Brian Eno on Cooperative Intelligence and Creative Behaviour

Brian Eno's Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don't Get a Job

by Colin Marshall - Open Culture

April 2, 2018

"Once upon a time, artists had jobs," writes Katy Waldman in a recent New York Times Magazine piece.

"Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring 'The Waste Land' (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims." Or Willem de Kooning painting signs, James Dickey writing slogans for Coca-Cola, William Carlos Williams writing prescriptions, Philip Glass installing dishwashers – the list goes on.

Waldman suggests that we consider day jobs not just bill-paying grinds but delivery systems for "the same replenishing ministries as sleep or a long run: relieving creative angst, restoring the artist to her body and to the texture of immediate experience."

Brian Eno thinks differently.

"I often get asked to come and talk at art schools," he says in the clip above,

"and I rarely get asked back, because the first thing I always say is, 'I'm here to persuade you not to have a job.'"

That doesn't mean, he emphasizes, that you should "try not to do anything. It means try to leave yourself in a position that you do the things you want to do with your time, and where you take maximum advantage of whatever your possibilities are."

Easier said than done, of course, which is why Eno wants to "work to a future where everybody is in a position to do that," enacting some form of universal basic income, the general idea of which holds that society will function better if it guarantees all its members a certain standard of living regardless of employment status.

But if that standard rises too high, might it run the risk of softening the rigors and loosening the limitations needed to encourage true creativity?

Musician Daniel Lanois, who has worked with Eno on the production of several U2 albums as well as ambient music projects, describes learning that lesson from his collaborator in the Louisiana Channel video just above.

"At the peak of my sonic experimentations with Brian Eno, we only ever used four boxes," says Lanois.

"That's when we started getting these really beautiful textures and human-like sounds from machines. We got to be experts at those few tools." 

The limitations under which they worked in the studio may not have followed from any particular philosophy, but the actual experience taught them how a richer artistic result can arise, paradoxically, from more straitened circumstances. Since the beginning of art, its practitioners have always had to find innovative ways around obstacles, whether those obstacles have to do with technology, sides, time, money, or anything else besides.

As Lanois reassuringly puts it, "I can imagine that if you have limitation, even financial limitation, that might be okay, man."

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema.

Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Maduro Election Win Breaks Norte and 'Lima' Siege - For Now

Why Venezuela’s Election Matters—It Was Under Siege by U.S., Canadian and EU Influence

by Vijay Prashad - RESUMEN

May 23, 2018 

On May 20, half the people of Venezuela went to vote. They delivered a mandate to Nicolás Maduro, the 55-year-old successor to Hugo Chávez and the leader of the Chavista movement. Maduro won 68 percent of the vote.

His closest challenger, Henri Falcón, who had been a Chavista until 2010, took 21 percent of the vote.

It was clear for months that Maduro would win the election. This had nothing to do with “irregularities” in the voting process, as the European Union put it. The residue of loyalty to the Chavista movement is clear. It is also clear that the opposition to Maduro and to the Chavista movement represents the oligarchy.

These are not the sentinels of democracy. They are merely using the word “democracy” to return to the old ways. This is clear among Venezuela’s poor, who stick with the Chávez movement despite the privations of the current period.

Why did half of Venezuela’s population not vote? In the last presidential election—which elected Maduro—80 percent of the population voted. What is the reason for the decline? It has everything to do with a clever strategy worked out by the opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution, the revolutionary process opened up in 1998 when Hugo Chávez won the first of many elections. The opposition—and its foreign allies (particularly the government of the United States)—knows that they cannot win at the ballot box. What they have done is to encourage the United States and their fellow oligarchs in Latin America to put the Venezuelan economy under siege.

The pain from this “economic war” has certainly disoriented and demoralized the Venezuelan people. At which point, still unsure about their ability to win an election, they have sought to reduce the legitimacy of the Chavista government. Hence, the opposition—backed by the oligarchs and the United States—boycotted the election. This is why only half the population voted.

Outside Interference

The “irregularities” in this presidential election came—essentially—from outside interference in Venezuela’s political process. Many are up in arms in the United States about allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. But they are totally sanguine about the open intervention of the United States in the Venezuelan election. There has been no public criticism of the statements made by the White House—notably Vice President Mike Pence—who called the election a “fraud and a sham” weeks before the Venezuelans went to the polls.

Strikingly, the European Union—which has been so sharp in its criticism of the election—and the United Nations were both invited to send election observers, but both declined. Those international observers who did come—including former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero—have said that they did not see anything outrageously untoward in the election process. Certainly, there will be problems. No election is conducted without some measure of fraud. According to the Electoral Integrity Project—based at Harvard University and Sydney University—the United States displays the worst election performance among all Western democracies.

To point to this or that example alone is hardly a good measure of a failed election. That the opposition won the 2015 parliamentary elections in Venezuela suggests that the government—even then led by Nicolás Maduro—did not fix the elections to their benefit. Why the opposition decided to boycott this election has—it seems to me—little to do with the possibility of a fair election in Venezuela and much more to do with the attempt to isolate the Venezuelan government and to set the stage for its collapse.

In January, Maduro announced that Venezuela would hold a presidential election in the coming months. Within no time at all, the United States and the European Union said that they would not recognize the election’s legitimacy. The U.S. and the EU found quick allies in the Lima Group, an intergovernmental organization of 17 states of the Americas. These 17 states—from Canada to Chile—have taken an openly hostile position not only against the government of Maduro, but against the Bolivarian process inside Venezuela and in the Bolivarian process across Latin America. Close coordination between the United States, the European Union, and the Lima Group is suggested by the similarity of the language used by their representatives.

ALBA versus Lima

It is important to know a little about the Lima Group, which has functioned as the Latin American mouthpiece for its domestic oligarchs and for the United States and Canada. It was set up in Lima (Peru) in August 2017. The purpose of the Lima Group was to overthrow the government of Venezuela. It was a formation that had been created to put pressure on the Organization of American States (OAS), set up in 1948, to take a firm position against Venezuela.

For some time now, the United States and Canada have not been able to get their way in the OAS. The emergence of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA) in 2004 was a direct challenge to the OAS. Led by Chávez and Fidel Castro, ALBA pushed aside the OAS and produced new formations—without U.S. control—in its place. Chávez called the OAS “a corpse that must be buried” and suggested—in 2010—that it was the “sign of a dying empire.” ALBA would soon have 11 members. It promised a new view of Latin American sovereignty and economic cooperation.

With the coup against Honduras in 2009, the United States announced a more aggressive posture against the ALBA dynamic. Honduras, an ALBA member, now left the group. It was the clearest sign of what was to come. Since 2010, the United States and its allies have worked hard to roll back the “pink tide” in Latin America. Pressure was put on Venezuela, the heartbeat of the ALBA process. When the Lima Group was set up in 2017, Peru’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Luna said, “What we have in Venezuela is a dictatorship.” There was no need for evidence. The term “dictatorship” would now be used by these governments to define the politics of Venezuela.

Brazil, another member of the Lima Group, had recently conducted a “soft coup” against the government of President Dilma Rousseff. That did not disqualify them from being a sanctimonious part of this alliance. Nor was there any uneasiness about the Peruvian government of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski—whom Maduro routinely called a lackey of Wall Street; Kuczynski would later resign under charges of corruption, but not after he offered a pardon for Peru’s dictator Alberto Fujimori. None of these men looked in the mirror. They had their fingers firmly pointed toward Venezuela.

