If It Ain't Broke, Brexit

Back to the Future

by Craig Murray

29 Jun, 2016 

The priority now of the political “elite” is to ensure voters never again get the chance to make a choice the political class do not want. Jeremy Corbyn is the thing the political class want least.

Do you remember when 184 Labour MPs refused to vote against the Tory benefit cuts that ruined lives and caused suicides? They did so on the grounds that their focus groups showed the public wanted benefit cuts, and so it would be wrong to oppose the Tory Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

Well, I can promise you that the 172 Labour MPs who voted to no-confidence Corbyn are exactly the same people who would not oppose welfare cuts. The net effect of the Corbyn year has been that 12 Labour MPs have decided that they have a purpose in politics which is not just personal gain. The vast majority would vote to push the unemployed off a cliff if they thought it would get them career advancement. Or adapt the John Mann anti-immigrant agenda.

Make no mistake. If Corbyn is deposed, the people of England and Wales will be back to having a choice between two colours of Tory. Labour will go full on anti welfare, anti immigrant and pro-nuclear weapon. Because Jon Cruddas will tell them that is what will get them elected.

In the UK, 78% of people do not know the name of their MP. With Labour MPs it was 82%. The idea that they have a “personal mandate” is rubbish. People vote for the party. In Blackburn I stood as an Independent against Jack Straw and all the main parties, and got 5% of the vote. Not one of those 172 Labour Party MPs would get 5% if they stood as an Independent.

The SNP has mandatory reselection for every MP and MSP for every election. It is a fundamental democratic need. The mainstream media are now trying to generate horror at the idea that the Labour MPs should be accountable to their local members, in whose name they wish to stand again. It is a ridiculous argument that people who have behaved like Simon Danczuk should have the right to represent the Labour Party for life. Yet it is the democratic alternative which the media are seeking to demonise.

NATO's Tottering European Bloc

Huge Scandal Erupts Inside NATO: Alliance Member Germany Slams NATO "Warmongering" Against Russia

by Tyler Durden - ZeroHedge

Jun 19, 2016

As we reported in just the past week, not only has NATO accelerated its encirclement of Russia, with British soldiers deployed in Estonia, US soldiers operating in Latvia and Canadians in Poland, while combat units are being increased in the Mediterranean...

... but even more troubling, was NATO's assessment that it may now have grounds to attack Russia when it announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V “collective defense” provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country.

Specifically, NATO is alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer, this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her U.S. State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russian’s then snooping into the U.S. State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the U.S. President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the U.S., trigger NATO’s mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the U.S. government in going to war against Russia, if the U.S. government so decides.

Also recall that the attack on the DNC servers which leaked the Democrats confidential files on Trump and Hillary donors lists were also blamed on "Russian government hackers", before it emerged that the act was the result of one solitary non-Russian hacker, but not before the US once again tried to escalate a development which may have culminated with war with Russia!

Throughout all of these escalations, the popular narrative spun by the "democratic" media was a simple one: it was Russia that was provoking NATO, not NATO's aggressive military actions on the border with Russia that were the cause of soaring geopolitical tension. Ignored in the fictional plot line was also Russia's clear reaction to NATO provocations that it would "respond totally asymmetrically" an outcome that could in its worst oucome lead to millions of European deaths. Still, no matter the risk of escalation, one which just two weeks ago led to assessment that the "Risk Of Nuclear Dirty Bomb Surges On Poor US-Russia Relations", NATO had to maintain its provocative attitude .

All NATO had to do was assure that all alliance members would follow the lead, and nobody would stray from the party line.

And then everything imploded when none other than the Foreign Minister of NATO member Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, criticized NATO for having a bellicose policy towards Russia, describing it as "warmongering", the German daily Bild reported.

And just like that, the entire ficitional narrative of "innocent" NATO merely reacting to evil Russian provcations has gone up in flames.

German Foreign Minister 

Frank-Walter Steinmeier

As AFP adds, Steinmeier merely highlighted all those things which rational persons have known about for a long time, namely the deployment of NATO troops near borders with Russia in the military alliance's Baltic and east European member states.


However, since it comes from a NATO member, suddenly one can't accuse Russian propaganda. In fact, NATO has absolutely no planned response to just this contingency.

"What we should avoid today is inflaming the situation by warmongering and stomping boots," Steinmeier told Bild in an interview to be published Sunday.

"Anyone who thinks you can increase security in the alliance with symbolic parades of tanks near the eastern borders, is mistaken," Germany's top diplomat added.

Needless to say, Russia bitterly opposes NATO's expansion into its Soviet-era satellites and last month said it would create three new divisions in its southwest region to meet what it described as a dangerous military build-up along its borders. This is precisely what NATO wants as it would be able to then blame Russian effect to NATO cause as an irrational move by the Kremlin, one to which the kind folks at NATO HQ would have no choice but to respond in their caring defense of all those innocent people, when in reality it is NATO that is desperate to provoke and launch the conflict with Russia.

And now even its own members admit it!

In its latest ridiculous escalation, blamed on Russia no less, NATO announced on Monday that it would deploy four battalions to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to counter a more assertive Russia, ahead of a landmark summit in Warsaw next month. Well, as Steinmeier made it very clear, NATO's deployment to provoke Russia was precisely that. As a result a Russian "assymmetric" response is assured, and this time it may even spill over into the combat arena, something which would bring infinite delight to Washington's military-industrial complex neocon puppets.

In an interview with Bild on Thursday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Russia is seeking to create "a zone of influence through military means". "We are observing massive militarisation at NATO borders -- in the Arctic, in the Baltic, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea," he told the newspaper.

How do we know Steinmeier hit it nail on the head? The neocon Council of Foreign Relations trotted out its "fellow" who promptly took to character assassinations and demanding Steinmeier's resignation, instead of asking if perhaps a NATO-member country accusing NATO of being a warmongering provocateur, is not the real reason why Europe is back deep in the cold war, with an escalating nuclear arms race to go alongside it, courtesy of the US military industrial complex whose profits are entirely dependent on war, conflict and the death of civilians around the globe.

As for the unprecedented reality in which NATO's biggest and most important European member is suddenly and quite vocally against NATO and as a result may be pivoting toward Russian, we for one can't wait to see just how this shocking geopolitical debacle for western neocons and war hawks concludes.

The Brexit and Washington's Anti-Russia Campaign

Washington Fears Brexit Will Unravel Its Anti-Russia Policy

by Finian Cunningham - RT

June 28, 2016
 
Britain’s stunning referendum vote to leave the European Union has thrown a cat among the pigeons, not least in Washington, where it is feared that the “Brexit” could scupper its anti-Russian policy.

That tacit policy is a foundation of the postwar international order whereby Washington – thanks to its trusty British acolyte – has been able to exert hegemony over Europe. Nearly seven decades of American transatlantic domination are at risk of crumbling.

The unscheduled, hasty visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry to Brussels followed by London on Monday is a sure sign that Washington is alarmed at the historic decision by the British electorate to quit the EU – after 43-year membership of the bloc.

“Kerry urges Britain, EU to manage their divorce responsibly,” was how American news outlet ABC reported the diplomat’s detour. The outlet went on to say with a pretense of chivalry that Kerry’s concern was “for the sake of global markets and citizens”.

