Men of Steele: Taking the Pee Out of the Trump/Putin Narrative in Court (and Winning)

THE REPUTATION OF MIKHAIL FRIDMAN AND PYOTR AVEN IS WORTH £18,000 EACH, BUT IT COST SIXTEEN TIMES THAT MUCH TO DEFEND — ENOUGH TO BANKRUPT CHRISTOPHER STEELE 

by John Helmer, Moscow

@bears_with

July 9, 2020

It was the 412th of Francois de la Rochefoucauld’s maxims that doesn’t stand the test of either time or money. “Whatever degree of disgrace we may have brought upon ourselves,” he said, “it is always within our power to re-establish our reputation.”

For years Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, the controllers of Alfa Bank of Moscow and LetterOne Holding in London, have been trying but not succeeding. This week they scored a success, but not quite of the kind they, or La Rochefoucauld, meant.

A Rae of Continuity: Canada's UN Amabassador Appointment Disappoints

New UN ambassador Bob Rae pushes pro-US, militarist and anti-Palestinian positions

by Yves Engler

July 6, 2020

Bob Rae’s appointment as ambassador to the UN is a direct result of Canada’s defeat in its bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. But, it suggests the Liberals are ignoring the lessons of that defeat and calls to rethink Canadian foreign policy.

Three weeks after the Trudeau government suffered an embarrassing loss in its bid to sit on the UN’s most powerful decision-making body the individual who lead the multi-year campaign is out. 

A History of the Jewish National Fund

The JNF’s sordid history: Tower and stockades, forests and Jim Crow vetting committees 

by Jonathan Cook

July 7, 2020

This is the expanded text of a talk I gave to the “Stop the JNF Campaign” webinar on Saturday 4 July 2020. The video can be watched below, or on Facebook, starting at 5.50 mins:

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) rightly presents itself as the most venerable of the Zionist institutions:

It stands at the heart of a state-building project launched more than a century ago;
It is an organisation that is today deeply embedded in the structures of the Israeli state;
It is the guardian of the Israel’s most precious resource – land;
And it is the bridge connecting Jews abroad to Israel, allowing them to become practically and emotionally involved in its continuing national mission of colonisation.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Radhika Desai, Ken Boon, Janine Bandcroft July 9th, 2020

This Week on GR

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

July 9, 2020

Welcome again to Gorilla Radio’s continuing efforts, NOT broadcast live from CFUV Radio in the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but emanating live-to-tape via skype from our home-based … studios on this date, June 30th, 2020.

As day by day the duration of this Covid disaster grows longer it becomes increasingly clear there will be no normal, new or otherwise, to return to; especially no economic one. What we’re witnessing, my first guest argues, is more cyclone than cyclical downturn; an effective overturning of the entire neo-liberal financial order. Not only are we not in Kansas anymore, but Kansas has done gone too!

Radhika Desai is a scholar, educator, author, editor. She is too director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group and professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, and author of the books, ‘Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire’, ‘Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics’, and ‘Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party’.

Listen. Hear.

Desai also serves as co-editor with Alan Freeman of the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press. Radhika’s many essays, primarily on the topics of political economy, culture and nationalism can be found at among other places, CanadianDimensions.com where her seven part, multi-week series, WHAT IS TO BE DONE? A MANIFESTO FOR POLITICS AMID THE PANDEMIC AND BEYOND features.

Radhika Desai in the first half.

And; the people of Old Fort don’t know what to expect next. The small town in British Columbia’s Peace River Valley has been under an evacuation alert since June 19th when a landslide destroyed their only road access. It’s the second time the road has been wiped out in the last two years, and locals want to know what’s going on beneath them, but the provincial government has yet to shed light on the geological cause of the slides.

Requests for information made through channels have been refused “pursuant to section 15” of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Section 15 regards disclosure of requested information as quote, “harmful to law enforcement”. Further explanation of how that may be has not been offered, but the geological and political fragility surrounding the contentious Site C dam has long been an issue for Peace Valley opponents of the project.

Ken Boon is a Peace Valley farmer and president of the Peace Valley Landowners Association. Ken and his family have lived at the heart of the resistance to the Site C dam project from the beginning.

Ken Boon and does the Old Fort slide mean things going sideways for Site C too? in the second half.

