January 30, 2018 “Information Clearing House” – In an act of insane escalation of provocations against Russia, Washington has produced a list of 210 top Russian government officials and important business executives who are “gangsters,” “members of Putin’s gang,” “threats,” “people deserving to be sanctioned,” or however the Western presstitutes care to explain the list. The absurd list includes the Prime Minister of Russia, the Foreign Minister, the Defense Minister, and executives of Gazprom, Rosneft, and Bank Rossiya. In other words, the suggestion is that the entirety of Russian political and business leadership is corrupt.
The Russians do not seem to understand the purpose of the list. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the government sees the list as an attempt to interfere in the Russian presidential election. There is no doubt that Washington would like to reduce Putin’s public support so that Washington can use the Western-funded NGOs operating in Russia to present American stooges as Russia’s true voices. However, it is unlikely that the Russian people are stupid enough to fall for such a trick.
Washington’s list has three purposes:
1) To undercut Russian diplomacy by presenting the top echelons of Russia as gangsters.
2) To present Russia as a military threat as per the ridiculous announcement by British defense minister Gavin Williamson on January 26 that Russia intends to rip British “infrastructure apart, actually cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths,” and create “total chaos within the country.”
3) To shift American and European attention away from the coming release of the House Intelligence Committee’s report that proves Russiagate is a conspiracy between the FBI, the Obama Department of Justice and the Democratic National Committee against President Trump. Washington’s Russian list will give the presstitutes something else to talk about instead of the act of treason committed against the President of the United States. Expect to hear nothing from the presstitutes except that the House Intelligence Committee report is only a political effort to shield Trump from accountability.
There is likely a fourth reason for the list. Israel wants Washington’s pressure on Russia, because Russia has so far prevented Israel’s use of the US military to create the same chaos in Syria and Iran as has been created in Iraq and Libya. Israel wants Syria and Iran destabilized because they support Hezbollah, which prevents Israel from occupying the water resources of southern Lebanon. The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which requires the list, passed the House and Senate by a vote of 517-5. Normally, such unanimous foreign policy votes are associated with demands from the Israel Lobby.

The Russian government and the Russian people need to understand that Washington considers Russia to be a threat because Russia is not under Washington’s thumb. The Zionist neoconservatives control US foreign policy. Their ideology is world hegemony. They do not use diplomacy. They rely on disinformation, threats, and violence. Therefore, there is no American diplomacy with which Putin and Lavrov can engage.
Putin, being a responsible political leader of a great power, does not respond to provocation with provocation. He ignores the insults and continues to wait for the West to come to its senses. But what if the West does not come to its senses?
For the West to come to its senses requires the complete overthrow of the Zionist neoconservatives and/or the breakup of NATO. The overthrow of the neoconservatives would require a rival foreign policy voice, and that voice is very weak as it is shut off from the media, the think tanks, and the universities. The breakup of NATO would require European political figures to give up their Washington subsidies and the career advancement that Washington provides.
As I write the Atlantic Council is holding a members and press call in for a discussion with Atlantic Council members Amb. Daniel Fried and Anders Aslund. The Atlantic Council is a neoconservative propaganda agency. The purpose of the “discussion” is to further undermine US-Russian relations.
The Russian government faces a difficult situation. The foreign policy of the US, and thereby of the Western world, is controlled by neoconservatives who are determined to present Russia in the most threatening light. Russian diplomacy can do nothing to change this. The non-provocative and responsible Russian response has the effect of encouraging more provocations from Washington. At some point Russian passivity might convince the neoconservatives that they can successfully attack Russia. Alternatively, the continual provocations might convince Russia that the country is targeted for attack, thereby causing a Russian pre-emptive action.
Everyone in the world should realize the threat of nuclear war that is inherrent in Washington’s policy toward Russia, and everyone in the world should understand that the only threat that Russia poses is to Washington’s unilateralism.

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

The Real Reason Why Washington Hates Iran So Much

A Clash of Ideologies: Imperialism vs. Self-Determination

The Islamic Republic is a system based on the faith in the wondrous and exalted status of human beings and their freedom, which must be endowed with responsibility, before God.

These are achieved through: the negation of all kinds of oppression, authoritarianism, or the acceptance of domination, which secures justice, political and economic, social, and cultural independence and national unity.”

“The U.S.’s attempts to put further sanctions on Iran or possibly even start a war with Iran have nothing to do with safety or US national security as consecutive administrations have emphasized since 1979 and everything to do with protecting corporate interests.

Iran has the third largest oil reserves and second largest natural gas reserves in the world. U.S. foreign policy has been centered on control of the world’s energy reserves, while the four major recipients of Iran’s oil are all from Asia, which is very much unacceptable to Western policymakers with national interests in mind.

The economic sanctions proposed by the U.S. would cripple the Iranian economy and surely it would not be long before political and domestic turmoil to grow out of hand. This would offer the U.S. and its allies the chance to enter the country with the goal of ‘spreading democracy.”

