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Chemical Weapons

=By= Steering Group – VIPS

One reason why Official Washington continues to insist that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “must go” is that he supposedly “gassed his own people” with sarin on Aug. 21, 2013, but the truth of that allegation has never been established and is in growing doubt, U.S. intelligence veterans point out. [Updated on Dec. 23 with new signers.]

MEMORANDUM FOR: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Lavrov
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Sarin Attack at Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013

In a Memorandum of Oct. 1, 2013, we asked each of you to make public the intelligence upon which you based your differing conclusions on who was responsible for the sarin chemical attack at Ghouta, outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. On Dec. 10, 2015, Eren Erdem, a member of parliament in Turkey, citing official documents, blamed Turkey for facilitating the delivery of sarin to rebels in Syria.

Mr. Kerry, you had blamed the Syrian government. Mr. Lavrov, you had described the sarin as “homemade” and suggested anti-government rebels were responsible. Each of you claimed to have persuasive evidence to support your conclusion.

Neither of you responded directly to our appeal to make such evidence available to the public, although, Mr. Lavrov, you came close to doing so. In a speech

 

Pointing to strong doubt among chemical weapons experts regarding the evidence adduced to blame the government of Syria for the sarin attack, you also referred to the “open letter sent to President Obama by former operatives of the CIA and the Pentagon,” in which we expressed similar doubt.

Mr. Kerry, on Aug. 30, 2013, you blamed the Syrian government, publicly and repeatedly, for the sarin attack. But you failed to produce the kind of “Intelligence Assessment” customarily used to back up such claims.

We believe that this odd lack of a formal “Intelligence Assessment” is explained by the fact that our former colleagues did not believe the evidence justified your charges and that, accordingly, they resisted pressure to “fix the intelligence around the policy,” as was done to “justify” the attack on Iraq.

Intelligence analysts were telling us privately (and we told the President in our Memorandum of Sept. 6, 2013) that, contrary to what you claimed, “the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21.”

This principled dissent from these analysts apparently led the White House to create a new art form, a “Government Assessment,” to convey claims that the government in Damascus was behind the sarin attack. It was equally odd that the newly minted genre of report offered not one item of verifiable evidence.

(We note that you used this new art form “Government (not Intelligence) Assessment” a second time – again apparently to circumvent intelligence analysts’ objections. On July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, after the media asked you to come up with evidence supporting the charges you leveled against “pro-Russian separatists” on the July 20 Sunday talk shows, you came up with the second, of only two, “Government Assessment.” Like the one on the chemical attack in Syria, the assessment provided meager fare when it comes to verifiable evidence.)

Claims and Counterclaims

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]peaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, President Obama asserted: “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the [Syrian] regime carried out this attack [at Ghouta].”

Mr. Lavrov, that same day you publicly complained that U.S. officials kept claiming “’the Syrian regime,’ as they call it, is guilty of the use of chemical weapons, without providing comprehensive proof.” Two days later you told the U.N. General Assembly you had given Mr. Kerry “the latest compilation of evidence, which was an analysis of publicly available information.” You also told the Washington Post, “This evidence is not something revolutionary. It’s available on the Internet.”

On the Internet? Mr. Kerry, if your staff avoided calling your attention to Internet reports about Turkish complicity in the sarin attack of Aug. 21, 2013, because they lacked confirmation, we believe you can now consider them largely confirmed.

Documentary Evidence

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]ddressing fellow members of parliament on Dec. 10, 2015, Turkish MP Eren Erdem from the Republican People’s Party (a reasonably responsible opposition group) confronted the Turkish government on this key issue. Waving a copy of “Criminal Case Number 2013/120,” Erdem referred to official reports and electronic evidence documenting a smuggling operation with Turkish government complicity.

In an interview with RT four days later, Erdem said Turkish authorities had acquired evidence of sarin gas shipments to anti-government rebels in Syria, and did nothing to stop them.

The General Prosecutor in the Turkish city of Adana opened a criminal case, and an indictment stated “chemical weapons components” from Europe “were to be seamlessly shipped via a designated route through Turkey to militant labs in Syria.” Erdem cited evidence implicating the Turkish Minister of Justice and the Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation in the smuggling of sarin.

The Operation

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]ccording to Erdem, the 13 suspects arrested in raids carried out against the plotters were released just a week after they were indicted, and the case was closed — shut down by higher authority. Erdem told RT that the sarin attack at Ghouta took place shortly after the criminal case was closed and that the attack probably was carried out by jihadists with sarin gas smuggled through Turkey.