More to the point, Washington’s perplexity is specific and self-serving. In particular, the loss of British influence inside the EU will impact on Washington’s carefully constructed policy of trying to isolate Russia. American objectives to isolate Russia go much further back than the past two years over Ukraine. Indeed, one can trace the anti-Russia policy to immediately after the Second World War, a policy that was intimately shared by the British establishment, as expressed by Winston Churchill in his famous 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, marking the onset of the Cold War against the West’s erstwhile wartime Soviet ally.

Former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, gave full expression to these fears in an opinion piece in the Washington Post at the weekend. The headline reads: “How Brexit is a win for Putin”.

The tone is almost panic-stricken. McFaul alludes to Russia’s growing economic and political influence with China and Eurasian integration: “Europe is now weakening as Russia, its allies and its multilateral organizations are consolidating, even adding new members. Putin, of course, did not cause the Brexit vote, but he and his foreign policy objectives stand to gain enormously from it.”

The former US envoy, who also served as national security adviser to the Obama administration, laments how Britain as Washington’s “closest ally” will have less leverage for American interests over the rest of Europe.

With regard to Russia, this means that the EU’s economic sanctions against Moscow and the build-up of NATO military forces are put into serious doubt. Both aspects have been led by Washington, with Britain as a strident advocate of sanctions and NATO militarism. Now that London does not have a vote in Brussels, America’s policy of hostility towards Russia is blunted.

Britain’s exiting of the EU puts Washington’s in a geopolitical dilemma. As the New York Times headlined:

“With ‘Brexit,’ Washington’s direct line to the continent suddenly frays”

The NY Times reports:

“American officials struggling to reimagine their strategy after Britain’s decision to divorce the European Union say the most urgent challenge will be to find a way to replace their most reliable, sympathetic partner in the hallways of European capitals. It will not be easy.” 

When Britain first joined the early European Economic Community in 1973, it was following a policy directed by Washington. With its “special relationship”, as coined by Churchill, Britain would ensure that Washington’s geopolitical interests prevailed on the continental Europeans, in particular the Germans and French, who were always suspected of being inclined towards socialism and rapprochement with Russia.

It is arguable that the EU was a political project engineered by the American Central Intelligence Agency, for which Britain served a crucial steering role.

Britain would thus bring a strong NATO perspective to the emerging EU. The US-led military alliance’s unofficial objective from its postwar inception in 1949 was, according to British Lord Ismay, the first secretary-general, to “keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out”. And Britain’s presence within the EU – as the second biggest economy after Germany – ensured that this anti-Russian ideology always remained a potent force, even 25 years after the Cold War supposedly ended.

Today, the 28-member EU bloc is barely distinguishable from the 28-member NATO military alliance in terms of adopting US-led policies, and in particular its anti-Russia policy. The renewal of European economic sanctions against Moscow has only served to inflict huge damage on EU nations. It is self-defeating and absurdly based on scant evidence of “Russian aggression”. But the policy prevails in large part due to Washington’s and Britain’s “NATO-ization” of the EU.

This is why the loss of Britain from the EU is so disconcerting to Washington and its Atlanticist advocate in London. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has been most vocal since the referendum, warning that “the Kremlin will be happy with the result”.

Unlike Washington’s admonitions against a Brexit in the run up to the referendum, Moscow refrained from making any such pronouncements, saying that it was an internal British political matter. Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed comments by British and American politicians who inferred “Kremlin rejoicing” over the Brexit as “a manifestation of low political culture”.

The snide, anti-Russian invective is really a reflection of the malign purpose with which Washington and London have been working for decades in order to impale a wedge between Europe and Russia.

Washington has much to lose as a hegemonic world power if Europe and Russia were to move closer together politically, economically and in terms of mutual security. The US and its transatlantic British cipher – being closely aligned in global finance capital – must do all in their power to make sure that Europe and Russia do not converge as natural partners.

With Britain now reverting to “Little England” as American media are mocking, there are moves ahead for Washington to recruit a new surrogate within the EU for its hegemonic ambitions. Germany is top of the list as the replacement for Britain. France is seen as too unreliable, while Poland and the Baltic states are too lightweight, from Washington’s viewpoint.

However, the Brexit has unleashed a Europe-wide public revolt of anti-EU sentiment. Part of that antipathy stems from the kind of oligarchic politics, financial oppression and NATO militarism that people associate with Washington’s influence on Europe.

Washington will not find an automatic, easy substitute for its British surrogate. No European state could ever replace Britain as the most loyal and fervent servant of American interests.

Russia is entitled to feel relief, if not rejoicing, over the Brexit result. And not just Russia, but many other countries and people who long for more peaceful international relations, free from Washington’s and NATO’s warmongering machinations.

Britain’s diminished influence over European policies means Washington is also curbed.

Nothing can be taken for granted, but there is a fair chance that Europe might be freer henceforth to develop normal, more harmonious relations with Russia.

Germany, whose postwar reconciliation with Russia was once a source of immense hope during the 1960s, 70s and 80s under its “Ostpolitik”, might now be able to resume that trajectory.

And no wonder Washington is panicked.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Eliza Olson, Finian Cunningham June 29, 2016

This Week on GR

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

June 29, 2016

MK Delta isn't the latest secret weapon aimed at the latest enemy du jour, but a land scheme targeting a piece of Burns Bog, one of the very last wetland sanctuaries on the west coast.

Perilously situated between hyper-developing Vancouver and the US border, last week, the MK Delta Lands Group development scheme received a preliminary green light from Delta council, a necessary step towards next month's public hearings.

MK Delta's president promises the 2 million plus square feet of industrial space will add to the tax base, while opponents worry about wildlife, the destruction of peatlands, and further diminishing of the Agricultural Land Reserve.

Listen. Hear.

Eliza Olson is president of the Burns Bog Conversation Society, an organization that has, for nearly thirty years, worked to preserve and protect the bog, while proselytizing the necessity of saving the peatland environment.

Eliza Olson in the first half.

And; last week, Russia's president addressed commemorations of the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Vladimir Putin used the sombre occasion to draw uncomfortable parallels of behaviour between Hitler's Reich and the current military masters of Europe residing at Boulevard Leopold Troisieme, Brussels, Belgium.

While oceans of ink have poured these past weeks, devoted to Britain's Brexit from the EU, barely a splash of that verbiage has focused on the role popular revulsion of NATO's war and rumouring for wars played in turning Britons against a continental union guaranteeing perpetual participation in endless wars of aggression.

Finian Cunningham is an East Africa-based freelance journalist and columnist for RT and Sputnik. He's a former editor and/or writer for the Mirror, Irish Times, and the Irish Independent. His reporting on human rights violations is also cited widely across the internet, earning him the enmity of despots, like the monarchical government of Bahrain, the world over.

Finian Cunningham and rejecting NATO's self-appointed role as spearhead for neo-liberalism’s second-wave, trans-global colonial project in the second half.

And, Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft is away on assignment this week. So first up, Eliza Olson and maintaining the centre against corruption of the periphery at Burns Bog.

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.  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.

Europe: Brexiting Western Civilization

Europe

by Mazin Qumsiyeh - Popular Resistance

June 26, 2016

I wrote several articles over the past 20 years suggesting for the sake of Europe’s future to develop a more independent foreign policy and end US led NATO’s adventurism whether in Libya or the Ukraine. But looking at the British poll to exit Europe, we cannot just say “we told you so”. We cannot feel happy seeing Europe collapse even though we here in Palestine suffered and continue to suffer from European colonization (yes Zionism that created Israel is European colonization).

