This morning Niqnaq posts an illuminating exchange of tweets between the odious Robert Mackey and the excellent Vanessa Beeley. Mackey attempts to undermine last Thursday's news conference at the OPCW by alleging that Russia rushed the testimony of the eyewitnesses to the public without allowing the OPCW to interview them first. Beeley refutes this, with an assist from the Russian embassy in the Netherlands, and then demands that Mackey produce the OPCW statement that he says "asked Russia to let them interview the witnesses first, and not hold their event until after the inspectors finish their work and file their report." Mackey does not, which probably means that he just made it up.
The silver lining to the Douma false flag provocation is that it exposes intelligence agency assets like Robert Mackey who have burrowed into left-of-center outlets like The Intercept. Mackey will go on finding work, but his career will never be the same.
****
Having had an opportunity to digest some of the reporting of the Kim-Moon talks at Panmunjom, my sense is that there is little chance for success because the U.S. is insisting on complete, rapid denuclearization before any sanctions are lifted. Call it the Gaddafi option. North Korean leadership is not as gullible as the ousted and lynched colonel.
Everyone knows by now that the United States is a bad-faith agent, something that will be even more pronounced when the U.S. pulls out the Iran nuclear deal sometime in May. It will be an official marker for the end of the U.S. unipolar world.
The North Korean strategy is to move South Korea away from the U.S. and closer to China. I think they will be successful.
Mid- to late-1970s NYC is synonymous in popular memory with urban decay and white flight. The city was purported to be collapsing. These pictures tell a different story. Notice how lean and alert people look. We were still alive in our bodies and our consciousness wasn't so hopelessly mediated by digital electronics.
If only we could go back to the Summer of '78 and plant our flag. But time rolls on. And now we are here, which doesn't look nearly as healthy as then.
The "breaking news" is not the Ghouta residents who can bear witness to being used as players in a chemical weapons theater staged by the White Helmets. The breaking news are the denunciations by the French and British envoys to the OPCW. This is basic rudimentary information warfare.
Russia is making this move no doubt because the OPCW is stacked against it and some ruse is afoot to skew the Douma investigation to find traces of chlorine and hence blur the conclusion that there was no chemical attack.
I am among those who argue that the strength of the state and corporate media is being increasingly and happily undermined by our ability to communicate via social media. But social media has developed in such a way that the channels of communication are dominated by corporations – Facebook, Twitter and Google – which can in effect turn off the traffic to a citizen journalism site in a second. The site is not taken down, and the determined person can still navigate directly to it, but the vast bulk of the traffic is cut off. What is more this is done secretly, without your being informed, and in a manner deliberately hard to detect. The ability to simply block the avenues by which people get to see dissenting opinions, is terrifying.
Furthermore neither Facebook nor Twitter contact you when they block traffic to your site to tell you this is happening, let alone tell you why, and let alone give you a chance to counter whatever argument they make. I do not know if I am blocked by Facebook as an alleged Russian bot, or for any other reason. I do know that it appears to have happened shortly after I published the transcript of the Israeli general discussing the procedures for shooting children.
Likely "shadow banning" will become the norm. All web sites will be filtered. The cat will be put back in its bag.
Based on the write-up by Ken Belson and Mark Leibovich, "Inside the Confidential N.F.L. Meeting to Discuss National Anthem Protests, of last October's meeting between NFL owners and players, the players were trying to get the owners to drop their ban of Colin Kaepernick, while the owners were trying to get the players to "knock off the kneeling" for fear of what Trump might do next:
The players sounded aggrieved. After discussing a proposal to finance nonprofit groups to address player concerns, they wanted to talk about why Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who started the anthem protests to highlight social injustice and police brutality against African-Americans, was, they believed, being blackballed by the owners. The owners sounded panicked about their business under attack, and wanted to focus on damage control.
“If he was on a roster right now, all this negativeness and divisiveness could be turned into a positive,” Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Chris Long said at the meeting.
Long said he did not wish to “lecture any team” on what quarterbacks to sign, but “we all agree in this room as players that he should be on a roster.” The owners’ responses were noncommittal. The Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said that fighting for social justice is not “about one person.”
The New England Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft pointed to another “elephant in the room.”
“This kneeling,” he said.
“The problem we have is, we have a president who will use that as fodder to do his mission that I don’t feel is in the best interests of America,” said Kraft, who is a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump’s. “It’s divisive and it’s horrible.”
[snip]
After the Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross raised the idea of a “march on Washington” by N.F.L. players and owners, Eric Reid, Kaepernick’s former teammate and the first player to kneel alongside him, brought the discussion back to Kaepernick.
Reid, who attended the meeting wearing a Kaepernick T-shirt over his dress shirt and tie, said that his former teammate was being blackballed.
“I feel like he was hung out to dry,” Reid said of Kaepernick. “Everyone in here is talking about how much they support us.” The room fell quiet. “Nobody stepped up and said we support Colin’s right to do this. We all let him become Public Enemy No. 1 in this country, and he still doesn’t have a job.”
[snip]
Kaepernick’s name was not mentioned again. He continues to pursue a labor grievance accusing the owners of colluding to keep him out of the league. He remains unsigned.
