Oil Wars and Rumours of Oil Wars (yet the price of oil keeps dropping!?)

The Kerry-Abdullah Secret Deal: Oil-Gas Pipeline War On Iran, Syria And Russia

by ​​​​F. William Engdahl -  ICH

The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called IS.

It involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabian flooding the world market with cheap oil.

Details were concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Saudi King. The unintended consequence will be to push Russia even faster to turn east to China and Eurasia.

One of the weirdest anomalies of the recent NATO bombing campaign, allegedly against the ISIS or IS or ISIL or Daash, depending on your preference, is the fact that with major war raging in the world’s richest oil region, the price of crude oil has been dropping, dramatically so. Since June when ISIS suddenly captured the oil-rich region of Iraq around Mosul and Kirkuk, the benchmark Brent price of crude oil dropped some 20% from $112 to about $88. World daily demand for oil has not dropped by 20% however. China oil demand has not fallen 20% nor has US domestic shale oil stock risen by 21%.

What has happened is that the long-time US ally inside OPEC, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been flooding the market with deep discounted oil, triggering a price war within OPEC, with Iran following suit and panic selling short in oil futures markets. The Saudis are targeting sales to Asia for the discounts and in particular, its major Asian customer, China where it is reportedly offering its crude for a mere $50 to $60 a barrel rather than the earlier price of around $100. [1] That Saudi financial discounting operation in turn is by all appearance being coordinated with a US Treasury financial warfare operation, via its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in cooperation with a handful of inside players on Wall Street who control oil derivatives trading. The result is a market panic that is gaining momentum daily. China is quite happy to buy the cheap oil, but her close allies, Russia and Iran, are being hit severely.

The deal

According to Rashid Abanmy, President of the Riyadh-based Saudi Arabia Oil Policies and Strategic Expectations Center, the dramatic price collapse is being deliberately caused by the Saudis, OPEC’s largest producer. The public reason claimed is to gain new markets in a global market of weakening oil demand. The real reason, according to Abanmy, is to put pressure on Iran on her nuclear program, and on Russia to end her support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria.[2]

When combined with the financial losses of Russian state natural gas sales to Ukraine and prospects of a US-instigated cutoff of the transit of Russian gas to the huge EU market this winter as EU stockpiles become low, the pressure on oil prices hits Moscow doubly. More than 50% of Russian state revenue comes from its export sales of oil and gas.

The US-Saudi oil price manipulation is aimed at destabilizing several strong opponents of US globalist policies. Targets include Iran and Syria, both allies of Russia in opposing a US sole Superpower. The principal target, however, is Putin’s Russia, the single greatest threat today to that Superpower hegemony. The strategy is similar to what the US did with Saudi Arabia in 1986 when they flooded the world with Saudi oil, collapsing the price to below $10 a barrel and destroying the economy of then-Soviet ally, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, ultimately, of the Soviet economy, paving the way for the fall of the Soviet Union. Today, the hope is that a collapse of Russian oil revenues, combined with select pin-prick sanctions designed by the US Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence will dramatically weaken Putin’s enormous domestic support and create conditions for his ultimate overthrow. It is doomed to fail for many reasons, not the least, because Putin’s Russia has taken major strategic steps together with China and other nations to lessen its dependence on the West. In fact the oil weapon is accelerating recent Russian moves to focus its economic power on national interests and lessen dependence on the Dollar system. If the dollar ceases being the currency of world trade, especially oil trade, the US Treasury faces financial catastrophe. For this reason, I call the Kerry-Abdullah oil war a very stupid tactic.

The Kerry-Abdullah secret deal

On September 11, US Secretary of State Kerry met Saudi King Abdullah at his palace on the Red Sea. The King invited former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Bandar to attend. There a deal was hammered out which saw Saudi support for the Syrian airstrikes against ISIS on condition Washington backed the Saudis in toppling Assad, a firm ally of Russia and de facto of Iran and an obstacle to Saudi and UAE plans to control the emerging EU natural gas market and destroy Russia’s lucrative EU trade. A report in the Wall Street Journal noted there had been “months of behind-the-scenes work by the US and Arab leaders, who agreed on the need to cooperate against Islamic State, but not how or when. The process gave the Saudis leverage to extract a fresh US commitment to beef up training for rebels fighting Mr. Assad, whose demise the Saudis still see as a top priority.” [3]

For the Saudis the war is between two competing age-old vectors of Islam. Saudi Arabia, home to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina, claims de facto supremacy in the Islamic world of Sunni Islam. The Saudi Sunni form is ultra-conservative Wahhabism, named for an 18th Century Bedouin Islamic fundamentalist or Salafist named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahha. The Taliban derive from Wahhabism with the aid of Saudi-financed religious instruction. The Gulf Emirates and Kuwait also adhere to the Sunni Wahhabism of the Saudis, as does the Emir of Qatar. Iran on the other hand historically is the heart of the smaller branch of Islam, the Shi’ite. Iraq’s population is some 61% majority Shi’ite. Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad is a member of a satellite of the Shi’ite branch known as Alawite. Some 23% of Turkey is also Alawite Muslim. To complicate the picture more, across a bridge from Saudi Arabia sits the tiny island country, Bahrain where as many as 75% of the population is Shi’ite but the ruling Al-Khalifa family is Sunni and firmly tied to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the richest Saudi oil region is dominated by Shi’ite Muslims who work the oil installations of Ras Tanura.

An oil and gas pipeline war

These historic fault lines inside Islam which lay dormant, were brought into a state of open warfare with the launching of the US State Department and CIA’s Islamic Holy War, otherwise known as the Arab Spring. Washington neo-conservatives embedded inside the Obama Administration in a form of “Deep State” secret network, and their allied media such as the Washington Post, advocated US covert backing of a pet CIA project known as the Muslim Brotherhood. As I detail in my most recent book, Amerikas’ Heiliger Krieg, the CIA had cultivated ties to the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood death cult since the early 1950’s.

Now if we map the resources of known natural gas reserves in the entire Persian Gulf region, the motives of the Saudi-led Qatar and UAE in financing with billions of dollars the opposition to Assad, including the Sunni ISIS, becomes clearer. Natural gas has become the favored “clean energy” source for the 21st Century and the EU is the world’s largest growth market for gas, a major reason Washington wants to break the Gazprom-EU supply dependency to weaken Russia and keep control over the EU via loyal proxies like Qatar.

The world’s largest known natural gas reservoir sits in the middle of the Persian Gulf straddling part in the territorial waters of Qatar and part in Iran. The Iranian part is called North Pars. In 2006 China’s state-owned CNOOC signed an agreement with Iran to develop North Pars and build LNG infrastructure to bring the gas to China.[4]

The Qatar side of the Persian Gulf, called North Field, contains the world’s third largest known natural gas reserves behind Russia and Iran.

