THE ROOTS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA

THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ISLAMOPHOBIA Since the election of Donald Trump to the White House, and his recruitment of several extremists in his cabinet and advisers, there has been a sharp rise in racist temperament especially against Muslims, and now we have had the murderous attack on mosques in Canada. The Canadian government – unlike the US government in similar cases such as the 2012 mass-murder in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin – labeled the attack(s) as a ‘terrorist’ one, even though the perpetrators were not Muslim. In the US, terrorism is whatever the government calls it, and tends to focus on ‘radical Islam’. So when white men create carnage and terror with automatic weapons in public places like cinemas (for example), or black churches, that is not ‘terrorism’, because the interests of powerful lobbies like the NRA are at stake. In reports and the funeral ceremony in Montreal yesterday, references were made to social media influencing the perpetrators, and inflaming their ‘ignorance’. But the main source of Islamophobia remains strangely unidentified. Put it simply, it is the major Western news media, which takes it lead from the US, ‘echoing’ the US line. The worst attack attributed to Muslims is 9/11, which killed less than 3000 people. Hundreds of millions of American and non-American citizens remain skeptical about the 9/11 Commission report. All manner of plausible theories abound on the internet; from claims that Mossad agents lined the World Trade Towers with demolition bombs (supported by the collapse of Building 7 which was not hit by a plane), to others that the crater in the Pentagon was not consistent with a 747 airliner hitting it, or that airliners were hijacked but not used in the actual attacks and so on. But they are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’, or as they are now called, ‘fake news’. But who has been the greatest disseminator of fake news, if not the major Western news media? Long before Trump ran for office, the major Western news media has been presenting a ‘fake’ perspective on ‘Islamic’ terrorism. The greatest war-crime of the 21st century – the invasion of Iraq – was carried out with major support for it by Western reporters and editors. The reports of cumulatively hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and millions turned into refugees, are rarely mentioned. Similarly, the hundreds of thousands destroyed in Afghanistan, done willfully to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, or similar numbers of casualties and refugees created by the West’s destruction of Libya and Syria are rarely mentioned in ‘official news’. These are all ‘Muslim’ victims; literally millions of them. And the perpetrators are Western countries led by the US, which no one bothers to say is the world’s leading ‘SuperPredator’ nation. That it also considers itself a ‘Christian’ country is mind-boggling. ‘No man can have 2 Masters.. it is either God or Mammon’. Yet the world’s leading Mammon-worshipping country is able to pretend in broad daylight that it is a Christian country, while murdering millions of Muslims and non-Muslims with invasions, terror bombings, and black ops (to name a few methods) to maximize its ownership of Mammon, while successfully portraying itself as the victim of 'radical Islam',which it calls the greatest threat to civilization. But it is really ‘radical Christianity’ which is, and has been for centuries, the greatest threat to the planet, now literally threatening its existence with climate change and nuclear holocaust. ‘Capitalism’ is merely the latest incarnation, earlier ones being ‘white man’s burden’, ‘mission civilisatrice’, and ‘Manifest Destiny’. The worst elements of colonialism and imperialism – the work of ‘Christian’ countries – remain alive through open and secret wars in some 138 countries. But we are rarely told the ‘true’ facts. And this infects the seemingly best of our journalists as well. After the Paris attacks which killed 129 some while ago, Western journalists including Canada’s Peter Mansbridge went to Paris to pontificate about the ‘horrors’ of those attacks, and the earlier ones on Charlie Hebdo. Has Mansbridge or any Canadian news anchor, ever used the word ‘horrors’ to describe Western bombing of Muslim countries? If 129 dead is a horror, what words would suffice to describe the murder of hundreds of thousands, or of millions? ‘The horror, the horror’, of a sick, diseased Western civilization which has murdered millions of Muslims, not in a ‘clash of civilizations’, but because the biggest oil reserves on the planet are located in Muslim countries, but successfully pretends it is under attack from ‘radical Islam’. The so-called terrorist attacks by misguided Islamists outraged by the monstrous crimes committed against their countries are but pitiful pin-pricks of retaliation compared to the Western crimes which provoked them. Sadly, so long as the West continues its depradations, so will the pin-pricks continue. The Western news media understand their role – to focus on the pin-pricks, while rarely mentioning the catastrophes which provoked them, except as noble or well-intentioned mistakes. What is this, if not fanning the flames of Islamophobia? No one asks the relevant questions…for example, was Charlie Hebdo journalistic satire? What is to be gained by portraying the Islamic prophet in demeaning fashion? What has he to do with current events? Why ignore so many far more deserving targets – such as the PIGS on Wall Street who have destroyed the middle class in the West? Or the corporate anus-lickers who wrote Citizens United? Or more significantly – are there Muslim armies in Western countries? Why are Western armies in Muslim countries? Western crimes against Islam go back to the Sykes-Picot agreement and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and include the 1953 Iranian coup. In a prime-time discussion with other journalists, Mansbridge referred to ISIS's references to these historical facts as 'propaganda'.... for obvious reasons, to falsify history... and delegitimize Islamic grievances. There is plenty that is ugly and hateful about the words and actions of Trump and his camp. But the roots of Islamophobia lie in American Empire, or as it should be called –‘radical Capitalism’. Trump’s travel ban for Muslims entering the US from 7 countries is being debated. Not debated is the real and terrible plight of Muslim (and other) nations, which have no practical way of banning the travel of American armies, bombs, Navy Seals, and drones. The world remains at the mercy of the SuperPredator nation.

