70,000 Kalashnikovs: Cameron’s “Moderate” Rebels

by ROBERT FISK

Not since Hitler ordered General Walther Wenck to send his non-existent 12th Army to rescue him from the Red Army in Berlin has a European leader believed in military fantasies as PR Dave Cameron did last week. Telling the House of Commons about the 70,000 “moderate” fighters deployed in Syria was not just lying in the sense that Tony Blair lied – because Blair persuaded himself to believe in his own dishonesty – but something approaching burlesque. It was whimsy – ridiculous, comic, grotesque, ludicrous. It came close to a unique form of tragic pantomime.

At one point last week, one of Cameron’s satraps was even referring to this phantom army as “ground troops”. I doubt if there are 700 active “moderate” foot soldiers in Syria – and I am being very generous, for the figure may be nearer 70 – let alone 70,000. And the Syrian Kurds are not going to conquer Isis for us; they’re too busy trying to survive the assaults of our Turkish allies. Besides, aren’t the “moderates” supposed to be the folk who don’t carry weapons at all? Who’s ever heard before of a “moderate” with a Kalashnikov?

The Syrian regime’s army – who really are ground troops and who never worried about the “moderate” rebels because they always ran away – are the only regular force deployed in Syria. And thanks to Vladimir Putin rather than PR Dave, they’re beginning to win back territory. Yet after losing at least 60,000 soldiers – killed largely by Isis and the al-Nusra Front – the Syrian army would be hard put to fight off an assault on Damascus by Dave Cameron’s 70,000 “moderates”. If this ghost army existed, it would already have captured Damascus and hurled Bashar al-Assad from power.

Yet in the Commons last week, we were supposed to believe this tomfoolery – all in the cause of launching two or three fighter bombers against Isis in Syria. It wouldn’t make us more vulnerable, Dave told us. In fact we were already vulnerable because we were bombing Isis in Iraq. Yet Dave knows – and we all know, don’t we? – that Isis will most assuredly try to commit an atrocity in Britain to revenge Dave’s latest schoolboy adventure. Then – à la Blair after 7/7 – Dave will insist that Isis are killing us because they hate our “values”. Then will come the inevitable video of a suicide killer saying he killed our innocents because Dave sent his miniature air force to bomb Isis.

The odd thing about all this is that most Brits I come across – and most Arabs I talk to in the Middle East – are well aware of the above. So is the Labour Party. But the Blairite MPs in the Labour Party are going to vote with Dave because while they loathe the evil cult of Isis, they hate the evil cult of Corbyn even more. Do they too believe – as we are all supposed to believe – that the so-called “Joint Intelligence Committee” is telling the truth about the mythical 70,000 “moderates”? Is this unspeakably valiant committee so stupid that it does not tell Dave about the role of the Saudi Wahabi death cult, which is the direct religious and sectarian inspiration for Isis? And if it did tell Dave, why didn’t he talk about the Saudis in the Commons last week?

No, we are not “at war”. Isis can massacre our innocents, but it is not invading us. Isis is not about to capture Paris or London – as we and the Americans captured Baghdad and Mosul in 2003. No. What Isis intends to do is to persuade us to destroy ourselves. Isis wants us to hate our Muslim minorities. It wants civil war in France between the elite and its disenfranchised Muslims, most of them of Algerian origin. It wants the Belgians to hate their Muslims. It wants us Brits to hate our Muslims. Isis must have been outraged by the thousands of fine Europeans who welcomed with love the million Muslim refugees who reached Germany. The Muslims should have been heading towards the new Caliphate – not running away from it. So now it wishes to turn us against the refugees.

To achieve this, it must implicate hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim refugees in its atrocities. It must force our EU nations to introduce States of Emergency, suspend civil liberties, raid the homes of Muslims. It wishes to destroy the European Union itself. It wishes to strike at the heart of the European ideal by liquidating the very foundation of the union: by persuading us to tear up the Schengen agreement and to close our frontiers. And we are doing exactly that. Are we, in some auto-panic, actually working for Isis? If that gruesome institution did not ban alcohol, their members would be toasting with champagne our political leaders for their vacuity, their sophistry, the abject fear with which they now regularly try to inject us under the dangerous old cry of “Unify the nation”.

Vladimir Putin comprehends this. He knows that Turkey is helping Isis – this is why he is going to destroy the Isis oil smuggling route to Turkey – and, as a former serving KGB officer, he understands the cynicism of any crisis. If an American aircraft had strayed into Turkish airspace, he asked at his Kremlin press conference with François Hollande last week, does anyone believe that Turkey would have shot down the US pilots? We all know the answer to that. If Turkey wished to destroy Isis, why does it bombard Isis’ Kurdish enemies? Why does it imprison two of Turkey’s top journalists for reporting how the Turkish intelligence service smuggled weapons to Islamist fighters in Syria? And Putin is hardly going to object if the EU is bent on suicide-through-fear.

Amid all this, PR Dave raves on. And why not? Having Photoshopped a fake poppy on to his lapel to honour Britain’s war dead, why shouldn’t he get away with Photoshopping 70,000 fake “moderates” on to a map of Syria?

