Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1193

The Last Country America “Liberated” From An “Evil” Dictator Is Now Openly Trading Slaves

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It is widely known that the U.S.-led NATO intervention to topple Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 resulted in a power vacuum that has allowed terror groups like ISIS to gain a foothold in the country. Despite the destructive consequences of the 2011 invasion, the West is currently taking a similar trajectory with regard to Syria.

peoples trust toronto

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

It is widely known that the U.S.-led NATO intervention to topple Libya?s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 resulted in a power vacuum that has allowed terror groups like ISIS to gain a foothold in the country.

Despite the destructive consequences of the 2011 invasion, the West is currently taking a similar trajectory with regard to Syria. Just as the Obama administration excoriated Gaddafi in 2011, highlighting his human rights abuses and insisting he must be removed from power to protect the Libyan people, the Trump administration is now pointing to the repressive policies of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and warning his regime will soon come to an end ? all in the name of protecting Syrian civilians.

But as the U.S. and its allies fail to produce legal grounds for their recent air strike – let alone provide concrete evidence to back up…

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What Everybody Needs to Know About Venezuela Protest Deaths

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By now, you’ve probably heard about what’s going on in Venezuela.

Right-wing opposition demonstrators are leading daily protests against the government of President Nicolas Maduro and supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution. As of Thursday, five people have tragically been reported dead: Jairo Ortiz, Ricarda Lourdes, Daniel Queliz, Miguel Colmenares and Brayan Principal.

In line with mainstream media, Venezuelan opposition leaders allege that Maduro’s administration is responsible for all of these deaths. Hasler Iglesias, for example, a youth organizer for the right-wing Popular Will party, claims police killed all five people.

“These are assassinations of the dictatorship,” Iglesias posted on Twitter Wednesday.

Opposition lawmaker Alfonso Marquina echoed these allegations, adding that “police are terrorizing our communities.”

There’s no denying that people have died as a result of ongoing protests. What the opposition fails to mention, however, is why and how these people died and who is responsible for their deaths.

Venezuelan police are responsible for two of the five deaths attributed to Maduro’s government by the opposition, Question Digital reports. Two others died from direct and indirect actions by opposition supporters, with the last person dying in the crossfire of conflict between both sides.

Here’s a quick rundown.

Ortiz was murdered on April 7 in Miranda by transit police officer Rohenluis Leonel Mata. The police officer believed Ortiz was one of many opposition protesters inciting violence against the socialist government.

After carefully investigating the case, however, the Venezuelan government discovered that Ortiz was not involved in any public demonstration or act of violence. Upon proving Ortiz’s innocence, the government immediately detained Mata, who is set to face criminal charges.

Lourdes, an 83-year-old woman, died at her home in Caracas on April 10 from hydrocephalus. When her symptoms began flaring earlier that day, she was unable to be transported to a nearby hospital because opposition protesters blocked all of the neighborhood’s roads, preventing ambulances from picking her up.

Queliz, a 20-year-old opposition protester, also died on April 10 in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo after police reportedly shot him in self-defense. He was among a group of protesters attacking police with rocks and sticks. The police officer connected with his killing was arrested on Wednesday, Question Digital also reports.

Colmenares was killed on April 11 in the department of Lara state while caught in the crossfire of conflict between opposition protesters and police.

Principal, a 13-year-old resident of the Ali Primera Socialist City, was shot and killed by opposition protesters after they toppled the main gate of the commune. The city was established by the Bolivarian Revolution in 2014 for low-income citizens.

A closer look into these deaths reveal that the nature of these killings are not as clear cut as the right-wing opposition portrays them to be.

Source: What Everybody Needs to Know About Venezuela Protest Deaths

Russia Warns Against US Interference in Venezuela

Briefing by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova, Moscow, April 12, 2017

The situation in Venezuela

We’re receiving a lot of requests to explain Moscow’s position on this issue.

We’re watching with concern the situation in Venezuela, a country with which we maintain friendly relations, where opposition activists continue to clash with law-enforcers, even with the Easter holidays approaching. We feel sorry for the people who were killed or injured in street violence that is spiraling out of control. We cannot help mentioning a growing risk that the destructive scenarios which we have spoken about time and again and have warned against and which call to mind the grievous events in Chile in the 1970s might be implemented.

We believe that non-violence offers a way to end political confrontation – this is exactly our vision of how to resolve the political crisis and resume nationwide dialogue for the sake of searching jointly for answers and solutions to the socioeconomic challenges facing the country.

