Taking Cover,
Eva Bartlett from Canada has been traveling in Donetsk, and has a story here of the people who hosted her and explained their lives, being shelled in their homes for 5 years by western-backed Ukrainian neo-nazis. Children lost, schools shelled, ordinary people captured and sent to torture camps, humans rushing out to get the wounded into their cars, to get to a hospital. They want their lives back. They are not invading, just holding their homes and dying in them.
Thanks Eleni.
Pepe Escobar has a truly informative article about the fires of strife burning in South and Central America, where neoliberalism has accellerated the rate of bleeding of native peoples, in order to further advance the wealth of colonial elite classes and foreign multinational corporations. This is presented country by country, comparing and contrasting, and providing historical context for these long-term wealth extraction processes. Bolivian election last...
Bolivia is now the most dynamic economy in Latin America, as stressed by top Argentine analyst Atilio Boron. The campaign to discredit Morales, which is bound to become even more vicious, is part of imperial 5G war, of which, Boron writes, “the chronic poverty that the absolute majority of the population suffered for centuries”, a state that always “maintained the population under total lack of institutional protection” and the “pillaging of natural wealth and the common good”.
Moon of Alabama: (What will happen over the Syrian oilfields? They must not remain foreign-occupied, after all.)
When Trump Ignored Bad Advice He Enabled Progress In Syria
When bureaucrats and officials, also known as the Borg, contradict the foreign policy of the president they inevitably create chaos. We yesterday explained how that happens:
Since Donald Trump became president many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies. Instead of implementing Trump's idea and preferences they have tried to implement their own. Some have done so because they believed that it is the "right thing to do" while others have ignored Trump's wishes to play their own game.
Trump was smart enough to circumvent the Borg with regards to northeast Syria. This led to the removal of U.S. troops and the Turkish-Russian agreement which is an excellent outcome for all sides.
When bureaucrats and officials, also known as the Borg, contradict the foreign policy of the president they inevitably create chaos. We yesterday explained how that happens:
Since Donald Trump became president many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies. Instead of implementing Trump's idea and preferences they have tried to implement their own. Some have done so because they believed that it is the "right thing to do" while others have ignored Trump's wishes to play their own game.
Trump was smart enough to circumvent the Borg with regards to northeast Syria. This led to the removal of U.S. troops and the Turkish-Russian agreement which is an excellent outcome for all sides.
More Moon:
When President Trump ignored bad advice he enabled progress in Syria. Unfortunately Trump is back at listening to the bad advice some State Department people are giving him:
President Donald Trump says he wants to “end endless wars.” But the counter-Iran, counter-Russia hawks on his national security team are planning to sneak in a long-term U.S. military presence in southeast Syria. And their plans may have been in the works for a while.
With U.S. forces opening the gates for Turkey to take over northeast Syria, Trump administration officials are now drawing up plans to keep several hundred U.S. troops alongside Arab rebel groups in the country’s oil-rich southeast. Trump has said, “we have secured the oil.” And Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) diplomats have said they’re willing to work with such a plan.
The National Interest has learned that the Trump administration’s anti-ISIS team, led by Ambassador James Jeffrey, has floated the idea of a counter-Iran presence in Deir ez-Zor for some time now.
President Donald Trump says he wants to “end endless wars.” But the counter-Iran, counter-Russia hawks on his national security team are planning to sneak in a long-term U.S. military presence in southeast Syria. And their plans may have been in the works for a while.
With U.S. forces opening the gates for Turkey to take over northeast Syria, Trump administration officials are now drawing up plans to keep several hundred U.S. troops alongside Arab rebel groups in the country’s oil-rich southeast. Trump has said, “we have secured the oil.” And Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) diplomats have said they’re willing to work with such a plan.
The National Interest has learned that the Trump administration’s anti-ISIS team, led by Ambassador James Jeffrey, has floated the idea of a counter-Iran presence in Deir ez-Zor for some time now.
All of these little side deals are hard to keep up with. Gotta' preserve CIA "assets". White Helmet terrorist-propaganda-specialists get funded again. Trump tried to unfund them last year. They sell conflict-kidneys on the side...
Washington pledged $5 million in aid to the group at a conference back in March. Last May, the Trump administration had announced it would stop funding the White Helmets, only to backtrack a month later and send the group $6.8 million. The group’s name is highly misleading, as the White Helmets have operated solely in areas controlled by anti-government militants, such as the Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front, now called HTS. The actual Syrian civil defense is part of the government, and has been subjected to US sanctions as such.
The president said at a cabinet meeting Monday: “I always said if you’re going in, keep the oil,” the WSJ reported. “We’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, so that they have some cash flow. Maybe we’ll get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
In response, former special presidential anti-ISIL envoy Brett McGurk, who served under both the Obama and Trump administrations, stated the obvious: “Oil, like it or not, is owned by the Syrian state,” he said Monday. “Maybe there are new lawyers, but it was just illegal for an American company to go and seize and exploit these assets."
"4D chess", my ass!
Not too long ago, the U.S. announced a portion of troops will remain in Syria to protect the oil fields. While some commentators have made it clear that unless the United States wants to become a globally renowned pirate outfit, it would not be able to exploit these resources as the oil belongs to the Assad government. However, that didn’t stop the U.S. from occupying these areas with the view of giving control of these resources to the Kurdish elements it had backed to defeat ISIS. People who think that the U.S. invades countries to take their oil are therefore somewhat naïve, as this cannot be the case. The U.S. war machine is not concerned with owning and using natural resources (the U.S. is pumping out oil in record numbers), it is actually concerned with controlling these resources.
The Russia-Turkey deal establishes a safe zone along the Syrian-Turkish border – something Erdogan had been gunning for since 2014. There will be joint Russia-Turkey military patrols. The Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units), part of the rebranded, US-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces, will need to retreat and even disband, especially in the stretch between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, and they will have to abandon their much-cherished urban areas such as Kobane and Manbij. The Syrian Arab Army will be back in the whole northeast. And Syrian territorial integrity – a Putin imperative – will be preserved...
As I have argued for years, Syria to a large extent has been a key ‘Pipelineistan’ war – not only in terms of pipelines inside Syria, and the US preventing Damascus from commercializing its own natural resources, but most of all around the fate of the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline which was agreed in a memorandum of understanding signed in 2012.
The move will allow prosecutor John H Durham the power to subpoena documents and witnesses, to impanel a grand jury, and to file criminal charges.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/doj-russiagate-probe-just-turned-criminal-investigation-nyt
A top official for the country's federal student-loan program has resigned and is endorsing canceling most of the country's outstanding student debt.
Calling the system "fundamentally broken," A. Wayne Johnson - appointed in 2017 by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, says that repayment trends suggest most student loan debt will never be repaid, according to the Wall Street Journal.
EU set to put Brexit delay on hold after Johnson's ultimatum
The EU’s plan to offer the UK an extension until 31 January on Friday is expected to be put on hold after Boris Johnson threatened to pull the Brexit deal if Jeremy Corbyn rejects a general election.
Calling the system "fundamentally broken," A. Wayne Johnson - appointed in 2017 by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, says that repayment trends suggest most student loan debt will never be repaid, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Bailing Out
No comments:
Post a Comment