This vote was focused mainly on fear of immigration (not economy as many expected) and this epidemic of fear of the brown people is afflicting the US and Europe and is stoked by Zionist xenophobes. It was not surprising that all of Rupert Murdoch’s vast media empire peddled for Brexit (British exit).

The stock markets collapsed, gold prices surged, and there is a general panic as the rich bankers who control/issue the money do not know what to do. The US Federal Reserve is panicking because interest rates are already so low and can’t be lowered so much further to “simulate the economy.”

The economy is bad in Europe and the US because it is a war economy. For example, some three trillions were spent on the Iraq war (for Israel). These wars to fragment the Arab world even further than what Sykes-Picot created in 1916 (100 years ago) are backfiring and are the real cause of the calamity in Europe (epitomized by what they call a refugee crisis and economic stress). Perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost?

In the US a similar pop culture promoted by Hollywood and other media peddled xenophobic islamophobia to serve Israel, peddled endless wars (divide and conquer), and peddled a diversionary silly culture to draw attention away from the major challenges to a livable world (especially climate change). These Zionists challenged the principled BDS campaign hypocritically crying “anti-semitism” while peddling Islamophobia. The witch hunts in 2016 are reminiscent of the 1950s McCarthy communist scare.

We were thus not surprised that this same Zionist controlled media repackaged the Florida shooter as a “Muslim terrorist” but Madeen was clearly a lunatic gay guy who drank heavily and frequented gay bars regularly and was psychotically depressed for rejection. Without understanding this massive media campaign we cannot explain the popularity in oppressive societies of people like Avigdor Lieberman (“Israel”), Donald Trump (USA), and Boris Johnson (England). The fact that they all support Zionism should give us a hint.

What is clear is that people need to worry about the future of the so called “Western Civilization” as it is clearly in decline. When asked about Western Civilization, Mahatma Gandhi was reputed to have said “I think it would be a good idea”! Many people especially the majority of the globe that is not “white” are worried about this civilization.

Writing in the Guardian, Lola Okolosie said,

“The paradox of this referendum has been that those who have experienced the highest levels of migration turned out to be the least concerned about it. Fear of the unknown often underlines bigotry and xenophobia. We know that.” 

Her article makes more interesting points and is worth reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/scary-people-of-colour-migrants-eu

Europe went through the Middle Ages for ten centuries (medieval period), a period not much different from the disarray and religious fervor gripping the Arab world today. Europe paid a heavy price for the transition from these dark ages to the renaissance and then they had the set-backs of colonialism and nationalism (including WW1 and WW2). I am hopeful that Europe will not slip back and its people learned from the past.

Now the focus is on the Arab world to finally rise out of the disarray and weakness into an era of science and technology and knowledge based decision making (our own renaissance) and this is inevitable. But then in 100 years (if climate change has not killed us all), we hope we will not be back into the colonial or nationalist mentality whether here or in Europe. Zionist colonialism like all other colonialism is already struggling to stay alive in a sea of native rejection in the 21st century.

There is so much we can learn from history of Europe and we must all consider it our human history. Humanity is evolving and we must work together to make sure it evolves in a good sustainable direction.

Good news according to a friend (Mai):

“Two years ago, Presbyterians passed divestment by a razor thin margin of just 7 votes. This year, they moved boldly forward with huge majority votes on further strong measures. Meanwhile, the Unitarians achieved a majority on their first attempt at divestment (remember, the Presbyterians took 10 years!)...In addition, Re/Max issued a statement to the Presbyterians prior to their Re/Max vote (which passed) that they will no longer profit from Israel's illegal settlements properties- see links below” 

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=4806
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/06/presbyterians-announces-settlements/?utm_campaign=trueanthem

Joining the Potash Rush: Fertilizer Surge Could Lead Food Price Spike for Billions

Potash Price Surge Could Lead to Higher Food Costs for Billions

by James Stafford - Oilprice.com

June 23, 2016

We are on the precipice of a food fight among 7 billion people, and potash will be right at the center of it.

If you can add 200,000 people every day to the global population and account for a significant loss of farmland at the same time, you can begin to understand the dire food situation facing the planet. This is why potash is so important: It’s the fundamental element that everyone takes for granted, despite the fact that a projected 7.7 billion lives will depend upon it by 2020.

No commodity is more fundamental than potash—and there is a lot of pressure riding on an element that many people aren’t even familiar with. Of the key commodities taken for granted, potash is on the top of the list.

The challenge for farmers—and for the world—is to increase crop yields on less land, which is being lost to climate change and increasing urbanization. This means not only steady demand for the three main elements of fertilizer—potash, phosphate and nitrogen—but significantly higher demand.

“A growing population needing to be fed from a limited amount of arable land makes fertilizer and particularly potash a robust commodity,” Potash Ridge President and CEO Guy Bentinck told Oilprice.com.

“Additionally, as the middle class grows, the demand for higher-end food increases, and with that the demand for potash and related fertilizers increases.”

For such a critical element, it’s hard to believe that potash remains so elusive. It took a high-profile US$40-billion hostile takeover attempt of Saskatchewan’s Potash Corp., which failed, by major miner BHP Billiton in 2010 for even the Wall Street Journal to decide to figure out what all the fuss was about.

Potash, and various potassium-containing compounds are used to fertilize crops as a necessary resource for the growth of plants. In many regions of the world, there are large potash-bearing deposits from ancient sea beds that dried up millions of years ago. Most potash comes from these sources and is separated from the salt and other minerals and then graded into a form that can be used to make fertilizer.

So even if you haven’t heard of it, Potash is so big that it eludes radar—until the giant miners start aggressively positioning themselves for bigger pieces of this pie.

If you’re still not sold on potash, consider this: As far as commodities go, though it’s been a tough couple of years, Potash outperformed gold, silver, copper and oil and gas in 2015, and this year, as its cycle comes full circle, it’s back by popular demand.

The Potash Playing Field

This is a huge playing field with some of the biggest miners in the world—all vying for market share. Russia, Belarus, China, Germany, the U.S., Israel, Jordan and China are all major potash miners, with Canada currently holding the top position for the commodity--producing 11 million tons last year and the year before, compared to Number 2 producer Russia’s 7.4 million tons.

Canada is also home to the world’s largest fertilizer company by capacity—Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, or Potash Corp.—the target of BHP Billiton’s long-running covetousness.

The U.S. came in at 770,000 tons of potash production in 2015, mostly from New Mexico and Utah, which have a total of seven potash mines. Most of the U.S. potash goes to the fertilizer industry, while small amounts are diverted to the chemical industry. The four mines in New Mexico are controlled by two companies—Intrepid Potash (NYSE:IPI) and Mosaic (NYSE:MOS). In Utah, it’s Intrepid again, Compass Minerals (NYSE:CMP), and Canadian explorer Potash Ridge (TSX:PRK) with its Blawn Mountain project. Potash Ridge’s Valleyfield project in Quebec is projected to produce 40,000 tons of SOP (sulfate of potash) annually, with construction slated to begin later this summer.

The movements among the big potash players make huge market ripples. In 2015, a US$500-million loan deal from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank with Russian potash major Uralkali, effectively gave China greater control over global potash production. Uralkali accounts for about 20 percent of the world’s potash production.

China—a major demand center for potash—now has immense influence in the potash market, and is both a major producer and a major importer because demand is far greater than domestic supply. The Chinese potash contracts that are typically made in February every year—but delayed this year—are a critical annual point for producers.