One of the leaders of the Lima Group is Canada, whose Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland felt no embarrassment in October 2017 saying, “If necessary we must put added pressure on the Maduro regime by taking concrete steps to further isolate it from the international community.” This kind of colonial language makes few in North America shudder. Nor did it worry anyone that Freeland gave political advice to the Venezuelan opposition, asking them to unite behind one candidate against Maduro.

Long before Maduro announced the presidential elections, therefore, the opponents of Venezuela (the U.S., the EU, and the Lima Group) had begun the process of denying the government legitimacy. They were openly meeting as the Lima Group to coordinate strategies to isolate Venezuela and to conduct regime change there.

Just before the elections, the United States and the Lima Group engineered the expulsion of Venezuela from the OAS.

Throttle

The election is over. Predictably, the United States and Canada will increase their sanctions regime. The Lima Group ambassadors are home getting their instructions. They will likely downgrade diplomatic relations with Venezuela. None of this is a surprise. It is what they had already announced. They did not wait to see how the elections went. Isolation of Venezuela is their strategy.

Meanwhile, the ALBA group congratulated Venezuela. They know that this is not just about one election or about Venezuela’s current difficulties. This is a line-struggle between the ALBA group and the Lima group, between those who want to drive a people-centered policy and those who want to drive a Wall Street-centered policy.

Oil prices are high. But these will not benefit Venezuela. Its oil economy is under threat not only from the seizure of its refineries, but also by the lack of investment in its oil infrastructure. Russia and China, as if on cue, have disassociated themselves with the isolation strategy. They will return with capital both for the distressed Venezuelan economy and for the oil sector.

But, of course, Maduro will have to face the crisis of his economy—whether created by the “economic war” or not. This has to be his priority—to stem the hunger and frustration inside the country. Venezuela is being garroted. Will Maduro’s government have the means to break the cord?

Devil in the Details: Dystopian Dangers

Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers

by Nick Turse - TomDispatch

 

May 29, 2018   

For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.

But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.”

That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” 

 

Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In their complaint, those groups contend that the report was “biased, misleading, and incomplete” and “manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conclusions.”

To bolster the president’s arguments for restricting the entry of foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national who, in 2016, “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS”; the Uzbek who “posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS”; the Syrian who, in a plea agreement, “admitted that he knew a member of ISIS and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah,” an al-Qaeda offshoot. 

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Tomorrow's Terror Today

Once upon a time, dystopian fiction was left to the novelists: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick. And once upon a time, the futuristic dreams of the military were distinctly upbeat. They were of generals leading armies to victory, of air power causing the morale of enemy nations to collapse (with surrender on the menu), of admirals dominating the seven seas with a fleet beyond compare -- 11 aircraft carriers included -- that would awe the rest of the world.

That was then; this is now. These days you’re likely to hear the word “victory” in Washington about as often as “peace.” In fact, according to the Washington Post, the futuristic phrase of the moment at the Pentagon, the one regularly on the lips of “senior officers,” is the dystopian “infinite war.” In translation: almost 17 years after the administration of George W. Bush launched its Global War on Terror and American military conflicts began to spread across the Greater Middle East, Asia, and Africa, no end is in sight. Ever. And that’s not just a passing phrase in the Pentagon’s arsenal of words. As TomDispatch regular Nick Turse makes clear today, as early as 2016, the Pentagon’s fantasists were already producing dystopian scenarios of the first order, bloodcurdling tales of a forever-war-fighting future as an over-muscled replication of the present never-ending war on terror. They were already, that is, beginning to write their own Brave New World (of War), their own 2084, their own The Lieutenant’s Tale, their own Do Drones Dream of Electric Terrorists?; they were, in short, creating stunningly well-funded gravestones for the American (and global) future. But let Turse tell you the rest. Tom

Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers

by Nick Turse

Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents, were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that “People’s Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched missile.”

That’s right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOM’s Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL!

Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the president’s hurricane of tweets?

Well, there’s a simple explanation. That attack doesn’t actually happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. military’s war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals and admirals.

PALing Around with Terrorists

The 2016 edition of JLASS-SP was played out remotely for weeks before culminating in a five-day on-site exercise at the Air Force Wargaming Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It involved 148 students from the Air Force’s Air War College, the Army War College, the Marine Corps War College, the Naval War College, the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, the National War College, and the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College. Those up-and-coming officers -- some of whom will likely play significant roles in running America’s actual wars in the 2020s -- confronted a future in which, as the script for the war game put it, “lingering jealousy and distrust of American power and national interests have made it politically and culturally difficult for the United States to act unilaterally.”

Here’s the scene as set in JLASS-SP: while the U.S. is still economically and militarily powerful into the next decade, anxieties abound about increasing constraints on the country’s ability to control, dictate, and dominate world affairs. “Even in the military realm... advances by others in science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by both state and non-state actors, proliferation of nuclear weapons and long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks have increasingly constricted U.S. freedom of action,” reads the war game’s summary.

While the materials used are “not intended to be an actual prediction of events,” they are explicitly meant “to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions.” Indeed, what’s striking about the exercise is how -- though scripted before the election of Donald Trump -- it anticipated many of the fears articulated in the president’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. That document, for instance, bemoans the potential dangers not only of regional powers like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but also of “transnational threats from jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations,” undocumented immigrants, “drug traffickers, and criminal cartels [which] exploit porous borders and threaten U.S. security and public safety.”

The JLASS-SP scenario also prefigured themes from that 2018 DOJ/DHS report supporting the travel ban in the way it stoked fears of, above all, a major “foreign-born” -- especially Muslim -- terror threat in the United States. A 2017 Government Accountability Office report would, however, conclude that, of “the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent).”

Two years after the war game was conducted, in a time of almost metronomic domestic mass killings, President Trump continues to spotlight the supposedly singular danger posed by “inadequately vetted people” in the U.S., although stovetops and ovens, hot air balloons, and burning pajamas are far more deadly to Americans. Indeed, since 9/11, terrorism has been a distinctly low-level risk to the American public -- at least when compared to heart disease, cancer, car crashes, fires, or heat waves -- but has had an outsized effect on the perceptions and actions of the government, not to mention its visions of tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s Terror Today

An examination of the threats from international and domestic terror groups, as imagined in JLASS-SP, offers unique clues to the Pentagon’s fears for the future. “Increasingly,” reads the war game’s summary, “transnational organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and violent extremist organizations challenge the traditional notions of boundaries and sovereignty.”

That drone-launching terror group, PAL, for instance, is neither Islamist nor a right-wing terror group, but an organization supposedly formed in 2017 in hopes of defeating “globalism and capitalism throughout the world by rallying the proletariat to orchestrate the overthrow of capitalist governments and global conglomerates.” Its ideology, an amalgam of increasingly stale leftist social movements, belies its progressive ranks, a rainbow coalition consisting of “most of the globe’s ethnicities and cultures,” all of whom seem to be cyber-sophisticates skilled in fundraising, recruiting, as well as marketing their particular brand of radicalism.

As of 2020, the audacious drone strike on CENTCOM’s headquarters was PAL’s only terror attack in the tangible world. The rest of its actions have taken place in the digital realm, where the group is known for launching cyber-assaults and siphoning off “funds from large global corporations, banks, and capitalist governments around the world.”

