Dissonate History: Can Good Presidents Do Any Good?

Jimmy Carter’s Blood Drenched Legacy

by Matt Peppe  - CounterPunch

January 9, 2016

Five months ago, I wrote an article titled “Jimmy Carter’s Blood-Drenched Legacy” about how the former President’s record in office contradicted his professed concern for human rights.

Despite campaigning on a promise to make respect for human rights a central tenet of the conduct of American foreign policy, Carter’s actions consistently prioritized economic and security interests over humanitarian concerns.

Listen. Hear. Matt Peppe speaks on Carter legacy.

I cited the examples of Carter’s administration providing aid to Zairian dictator Mobutu to crush southern African liberation movements; financially supporting the Guatemalan military junta, and looking the other way as Israel gave them weapons and training; ignoring calls from human rights activists to withdraw support from the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia as they carried out genocide in East Timor; refusing to pursue sanctions against South Africa in the United Nations after the South African Defence Forces bombed a refugee camp in Angola, killing 600 refugees; financing and arming mujahideen rebels to destabilize the government of Afghanistan and draw the Soviet Union into invading the country; and providing aid to the military dictatorship in El Salvador, despite a letter from Archbishop Oscar Romero – who was assassinated by a member of a government death squad weeks later – explicitly calling for Carter not to do so.

This list was not meant to be exhaustive, but merely to highlight some of the most prominent contradictions between Carter’s ideals and his actions. After subsequent research and reader feedback, I realized there were many examples I had not mentioned. Their significance to the history of American foreign policy, and the repercussions they produced, is worth exploring in a subsequent analysis.

Carter announced in early December that he is cancer free. Sadly, that news was followed shortly thereafter by the tragic, premature death of his 28-year-old grandson. But Carter seems to have maintained his positivity. He has kept up his public schedule and says that healthwise he still feels good.

A person’s record and legacy should be debated while they are still alive – rather than after they are gone, when nostalgia or reluctance to speak ill of the dead can easily lead to embellishment and historical revisionism. And a person should be able to defend himself and his actions. Otherwise, it is merely an academic exercise instead of a demand for accountability. In this spirit, I present six more foreign policy positions that demonstrate Carter’s prioritization of American political and economic hegemony over actual support for human rights while he held the highest office in the United States.

Vietnam

Article 21 of the Paris Agreement in 1973 stipulated that “the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and throughout Indochina.”

When asked in 1977 if the United States had a moral obligation to help rebuild Vietnam, Carter responded that,

“the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

The United States went to Vietnam after they could not convince the French to further continue a war to recolonize Vietnam. The Geneva Accords reached between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1954 called for a temporary division of Vietnam pending unification, which was to take place after national elections two years later.

In 1955, the Eisenhower administration began granting direct aid and providing American military advisers to the Bao Dai monarchy. Ngo Dinh Diem assumed control later that year through a fraudulent election. Knowing he would be trounced by the Communist party, he declined to participate in reunification elections called for by the peace agreement..

The United States government was indispensable to the survival of the Diem regime – and after complicity in Diem’s assassination, the Theiu regime. They funded and organized the police, military and intelligence services and were complicit in the reign of terror they unleashed on the South Vietnamese. Throughout the military dictatorship, tens of thousands of people were imprisoned without charges or trial; tortured and held in notorious Tiger Cages; assassinated extrajudicially; and displaced forcibly from their homes and transferred to concentration camps as American forces “helped to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese.”

The South Vietnamese people are still suffering from the refusal to grant reparations for the devastation wrought by the U.S. military. More 100,000 Vietnamese have been killed or injured (an average of 2,500 per year) due to land mines and other ordnance dropped on Vietnam that did not explode on impact.

Residents also still suffer the horrific after effects of chemical weapons. The U.S. military sprayed millions of gallons of chemical defoliants, including including Agent Orange, throughout South Vietnam. The President’s Cancer Panel in 2010 determined that “(a)pproximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities and a half million children born with birth defects.”

Had Carter not so flippantly dismissed the U.S.’s role in the destruction of Vietnam and recognized its responsibility to uphold their obligation to pay reparations, likely tens of thousands of lives of lives may have been saved with funds that could have been used for demining, and the cleanup and treatment of chemical agents that have gone on spreading the horrors of war for decades after the fighting ended.

Nicaragua

“Carter Must End Aid To Somoza,” proclaimed an editorial in The Harvard Crimson in September 1978. The paper demanded that the U.S. government cut off all forms of aid to the dictatorship of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, who was using indiscriminate force to try to crush a popular revolutionary movement to oust him, so the Nicaraguan people could choose their own manner of governance.

William Blum writes in Killing Hope that with the Somoza regime on the verge of collapse, “Carter authorized covert CIA support for the press and labor unions in Nicaragua in an attempt to create a ‘moderate’ alternative to the Sandinistas.” The Carter administration’s plan, according to Blum, was to allow the Somoza regime to take part in a new government, while leaving the state’s military and security institutions largely in tact.

The Sandinistas were victorious in July 1981, as Somoza was forced to flee the country in disgrace. They were able to dismantle the dictatorship and create a new revolutionary government.

The meddling and funding for opposition organizations by the Carter administration, however, would pale in comparison to the full-scale terrorism and aggression that would follow under Ronald Reagan, who had by then taken over as President.

Cambodia

Starting in March 1969, President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger waged a massive, secret bombing campaign (Operation Menu) on Cambodia in which the U.S. military was instructed “anything that flies on anything that moves.”

The American aggression likely caused higher than official estimates of 150,000 Cambodian civilian deaths. When the operation was discovered by a Congressional Committee, it was not even included in the impeachment articles against Nixon, much less used as a basis to refer Nixon and Kissinger for prosecution for war crimes.

Radicalized, destitute and shell-shocked by the destruction wrought by the American bombing, Pol Pot and his previously marginal Khmer Rouge were able to rally enough recruits to seize control of the government in 1975.

It is generally accepted that the Khmer Rouge’s massacres in the Killing Fields and drastic measures to create a primitive agrarian society amounted to genocide. On the high end, two million deaths is a common number – though that number has likely been highly inflated for anti-Communist propaganda purposes. The American establishment and media were loudly outspoken against Khmer Rouge atrocities, especially considering the near unanimous silence regarding the nearly simultaneous genocide by the Indonesian military taking place in East Timor.

But, strangely, after a Vietnamese invasion in 1978 ousted them, the Khmer Rouge lost their status as evil Communists, as the official American foreign policy narrative recast them as victims of Vietnamese aggression.

The Carter administration began supporting the Khmer Rouge, who had been relegated to remote rural sections of the country, by financial and diplomatic means. Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski reportedly told an American journalist he “encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot… Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”

According to columnist William Pfaff, financial support started by the Carter administration and continued by the Reagan administration to the Khmer Rouge totaled more than $15 million annually.

Despite the fact they had been driven from power, with American support the Khmer Rouge managed to maintain their UN seat – as the Carter administration had refused to recognize the government installed after the Vietnamese invasion.

The remnants of the Khmer Rouge fought a guerilla war until Pot’s death in 1998. There is no precise count of the dead and injured that resulted from the fighting so long after the regime was ousted, but it is known that hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes and became refugees.

The Carter administration’s decision to fan the flames of violence for frivolous reasons – mainly to punish Vietnam for their defeat of American forces five years earlier – was a scandalous example of vindictiveness.

South Korea

In December 1979, the South Korean military led by General Chun Doo Hwan led a coup d’ état in which Chun imprisoned potential military rivals and cleared the way to his succession as dictator. On May 17, 1980, Chun declared martial law across the country. The next day, popular protests emerged in the city of Kwangju in opposition.

Chun’s support from the United States would be crucial to maintain legitimacy as he brought in the military to crush the uprising.

“The White House had tacitly shelved President Carter’s human rights campaign in its anxiety that nothing should ‘unravel and cause chaos in a key American ally’,” writes The Guardian.

“It agreed to continue supporting thuggish General Chun Doo Hwan, a major figure behind the coup who was by now imposing stringent military rule.”

Journalist Tim Shorrock studied more than 3,500 documents obtained by FOIA request and determined that more than mere complicity, the Carter administration played a “significant background advisory role in the violent 1980 military crackdown that triggered the May 18 citizens’ uprising.”

William Gleysteen, who Carter had personally appointed ambassador to South Korea, told Chun the U.S. would not object if he were to use the military to quell large-scale student protests.