Not all Potash is Equal: Some Potash is Posh

As Mr Bentinck has noted above, the middle class is growing, and they want higher-quality, healthier food, which means cash crops. This demographic change is leading to a health food revolution for which potash is the primary element. But not all fertilizers are equal in this game.

The two most common forms of fertilizer are MOP (muriate of potash) and SOP (sulfate of potash). Right now, MOP is the most common; but while it’s good for some crops, it’s not good for others, and it can create environments that are detrimental to some crops, primarily due to high levels of chloride.

SOP, on the other hand, is the premium end of potash. It’s the posh potash. It improves both the quality and yield of a crop, while at the same time making them more drought, frost, insect and disease-resistant. It’s been said that SOP also improves the taste of the food by improving its ability to absorb nutrients.

The other problem with MOP today is that the market is temporarily over-supplied and prices have dropped, which has prompted some more junior miners—such as Potash Ridge in Quebec and Utah--to swoop in to take advantage of the opportunity for the less common SOP. Potash Ridge, which is one of the fastest-growing juniors on the posh potash scene, says SOP “continues to be one of the best performing commodities across all sectors, which realized prices in North America exceeding US$880 per ton in the fourth quarter of 2015.”

Riding the Cycles: The Potash Catalysts Are Already Visible

Fertilizer demand is set to increase over the long-term. While globally we consumed 35.5 million tons of potash in 2015, the next four years should see this rise to 39.5 million tons.

The catalysts for potash are already clear and present. The grain cycles that affect fertilizer are coming back around now; the long overdue, but now occurring monsoon season in India should relieve several quarters of slumping demand in this major demand venue; a health food boom is increasing demand for the SOP form of potash; long-term global population figures stand starkly against plummeting farmland figures; and major potash production is coming offline in the near-term, making even more room for the juniors to break in.

Remember—grain crops are cyclical, so buying when they are down is when the big investors make all their money. Just because corn and other key crops that rely on potash have been down, adversely affecting fertilizer revenues—doesn’t mean they’re out. Corn has many booms and busts; buy on the bust, right before the next cycle boom.

One of the biggest immediate-term catalysts will be the planned moves by giant Potash Corp., it’s Canadian competitor Agrium (NYSE:AGU) and Mosaic to take potash production offline in order to rebalance the supply side of the market—something everyone’s been trying to get OPEC to do with oil to no avail. This means that in the next few months we should see potash prices recover, so the window to get in on the downside here is only open a crack.

(Click to enlarge)

The last great cycle for potash was 2004-2008, but prices for MOP have dropped 60 percent since then, while prices for SOP have doubled since then.

(Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

While MOP is experiencing a glut right now that could soon be rebalanced, supply for SOP is tight, making the margins for SOP increasingly attractive, and the juniors breaking into a high-reward versus risk bargain.

“The global SOP market appears to be under-supplied, with current tightness of the market demonstrating demand for additional global capacity outside China,” according to Neil Fleishman, Director of Research for Green Markets.

To Re-Cap: This is Why We Like Potash

There is massive opportunity here in the uncertainty of this market, for which the fundamentals absolutely must re-balance in the medium-term.

And while the MOP fundamentals might take a bit longer to fully rebalance as the global supply-demand picture recovers, the premium-priced posh potash, SOP, is the emerging darling that gives us cause to look more bullishly at the break-out juniors here.

The Existential War: Water as Weapon in Gaza

Palestine’s ‘Prayer for Rain’: How Israel Uses Water as a Weapon of War

by Ramzy Baroud - PalestineChronicle.com

June 22, 2016

Entire communities in the West Bank either have no access to water or have had their water supply reduced almost by half.

This alarming development has been taking place for weeks, since Israel's national water company, “Mekorot”, decided to cut off - or significantly reduce - its water supply to Jenin, Salfit and many villages around Nablus, among other regions.

Israel has been ‘waging a water war' against Palestinians, according to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah.

The irony is that the water provided by “Mekorot” is actually Palestinian water, usurped from West Bank aquifers. While Israelis, including illegal West Bank settlements, use the vast majority of it, Palestinians are sold their own water back at high prices.

By shutting down the water supply at a time that Israeli officials are planning to export essentially Palestinian water, Israel is once more utilizing water as a form of collective punishment.

This is hardly new. I still remember the trepidation in my parents’ voices whenever they feared that the water supply was reaching a dangerously low level. It was almost a daily discussion at home.

Whenever clashes erupted between stone-throwing children and Israeli occupation forces on the outskirts of the refugee camp, we always, instinctively, rushed to fill up the few water buckets and bottles we had scattered around the house.

This was the case during the First Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, which erupted in 1987 throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Whenever clashes erupted, one of the initial actions carried out by the Israeli Civil Administration - a less ominous title for the offices of the Israeli occupation army - was to collectively punish the whole population of whichever refugee camp rose up in rebellion.

The steps the Israeli army took became redundant, although grew more vengeful with time: a strict military curfew (meaning the shutting down of the entire area and the confinement of all residents to their homes under the threat of death); cutting off electricity and shutting off the water supply.

Of course, these steps were taken only in the first stage of the collective punishment, which lasted for days or weeks, sometimes even months, pushing some refugee camps to the point of starvation.

Since there was little the refugees could do to challenge the authority of a well-equipped army, they invested whatever meager resources or time that they had to plot their survival.

Thus, the obsession over water, because once the water supply ran out, there was nothing to be done; except, of course, that of Salat Al-Istisqa or the ‘Prayer for Rain’ that devout Muslims invoke during times of drought. The elders in the camp insist that it actually works, and reference miraculous stories from the past where this special prayer even yielded results during summer time, when rain was least expected.

In fact, more Palestinians have been conducting their prayer for rain since 1967 than at any other time. In that year, almost exactly 49 years ago, Israel occupied the two remaining regions of historic Palestine: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. And throughout those years, Israel has resorted to a protracted policy of collective punishment: limiting all kinds of freedom, and using the denial of water as a weapon.

Indeed, water was used as a weapon to subdue rebelling Palestinians during many stages of their struggle. In fact, this history goes back to the war of 1948, when Zionist militias cut off the water supply to scores of Palestinian villages around Jerusalem to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of that region.

During the Nakba (or Catastrophe) of 1948, whenever a village or a town was conquered, the militias would immediately demolish its wells to prevent the inhabitants from returning. Illegal Jewish settlers still utilize this tactic to this day.

The Israeli military, too, continued to use this strategy, most notably in the first and second uprisings. In the Second Intifada, Israeli airplanes shelled the water supply of whichever village or refugee camp they planned to invade and subdue. During the Jenin Refugee Camp invasion and massacre of April 2002, the water supply for the camp was blown up before the soldiers moved into the camp from all directions, killing and wounding hundreds.

Gaza remains the most extreme example of water-related collective punishment, to date. Not only the water supply is targeted during war but electric generators, which are used to purify the water, are often blown up from the sky. And until the decade-long siege is over, there is little hope to permanently repair either of these.

It is now common knowledge that the Oslo Accord was a political disaster for Palestinians; less known, however, is how Oslo facilitated the ongoing inequality under way in the West Bank.

The so-called Oslo II, or the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 1995, made Gaza a separate water sector from the West Bank, thus leaving the Strip to develop its own water sources located within its boundaries. With the siege and recurring wars, Gaza’s aquifers produce anywhere between 5-10 percent of ‘drinking-quality water.’ According to ANERA, 90 percent of Gaza water (is) unfit for human consumption.’