Even though PAL went from a gleam in the eye of its founder, the Bond-villain-esquely named Otto Cyre, to terrorist power-player in just a few short years, the pace of its operations didn’t please its hardest core members who, the war game scenario says, broke away in late 2020 to form yet another organization devoted to even more rapidly eroding “confidence in governmental and institutional bodies by staging events that demonstrate the ‘impotency’ of the establishment.” That splinter group, United Patriots Against International Government (UPAIGO) -- in this war game all terror groups have Pentagon-style acronyms -- concentrates on “spectacular but deniable actions,” a scattershot campaign of often botched but sometimes lethal efforts that include:

* November 2021: a cyber-attack on the Angarsk Refinery in the Russian Federation, which resulted in a two-week shutdown causing a sharp rise in the price of oil and gas just prior to the 2021-2022 winter heating season.

* April 2022: a failed attempt to assassinate, by IED, the chief of U.S. Pacific Command. Two members of the commander’s security detail and the command’s political advisor were killed in the attack while others, including civilians, were injured.

* January 2022: a failed plot to detonate a dirty [radioactive] bomb, employing medical waste and homemade explosives, at Philadelphia International Airport.

* 2023 fire season: as fires raged in the western United States, UPAIGO established relief efforts designed to compete with the U.S. government’s response, in order to "undermine confidence in government agencies."

* June 2024: an attack, in coordination with members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), on a U.S. flagged air carrier transporting U.S. military personnel at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Militants fired two surface-to-air missiles at the aircraft, which was damaged but managed to land successfully."

PAL and UPAIGO are, however, hardly the only terror threats facing the United States in the 2020s, according to JLASS-SP 2016. PAL’s fellow travelers, for example, include the fictional versions of the real Irish National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). There’s also the Environmentalists Against Capitalists Organization, or EACO, “a lethal environmental anti-capitalist terrorist group with global connections.” Formed in 2010 (though not in our actual world), EACO, according to the war gamers, evolved into an increasingly violent organization in the 2020s, carrying out not just cyberattacks on corporations but also a full-scale bombing campaign “targeting executive board meetings of large corporations, particularly in industries such as oil, coal, natural gas, and logging.” The group even took to planting IEDs on logging roads and employing tainted food as a weapon. By 2025, EACO was implicated in more than 400 criminal acts in the U.S. resulting in 126 deaths and $862 million in damages.

Then there’s Anonymous. In the Pentagon’s fictional war-game, this real-world hacktivist group is characterized as a “loose organization of malicious black-hat hackers” that employs its digital prowess to “distribute bomb-making instructions, and conduct targeting for options other than planes, trains, and automobiles.” In the past created by the military’s imagineers, Anonymous was declared a terrorist organization after it conducted an August 2015 digital attack on Louisiana’s power grid with something akin to the Stuxnet worm that damaged nuclear centrifuges in Iran. That cyber-assault was meant to protest the state’s restrictions on online gambling -- an affront, according to the fictional Anonymous, to Internet freedom. (In the real world, Louisiana lawmakers actually just deep-sixed online gambling without an apparent terrorist response.) Taking down that power grid “resulted in the death of 15 elderly patients trapped in a facility denied air conditioning as a result of the power outage.”

Also included among domestic terror groups is Mara Salvatrucha 13 or MS-13, the Los Angeles street gang, born of the American-fueled Central American civil wars of the 1980s, that was transplanted to El Salvador and has since returned to the United States. This violent American export -- the product of deportations in the 1990s -- has paradoxically become a key justification for President Trump’s crackdown on immigration. “MS-13 recruits through our broken immigration system, violating our borders. And it just comes right through -- whenever they want to come through, they come through,” said Trump earlier this year during a White House roundtable focused on the gang. 

 

“We’ve really never seen anything quite like this -- the level of ferocity, the level of violence, and the reforms we need from Congress to defeat it.”

In the real world, the U.S. branch of MS-13 operates in loose local cliques under a franchised name, dabbling in small-time drug dealing, gun-running, prostitution, and extortion (primarily of recent immigrants). Many of its crimes are committed against its own affiliates or members of other gangs. The president nonetheless baselessly claimed that MS-13 has “literally taken over towns and cities of the United States.” He also continues to portray the gang, which reportedly makes up less than 1% of the estimated 1.4 million gang members in the U.S., as a sophisticated international cartel.

And that’s precisely how MS-13 was also portrayed in the fantasy world of JLASS-SP. In that war game, Mara Salvatrucha has developed “the resources to wage full-scale insurgent campaigns in Central America and the capability to cause serious disruption in the United States and Canada,” while rumors swirl of contacts between its members and foreign militants. “If cooperation between foreign terrorist groups and MS-13 ever blossomed, the potential for terrorist attacks within the borders of the United States would increase significantly,” the war game scenario warns.

President Trump has been accused of conflating members of MS-13 with undocumented immigrants (and referring to both groups as “animals”). Regardless, there’s no question that he kicked off his presidential run in 2015 by disparaging Mexicans. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he infamously declared. The JLASS-SP documents reverse Trump’s formula by first noting that “most illegal immigrants crossing into the United States are just trying to make a better life for themselves,” only to suggest that the U.S.-Mexican border also “serves as an infiltration point for terrorists.”

Unlike in the real world, where such fears circulate primarily as a conspiracy theory, in the Pentagon’s future fantasy there is “substantial evidence... that terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa transit the Mexican-U.S. border.” Worse yet, radical Islamists even “camouflage themselves as Hispanics” to cross the border. The military’s fantasists point to “a flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported linking of drug cartels along the Texas border with Middle East and North Africa terrorism.”

That represents a Trumpian-style nightmare-cum-fantasy even the president hasn’t yet dreamed up -- a Hispanic-surnamed, cartel-supported group of Islamist terrorists. But by the 2020s, according to the Pentagon’s futurists, such worries are well-founded. And this will occur at the same time that Mexican and South American drug gangs have grown so rich and powerful they can regularly buy protection from U.S. government officials.

“Popular opinion in the United States is beginning to believe the ‘Narco-corruption’ is affecting the ‘rule of law’ north of the border,” according to their scenario, with the cartels spending $20 billion in 2022 alone to buy off U.S. officials or get candidates of their choice elected. That same year, allegations of election tampering in mayoral races across the American South come to light and the number of corruption convictions of U.S. Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials skyrockets.

“Perhaps most shocking is the discovery of a “vast irrigated grow site” (evidently a massive marijuana farm) tended by “a dozen Mexican farmers armed with AK-47’s” in -- wait for it! -- “remote areas of Illinois.”

Mexican farmers, El Salvadoran gang members, Islamists masquerading as Hispanics, eco-terrorists, and anti-globalization militants aren’t the only threats foreseen by the military’s futurists. Much-ballyhooed reports of the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, like the much-hyped defeat of its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, turn out to be premature. In the 2020s, the re-re-branded group, now known as the Global Islamic Caliphate, or GIC, draws “support from Sunni-majority regions in Syria and Iraq; refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; and internally displaced persons in Syria and Iraq,” while continuing to launch attacks in the region.

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has grown in reach, size, and might. By 2021, the group has 38,000 members spread across Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger with bases reportedly located in Western Sahara. On May 23, 2023, AQIM carries out the most lethal terror attack in the U.S. since 9/11, detonating massive truck-bombs at both the New York and New Jersey ends of the Lincoln Tunnel, killing 435 people and injuring another 618. The bombing prompts President McGraw -- you remember him, Karl Maxwell McGraw, the independent Arizona senator who rode his populist “America on the Move” campaign to victory in the 2020 election -- to invade Mauritania and become mired in yet another American forever war that shows every indication of grinding on into the 2030s, if not beyond.