A couple of things are interesting here. One, no owner denies that a Kaepernick blacklist exists. It is a point seemingly granted by the owners. They appear to ignore the players' pleas. Two, nothing in the write-up pegs the ratings drop to the anthem protests. The ratings drop is mentioned in passing. The real concern of the owners is with Trump using the NFL as part of his pageantry of racial hatred to stir up the crackers.
Egypt held a presidential election last month. The New York Times' Declan Walsh published a handful of stories on the election. Walsh is a notable reporter in that he was kicked out of Pakistan by the government in 2013.
Egyptian strongman Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi won reelection with 97% of the vote. It is worthwhile to note that when inveighing against the rise of the autocrat and the death of democracy opinion leaders rarely mention el-Sisi or Prayut Chan-o-cha, the Thai prime minister and leader of the military junta that rules Thailand, preferring instead to descry Hungary's Viktor Orban, Russia's Vladimir Putin or Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.
CAIRO — A military court on Tuesday sentenced a former government anticorruption czar to five years in prison over incendiary claims about documents said to incriminate Egypt’s leaders, his lawyers and state news media said.
The sentence levied against the official, Hisham Geneina, who had served under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi until 2016 when he became one of the president’s sharpest critics, signaled that the harsh crackdown on the opposition that preceded last month’s election was set to continue.
Mr. Geneina was one of several opposition figures detained before the vote, effectively clearing the field for Mr. Sisi, who ultimately faced a single token candidate and won with 97 percent of valid votes. All of the opposition figures remain in jail, including Sami Anan, a former army chief whose campaign lasted four days before he was arrested.
Walsh goes on to list, one after another, the people Sisi has jailed.
After the Tamarod hocus pocus that paved the way for the military coup and Sisi's toppling of Morsi, I imagined that this would be the drift. Repressive strongman rule. The U.S. accepts it when it is an ally; bemoans it when it is an adversary..
Over the weekend I finally finished reading R.P. Dutt's Fascism and Social Revolution (1934). It was lent to me by my next-door neighbor, whose son, a resident of Portland, had photocopied and spiral-bound it himself. It's a real eye-opener. The socio-economic conditions which led to the rise of fascism are very similar to those of today. There are huge differences too. But Dutt's thesis, that fascism is a last-ditch effort by finance capital to suppress contradictions of its own making after social democrat parties willingly pave the way for strongman rule, is as true today as it was in the 1930s.
The difference is that workers were much more militant and organized, both politically and economically, then than now; that, and there was much more of a vibrant press.
The legendary Australian journalist John Pilger, whose work on the evils of war and imperialism has been an inspiration for generations of journalists like myself, stated in an interview earlier this year that there was a “purge” of antiwar writers from The Guardian some three years ago.
“But my written journalism is no longer welcome — probably its last home was The Guardian, which three years ago got rid of people like me and others in pretty much a purge of those who were saying what The Guardian no longer says anymore,” Pilger said on the Flashpoint radio show.
The Washington Consensus is resistant to outright strongman rule buttressed by a renascent economic nationalism; it prefers the maintenance and extension of a globalized neoliberal corporate-managed trade architecture. A strong tell that this Washington Consensus is rapidly fraying is when the categorically pro-trade New York Times advocates restricting technology transfers to China based on national security.
Macron is the prodigal child of a fracturing Washington Consensus; hence all the pomp for his visit this week. Merkel is being served cold leftovers in comparison. The message is plain. Germany, possessing perhaps a deeper understanding of where the current path of great power conflict is headed, is drifting back to the East.
Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith has never lost focus on the Brexit negotiations between the Europe Union and the United Kingdom. She has been skeptical of Tory promises and Tory tough talk. She sees a calamitous "crash-out" coming Britain's way.
[T]he UK is now on track for a crash-out Brexit. There is astonishingly still no comprehension of what leaving the EU entails among, it seems, both houses of the legislature, all of the ministers, and virtually all of the UK punditry. That means they will not come up with solutions to the problems they are trying to remedy. It also implies yet more incomprehension as the UK will pose approaches to the EU that are non-starters in light of how the EU operates, which the EU will reject them for what ought to understood as perfectly logical reasons. But that will elicit more outrage and upset from the UK, which will instead regard yet more EU rebuffs as proof that the EU wants to punish them by forcing them into the worst possible Brexit, when it will be the UK that has gotten itself in that mess due to unprecedented incompetence.
Shorter: assume the brace position.
She was back with her doom and gloom this morning in "Hoisted from E-Mail: Brexit, Security, and the UK’s Coming Poodledom": "[A] Japan-like relationship with the US is the endgame for the UK, this will make a mockery of the Brexit selling point that that UK would be reclaiming its independence."
I lost interest in tracking the Tory twist and turns on Brexit because I think the May government's strategy is fairly transparent. It's running the clock out until such time as a re-vote can be engineered. Stephen Castle provides proof of this in "Could the U.K. Vote Again on Brexit? The Prospects Are Rising."
Castle assesses May's options once a deal is struck with the EU:
Any withdrawal deal struck by Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, will need approval from Parliament, where she has no reliable majority.
Were lawmakers to reject her agreement, Mrs. May would then face three choices, says Dominic Grieve, a pro-European rebel lawmaker in her own Conservative Party. She could try to renegotiate it — unlikely, in view of domestic political pressures and resistance from the European Union — call a general election or put her Brexit plan directly to the people.
If Yves Smith is right, if there is any deal at all, it will be horrible. Parliament is bound to reject it. Then new elections would be inevitable, all with "crash-out" looming.