And; long-time Gorilla Radio contributor and ‘Green Vegan Grandma’ YouTuber, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with the Left Coast Events Bulletin of some of the good things to be gotten up to in and around Victoria in the coming week. But first, Radhika Desai and just what is to be done in a World undone?

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.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/

Guaidó Lackey Declares War on Journalism: "There's a price on your head."

Guaido Representative Threatens FBI Investigation Into Journalists Exposing Her Dealings

by Alan MacLeod - MintPress News

July 6, 2020

 From the Twitter account of her communications firm, Asymmetrica, Vanessa Neumann accused four journalists of a “criminal conspiracy” to support Venezuelan vice-president Delcy Rodriguez. “There is a price on your head,” she threatened. 

Vanessa Neumann, the U.K. ambassador of self-declared President of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, claims that she is working closely with the FBI in an investigation exposing a “transnational criminal network” of journalists, including John McEvoy, Pablo Navarette, independent outlet Venezuelanalysis and former MintPress News contributor Camila Escalante.

Dirty Laundering: Meng/Huawei A Blatant Case of USA-ing Canadian Justice to Pressure Wash China

Meng, Huawei and Canadian Law: Soap, Rinse and Dry-Laundered

by Harry Glasbeek - SocialistProject

June 25, 2020

One of the graver risks for big-time criminals is that investigators will be able to identify them and their deeds by ‘following the money’. The criminals have to hide the proceeds of their crimes. This is done by depositing their monies into legitimate finance houses and businesses. It often requires some fancy book-keeping tricks and intricate transactions. This is called layering by the afficionados of this dark art.

Once it is done, the criminals can draw on the accounts created and mix the ill-gotten gains with legally garnered capital. The term for this is ‘integration’ and it makes the investigators’ tasks much harder. The rotten fruit of crime will have been laundered.

"Don't quote ME on that!" Shoddy Journalism Begs War on the Brink of Doomsday

In ‘Russian Bounty’ Story, Evidence-Free Claims From Nameless Spies Became Fact Overnight

Alan MacLeod - FAIR

July 3, 2020

Based upon a bombshell New York Times report (6/26/20), virtually the entire media landscape has been engulfed in the allegations that Russia is paying Taliban fighters bounties to kill US soldiers.

The Washington Post (6/27/20) and the Wall Street Journal (6/27/20) soon published similar stories, based on the same intelligence officials who refused to give their names, and did not appear to share any data or documents with the news organizations.

The Beat Goes On: Police Violence Against Anti-Violence Protest Continues Unabated (if unrecorded)

Anti-Racism Protesters Face Ongoing Police Violence

by TRNN

July 3, 2020

Protests against racism and police brutality are being violently attacked across the country, even as they receive less media attention.

Rummy's Map: America's Vision of a New Middle East Remains Unchanged

Reshaping the Greater Middle East: How Washington intends to triumph

by Thierry Meyssan - Voltaire Network

June 23, 2020

During the quarter of Western lockdown, the map of the Middle East was profoundly transformed. Yemen has been divided into two separate countries, Israel is paralysed by two Prime Ministers who hate each other, Iran openly supports NATO in Iraq and Libya, Turkey occupies northern Syria, Saudi Arabia is close to bankruptcy. All alliances are being called into question and new dividing lines are appearing or rather reappearing.

 

For two decades Washington has been trying to "reshape" the "Greater Middle East", an arbitrarily defined region stretching from Afghanistan to Morocco. However, over the last three years two strategies have clashed: on the one hand the Pentagon, which wants to destroy the state structures of all the countries in the region, whether friends or enemies, and on the other President Trump, who intends to dominate the region commercially without military occupation.

Toe-ing America's Line on Huawei Strains Canada's Political Elite

US anti-China campaign intensifies factional conflicts within Canada’s ruling elite

by Roger Jordan - WSWS

3 July 2020

Sharp differences have emerged within Canada’s ruling elite over Ottawa’s policy towards China. The rift is directly tied to Washington’s escalating diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against Beijing, which has already roiled Canada’s relations with China, and to intense US pressure for Canada to adopt an even more hardline anti-China stance. 