The Age of Terrorism

In the real world, the lifetime odds of an American dying from “walking” are one in 672. The chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist? One in 45,808. By an illegal immigrant terrorist? One in 138 million. And the odds of being killed by a “chain migration” immigrant sometime this year? One in 1.2 billion! In other words, you have a far greater chance of being killed by a dog, a shark, lightning, or the government via legal execution.

This is not to say terrorism isn’t a major threat to others around the world or that terror groups are not proliferating. Since 9/11, the number of terrorist organizations recognized by the U.S. State Department and battled by the Pentagon -- from Africa to the Middle East to Asia -- has grown markedly.

“States are the principal actors on the global stage, but non-state actors also threaten the security environment with increasingly sophisticated capabilities,” reads an unclassified synopsis of the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy. “Terrorists, trans-national criminal organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption.”

In the fictional future of the Pentagon’s JLASS-SP 2016, this menace only expands to include various hybrid threats and new homegrown groups with increasing capabilities for death and destruction.

While it may be “the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks,” as President Trump’s 2017 executive order declares, the Pentagon envisions a future in which such policies are increasingly ineffective. In their dystopian war-game future, more than two decades of fighting “them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America” (as former President George W. Bush put it in 2007) proves unequivocally futile. In this sense, the Pentagon’s fantasies bear an eerie resemblance to the actual present. In the dystopian scenario used by the Pentagon to train its future leaders, today’s forever wars have proven ineffective and future threats are to be met with new, similarly ineffective, forever wars.

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Trump declared that we’re living in the “age of terrorism.” His solution: wielding “unmatched power,” loosening the rules of engagement, and establishing an unfettered ability to detain, question, and “annihilate” terrorists.

All of these tactics have, however, been part of the Pentagon’s playbook since 2001 and, according to the military’s best guess at the future, will lead to an increase in terror groups and terror attacks while terror networks and terrorist ideologies will grow in strength, resilience, and appeal. Almost two decades in, it seems we’re still only in the opening days of the “age of terrorism” and, if the Pentagon’s war-gamers are to be believed, far worse is yet to come.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead.

Copyright 2018 Nick Turse

Who's Q?

WikiLeaks Calls QAnon A Likely ‘Pied Piper’ Operation 

by Caitlin Johnstone - Rogue Journalist

May 28, 2018

A few months back I started having bizarre interactions on social media of a kind I'd never experienced previously.

Suddenly, whenever I'd write about President Trump's nonstop warmongering and capitulations to longstanding neoconservative agendas like implementing aggressive new cold war escalations against Russia along multiple fronts, the illegal occupation of Syria with the stated goal of effecting regime change, increasing troop presence in Afghanistan, unprecedented civilian deaths in drone strikes, facilitating the slaughter of civilians in Yemen, or the administration's open regime change policy against Iran, I'd get all these weird accounts telling me things like "Trust the plan" and "This is the Art of the Deal, Trump is playing 4-D chess", and saying I should research something called "QAnon" or "Q".

It happens literally every time I write anything critical of this administration; a deluge of commenters telling me in effect, "Shush. Calm down. This is nothing. What looks like Trump facilitating longtime establishment agendas just like his predecessors is actually brilliant strategic maneuvering." Every single time, without a single solitary exception.

It got particularly frustrating when I'd try to talk about Attorney General Jeff Sessions' statement that arresting WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is a high priority for this administration, a statement Trump personally supported. These Q people told me they had great news for me: Assange is no longer languishing in London's Ecuadorian embassy. No, some clever researchers had deciphered some cryptic statements from an anonymous poster on 8chan, and it turns out that Assange is now walking free and enjoying a full presidential pardon. Some even say it to Assange's own mother.

Unless you move in certain circles you may never have even heard of the Q phenomenon; it's almost never in the news and very seldom comes up in anything resembling mainstream discourse. But for people like me who write about the behavior of America's unelected power establishment, it comes up a lot and can be a bit of an obstacle to the lucid sharing of ideas and information.

To summarize, someone claiming to be an insider with "Q clearance" began making posts on the anonymous message board 4chan, a notorious online playground for millions of meme creators, trolls and nerds which has fostered a massively enthusiastic pro-Trump zeitgeist since 2015. 4chan users refer to one another as "anons", so "Q" is often referred to as QAnon. Q would share intentionally vague clues they referred to as "crumbs" and encourage readers to research what was meant by them, usually leading toward incriminating information about Trump's political rivals and never toward any incriminating information about Trump. The posts moved from 4chan to the related forum 8chan, with disputed claims of authenticity.

This has created a dynamic wherein an anonymous poster shares extremely vague messages, and many thousands of Q enthusiasts go off combing the internet to find out what is meant by them. There are disputes within the community about precisely what is meant by which posts, but the net result is universally the same: all the information confirms that Trump is a brilliant hero who is fighting the Deep State, and all of Trump's political enemies are corrupt criminals/pedophiles/satanists. All that is asked of Q's army of woke patriots is that they have faith and trust the plan, and to know in their hearts that soon the President of the United States will solve all the nation's problems.

Now who could possibly benefit from such an arrangement?

I've been openly critical of Qanon for many months, but it's hard to write anything substantial about this subject because the QAnon phenomenon is so amorphous and is spread all over the internet in a sprawling, non-cohesive conversation consisting of many thousands of parts, so anything you say about it will be immediately slammed as untrue by its more passionate enthusiasts because you're not saying it in exactly the way that they would say it. That plus the faith-based, religion-like reality tunnel Q enthusiasm requires one to espouse makes engaging this topic about as much fun as debating creationists online, so I've been avoiding writing about it.

For that reason, I was very happy to see that journalist Suzie Dawson had posted an epic, in-depth thread about why she views QAnon as a "Pied Piper operation".

The thread is worth reading in its entirety, easier done here in this thread reader due to its size. Dawson explains how QAnon uses standard psyop tactics, first establishing credibility and then implementing gamification and spirituality to suck followers into an energized, cultish mentality which leaves them susceptible to suggestion, manipulation and direction. From there they are told things like not to worry about Julian Assange at a time when he needs our support and activism more than ever before, or told to be suspicious of Edward Snowden. She shows using primary source documents that Snowden has revealed vastly more to the public about the mechanics of the deep state than QAnon ever has, including information about the CIA, and shows who does and does not benefit from the operation.

Yesterday, Dawson's thread was shared by the WikiLeaks Twitter account with the comment "This analysis, unfortunately, increasingly appears that it may be correct."

1. I referred to #QAnon today as a 'Pied Piper' operation. What I meant by this, is that the operation exists to round up people that are otherwise dangerous to the Deep State (because they are genuinely opposed to it) usurp time & attention, & trick them into serving its aims.

— Suzie Dawson (@Suzi3D) May 25, 2018

In response to a tweet from Roseanne Barr asking "where is julian assange?", the WikiLeaks account (which has long been a multi-user account run by a rotating WikiLeaks staff) replied that he is "Gagged and isolated as a result of the Trump administration's betrayal of the constitution and the demands of those who voted for it." Barr, who has promoted QAnon in the past, replied that WikiLeaks' answer was "BS", to which they responded with Dawson's thread.