Small wonder President Erdogan has accused Erdem of “treason.” It was not Erdem’s first “offense.” Earlier, he exposed corruption by Erdogan family members, for which a government newspaper branded him an “American puppet, Israeli agent, a supporter of the terrorist PKK and the instigator of a coup.”

In our Sept. 6, 2013 Memorandum for the President, we reported that coordination meetings had taken place just weeks before the sarin attack at a Turkish military garrison in Antakya – just 15 miles from the Syrian border with Syria and 55 miles from its largest city, Aleppo.

In Antakya, senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials were said to be coordinating plans with Western-sponsored rebels, who were told to expect an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development.” This, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria, and rebel commanders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Assad government.

A year before, the New York Times reported that the Antakya area had become a “magnet for foreign jihadis, who are flocking into Turkey to fight holy war in Syria.” The Times quoted a Syrian opposition member based in Antakya, saying the Turkish police were patrolling this border area “with their eyes closed.”

And, Mr. Lavrov, while the account given by Eren Erdem before the Turkish Parliament puts his charges on the official record, a simple Google search including “Antakya” shows that you were correct in stating the Internet contains a wealth of contemporaneous detail supporting Erdem’s disclosures.

Mr. Kerry, while in Moscow on Dec. 15, you said to a Russian interviewer that Syrian President Assad “has gassed his people – I mean, gas hasn’t been used in warfare formally for years – for – and gas is outlawed, but Assad used it.”

Three days later The Washington Post dutifully repeated the charge about Assad’s supposed killing “his own people with chemical weapons.” U.S. media have made this the conventional wisdom. The American people are not fully informed. There has been no mainstream media reporting on Turkish MP Erdem’s disclosures.

Renewed Appeal

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e ask you again, Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov, to set the record straight on this important issue. The two of you have demonstrated an ability to work together on important matters – the Iran nuclear deal, for example – and have acknowledged a shared interest in defeating ISIS, which clearly is not Turkish President Erdogan’s highest priority. Indeed, his aims are at cross-purposes to those wishing to tamp down the violence in Syria.

After the shoot-down of Russia’s bomber on Nov. 24, President Vladimir Putin put Russian forces in position to retaliate the next time, and told top defense officials, “Any targets threatening our [military] group or land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed.” We believe that warning should be taken seriously. What matters, though, is what Erdogan believes.

There is a good chance Erdogan will be dismissive of Putin’s warning, as long as the Turkish president believes he can depend on NATO always to react in the supportive way it did after the shoot-down.

One concrete way to disabuse him of the notion that he has carte blanche to create incidents that could put not only Turkey, but also the U.S., on the verge of armed conflict with Russia, would be for the U.S. Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister to coordinate a statement on what we believe was a classic false-flag chemical attack on Aug. 21, 2013, facilitated by the Turks and aimed at mousetrapping President Obama into a major attack on Syria.

One of our colleagues, a seasoned analyst of Turkish affairs, put it this way: “Erdogan is even more dangerous if he thinks that he now has NATO license to bait Russia — as he did with the shoot-down. I don’t think NATO is willing to give him that broader license, but he is a loose cannon.”

FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY

Graham E. Fuller, Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer

Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)

David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council (ret)

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)

Scott Ritter, former Maj., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Robert David Steele, former CIA Operations Officer

Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)

 

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Climate Crisis

=By= Valerie Brown

It may not be polite to mention Karl Marx in America, but leading thinkers on the left think that capitalism may be the cause of climate change, and that to save the planet the system needs fundamental reform.

According to a new book the profit motive, which drives capitalism above all other considerations, forces it to extract everything from the planet that will generate a surplus, at the expense of real benefits to humans, living nature (animals), and entire ecosystems.

Fossil Capital: the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, by Andreas Malm, out in hardback from Verso in January 2016, analyses capitalism’s role in global warming by delving into its past.

The book builds on the work of Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. Both ask whether catastrophic climate change can be averted without at least a major makeover – or the outright elimination – of capitalism.

Malm, a professor of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University, starts with James Watt’s patenting of the rotating steam engine in 1784. This was also the first year that rising carbon dioxide and methane levels were observed in polar ice.

First Malm attacks the accepted theories of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. who developed and reinforced the capitalist notion that markets are the cure for all social ills. He shows that mills adopted coal power instead of water only because it enabled mill owners to move to populated areas to find docile and skilled workers, who were in short supply in the countryside.

More biddable

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]oal enabled this move because, once out of the ground, it is highly portable. The machines, of course, eliminated many jobs and made others both simpler and more difficult. Owners started hiring women and children because they were easier to control than adult men.