It could be the gift of the outgoing government to put in place a Brexit re-vote. Infrastructure is already being put in place for the Remain campaign. That's one of the points of Castle's article.
World Socialist Web Site has done a good job recently of calling out reputedly Left organizations for supporting the recent Trump-Macron-May bombing of Syria. In "Pseudo-left parties promote US-French-British bombing of Syria" Will Morrow names Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as a pro-war organization, which is interesting because Bernie Sanders opposed the bombing. Reference to the bombing is not readily apparent on the DSA web site.
Last week I noticed the absence of any mention of Syria on Jacobin's web site. Morrow detected it as well:
Jacobin magazine, the journal supported by the DSA, has not published a single recent article on the US threats against Syria nor on the bombings themselves. While Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara remained silent about Trump’s threats to bomb Syria in the days before the attack, he found time to publish multiple tweets about the New York Knicks basketball team. Jacobin’s silence denotes consent and complacency.
But yesterday Jacobin got its act together by publishing the excellent "US Out of Syria" by Greg Shupak. Devastatingly brief, it pretty much says it all:
The April 13 American, British, and French attack on Syria was just the latest disastrous action taken by Western powers in the country.
Western states and anti-government groups accuse the Syrian government of carrying out a chemical weapons attack in Douma, East Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, on April 8. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that an estimated 500 patients showed “signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals” and that “70 people sheltering in basements have reportedly died, with 43 of those deaths related to symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals.” The WHO does not say who it believes is to blame for these deaths. The Syrian government and its allies have denied responsibility and US Defense Secretary James Mattis testified that America and its partners “don’t have evidence” of its culpability.
Here’s what we do know: The US admits it has between 2,000 and 4,000 American troops in Syria. Between late 2016 and May 2017, the US bombed pro-government forces at least three times. The US’s support for armed groups in Syria has gone far beyond its backing of Kurdish groups as America and its conservative allies in the Middle East have supported groups fighting the Syrian government, including reactionary religious fundamentalistsguilty of sectarian violence.
The CIA’s effort to oust the Syrian government has been one of the costliest covert-action programs in the agency’s history. Turkey and anti-Assad forces, to whom the US provided significant support, have taken over Afrin, a Kurdish-majority territory in northern Syria, plundering the area and driving out 220,000 civilians. Over the course of the Syrian war, America’s ally Israel has sponsored an armed insurgency against the Syrian government, has bombed Syria nearly a hundred times, and has sought to intensify its control over Syria’s Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally annexed. The US has also supported devastatingsanctions and, when a US-led coalition bombed ISIS-occupied parts of Syria, the coalition killed thousands of civilians.
As of July 2017, the US had ten military bases in Syria. Earlier this month, America began constructing two more. In June 2017, the US shot down two Iranian-made drones near Al Tanf. An Al-Monitor report says that the Trump administration is seeking $2 billion more in precision-guided weapons for Iraq and Syria, 20 percent more than the Pentagon spent on munitions in all Middle East war zones in 2017. The $2 billion includes a $31.1 million request for Javelin anti-tank missile systems that a retired US Air Force colonel says will “come in very handy” because they can be used against Syrian army tanks. Days before the Al-Monitor story, a US drone destroyed a tank fighting on behalf of the Syrian government.
Should the US embark on a larger-scale bombing aimed at the Syrian government over alleged chemical weapons use or any other pretense, the results will be grim for Syrians. Twelve million of the sixteen million Syrians still living in the country are in government-held territories. Should the US engage in widespread attacks on the Syrian government, it will therefore be doing so against the parts of the country where the vast majority of its population lives, which effectively guarantees a high civilian casualty rate.
There is no positive role that America and its allies can play through intervention — we must prevent our governments from inflicting more damage abroad and call for immediate US withdrawal from Syria.
The last Hippies vs. Punks post was back at the end of August, nearly eight months ago. It is not as if I have stopped listening to or thinking about music. It's that a series of crises erupted at work. By the time things settled down in February I had figured out what I wanted to say, but a couple of things changed since last Summer that so far have prevented me from dipping back into the exploration of why, how, when the Hippies die off in the mid- to late-70s, to be replaced by the Punks.
First, my physical conditioning cratered. Week after week of 60-hour work-weeks prevented me from exercising. I was in survival mode for months. After a while when you don't exercise, you get weak. And when you get weak, your ability to produce diminishes; your discipline disappears; basically, you become another species.
Second, the demands placed upon me by my job, though no longer necessitating six-day work-weeks, are significantly more substantial than pre-crisis. Subsequently, I've had to slowly improve my physical conditioning before I can start sitting for hours in front of the computer on the weekend or get up early on a Friday morning (4:00 AM), which is how I used to do Hippies vs. Punks.
At the beginning of February, as the sunlight started to creep back from its winter recess, I happened to hear The Leaving Trains' Fuck (1987). I was in my kitchen preparing dinner when James Moreland's "Temporal Slut" shuffled on my iPod docking station. I couldn't place it. I thought it might be one of the later Fleshtones albums I purchased when I posted on Hexbreaker last April.
A couple more songs played and I still couldn't place it. Finally, I went and looked at the iPod. I saw that it was The Leaving Trains' Fuck which I had downloaded several months ago after I saw that the band's oeuvre was finally available for purchase and digital download. I think the last time I looked, 2014 or 2015, the only recordings available online were YouTube cuts.
