Brazil: Scoundrel Republic

Brazil: The Provisional Banana Scoundrel Republic

Pepe Escobar - Sputnik

May 24, 1016

Every political junkie on the planet has to be glued to the ongoing Brazilian House of Cards, consistently offering an unparalleled feast of cheap thrills.

The latest cliffhanger was the leak of a conversation between one of the key operators involved in the oil giant Petrobras corruption scandal and a senator and short-lived Minister of Planning in the usurper interim government currently replacing President Dilma Rousseff while she is undergoing an impeachment trial by the Senate.

Call the leak a short autopsy of what from the beginning should have been defined as golpeachment; a mix of coup (“golpe”, in Portuguese) and impeachment, which took place in a one/two sequential vote in the Brazilian Congress and Senate, as a notorious congregation of crooks investigated for myriad offenses and crimes seized power in Brasilia in a full-fledged Buffon’s Opera. I call their scam Provisional Banana Scoundrel Republic (PBSR).

Meet the interim Walking Dead

The leak/autopsy duly unveiled how the PBSR cancer progressed. One of the key plotters outlines the coup; stresses how it should protect Brazilian plutocracy/kleptocracy from unintended consequences of the ongoing, two-year-old Car Wash corruption investigation; and how the Left – from President Rousseff to Lula and the Workers’ Party – should be criminalized for good.

The rest would be history, including the demolition of recently acquired social and workers’ rights via the imposition of a neoliberal restoration; total reversion in foreign policy, with geopolitical and geoeconomic relations back to a colonized mindset; and the reestablishment of a conservative, neoliberal, rentier hegemonic class lording over a socially-oriented, democratic society.

That fits in with the current Brazilian Congress and Senate dominated by “BBB” interests. “BBB” stands for Beef (the powerful agribusiness lobby); Bullet (the weapons and private security complex); and Bible (evangelical fanatics), all supported by corporate media. Many of these unsavory characters are connected and/or represent the toxic Brazilian rural aristocracy – which are in fact heirs to nobility titles handed over to slave owners.

It was going all so swell after only a few days – even with the former head of the lower house, notorious crook Eduardo Cunha, temporarily sidelined; Cunha – the ringleader of a campaign financing scam inside Congress – de facto had become the Prime Minister of the puppet former Vice-President and current, interim President Michel Temer.

Temer The Usurper – who might actually become Temer the Brief – has been under siege since he took power. His unpopularity index is reaching reverse Kim Jong-Un levels, standing at almost 99%. The overwhelming majority of Brazilians want him impeached. He’s mentioned in several corruption scandals while serially nominating ministers mired in corruption scandals themselves.

The problem is the PBSR cabal simply can’t afford to let him go – and let power slip away. The Dialogue of the Crooks leak conclusively proved that the Car Wash investigation was instrumentalized to criminalize the Workers’ Party and bring down Rousseff while the golpeachment scam advanced in parallel, making sure certain key political forces would not be caught in the Car Wash web.

The Dialogue of the Crooks took place over two months ago — and at least three weeks before the golpeachment farce reached its apex in a ghastly voting session in the lower house. Which lead us to a key question; why the attorney general and the provincial judge in charge of the Car Wash investigation did not previously reveal its contents, and why did they not take immediate action? If the Dialogue of the Crooks was revealed already in March, golpeachment could not possibly have taken place.

The fact that there was no leak two months ago raises all serious eyebrows. The senator featured in the Dialogue of the Crooks is a notorious node in a historical corruption link inside oil giant Petrobras since the Cardoso administrations in the 1990s. He happened to have been ensconced in the political leadership of all Brazilian administrations for the past 22 years. This means he was always the go-to Crook-in-Chief for his political party, the PMDB.

Yet nothing gets as serious as the admission that the hidden agenda of golpeachment has always been to ditch all corruption probes as part of a broader agreement involving selected Supreme Court judges. If this was not the Brazilian House of Cards, the whole golpeachment scam should have been declared null and void by now. Yet, as I have been stressing from the get-go, this is a sophisticated, Hybrid War-style, judicial-political-financial-media coup. And it will be very hard to unravel it.

The logic of perpetual scandal

So future historians already have their story line – furnished by the Dialogue of the Crooks; the 2016 golpeachment was a scam concocted by a bunch of political scoundrels willing to do anything to stay out of jail.

Temer the Brief, a lowly puppet, is now under siege. His two manipulators – the former leader of the lower house and his short-lived Minister of Planning – are now forced to be in the shade. Practically, that means approving deeply unpopular economic policies in Congress will be much harder.

Temer The Brief’s is a certified illegitimate reign. Not even privileged actors – the Goddess of the Market, assorted businessmen, even some mainstream media sectors – are buying the farce. Meanwhile, the Brazilian street won’t be quiet; that’s Rousseff’s and the Workers’ Party’s strategy (although that’s not enough).

So what next? The only way Rousseff would be reinstated is if she and the party could concoct a credible narrative of the priorities for the country up to the 2018 presidential elections. That implies a lot of back room political negotiation – and Rousseff is really lousy at it.

What has been aptly described as a presidential condominium — the new normal in Brazil – envelops conflicting agendas with no consensus in sight. So one should expect the nation to be mired, for a long time, in the logic of perpetual scandal.

The key variable from now on is how the PBSR gang will maneuver – possibly illegally — to cling to power. The Public Ministry and the Federal police are totally politicized. Increasingly there are no mediation powers. The PBSR gang will take no prisoners. The Public Ministry will go after Lula while the attorney general will try to block any chance of Rousseff being reinstated.

Meanwhile, the social democrats turned neoliberal enforcers – key associates of the PBSR — will keep advancing their own agenda; hardcore privatizations; handing over the exploration of the pre-salt oil deposits to US Big Oil; and dutifully prostrating as Washington vassals. One just needs to examine the extreme interest by the US Department of Justice on all things related to the Car Wash investigation to infer how Washington is deeply involved in smashing leading Brazilian corporations.

And what about the BRICS?

Brazil is now globally isolated. Vulture fund-friendly Argentina President Mauricio Macri has been the only leader to recognize the illegal PBSR government. The PBSR worships Macri as if he was Beyonce; they absolutely love his role of Slasher of a socially inclusive cycle of governments in Argentina.

Washington has not had the balls to do it directly – relying on minions such as the State Department spokesman and the interim ambassador to the OAS. But the message is unmistakable; golpeachment is legal, and Washington trusts Brazilian “democratic institutions”. Compare it to the Russian Foreign Ministry, which alerted to “foreign interference” in Brazilian affairs.

The new Brazilian Foreign Minister – a sore loser (twice) in presidential elections won by the Workers’ Party – took no time to launch his glorious Vassal of Washington/US Big Capital policy. He already issued a veiled “threat” to Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and El Salvador. Mercosur will be sidelined to the benefit of the Pacific Alliance – where Mexico, Peru and Colombia are under Washington’s wings. Unasur will be ditched.

And then there’s the stale ice cream in the scoundrel’s tart; the “B” in BRICS is now dormant. This means the role of Brazil in the BRICS bank will be seriously compromised. Granted, the BRICS were never a homogenous group and have been riddled with conflicting interests. For instance, India’s nuclear-sharing agreement with the US effectively ties it up with Washington. The next BRICS summit is in India, in October. Brazil risks the ignominy of being represented by the PBSR gang.