In this context, we’re concerned about the statements by the US Southern Command to the effect that further aggravation of the crisis in Venezuela might require a prompt response at a regional level. It should be understood that statements like these are adding to the instability, escalating the situation in that country. They cannot be treated otherwise than words to encourage Venezuelan radicals to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and instability and incite violent confrontation. We consider the fact that tensions are running high in Venezuela to be a very dangerous trend. Honestly, in our view, this would hardly be in the interests of the United States and the entire international community, including the countries in the region.

We would like to say again that all political processes unfolding in Venezuela should be strictly in line with the constitution, keep to both its letter and spirit in full, and comply with the governing laws. There is no alternative to a peaceful settlement of Venezuela’s internal problems reached at the negotiating table and in compliance with the constitution – and there cannot be any.

Crisis in Venezuela

Question: You mentioned the crisis in Venezuela today. Is it possible to initiate any cooperation between Russia and the Latin American countries that could help resolve this issue?

Maria Zakharova: We maintain bilateral relations with the region’s countries, as well as with the concerned associations of various countries. We address and discuss various issues, conduct dialogues and assist the legitimate authorities in Venezuela. Today, this dialogue and our cooperation hinge on a desire to help resolve a political crisis whose origins I have already discussed.

I think we would be ready to review any proposals on expanded cooperation that might be submitted by these countries or their regional organisations.

 

 

Source: Russia Warns Against US Interference in Venezuela, Calls for Dialogue

How to Have a Revolution

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Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon (1961)

Free PDF:Wretched of the Earth

Book Review

Wretched of the Earth is a sociopolitical analysis of how revolution happens, based on the author’s personal experience in Algeria and his study of nationalist revolutions in sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam, Latin America and Cuba.

Many Marxist scholars consider Fanon’s work to be the first major expansion of Marxist theory after Lenin. His primary contribution is to delineate the potential revolutionary forces of third world countries. His chief disagreement with Marx concerns the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, the urban beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes and gang members who lack access to formal work. According to Fanon, the lumpenproletariat make up the majority of the population in third world countries (and increasingly, in 2017, the industrialized world)  thanks to first world colonizers who have driven them off their land.

Marx believed the lumpenproletariat were incapable of achieving class consciousness and thus of no use in the revolutionary struggle. In contrast, Fanon feels they help to instigate revolution owing to their high proportion of young people and their belief they had nothing to lose.

Unlike Marx, Fanon believes third world revolutionary struggles must originate with rural peasants (like the Chiapas uprising in Mexico), that city dwellers are too “colonized,” ie too invested in existing political and economic structures to want to dismantle them.

Wretched of the Earth also describes the phenomenon of economic colonialism, as manifested in Latin America (and later South Africa). In these cases, a country achieves political independence but continues to be economically (and militarily) oppressed by first world multinational corporations.

Fanon makes a number of recommendations for preventing this, including

immediate nationalization and decentralization (via the creation of wholesale and retail cooperatives) of the economy
mass political education aimed at enabling the masses to govern themselves,
rapid economic restructuring aimed at developing soil and other natural resources for national use (as opposed to first world benefit),
land reform to stem the migration of peasants to the city,
guarding against feudal traditions that view men as superior to women, and
avoiding the trap of political parties.

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 of mixed heritage in Martinique. He fought with the French resistance during World War II and received a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in France. In 1953, he was offered a hospital position in Algeria, where he joined the Algerian National Liberation Front. He died of leukemia in 1961, shortly after the publication of Wretched of the Earth.

 

Young Republicans Not buying GOP Zombie Climate Denial

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A younger generation of Republicans – those on college campuses today – increasingly say they believe climate change is a human-caused problem, and that Americans have a responsibility to act on it and protect the environment.

Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Reuters:

Davidson College in North Carolina has fewer than 2,000 students – small enough that the presidents of the College Republican and College Democrats clubs count each other as friends.

They disagree on some political issues, but an unusual one unites them: they both believe climate change is a serious problem.

“Climate change is really real and really alarming to me personally,” said Grace Woodward, the College Republicans’ president. University students – and Republicans in particular – “need to do a better job of talking about climate change”, she said.

Woodward is well aware that her views differ from those of many older Republican leaders. But “we shouldn’t just be blindly loyal to a party”, she said. “In 20 years maybe we’ll hold those positions and we can make changes to the party.”

In the U.S. Congress and in U.S. party politics, beliefs about climate change often match party membership:…

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Why Did Trump Just Send Dozens of Troops to Somalia?

The end of his first 100 days as US president near, Donald Trump has changed gears when it comes his position on military intervention. As he was enjoying the “most beautiful” chocolate cake with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, he told the Chinese president that the US had fired missiles at a Syrian airfield, following Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attack on his own people.