In July 2011, the governments of Syria, Iran and Iraq signed an historic gas pipeline energy agreement which went largely unnoticed in the midst of the NATO-Saudi-Qatari war to remove Assad. The pipeline, envisioned to cost $10 billion and take three years to complete, would run from the Iranian Port Assalouyeh near the South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf, to Damascus in Syria via Iraq territory. The agreement would make Syria the center of assembly and production in conjunction with the reserves of Lebanon. This is a geopolitically strategic space that geographically opens for the first time, extending from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.[5] As Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar put it, “The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline – if it’s ever built – would solidify a predominantly Shi’ite axis through an economic, steel umbilical cord.”[6]
Shortly after signing with Iran and Iraq, on August 16, 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Ministry of Oil announced the discovery of a gas well in the Area of Qarah in the Central Region of Syria near Homs. Gazprom, with Assad in power, would be a major investor or operator of the new gas fields in Syria. [7] Iran ultimately plans to extend the pipeline from Damascus to Lebanon’s Mediterranean port where it would be delivered to the huge EU market. Syria would buy Iranian gas along with a current Iraqi agreement to buy Iranian gas from Iran’s part of South Pars field.[8]

Qatar, today the world’s largest exporter of LNG, largely to Asia, wants the same EU market that Iran and Syria eye. For that, they would build pipelines to the Mediterranean. Here is where getting rid of the pro-Iran Assad is essential. In 2009 Qatar approached Bashar al-Assad to propose construction of a gas pipeline from Qatar’s north Field through Syria on to Turkey and to the EU. Assad refused, citing Syria’s long friendly relations with Russia and Gazprom. That refusal combined with the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline agreement in 2011 ignited the full-scale Saudi and Qatari assault on Assad’s power, financing al Qaeda terrorists, recruits of Jihadist fanatics willing to kill Alawite and Shi’ite “infidels” for $100 a month and a Kalishnikov. The Washington neo-conservative warhawks in and around the Obama White House, along with their allies in the right-wing Netanyahu government, were cheering from the bleachers as Syria went up in flames after spring 2011.

Today the US-backed wars in Ukraine and in Syria are but two fronts in the same strategic war to cripple Russia and China and to rupture any Eurasian counter-pole to a US-controlled New World Order. In each, control of energy pipelines, this time primarily of natural gas pipelines—from Russia to the EU via Ukraine and from Iran and Syria to the EU via Syria—is the strategic goal. The true aim of the US and Israel backed ISIS is to give the pretext for bombing Assad’s vital grain silos and oil refineries to cripple the economy in preparation for a “Ghaddafi-”style elimination of Russia and China and Iran-ally Bashar al-Assad.

In a narrow sense, as Washington neo-conservatives see it, who controls Syria could control the Middle East. And from Syria, gateway to Asia, he will hold the key to Russia House, as well as that of China via the Silk Road.

Religious wars have historically been the most savage of all wars and this one is no exception, especially when trillions of dollars in oil and gas revenues are at stake. Why is the secret Kerry-Abdullah deal on Syria reached on September 11 stupid? Because the brilliant tacticians in Washington and Riyadh and Doha and to an extent in Ankara are unable to look at the interconnectedness of all the dis-order and destruction they foment, to look beyond their visions of control of the oil and gas flows as the basis of their illegitimate power. They are planting the seeds of their own destruction in the end.

William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order. www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net

Notes:

[1] M. Rochan, Crude Oil Drops Amid Global Demand Concerns, IB Times, October 11, 2014 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/crude-oil-drops-amid-global-demand-concerns-1469524

[2] Nihan Cabbaroglu, Saudi Arabia to pressure Russia Iran with price of oil, 10 October 2014, Turkish Anadolu Agency, http://www.aa.com.tr/en/economy/402343–saudi-arabia-to-pressure-russia-iran-with-price-of-oil

[3] Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes, Deal With Saudis Paved Way for Syrian Airstrikes: Talks With Saudi Arabia Were Linchpin in U.S. Efforts to Get Arab States Into Fight Against Islamic State, Wall Street Journal, September. 24, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/deal-with-saudis-paved-way-for-syrian-airstrikes-1411605329?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

[4] POGC, North Pars Gas Field, Pars Oil and Gas Company website, http://www.pogc.ir/NorthParsGasField/tabid/155/Default.aspx

[5] Imad Fawzi Shueibi , War Over Gas–Struggle over the Middle East: Gas Ranks First, 17 April, 2012. http://www.voltairenet.org/article173718.html

[6] Pepe Escobar, Why Qatar Wants to Invade Syria, Asia Times, September 27, 2012, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32576.htm

[7] Ibid.

[8] F. William Engdahl, Syria Turkey Israel and the Greater Middle East Energy War, Global Research, October 11, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-turkey-israel-and-the-greater-middle-east-energy-war/5307902

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/

Snowblind Support from Liberals for Stone Cold Obama

Pale Riders: The Moral Blindness of our Leading Liberals

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

Behold the quintessential earnest progressive liberal in the highest moral dudgeon: Digby railing with thunderous fury at the possibility (the very distinct possibility) that Barack Obama is going to suppress the Senate's report on CIA torture.

Digby quotes the recent letter from some of Obama's fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates, who are calling on Obama to release the report (and close the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, for good measure.)

Worthy sentiments and justifiable anger indeed. But then Digby adds this gloss:

"Honestly, if they deep six the report (or redact it so heavily that it's meaningless) I think President Obama has no choice but to give back his prize. There's [sic] a lot of actions he's taken as president that people could claim disqualify him for the prize anyway. Arguments about the dirty wars and targeted assassination programs alone will go on for generations. But one can, at least, say they represent some form of modern warfare and that the President of a military Empire is always going to be required to deal in such ugly matters. (That, in fact, s one reason why it was ludicrous to give him the prize in the first place --- he runs the most powerful killing machine on the planet.)

But however you see his performance as Commander in Chief, There can be no debate about torture. It's a war crime. It should be prosecuted. But even if they cannot do that, covering it up is to be complicit."

Old cynic that I am, I must admit that even my grizzled jaw dropped as I read these words. "Arguments about the dirty wars and targeted assassination programs alone will go on for generations." This, again, is from one of our leading liberal lights. She thinks dirty wars -- secret incursions into other nations to murder, subvert, wreak havoc, terrorize -- are open to debate. She thinks that "targeted assassination programs" -- one of which is run directly out of the White House, with regular weekly meetings where Obama and his advisors tick off names of human beings to be killed without warning, without the slightest pretense of judicial process or rule of law -- will be argued about for generations. The morality of death squads and dirty wars is something about which serious, concerned citizens can disagree and debate, apparently.

Running a death squad -- which, among many others, kills American citizens without due process, then, just for the hell of it, murders their children: this doesn't put a person beyond the pale of acceptable human behavior. Not at all. It's something we can argue about, sure; but not only is it within the parameters of acceptable behavior, it does not even disqualify you from enthusiastic political support, not even from earnest, peace-loving antiwar liberals like Digby, who fought tooth and nail to keep Obama running his death squads and dirty wars in 2012. (And if he could run for a third term there is no doubt -- none whatsoever -- that he would have fierce backing of the earnest, peace-loving antiwar liberals like Digby.)

But my poor jaw had not yet done descending. For Digby, astonishingly, goes on to offer one of those arguments for state murder and the Nuremberg-level war crime of carrying out "dirty wars" on the sovereign territory of other nations: "One can, at least, say they represent some form of modern warfare and that the President of a military Empire is always going to be required to deal in such ugly matters."

Now, I'm sure we are all to understand that Digby herself wouldn't make that argument. But she does see its point. She thinks it’s something that can be debated. She might not like it, she might even oppose it (while of course never opposing the continuation of its perpetrator in power). But from the gritty, savvy realpolitik perspective that our earnest progressive liberals are always so keen to show they understand and appreciate, you can certainly make that argument and remain within the bounds of respectable debate in Digby's eyes.

Isn't this a wonderment? A progressive, peace-loving liberalism that can accept a president actually checking off names on a death list, like Stalin in the Politburo -- that can accept "dirty wars" that have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians and destabilized whole regions, breeding more violence and terror. And although Digby has criticized such actions, it is obvious that none of them have put Obama beyond the moral pale for her. He's still within the bounds of acceptable realpolitik. ("Hey, the guy has to run a military Empire. What's he supposed to do?"). He is still -- if only just -- on "our" side.