Shorrock notes that declassified documents show that “U.S. officials in Seoul and Washington knew Mr. Chun’s contingency plans included deployment of Korean Special Warfare Command troops, trained to fight behind the lines in a war against North Korea. The ‘Black Beret’ Special Forces, who were not under U.S. command, were modeled after the U.S. Green Berets and had a history dating back to their participation alongside American troops in the Vietnam War.”

On May 22, Shorrock writes, “the Carter administration approved further use of force to retake the city and agreed to provide short-term support to Mr. Chun if he agreed to long-term political change.”

The Special Warfare troops carried out a massacre in which officially 200 people were killed, but estimates place the likely number of victims 10 times higher. Chun continued ruling as a dictator until 1988.The George H. W. Bush administration would whitewash American involvement during the 1980 uprising by claiming the U.S. government had no knowledge of the use of the Korean special forces and did not approve of any such actions. Chun’s dictatorship in South Korea would continue until popular protests were able to force democratic elections in 1988.

Philippines

In September 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in Proclamation No. 1081. It would not be lifted until three days before the end of Jimmy Carter’s tenure as President in 1981.

This would not prevent the Carter administration from continuing the billions of dollars provided by the U.S. government to the Marcos dictatorship in military aid. As he had with Indonesian Major General and President Suharto, Carter kept the spigot flowing to a dictator who demonstrated not just lack of respect, but outright hostility to the human rights of his subjects.

The quid pro quo in the Philippines was a Military Bases Agreement agreed to in December 1978. The Filipino-American socialist newspaper the Katipunan said that after signing the agreement, the Carter administration ignored Marcos’s many human rights violations.

“Especially now, in light of renewed threats to its imperialist hegemony of the world, the Carter administration has made it very clear that such considerations as human rights, democracy, etc., take a back seat, to the protection of American global interests, insofar as U.S.-R.P. relations are concerned,” the paper wrote in April 1980.

The Katipunan said that political considerations led Carter’s State Department to reverse their previous condemnation to claim the Marcos regime was improving its record. “The State Department might as well have congratulated Marcos for torture, salvaging, mass arrests, indefinite detention, etc.,” they wrote.

The Middle East

No one is more responsible for the vast proliferation of foreign U.S. military bases – now about 800, compared to about 30 for the rest of the world combined – than Jimmy Carter.

Any rational geopolitical analysis of the post-war period until Carter’s presidency would have concluded the Soviet Union had absolutely no intention of military expansion beyond their immediate satellite states. But Carter – like each of his predecessors since World War II – was delusional in his imagination of a Soviet threat behind every corner. His anti-communist, Cold-War strategy called for a military presence everywhere American economic interests existed. Using the phantom “Soviet threat,” Carter laid out what became known as the Carter Doctrine.

“In his January 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter announced a policy change that rivaled Roosevelt’s destroyers for bases deal in its significance for the nation and the world,” writes anthropologist David Vine in Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.

“Carter soon launched what became one of the greatest base construction efforts in history. The Middle East buildup soon approached the size and scope of the Cold War garrisoning of Western Europe and the profusion of bases built to wage wars in Korea and Vietnam. U.S. bases sprang up in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region to host a ‘Rapid Deployment Force,’ which was to stand permanent guard over Middle Eastern petroleum supplies.”

Post-Presidency

In my first article on Carter’s legacy, I wrote that he has – by far – the most impressive record of any American President after leaving office. I cited the examples of his condemnations of Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territories and his Carter Center’s work independently verifying voting systems and electoral processes – specifically their endorsement of Venezuela’s 2013 election – as invaluable accomplishments for social justice.

Since then, Carter has bolstered his already impressive post-Presidency record even more. First, Carter told Oprah Winfrey in a September interview that “We’ve become now an oligarchy instead of a democracy. And I think that’s been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards of the American political system that I’ve ever seen in my life.”

His summation of the state of the American sociopolitical system is both precise and brutally honest. While academic studies have already reached the same conclusion, Carter putting the issue in simple terms for a mainstream audience demonstrates his willingness to take on matters that would be considered taboo for the rest of the elite class. We can hope that the impact of his statement will be similar to his calling Israeli rule over Palestinians apartheid, something also taboo among elites at the time but increasingly gaining currency in mainstream discourse.

In October, Carter wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times calling for “A Five-Nation Plan to End the Syrian Crisis.” Carter writes that since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the Carter Center had explained to Washington that the Obama administration’s demand for Bashar al-Assad’s removal would preclude the achievement of a political solution.

Meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin led Carter to believe that a peace proposal endorsed by the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia would gain enough support among the Syrian parties to end the fighting.

“The involvement of Russia and Iran is essential. Mr. Assad’s only concession in four years of war was giving up chemical weapons, and he did so only under pressure from Russia and Iran. Similarly, he will not end the war by accepting concessions imposed by the West, but is likely to do so if urged by his allies,” Carter writes.

The peace plan that Secretary of State John Kerry essentially copied from Russia – and has now endorsed as his own at the United Nations – looks very much like that laid out by Carter. There is good reason to think that if the Obama administration had not stubbornly ignored Carter’s advice four years ago – when they still believed, before Russia’s military intervention on Assad’s behalf, that they could overthrow the regime by force through proxy groups like the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army – the unimaginable violence and devastation could have been largely been avoided.

While in power, Carter and the officials he hand-picked to serve in his administration acted with the same Cold War zeal as their predecessors to relentlessly combat – with overwhelming force and the power of the U.S. government’s diplomatic muscle – threats to global corporate capitalist dominance, both real and imagined.

What accounts for the discrepancy between Carter’s actions in and out of office is a matter of speculation. Was it merely a change of heart? A reflection of the nature of authority? Or of the limits of the office of President and its subordination to the power of unelected, entrenched bureaucracy?

The bottom line is that, unfortunately, when Carter was afforded the opportunity to change the direction of U.S. foreign policy after receiving a mandate from the American voters, he was unable or unwilling to do so. We can only hope this missed opportunity will not be the last.

Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.

More articles by:Matt Peppe

Passing: David Bowie

Lazarus

by David Bowie

Seeing Double: Rinse and Repeat for Syria Nightmare

Seeing Ghosts: History's Nightmares Return in Syria

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

11 January 2016

Just hours after the UK Parliament’s vote to bomb Syria on December 2, four British jets were scrambling from their base in Cyprus, on their way to strike oilfields held by ISIS.

The launch point, Akrotiri, one of two UK bases on the island, was apt: Cyprus was one of the last colonies acquired by Britain — formally annexed in 1925, as the tidal wave of the Empire’s “late Victorian holocausts” was slowly beginning to ebb away. Now it serves the Empire’s withered rump as Britain joins France’s continuing attacks on its own former “protectorate,” Syria.

The Cyprus-based operation is an extension of Britain’s ongoing bombing campaign in its former colony — sorry, “mandate” — of Iraq: three former Ottoman provinces jammed together by London after its betrayal of the Arab forces it used as cannon fodder during the First World War, promising them liberation then dividing up their lands with the French.

It took a savage bombing campaign against what Winston Churchill liked to call the “recalcitrant tribes” of the region before it was “pacified” into acquiescence — and laid open for exploitation of its oil. This was 95 years ago; and except for the technology — and the now-longer reach of the recalcitrant tribes — not much has changed.

Vast interests in oil and natural gas — both existing and potential — are in play behind the strutting moralizers striking poses in Parliament, the White House and the Elysee. (And in the Kremlin too, of course.) Competing pipelines — one favoring the West, undercutting Russia, the other bolstering Moscow and Tehran — are in the mix. (No points for guessing which one Assad decided to back, just before he stopped being a Hillary-praised “reformer” and became the new Saddam.) Now, as then, the imposition of Western dominance over the region — regardless of its form and nomenclature: colony, protectorate, ally, partner — also remains a paramount concern.

The fierce recalcitrants of ISIS take a back seat to these higher strategic goals. Although Britain’s rather pipsqueaky addition to the vast tonnage of ordnance that the US and France are raining down on Syria is, we’re told, a vital part of the allied effort to “defeat ISIS militarily,” it’s plain that this defeat is in no way a priority of our modern Churchills. If “defeating ISIS” really was their top strategic priority, then of course they would make common cause with all the forces now fighting the group — the Syrian army, Iran, Hizbollah, the Kurds — while cutting off ISIS’s supply-and-oil lifelines through Turkey and stopping the powerful financial institutions who are profitably washing ISIS’s money through their well-appointed boardrooms.

