Expulsion: Palestinians Dispossessed for Life

Expelled for Life: A Palestinian Family’s Struggle to Stay on Their Land

by Jen Marlowe  - TomDispatch

Nasser Nawaj’ah held Laith’s hand as, beside me, they walked down the dirt and pebble path of Old Susya. Nasser is 33 years old, his son six. Nasser’s jaw was set and every few moments he glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was approaching.

Until Laith piped up with his question, the only sounds were our footsteps and the wind, against which Nasser was wearing a wool hat and a pleated brown jacket.

“Why did they take our home?” the little boy asked.

“Why did they take it? Good question,” replied Nasser, pausing to choose his words carefully. “They don’t want Palestinians. They don’t want us here.”

Laith was, in fact, asking about something that had happened 29 years ago when his father was a young boy. But he could just as well have been referring to the imminent threat of expulsion facing his family and his community today.

I had spent the previous night with Nasser and his family in their tent on their farmland in Khirbet Susya in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank. Since 1986, they have have lived there, one-third of a mile from their old home, which is now an Israeli archeological park. Perched on the hill above us is an Israeli settlement built on land occupied by Israel in 1967. That settlement, which is considered illegal under international law, was established in 1983 and is also called Susya. Where we now are, a few hundred meters away across the road, was once Old Susya, the former village of Nasser’s family.

I had mentioned to Nasser earlier that morning that I wanted to see Old Susya. As a foreigner, I could purchase a ticket to the archaeological site and enter without any problem. For Nasser, a Palestinian, it was a different story. He had tried twice to visit the site of the village and cave where he was born without much success, but decided to try again with me. This time he would bring along his six-year old son.

Tomgram: Jen Marlowe, "They Demolish and We Rebuild"

There’s an ugliness to war beyond the ugly things war does. There are scars beyond the rough, imperfectly mended flesh of the gunshot wound, beyond the flashback, the startle reflex, the nightmare. War finds peculiar and heinous ways to distort lives, and when children are involved, it can mean a lifetime spent trying to recapture what was, to rebuild what never can be.

I’ve met these former child victims again and again. I think of the man whose features seemed to be perpetually sliding off his face because a grotesque incendiary weapon landed near him when he was just a boy. I think of the woman who, as a pre-teen, watched as her grandmother and neighbor were gunned down right in front of her. I think of the little boy who, after fleeing from a town in the midst of a rebel assault, hadn’t seen his father in over a year. I think of the tiny girl who sang a song about orphans for me just months after her mother, father, and brother were killed by an old artillery shell. The boys who, on the cusp of their teens, had assault rifles thrust into their hands and were sent off to battle.

Those whom I met in adulthood were still suffering the after-effects, decades later, of adult wars that intruded on their young lives. Those I met as children were already thoroughly marked and, I have no doubt, will join the ranks of this enormous legion of the damaged. And they in turn will find company among the countless child victims in present-day Iraq and Syria, Yemen and Libya, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, not to mention Palestine.

After last summer’s 50-day war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas government, hopes were high for the reconstruction of battered Gaza City. Instead, all these months later, rubble remains ubiquitous, the economy is in shambles, and living standards are deteriorating as the enclave struggles to stay afloat. “A lot of factors pile on top of each other: unemployment remains [at] 40 percent, youth unemployment is more than 60 percent,” says Robert Turner, the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

The Gaza War and its aftermath have scarred yet another generation of Palestinian children, but Gaza has no monopoly on hardship. Suffering can be found even in the smallest of villages on the West Bank, too. In her latest report from the front lines of trauma, TomDispatch regular Jen Marlowe focuses on one family of war victims: a father scarred in his youth by war and occupation whose young son seems about to follow in his footsteps -- to follow, that is, a path to displacement and despair so common to so many Palestinians.

What does it mean for a family to be made refugees again and again, generation after generation? What does it mean for the children of yesterday, today, and tomorrow to be made homeless in a way that transcends the loss of a house? What does it mean for them to have lost their place, quite literally, in the world? Just what does that pain do to children? Where does it take them as adults? Let Jen Marlowe lead the way in answering these questions. Nick Turse

Expelled for Life: A Palestinian Family’s Struggle to Stay on Their Land

by Jen Marlowe

Nasser’s parents were born in El-Jaretain, a village in the Naqab desert in what is now Israel. They were pushed out of their home in 1948, during the mass displacement accompanying the founding of that country. After their expulsion from El-Jaretain, they joined relatives who had lived for decades in the ancient caves of Old Susya. A Palestinian village had existed there since at least 1830, when it was first mentioned in written records.

Though his family’s origin is in El-Jaretain, Old Susya is home for Nasser.

“Our village resides in our memory, and I want it to be in our children’s memory, the memory of the children of Susya,” Nasser said, explaining why he decided to bring Laith with him today. “This is their village, their real village, from which they were expelled in 1986. They have to see it, feel it, remember it, know its features. This is our heritage.”

Nasser first attempted to return to Old Susya several years ago, accompanied by his father and an Israeli friend from the human rights organization B’Tselem for which Nasser works. The Israeli army kicked them out, but not before his father was able to show him the cisterns where he had watered his sheep and the cave in which Nasser had been born. A few weeks before my visit, he tried a second time, buying tickets to the archaeological park and briefly getting in. Once again, he told me, Israeli soldiers wouldn’t let him stay. “They told us Palestinians were not allowed in, that this is a closed area, and kicked us out.”

Nasser fully expected to be ejected again, but for some reason, the soldiers stayed in their jeep at the entrance to the site and left us alone.

“Where is our home?” Laith asked as soon as we were inside.

“You want to see our home? Okay, I’ll show you,” Nasser replied, taking his young son by the hand and guiding him deeper into the village.

“Is this our house?” Laith asked again moments later with the persistence only a six-year-old can muster.

“We’re coming to it, hold on.”

Nasser pointed out the cistern from which their family used to draw water, now covered with iron bars and filled with pigeons. Laith peered inside. “Are these pigeons ours?”

“No, pigeons belong to God.”

Nasser stopped walking and stood looking at one particular cave.

“Here?” Laith asked, tugging his father’s arm.

Nasser was silent for a moment before replying, “Here.”

He led his son down stone steps and through a rectangular entrance hewn from white and pink rock. “Here it is,” he said, pausing before entering the dark, damp underground structure. “This is our cave. My mother gave birth to me here.”

Laith wanted to know if water dripped from the ceiling back then as it does now, if the entrance had been open then, and if there had been electricity in the cave when Nasser was a child. But he had an even more pressing question, one he kept asking throughout the day: “Why did they take it from us, Daddy?”

Click here to view the video clip if it does not load for you.

Nasser Nawaj’ah takes his son back to Old Susya

Expelled for Life

Nasser was only four years old in June 1986 when, after the remains of an ancient synagogue were discovered in Old Susya, Israel’s Civil Administration -- the military body through which it manages the Occupied Palestinian Territories -- declared the village an archaeological site and expropriated it. Nasser doesn’t remember being driven out of the cave in which he was born, but his 70-year old mother, Um Jihad, recalls it vividly.

Each summer during the harvest, the villagers would travel to their agricultural lands to pick figs, olives, and grapes. At the end of the harvest, they would return to Old Susya. One summer, when they tried to go back, she remembers, they found that “the Israeli army had fenced off the village and locked us out.” Bulldozers had blocked the caves and destroyed their homes.

Um Jihad was determined to retrieve her possessions. She approached the new gate just then being erected. Bedouin Arabs were working on it. “Ma’am, you better leave,” she remembers one of them warning her. “They are going to beat you up.”

Um Jihad knew who “they” meant. Israelis from the settlement of Susya, backed by the Israeli military, had already taken over the village.

“I will get my belongings even if they shoot me dead,” she replied and returned to her cave, wrapped her possessions in bundles, and carried them one by one back to the gate. By the time she had wrapped her last bundle, the gate was closed and locked and the Bedouin workers had left. She was trapped inside Old Susya with hostile settlers and soldiers. Undaunted, Um Jihad climbed atop a small hill next to the gate and tossed the bundles over one by one. Then she dug a hole beneath the fence and crawled out just as a soldier ran towards her, rifle in hand.

“I was young and fearless back then,” she said with a laugh. “Now, I scare easily.”

Along with many of the other 25 families from Old Susya, Um Jihad refused to abandon her land. Instead of moving to the nearby town of Yatta, they settled on their farming and grazing lands, building rough houses or shacks there or moving into caves on that land, and they continued to call their community Susya, or Khirbet Susya.