This would line up with a comment made by Assange a month prior to his being silenced and isolated by the Ecuadorian embassy in March, in which he responded to someone who'd heard an internet rumor that he was secretly free saying it was "Probably a black PR campaign amplified by CIA contractors to reduce the support for WikiLeaks."

Probably a black PR campaign amplified by CIA contractors to reduce the support for WikiLeaks.

— Julian Assange (tweets by #FreeJulian campaign) (@JulianAssange) February 11, 2018

So on one hand we've got WikiLeaks insiders saying QAnon is a likely psyop designed to Pied Piper the populist right into supporting establishment agendas, and on the other we've got an anonymous someone on 8chan saying "trust the plan" and the President is awesome. These are not equally credible sources.

It would make perfect sense for the US intelligence community to conduct psychological operations against those on the right who espouse anti-establishment ideals, since they've been conducting them on the anti-establishment left for generations. Any political faction in the US which opposes war, corruption and oligarchy is going to be infiltrated, monitored and manipulated, and there's no reason to believe the faction which elected Trump on the basis of his anti-globalist and anti-interventionist positions wouldn't get the same treatment.

The same intelligence agencies which have successfully manipulated a large portion of America's left wing into despising Assange are now manipulating the right wing into despising Snowden. The same social engineers who manipulated Obama's base into ignoring his warmongering and oligarchic capitulations are now doing exactly the same for Trump's base.

Somebody's benefiting from this, and it ain't you. This administration is advancing longstanding neoconservative agendas with increasing aggression, perpetuating the Orwellian surveillance state of Bush and Obama, and actively pursuing the extradition and imprisonment of Julian Assange. Ignore the narratives and watch the behavior, and he looks very much like his predecessor. So cut out the narratives. Cut out the manipulators. Cut out QAnon from the equation and look at what's really happening here.

_____________________________

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Victoria Sez: "No Kinder Morgan Bailout!" May 31st March from the Inner Harbour

No Kinder Morgan Bailout! March from the Inner Harbour

by #NoKinderMorgan!

May 31st, 2018

Come out and make some noise to say 

#NoKinderMorgan!

 

Kinder Morgan has given the governments of Canada a deadline of May 31st to ensure that the Trans Mountain pipeline can go forward.

The federal and Alberta governments will put billions of tax-payer dollars on the line to prop-up this failing project.

In the evening of May 31st the people of Victoria, Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ territories, will gather at the Inner Harbour to say #NoKM and #NoPipelineBailout!

Thursday, May 31 at 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM PDT

Please bring: your pots, pans, musical instruments and noise-makers of any kind; signs and symbols of resistance; your friends, neighbours, family, and children; your love of the coast and your willingness to defend it.

Our actions are meant to be a show of hope, anger, and solidarity with Indigenous leadership. We are working together with the Protect the Inlet coalition on the front lines on Burnaby Mountain.

Victoria is making it clear: Kinder Morgan will not be built.

* We acknowledge with respect that this event is taking place on the territories of the Lkwungen speaking peoples of the Songhees and Esquimalt nations, and that many of our participants will be travelling from the territories of neighbouring nations, all of whose relations to each other and to these lands and waters long predate the City of Victoria, British Columbia, or Canada. *

Erdogan Calls Election As Currency Tumbles

Turkey’s Lira in Free Fall – Erdogan Calls Snap Election (Pt 1/2) 

by TRNN

May 28, 2018

In the coming economic crisis, combined with political repression under emergency rule, President Erdogan is expected to consolidate power without much opposition. We speak to the co-editor of Rapture Magazine.

 

Sea Shepherd Reports MARTIN SHEEN Detained by Canadian Customs Officials

Sea Shepherd Vessel MARTIN SHEEN detained in Victoria

by SSCS

May 28, 2018

The Sea Shepherd U.S. flagged sailing vessel MARTIN SHEEN is being detained in Victoria, British Columbia. Canadian Customs has refused to grant clearance despite advanced notice of the arrival of the vessel from Honolulu, Hawaii.

U.S. citizen Captain Chris Holt has been detained and his passport removed from the vessel by custom officers.

The other 7 crew are American and Canadian plus one Polish and one French citizen. They have all been cleared.

The captain and the vessel have not been cleared.

Sea Shepherd Director of Operations Locky MacLean is appearing at Customs HQ in Victoria in court this morning for a hearing on the manner.

Customs asked if Dr. Alexandra Morton would be coming on board. They also informed Sea Shepherd that there was no need for any research regarding the salmon farms because the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans already does research.

The MARTIN SHEEN has been in B.C. waters every summer for the last three years and not once has the vessel or crew been in violation of any Canadian laws.

The sole motivation for the MARTIN SHEEN being in B.C. waters is to assist Dr. Alexandra Morton and her independent research into the transmission of salmon parasites and viruses.

The campaign is Operation Virus Hunter

 

It appears that the denial of entry is politically motivated.

Will the Canadian government deny this independent research by Sea Shepherd and Dr. Morton?

Dr. Alexandra Morton is asking if this has anything to do with the fact that she is studying the spread of piscine reovirus to wild salmon from BC farm salmon, as the Canadian Minister of Fisheries is fighting two lawsuits to allow infected fish into BC farms, while in Washington State, transfer of farm fish infected with this virus is prohibited.

Does It Take Another War in the Woods to Get John Horgan's Attention?

Massive Cutting of Canada’s Grandest Old-Growth Forests Coordinated by BC Government’s Logging Agency - Near Record-Sized Douglas-firs Found in Nahmint Valley on Vancouver Island

by Ancient Forest Alliance

May 18, 2018

Hundreds of hectares of the grandest old-growth forests in Canada are being logged at breakneck speeds right now in the Nahmint Valley near Port Alberni, including thousands of old-growth western redcedars - some 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter - and exceptionally large Douglas-firs. BC's 5th and 9th widest Douglas-fir trees, according to the BC Big Tree Registry, were found on the expedition to the area.

Ancient Forest Alliance campaigner Andrea Inness walks beside an 

enormous, freshly fallen western redcedar in a BCTS-issued cutblock 

in the Nahmint Valley near Port Alberni. Photo by TJ Watt 

Click for larger image

Port Alberni - Conservationists with the Ancient Forest Alliance (AFA) were dismayed last week to discover that the BC government's logging agency, BC Timber Sales (BCTS), has auctioned off at least 300 hectares of some of the world’s grandest old-growth forests in the Nahmint Valley for logging, with thousands of old-growth trees already having been cut down this spring.

AFA campaigners TJ Watt and Andrea Inness, arborist-conservationist Matthew Beatty, and local Port Alberni conservationists Mike Stini and Ariane Telishewsky, came across the new clearcuts and road-building operations with enormous, 12-foot-wide, freshly cut logs of ancient cedars on May 6.

The campaigners also identified an enormous Douglas-fir tree, which they dubbed the “Alberni Giant”, that is wider than the fifth widest Douglas-fir tree listed in the BC Big Tree Registry at almost 11.5 metres (38 feet) in circumference or 3.7 metres (12 feet) in diameter. In addition, they found a Douglas-fir tree 3 metres (9.9 feet) in diameter, making it wider than even the widest Douglas-fir in Cathedral Grove, which is 2.8 metres (9.2 feet) in diameter, as well as a massive 4.3-metre or 14-foot-wide western redcedar.