Wholesale murder, wanton destruction, untold -- and unnecessary -- anguish and grief and suffering and turmoil: these things can be borne, if reluctantly, by our liberal progressive peace-lovers. But torture -- that, apparently, is the one thing that is beyond the pale. And in this particular case, it is not even torture being carried out by the Obama administration. (There is torture still going on, of course, but it's not at issue in the Senate report on past CIA actions which has so fixated our progressive liberals.) No, just the mere act of covering up a report on past torture is, for Digby, a step too far at last. Killing, mayhem, subversion -- well OK, if you have to; but torture -- why, that's "a war crime"! There can be absolutely "no debate about torture."

But here the obvious question arises: why not? If you can swallow all the rest and still support the perpetrator, why draw the line at torture? If, by Digby's own logic, you can "at least" make the argument that dirty wars and death squads "represent some form of modern warfare" -- then why not torture? Why not lump it in with those other "forms of modern warfare"? "Hey, we do lots of things now that used to be considered war crimes --- because we now face new dangers in our modern warfare. We have to kill people without due process, we have wage dirty wars -- and every now and then, we have to get rough with a prisoner. If you can support a president who murders and subverts, why not support him when he tortures, or covers up for torturers?"

What is that makes torture worse than actually murdering innocent people? Why is torture an undebatable war crime, but blowing up children sleeping in their homes in some Pakistani village is something that can be "argued about" -- indeed, such an open moral question that the debate will go on "for generations"?

The truth, of course, is that murder and dirty war are even worse than torture. But all of them partake of a radical evil that should put any perpetrator beyond the pale, making the person a war criminal who indeed "should be prosecuted." But if our earnest progressive liberals took off their blinders and acknowledged this truth -- then what? They would have to admit that they have been supporting -- with however much showy reluctance and "savvy" constructive criticism -- the perpetrator of monstrous war crimes.

So they focus on what is, relatively speaking, the lesser evil. Probably because most of them believe that Obama really has abolished torture in our far-flung gulags and bases and "secret facilities," rather than just entrenching it and codifying it with new manuals and different jargon. So in the end, Obama is not really that evil, is he? Since they cannot accept the full moral import of the death squads and dirty wars, they expend their righteous fury on the safer and more limited ground of torture. Or again, in this case, on "complicity" with torture, by covering up a report on the crimes committed years ago by the real bad guys, from the other side of the partisan divide: the Bush gang.

But let's say that Obama does quash or whitewash the report, confirming his "complicity" in torture. What then? What condign punishment does our morally furious liberal progressive envision for him in that case? Impeachment? Prosecution? Imprisonment? No. If Obama does this really, really bad thing -- which is so much worse than murdering people and waging dirty war -- then Digby believes he should ... he should ... give his Nobel Peace Prize back.

That's it. Pretty rough, huh? That would really teach him a lesson, if he had to do that!

But even if Digby's worst fears come to pass, is there anyone who believes that she would then disown the president, break with him, denounce him publicly as a war criminal? Of course not. She, and the other earnest progressive liberals, will continue to support him -- with loving chastisement and sad shakes of the head, to be sure -- but they've got his back.

And we will see them on the hustings for Hilary Clinton when the time comes for her to perpetrate these same moral outrages, these same war crimes. Their partisan tribalism blinds them to the fullness of the reality that confronts us. (And I know how that works; I suffered from the same tribal blindness for many, many years.) They cannot genuinely and effectively oppose the monstrous system of military Empire because, in the end, what is most important to them is not stopping the system -- but making sure that one of "theirs" is running it.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Greg Palast, Zaria Stoffman, Janine Bandcroft Wed. Oct 29, 2014

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

November is right around the corner, and befitting the monotonous return of a least loved season, this year it means too another turn of the civic election cycle. It's also time for our neighbours south to head to the polls for mid-term elections; and, as with all things it seems, America's November contest has outshone us again, with the big time fraud and election-fixing Stephen Harper and his insipid robo-callers can only envy.

Listen. Hear.

Reporting investigator, Greg Palast is just returned to New York after a trip into the heart of Republican America, where he and his crack team of researchers recently wrapped a year-long investigation for Al Jazeera America; obtaining among other things the first-ever copies of the lists of targeted voters, that is; voters subject to being “scrubbed” from voter rolls.

And surprise surprise, the list lurches heavily towards Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans. Who could be behind such skullduggery? Stay tuned...


Greg Palast has been on the trail of ballot bandits for a long time now; breaking the story on George W. Bush's 2000 election win assist by orange juice heiress Katherine Harris' mass purgative of Florida's voter rolls. Then, as an elections official, Harris disallowed thousands of Black "felons" access to the voter's booth. Small problem: they were innocent. Palast is also the author of several books, including New York Times bestsellers: 'Billionaires & Ballot Bandits,' 'Armed Madhouse,' and 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.' His latest is 'Vultures' Picnic,' named by the BBC's Newsnight Review as "Book of the Year for 2012."

In addition to appearing in Britain's Guardian newspaper, (who regard him as "the most important investigative journalist of our time...") and on the BBC flagship news program Newsnight, Greg's reports are featured stateside by The Nation Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, and online at Truthout.org and at GregPalast.com. Palast film exposés include: 'Billionaires and Ballot Bandits - The Movie,' 'Vultures and Vote Rustlers.' 'Why We Occupy - Palast Live!,' 'Big Easy to Big Empty,' 'Bush Family Fortunes, ' 'The Assassination of Hugo Chavez,' 'Palast Investigates,' 'The Election File,' and with Jeremy Scahill 'Big Noise: From Black Water to White Powder.'

Greg Palast in the first half.

And; though mere pikers compared to America's anti-democrats, Canadian politicians are learning how to spike the process here too. Federally, Stephen Harper's New Government of Canada has stifled federal employees of all stripes, barring especially scientists from talking un-minded to the press, and has allowed tax agency intimidation tactics against non-profit organisations with inconvenient politics to continue. Right here in BC meanwhile, the Chirsty Clark government recently proposed changes to the Society Act - something promising to effect, according to the West Coast Environmental Law Association, "community development organizations, church groups, secular groups, community organizations, and hunting groups" among many others. Particularly contentious is the seemingly innocuous provision, s.99.

Zaria Stoffman is an articling student with the Environmental Law Centre Society, or ELC right here at UVic. That society's mission is to "provide research and advocacy on public interest environmental issues" and provide for an social environment where "local communities, environmental groups, and First Nations have the legal tools and resources to advocate effectively for the restoration, conservation, and protection of this province's unique and diverse environment."

Zaria Stoffman and BC Liberals' Society Act engineering in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news from our city's streets and beyond there too. But first, Greg Palast and the purge this time.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Wednesday, 1-2pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. And now heard at Simon Fraser University's http://www.cjsf.ca . He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Reviewing John Pilger's Utopia

Reviewing John Pilger's Utopia - An Epic Story of Struggle and Resistance

by Jim Miles

In a clash of cultures, the one carrying the most guns, germs, and steel wins. In Australia as with all former British colonial possessions, cultural views are dominated by white society.

The First Nations of Australia, commonly referred to as the aborigines, have struggled through two centuries of subjugation by a white society that refuses to recognize the histories of the two peoples and their conflicting cultures.

As described by native elder Robert Eggington at the end of the film:

“In our culture, our laws, if we were to harm the land and to hurt that land the way in which it is being done today, we would be punished spiritually severely for that. White Australia doesn’t have a sense of belonging to this land and it only has a sense of belonging to the establishment and its institutions and it cities it’s built here. It doesn’t understand their country.”

Utopia examines the many contradictions and double standards, the many ignorances of the white population, and the many cruelties and violences that they have visited on the land and people of the First Nations of Australia. It is a captivating and hauntingly disturbing film as these actions are not simply historical incidents to be forgiven by some simplistic apology, but are actions that are occurring through the beginning of the Twenty-first Century without concern for essential human rights.

The capital city, Canberra, was where a “city of white was born,” and the first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton said that “equality of man never intended to apply to those who were not British and white skinned.” This arrogant, ignorant, and racist viewpoint was common throughout the British empire and still clings strongly to former empirical states, but is arguably strongest in Australia.

