polly7
polly7's JournalA World War Has Begun
Break the Silenceby John Pilger / March 23rd, 2016
Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority. This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.
The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers.
This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.
************
No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?
Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/a-world-war-has-begun/
WW111 was begun with the illegal invasion and military destruction of Iraq, imo with every death since being a continuation in the grand plan of that PNAC objective.
Hillary’s Hate Crime
Killing Africa’s Best Hope for Independenceby Jason Hirthler / March 24th, 2016
Of course, to imply that the brutal assassination of the leader of a sovereign state by foreign-backed terrorists was a criminal act would be to implicate Hillary Clinton in a war crime. And that, we all know, is off the table. But that is the first point to make in an honest discussion of Clinton’s involvement in Libya. It was a war crime, violating the U.N. Charter and the Nuremburg principals. Wars of aggression, as Nuremberg judge Robert Jackson limned, “are the supreme international crime, because they contain within them the evil of the whole.” Precisely the story of Libya, a country with the highest standard of living in Africa, destroyed by Western NATO aerial forces backing terrorist jihadists on the ground. The once proud nation is now a festering swamp of extremism and an escape valve for ISIS fighters being routed in Syria.
Over the course of his career, Gaddafi implemented a huge raft of social and economic programs that were highly popular with the people. It seems hard to reconcile the notion of a populace living in perpetual fear with one that receives free education, healthcare, housing, and a novel system of direct democracy—born in an Islamic state.
Basically an admirer of Gamal Nasser’s theories of economic nationalism as a path between Cold War polarities, Gaddafi was an independent-minded, anti-imperialist Muslim radical. He dramatically altered the shape of the state several times, lastly by creating something called the Jamahiriya, which was a radical form of direct democracy, or at least an attempt at it. In short, small communities would meet, debate issues, and send off representatives to a people’s congress to shape laws based on community decisions. Then this legislation would be sent to revolutionary committees for implementation. Observers have noted instances in which Gaddafi, in a nominal role of avuncular overseer, was rebuffed by the Jamahiriya system and times where he rejected its demands. As head of the armed forces, he never really relinquished the power that would have made the Jamahiriya all the more empowering to the population. But this is not to say it does not include elements that American democracy could not profit by, notably the Jeffersonian and anarchic notion of delegating decision-making to the most grassroots level.
For Africans, these were monumental undertakings and offered the hope of independence from Western militaries, multinationals, and creditors. For the West, Gaddafi’s actions were the ultimate crime. He was essentially trying to block the IMF from furthering shackling Africa in suffocating debt that, to be sure, would provide a steady flow of interest payments back to Western banks. He also effectively proposed a de-dollarized African economic block free of both the dollar reserve currency and Western lending institutions. He understood that both were tools of oppression and enslavement. He wanted to replace these extractive tools with continental development funds beneficial to Africans.
For all of this he was murdered and his country reduced to ruin.
As part of the run up to war, Barack Obama froze some $30 billion belonging to the Libyan Central Bank. This money was going to fund the above developments. How convenient that the money was frozen, which derailed the projects, and that a no-fly zone was implemented, which immediately led to the illegal war that overthrew the Gaddafi government.
It’s obvious that the United States sought to unseat Gaddafi because he threatened the global superstructure of U.S. power. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Washington isn’t afraid of Islam but independence. This tragic spectacle has played out ad nauseum across the history of the American empire. In North America itself, in Central and South America, in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and throughout Asia. Anywhere freethinkers rear their un-indoctrinated heads, they are swiftly cut down. Rulers like Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chavez are demonized not for their flaws as governors but for their virtues as nationalists. Independent domestic economics, independent foreign policies–these are the bête noir of Washington’s imperial plan.
Sadly, the rest of the world has been slow to learn the hard lesson that the United States can’t be trusted. This should have been obvious to the world during the Native American genocide. But each new generation of leaders forget their history and repeat the gullibility of their forbears. Yet it is also every new generation of American leaders that somehow ingest the vices of their antecedents.
As time was running out, Gaddafi fielded several peace proposals to the West, ignored by Hillary Clinton as she made an impassioned push for war. He tried vainly to deny the lies promoted incessantly by the Western media: that he was minutes away from committing genocide on his own population. He never had a chance. Media is the spearhead of American foreign policy. Controlling the narrative is the fight that must be won before the war is fought. There is no better practitioner of this shadowy art than Washington.
Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/hillarys-hate-crime/
Thousands of children dying of starvation in the Colombian Guajira
By Arturo Rosales, Axis of Logic
Thursday, Feb 11, 2016
La Guajira is a Colombian department bordering Venezuela and encompassing most of the Guajira Peninsula, on the Caribbean Sea. It is distinguished by desert landscapes, giant sand dunes and the remote ranches and fishing villages of the indigenous Wayúu people. The capital city Riohacha has a palm-lined waterfront, beaches and craft stalls, and serves as the gateway for adventure tourism in the region.
However, behind this image of an indigenous people living and preserving their millennium culture in their traditional territory, there is an epidemic of hunger and starvation present affecting mainly the children of La Guajira.
Just recent two more children from the Wayúu died from malnutrition in less than a week and this has been an ongoing problem that, in the words of Javier Rojas, a leader of this indigenous community, “is an epidemic that is undermining the childhood future of La Guajira”.
There has been no let-up in children’s deaths from starvation in the Colombian La Guajira. Part of La Guajira runs into Venezuelan territory where the Wayúu are still poor but thanks to the socialist policies of the Bolivarian Revolution, tragic cases of starvation and malnutrition of vulnerable infants has largely been avoided.
On the other hand, Colombia’s neoliberal, free trade minded government does not provide such effective social safety nets for the vulnerable Wayúu children and the results are as tragic as they are sad and hard to bear.
Water duty in La Guajira
Reports on this situation have been filed with the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) and show that in the last eight years more than 4770 children of this indigenous community have died due to malnourishment and a lack of drinking water.
In 2015 the representative of the Shipia Wayúu, Javier Rojas, rejected the numbers mentioned by Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos concerning the number of Wayúu children dying of malnutrition in La Guajira. According to Santos only 300 children had died from malnutrition in the last eight years, which is an attempt to minimize or hide the true scale of this tragedy. In fact, in a report broadcast today on Radio Del Sur, some Colombian doctors are saying that the cause of death of many children has been heart failure and thus do not mention malnutrition.
In an interview Rojas stated that more than 3000 children had died from malnutrition and lack of drinking water according to a census carried out by indigenous families themselves. Rojas maintains that each week one or two children are dying from this cause.
For the Wayúu population as whole living in La Guajira the situation has been complicated by a three year long drought that shows no sign of breaking. There is little work, most of it temporary and paid at starvation wage levels and children in the area survive on a glass of chichi a day plus any extra food drummed up from the temporary work their parents can find.
According to Javier Rojas there is simply no work available and no governmental source of food. “In the salt beds, where there used to be work, the whole area is now being run by foreigners,” he said.
Child poverty in Colombia's La Guajira
Last year the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) asked the Colombian government to “adopt measures necessary to preserve life and human integrity” of children and adolescents of the indigenous Wayúu community in the Guajira municipalities of Uribia, Manaure, Riohacha and Maicao. According to the CIDH the indigenous “are at risk due to the lack and access to drinking water and the state of destitution of children living in the community”.
The CIDH also asked the Colombian government to ensure the ”availability, accessibility and quality of health services focused on combating infantile malnutrition in the region”.
La Guajira has a population of 846,609 of which 54.8% live in the towns and 45.2% in rural areas. Almost 45% is indigenous which represents 20.2% of the total indigenous population of Colombia.
Unemployment in La Guajira is running at 47%, which is 300% higher than the national average in Colombia.
Water for coal mining but not for indigenous communities
In La Guajira policies allow foreign investments to enjoy far more rights and importance than social policies to protect the population. Mining activities to extract natural resources do little to stimulate any social development and on the contrary increase the vulnerability of the inhabitants due to damage to the environment and the privatization of water resources in the area.
El Cerrejo - World's biggest open cast coal mine
El Cerrejón is the world’s largest open cast coal mine. It is located at the source of the River Ranchería and produces annually 32 million tons of coal. This exploitation renders a high level of taxes for the country. There is also a railway consortium for transporting minerals for about 150 km direct to a sea port where vessels with a capacity of 180 thousand tons are moored.