At one time I owned Fuck. I had purchased it either in late 1987 or early 1988, but I never managed to get a handle on its hard, slick LA thrash sound. Much like my unsuccessful attempts at mastering Back Flag's My War and Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record, I tossed in the sponge after several attempts, never really to listen to it again.
And while I apparently didn't remember much of the record's sound, I do remember the cover art:
A cloudy firmament conjuring up heaven's pearly gates juxtaposed with the basic building block of profanity. A kind of perfection, a marriage of the sacred and the profane whose semiotic economy one would be hard pressed to equal.
And when I think about Fuck, I think about Stacey. Stacey was my girlfriend right before I married my ex-wife. This was a time -- 1988 -- that SST Records seemed to significantly increase the number of bands signed to the label and the records which those bands produced. The horizon seemed wide open, free, robust and filled with rock'n'roll.
I must have listened to Fuck more than 25 times in February. I figured it out. I got it, which is something of an achievement given that it was three decades in coming. I am even prepared to do a song-by-song breakdown of the record.
But what it really got me thinking about was the period from 1987 to 1994, and how in this time frame I was alive, my horizon was truly open, and how everything since then has been of a diminished nature.
Rock'n'roll begins its death march in 1994. There are some bright spots along the way, including some manifest perfection in the form of Post-Rock and Alt-Country. But its descent to cultural marginality is clear; Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer for music should make that obvious. As NYT rock critique Jon Pareles says in today's paper ("Kendrick Lamar Shakes Up the Pulitzer Game: Let’s Discuss"):
To me, it looks like some of the squawks are complaints about exclusivity being breached. And if you ask me, it should have happened sooner. I hereby nominate, for a retrospective Pulitzer, Public Enemy’s 1988 album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”: an experimental sonic bombshell, a verbal torrent, a mind expander. For that matter, the Pulitzers were late on Kendrick Lamar, too: “To Pimp a Butterfly,” from 2015, has even more musical breadth than “DAMN.” (which has plenty).
All of March I re-explored 1987 and 1988 in popular music. It's an amazing period. I saw Public Enemy perform at Nassau Coliseum in 1988.
What we shall do in the weeks ahead is back-burner 1975-1979 in favor of 1987-1994. Big-ticket culturally-unifying rock'n'roll dies with Kurt Cobain. There was an off-ramping period with Oasis and Radiohead, but 25 years later Hip Hop is the cultural king. No doubt about it.
The Hippie and the Punk are both cliches. Yes, they still resonate in the right audience. But for how much longer?
Mackey is a spook along the lines of Eliot Higgins (whom Mackey admiringly quotes in the story), a cyber-savvy sleuth of social media who works to uphold Langley's world view. Mackey asserts that
Russian diplomats and pundits on state-controlled news outlets have, for years, promoted unverified conspiracy theories about the White Helmets working with Islamic extremists and foreign intelligence agencies. Attempting to discredit the rescue workers, who often film in the immediate aftermath of bombings by government forces or Russian jets, has been a central concern for supporters of the Syrian government since the protest movement of 2011 turned into an armed conflict.
Given that Douma is now under the control of the Assad government, Russia’s ally, and thus off-limits to independent journalists, the Russian claims are impossible to verify or debunk — a situation Russian and Syrian officials have taken advantage of throughout the war to cast doubt on claims that atrocities have been committed by forces loyal to Assad.
Well, debunk Fisk does, not only that there was a chemical weapons attack in Douma, but that the White Helmets are legitimate, independent rescue workers. As Fisk notes
The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.
Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.
The Intercept should disavow Mackey's story, or at least request that Mackey write another one, explaining some of Fisk's revelations. Are all the people Fiske spoke to Russian plants? Are the White Helmets not associated with Jaysh al-Islam?
I attended an anti-war rally yesterday. Located in the heart of the downtown shopping district at a concrete park, the number of rally attendees was more modest than I expected. I wasn't anticipating huge numbers, but more than the, say, fifty people that filled a street corner.
We held "No War on Syria!" signs and signed petitions on other issues -- like a carbon fee, and an expansion of publicly-funded heath care. There was discussion of voter registration, Trump's legal troubles, and even a cynical mention or two of the war in Syria. I left after an hour.
Not a particularly good sign. But afterwards when, being downtown, I decided to purchase a new shirt for work, I was pleasantly surprised when the woman who was helping me asked approvingly how many people had been at the rally.
I haven't seen any polls on the latest missile strike, but polling on last year's were supportive, a big shift from the overwhelming disapproval when Obama mulled a bombing in 2013.
My sense is that people do not support a war with Syria. But people -- after Obama, after the New Cold War, after Trump -- feel more marginalized than ever. It's a "duck and cover" mentality. Why commit to political action when the entire arena is polluted?
That's the problem. But it's a success for neoliberalism.
The long and short of it -- for an excellent compendium see Niqnaq's "skripal and BZ agent" -- is that the Skripals were poisoned by BZ, a toxic nerve agent which temporarily disables a person. The sample sent to the OPCW was spiked with A-234 (what has been referred to by the British as "Novichok") in "its virgin state."