Throughout the film John Pilger examines the lies and platitudes of those in government with the actual historical record and with the narrative of the First Nations people.

As recently as the 1990s, there was an “ideological campaign known as the history wars.” The historians claimed that there were “no invasions, no massacres, no genocide” and the natives should be grateful for Britain’s arrival, as: “they and their culture were all but obsolete, their history worthless.” This genocide denial was the propaganda of empire, trying yet again to justify the stealing of a land, and banishment of its people.

Specific cases are examined, looking at their history, their modern history of the past twenty-five years as witnessed by Pilger, and the ongoing lack of real concern and real action to address the problems. Comparison are between a lavish resort that charges $30 000 (AUSD) per week on land from which it was “resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter (Sidney Monitor, 1838);” and a former concentration camp - Rattnest Island - that now serves as a holiday resort with rooms (former cells) renting at $240 a night, where “thousands of aboriginal men and boys incarcerated here, many of them tortured and killed. Today it a hotel with a luxury spa (Karma Spa).”

Government is only part of the factor of Australia’s racism. Pilger examines how the media, print and visual, support the generalized racist views within Australia. Towards the end of the film, he makes a comparison between the “lost generation” - those that were removed from their homes and families in order to deny their culture and lifestyle embedded into the landscape the government and corporations wished to exploit (again a typical factor in other British colonial regimes) - and the much more recent “Interventions” of 2008-09, a government scheme concocted for the same reasons - exploitation of the land and its resources.

The excuse for the interventions was a false claim by a disguised government minister on a TV show about sexual abuse and drugs being rampant within the aboriginal communities. The government suspended the racial discrimination act (!!), they sent in the military, job schemes were eliminated, benefits and pensions were restricted, and a pass card was issued (how so much like South Africa, Canada, Israel and their British supported histories of apartheid!). “With incomes quarantined, starvation was reported and “rates of self harm and suicide quadrupled.”

The fraud was exposed with no evidence for the charges that led to the intervention. No one paid any penalty, not the government personnel involved nor the media station (ABC, “Lateline”) that promulgated the misinformation. The bitter irony of the event is that it created situations similar to the previous “lost generation” wherein children were and still are being removed from families without explanation, many adopted for domestic servants leading to “rape and sexual exploitation used by whites against black women and children.”

Enter the corporations. In 2007 a government program, “Top Secret 2” in 2007 was searching to create “the new frontier in mining.” After this, and the “interventions” it was found that there was a “huge amount of uranium and rare earths” in the affected area.

While it is mostly a service economy (as per most neo-liberal economies today) mining is a large part of the industrial economy, shipping mostly coal, iron ore, and gold to China (30%) and other Asian countries. It is “enormously profitable - one billion per week….from minerals they didn’t make from land they don’t own.”

In the 1980s an attempt was made to legislate national land rights, but a combination of industry, media ads, and scare tactics were “bold, crude, and sadly effective” in defeating it. Universal land rights were abandoned. In 2010, PM Gillard attempted to raise the tax rate on the mineral super-profits, but the tax was effectively reduced to nothing, with lost revenue estimated at $60 billion dollars.

Today, the First Nations of Australia are still discriminated against with all the resultant socio-economic problems that go along with the lack of good housing, education, and land and employment. The Australian government and the majority of its white population hold the typical ignorant and racist British colonial views concerning other races.

Utopia addresses these issues directly, creating a picture of struggle and survival against the oppressive nature of a racist society. Australia is the “only western country repeatedly condemned for its abuse of indigenous people….reconciliation is not possible without justice.” The First Nations should be “offered genuine treaty that shares this land….until we give back their nationhood, we can never claim our own.”

Utopia - An Epic Story of Struggle and Resistance. John Pilger/Dartmouth Films, 2013.

Gaza Super Max: Where Else Would Such Suffering Be Allowed to Continue?

How Israel is turning Gaza into a super-max prison

by Jonathan Cook - The National

It is astonishing that the reconstruction of Gaza, bombed into the Stone Age according to the explicit goals of an Israeli military doctrine known as “Dahiya”, has tentatively only just begun two months after the end of the fighting.

According to the United Nations, 100,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, leaving 600,000 Palestinians – nearly one in three of Gaza’s population – homeless or in urgent need of humanitarian help.

Roads, schools and the electricity plant to power water and sewerage systems are in ruins. The cold and wet of winter are approaching. Aid agency Oxfam warns that at the current rate of progress it may take 50 years to rebuild Gaza.

Where else in the world apart from the Palestinian territories would the international community stand by idly as so many people suffer – and not from a random act of God but willed by fellow humans?

The reason for the hold-up is, as ever, Israel’s “security needs”. Gaza can be rebuilt but only to the precise specifications laid down by Israeli officials.

We have been here before. Twelve years ago, Israeli bulldozers rolled into Jenin camp in the West Bank in the midst of the second intifada. Israel had just lost its largest number of soldiers in a single battle as the army struggled through a warren of narrow alleys. In scenes that shocked the world, Israel turned hundreds of homes to rubble.

With residents living in tents, Israel insisted on the terms of Jenin camp’s rehabilitation. The alleys that assisted the Palestinian resistance in its ambushes had to go. In their place, streets were built wide enough for Israeli tanks to patrol.

In short, both the Palestinians’ humanitarian needs and their right in international law to resist their oppressor were sacrificed to satisfy Israel’s desire to make the enforcement of its occupation more efficient.

It is hard not to view the agreement reached in Cairo this month for Gaza’s reconstruction in similar terms.

Donors pledged $5.4 billion (Dh19.8bn) – though, based on past experience, much of it won’t materialise. In addition, half will be immediately redirected to the distant West Bank to pay off the Palestinian Authority’s mounting debts. No one in the international community appears to have suggested that Israel, which has asset-stripped both the West Bank and Gaza in different ways, foot the bill.

The Cairo agreement has been widely welcomed, though the terms on which Gaza will be rebuilt have been only vaguely publicised. Leaks from worried insiders, however, have fleshed out the details.

One Israeli analyst has compared the proposed solution to transforming a third-world prison into a modern US super-max incarceration facility. The more civilised exterior will simply obscure its real purpose: not to make life better for the Palestinian inmates, but to offer greater security to the Israeli guards.

Humanitarian concern is being harnessed to allow Israel to streamline an eight-year blockade that has barred many essential items, including those needed to rebuild Gaza after previous assaults.

The agreement passes nominal control over Gaza’s borders and the transfer of reconstruction materials to the PA and UN in order to bypass and weaken Hamas. But the overseers – and true decision-makers – will be Israel. For example, it will get a veto over who supplies the massive quantities of cement needed. That means much of the donors’ money will end up in the pockets of Israeli cement-makers and middlemen.

But the problem runs deeper than that. The system must satisfy Israel’s desire to know where every bag of cement or steel rod ends up, to prevent Hamas rebuilding its home-made rockets and network of tunnels.

The tunnels, and element of surprise they offered, were the reason Israel lost so many soldiers. Without them, Israel will have a freer hand next time it wants to “mow the grass”, as its commanders call Gaza’s repeated destruction.

New Vote, Old Tricks: 27 State Republican Purge Gets Crackin'

Al Jazeera exposé: New voter suppression tactic threatens 3.5 million - Racial minorities targeted in false claims of voting twice, in two states

by Greg Palast

Advisory: Palast, Aljazeera, to Expose New Voter Purge - Georgia Democrats angry purge begun in secret

A special investigation by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America.

Republican officials in more than 20 states have begun canceling voting rights of 3 million citizens, mostly minorities, accused of voting in two states.