The demands of the machines set the pace of work, and it was only after massive strikes and riots in the 1840s that a ten-hour workday was established; but this, Malm shows, only caused the mill owners to speed up the machinery and make workers adapt further, producing more in less time.

This in turn increased the demand for coal. The energy transition fostered a “bourgeois fantasy” that self-sustaining machines, godlike in their power but also biddable, would create a golden age.

Malm frames non-fossil energy – air, water and light – as “the flow”, a constant movement of forces not generated by humans that can sometimes be harnessed for human ends. Coal – and by extension all further fossil fuels – is “the stock”, something manufacturers can buy, accumulate, and use at need.

Humans were extremely vexing to the industrialists, because they behaved more like the flow than the stock. Coal-powered engines drastically reduced manufacturers’ dependence on human workers.

Dispensing with people

“The engine is much more tractable and civil than the hod-man,” wrote Edward Tufnell, a member of the Factories Enquiry of 1833, “easier managed, keeps good hours, drinks no whiskey, and is never tired.”

Thus, Malm asserts, capital’s switch from water to coal, and even later to oil, resulted fundamentally from an attempt to dispense with the services of human workers to the greatest possible extent. “Some humans introduced steam power against the explicit resistance of other humans,” he writes.

Workers were aware of this from the beginning. The millions who flocked to northern British cities, dispossessed by enclosures of formerly public lands, nonetheless hated the factories.

Scotsmen, Malm notes, viewed factories as prisons – and for good reason: the average temperature inside a steam-powered textile factory was 84-94°F (29-34°C).

Levels of carbon dioxide in the air could reach 2,800 parts per million – ten times the atmospheric levels at the time. The faster the mill owners pushed their machines, the more boiler explosions occurred, killing nearly one person a day in the 1850s.

But labour was eventually crushed with the aid of government soldiers. Coal was king, and the rest is history. This should be a cautionary tale for the present – if government allies with capital rather than the citizenry, Malm asserts, there will be no stopping climate change.

The grandiose schemes for geo-engineering and other technical fixes bankrolled by the likes of Bill Gates, the major oil companies and the American Enterprise Institute, says Malm, would keep mitigation in the wrong hands – and in any case are too dangerous to try.

Insisting that the real authors of the climate crisis comprise a tiny, all-male, all-white fraction of the planet’s population, Malm objects to calling this the Anthropocene epoch; he would rather call it the “Capitalocene.” And capital, he insists, is not capable of solving the crisis it created.

What we need instead, he writes, is a return to “the flow”: distributed solar, wind and water power. Moreover, in order to avoid severe damage to civilisation, we need to abandon carbon immediately, and this can be accomplished only by intentional and decisive governmental action.

The governments that are doing best at this, Malm observes, are state and city governments, which have no obligation to generate profits and are not owned by Big Capital.

Malm recognises that “socialism is an excruciatingly difficult condition to achieve.” He’s not envisioning a new Stalinist approach to replace runaway capital. For one thing, Malm observes, capitalist ideology is so deeply ingrained in society that, quoting Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Still, he says, people must try at least to modify free-range capitalism, echoing the cries of workers who challenged capital in the world’s first general strike in 1842: “Go and stop the smoke!” – Climate News Network

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-129-3 paperback

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Valerie Brown, based in Oregon, US, is a freelance science writer focusing on climate change and environmental health. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and Society of Environmental Journalists. http://www.vjane-arts.com/vjane-arts/writing.html; Twitter: @sacagawea

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Saudi Medievalism

=By= Daniel Lazare

Is the Saudi monarchy coming apart at the seams? Scholars and journalists have long predicted the kingdom’s demise, but this time the forecasts may finally prove correct.

The reason is an unprecedented avalanche of problems pouring down on Saudi Arabia since 79-year-old Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud assumed the throne last January. A hardliner in contrast to his vaguely reformist predecessor Abdullah, Salman lost no time in letting the world know that a new sheriff was in town. He upped the number of public executions, which, at 151, are now running at nearly double last year’s rate.

After meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he promised to intensify efforts to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by increasing aid to Al Nusra, Al Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate. A few weeks later, he assembled a coalition of nine Sunni Arab states to launch nightly bombing raids on Yemen, quickly reducing one of the poorest countries in the Middle East to ruin.

People certainly took notice. But if Salman thought such actions would win him respect, he was wrong. Instead, the result has been a steady drum beat of negative publicity as the world awakes to the fact that, with its public beheadings and barbaric treatment of women, the Islamic state headed by the House of Saud is little different from the Islamic State headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in northern Syria and Iraq.

