Ukraine: Stinky Ink Everywhere, but Nary a Line to Think

The “Stinky Inky,” Part VII: Trudy Rubin’s Astounding Ignorance about Russia

by Walter C. Uhler

I live in Philadelphia. There was a time when I wrote book reviews and op-eds for The Philadelphia Inquirer. That period ended, however, thanks to the intemperate language I hurled at its editors for the far too many articles and columns they published that attempted to justify an invasion of Iraq. Subsequently, whenever I was moved by something in the Inquirer that was egregiously lousy, I would write an article about it. Some of these articles eventually were given the title, “Stinky Inky.”

Well, the “Stinky Inky” is at it again. Upset by events in Ukraine, Trudy Rubin is stinking up the Inky with her blatant anti-Putin propaganda. Beyond her inability to get her facts straight, Ms. Rubin has displayed a stunning ignorance of post-Soviet Russia.

For example, in her 23 March 2014 column titled, “A framework for a response to Putin,” Ms. Rubin began by misrepresenting what Secretary of State, John Kerry, meant, when he called Russia’s invasion of Crimea “a 19th-century act in the 21st century.” Mr. Kerry’s actual statement was: “Russia is engaged in a military act of aggression against another country, and it has huge risks, George. It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

Mr. Kerry was much clearer when speaking to CBS. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.” But, presumably uncomfortable with Mr. Kerry’s poor choice of words – which conjured up memories of his support for President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the most serious war crime of the 21st century — Ms. Rubin decided to bail out America’s Hypocrite of State by telling us what he really meant to say. “In other words, 21st-century rules of an interconnected world barred anything as atavistic as forceful seizure of European territory.” Changing Kerry’s words to mean “forceful seizure of European territory,” is something best left to a press secretary or an apologist, not an independent journalist.

Ms. Rubin also denounced Russia for threatening to use a gas cutoff as political leverage. Then, she hypocritically urged Western leaders to “brandish the energy weapon when they gather in Europe.” Finally, she also urged the West to provide weapons to Ukraine.

Now, it is true that many in the West thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union had brought “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama so memorably put it, and inaugurated what Ms. Rubin calls “21st-century rules of an interconnected world.” Democracy and markets had achieved their final triumph over ideology and geopolitical blocs. Now it was the fate of democracy and markets to complete their glorious and inexorable sweep across the rest of the world.

According to this conceit of Western triumphalism, the new liberal world order would render geopolitical considerations obsolete (except, of course, when the U.S. felt compelled to invade or bomb another sovereign state). Under the new liberal world order, the gentle penetration of sovereign states by the West’s free markets and democracy was natural and beneficial, even if such free markets and democratic institutions in the West had become pawns in the hands of the Western financial and corporate oligarchs known as the 1%.

(In a widely heralded scholarly study titled: “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page concluded: “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts of U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” Thus, even the U.S. is not a democracy but an oligarchy.)

Nevertheless, any attempt to prevent the West’s gentle penetration was viewed as a violation of the natural and beneficial new liberal world order. And if such penetration in Europe brought benign NATO membership in its wake, so what?

However, what the cheerleaders for the new liberal world order have forgotten is the fact that both the United States and Germany – in the persons of Secretary of State James Baker and German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher — made a decidedly geopolitical promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. They promised not to extend NATO east of Germany in return for Soviet assistance in the peaceful reunification of Germany under NATO. The Soviet leaders upheld their end of the bargain, but the U.S. – in the person of President Clinton – reneged.

In post-Soviet Russia, the new liberal world order took the form of “shock therapy,” which transferred enormous wealth to the oligarchs and severely impoverished millions of Russians during the 1990s. As a result of their experience, many Russians began to associate free markets with outright theft.

Russia’s political elite never forgot Clinton’s “stab-in the-back” on NATO enlargement. Neither did they overlook NATO’s revision of its strategic concept that, by 1999, allowed it to undertake offensive military action, even if none of its members had suffered an attack.

Moreover, while the world was touting the new liberal world order of markets and democracy, in 1998 Zbigniew Brzezinski, a prominent Polish-American Russophobe, was waxing geopolitical: “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

“However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”

Mr. Brzezinski’s views were echoed in 2004 by the obnoxious neoconservative jingoist Charles Krauthammer. Talking about Ukraine’s so-called Orange Revolution, Mr. Krauthammer asserted: “This is about Russia first, democracy only second…The West wants to finish the job begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe’s march to the east…. The great prize is Ukraine.”

In December 2004, America’s Richard Holbrooke asserted that “NATO virtually defines our core zone of security in half the world, and danger lurks to the south and east.” He added, “Ukraine, as part of the greatest peacetime military alliance…, gives added comfort and stability to the eastern tier of NATO nations.” He then advocated for Ukraine’s admission to NATO by 2007.

Thus, in a profound misreading of Russia’s existential ties to Ukraine – the type that leads to war — Mr. Holbrooke not only arrogantly placed Ukraine in America’s “core zone of security,” he assured his readers that, because previous rounds of NATO expansion had not destroyed relations with Russia, there was no reason to believe that the addition of Ukraine would do so.

Russia’s political elites were sensitive to such threats. In fact, they fumed when political leaders in the West paid absolutely no attention to their increasingly vehement objections to NATO interminable expansion, seemingly aimed at Russia’s geopolitical encirclement.

Then, in Georgia in 2008, Russia finally fired a shot across the bow of the United States, Europe and NATO. Russia used Georgia’s massive shelling of Russian peacekeepers and others living in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, as sufficient reason to invade and split off pieces of Georgia.

Russia’s invasion shocked the new liberal world order folks in the U.S. and Europe. But in their many fulminations about so-called “Russian aggression” (usually followed by the words, “which will not stand”) nobody understood that Russia was telling both Georgia and NATO that Georgia would not be joining NATO, not unless both wanted war. Soon after Russia’s dismemberment of Georgia, Dmitri Medvedev asserted: “We will not tolerate any more humiliation, and we are not joking.”

In March 2014, precisely because the new liberal world order folks didn’t learn their lesson in Georgia, Russia was compelled to fire another shot across the bow of the economic imperialists in the U.S. and Europe. It occurred after protesters in Kiev rejected a comprise agreement – reached by Yanukovych and the opposition parties on 21 February 2013 under the auspices of the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland – in favor of the violent overthrow of Yanukovych’s democratically elected government.

(I’m not pleased with anything that has occurred. But, pleased or not, for Russia, the prospect of Ukraine in NATO is an existential red line.)

Consequently, after Western diplomats recklessly cavorted with anti-Russia protesters in Kiev, and after those emboldened protesters (probably hijacked by Pravy Sektor) staged a coup, Russia simultaneously secured its Black Sea Fleet and smacked the West and Ukraine across the face by annexing the Crimea. Now, there will be no NATO in Ukraine, except, perhaps in area surrounding Lviv, the capital of Banderastan.

Unfortunately, you’ll find none of this in any column about Ukraine recently written by Trudy Rubin. Whether out of ignorance or malice Ms. Rubin does not acknowledge that Russia, like any other sovereign state, has national interests. Instead, out of ignorance or malice, Ms. Rubin simplistically makes Ukraine all about Vladimir Putin.

Out of ignorance or malice, Ms. Rubin’s column of 17 April 2014 was riddled with hysterical gibberish. Consider her inane assertion that “Putin can’t afford to attack NATO countries.” It’s a red herring, born out of hysteria.

Or, consider her prediction that Russia’s “power will wane when Russia’s gas income drops.” Virtually everyone familiar with Russia knew that it was negotiating a massive gas deal with China. Price was the only issue delaying agreement. Fittingly, a mere month after Ms. Rubin wrote her nonsense, the New York Times reported, “China and Russia signed a $400 billion gas deal on Wednesday, giving Moscow a megamarket for its leading export and linking two major powers that, despite a rocky history of alliances and rivalries, have drawn closer to counter the clout of the United States and Europe.”