The cutblocks targeting prime ancient forests were identified by the AFA and are on BCTS-controlled Crown lands and total over 300 hectares in the Nahmint Valley, with some cutlbocks being 30 hectares - or about 30 football fields - in size. The Nahmint Valley is in the territory of the Hupacasath and Tseshaht First Nations bands.

"The BC NDP government is fully in charge of BC Timber Sales' mandate. For them to let their own logging agency auction off logging rights to some of the largest and oldest endangered trees on Earth is like enabling the slaughter of elephant herds or the harpooning of blue whales.

"It’s the very opposite of sustainable forest management. The new NDP government needs a serious wake-up call. They need to end the status quo of old-growth liquidation - for starters, BCTS must stop issuing old-growth cutblocks - and instead ensure a sustainable second-growth forest industry," says AFA forest campaigner Andrea Inness.

"It's brutal, what’s happening out there. In advance of our trip I researched where the finest old-growth stands might be located based on Google Earth satellite maps and each one turned out to have a logging cutblock placed on it – cutblocks planned and issued by the BC government's own logging agency.

"We visited many spectacular trees on the day we arrived – some trees bigger than even those found in Cathedral Grove – and, by the second day, many of them were already on the ground. It’s a full-on assault. All day long the sounds of chainsaws, drilling machines, and huge trees crashing down boomed throughout the valley," states TJ Watt.

The Nahmint Valley is considered a “hotspot" of high-conservation value old-growth forest by conservation groups and is home to Roosevelt elk, black-tailed deer, cougars, wolves, and black bears, as well as old-growth associated species like the marbled murrelet and northern goshawk. The area also supports significant salmon and steelhead spawning runs. The Nahmint is considered by many people to be one of the most scenic areas in BC, with its ancient forests, rugged peaks, gorgeous turquoise canyons and swimming holes, and large and small lakes, and is heavily used by hikers, campers, anglers, and hunters.

“Only about 1% of the original old-growth Douglas-fir stands still remain on BC’s coast, and just about the finest stands are here in the Nahmint Valley. The area is also prime wildlife habitat for so many species. Having explored the forests around Port Alberni for decades, I can say with confidence that the remaining old-growth forests in the Nahmint are a first-rate conservation priority,” says wildlife expert Mike Stini of the Port Alberni Watershed-Forest Alliance.

The NDP’s 2017 election platform states,

“In partnership with First Nations and communities, we will modernize land-use planning to effectively and sustainably manage BC’s ecosystems, rivers, lakes, watersheds, forests and old growth, while accounting for cumulative effects. We will take an evidence-based scientific approach and use the ecosystem-based management of the Great Bear Rainforest as a model.” (see page 61 of their platform at: https://action.bcndp.ca/page/-/bcndp/docs/BC-NDP-Platform-2017.pdf). 

If taken literally and seriously, this would almost certainly result in the protection of the remaining endangered old-growth forest on BC’s southern coast and in the BC Interior, where old-growth forests are far scarcer and more endangered than in the Central and Northern Coast (Great Bear Rainforest) where 85% of the forests (including the vast majority of the old-growth) were set aside in protected areas and under the ecosystem-based management reserve networks.

Several environmental groups, including the Ancient Forest Alliance, Sierra Club BC, and Wilderness Committee, are calling on the BC government to implement a series of policy changes that can be rolled out over both short- and longer-term timelines. This includes a comprehensive, science-based law to protect old-growth forests and financial support for sustainable economic development and diversification of First Nations communities, known as “conservation financing,” while supporting First Nations land use plans.

While these longer-term solutions are being developed, an interim halt to logging in old-growth “hotspots” - areas of high conservation value - must be implemented to ensure the largest and best stands of remaining old-growth forests are kept intact while a larger plan is developed.

There are also a number of policies that can be readily implemented more quickly. For example, the NDP government should direct BCTS to discontinue issuance of old-growth cut blocks and support the implementation of conservation solutions in such rare and endangered forests.

In addition, there needs to be an effective big tree protection order with buffer zones and forest reserves such as many Old-Growth Management Areas that currently exist only on paper should be made legally binding and the system should be quickly expanded to protect additional endangered old-growth forests. Finally, annual funding needs to be directed to establish a park acquisition fund, which would allow the BC government to purchase and protect private lands of high conservation, cultural or recreational value.

"So far, the new NDP government has, disappointingly, supported the destructive status quo of high-grade old-growth forest liquidation, raw log exports, mill closures, and unsustainable forestry in general. They need to break away from the old unsustainable mindset that has driven the increasing collapse of both ecosystems and rural communities in this province.

"When it comes to forestry, the NDP have not distinguished themselves from the BC Liberals in terms of any new laws or regulations, and it’s very unwise for them to think they can take the environmental movement for granted and test its patience with excuses, heel-dragging, and PR spin while the destructive status quo rages on.

"Today there is a viable, potentially sustainable, second-growth forestry alternative that the government can foster, while protecting endangered old-growth forests and supporting the economic diversification of First Nations and rural communities," says Ancient Forest Alliance executive director Ken Wu.

MEDIA RELEASE:

More Background Info

Old-growth forests are vital to sustaining unique endangered species, climate stability, tourism, clean water, wild salmon, and the cultures of many First Nations. On BC’s southern coast, satellite photos show that at least 75% of the original, productive old-growth forests have been logged, including well over 90% of the valley bottoms where the largest trees grow. Only about 8% of Vancouver Island’s original, productive old-growth forests are protected in parks and Old-Growth Management Areas. Old-growth forests – with trees that can be 2000 years old – are a non-renewable resource under BC’s system of forestry, where second-growth forests are re-logged every 50 to 100 years, never to become old-growth again.

On BC’s southern coast (Vancouver Island and the southwest mainland), 75% of the original, productive old-growth forests have already been logged, including over 90% of the valley bottoms where the largest trees grow. 3.3 million hectares of productive old-growth forests once stood on the southern coast (with an additional 2.2 million hectares of bog, subalpine forests, and other low productivity old-growth forests of low to no commercial value with stunted trees), and today only 860,000 hectares remain, while only 260,000 hectares are protected in parks and Old-Growth Management Areas. Second-growth forests now dominate 75% of the southern coast’s productive forest lands, including 90% of southern Vancouver Island, and can be sustainably logged to support the forest industry. See “before and after” maps and stats of the southern coast’s old-growth forests at: www.ancientforestalliance.org/old-growth-maps.php

In order to placate public fears about the loss of BC’s endangered old-growth forests, the government’s PR-spin typically over-inflates the amount of remaining old-growth forests by including hundreds of thousands of hectares of marginal, low productivity forests growing in bogs and at high elevations with small, stunted trees, together with the productive old-growth forests where the large trees grow (and where most logging takes place). They also leave out vast areas of largely overcut private managed forest lands – previously managed as if they were Crown lands for decades and still managed by the province under weaker Private Managed Forest Lands regulations – in order to reduce the basal area for calculating how much old-growth forest remains, thereby increasing the fraction of remaining old-growth forests. See a rebuttal to some of the BC government’s PR-spin and stats about old-growth forests towards the BOTTOM of the webpage: https://www.ancientforestalliance.org/news-item.php?ID=1052

In recent times in BC, the voices for old-growth protection have been quickly expanding, including numerous Chambers of Commerce, mayors and city councils, forestry unions, and conservation groups across BC who have been calling on the provincial government to expand protection for BC’s remaining old-growth forests.