NEOLIBERALISM - THE ECONOMICS OF FRAUD, THEFT AND ARMED ROBBERY

THE ECONOMICS OF FRAUD AND THEFT Attached is a 407 bill. I accidentally entered the 407 and departed it at the next exit. The bill shows a Toll charge of 46 cents, plus trip toll charge of $1, plus camera charge of $4.05, plus account fee of $3.75, for a total of $9.26. That's an impressive statement of 'efficiency' by the private sector. Efficiency at maximising private profit at citizenry cost. The last few decades have been described as the neo-liberal assault on populations and democracy. It might equally be called the Economics of Fraud and Theft, a fundamentalist 'religion' called the 'free market'. Free for whom? For the 0.1% and their slaves? The major components of this religion included privatisation of public property in different parts of the world, including of resources like water, on the theory that the public sector is inefficient and the free market will do better. From the cost of the subway in London, England, to the cost of electricity in Ontario, to private medical care in the US this is undeniably a scam. Everywhere private sector costs are grotesquely higher, and massive thefts of public property took place at bargain prices, creating the billionaire class of oligarchs who rule most Western countries and Western-influenced countries like Russia. A second leg of this religion was deregulation - to 'free the business class from red-tape and encourage innovation'. This reached ultimate heights in the unregulation of derivatives, where regulation was stopped on inception. A quadrillion dollars of derivatives contracts is estimated to exist on the balance sheets of American banks, and despite clever mathematical formulas suggesting precision, no one can really estimate the degree of risk and fraud they contain. Hence, despite the multi-trillion dollars of 'quantitative easing' (creating money from thin air by privately owned central banks led by the Federal Reserve), 'liquidity' remained elusive. Deregulation and the gutting of the SEC led to innovations like securitization (the creation of dangerous instruments like CDOs which destroyed mortgage audit trails, allowed the sale of trillions of dollars of junk CDOs bearing fraudulent AAA ratings, because billions of dollars in commissions and fees were earned by Wall Street). Financial officers openly spoke of 'off-balance sheet financing', or violating the requirement of 'full disclosure' on balance sheets. This part of the religion relies on 'self-interest' leading to optimal solutions.... as if eliminating traffic rules, speed limits and police would lead to safer and more optimal driving because every driver's self-interest would guarantee it. Dr. Chomsky has challenged the 'free-market innovation' assumption, stating that most of the major components of the post-industrial economy like the computer, the internet, wi-fi, smart phones, and so on, were developed at public cost and risk, in institutions like MIT funded by the taxpaying 99%, but the benefits went elsewhere. But economics students were consistently led to parrot the idea that 'public investment crowds out private investment'. A third leg was 'supply-side economics'. .... The Trudeau government pulled off a minor revolution when it campaigned on tax increases. Since Reagan however the mantra continued virtually unabated that tax cuts for the rich would lead them to invest and this would create 'trickle-down' jobs. But the Laffer curve was another fraud, as the super-rich took the cuts and then disinvested, dismantling manufacturing in major Western economies and moving it to cheap-labor countries, citing 'market forces' and 'globalization'. Why isn't there a movement to reclaim the falsely earned tax cuts back? In the UK in particular but generally in the West, working-class people were encouraged to invest in speculative things like stocks and real estate to distract attention from their stagnant or declining wage. The attack on the deceased Keynes and his replacement by the ‘monetarist’ Milton Friedman almost certainly was