(In fact, the Associated Press reported on May 21st that “China’s president also called for an Asian security arrangement that would include Russia and Iran and exclude the United States.”)

Other nonsensical assertions by Ms. Rubin in her 17 April 2014 opinion column prompted me to write a letter to the editor – which, obviously, the Stinky Inky failed to publish. My letter reads as follows:

“Russia is engaging in a massive propaganda campaign about events in Ukraine,” as Trudy Rubin notes.

But the West is engaging in a similarly massive propaganda campaign. Simply read NATO’s extremely biased 14 April rebuttal of Russia’s allegations. Unfortunately, Ms. Rubin also is spreading anti-Russian propaganda.

She is wrong to assert, Yanukovych’s ‘government fell not because of a plot, but because special Ukrainian forces, with advisers from Moscow, killed dozens of demonstrators.’ She appears to be unaware that ARD German television found evidence that much of the murderous sniper fire came from the Hotel Ukraina, which was tightly controlled by Kiev’s protesters.

She fails to mention the European Union-mediated agreement struck between the opposition and Yanukovych, only to be rejected by protesters led by extreme right-wing members of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. Highly respected sociologist, Volodymyr Ishchenko — an expert in civil disturbances in Ukraine — claimed that the far right had hijacked the protest.

Russia responded to the coup by “taking Crimea.”

Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov, an expert on Ukraine and right-wing parties in Europe says this about Pravy Sektor (Right Sector). “What is frightening, however, with Pravy Sektor itself is that it comprises many groups that I would call neo-Nazi. Fortunately, they also constitute a minor element of Pravy Sektor, but they are there. Dmitro Yarosh, who is the leader of the Trident, of Trizub-it’s the name of the organization — it may be not racist itself, but it cooperates with the real nasty people who are part of the Pravy Sektor, like Patriot of Ukraine.” [“Crisis in Ukraine: The Role and Responsibility of the West.” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, February 7, 2014.

Nevertheless, in a column titled, “A veiled threat to Ukrainian Jews” Ms. Rubin goes to great lengths, admittedly without any proof, to blame Russia for the obviously fake fliers – requiring Jews to register with the Donetsk People’s Republic — distributed outside a synagogue in Donetsk. But she whitewashes the anti-Semitism of the genuine neo-Nazis who led the protesters in their violent coup against a democratically elected government.

Yes, admits Ms. Rubin, Svoboda was denounced as “neo-Nazi” by the World Jewish Congress. But it “appears to be moderating its positions.” In the one sentence she devotes to Pravy Sector, Ms. Rubin simply notes that “Its leaders publicly insist the group is not anti-Semitic.” Well, that settles it then. Doesn’t it?

In her most recent opinion column on 21 May 2014, titled “Ukraine’s pivotal revolution,” Ms. Rubin spouts more propaganda. Once again it was a largely peaceful revolution lead by heroic protesters seeking the new liberal world order for Ukraine, not a protest transformed into a violent anti-Russia coup led by Pravy Sektor (Right Sector). Once again it was all about Putin, “with his bare-chested machismo, his homophobia, his odes to tradition and religious orthodoxy, and his disdain for the West.” Once again, Ms. Rubin failed to utter a single word about Russia’s legitimate national interests.

Once again there was her unwarranted certainty that “the violence of the revolution’s last days sparked by a pro-Russian government’s murder of demonstrators, was only a coda to months of peaceful protests.” In fact, a definitive conclusion has yet to be reached on the matter of the murder of demonstrators. However, Ms. Rubin, as well as readers seeking information that challenges her blatant propaganda, are advised to read an article by Yulia Latynina titled “The Rise and Fall of Right Sector.”

Ms. Latynina is a fierce critic of President Putin, but she makes a few observations about Right Sector and its leader, Dmitry Yarosh, that challenge Ms. Rubin’s propaganda. First, she assists in the demolition of Ms. Rubin’s canard about months of peaceful protests by claiming that Right Sector figured prominently in the heavy fighting on Hrushevsky Street on Jan. 19.” (Even the New York Times reported the use of stun grenades by protesters as early as 1 December 2013.) Ms. Rubin, wake up!

Second, she speculates that “someone close to Yanukovych gave Right Sector money so they would stop fighting.” But, “like a true revolutionary, Yarosh took the money, bought weapons with it and continued to fight.”

Third, Ms. Latynina notes that on February 20th, the center of Kiev “was closed off, no cars moved and people were dropping like flies under a hail of snipers’ bullets.” Yet, to get and from his meeting at the presidential residence “Yarosh would have had to pass through the gauntlet of sniper fire. What guarantee did he have that snipers would not shoot at him, or that he would manage to return alive from that meeting?”

Fourth, Ms. Latynina notes that “not a single Right Sector member was among the 100 Maidan protesters who died.”

Finally, Ms. Latynina suspects that President Putin “sincerely believed that the European Union is financing Right Sector.” Then, she concludes by observing, “Obviously, the EU is not financing Right Sector, but the organization definitely did receive a large sum of money from someone.”

There was a time when I thought Trudy Rubin was a thoughtful voice on world affairs and a credit to an often abysmally poor Stinky Inky. However, after Russia’s annexation of the Crimea – which shocked the new liberal world order people to their core – Ms. Rubin seems to have degenerated into yet another anti-Putin mainstream media crank.

To the Minister Responsible, Re: Consideration of Site-C

Re: Consideration of Site C

by Andrea Morison, MA -  Peace Valley Environment Association

Minister of Energy and Mines and 
Minister Responsible for Core Review
Parliament Buildings
Victoria, BC
V8V 1X4

Re: Consideration of Site C

Dear Minister Bennett,

I understand that you are presently undertaking serious consideration of Site C dam to determine whether it is in the best interests of British Columbians. Our organization has undertaken considerable research on this issue and I would like to share some of the highlights with you along with some of the key recommendations of the Joint Review Panel on Site C. I trust you will find this information useful in your deliberations.

On the need for Site C

Observations/conclusions of the Joint Review Panel on Site C:

• Given that there are significant adverse effects that would result from Site C, justification for the project must rest on an unambiguous need for the power. 
• Alternative sources of power are available at similar costs, notably geothermal. BC Hydro should conduct more research into energy alternatives.
• The Panel cannot conclude on the likely accuracy of project cost estimates and recommends that the costs of Site C be assessed by the BCUC.

BC Hydro has failed to fully demonstrate the need for Site C at this time.

 Additional key points

• BC Hydro’s ‘Site C Clean Energy Project Evidentiary Update’, Table 5, pp. 12-13, states, “BC Hydro believes that the unique requirements of potential LNG customers may be better served by north coast supply.”

Energy economist Dr. Marvin Shaffer states:

BC Hydro’s analysis of future demand is based on a very serious market failure in the pricing of electricity.The average price for new industry is about $50/ MWh, but the cost of new supply, whether delivered from Site C or other sources, is $100/MWh or more. That clearly attracts more demand than economists would consider economically justified.

• With Burrard in place, BC would have no shortfall of energy until 2033.

• Even without Burrard, BC Hydro could meet the future energy needs of the province more cost effectively if they developed single-cycle gas thermal plants which can be built on an ‘as needed’ basis, strategically located and supply low cost energy to meet peak loads.

• Like Burrard, single-cycle gas thermal plants could enable greater reliable use of non-firm and spot market supplies and would be far less costly than Site C. The savings would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

• We wouldn’t be producing energy from gas turbines any more than we have to; in most years we would be using available non-firm hydro and purchases of spot-market energy, which forecasts tell us are going to be much lower costs sources of energy in the future than Site C.