BC’s premier business lobby, the BC Chamber of Commerce, representing 36,000 businesses, passed a resolution in May of 2016 calling on the province to expand protection for BC’s old-growth forests to support the economy, after a series of similar resolutions passed by the Port Renfrew, Sooke, and WestShore Chambers of Commerce. See: http://www.ancientforestalliance.org/news-item.php?ID=1010

Both the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM), representing the mayors, city and town councils, and regional districts across BC, and Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities (AVICC), representing Vancouver Island local governments, passed a resolution in 2016 calling on the province to protect the Vancouver Island’s remaining old-growth forests by amending the 1994 land use plan. See: http://www.ancientforestalliance.org/news-item.php?ID=1057

The Public and Private Workers of Canada (PPWC), formerly the Pulp, Paper, and Woodworkers of Canada, representing thousands of sawmill and pulp mill workers across BC, passed a resolution in 2017 calling for an end to old-growth logging on Vancouver Island. See: http://ancientforestalliance.org/news-item.php?ID=1100

Each year, a significant portion of the provincial timber harvest is carried out on BC Timber Sales (BCTS) controlled land through its timber sales program. BCTS, a division of the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development (FLNRO), is the BC government’s logging agency that plans and directly issues logging permits for about 20 percent of the province’s merchantable timber on Crown lands, which fall outside of forestry tenures. Under this system, logging rights are granted through competitive auction to the highest bidding company for each timber sale, which provides benchmark costs and prices from the harvest of Crown timber in BC in order to set stumpage rates for tenure holders. The remaining 80 per cent of the province’s annual timber harvest occurs under the timber tenure system through tree farm or forest licences within Timber Supply Areas, woodlot licences, First Nations woodland licences, community forest agreements, or other tenures.

As the BC government retains full control over which cut blocks are auctioned each year through BCTS, the new government should use this control to quickly phase out issuing timber sales in old-growth forests and support implementation of conservation steps. The government should also review alternative ways to set benchmarks, considering broader socio-economic and ecological criteria, and consider how BC Timber Sales can be used to enable solutions for conservation and forestry that support communities.

Witness to Democracy: International Venezuela Elections Monitors Report

Eyewitnesses to Venezuela's May 20th Presidential Elections: "Western Media Never Talks About the Improvement to Life for Venezuela's Poor

by Daniel Kovalik and Vinnie Molina - via A Socialist In Canada

May 28, 2018

Below are two accounts by eyewitness observers of the May 20, 2018 presidential election in Venezuela. They are written by Daniel Kovalik from Pittsburgh, USA and Vinnie Molina from Western Australia.

Below their texts are several recommended additional readings.

• Voter turnout was 46 per cent.
• Many right-wing political forces called for a boycott of the election.

The vote result for the three leading candidates was the following: 

Nicolás Maduro, United Socialist Party of Venezuela: 6,245,862 (68 per cent)
Henri Falcón, 1,927,387 (21 per cent)
Javier Bertucci: 996,181 (11 per cent)
(source: Wikipedia) 

The real Venezuela is not what you think

By Daniel Kovalik, op-ed commentary in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 

May 24, 2018

I just returned from observing my fourth election in Venezuela in less than one year. Jimmy Carter has called Venezuela’s electoral system “the best in the world,” and what I witnessed was an inspiring process that guarantees one person, one vote, and includes multiple auditing procedures to ensure a free and fair election.

I then came home to the United States to see the inevitable “news” coverage referring to Venezuela as a “dictatorship” and as a country in need of saving. This coverage not only ignores the reality of Venezuela, it ignores the fact that the U.S. is the greatest impediment to democracy in Venezuela, just as the U.S. has been an impediment to democracy throughout Latin America since the end of the 19th century…

Prior to the Venezuelan presidential election on May 20 — an election which included an opposition candidate, Henri Falcon, from the business community — the U.S. government announced that it would not recognize the outcome, no matter who won. The U.S. had gone so far as to threaten Mr. Falcon with sanctions if he even ran in the election. The U.S. also threatened further economic sanctions on Venezuela if incumbent leftist Nicolas Maduro won — sanctions that even Mr. Falcon’s economic adviser has said were leading to the collapse of the Venezuelan economy. President Donald Trump kept to his promise in this regard, announcing more onerous sanctions the day after the election, which will further immiserate the Venezuelan people.

Meanwhile, while members of the more radical, right-wing opposition had themselves been calling for presidential elections and had agreed to hold them in May, the U.S. leaned on them to back out of this deal before it was signed. Following this, the radical opposition, backed by the U.S., called for people to boycott the vote.

The result was that Mr. Maduro won in a landslide. But it was not only the boycott — observed mostly in wealthier communities, as I witnessed — that won the day for Mr. Maduro. There were other reasons you will never hear about in the U.S. press.

First, the true patriots of Venezuela, not surprisingly, resent the United States’ devastating economic sanctions as well its constant call for regime change. Some U.S. officials even talk of military intervention to overthrow Mr. Maduro. In part, the vote for Mr. Maduro was a vote against U.S. meddling in the affairs of Venezuela.

In addition, despite the real hardships in Venezuela — for which the U.S. is largely to blame — most of Venezuela’s poor are better off now than they were before the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. For example, over the past 7 years, the government has built 2 million units of housing for low-income Venezuelans. In a country of only some 30 million people, these units are now home to a large proportion of the Venezuelan population. The current government also has provided free health care and subsidized food.

Before Chavez, the sprawling poor barrios which ring the cities were literally not on any government maps, and they had no utilities and no election centers. After Chavez, the existence of these barrios was recognized for the first time, and they were provided with utilities, health service, election stations and, most important, dignity. Chavez even started a world-class music program which has now provided 1 million underprivileged children with music education. One graduate of this program, Gustavo Dudamel, is now considered one of the greatest conductors in the world!

Grateful for a government on their side and flouting U.S. extortion, the poor came out to vote in large numbers for Mr. Maduro. These are the same poor, by the way, who came down from the mountains in 2002 to demand the return of Hugo Chavez to power after he was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup and kidnapped.

But you never hear the voices of these poor people in the U.S. press. You never hear their side of the story, how they have benefitted from the Bolivarian Revolution and how desperately they do not want to go back to how things were before.

While they have been given a voice in Venezuela, it remains muzzled in this country, and by a press which passes off pro-intervention and pro-war propaganda as journalism. It is no wonder the United States continues to careen into one disastrous military adventure after another.

Daniel Kovalik teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. His most recent book is ‘The Plot to Attack Iran’.

The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela shall overcome!

By Vinnie Molina, The Daily Blog (New Zealand), 

May 28, 2018

At the invitation of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, I had the opportunity to witness the historic presidential election in Venezuela on Sunday, May 20. I represented the Western Australia branch of the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union).

The long journey to Venezuela from Australia was well worth to learn a lesson in participatory democracy. The Venezuelan people were out there casting their vote in an environment of self- determination and love of their country.

Arriving on the wee hours of Saturday 19th May, observer delegates numbering around 400 were up at 5am on May 20 to act as witnesses to the event. Delegates were first taken to the National Electoral Council’s Production and Distribution Centre, where more than 34,000 electronic voting machines are built, tested, audited and distributed to every corner of the country.

We were welcomed by electoral authorities and the workers who were in charge of the huge responsibility. Workers gave us a guided tour of the massive warehouse, showing us the different models of the voting machines with an explanation of the safety features of the system that is employed to ensure a safe electoral tool. We had the opportunity to put the equipment through its paces to verify its reliability. Electoral staff patiently answered the many questions from delegates.