Lavrov's question to the OPCW is why there was no mention of BZ in its final report:
Taking into account that Yulia Skripal and the policeman have already been released from hospital, whereas Sergei Skripal is still recovering, as the British claim without letting us see either Yulia or Sergei, the clinical pattern corresponds more to the use of a BZ agent. Nothing is said whatsoever about a BZ agent in the final report that the OPCW experts presented to its Executive Council. In this connection we address the OPCW a question about why the information that I have just read out loud, and which reflects the findings of the specialists from the city of Spiez, was withheld altogether in the final document. If the OPCW would reject and deny the very fact that the Spiez laboratory was engaged, it will be very interesting to listen to their explanations.
A-234 apparently degrades very quickly. To find it in its "virgin state" weeks after the event is highly suspicious; it would have killed the Skripals instantaneously. An obvious conclusion is that A-234 was added in haste to the BZ that poisoned the Skripals to fit the original story concocted by the British government.
Reuters ran a turgid version of the story. So far there is nothing in the "newspaper of record." It is too busy celebrating Trump's blowing up of fictitious chemical weapons labs in Syria.
The scale of the rogue U.S.-UK-French attack on Syria failed to live up to its promotion in the pages of the prestige press. It's a win for Syria, for Russia, for Iran, for all of us living in the belly of the beast. The leaders of the crumbling Washington Consensus are caught between the disgusted but heretofore acquiescent masses and the threat of military conflict spiraling out of control and into nuclear war. That leaves information warfare, psychological operations directed at domestic populations, false flag provocations that fool hardly anyone, jihadist mercenaries, opulently funded spookery and special forces, capped by cruise missile launches. That's what this latest assault on Syria has reaffirmed -- a failing status quo. Time is running out. But how much time is left? I always come back to that question. May, a doomed prime minister prior to last night, is now 100% zombie. The flower is off Macron's presidency. Trump is thrashing about like a gaffed fish. Our problem is there is no substitute paradigm, no enlightened "outs" waiting in the wings to bear the burden of "good government." A social revolution is required. So a social revolution there must be. What this looks like is anyone's guess. In the immediate future, given that this latest bit of Western insanity was clearly for the benefit of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, expect a Russian reply directed to Riyadh. That's the smart, the correct, move.
War with Russian is still the strong bet. War appears to be a last ditch frantic effort to slow the rapid collapse of the neoliberal center in Europe.
It doesn't look like the Five Star Movement (M5S) is going to govern Italy, as Outis Philalithopoulos explains below. M5S representatives are defecting to other parties. Philalithopoulos predicts a center-right government.
No less significant than the geopolitical motivations for the war are pressing domestic considerations. All of the major imperialist powers preparing for war are riven by deep internal crises and a growing movement of the working class.
French President Macron has signaled his support for the US war drive as his government is embroiled in a head-on confrontation with transportation workers over his hated neoliberal policies. Germany’s right-wing grand coalition government, cobbled together after months of back-room deals, enjoys minuscule public support.
The British state, thrown into crisis by the Brexit-mandated withdrawal from the European Union, is led by a prime minister who is held in universal contempt, with no authority or legitimacy. Theresa May is so afraid of public opposition to British involvement in Syria and a repeat of Prime Minister David Cameron’s debacle in 2013 that she has announced plans to proceed with an attack without a vote in Parliament.
And the United States is embroiled in the greatest political crisis since Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon, exacerbated by a growing strike wave of teachers and mounting opposition throughout the working by class.
The rush by NATO to embrace a conflict with Russia leaves the distinct impression that the US and the European powers would welcome a de facto state of war, which they could use as a pretext to intensify their drive to censor the Internet and outlaw domestic political opposition. The NATO powers are in the grip of a war fever as reckless as it is criminal. As their internal crises intensify, their military provocations become all the more naked.
First [Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio] declared that the Five Stars would stick with the EU, with the Euro, and with the Atlantic alliance.
Next he declared that he was willing to form a coalition government with any political party as long as it would respect the Five Stars’ rules.
After that, he declared that he would be happy to form a government with the PD provided they would save face for him by leaving Renzi out of it. Or he could form a government with Lega provided that they would save face for him by leaving Berlusconi out of it.
For the time being, the center-right parties have been fairly decent about maintaining their pacts, and it soon became clear that Salvini/Lega would stick to the coalition they had committed to. Di Maio then returned to the idea of forming a government with the PD. When the PD said it wasn’t interested, the Five Stars responded that for the good of the country it ought to be, considering that it could thereby atone for its mistakes.
The current state of play is that Di Maio is continuing on his desperate quest to find a person, party, angel, demon, or extraterrestrial life form that might be capable of giving him enough support to allow him to form a government. In this he draws strength from the 11 million Italians who believed in him and his promise to provide a sort of universal basic income at least to the unemployed – an attractive vision especially in the South given the high unemployment rate there. On the other hand, if it starts to look like the promises of the Five Stars are empty, then there is a significant risk that many of its voters will lose faith and bolt in the next election.
Di Maio doesn’t merely have to worry about the voters deserting – there are also real reasons to doubt the loyalty of some of the newly-elected Five Stars senators and deputies. After the previous election, there were about 40 defectors (deputies and senators) from the Five Stars: the so-called “mixed group,” which subsequently became a prize that other parties worked to attract into their own orbits in order to bulk up their coalitions.
