Broken Record

Posted on November 18, 2015 by camelotkidd

At risk of sounding, once again, like a broken record, here’s a very easy point to remember–if you deplore terrorism, don’t employ terrorists.

Also, for those who still have a hard time accepting that our country does bad things, here is further evidence for your consideration– an article at the Jacobin that outlines US support of Sunni terrorism.

“American complicity in the rise of ISIS would hardly be an anomaly. At various times since World War II—most infamously in Afghanistan in the ’70s and ’80s — the United States has armed, allied with, or otherwise strengthened jihadists (and their precursors) for the purpose of undermining its more immediate and authentic adversaries.

And one need not consult history for an antecedent. Right now, as its effort to build a force from scratch founders, the United States is encouraging its proxies in Syria to work with al-Nusra Front and has green-lighted a new coordinated effort of Gulf countries and Turkey to arm an opposition coalition that includes al-Nusra Front and other reactionary groups.

If the United States really wanted to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, it would stop empowering them.”

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Reaping the Whirlwind

Posted on November 15, 2015 by camelotkidd

I feel like a lonely voice in the wilderness, warning of the consequences of US foreign policies.  The polices our elite have chosen–that of employing Sunni terrorists to smash any secular government that puts its citizens ahead of US corporations–have always contained the seeds of a great tragedy.

And now with the terrorists attacks in Paris we see again the poison fruit of these policies.

Here’s Chris Floyd, at Empire Burlesque, describing the whirlwind these foreign policies have stirred up.

“Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.”

Update: Investigative journalist Robert Parry asks some great questions about President Obama’s leadership, or lack thereof, in the wake of the Paris attacks.

“Will Obama finally take on Official Washington’s well-entrenched neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” junior varsity by challenging their innumerable false narratives? Will he pointedly blame the neocons and the liberal hawks, including those who run the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, for the disastrous Iraq War? Will he take on the “deep state” dug in at the big-name think tanks, not just at neocon havens like the American Enterprise Institute but at the center-left Brookings Institution?

Can the President muster the courage to ally himself with the American people, arming them with real information, so they can act like true citizens in a Republic rather than cattle being herded toward the slaughterhouse? Can he shake his own elitism or his fear of social ostracism to somehow become a true leader in his last year in office, rather than a timid follower of the prevailing group think?”

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The Safari Club

Posted on November 14, 2015 by camelotkidd

The Safari Club sounds like a seedy stripper bar on the wrong side of the tracks that sells cheap beer and has a condom machine in the mens room advertising–For Her Pleasure.

In reality the Safari Club is an instructional story of how the American deep state evaded accountability in the wake of the intelligence scandals of the 1970’s.

At The Intercept, Jon Schwarz reviews the new book by David Talbot on Allen Dulles entitled; the Devil’s Chessboard, and reminds me of the Safari Club–a secret, multi-national intelligence cut-out that was created to carry out anti-communist covert operations in the wake of Watergate and Church Committee revelations on the numerous crimes carried out by the CIA.

In his informative article, Schwarz recounts the story of the Saudi intelligence chief Turki Al Faisal, speaking before Georgetown University students. “In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.”

This account by Faisal, while somewhat informative also greatly misleads about the nefarious and highly undemocratic nature of the Safari Club, as well as the part about the US not being involved. In fact, as Schwarz recounts, “… the evidence suggests the Safari Club was largely the initiative of powerful Americans…Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, talked a number of rich Arab oil countries into bankrolling operations against growing communist influence on their doorstep in Africa. Alexandre de Marenches, a right-wing aristocrat who headed France’s version of the CIA, eagerly formalized the project and assumed operational leadership. The United States, (however) directed the whole operation,” and “giant U.S. and European corporations with vital interests in Africa” leant a hand. As John K. Cooley, the Christian Science Monitor’s longtime Mideast correspondent, put it, the setup strongly appealed to the U.S. executive branch: “Get others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails.”

Gee, where have I heard this idea of employing proxies to do the US’s dirty work before?

Anyway, it’s a great story and you should read the whole thing. Here’s Schwarz with more on the relevance of the Safari Club.

Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”

The safari goes on forever.