But Um Jihad’s problems and those of the rest of her community had only begun. “From then on, we lived in constant suffering and harassment,” she told me. “That Susya settlement is the mother of all our troubles. They keep uprooting our trees. Once one of their bulldozers almost ran me over while flattening the land.”

She describes several violent incidents the villagers endured at the hands of the settlers. About 15 years ago, she tells me, her cousin Mahmoud, a father of 12, was shot and killed by settlers.

Nasser has been beaten up multiple times -- by soldiers as well as settlers. Um Jihad recalls one such incident from 2001 after Yair Har-Sinai, an Israeli settler from the Susya settlement, was murdered by a Palestinian. Though Har-Sinai’s killer was not a resident of Khirbet Susya, many left the village in fear of the retaliation that was sure to come. Um Jihad’s daughters, however, wanted to stay and the teenaged Nasser refused to leave his sisters. “The settlers caught Nasser, kicked and punched him,” his mother said. “He was bleeding from the ears and nose. He was bedridden for two months.”

In another incident, Nasser (who was by then a well-known activist) was at the top of the hill near the Susya settlement when settlers started shouting “Nasser Nawaj’ah, we are going to slaughter you!” and shooting at him. “He rolled down all the way to the valley. He rolled until he reached the olive groves and ran away,” Um Jihad told me.

In addition to settlers physically assaulting villagers, sabotaging their water cisterns, destroying their caves, cutting down their trees, and vandalizing their fields, Susya and associated illegal outposts (unauthorized Israeli settlements) have seized approximately 740 acres of the villagers’ land, preventing them from accessing it to graze their sheep. On top of this, the Israeli military has repeatedly attempted to expel the already displaced villagers from Old Susya from their present homes.

In 1990, soldiers loaded many of the villagers onto trucks, drove them 15 kilometers north of Khirbet Susya, and then dumped them on the side of the road by a landfill. They returned to their agricultural lands, however, and rebuilt.

In 2001, after the murder of Yair Har-Sinai, soldiers accompanied by settlers violently and without warning expelled the community. Trees were uprooted, livestock slaughtered, wells and caves destroyed, and villagers beaten and arrested. An interim decision by the Israeli High Court permitted the villagers to return, but Israel’s Civil Administration has routinely denied them permits to build homes or pens for their livestock, and they have not been able to repair their caves. When temporary structures are built, they are declared illegal and some are demolished.

Um Jihad’s voice took on an edge of defiance as she summarized her community’s plight: “They demolish and we rebuild.”

Click here to see a larger version
Khirbet Susya, 2012. Photo Credit: Anne Paq/Activestills.org

“If I Lose This, I Lose My Life As Well”

The residents of Khirbet Susya have not been alone in their struggle. For protection and as witnesses, Israeli activists from organizations like Ta’ayush, a grassroots movement challenging racism and inequality between Jews and Arabs, have accompanied the village’s shepherds when they graze their sheep close to Israeli settlements. And Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) has played a central role in the village’s legal battles since the 2001 expulsion.

The villagers’ situation deteriorated further in 2012 when the Susya settlement teamed up with the right-wing Israeli organization Regavim, which promotes an openly Zionist agenda to “protect national lands and properties,” and filed a petition with the High Court of Justice. The petition demanded the demolition of all structures in Khirbet Susya. Ironically, it described the village as an “illegal outpost” and a “security risk” to the Susya settlers. Incidents of violence and destruction against the Palestinian community soon intensified.

Late that year, the lawyers of RHR submitted a proposed master plan on behalf of Khirbet Susya to the Civil Administration. Its response, released in October 2013, read, in part: “We see the current plan as yet another attempt to keep a poor, downtrodden population from advancing... It is an attempt to prevent the Palestinian woman from breaking the cycle of poverty and depriving her of educational and professional opportunities. Similarly, by sentencing the Palestinian child to life in a small, stultified village with no means for development, the plan keeps the child from being aware of all the opportunities available to any other person. It is our recommendation that the plan be rejected out of hand.” The Civil Administration recommended that the villagers move closer to the nearby town of Yatta.

Nasser was not fooled by such protestations of concern. The Civil Administration’s moves, he told me, have nothing to do with conditions not being good enough for the villagers. If that truly were their concern, then they would permit Khirbet Susya to develop. “This is the master plan for the Susya settlement: they need this land without Palestinians in order to expand the settlement.”

In February 2015, RHR petitioned the High Court of Justice, appealing the rejection of the village’s master plan and requesting that an interim injunction be issued to prevent further demolition until a ruling on the petition is made. On May 5th, the Court refused to issue the injunction, giving the Israeli military the green light to proceed with demolition even while a ruling is still pending. Five days later, an inspector from the Civil Administration came to Khirbet Susya and took photographs and measurements of the village’s structures. Nasser and his family have every reason to believe that expulsion from their homes is imminent.

The villagers and their supporters quickly mobilized, organizing large demonstrations and erecting an international tent where solidarity activists from all over the world are keeping up a 24-hour presence. Nasser himself is determined to fight on. “This is my land. My mother gave birth to me in Susya. My father is a refugee from 1948, and I am a refugee from 1986. I don’t want my children to be refugees in 2015. This is my place. My life is here; the land, the olive trees, the grapes. If I lose this, I lose my life as well.”

Um Jihad agrees. “We suffered and lived our entire lives in Susya, from the day we left El-Jaretain to the day we arrived in Susya. Our sheep and land are in Susya, and we’re staying in our land to protect it. If we die, we’ll die steadfast in our land.”

Click here to see a larger version

Um Jihad sitting in her family's tent in Khirbet Susya. 

Photo Credit: Nasser Nawaj’ah

Standing in his birth-cave, Nasser told Laith to hold still for a photo and then handed him the camera, so that the boy could record his heritage.

I asked Nasser how it felt to show his son the place of his birth. “I feel something, but there are no words for it,” he replied. He struggled for a moment to articulate his emotions, but broke off in mid-sentence, took Laith’s hand, and walked with him towards the cave’s exit. Father and son climbed the stairs out into the brightness of the cold winter day, where they would continue to explore Old Susya, before returning to their current home in Khirbet Susya -- another home from which they may be expelled at any moment.

Jen Marlowe, a TomDispatch regular, is a communications associate for Just Vision, the founder of donkeysaddle projects, an award-winning author/documentary filmmaker, and a human rights/social justice activist. Her books include The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey From Prisoner to Peacemaker and I Am Troy Davis. Her films include Witness Bahrain and One Family in Gaza. Twitter: @donkeysaddleorg. For information on how to support Susya, please visit Susiya Forever.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Jen Marlowe

The "Canadian Bakken" - Northern Myths and a Pipe Dream

Busting The "Canadian Bakken" Myth

by Andrew Topf - Oilprice.com

The financial pages of Canadian newspapers have been full of headlines lately announcing the potential of two large shale oil fields in the Northwest Territories said to contain enough oil to rival the Bakken Formation of North Dakota and Montana.

The report by Canada's National Energy Board (NEB) evaluated, for the first time, the volume of oil in place for the Canol and Bluefish shale formations, located in the territory's Mackenzie Plain. It found the "thick and geographically extensive" Canol formation is expected to contain 145 billion barrels of oil, while the "much thinner" Bluefish shale contains 46 billion barrels.

The report did not estimate the amount of recoverable oil, but points out that even if one percent of the Canol resource could be recovered, that represents 1.45 billion barrels. The calculation immediately had reporters comparing Canol and Bluefish to the Bakken, where the latest USGS estimate shows 7.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil (this includes the Three Forks Formation underlying the Williston Basin straddling North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba).

"Northwest Territories sitting on massive shale oil reserves on par with booming Bakken field in U.S.," enthused the Financial Post. 

 "NEB and GNWT study finds 200 billion barrels of oil in the Sahtu," gushed CBC News, referring to a region of the sprawling territory that cuts across three provinces and touches the Arctic Ocean.

In truth, energy industry followers would do better to read a more subdued story in Bloomberg News, titled "Drop in oil prices means no drilling in Canada's biggest shale reserves." Because while the report from the NEB does indeed point to a very large pool of potential shale oil, getting it out of the ground will be no small feat, especially at today's prices.

Before getting into the explanations, a little history and context.