Topping the kingdom’s list of woes is the economy. With its stubbornly high unemployment rate and growing wealth gap between the rich and poor, Saudi Arabia has long been the sick man of the Persian Gulf. Even though planners have been talking about economic diversification since the 1970s, the kingdom was actually more dependent on oil as of 2013 than 40 years earlier.

“Saudization” of the workforce is another mantra, yet the labor market remains polarized between a private sector dominated by foreign guest workers, mainly from South Asia, and a public sector filled with Saudi “sofa men” who spend their days lounging about in government offices.

Riyadh wishes that young people would take jobs in hotels, oil refineries and the like, but most prefer to wait for a high-paid government sinecure to open up – which is one reason why the jobless rate among young people is as high as 29 percent.

Oil Price Crash

Given this combination of oil dependence and joblessness, a two-thirds drop in the price of crude since mid-2014 couldn’t be more painful. But what makes it even more frightening is the growing realization that, with softening demand due to the global slowdown and growing over-supply due to the fracking revolution, low prices will be a fact of life for years to come.

This prospect does not bode well for a country dependent on oil for 91 percent of its foreign revenue, one that is currently burning through its foreign reserves at the rate of $10 billion a month

The news on the political front is almost as dire. Every week seems to bring a fresh new scandal. First, liberal blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to a thousand lashes for the crime of speaking his mind. Then Karl Andree, a 74-year-old British grandfather, was sentenced to 350 for the crime of having a bottle of wine in his car.

Three Saudi Shi‘ite youths – Ali al-Nimr, Abdallah al-Zaher and Dawood al-Marhoon – have been sentenced to death for participating in Arab Spring protests while still in their teens. A kangaroo court has imposed a death sentence in the case of Ali’s uncle, a Shi‘ite religious leader named Nimr al-Nimr, convicted of inciting sectarian strife (i.e. opposing flagrant Wahhabist discrimination and oppression).

Yet another religious court has sentenced a 35-year-old artist and poet named Ashraf Fayadh to death for the crime of atheism and apostasy.

All of which is generating widening waves of anger and disgust. But perhaps the final straw was Salman’s offer to build and staff 200 Wahhabi mosques for Syrian refugees fleeing chaos that his policies have helped create. The offer brought an unusual counter-blast from German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel.

“We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over,” Gabriel told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. “Wahhabi mosques all over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Islamists who are a threat to public safety come from these communities in Germany.”

The last thing Germany needs, in other words, is hundreds of Saudi-financed mullahs preaching sectarianism and jihad.

Then there is the military front – or fronts – in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, where the situation grows worse by the day. Like all wars of aggression, the Saudi-led air assault on Shi‘ite Houthi rebels in Yemen was supposed to be short and sweet.

Indeed, four weeks after the campaign began last March, Riyadh issued a “Mission Accomplished” message declaring that it had “successfully eliminated the threat to the security of Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries” by destroying Shi‘ite Houthi rebels’ heavy weaponry and ballistic missiles. But some of those missiles must still have remained in place since the coalition resumed bombing just a few days later.

Destroying Yemen

The result has been a growing humanitarian disaster that Western governments are doing their best to ignore. “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” Peter Maurer, head of the International Red Cross, said after visiting the country in August. Since then, deaths have reached 5,700, nearly half of them civilian, food and water systems have broken down, while 2.3 million people have been displaced and another 120,000 have been forced to flee abroad.

Yet with the war turning into a classic quagmire, no end is in sight. Poorly trained Saudi troops have “proven to be no match for the battle-hardened Houthis.” While they’ve succeeded in clearing Houthi fighters out of the southern port city of Aden, the rebels still control the northern part of the country, including the capital of Sana’a, and are besieging Taiz, located roughly midway in between.

The Saudi-led coalition is meanwhile breaking apart. David Ottoway, the Washington Post’s longtime Middle East correspondent, notes that the Saudis have quarreled with their United Arab Emirate allies over whether to support the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. As a consequence, the UAE has halved its troop strength to 2,000 and has sent in hundreds of Colombian mercenaries in their place.

The Saudi-backed government of ousted President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi is also falling asunder as Vice President Khaled Bahah, seen as more amenable to compromise with the Houthis, moves to establish his own power base.

Much of this is the fault of Muhammad bin Salman, the king’s favorite son by his third wife, whom he named chief of court and minister of defense immediately after taking office. Officially 35, Muhammad may actually be as young as 29, which, if true, would make him the youngest defense minister in the world. A graduate of King Saud University in Riyadh, he is entirely a product of a closed and narrow educational system that emphasizes the Qur’an and Hadiths over science and analysis and imbues students with hostility toward Christians, Jews, Shi‘ites and foreigners in general.