 

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The Kill Switch

Posted on November 11, 2015 by camelotkidd

New Zealand just released the draft of the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership)and it is worse than we could have imagined. According to consumer advocate Ralph Nader, the TPP, “…allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

Journalist Chris Hedges calls the TPP a corporate coup, and says that under the TPP, ” Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.”

How will the deep state make out under a secretive trade pact like the TPP?

Glad you asked.

Banks and other financial institutions that are facing efforts to curb their excess would be able to use provisions in the proposed TPP to block new regulations that cut into their profits, according to the text of the trade pact released this week.

Oil and gas companies like Exxon/Mobile that are under investigation for covering up global warming would be able to use the TPP to squash the investigations and keep burning fossil fuels.

And, the military/intelligence/industrial complex loves the TPP, which is all about confronting China as part of the US’s pivot to Asia. After all, this will mean increased arms sales, more spying and much more secrecy. More than just being a trade deal, the TPP is an important component of the US scheme to maintain its hegemony in Asia. “US President Barack Obama and State Secretary Hillary Clinton made it clear during the APEC Honolulu meeting in 2011 that the TPP serves as the economic arm of the US geopolitical strategy to maintain its political and economic influence in Asia Pacific by creating a region-wide legal regime that serves the interests of and is enforceable by the US and its corporations.”

The TPP’s Investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) places investment tribunals above states, above democracies. This puts key economic decisions beyond democratic scrutiny. At a national level, legislators can change laws that do not work out well. This is not possible at the global level under the TPP. The transfer of power is as good as definitive: it is practically impossible to withdraw from (deep integration) trade agreements.

This is perfect in a perversely humorous way. These ISDS secret tribunals are decided by a star chamber of corporate lawyers. Isn’t that kind of a mini-me deep state?

Trade agreements like the TPP give the deep state another way to circumvent representative democracy. This seems to be the plan. So-called free trade pacts like NAFTA and now the TPP have not only wrecked the world’s economy they have left western democracies a hollow shell, more theatrical than substantive. Kabuki.

Vote all you want, it doesn’t matter.

Our elite despise accountability and believe that only they are capable of making the tough economic and foreign policy decisions, free of pesky citizen input. Having a secretive trade pact that works in concert with an unaccountable power center within democratic government is the elite override, or kill switch.

Update: Patrolling at night in the Army they trained us to use our peripheral vision to spot movement. Here’s some movement by the deep state. Can you spot it?

“The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has named former banker, government official and unsuccessful California gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari to become its new president and chief executive officer.

Mr. Kashkari’s views on central bank interest-rate policy are not publicly known. He’s not an economist, beginning his career as an aerospace engineer working on space missions before earning an M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He’s an alumni of investment bank Goldman Sachs and investment fund Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco.

Mr. Kashkari rose to public prominence as a member of President George W. Bush’s administration by running the government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program—a controversial effort aimed at stabilizing the financial system by pumping capital into banks during the 2008 financial crisis. Critics called the program an improper intrusion by the government into private enterprise and an unfair bailout of big banks.”

Love the name.

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It’s the empire, stupid!

Posted on November 4, 2015 by camelotkidd

Why does the US pursue such boneheaded foreign policies?

Can you say empire?

Over at Colonel Pat Lang’s shop–Sic Semper Tyrannis , they write of the dilemma the US faces as an empire that’s dependent on allies to provide bases where US forces can operate from.

♦ US dependence on bases for empire

“And so, the ironic result is that the guys who are funding, training and arming the common, headchopping, atrocity-comitting and opportunistically cannibalistic Jihadi enemy – the Turks, Saudis, UAE and Qataris – are allies, while the folks  (Putin, you devil!) who are fighting Americas enemies are enemies.

Judging by their assent to their client’s excess at US expense, the US apparently feel that they have no choice but to endure such policies because their nominal allies, even when they pursue diametrically opposed policy goals, threaten the US with denial of the one thing the US empire relies on – and that is the use of overseas bases in these allied countries to ‘project US power’.”

Going further, a critical examination of the relationships between US allies such as Saudi Arabia, provides much evidence of the mythical deep state—composed of finance, oil and the military/intelligence/industrial complex.