On April 13, the US dropped the “Mother Of All Bombs” (MOAB) on Afghanistan: The largest bomb it has used since World War II hit an ISIL tunnel complex. On the same day, as the tension between the US and North Korea escalated, NBC reported that Trump may be ready to launch strikes, prompting requests of caution from China and Russia.

Meanwhile, the US is sending a “small number” of F-35A aircraft to Europe, as part of a “long-planned” training deployment.

And that’s not all: the US has announced April 14 that, for the first time since 1994, it’s deploying “dozens” of regular troops in Somalia to help the ongoing fight against al-Shabab, al-Qaeda’s jihadist ally. They are to provide training and support to the Somali National Army and the African Union mission on the ground, Voice of America reported. The US troops will enhance what has been America’s small presence (three to 50 people) in the country to facilitate the military relationship between Somalia.

The mission is scheduled to continue until the end of September.

This is the first time the US has sent regular forces to Somalia since March 1994, after special forces that were part a peacekeeping mission aimed at enforcing a ceasefire during the Somalian civil war were ensnared in a 15-hour-long battle in Mogadishu. Eighteen Americans were killed in the incident, memorialized in Black Hawk Down, prompting then president Bill Clinton to order a US withdrawal.

via Why did Donald Trump just send dozens of troops to Somalia? — Quartz

US snubs 11-state Afghanistan peace conference

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RT | April 14, 2017

Washington failed to attend the latest international conference hosted by Moscow, where 11 nations discussed ways of bringing peace to Afghanistan. The US branded it a “unilateral Russian attempt to assert influence in the region.”

Friday’s meeting is the latest in a series of similar events in the Russian capital that have grown from trilateral consultations between Russia, China, and Pakistan held in December of last year into talks involving the majority of the Afghan region’s powers. The latest included Russia, China, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. An invitation was sent to Kabul’s patron, America, but was rejected.

“I think just to end it, we just felt that these talks – it was unclear to us what the purpose was,” US State Department spokesman Mark Toner said on Tuesday, in explaining the US’ absence.

“It seemed to be a unilateral Russian attempt to assert influence in the region that we felt wasn’t constructive at this time,” he noted.

Moscow responded by saying it “could not comprehend” the US’ reason for snubbing the gathering.

Participants in the event reiterated their support for a peaceful transition in Afghanistan, while calling for Kabul to be supported in moving in that direction.

“A call has been sent to the Taliban movement to abandon its line for a military solution of the Afghan conflict in favor of direct talks with the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on the issue of national reconciliation,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement after the conference.

The statement added that more consultations in this format will follow, while noting that Moscow has offered to host them again.

Moscow and China have separately been trying to persuade the Taliban to focus less on Kabul and more on the more imminent threat – the advances of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorist group.

Washington has criticized such initiatives, citing the Taliban’s record of waging guerilla warfare against the Afghan government, while downplaying the threat posed by IS in Afghanistan. The US military reported in February that the joint efforts of Afghan troops and US-led international forces have reduced IS’ presence in the country to less than 1,000 fighters, according to Voice of America.

According to Russia’s estimate, the jihadist group has at least 3,500 fighters in Afghanistan, which Moscow says Kabul and its allies are not doing enough to eradicate.

The conference in Moscow comes a day after the US dropped its most powerful conventional bomb on a suspected IS hideout in Afghanistan, marking the first time the weapon has been used in combat. It was not immediately clear whether this signified a shift in Washington’s view of the threat posed by IS affiliates in Afghanistan.

Source: US snubs 11-state Afghanistan peace conference, says Russia trying to ‘assert influence’

The Alt-Right Crowd Breaks with Trump

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The fractured elements of what was once called the alt-right were unified once more on Thursday night in condemning Donald Trump’s airstrike in Syria as a mistake.

Blog of Staś

Trump’s Troll Army Isn’t Ready for War in Syria

The alt-right crowd breaks with the president.

By BEN SCHRECKINGER

The fractured elements of what was once called the alt-right were unified once more on Thursday night in condemning Donald Trump’s airstrike in Syria as a mistake. Or as Milo Yiannopoulos put it, “FAKE and GAY.”

This loose confederation of Web-savvy, anti-establishment right-wingers formed an important vanguard of Trump’s online support in last year’s election, and its unified opposition to the airstrike forewarns a political downside to intervention in Syria. While foreign wars tend to boost presidents’ popularity in the short term, Trump risks losing the segments of his base that flocked to his isolationist, “America First” message.

http://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-7/html/container.html#eid=21060248,21060231

In addition to its nationalist, anti-interventionist and anti-“globalist” views, the alt-right and its fellow travelers have also displayed a marked affinity for Syria’s ally Russia, whose government has returned the love by…

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Tribal Members in Oklahoma Defeat Natural Gas Pipeline Company*

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Federal court orders removal of natural gas pipeline in Oklahoma for trespassing on original Kiowa Indian lands.