Syria as a Breaking Point and the Curious Case of Yemen

Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Israel’s secret intelligence service, Mossad, has rightly argued that toppling Assad and weakening Hizbullah is a far more important and strategic opportunity for Israel today than a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Nowhere is Iran projecting its regional power more broadly than in Syria. … This only made Trump push for a further aggressive approach to try to contain Iran. I think what worries the Trump administration is that, with these gains, Iran and its allies will carve out what the U.S. calls a ‘Shia crescent’ extending from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, and into Lebanon, where Hezbollah is the most powerful political and military force.

Such a viewpoint appears threatening not only for the Trump Administration, but also its allies in the Arab world, especially the KSA and the Israeli entity. According to the recent developments this past week, combined with Tillerson’s statement, it’s obvious that the next line of attack is going to be the northern border of Syria with Turkey.”

The network Hezbollah helped build has changed conflicts across the region. In Syria, the militias have played a major role in propping up President Bashar al-Assad, an important Iranian ally. In Iraq, they are battling the Islamic State and promoting Iranian interests. In Yemen, they have taken over the capital city and dragged Saudi Arabia, an Iranian foe, into a costly quagmire. In Lebanon, they broadcast pro-Iranian news and build forces to fight Israel.”

Iran is Not a “Shia” Saudi Arabia

“The reason behind this behavior is that the Western mainstream media knows that the easiest way to gain support with their audiences back home and abroad for all the hostilities against independent nations that are opposing them, is to smear and demonize them.

In the eyes of many people, Iran is a nation of Islamic fundamentalists with a sole purpose of destroying ‘Western’ and ‘civilized’ values. … News stories about the country are often accompanied by photos of burka-clad women walking past a graffiti illustrating the Statue of Liberty with the face of a skull on the wall facing the former U.S. Embassy.

But this is not the real Iran. I have been to Iran and have one thing to say about it: Pack your bags and go see it, you can thank me later for the great experience you will have, the amazing and generous people you will meet and the astonishing history you will learn about the country.”

A Thorn in Washington’s Side

This is for the Guardian, NYT and the BBC: 1939 to 2018

By William Bowles

January 22, 2018 “Information Clearing House” – Before I go any further with this let me state that I’m not a Trotskyist, or a Leninist, or a Stalinist or a Maoist (but I might have been all of the above, with exception of Maoist, at one time or another). However, I might be a Zapatista, at least in spirit, but I’m definitely a Socialist Revolutionary (or is that a Revolutionary Socialist?). I’m not sure if I’m a Marxist either, but I’m definitely an admirer of the old man, he was a great artist and thinker, and possibly, along with Charles Darwin, the greatest mind of the 19th century. Whatever you call it, we need a socialist revolution and we need one now, we are running out of time!

War, Crisis, War

Crisis is capitalism’s middle name and, as in the past, crisis leads to war, major wars and indeed lotsa ‘little’ ones too. Thus if crisis is capitalism’s middle name then war is it’s first and possibly last name too! Boom, Bust, Boom takes on a whole new meaning.

I don’t think you need a crystal ball to figure out that capitalism is headed down the major war path, it’s displaying all the same pathological signs as it has done in past decades; economic crisis, economic collapse, repression abroad and repression at home. Increasing intolerance; increasing censorship of any opposition to the maniacs allegedly running things. This is how things were in the 1930s, when my folks cut their political teeth. Then it was the Spanish Civil War that was the trigger, the catalyst, the testing ground and we, that is the left, failed to stop it then and it looks like the ‘left’ or at least what’s left of it, are even less able to offer an alternative today. Where is our equivalent to the International Brigade that fought to defend Republican Spain?

And this time there is no Stalin to boss Communist Parties around (worse, there’s virtually no Communist Parties left to boss around) and tell them what to do in the mistaken notion that it would have defended the Soviet Union against Fascist invasion. Instead, and this is the tragedy of it, the left, or what laughingly calls itself the left, is bossing other countries around instead of dealing with its own failures to challenge capitalism, e.g., Syria, Libya, and other points East and South, obsessed as it is, with the spurious notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and attempting to manage other countries political struggles.

War = Capitalism, Capitalism = War

War solves, at least for the capitalist class, several fundamental and intractable contradictions that afflict capitalism:

1. The cyclical crisis of over-production and the related problem of the vast accumulation of surplus capital that needs to be consumed, spent, valorised, one way or the other, in order that yet more capital can be accumulated and set the entire monstrosity lurching off all over again;

2. The crisis of surplus labour, usually called unemployment, aggravated by machines and now computers and the obscenely misnamed ‘Artificial Intelligence’;

3. The crisis of competition between capitalist economies, now that there’s no Red Menace around and the incessant search for new markets (see War above);

4. And finally, the problem of the potential insurrection of working people when they finally see what’s in store for them once again (more on this below).

5. War, better still, general war solves all of these problems, for the capitalist class that is. War chows vast amounts of surplus capital in the form of weapons and infrastructure destruction and secondly, it deals with the ‘problem’ of all that surplus labour but unlike previous wars, rather than destroy the competing armies and the civilians, it now destroys only the civilians and the infrastructure. The advantages of this approach are obvious. Armies are now numerically small but highly trained and highly mechanised and it’s very expensive and above all, it’s time-consuming to replace all that flesh, brains and computers. Annihilating the civilian populations kills two birds with one stone as it were but leaves the armies (relatively) intact, ready to fight the next war.