This is not happening because defeating ISIS — or quelling terrorism, for that matter — is not their main goal in Syria. Imposing regime change, for power and profit, is. ISIS plays an ambiguous role in this, as both hindrance and help. Although they are the most powerful force trying to unseat Assad, their very public brutality — continually amplified by the West’s own fearmongering media/political class — means they can’t be used as the chief “liberators” of Damascus. On the other hand, ISIS keeps Assad tied down and weakened, which neatly serves our leaders' purposes.

What's more, ISIS has already been instrumental in yet another regime change sought by Washington: the ouster of Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki. (Yes, the man who took charge after the previous regime change imposed by Washington.) Barack Obama — to his credit, I guess — was very open about this. As he told an ever-fawning Thomas Friedman in August 2014: the reason “we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as [ISIS] came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of al-Maliki.”

Washington didn’t find him useful anymore — he was “corrupt” (although of course he was a piker compared to the multi-trillion-dollar corruption of Washington’s Terror War complex), he was too close to Iran, he was too “sectarian” (i.e., he was the inevitable product of the American occupation’s hideous policy of hardening Iraq’s sectarian differences in a replay of the British Empire’s tried-and-true ‘divide and conquer’ strategy) — so he had to go. ISIS was thus allowed to grow — conquer cities, seize oilfields, murder civilians — in order to force Iraq to change its government.

Now, having failed to dislodge Assad from power early on and impose a more compliant regime in Damascus, our leaders have decided that the dismemberment of Syria is now their next best option. Multi-sided, hydra-headed, interminable, intractable conflict — plus continued radicalization and intermittent terrorist attacks — will be the only result of the outside military interventions in Syria, just as it was in Iraq and Libya. (And Somalia and Yemen.)

But if we've learned anything in the course of this wretched 21st century of ours, it's that history no longer exists. Or rather, it exists, but like a ghost few can see, exerting no pressure on our contextless present, informing no decisions, providing no nuance to public understanding. What happened in the last decade, last year, last week -- much less a hundred years ago -- melts into air, into thin air, leaving a baseless fabric that our politicians and their paymasters shape with their lies and manipulations.

Blowing Back - Hard: The Ultimate Meaning of Trump

Trump: the Ultimate Blowback for American Foreign Policy?

by Walden Bello - CounterPunch

January 11, 2016

When the late Chalmers Johnson introduced the word “blowback” to describe the adverse consequences of Washington’s actions in the world, he wasn’t referring simply to the victims of U.S. imperial interventions striking back on American soil.

More importantly, he saw the resulting destabilization of the American democratic process as the most dangerous blowback of all.

Seen in this light, Donald Trump’s “M&Ms campaign” — which relies heavily on broadsides against Mexicans and Muslims — is unquestionably a disturbing blowback from Washington’s policies abroad.

Trump launched his campaign with a plan to build a wall along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border while summarily deporting undocumented migrants and their families. After the San Bernardino shootings on December 2, in which a Muslim couple killed 14 people, Trump has pushed for the U.S. to stop accepting Muslim migrants and visitors to the United States.

These two proposals run directly against the U.S. self-image as a country of migrants, threatening to unleash a tide of hatred against Mexican-Americans and Muslims, and putting them on notice that their rights are fragile. Yet Trump’s calls have resonated with large sectors of the Republican base, with extremist rhetoric now a staple not only of Trump’s campaign but of his rivals’ as well.

The Blowback from Iraq

The U.S. foreign policy blunders that created ISIS — popular fear of which now drives U.S. domestic and foreign policy alike — are relatively well documented.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq blew the lid off Iraqi society, which had been a pressure cooker of sectarian rivalries contained by the regime of Saddam Hussein. As a Shia-dominated regime took over in Baghdad, an extremist Sunni movement — al-Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — rose to fight the government and its American sponsors.

Zarqawi found many receptive recruits among the hundreds of thousands of Sunni soldiers in Saddam’s army, which had been disbanded by the Americans shortly after their takeover. Adherents were also nurtured in U.S. prison camps, among them future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike, Baghdadi emerged as the leader of the group, which broke from al-Qaeda during the Syrian civil war and began calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — later shortened to just the Islamic State.

At first, ISIS was seen by western intelligence as focused mainly on establishing a caliphate in the Middle East, for which it undertook a sophisticated international recruitment campaign online. Then concern developed that ISIS was not simply recruiting young people from Europe and the U.S. to fight in Iraq or Syria, but training them to be sent back to perform terrorist acts in their home countries.

The Paris massacre in mid-November, which saw a handful of shooters and bombers kill some 130 people in a sophisticated coordinated operation, was seen as the ultimate blowback. That is, until the San Bernardino shooting two weeks later, which U.S. authorities saw as the scariest blowback of all: shooters carrying out uncoordinated individual actions inspired by ISIS propaganda disseminated online.

The Mexican Blowback 1: The CIA Connection

The blowback process from Mexico is less well known but equally well documented. One trigger, as in Iraq, was political intervention.

The Mexican drug syndicates were relatively small-time affairs until the 1980s. It was the Central Intelligence Agency that made them big-time during

the Reagan administration’s efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, where it engaged in unconventional fundraising operations to evade congressional scrutiny.

One was the so-called Iran-Contra deal, where top Reagan administration officials facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran — then the object of a U.S. arms embargo — and then diverted part of the proceeds to fund the anti-Sandinista guerrillas known as the Contras.

Another method was to use Mexican drug syndicates.

In her brave expose on the rise of Mexican drug cartels, Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers, the celebrated Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez writes that when the U.S. Congress prohibited the use of government money to fund the overthrow of the Sandinistas, the CIA made a deal with the cartels to allow large-scale cocaine sales into the United States, but on condition that part of the proceeds would be diverted to support the Contras.

Indeed, the CIA’s complicity in fostering the rise of the Mexican cartels, which eventually displaced the Colombian cartels as the main transporters of cocaine to the United States, has also been documented by a number of U.S. journalists. Among the key beneficiaries of the CIA connection was the Sinaloa Cartel, which eventually produced the lord of drug lords: “El Chapo” Guzman.

The Mexican Blowback II: NAFTA

The other source of the Mexican blowback was economic.

Following the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s, the United States — via the International Monetary Fund and World Bank — began an ambitious effort to restructure the Mexican economy along free-market lines. The cutting back of government support for many agricultural services, along with a program of privatization designed to reverse communal ownership of land institutionalized by the Mexican Revolution, resulted in widespread suffering in the countryside, with many peasants thrown off their lands.

But even more devastating was Mexico’s integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which quickly became a program for dumping subsidized U.S. corn and other agricultural products into Mexico. According to a 2003 report of the Carnegie Endowment, imports of U.S. agricultural products under NAFTA threw 1.3 million farmers out of work.

For these peasants, the choice became either the shantytowns of Mexico City or “El Norte,” with vast numbers opting for the latter. By 2006, roughly 10 percent of Mexico’s population was living in the United States, 15 percent of its workforce was working there, and one in every seven Mexicans was migrating to the U.S. There was a strong element of truth in the sardonic comment that, owing to NAFTA’s savage impact on peasant agriculture, Mexico’s peasantry simply moved to the United States.

U.S. policies in Mexico and Central America thus had a dramatic dual blowback effect. On one side, the CIA godfathered a powerful cartel whose massive exports of cocaine devastated inner cities from Los Angeles to Washington, DC — and whose violence has now killed or displaced tens of thousands of Mexicans. On the other side, U.S.-sponsored structural adjustment and NAFTA ruined Mexican peasant agriculture, leading to the migration of millions to the north, where they’ve become scapegoats for U.S. economic troubles.

Study after study has refuted claims that migrants take jobs away from non-migrant workers, or that they don’t pay their taxes. Yet Mexican migrants are continually blamed by opportunistic politicians on the make, like Trump and his Republican colleagues.

The Ultimate Blowback

It’s unfortunate that this opportunistic, demagogic game of playing on physical fear (“Muslim terrorists out to take your life”) and economic fear (“Mexican workers out to steal your jobs”) has resonated among so much of the country’s white population. Trump, whose anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican rhetoric is most brazen, leads his opponents in the Republican presidential race by a wide margin in the surveys.

Instead of aggressively challenging the Republican candidates’ inflamed rhetoric and pointing to U.S. political and economic programs as the cause of the blowback, most liberal leaders are on the defensive. Only Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, is pointing to the real roots of America’s foreign policy and domestic crises. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, continues to push for more military intervention in the Middle East and is reluctant to finger Wall Street as the source of the country’s economic troubles.