Petroleum geologists have known about the Canol (short for Canadian oil) shale play at least since 2010, when ConocoPhillips bid $66 million to secure the rights to explore an 87,000-hectare parcel known as EL470. Thought to be the source rock of the Normal Wells discovery, which has yielded over 226 million barrels of conventional, light sweet crude since it was found in the 1920s, the Canol formation sparked a flurry of exploration activity around 2012-14. The area has seen 14 exploration licenses granted and $628 million in work commitments over the last five years.

ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil, Shell Canada and Husky Energy are the major leaseholders in the Canol, along with MGM Energy, an Alberta-based junior that originally hitched its wagon to the Mackenzie Gas project, a proposed natural gas pipeline that would run 1,200 kilometers along the Mackenzie Valley to connect northern onshore gas fields with North American markets. The project was approved by the NEB in 2010.

But with U.S. shale gas flooding the market, the proposed pipeline, led by Imperial Oil, no longer made sense, so MGM turned its attention to unlocking Arctic shale oil. The company gobbled up 189,000 net acres in the Canol, and in 2013 did some drilling at one of its four licenses in the play. Shell, Husky and ConocoPhilllips have also drilled wells, but in all, only about 20 have penetrated the formation, according to John Hogg, the former vice president of exploration and operations at MGM, who is now president of Skybattle Resources Ltd., a consulting company.

In 2014 MGM was taken over by Paramount Resources after failing to find a partner to help fund development of its shale oil prospects, including its main exploration license known as EL466. That license was estimated to have 625 million barrels of oil in place.

"We know there is a tremendous resource here," Hogg told Alberta Oil in a feature report on the Canol in 2013.

"What we don't know is how much has the potential to be economically developed."

Indeed that is the question on the minds of oil investors as they digest the latest numbers of potential barrels of oil under the Arctic tundra. The two formations have more oil in place than any other shale deposit assessed by the NEB, including the Montney region and Duvernay field. Globally, their significance is harder to assess. If all 191 billion barrels were technically recoverable, they would represent over half of the 345 billion barrels of global recoverable shale oil resources, more than the top four countries, Russia, the U.S., China, and Argentina, combined. But as was mentioned earlier, the NEB did not do that recoverable-oil calculation.

Knowledgeable oilmen like Hogg say that the Canol, while highly prospective, is a long-term game that will have to wait until oil prices rise. ConocoPhillips and Husky have both suspended exploration in the play, scared off by the oil price rout.

Hogg told Bloomberg that exploring the Canol costs three to four times more than in northeast British Columbia, where the Montney Basin has been a hot zone of oil and gas exploration recently. That's because the region lacks key infrastructure. A winter road is the only means of trucking drilling equipment to the Mackenzie Valley, with no all-weather road linking the potential oilfields to southern Canada. According to Hogg, a 500 to 800-barrels-a-day per well operation would only be profitable with oil at $75 a barrel (the Bakken produces an average of 630 barrels a day per well currently). WTI crude closed at $59.13 on Friday, June 5th.

Even if oil prices climb higher, those hoping for a Canadian Bakken need to be aware of the byzantine regulatory environment the Northwest Territories operates under compared to business-friendly Alberta to the south. Companies must submit applications to multiple regulators, versus a single regulator in Alberta With environmental assessments typically taking over 18 months to complete.

The Canol and Bluefish are shale oil formations, so companies will have to drill horizontal wells and use hydraulic fracturing to extract the oil. Fracking is a controversial practice that has not gone over well in other parts of Canada. Quebec and Nova Scotia have banned it, along with the state of New York, in the United States. Considering that most of the communities in the Mackenzie Valley are small and aboriginal, where the people see themselves as stewards of the land, it is quite unlikely that a big expansion of oil and gas production in the area would be allowed to go forward unopposed.

Then there's the historical enmity towards new pipelines in the Northwest Territories. Pulling the oil out of the ground at economical prices is one thing, but getting it to southern markets is quite another. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline to move natural gas from the Beaufort Sea through the Mackenzie Valley into Alberta has been frequently delayed due mostly to opposition from aboriginal groups. The closest the pipeline ever came to fruition was to receive federal Cabinet approval in 2011. The project is now estimated to cost $20 billion and no-one knows if and when market conditions will be favorable.

In late 2014, there was another proposal to transport bitumen, the tarry substance from which oil sands crude is derived, to Tuktoyaktuk, a hamlet on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. But again, the participation of native tribes is deemed crucial to the project. The experience of Enbridge, which is trying unsuccessfully to gain public acceptance of a plan to move oil sands crude across northern Alberta to a port on the British Columbia coast, does not hold much hope for the Northwest Territories, as far as new pipelines go.

Put it all together, and the potential of Canadian Arctic shale turning into another Bakken appears rather remote. Lack of infrastructure, low oil prices, a difficult regulatory environment, and a population that has traditionally opposed the expansion of oil and gas pipelines, are all factors working against this monster resource from ever moving beyond "in place" to anything resembling a set of producing fields.

The Rise of “Criminal Capitalism”

Pillage and Class Polarization: The Rise of “Criminal Capitalism”

by James Petras

About 75% of US employees work 40 hours or longer, the second longest among all OECD countries, exceeded only by Poland and tied with South Korea. In contrast, only 10% of Danish workers, 15% of Norwegian, 30% of French, 43% of UK and 50% of German workers work 40 or more hours. With the longest work day, US workers score lower on the ‘living well’ scale than most western European workers. Moreover, despite those long workdays US employees receive the shortest paid holidays or vacation time (one to two weeks compared to the average of five weeks in Western Europe). US employees pay for the costliest health plans and their children face the highest university fees among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In class terms, US employees face the greatest jump in income inequalities over the past decade, the longest period of wage and salary decline or stagnation (1970 to 2014) and the greatest collapse of private sector union membership, from 30% in 1950 down to 8% in 2014.

On the other hand, profits, as a percentage of national income, have increased significantly. The share of income and profits going to the financial sector, especially the banks and investment houses, has increased at a faster rate than any other sector of the US economy.

There are two polar opposite trends: Employees working longer hours, with costlier services and declining living standards while finance capitalists enjoy rapidly rising profits and incomes.

Paradoxically, these trends are not directly based on greater ‘workplace exploitation’ in the US.

The historic employee-finance capitalist polarization is the direct result of the grand success of the trillion dollar financial swindles, the tax payer-funded trillion dollar Federal bailouts of the crooked bankers, and the illegal bank manipulation of interest rates. These uncorrected and unpunished crimes have driven up the costs of living and producing for employees and their employers.

Financial ‘rents’ (the bankers and brokers are ‘rentiers’ in this economy) drive up the costs of production for non-financial capital (manufacturing). Non-financial capitalists resort to reducing wages, cutting benefits and extending working hours for their employees, in order to maintain their own profits.

In other words, pervasive, enduring and systematic large-scale financial criminality is a major reason why US employees are working longer and receiving less – the ‘trickle down’ effect of mega-swindles committed by finance capital.

Mega-Swindles, Leading Banks and Complicit State Regulators

Mega-swindles, involving trillions of dollars, are routine practices involving the top fifty banks, trading houses, currency speculators, management fund firms and foreign exchange traders.

These ‘white collar’ crimes have hurt hundreds of millions of investors and credit-card holders, millions of mortgage debtors, thousands of pension funds and most industrial and service firms that depend on bank credit to meet payrolls, to finance capital expansion and technological upgrades and raw materials.

Big banks, which have been ‘convicted and fined’ for mega-swindles, include Citi Bank, Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, JP Morgan, Barclay, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsch Bank and forty other ‘leading’ financial institutions.

The mega-swindlers have repeatedly engaged in a great variety of misdeeds, including accounting fraud, insider trading, fraudulent issue of mortgage based securities and the laundering of hundreds of billions of illegal dollars for Colombian, Mexican, African and Asian drug and human traffickers.

They have rigged the London Interbank Official Rate (LIBOR), which serves as the global interest benchmark to which hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial contracts are tied. By raising LIBOR, the financial swindlers have defrauded hundreds of millions of mortgage and credit-card holders, student loan recipients and pensions.

Bloomberg News (5/20/2015) reported on an ongoing swindle involving the manipulation of the multi-trillion-dollar International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) fix, a global interest rate benchmark used by banks, corporate treasurers and money managers to determine borrowing costs and to value much of the $381 trillion of outstanding interest rate swaps.

The Financial Times (5/23/15, p. 10) reported how the top seven banks engaged in manipulating fraudulent information to their clients, practiced illegal insider trading to profit in the foreign exchange market (forex), whose daily average turnover volume for 2013 exceeded $5 trillion dollars.