 

Brian Mulroney (Flickr.com/NATO Association of Canada) 

The latest salvo in this increasingly fractious dispute came in the form of Wednesday’s lead article in the Globe and Mail. Titled “Canada-China relations need ‘urgent rethink,’ Mulroney says,” the article promoted the call of the former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister for the establishment of a “blue-ribbon” committee to fundamentally redefine Canada’s China policy.

India's Lockdown for Lockdown's Sake

India Unlocked: World’s “Biggest Lockdown” and Workers’ Long March

by Pratyush Chandra - Dissident Voice

July 3rd, 2020

At times, states compete to showcase merchandise and relative productive capacities. Other times, many of these states sell misery to gain access to economic packages, charities and loans. Today is the time when they compete to show off their capacity to impose the most efficient lockdown on their citizenry. 

 

 Deserted Ranganathan Street, Chennai June, 2020. Hindu Times

Of course, the priority is to make this imposition consensual, because that would showcase the self-discipline of the national workforce. But if that doesn’t work, then the dosages of coercion are streamlined to measure the states’ disciplining capacity. The Narendra Modi government’s chest-thumping claim to run the “world’s biggest lockdown” was to showcase the realization of the neoliberal ideal of a “strong state” in India — the carrots-and-sticks hidden behind the quinine-and-quarantine lockdown.

Masks and Other Media Deceptions

Conspiracy Theories Malign And Benign – Face Masks And Israeli Training Of US Police

by Media Lens

July 3, 2020

Frightening numbers of people still believe that profit-maximising corporate media merely disseminate something called ‘news’. In reality, ‘mainstream’ ‘news’ is chock full of Pavlovian bells, trigger terms designed to shape and control public opinion.

When journalists use terms like ‘secretive’ and ‘hermit’ to describe North Korea, they mean ‘Evil’. When Venezuelan presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro are described as ‘leftist’, it means ‘Evil’. When Julian Assange is described as the ‘controversial’ WikiLeaks editor, it means ‘Evil’.

Feds and Seattle Cops Chop CHAZ

After multiple shootings and two deaths Seattle police forcibly end Capitol Hill Occupied Protest

by Kayla Costa  - WSWS

2 July 2020

Early on Wednesday morning, heavily militarized police officers swept the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), a tent encampment in downtown Seattle that began as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) over three weeks ago on June 8, in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. The principal demand of the demonstrators had been the defunding of the police.

Seattle police officers prepared to sweep CHOP area on Wednesday morning 

(Credit: Jake Gravbrot @walk.into.the.light for Converge Media, 2020)

At least one hundred officers from the Seattle Police Department and nearby Bellevue Police Department, as well as FBI agents, arrived at the protest with heavy riot gear and even tactical military-style vehicles to clear out dozens of protesters from their tents.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Ariel Nasr, Will Tell, Janine Bandcroft July 2nd, 2020

This Week on GR

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

July 2, 2020

Welcome to Gorilla Radio’s continuing efforts, NOT broadcast live from CFUV Radio in the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but emanating live-to-tape via Skype from our home-based studios on this date, June 17th, 2020.

In 2001 a great tragedy befell Afghanistan; but, as bad as hosting the inauguration of America’s Global War on Terror was for Afghans, it was merely the continuation of decades of suffering conflicts of other people’s making.

Nearly twenty years after Operation Enduring Freedom’s first B-52 bombing sortie the fighting rages still; and though its name has since changed, the price those mired within The Long War pay endures. Yet, Afghanistan is more than a proxy battlefield for superpowers; made of more than just its most recent history.

Ariel Nasr is a celebrated documentary filmmaker, earning more than a dozen awards and nominations, (including an Oscar nod and Canadian Screen Award prize) for his film work; work encompassing writing, directing, and producing across platforms and crossing continents.

Listen. Hear.

Nasr’s credits include, ‘The Boxing Girls of Kabul’, Good Morning Kandahar, the interactive, ‘Kabul Portraits’ project, and his latest, the feature-length documentary release, ‘The Forbidden Reel,’ a "story of Afghanistan’s fearless and visionary moviemakers…"

Ariel Nasr in the first half.

And; as the tidal wave that has been the Covid-19 lockdown ebbs, around the World the financial and social damage wrought in its wake is beginning to be revealed. While Wall Street rockets, the biggest and strongest buffeted best by government bailouts, workers are finding promises made at the height of crisis are now quietly being broken. And like the pandemic itself, the pattern of feeding piles of public funds to corporations while pleading poor mouth to the starving knows no borders.