Therefore, most Gazans subsist on sewage-polluted or untreated water. But the West Bank should - at least theoretically - enjoy greater access to water than Gaza. Yet, this is hardly the case.

The West Bank's largest water source is the Mountain Aquifer, which includes several basins: Northern, Western and Eastern. West Bankers’ access to these basins is restricted by Israel, which also denies them access to water from the Jordan River and to the Coastal Aquifer. Oslo II, which was meant to be a temporary arrangement until a final status negotiations are concluded, enshrined the existing inequality by giving Palestinians less than a fifth of the amount of water enjoyed by Israel.

But even that prejudicial agreement has not been respected, partly because a joint committee to resolve water issues gives Israel veto power over Palestinian demands. Practically, this translates to 100 percent of all Israeli water projects receiving the go-ahead, including those in the illegal settlements, while nearly half of Palestinian needs are rejected.

Presently, according to Oxfam, Israel controls 80 percent of Palestinian water resources. "The 520,000 Israeli settlers use approximately six times the amount of water more than that used by the 2.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The reasoning behind this is quite straightforward, according to Stephanie Westbrook, writing in Israel’s +972 Magazine.

“The company pumping the water out is ‘Mekorot’, Israel’s national water company. ‘Mekorot’ not only operates more than 40 wells in the West Bank, appropriating Palestinian water resources, Israel also effectively controls the valves, deciding who gets water and who does not.”

“It should be no surprise that priority is given to Israeli settlements while service to Palestinian towns is routinely reduced or cut off,” as is the case at the moment.

The unfairness of it all is inescapable. Yet, for nearly five decades, Israel has been employing the same policies against Palestinians without much censure or meaningful action from the international community.

With current summer temperature in the West Bank reaching 38 degrees Celsius, entire families are reportedly living on as little as 2-3 liters per capita, per day. The problem is reaching catastrophic proportions. This time, the tragedy cannot be brushed aside, for the lives and well-being of entire communities are at stake.

Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada” and his latest “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story”. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

The Power of Pencil and Paper: What Americans Can Learn from the Brexit Referendum

Beating Establishment Power Requires an Honest Election System: What is the Big Lesson of the UK 'Brexit' Vote for Americans? It Was Done With Paper Ballots

by Dave Lindorff  - This Can't Be Happening

June 25, 2016

The decision by a majority of UK voters to reject membership in the European Union in Wednesday's hotly-contested referendum has been a devastating defeat for the corporatist domination of the European political and economic scene. It throws the corporate duopoly in the UK into turmoil, and also has the EU bureaucrats and the banking elite in Brussels and the financial capitals of Europe in a panic, lest other countries' voters, as in Spain and Italy, or even France and the Netherlands, decide to follow suit. (Spain has a national election tomorrow which could be heavily influenced by the British referendum outcome, since if the united left wins, it could eventually lead to Spain's exit from the EU.)

But for the US, which is not a party to the EU, there is also a huge lesson: 'Brexit,' despite being opposed by the political establishment -- Conservative and Labor -- and by the corporate elite of London's City, the financial capital of Europe, won this vote. And the reason the opponents of UK membership in the EU were able to win against all that powerful opposition, has, in no small part, to do with the fact that all the voting was done on paper ballots.

Compare that to the US, where voting, for the vast majority of people, is done on machines, in many cases electronic machines that leave no paper trail of individual votes, or even of vote totals per machine. We are always hearing reports of faulty -- or hacked -- machines that are "flipping" votes, so that someone can cast a vote for a Democratic candidate or party slate and see it switched to Republican, reports of entire tallies for a day's voting being simply lost, machines that don't work, forcing would be voters to wait for hours to vote on a limited number of machines that supposedly are working, limited polling places because county or city governments claim they can't afford to buy an adequate number of machines, a shortage of paper ballots when machines fail, etc.

The list of excuses goes on and on. And why, one might ask, does America vote by electronic machines instead of on readily verifiable paper ballots? The only possible official reason for doing our voting in a way that is costlier, more complicated for voters, and less reliable and trustworthy into the bargain has to be pressure from the corporate media, whose sole interest in our elections is the "horse race" leading to a meaningless competition to get the results out first. Why should it matter though, how fast results are available? If you think about it, whether we learn the results of an election an hour or two after the voting ends, or the next day, or even several days after the voting, so what? Why, in fact, do we allow news organizations like AP or the New York Times to "call" elections based on faulty algorithms that make extrapolations of early counts in specific targeted voting districts based upon prior years' experience?

Voting in the UK is done on paper ballots, as here in the 'Brexit' referendum. 

In the US many vote on easily hacked computers that leave no paper trail.

 
Most recently, we witnessed the outrage of AP calling the Democratic national presidential primary for Hillary Clinton the morning that California and six other states totaling 15% of the total delegate count in the nation were holding primaries. Then AP and the rest of the corporate media prematurely announced the victory in California that evening when less than half of the votes cast had actually been counted (the rest were paper ballots -- both mailed-in ones, and over a million "provisional" ballots that were given to voters who had registered close to election day, and whose registrations had not been provided in time to local voting district officials. As those votes are finally hand counted -- and they are still being counted today, some two and a half weeks after the voting! -- it is becoming clear that far from being a rout by Hillary Clinton, the vote between Clinton and Sanders in California was very close, as will be the delegate count for each of the two candidates. (For the entire one-year Sanders campaign, the corporate media insisted that he "could not win," though clearly had a few states gone slightly different, he could have.)

A number of analysts have pointed out that there is serious evidence of vote rigging in the Democratic primary in favor of Clinton [1], with most of the states that she won outside of the deep South which had electronic voting machines having exit polls that showed Sanders should have won. Exit polling, unlike pre-ballot polling, is usually quite an accurate predictor of final outcome, but there is no way to check those votes, because the machines don't have a paper trail.

And that's not all. This latest primary season, like elections in prior years, has been rife with other examples of interfering with the right of Americans to cast their votes. There was massive voter suppression in New York's Democratic primary, for example, with entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other jurisdictions -- all of them likely to have favored Bernie Sanders -- finding that their voter registration records had been wiped, making them ineligible to vote. Other venues, in New York and other states, found that people who had registered as Democrats were recorded as "independents," making them, in closed-primary states, ineligible to vote in the primaries. In California, the Secretary of State instructed voting district officials not to tell independent voters how to request a Democratic Party primary ballot that would include the presidential choice, causing many to either vote on a ballot with no presidential choice, or, if they were smart enough to ask, to fill out a provisional ballot--one reason there are so many of those still being counted.

The list of such abuses and frauds goes on and on and, like the many examples of voter suppression by both Republican and Democratic governments in the past, make it clear that voting in the US is as corrupted as it is in many third-world countries where elections are understood to be only for show.

The lesson of Britain's 'Brexit' referendum, like the hotly contested presidential election I witnessed and covered in Taiwan in 2004, both of which contests were conducted using paper ballots, and the latter which was subjected to a recount that returned an almost identical result after tons of paper and millions of ballots were painstakingly inspected and hand-counted all over again, is that democracy can only work if voting is scrupulously honest and absolutely verifiable. On both those counts the US fails miserably, meaning that besides all the other problems that make American democracy a joke -- the grotesquely biased (and inane) media coverage, the widespread voter apathy and ignorance, a stultifying two-party political system that limits candidate choices to two virtually identical candidates and to two political positions that only differ in meaningless, but emotionally powerful ways, and a campaign-funding system that in reality is nothing but legalized bribery -- American voters cannot really expect their votes to be honestly counted in the end.