Meanwhile, make no mistake; as much as the Car Wash investigation was revealed to be a totally politicized drive – where fighting corruption was just a convenient cover – the PBSR gang and their allies will do everything to get rid of the 2018 direct presidential elections. So here’s the sorry Brazilian road map up to 2018; total political, economic, social and juridical chaos.

Hydro "SLAPPing" Down Site C Opponents

BC Hydro Suing Opponents of Site C Dam in SLAPP-Style Suit Legal Experts Say

by Sarah Cox - DeSmog Canada

May 24, 2016

Nothing remains at the Rocky Mountain Fort site where Peace Valley farmers and First Nations camped for 60 days in the hopes of stopping clear-cut logging for the Site C dam.

The camp was dismantled in March and the old-growth spruce and cottonwood forest was logged, as BC Hydro prepares to convert the Class 1 heritage site into a Site C waste rock dump.


Ken Boon on his farmland in the Peace Valley. 

Photo: Emma Gilchrist.

But one notable thing still stands: the civil lawsuit BC Hydro filed in January against five campers and a supporter, a suit the B.C. Civil Liberties Association describes as a matter “of grave concern.”

The 13-page lawsuit accuses six Peace Valley residents of conspiracy, intimidation, trespass, creating a public and a private nuisance, and “intentional interference with economic relations by unlawful means.”

Most worrisome for the people named is that the suit seeks financial damages for BC Hydro that could result in the loss of their homes, life savings or other assets. Five of the six already stand to lose their houses, farms, land or traditional territory to the nearly $9 billion Peace River dam.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), says the association is extremely concerned about the civil suit because it could put a chill on freedom of expression. It might cause others “to think twice before they talk about their political opinion.”

BCCLA’s unease is heightened because BC Hydro is a Crown corporation, says Paterson.

“For a government agency to come down in that way is of grave concern. What it does is send a message, perhaps deliberately, that ‘you’d better be careful if you plan to oppose these kinds of developments’…BC Hydro as a public institution should be very cautious about making these kinds of claims for damages it would impose.”

The civil suit, according to University of Victoria law professor Chris Tollefson, bears some of the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

SLAPP suits can stifle freedom of speech and quash opposition to controversial projects like Site C, which Premier Christy Clark has vowed to push “past the point of no return,” despite four on-going court cases against the dam by Treaty 8 First Nations and Peace Valley landowners.

A fifth on-going legal action, launched by the Blueberry River First Nations, claims treaty rights have been violated by the cumulative impacts of Site C and other industrial development in the Peace.

“If the end result is that they face financial or personal ruin, a key implication is that others won’t want to follow in their footsteps and take that risk,” says Tollefson.

“Then free speech becomes a luxury that only those who have nothing, or those who are incredibly rich, can afford.”

Tollefson, an expert on SLAPP suits, says it is the first time he has ever heard of a Crown corporation seeking damages from an individual in B.C. “or anywhere else for that matter,” for lawfully and peacefully exercising their right to protest on a matter of public interest.

Those named in the suit include farmers Ken and Arlene Boon, Helen Knott, a social worker from the Prophet River First Nation, and Yvonne Tupper, a community health worker from the Saulteau First Nations.

Esther Pedersen, a Peace Valley farmer whose land was used to helicopter two survival shacks across the river for the campers and to collect food donated by community members, was also named. The suit includes “Jane Doe” and “John Doe,” leaving open the possibility for other Site C opponents to be singled out as well.

After BC Hydro filed the civil suit, it launched an injunction application to remove campers from the fur trade fort site on the Peace River’s south bank, near the confluence of the Moberly River. That area was deemed to be so ecologically and historically important that the B.C. government had made four designations to protect its heritage resources, wildlife and old-growth forests. The government even went so far as to set aside the land to become part of a future B.C. protected area.

But BC Hydro had obtained the necessary government permits to log the forest and convert the fort site area into a 216-hectare rock dump for potentially acid-generating waste rock from Site C construction. After the camp was ruled illegal by the courts, the people named in the suit said they were law-abiding citizens and promptly dismantled their encampment.

Ken Boon says he and his wife Arlene made a personal request to BC Hydro CEO Jessica McDonald to drop the civil suit when McDonald recently visited their farm.

 Peace River Valley farmer Ken Boon at Rocky Mountain site encampment. 

Photo: Sarah Cox.

Accompanied by a driver and an aide, McDonald spent two hours with the Boons. “We basically agreed to disagree,” says Boon of the visit, which he characterizes as cordial and personable. “We showed her around the farm.”

The Boons will lose productive fields to flooding and when riverbanks slough into the dam reservoir, a deep body of water that will stretch for 107 kilometres along the Peace River and its tributaries. The Boon’s home and farm buildings are slated to be destroyed, to make way for the $530 million re-location of Highway 97 away from the flood zone.

Boon says McDonald was willing to drop the suit, but only if the Boons were prepared “to sign a document basically stating we would not impede further work or stand in the way of the project.”

The Boons declined to sign. They believe it is their constitutional right to oppose Site C, which will flood at least 6,500 hectares of prime farmland and, in the words of a government-appointed panel that reviewed the project, have “significant adverse effects” on the environment and on lands and resources used by First Nations.

In late April, BC Hydro launched a second civil suit, this time against hunger striker Kristen Henry and three others camped outside the Crown corporation’s head office in Vancouver to protest Site C.

The Vancouver campers packed up 10 days later, saying they did not have the money or the inclination to fight BC Hydro in court. BC Hydro claimed “hundreds of thousands” of dollars from them in damages, the four campers stated in a press release.

BC Hydro said the camp had forced it to take expensive measures to step up security, including spending $30,000 for new door handles to which people cannot chain themselves, up to $60,000 a month to hire the company Xpera Risk Mitigation and Investigation to monitor the campers, and up to $35,000 a month to boost general security measures.

Even though that camp, too, is gone, the civil law suit stands, Dave Conway, BC Hydro’s Site C community relations manager, confirmed in an email. Conway said in a separate email that the crown corporation cannot comment on the civil suit against the six Rocky Mountain fort campers due to the fact that it is an “on-going court action.”

The majority of U.S. states, along with Ontario and Quebec, have anti-SLAPP suit legislation. In 2001, the NDP government in B.C. passed similar legislation, called the Protection of Public Participation Act. Six months later, that legislation was repealed by the newly-elected B.C. Liberal government.

Such legislation, says Tollefson, aims to expedite justice and provide the courts with tools to dismiss SLAPP suits early on “so a very deep-pocketed corporation doesn’t get to drag it out and benefit from simply being better endowed.”

Palestine, Media, Truth, and Hasbara

Time to End the ‘Hasbara’: Palestinian Media and the Search for a Common Story

by Ramzy Baroud  - PalestineChronicle.com

May 25, 2016

Merely being in the company of hundreds of Palestinian journalists and other media professionals from all over the world has been an uplifting experience.

For many years, Palestinian media has been on the defensive, unable to articulate a coherent message, torn between factions and desperately trying to fend off the Israeli media campaign, along with its falsifications and unending propaganda or ‘hasbara’.

It is still too early to claim any kind of paradigm shift, but the second Tawasol Conference in Istanbul, which took place May 18 to 19, served as an opportunity to consider the vastly changing media landscape, and to highlight the challenges and the opportunities facing Palestinians in their uphill battle.

Not only are Palestinians expected to demolish many years of Israeli disinformation, predicated on a make-believe historical discourse that has been sold to the world as fact, but also to construct their own lucid narrative that is free from the whims of factions and personal gains.

