“There are an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 fighters from Russia and other CIS member states fighting for ISIL,” Putin said referring to IS by its former name.”We certainly cannot allow them to use the experience they are getting in Syria on home soil.”

Putin was speaking to leaders of the CIS, a regional union of a dozen former Soviet republics. He reported details of the Russian bombing campaign in Syria targeting the jihadists and assured that there was significant progress in defeating IS. He added that Russia stands for the creation of “as big a coalition to fight the extremists and terrorists as possible and is working with major regional and international partners” like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. Vladimir Putin also reiterated that Russia is acting in compliance with international law in Syria.”

Dr. S.J.Bellamy

“The operation of the Russian Air Forces supported by the ships of the Caspian Fleet are in full compliance with the international law and absolutely legitimate, since we are conducting it at the formal request of [Syrian] President [Bashar] Assad,” he said.

The Russian leader said CIS members should be on guard for possible retaliation from the terrorists and ramp up cooperation between their national counterterrorism and border guard agencies.

With the exception of Israel, no other state has more experience countering jihadi terrorists operating in their own territory than Russia. IS poses a direct threat to the Caucasus, with the leader of Russia’s Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov, issuing statements reiterating the risk returning fighters pose to his territory. While the West drags its feet, Russia has already made impressive gains in Syria against ISIS targets. The refugee crisis in Europe, which surely will spill over to the United States at some point has hastened the view that we must cooperate with Russia, to end the refugee crisis by ending the encroachment of Islamic State into Syria and Iraq.

Refugee crisis

While the refugee crisis, a humanitarian disaster caused  partially by our failure to intervene in Syria to stop ISIS at a much earlier stage is worrying, IS manufacturing of crude chemical munitions will be a real wake-up call should such unconventional warfare munitions be used against European targets. Russia, of all countries, has sadly learned by experience, the devastation Islamic terrorism can bring to the field.

Why do some European states hold back from cooperation with Russia when this would clearly be to their benefit? A few European countries feel they are exempt from Islamic terrorism and think they can naively claim some kind of neutrality. They believe if they are not perceived as a primary force against IS, even though they donate their last F16’s to the cause and make a spectacle of themselves, they can kind of slide under the radar. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Their countries are at greater risk because they choose not to cooperate to the extent that is needed, lest they be seen to help President Assad stay in power which might pit them against their UK counterparts. Unfortunately such choices designed purely to be perceived as ‘politically correct’ are likely to increase the threat IS poses to them and their allies. 

Russia, on the other hand, has consistently offered cooperation, even while being blamed for events they had nothing to do with and threatened with legal procedures. Israel and a handful of other countries, thankfully, understand the practical side of cooperation, beyond trying to be perceived as politically correct or attempting to garner some kind of international attention. They understand fully the consequences of IS over running Syria and Iraq. At the moment Russia is fighting our war for us. They are literally paying for it and war is expensive. They will suffer possible loss of life in fighting IS, so that Europe can enjoy peace and security from the threat of IS; a far more serious threat than Syria under Assad ever posed. Additionally, they have suffered criticism for bombing civilian areas, without any mention that IS is using civilians and these areas as human shields. They know very well that Russia will be blamed for collateral damage and any loss of civilian life. Beyond the strategic posturing of some countries, it is time for Europe to take a serious look at the consequences, should IS operatives infiltrate refugee camps and or gain access to European immigration routes. Coordination with Russia is crucial, not only to prevent mishaps between nations currently engaging IS, but to ensure Syria does not fall to possibly the worst terrorist organization we have ever witnessed.

Biological and chemical capabilities

In terms of biological and chemical capabilities, IS has used crude chemical warfare agents against civilians and will likely continue an interest in manufacturing these agents. In August, ISIS is strongly suspected of using mustard agents. See Russian forces, although not yet on the ground, could well face CBW agents if a ground offensive is deemed necessary. While Russian forces are well prepared for unconventional weapon use, we must still consider that they are placing their forces in harm’s way and the results of this will benefit Europe and the West considerably.