ideological. Keynes counselled putting money in the hands of the 99%, who would spend it on the necessities of life. This created the post-WW2 social welfare states, which stuck in the craw of the super-rich, who could not stand the notion of a middle class earning a decent wage. So they set about destroying it, following the advice of the 'Powell memorandum'. Friedman's monetarist theory of growth of money supply a point or so ahead of inflation has been proven to be a 'false doctrine', as credit creation by the Fed proceeds in ways intended to create and support bubbles, with inevitable crashes. A major unasked question is why are the Federal Reserve, the IMF and most central banks privately owned, and why is the identity of the owners secret? Why do private bankers have the license to print/create money from thin air, and then charge the public interest? How much of today's government debts and deficits would vanish if this license (protected by the world's greatest weapons of mass destruction and deception) were to be taken away, and returned where it arguably belongs - in the hands of 'the people'. And no modern economic theory concerns itself with the Economics of Armed Robbery aka Empire.... the use of weapons, armed forces, and 'intelligence agencies' to allow powerful nations to rob and plunder the weak. Perhaps that's what the 'free' market refers to - the freedom of the Empire to do what it wants. To be fair though, the US-UK 'Ivy League' (Harvard, Oxford, etc.) do refer to the strange 'resource curse' which causes countries possessing oil, gold, minerals etc. to plunge into an abyss which the wonderful West then miraculously benefits from..... the unofficial activities of the 'Christian' West in engendering these events by inciting civil wars, insurgencies, toppling of democracies, bribing and arming military or non-military insurrections, etc., do not form part of the profession of economics, which requires its adherents to spend years in the study of exquisite mathematical models leading to 'equilibrium', based on assumptions (rationality, 'efficient markets', etc) which have no equivalence in reality. A 407 BILL.pdf

FAKE NEWS, RUSSIAN HACKING, AND THAT AWFUL PUTIN (USED TO BE TRUMP)

Since the Trump election, a major news media allegation has been that ‘fake news’ interfered with the electoral process, and further that ‘Russian hacking’ helped defeat Hillary Clinton. Today’s declassified ‘intel’ report cites the ‘clear preference’ of Putin for Trump, but keeps the ‘damning evidence’ secret, presumably for national security reasons. Leading the drumroll for aggressive punishment of Russia for ‘undermining democracy’, is Senator John McCain, who says this was an ‘act of war’. He is of course, an ‘honorable man’, like the others in the US government who dismiss Russia as a ‘gas-station economy’ the ‘size of Italy’s’. McCain once made jokes about bombing Iranians. In 2008 in one of his presidential debates with Obama, he repeated the claim of the holiest of recent US Presidents (Reagan), that publicly funded health-care would be ‘like communism - with the state telling you which doctor you can use’. 35 million Canadians and hundreds of millions of Europeans know how exceptionally true these claims are. Such honorable men (and women – Clinton, Rice, Albright) also led the drum-roll for the invasion of Iraq, not very long ago, on charges of ‘weapons of mass-destruction’ (WMD), which then morphed into ‘installing democracy’ when none were found. Some may even recall the ‘evidence’ presented by Colin Powell in the UN in support. Despite references to 'weapons of mass deception' at the time, Oxford did not invent the phrase ‘Post-Truth’ then; only after Trump was elected, against odds and polls; and the wishes of the 'elites', aka the 'Deep State'. Perhaps ‘social media’ was not as strong in 2003. But it seems the real complaint by the major corporate news media is that they no longer have what they have long had – a monopoly. Now there is a serious competitor. Dozens of tomes written by the likes of Dr. Chomsky