All of which is all too evident in Bin Salman’s handling of the war. Since Vietnam, one military conflict after another has demonstrated that air power rarely works without ground forces doing the hard work of rooting out the enemy. But not only is Saudi Arabia short of “grunts” willing to sacrifice their lives in behalf of a greedy and over-sized royal family, it was understandably reluctant to send troops into a rugged terrain that highly motivated Houthi fighters know like the back of their hand.

Hence Saudi Arabia resisted putting “boots on the ground” for months, thereby allowing the Houthis to dig in all the more securely. Although the’ ostensible goal was to prevent the Houthis from taking power, the Saudis’ real aim was to humiliate Iran, which they see as the mastermind behind the uprising, and show the U.S. that the kingdom was capable of stepping out on its own.

But instead the Saudies have done neither. Not only does Iran remain unscathed, but the longer the Houthis hold out, the clearer it becomes that the Saudis are unable to prevail in their own backyard. It’s as if the U.S. had gotten hopelessly bogged down after invading Mexico.

Backing Jihadists in Syria

The proxy war in northern Syria and Iraq is at the same time not going much better. The Saudis thought they had Assad on the run after channeling U.S.-made TOW missiles to the rebels last spring, but Russian intervention is altering the equation. Thanks to Russian bombardment of ISIS, Al Qaeda and other rebel groups, Assad was able to announce in late November that his troops were advancing on “nearly every front,” while, in mid-December, government forces racked up a significant victory by capturing an air base nine or ten miles east of Damascus that had been in anti-government hands since 2012.

Saudi options are limited in response. The kingdom could funnel still more aid to the anti-Assad forces. But if it does, it knows that much of the weaponry will wind up in the hands of ISIS (also known as ISIL, Islamic State and Daesh), with whom relations, for the moment, could not be more hostile.

With Saudi mullahs calling on Muslims to support “the holy warriors of Syria … because if they are defeated, God forbid, it will be the turn of one Sunni country after another,” it could encourage rebels, many of whom are Chechen, to launch a retaliatory assault on Russia, as Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan reportedly threatened to do in 2013.

But this would mean risking a Russian counter-attack that could prove devastating. Instead of demonstrating their military and strategic independence, the Saudis have wound up more reliant on an all-forgiving U.S. than ever.

Given such incompetence, it was startling to see Muhammad bin Salman behaving yet again like a bull in a china shop last week when he announced that the Saudis had assembled a 34-nation coalition to fight terrorism. After two supposed members – Pakistan and Malaysia – announced that this was the first they had heard of it, questions began raining down.

Since Shi‘ite-majority Iran and Iraq were conspicuously absent from the list, was the real purpose to fight terrorism or to push a Sunni sectarian agenda? Considering the draconian “anti-terrorism” law that Salman pushed through last March banning everything from atheism to “sowing discord in society,” was the real goal to fight groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda or to ban dissent against the monarch in general?

It’s not hard to see why the Saudi defense chief is now known as “Muhammad the reckless” and why rumblings of a palace coup are beginning to be heard. All too aware of the role that the 1980s oil collapse played in tipping the Soviet Union over the edge, the Saudis, according to one foreign analyst, are determined to avoid anything smacking of perestroika and glasnost:

“The Saudis are obsessed with it, that if they liberalize a little, the whole thing will come apart,” the analyst said. Rather than loosening, they are determined to tighten up all the more even if it means pushing the contradictions to the breaking point.

The West is afraid to push too hard for the same reason. All too aware that the Saudi opposition to the monarchy is dominated by hard-line Islamists rather than nice house-broken liberals, the West’s greatest nightmare is of a failed oil giant sitting on top of 20 percent of the world’s proven reserves as Al Qaeda and ISIS run riot in the streets.

“Get rid of the House of Saud,” observed a senior UK diplomat, “and you will be screaming for them to come back within six months.” After years of feeding the Saudi monster, Western leaders are afraid to stop for fear of making things even worse.

 

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Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).

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What Climate Catastrophe?