Hwaairfan's Blog

Tribal Members in Oklahoma Defeat Natural Gas Pipeline Company*

Federal court orders removal of natural gas pipeline in Oklahoma for trespassing on original Kiowa Indian lands

By Kristin Eaton

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma has ordered a natural gas pipeline operator to cease operations and remove the pipeline located on original Kiowa Indian lands Anadarko.

The ruling in Davilla v. Enable Midstream Partners,, L.P., issued at the end of March, found that Enable Midstream was continuing to trespass on the land and ordered the company to remove the pipeline within six months.

The plaintiffs are 38 enrolled members of the Comanche, Caddo, Apache, Cherokee and Kiowa Tribes of Oklahoma. Additionally, the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma has an interest in the land. The interests vary from nearly 30% to less than 9/10th of a percent.

“It’s very significant,” said plaintiffs’ lawyer David Smith.

David Klaassen…

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How the US Uses War to Protect the Dollar

The Gods of Money

William Engdahl (2015)

The first video is a 2015 presentation by William Engdahl about his 2010 book The Gods of Money. It focuses on the use of US economic and military warfare to maintain the supremacy of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

As his point of departure, he begins with the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, in which the Allied powers agreed to use the gold-backed US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In 1971 when Nixon was forced to end the gold standard,* the gold-backed US dollar was replaced by the “petrodollar.” According to Engdahl, it was so named because of a secret agreement the US made with Saudi Arabia – in return for a guarantee that OPEC would only trade oil in US dollars, the US guaranteed the Saudis unlimited military hardware.

In this way, oil importing nations (most of the world) were forced to retain substantial US dollar reserves. This was the only way they could provide their economies with a continuous supply of oil.

The petrodollar remained supreme until the mid-1980s, when the collapse of the US Savings and Loan industry (a pre-cursor of the 2007 banking collapse) raised concerns in Europe that the US was failing as a super power. Fearing the US economy was collapsing, they created the euro and the Eurozone, to prevent the Soviet Union or China from filling the power vacuum.

The financial warfare unit of the US treasury responded by feeding hedge fund manager and currency speculator George Soros secret information that enabled him to lead an attack on the British pound. This, in turn, destabilized the British economy to the point the UK no longer qualified to join the euro.

In 1997 the US Treasury and Soros made a a similar attack on economies of Southeast Asia (Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines) that attempted to use currencies other than the dollar as their reserve currencies.

In 2010, after the US government had run three years of $1 trillion deficits, China, Russia and Japan announced their intention of selling US Treasury bonds (which the US government sells to finance its debt) to increase their euro reserves. Concerned this placed the US dollar on the brink of catastrophic collapse, the US Treasury and Soros attacked the Euro directly by collapsing the Greek economy. The mechanism Soros used was to direct his hedge funds to dump the sovereign treasury bonds that financed Greek debt.** When the European Central Bank announced its commitment to a Greek bail-out, the US Treasury and Soros followed up with an attack on Irish, Spanish and Portuguese sovereign bonds.

*A US economic crisis led to massive foreign demand for US dollar redemption that threatened to deplete US gold reserves.

** The immediate effect of bondholders dumping Greek bonds raised interest rates on Greek debt to a level that threatened to bankrupt their government.

 

 

The second clip is a Guns and Butter radio interview with Engdahl. It focuses on a second area the Gods of Money covers, namely the long US battle to abolish their private central bank (aka the Federal Reserve) and end the ability of private banks to create money out of thin air (see How Banks Create Money Out of Thin Air).

After a brief explanation of fractional reserve banking, whereby 97% of our money is created by private banks, Engdahl traces the history of the First Bank of the United States, created by Alexander Hamilton in 1791. The latter was the first US central bank, 80% owned by private (mostly Rothschild-controlled) banks in the City of London and 20% owned by the US government. President James Madison’s refusal to renew the bank’s charter in 1811 would result in Britain and the US going to war in 1812.

When the war ended in 1815, the American war debt was so substantial, the US had no choice but to charter the Second Bank of the United States, which once again was 80% controlled by London banks.

In 1832, Andrew Jackson refused to renew the bank’s charter, and the US had no central bank between 1832 and 1913. In 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson secretly colluded with the global banking establishment to create the Federal Reserve.

Both Lincoln and Kennedy challenged the exclusive role private banks play in creating the US money supply – Lincoln by issuing greenbacks (rather than borrowing money from private banks) to pay for the civil war and Kennedy by issuing silver certificates directly redeemable by the US Treasury. In both cases, Engdahl feels their defiance of the international banking establishment played a role in the decision to assassinate them.