Reporter Greg Palast, who led a team of researchers in year-long investigation for Al Jazeera America, has obtained the first-ever copies of the lists of targeted voters – voters subject to “scrub” from voter rolls.

The list is heavily over-weighted with Asian-American, African-American and Hispanic voters.

The voter purge could affect tight Senate races in Georgia and North Carolina—and the 2016 Presidential race. Tens of thousands have already lost their right to vote without any proof they have committed this felony crime.

The “scrub” list is deeply flawed. Over one million of the alleged double-voting “matches” have different middle names.

No social security numbers match

Over a million of the alleged double voters did not vote once, let alone twice The top-ranking Democrat in Georgia, Rep Stacey Abrams, House Minority Leader, is livid that she and other officials were kept in the dark about Republican Secretary of State’s purge operations.

America.AlJazeera.com will release Palast’s report, filmed in Georgia and North Carolina, on the web at 5am ET this Wednesday. The Al Jazeera America news network will broadcast a two-part report this Wednesday & Thursday nights at 9pm ET on America Tonight.

Greg Palast was the reporter who, for BBC-TV and The Guardian, broke the story in 2000 of Katherine Harris’ wrongful purge of innocent Black voters as “felons.”

Russell Brand and Irritating Mediacracy

Russell Brand Shows His Irritation With Mediacracy

by Jonathan Cook  - ICH

 

'I don't trust politicians & corporations in this country' 

Brand is getting plenty of exposure in the British media at the moment as he plugs his new book, Revolution (and there’s no shame in that!).

It is worth noting the differences between the Brand who was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last year and the Brand who now faces off with Paxman’s dull successor, Evan Davis (see the interview below), as well as the differences in the reception of the two interviews.

On my reading, the media’s patience with Brand is running out. He was supposed to entertain us with whacky political ideas above his station as he played the loveable, roguish clown. But over time Brand has honed his skills, especially on his show The Trews, and is increasingly resistant to being pushed down intellectual cul-de-sacs in these supposedly heavyweight interviews.

Equally he is seemingly finding it harder to hide his irritation at the constant trivialisation of the issues he raises. After all Newsnight is the most serious political affairs show on British TV. Whereas Brand kept his confrontation with Paxman largely friendly and humorous, here his impatience makes Davis look like the real buffoon. That’s not good TV, at least from the BBC’s perspective.

A nasty backlash is already brewing, with the liberal media – of course! – leading the assault. The Guardian has brought out its big guns over recent days: its main columnist Polly Toynbee, with Toynbee then recruiting John Lydon (of Sex Pistols fame), followed, most depressingly of all, by the usually astute comic Stewart Lee.

Now the Independent is rushing to get in on the act (see here and here). It trivialises Newsnight’s already trivial interview by focusing on anything but the serious issues Brand tried to address. This kind of subtle character assassination works – just look at the feedback comments below from readers.

After that, if you can stomach it, try the FT’s interview with Brand. This part of their exchange had me howling in mental anguish at the sheer obtuseness of Lucy Kellaway:

When I ask how lucrative [acting] is, he shrugs.

“It makes me scared if I think about money too much, then it makes me feel guilty. The only thing I tell the people who look after my money is, ‘Make sure my fucking taxes are 100 per cent legitimately paid,’ and then I do my own shit.”

But isn’t he against taxes? “Only as part of a mass movement, not as tax evasion,” he says.

When I ask how lucrative [acting] is, he shrugs.

 “It makes me scared if I think about money too much, then it makes me feel guilty. The only thing I tell the people who look after my money is, ‘Make sure my fucking taxes are 100 per cent legitimately paid,’ and then I do my own shit.”

But isn’t he against taxes? “Only as part of a mass movement, not as tax evasion,” he says.

It’s a funny line but one provoked by the refusal of our pundit-gatekeepers to move out of the intellectual playground that is supposedly the media “conversation”.

 

Brand’s critics are asking the wrong question

by Jonathan Cook

I am staying on the Brand theme a little longer.

As I mentioned yesterday, the liberal media backlash against Brand has begun in force. Below is a prime example of the vacuous responses to Brand that pose (and, sadly, are widely accepted) as sophisticated analysis. Sunny Hundal over at Liberal Conspiracy makes this preposterous criticism of Brand’s interview with Evan Davis on Newsnight I posted last night:

But Davis has a more profound question that Brand clearly doesn’t want to answer. My version of that question goes like this: If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?

Here, in a nutshell, is what the liberal’s concern amounts to: I am doing fine in the current system. I like my privileges. How can you promise me that in a fairer society I will not lose any of those privileges?

One has to credit Hundal for his honesty. When I speak of gatekeepers, this is exactly what I mean. If Brand wants to get a fair hearing in the media, he needs first to reassure people like Hundal that they will not lose their iPhones. If Brand doesn’t think such reassurances are a priority as we try to address climate meltdown and social collapse, he will be dismissed as a simpleton or court jester.

I have no doubt Brand can answer this question, as can I. But not in a way Hundal or anyone in his blinkered generation of coopted liberals could understand. That is why Brand is talking about a revolution: not in the facile sense of cutting off our rulers’ heads, but in consciousness – consciousness about who we are and where we live. In short, to drop our God-complexes and learn a little humility and humanity before it is too late. That revolution is coming whether we like it or not because our consciousnesses are going to be forced to understand the answers by far superior forces – those of the natural world. Mankind in a fist-fight with the planet is going to lose.

So I recommend to those like Hundal for whom the most pressing question right now is where their next iPhone is coming from to read the article below. It answers the question. It is long. It is thoughtful. It is sensitive. It is worldly, in the deepest sense of the word. And its sensibility most certainly can’t be expressed in soundbite interviews on our most serious TV shows, like Newsnight. And hardest of all, it is only an answer if you know what the real question is.

http://itsvivid.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/could-do-better-why-we-must-let-young-minds-free/

(h/t Media Lens)

"Billions of Gallons" - Fracking Wastewater Contamination of California Aquifers Confirmed

Confirmed: California Aquifers Contaminated With Billions Of Gallons of Fracking Wastewater

by Mike G - DeSmogBlog

After California state regulators shut down 11 fracking wastewater injection wells last July over concerns that the wastewater might have contaminated aquifers used for drinking water and farm irrigation, the EPA ordered a report within 60 days.

It was revealed yesterday that the California State Water Resources Board has sent a letter to the EPA confirming that at least nine of those sites were in fact dumping wastewater contaminated with fracking fluids and other pollutants into aquifers protected by state law and the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity, reveals that nearly 3 billion gallons of wastewater were illegally injected into central California aquifers and that half of the water samples collected at the 8 water supply wells tested near the injection sites have high levels of dangerous chemicals such as arsenic, a known carcinogen that can also weaken the human immune system, and thallium, a toxin used in rat poison.

Timothy Krantz, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Redlands, says these chemicals could pose a serious risk to public health:

“The fact that high concentrations are showing up in multiple water wells close to wastewater injection sites raises major concerns about the health and safety of nearby residents.”

The full extent of the contamination is not yet known. Regulators at the State Water Resources Board said that as many as 19 other injection wells could have been contaminating protected aquifers, and the Central Valley Water Board has so far only tested 8 of the nearly 100 nearby water wells.

Fracking has been accused of exacerbating California's epic state-wide drought, but the Central Valley region, which has some of the worst air and water pollution in the state, has borne a disproportionate amount of the impacts from oil companies' increasing use of the controversial oil extraction technique.

News of billions of gallons of fracking wastewater contaminating protected aquifers relied on by residents of the Central Valley for drinking water could not have come at a worse time.

Adding insult to injury, fracking is a water-intensive process, using as much as 140,000 to 150,000 gallons per frack job every day, permanently removing it from the water cycle.

Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, says these new revelations prove state regulators have failed to protect Californians and the environment from fracking and called on Governor Jerry Brown to take action now to prevent an even bigger water emergency in drought-stricken California.

“Much more testing is needed to gauge the full extent of water pollution and the threat to public health,” Krezmann says. 

 “But Governor Brown should move quickly to halt fracking to ward off a surge in oil industry wastewater that California simply isn’t prepared to dispose of safely.”

Mike G. is an activist, writer, and musician who lives in San Francisco. He has several years’ experience as an online campaigner working on energy, climate, and forest issues for organizations like Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. His writing has appeared on Alternet.org, Treehugger.org, Change.org, HuffingtonPost.com, and more.

Gary Webb Feasted Upon Again: How Free the Free Press?

The Myth of the Free Press

by Chris Hedges - Truthdig

There is more truth about American journalism in the film 'Kill the Messenger', which chronicles the mainstream media’s discrediting of the work of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie 'All the President’s Men', which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal.

The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy—even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia.

The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses. 

The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power.

When Webb, writing in a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed the Central Intelligence Agency’s complicity in smuggling tons of cocaine for sale into the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press turned him into a journalistic leper. And over the generations there is a long list of journalistic lepers, from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone to Julian Assange.

The attacks against Webb have been renewed in publications such as The Washington Post since the release of the film earlier this month. These attacks are an act of self-justification. They are an attempt by the mass media to mask the collaboration between themselves and the power elite. The mass media, like the rest of the liberal establishment, seek to wrap themselves in the moral veneer of the fearless pursuit of truth and justice. But to maintain this myth they have to destroy the credibility of journalists such as Webb and Assange who shine a light on the sinister and murderous inner workings of empire, who care more about truth than news.

The country’s major news outlets—including my old employer The New York Times, which wrote that there was “scant proof” of Webb’s contention—functioned as guard dogs for the CIA. 

Soon after the 1996 exposé appeared, The Washington Post devoted nearly two full pages to attacking Webb’s assertions. The Los Angeles Times ran three separate articles that slammed Webb and his story. It was a seedy, disgusting and shameful chapter in American journalism. But it was hardly unique. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in the 2004 article 'How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb’s Career', detailed the dynamics of the nationwide smear campaign.

Webb’s newspaper, after printing a mea culpa about the series, cast him out. He was unable to work again as an investigative journalist and, fearful of losing his house, he committed suicide in 2004. We know, in part because of a Senate investigation led by then-Sen. John Kerry, that Webb was right. But truth was never the issue for those who opposed the journalist. Webb exposed the CIA as a bunch of gunrunning, drug-smuggling thugs. He exposed the mass media, which depend on official sources for most of their news and are therefore hostage to those sources, as craven handmaidens of power. He had crossed the line. And he paid for it.

If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the government’s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?

These were questions the power elites, and their courtiers in the press, were determined to silence.

The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power. The press writes and speaks—unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians—to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state. It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions.

The mass media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to readers and viewers their sense of themselves. They tell them who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice and schemes that promise personal and professional success. The mass media, as Wright wrote, exist primarily to help citizens feel they are successful and that they have met their aspirations even if they have not. They use language and images to manipulate and form opinions, not to foster genuine democratic debate and conversation or to open up public space for free political action and public deliberation. We are transformed into passive spectators of power by the mass media, which decide for us what is true and what is untrue, what is legitimate and what is not. Truth is not something we discover. It is decreed by the organs of mass communication.

“The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda; it has disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed,” James W. Carey wrote in 'Communication as Culture'.

Bridging the vast gap between the idealized identities—ones that in a commodity culture revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of it—and actual identities is the primary function of the mass media. And catering to these idealized identities, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, can be very profitable. We are given not what we need but what we want. The mass media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern of the mass media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.

“This,” Mills wrote, “is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.”

At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions, including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in the mass media.

Those who work in the mass media, as I did for two decades, are acutely aware of the collaboration with power and the cynical manipulation of the public by the power elites. It does not mean there is never good journalism and that the subservience to corporate power within the academy always precludes good scholarship, but the internal pressures, hidden from public view, make great journalism and great scholarship very, very difficult. Such work, especially if it is sustained, is usually a career killer. Scholars like Norman Finkelstein and journalists like Webb and Assange who step outside the acceptable parameters of debate and challenge the mythic narrative of power, who question the motives and virtues of established institutions and who name the crimes of empire are always cast out.

The press will attack groups within the power elite only when one faction within the circle of power goes to war with another. When Richard Nixon, who had used illegal and clandestine methods to harass and shut down the underground press as well as persecute anti-war activists and radical black dissidents, went after the Democratic Party he became fair game for the press. His sin was not the abuse of power. He had abused power for a long time against people and groups that did not matter in the eyes of the Establishment. Nixon’s sin was to abuse power against a faction within the power elite itself.

The Watergate scandal, mythologized as evidence of a fearless and independent press, is illustrative of how circumscribed the mass media is when it comes to investigating centers of power.

“History has been kind enough to contrive for us a ‘controlled experiment’ to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in 'Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'.

“By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.”

The righteous thunder of the abolitionists and civil rights preachers, the investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the Chicago stockyards, the radical theater productions, such as 'The Cradle Will Rock,' that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a voice to ordinary people, the labor unions that permitted African-Americans, immigrants and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great public universities that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private power, are no longer part of the American landscape. It was Webb’s misfortune to work in an era when the freedom of the press was as empty a cliché as democracy itself.

'The Cradle Will Rock,' like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than the power elite. And it excoriated the folly of war, greed, corruption and the complicity of liberal institutions, especially the press, in protecting the power elite and ignoring the abuses of capitalism. Mister Mister in the play runs the town like a private corporation.

“I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,” Mister Mister says. “My steel industry is dependent on them really.”

“Just you call the News,” Editor Daily responds. “And we’ll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border.”

Editor Daily and Mister Mister sing:

O the press, the press, the freedom of the press.
They’ll never take away the freedom of the press.
We must be free to say whatever’s on our chest—
with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no
for whichever side will pay the best.

“I should like a series on young Larry Foreman,” Mister Mister tells Editor Daily. “Who goes around stormin’ and organizin’ unions.”

“Yes, we’ve heard of him,” Editor Daily tells Mister Mister. “In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen.”

“Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with. And look up his past till at last you’ve got it on him.”

“But the man is so full of fight, he’s simply dynamite, why it would take an army to tame him,” Editor Daily says.

“Then it shouldn’t be too hard to tame him,” Mister Mister says.

“O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,” the two sing. “You’ve only got to hint whatever’s fit to print; if something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and aho-nonny-no. For whichever side will pay the best.”

Civil Liberties Org. Reaction to Proposed Expansion of Spy Agency Powers

BCCLA reacts to proposals for expanded powers for CSIS and to spy review body’s critique of CSIS accountability failures

by British Columbia Civil Liberties Association

VANCOUVER – Carmen Cheung, Senior Counsel at the BC Civil Liberties Association, reacted this morning to reports that a security bill seeking to expand the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) powers may be tabled as early as today, and to the suggestion that “radical thoughts” expressed online might be criminalized:

“Rushed and reactionary lawmaking is unwise. The question that Canadians should be asking is not what additional powers government needs to protect public safety, but how existing powers are being used and whether the existing criminal law is being properly enforced.

“We must ask how the tragic events of last week came to pass, without jumping to the conclusion that creating new laws is the answer. In a free society, there is no such thing as perfect security. The prospect of an all-seeing, always-spying government that can lock people up merely for their thoughts, and not their actions is fundamentally at odds with our democratic society.”

