Day: November 25, 2009

Former Soviet States: Battleground For Global Domination By Rick Rozoff

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23 November, 2009 — Global Research – Stop NATO

A Europe united under the EU and especially NATO is to be strong enough to contain, isolate and increasingly confront Russia as the central component of U.S. plans for control of Eurasia and the world, but cannot be allowed to conduct an independent foreign policy, particularly in regard to Russia and the Middle East. European NATO allies are to assist Washington in preventing the emergence of “the most dangerous scenario…a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran” such as has been adumbrated since in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Four years after the publication of The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski’s recommended chess move was made: The U.S. and NATO invaded Afghanistan and expanded into Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests converge and where the basis for their regional cooperation existed, and Western military bases were established in the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where they remain for the indefinite future.

As the United States escalates its joint war with NATO in Afghanistan and across the Pakistani border, expands military deployments and exercises throughout Africa under the new AFRICOM, and prepares to dispatch troops to newly acquired bases in Colombia as the spearhead for further penetration of that continent, it is simultaneously targeting Eurasia and the heart of that vast land mass, the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Within months of the formal breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December of 2001, leading American policy advisers and government officials went to work devising a strategy to insure that the fragmentation was final and irreversible. And to guarantee that the fifteen new nations emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union would not be allied in even a loose association such as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) founded in the month of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

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Iraq Inquiry: The First Big Lie By Craig Murray

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24 November, 2009 — Craig Murray

Sir John Chilcot was just ten minutes in to the first public session of the Iraq Inquiry when he told the first big lie – and a lie which, when examined, exposes the entire charade.

‘My colleagues and I come to this inquiry with an open mind.’

That is demonstrably untrue. Three of the five members – Rod Lyne, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman – are prominent proponents of the Iraq war. By contrast, nobody on the committee was in public against the invasion of Iraq. How can it be fine to pack the committee with supporters of the invasion, when anyone against the invasion was excluded?

Let us look at that committee:

Sir John Chilcot

Member of the Butler Inquiry which whitewashed the fabrication of evidence of Iraqi WMD. The fact is that, beyond doubt, the FCO and SIS knew there were no Iraqi WMD. In the early 1990’s I had headed the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, tasked with monitoring and preventing Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement. In 2002 I was on a course for newly appointed Ambassadors alongside Bill Patey, who was Head of the FCO Department dealing with Iraq. Bill is a fellow Dundee University graduate and is one of the witnesses before the Iraq Inquiry this morning. I suggested to him that the stories we were spreading about Iraqi WMD could not be true. He laughed and said ‘Of course not Craig, it’s bollocks’. I had too many other conversations to mention over the next few months, with FCO colleagues who knew the WMD scare to be false.

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MEDIA LENS ALERT: DANCING ON A MASS GRAVE – OLIVER KAMM OF THE TIMES SMEARS MEDIA LENS

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25 November, 2009 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

One of our most relentless critics is Oliver Kamm, leader writer and blogger at The Times. Kamm joined the paper in 2008 having been an investment banker and co-founder of a hedge fund. In a 2006 blog, Kamm described us as “a shrill group of malcontents”, an “aggressively simple-minded lobby” guilty of “unprofessional and often comically inept exegesis” whose approach “demeans public life”. An impressive claim to make about one writer living off donations, one writer working in his spare time after finishing full-time work, and a virtually unpaid webmaster. David Cromwell, Kamm added, is “an ignoramus”.
(oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/media_lens_vs_h.html)

In another blog, two years later, Kamm described us as a “curious organisation”, operating “in effect as a ‘care in the community’ scheme for numerous species of malcontent on either political extreme”. (oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/media-lens-trie.html)

There is an overriding theme to Kamm‘s criticism. We are, he tells anyone willing to listen, “a reliable conduit for genocide-denial”. Indeed, we are responsible for nothing less than “the denial of genocide and the whitewashing of the single greatest war crime to have been committed on European soil since the defeat of Nazism”. (See comments following the Times Higher Education review of Newspeak at:
www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=409008)

He goes on: “Genocide denial is the organisation’s orthodoxy”. We are “an extreme, unsavoury and unrepresentative organisation whose function is the aggressive and often abusive targeting of working journalists”. (oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/media-lens-trie.html)

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German government to give Israel warships for free: PROTEST DEMO

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24 November, 2009 – Palestine Think Tank

Protest demo scheduled in Berlin for November 30

Written by Jonas Feller for Campo Anti-Imperialista

israel-warship.jpgIsrael, which has recently been condemned by the UN Human Rights Council because of their war crimes [1], asks Germany to build them two new warships – for free. [2]

After the German chancellor Merkel argued in front of the US congress that “whoever threatens Israel, threatens us” [3], it seems as if Israel will get what it wants. This wouldn’t, however, be anything new: At the turn of the millennium, Germany financed three submarines spending 560 Million Euros on them. In 2012, there will two additional submarines, this time German tax payers will have to pay 333 Million Euros. [4]

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Sameh Brill – VIDEO: Looking at the Gaza War (if they let us): for “End the Siege on Gaza”

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25 November, 2009 — Palestine Think Tank

Sameh Brill is back! And he’s produced the first of a new series of videos for the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza. In this video we see news clips, but mostly… we see those who tell us that we weren’t allowed access to see ANYTHING. Those people include Richard Falk, George Galloway, Ilan Pappe and others.

http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/ExternalVideo.900467

Neoliberalism and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development in Latin America By Prof. James Petras and Prof. Henry Veltmeyer

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19 November, 2009 — Global Research

An analysis of the dynamics of capitalist development over the last two decades has been overshadowed by an all too prevalent “globalization” discourse. It appears that much of the Left has bought into this discourse, tacitly accepting globalization as an irresistible fact and that in many ways it is progressive, needing only for the corporate agenda to be derailed and an abandonment of neoliberalism. This is certainly the case in Latin America where the Left has focused its concern almost exclusively on the bankruptcy of “neoliberalism”, with reference to the agenda pursued and package of policy reforms implemented by virtually every government in the region by the dint of ideology if not the demands of the global capital or political opportunism. In this concern, imperialism and capitalism per se, as opposed to neoliberalism, have been pushed off the agenda, and as a result, excepting Chavéz’s Bolivarian Revolution, the project of building socialism has virtually disappeared as an object of theory and practice.

In this paper we would like to contribute towards turning this around—to resurrect the socialist project; to do so by deconstructing the discourse on “neoliberal globalization” and reconstructing the actual contemporary dynamics of capitalist development.

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