on what he politely calls the ‘propaganda system’, about the misrepresentation of the role of the US and its allies in the world, at the behest of a few super-rich families and huge corporations, are rarely mentioned in major news outlets – so they must be ‘fake’. (Oxford and its ilk, of course, understand their role in the Empire which replaced the British one.) Trump responds that charges of Russian hacking are a ‘witch-hunt’ by sore losers. While that may be true, the real motives appear to be much deeper-rooted. What Eisenhower called the ‘military-industrial complex’, and early 20th century General Smedley Butler called ‘racketeering for capitalism’ remains a huge and powerful force in US politics. Inventing external enemies is key to justifying half the planet’s expenditure on WMD by the US. After the USSR fell, the war on terror replaced it. Now there is a secret war over the future of the US dollar, the enormous debt accumulated by the US government, financed by Petrodollars (and post-2008 the creation of trillions of $ from thin air, called 'quantitative easing'), which has generated pushback from those who resent this grotesquely ‘exorbitant privilege’ But there is not much news coverage about this secret war, except in ‘fake news’. So let’s review some of the fake news that has successfully been censored by the responsible and ethical major news media of the West (allegedly corporate-owned). 1. That the US and its allies have killed not just hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, but cumulatively (including through ‘genocidal’ sanctions) – millions. That Obama’s drone assassination victims number over 80,000 including 8 wedding parties. Both those claims were made by Physicians for Social Responsibility in the US, Canada and Germany, but were blanked out. Imagine for instance the hysteria in major news outlets if ISIS had taken out 1 Western wedding party. 2. That the US and its allies have secret wars in 138 countries, including several in Africa, and this is the source of the 60 million refugees today. That’s from Tomdispatch.com, who also report that every Western bomb blows off heads, arms, legs of women, children, men…. Again no reference in Western news sources to these matters, except to civilian casualties by Russian bombings in Syria. Presumably Russia does not have the ‘smart-bombs’ of the US, which refuse to explode when they hit civilians. 3. The most outlandish of fake news claims on the internet must be that the Federal Reserve, IMF and most central banks are not state-owned, but privately owned banks, and that these invisible bankers have orchestrated wars for centuries, including the world wars and most recently the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria because their leaders did not want to sell their countries’ resource (oil) in US dollars. Now we all know for sure that these are simply conspiracy theories, don’t we? 4. Equally outlandish must be the reports including by John Pilger, that NATO's buildup of armed forces on the Russian border is the greatest since Adolf Hitler; or that Obama's 'pivot to Asia' likewise is an unprecedented buildup of naval forces, bases and weaponry designed to provoke, intimidate and potentially strangulate China, including massive arms budgets in Australia and Japan for the same reason. It goes without saying that claims that Brexit and the Trump victory represent 2 revolts by peoples angry at the ‘neo-liberal’ assault against those populations and their democracy are nonsense. True, ‘populism’ raises its ugly head now and then (will the 'stupid and ignorant herd' never learn?). But the real enemy is external, and the world’s greatest defender of freedom and democracy is of course the USA. The revelation of embarrassing information through wikileaks is the assault on democracy; concealment would have defended it. Blaming Putin helps deflect attention from the reasons for Trump’s victory, and other pesky things like Citizens United, which could be called the US Supreme Court’s support for plutocracy, and attack on democracy.