The country seems headed towards an even less liberal democratic order than now exists — one marked by more religious intolerance, more restrictions on civil liberties, and more immigration rules designed to keep out migrants. And that, as Chalmers Johnson so presciently warned, was really the ultimate blowback.

Walden Bello, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, is the author or co-author of 19 books, the latest of which are Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013) and State of Fragmentation: the Philippines in Transition (Quezon City: Focus on the Global South and FES, 2014).

More articles by:Walden Bello

An earlier version of this commentary was published by Telesur. 

Saving the Walbran: Black Diamond Grove

Save Walbran Valley's Black Diamond Grove 

by BC EcoNews

Help Save the Central Walbran Valley's Black Diamond Grove on the South West Coast of Vancouver Island. An Ancient Temperate Rainforest of Red Cedar & Hemlock slated for cutting by Teal Jones Group in 2016. 

SONG: TEMAGAMI ROUND By MARIE-LYNN HAMMOND. 

Used with permission

More info: http://friendsofcarmanahwalbran.com/

What the Blimps Miss: Surveillance without Conscience in Afghanistan

Surveillance and Surveys in Kabul

by Kathy Kelly - VCNV

January 12, 2015

In Kabul, where the Afghan Peace Volunteers have hosted me in their community, the U.S. military maintains a huge blimp equipped with cameras and computers to supply 24 hour surveillance of the city.

Remotely piloted drones, operated by Air Force and Air National Guard personnel in U.S. bases, also fly over Afghanistan, feeding U.S. military analysts miles of camera footage, every day.

Billions of dollars have been invested in a variety of blimps which various vendors, such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Aeros have shipped to Afghanistan. All of this surveillance purportedly helps establish “patterns of life” in Afghanistan and bring security to people living here.

But this sort of “intelligence” discloses very little about experiences of poverty, chaos, hunger, child labor, homelessness, and unemployment which afflict families across Afghanistan.

This morning, Zarghuna listed for me the survey questions that she and her young colleagues ask when they visit families in Kabul. The family visits help them choose participants in the Borderfree Street Kids School and the Duvet Project. The survey teams also help with plans for a “Food Bank” that the Afghan Peace Volunteers hope to open sometime in the coming year.

The questions Zarghuna and the survey team use may seem simple.

How many times a week does your family have a serving of beans? Do you rent your home? Can anyone in your family read and write? Child laborers are asked to tell about what type of work they do in the streets, how many hours they work each day and how much money they earn.

But the answers open up excruciatingly painful situations as many family members explain that they never have adequate food, that the only person earning an income is one of the children, that once they pay rent for the mud home in which they live, they have no remaining funds for food, blankets, fuel or clean water.
I’ve watched the young volunteers work hard to develop useful survey questions and discuss ways to be sensitive as they visit families and try to build trust. Sometimes very difficult arguments erupt over which families are most needy.

As the Pentagon decides about investments in aerial, remotely controlled surveillance capacities, disagreements over which proposals to support have arisen within the various military forces. Defense companies pay handsome salaries to former military leaders who will advocate for one or another program. Afghanistan has become a “proving ground” where different “protective” systems have been tested, including successive generations of Predator and Reaper drones and the aerostat “blimps.”

In Afghanistan, an October 11, 2015 accident involving a U.S. military blimp cost the lives of five people. The Intercept reported that “a British military helicopter was coming in for a landing at NATO headquarters, where the blimp is moored. According to an eyewitness who spoke to the BBC, the helicopter hit the tether, which then wrapped itself around the rotors. The helicopter crashed, killing five people --two U.S. service members, two British service members, and a French contract civilian—and injuring five more.”

Among opponents of continued funding for blimp surveillance, blimp accidents are but one of many criticisms raised. Some Army leaders argue that even a fully functioning blimp borne air defense system would be irrelevant in terms of the kinds of attacks that threaten U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Los Angeles Times notes that “the weapons that were killing and maiming U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were crude rockets, artillery and improvised explosive devices.”

Other real and life threatening threats afflict many Afghan people, especially the 40% of the population who live beneath the poverty level. These threats are invisible to surveillance carried on by blimps or drones.

A UN Human Development Report recently revealed that Afghanistan has slipped to 171st of 173 countries in terms of development.

The UN report says that an Afghan person can, on average, expect to live 60 years. According to the CIA World Fact Book, the average life span here is 50 years.

In 2015, 1.2 million Afghans were internally displaced and about 160,000 people fled to Europe.

The U.S. military continues to invest billions of dollars in the “surveys” accomplished by blimps and drones. Certainly poverty and desperation cause people to fight against foreigners who have invaded and occupied their country.

If U.S. resources spent on unproductive military surveillance of Afghans were dedicated to assessments of both U.S. and Afghan people burdened by poverty, unemployment, hunger, disease and climate change, today’s U.S. generations would be less willing to feed their tax money to the insatiable appetite of the “defense” corporations and their illusions of omniscient security.

Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org) While in Kabul, she is a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers (ourjourneytosmile.com)

The Primal Solution: Americans for Bombing Agrabah

Ted Cruz’s Stone-Age Brain and Yours: Why “Collateral Damage” Elicits So Little Empathy Among Americans

by Rick Shenkman - TomDispatch

 
After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria, the reaction was swift. Hillary Clinton mocked candidates who use “bluster and bigotry.” Jeb Bush insisted the idea was “foolish.” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, tweeted: 

“You can't carpet bomb an insurgency out of existence. This is just silly.”

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer objected that Cruz’s proposal would lead to lots of civilian casualties, the senator retorted somewhat incoherently: 

"You would carpet bomb where ISIS is -- not a city, but the location of the troops. You use air power directed -- and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn't to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists." 

Tomgram: Rick Shenkman, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing

Torturers, rapists, murderers: for more than a decade as I researched my history of the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves, I spent a good deal of time talking to them, thinking about them, reading about them, writing about them. They all had much in common. At a relatively young age, these men had traveled thousands of miles to kill people they didn’t know on the say-so of men they didn’t know, and for a mere pittance -- all of it done in the name of America.

I also spent time talking to another group of men, a much larger contingent who stood by and watched as those beside them tortured or raped or murdered. Some heartily endorsed these acts, some seemed ambivalent about them, some were appalled by them, but none did much of anything about them.

Then there was a third contingent of men: those who witnessed the torture, rapes, or murders and couldn’t -- wouldn’t -- abide by that conduct. This tiny group spoke out about what they had seen, often at the risk of their own welfare, sometimes their very lives.

What differentiated these men from each other? They had all been raised in the same country, had been subject to the same laws and norms, including prohibitions against torture, rape, and murder. Many, if not most, had grown up in similar socio-economic circumstances, received comparable educations, and at least nominally belonged to churches with strict moral codes and an emphasis on doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why then did so many of them commit horrendous acts or stand by while others did? Why did so few speak up?

I never came up with satisfactory answers to these questions. What I learned instead was that almost any man might be a torturer or a rapist or a murderer if given the chance. I learned that most men will look the other way if at all possible. And I learned that shockingly few men are capable of the courage and the empathy necessary to stand up for those that their brothers-in-arms would just as soon kill.

Today, Rick Shenkman -- head honcho at the History News Network and author of the just-published Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics -- explores the biological phenomena that may well underpin our appalling lack of empathy, the animal instincts that allow so many of us to stand by in the face of unspeakable acts. While the science may still be in its early stages and the means of measuring our motivations still crude and inexact, Shenkman (whose new book Scientific American calls “a timely look into psychological patterns that drive political behavior”) analyzes a raft of studies that offer new ways of thinking about why so many humans tend to be so utterly inhumane, and explores how the stories we tell ourselves and others might offer us a path to overcome our utterly human inhumanity. Nick Turse

Ted Cruz’s Stone-Age Brain and Yours: Why “Collateral Damage” Elicits So Little Empathy Among Americans

by Rick Shenkman

PolitiFact drily noted that Cruz apparently didn’t understand what the process of carpet (or “saturation”) bombing entails. By definition, it means bombing a wide area regardless of the human cost.

By almost any standard Cruz’s proposal was laughable and his rivals and the media called him on it. What happened next? By all rights after such a mixture of inanity and ruthlessness, not to say bloody-mindedness against civilian populations, his poll numbers should have begun to sag. After all, he’d just flunked the commander-in-chief test and what might have seemed like a test of his humanity as well. In fact, his poll numbers actually crept up. The week before the imbroglio, an ABC opinion poll had registered him at 15% nationally. By the following week, he was up to 18% and one poll even had him at a resounding 24%. 