=By= xraymike79

Another climate conference has once again come and gone, echoing hollow promises and ugly unspoken realities. I won’t waste anyone’s time analyzing the verbiage of this so-called agreement which failed to even mention the term fossil fuels, probably at the behest of those who financed the entire farce, i.e. the carbon-extraction companies. Suffice it to say that countries were approving fossil fuel exploration projects before the ink of the global climate agreement had fully dried. As long as corporations are able to push environmental and social costs off their balance sheets and onto the backs of the weak and defenseless, dirty coal will be burnt and the cheapest slave labor will be employed. Questioning root causes like our inherently unsustainable way of life is still very much taboo and will remain so even after our descendants are sifting through the wreckage. Sure, mainstream publications have expanded their coverage of man-made climate change and global warming, but these existential threats to life on Earth remain an enigma to the vast majority, a footnote in some obscure textbook.

Retailers on the East Coast talk about a crisis for winter clothing sales because the weather has been too unseasonably warm to attract buyers, but nary a mention of man’s role in influencing these abnormal events, such as a super El Niño amplified by global warming. As the developed world continues to roll the climate chaos dice, we now face a higher chance of turbo-charged El Niños every 4 to 12 years and all the destruction that they bring —mass coral bleaching events, die-offs of marine mammals, record flooding and drought, crop failure and famine, refugee crises, etc. This year’s El Niño is on track to becoming the strongest on record with meteorologist Eric Holthaus exclaiming, “Our planet’s climate has undergone a step-change this year.”:

This climate “step-change” may also be indicative of a considerable underestimation of the Earth’s climate sensitivity. What should be painfully obvious by now is that the carbon footprint for everyone will have to decrease dramatically and quickly in order to slow emissions. In other words, the world’s richest will have to radically alter their lifestyles. That’s never going to happen in any variant of capitalism, a system so entrenched that it is inconceivable to imagine anything substantially different taking its place. Instead we get things like corporate greenwashing, carbon trading, decades of climate conferences, First World offshoring of manufacturing emissions into the Third World, and out-and-out fraud like the VW auto emissions scandal. The problem has been identified for nearly half a century, yet we continue to deceive ourselves with half-baked solutions and hypocritical indignation. The inertia of the system is simply too great and the dominant culture has a tendency to kill the messenger of bad news, so there is a strong incentive to sugarcoat things, but a deus ex machina is nowhere on the horizon. We’ll only change in response to the hard realities from an increasingly inhospitable planet. Sunken costs and material incentives built into our socio-economic system prevent radical change and fetishize the myth of the easy techno-fix, a yet-to-be-invented technology that will magically sustain modern civilization while at the same time keep the wolves of ecological collapse at bay. Even more delusional, a prominent tech magnate has urged humanity to pursue interstellar colonization before we render the Earth uninhabitable, but as an internet commenter quipped, “A post-nuclear war, global warming-baked and hyper polluted Earth will still be paradise compared to Mars.” Some technophiles admit the future actually looks rather grim:

…But the most worrisome threats are not merely anthropogenic, they’re technogenic. They arise from the fact that advanced technologies are (a) dual-use in nature, meaning that they can be employed for both benevolent and nefarious purposes; (b) becoming more powerful, thereby enabling humans to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in new ways; and (c) in some cases, becoming more accessible to small groups, including, at the limit, single individuals…

Just as technology is not neutral, so too is the economic system driving this technology. The institution of capitalism, which has been copied and exported all over the world since WW II, has established widespread acceptance for the condition of mass production, mass consumption, and waste at an ever accelerating rate, pushing the world deeper and deeper into ecological crisis. For example, the ubiquity of plastics now exhibits itself as microscopic pieces on every beach in the world and in our dinner with trillions more pieces in the oceans than previously thought. Scientists estimate that nearly all sea birds will be ingesting some sort of plastic by 2050. In spite of this growing evidence of a plasticised planet, the production of plastics has only increased while recycling remains an effort in futility:

For more than 50 years, global production of plastic has continued to rise. Some 299 million tons of plastics were produced in 2013, representing a 3.9 percent increase over 2012’s output. With a market driven by consumerism and convenience, along with the comparatively low price of plastic materials, demand for plastic is growing. Recovery and recycling, however, remain insufficient, and millions of tons of plastics end up in landfills and oceans each year – link

There’s no going back from this global complexity trap we’ve built around ourselves. All those bits of plastic will end up in the sedimentary layer of the Anthropocene along with elevated concentrations of CO2, radionuclides from nuclear fallout and waste, as well as novel metals and pollutants never before seen. Once underway, mass extinctions cannot be reversed, especially when driven by over seven billion pleasure-seeking, individualistic “consumers”. Materialism and greed, we are told, are natural human instincts, and they are all too eagerly rewarded by an economic system which reduces everything to a financial object and monetizes every aspect of the natural world. Today’s environmentalism is, as Derrick Jensen pointed out, similar to the palliative care given to prisoners in Nazi Germany death camps. The emaciated ecological ghosts of so many species are right before us, yet nearly everyone is blind to the unfolding catastrophe of the 6th mass extinction:

…we lose a huge chunk of the world’s diversity that will never come back. We lose the potential for communication with other lifeforms, with the only remaining ones eventually whittled down to domesticated animals or weed species that thrive in civilized man’s destructive footsteps. The conversation of life itself is turning into small talk, but the only recognition that seems to be made by this culture is how [biodiversity loss] “reduces carbon storage”. How trees and animals can provide “ecosystem services”, as if they existed for nothing more than to continue the existence of the mad king ape. – pathofraven

Yes, we are pretty far gone when a four minute comedy routine makes more sense than anything broadcasted on the evening news. Corporate mass media-controlled public debates have degenerated into infomercial sound bites. In a society where success is measured by the key metrics of money and profit, it should be no surprise that a wealthy, xenophobic businessman is able to garner mass appeal by hogging publicity and playing on the fears and base desires of the populus. “Make America Great Again” is a catchy slogan for a society ignorant of the collapsing world around them and oblivious to the over-consumptive, profligate way of life that is proving to be their undoing. For a celebrity-obsessed culture whose world is falling apart, the next logical choice for its leader would seem to be a reality TV show star who says he can restore the illusion of the American dream and build a great wall to keep all the riff-raff out.

A fascist right-wing administration might just provide that extra push that takes us all over the edge into collapse. With the Presidency largely serving as a figurehead position for the Deep State, I’m not convinced a different candidate would make a measurable difference in the grand scheme of things anyway. Our “democracy” is, after all, just one more illusion in a bread-and-circus election cycle:

“Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

So while terrorism takes center stage in the overstretched Empire of Amnesia, remember this simple fact: 303 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks worldwide in the last decade while 320,523 Americans were killed because of gun violence in that same time period. Random mass shootings, capitalism’s “free market” genocides, the disruption of the Holocene’s stable climate regime by anthropogenic climate disruption, tipping points in the earth’s biosphere, terminal industrial disease, and many other things come to mind that pose a much bigger danger to the average American, but the War on Terror, conceived as open-ended, serves as a conveniently omnipresent boogieman for jerking the chain of the taxpayer and justifying the growth of an intrusive security state. What better way to control the masses as the wheels continue coming off the global economy and the biosphere becomes evermore threadbare. The rich will retreat into their luxury spider holes until the coast is clear.

 

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www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com.”

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Look Back Machine
=By= Andy Paiscik

College students were an integral part of the popular upheaval of the 1960’s. Beginning with the lunch counter sit-ins one month into the decade and continuing on through 1969 and beyond, college students around the country rallied to the cause of justice and freedom. The two best known student organizations of that time were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for Student a Democratic Society (SDS). Another important group, though less well known, was the Northern Student Movement (NSM) and it was founded in Connecticut on the campus of Yale University.

Tens of thousands of young Americans were inspired by the lunch counter sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina and spread throughout the South. The lie that many knew was a lie — that the United States is based on freedom, justice and equality – was exposed by the incredible bravery of young black people. It was as though a dam had broken and a tidal wave of people, led by college students, were suddenly passionately committed to making the world a better place and not so concerned about forging comfortable careers for themselves.

Students at Yale University were no exception and some of them got together in the Fall of 1961 to form the NSM. One of the two projects they initiated was support of SNCC, which by then had branched out from the lunch counter sit-ins to spearheading the Freedom Rides, a concerted effort to end segregation and discrimination on the nation’s bus and train systems. The other project the NSM undertook was to challenge racial discrimination in the North. To that end, the group organized an action a month after it was formed with the New Haven chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) to protest local housing discrimination.

Like SNCC, the NSM had struck a chord and there were soon dozens of chapters on campuses throughout the Northeast. Initially, its membership was primarily white, though it worked closely with organizations like CORE whose memberships were mainly or exclusively black. Within several years, NSM had recruited a large number of blacks from both college campuses and from the communities where it established programs. NSM also began publishing a publication, Freedom North, with articles about its work and that of the Black Freedom Movement as a whole.

Peter Countryman, a Yale undergraduate from Chicago, was elected as the group’s first executive director. Only 19 at the time, Countryman had already been active in civil rights work through the New England Student Christian Movement. He was instrumental in establishing a tutoring program in which students and recent graduates from Yale and other local colleges worked with young people enrolled in New Haven’s public schools. The effort proved a success and NSM established similar programs in several dozen cities in the Northeast. By 1963, the group had enlisted over 2,000 students from a number of colleges to tutor an estimated 3,500 children. Countryman eventually left New Haven to spearhead NSM’s tutoring program in Philadelphia.