Think about it, the US has a complex relationship with the desert kingdom where the Saudi’s exchange oil for US weapons systems and intelligence as well as for ongoing military training and support. Even better, the US gets oil denominated in dollars, providing an enormous subsidy to American banks. And when it comes time to invest their vast petroleum fortune many Saudi’s depend on Wall Street for financial products and guidance, aa well as for sophisticated financial access to the world’s markets in real time.

Amazing how much better the vision when the scales are removed from the eyes.

Viewing the US/Saudi relationship through the prism of the deep state provides a whole new reason why the US might be pursuing supposedly boneheaded foreign policies in the Middle East. In case you haven’t noticed, the deep state doesn’t pursue policies that benefit the US as much as policies that benefit the deep state. Like all the cool kids say–it’s not a bug, but a feature.

This tear in the fabric of the carefully spun war on terror narrative threatens the power and control of the US elite over an empire whose benefits primarily flow to them. No wonder our leaders are freaking-out and running around with their hair on fire.

 

 

 

 

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Salvaging the Narrative

Posted on October 31, 2015 by camelotkidd

Even our elected representatives are starting to figure out that the war on terror narrative is bull-shit.

Here Tyler Durden, at Zero Hedge laying out the grisly details.

“One point we’ve been particularly keen on driving home since the beginning of Russian airstrikes in Syria is that The Kremlin’s move to step in on behalf of Bashar al-Assad along with Vladimir Putin’s open “invitation” to Washington with regard to joining forces in the fight against terrorism effectively let the cat out of the proverbial bag. 

That is, it simply wasn’t possible for the US to explain why the Pentagon refused to partner with the Russians without admitting that i) the government views Assad, Russia, and Iran as a greater threat than ISIS, and ii) Washington and its regional allies don’t necessarily want to see Sunni extremism wiped out in Syria and Iraq. 

Admitting either one of those points would be devastating from a PR perspective. No amount of Russophobic propaganda and/or looped video clips of the Ayatollah ranting against the US would be enough to convince the public that Moscow and Tehran are a greater threat than the black flag-waving jihadists beheading Westerners and burning Jordanian pilots alive in Hollywood-esque video clips, and so, The White House has been forced to scramble around in a desperate attempt to salvage the narrative.”

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Class-Warfare

Posted on October 27, 2015 by camelotkidd

The free-market economic policy our leaders have chosen for us–neoliberalism–requires coercion to make people participate. Enforcing market obedience is something I’ve written about at CK before. It’s also one of the salient points made about early capitalism in Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece, The Great Transformation.

Political theorist Corey Robin also notices that neoliberal policies don’t just appear out of thin air. He examines Chile, where President Allende, a democratically elected leader, was overthrown by the military with savage free-market economic doctrines imposed at gunpoint.

“Whether we call it primitive accumulation or the great transformation, we know that the creation of markets often require or are accompanied by a high degree of coercion. This is especially true of markets in labor. Men and women are not born wage laborers ready to contract with capital. Nor do they simply evolve into these positions over time. Wage laborers are often made—and remade—through violence, coercion, and force. Like the labor wars of the Gilded Age or the enclosure riots, Pinochet’s Chile was about the forcible creation, at lightning speed, of new markets in land and labor.”

Neoliberalism could not succeed without a coercive state to enforce the market diktat. Libertarians, like Rand Paul and his papa, pretend that the market confers freedom but that’s true only if you have capital. Libertarians also pretend that democratic government is an evil oppressor of the wealthy. However, the US government is hardly a jack-booted thug when it comes to the wealthy. In fact, the US government works tirelessly in promoting policies favored by capital.

Even more, our wealthy elite are situated inside the US government to an enormous degree, moving back and forth between corporations, think-tanks and foundations that are likewise intertwined with the state. They represent finance, oil, and the military/intelligence/industrial complex. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? They’re the deep state, and their existence has evolved into something of an open secret. Hollywood loves them some deep state, with movie after movie portraying an intrepid hero battling an evil and mysterious cabal. Not to mention TV shows, look at what’s making a return–The X Files–a show that was all about the deep state. 

Of course the X-Files never really tried to examine the evil cabal behind the Smoking-Man and what they wanted from their evil schemes. Perhaps this topic was not broached because in real life the US deep state ensures policies that benefit the 1%, especially when it comes to foreign policy. In case you haven’t noticed, the US pursues regime change in countries that fail to pursue economic and political policies that our wealthy elite demand. US foreign policies of regime change since WWII bears this out. Examining the history it’s clear that governments and leaders that attempted to pursue economic policies at odds with elite US opinion were demonized, sanctioned and ultimately overthrown and or assassinated.