• BC Hydro didn’t provide appropriate cost comparisons to alternative sources of power in their analysis. The 1,100 MW capacity of Site C will result in an oversupply of energy for many years after it is commissioned. Clearly, if alternative sources of energy were used, they could be constructed on an incremental, as-needed basis, thus resulting in significant cost savings over time. We wouldn’t end up with a huge initial surplus of power for many years like we would with Site C.

On energy demand and cost

• Observations/conclusions of the Joint Review Panel on Site C:
• The Panel concludes that there are uncertainties regarding BC Hydro’s long term energy forecasts.
• Basing a $7.9 billion project on a 20-year demand forecast without an explicit 20-year scenario of prices is not good practise.
• The Panel recommends that BC Hydro construct a reasonable long-term pricing scenario for electricity and its substitutes and update the associated load forecast, including LNG demand and that this be exposed for public and BCUC comment in a BCUC hearing, before construction begins.

Additional key points

• Erik Andersen, a retired economist who previously worked for the federal government as well as private corporations, has reviewed Hydro’s financial statements and reveals the following:

• Between 2006 and 2009 domestic demand has mostly ‘flat-lined’ at about 50,000 GWhrs while BC Hydro, over a decade ago, forecasted demand to be well over 60,000 GWhrs by 2012.

• BC Stats show that BC’s population growth rate is decreasing. During the decades of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, BC’s population grew by 26%, 19.3% and 20.8 %. In 2000, it shrunk to 12.3% and is expected to be 12.8% this decade. BC Stats has projected the growth rate to be +1.3% for each year beyond that to 2036. Despite this shrinking trend, BC Hydro has projected that residential accounts will increase at annual rates of between 1.3 to 1.7%. Given that BC Hydro residential customer accounts are about 2 million, meaning, on a simple average, every account has 2 people living behind the meter, then BC Hydro’s residential per capita demand is projected to increase at twice the rate that BC Stats expects the population to increase.
• As hydro rates continue to increase, the public is likely to respond with conservation.
• BC Hydro reported sales to “Others” is fiscal 2013 of 7,417 GWhrs. Auditors of BC Hydro’s financial report indicated that “Others” were customers outside of BC with long-term purchase contracts.
• This is more energy than would be produced by Site C. In fact, even though Site C can supply a maximum of 5,100 GWhrs/yr, dams of this size usually only run at about half their potential.
• Sales to “Others” were at $43/MWh, whereas Site C generated energy would be at least $100/MWh.

On the loss of valuable agricultural land

• PVEA hired two extremely knowledgeable and highly accredited agricultural experts, each with over 40 years’ experience, to assess the value of the land in the Peace River Valley that would be lost if Site C were approved. The following key findings are critical to the decision on Site C:
• The area of agricultural land that would be impacted by Site C is grossly under-represented. BC Hydro’s economic evaluation of loss resulting from of the construction of the Site C dam is based on 1,666 hectares of land; that only represents 13% of impacted farmland. The actual impact area is 31,528 hectares of Class 1 to 7 lands.
• BC Hydro established a baseline for agricultural production in the Peace River Valley that is completely inaccurate: it created a utility rating system that has never been used or even heard of in the agricultural industry; and, it failed to account for the influence of the 50-year flood reserve on existing agricultural production in the Valley.
• The productivity of the agricultural land in the Peace River Valley is unique not only in the Peace River region, but in Western Canada. It is capable of producing a variety of crops comparable to BC’s fertile Fraser Valley and in some cases the yields from the Peace River Valley are even higher than in those in southern BC.
• As world prices for food escalate in response to inevitable climate change, population and fossil fuel pressures, the land BC Hydro plan’s to flood for Site C is our food security Plan B. It can produce fruit and vegetables for over a million people.
• BC Hydro projects total economic activity resulting from agriculture in the Peace River Valley would total $215 million over 100 years. Even using BC Hydro’s own model, with its impoverished impact base of 1,666 hectares (5% of Site C impacted ALR) a more robust horticulture scenario suggests agricultural activities are capable of generating fully $2 billion from farm gate sales and secondary economic activity during this same time frame. This doesn’t measure values associated with human health resulting from better nutrition in Northern communities.
• According to experts, Site C dam may have a 100-year life. The agricultural land in the Peace River Valley will support life in perpetuity.
•  The Peace River Valley has extraordinarily high value for agriculture and the public interest is better served by allowing it to continue to sustain citizens through agricultural production rather than destroying it for power production. Power can be sourced from other alternatives; agriculture cannot. 

Given all of the above, it is clear that Site C is not in the best interests of British Columbians. I urge you to give serious consideration to the information I have provided and trust that, in considering the long term interests of the citizens of the province, you will not approve Site C.

(Please note that I can provide sources and approved references for all information provided in this letter.)

Sincerely,
Andrea Morison, MA
Coordinator, Peace Valley Environment Association
Fort St. John, BC
pveacoordinator@gmail.com

The Holy Land the Pope Will Find

Pope, Israeli lies and more

by Mazin Qumsiyeh

The Pope is coming to Palestine, a country under a regime of apartheid and colonialism. The Zionists are greeting him by insisting that they will continue to occupy the site of the last supper and insisting that he visit "Yad Vashem" (a museum exploiting one tragedy to create more holocausts), and "Mount Herzle" named after the guy who is a key architect of ethnic cleansing and colonialism here that cost hundreds of thousands of Arab lives.

Christians here (and all other people) have become more and more active in boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Zionist regime.

Meanwhile Palestinian leadership in Ramallah still seems mired in its old ways of sanctifying pope Abu Mazen. Text of signs here in Bethlehem initially welcomed the Pope as a guest of Abu Mazen not the guest of
Palestine; this text was changed after some uproar though Abu Mazen's pictures remained. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and many others complained about the unilateral moves and decisions by Abu Mazen without consulting the Palestinian people (and not just his key financially connected yes-men from Fatah). PFLP was promptly denied its financial share from the PLO umbrella (small as it  maybe since the PLO was subsumed to the Palestinian Authority and its corrupt officials).

These issues and problems portray a liberation movement gone awry after Oslo treacherous agreements. Yet, this does not take away from the justice of the Palestinian cause or the fact that it is inevitable that truth and freedom will prevail. Meanwhile we continue here struggling and sacrificing. Below are glimpses of reality and in particular please note the plight of youth assassinated and prisoners in "administrative detention".

Maybe the Pope will say something about this continuing suffering and the lies and mythology that make it all possible.

Israeli military commit crimes and are caught lying (again). This is not the first time the Israeli army  assassinates Children and lie about it. In this case two young people are shot with live ammunition and Israeli
military said they posed direct threats and that they only used rubber bullets.

Footage and other evidence was then released by Defense of Children International which shows the military lied.

After significant uproar, even the US State Department and CNN had to pay attention but the arrogant Israeli military is still sticking to its lies.

My letter to editor in response to a Zionist standard PR.

Palestinian Hunger Strike: “Either I Go Home – Or I Go in a Plastic Bag” -
See more at: http://iwps.info/2014/05/21/palestinian-hunger-strike-2014/

Interactive on Gaza under siege: http://ajinteractive.businesscatalyst.com/GazaLifeofSiegeJazeera/index.html

Newsweek says Israel won't stop spying on the US. Newsweek follow-up article on Israeli extensive spying on the US: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/05/newsweek-extensive-pressure.html

The Lab: by Yotam Feldman: A unique insight into the world of Israeli arms dealers selling weapons and experience around the world. Armies and police around the world are interested in the latest Israeli weapons and their military tactics, which have been refined by fighting in the occupied  territories. With unique access, Witness follows private Israeli arms dealers in their day-to-day work; making deals, attending arms fairs, shipping weapons, and inspecting armed forces overseas. This film reveals how the Israeli arms industry is making vast profits worldwide, and partly thanks to their activities in the occupied territories... http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2014/05/lab-20145475423526313.html

Aljazeera: Israel's Drone Dealers by Yotam Feldman People & Power investigates how Israeli drone technology - first tried and tested in Gaza - came to be used by the US and its allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iu-a-irAiA

From Akka, the remaining Arabs reject continued ethnic cleansingمن عكا مش
طالعين !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JPnqba3AWM

Come visit us in Palestine and, stay human

Mazin Qumsiyeh
http://qumsiyeh.org
https://www.facebook.com/mazin.qumsiyeh.9

The Last Time I Saw Yafa: 66 Years of the Nakba

66 Year Nakba: I Saw Yafa, Land of Oranges

by Ramzy Baroud  - PalestineChronicle.com

In ‘Jaffa: Land of Oranges’, Ghassan Kanafani described his exile from the Palestinian coastal city of Yafa.