These seven convicted banks ended up paying less than $10 billion in fines, which is less than 0.05% of their daily turnover. No banker or high executive ever went to jail, despite undermining the security of millions of retail investors, pensioners and thousands of companies.

The Direct Impact of Financial Swindles on Declining Living Standards

Each and every major financial swindle has had a perverse ripple effect throughout the entire economy. This is especially the case where the negative consequences have spread downward through local banks, local manufacturing and service industries to employees, students and the self-employed.

The most obvious example of the downward ripple effect was the so-called ‘sub-prime mortgage’ swindle. Big banks deliberately sold worthless, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligation (CDO) to smaller banks, pension funds and local investors, which eventually foreclosed on overpriced houses causing low income mortgage holders to lose their down payments (amounting to most of their savings).

While the effects of the swindle spread outward and downward, the US Treasury propped up the mega-swindlers with a trillion-dollar bailout in working people’s tax money. They anointed their mega-give-away as the bail out for ‘banks that are just too big to fail”! They transferred funds from the public treasury for social services to the swindlers.

In effect, the banks profited from their widely exposed crimes while US employees lost their jobs, homes, savings and social services. As the US Treasury pumped trillions of dollars into the coffers of the criminal banks (especially on Wall Street), the builders, major construction companies and manufacturers faced an unprecedented credit squeeze and laid off millions of workers, and reduced wages and increased the hours of un-paid work.

Service employees in consumer industries were hit hard as wages and salaries declined or remained frozen. The costs of the FOREX, LIBOR and ISDA fix swindles’ fell heavily on big business, which passed the pain onto labor: cutting pension and health coverage, hiring millions of ‘contingent or temp’ workers at minimum wages with no benefits.

The bank bailouts forced the Treasury to shift funds from ‘job-creating’ social programs and national infrastructure investment to the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector with its highly concentrated income structure.

As a result of the increasing concentration of wealth among the financial swindlers, inequalities in income grew; wages and salaries were frozen or reduced and manufacturers outsourced production, resulting in declines in production.

Employees, suffering from the loss of income brought on by the mega-swindles, found that they were working longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits. Productivity suffered. With the total breakdown of the ‘capitalist rules of the game’, investors lost confidence and trust in the system. Mega-swindles eroded ‘confidence’ between investors and traders, and made a mockery of any link between performance at work and rewards. This severed the nexus between highly motivated workers, engaged in ‘hard work, long hours’ and rising living standards, and between investment and productivity.

As a result, profits in the finance sector grew while the domestic economy floundered and living standards stagnated.

Financial Impunity: Regulatees Controlling the Regulators

Despite the proliferation of mega-swindles and their pervasive ripple effects throughout the economy and society, none of the dozens of federal or state regulatory agencies intervened to stop the swindle before it undermined the domestic economy. No CEO or banker was ever arrested for their part in the swindle of trillions. The regulators only reacted after trillions had ‘disappeared’ and swindles were ‘a done deal’. The impunity of the swindlers in planning and executing the pillage of hundreds of millions of employees, taxpayers and mortgage holders was because the federal and state regulatory agencies are populated by ‘regulatory administrators’ who came from or aspired to join the financial sector they were tasked with ‘regulating’.

Most of the high officials appointed to lead the regulatory agencies had been selected by the ‘Lords of Wall Street, Frankfurt, the City of London or Zurich.’ Appointees are chosen on the basis of their willingness to enable financial swindles. It therefore came as no surprise on May 28 2015 when US President Obama approved the appointment of Andrew Donahue, Managing Director and Associate General Council for the repeatedly felonious, mega-swindling banking house of Goldman Sachs to be the ‘Chief of Staff’ of the Security and Exchange Commission. His career has been typical of the Washington-Wall Street ‘Revolving Door’.

Only after fraud and swindles evoked the nationwide public fury of mortgage holders, investors and finance companies did the regulators ‘investigate’ the crimes and even then not a single major banker was jailed, not a single major bank was closed down.

There were a few low-level bond traders and bank employees who were fired or jailed as scapegoats. The banks paid puny (for them) fines, which they passed on to their customers. Despite pledges to ‘mend their ways’ the bankers concocted new schemes with their windfalls of billions of Federal ‘bailout’ money while the regulators looked on or polished their CV’s for the next pass through the ‘revolving door’.

Every top official in Treasury, Commerce and Trade, and every regulator in the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) who ‘retired to the private sector’ has ended up working for the same mega-criminal banks and finance houses they had investigated, regulated and ‘slapped on the wrist’.

As one banker, who insists on anonymity, told me: ‘The most successful swindlers are those who investigated financial transgressions’.

Conclusion

Mega-swindles define the nature of contemporary capitalism. The profits and power of financial capital is not the outcome of ‘market forces’. They are the result of a system of criminal behavior that pillages the Treasury, exploits the producers and consumers, evicts homeowners and robs taxpayers.

The mega swindlers represent much less than 1% of the class structure. Yet they hold over 40% of personal wealth in this country and control over 80% of capital liquidity.

They grow inexorably rich and richer, even as the rest of the economy wallows in crisis and stagnation. Their swindles send powerful ripples across the national economy, which ultimately freeze or reduce the income of the skilled (middle class) employees and undermine the living conditions for poor working-class whites, and especially under and unemployed Afro-American and Latino American young workers.

Efforts to ‘moralize’ capital have failed repeatedly since the regulators are controlled by those they claim to ‘regulate’.

The rare arrest and prosecution of any among the current tribe of mega-swindlers would only results in their being replaced by new swindlers. The problem is systemic and requires deep structural changes. The only answer is to build a political movement independent of the two party system, willing to nationalize the banks and to pass legislation outlawing derivatives, forex trading and other unnatural parasitic speculative activities.                

Denali

Denali

by Soul Felt Media

Arming ISIS: Who Is Doing It?

Logistics 101: Where Does ISIS Get Its Guns?

by Tony Cartalucci - NEO

Since ancient times an army required significant logistical support to carry out any kind of sustained military campaign. In ancient Rome, an extensive network of roads was constructed to facilitate not only trade, but to allow Roman legions to move quickly to where they were needed, and for the supplies needed to sustain military operations to follow them in turn.

In the late 1700’s French general, expert strategist, and leader Napoleon Bonaparte would note that, “an army marches on its stomach,” referring to the extensive logistical network required to keep an army fed, and therefore able to maintain its fighting capacity. For the French, their inability to maintain a steady supply train to its forces fighting in Russia, and the Russians’ decision to burn their own land and infrastructure to deny it from the invading forces, ultimately defeated the French.

Nazi Germany would suffer a similar fate when it too overextended its logical capabilities during its invasion of Russia amid Operation Barbarossa. Once again, invading armies became stranded without limited resources before being either cut off and annihilated or forced to retreat.

And in modern times during the Gulf War in the 1990’s an extended supply line trailing invading US forces coupled with an anticipated clash with the bulk of Saddam Hussein’s army halted what was otherwise a lightning advance many mistakenly believed could have reached Baghdad had there been the political will.

The will to conquer was there, the logistics to implement it wasn’t.

The lessons of history however clear they may be, appear to be entirely lost on an either supremely ignorant or incredibly deceitful troupe of policymakers and news agencies across the West.

ISIS’ Supply Lines

The current conflict consuming the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Syria where the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) is operating and simultaneously fighting and defeating the forces of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, we are told, is built upon a logistical network based on black market oil and ransom payments.

The fighting capacity of ISIS is that of a nation-state. It controls vast swaths of territory straddling both Syria and Iraq and not only is able to militarily defend and expand from this territory, but possesses the resources to occupy it, including the resources to administer the populations subjugated within it.

For military analysts, especially former members of Western armed forces, as well as members of the Western media who remember the convoys of trucks required for the invasions of Iraq in the 1990s and again in 2003, they surely must wonder where ISIS’ trucks are today. After all, if the resources to maintain the fighting capacity exhibited by ISIS were available within Syrian and Iraqi territory alone, then certainly Syrian and Iraqi forces would also posses an equal or greater fighting capacity but they simply do not.

And were ISIS’ supply lines solely confined within Syrian and Iraqi territory, then surely both Syrian and Iraqi forces would utilize their one advantage – air power – to cut front line ISIS fighters from the source of their supplies. But this is not happening and there is a good reason why.