It will not be easy, of course.

My message in the “Palestine in the Media” Conference, organized by the Palestine International Forum for Media and Communication is that, if the Palestinian leadership is failing to achieve political unity, at least Palestinian intellectuals must insist on the unity of their narrative. Even the most compromising of Palestinians can acknowledge the centrality of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the destruction of their towns and villages in 1947-48.

They can - and should - also agree about the hideousness and violence of the Occupation; the dehumanization at the military checkpoints; the increasingly shrinking spaces in the West Bank as a result of the illegal settlements and the colonization of whatever remains of Palestine; the suffocating hold on Occupied Jerusalem (al-Quds); the injustice of the siege on Gaza, and the one-sided wars on the Strip that have killed over 4,000 people, mostly civilians, in the course of seven years, and much more.

Professor Nashaat Al-Aqtash from Birzeit University, perhaps more realistically, downgraded the expectations even further. “If we could only agree on how we present the narrative regarding Al-Quds and the illegal settlements, at least that would be a start,” he said.

The obvious fact is that Palestinians have more in common than they would like to admit. They are all victimized by the same circumstances, fighting the same Occupation, suffering the same violations of human rights, and facing the same future outcome resulting from the same conflict.

However, many are strangely incapable of disconnecting from their tribal-like, factional affiliations. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having ideological leanings and supporting one political party over another. It becomes a moral crisis, though, when the party affiliation becomes stronger than one’s affiliation to the collective, national struggle for freedom. Sadly, many are still trapped in this thinking.

But things are also changing; they always do. After over two decades of the failure of the so-called ‘peace process’, and the rapid increase in the colonization of the Occupied Territories in addition to the extreme violence used to achieve these ends, many Palestinians are waking up to the painful facts. There can be no freedom for the Palestinian people without unity and without resistance.

Resistance does not always have to mean a gun and a knife, but rather the utilization of the energies of a nation at home and in ‘shatat’ (Diaspora), along with the galvanization of the pro-justice and peace communities all over the world. There must soon be a movement in which Palestinians declare a global struggle against apartheid, involving all Palestinians, their leadership, factions, civil society and communities everywhere. They must speak in one voice, declare one objective, and state the same demands, over and over again.

It is bewildering to realize that a nation that has been so wronged for so long being so greatly misunderstood, while those who have done the harm are largely absolved and seen as if the victim.

Sometime in the late 1950’s, Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, became aware of the need to unify the Israeli Zionist narrative regarding the conquering and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. According to a revelation by Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Ben-Gurion worried that the Palestinian refugee crisis was not going to go away without a consistent Israeli message that the Palestinians left their land of their own devices, following instructions to do so by various Arab governments.

Of course, that, too, was a fabrication, but many supposed truths often start with a sheer lie. He delegated several academics to present the most falsified, yet coherent, story on the exodus of the Palestinians. The outcome was Doc GL-18/17028 of 1961. That document has, ever since, served as the cornerstone of the Israeli ‘hasbara’ concerning the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Palestinians ran away and were not driven out, was the crux of the message. Israel has been repeating this falsehood for over 55 years and, of course, many have believed it.

Not until recently, thanks to the effort of a burgeoning group of Palestinian historians - and courageous Israelis - who counter the propaganda, a Palestinian narrative is taking shape, although much is yet to be done to offset the damage that has already taken place.

In fact, a real victory for the truth would only happen when the Palestinian narrative is no longer seen as a ‘counter narrative’ but as a sovereign story of its own, free from the confines of defensiveness and the burden of a history laden with lies and half-truths.

The only way I see that happening is when Palestinian intellectuals invest more time and effort in studying and narrating a ‘people’s history’ of Palestine, which could finally humanize the Palestinian people, and challenge the polarized perception of them as terrorists or perpetual victims. When the ordinary individual becomes the center of history, the outcomes are more relatable, more effective and poignant.

The same logic can be applied to journalism, as well. Aside from finding their common story, Palestinian journalists need to reach out to the wider world, not only to their traditional circle of dedicated friends and supporters, but to mainstream society. If people truly appreciate the truth, especially from a humanist perspective, they cannot possibly support genocide and ethnic cleansing.

And by ‘wider world’ I am hardly referring to London, Paris and New York, but to Africa, South America, Asia and the entire South. Nations from this hemisphere can fully understand the pain and injustice of military occupation, colonization, imperialism and apartheid. I fear that the emphasis on the need to counter Israeli ‘hasbara’ in the West has meant the allocation of a disproportionate amount of resources and energy in a few places, while ignoring the rest of the world, whose support has for long been the backbone of international solidarity. They must not be taken for granted.

The good news, however, is that Palestinians have been making great strides in the right direction, although with no thanks to the Palestinian leadership. The key, now, is to be able to unify, streamline and build on those existing efforts so that such growing solidarity translates into greater success in raising global awareness and holding Israel accountable for its Occupation and violations of human rights.

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.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Natalie Drolet, Steve Lawson, Janine Bandcroft May 25, 2016

This Week on GR

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

May 24, 2016

Just over a week ago, a delegation of temporary workers, accompanied by migrant worker leaders from across the country, paid a visit to Parliament Hill. They went to Ottawa to make their concerns known to the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.

The Coalition for Migrant Worker Rights Canada helped coordinate the testimonies, and insists more needs be done to ensure migrant worker participation in the laws that affect their lives.

Natalie Drolet is Executive Director of the West Coast Domestic Workers' Association, and has served as the WCDWA Staff Lawyer since 2014.

Listen. Hear.

A native Ottawan, since moving to Vancouver Drolet has worked on access to justice for newcomers, founded a working group on labour trafficking, and has advocated for her clients before various administrative tribunals at all levels of court in BC.

Natalie Drolet in the first half.

And; there was sad news last week for BC's environmental community. Long-time ecologist and Clayoquot Sound defender, Steve Lawson passed away on May 8th. Steve was, with partner Susanne Hare, well-known as a 'War in the Woods' warrior, opposing the logging of the old-growth forests and mining within B.C.'s oldest nature reserve, Strathcona Park. More recently, Steve was at the forefront of efforts to stop trophy hunting, putting an end to the bear parts market, and fighting to ensure the survival of wild salmon and marine life. I talked to Steve last July about the renewed fight to protect again the Walbran from logging.

Steve Lawson and a clear-cut call to arms in Clayoquot and the Walbran in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio braodcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of some of what's good to do on, in, and around our town's streets, and beyond there too, in the coming week. But first, Natalie Drolet and calling for real immigration reforms in Canada.

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.

Temporary People: Canadian Migrant Workers Testify on Parliament Hill

Migrant workers testify on Parliament Hill today, call for permanent immigration status, open work permits, and real reforms

by Coalition for Migrant Worker Rights Canada

May 16, 2016

Ottawa – Four migrant workers will testify at the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities (HUMA) today between 4:30pm and 6:30pm calling for permanent immigration status, open work permits and comprehensive reforms.

Migrant worker leaders from across Canada are joining them to call for permanent immigration status on landing.

 The Coalition for Migrant Worker Rights Canada which is helping to coordinate these testimonies continues to insist that more needs to be done to ensure migrant worker participation in laws that primarily affect their lives.

The hearing can be watched – audio only – as of 3:30pm by clicking here.

Gina Bahiwal, has been a Temporary Foreign Worker in Ontario and BC since 2008 and has worked at a warehouse, Holiday Inn and Mcdonalds. She will testify to HUMA today.