Ms. Cheung also commented on last week’s report of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) – the independent body responsible for reviewing CSIS activities – that identified several issues of concern with how CSIS is using its existing powers:

“We need to take care that we not adding to CSIS’s powers only as a reflexive response to recent tragedy, particularly when its own review body reported just last week that Canada’s spies have not been properly accountable for their existing powers. SIRC itself reports that it encountered difficulties in conducting its review and that in one investigation, it had been ‘seriously misled’ by CSIS and that CSIS had ‘violated its duty of candour.’ 

“Last year the Federal Court of Canada harshly rebuked CSIS for keeping the court in the dark about its operations when applying for warrants. This is unacceptable. And while the government wants to give our spies more power overseas and provide blanket confidentiality for CSIS informants, SIRC’s report highlights ongoing concerns with CSIS intelligence operations outside Canada. 

“This includes flaws with how CSIS confirms the value and reliability of intelligence collected overseas, which can have a direct impact on how CSIS investigates Canadians here at home. Before we can expand the power of our spy agencies, Canada’s spies need to be accountable for the powers they already have.”

The BCCLA is a non-partisan civil liberties and human rights organization that has developed expertise on national security issues for over fifty years, including public opposition to the use of the War Measures Act in 1970, participation in the Commission of Inquiry that led to the creation of CSIS and the end of the RCMP’s domestic spying role, and submissions to Parliament on anti-terror legislation following 9/11.

The BCCLA currently has two constitutional lawsuits against Canada’s electronic spy agencies for mass, warrantless surveillance of the public.

Statement on attacks in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Ottawa 

"Movements Undoing Border Imperialism" with Activist, Writer Harsha Walia

"Movements Undoing Border Imperialism" with Activist, Writer Harsha Walia

by Social Justice Studies Program

Tonight October 27: Harsha Walia at UVIC join activist and writer Harsha Walia speaking on "Movements Undoing Border Imperialism" at the Social Justice Studies Program Annual Lecture.

Walia is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013).

 FREE EVENT; ALL ARE WELCOME

7 pm, MONDAY OCTOBER 27, 2014

Bob Wright Centre, B150

UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA

Also later this week: the Victoria Coalition in Support of Temporary Workers presents: Migration and Misconceptions: Understanding Canada's Temporary Worker Program

Saturday, November 1, 3 to 5 pm
1611 Quadra Street

Margo Matwychuk
Director
Social Justice Studies Program
University of Victoria
web.uvic.ca/socialjustice/
@UVicSJS on Twitter
UVicSJS on Facebook
UVicSJS on YouTube

Pentagon, Ebola, and CDC Patents

Why is the Pentagon making Ebola ‘therapeutic’ and CDC Patenting Ebola strains?

by F. William Engdahl - NEO

The growing Ebola panic, being deliberately fanned by the criminally-irresponsible Dr Margaret Chan, the notorious “Swine Flu Pandemic” Director General of WHO in Geneva, and by the criminally irresponsible officials of the US Government Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is getting more and more absurd and more destructive by the day.

Not only do the official WHO “Ebola symptoms” list symptoms of common influenza or even severe colds. Not only is the only recognized “accurate laboratory test” for Ebola, the Kary Mullis PCR test identified by its inventor (for an entirely other purpose) Nobel Prize winning Dr Kary Mullis as utterly worthless to detect Ebola in a body.

In an interview Mullis stated, “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.” PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers. The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but not viruses themselves.

Now we discover that a new company has gone into partnership with the Pentagon…to produce “an anti-Ebola virus RNAi therapeutic” (sic). On August 4, the US TV channel, Fox News carried this intriguing lead: “The experimental drug used to treat two American aid workers who have been infected with the Ebola virus has never been tested on humans before and was only identified earlier this year as part of an ongoing research program backed by the U.S. government and military…The Defense Department has long had a hand in researching infectious diseases, including Ebola.”

DOD and Tekmira

Further research has since uncovered the following highly fascinating and highly suspicious fact about that ongoing US Department of Defense Ebola research program.

It seems the US Defense Department has joined with a biotech company named Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation. Its stock is listed on NASDAQ under TKMR. Tekmira labels itself as a leading developer of RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics. Since the Ebola scare, the stock price has shot through the roof, much like Don Rumsfeld’s shares in Gilead Sciences, inventor of the Tamiflu soared after Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ordered $1 billion worth of the worthless Tamiflu for his soldiers against an earlier fake flu scare, Bird Flu.

Tekmira’s own website notes, “TKM-Ebola, an anti-Ebola virus RNAi therapeutic, is being developed under a $140 million contract with the US Department of Defense’s Medical Countermeasure Systems BioDefense Therapeutics (MCS-BDTX) Joint Product Management Office.” As far back as 2010, they state further, “Tekmira signed a $140-million contract with the DoD to advance an RNAi therapeutic, which utilized our LNP technology, to treat Ebola virus infection. In 2013, the collaboration was expanded to include significant advances in LNP formulation technology, including a new LNP formulation that was more potent, the ability to be able to lyophilize (freeze-dry) LNP formulations and an LNP formulation that can be administered intravenously.”

The same Tekmira website goes on to note that “In 2014, Tekmira signed an Option Agreement with Monsanto, permitting Monsanto to obtain a license to use Tekmira’s proprietary delivery technology…” And now Tekmira is authorized (by whom?) they state, to test their TKM-Ebola on human guinea pigs. Where?

Tekmira tells us:

"Tekmira has joined an International Consortium led by the WHO, to provide an RNAi based investigational therapeutic for expedited clinical studies in West Africa. The Consortium includes representatives from the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC), at the University of Oxford, UK, the US Centers for Disease Control, Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors without Borders (MSF), and Fondation Mérieux, among others."

With the world already in induced hysteria over Ebola, who would miss a few hundred West Africans who died of complications not from Ebola, but from the Pentagon’s TKM-Ebola human experiments. All the key players in the crime are there in the consortium running the Tekmira human tests in West Africa—WHO, US CDC, and the Doctors Without Borders.

Is Ebola and the entire Ebola scare campaign of WHO and CDC designed by its ultimate sponsors to panic the world into receiving untested or inadequately tested “anti-Ebola” medications or injections such as TKM-Ebola that are designed to eliminate a significant portion of West African populations and beyond?

Ebola and Eugenics?

Interesting to note is the fact that until his recent death in a curious airplane accident, the chairman until 2010 of the US Doctors Without Borders was Richard Rockefeller, son of David Rockefeller. And, until only some months ago, another Rockefeller sat on the board of Monsanto when he died. The Rockefeller family, for more than a century since creation of their Rockefeller Foundation, have been among the most generous patrons of eugenics, including the Nazi eugenics research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin and Munich during the late 1930’s.

There are some very rich and very powerful families who deem themselves as Gods over us mere mortals. Indeed the Rockefeller history in this light is telling. In her 1993 book The Molecular Vision of Life, Dr. Lily E. Kay, described as “one of the outstanding historians of biology of her generation,” argued that the “new biology” was largely created by the Rockefeller Foundation and its subsidiary program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) through a consensus between a scientific elite and a business elite whose broader aims centered on eugenics and the need to create a mechanism of social control and human engineering.

The term “molecular biology,” in fact, was coined in 1938 by Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Natural Sciences Division. The scarce research money to develop the reductionist discipline of molecular biology came from the well-endowed Rockefellers. Many of the scientists involved were not even eugenics supporters, but scientists in need of research money. Kay notes many of them, even at the elite level, were interested in the pursuit of “pure science,” even though they were aware of the goals of the Rockefeller Foundation. As Kay notes, “the end result was that the ‘new biology’ would not be an open-ended investigation of ‘the riddle of life’ but would rather be a directed investigation to answer specific questions in ways amenable to the goals of eugenics and social control.”

CDC Patented a strain of Ebola?

All available evidence suggests that the ongoing Ebola hysteria from the WHO and CDC is part of just such a eugenics agenda that drove the Rockefeller Foundation to create Monsanto’s GMO varieties to contaminate the human and animal food chain.