An amazing article by Professor James Petras, examines the military coup in Argentina in the late 1970’s that was carried out with US approval. Petras makes quite clear the coup wasn’t carried out just so the military could seize power for itself. No, the most powerful members of Argentinian society deployed the military to overthrow a democratic government that had strayed from serving its true masters.

“According to the documentary evidence presented by the Argentine Central Bank, immediately after the military seized power, the leading manufacturers presented the military with a comprehensive list of all the trade union leaders, delegates and activists to be eliminated.  In other words the capitalist class give the military their ‘marching orders’.  They dictated who was to be arrested, tortured, killed and/or disappeared.  The military executed the orders of the capitalist class – of the 30,000 Argentines who were murdered the vast majority were unarmed industrial workers involved in workplace industrial action.”

The history of the Argentinian elite using the military to murder their political opponents gives a whole new meaning into the term class-warfare. That the US was complicit should have all Americans outraged. This should also be a cautionary tale. With economic inequality at record highs who’s to say that that sort of thing couldn’t happen here?

Update: In light of this new information, I’m inclined to view presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s newspaper column in 1978 in a whole new light.

“Reagan portrayed Videla’s junta as the real victims here, the good guys who were getting a bad rap for their reasonable efforts to protect the public from terrorism.”

I also think the US air traffic controllers union got off easy compared to the alternative.

 

 

 

 

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My Pet Goat

Posted on October 21, 2015 by camelotkidd

That Trump fellow sure is making things interesting with his recent statements. “Say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.” Trump’s attack forced Jeb Bush to defensively claim that his brother, President George Bush, “kept us safe.”

The idea that President George Bush kept us safe has always been ludicrous. He ignored a memo from US intelligence entitled ”Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,’‘ before 9/11 and while the attack was happening sat reading My Pet Goat to school children in Florida. And Jeb Bush’s answer to this problem, to try to make 9/11 about the aftermath, isn’t going to help him much. The aftermath was the failed Iraq War, which had nothing to do with 9/11.

That someone has finally called bullshit on the idea of President Bush keeping us safe is a good start but it seems to me that everyone is still missing the fundamental contradiction in the war on terror narrative. The fundamental contradiction is Sunni terrorists, as represented by al-qaeda, rather than being mortal enemies are and have always been either proxies or patsies. That’s right, every presidential administration since Carter has either employed Sunni terrorists as proxies to carry out covert US foreign policies, or like Bush in seizing upon al-qaeda’s attacks as a pretext to advance already agreed upon plans for Middle-East conquest. These plans are summed up nicely by the Project for the New American Century, whose assortment of neoconservative luminaries wrote openly of desiring “a new Pearl Harbor,” in order that they might reconfigure the Middle-East. Of course they got their Casus belli with 9/11.

For much more on the neoconservatives plan to remake the Middle-East in their splendid image check out this, and this, and this, and this. The one redeeming behavior of the neoconservatives, if that’s what you can call it, is that they are vain and tend to leave a vast paper trail.

With the Obama Administration continuing to employ Sunni-terrorists in Syria as proxies, this fundamental contradiction in the war on terror narrative takes on increased significance. During the Cold War Democrats lived in fear of being labeled as soft on communism by Republicans and shied away from any compromise with the Soviets less they be tarred with appeasing the enemy.

Now that the Cold War has morphed into the war on terror, where America’s mortal enemy is supposedly al-qaeda, the Obama administration is not just compromising with al-qaeda but wielding them as a battlefield proxy in Syria and there is silence from the Republicans. In fact, the Republicans are urging them on.

A CNN op-ed that Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a leading voice on national security issues, wrote on Oct. 13, 2015, was particularly chilling. McCain called on Obama to support our moderate fighters in their struggle against the Syrian government, and going further in his bellicosity, urged Obama to inflict severe pain on Russia and Putin regardless of the consequences.