“I think migrant workers should all get permanent status upon arrival because we came here to Canada to work, and our work is skilled work. If you come to Canada and your work is called high-skilled, you get permanent immigration status, why don’t we?

“In addition, those workers who are being abused on closed work permits, can’t find another job because their work permit is tied to a job. Many workers, vulnerable workers, who worked in Canada for four years are being told to go home, but they have no life to go back to.”

Gabriel Alahuda is a Seasonal Agricultural Worker in Ontario. He will testify to HUMA today.

“A migrant farmworker, named Sheldon Mc Kenzie, died in 2005 in a work related accident – a fact that is news across Canada today. What safety net is available for the young family he’d left behind after 13 years of service on the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program?

“These questions must be answered. Migrant workers spend years working in a developed country like Canada, where we consistently make our contributions, like all working citizens, only to be denied the benefits which only citizens can access and enjoy. We need rights, we need permanent residency and need it now.”

Francisco Mootoo a temporary foreign worker from Mauritius. He arrived in Quebec in 2012. He will testify to HUMA this week.

“We were lucky, but we had to fight for our right to stay, knowing full well that we have done everything required of us as working people contributing to Canada’s economy here in Quebec. These immigration policies have to change for the better, reflecting a program that does not seek to exploit the desperation of hardworking people who merely wish to make this country their home.

“In that light, we fully support the demands of the Coalition for Migrant Worker Rights Canada and hope that the HUMA committee seriously listens to our collective voice when reviewing the TFWP.”

Ericson Santos De Leon, Caregiver from Montreal, Quebec who will testify to the committee

“My agency charged me $4,300 placement fee. They said that I had to pay such a high fee because it was harder to place male caregivers. When I got here, I found out that the agency that hired me paid a friend to pretend to be my employer for my papers. For three months, I was stranded. After three months, I was getting desperate so I went to the agency and asked, what was going on?

“I’ve been waiting for so long. They made me work under the table for a family for a year. After a year, I told them I would report them to the authorities. I said, “you’ve been abusing me. I have a family to support.” They got scared and finally fixed my papers so I was legally employed. What they did was very wrong. They took advantage of me because they know that I wanted to come to Canada.”

Hessed Torres, Temporary Foreign Worker from Vancouver, British Columbia

“As a live-in caregiver, I experienced working between 12-16 hours a days despite my contract stating that I would work 8 hours a day. I also worked beyond the job duties that were stated in my contract. I felt that I needed to stay with my employer despite my working conditions being unjust because I didn’t have mobility to work for a different employer that would treat me fairly.

“When I asserted my rights, I was terminated. I was left jobless and homeless. I’m very fortunate to be part of MIGRANTE BC because they gave me shelter, a home, a community, and helped to empower me to assert my rights and to talk about my experience as a migrant worker.”

Dhon Mojica, Migrant Worker from Alberta

“Temporary foreign workers like myself are people, we are workers were not rags that can be thrown away when you don’t need us anymore. We were invited to come and many made money off us, we deserve the right to stay in Canada.”

Source
Coalition for Migrant Worker Rights Canada
www.migrantrights.ca

Backgrounder
Please see: http://migrantrights.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/MigrantWorkers_Backgrounder.pdf

Supporting Terrorists in Syria Delegitimizes Canada

Canada Loses Legitimacy: Stop Supporting All Terrorists in Syria

by Mark Taliano - AHT

May 24, 2016

The legitimacy of Canada’s government needs to be questioned, as long as it continues to hide its barbaric foreign policy decisions beneath a mantle of egregious lies and deceptions. Informed consent requires truth and transparency, not lies and degeneracy.

Currently, we are imposing illegal sanctions on Syria; we are supporting mercenary terrorists invading Syria; we are supporting a Wahhabi dictatorship, and we are supporting criminally corrupt corporate media messaging.

All of this is being done without the informed consent of Canadians.

An article published in The Lancet|Global Health, “Syria: end sanctions and find a political solution to peace” enumerates the toll exacted by these sanctions on the people of Syria:

“The economic losses of the country at the end of 2014 stood at US$143.8 billion, with more than 80% of the population living in poverty, of whom a third (32.6%) were in abject poverty, unable to obtain even basic food items. More than half of the population (52.8%) is displaced, of whom a third are internally displaced.

“Life expectancy has been reduced from 75.9 years in 2010 (one of the highest in the region for countries not part of the Gulf Cooperation Council) to 55.7 years in 2014—a loss of 20 years.

“The unemployment rate rose from 15%5 in 2011 to 55.7% in 2014, with more than 3 million losing work within the first 2 years of the conflict.

“The cost of basic food items has risen six-fold since 2010, although it varies regionally. With the exception of drugs for cancer and diabetes, Syria was 95% self-sufficient in terms of drug production before the war. This has virtually collapsed as have many hospitals and primary health-care centres.”

Once we add to this the fact that Western-sponsored terrorists deliberately destroyed more than two thirds of Syria’s public hospitals since 2011, it becomes clear that NATO and its allies are targeting innocent civilians, as they did during the sanctions preceding the illegal invasion of Iraq.

We should stop supporting all terrorists in Syria. Sustainable evidence has demonstrated for years that ALL of the terrorists are trying to destroy Syria, and that the West and its allies support them all, including ISIS. Constant efforts to rebrand the terrorists – Is it “IS’, “ISIS”, or “ISIL”? – serve to confuse mass media consumers, a powerful strategy in the propagandist’s toolbox.

Beseiged Syrians call all of the invading terrorists “Daesh”.

Afra’a Dagher explains:

“In Syria fighters call themselves the “Free Syrian Army” or “Islamic state fighters” or Daesh or by any other name that suits them. There is nothing “magical” about this. It is just a kaleidoscope of names intended to cause confusion. In reality it is always the same people calling themselves by these different names.”

Canada’s Defense Minister, Harjit Sajjan should be offering unqualified support for Syria against the terrorists, not unqualified support for terrorists against Syria.

Another seemingly self-evident point is that we should be supporting the growth of pluralism, democracy, and international law globally, whereas in reality we are supporting the opposite. Wahhabi Saudi Arabia is a chief financier for Daesh, and a chief proponent in the expansion of Sharia law in Syria. Not only are we selling armaments to Saudi Arabia, but we also support its efforts to destroy democratic, pluralist, non-secular Syria in favour of an imposed puppet Wahhabi regime.

Finally, we should support, rather than suppress, truthful, evidence-based reporting on Syria. Instead, we are supporting criminal, mainstream media (MSM) lies about Syria.

Ample sustainable evidence demonstrates that the democratically-elected, reformer President Assad, was not, and is not, a brutal dictator; that he does not “kill his own people”; that it is not a “civil war”; and that the “initiating” demonstrations were neither “peaceful” nor “organic”. (Peaceful demonstrations were hijacked, hybrid war style, by armed, foreign-funded al Qaeda militants.)

The foundation for these dangerous lies include intelligence agencies, and well-funded, embedded “NGOs” such as the White Helmets. The author explains in “Why do people in the West still believe the official lies about Syria?”:

“Predominant narratives are supported by corrupt ‘NGOs’ – totally bereft of objectivity -- and intelligence agency “fronts”. Real investigative journalism offering historical context and legitimate evidence are relegated to the fringes, far outside the domain of the broad-based ‘consensus of misunderstanding.’”