Terrorists and weapons left over from NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011 were promptly sent to Turkey and then onto Syria – coordinated by US State Department officials and intelligence agencies in Benghazi – a terrorist hotbed for decades.ISIS’ supply lines run precisely where Syrian and Iraqi air power cannot go. To the north and into NATO-member Turkey, and to the southwest into US allies Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Beyond these borders exists a logistical network that spans a region including both Eastern Europe and North Africa.

The London Telegraph would report in their 2013 article, “CIA ‘running arms smuggling team in Benghazi when consulate was attacked’,” that:

[CNN] said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels.

Weapons have also come from Eastern Europe, with the New York Times reporting in 2013 in their article, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.,” that:

From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia, and have vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive, according to American officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.

And while Western media sources continuously refer to ISIS and other factions operating under the banner of Al Qaeda as “rebels” or “moderates,” it is clear that if billions of dollars in weapons were truly going to “moderates,” they, not ISIS would be dominating the battlefield.

Recent revelations have revealed that as early as 2012 the United States Department of Defense not only anticipated the creation of a “Salafist Principality” straddling Syria and Iraq precisely where ISIS now exists, it welcomed it eagerly and contributed to the circumstances required to bring it about.

Just How Extensive Are ISIS’ Supply Lines?

While many across the West play willfully ignorant as to where ISIS truly gets their supplies from in order to maintain its impressive fighting capacity, some journalists have traveled to the region and have video taped and reported on the endless convoys of trucks supplying the terrorist army.

Were these trucks traveling to and from factories in seized ISIS territory deep within Syrian and Iraqi territory? No. They were traveling from deep within Turkey, crossing the Syrian border with absolute impunity, and headed on their way with the implicit protection of nearby Turkish military forces. Attempts by Syria to attack these convoys and the terrorists flowing in with them have been met by Turkish air defenses.

Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) published the first video report from a major Western media outlet illustrating that ISIS is supplied not by “black market oil” or “hostage ransoms” but billions of dollars worth of supplies carried into Syria across NATO member Turkey’s borders via hundreds of trucks a day.

The report titled, “‘IS’ supply channels through Turkey,” confirms what has been reported by geopolitical analysts since at least as early as 2011 – that ISIS subsides on immense, multi-national state sponsorship, including, obviously, Turkey itself.

Looking at maps of ISIS-held territory and reading action reports of its offensive maneuvers throughout the region and even beyond, one might imagine hundreds of trucks a day would be required to maintain this level of fighting capacity. One could imagine similar convoys crossing into Iraq from Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Similar convoys are likely passing into Syria from Jordan.

In all, considering the realities of logistics and their timeless importance to military campaigns throughout human history, there is no other plausible explanation to ISIS’s ability to wage war within Syria and Iraq besides immense resources being channeled to it from abroad.

If an army marches on its stomach, and ISIS’ stomachs are full of NATO and Persian Gulf State supplies, ISIS will continue to march long and hard. The key to breaking the back of ISIS, is breaking the back of its supply lines. To do that however, and precisely why the conflict has dragged on for so long, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and others would have to eventually secure the borders and force ISIS to fight within Turkish, Jordanian, and Saudi territory – a difficult scenario to implement as nations like Turkey have created defacto buffer zones within Syrian territory which would require a direct military confrontation with Turkey itself to eliminate.

With Iran joining the fray with an alleged deployment of thousands of troops to bolster Syrian military operations, overwhelming principles of deterrence may prevent Turkey enforcing its buffer zones.

What we are currently left with is NATO literally holding the region hostage with the prospect of a catastrophic regional war in a bid to defend and perpetuate the carnage perpetrated by ISIS within Syria, fully underwritten by an immense logistical network streaming out of NATO territory itself.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/09/logistics-101-where-does-isis-get-its-guns/

Reaching the Growth Ceiling

Twenty-Three Geniuses

by James Howard Kunstler

If there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and accompanying video was actually prepared by a staff of 23 journalists. Give the Times another award for rounding up so many credentialed idiots for one job.

Apart from just dumping on Stanford U. biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), this foolish “crisis report” strenuously overlooks virtually every blossoming fiasco around the world. This must be what comes of viewing the world through your cell phone.

One main contention in the story is that the problem of feeding an exponentially growing population was already solved by the plant scientist Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution,” which gave the world hybridized high-yielding grain crops. Wrong. The “Green Revolution” was much more about converting fossil fuels into food. What happens to the hypothetically even larger world population when that’s not possible anymore? And did any of the 23 journalists notice that the world now has enormous additional problems with water depletion and soil degradation? Or that reckless genetic modification is now required to keep the grain production stats up?

No, they didn’t notice because the Times is firmly in the camp of techno-narcissism, the belief that the diminishing returns, unanticipated consequences, and over-investments in technology can be “solved” by layering on more technology — an idea whose first cousin is the wish to solve global over-indebtedness by generating more debt. Anyone seeking to understand why the public conversation about our pressing problems is so dumb, seek no further than this article, which explains it all.

Climate change, for instance, is only mentioned once in passing, as though it was just another trashy celebrity sighted at a “hot” new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Also left out of the picture are the particulars of peak oil (laughed at regularly by the Times, which proclaimed the US “Saudi America” some time back), degradation of the ocean and the stock of creatures that live there, loss of forests, the political instability of whole regions that can’t support exploded populations, and the desperate migrations of people fleeing these desolate zones.

As averred to above, the Times also has no idea about the relation of finance to resources. The banking problems we see all over the world are a direct expression of the limits to growth, specifically the limits to debt creation. We can’t continue to borrow from the future to pay for our comforts and conveniences today because we have no real conviction that these debts can ever be repaid. We certainly wish we could, and the central bankers running the money system would like to pretend that we could by making negligible the cost of borrowing money and engaging in pervasive accounting fraud. But that has only served to cripple the operation of markets and pervert the meaning of interest rates — and, really, as a final result, to destroy any sense of consequence among the people running things everywhere.

The crackup of that financial system will be the signal failure of the collapse of the current economic regime. The financial system is the most fragile of all the systems we depend on (though the others do not lack fragility). This is the reason, by the way, that oil prices are so low, despite the fact that the cost of producing oil has never been higher. The oil customers are going broke even faster than the oil producers. Does anybody doubt that the standard of living in the USA is falling, despite all our cell phone apps?

The basic fact of the matter is that the energy bonanza of the past 200-odd years produced a matrix of complex systems, as well as a hypertrophy in human population. These complex systems — banking, agri-biz, hop-scotching industrialization, global commerce, Eds & Meds, Happy Motoring, commercial aviation, suburbia — have all reached their limits to growth, and those limits are expressing themselves in growing global disorder and universal bankruptcy. Do the authors of The New York Times report think that the oil distribution situation is stable?

There were two terror bombings in Saudi Arabia the past two weeks. Did anyone notice the significance of that? Or that the May 29th incident was against a Shiite mosque, or that the Shia population of Saudi Arabia is concentrated in the eastern province of the kingdom where nearly all of the oil production is concentrated? (Or that the newly failed state of neighboring Yemen is about 40 percent Shiite?) Have any of the 23 genius-level reporters at The New York Times tried to calculate what it would mean to the humming global economy if Arabian oil came off the market for only a few weeks?

Paul Ehrlich was right, just a little off in his timing and in explicating with precision the unanticipated consequences of limitless growth. But isn’t it in the nature of things unanticipated that they generally are not?

Journalism's Fundamentalists

American journalism’s ideology: Why the “liberal” media is fundamentalist

by Robert Jensen

Note: The memo below is my response to an editor at a U.S. news organization who was soliciting feedback for a review of the organization’s coverage of environmental news. From a conservative point of view, this newsroom is part of the “liberal media.” My goal in the memo was to step back from that superficial, diversionary label and evaluate the deeper ideological commitments that shape mainstream news.

Evaluation of a news media outlet’s coverage of a subject often focuses on a critique of how stories are covered, suggestions for how stories can be improved, and ideas for stories that currently aren’t being covered. Such an evaluation of XYZ’s environmental coverage would be useful, but it also is crucial to consider more basic questions about the ideological framework in which the coverage goes forward.

Talk of journalism’s ideology typically meets resistance, given that journalists routinely assert that they are non-ideological. If “ideology” is defined as a rigid, even fanatical, devotion to a set of ideas no matter what the evidence, then it is a good thing for journalists (and everyone else) to avoid ideology. But if ideology is understood as the set of social attitudes, political beliefs, and moral values that shape one’s interpretation of the world, then everyone works within an ideological framework, including journalists. Then the task is to understand competing ideologies, including one’s own, and not to imagine that anyone, or any institution, transcends ideology.