*Dr. S.J. Bellamy is a recognized international expert on biological warfare. She has previously developed and run NATO sponsored policy programs on biological terrorism and has published extensively in related fields. Her papers have appeared in the National Review, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Le Monde, Le Temps and the Jerusalem Post. Over the past twenty five years she has worked in non-proliferation and contributed to UN Expert Meetings for the Biological and Toxin Weapon Convention.  She has developed and run nuclear and biological war games and scenarios supported by European Ministries of Defence.  Currently she advises governments on national strategic stockpiling and force protection.

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/19-10-2015/132353-syrian_strategy-0/

The information warfare against Russia is in full swing. Syria has been in the center of world news agencies for a long time already. However, the West does not intend to stop in Syria. Western countries plan to shake Belarus. Pravda.Ru discussed these questions in an interview with military expert Igor Korotchenko.

“What was that all about with the Nobel Prize for Literature?”

“The Nobel Prize for Literature, in my opinion, was a purely political move. The people in the committee act as political provocateurs. This time, they are creating an artificial moral leader who will tell the world what is good and what is bad in Belarus. No matter how Lukashenko may try to improve ties with the West, the latter prefers him beheaded so to speak. They say that Alexander Lukashenko lacks charisma and eloquence.”

“Lukashenko is definitely not on top of the list at the moment for the West anyway.”

“That’s why Lukashenko should not forget that his only geopolitical ally that will never betray him is Russia. The West will always treat Lukashenko the way it treated Colonel Gaddafi. The West respects only the strong, and Russia’s experience is the best proof for that. For the Belarusian people, a close alliance with Russia is the only possible path of development.”

“Does it mean that the Nobel Prize Committee has also become a part of the information warfare against Russia?”

“Yes, $80 million has been allocated for the establishment of anti-Russian propaganda centers in the Baltic States. This is the reason why Russian “dissident” persons and media resources have suddenly started to move to the Baltic countries. The Baltic region is turning into a media dump indeed.

“It may also become the front of the information war against Russia.”

“True. There is the US National Security Council that President Obama chairs.  This agency takes special presidential directives about information operations, thus triggering the mechanism, in which all key ministries and agencies in the United States start working within the scope of one  single concept, for example, against the Russian operation in Syria.

“Russia must also build its long-time information strategy. To do this, Russian power structures should involve experts from non-governmental spheres, work with the Russian public opinion that  Western opponents are doing their best to shake.

“A friend of mine had an  opportunity once to  meet the director of the CIA, who arrived in Moscow for talks. He said that he approached the aircraft and looked inside. He saw rows of computer screens with officers sitting at them. The Americans are monitoring information 24/7 and it goes about global information space. Russia must have something like this as well. Russia needs to learn how to predict enemy’s actions. Russia si already successful at this point, but we need to be proactive, we need to work on social networks, to see what’s happening there. The US has been working persistently to discredit Russia. Without a system of global monitoring of information space Russia will not win the media war.”

Interview conducted by Inna Novikova

Pravda.Ru

Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru

– See more at: http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/19-10-2015/132361-russia_media_war-0/#sthash.m0U4C2Uc.dpuf

http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/19-10-2015/132361-russia_media_war-0/

By Paul Craig Roberts

October 19, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – Western civilization is in collapse. Every public and private institution in every western country, with the sole exception of Iceland, is corrupt. Government at every level is corrupt. The courts and judicial systems are corrupt. Justice is nonexistent. The financial systems are corrupt. The media is corrupt. The corrupt corporations continue to maximize their profits by destroying the environment and by replacing domestic workers with foreign ones. The income and wealth continues to gravitate to the One Percent.

Even sports, which once consisted of games played for fun, are corrupt. Participants in every competitive sport have to be drug tested, whether a skier, a bobsledder, a football, baseball, basketball, or hockey player, a boxer, a bicyclist, a distance runner, a sprinter, a high jumper, a pole vaulter, or whatever. Sports were corrupted by money. The rewards for success are so high that people sacrifice their personal integrity and cheat in order to obtain the money, just as government officials and regulators betray their constituencies in order to be rewarded by special interests who profit at the expense of society.