How to explain this? While many factors can affect a candidate’s polling numbers, one uncomfortable conclusion can’t be overlooked when it comes to reactions to Cruz’s comments: by and large, Americans don’t think or care much about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition backed by the United States “carried out at least six apparently unlawful airstrikes in residential areas of the [Yemeni] capital,” Sana’a. The attacks resulted in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about no one in the United States took notice, nor was it given significant media coverage. More than likely, this is the first time you’ve heard about the HRW findings.

You might think that this is because the conflict in Yemen is off our national radar screen. But how much attention have Americans paid to U.S. air strikes and bombing runs in Iraq? Washington has literally been bombing Iraq on and off for twelve years and yet few have taken much notice. That helps explain why bombing is such an attractive option for Washington any time trouble breaks out in the world. Americans don’t seem to care much what goes on when our bombs or missiles hit the ground. As pollsters found recently, a surprising number of Americans even want to bomb places that can’t be found on a map. When Public Policy Polling asked GOP voters in mid-December if they favored bombing Agrabah, 30% said they did (as did 19% of Democrats), while only 13% opposed the idea. Agrabah is the fictional city featured in the Disney movie Aladdin.

Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?
Support bombing Agrabah….……………….. 30%
Oppose bombing Agrabah…………………… 13%
Not sure……………………………………… 57%

That 57% were “not sure” might be considered at least modestly (but not wildly) reassuring.

Why Cruz’s Numbers Went Up

History suggests that this blanket bloodthirstiness or at least lack of empathy for those on the other end of America’s bombing campaigns isn’t new. In March 1951, nine months into the Korean War, Freda Kirchwey, a crusading liberal journalist at the Nation, expressed bewilderment at American indifference to the fate of Korean civilians killed by our bombs. The destruction was awful. Little was left standing, structurally speaking, in North Korea. Nothing, she complained in a column, “excuses the terrible shambles created up and down the Korean peninsula by the American-led forces, by American planes raining down napalm and fire bombs, and by heavy land and naval artillery.” And yet few seemed bothered by it.

Because she was an optimist Kirchwey expressed the hope that Americans would eventually come to share her own moral anguish at what was being done in their name. They never did. If anything, the longer the war ground on, the less Americans seemed interested in the fate of the victims of our bombing.

Why did they show so little empathy? Science helps provide us with an answer and it’s a disturbing one: empathy grows harder as distances -- whether of status, geography, or both -- increase. Think of it as a matter of our Stone Age brains. It’s hard because in many circumstances an empathic response is, in fact, an unnatural act. It is not natural, it turns out, for us to feel empathy for those who look different and speak a different language. It is not natural for us to empathize with those who are invisible to us, as most bombing victims were and are. Nor is it natural for us to feel empathy for people who have what social scientists call “low status” in our eyes, as did the Korean peasants we were killing. Recent studies show that, faced with a choice of killing a single individual to save the lives of several people, we are far more apt to consider doing it if the individual we are sacrificing is of such low status. When subjects in an experiment are told that high-status people are being saved, the number willing to let the low-status victim die actually increases.

Another social science finding helps us understand why empathy is often in short supply and why Ted Cruz is capable of cavalierly recommending we carpet bomb Syrians living under the control of the Islamic State. Once we have convinced ourselves of the necessity and correctness of bombing the hell out of a country -- as Americans did during the Korean War and as we are now doing in our war against IS -- the wiring in our Stone Age brain helps us overcome any hint of guilt we might be inclined to feel over the ensuing loss of life. It quite naturally acts to dehumanize the distant victims of our air strikes.

This is a classic case of cognitive dissonance. Our brain hates to feel torn between conflicting emotions. Instead it rationalizes doing what we want to do by discounting any feeling that gives rise to negative emotions, in this case, guilt. An extreme example of this was what happened when the Nazis decided to stigmatize Jews and later wipe them out. From the moment they began their ruthless anti-Semitic campaigns, they used hideous imagery to convince other Germans that Jews were not, like them, human at all, but little different than rats. It is, of course, far easier to kill someone, or to sit by while others do the same, if you dehumanize them first. Rather than feeling empathy for the downtrodden Jews, many Germans felt contempt and disgust, strong emotions that swamped whatever other feelings they might have had.

In a study a few years ago, researchers measured the activity in the brains of subjects looking at pictures of homeless people. The finding was shocking. Brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain where empathy is often registered, was significantly lower than normal. Put another way, the subjects in this experiment literally paid the homeless no (or at least less) mind.

This may sound cruel and uncaring, but as far as biology is concerned it makes sense. Our genes, as the biologist Richard Dawkins has taught us, are “selfish”; they are, that is, built to enhance their own replication, which is, in effect, their biological imperative. Caring for people who are low in status, particularly those who belong to another tribe, doesn’t serve this imperative. Indeed, it may interfere with it by diverting the attention of the host -- that’s you and me -- from activities that will enhance our survival.

Think of this as our Stone-Age brains in action. It’s not that we necessarily make a conscious decision to ignore the fate of people who are low in status. Our brain does this automatically and seamlessly for us. Out of conscious awareness it decides if someone is useful to us. If that person is, our brain quickly achieves a state of hyper-attentiveness: our nostrils flare, our eyes widen, and our ears tune in relevant sounds. Think of what happens when you’re in the presence of somebody important and you’ll know what I mean. If someone is deemed useless to us? Unless we’re worried that they hyperpose a threat, our brain tells our body to relax.

Because it is in our biological interest to feel empathy for people from our own tribe and family -- those, that is, in a position to either enhance our survival or perpetuate our genes -- we come equipped with mechanisms to help us distinguish our people from outsiders. From the moment we’re born, we focus on those around us and bond with them. A mother and child know each other through smell. Brother and sister recognize each other’s familiar facial features.

When we hear someone speaking a foreign language, we instinctively discount their humanity. This was shown in a 2014 experiment designed to determine if human beings were more willing to sacrifice someone who spoke a different language in order to save the lives of several others. The findings were clear-cut. Only 18% of the subjects in the experiment were willing to make the cold calculation that saving the lives of several people at the cost of one life was “fair” when the intended victim shared their native language. However, that percent more than doubled when it was revealed that the person to be sacrificed spoke a foreign language. The experiment’s results remained the same whether that language was Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English, or Spanish.

Why Stories Matter When It Comes to American War

You may be beginning to wonder if we aren’t doomed to eternal indifference to the human beings who suffer when we loose our Air Force on them, but science offers us a modicum of hope on the subject. In recent years, one of the strongest findings is that storytelling can break through our indifference and foster empathy even for distant peoples who might otherwise seem alien to us. This more than anything else gives us the ability to empathize with those with whom we don’t identify demographically or otherwise. Stories hold our attention, while feeding the strong urge to find meaningful patterns in human behavior.

As scientists have now demonstrated in experiments, the brain is a natural pattern finder. It wants one and one to equal two. Mysterious may be the will of God, but here on Earth we expect behavior to be explicable. Stories are designed to establish cause and effect, and once we understand what motivates people we can usually find a way to empathize with them.

Stories connect us to people in a way nothing else can. It’s the reason politicians regularly tell stories on the campaign trail. Years ago, Harvard social scientist Howard Gardner set out to discover what highly successful leaders have in common. After reviewing the lives of 11 luminaries, from Margaret Thatcher to Martin Luther King, Jr., he concluded that their success depended to a remarkable extent on their ability to communicate a compelling story or, as he put it, “narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed.” These stories, he found, “constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader’s literary arsenal.”

When people are reduced to numbers -- as were the civilian victims of air power during the Korean War and as are the civilians who become “collateral damage” in American air strikes in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere -- we don’t feel their pain, nor do we automatically put ourselves in their shoes, which is by definition what you do when you are feeling empathic. We have the bomber pilot’s syndrome. We don’t feel anything for the victims below.

This is one reason why antiwar movements matter. They tell stories about the victims of war. It was striking in the Vietnam years, for instance, how many Americans came to care for, say, a small naked Vietnamese girl napalmed near her village, or so many other Vietnamese civilians who suffered under a rain of American bombs, rockets, napalm, and artillery shells. The stories that the massive antiwar movement regularly told here about the distant world being decimated by the U.S. war machine created a powerful sense of empathy among many, including active-duty American soldiers and veterans of the war, for the plight of the Vietnamese. (It helped that few Americans believed that North Vietnam posed an existential threat to the United States. Fear brings out the worst in us.)