Di Maio’s worry is that as he continues to fail to form a government, there will be fresh defections – there have already been eight. Many of the Five Stars’ representatives come from modest backgrounds. Although defecting would mean having to pay the fines mentioned above, that might seem like a small price to pay compared to having the opportunity to safeguard their (potentially lucrative) seats at the table.
All of this raises the stakes for Di Maio in his frantic efforts to try to accomplish something, somehow.
This is the best The New York Times can do close to a week after the alleged chlorine attack in Douma that has led the U.S., France, Britain and sundry Gulf monarchies to threaten war against Syria:
While much about the attack remains unclear, a New York Times review of more than 20 videos of its aftermath, an examination of flight records compiled by citizen observers, and interviews with a dozen residents, medics and rescue workers suggest that during a military push to break the will of Douma’s rebels, pro-government forces dropped charges bearing some kind of chemical compound that suffocated at least 43 people and left many more struggling to breathe.
It is interesting to note that the mainstream media will no longer cite the organization by name, preferring the innocuous "medics and rescue workers," because the group has been repeatedly outed as a front for jihadists and Western intelligence agencies.
Now is a good time to click through the internet and take note. We are on the brink of another "Missiles of October" moment with Russia proclaiming that any U.S. missiles fired at Syria will be shot down and their launch sites targeted, and Trump responding by taunting Russia that "nice new and smart missiles" are headed for Syria.
Yet Jacobin, the smart-set magazine of the coming socialist revolution, is silent. So too is Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept. Democracy Now conducted an interview with Phyllis Bennis yesterday which was very basic. Bennis made the connection between what is happening currently with the previous Iraq wars under Bush I and Bush II. This morning the broadcast is focusing on Michael Cohen's legal difficulties and Mark Zuckerberg's Capitol Hill testimony, which is pretty much the same as right-wing Breitbart. Infowars was silent on Syria yesterday, but today has a largely mainstream write-up.
There is no large, organized anti-war opposition in the United States. The Democrats are more hawkish than Republicans. My local congresswoman, whom I campaigned for and donated to based on evidence that she was the most anti-war candidate in the field, has become one of the up-and-coming traffickers of the New McCarthyism.
This boil has to be lanced. Maybe the Russians are correct. Maybe the only way to check the destructive, slaughtering proclivities of the U.S. warfare state is to bring the planet to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Trump of course has a way out of his self-imposed deadline to attack Syria. He could declare the chemical attack in Douma a fraud staged by Jaysh al-Islam. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a reliably anti-Assad intelligence bureau headquartered in the UK, sees no evidence of chemical attack in Douma; rather "the suffocations were the result of shelters collapsing on people inside them."
The president now faces a challenge in creating a response to the chemical attack that will be more effective than the missile strike he ordered last year after a similar assault on civilians that he attributed to the Assad government. While only days ago Mr. Trump said he wanted to pull American troops out of Syria and “let the other people take care of it now,” which would effectively mean Russia and Iran, his comments on Monday suggested that he was prepared to take them on.
For a bird's-eye view of the insanity unfolding there is yesterday's post by Craig Murray, "The Rush to War":
I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in Salisbury, amongst other possibilities. But I do rule out the possibility that Assad is dropping chemical weapons in Ghouta. In this extraordinary war, where Saudi-funded jihadist head choppers have Israeli air support and US and UK military “advisers”, every time the Syrian army is about to take complete control of a major jihadist enclave, at the last moment when victory is in their grasp, the Syrian Army allegedly attacks children with chemical weapons, for no military reason at all. We have been fed this narrative again and again and again.
We then face a propaganda onslaught from neo-con politicians, think tanks and “charities” urging a great rain of Western bombs and missiles, and are accused of callousness towards suffering children if we demur. This despite the certain knowledge that Western military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have had consequences which remain to this day utterly disastrous.
I fear that the massive orchestration of Russophobia over the last two years is intended to prepare public opinion for a wider military conflict centred on the Middle East, but likely to spread, and that we are approaching that endgame. The dislocation of the political and media class from the general population is such, that the levers for people of goodwill to prevent this are, as with Iraq, extremely few as politicians quake in the face of media jingoism. These feel like extremely dangerous times.
In the wake of Israel's bombing of a Syrian military airfield in Homs Province, which apparently killed a number of Iranians, we need to keep focused on the possibility of a double tap. The second strike would be delivered by France and/or the United States.
Macron and Trump conferred by phone prior to today's UNSC special meeting on the alleged chlorine attack in Douma. They will be united in opposition to whatever Russian position is put forward.
Trump will be happy to have Emmanuel Macron as a wing man. Say what you will about Trump, but he is generally a quick study. He knows by know that the Saudis and Israelis are running U.S. policy on Syria.
Jaysh al-Islam is a Salafi terror group guided by Saudi Arabia. It staged the chlorine attack in Douma prior to agreeing to an evacuation. The Saudis have Trump in a box. They stage a chemical weapon attack and they know Trump has to respond.
The problem here is that Russia is going to respond sooner or later, and that response will be designed to bring us to the brink of nuclear confrontation.
I just spend about 2 hour listening to a TV debate of Russian experts about what to do about the USA. Here are a few interesting interesting points.
1) They all agreed that the AngloZionist (of course, they used the words “USA” or “Western countries”) was only going to further escalate and that the only way to stop this is to deliberately bring the world right up to the point were a full-scale US-Russian war was imminent or even locally started. They said that it was fundamentally wrong for Russia to reply with just words against Western actions.