If a referendum like 'Brexit' were to be held in a US-type electoral system, involving a major issue affecting powerful economic interests, it would predictably fail. Of this there is little or no doubt. What in the '60s we called "The System" will simply not allowed opponents of major corporate interests to win.

The difference is, to steal an election that uses electronic voting machines, you just need a good hacker. To steal an election that uses paper ballots, you need people with wheelbarrows.


Links:
[1] http://www.inquisitr.com/3207171/election-fraud-study-points-to-rigged-democratic-primary-against-bernie-sanders-video/

Brexit As Repudiation of Globalization and the Arrogance of Empire

A Blow for Peace and Democracy: Why the British Said No to Europe

by John Pilger - CounterPunch

June 24, 2016

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the “Remain” campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.

Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East – first Iraq, now Syria – are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A nineteenth century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centrepiece of modern “globalisation”, with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour; its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants.

All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the British said no more.

The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even “cool”. What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as “neoliberalism”.

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor. In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000 residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are, reports a study, “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty” and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.

Little of this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois controlled media, notably the Oxbridge dominated BBC. During the referendum campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon the clichéd hysteria about “leaving Europe”, as if Britain was about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.

On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to his studio as old chums. “Well,” he said to “Lord” Peter Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, “why do these people want it so badly?” The “these people” are the majority of Britons.

The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson “European” class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project” of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses. “Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain”, said the headline over his full-page piece. The “we” was unexplained but understood — just as “these people” is understood. “The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more,” wrote Kettle. “ … the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again.”

The kind of ruthlessness Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought “better terms” with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.

On Friday, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed Cameron, his comrade in the “remain” campaign. Corbyn fulsomely praised Cameron’s “dignity” and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday. He said nothing about Cameron’s divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about “protecting” the Health Service. Neither did he remind people of the war mongering of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of world war three.

In the week of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my knowledge, no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin’s speech in St. Petersburg commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. The Soviet victory – at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces – won the Second World War.

Putin likened the current frenzied build up of Nato troops and war material on Russia’s western borders to the Third Reich’s Operation Barbarossa. Nato’s exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia, presumably with nuclear weapons. On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering “peace and security” if they voted to leave the EU. The millions who ignored him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn, Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.
 

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

More articles by:John Pilger

Brexit Smexit: Vote Makes No Difference in the End

Despite the Vote, the Odds Are Against Britain Leaving the EU

by Paul Craig Roberts  - ICH

June 24, 2016

The Brexit vote shows that a majority of the British voters understand that the UK government represents interests other than the interests of the British people.

As difficult as the British know it is to hold their own government to account, they understand they have no prospect whatsoever of holding the EU government to account. During their time under the EU, the British have been reminded of historical times when law was the word of the sovereign.

The propagandists who comprise the Western political and media establishments succeeded in keeping the real issues out of public discussion and presenting the leave vote as racism. However, enough of the British people resisted the brainwashing and controlled debate to grasp the real issues: sovereignty, accountable government, financial independence, freedom from involvement in Washington’s wars and conflict with Russia.

The British people should not be so naive as to think that their vote settles the matter. The fight has only begun. Expect:

— The British government to come back to the people and say, look, the EU has given us a better deal. We can now afford to stay in.

— The Fed, ECB, BOJ, and NY hedge funds to pound the pound and to short British stocks in order to convince the British voters that their vote is sinking the economy.

— More emphasis on the vote’s weakening of Europe, leaving all to the mercy of “Russian aggression.”

— Hard to resist bribes (and threats) to prominent members of the leave majority and pressure on such leave leaders as Boris Johnson to be reasonable, conciliatory and to maintain good relations with Washington and Europe, and to reach a compromise on remaining in the EU.

— Expect the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to attribute the loss of British jobs and investment opportunities to the leave vote.

Once you learn to think about how things really are and not as the presstitutes present them,
you will be able to add to the list all by yourself.

Remember, the Irish voted against the EU and pressure was kept on them until they reversed their vote. This is the likely fate of the British.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

In the Footsteps of Napoleon: NATO Moves Toward Russia Criticised from Within and Without

Putin Calls Out NATO's 'Insecurity Agenda'

by Finian Cunningham - RT

June 23, 2016 

Russia’s repeated – and rebuffed – calls for security cooperation proves it is not Russia, but NATO which is the source of Europe’s instability and geopolitical tension.

Not for the first time, President Putin this week sought to allay fears that Russia presents a security threat to Europe and the US.

He was speaking on the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.


German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter
Steinmeier admonishes NATO

Putin boldly referred to historical similarities. He pointed to how the US-led NATO military alliance is increasingly aggressive towards Russia, with the stinging implication this development by the supposedly “freedom and democracy promoting” alliance takes its precedence from the Third Reich and Operation Barbarossa.

The fact that NATO just completed its biggest-ever maneuvers in Poland this month – Operation Anaconda involved 31,000 troops – simulating an attack on Russia is not without dark historical resonance.

Putin also said the serious security threat posed by terrorism required a collective, international response. But he added that Russia’s repeated calls for collective action have been rebuffed by Western countries. He lamented the Western attitude of maintaining “bloc-like” security policies – as manifested in the form of NATO – instead of forming an international security body. And Putin compared the complacency of Western nations today on the question of cooperating in the defeat of terrorism to a similar indifference among Western states during the 1930s towards the rise of Nazi Germany.

The Russian leader told lawmakers in the State Duma: “NATO is stepping up its aggressive rhetoric and its aggressive actions close to our borders… In these conditions we are obliged to dedicate special attention to resolving tasks connected with heightening the defense capabilities of our country.”

While Russia is beefing up its defense capabilities, Moscow’s emphasis is unmistakably on diplomacy, dialogue and cooperation – not as a partner with NATO but as a member of a genuinely multilateral security organization.

The world needs a “modern, non-bloc collective security system,” said Putin. “Russia is open to discuss this crucial issue and has more than once shown its readiness for dialogue, but, just as it happened on the eve of World War Two, we do not see a positive reaction in response.”

So, if the United States and its European allies are decidedly reluctant to refashion a new international security arrangement, what does that mean?

The obvious conclusion is that the proponents of NATO are not primarily motivated by maintaining security through cooperation. NATO proponents are more interested in perpetuating Cold War ideological divisions in the world that revolve around a mentality of “us and them”.

The creation of blocs, camps, demarcations and divisions is connected to the necessity of certain nations being compelled to dominate others and to exercise hegemony. Let’s cut to the chase: that power mindset most fittingly describes the United States which sees itself as the exceptional, superpower that must not brook any ‘rival’, meaning equal.

But, surely, equality is the essence of democracy and universal human rights? That the rulers in Washington do not fundamentally share those values is the key to understanding the source of much dysfunction in international relations and rule of law.

The NATO-bloc approach to international relations, also by necessity, creates external enemies when such enemies do not actually exist.

At the St Petersburg International Economic Forum last week, President Putin concisely captured the nefarious logic: “NATO needs a foreign enemy; otherwise it would have no reason for the organization’s existence.”

Of course, the 28 members of NATO do have real enemies or security problems, such as jihadist terror groups and mass migration. But why NATO does not address these problems more effectively – by forming a collective, international security organization, as Russia proposes – is because the NATO leadership under the United States is much more concerned about maintaining its hegemony through carving out global divisions.