OBAMA'S LATEST LEGACY OP

ISRAEL'S OUTLAW STATUS NOW TEMPORARILY CONFIRMED? With but a few weeks left in his term, President Obama authorized the US's abstention from vote against a resolution brought in the UN Security Council ordering Israel to stop its illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. Israel's government immediately denounced the resolution, which is merely the first of many such attempts including in the wider General Assembly, which have so far been blocked by the US. So the question is why now? Obama had 8 years to do something substantive to erode Israel's progressive theft of Palestinian land. He could have initiated such resolutions himself, but more importantly, taken tangible action to stop aiding, abetting and arming Israel in its actions which he understood perfectly well were 'changing the reality on the ground' - negating any possibility of the universally supported 'two-state solution' by building highways, walls, security fences and otherwise stripping the disputed territories of all precious resources including water and arable land. Like predecessor Bush, Obama sent a shipload of weapons to Israel to commit genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu's position is on the record for several years - that 'there already is a Palestinian state - Jordan'. So why now this essentially symbolic resolution? Is it because Obama knows that the Palestinian state will die unborn, since Israel already has stolen more than 80% of Palestine? Or because he knows that his successor Trump is going to overturn this resolution as soon as he can, and proceed with more dramatic moves supporting Israel's thefts by moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? Back in 2008, before his election to the White House, Obama had already (according to an Israeli journalist) 'broken all records for fawning' before the Jewish community in Florida, assuring them that Jerusalem would remain in Jewish hands, knowing perfectly well that without a share of Jerusalem (even without the 'Bantustanization' of the remaining 20% of Palestinian land) - there could be no viable Palestinian state. The Israeli government's response to this resolution of course shows its utter contempt for world opinion. After all, 'God promised Israel to the Jews'... Having benefited from the single super-power's help in just about every way from 1967 on, it knows it is safe, also possessing hundreds of nuclear weapons launchable from land, sea and air, and the latest conventional and biological/chemical weapons. The 'Christians' who settled America also believed it was the 'promised land', the 'New Zion'; so there is a logical consistency that American should aid and abet the settlement of the 'old' Zion. Some years ago, Naomi Klein described how Western states notably the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel, boycotted the Durban conferences because they raised real issues for example of theft of human capital (slavery) and compensation for them. All of these were 'settler-colonial' states, who not only stole countries and continents, but virtually eliminated local populations under various pretexts ('savages' - precursors of today's 'terrorists') and forcibly kidnapped millions of slaves. These 'real debts' cannot be recognized by the perpetrators, while comparatively fake debts of electronically printed money by the Federal Reserve, IMF and ECB are used to destroy nations such as Argentina, Greece and others through austerity programs. No austerity is needed for the US - the world's greatest debtor nation, in accordance with its own 'supreme outlaw' status. After the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Obama made a photo op to the Louisiana bayou to lecture oil companies who promised a cleanup. Once he left, the ships supposed to carry out the cleanup also did - replaced by airplanes that simply sprayed the oil slick with chemicals to break it up into smaller invisible pieces that are still destroying the Bayou's ecosystem. Like that photo op, this latest 'legacy op' at the UN, seems classic Obama.

STOP THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE PLANET

The Western propaganda machine has made much of 'Muslim terror' including the numerous posts on facebook to 'Stop the Islamization of America'..... Trump's infamous comments to ban Muslims altogether was criticized even by Dick Cheney (one of the greatest war-criminals of our time) as being not consistent with 'American values'.. Cheney's American values of course include invading and destroying Muslim countries on false pretences and murdering hundreds of thousands and millions of refugees..... Obama has continued American values by arming and financing the insurgents in Syria to remove Bashar Assad. It is Obama, not ISIS, that has created millions of Syrian refugees. And at least one online writer suggests that the arms provided by the US to 'moderate rebels' to fight Assad have actually gone to ISIS.... Go figure. The other source of course is Saudi Wahhabism - the most extreme version of Islam - but Saudi Arabia is fully supported by the US, which sells it tens of billions of dollars of weapons..... Iran's weapons expenditures are less than an eighth of Saudi, and they are mostly obsolete weapons from before 1979, when it was a US ally under the Shah (yes that democrat