Will Tell is an expat living in rural southern India who says, as well as reneging on promises of financial aid to small business, the Indian government has, "NOT delivered on its promise to subsidise the ‘day labourers’. This includes taxi drivers, rickshaw drivers […and] self-employed skilled tradesmen […] either in the form of money […] or in delivery of staples [like] rice, dahl, cooking oil, [and] sugar."

Will Tell and India racing to aid the powerful, whilst the rest are left to the Covid tsunami’s rip tide in the second half.

And; long-time Gorilla Radio contributor and Green Vegan Grandma Youtuber, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with this week’s Left Coast Events Bulletin of some of the good things to be gotten up to in and around our town in the coming week. But first, Ariel Nasr and preserving a nation’s culture, frame by frame.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.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/

Herding the Morons: Media Lies and Cow Pies

This Russia-Afghanistan Story is Western Propaganda at Its Most Vile

by Caitlin Johnstone - Rogue Journalist

June 28, 2020

All western mass media outlets are now shrieking about the story The New York Times first reported, citing zero evidence and naming zero sources, claiming intelligence says Russia paid out bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for attacking the occupying forces of the US and its allies in Afghanistan. 

As of this writing, and probably forevermore, there have still been zero intelligence sources named and zero evidence provided for this claim.

Brave New Normal (It Ain't)

The New (Pathologized) Totalitarianism

by CJ Hopkins - Consent Factory

June 29, 2020

It was always going to come to this … mobs of hysterical, hate-drunk brownshirts hunting down people not wearing masks and trying to get them fired from their jobs, “no mask, no service” signs outside stores, security staff stopping the mask-less from entering, paranoid pod people pointing and shrieking at the sight of mask-less shoppers in their midst, goon squads viciously attacking and arresting them …

Welcome to the Brave New Normal.

Agenda for the Global South: Ten Steps to a Viable Economic Future

Ten Point Agenda For The Global South

by Vijay Prashad - Tricontinental Institute for Social Research

via Popular Resistance

June 28, 2020

In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly passed a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was driven by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The resolution laid out a clear plan for the structural transformation of the world system, which was in the throes of a crisis at the time. But, the NIEO was set aside and the world order was shaped in a neoliberal direction; this neoliberal orientation furthered the crisis and brought us to this current cul-de-sac of human possibilities. 

Capitalism Kills but we shall rise

Judy Ann Seidman (South Africa), Capitalism, 2020

Our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research developed a ten-point agenda for a post-COVID-19 world. Last week, I presented this agenda at the High-Level Conference on the Post-Pandemic Economy, organized by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). 

Israel Ends Its Palestine Pretense: Netanyahu's "Bantustan" Proclamation

Netanyahu prepares Israel’s annexation of large slice of West Bank

by Jean Shaoul  - WSWS

29 June 2020

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to announce later this week his intention to annex the most important parts of the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel has illegally occupied since the 1967 war with its Arab neighbours.

The cabinet is to meet to approve the move, set for July 1, after it gets the green light from US President Donald Trump.

Court Capture: Dutch Courage Falters in MH17 Downing Case

MH17 TRIAL PROSECUTORS WARN JUDGES NOT TO UNRAVEL UKRAINIAN COVER-UP, REJECT CALLING RUSSIAN GENERAL KONASHENKOV TO TESTIFY

by John Helmer, Moscow

@bears_with

June 28, 2020

Dutch state prosecutors told the court in the trial of the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines MH17 that Major-General of the Russian Army Igor Konashenkov should not be allowed as a witness for the defence. To justify this in a hearing last Friday, the prosecutors revealed an illegal trick exposing the evidence in the case as a fit-up by the Ukrainian government’s military and security agencies.

Dismissing almost all the defence applications to the court for new evidence and witnesses, prosecutor Ferdinandusse* (lead image, right) said: “We do not see any reasonable grounds for accusing the prosecution of not being objective” (June 26 hearing, Min 9:17).

Justice's Last Gleaming: America Throws Another Log on Assange Fire

WikiLeaks Founder Charged in Superseding Indictment

by U.S. Department of Justice

June 24, 2020

New Allegations Assert Assange Conspired With “Anonymous” Affiliated Hackers, Among Others

A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.