All of these agencies spread well-constructed lies to news agencies with a view to corrupting all information coming out of Syria in favour of the terrorists, and to the detriment of Syria, democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, and global security.

If the Canadian government were to honor truth and justice, we might well set an example, and help to avert a cataclysmic nuclear war --- which could occur if the war on Syria escalates.

Our current role as vassal appendage to the U.S - dominated NATO war machine is unworthy of any nation that pretends to be sovereign and democratic.

Pentagon Winning War on American Treasury

The Pentagon’s War on Accountability: Slush Funds, Smoke and Mirrors, and Funny Money Equal Weapons Systems Galore

by William Hartung  - TomDispatch

May 24, 2016

Now you see it, now you don’t. Think of it as the Department of Defense’s version of the street con game, three-card monte, or maybe simply as the Pentagon shuffle. In any case, the Pentagon’s budget is as close to a work of art as you’re likely to find in the U.S. government -- if, that is, by work of art you mean scam.

The United States is on track to spend more than $600 billion on the military this year -- more, that is, than was spent at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military buildup, and more than the military budgets of at least the next seven nations in the world combined. And keep in mind that that’s just a partial total.

As an analysis by the Straus Military Reform Project has shown, if we count related activities like homeland security, veterans' affairs, nuclear warhead production at the Department of Energy, military aid to other countries, and interest on the military-related national debt, that figure reaches a cool $1 trillion.

The more that’s spent on “defense,” however, the less the Pentagon wants us to know about how those mountains of money are actually being used. As the only major federal agency that can’t pass an audit, the Department of Defense (DoD) is the poster child for irresponsible budgeting.

It’s not just that its books don’t add up, however. The DoD is taking active measures to disguise how it is spending the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars it receives every year -- from using the separate “war budget” as a slush fund to pay for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting wars to keeping the cost of its new nuclear bomber a secret. Add in dozens of other secret projects hidden in the department’s budget and the Pentagon’s poorly documented military aid programs, and it’s clear that the DoD believes it has something to hide.

Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Disappear Money, Pentagon-Style

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I hope those of you who want to ensure that TD’s voice stays strong in this grim world of ours will think about donating to the site. Remember that, for a contribution of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of Nick Turse’s powerful, up-close-and-personal new Dispatch Book on a country that has become a war-crimes zone, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, or Rebecca Gordon’s American Nuremberg, a riveting account of who should (but never will) be in the dock in future war-crimes trials here, or a range of other books on offer (including mine). Just check out the details at our donation page. Tom]

Colonel Mark Cheadle, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), recently made a startling disclosure to Voice of America (VOA). AFRICOM, he said, is currently mulling over 11 possible locations for its second base on the continent. If, however, there was a frontrunner among them Cheadle wasn’t about to disclose it. All he would say was that Nigeria isn't one of the countries in contention.

Writing for VOA, Carla Babb filled in the rest of the picture in terms of U.S. military activities in Africa. “The United States currently has one military base in the east African nation of Djibouti,” she observed. “U.S. forces are also on the ground in Somalia to assist the regional fight against al-Shabab and in Cameroon to help with the multinational effort against Nigeria-based Boko Haram.”

A day later, Babb’s story disappeared. Instead, there was a new article in which she noted that “Cheadle had initially said the U.S. was looking at 11 locations for a second base, but later told VOA he misunderstood the question.” Babb reiterated that the U.S. had only the lone military base in Djibouti and stated that “[o]ne of the possible new cooperative security locations is in Cameroon, but Cheadle did not identify other locations due to ‘host nation sensitivities.’”

U.S. troops have, indeed, been based at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti since 2002. In that time, the base has grown from 88 acres to about 600 acres and has seen more than $600 million in construction and upgrades already awarded or allocated. It’s also true that U.S. troops, as Babb notes, are operating in Somalia -- from at least two bases -- and the U.S. has indeed set up a base in Cameroon. As such, the “second” U.S. base in Africa, wherever it’s eventually located, will actually be more like the fifth U.S. base on the continent. That is, of course, if you don’t count Chabelley Airfield, a hush-hush drone base the U.S. operates elsewhere in Djibouti, or the U.S. staging areas, cooperative security locations, forward operating locations, and other outposts in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda, among other locales. When I counted late last year, in fact, I came up with 60 such sites in 34 countries. And just recently, Missy Ryan of the Washington Post added to that number when she disclosed that “American Special Operations troops have been stationed at two outposts in eastern and western Libya since late 2015.”

To be fair, the U.S. doesn’t call any of these bases “bases” -- except when officials forget to keep up the fiction. For example, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 included a $50 million request for the construction of an “airfield and base camp at Agadez, Niger.” But give Cheadle credit for pushing a fiction that persists despite ample evidence to the contrary.

It isn’t hard, of course, to understand why U.S. Africa Command has set up a sprawling network of off-the-books bases or why it peddles misinformation about its gigantic “small” footprint in Africa. It’s undoubtedly for the same reason that they stonewall me on even basic information about their operations. The Department of Defense, from tooth to tail, likes to operate in the dark.

Today, TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung reveals another kind of Pentagon effort to obscure and obfuscate involving another kind of highly creative accounting: think slush funds, secret programs, dodgy bookkeeping, and the type of financial malfeasance that could only be carried out by an institution that is, by its very nature, too big to fail (inside the Beltway if not on the battlefield).

Rejecting both accurate accounting and actual accountability -- from the halls of the Pentagon to austere camps in Africa -- the Defense Department has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to keeping Americans in the dark about the activities being carried out with their dollars and in their name. Luckily, Hartung is willing to shine a bright light on the Pentagon’s shady practices. Nick Turse

The Pentagon’s War on Accountability: Slush Funds, Smoke and Mirrors, and Funny Money Equal Weapons Systems Galore

by William D. Hartung  

Don’t for a moment imagine that the Pentagon’s growing list of secret programs and evasive budgetary maneuvers is accidental or simply a matter of sloppy bookkeeping. Much of it is remarkably purposeful. By keeping us in the dark about how it spends our money, the Pentagon has made it virtually impossible for anyone to hold it accountable for just about anything. An entrenched bureaucracy is determined not to provide information that might be used to bring its sprawling budget -- and so the institution itself -- under control. That’s why budgetary deception has become such a standard operating procedure at the Department of Defense.

The audit problem is a case in point. The Pentagon along with all other major federal agencies was first required to make its books auditable in the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. More than 25 years later, there is no evidence to suggest that the Pentagon will ever be able to pass an audit. In fact, the one limited instance in which success seemed to be within reach -- an audit of a portion of the books of a single service, the Marine Corps -- turned out, upon closer inspection, to be a case study in bureaucratic resistance.

In April 2014, when it appeared that the Corps had come back with a clean audit, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was so elated that he held a special ceremony in the “Hall of Heroes” at the Pentagon. “It might seem a bit unusual to be in the Hall of Heroes to honor a bookkeeping accomplishment,” he acknowledged, “but damn, this is an accomplishment.”

In March 2015, however, that “accomplishment” vanished into thin air. The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which had overseen the work of Grant Thornton, the private firm that conducted the audit, denied that it had been successful (allegedly in response to “new information”). In fact, in late 2013, as Reuters reported, auditors at the OIG had argued for months against green-lighting Grant Thornton’s work, believing that it was full of obvious holes. They were, however, overruled by the deputy inspector general for auditing, who had what Reuters described as a “longstanding professional relationship” with the Grant Thornton executive supervising the audit.