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared. 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/30/70000-kalashnikovs-camerons-moderate-rebels/

Class, War and David Cameron

 COLIN TODHUNTER

British Prime Minister David Cameron has said it is time for Britain to join air strikes against Islamic State in Syria (ISIS). After the killing of 130 people in Paris, he feels the tide has now turned in favour of military action against ISIS. Cameron has told the British public that such action is vital to protect Britain from similar attacks.

Although in 2013 Cameron lost a vote in parliament on air strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces (based on the liethat government forces had used chemical weapons), he is now arguing that Britain does not have the luxury of being able to wait any longer to launch attacks on Syrian territory, this time supposedly on ISIS.  Some anticipate that Cameron might push for a vote on the matter in parliament within the coming week.

However, any talk about attacking Syria to make Britain ‘safer’ is based on hollow rhetoric, as Graham Vanbergen writes:

“In the 12 years preceding the Invasion of Iraq, 65 people in Europe were killed by various ‘terrorist’ attacks, mainly in France, Italy and Greece. In the 12 years since that fateful invasion, the terrorists kill rate has increased by nearly 600%. Far from making its citizens safer, politicians have achieved the opposite.”

For all Cameron’s seemingly high-minded utterances about protecting Britain by attacking the territory of a sovereign state thousands of miles away, it is worth reflecting on Felicity Arbuthnot’s observation that what he is advocating is wholly illegal:

“David Cameron is morphing in to his pal, alleged war criminal Tony Blair and is attempting to persuade Parliament that Britain must join those illegally in Syrian air space and equally illegally drop its own bombs with no UN mandate for such action. The Cameron backing media is beating the war drums along with America’s partisan hacks…”

Like Blair before him, Cameron is using a good old dose of fear mongering and a grab for the moral high ground in an attempt to disguise the illegal nature of what he is advocating. The hypocrisy is palpable.

Earlier this year, in response to Syrian refugees arriving in Europe, Cameron said that he felt deeply moved by the image of a Syrian boy dead on a Turkish beach. As pressure mounted on Britain to take in more of those fleeing to Europe, he added that the country would fulfill its moral responsibilities.

Anyone who had been following the Syrian conflict at that point could not have failed to detect the hypocrisy. Former French foreign minister Roland Dumas has stated that Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009. He told French TV:

“I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business… I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”

Writing in The Guardian in 2013, Nafeez Ahmed discussed leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, that confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources.

In 2009, Syrian President Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets in direct competition with Russia and in the hope of further undermining and helping to break the energy-dependent Russian economy. Russian ally Assad refused to sign and instead pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran crossing Iraq and into Syria that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe. Thus Assad had to go.

Last year, Cameron told the United Nations that Britain was ready to play its part in confronting “an evil against which the whole world must unite.” He also said that that “we” must not be so “frozen with fear” of repeating the mistakes of the 2003 Iraq invasion. He was attempting to drum up support for wider Anglo-US direct military action against the Syria under the pretext of attacking ISIS.

A year on, it’s the same story with added impetus due to the attacks in Paris. Cameron is again trying his hand again at pushing Britain into war: one that it is already covertly involved up to its neck in and one that Britain has already ‘subcontracted’ out to a bunch of anti-Assad terror groups, the foot soldiers of US-led imperialism in the region.

Cameron’s call for an urgent military response by Britain comes on the back of the events in Paris, which occurred at a highly convenient time as Russia’s (wholly legal and UN-backed) actions in Syria were severely undermining the anti-Assad militias – trained, funded and supported by the West, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others (see the forthcoming book ‘The Dirty War on Syria’ by Tim Anderson). Russian intervention has turned the tide against the West’s proxy forces in the region, including ISIS.

David Cameron is manipulating a war-fatigued public into getting behind yet another military intervention disguised as yet another component of the bogus ‘war on terror’. Whether it involves rhetoric about ‘Russian aggression’ or it involves a US-backed coup in Ukraine, the destruction of Libya or NATO-Saudi-backed terror in Syria, these components are not for one minute to be regarded by the public as the planned machinations of empire with the aim of destroying or at least severely weakening Russia. The public must be kept confused and most of all fearful of the designated bogeyman of Washington’s choice.

If Cameron is serious about defeating ISIS, he would do better to join with Russia and help sever the logistics that enable ISIS to function as a fighting force in Syria. All roads lead to Turkey (quite literally) and Saudi Arabia. But Cameron’s role is to dance to the neocon’s tune in Washington, to deceive the public, to lie to it and to push the world ever closer to a major conflict with Russia.

His sidekick, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon is also on cue. Speaking on Britain’s Radio 5, he stated the need “to spend less on some things like the welfare system and to spend more on things that really matter to keep our country safe.”

With a £12 billion saving on cuts to the welfare budget, Fallon was attempting to justify a £12 billion increase to the military budget to help pay for eight BAE warships, nine Boeing maritime patrol crafts, surveillance drones and Lockheed Martin jets.