Cerrejon Coal is owned by three mega mining multinationals listed on the London Stock Exchange and with offices in London: Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Glencore Xstrata.
Originally El Cerrejón was seen as the great hope for combating unemployment in the region, but it has been converted into a camp of human exploitation. Multinationals that get rich extracting Colombian coal, have been denounced by the miners for not complying with minimum labor or wage conditions. Workers mention long shifts under a searing sun; no recognition of work related illnesses such as silicosis, dehydration and physical injuries as well as hearing problems - and this is without even mentioning the long hours laboring in coal dust.
The indigenous community has also denounced the environmental and human impact that open cast coal mining has caused. They have lost access to the river as the land has been privatized as well as thousands of hectares of tribal lands. Nearby settlements suffer from noise, explosions, drilling and the rail line crossing their territory.
Despite protests there has been little or no response from the Colombian government to rein in this ongoing destruction of the life of the Wayúu. The main water source is controlled by the multinationals that run El Cerrejón. They have desalinization plants, water holding areas and water pumps for their industrial processes.
At the same time water resources are being denied to the Wayúu causing misery and death all in the name of the exploitation of natural resources for monetary gain.
Loading coal from El Cerrejón at Puerto Bolívar
Conclusions
Intervention by the CIDH has had little impact and so year after year, vulnerable Wayúu children are dying unnecessarily. Now, what are you doing with the taxes you collect from the coal mining carried out at El Cerrejón, President Santos? Millions of us would like to know.
Do you have no control to curb the anti human rights abuses of Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Glencore Xstrata who now own the natural resources of the Colombian people?
And one final thought – imagine the outcry if kids were dying of hunger in Venezuela as is happening in Colombia. We have enough mud thrown at us saying our economic model is wrong since people cannot buy the soap powder they want! God knows what would be said about the economic model if kids were actually dying in their thousands of hunger. The marines would already be landing.
The fact little is said in the corporate media about this tragedy of starving kids on La Guajira must mean that these unethical rags and their editors believe that the Colombian economic-malnutrition model is just fine.
Arturo Rosales writes from Caracas
© Copyright 2016 by AxisofLogic.com
This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article in its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of Logic as the original source including a "live link" to the article. Thank you!
Can the Establishment Fix Its Bernie Sanders Problem?
By Shamus Cooke
February 11, 2016
The first major Party attack misfired badly when the Democrats tried to sabotage Bernie by restricting access to voter data. Hundreds of thousands of people expressed outrage on social media and by signing petitions.
The blowback stunned the Party, which quickly backtracked. They learned a powerful lesson: By destroying Bernie, they could destroy the Party, completely discrediting themselves in front of millions of people.
They didn’t realize how fast the political ground was shifting beneath their feet. Nobody did, and unless an anti-Bernie cryptonite is found soon, the crisis will deepen. Their own electoral game is rigged, yet out of their control.
The trump card of the Party elites is their control of “superdelegates.” But overplaying your best cards is risky too. Imagine Sanders winning the popular vote by wide margins in state after state, only to have the Party machine give the delegates to Clinton. Acting this undemocratically could trigger a deep crisis and destroy the veneer of democracy.
For now the Democrats have opted for a backup plan. It isn’t working. They launched a coordinated pro-Hillary bandwagon campaign, foolishly thinking that Bernie’s populist message could be drowned by a flood of “respected individuals” offering glowing endorsements of Clinton or making cheap attacks against Bernie.
Full article incl. links: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/can-the-establishment-fix-its-bernie-sanders-problem/
Fanaticism and Fantasy Drive Purported TPP ‘Benefits’
By Pete Dolack
Source: Systemic Disorder
February 9, 2016
?w=640&h=311
Protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, October 2015 (photo by Lorena Müller, Pirate Times)
Heartland later began specializing in global-warming denial, receiving $676,500 from Exxon Mobil alone between 1996 and 2006; after which it stopped identifying its contributors. Mr. Bast seems to have no shame, writing that “Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate” in an article describing global warming as a “scam.” In fact, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity is behind global warming.