The Pentagon and the firm deny that there was any conflict of interest, but the bottom line is clear enough: there was far more interest in promoting the idea that the Marine Corps could pass an audit than in seeing it actually do so, even if inconvenient facts had to be swept under the rug. This sort of behavior is hardly surprising once you consider all the benefits from an undisturbed status quo that accrue to Pentagon bureaucrats and cash-hungry contractors.

Without a reliable paper trail, there is no systematic way to track waste, fraud, and abuse in Pentagon contracting, or even to figure out how many contractors the Pentagon employs, though a conservative estimate puts the number at well over 600,000. The result is easy money with minimal accountability.

How to Arm the Planet

In recent years, keeping tabs on how the Pentagon spends its money has grown even more difficult thanks to the “war budget” -- known in Pentagonese as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account -- which has become a nearly bottomless pit for items that have nothing to do with fighting wars. The use of the OCO as a slush fund began in earnest in the early years of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and has continued ever since. It’s hard to put a precise number on how much money has been slipped into that budget or taken out of it to pay for pet projects of every sort in the last decade-plus, but the total is certainly more than $100 billion and counting.

The Pentagon’s routine use of the war budget as a way to fund whatever it wants has set an example for a Congress that’s seldom seen a military project it wasn’t eager to pay for. Only recently, for instance, the House Armed Services Committee chair, Texas Republican Congressman Mac Thornberry, proposed taking $18 billion from the war budget to cover items like an extra 11 F-35 combat aircraft and 14 F-18 fighter-bombers that the Pentagon hadn’t even asked for.

This was great news for Lockheed Martin, which needs a shot in the arm for its troubled F-35 program, already slated to be the most expensive weapons system in history, and for Boeing, which has been lobbying aggressively to keep its F-18 production line open in the face of declining orders from the Navy. But it’s bad news for the troops because, as the Project on Government Oversight has demonstrated, the money used to pay for the unneeded planes will come at the expense of training and maintenance funds.

This is, by the way, the height of hypocrisy at a time when the House Armed Services Committee is routinely sending out hysterical missives about the country’s supposed lack of military readiness. The money to adequately train military personnel and keep their equipment running is, in fact, there. Members of Congress like Thornberry would just have to stop raiding the operations budget to pay for big ticket weapons systems, while turning a blind eye on wasteful spending in other parts of the Pentagon budget.

Thornberry’s gambit may not carry the day, since both President Obama and Senate Armed Services Committee chair John McCain oppose it. But as long as a separate war budget exists, the temptation to stuff it with unnecessary programs will persist as well.

Of course, that war budget is just part of the problem. The Pentagon has so many budding programs tucked away in so many different lines of its budget that even its officials have a hard time keeping track of what’s actually going on. As for the rest of us, we’re essentially in the dark.

Consider, for instance, the proliferation of military aid programs. The Security Assistance Monitor, a nonprofit that tracks such programs, has identified more than two dozen of them worth about $10 billion annually. Combine them with similar programs tucked away in the State Department’s budget, and the U.S. is contributing to the arming and training of security forces in 180 countries. (To put that mind-boggling total in perspective, there are at most 196 countries on the planet.) Who could possibly keep track of such programs, no less what effect they may be having on the countries and militaries involved, or on the complex politics of, and conflicts in, various regions?

Best suggestion: don’t even think about it (which is exactly what the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex want you to do). And no need for Congress to do so either. After all, as Lora Lumpe and Jeremy Ravinsky of the Open Society Foundations noted earlier this year, the Pentagon is the only government agency providing foreign assistance that does not even have to submit to Congress an annual budget justification for what it does. As a result, they write, “the public does not know how much the DoD is spending in a given country and why.”

Slush Funds Galore

If smokescreens and evasive maneuvers aren’t enough to hide the Pentagon’s actual priorities from the taxpaying public, there’s always secrecy. The Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists recently put the size of the intelligence portion of the national security state’s “black budget“ -- its secret spending on everything from spying to developing high-tech weaponry -- at more than $70 billion. That figure includes a wide variety of activities carried out through the CIA, the NSA, and other members of the intelligence community, but $16.8 billion of it was requested directly by the Department of Defense. And that $70 billion is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to secret spending programs, since billions more in secret financing for the development and acquisition of new weapons systems has been squirreled away elsewhere.

The largest recent project to have its total costs shrouded in secrecy is the B-21, the Air Force’s new nuclear bomber. Air Force officials claim that they need to keep the cost secret lest potential enemies “connect the dots” and learn too much about the plane’s key characteristics. In a letter to Senator McCain, an advocate of making the cost of the plane public, Ronald Walden of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office claimed that there was “a strong correlation between the cost of an air vehicle and its total weight.” This, he suggested, might make it “decisively easier” for potential opponents to guess its range and payload.

If such assessments sound ludicrous, it’s because they are. As the histories of other major Pentagon acquisition programs have shown, the price of a system tells you just that -- its price -- and nothing more. Otherwise, with its classic cost overruns, the F-35 would have a range beyond compare, possibly to Mars and back. Of course, the real rationale for keeping the full cost estimate for the B-21 secret is to avoid bad publicity. Budget analyst Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that it’s an attempt to avoid “sticker shock” for a program that he estimates could cost more than $100 billion to develop and purchase.

The bomber, in turn, is just part of a planned $1 trillion splurge over the next three decades on a new generation of bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and ground-based nuclear missiles, part of an updating of the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal. And keep this in mind: that trillion dollars is simply an initial estimate before the usual Pentagon cost overruns even begin to come into play. Financially, the nuclear plan is going to hit taxpayer wallets particularly hard in the mid-2020s when a number of wildly expensive non-nuclear systems like the F-35 combat aircraft will also be hitting peak production.

Under the circumstances, it doesn’t take a genius to know that there’s only one way to avoid the budgetary equivalent of a 30-car pile up: increase the Pentagon’s already ample finances yet again. Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Brian McKeon was referring to the costs of building new nuclear delivery vehicles when he said that the administration was “wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it, and probably thanking our lucky stars we won’t be here to answer the question.” Of course, the rest of us will be stuck holding the bag when all those programs cloaked in secrecy suddenly come out of hiding and the bills come fully due.

At this point, you may not be shocked to learn that, in response to McKeon’s uncomfortable question, the Pentagon has come up with yet another budgetary gimmick. It’s known as the “National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund,” or as Taxpayers for Common Sense more accurately labels it, “the Navy’s submarine slush fund.” The idea -- a longstanding darling of the submarine lobby (and yes, Virginia, there is a submarine lobby in Washington) -- is to set up a separate slush fund outside the Navy’s normal shipbuilding budget. That’s where the money for the new ballistic missile submarine program, currently slated to cost $139 billion for 12 subs, would go.

Establishing such a new slush fund would, in turn, finesse any direct budgetary competition between the submarine program and the new surface ships the Navy also wants, and so avoid a political battle that might end up substantially reducing the number of vessels the Navy is hoping to buy over the next 30 years. Naturally, the money for the submarine fund will have to come from somewhere, either one of the other military services or that operations and maintenance budget so regularly raided to help pay for expensive weapons programs.

Not to be outmaneuvered, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has now asked Congress to set up a “strategic deterrence fund” to pay for its two newest nuclear delivery vehicles, the planned bomber and a long-range nuclear-armed ballistic missile. In theory, this would take pressure off other major Air Force projects like the F-35, but as with the submarine fund, it only adds up if a future president and a future Congress can be persuaded to jack up the Pentagon budget to make room for these and other weapons systems.