Add on the cost replacing the Trident nuclear programme put at around £31 billion, with another £10 billion being set aside for contingencies, and it is clear where Britain’s priorities lie: not with ordinary people whose jobs have been sold to the lowest bidder abroad and who now see their liberties and welfare state being dismantled under the lies of ‘austerity’ (a manifestation of ‘class war’, as Noam Chomsky correctly states) and tackling terrorism but with arms companies and militarism.

Cuts to welfare, increases in military spending and events in Syria form part of an ongoing war on working people. That’s because militarism is but one arm of a neoliberal agenda that seeks to bend all working people and regional elites – whether Assad, Putin, Saddam or Gaddafi – to the will of Western capital. It is ordinary working people who ultimately pay the price, whether refugees fleeing from conflict, civilian deaths in war zones or those subject to the types of structural violence that ‘austerity’ or other forms of economic warfare brings courtesy of the IMF, World Bank, WTO or trade agreements like NAFTA, TPA and TTIP. And, ultimately, it is the Lockhead Martins, the Blackwaters (XE Services) and the BAEs, the Chevrons and Occidental Petroleums, the Halliburtons and Monsantos and the financial interests on Wall Street and in the City of London that benefit.

As the media get ready to cheer lead Cameron into war with the unstated aim of removing Assad from power, this fact should not be lost on anyone, not least the British public.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher based in the UK and India.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/class-war-and-david-cameron/

Recolonization Of India: Circle Is Closing Faster Through New-Education Policy Dictated By WTO-GATS!

By Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle

Countercurrents.org

Talk by Dr. ANIL SADGOPAL,
Ret Professor, Delhi university, Member of the AIFRTE Presidium
Date : 30-11-2015 @ 5:15 pm, Venue: CLT

New Education Policy 2015 (NEP), which will be unleashed in Dec. 2015, is being drafted by the Government of India (GoI) on which opinions have been sought. In 1986, National Policy on Education was framed and amended in the wake of implementing neo–liberal policies in 1992. Now, NEP 2015 is a move of GoI towards the implementation of WTO-GATS [World Trade Organisation - General Agreement on Trade in Services] dictates before its ministerial meeting in Dec 2015.. While recolonializing our nation by implementing the WTO-GATS dictate, under that umbrella, Hindutva forces are planning to reestablish caste system and revive the brahminic hegemony. The composition of the 4 member NEP drafting committee itself is revealing in terms of what the government’s agenda: three members are bureaucrats and only one is an academician – who is none other than RSS and hindutva ideologue Dinanath Batra!

The implementation of LPG [Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization] policy and GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], for the last twenty five years, has had grave consequences of massive destruction of agriculture, lakhs of farmer suicides, firing of millions of workers, government employees and IT employees, almost elimination of small and medium scale industries, plundering and destruction of natural resources. After destroying productive sectors like agriculture and industry, now the imperialists’ evil eye has turned to the service sector. Essentials of human existence like food, water, land, education, health, sanitation, transportation and climate are now turned into fully tradable commodities under WTO-GATS for the unrestricted loot by MNCs and TNCs. By signing on WTO-GATS, it will be mandatory for GoI to restructure the system through legislative and judiciary measures by drafting policies and passing Bills and Acts accordingly. The New Education Policy 2015 is one measure in this game. Though, the LPG is introduced by the Congress around 90s, and had strived for it’s implementation, the Modi Govt is willing to complete the recolonization phase of INDIA as fast as possible. To the core, Modi’s “Minimum government Maximum governance” imitate the interest of WTO-GATS!

NEP themes mention that the existing educational establishment is incapable of and has failed in supplying skilled human capital to the labour market and complain about its inadequacy in systematic thinking. NEP is a move towards demolishing the academic establishment of the nation phase by phase. Phases will start with grabbing the power of the states to legislate and administer education through the unification and centralization of pedagogy and curriculum; dissolving the power of syndicates/senates and disaffiliating colleges from Universities, turning them into skill instruction based community colleges; stopping fund allocation and dissolving the UGC; free education only for 1 % for the so called meritorious and 1 % needy; liberalization and deregulation of foreign educational institutions, allowing them to grant degrees in India; importing subject experts from the industry and foreign academia through GIAN or ‘Teach in India’ for content generation for online repositories like MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses] and trashing the job security of local teachers and gradually pushing them out as ‘an endangered species’; digitization of education and networking of institutes through ‘Digital India’, where students are no longer stake holders in education, but foreign universities, multi-national companies, corporates and private industries are (Though, students rush to MOOCs with an idea that it is ‘open’ and a public property which anyone can access ‘at anytime’, ‘from anywhere’, and ‘acquire knowledge as if they wish’ – similar to ‘water’, a decade later, the whole education establishment will be scrapped down, as MOOCs is a ‘disruptive innovation’ for the corporate like Coursera to loot); vocationalisation of school education from 8th std in the name of skill development, pushing majority of the children of toiling masses into informal labour. We need to ask the question whether ‘Make in India’ will ride on the back of exploitation of such unorganized informal labour. Finally it must be said that subjecting education to international trade rules would lead to the loss of authority of the national and the state governments to regulate education according to the nation’s needs and priorities.