As if the Tekmira US Pentagon link on Ebola were not alarming enough, it is worth noting that in 2010 the US Centers for Disease Control won a patent on a particular strain of Ebola known as “EboBun.” It’s patent No. CA2741523A1. They are also allowed to charge royalties for its use. Ugggg. What is the premier US Government health agency doing patenting Ebola virus strains in the first place? Patenting a virus? How is such a monstrosity possible? According to Canadian patent lawyer David Schwartz, “You can’t patent a disease condition per se, such as cancer or influenza. But if you’re talking about patenting a life form like a bacteria or virus, if altered by man, the answer there is yes.”

Welcome to the WHO and CDC and Department of Defense and what more and more is becoming clear as their “Twilight Zone,” to paraphrase the brilliant 1960’s TV science fiction series created by Rod Sterling.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

They Also Serve Who Only Wait: Why Multi-Nationals Sit Silent While Western Politics Blows Up Their Profit Centers

The Pentagon and Big Oil: Militarism and Capital Accumulation

by James Petras

There is no question that, in the immediate aftermath and for several years following US military conquests, wars, occupations and sanctions, US multi-national corporations lost out on profitable sites for investments. The biggest losses were in the exploitation of natural resources – in particular, gas and oil – in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and South Asia.

As a result some observers speculated that there were deep fissures and contradictory interests within the US ruling class. They argued that, on the one hand, political elites linked to pro-Israel lobbies and the military industrial power configuration, promoted a highly militarized foreign policy agenda and, on the other hand, some of the biggest and wealthiest multi-national corporations sought diplomatic solutions.

Yet this seeming ‘elite division’ did not materialize. There is no evidence for example that the multi-national oil companies sought to oppose the Iraq, Libyan, Afghan, Syrian wars. Nor did the powerful 10 largest oil companies with a net value of over $1.1 trillion dollars mobilize their lobbyists and influentials in the mass media to the cause of peaceful capital penetration and domination of the oil fields via neo-liberal political clients.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the three major US oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, eager to exploit the third largest oil reserves in the world, did not engage in Congressional lobbying or exert pressure on the Bush or later Obama Administration for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. At no point did the Big Ten challenge the pro-war Israel lobby and its phony arguments that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction with an alternative policy.

Similar “political passivity” was evidenced in the run-up to the Libyan war. Big Oil was actually signing off on lucrative oil deals, when the militarists in Washington struck again – destroying the Libyan state and tearing asunder the entire fabric of the Libyan economy.

Big oil may have bemoaned the loss of oil and profits but there was no concerted effort, before or after the Libyan debacle, to critically examine or evaluate the loss of a major oil producing region. In the case of economic sanctions against Iran, possessing the second largest oil reserves, the MNC again were notable by their absence from the halls of Congress and the Treasury Department where the sanctions policy was decided. Prominent Zionist policymakers, Stuart Levey and David Cohen designed and implemented sanctions which prevented US (and EU) oil companies from investing or trading with Teheran.

In fact, despite the seeming divergence of interest between a highly militarized foreign policy and the drive of MNC to pursue the global accumulation of capital, no political conflicts erupted. The basic question that this paper seeks to address is: Why did the major MNC submit to an imperial foreign policy which resulted in lost economic opportunities?

Why the MNC Fail to Oppose Imperial Militarism

There are several possible hypotheses accounting for the MNC accommodation to a highly militarized version of imperial expansion.

In the first instance, the CEO’s of the MNC may have believed that the wars, especially the Iraq war, would be short-term, and would lead to a period of stability under a client regime willing and able to privatize and de-nationalize the oil and gas sector. In other words, the petrol elites bought into the arguments of Rumsfeld, Chaney, Wolfowitz and Feith, that the invasion and conquest would “pay for itself”.

Secondly, even after the prolonged-decade long destructive war and the deepening sectarian conflict, many CEO’s believed that a lost decade would be compensated by “long term” gain. They believed that future profits would flow, once the country was stabilized. The oil majors entry after 2010; however, was immediately threatened by the ISIS offensive. The ‘time frame’ of the MNC strategic planners was understated if not totally wrong headed.

Thirdly, most CEO’s believed that the US-NATO invasion of Libya would lead to monopoly ownership and greater profits than what they received from a public-private partnership with the Gadhafi regime. The oil majors believed that they would secure total or majority control. In other words the war would allow the oil MNC to secure monopoly profits for an extended period. Instead the end of a stable partnership led to a Hobbesian world in which anarchy and chaos inhibited any large scale, long-term entry of MNC.

Fourthly, the MNC, including the big oil corporations, have invested in hundreds of sites in dozens of countries. They are not tied to a single location. They depend on the militarized imperial state to defend their global interests. Hence they probably are not willing to contest or challenge the militarists in, say Iraq, for fear that it might endanger US imperial intervention in other sites.

Fifthly, many MNC interlock across economic sectors: they invest in oil fields and refineries; banking, financing and insurance as well as extractive sectors. To the degree that MNC capital is diversified they are less dependent on a single region, sector, or source for profit. Hence destructive wars, in one or several countries, may not have as great a prejudicial effect as in the past when “Big Oil” was just ‘oil’.

Six, the agencies of the US imperial state are heavily weighted to military rather than economic activity. The international bureaucracy of the US is overwhelmingly made up of military, intelligence and counter-insurgency officials. In contrast, China, Japan, Germany and other emerging states (Brazil, Russia and India) have a large economic component in their overseas bureaucracy. The difference is significant. US MNC do not have access to economic officials and resources in the same way as China’s MNC. The Chinese overseas expansion and its MNC, is built around powerful economic support systems and agencies. US MNC have to deal with Special Forces, spooks and highly militarized ‘aid officials’. In other words the CEO’s who look for “state support” perforce have mostly ‘military’ counterparts who view the MNC as instruments of policy rather than as subjects of policy.

Seventh, the recent decade has witnessed the rise of the financial sector as the dominant recipient of State support. As a result, big banks exercise major influence on public policy. To the extent that is true, much of what is ‘oil money’ has gone over to finance and profits accrue by pillaging the Treasury. As a result, oil interests merge with the financial sector and their ‘profits’ are as much dependent on the state as on exploiting overseas sites.

Eighth, while Big Oil has vast sums of capital, its diverse locations, multiple activities and dependence on state protection (military), weaken its opposition to US wars in lucrative oil countries. As a result other powerful pro-war lobbies which have no such constraints have a free hand. For example the pro-Israel power configuration has far less ‘capital’ than any of the top ten oil companies. But it has a far greater number of lobbyists with much more influence over Congress people. Moreover, it has far more effective propaganda – media leverage- than Big Oil. Many more critics of US foreign policy, including its military and sanctions policies, are willing to criticize “Big Oil” than Zionist lobbies.

Finally the rise of domestic oil production resulting from fracking opens new sites for Big Oil to profit outside of the Middle East – even though the costs may be higher and the duration shorter. The oil industry has replaced losses in Middle East sites (due to wars) with domestic investments.

Nevertheless, there is tension and conflict between oil capital and militarism. The most recent case is between Exxon-Mobil’s plans to invest $38 billion in a joint venture in the Russian Arctic with the Russian oil grant Rosneft. Obama’s sanctions against Russia is scheduled to shut down the deal much to the dismay of the senior executives of Exxon Mobil, who have already invested $3.2 billion in an area the size of Texas.

Conclusion 

The latent conflicts and overt difference between military and economic expansion may eventually find greater articulation in Washington. However, up to now, because of the global structures and orientation of the oil industry, because of their dependence on the military for ‘security’, the oil industry in particular, and the MNC in general, have sacrificed short and middle term profits for “future gains” in the hopes that the wars will end and lucrative profits will return.