who killed, tortured and imprisoned thousands of Iranians via SAVAK). And of course the vast majority of the some 60 million refugees worldwide (UN figure) are not from the Middle East, but from Africa, also arising from conflicts fostered or created by the West, which is plundering Africa's mineral resources via secret wars, death squads, etc. In Congo alone, some 4 million people have been killed. But since the same people who are responsible for these killings own the major Western news media, these genocides are not reported on the news.. Canada is the mining capital of the world according to a recent book, with 75% of the world's mining companies incorporating here, principally in Ontario (major source of TSE revenues) as Canada provides the most favorable legal and judicial framework for these companies. Yes some of these companies are paying death squads in Africa and South America to displace populations inconveniently located in mining areas. So the question for the majority of the world's population, including Muslim ones, is how to 'STOP THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE PLANET'. How to ban Americans - their armies, their CIA insurrections, assassinations and kidnappings (eg of Haiti's President Aristide because he wanted the raise the minimum wage in his country from $1 to $1.60), Navy Seals ops, black ops by mercenary armies like Blackwater (now under a new name), the mass-murdering B-52 bombing raids which in every raid cause more terror, mass-murder of civilians and destruction than a thousand suicide-bombers could ever do............ This is not an academic question. We are repeating the course of the 20th century which also began with a 'Gilded Age' of opulence and obscene wealth in America followed by the Great Depression through Wall Street fraud and excess, and the World Wars..... The era of 'unregulation' under the worship of that hideous Ayn Rand brought about the multi-trillion sub-prime fraud and the Great Recession. Trillions of dollars had to be printed out of thin air to get the US to bail out of that near depression.... but the wars over geopolitics and resources - principally fueled by the US and its 'Christian' allies in the West (always led by the UK's anxious licking of the American master's boots and other parts of his anatomy) - are taking us if not toward WW3 or nuclear holocaust, then to environmental catastrophe. The US is not a Christian country - its God is Mammon (capital), and it is covering the planet with the 'dung of the devil'. 'The horror, the horror' of a sick, diseased Western society that is murdering millions of people around the world so a tiny fraction of 1% can get even more rich, and covering it all up, while displaying hysterical outrage over 129 killings in Paris and 14 in California, is the reality we live in. Those attacks were pitiful pinpricks, pathetically inadequate responses motivated by outrage and hatred of the West, for the major, monstrous crimes committed by the West in Muslim nations. Which include the so-called bombings of ISIS. Every bombing is a terror attack which kills civilians..........But no one reports those killings, no one conducts a candle-light vigil for those victims... They don't matter..... The time is running out for the planet to collectively cry: 'YANKEE GO HOME'. TAKE YOUR MCDONALDS, YOUR MONSANTO POISON (GMO) YOUR TRADE AGREEMENTS AND YOUR 900 ARMED BASES OUT OF OUR COUNTRIES.... GET OUT. 135 countries are presently under attack by the US, but the corrupt, obedient news media does not report it. It is long overdue for the planet to defy, resist and ultimately defeat the 'Washington Consensus', that WC or inverted toilet bowl from which all manner of corruption and criminality is flowing out and poisoning, strangulating, robbing and murdering the planet........ We need a Global Consensus against the world's biggest war-criminal and terrorist. South America has already more or less told the US to 'fuddle duddle'... It will just take some courage for the rest of the world to join them.

CANADIAN ELECTIONS AND THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS

As a new chapter in Canadian history approaches with tomorrow’s election results, the various debates and policy discussions will end with either the status quo or a change. Various issues have been discussed the last 78 days – foreign policy, security, economic prosperity, TPP, taxes, spending, the niqab and so on. One issue that has not been mentioned is the shadow of the great superpower to the south, and what is called the ‘Washington Consensus’ (WC). No one reasonably in touch with the major events of the last few decades can be unaware of the major stride inequality has made in most societies where the WC’s power or influence is exercised. No accident – this is the result of deliberate policies political and economic designed to achieve precisely the status quo. Also called ‘ neo-liberalism’ – the policies have essentially been to enrich the 1% at the expense of the rest. The super-rich has virtually doubled its share of national wealth in many if not most countries certainly of the West but not just the West. Buttressed by US Supreme Court decisions like McCutcheon and Citizens United (both v. FEC) the result has been the ‘corporate takeover of the political system’ and the inexorable replacement of