Of course, McCain and the Republicans, and Democrats like Obama pretend that we’re supporting moderates rather than terrorists in Syria and that we’re only doing it to bring about democracy but that’s a load of crap. McCain and Obama understand the ugly reality of the US palling around with terrorists, it’s only the American people who are in the dark.

This has to stop. If the American people discover that the Obama Administration is working with al-qaeda there will be hell to pay. Shit, the whole reason we went to war forever was the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, in the wake of 9/11 that explicitly targeted al-qaeda.

“Under U.S. domestic law Obama justifies his attacks on the Islamic State in Syria (which is illegal under international law) with reference to the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists as passed by the United States Congress on September 14, 2001. According to that AUMF: That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist …”

I’m pretty sure the AUMF was a giant bait and switch. In the wake of 9/11, what were our policy makers like Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld concerned with? Give yourself cookie if you answered Iraq. I’m also pretty sure that the so-called war on terror is simply an excuse to wage an endless war and pursue the sorts of militaristic foreign policies that our deep-state demands.

All powerful and aggressive empires prize control over everything else. And their policy elites know that the biggest potential stumbling block to exercising control over the resources and/or strategically located territories they covet comes in the form cohesive polities—secular nation-states in our era—located on top of those precious materials and key pinch points. Conversely, they understand that they can actually exercise more control of the things (both material and strategic) they desire when such places are mired in internecine conflicts which, of course, eventually engender the creation of “failed states”.

The 2016 Presidential campaign has the potential to blow the lid off these falsehoods. The Donald, odious as he obviously is, reminds me of a classic Greek play with the appearance of Deus ex machina, an unexpected intervention of some new event, or character.”

If the US is still a democracy then the present US foreign policy of employing Sunni terrorists as proxies needs to come out of the shadows to be openly debated.

 

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The Next Phase

Posted on October 7, 2015 by camelotkidd

It’s back.

Like the monster in a B-grade Hollywood movie that refuses to stay in the grave, the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), the so-called trade treaty that many of us had assumed dead, was ratified in Atlanta this weekend.

Trade ministers from 12 countries announced the largest trade-liberalizing pact in a generation on Monday. In a press conference in Atlanta, trade ministers from the US, Australia and Japan called the the Trans-Pacific Partnership an “ambitious” and “challenging” negotiation that will cut red tape globally and “set the rules for the 21st century for trade”.

The TPP is not a trade deal as much as a corporate coup where our benighted rulers deploy trade policies, on behalf of corporations, rather than tanks to crush democracy. One of the provisions in the TPP–the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)–is a surrender of state sovereignty to corporations (see here, here, and here). It allows for secret arbitration panels to effectively overrule national regulations by allowing foreign investors to sue governments over lost potential future profits in secret arbitration panels.

Historically, the TPP represent the next phase of primitive accumulation, where member nations herd their citizens into corporate enclosures. The problem that neoliberal advocates always face is that neoliberal policies are wildly unpopular with citizens, hence the use of force by governments to ensure compliance.

Greg Grandin, author of the Empires Workshop, makes the connection from the TPP to the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the President of Chile in 1973, and imposition by force of radical free market economic policies under dictator General Pinochet. Grandin argues that the passage of the TPP will complete what the coup in Chile started.  Before the coup, President Allende recognized the grave threat that state supported corporations represented and spoke out eloquently about the risks Chileans faced in their experiment with democracy.

“We are faced by a direct confrontation between the large transnational corporations and the states. The corporations are interfering in the fundamental political, economic and military decisions of the states. The corporations are global organizations that do not depend on any state and whose activities are not controlled by, nor are they accountable to any parliament or any other institution representative of the collective interest. In short, all the world political structure is being undermined.”

Chile represented the first neoliberal “free market” experiment that was imposed by a military coup with US blessing.

Today what had to be imposed by tanks and torture in the 1970’s can be carried out via so-called trade treaties. The ISDS portion of the TPP allows corporations and investors to sue governments before tribunals of corporate lawyers to demand taxpayer compensation for any domestic law that investors believe will diminish their expected future profits.

By signing this treaty governments are essentially surrendering their sovereignty and renouncing democracy.

Of course, the TPP is not a done deal. Despite the success of the negotiations, the TPP still has to be ratified by lawmakers in each country.