Along with serving GATS, the NEP also seems to be a move towards grabbing state governments’ power; abolition or dilution of reservation; and perhaps even a reintroduction of traditional caste based occupation through vocationalisation of education from early childhood; suggesting to institutions to ensure safety of girl students through CCTV surveillance or to provide education through DTH at home, thus throwing girls back to the dark rooms of patriarchy; establishing Indology studies and departments for dead languages to promote brahmanical culture in the name of ‘cultural tolerance’ and imposing Sanskrit throughout India.

GATS removes the legislative authority of parliament and means a surrender of judicial power to trade tribunals, in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, students, environmental and advocacy groups and labour unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished. Re-establishing ‘slavery’ all over again. In this context, the New Education Policy is nothing but the spider’s web knitted over our nation as it terms human beings as ‘human capital’ and knowledge as ‘knowledge economy’ as mentioned in GATS. Perhaps WTO, controlled and directed by the trans-national capital and the Super Power - US, can legitimately be the policeman, guardian and rule maker of the international socio-economic-political and cultural system, which is locally supervised by existing brahminic hegemony.

It is the death knell for the sovereignty of our country. By demolishing agriculture, labour and services like education, health and restructuring it in accordance with WTO-GATS, does the government of India want to serve the lone super power, the US, and aid in a more rapid closing of the recolonisation circle in India? Scrapping of non-NET fellowship, implementation Lyngdoh committee recommendations and code of conduct, UGC’s circular on safety and security in campus and especially girl students, increase of fee in IITs and NITs, contractualization of teaching positions through UGC-FRP and DST-INSPIRE, self-financing of CSIR Labs and IITs, fund cut for R&D, appointment of RSS lackeys in FTII, ICHR, NCERT etc. are tip of the iceberg.

In the condition of systemic crisis, our resolve must be to trash the NEP which serves the interests of imperialists and Hindutva forces and let us strive to construct a new policy on education which is people oriented, indigenous and patriotic.

Kick out WTO-GATS! Defeat recolonization!

http://www.countercurrents.org/apsc291115.htm

British PM to Risk Parliament Vote on Syrian Airstrikes

Urges Opposition to Defy Their Leader, Endorse War Escalation

by Jason Ditz, 

When Britain’s parliament approved its involvement in a war against ISIS, they made it clear that they were only approving airstrikes in Iraq, and explicitly ruled out any strikes in Syria without a new resolution. Prime Minister David Cameron initially sought to circumvent that by “embedding” planes with Canadian units who were already attacking Syria, but now is looking to get parliament to formally approve the escalation.

The move is seen as risky, with tepid support among his own party meaning he’s going to have to rely heavily on opposition Labour MPs, and a failed vote would be a particular embarrassment at a time when Cameron is trying to present himself as ratcheting up the conflict dramatically.

This has Cameron pressuring Labour MPs to defy their leader, Jeremy Corbyn,who is opposed to the conflict and warns increased British involvement will only fuel extremism and ultimately benefit ISIS.

Cameron is also under fire from all sides in the parliament for claims last week that there are 70,000 moderate fighters willing to ally with Britain, a figure for which he claims secret evidence but which even members of his own party called preposterously high.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/11/29/british-pm-to-risk-parliament-vote-on-syrian-airstrikes/

Forcing Greek Women Into Prostitution: Capitalism At Work

By Paul Craig Roberts
Paulcraigroberts.org

Zero Hedge reports a story from “Keep Talking Greece” that first appeared in The Timeshttp://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article4624755.ece

According to the story, the plummeting living standards forced on the Greek people by German chancellor Merkel and the European banks have forced large numbers of young Greek women into prostitution. The large increase in the supply of women offering sexual services has dropped the price to 4 euros an hour. That’s $4.24, enough for a cheese pie or a sandwich, the value that bankster-imposed austerity has placed on an hour’s use of a woman’s body. The half hour price is $2.12. They don’t even get the minimum wage.

When one reads a story such as this, one hopes it is a parody or a caricature. Although the London Times has fallen a long way, it is not yet the kind of newspaper that can be purchased at grocery store checkout counters.

The story gains credence from the websites in the US on which female university students advertise their availability as mistresses to men who have the financial means to help them with their expenses. From various news reports, mistress seems to be a main occupation of female students at high-cost universities such as NYU.

The NYU girls have it far better than the Greek ones. The mistress relationship is monogamous and can be long-lasting and loving. Prudes make an issue of the disparity in ages, but disparity in age was long a feature of upper class marriages. Prostitutes have large numbers of partners, each possibly carrying disease, and they receive nothing in return except cash. In Greece, if the report is correct, the payment is so low that the women cannot survive on the money beyond lunchtime.

This is capitalism at work. In the US the hardship comes from escalating tuition costs, with 75% of the university budget spent on administration, rather than on faculty or student aid, and from the lack of jobs available to graduates that pay enough to service the student loans. These days your waiter in the restaurant might be an adjunct or part-time university professor hoping to get a full-time job as an actor. As mistresses, the NYU girls will be doing better.