Storytelling happens to be in every human’s toolkit. We are all born storytellers and attentive listeners. Biology may incline us to turn a cold eye on the suffering of people we can’t see and don’t know, but stories can liberate us. Ted Cruz may be able to build up his poll numbers by promising to carpet bomb foreigners in the Middle East of whom we are fearful, but at least we know that biology doesn’t have to dictate our response. Our brains don’t have to stay in the Stone Age. Stories can change us, if we start telling them.

Rick Shenkman is the editor and founder of the History News Network and the author most recently of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, January 2016).

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 2016 Rick Shenkman

We the Weeds: Turning Monsanto's Toxic Technologies Around

Victory in Paris vs Monsanto GMO Cabal

by F. William Engdahl - NEO

There is a very positive news coming out of Paris, a city with more than her share of bad news lately. It’s a major legal victory for the voices of science and reason against the GMO Monsanto-led cabal.

Its implications will be felt worldwide.

If our world ever gets the will to rid the 21st Century Black Death plague masquerading under the name of Genetic Manipulation of Organisms or GMO, it will owe a huge debt of gratitude to the courageous work of Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini and his extraordry team of dedicated scientists at CRIIGEN, the Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering, in France.

In a world where industry’s corruption of scientists has almost become ordinary, the existence of a non-industry-funded team of scientists dedicated to producing research and independent information on genetic engineering and its impacts in biology, environment, agriculture, food, medicine, and public health, including the short, medium and long-term effects on human health and on the health of the entire living ecosystem, is, so far as I am aware, unique. Few are aware of their tireless and largely thankless work.

For this reason it’s doubly good news that the Paris High Court has just announced a verdict in favor of Seralini in a libel trial. On 6 November 2015, the High Court of Paris indicted Professor Marc Fellous, former chairman of the French Biomolecular Engineering Commission, for “forgery” and “the use of forgery,” in a libel trial he lost to Prof Séralini. The penalty will be decided sometime in 2016.

The French Biomolecular Engineering Commission (CGB in French) was created within the Ministry of Agriculture and is well-known for its advocacy of GMO. The body is responsible for approving as safe a number of GMO plant varieties in France.

Fellous himself is no small fish. A fellow at the renowned Pasteur Institute, he is President of the Association Française des Biotechnologies Végétales, and he is responsible for assessment of risks of GMO at the French Ministry of Agriculture, as well as Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Paris. The case was brought by Seralini in January 2011.

According to a source close to the case, Fellous had used or copied the signature of a scientist without his agreement in order to argue that Séralini and his co-researchers were wrong in their re-assessment of Monsanto studies.

The Séralini re-assessment reported finding signs of toxicity in the raw data from Monsanto’s own rat feeding studies with GMO maize, Monsanto’s MON 863.

Another egregious wrong

The same Seralini team of scientists were in the middle of one of the most egregious of recent cases of professional misconduct involving his publication of an explosively damning rat study, one examining the effects over a full two year life span. Astonishing to believe, it was the first-ever long-term rat study documenting the effects of a GMO diet in the entire twenty years’ history of commercial GMO. The results were bone-chilling.

In September 2012 Food and Chemical Toxicology, in those days a respected scientific trade journal, released a study by the team of scientists at France’s Caen University led by Gilles-Eric Seralini. The results of the study sent shockwaves around the world.

Seralini’s group had just completed the world’s first feeding study of the effect on more than 200 rats of a diet of GMO corn over a period of a full two years at a cost of €3 million. The study found alarming instances of cancer tumors, severe organ damage and premature death in rats fed GMO corn treated with Monsanto Roundup with Glyphosate. It was Monsanto NK603 Roundup Ready corn. The patented term Roundup Ready meant the GMO corn was “ready” to resist one of the most toxic weed-killers in the world, Monsanto’s Roundup with a cocktail of highly toxic glyphosate and other trade secret chemicals.

The Seralini study was published after a four-month peer-review process by scientifically qualified colleagues and two years of research in absolute secrecy to avoid industry pressure. Within hours of the public release of the Seralini study, a coordinated global media campaign to discredit the conclusions was launched. No facts were presented, merely typical allegations that the study was “unscientific,” or that the wrong rats were used.

World media coverage forced the corrupt pro-GMO EU Commission to cover its tracks. The official EU food safety advisory body of “independent” experts, EFSA, denounced the Seralini study even before making an independent comparable long-term study to verify or refute it. Unknown to most EU citizens was the fact that the EFSA scientific board members had been exposed by investigative organizations for direct and indirect ties to the same GMO industry it was responsible to monitor, including Monsanto front organizations.

In January, 2014, well over one year from initial publication, the Journal Food and Chemical Toxicology took an unprecedented step of officially retracting the Seralini article with the incredible justification that his study was “inconclusive.” If you open the footnote here, you can read the entire exchange between Elsevier, the journal’s publisher and the Seralini team.

Just prior to the Seralini retraction, the journal had hired a new “Associate Editor for biotechnology”, Richard E. Goodman. This was a new position, apparently established especially for Goodman in the wake of the “Séralini affair.”

Goodman was a former Monsanto employee and an active member of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). ILSI is funded by multinational GMO and agrochemical companies, including Monsanto, to develop “industry-friendly” risk assessment methods for GMO foods and chemical food contaminants and inserts them into government regulations. One of Goodman’s first acts at the journal was to retract the Seralini article as “inconclusive.” Were that criterion applied to all science studies, there would be no science journals left. All science by definition is a process of mining, testing radical hypotheses, retesting old, on an ever deeper level. Seralini’s paper called for further research to confirm the alarming findings. Instead, Monsanto and the GMO lobby decided to “shoot the messenger.”

‘curses are like chickens…’

There is an expression dating back to the 13th Century, “curses are like chickens; they always come home to roost.” On March 30, 2015, more than a year later, the publishers of the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology announced that ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman had been “removed” from the Editorial Board of the Journal and that Editor-in-chief, pro-GMO Editor-in-Chief, A. Wallace Hayes, was kicked upstairs to the silly position as “Editor-in-Chief for Strategy and Vision.”

In June, 2014, the Springer online journal, Environmental Sciences Europe, saw fit to republish the retracted Seralini paper. Has the new editor of the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology had the moral backbone to attempt to undo the severe damage to Seralini’s scientific reputation and to the truth about the deadly consequences of GMO patented seeds and their paired weed-killers by printing a public apology? Perhaps that will have to await a new Paris court verdict. In the meantime Professor Seralini and his group are making further rat studies and uncovering more proof that ALL GMO is toxic to humans and animals. In true science as in life, persistent honesty eventually trumps fraud, defceit and corruption.

The entire field of so-called biotechnology is corrupt and rotten to its very unscientific, reductivist core. That should not surprise as it was created deliberately by America’s leading eugenics family and funded by their Rockefeller Foundation to advance their mad eugenics agenda at the very same time the Rockefeller Foundation was funding the Nazi eugenics research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

The Rockefeller Foundation Director of Medical Research for 34 years, when Molecular Biology was “invented” in 1938 through his foundation grants to universities such as California Institute of Technology and Cambridge University in England, was a man named Alan Gregg. Gregg once wrote, “There is an alarming parallel between the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the growth of human population in the earth ecological economy.” He then asserted that “cancerous growths demand food, but so far as I know, they have never been cured by getting it. The analogies can be found in our plundered planet.” James Stillman Rockefeller, former chairman of First National City Bank, later Citigroup, sat on the board of Monsanto until his death in 2004 at age 102.

GMO and their “weed-killers” are intended by its founders to kill us off as “useless eaters” or as I titled a recent article, “We’re the ‘weeds‘ for Monsanto Roundup Weed Killer.” That article discussed a new study by the group of Professor Seralini. It’s all there for you to discover if you’re interested in the health of yourself and of your children, relatives and friends.

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”.

British Columbia's Site C Dam: No Respect for Land, for Wildlife, for People, for Culture, for Nothin'

Keeping the Peace: Why Is This River So Important to Preserve?

by Andy Sinats -  Square Space

January 9, 2016

The flooding and destruction of a river valley ecosystem cannot be considered a green solution to meeting energy demand.

The following are just a few of the many concerns about the construction of another dam on the Peace River in British Columbia:

1. The provincial government’s Energy Plan states that “all new electricity generation projects will have zero net greenhouse gas emissions.” The Site C reservoir will not have zero net greenhouse gas emissions. Reservoir creation results in methane production, a potent contributor to climate change.