One of the safety features was an inbuilt source of power to keep voting machines running in the case of an expected blackout. The machines are protected from hacking because they do not have access to the internet and are only enabled to send data after polling booths are closed. Members of the political parties, scrutineers and members of the public who wish to participate in the counting and auditing process can be fully satisfied with the process. It incorporates crosschecking electronic results with the paper receipts provided by the machine to each elector which are deposited in a ballot box.

The voting process starts with electors arriving at their designated polling place where they are required to show an ID card then the voting machine is accessed with their finger print. The machine identifies the person and it only opens if the data matches the elector’s finger print. There is no way a person would be able to vote more than once. The vote is secret and the process witnessed by electoral authorities and members of the political parties participating in the election. All personnel involved in the election day are volunteers from the public chosen randomly in a similar way to how Australians are chosen for jury service.

On election day, polling booths were to open from 6 am to 6 pm. If there were people still queueing after 6 pm, polls would remain open until the last person had cast their vote. On this occasion, it meant some polling places did not close until 8 pm.

The electoral process in Venezuela is voluntary. Despite that, there is a sense of personal responsibility and the people freely participate at high levels.

May 20 an historic day

On Sunday 20th May, delegates were up at 4 am and on several buses by 5 am. We were taken to several polling places to witness the process. We were encouraged to ask any questions we might have, take photos or interview electoral officials or the people.

I was impressed with how politically aware were the Venezuelan people to whom we spoke. Their views of the process, the problems they face, and for most their pride in self determination and trust in the future were evident. Most of the people were aware of the country’s immense problems, in particular the economic crisis and the enormous external pressure put on the country by the United States and its allies. They were very concerned about the declaration of the ‘Lima Group’ of 14 countries calling for a ‘humanitarian’ intervention. That call openly supports the U.S. threats of regime change in Venezuela.

As a result of the U.S. economic and financial blockade, the Bolivarian government has been unable to get hard currency to purchase food and medicines. The economic blockade is hitting the general population hard and they must struggle just to satisfy their basic needs on a daily basis.

The U.S. policies aiming at regime change contributes also to the hyperinflation which has sent the local currency, the Bolivar, through the roof. It is an economic war driving the effect that workers’ wages aren’t enough to satisfy their basic needs, despite the government’s continuous salary increases. For example, a kilo of meat cost about four million Bolivars–roughly equivalent to three to four U.S. dollars. The minimum wage is equals to US$3 per month, based on the exchange rate dictated by the black market.

Most people manage to survive through the efforts of President Nicolas Maduro and his government which provides the people with a basic supply of food and cheap utilities such as gas, electricity, public transport and fuel. The government has also built more than two million homes, securing a roof over the head of the many poor Venezuelans. All of these measures are endorsed by the majority of the people who support their government. Some of President Maduro’s supporters are also critical and expect more from his government, but they are not seeking or supporting any foreign intervention in their homeland.

The election result

President Nicolas Maduro was reelected with more than 6.7 million votes, or 68 per cent, followed by the opposition candidate Henri Falcon who received 1.9 million votes, or 20 per cent. The other two running candidates received lesser returns.

All international observers and members of political parties attended the Venezuelan Electoral Council offices to listen to the official results from its Director Tibisay Lucena. At 10 pm and with 92 per cent of the results available, President Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner for a new six year period until 2025.

The opposition candidate Falcon issued a statement calling for a new election, citing a low voter turnout as the reason. Only 48 per cent of those eligible cast their vote, but Falcon forgot to mention that the opposition had called its supporters to boycott the election and not to vote. In the view of many, the process was legitimate and free of any incidents. The Venezuelan people cast their vote against violence and for peace. They also demand President Maduro fix the economy and defend their country from foreign intervention.

On Monday 21st May, delegates gave a press conference and issued a statement in support of the results and congratulated President Nicolas Maduro for his reelection. Delegates condemn the U.S. economic blockade designed to hurt the people and the government. They also condemned the Lima Declaration which calls for a humanitarian intervention in Venezuela.[1]

During our stay, delegates were able to meet with many Venezuelans as well as with members of the trade unions who thanked us for our visit and solidarity. I feel proud the CFMEU WA branch was represented. Bolivarian trade unionists expressed their desire to develop further fraternal relations. Workers I spoke to were horrified to hear of the struggle faced by construction workers in Australia, particularly the special legislation that criminalises legitimate trade union activity, and the secondary boycott provisions of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and the lack of the right to strike. They were surprised to hear reports that Australia isn’t the democracy they expect from a first world country. A message of solidarity was sent to the Aboriginal traditional custodians of the land. The struggle for land rights in Australia is well understood in Latin America, where indigenous people were also disposed from their lands.

I would like to conclude by expressing my solidarity with the Venezuelan people and its government. I congratulate President Nicolas Maduro for his reelection and l encourage the readers to also express their solidarity with Venezuela and call on the Australian government to recognise the election process of 20th May that reelected President Nicolas Maduro.

Notes by A Socialist In Canada:

[1] Many declarations have been issued by the anti-Venezuela ‘Lima Group’ of 14 Latin American countries plus Canada. Here is a ‘Lima Declaration‘ dated August 8, 2017, signed by Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru. [2] The Western critics hoping to see the demise of Venezuela’s socialist government are located not only on the right of the political spectrum. They also sit on the left. The Trotskyist World Socialist Website, for example, informed its readers in a May 22 article that the May 20 election shows that support for Venezuela’s socialist government has “tumbled”. The article concluded with a dire warning of “the inadequacy of chavismo“. An earlier commentary the same month by the same publication catalogued what is called the ‘betrayal by left nationalism‘ of successive Venezuelan governments under presidents Hugo Chávez (who died of cancer in 2013) and Nicholas Maduro.

The International Socialist Organization in the United States has long opposed Venezuela’s socialist government. A June 7, 2017 commentary in its online publication warned, “To the extent that [former president Hugo] Chávez proposed a strategy for achieving socialism in the future by accepting compromises with private capitalist control and the political rule of a minority acting on behalf of the masses of people, that, too, has been proven lacking.” A survey of Latin American politics by ISO leader Ashley Smith on May 7, 2018 wrote, “Nicolas Maduro has betrayed the masses’ aspiration for socialism and democracy.”

The New Politics online publication in the U.S. published a call by U.S. academic Chris Carlson not to vote for what he called “the corrupt and authoritarian Maduro regime” in the May 20 election.

Background readings:

* After election, intransigence in Venezuela, by Steve Ellner, published in NACLA (‘reporting on the Americas Since 1967’), May 25, 2018

* Maduro’s election win in Venezuela: A bright spot in dark times, by Nick Pemberton, CounterPunch, May 23, 2018

… Across the United States, the press tells us that Venezuela is failing because of socialism. The U.S. left has not been much better, often painting the situation as a complicated two way fight to the bottom between the Venezuelan government and U.S. sanctions…

* A primer on the Venezuelan presidential election of May 20, 2018, by Alan Macleod, CounterPunch, May 18, 2018, and: Writing off democracy in Venezuela, U.S. press and politicians dream of a coup, by Alan MacLeod, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), May 16, 2018 (Alan MacLeod is a researcher and PhD graduate at the University of Glasgow. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting, was recently published by Routledge.)