In Greece the hardship is imposed from outside the country by the European Union, which Greece foolishly joined, giving away its sovereignty in exchange for austerity. The banksters and their agents in the EU and German governments claim that the Greek people benefitted from the loans and, therefore, are responsible for paying back the loans. But the loans were not made to the Greek people. The loans were made to corrupt Greek governments who were paid bribes by the lenders to accept the loans, and the proceeds often were used for purchases from the country from which the loan originated. For example, Greek governments were paid bribes to borrow money from German or other foreign banks in order to purchase German submarines. It is through this type of corruption that the Greek debt grew.

The story told by the financial media and neoliberal economists who shill for the banksters is that the Greek people irresponsibly borrowed the money and spent it on welfare for themselves, and having enjoyed the fruits of the loans don’t want to repay them. This story is a lie. But the lie serves to ensure that the Greek people are looted in order to make good the banks’ own mistakes in overlending. The banks got both the loan fees and the kickbacks from the submarine producers. (I am using submarine producers as a generic for the range of outside goods and services on which the loans were spent.)

In Greece the loans are being paid by money “saved” by cutting Greek pensions, education and social services, and public employment, and by money raised from selling off public assets such as ports, municipal water systems and protected islands. The cutbacks in pensions, education, social services and employment drain money from the economy, and the sale of public assets drains money from the government’s budget. Michael Hudson tells the story brilliantly in his new book, Killing The Host.

The result is widespread hardship, and the result of the hardship is that young Greek women have to sell themselves.

It is just as Marx, Engels, and Lenin said.

One would think that people everywhere would be outraged. But to most of those who commented on Zero Hedge it is just something to make crude jokes about—“think about it, Viagra costs 4x the cost of pussy.” “Sure beats dating and taking a girl to dinner.” Those who represent the vaunted “Western Values” see nothing to be outraged about.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-28/meanwhile-greece-price-prostitute-drops-€4-hour

The percentage of pro-Western Russians who look to the West for leadership must be rapidly approaching zero.

What’s more important? The dignity of women or another billion dollars for the banksters?
Western “civilization” has given its answer: Another billion dollars for the banksters.

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

http://www.countercurrents.org/pcr291115.htm

‘Oxygen for jihadists’: ISIS-smuggled oil flows through Turkey to intl markets – Iraqi MP

Terroist group Islamic State earns millions of dollars selling oil on the black market in Turkey, Iraqi MP and former national security adviser, Mowaffak al Rubaie told RT. He also revealed that wounded terrorists are being treated in Turkish hospitals.

TrendsIslamic State, Syria-Turkey

“In the last eight months ISIS has managed to sell ... $800 million dollars worth of oil on the black market of Turkey. This is Iraqi oil and Syrian oil, carried by trucks from Iraq, from Syria through the borders to Turkey and sold ...[at] less than 50 percent of the international oil price,” Mowaffak al Rubaie said in an interview with RT.

“Now this either get consumed inside, the crude is refined on Turkish territory by the Turkish refineries, and sold in the Turkish market. Or it goes to Jihan and then in the pipelines from Jihan to the Mediterranean and sold to the international market.”

“Money and dollars generated by selling Iraqi and Syrian oil on the Turkish black market  is like the oxygen supply to ISIS and it’s operation,” he added. “Once you cut the oxygen then ISIS will suffocate.”

The Iraqi MP said there is “no shadow of a doubt” that the Turkish government knows about the oil smuggling operations. “The merchants, the businessmen [are buying oil] in the black market in Turkey under the noses – under the auspices if you like – of the Turkish intelligence agency and the Turkish security apparatus,” he said.

READ MORE: Turkey boosts arms supplies to Syria terrorists in exchange for oil & antiques – Damascus

Citing Iraqi intelligence services, Mowaffak al Rubaie also accused Turkey of providing medical treatment to terrorists in hospitals along the border and at times even in “Istanbul itself.”

“There are security officers who are sympathizing with ISIS in Turkey,”the Iraqi politician believes. “They are allowing them to go from Istanbul to the borders and infiltrate ... Syria and Iraq.”

“There is no terrorist organization which can stand alone, without a neighboring country helping it – in this case Turkey,” Rubaie said, urging Ankara to come clean and join the international efforts to destroy the terror group.

Russia considers ISIS oil smuggling operations to be one of the highest priority targets in crippling the terror group’s finances and capabilities. Moscow has long been requesting that Ankara properly addresses reports of its alleged involvement with ISIS oil smuggling.

READ MORE: Ankara defends ISIS, Turkish officials have financial interest in oil trade with group - PM Medvedev

President Putin himself noted that it was “hard to believe, but it is theoretically possible” that the Turkish leadership knows nothing about oil flowing into Turkey illegally. However he noted that the operations are too daring and obvious to ignore.

“Vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,”said Putin, comparing the views seen by Russian pilots and drones to a“living oil pipe” stretched from ISIS and rebel controlled areas of Syria into Turkey. “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there – empty,” Putin said earlier this week.

https://www.rt.com/news/323895-isis-smuggled-oil-iraq-syria/

People's Global Climate March 2015: Taking to the Streets for Our Future

Millions expected to take to streets ahead of COP21 - the Paris climate summit

by

Common Dreams staff

 19 Comments

Thousands of pairs of shoes in the Place de la Republique in Paris on Sunday, November 29, 2015. The shoes represent climate campaigners who were banned from marching. The planned Paris climate rally was canceled when France declared a state of emergency after the Nov. 13 attacks in the city. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)

On the biggest day of climate change activism ever seen worldwide, millions of of people are joining in on Sunday, at more than 2,500 events all around the globe, using people power to put pressure on world leaders to unite in fighting global warming at the COP21 summit opening in Paris on Monday.

Over 20,000 pairs of shoes were laid out in the Place de la Republique in Paris to symbolize absent marchers after France banned Sunday's march that was meant to be at the heart of the global action.

To find a Climate March event near you, click here for 350.org's list or here for Avaaz's list.

An estimated 50,000 people took part in a march in central London, where opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn addressed crowds.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/11/29/peoples-global-climate-march-2015-taking-streets-our-future