2. Reservoir creation results in mercury bioaccumulation. To avoid large increases in both greenhouse gas production and methyl mercury accumulation, C.A. Kelly et al. recommend that areas of low relief and wetlands should not be flooded. Neither of these recommendations can be accomplished if the Peace River is flooded at Site C.

3. Building Site C will flood much of the only Class 1 farmland in northern BC, including land within the Agricultural Land Reserve. This is the only land capable of growing many vegetables that would otherwise have to be imported.

4. Further damming the Peace will destroy high-capacity wildlife habitat that cannot be replaced by other habitats in the northeast. The many islands with their back channels that make up this section of the Peace River Valley are vital to wildlife.

5. The Site C dam would destroy a favourite recreational area. If this project were proposed in the Lower Mainland, the public would never stand for the loss of such a high-quality recreational area.

6. Much of the area that would be flooded and otherwise affected by the Site C project includes First Nations traditional lands.

IN SUMMARY

The Energy Plan is flawed and has not allowed a serious examination of other greener ways to meet the province’s energy needs.

There should be some areas that are just too precious to destroy. When this project was last examined, through a formal British Columbia Utilities Commission Hearing in 1982, it was rejected as unjustified.

Now, a quarter of a century later, when our ability to use energy ef- ficiently is so much greater, as is our understanding of the value of river ecosystems, why is Site C the best option? Will there be an equivalent level of public scrutiny this time around? Surely such a unique valley cannot be destroyed without examining all the available options.

To quote the late Leo Rutledge, Peace Valley pioneer and long-time advocate for the Peace:

“If a government has no respect for its land base, its very earth, then, it has no real respect for its people or anything else.”

Smoke and Mirrors in Oregon: Who Profits Malheur Occupation?

Is the Oregon Occupation Being Stage-Managed?

by Eric Draitser - NEO

US and international media have been abuzz in recent days with the ongoing armed occupation at the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

The social media space has been, quite predictably, polarized with many on the far right lionizing the armed occupiers as “patriots” and “heroes” defending a just cause in the name of “liberty.”

Naturally many liberals and assorted leftists have condemned the occupation, pointing out both the relevant legal and historical issues at play here, including the vicious tradition of white militias in the US, the blatant disregard of environmental regulations, and much more that is well beyond the scope of this article.

But what has been missed by seemingly every pundit, left and right, who has chimed in on the Oregon occupation is the unmistakable stench of provocation. Simply put, something is off about this whole story, and it struck me from the first moment I read about what was happening, who was involved, and who wasn’t involved. Specifically, there are indications that this entire fiasco has been manufactured by either government agencies themselves or some other private forces for any number of reasons.

If this sounds like “conspiracy theory” to you, it should; I am here theorizing about a potential conspiracy [studio audience gasps]. While the media, academia, and other assorted handmaidens of the ruling class have conditioned many on the Left to recoil in horror at the mere mention of the word, the fact remains that conspiracies are everywhere, that the government and corporations are involved in them, and that refusing to question received narratives and facts for fear of being tarred and feathered as a “conspiracy nut” is precisely the sort of mindless twaddle that has become all too pervasive on the Left.

And so, armed with my bullshit detector, and with full knowledge that many potential angry emailers have already stopped reading, I now dive into the morass that is the #OregonOccupation.

Questions about the Key Players

While much can be said about Ammon Bundy, the son of Nevada rancher (and well known racist) Cliven Bundy, the real suspicion lies with three of the “activists” widely regarded as instrumental in organizing the occupation. By examining what is known and unknown about these three shady characters, a much different picture begins to emerge, one in which a publicity stunt-cum-armed occupation is less an act of protest, and more an act of provocation.

First up for scrutiny is Ryan Payne, an Army veteran and one of the spokespeople for the occupiers both in Oregon, and during the 2014 standoff at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada. Speaking of the ongoing Oregon occupation, Payne told the New York Times, “We will be here for as long as it takes…People have talked about returning land to the people for a long time. Finally, someone is making an effort in that direction.” Leaving aside the hilariously wrongheaded idea that public lands can be seized and given over to private landowners, and that that would somehow qualify as “returning land to the people,” it is Payne himself who deserves further investigation.

Payne, who served in the US Army in Iraq from 2003-2005, is described in his Army Commendation Medal certificate as having performed “exceptionally meritorious service as a long range surveillance senior scout observer and assistance team leader” while being part of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion. It strikes me as curious, if not completely suspicious, that a young white veteran of military intelligence happens to have been part of both the Bundy Ranch standoff and the ongoing occupation in Oregon. But maybe I’m just paranoid, right? Maybe he’s just some right wing young veteran with an overzealous desire to effect political change. Well, maybe. But when you consider that this nobody from Nowhere, Montana has become one of the main participants of these two actions in Nevada and Oregon, and that he’s been at the center of nearly every aspect of both incidents, it should certainly raise some questions.

But don’t take it from me. Gary Hunt, a right wing, pro-militia blogger writing at Canada Free Press, had this to say about Payne, “[Payne provided] ‘meritorious service’ at Bunkerville[the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014], holding the chaotic mass of militia and molding them into a cohesive force.” That certainly does not sound like some Johnny-come-lately just trying to be part of some cool anti-government action. Instead, that sounds like an intelligence operator, someone coordinating actions and groups and maintaining operational security, among other responsibilities. In short, Payne appears from all indications to be a focal point of both episodes.

However, “molding the militia into a cohesive force” was not Payne’s only contribution to the 2014 standoff. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center report entitled War in the West:

After watching the [viral Cliven Bundy] video from his home in Anaconda, Montana, 650 miles away, Ryan Payne, 30, an electrician and former soldier who had deployed twice to the Iraq war, became enraged […] Payne left that day with another member of his militia, Jim Lardy, and drove through the night, a few sleeping bags in tow, burning up cell phones hoping to bring every militia member they could. On April 9 he sent out an urgent call for the militias to mobilize. ‘At this time we have approximately 150 responding, but that number is growing by the hour,’…Militia snipers lined the hilltops and overpasses with scopes trained on federal agents. What happened was not unplanned. As Payne later told the SPLC, he had ordered certain gunmen [sic] ‘to put in counter sniper positions’ and others to hang behind at the rance [sic]. ‘[M]e and Mel Bundy put together the plan for the cohesion between the the Bundys and the militia…. Sending half of the guys up to support the protestors…and keep overwatch and make sure that if the BLM wanted to get froggy, that it wouldn’t be good for them.’

According to Payne’s own words, and those of his supporters, there is certainly ample reason to suspect that this 30 year old veteran was more than simply a participant in this saga, but that he was one of the principal organizers of nearly every aspect of the event, from recruitment and media penetration to operational control. Payne’s message to his fellow right wing militia brothers certainly has the air of provocation as he suggests that they be prepared to lay down their lives in armed struggle against the federal government. “All men are mortal, most pass simply because it is their time, a few however are blessed with the opportunity to choose their time in performance of duty,” Payne explained in a thinly veiled threat of potentially lethal violence.

As I adjust my tinfoil hat, allow me to suggest that such words as those uttered by Payne reek of the tactics of agents provocateurs whose objective it is to incite violence in order to either discredit a particular targeted group or to effect a confrontation designed to escalate a given conflict. While impossible to say definitively, it seems just based on his words and deeds, that Payne has become what amounts to a coordinator of the militia movement. Whether he is still working for military intelligence, some other intelligence or law enforcement agency, or the FBI, it seems clear that Payne deserves far more scrutiny than the controlled corporate media has given him.

Interestingly, The Oregonian reported the following:

Among those joining Bundy in the occupation are Ryan Payne, U.S. Army veteran, and Blaine Cooper. Payne has claimed to have helped organize militia snipers to target federal agents in a standoff last year in Nevada. He told one news organization the federal agents would have been killed had they made the wrong move. He has been a steady presence in Burns in recent weeks, questioning people who were critical of the militia’s presence. He typically had a holstered sidearm as he moved around the community.

So not only is Payne one of the main coordinators and organizers of the occupation, he seems to also be doing double duty, acting as a liaison while obviously gathering intelligence about the participants, the non-participants, critical voices in the community, etc. Again, one could say he’s just a zealous right winger trying to help a cause. But when you combine the various threads of evidence about his background and his activities, my suspicions are certainly raised. It seems I’m not alone, as many commenters on right wing blogs use phrases like “plant” and “Fed shill” and “agent” when describing Payne. According to sources involved in the Bundy Ranch standoff, some were even accusing Payne of precisely that from the very beginning.