democracy by plutocracy, the replacement of ‘vote’ by ‘note’ ($). These policies are of course cloaked in Orwellian jargon, which makes it difficult for the general public to keep track of what is being done. With this lens in mind it is possible to make some comments about the issues that were discussed in the campaign: 1. Taxes and spending and trade agreements. One of the recurring themes of the past few decades was that taxes had to be cut for the super-rich, which would then result in investment by them, which would create jobs. Associated with this was the idea that ‘free trade’ was good and would also create jobs. Warnings when NAFTA was being put in place about ‘a giant sucking sound’ did not stop either NAFTA or globalization. The result is known to most people.: a major dismantling of manufacturing industry and its shipment to places where labor was dirt-cheap. All the clever planning of Wall Street's investment banks and consulting firms amounted to old-fashioned ‘arbitrage’. The US destroyed tens of millions of jobs so that a tiny fraction of 1% would become even more obscenely rich. And spending for the 99% was cut, while the major economic program that drove American innovation and investment – the so-called ‘defense’ industry kept on expanding, because it is essential to enforcement of the WC. People seem to have forgotten about the MAI which was justly hated and defeated as its policies to enforce corporate rights against those of nations and populations were a thinly disguised assault on the sovereignty of nation-states. But the Corpo-Rat lawyers and lobbyists who were defeated then don’t give up easily. Isn’t the TPP (and its European counterpart the TAP) simply a resurrection of the MAI?. Isn’t that why its text has been kept secret from the voters everywhere, not just in Canada.? The Liberal and NDP leaders acted rightly in refusing to attend a Privy Council briefing on TPP absent a public knowledge of the text. 2. National security, the jihadist threat, ISIS, niqab etc. The ‘Clinton doctrine’ openly declared the US’s unilateral right to use force to ‘access markets, energy supplies and resources’. Never mind that those markets, supplies and resources are located all over the planet and belong to the populations of the 190+ countries in it. Behind its talk of security, democracy-promotion, and so on (which major Western allies are pressured to agree with and to join in the actions that follow, as well as benefiting from them) is the reality of the rape and plunder of those countries and the devastation of those who resist, with pretexts invented as needed. Whether it was coups in Iran, Guatemala or Chile, or the killing of millions in South East Asia to prevent ‘dominoes’ from falling, or later actions financed by the grotesquely ‘exorbitant privilege’ accorded by the Petro-dollar (which replaced the constraints of Bretton Woods with virtually unlimited capability to the US to continue to spend half the planet’s expenditure on WMD) the global hegemon has been able to do whatever it wants. 3. Should countries like Canada connive in or resist the WC? It is easy to join a Western gang-up and tell the Russian President to get out of Ukraine. No one seems capable of telling the US to get out of Ukraine, Central Asia, the Middle East, or any of the 134 countries in which (according to TomDispatch.com) it is conducting secret, bloody and illegal wars, The WC and the ‘unbridled capitalism’ that motivates it now adds (for the planet) the unprecedented risk of environmental catastrophe with increasingly extreme and bizarre weather events (like the California mudslide) to the decades old nuclear one. The Nobel Peace Prize winning incumbent of the White House has maximized fracking and authorized a trillion dollars of upgrades to the US’s nuclear weapons, which already can blow up the planet several times over. Dr. Strangelove still is here, and the underground bunkers in which the masters of mankind might live would only have to be modified for climate change. 4. Our media often fails to tell the truth, even resorting to brazen lies about what is going on. When a Malaysian airliner was mistakenly shot down, Maclean’s and Economist magazines had covers screaming Putin the Murderer. No one bothered to ask what motive he might have, or mentioned that some decades earlier a US warship had shot down an Iranian airliner and its captain been given a medal. Was Clinton called a murderer for sacrificing a half-million Iraqi children through sanctions, a price his Secretary of State called ‘worth paying’. Or Bush W for the price Iraq paid for the democracy (ISIS) they were force-fed? One has to search hard to find stories that recount the true origins of jihad – US-UK sales of WMD to Iran, Iraq and all the countries of the region…….wars in which ‘unpeople’ die are tremendously good business for the West….. or that it was Kissinger who introduced the nuclear program to Iran – or Reagan who recruited the most fanatic jihadists to dislodge the Soviets from Afghanistan, having first apparently manipulated them to invade….. to give them their own ‘quagmire’. 5. The Drone papers – on Obama’s personal authorization of the assassination of some 80,000 people (an International Herald Tribune estimate from April this year) have just been released. No doubt our magazines will be screaming….