As a 12-year-old boy, he struggled to understand, but “on that night, though, certain threads of that story became clearer .. a big truck was standing in front of our door. Light things, mainly sleeping items, were being chucked into the truck swiftly and hysterically.”

A few decades after Kanafai wrote about his exile, I, an 8-year-old boy from a Gaza refugee camp, pondered on my own. When I stood at the borders of Yafa, the line of what was real and imagined suddenly became blurred. Once Palestine’s largest city, Yafa turned out not to be a figment of my grandfather’s imagination, or Kanafani’s, but a tangible space of sand, air and sea. The Palestinian-Arab identity of Yafa was evident everywhere.

I was a third grader on my first school trip. Gazans were still allowed to cross into Israel in those days, mostly as exploited cheap labor. My family was driven out of Palestine during the Nakba, the "Great Catastrophe" that saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. My family was comprised of simple peasants from the village of Beit Daras. The residents of my village were known for their love of couscous, and for their legendary stubbornness, courage and pride. Beit Daras residents saw in Yafa a center of many aspects of their lives. A commercially vibrant port city, known around the world for its oranges, Yafa was home to some of the largest markets in southern Palestine.

Yafa was a center for Arab culture, and a model of co-existence between religions. But British colonization of Palestine starting in 1917 then morphed into a mandate government in 1922, interrupting the natural historic flow that positioned Yafa as the beating heart of Palestine.

Strata of educated elites in Yafa had raised the level of political consciousness of the city to standards that would still be considered high by Middle Eastern criteria today. Politicians, artists, bankers, craftsmen and young and vibrant student communities gave Yafa a middle class that served an essential role in the fight against British colonialism and its Zionist allies many years before the Nakba and the creation of Israel.

Yafawi union members organized around labor rights with steadfast commitment. Arab laborers were being laid off and Jewish laborers coming from Europe were taking their place. That mobilization become part of the 1936 strike and revolution, Palestine’s first collective uprising that inspired generations of Palestinians, and still does today.

Numerous villages and small towns looked to Yafa for guidance, and sometimes survival. My grandfather, who owned a small piece of land in Beit Daras, was a craftsman who weaved baskets. Every few days, he hauled the best of what he made into the Isdud and sometimes al-Majdal markets hoping for a few extra Palestinian dinars to supplement his meagre income. But the best was saved for Yafa because the Yafawis had the best taste. He would put on his poshest outfit for this trip. After feeding his trusty donkey he would pile his baskets on the cart and embark on the long journey.

'Sido (grandpa) please tell us stories about your adventures in Yafa,' we would plead him, as he sat atop an old mattress in his special corner of a small, decaying house in a refugee camp in Gaza. His stories, which he conveyed with much suspense, trode a fine line between truth and fantasy. When I grew up, I realized that the fantasy was not simply his way to amuse us children, but also a way to express how Yafa represented my grandfather’s greatest triumphs and most humiliating defeats.

Fantasy helped him make sense of the world he had left behind. When the Arabs revolted in 1936, Britain hit back pitilessly. Not only did they kill, imprison and exile many Yafawis, they also defaced the city. Large parts of the Old City were erased never to be seen again. History was violently undone.

Grandpa was one of the thousands who defended Palestine to the bitter end. Although he was a peasant, who had taught himself how to weave baskets to survive, later he exchanged everything for an old Turkish rifle to defend Beit Daras, as nearby villages were falling in the hands of Zionist militias, one after the other.

Grandpa said much about how beautiful Yafa was. He would describe the gentle breeze of the sea as it greeted you upon your entrance to the city, and how it would make you feel as if your soul returned to you.

When Beit Daras fell after successive battles between Zionist militias and villagers armed with only a few rifles, grandpa’s soul was trapped forever.

When Plan Dalet, the master plan through which most of Palestine was violently conquered, was implemented following the calculated departure of the British forces, the capture of Yafa became the culmination of a violent campaign.

The highway between Yafa and Jerusalem was a theatre for heroic battles, culminating in the battle of Castal, a few miles away from Jerusalem.

Yafa, known as the "Bride of Sea" was conquered between April and May, 1948. A major exodus was already underway into Transjordan and Syria. Zionist forces belonging to the Haganah and Irgun set aside their supposed differences as they moved in against Yafa.

Three different military campaigns were launched simultaneously - Chametz, Jevussi and Yiftach - through which Yafa, areas around Jerusalem and the whole of eastern Galilee were seized. But when Yafa fell, the pride of Palestine was crushed.

The city was encircled, forcing thousands of people to flee by sea to Gaza or Egypt. Many drowned as small, overcrowded fishing boats gave in and sank. The Arab leadership had hoped the British would not allow the Zionists to conquer Yafa. They were ill-prepared. Civil defenses arrangements were almost non-existent.

The military disparity between Zionist militias (numbering at about 5,000 well trained fighters) and Arab volunteers (numbering around 1,500) was impossible to overcome without backing from the outside. None came. Men and women died in droves. Tens of thousands were on trek over land, but mostly by sea.

At the age of eight, I discovered that Yafa was not a fantasy. Much later in life, I discovered that Yafa, although conquered in battle, still stands through the collective memory of Yafawis everywhere.

While the term Nakba might be a fitting depiction of what befell the Palestinian nation in 1947-48, it is somud - steadfastness - that keeps the millions of refugees holding on tight to their right of return 66 years after the land of orange trees was conquered, and its somud that will keep Yafa alive, forever.

- Ramzy Baroud is the Managing Editor of Middle East Eye. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).

Fortress America: Continental Military Framework Marches Forward

Trilateral Defense Ministers Meeting Continues to Build North American Security Framework

by Dana Gabriel - Be Your Own Leader

As an extension of the North American Leaders Summit which was held in February, the defense ministers from the U.S., Canada and Mexico quietly met last month to discuss continental security issues. During the conference, they addressed shared defense and security challenges. This includes threats posed by cyber attacks and transnational criminal organizations. The North American security relationship has evolved with Mexico being increasingly viewed as a valued part of the continental defense team. The U.S., Canada and Mexico are building the framework for greater cooperation on common security issues. They are expanding security arrangements and are further establishing new institutions at a continental level. The trilateral defense ministers meeting, which received very little media attention is part of the process of integrating military planning and coordination into a North American security perimeter.

On April 24, Mexico's Secretary of National Defense General Salvador Zepeda Cienfuegos and Naval Secretary Admiral Vidal Francisco Soberon Sanz hosted the Second Trilateral Meeting of North American Defense Ministers with their counterparts, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Canadian Defense Minister Robert Nicholson. A joint statement explained that, “Threats to North America and the hemisphere are increasingly complex and require coordinated responses. Building upon the trilateral collaboration under the North American Leaders Summit process, we remain committed to enhancing our common understanding of those threats and developing effective and efficient approaches needed to address them.” It went on to say, “With this foundation, our countries continue to work together to address the security and defense challenges that our continent faces. We acknowledge that transnational threats require transnational responses and are committed to furthering our collaboration.” The Inaugural Meeting of North American Defense Ministers was held in March 2012.