2) Interestingly, there also was a consensus that even a full-scale US attack on Syria would be too late to change the situation on the ground, that it was way too late for that.
3) Another interesting conclusion was that the only real question for Russia is whether Russia would be better off delaying this maximal crisis or accelerating the events and making everything happen sooner. There was no consensus on that.
4) Next, there was an consensus view that pleading, reasoning, asking for fairness or justice, or even for common sense, was futile. The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported by an infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been hopelessly zombified. The authority of the so-called “western values” (democracy, rule of law, human rights, etc.) in Russia is now roadkill.
5) There was also a broad consensus that the US elites are not taking Russia seriously and that the current Russian diplomatic efforts are futile (especially towards the UK). The only way to change that would be with very harsh measures, including diplomatic and military ones. Everybody agreed that talking with Boris Johnson would be not only a total waste of time, but a huge mistake.
6) To my amazement, the notion that Russia might have to sink a few USN ships or use Kalibers on US forces in the Middle-East was viewed as a real, maybe inevitable, option. Really – nobody objected.
Reach your own conclusions. I will just say that none of the “experts” was representing, or working for, the Russian government. Government experts not only have better info, they also know that the lives of millions of people depend on their decisions, which is not the case for the so-called “experts”. Still, the words of these experts do reflect, I think, a growing popular consensus.
The corporate media seems to be getting worse. I reference here, in full, yesterday's post by Craig Murray, "Those Who Die in Palestine: Those With Dead Souls Here," which succinctly captures the perverted contortions of the prestige press, in this case the Guardian:
I cannot imagine the cold courage it must take to be a Palestinian, walking in protest, unarmed, towards the fence that contains the agony of their long drawn-out genocide, in the knowledge that the bullets will start splintering bones and ripping out brain matter around them, and every millisecond could be their own last.
I cannot imagine the cold viciousness it must take to work on the Guardian newspaper, where on the homepage the small headline of the latest six Palestinians to be shot dead, is way below the larger headline of the several hundredth article associating Jeremy Corbyn with anti-Semitism, on the basis of the quite deliberate conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel.
The corporate press serves the government, and the government serves the wealthy corporate elite, a simple identity statement that leaves out almost everyone else.
Newspapers are organized mostly around the identification of official enemies, like Russia, Venezuela, "the animal Assad," Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orban, Jeremy Corbyn, et al. Normal people are treated as un-people, not really material, usually just victims, hopeless, embarrassing. Then there is the constant boosting of the marvels of technology, the right-around-the-corner splendor of AI and autonomous vehicles.
Trump can't win a trade war with China, and it looks like his principal MAGA demand to scrap NAFTA is being walked back. Trump's NAFTA position was always a bully's boast, the same one with which he is taunting the Chinese. He can't deliver because ag states are red states, and it's the ag states that are going to suffer the most if NAFTA is repealed or a trade war widens with China.
“The American agricultural sector is quite influential in the Congress,” said Wang Yong, a professor of economics at Peking University, explaining why China has targeted farm products such as soybeans with possible retaliatory tariffs. “China wants the American domestic political system to do the work.”
The president and his administration have sent drastically different messages this week.
Hours after China’s announcement on Wednesday, administration officials sought to calm fears that a trade war was imminent, suggesting that they might not pull the trigger on a plan to impose tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods.
But late Thursday, Mr. Trump said he would consider levying an additional $100 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods in response to its “unfair retaliation.” In a statement, he said, “Rather than remedy its misconduct, China has chosen to harm our farmers and manufacturers.”
Mr. Zhu, China’s vice minister of finance, this week had thanked American soybean farmers and the association that represents them for declaring their opposition to the Trump administration’s plan.
In addition to soybeans, China threatened to retaliate with tariffs on American cars, chemicals and other products. The 106 goods, many produced in parts of the country that have supported Mr. Trump, were selected to deliver a warning that American workers and consumers would suffer in a protracted standoff.
“If anyone wants to fight, we will be there with him,” Mr. Zhu said, more or less outlining the terms for an American surrender: the removal of unilateral tariffs and a resolution of any grievances through the World Trade Organization. “If he wants to negotiate, the door is open.”
The news is not good for Trump. He has turned out to be much more the warmonger than he appeared on the hustings. MAGA voters were not fans of the Clinton-Obama entanglements in the Middle East. Trump campaigned against the Iraq War and he criticized the Saudis. In office, his first overseas trip was to Saudi Arabia. The U.S. under Trump has proclaimed a long-term commitment to occupy Syria. Last week Trump said the occupation would end shortly, only to have the White House deny it this week.
Everything else to one side, if Trump proves to MAGA voters that he can deliver his tough talk on trade I think he has a chance at a second term. But the problem for Trump is that he can't. The best he can hope for is smoke and mirrors.
I know I've waffled on this because the Democrats are so horrible. But unless Trump can somehow spin his soon-to-be losses on trade, a blue wave could very well appear in November.
The New York Times has published a long story by Rukmini Callimachi called "The ISIS Files." Callimachi, as part of a larger group which included West Point analysts, tracked down documents abandoned by the Islamic State in Iraq.
One of the main takeaways for readers of The Times is
Contrary to popular perception, the group was self-financed, not dependent on external donors.