In the end, however the specifics work out, any “fund” for such weaponry will be just another case of smoke and mirrors, a way of kicking the nuclear funding crisis down the road in hopes of fatter budgets to come. Why make choices now when the Pentagon and the military services can bet on blackmailing a future Trump or Clinton administration and a future Congress into ponying up the extra billions of dollars needed to make their latest ill-conceived plans add up?

If your head is spinning after this brief tour of the Pentagon’s budget labyrinth, it should be. That’s just what the Pentagon wants its painfully complicated budget practices to do: leave Congress, any administration, and the public too confused and exhausted to actually hold it accountable for how our tax dollars are being spent. So far, they’re getting away with it.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior adviser to the Security Assistance Monitor. He is the author of, among other books, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 William D. Hartung

Kerry Rattles on Syria: Perpetual War Promised

Kerry Threatens War-Without-End on Syria

by Finian Cunningham  - Information Clearing House 

May 23, 2016

Alleged peace-maker John Kerry threatened to wage war-without-end on Syria - if the Middle East country does accept the US demand for regime change.

That's hardly the language of a supposed bona fide diplomat who presents an image to the world as a politician concerned to bring about an end to the five-year Syrian conflict.

The US Secretary of State repeatedly sounds anxious to alleviate the appalling suffering of the Syrian nation, where over the past five years some 400,000 people have been killed and millions displaced as refugees.

Anyone who has not been brainwashed by Western media propaganda knows full well that the suffering of Syria has been caused by Washington and its allies sponsoring a covert war for regime change in that country.

Kerry was speaking during another round of failed negotiations — this time in Vienna — along with other leaders from the 17-nation International Syria Support Group that includes Russia, as well as the United Nations.

The "support group" is a disgustingly erroneous name, given that certain members of this entity — primarily the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — have done everything in their power to sponsor a proxy terrorist war on Syria. If the truth were not so abject, it would be laughable.

In a Voice of America report headlined "US still has leverage in Syria," Kerry is quoted thus: "He said the greatest leverage [on Syria] was the fact that [President] Assad and his backers would never be able to end the war in Syria if they declined to negotiate a political settlement."

Consider the pernicious import of that for a moment. In other words, America's top "diplomat" is laying down a criminal ultimatum to the sovereign state of Syria and its elected government of President Bashar al-Assad. Kerry is saying in no uncertain terms that unless the Syrian authorities do not accept Washington's demand for regime change, then the country is facing never-ending war.

Of course, being a weasel-worded diplomat, Kerry does not use the illegal term "regime change". He instead talks about "political transition". And he has set a date in August for this "transition" to take place. But what Kerry's euphemistic jargon boils down to is this: the Syrian president and his administration must vacate government — or else face more violence and destruction.

This is the political objective that Washington and its allies in NATO, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have wanted all along. They want what is an independent, anti-imperialist Syrian government to give way to some composite regime that would be a puppet for Washington's geopolitical interests in the oil-rich, strategically vital Middle East region.

Any replacement regime would spurn its erstwhile allies of Russia, Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah resistance movement to become an American vassal.

In reality, the supposed pro-democracy change that Washington allegedly wants to install in Syria would be dominated by a repressive, fundamentalist regime that would betray the interests of the Syrian people. We can count on this outcome because the proxies who are waging Washington's covert war are dominated by extremists fully aligned with their despotic sponsors in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Kerry's apparent confidence in predicting that Syria faces a war of attrition if it does capitulate is a tacit admission by Washington that it controls the illegally armed factions in Syria.

The United States may officially proscribe terror groups like al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al Nusra and the so-called Islamic State (also known as Daesh). The US pays lip service to "defeating terrorism".

But anyone with an informed understanding of what is really happening in Syria and other countries subjected to US-led regime change knows that Washington has orchestrated these same terror groups for its criminal political objectives.

This is corroborated by the fact that Washington refuses to coordinate its (ineffectual) bombing campaign with Russia to eliminate the terror groups. It is corroborated by the fact that Washington and its allies point-blank refuse Russia's proposals at the UN Security Council to designate other known terror outfits — Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Shams — as terrorist.

Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Shams are every bit as vile and barbaric as the other al Qaeda-affiliated franchises. They all espouse the same twisted death-cult ideology; fight alongside each others (when they are not feuding, that is, over war spoils); and ultimately they all share the same sponsors and American-supplied weaponry.

It is openly admitted that America's allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as Qatar, bankroll Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Shams and that this nexus serves as a conduit for American weapons from the Central Intelligence Agency.

Why else would John Kerry begin his week of "diplomacy" in Vienna by first making an urgent visit to Saudi King Salman last weekend. Kerry was reportedly appealing to the 9/11-sponsoring Saudi regime to support his diplomatic push in Vienna. The Western media "reported" Kerry's Saudi visit as if it were a benign mission, as they usually do. Whenever it should be obvious that what he was really doing was trying to get the Saudis to ease off on the terror war in Syria.

Washington is currently trying to wrangle regime change in Syria through a political track. That is a world of difference from gullible Western media projections of Kerry's pretensions of "negotiating peace".

Yet all the while the US and the Saudis are reserving the right to use "Plan B" if the political track should not materialize in regime change.

That is what Kerry really means when he said in Vienna that "Assad and his backers would never be able to end the war in Syria if they declined to negotiate a political settlement."

Washington's "leverage" in Syria is due to the simple, diabolical fact that it and its despotic allies ultimately can turn on and off the violence when it is expedient for their interests. And that violence relies on the deployment of known terrorist organizations, including the ones that Washington's double-think refuses to recognize as "terrorist".

So let's put this into stark perspective. Despite his Orwellian title of diplomat and peace-maker, US Secretary of State John Kerry is the public face of a terrorist enterprise.

What other world power gives itself the right to threaten nations with "regime change or war"? And yet this same nation considers itself a paragon of democracy, human rights and law-abiding probity.

The United States of America is a rogue regime on a criminal scale that exceeds the very worst in history.

As a parting footnote, John Kerry is a decorated American "war hero". He served four months as a navy officer during the US genocidal war on Vietnam during the late 1960s. Kerry received a bunch of medals for his "actions", which according to reliable accounts from veterans on his river-boat patrols, involved shooting fleeing Vietnamese peasants in the back.

This is the same Kerry who is now purporting to bring peace to Syria.

Like everything that Washington says, it is full of lies and deception. The abiding lesson: don't turn your back on Washington and its terrorist-sponsoring, war-mongering "diplomats".

Article originally appeared at Sputnik

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. 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. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. 

It Can Happen: Weimar Israel

Israeli Weimar: It Can Happen Here

by Uri Avnery - CounterPunch

May 23, 2016

“Please don’t write about Ya’ir Golan!” a friend begged me, “Anything a leftist like you writes will only harm him!”

So I abstained for some weeks. But I can’t keep quiet any longer.

General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, made a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. Wearing his uniform, he read a prepared, well-considered text that triggered an uproar which has not yet died down.

Dozens of articles have been published in its wake, some condemning him, some lauding him. Seems that nobody could stay indifferent.

The main sentence was:

“If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.”

All hell broke loose. What!!! Traces of Nazism in Israel? A resemblance between what the Nazis did to us with what we are doing to the Palestinians?