There are three key elements to the dominant ideology of the contemporary United States—involving world affairs, economics, and ecology—which can be best understood as forms of fundamentalism. Moving beyond the religious roots of the term, we can understand fundamentalism as any intellectual, political, or moral position that asserts a certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. In that sense, the United States is an especially fundamentalist country.

• First is national fundamentalism, a faith in the benevolence of the United States’ projection of power around the world. From this fundamentalist position, the United States acts in its own interests but always to advance the greater goal of creating a just and peaceful world. Even when there is a consensus that U.S. policy has failed, such as in Vietnam or Iraq, the unquestioned assumption is that the United States’ intentions were noble and actions were morally justified. When journalists cannot step back to evaluate these claims, their accounts of the world inevitably reinforce the fundamentalism, even when those reports are critical of some of the specific ways that U.S. policy is executed.

• Second is economic fundamentalism, the steadfast belief in the moral claims of capitalism and the efficiency claims of the corporation. From this fundamentalist position, corporate capitalism is not only the best, but the only viable, way to organize economic activity. Even when the system fails to deliver on its promise of shared prosperity and rationality, the only available responses are assumed to be minor shifts in limited government oversight. When journalists cannot step back to evaluate these claims, their accounts of the economy inevitably reinforce the fundamentalism, even when those reports highlight market failures and the corrosive nature of concentrated wealth.

• Third is technological fundamentalism, the unquestioned assumption that the use of high-energy/high-technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology can be remedied by more technology. From this fundamentalist position, the industrial model is unchallengeable and any proposed solutions to environmental problems must conform to that model. Even when those solutions continue to create more problems, alternative paths based on different models are unacceptable. When journalists cannot step back to evaluate these claims, their accounts of the problems and potential solutions reinforce the fundamentalism, even when those reports present data that suggests that the solutions are inadequate or even counterproductive.

These three fundamentalisms are, of course, related. Aggressive U.S. foreign policy around the world typically serves the economic interests of a relatively small number of people; the capitalist growth imperative and conventional economic activity undermine the health of the ecosphere; military action is a tool for dealing with the conflict that emerges from, or is intensified by, ecological degradation and resource scarcity around the world.

All three of these ideologies also are in crisis, as the post-WWII dominance of U.S.-dictated economic arrangements erodes and the instability of the systems becomes more obvious. In each case, we can ask whether any current crisis is merely cyclical or more structural. Are relatively stable systems going through inevitable periodic corrections, or are the systems themselves running down? If the crisis in any one of these systems is structural, what is our best guess on the time frame of the process of systemic change (which will be planned or chaotic, depending on our choices)?

Given human intellectual limits, it is folly to make definitive claims about, or offer precise timetables for, such questions and processes. But our inability to know definitively and precisely does not absolve us of our obligation to come to the best judgments we can, since public-policy decisions must be based on some account of what we expect will happen. No one can predict the future, but everyone is responsible for our actions that create the future.

Obviously, reasonable people can disagree on these questions, and in a healthy political system striving for informed democratic deliberation, it is important for citizens to be exposed to all relevant opinions. Journalists’ task is not to settle these questions but rather help circulate the ideas, striving to identify and amplify the relevant competing points of view. The key term in those two sentences is “relevant.” If journalists are trapped within ideologies that prevent them from identifying the full range of relevant views, they will fail at their central task.

When faced with such criticism, mainstream journalism’s reflexive defense mechanism—“Look, conservatives hate us and liberals hate us, and so we must be doing something right”—is a shallow and inadequate response. A more useful approach would be for journalists to critically self-reflect on the ideological assumptions that define their reporting (such as the absence of foundational critiques of nationalism and capitalism) and how their professional practices (such as a heavy reliance on official sources) limit mainstream journalism’s ability to contribute to democratic dialogue.

The implications of this analysis for coverage of international and economic stories requires careful argument, though the broad outlines are fairly clear (the stunted coverage of the 2003 Iraq invasion and NAFTA negotiations of the early 1990s offer clear examples). The role of technological fundamentalism in journalism, which has not been as widely discussed, deserves more attention. I’ll address three aspects—how environmental issues are reported, the demand to focus on solutions, and the nature of the preferred solutions.

Contemporary journalism has long struggled to report on complex and multifaceted issues that aren’t tied to specific events. Wars and elections are comparatively easy; social movements that develop over time and the daily reality of institutionalized oppression are hard. But the first and most important step in covering what are typically called “environmental issues” is to understand that any single issue is but one part of multiple, cascading ecological crises the world faces.

The plural—crises—is crucial. Look at any measure of the health of the ecosphere—groundwater depletion, soil erosion, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of dead zones in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity—and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheapest and most easily accessible oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds modern life. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of “extreme energy” using more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountain-top removal, tar sands extraction). And, of course, let’s not forget global warming/climate disruption.

Whatever assessment we make of a specific issue, an honest accounting of the state of the ecosphere should leave us frightened. Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing the planet beyond its limits. The problem is not just those who deny the nearly universal scientific consensus on climate change, but a much wider and deeper denial about the fragile state of the ecosystems on which our lives depends. Reporting on any environmental issue has to place any specific story in this context, no matter how resistant people are to this blunt accounting.

A common response to this analysis is “we know the problems, and so let’s focus on solutions.” That’s ironic, since it’s obvious that we don’t “know” the problems. The capacity of the ecosphere to support life, including large-scale human societies, is the product of complex interactions—among organisms, and between the living and non-living world—about which we know surprisingly little. This rush to solutions based on flawed assumptions of the depth of our ecological understanding is another feature of this denial. We know a lot through science, but scientists are the first to recognize how much of the complex working of the world remains unknown.

One reasonable conclusion is that the most responsible and viable solutions to these problems start with an immediate decrease in human consumption, especially of energy and non-renewable resources. Given that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world’s population now consumes too little to guarantee a minimally decent life, that means the obligation to reduce falls on the affluent sectors of the world, which means major changes in lifestyle in the United States and similarly situated societies. Given the limited effectiveness of individual action and market mechanisms, there’s an immediate need for discussion of limits that would have to be enforced by mutual coercion (that is, collective action through some form of government). But rather than factor this into discussion of solutions—a difficult conversation in any system but especially in the growth-obsessed modern consumer capitalist system—policymakers, and the culture more generally, ignore this dimen
sion.

As a result, technological fundamentalism defines the boundaries of the debate. Technology has to save us, and the unintended consequences of technology are, when considered at all, relegated to a footnote. For example, industrial agriculture has seriously degraded the amount and fertility of topsoil, and yet the dominant conversation about agriculture focuses on intensifying the industrial approach. In mainstream journalism, we find stories about the latest development in battery storage capacity or solar panel innovation. But stories about the need for the human species to immediately and dramatically lower this drawdown of the planet’s non-renewable resources—and the moral, political, and economic changes that would be required for such a process—are rare.

Journalists may fear that pursuing such stories will open them up to criticism that they are biased. In some sense of the term, that’s true—such stories indicate a bias toward taking seriously the data that is readily available. But, of course, not addressing these issues is also biased, toward denial of the data. Again, reasonable people can disagree, but today mainstream journalism is failing to engage all relevant views on the state of the ecosphere.

To return to the initial question: How well does XYZ cover environmental issues? My answer: Badly, but no worse than other media outlets that accept the ideological limits and professional practices of mainstream journalism. My proposal for change would begin with an ideological self-assessment by management and working journalists, at both the personal and institutional level. What assumptions about the way the world works guide XYZ’s reporting? Are those assumptions undermining comprehensive coverage in ways that marginalize or eliminate key questions and opinions?

From there, journalists could begin the process of shaping the goals of the network, not just for the next program or even the next year, but for the coming decades, during which we almost surely will face much greater impediments to achieving social justice and ecological sustainability, making these questions more compelling.

Last thought: When I present this kind of analysis, I’m sometimes told, “That’s a reasonable critique, but the problem is that people can’t handle it.” Whenever someone tells me that people (assuming that term refers to “ordinary” people who aren’t part of the journalistic/intellectual establishment) can’t handle it, I interpret it to mean that the person I’m speaking to can’t handle it and finds it easier to displace that fear onto an abstracted public.

That reaction is understandable. These multiple, cascading crises are a lot to handle, perhaps more than humans are equipped to bear. But however unfair that burden may be, denying the evidence and ignoring the implications of the evidence is not a winning strategy.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, forthcoming fall 2015). Jensen’s other books include Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing” (Media Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. 