The ministers joint statement also identified specific areas where they seek to expand trilateral defense cooperation. This includes working together to strengthen hemispheric defense forums, developing an updated continental threat assessment, identifying opportunities to synchronize security on the southern border, as well as sharing information regarding cyber defense challenges. In his speech at the trilateral meeting, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel acknowledged that, “Cyber security is another threat, like transnational crime, that knows no borders.” With that in mind, he proposed that all three countries, “establish a cyber-working group to identify potential opportunities to work together to share best practices and lessons learned.” During their meetings, Secretary Hagel also noted that the defense ministers agreed that, “combatting transnational crime at the strategic level is best addressed by the security group under the North American Leaders Summit.” Nevertheless, he emphasized that, “we need to ensure that coordination at the tactical and operational level continues.”

In his speech which focused on security issues facing North America, Secretary Hagel further elaborated on how the trilateral defense meeting is, “moving beyond the concept stage and is becoming a venue to develop new opportunities for deeper collaboration and new approaches to more effectively address shared threats and challenges. We have identified important areas where we can work together as equal partners. As we move forward, the discussions today will further strengthen the foundation for continued cooperation in meeting defense and security requirements for our three nations.” In order to continue their important trilateral dialogue, Secretary Hagel has offered to host the next defense ministerial in 2016.

Back in February, Canada and Mexico also announced plans to further strengthen defense relations. As part of the trilateral defense meeting, they officially signed the Declaration of Intent on Defense Cooperation. The agreement, “further solidifies defense relations between Canada and Mexico, and demonstrates commitment by both countries to continue cooperation in areas such as military training, support to civilian authorities, defense research, defense materiel cooperation, defense industry matters, as well as other areas of importance to defense and security.” Canadian Defense Minister Robert Nicholson described how, “The Trilateral Meeting of North American Defense Ministers has given us a valuable opportunity to further deepen our cooperation and collaboration towards our common goals of ensuring the security of our citizens, and our continent. Signing the Declaration of Intent on Defense Cooperation with Mexico is a demonstration of this cooperation and collaboration, and shows Canada’s commitment to deepening the defense component of Canada’s longstanding, friendly relations with Mexico.”

Increased U.S. interest in continental defense continues to have an impact on Canadian and Mexican security policy. Both countries are further adopting American security priorities, which raises concerns regarding sovereignty. Under the guise of stopping drug and illicit arms trafficking, the U.S. seeks to further extend its military and security apparatus into other regions. The trilateral defense ministers meeting is part of the ongoing efforts to establish a fully integrated continental security perimeter and represents another important step towards a North American Union.

Dana Gabriel is an activist and independent researcher. He writes about trade, globalization, sovereignty, security, as well as other issues. Contact: beyourownleader@hotmail.com Visit his blog at Be Your Own Leader

Related articles by Dana Gabriel:
NAFTA Partners Pushing North American Competitiveness Integration Agenda
Increasing Data Collection and Surveillance in the North American Homeland
Strengthening U.S.-Canada Security Interests in North America
U.S.-Canada Perimeter Security and an Integrated North American Command

The Unbombable Foe: Climate Change as the Ultimate WMD

The 95% Doctrine: Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch

Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who -- other than a few suckers -- could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five?

And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on.

For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.

Then there were those “mushroom clouds” that Condoleezza Rice, our national security advisor, was so publicly worried about -- the ones destined to rise over American cities if we didn’t do something to stop Saddam. As she fretted in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on that same September 8th, “[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No, indeed, and nor, it turned out, did Congress!

And just in case you weren’t anxious enough about the looming Iraqi threat, there were those unmanned aerial vehicles -- Saddam’s drones! -- that could be armed with chemical or biological WMD from his arsenal and flown over America’s East Coast cities with unimaginable results. President George W. Bush went on TV to talk about them and congressional votes were changed in favor of war thanks to hair-raising secret administration briefings about them on Capitol Hill.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is Climate Change a Crime Against Humanity?

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Our next new piece will be posted on Tuesday, May 27th. In the meantime, remember that for a $100 donation, you can get a personalized, signed copy of Rebecca Solnit’s sensational new book, Men Explain Things to Me, now tearing up the Internet and already #6 on the bestseller list of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. (And if you missed the essay from it we posted Tuesday, just click here.) Still available as well are Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes (if you missed his powerful recent piece on America’s Afghan War that catches the uniqueness of his book, click here) and Nick Turse’s bestselling, paradigm-breaking Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, among other works. Check our donation page for the details and remember: it’s your dollars that keep TomDispatch afloat and allow us to offer views of our world that you just won’t find in the mainstream media. Have a good Memorial Day weekend. Tom]

The 95% Doctrine: 

Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

by Tom Engelhardt

In the end, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons program, no nuclear bomb in the offing, no centrifuges for those aluminum pipes, no biological or chemical weapons caches, and no drone aircraft to deliver his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (nor any ships capable of putting those nonexistent robotic planes in the vicinity of the U.S. coast). But what if he had? Who wanted to take that chance? Not Vice President Dick Cheney, certainly. Inside the Bush administration he propounded something that journalist Ron Suskind later dubbed the “one percent doctrine.” Its essence was this: if there was even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be dealt with as if it were a 95%-100% certainty.

Here’s the curious thing: if you look back on America's apocalyptic fears of destruction during the first 14 years of this century, they largely involved three city-busting weapons that were fantasies of Washington’s fertile imperial imagination. There was that “bomb” of Saddam’s, which provided part of the pretext for a much-desired invasion of Iraq. There was the “bomb” of the mullahs, the Iranian fundamentalist regime that we’ve just loved to hate ever since they repaid us, in 1979, for the CIA’s overthrow of an elected government in 1953 and the installation of the Shah by taking the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran hostage. If you believed the news from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Iranians, too, were perilously close to producing a nuclear weapon or at least repeatedly on the verge of the verge of doing so. The production of that “Iranian bomb” has, for years, been a focus of American policy in the Middle East, the “brink” beyond which war has endlessly loomed. And yet there was and is no Iranian bomb, nor evidence that the Iranians were or are on the verge of producing one.

Finally, of course, there was al-Qaeda’s bomb, the “dirty bomb” that organization might somehow assemble, transport to the U.S., and set off in an American city, or the “loose nuke,” maybe from the Pakistani arsenal, with which it might do the same. This is the third fantasy bomb that has riveted American attention in these last years, even though there is less evidence for or likelihood of its imminent existence than of the Iraqi and Iranian ones.

To sum up, the strange thing about end-of-the-world-as-we’ve-known-it scenarios from Washington, post-9/11, is this: with a single exception, they involved only non-existent weapons of mass destruction. A fourth weapon -- one that existed but played a more modest role in Washington’s fantasies -- was North Korea’s perfectly real bomb, which in these years the North Koreans were incapable of delivering to American shores.

The "Good News" About Climate Change

In a world in which nuclear weapons remain a crucial coin of the realm when it comes to global power, none of these examples could quite be classified as 0% dangers. Saddam had once had a nuclear program, just not in 2002-2003, and also chemical weapons, which he used against Iranian troops in his 1980s war with their country (with the help of targeting information from the U.S. military) and against his own Kurdish population. The Iranians might (or might not) have been preparing their nuclear program for a possible weapons breakout capability, and al-Qaeda certainly would not have rejected a loose nuke, if one were available (though that organization’s ability to use it would still have been questionable).

In the meantime, the giant arsenals of WMD in existence, the American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian ones that might actually have left a crippled or devastated planet behind, remained largely off the American radar screen. In the case of the Indian arsenal, the Bush administration actually lent an indirect hand to its expansion. So it was twenty-first-century typical when President Obama, trying to put Russia's recent actions in the Ukraine in perspective, said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”

Once again, an American president was focused on a bomb that would raise a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. And which bomb, exactly, was that, Mr. President?