Dark Humor: Western Media Makes Light of Political Repression in Ukraine

EDITOR'S CHOICE ERIC DRAITSER, Political repression and violence are allegedly incompatible with Western liberal democratic values. Respect for human rights, freedom of expression, and protection of the rights of minorities are all purportedly the hallmarks of “free societies,” the goals toward which all nations should be striving. And yet, such standards of freedom and democracy are only selectively applied, and only when beneficial to the Western (US-UK-EU-NATO) agenda. Western media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are quick to highlight abuses, both real and imagined, in countries where it is politically useful to do so, such as in North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and China. However, when it comes to the US-EU project in Ukraine, magically the liberal democratic values and human rights are no longer of central importance. Indeed, were one to read the Western media coverage of Ukraine, not only is political repression and violence not concerning, it’s downright funny. The Real Story An article published in the exalted liberal pages of Britain’s The Guardian ran with the headline The force awakens (in Ukraine): Darth Vader statue replaces Lenin monument (23 October 2015). The story highlighted the transformation of a statue of Lenin in the city of Odessa, into the Star Wars villain Darth Vader by Ukrainian artist Alexander Milov. The lighthearted tone of the piece, with tongue-in-cheek references to “the Force” (a Star Wars plot point) of the WiFi being radiated from the statue’s head belies the seriousness of the issue – the intimidation and violent repression of political forces in the ‘New Ukraine’ – which the author conveniently downplays. The story makes only passing mention of the “decommunization laws” – conspicuously referenced in parentheses with a hyperlink, as if they were an afterthought – under which this statue has now legally been defaced and destroyed. In fact, the “controversial decommunization laws” were not merely an attempt to erase the symbols of Soviet history, but part of a broader process of political repression that has included violence, kidnappings, and death. In fact, the appropriation of the Lenin statue is merely an outgrowth of the repeated attacks upon the Communist Party and its grassroots organizers all throughout Ukraine, as the pro-fascist government and police systematically attacked, and ultimately dissolved the entire Party which had been traditionally one of the most popular in the country. In a grossly dishonest bit of writing, the author of the article noted that, “Darth Lenin is in a factory in the Black Sea port city, which has been the location of clashes between separatist and pro-Ukraine forces, and recently saw pro-western former Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili installed as governor of the region.” Note the twin distortions embedded in the excerpt. First, describing the infamous May 2, 2014 massacre of leftist activists at the Trade Unions House in Odessa (which left at least 43 dead and remains the single most heinous act of repression since the war began) as “clashes,” is yet another attempt to whitewash the pogrom. Such language seeks to both obscure the fact that the fascists presented to western audiences as “nationalists” and “patriots” were little more than Nazi thugs, and to present the illusion of equivalence between the two sides. This was no clash, it was a one-sided slaughter. But by continuing to present the incident as “clashes,” The Guardian merely upholds the political and editorial line of the Western political establishment which desperately tries to justify its continued support for the oligarch-fascist government in Kiev. Secondly, the author completely distorts the undemocratic, dare I say fascist, nature of the appointment of Mikheil Saakashvili as governor of Odessa. One sees here Saakashvili described as “pro-western” because, as The Guardian understands perfectly well, in the context of Ukraine and Russia, the term “pro-western” is supposed to be synonymous with goodness and justice, while “pro-Russian” is evil and sin; Russophobia is still deeply embedded in the collective psyche of Westerners. Of course, the author fails to mention that Saakashvili is a fugitive from justice, having fled Georgia rather than face charges of corruption and human rights violations stemming from his brutal crackdown on political protesters while he was president. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the fact that Saakashvili, close friend and ally of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, David Petraeus, John McCain and the entire neocon establishment, is directly responsible for egregious war crimes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, namely unprovoked aggression which sparked the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. Indeed, The Guardian itself reported back in 2009 on the EU-commissioned report into that war: An investigation into last year’s Russia-Georgia war delivered a damning indictment of President Mikheil Saakashvili today, accusing Tbilisi of launching an indiscriminate artillery barrage on the city of Tskhinvali that started the war… the conclusions will discomfit the western-backed Georgian leader, Saakashvili, who was found to have started the war with the attack on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, on the night of 7 August last year, through a “penchant for acting in the heat of the moment”…The war started “with a massive Georgian artillery attack”, the report said, citing an order from Saakashvili that the offensive was aimed at halting Russian military units moving into South Ossetia…Flatly dismissing Saakashvili’s version, the report said: “There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation … Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive could not be substantiated … It could also not be verified that Russia was on the verge of such a major attack.” So, it should not be a secret to anyone, least of all the staff at The Guardian, that Saakshvili is a war criminal who has simply not yet been convicted of his crimes. And yet, The Guardian thought it not worth commenting on, instead choosing to simply note that he is the “pro-western former Georgian leader.” Imagine referring to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, guilty of having committed countless crimes including crimes against humanity, simply as the “pro-American former Chilean leader,” or Somoza as the “pro-American former Nicaraguan president.” It would be considered dishonest at best, downright contemptible at worst. And yet that is precisely how The Guardian presents Saakashvili, a man who is not even Ukrainian. The only hint of criticism in the sentence is an implication, using the word “installed” to describe how Saakashvili came to power in Odessa. However, such an implication certainly does not do justice to the reality of the situation, one in which non-Ukrainians loyal to Washington and NATO are installed alongside Ukrainian quislings to do the bidding of the Kiev regime’s sponsors in the US and Europe. And it is just such examples of deliberate obscurantism over Ukraine that has to a large extent discredited many Western media outlets when it comes to the continuing conflict in the country. Odessa and the Real Dark Side of the Force A serious journalist writing about Odessa, and using the metaphors of “Darth Lenin” and Star Wars might have explored the truly sinister forces at work in Ukraine’s all-important port city. A hotbed of political activism and site of the infamous May 2nd massacre, Odessa has been the scene of some of the worst, but by no means exceptional, political repression. Activists, journalists and bloggers have been deliberately targeted for physical attacks, kidnapping, and arbitrary imprisonment, all under the watchful eye of the allegedly ‘democratic’ government in Kiev, backed by the US-NATO powers. In late 2014 and early 2015, editors at the important anti-Kiev websiteinfocenter-odessa.com were intimidated and arrested for various so-called ‘crimes,’ including being in possession of video evidence of illegal shelling by Ukrainian military, and of a list of names of political prisoners held without trial in Odessa. One would think that Western journalists, in the interests of their Ukrainian colleagues, and in defense of the Geneva conventions protections for journalists, would perhaps consider such information worthy of publication. Alas, not. Aside from journalists, a large number of activists have been detained, kidnapped, and/or tortured by Ukrainian authorities and their fascist goons. Key members of the Borotba (Struggle) leftist organization have been repeatedly harassed, arrested, and beaten by the police. So too have been communist activists and party members such as Pavel Shishman and Nikolai Popov, among many others. These courageous men and women are the real victims of the “decommunization” lawsand, unlike the Lenin statue, their persecution and repression cannot be trivialized as a mere humorous footnote. Aside from these shameful attacks on leftist formations, multicultural institutions in Odessa have also been repressed under the pretext of “Russian separatism.” A multi-ethnic, multi-nationality organization known as the Popular Rada of Bessarabia (PRB) was founded in early April 2015 in order to push for regional autonomy and/or ethnic autonomy in response to the legal and extralegal attacks on minorities by the Kiev authorities. It was reported that within 24 hours of the founding congress, Ukraine’s SBU (security services) had detained the core leaders of the organization. Within two weeks 30 more PRB activists were arrested, including founding member Vera Shevchenko. Perhaps such egregious political repression should have found its way into the pages of The Guardian? Alas, no. It is plainly obvious that The Guardian, like all Western corporate media, intends to continue to distort the true nature of the situation in Odessa, and in Ukraine generally. Of course, the argument in this case could be that the article simply was covering a kitschy pop culture story, rather than a deeply political issue. But such a response is pure deflection. Everything in Ukraine is political in this time of civil war and instability. And to gloss over the repression and violence is to tacitly approve of it. Naturally, this is simply par for the course for Western media, be it of the liberal or conservative variety. But, increasingly each day, these outlets are discrediting themselves by showing just how hypocritical they are. They’ll run a light-hearted story about a Lenin statue, but make no mention of the murder of journalists, or of the Nazi rallies in support of the murderers in the very same city. This is shameful. This is embarrassing. This is Western propaganda at its finest. ERIC DRAITSER, New Eastern Outlook, counterpunch.org

The United States Didn’t Just Help Topple Allende—We Trained the Economists, Too

By Greg Grandin 

“I didn’t know absolutely nothing.” That double negative is from Sergio de Castro, talking about the killing, disappearances, and torture that took place when he served as Chile’s economic and finance minister during the Pinochet regime’s most brutal period. It’s from a great documentary that premiered this week in Chile, Chicago Boys, made by Carola Fuentes, a journalist, and Rafael Valdeavellano, a filmmaker.