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://robertwjensen.org/.

DC Death Squad

Washington’s death squads

by Bill Van Auken - WSWS

9 June 2015

In a lengthy article published Sunday, the New York Times provided a glimpse into the criminal and grisly methods employed by Seal Team 6, a secret unit within the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

The unit was made famous by the phony accounts of its assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, cover stories that were blown last month by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who exposed the operation as the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed and decrepit individual who had been fingered by Pakistani intelligence.

What the Times account makes clear—whatever the newspaper’s intentions and its undoubted vetting of its material with the Pentagon and the White House—is that in the pursuit of its global interests, the United States government has become ever more dependent upon the murderous operations of secret death squads.

The newspaper quotes a Pentagon spokesman as saying that the number of missions carried out by Seal Team 6 and other special operations units has risen to the “tens of thousands” since 2001. The victims killed by Seal Team 6, whose very existence the US military refuses to acknowledge, number in the thousands, the vast majority of them unidentified individuals with no link to any plot or threat against the US itself.

The report says the secretive unit has grown to 1,800 personnel and boasts a “ballooning” budget and an ever-expanding remit. It details Seal Team 6’s exploits in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2008, when it carried out continuous night raids, killing, on average, 15 individuals each night and frequently as many as 25, while in most cases finding no one identified as a target.

Neither those hunted nor the many more who were killed posed any threat to the American people. They were targeted because they were identified as potential impediments to US policy, specifically to Washington’s attempt to prop up the corrupt and unpopular regime under Hamid Karzai that the US installed in Kabul.

The Times provides a sanitized account of one of these raids, carried out on December 27, 2009, as part of the Obama administration’s Afghan “surge,” in which the American military death squad murdered eight schoolboys—ages 11 to 17—along with a 12-year-old shepherd boy and an Afghan farmer.

At the time, a local school principal recounted the massacre: “First, the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him, they shot him as well.”

Describing this period, a Seal Team 6 former officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated,

“These killing fests had become routine.”

The Times reports that in Afghanistan, the Team 6 operatives “engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own.” It adds, “At times, Seals cut off fingers or patches of scalp from dead militants for DNA analysis.”

What is described here are not the actions of rogue soldiers or a band of lawless mercenaries, but rather a unit that is touted as the most elite within the US armed forces. Its methods and its crimes are the methods and crimes of the US government, the Obama administration and America’s capitalist ruling establishment.

The unit is given what amounts to blanket immunity for its crimes, with investigations of its activities almost invariably going no further than JSOC, itself a secretive command dedicated to “counter-insurgency” methods that routinely translate into war crimes.

Civilian officials at the Pentagon give these operations a wide berth, and, as Harold Koh, the State Department official who drafted pseudo-legal rationales for the Obama administration’s drone assassination program, told the Times, “This is an area where Congress notoriously doesn’t want to know too much.”

The Obama administration’s reliance upon these operations has become so pervasive that former US senator from Nebraska Robert Kerrey told the Times, “They have become sort of a 1-800 number anytime somebody wants something done.” Kerrey knows whereof he speaks, having participated as a Navy Seal in war crimes in Vietnam as part of the infamous Operation Phoenix program of torture, massacres and mass assassinations that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women and children—the program on which much of today’s operations is modeled.

To the extent that the Times piece expresses any reservations concerning the operations of Team 6 and similar units, it is in regard to their efficacy. The newspaper complains that the wall of secrecy that surrounds this death squad operation makes it difficult “to fully assess its record and the consequences of its actions.”

Left unexplored is the far more significant question of what the ever-growing reliance on death squads, “kill lists” and assassinations says about the nature of the American government itself. The use of such methods is not new, and Vietnam was by no means exceptional.

In El Salvador, Washington trained and equipped death squads that carried out horrific violence against that country’s civilian population, accounting for a large share of the 75,000 people killed in the attempt to crush resistance to the US-backed dictatorship. This bloodbath is now touted within the Pentagon as a counterinsurgency success story.

But now these methods have become institutionalized as never before. They are the preferred method of the White House and Washington’s massive military and intelligence apparatus for the elimination of perceived enemies anywhere on the planet.

War crimes abroad go hand-in-hand with a frontal assault on democratic rights within the United States itself. Unprecedented levels of social inequality and a ruling capitalist oligarchy that is determined to reverse its economic decline at the expense of the working class are wholly incompatible with democratic forms of rule.

This already finds expression in the militarization of the police in the US and the routine use of violence and deadly force against the most oppressed layers of the population. How long will it be before units like Seal Team 6 are given “kill lists” of enemies of the state to be hunted down not in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq or Yemen, but rather at workplaces and homes within the United States itself?

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Roger Annis, Kevin Washbrook, Janine Bandcroft June 10, 2015

This Week on GR

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

More than a year after the violent ouster of Ukraine's president, Viktor Yanukovych the country is still riven by a war that has, according to a United Nations report, cost more than 6,000 lives, with thousands more wounded, and more than a million and a half Ukrainians made refugees.

And that was before the escalation of artillery attacks against the civilians of Donetsk last week.

Those attacks, and a general ramping up of Kyiv's aggression occurred during the latest meetings of the G7 countries in Germany, where Ukraine was promised to figure prominently on the agenda.

Canada's bellicose prime minister Harper used the G7 platform to again sabre-rattle against Russia in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War.

Listen. Hear.

Sadly, the Canadian corporate media abandoned objective reportage on the US-fomented crisis from the outset, and State broadcaster, the CBC has echoed the "blame Putin" line coming from Ottawa and Washington. 

Roger Annis is an editor at the website, New Cold War, where he's written extensively on the conflict in Ukraine. He visited Crimea last year, and was in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Donestk earlier this year. Roger will be speaking this Friday, June 12th at a Simon Fraser University, Institute for the Humanities sponsored event titled, 'Eyewitness Report from the War Zone of Eastern Ukraine.'

More of Roger's work can also be found at his website, A Socialist in Canada and at Rabble.ca and Counterpunch.org.

Roger Annis in the first half.

And; citizens hoping to weigh in on the quietly announced National Energy Board approval of a Delta fracked gas export terminal have only until June 11th (tomorrow!) to have their concerns heard by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. The WesPac Midstream plan is merely another element in the big plans to make of the Delta Super Port a super supplier of fossil fuels of all sorts to Asia and the greater World.

Kevin Washbrook is a director with VTACC, Voters Taking Action on Climate Change. Their mission is to "provide opportunities for the public to express their concerns about climate policy -- and fossil fuel exports -- to government."

Kevin Washbrook and coal and LNG on the Fraser 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 of some of the good things going on in and around our town, and beyond there too, for in the coming week. But first, Roger Annis, eyewitness back from the war zone of Eastern Ukraine.

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.

Big Plans for Delta/Fraser River Fracked Gas Terminal

LNG on the Fraser? That needs a full federal environmental assessment!

by Real LNG Hearings.org

Urgent Action Needed: Please send a comment to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency using the form by June 11 requesting a federal environmental assessment of the proposed WesPac Tilbury LNG terminal.

UPDATE: HAZARD ZONE MAPPING FOR LNG TANKER ROUTE HERE.

What is this project about?

WesPac Midstream wants to build an LNG export terminal in Delta. If approved, 120 LNG tankers and 90 LNG barges could travel the Fraser River yearly. WesPac has NEB approval and now seeks environmental assessment.

WesPac’s project description excludes consideration of LNG tanker traffic in the narrow, busy Fraser River. The company says that’s not its responsibility.

BC has requested the federal EA office turn over assessment of this project to the province. On May 22 the federal EA office asked for public comment on the need for a project EA and BC’s request to take control. Deadline for comment: June 11. (further details in links above)

What are the key concerns?

Use the form to ask federal Environment Min Aglukkaq to 1) conduct an assessment of this project and 2) reject BC’s request to substitute a provincial assessment instead.

Some key points to raise with the Minister:

Ask her to reject BC’s request for substitution. BC has thrown its full support behind LNG exports and we can’t be confident a provincial assessment will objectively evaluate project risks. Substitution is neither appropriate nor in the public interest.

Request a federal environmental assessment by review panel.

Ask that the assessment include the terminal as well as transit of LNG tankers from the terminal to Canada’s territorial sea limit.