Although the U.S. Congress voted to give President Obama “fast-track authority,” meaning the body gave up its power to amend the agreement and must simply vote yes or no, that is not a guarantee that the TPP will get the votes it needs. And, here’s where the fun begins–the attempt to pass the TPP will happen smack dab in the middle of a crazy presidential campaign where candidates from both parties are claiming to be against it.

Here’s Democratic candidate Bernie Sander speaking against the TPP.

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy. The TPP is a treaty that has been written behind closed doors by the corporate world. Incredibly, while Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and major media companies have full knowledge as to what is in this treaty, the American people and members of Congress do not. They have been locked out of the process.”

On the other side, GOP front runner Donald Trump opposes the agreement, which could put real pressure on House and Senate Republicans not to approve it.

Despite the spectacle the fight over the TPP provides we must never forget what’s at stake. Historian Greg Grandin reminds us of the connections between trade treaties, neoliberalism and the ongoing dirty wars waged by the US in foreign countries.

 “..as the Obama administration makes its final push for the TPP, it’s worth taking a moment to realize why all those people in Chile—and in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and throughout Latin America—died and were tortured: to protect the “future profits” of multinational corporations.”

Update: Here’s Lambert at Naked Capitalism with a pithy summery of what the elite want from a so-called trade treaty like the TPP.

“…what the trans- and post-national squillionaire parasitroids who have injected their controlling, neoliberal, TINA-flavored ideological venom into the hive mind of our political class really want — is the destruction of national sovereignty in favor of global rule by the corporations they own.”

 

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Chickens Come Home to Roost

Posted on October 1, 2015 by camelotkidd

This is awkward.

By bombing Islamic terrorists in Syria, Russia has exposed the US’s war on terror for what it really is–a war of terror. The dirty little secret of the Syrian conflict is that the US and their allies have been employing the Nusra Front, which is the al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, as their proxy force to bring about regime change there.

Here’s Marcy at Emptywheel deconstructing this hairball.

“This attempt to distinguish ISIS from the CIA-backed rebels will quickly lead to an awkward place for the Administration and its allies, not least because making any distinction will require providing details on the vetting process used to select these forces, as well as addressing the evidence of cooperation with ISIS or traditional al Qaeda in the past. Plus, the more the US argues these groups that aren’t entirely distinct from al Qaeda are entirely distinct from ISIS, it will make the Administration’s claim that the 2001 AUMF against Al Qaeda authorizes it to fight ISIS (in related news, DOJ just denied USAT’s FOIA request for 3 OLC documents making that case) really wobbly.” 

Wow!

This might mean that the Obama Administration will have to tell the American people that the war on terror is a giant hoax.

Or, not.

Man, the neoconservatives are going to be pissed, as their beloved regime change operation in Syria just got a lot more complicated. Shit, imagine the language that Victoria Nuland is using around the dinner table tonight with hubby Robert Kagen. I bet the expletives are really flying.

Update: Veteran journalist Robert Parry has much more on how the neoconservatives have turned justifications for the war on terror upside down in their efforts to overthrow the Syrian government.

“Ultimately, President Barack Obama will have to decide if he wants to cooperate with Russia and Iran in beating back Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other jihadists – or realign U.S. policy in accord with Israel’s obsession with “regime change” in Syria, even if that means a victory by Al Qaeda. In other words, should the United States come full circle in the Middle East and help Al Qaeda win?”

Update 2: Here’s B, at Moon of Alabama, discussing in much more detail US and Israeli support of Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria.

The CIA mercenaries in Syria – 10,000 men trained, armed and paid under a secret program – are directly cooperating with al-Qaeda and the likewise terrorist Ahrar al Shams. The NYT finally acknowledges this in two pieces today. The first says:

The fighters advancing on that [northern] front were not from the Islamic State but from the Army of Conquest, a group that includes an affiliate of Al Qaeda known as the Nusra Front and other Islamist groups, including several more secular groups that have been covertly armed and trained by the United States.

The Israelis are now also admitting that they work with al-Qaeda:

Together with some local militias Nusra is in charge of most of the 100-kilometer border with Israel on the Syria side of the Golan Heights. In recent years, Nusra slightly toned down its militant ideology due to the influence of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which provide it with financial support.
…
Nusra is in control of most of the border but so far has reached a tacit understanding not to turn its weapons against the Jewish state.

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