Of course, there was a weapon of mass destruction that could indeed do staggering damage to or someday simply drown New York City, Washington D.C., Miami, and other East coast cities. It had its own efficient delivery systems -- no nonexistent drones or Islamic fanatics needed. And unlike the Iraqi, Iranian, or al-Qaeda bombs, it was guaranteed to be delivered to our shores unless preventative action was taken soon. No one needed to hunt for its secret facilities. It was a weapons system whose production plants sat in full view right here in the United States, as well as in Europe, China, and India, as well as in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other energy states.

So here’s a question I’d like any of you living in or visiting Wyoming to ask the former vice president, should you run into him in a state that’s notoriously thin on population: How would he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use them against us, there was at least a 95% -- and likely as not a 100% -- chance of them being set off on our soil? Let’s be conservative, since the question is being posed to a well-known neoconservative. Ask him whether he would be in favor of pursuing the 95% doctrine the way he was the 1% version.

After all, thanks to a grim report in 2013 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is now a 95%-100% likelihood that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United States, as a recent scientific report released by the White House made clear. We also know, with grimly reasonable certainty, what kinds of damage those 95%-100% odds are likely to translate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end that could exceed 10 degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage, devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices, and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.

From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea levels by a nightmarish 10 to 13 feet. That mass of ice is, according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in “irreversible retreat,” which means -- no matter what acts are taken from now on -- a future death sentence for some of the world's great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in Antarctica.)

All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and so annually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass destruction of a new kind. While some of their effects are already in play, the planetary destruction that nuclear weapons could cause almost instantaneously, or at least (given “nuclear winter” scenarios) within months, will, with climate change, take decades, if not centuries, to deliver its full, devastating planetary impact.

When we speak of WMD, we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see. Unlike the feared Iranian bomb or the Pakistani arsenal, you don’t need the CIA or the NSA to ferret such "weaponry" out. From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction down on them.

The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain remarkably open about what they’re doing. Generally speaking, they don’t hesitate to make public, or even boast about, their plans for the wholesale destruction of the planet, though of course they are never described that way. Nonetheless, if an Iraqi autocrat or Iranian mullahs spoke in similar fashion about producing nuclear weapons and how they were to be used, they would be toast.

Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal with the fact that [it] and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn." He went on:

The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were 'highly unlikely,' and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil -- a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day. 'Based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become "stranded."'

In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel reserves it possesses to their fullest extent. Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance. Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in March 2012 on his energy policy:

Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.

Similarly, on May 5th, just before the White House was to reveal that grim report on climate change in America, and with a Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s “green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. It's projected that the United States will continue to be the largest producer of natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we've produced more oil here at home than we've imported from overseas. So that's all a good-news story.”

Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more greenhouse gases -- of, that is, the engine of our future destruction -- remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on planet Earth.

Weapons of Planetary Destruction

We know exactly what Dick Cheney -- ready to go to war on a 1% possibility that some country might mean us harm -- would answer, if asked about acting on the 95% doctrine. Who can doubt that his response would be similar to those of the giant energy companies, which have funded so much climate-change denialism and false science over the years? He would claim that the science simply isn’t “certain” enough (though “uncertainty” can, in fact, cut two ways), that before we commit vast sums to taking on the phenomenon, we need to know far more, and that, in any case, climate-change science is driven by a political agenda.

For Cheney & Co., it seemed obvious that acting on a 1% possibility was a sensible way to go in America’s “defense” and it’s no less gospel for them that acting on at least a 95% possibility isn’t. For the Republican Party as a whole, climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus test of loyalty, and so even a 101% doctrine wouldn’t do when it comes to fossil fuels and this planet.

No point, of course, in blaming this on fossil fuels or even the carbon dioxide they give off when burned. These are no more weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. With climate change, there is no “Little Boy” or “Fat Man” equivalent, no simple weapon to focus on. In this sense, fracking is the weapons system, as is deep-sea drilling, as are those pipelines, and the gas stations, and the coal-fueled power plants, and the millions of cars filling global roads, and the accountants of the most profitable corporations in history.

All of it -- everything that brings endless fossil fuels to market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives -- is the WMD. The CEOs of the planet's giant energy corporations are the dangerous mullahs, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth, since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.

Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to focus us on the nature of our present 95%-100% circumstances. Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of planetary harm (WPH). Only two weapons systems would clearly fit such categories. One would be nuclear weapons which, even in a localized war between Pakistan and India, could create some version of “nuclear winter” in which the planet was cut off from the sun by so much smoke and soot that it would grow colder fast, experience a massive loss of crops, of growing seasons, and of life. In the case of a major exchange of such weapons, we would be talking about “the sixth extinction” of planetary history.

Though on a different and harder to grasp time-scale, the burning of fossil fuels could end in a similar fashion -- with a series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the ruling and corporate elites on the planet, is becoming (to bring into play another category not usually used in connection with climate change) the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact, against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture (from which some of this essay has been adapted). He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt

Counter-Summit Challenges BC's LNG Claims

Counter-summit exposes true impacts of BC's LNG pipe dreams

by Wilderness Committee

Forum brings together frontline community members from Squamish, Hazelton and Fort Nelson

VANCOUVER - From May 21st to 23rd, the BC government and the oil and gas industry are converging on Vancouver to hold a large Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) summit. In response, the Council of Canadians and the Wilderness Committee are hosting a night of powerful speakers from the frontlines of community resistance to fracking, pipelines and LNG, who will expose the true impacts of extracting and exporting Liquefied Fracked Gas (LFG).

The counter-summit, LNG Pipedreams: Fractured Futures and Community Resistance, takes place tonight at 7:00 p.m. at Simon Fraser University (SFU) Harbour Centre, Room 1900. Speakers include Chief Liz Logan of the Treaty 8 Tribal Association, as well as representatives from the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, Common Sense Canadian, My Sea to Sky, Skwomesh Action and the former CAW director for Unifor.

There are upwards of six northern and six southern corridor pipelines proposed to cross northwest British Columbia, connecting the fracked gas fields of the northeast to the proposed LNG terminals and tankers on the coast.

"Gas extraction for LNG has the potential for massive cumulative impacts on a landscape that is already heavily impacted," says Tribal Chief Liz Logan of the Treaty 8 Tribal Association, whose territory would feed LNG with fracked gas. "There are too many unanswered questions related to the impacts of the LNG projects in our territory, and a Regional Strategic Environmental Assessment (RSEA) must be done before any more development takes place. An RSEA is a pathway to answering some of those questions," she said.

"The BC government and LNG industry are putting our economy, environment and our communities at risk and they are doing so with reckless haste," says Shannon McPhail, Executive Director of the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition from Hazelton, BC.

Lelu Island and Ridley Island near Prince Rupert are both being considered as locations for LNG terminals. These islands are adjacent to the most important critical juvenile salmon habitat in the entire Skeena watershed.

Further south, the Woodfibre LNG project proposed for Howe Sound and Squamish is facing increasing local concern.

"At a local level, we're looking at potential air pollution, light and noise pollution, and impacts to marine species due to underwater noise pollution. The community is very concerned about the safety of this proposed LNG facility, and the possibility of explosions and spills," states Tracey Saxby, one of the founders of My Sea to Sky, a Squamish community group started in response to widespread concern about the proposed Woodfibre LNG project. "Looking at the bigger picture, this project does not make sense from a climate change standpoint, and the upstream impact of fracking in northern BC is something all Canadians should be worried about," Saxby says.

"Workers – and lots of them – need jobs. But we need jobs that will produce an environment our children and grandchildren will thank us for," says Susan Spratt, former CAW area director for Unifor. "The answer is clear. Green jobs not LNG or Pipelines."

For a full list of guest speakers and speaker bios, click here [https://wildernesscommittee.org/lng_pipedreams_forum_guest_speakers].