But not all corruption is financial or money-motivated. Spiritual corruption is even more dangerous as it erodes the character of people. Once people's concerns do not go beyond themselves and their own feelings, a culture is dead. There has always been betrayal between husbands and wives, but not on the mass scale of today when vows play second fiddle to one's personal desires. Another way of saying this is that keeping one's vow or one's word is no longer an important desire or contributor to self-esteem.

Consider something as ordinary as sexual relations between the genders. Sexual intercourse is one of the most common activities in which people engage. Yet there are those who go up the wall when the subject is mentioned. The prudery is silly, because the sexual relationship between a man and a woman is the foundation of society. Civilizations have protected the relationship in marriage, the basis for procreation and enculturation that perpetuates the society. What we see today is a growing seperation of the sexual relationship from its social purpose and the loss of parental control over children to the state and outside forces. Indoctrination replaces enculturation.

It is dangerous for a society to neglect erosion in its basis. The subject is too large for a column. This article deals only with the disassociation of the romantic element, with its implication of love and commitment, from sex. An article inCosmopolitan, a women's magazine, testifies to female liberation from love and commitment by casual sex.

I remember when sex was romantic. Apparently those days are gone. Today sex is about two people (or more) getting each other off. Sex has been reduced to an orgasmic act. The Ashley Madison website, where wives and husbands sign up for extramarital sex with strangers, testifies to the purely orgasimic character of sex today.

Another article in Cosmopolitan explains sex as "fun. If it weren't we would never bother leaving the house to meet new people to have sex with and we'd all just masturbate instead."

Years ago in a waiting room I picked up a copy of Cosmopolitan. The cover story was "How to get your man hard and keep him coming back for more." At least it was normal sex, if denatured. But we have moved on. The October 9 digital issue of Cosmopolitan has an article by a "former escort and current dominatrix who specializes in balloon fetish play." She calls herself "an adult play faciliator" and "the type of work I do is much broader than just BDSM or fetishistic type stuff. I specialize in helping people to open this part of their sexual selves, and be playful and creative." She puts them inside giant balloons. Balloons are "erotic and playful" and "a very friendly catalyst."

Playboy magazine has announced that it is ceasing publication of photos of nude women. The ubiquity of pornography has destroyed the thrill and excitment of the female body and made such images "passe." Men are being desensitized, and the female body is losing arousal power. Perhaps this explains why there is a demand for a dominatrix to put couples inside giant baloons as a method of stimulating sexual arousal. The role of the imagination in stimulating male arousal is apparently a thing of the past. Men have seen too many images of women engaged in sexual activity.

Women experience "the gift of orgasm" more readily through clitoral stimulation than penetration. To faciliate oral sex, women have abandoned pubic hair. They look like little girls with big boobs. Perhaps this "innocent" look has contributed to the perverted sexual interest in child porn and child sex trafficing.

Feminism taught women promiscuity so that no man wants to marry them, because so many of the wedding guests have already slept with the bride.

Promiscuity brought female empowerment. The woman can be on top and set the pace, while the man restrains himself by thinking about distracting subjects. If he can last long enough, she can get off and think he is a fantastic lover.

The emotional side of sex with its components of love and commitment, if still present, is in the background. Sex is about pleasurable physical feelings, which is why we leave "the house to met new people to have sex with." This is a bigger change than people realize. The young don't even know what has been lost. Today a girlfriend is a convenience. You don't have to go to a brothel.

People still get married, but the percentage is declining for economic and divorce court reasons and because of the availability of sex outside marriage. Moreover, in the marital bedroom there is no dominatrix with a giant balloon to help to get you off. Today the people most interested in marriage are homosexuals, lesbians, and transgendered. Marriage is a way of legitimizing themselves and what would once have been called perverted sexual preferences.