90 years ago was 1926, one of the last years of the German republic. 80 years ago was 1936, three years after the Nazis came to power. 70 years ago was 1946, on the morrow of Hitler’s suicide and the end of the Nazi Reich.

I feel compelled to write about the general’s speech after all, because I was there.

As a child I was an eye-witness to the last years of the Weimar Republic (so called because its constitution was shaped in Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller). As a politically alert boy I witnessed the Nazi Machtergreifung (“taking power”) and the first half-a-year of Nazi rule.

I know what Golan was speaking about. Though we belong to two different generations, we share the same background. Both our families come from small towns in Western Germany. His father and I must have had a lot in common.

There is a strict moral commandment in Israel: nothing can be compared to the Holocaust. The Holocaust is unique. It happened to us, the Jews, because we are unique. (Religious Jews would add: “Because God has chosen us”.)

I have broken this commandment. Just before Golan was born, I published (in Hebrew) a book called “The Swastika”, in which I recounted my childhood memories and tried to draw conclusions from them. It was on the eve of the Eichmann trial, and I was shocked by the lack of knowledge about the Nazi era among young Israelis then.

My book did not deal with the Holocaust, which took place when I was already living in Palestine, but with a question which troubled me throughout the years, and even today: how could it happen that Germany, perhaps the most cultured nation on earth at the time, the homeland of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant, could democratically elect a raving psychopath like Adolf Hitler as its leader?

The last chapter of the book was entitled “It Can Happen Here!” The title was drawn from a book by the American novelist Sinclair Lewis, called ironically “It Can’t Happen Here”, in which he described a Nazi take-over of the United States.

In this chapter I discussed the possibility of a Jewish Nazi-like party coming to power in Israel. My conclusion was that a Nazi party can come to power in any country on earth, if the conditions are right. Yes, in Israel, too.

The book was largely ignored by the Israeli public, which at the time was overwhelmed by the storm of emotions evoked by the terrible disclosures of the Eichmann trial.

Now comes General Golan, an esteemed professional soldier, and says the same thing.

And not as an improvised remark, but on an official occasion, wearing his general’s uniform, reading from a prepared, well thought-out text.

The storm broke out, and has not passed yet.

Israelis have a self-protective habit: when confronted with inconvenient truths, they evade its essence and deal with a secondary, unimportant aspect. Of all the dozens and dozens of reactions in the written press, on TV and on political platforms, almost none confronted the general’s painful contention.

No, the furious debate that broke out concerns the questions: Is a high-ranking army officer allowed to voice an opinion about matters that concern the civilian establishment? And do so in army uniform? On an official occasion?

Should an army officer keep quiet about his political convictions? Or voice them only in closed sessions – “in relevant forums”, as a furious Binyamin Netanyahu phrased it?

General Golan enjoys a very high degree of respect in the army. As Deputy Chief of Staff he was until now almost certainly a candidate for Chief of Staff, when the incumbent leaves the office after the customary four years.

The fulfillment of this dream shared by every General Staff officer is now very remote. In practice, Golan has sacrificed his further advancement in order to utter his warning and giving it the widest possible resonance.

One can only respect such courage. I have never met General Golan, I believe, and I don’t know his political views. But I admire his act.

(Somehow I recall an article published by the British magazine Punch before World War I, when a group of junior army officers issued a statement opposing the government’s policy in Ireland. The magazine said that while disapproving the opinion expressed by the mutinous officers, it took pride in the fact that such youthful officers were ready to sacrifice their careers for their convictions.)

The Nazi march to power started in 1929, when a terrible world-wide economic crisis hit Germany. A tiny, ridiculous far-right party suddenly became a political force to be reckoned with. From there it took them four years to become the largest party in the country and to take over power (though it still needed a coalition).

I was there when it happened, a boy in a family in which politics became the main topic at the dinner table. I saw how the republic broke down, gradually, slowly, step by step. I saw our family friends hoisting the swastika flag. I saw my high-school teacher raising his arm when entering the class and saying “Heil Hitler” for the first time (and then reassuring me in private that nothing had changed.)

I was the only Jew in the entire gymnasium (high school.) When the hundreds of boys – all taller than I – raised their arms to sing the Nazi anthem, and I did not, they threatened to break my bones if it happened again. A few days later we left Germany for good.

General Golan was accused of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. Nothing of the sort. A careful reading of his text shows that he compared developments in Israel to the events that led to the disintegration of the Weimar Republic. And that is a valid comparison.

Things happening in Israel, especially since the last election, bear a frightening similarity to those events. True, the process is quite different. German fascism arose from the humiliation of surrender in World War I, the occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium from 1923-25, the terrible economic crisis of 1929, the misery of millions of unemployed. Israel is victorious in its frequent military actions, we live comfortable lives. The dangers threatening us are of a quite different nature. They stem from our victories, not from our defeats.

Indeed, the differences between Israel today and Germany then are far greater than the similarities. But those similarities do exist, and the general was right to point them out.

The discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.)

The rain of racist bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then. The call “Death to the Arabs” (“Judah verrecke”?) is regularly heard at soccer matches. A member of parliament has called for the separation between Jewish and Arab newborns in hospital. A Chief Rabbi has declared that Goyim (non-Jews) were created by God to serve the Jews. Our Ministers of Education and Culture are busy subduing the schools, theater and arts to the extreme rightist line, something known in German as Gleichschaltung. The Supreme Court, the pride of Israel, is being relentlessly attacked by the Minister of Justice. The Gaza Strip is a huge ghetto.

Of course, no one in their right mind would even remotely compare Netanyahu to the Fuehrer, but there are political parties here which do emit a strong fascist smell. The political riffraff peopling the present Netanyahu government could easily have found their place in the first Nazi government.

One of the main slogans of our present government is to replace the “old elite”, considered too liberal, with a new one. One of the main Nazi slogans was to replace “das System”.

By the way when the Nazis came to power, almost all high-ranking officers of the German army were staunch anti-Nazis. They were even considering a putsch against Hitler . Their political leader was summarily executed a year later, when Hitler liquidated his opponents in his own party. We are told that General Golan is now protected by a personal bodyguard, something that has never happened to a general in the annals of Israel.

The general did not mention the occupation and the settlements, which are under army rule. But he did mention the episode which occurred shortly before he gave this speech, and which is still shaking Israel now: in occupied Hebron, under army rule, a soldier saw a seriously wounded Palestinian lying helplessly on the ground, approached him and killed him with a shot to the head. The victim had tried to attack some soldiers with a knife, but did not constitute a threat to anyone any more. This was a clear contravention of army standing orders, and the soldier has been hauled before a court martial.

A cry went up around the country: the soldier is a hero! He should be decorated! Netanyahu called his father to assure him of his support. Avigdor Lieberman entered the crowded courtroom in order to express his solidarity with the soldier. A few days later Netanyahu appointed Lieberman as Minister of Defense, the second most important office in Israel.

Before that, General Golan received robust support both from the Minister of Defense, Moshe Ya’alon, and the Chief of Staff, Gadi Eisenkot. Probably this was the immediate reason for the kicking out of Ya’alon and the appointment of Lieberman in his place. It resembled a putsch.

It seems that Golan is not only a courageous officer, but a prophet, too. The inclusion of Lieberman’s party in the government coalition confirms Golan’s blackest fears. This is another fatal blow to the Israeli democracy.

Am I condemned to witness the same process for the second time in my life?

URI AVNERY is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.