Ask that the assessment consider:

• an evaluation of terminal location according to internationally recognized SIGTTO siting standards or their equivalent;

• a Waterway Suitability Assessment equivalent to that required by the US Department of Homeland Security and US Coast Guard, including a 3.5 km hazard zone on both sides of the entire LNG tanker route;

• an explicit assessment of risks posed by intentional acts (i.e. terrorism) as required in the United States;

• an assessment of project impacts on the climate, including extraction, compression and transport of the natural gas.

Our time is short! Please write today, and encourage others to write as well. It’s crucial we convince the Minister to commit to a full review of this proposal. Her decision will be influenced by the number of comments received.

All comments sent through this site will be posted here to create a public record of concern about this project.

LNG on the Fraser requires careful hazard zone assessment

In the US, LNG proponents need to assess potential hazards all along LNG tanker routes. Not so in BC. On the map here we’ve superimposed hazard zones used by the Department of Homeland Security/US Coast Guard during review of LNG proposals in the US onto the tanker route from the proposed Tilbury LNG site on the Fraser River. Scroll out to see the entire route to international waters. Zoom in to see where the hazard zones fall in Richmond, Delta and the Gulf Islands. Switch the map to full screen using the button at left.

Requiring LNG proponents to conduct hazard zone mapping allows government regulators to assess risks to public safety and property along LNG tanker routes. Please write to federal Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq today to require this level of LNG risk assessment here in BC.

The hazard zone guidelines reflect a worst case scenario — the complete loss of LNG containment due to an intentional act. Summary description:

• 500 m zone: extreme hazard of combustion and thermal damage from pool fire if evaporating LNG is ignited. Cryogenic burns and structural damage from exposure to supercooled LNG. Asphyxiation hazard for those exposed to expanding LNG vapor plume.

• 1600 m zone: hazards as for the 500 m zone, with severity of consequences declining over distance.

• 3500 m zone: conservative maximum distance within which an expanding LNG vapour cloud may still ignite if in contact with a source of ignition. Resulting fireball would burn back to the spill source and could cause intense pool fire.

Further details on hazard zones and waterway suitability assessments required in the United States — but not in Canada — found here.

Harper's Nazis: Canada's Military Support of Ukraine's Shock Troops

Canada’s Harper Government Provides Military Training to Neo-Nazi Ukraine National Guard

by Prof Michel Chossudovsky  - Global Research

June 08, 2015 

The Canadian media has highlighted Prime Minister Harper’s one on one meeting with Ukraine’s president Poroshenko in Kiev (June 5, 2015). The official story which has been fed to Canadians is that Ottawa is providing “non-lethal aid” as well support to the country’s civilian police force:

“We supply a range of non-lethal military equipment,” Harper said… While disappointed about this, Poroshenko praised Canada for supporting Ukraine since “the first hours” of his presidency and said the military aid it had provided to his country, such as medical kits and mobile hospitals, “addressed an acute problem. (National Post, June 6, 2015, emphasis added)

Harper also announced that Canada would be sending 10 police officers to Ukraine to help reform the country’s security sector in a partnership with the United States.

Harper announced the $5 million project during a visit in which he watched training exercises by police cadets. … (CP News 24, June 6, 2015, emphasis added)

This story contradicts earlier reports and government statements.

The gist of Harper’s flash visit to Kiev prior to the G7 Summit was to reaffirm Canada’s commitment to the dispatch of “military instructors” in support of Ukraine’s National Guard, which is controlled by the two Neo-Nazi parties, Svoboda and Right Sector.

In April, Washington confirmed that it would send in a US contingent of instructors “of 290 specialists which will be working with the National Guard. Britain has dispatched 75 military personnel responsible for training “in command procedures and tactical intelligence”. (Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2015).

Ironically, the Harper government quite candidly acknowledged that there were Neo-Nazi elements within the National Guard, and that provisions were being envisaged to prevent Canadian military instructors from training Neo-Nazis:

The Canadian government is confident that troops from Petawawa won’t end up instructing Neo Nazis and far right extremists when they begin their training mission in Ukraine this summer, but a former diplomat is warning it will be difficult to weed out such extremists as their militia units are now being integrated into Ukraine’s regular forces.

Some members of Ukraine’s most effective fighting units [Azov batallion] have openly acknowledged they are Nazi sympathizers or have expressed anti-Semitic or extreme right wing views. (Ottawa Citizen, April 18, 2015, emphasis added)

The solution proposed by Canada’s Defence Minister Kenney is contradictory to say the least: Ottawa will support the National Guard as a means to avoiding the training of Neo-Nazis. Canada’s military instructors will be dispatched and allocated to the National Guard:

“We’re not going to be in the business of training ad hoc militias… We will only be training units of the Ukrainian National Guard and army recognized by the government of Ukraine.” (Ibid, emphasis added)

What is Ukraine’s National Guard

The National Guard which is now supported by Canada has been responsible for countless atrocities in the Donbass region.

They wear Nazi insignia on their uniforms.

Below is the Nazi emblem of the National Guard [Національна гвардія України] which is defined as Reserves of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They operate under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The National Guard is part of the so-called “Internal Troops of Ukraine.” The emblem is a stylized swastika (see below).

 



The main battalion of the National Guard under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs involved in the Donbass region is The Azov Battalion (Батальйон Азов).

This battalion is supported by the Western military alliance including Canada.

The Azov Battalion -which displays the Nazi SS emblem– (below left) is described by the Kiev regime as “a volunteer battalion of territorial defense”.

It’s a National Guard battalion under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Officially based in Berdyank on the Sea of Azov, it was formed by the regime to fight the opposition insurgency in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. It is supported by the US and NATO.

These militia bearing the Nazi SS emblem supported by the US and Canada are casually referred to as “Freedom fighters”.

Scroll down for Selected Images of the Azov Battalion “Freedom Fighters”









Imagine what would happen if Canada’s RCMP or the US National Guard were to display swastika-like symbols.

Media Disinformation

Unknown to both Americans and Canadians, the West is channeling financial support, weapons and training to a Neo-Nazi entity. Both Washington and Ottawa have sent in military instructors.

Nobody knows about it because the use of the words “Neo-Nazi” and “Fascist” in relation to Ukraine is a taboo. The have been excluded from the lexicon of investigative reporting. In media reports they have been replaced by “Ultra-conservative”, “Extreme Right” and “Nationalist”.

Ukraine’s National Guard –which is supported by Canada– glorifies Adolph Hitler and Stepan Bandera, Ukraine’s World War II Nazi leader and collaborator of the Third Reich.

People holding UPA (horizontal red and black) and Svoboda (3 yellow fingers on blue) flags march through Kyiv to the honor of the Nazi ally, Bandera.

See http://revolution-news.com/ukrainian-euromaidan-putin-just-another-fascist-political-coup/
It is worth noting that Ukrainian Jews were the target of the Third Reich’s Einsatzgruppen (Task Groups or Deployment Groups) which were supported by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators led by Stepan Bandera . These “task forces” were paramilitary death squads deployed in occupied territories.

Talking about Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, who are part of the coalition government, is a taboo. It is not newsworthy. Yet, the Neo-Nazis play a central role in the country’s security apparatus.

Surely Canadians should be made aware of the fact that their government is sending military instructors to train Neo-Nazi recruits.

In contrast to the scanty news which is fed to Canadians, the Ukrainian media’s coverage of Harper’s visit to Kiev has nonetheless acknowledged Canada’s support for the country’s National Guard:

Canada will allocate $5 million to train new police officers and military instructors for the National Guard of Ukraine, Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatseniuk said.

Besides, Canadian military instructors will arrive to Ukraine to train the National Guard, the premier said. (Interfax-Ukraine, June 6, 2015)

Trans Canada Pipeline Arms Up at Unistoten Camp: Mercenaries in Helicopters Land at Blockade

Trans Canada Pipeline Developments brings in Goons

by Rhyno

Camp Update: A helicopter crew with ex-military security has landed in the territory. The TransCanada Pipeline crew indicated to the land defenders that they were aware that the Unistoten were busy dealing with the ceremonies surrounding the funerary arrangements.

They came in and landed less than 1 km from a "No PIPELINES" banner on the logging road. They told the land defenders they will leave when they are finished their work.

They were held up for a considerable amount of time as the land defenders gathered beneath the helicopter until they were able to contact Freda.

If you are interested in helping out ASAP,
please contact: www.wildcoast.ca

Also, please step up the actions against this pathological company in all of their offices and places of infrastructure.

One thing I would add having been up at camp this morning is that if anyone has access to an ATV or 4x4 vehicle that could be mobilized to the camp, it could be greatly used to help track down helicopters in the
back of the territory.

All the best,
Rhyno