Economic adversity has brought older women increasing competition from younger women, who advertise their availability to older men who have the financial resources to help them with college tuition, student loan debt, car payments, utility bills and apartment rents. Perhaps it is this development that has led to the websites where older women advertise that all they want is one night stands. Younger women move away from young men because the men have no financial resources. Perhaps this is the reason for the enormous amount of youthful male homosexuality, a sexual preference that in my day was either very well hidden or as rare as a unicorn.

If the point is simply to get off, it doesn't matter who or what you do it with. A robotic sex doll has been created that talks dirty, has simulated female genitals, and is programed with sexual movements. A male sex robot can't be far behind.

Perhaps Americans will cease procreating, which might save the planet and its remaining animal and plant life from habitat destruction. Who's to say the world wouldn't be a better place without us.

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

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43192.htm.

According to new Credit Suisse data, nearly 50 million of America’s 243 million adults are part of the world’s poorest 10%

By Paul Buchheit

October 19, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – Bernie Sanders showed his outrage about inequality at the Democratic Debate, and more and more Americans are understanding his message. Indignation is likely to grow with new data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, which reveals the wealthy elite’s continuing disdain for the poor, for the middle class, and for people all around the world.Some of the most troubling disparities are hidden in the myriad tables of this remarkably comprehensive publication. The purpose here is to translate the numbers into wealth gap realities that victimize the great majority of Americans. Details can be viewed at You Deserve Facts.

1. At the Bottom: Of the Half-Billion Poorest Adults in the World, One out of Ten is an American

That seems impossible, with so many extremely poor countries, and it requires a second look at the data, and then a third look. But it’s true. In the world’s poorest decile (bottom 10%), one out of ten are Americans, many of whom are burdened with so much debt that any remnant of tangible wealth is negated. Other nations have high debt, most notably in Europe, but without an excessive burden on their poorest citizens.

Incredibly, then, nearly 50 million of America’s 243 million adults are part of the world’s poorest 10%. In contrast, over 110 million American adults are among the world’s richest 10%.

2. At the Top: The Richest 1/10 of American Adults Have Averaged Over $1 Million Each in New Wealth Since the Recession

Housing rebound? Mostly for the rich, along with their taking of almost all the financial wealth. Total U.S. wealth increased by a stunning 60 percent since 2009, from $54 trillion to $86 trillion, but 3/4 of that massive increase went to the richest 10% of Americans.

The average one-percenter has accumulated $5 MILLION since the recession.

3. In the Middle: The US is the Only Region Where the Middle-Class Does Not Own Its Equivalent Share of Wealth

The North American middle class, as defined by Credit Suisse, and of which the U.S. is by far the largest part, has 39% of the people but only 21 percent of national wealth. Every other region of the world shows the reverse phenomenon, with the middle class owning an oversized portion of national wealth.

The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report states: “The average wealth of middle-class adults in North America is barely half the average for all adults. In contrast, middle-class wealth per adult in Europe is 130% of the regional average; the middle class in China is three times better off in wealth terms than the country as a whole; and the average wealth of the middle class in both India and Africa is ten times the level of those in the rest of the population.”

4. In the Upper-Middle: For a Full 70% of Americans, Percentage Ownership of National Wealth is One of the Lowest in the World

That’s 70%. Not just the most impoverished, or the poorest half, but a full 70% of us are near the bottom of the world in percentage of wealth ownership. Just 6.9 percent of the wealth is owned by 70% of us. All other reporting nations range between about 13 and 30 percent.

5. The Big Picture: Only Kazakhstan, Libya, Russia, and Ukraine Have Worse Wealth Inequality than the United States

That’s among countries with at least a million adults (see details for a discussion of the outlier Denmark). The global Gini is also higher, at .91, reflecting the dramatically greater disparity between nations rather than within them.