Pax Americana! Rule Britannia! It’s the ultimate end-product of industrialising war, just as capitalism has industrialised everything else and trashed the planet in the process.

The really important thing is that, believe it or not, we can actually stop them, if we choose to. So what is stopping us from stopping them? Is it because we’re as suicidal and as shortsighted as the ruling class is? Like all honest socialists, I’m an optimist, I like to think that we are different from our rulers, that people are being misled, lied to, hooked on addiction to things by the all-devouring monster that is capitalism.

But it’s not inevitable, any more than revolution is inevitable. Can we break the addiction? It really does depend on us.

Of course it’s extremely dangerous to draw direct analogies with the past[1] but the common thread is capitalism, so you have to draw the obvious conclusion don’t you? Well don’t you? How can you escape the obvious when a man called Donald Trump heads up the most powerful, the most destructive society in all of history. So destructive and insane that it’s driven a goodly percentage of its population insane as well.

But Trump is no Adolf Hitler in spite of the similarities in outlook. Hitler’s raison d’être was lebensraum (living space) for a Greater Germany. US capitalism’s is an unabashed desire for global domination. The current number of US foreign bases is 1000, streets ahead of anything Hitler’s Germany achieved even at its height! And this doesn’t include the floating bases, the US Navy’s aircraft carriers, 19 in total with 15 more planned that carry a total of between 1235-1330 warcraft and 142,500 personnel. There’s simply no comparison! Yet the economic motivation is in fact the same; economic domination or economic collapse, or Revolution.

The choice is yours and in a really bizarre, nay abhorrent way, perhaps we do have to thank Donald Trump (if it’s not too late to do so), for he has surely and finally revealed to us the true nature of capitalism in all its horrific barbarism. For Trump is no aberration, he is capitalism personified, just as Hitler’s Germany was brute force capitalism. The Emperor really does have no clothes. But note that even though he does embarrass the Guardian, the New York Times and the BBC, they do their utmost to present things as business as usual, which it surely is of course. Think about that over your morning latté while you read the newspaper.

The way forward

So how exactly, do we weld together a fractured working class, what’s left of a coopted trade union movement and bring onboard a compromised and divided middle class, half of whom (or more) get their pay check from the very system that’s destroying the ground we walk on? A divided Labour Party? One that’s stabbed us in the back so many times I’ve lost count?

We can however draw some conclusions from the Corbyns, the Maduros, the Syrizas, the Podemos’es et al, all of whom have failed or are in the process of failing like Corbyn and his traitorous Labour Party to produce a viable alternative to capitalism. Yet millions are currently putting their faith in Corbyn to deliver us from evil, just as millions put their faith in Syriza, only to be betrayed. Will a Corbyn-led Labour government betray us all over again? History says yes. So what do we have to do to avoid another betrayal, another debacle? To avoid another version of some kind of Fascism?

We don’t appear to have a clue as to how to go about it. No programme, no clear analysis, no way forward except our anger and our revulsion driving us in our frustrations but toward what end? My friend in NYC, wrote me this in response to my sending this essay (or something like it) for comments before I published:

Only by developing a revolutionary program. So what’s our program? What’s our strategy that leads us to being able to implement the program. What are the tactics that build the strategy. It doesn’t get us far enough to say “we are the solution, we can change things.” How is the question demanding a…

What I can say is that currently we don’t have anything that even remotely resembles a programme that will stop the suicidal course capitalism is taking us on. What we do have are a thousand fractured visions, individualised struggles about this and about that, but nothing that ties them all together.

In addition, I can say that the way forward does not lie with Parliament, if anything, Parliament is an intrinsic part of the problem blocking the way forward. Yet popular insurrection isn’t the answer either, it will lead only to bloody defeat, just as it has in the past. Yes, part of the answer lies in taking our struggle to the streets but it’s only part of the solution. It is, if you like, a catalyst for change. A shot across the bows of capitalism but no more than that. The biggest march in British history in 2002 to try and stop the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, put not a dent in the process, so clearly it’s going to require a multi-pronged approach. But first we need a viable programme upon which to base our alternative to capitalism. And not only an alternative economic model, but the means by which to realise it. This requires us to disabuse ourselves of the capitalist notion of democracy, of voting every five years for essentially the same, professional political class, the so-called two-party system, or whatever it’s called in your country.

Somehow, we need to develop a structure that unites a thousand different struggles and do it if not simultaneously, then in a ‘cascade’ across the world system, well at the very least the seven, major imperialist states that control it.

A big ask you say? Well yes of course it is, but what’s the alternative? Armageddon? Definitely barbarism.
Note

1. See Eric Walberg’s essay, ‘America 2018: postmodern ‘Germany 1933’, which I think makes the mistake of confusing form with substance but draw your own conclusions. This is not to say that there isn’t a parallel between 1939 and 2018, the question is, what do these parallels consist of and can we usefully draw conclusions from them?

This article was originally published by Investigating Imperialism –