Unfortunately for Russia, it is the “foreign enemy” the US and its NATO advocates require in order to perpetuate divisions, insecurities and the very existence of NATO itself.

The tremendous paradox of this is that NATO is far from serving as the architecture for security in the North Atlantic and Europe that it purports to be. It is the source of instability and insecurity.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier last week admonished NATO for “saber-rattling” and “warmongering” with its “provocative” military exercises in Poland towards Russia. He instead called for “more dialogue and cooperation with Moscow.”

It was a remarkably refreshing admission of reality by a senior NATO member. And it is notable how this “outburst” of sanity has since been ignored by other NATO states and the Western media.

Steinmeier’s comments corroborate what Russia has long been saying; that NATO’s activities and build-up across Eastern Europe is the provocation, not alleged Russian malfeasance.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also attempted to break through the illusory NATO narrative when he said recently:

“Every serious and honest politician is well aware that Russia will never invade any NATO member.”

Russia’s envoy to NATO, Aleksandr Grushko, said constant NATO declarations about defending Baltic States and Poland from Russian aggression are “completely absurd because they are discussing a non-existent problem.”

It is absurd, but from NATO’s point of view it is completely logical. For in that logic, there resides the rationale for massive military spending that props up the US economy; the continued domineering political control by Washington over European affairs; and the rewarding American patronage for European politicians who conform to the NATO agenda.

One such politician is the former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who became NATO’s civilian titular head in 2014. He is one of the mantra-like voices warning about Russia’s threat to Europe and the need for NATO strength. One wonders what kind of salary Stoltenberg would obtain if he hadn’t the NATO gig?

Ahead of the British referendum this week on whether to stay or leave the European Union, Stoltenberg weighed in with a vigorous plea for a Remain vote. His line of argument was that Britain is an important member of NATO and the EU, and that “strength and unity” are vital for security.

Closer to the truth is that NATO’s “strength and unity” is the source of much of Europe’s insecurity. Not only has it driven Europe’s refugee crisis by its members interfering unlawfully in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq; the military organization has cynically driven a dangerous and totally unnecessary cleavage between Europe and Russia.

Putin’s inference of NATO as representing a modern-day threat following in the historical tank tracks of Nazi Germany is appropriate.

NATO’s record of propagating instability and insecurity is patent. When one considers the real, ulterior purpose of NATO at its founding in 1949 – “to keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the Americans in” – this baleful legacy should not be surprising.

But the proof of the argument follows Russia’s proposal for a new collective, international security cooperation. NATO’s refusal to meet this reasonable proposal betrays its real agenda of confrontation and insecurity.

In that way, Vladimir Putin succeeded in calling out the true nature of NATO. Unwillingness speaks volumes.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV. 

Houston, Texapocalypse

Stuck in Houston on the Cusp of the Apocalypse

by David Yearsley

June 24, 2016 

There’s that mythic line from America’s long-abandoned manned lunar space adventures: “Houston, we have a problem.” Nearly fifty years on, I can correct that statement from my hotel room in the city’s so-called downtown some twenty-five miles from the Space Center where those words first came to earth: Houston, you’re the one that’s got the problem.

It’s you who’s been abandoned by all but the destitute, who seek shade from the early summer heat in the highway underpasses that moat the central district.

One can assume that there are sometimes people in the corporate skyscrapers and heavily fortified apartment buildings downtown. They scuttle between the towers in skyways and tunnels. But these cryogenic shut-ins aren’t city-dwellers as that concept has been understood for several millennia. Speaking of lunar landings, the downtown rich might as well be on the moon.

I’ve come to Houston to write concert reviews for the American Guild of Organists’ biennial convention. Checking into the hotel last Sunday evening the vast, frigid lobby was full of some odd characters—and I don’t just mean the organists. There were also people dressed up in outlandish outfits, from winsome mice to muscly heroes—some martial, some whimsical (not that you can’t be both: look at any US Prez of the last twenty-five years — and the next eight). A comic convention was just concluding. I peered through the potted palms in search of someone to pitch my Organ Man idea to: when so called upon, the unassuming air-conditioning technician Jimmy Buxtehude pilots a giant mobile organ that transforms into a thousand-barreled weapon for good …

Before I could make my move I was collared by a colleague, and dreams of a ten-picture deal were sucked up into the air handling ducts towards a giant Chihuly chandelier of fiery red and orange.

At last I made it to the elevator and dropped my bag in my room overlooking the Toyota Center where the Houston Rockets play basketball. Next to it there was city block of transformers required to deal, I guess, with the energy demands of this concrete entertainment bunker. Beyond this spread a bleak and unpeopled landscape. Was the terrain habitable—or even inhabited?

I went in search of tacos.

Out in the moist and welcoming heat—a good thirty degrees warmer than the hotel’s stifling climate—a brick monolith beckoned above the low palm trees and magnolias ringing what appeared to be a park.

I made my way towards a building, which, without a trace of irony, proclaimed itself to be One Park Place, so named because it looks onto Houston’s Discovery Green. This luxury apartment block faced with brick rises up nearly forty floors to neo-Victorian gables and a pitched roof crowned by what, from street level, looks like wrought iron, but surely isn’t. The building’s jokey allusions to nineteenth-century architecture of a more human scale makes the absurdity of its size and isolation, even though placed at the purported geographic center of Houston, all the more blatant and depressing.

There is a grand piano in the narrow lobby that gives onto the green. The instrument invites us to imagine we are looking into a mansion on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. In five days of walking past this entrance I saw no one enter the building here, not to mention sit down and play the piano. The residents arrive and escape by car.

After dark this Steinway looks as abandoned and forlorn as any human figure in an Edward Hooper painting. Silent and sullen, this accoutrement of a forgotten era stares out from its interior emptiness into the urban emptiness beyond. Is it an alien? A lunar lander? Or simply another of the city’s tombstones?

As for Discovery Green, it is a bell-shaped public space of abraded grass paired and a water feature grandly called Kinder Lake—actually a bleakly artificial basin of straight lines and right angles given the natural touch along one flank with a bit contouring. You can rent kayaks if you really want to investigate the pond’s misguided assertion that water alone equals the natural world. Actually, Kinder Lake isn’t so much bigger than the palm-lined pool on the massive terrace several floors above street level of One Park Place—an oasis in the sky visible on Google Earth.

The Green itself is less a park than a platform onto which have been plunked life-size architectural models: a free-standing café and restaurant and across the Avenida de Las Americas the convention center—a manically happy eyesore of bright white topped by goofy red pipes that seem to refer to the air intake pipes of old steamers. One just wishes this Titanic would be towed from its blighted berth down the Buffalo Bayou (the city’s sluggish central water way) to a breaking yard on Galveston Bay.

Taking in this post-urban desert not from above, but from the edge of Discovery Green, I fell into a conversation with a homeless man as we watched a couple of kids kick a soccer ball around the otherwise unpopulated lawn in the golden Gulf light of early evening. The air was humid but hardly stultifying enough on its own to keep people away.

My local informant told me that there is ice-skating on the Green at Christmas. He called it crazy, and I agreed, adding this Brueghelesque scene, unimaginable in the June heat, to the already growing accumulation of paradoxes I’d tallied up in my first hour in the city, and to which would be added so many more in the five summer days I would spend downtown and moving from it to points far beyond.