TSUNAMI OF LIES - THE UNREPORTED NEWS

The upcoming Canadian election and debates as well as pronouncements by world leaders at the UN have brought the issues of ISIS, Ukraine, Iran's nuclear deal, and others to the forefront of the news.The rhetoric and news coverage focusses on the standard viewpoints of Western governments: ISIS is evil, the n-bomb that Iran may build is a threat to world peace and to Israel's existence, Russian President Putin is responsible for the Ukraine crisis, and so on. Views questioning this narrative are hard to find. No one mentions that ISIS was created by the American destruction of Iraq, aided and abetted by its pit-bull allies in the UK and Australia, and others 'bribed and bullied'; much as the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s rose from the ashes of genocidal bombing of Cambodia by the US. ISIS's crimes are dastardly, but do they compare to what the West did in Iraq? Hundreds of thousands killed, millions turned into refugees.... Not too many people want to connect the dots. On Iran, the hysteria continues on the bomb it may build. Not a word about the hundreds of nuclear bombs already in the Mideast - in Israel's possession. The Iranian President's speech at the UN mentioning resolutions asking for a nuclear-free zone in the region received the usual derisory contempt. As for the US Republican party's reaction to the deal negotiated with Iran, it is not new. Republicans have made jokes about bombing Iran for years. With the deal, jokes have become open threats. Dr. Chomsky pointed out recently that the main difference between 2 GOP candidates who led the race until recently (Jeb Bush and another) was that one promised to bomb Iran immediately on taking office, and the other - to wait until the first Cabinet meeting. No one asks: what did Iran do to the US, and what have the US and its allies done to Iran? The toppling of democracy in Iran in 1953 and the installation of the Shah who ruled as terrrorist/dictator until 1979, and after his ouster the supply of arms to Saddam Hussein to prosecute an 8-year war which killed hundreds of thousands on either side are among the major crimes against Iran. While the 'King of Kings' (Pahlavi) was in charge however, Kissinger was happy not only to make him the US's largest buyer of weapons, but to pressure US universities like MIT to accept Iranian students into nuclear engineering studies - they have been running the.Iranian nuclear program. But all this is unreported in the major news media. Salon.com has just published a superlative article on the history of Kissinger's crimes in the Middle East and Western Asia including Afghanistan and South Asia including the unreserved backing of West Pakistan's genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). But try to find that information in the New York Times or the Washington Post. On Ukraine, the hysteria is equally misleading. John Pilger - an Australian born award-winning journalist living in Britain who became a pariah after exposing the West's complicity in the East Timorean genocide - reports on his website that the entire crisis has been 'inverted'. It is US-driven NATO that has aggressively expanded all the way to Ukraine, renewing a century-old theme of 'encirclement' of Russia by the West, and mocking Reagan's (false) promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand 'an inch to the East'. President Putin moved to take over the Crimean port only to prevent NATO from establishing its own naval base there, and Eastern Ukraine is the last remaining 'buffer' between Russia and NATO. In short, he was (and is) acting defensively. Russia's economy is roughly one-eighth the size of the US's. At the height of the Cold War, the USSR's economy was a quarter of the US's. It had lost some 30 million people in WW2, versus less than 1 million by the US. But these facts were not generally reported, as they contradicted the narrative of the 'Red Menace', needed to justify the 'permanent war-economy'. People like Thomas Friedman of the NY Times, who called Putin a 'thug' are the same ones who advocated the invasion of Iraq as a 'threat' to the US, then effortlessly changed the pretext to 'installing democracy' when no WMD were found. To call them 'slugs' would be to insult slugs. They are today's 'Julius Streicher(s)', inciters of war-crimes. Russia of course is no Iraq, being a major nuclear power. But the rot runs deeper. It was Oxford-educated Niall Ferguson who propagated the 'Armageddon' myth about Iran's n-bomb. Closer to home, Canada's own Margaret MacMillan, now a rector at Oxford, finished an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail just before the Scottish referendum with the counsel that Scots ought to remain in the comparative safety of the UK, since the world had 'become a dangerous place with ISIS and the Russian aggression in Ukraine'. There was no mention of earlier events such as the Vietnam war or invasions of Iraq or the destruction of democracy in dozens of countries by the West. One is to infer they made the world safer. When Ukrainian rebels mistakenly shot down a Malaysian airliner, Maclean's magazine in Canada and the Economist in Britain both had magazine covers screaming "Putin the murderer'. No one bothered to question what possible motive the Russian President would have in downing a Malaysian airliner. No one bothered to report what had happened some decades ago when a US warship intentionally shot down an Iranian airliner with roughly the same casualties - the 'murderer' was given a medal by the US government. Did any of these magazines call Clinton or Bush Jr. a murderer for the crimes committed by these Presidents in Iraq? Sanctions which killed 500,000 infants were described by Madeleine Albright as a 'price worth paying'. The casualties from Dubya's war-crimes remain as estimates - since the news reported from that region was controlled by the US army. Estimates start at minimum in the hundreds of thousands and run upto 2 million deaths. Did Maclean's or the Economist publish covers with Bush Jr. as a mass-murderer?