Sergio de Castro is among the vilest of the “Chicago Boys,” Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger and who, after the September 11, 1973, coup, helped impose on their fellow citizens a punishing program of extreme economic austerity. In the film, de Castro recalls climbing a hill in Santiago so he could watch the Air Force bomb La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende was soon to die. As flames poured out of the palace’s windows, he felt, he says, an “infinite happiness.” De Castro says he “didn’t know anyone who had been killed” by his government, even though representatives from the World Bank, the IMF, and the US State Department kept complaining about the repression. Asked by Carola Fuentes if he ever brought up those complaints with Pinochet, he said no. De Castro says he feels great “pain,” not just for the “tortured but the torturers” but that, knowing what he knows now–that thousands were killed or disappeared and tens of thousands tortured during his tenure–he still would have served Pinochet. “There aren’t any corrective measures that are painless,” de Castro says.

Fuentes and Valdeavellano have dug up terrific home movies of the first class of Chicago Boys, studying and socializing in Hyde Park in the mid-1950s, replete with narrow lapels, thin ties, and endless cigarettes. Friedman, now dead, appears in passing. He was “brilliant in his exposition, naïve in his proposals,” says Ricardo French-Davis, who took classes with Friedman but broke from the orthodoxy. The documentary nicely reveals how ideological the Chicago Boys were, trained not just in the technical details of monetarism but, as one of them puts it, inculcated with “a religious belief in the efficient operation of the totally liberalized markets.” They understood their mission in continental terms. They were determined to, Ernesto Fontaine, another original unrepentant Chicago Boy who appears in the documentary, says elsewhere, “expand throughout Latin America, confronting the ideological positions which prevented freedom and perpetuated poverty and backwardness.”

The exchange program that brought the Chileans to Chicago was funded by public money, from the US government’s Point Four foreign-aid program. “I don’t think there has been a better investment of American taxpayers’ money,” Fontaine says in the film. The program was targeted at weakening Keynesian developmentalism in Latin America, at spreading, as one former University of Chicago president put it, “the Chicago influence” and “market economics” throughout Latin America. Considering the dominance of Keynes and Marx in Chile and elsewhere, a number of adjectives could be attached to the program: quixotic in the face of statist hegemony; Gramscian in its success at marching through and transforming the institutions; and Jesuitical in its determination against seemingly long odds.

Indeed, a number of Chicago Boys were members of Opus Dei, right-wing Catholics, and they saw no contradiction between their individual supremacy (when it came to the market) and submission to authoritarian order (when it came to bowing down before Pinochet). “Choice,” in the moral lexicon of the Friedmanites, is both a freedom and a discipline. When asked about the social consequences that resulted from extreme austerity and “shock therapy,” one of the coup leaders, Admiral José Toribio Merino, replied that “such is the jungle of…economic life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to him, kills him. That is reality.” That quotation is not in the documentary, but the filmmakers get Rolf Lüders, another Chicago Boy who took a prominent role in Pinochet’s junta, to admit that an authoritarian state was “necessary to make the change that was made.”

“To us it was a revolution,” said Miguel Kast, a second-generation Chicago Boy and “mystical Catholic”–a “revolution in freedom.” I’ve argued elsewhere that it wasn’t a coincidence that Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek (who makes his own pilgrimage to Chile after the coup), and their allies targeted Chile: “For most of the 20th century, many Latin Americans thought democracy and socialism were the same thing–the fight for the vote was indistinguishable from the fight for welfare–but it was especially the case in Chile, where communists and socialists had built a modern social democratic state.” So if the Chicago Boys could break the link between democracy and socialism in Chile, they could break it anywhere. As Hayek put it, Pinochet’s coup offered a chance to establish an untainted form of “democracy and liberty, clean of impurities.”

Among the film’s many useful contributions is to reveal the key role the civilian Chicago Boys played in the coup itself: the military was reluctant to move against Allende unless they had an alternative economic plan. And so the Chicago Boys, especially de Castro, gave them an economic plan. Then, once the coup took place and Allende was dead, it was the Chicago Boys who convinced statist military officers to take a gamble on shock therapy, bringing in Milton Friedman to close the deal.

Starting more than five years ago, a growing protest movement, led by students, has made specific demands but has also advanced a foundational critique of “neoliberalismo,” a rejection of the reduction of human beings into atomistic utility maximizers. Valdeavellano’s camera catches a quick glimpse of one of the placards: “Menos Friedman, Más Keynes”–Less Friedman, More Keynes. It’s doubtful that whoever wrote that sign is much invested in the specifics of Keynesian economics. Rather, the sentiment reveals the way politics in Chile continues to be framed in the primal opposition created by the 1973 coup, whereby Keynes v. Friedman, or Allende v. Pinochet, represent competing definitions of human nature.

Fuentes and Valdeavellano end the documentary with a fitting epilogue: a younger neoliberal Chilean economist, trained by de Castro and other Chicago Boys in the 1970s, complaining about the current government’s ban on snacks with high sugar content in elementary schools. What had started out as a world-historical insurgency committed to executing a revolution not just in economics but in morals, is today reduced to complaining that the government “won’t allow us to get fat.”

Hopefully Chicago Boys, which received financing from Sundance, will be released in the United States.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-united-states-didnt-just-help-topple-allende-we-trained-the-economists-too/