– 30 –

For Immediate Release - May 21, 2014

For more information or to arrange interviews:

Leila Darwish, BC-Yukon Regional Organizer, Council of Canadians


Eoin Madden, Climate Campaigner, Wilderness Committee

[http://wildernesscommittee.org/]

The Wilderness Committee is Canada's largest membership-based, citizen-funded wilderness preservation organization. We work for the preservation of Canadian and international wilderness through research and grassroots education. The Wilderness Committee works on the ground to achieve ecologically sustainable communities.

Digging Ones Own Grave: BC's Fracked-Dream Future Gets Rude Awakening

BC LNG: Promised Land of Prosperity or Gas Fueled Race to the Bottom?

by Kevin Logan

On this the first day of BC's much ballyhooed International LNG conference, it is worth noting, comparing and contrasting BC's LNG "model" and that of competing Nations around the world in the natural gas industry.

Particularly noteworthy is today's announcement that Russia and China have signed the biggest gas deal in the "history of the world." (watch this before reading the rest of this piece).

This is of importance given the reliance the current government has with China as a destination market, and its strange propensity to sanction Russia over the contentious Ukranian issues that some say are driving Russia into the arms of China.

The values of the China/Russia so-called "biggest deal in history," mirror almost exactly those involved in the BC / Petronas deal.

At the time of the Petronas BC announcement I published this piece at Common Sense Canadian outlining the 25 year 400 Billion dollar deal, and now we see Russia boasting about their 30 year, 400 Billion dollar landmark deal with China.

Moreover, BC is boasting that their Petronas deal will see some 68 Billion dollars in total investment over the life of that arrangement, once again mirroring the 70+ billion dollars that China and Russia will be investing in the required infrastructure.

The big difference of course is that Russia is celebrating the largest deal in its history while we were simply negotiating behind closed doors and handing it all over to foreign interests.

You will notice the pomp and ceremony of this deal between China and Russia, meanwhile when we handed over 25 years of supply to Petronas (and others dwarfing the Tarsands in oil equivalent), hardly anyone heard about it. Why is that you think?

Could it be that Russia intends to be on the receiving end of the 400 Billion dollars in gas revenue, whereas the deals BC and Canada have structured see us on the receiving end of, well, not much at all actually.

Instead of getting paid for the gas and celebrating 400 Billion in new revenues as Russia is, we are instead celebrating the fact that Petronas will have to invest in infrastructure to take all of our gas and that there might be a few jobs involved when we "re-engineer" our entire education system.

In fact, the paltry LNG tax ( I wrote about here) that the Liberals promised prosperity is based on is already being eroded away before we even break ground on one LNG plant. This leaves us almost entirely reliant on "Royalty Rates" on the drilling (fracking) side of the LNG equation which Rich Coleman has already said there will be no changes in and as a result will remain the lowest in North America and in most parts of the world.

See Northern Insights blog here as Natural gas revenues are decreasingly relevant to our "prosperity." And see where Ernst and Young bolster the government model here estimating a 200 billion dollar LNG investment potential, however you have to ask yourself, if they are investing 200 Billion how much gas/value are they intending for a return on that investment? Well, unlike Russia those returns will not stay in Canada and instead will just be "trillions" jotted down in new GDP figures, benefiting mostly foreign interests and but a few Canadians.

So that leaves jobs right? Well not so much, it was reported this week in the Globe and Mail that Trade Agreements with our new LNG destination markets dictate that foreign workers must be allowed in to work on these foreign investment projects in Canada.

Moreover, BC just "celebrated" the so called 'Canadian LNG's' announcement that foreign owners will be hiring foreign contractors on the leading and most likely to succeed LNG projects.

But don't worry... because as reported here...."Some local suppliers and "picks and shovels" business are going to reap the rewards from the 20 years-plus construction boom."

So if concrete, picks and shovels are your thing you are in luck! Makes you wonder exactly what skills we need that validate the entire re-engineering of our education system... doesn't it?

China is investing 22 Billion up front in the Gas Deal reached today in Russia - "Upfront" - where as in BC, any and all investment by Petronas will be handed back in the form of tax credits, probably on both royalties and the proposed tier 1 LNG tax rate of 1.5% because both are so low that it will take decades to recoup the capital costs as BC has promised based on these paltry tax rates (remember Ernst and Young is estimating 200 Billion investment as linked above).

Meanwhile Petronas already has the 25 year export license in hand and the recent, not legally binding, 'Letter of Intent' was more a request for certainty on tax rates into the future than a commitment on their behalf to prosperity for BC .

Moreover, Petronas has already sold off huge, long- term, "off-take" contracts for LNG supply to India, Japan, China and Brunei, as well as still searching for a final partner. In so doing they have already regained their original investment in Canada "approved by Harper" over a year ago as the last of a "trend" where foreign SOEs displace Canadian interests.

So what we have here is Foreign SOEs displacing domestic ones and foreign policy that is so contradictory and incoherent it is impossible to understand how Canadians benefit.

In addition to Trade Agreements that lock down future governments and sweetheart oil and gas exploitation deals mirroring that of third world countries where the populace is impoverished while the resource wealth is stripped out beneath their feet and politicians "celebrate" with lavish self-congratulatory events.

Its time to wake up BC, your prosperity is slipping away and your economy is about to be fracked beyond recognition, unless of course you are into "picks and shovels" and digging your own grave.

Waiting to Exhale: West Anxiously Watching Russia/China Gas Deal

We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia…Or Is It Eurasia?

by Peter Lee - China Matters

Current US China policy seems to be “Who Needs Russia? We’ve got…The Philippines!”

Unless President Obama has absolute faith in the ability of the United States and the Asian democracies to restrain the PRC, there would seem to be some disturbing developments for the United States in Asia.

First of all, the People’s Republic of China parked its HYSY 981 oil rig in waters that Vietnam claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone, triggering a heated response from Vietnam, anguished writhing from ASEAN, and a stern “don’t engage in provocations” fingerwag from the United States.

The PRC, however, is not yielding, implicitly highlighting the fact that the United States is failing in its self-proclaimed mission to assure peace and prosperity in the South China Sea (as I pointed out in a previous piece, the PRC’s oil-rig shenanigans accentuate the essential sovereignty/EEZ character of disputes between China and its South China Sea neighbors, and undercut the “freedom of navigation” hobbyhorse that the US has crafted to ride to the rescue of the SCS).

Although VOA reported it as “US Navy ‘Shaping Events’ in South China Sea”, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert acknowledged that the US has its work cut out for it in the SCS:

“We are starting to shape events. We have got to manage our way through this, in my opinion, through this East China Sea and South China Sea [tensions]. We’re not leaving. They know that. They would be the leadership of the Chinese navy. We believe that we have to manage our way through this."

Also, this week also witnessed a slobbery authoritarian love-fest between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at a confab in Shanghai, also attended by Iran and a bunch of stans, illustrating the completely predictable dynamic of the Western hardline on Ukraine driving Russia and its gas into the arms of the PRC.

As of this writing the gas deal has not gotten done, apparently because of a disagreement over the unit price, and because the PRC is jibbing at the Russian demand for a $25 billion prepayment—a prepayment that, I might add, will relieve Gazprom of the financial embarrassment incurred by shipping Ukraine a few billion dollars of gas that it hasn’t been paid for, provide a nice receivable (if not immediate cash cushion) for Russia as it haggles with Ukraine (and a rather anxious Europe) re the next round of gas shipments to the West, and establish a precedent for demanding prepayment for Ukraine.

If the gas deal doesn’t go down, the US foreign policy commentariat in general and the Obama administration in particular will breathe a quiet sigh of relief that the dreaded Eurasian alliance of ex-Commies and pseudo-Commies in Russia and China has failed to occur.

If the gas deal gets done, especially on the basis of a ruble/yuan settlement that sidelines the dollar, on the other hand, the manure should hit the fan.

Right now, the Western response to these Asian developments has been pretty muted, a sign, I think that the foreign policy consultant/think tank/media complex has not received any useful guidance from the Obama administration.