Houston is a megalopolis of astounding contradictions, the main one being the fact that, though the city is one of the fastest growing in the USA, with cranes everywhere visible pulling clusters of new glass towers from the plain, the geographic center nostalgically called “downtown” feels like a neutron bomb hit it. Only a few mutant souls like myself survive to walk its streets.

Houston is infamous as the American city most enslaved to the automobile. That’s quite an achievement in this auto-crazed country. Yet throughout the day many of the four lane boulevards in the center of town are virtually empty of traffic. They reminded me of the broad socialist avenues of the Eastern Block in the late days of the Cold War.

What I began sardonically calling the historic Art Deco district—a low-slung huddle of bars and empty storefronts—clings to less than a quarter of block at the corner of Dallas and Caroline Streets. New luxury apartments will soon put this enclave into still deeper shadows. Several blocks is Main Street, a lifeless boulevard of surreal flowerbeds and a valiant light rail line that, in terms of mass transit, is the equivalent to pissing into the daily hurricane of Houston’s freeway exhaust. On this once busy boulevard another can be admired another rare architectural remnant of a more vibrant past. The Rice Hotel is now dark at street level.

Scrubby, puddled parking lots alternate with skyscrapers, perfect to the point of abstraction. Looking up you sometimes think you’re seeing a 3D photograph on an architect’s webpage. But then you remember it’s real, in a way, and that the whole point is literally to be belittled—to be made little—by the glass encased egos of Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei and other men.

How to survive in this post-urban environment on the cusp of apocalypse?

My strategy was to meet contradiction with contradiction: instead of driving, I would walk.

Next Week: The Long March to the West.

 

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His recording of J. S. Bach’s organ trio sonatas is available from Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com

More articles by:David Yearsley

War Hawks Come Out for Hillary

Mideast war architects back Clinton over Trump

by Patrick Martin  - WSWS

24 June 2016  

Retired Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, who has held top national security positions in Republican administrations going back to Richard Nixon, endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton Wednesday.

Scowcroft was National Security Adviser to two presidents, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, and played a major role in US policy in wars of aggression from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf.

In an email distributed to friends and associates, mainly in the Republican foreign policy establishment, and shared by them with the press, Scowcroft wrote that former Secretary of State Clinton “brings deep expertise in international affairs, and a sophisticated understanding of the world,” which he said were “essential for the Commander-in-Chief.”

Scowcroft sees eye-to-eye with Clinton in seeking to maintain the dominance of American imperialism in global politics. “Secretary Clinton shares my belief that America must remain the world’s indispensable leader,” he declared.

“She understands that our leadership and engagement beyond our borders makes the world, and therefore the United States, more secure and prosperous.”

While not referring to Republican candidate Donald Trump, Scowcroft implicitly compared Clinton’s experience to Trump’s, writing,

“Her longstanding relationships with a wide array of world leaders, and their sense of her as a strong and reliable counterpart, make her uniquely prepared for the highest office in the land … She brings deep expertise in international affairs and a sophisticated understanding of the world, which I believe are essential for the commander-in-chief.”

Scowcroft specifically cited Clinton’s role as Secretary of State during the Israeli war on Gaza in 2012, and in mobilizing “a global coalition to impose a sanctions regime on Iran.” He made no mention of Clinton’s support for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which Scowcroft himself opposed, or her advocacy of a more aggressive US intervention in the Syrian civil war. Instead, he portrayed her as a cautious advocate of military force, saying,

“She appreciates that it is essential to maintain our strong military advantage, but that force must only be used as a last resort.”

In endorsing Clinton, the 91-year-old Scowcroft is giving her the stamp of approval of the vast US military-intelligence apparatus, where he has played an important role for nearly half a century. A career Air Force officer, he went to work in the Nixon White House in 1969 as an assistant to Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser, moved to an advisory position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the Vietnam War was then at its height), before moving back to the White House in 1972 as military assistant to the president, then as Kissinger’s deputy from 1973 to 1975, a period that includes such crimes as the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and the US-backed military coup in Chile, in which tens of thousands were slaughtered.

In November 1975, President Gerald Ford named Scowcroft his national security adviser. During his 14 months in that position, the US government backed the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in which as many as 200,000 Timorese were killed by death squads of the military dictatorship.

Scowcroft left government after Ford’s defeat, taking a lucrative position at Kissinger Associates advising US corporations on foreign policy matters, serving on several advisory commissions under the Reagan administration, then returning to the White House as national security adviser for President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993.

Among the major military operations launched by the US government during this period were the 1989 invasion of Panama, the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War, in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were incinerated by US bombs and missiles, and the dispatch of troops to Somalia in 1992. Scowcroft also played a major behind-the-scenes role in the US policy during the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Scowcroft’s one moment of public notoriety came when he visited Beijing in December 1989, six months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and was televised warmly saluting the Chinese leaders and inviting them “as friends to resume our important dialogue.”

In the subsequent political uproar, it was revealed that Scowcroft had actually visited Beijing previously, in July 1989, a few weeks after the bloodbath, to reassure the Stalinist butchers that the Bush administration’s public denunciations were only for show. In reality, US imperialism welcomed the slaughter of Chinese workers and youth, which paved the way for the restoration of capitalism in China and the transformation of China into a cheap-labor haven for transnational corporations.

That such a figure embraces Hillary Clinton and publicly praises her views on foreign and military policy speaks volumes about the right-wing course that a second Clinton administration would adopt. If anything, Clinton has adopted an even more hawkish posture than Scowcroft, who opposed the 2002 authorization for the war against Iraq which Clinton voted for in the US Senate.

A second prominent Republican war criminal, former Pentagon official Richard Armitage, announced last week that he would vote for Clinton over Trump. Armitage has a record of involvement in the wars of US imperialism just as long as Scowcroft’s, although he held less senior positions.

His backing of Clinton is perhaps even more revealing than Scowcroft’s, because Armitage is a more hands-on militarist who has played a direct, personal role in some of the foulest crimes of American imperialism. A naval officer in Vietnam, Armitage is widely reported to have been involved in the Phoenix Program, in which more than 20,000 Vietnamese were assassinated by US special forces and CIA operatives. He later became a defense attaché at the US embassy in Saigon.

From 1976 to 1978, the former military-intelligence operative ran an export-import business based in Bangkok, Thailand, allegedly part of the notorious CIA operation to export heroin from the Golden Triangle area of Burma, Thailand and Laos, where US-backed anti-communist Chinese warlords sustained their exile military forces by harvesting the crop.

After returning to the United States to work for Senate Republican leader Bob Dole, Armitage became a foreign policy adviser to candidate Ronald Reagan, moving on to increasingly high-level positions in the Pentagon. As Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (1983-1989) he was responsible for all international security, special operations and counter-terrorism programs during the period of intensive US arming of death squads in Central America and the covert war against Nicaragua.

The special prosecutor investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, Lawrence Walsh, reportedly considered indicting Armitage for his role—he certainly knew of and approved the shipment of Israeli weapons, supplied by the US, to Iran—but eventually decided that Armitage was not a central player.

Armitage followed his patron Colin Powell into the Bush administration, serving as Powell’s chief deputy during his four years as Secretary of State (2001-2005), where he played an important role in promoting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was also the official who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to the media, in retaliation for statements by her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson, opposing the war in Iraq.

Again, that such a thug for American imperialism, linked to assassinations, drug-peddling, gun-running and illegal wars, publicly declares his support for Democratic presidential candidate provides another yardstick for measuring the reactionary nature of both the Democratic Party and a future Clinton administration.