In June of 1963, NSM members primarily from Trinity College established a tutorial program in Hartford with a staff of 25 and over 200 volunteers. The tutoring sessions were held in churches and other public facilities in or near the communities where the tutees lived and were so popular that the Hartford chapter grew to be one of the NSM’s largest. Soon the group was holding classes on Black history and the arts and regular forums on police brutality and civil rights activities in the South. The NSM publicized these activities and news of the Freedom Movement through a newspaper, the North End Voice, which members distributed throughout Hartford. Simultaneously, NSM members in Hartford established the North End Community Action Project (NECAP) that organized sit-ins and other protests against discriminatory hiring practices around the city.

As the Freedom Rides continued through 1962 and into 1963, NSM members from college campuses in Connecticut travelled to the South to participate. They were also actively involved in a voter registration drive that SNCC launched in Mississippi in 1963 as well as, a year later, in Freedom Summer. One who participated in voter registration, Yale graduate student Bruce Payne, was shot and wounded in Mississippi by opponents of the campaign.

More students from Yale took part in these projects than from any other school and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was among many who took note. King visited Yale several times during this period including once at the invitation of Yale’s chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a supporter of the NSM who a few years late became one of the leading figures in the movement against US aggression in Southeast Asia. After one of his visits, King wrote to Coffin of the work being led by the NSM that he was “really heartened by the movement in the right direction I sense at Yale.”

In addition to New Haven and Hartford, the NSM had vibrant chapters on many campuses and in many cities, including New York, Detroit and Philadelphia. In 1963, the group moved its main office from New Haven to New York City and Peter Countryman was succeeded as executive director by William Strickland, an African-American graduate of Harvard who joined the NSM in his native Boston. After Freedom Summer, the group, while continuing to steadfastly support SNCC’s work in the South, shifted more of its attention to the problems of blacks in the North.

By 1965, many in the NSM had grown critical of what they saw as the limitations of a movement predicated on “civil rights.” Blacks in the organization, like blacks in SNCC and the soon-to-emerge Black Panther Party, heeded the call of Malcolm X for black self-determination, a broader and more revolutionary demand than civil rights. They began to see themselves, in addition to being a part of a movement for black liberation within the borders of the United States, as part of a global upsurge of primarily people of color against colonialism and imperialism. They began to call for Black Power and saw the need to transform the NSM and SNCC into all-black groups to better achieve that goal. Advocates of Black Power recognized the accomplishments and dedication of white members while stating that it was for blacks to determine what their communities needed. Rather than providing services like the tutoring programs that were decided by and initiated by whites, whites were asked to leave the NSM and SNCC and challenged to organize the broader white community to support black liberation.

Much as happened on a larger scale in SNCC, there were tensions around these changes within the NSM. Close friendships ended and there was anger and resentment in some quarters. Though understandable, the bitterness that some whites felt was in large part a reflection of a movement that was still very young and somewhat immature. Race, after all, is perhaps the most complicated question confronting those of all colors dedicated to building a just society. For whites, it is essential to understand that it is for black people to decide what is best for black people. Blacks, especially blacks from the poorer and working classes, and not whites, must be in leadership of the Black Freedom Movement and significantly represented in the leadership of whatever larger multi-racial movement we are able to build.<

There’s nothing easy about this, either in theory or practice. It was (and is) especially difficult for young whites from schools like Yale to learn and accept. Many have, after all, been taught all their lives that it is their destiny and their right to rule. Without disregarding the pain some people experienced, the move by the NSM and SNCC to black self-determination was a necessary one.

The NSM continued to do important work for most of the rest of the 1960’s, organizing students and non-students alike. Many joined the much-larger SNCC, which by 1966 was establishing itself in the North. Others, upon leaving campuses, joined the Black Panthers, including in one-time NSM strongholds Hartford and New Haven, as well as Bridgeport. As US aggression in Indochina escalated and the movement against it exploded, many whites who had been in the NSM immersed themselves in anti-war work. That effort was important, necessary and, in the end, successful, though in many ways that fact has been whitewashed from history. Perhaps ironically, though, the massive growth of the anti-war movement in the late 1960’s diverted whites from taking up the challenge of their black comrades in NSM to organize the greater white community to support black liberation. Though we are on higher ground than 50 years ago, that challenge remains.

 

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Andy Paiscik is a Bridgeport native, long-time activist and award-winning author who writes for Counterpunch, Z, and many other publications and websites.

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Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.