It is this same attitude toward the truth that pervades papers predicting wondrous results from “free trade” agreements. In contrast to the Peterson Institute’s rosy projections, the first 20 years of NAFTA proved to be a lose-lose-lose proposition for Canada, Mexico and the United States. Almost 5 million Mexican farmers have been displaced with inflation-adjusted wages in Mexico barely above the level of 1980; U.S. food prices have risen 67 percent since NAFTA took effect and two-thirds of displaced manufacturing workers in the U.S. have been forced to take work with reduced wages; and Canadians suffered drastic cuts in government benefits while their environmental laws were reversed in the wake of corporate challenges.
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/fanaticism-and-fantasy-drive-purported-tpp-benefits/
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda
By Tom Engelhardt
Source: TomDispatch.com
February 9, 2016
It was a hell of a dream, with an emphasis on hell. It would, in fact, prove a nightmare of the first order, and the cameras just kept rolling and rolling for nearly 13 years while (I think it’s time for an acronym here) the FFFIHW, also known as the Finest Fighting Force etc., etc., proved that it could not successfully:
*Defeat determined, if lightly armed, minority insurgencies.
*Train proxy armies to do its bidding.
*Fight a war based on sectarian versions of Islam or a war of ideas.
*Help reconstruct a society in the Greater Middle East, no matter how much money it pumped in.
*Create much of anything but failed states and deeply corrupt ruling elites in the region.
*Bomb an insurgent movement into surrender.
*Drone-kill terror leaders until their groups collapsed.
*Intervene anywhere in the Greater Middle East in just about any fashion, by land or air, and end up with a world in any way to its liking.
Long, full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/shoulda-woulda-coulda/
School of the Americas Graduates Responsible for 1989 Jesuit Massacre Face Extradition to Spain
Military Officers Arrested in El Salvador
by SOA Watch / February 8th, 2016
The SOA made headlines again in 1996 when the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Despite this shocking admission, and even in the face of hundreds of documented cases of human rights abuses connecting to soldiers trained at the institution, no independent investigation into the training facility has ever taken place.
Protests calling for the closure of the School of the Americas/WHINSEC have taken place around the November 16 anniversary of the San Salvador massacre since 1990. Last year over 2,000 participated in the annual demonstration at the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia to call for the closure of the military training school, which continues to instruct Latin American soldiers, as well as to demand an end to U.S.-led militarization in the Americas that continues to fuel violence and forced migration. SOA Watch maintains that for justice to prevail, the U.S. officials who are responsible for the training of repressive foreign militaries need to be held accountable as well.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/02/school-of-the-americas-graduates-responsible-for-1989-jesuit-massacre-face-extradition-to-spain/
I just saw this one the other day.
Yemen is being destroyed, purposefully. Hospitals, schools, infrastructure, important heritage sites Yemenis have always placed so much pride in. Millions are suffering from food-shortage or starvation. It's sick, and the world couldn't care less.
Risking World War III in Syria
February 6, 2016
Exclusive: After Saudi-backed Syrian rebels balked at peace talks and the Russian-backed Syrian army cut off Turkish supply lines to jihadists and other Syrian rebels, the U.S. and its Mideast Sunni “allies” appear poised to invade Syria and force “regime change” even at the risk of fighting Russia, a gamble with nuclear war, writes Joe Lauria.
The Prize of Aleppo
The excuse of the Geneva collapse is a ruse. There was little optimism the talks would succeed. The real reason for the coming showdown in Syria is the success of Russia’s military intervention in defense of the Syrian government against the Islamic State and other extremist groups. Many of these groups are supported by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States in pursuit of overthrowing Assad.
These three nations are all apparently poised for a ground invasion of Syria just as, by no coincidence, the Syrian Arab Army with Russian air cover is pushing to liberate perhaps the greatest prize in the Syrian civil war — Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital. The Russians and Syrians have already cut off Turkey’s supply lines to rebels in the city.
On Saturday, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates joined the Saudis in saying they would intervene only as part of a U.S.-led ground invasion. The Obama administration has maintained that it would not send U.S. ground forces into Syria, beyond a few hundred special forces.
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/06/risking-world-war-iii-in-syria/
Regime change ......... it never gets old.
General Wesley Clark tells of how Middle East destabilization was planned as far back as 1991
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayHometown: Saskatchewan
Home country: Canada
Member since: Sat Jul 9, 2005, 11:46 PM
Number of posts: 20,582