My personal feeling is that the United States is loath to acknowledge the Eurasian “ghost at the banquet” and is declining to escalate openly at the current awkward juncture. Instead, the Obama administration is quietly rolling out a sequence of passive-aggressive reproofs to the PRC.

Last week the USN Blue Ridge just happened to cruise past the Scarborough Shoal.

This week, the Justice Department indicted 5 PLA officers for hacking US corporations.

This sort of thing was always in the cards. Starting in 2011, the Obama administration had been methodically rolling out the PRC cyber-bad-guy product for over a year, to be capped by a formal direct confrontation with Xi Jinping by Barack Obama concerning Chinese cybersins at Sunnylands in June 2013, followed by some public naming and shaming, but then Boom! Snowden! Doh!

The Snowden thing seems to have derailed the campaign for a year or so—most of the hacking allegations in the DOJ indictment date to 2012 or before, an indication that the United States is belatedly working off its depreciated pre-Snowden inventory of PRC misbehavior.

In rolling out the indictments yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder was obliged to abandon the pre-Snowden framing—that PRC hacking was a Defcon 1 threat both to the US economy and the global Internet commons—in favor of condemning the PRC hackers for the one kind of hacking that the United States government still asserts it does not do…corporate spying…for corporate advantage.

In context, I should point out that the United States has an unequivocal agenda of espionage on economic matters pertaining to energy, since energy is a matter of “national security”. As to whether the information on potentially unfavorable developments in oil, gas, and uranium is simply put into a dossier for President Obama to wring his hands over, or whether actionable intelligence somehow makes it to pro-Western energy giants, is something that I and the reader can currently only speculate about.

However, it will be interesting if Glenn Greenwald comes up with any blockbuster revelations concerning Brazil, its over the top anxiety concerning the security and secrecy of the bidding process for its massive “deep salt” offshore oil blocs (first award included Total & two PRC companies), Brazil’s stated desire to disconnect from the US Internet, and any US NSA/CIA hijinks.

Also, I might point out that, in the founding document of the pivot, “America’s Pacific Century” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defined US “economic security” as “national security”, which would conceivably place a broader range of corporate information into the purview of the CIA and NSA.

A look at the indictment seems to indicate that the US wanted to make sure its threat to prosecute looked credible, and not be hamstrung by US corporations’ unwillingness to air matters pertaining to vital proprietary knowledge or the loss thereof in open court.

Many of the hacking infractions pertained to US firms that were involved in various trade disputes with the PRC on issues like solar panels, steel, and whatnot and already involved extensive declarations of fact before the WTO.

The US grand jury returned the sealed indictment on May 1 and the Department of Justice exercised its discretionary powers to unseal the indictment on May 29; in other words, the timing was a matter of choice by the Obama administration. I suspect it was a squib fired across the PRC’s bow in response to the PRC’s defiance in the SCS and its romance with Russia.

The PRC has responded with spluttering denials, suspension of a working group on cybersecurity, and threats of a chill in military-to-military ties.

The Obama administration’s move doesn’t seem to have much of an upside; it scotched the joint US-PRC work on groundrules in cyberwarfare, something that I think is of genuine interest to the Pentagon if not the keyboard commandoes of the national security apparatus; it also threatens military-to-military exchanges, again a priority for the military, which cherishes interactions with opposing commanders it may be called upon to confront or fight; and it provides very little consolation for US high tech businesses like Cisco, which are reeling from the public revelation of their intimate games of footsie with the NSA.

Needless to say, the indictment also did nothing to advance what should be the sin qua non of superpower geopolitics: trying to drive a wedge between the PRC and Russia by highlighting differences in treatment. But instead of stroking Xi Jinping, we gave him a whack on the snout at the same time we’re pummeling Putin.

That is, it would seem, rather stupid, since Russia is wary of PRC economic dominance, especially in the Siberian east, fears the demographic onslaught of the “Yellow Horde”, and is not an automatic and natural ally of China.

Nevertheless, “Eurasia” is now becoming a thing, and that’s not very good news for the pivot to Asia. The pallid multilateralism of the pivot, I must confess, does not compare favorably to the muscular posturing of red strongmen that makes the hearts of neo-nationalists, particularly in Russia, go pitty-pat.

The premise of the pivot—that an ostensible united front of the US and Asian democracies will impel the PRC to modify its behavior to adhere to desired Western norms—is taking a hit along with the optics.

As the relative weight of the US and Europe in the world economy diminish, US sanctions encourage disintermediation of the US financial system in the world economy, the US pursues an ineffectual but polarizing all-stick/zero-carrot confrontation with Russia at the very time it is seeking to isolate the PRC diplomatically, and “Eurasia” looks more viable, the PRC’s willingness to bear the cost of defying US soft power increases.

Don’t get me wrong. PRC aggressiveness in the South China Sea is real. Problem is, the US will to confront the PRC in the SCS is not. The Rube Goldberg structure of the pivot announces that fact instead of hiding it.

As the deterrent effect of US soft power in Asia dwindles, the US must decide whether to force developments in Asia into the sphere in which it still exercises unquestioned dominance—the hard power of military action—or resign itself to an ineluctable erosion of US prestige and influence in the region and a retreat to bilateral horsetrading with the unpalatable “Eurasian” powers.

It will also be interesting to see if America recognizes that it has a choice, albeit from an unattractive menu of options. But if the Western spin of the Ukraine crisis is any guide, the US will console itself with the fantasy that it is merely reacting passively to aggression, the pivot was forced on it, and the PRC can be blamed for the unwise choices that Washington made.

The U.S. is not in the business of acknowledging it made bad foreign policy, even though it has made spectacularly bad foreign policy during the Obama as well as Bush administrations. The usual temptation is to blame incapable proxies and venal antagonists for crises exacerbated by the United States.

For a useful illustration, I direct readers to the case of Libya, where the US & NATO destroyed the governing authority, handed the reins over to groups totally incapable of exercising power, and are now apparently backing a coup by an ineffectual strongman who just might make things right; the cavalcade of bloody disaster that is US policy in Syria; the botch in Ukraine; and, for that matter, the massacre and misery of Iraq. And I almost forgot the disaster that the US-midwifed regime of South Sudan has become. And how about Yemen?

Either the US is rather maladroit practitioner of foreign policy, or failure is displaying an inexplicable bias for dogging American actions.

For a classic specimen of US bewilderment at the pickle it’s in, I direct you to “China’s Grand Strategy Disaster” by Brad Glosserman of CSIS. He is genuinely gobsmacked that the PRC cannot perceive the subtle genius of the pivot, which is so evident from the privileged perspective of the Washington Beltway. Must be collective terror and/or insanity in the PRC ruling elite:

Why, then, does China stick to this course? Either no one in the upper echelons of the Chinese leadership sees the big picture—which is a very disturbing scenario—or no one in that leadership is prepared to question the wisdom of current policies, because the price of dissent is potentially too high. If true, that should be extremely worrying. That logic implies the momentum of current decisions cannot be diverted and confrontation, if not clashes, will follow.

There is only one convincing explanation for Chinese behavior: Beijing is trying to harvest a new source of energy to fuel its economy—capturing the power generated by Deng Xiaoping as he spins in his grave.

You know, I’m not sure a diagnosis of collective insanity in Zhongnanhai is really going to reassure President Obama that the pivot to Asia is the magic elixir for America’s “Pacific Century”.

There is, of course, another convincing explanation: that the PRC thinks it has enough regional clout to avoid catastrophic long term consequences from the transitory distaste of its neighbors and US for its policies, just as the United States feels it can shove its Ukraine policy down the throats of Germany and the EU.

For the US in Asia, I predict a choice off the confrontation/accommodation menu of “both and neither”, escalating but indecisive sanctions and military posturing, a mish-mash of soft power and hard power antagonism, i.e. an era of ugly and counterproductive muddling. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.