Then there is the man known as Blaine Cooper (given name Stanley Hicks) who poses on his Facebook page in military fatigues with sniper rifles and a veritable potpourri of other weapons claiming to be a “patriot” defending the rights of citizens. Cooper aka Hicks enlisted in the Marines in the Delayed Entry Program which allows prospective soldiers a year before they have to report to boot camp. However, according to US Marine Corps records, Cooper/Hicks never showed up. This failure to honor his signed commitment, coupled with more than a dozen arrests and convictions under the name Stanley Hicks, might account for why he changed his name to Cooper and reinvented himself as a self-styled militia leader.

Cooper/Hicks is well known on YouTube within right wing militia circles, with tens of thousands of views of his various videos. He has also falsely presented himself as a member of the Oath Keepers, another militia organization that has featured prominently in various exploits, including their much maligned visible presence in Ferguson, Missouri at the height of the protests over the murder of Mike Brown. Here is what Stewart Rhodes, a founder and President of the Oath Keepers had to say about Cooper/Hicks (see also here and here):

Actually, he [Cooper/Hicks] has never been a member of Oath Keepers. Being a felon, he is automatically disqualified and inelligible [sic] for membership in our org, nor has he ever tried to join. He has paraded around in an Oath Keepers T shirt, and misrepresented himself as being onr [sic] of us, and has used our logo without our permission in some of his idiotic crap he has done. He is a loose cannon retard and blow-hard…But he is not an Oath Keeper.

Interestingly, the Oath Keepers, along with a number of other militia organizations, have been quick to distance themselves from the Burns, Oregon occupation, and from the likes of Payne and Cooper. According to a statement on the Oath Keepers website, the organization disavows the actions of Payne, Cooper & Co., making clear that “In the Hammond case, there is no clear and present danger of the family being mass murdered, there is no stand off [sic], and the family has no intent of starting one … If you want to go protest, by all means do so … but do not allow yourselves to be roped into an armed stand off [sic] the Hammonds do not want.”

Similarly, the Oregon chapter of the Three Percenters, another right wing militia organization, released a statement on their Facebook page in which they explained that:

Unbeknownst to the Idaho 3%, Oregon 3%, it’s [sic] leaders, associations, rally participants, or the citizens of Harney County; these actions were premeditated and carried out by a small group of persons who chose to carry out this takeover after the rally [emphasis added]. The 3% of Idaho, 3% of Oregon, The Oregon Constitutional Guard, and PPN organizations in no way condone nor support these actions. They do not mirror our vision, mission statement, or views in regards to upholding the Constitution, The Rule of Law, or Due Process.

(Also, check out this video from Cooper and read the comments which, aside from the standard anti-semitic nonsense, are littered with commenters accusing Cooper of being a liar, a plant, a provocateur, an agent.)

Such strongly worded disavowals and condemnations indicate that Payne, Cooper, and their cohort are manufacturing this incident entirely. Whether or not the disagreement between the militias and the occupiers is purely a matter of tactics, or something more deeply rooted, including suspicions about the motives and connections of Payne and Cooper, this is a question for those involved in these groups. At the very least however, it seems that segments of the right wing militia movement are not exactly embracing these actions.

Finally we come to the loathsome buffoon Jon Ritzhemier. If that name rings a bell, it should; Ritzheimer was the organizer and sponsor of the “Draw Muhammad” contest in Phoenix, Arizona which made national headlines. One important aspect of the protest outside a Phoenix area mosque which coincided with the contest was the fact that Ritzheimer was deliberately provoking both the Muslim community and the hardcore right wingers who participated in the protest. Ritzheimer described the rally as being “about pushing out the truth about Islam.” However, according to the event’s Facebook page (since deleted but quoted by the Washington Times), “This will be a PEACEFUL protest in front of the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix AZ… Everyone is encouraged to bring American flags and any message that you would like to send to the known acquaintances of the 2 gunmen…People are also encouraged to utilize their second amendment right at this event just in case our first amendment right comes under the much anticipated attack.”

While Ritzheimer talked up his event as a “peaceful protest,” it’s quite clear that there was a not so subtle implied threat of violence, just as there was at Bunkerville, just as there is in Burns, Oregon today. The salient point is not that these are gun-toting lunatics, but rather that they are being lured into a potentially dangerous and violent confrontation by an individual whose intentions are suspect to say the least.

A further indication that Ritzheimer’s objective is provocation rather than protest is his outlandishly stupid, and incredibly irresponsible, “roadtrip” to New York where he planned to confront the Muslims of America organization which had referred to him as the “American Taliban.” What is particularly interesting is that Ritzheimer was in communication with the FBI throughout the trip until he allegedly cut off communication. How does an allegedly anti-government right wing activist spend hours talking on the phone with Federal agents? Perhaps, as some are likely to say, I’m reading too much into this. Well, the right wing militia types who have been suggesting that Ritzheimer is a provocateur might also be “reading too much into this.”

As well known patriot blogger and journalist Patrick Henningsen of 21st Century Wire acerbically wrote in the lead up to Ritzheimer’s rally:

The net result of this elaborately staged event is that it may have opened the flood gates for some of America’s craziest paranoid and politically warped individuals to fall off the edge of reality altogether….“Come armed to march on the Mosque while holding-up cartoons of Mohammed” and wearing T-Shirts that say, “F*** Islam”…? Apparently the police and the FBI are cool with that. No safety risk? Really? Hmmm. Doesn’t that sound a little crazy? Not really, if you consider that this is probably a stage-managed event.

Cui Bono?

The question of motive is obviously front and center when considering the potential that the entire Oregon Occupation is being staged. Why would the handlers of these potential agents provocateurs want to do this? Here are some, but certainly not all, of the possible motives:

• Create a situation that is likely to escalate in order to then use it to justify everything from increasingly draconian anti-terror legislation (especially “domestic” terrorism) to potential dragnet policing of the radical fringes on both left and right. Nothing would justify a crackdown on radical environmentalists, armed self-defense organizations (be they Oath Keepers or the Huey P. Newton Gun Club), revolutionary communists and anarchists, and other such groups better than a nice, messy, dramatic event in Oregon.

• Use this event, and others like it, as a means of discrediting, dividing, and factionalizing not merely the right wing organizations, but all groups who see corporations and the State as the enemy. As communist writer and journalist Harriet Parsons correctly wrote in 1980:

The state’s tactics fall into two broad categories, spying and provocation… The government boasts that over 87% of the information on revolutionaries collected by the state comes from informants, members of organizations solicited by the police or people placed within a group to gather information. Once in the organization, the informants worm their way into key positions in order to have access to critical information about the leadership and tactical plans… In some cases, agents within will try to push the line of the organization to an incorrect position on the right or left so as to discredit the Party’s work among the masses… Excellent examples of this technique can be seen in the government’s disruption of the mass organizations engaged in the anti-war movement in the 1960s… FBI agents often offered to supply dynamite and weapons to the radicals to encourage terrorist action which would raise public sentiment against them and make them vulnerable to legal prosecution. 

Manufacture some sort of heroism or martyrdom on the part of the occupiers in order to promote right wing extremist ideology which will appeal to an increasing segment of the population, particularly in light of recent developments ranging from the ascendance of Trumpism to the ongoing economic breakdown of the middle class. In doing so, the ruling class then ‘lances the boil’ of activism and revolutionary energies, directing them to fascistic, nationalistic dead ends rather than to a genuine mass movement centered on the rights of working people and the poor. In other words, social engineering.

Naturally there are likely many other possible motives for manufacturing the sort of fiasco that is unfolding in Burns, Oregon. Whatever the true motives, one thing is clear: what’s happening in Oregon is dangerous, unproductive, and dare I say, counter-revolutionary.

I should note that, as if it weren’t already plainly obvious, I’m not a supporter of right wing militia groups in the US, though I do share some of their concerns in regards to the police state and the corporate entity called the US Government. Nor am I a fan of that nebulous thing called the “Patriot Movement,” riddled as it is with anarcho-capitalist claptrap, radical libertarian pseudo-politics, racism, xenophobia, and outright fascism.

However, that aside, it is important to separate what’s real from what’s manufactured. There are real people with real grievances and a genuine desire to roll back the fascist police state in this movement. It is precisely such activists who are the REAL target of the Oregon occupation, and along with them, so too are any radical activists who want to use direct action to effect change.

While many on the left and right are mesmerized by Bernie and Trump and the non-revolutionary “revolutions” they represent, the ruling class knows perfectly well that true revolution will come from below. Oregon might just be yet another effort to cut the legs out from under it.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/10/is-the-oregon-occupation-being-stage-managed/