[snip]
But perhaps the most lucrative tax was a religious tax known as zakat, which is considered one of the five pillars of Islam. It is calculated at 2.5 percent of an individual’s assets, and up to 10 percent for agricultural production, according to Ms. Revkin, the Yale researcher. While some of these fees had been charged by the Iraqi and Syrian governments, the mandatory asset tax was a new development.
Ordinarily in Islamic practice, the zakat is a tithe used to help the poor. In the Islamic State’s interpretation, an act of charity became a mandatory payment, and while some of the funds collected were used to help needy families, the Ministry of Zakat and Charities acted more like a version of the Internal Revenue Service.
Most accounts of how the Islamic State became the richest terrorist group in the world focus on its black-market oil sales, which at one point brought in as much as $2 million per week, according to some estimates. Yet records recovered in Syria by Mr. Tamimi and analyzed by Ms. Revkin show that the ratio of money earned from taxes versus oil stood at 6:1.
Callimachi's profusion of words provides zero insight into who led ISIS --
The disheveled fighters who burst out of the desert more than three years ago founded a state that was acknowledged by no one except themselves. And yet for nearly three years, the Islamic State controlled a stretch of land that at one point was the size of Britain, with a population estimated at 12 million people. At its peak, it included a 100-mile coastline in Libya, a section of Nigeria’s lawless forests and a city in the Philippines, as well as colonies in at least 13 other countries. By far the largest city under their rule was Mosul.
We are told that ISIS co-opted the existing state bureaucracy, ruled by violence and terror (which produced surprisingly good public services) and practiced religious cleansing whereby land of the Shia and the Christian was seized and transferred to the caliphate -- and everything was taxed, down to a single grain of wheat.
But where is a description of the amazing "disheveled fighters who burst out of the desert" to accomplish Alexander-the-Great-like logistical feats? That's the story. Who did this? Where did they come from?
We get zero of that, which should make a reader very suspicious.
The caliphate, in all its complexity and the Blitzkrieg-like speed with which it sprang up, could only have been erected by a state actor.
If I wanted to obscure the foreign source of its capital what better way to do it than with dummy tax receipts?
Callimachi goes out of her way to say the documents are legit. The guys from West Point said so.
The usual pattern of a walk-back is for the organs of the mainstream media to bury it and then go on referring to the big lie as if it had never been debunked. An example: Saddam Hussein ordered the UN weapons inspectors out of the country prior to U.S. shock and awe in 2003. Another example: Bashar al-Assad used Sarin to murder his people in eastern Ghouta August of 2013. Both are untrue, but both have been regularly referred to as truth in the corporate press long past their "sell-by" date.
Another positive development yesterday -- "Strikes by railway workers and aircrews paralyze France." It's too early to tell, but if Macron is broken by a popular uprising it will be a huge defeat for the disintegrating neoliberal world order. Macron's enormous electoral victory last year was a big win for the listing status quo, a spectacular old-fashioned propaganda achievement. If the Macron idol crumbles, it is not clear electorally where the neoliberals can turn.
There should be marches to end U.S. support of the Saudi war on Yemen like the the big March For Our Lives event last month in Washington, D.C. Monday Saudi missiles blew up more innocent civilians:
In what medics and residents in Yemen’s western port city of Al Hudaydah described as an instant midmorning slaughter in a residential housing area, the warplanes fired missiles at the civilians, cutting them to pieces as they sought relief from the 92-degree temperature. At least 14 were killed and nine wounded.
Following the initial UK-U.S. organized bum rush of Russia over the Skripal poisoning, the narrative has come under increasing suspicion.
The Skripal daughter, Yulia, is now conscious and appears to be on her way to recovery. The police officer who assisted the Skripals has also recovered and returned home. How is this possible if what we're dealing with here is a super-lethal fourth generation chemical weapon, code name Novichok?
More questionable is the idea that an assassin -- and not just any assassin, but one who is trained in the use of a fourth generation nerve agent -- would smear her Novichok on the front-door handle and skedaddle. What if the Amazon deliveryman were to arrive?
British and American officials say they are struck by the symbolism of the attack on Mr. Skripal, as well as its effectiveness. There were many ways the former spy could have been killed: He could have been shot, or killed in a staged accident.
But the assassins knew the nerve agent would be identified, and knew it would be linked to Russia, the officials said. That was meant to send a chilling message to others who would think of defecting to, or informing, the West.
And by conducting the operation in an historical British town, some distance from London, the attack was meant to indicate that no place was out of reach of Russian assassins, the officials said.
The boldness of the attack on Mr. Skripal, which took British authorities by surprise, has caused them to reassess Mr. Putin’s use of what has come to be called “hybrid warfare.”
The officials are now viewing those actions as part of a pattern — one rarely seen in the Cold War — in which Mr. Putin exerts Russian power in ways that are hard to attribute directly to Russian actors, but leave little doubt in the minds of adversaries about the country’s willingness to use a range of new tactics.
This explanation is similar to the one used when the question is asked, Why would Assad use a weapon that provides no tactical advantage yet invites retribution from a superpower? Because he loves to terrorize his people.
That's basically what Barry and Sanger are hanging out there for the NYT readers to consume. Putin did this, used a chemical weapon nonsensically in an assassination attempt, to terrorize his opponents.
It's the Boris and Natasha explanation. In other words, a cartoon meant for children.