Barack Obama once said, “I believe America is exceptional.” The inequality data proves him right.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of “American Wars: Illusions and Realities” (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org. Via http://www.commondreams.org.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43190.htm

By Chris Hedges

October 19, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “Truthdig” – DENVER—The maniacal drive by the human species to extinguish itself includes a variety of lethal pursuits. One of the most efficient is fracking. One day, courtesy of corporations such as Halliburton, BP and ExxonMobil, a gallon of water will cost more than a gallon of gasoline. Fracking, which involves putting chemicals into potable water and then injecting millions of gallons of the solution into the earth at high pressure to extract oil and gas, has become one of the primary engines, along with the animal agriculture industry, for accelerating global warming and climate change.

The Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers who are profiting from this cycle of destruction will—once clean water is scarce and crop yields decline, once temperatures soar and cities disappear under the sea, once droughts and famines ripple across the globe, once mass migrations begin—surely profit from the next round of destruction. Collective suicide is a good business, at least until it is complete. It is a pity most of us will not be around to see the power elite go down.

I met recently in Denver with three of the country's leading anti-fracking activists:Gustavo Aguirre Jr. of KEEN (Kern Environmental Enforcement Network) in California; Kandi Mossett with the Indigenous Environmental Network and from the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota, the second-largest oil-producing state because of hydraulic fracturing; and Shane Davis, a longtime campaigner against fracking and the founder of fractivist.org, a data mining organization that exposes what fracking corporations are doing in communities around the country.

The activists are waging a war against a corporate state that is deaf and blind to the rights of its citizens and the imperative to protect the ecosystem. The corporate state, largely to pacify citizens being frog-marched to their own execution, passes environmental laws and regulations that, at best, slow the ongoing environmental destruction. Corporations, which routinely ignore even these tepid restrictions, largely write the laws and legislation designed to regulate their activity. They rewrite them or overturn them as the focus of their exploitation changes. They turn public hearings on local environmental issues into choreographed charades or shut them down if activists succeed in muscling their way into the room to demand a voice. They dominate the national message through a pliable and bankrupt corporate media and slick public relations. Elected officials are little more than corporate employees, dependent on industry money to stay in office and, when they retire from "public service," salivating for jobs in the industry. Environmental reform has become a joke on the public. And the Big Green environmental groupsare complicit because they rely on donors, at times from the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries; they are silent about the reality of corporate power, largely ineffectual, and part of the fiction of the democratic process.

Resistance will be local. It will be militant. It will defy the rules imposed by the corporate state. It will turn its back on state and NGO environmental organizations. And it will not stop until corporate power is destroyed or we are destroyed.

"Forty years after the major environmental laws were adopted in the U.S., and 40 years after trying to regulate the damage caused by corporations to the natural environment and our communities, by almost every major environmental statistic things are worse now than they were before," Thomas Linzey, the executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, told me recently.

The fracking industry is omnivorous, biologist Davis noted. It "is so intoxicated and bloated by greed that it has moved into our backyards, near our school playgrounds, our hospitals, universities, our day cares, our state parks, our national grasslands, and has its sights on the rest of our public lands across America unless we stop them," he said.

In writing "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," the cartoonist Joe Sacco and I visited devastated "sacrifice zones" where corporate power manipulates judicial and political power, and has free rein to impoverish families, destroy or abandon infrastructure, plunder and pollute the environment and shape the message disseminated by mass communications. Those who organize and resist are met with intimidation and violence from the state and private security firms in the pay of corporations.

Sacco and I wrote the book from the poorest pockets of the United States, including Camden, N.J., the nation's poorest city, per capita, among those with more than 65,000 residents; the Lakota reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., where the average life expectancy for a male is only 48 and where at any one time 60 percent of residents have neither running water or electricity; devastated coal fields of southern West Virginia where the tops of Appalachian mountains have been blown off to extract coal seams and the landscape has become a wasteland; and produce fields in Florida where undocumented workers are not only sickened by pesticides but at times are held in bondage and slavery.

The point of the book, whose last chapter takes place in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan during the Occupy movement, is this: These sacrifice zones went first and we are next. We have all become part of a sacrifice zone. It behooves us to understand what unfettered, unregulated corporate power looks like, how it operates and what levels of wholesale destruction it inflicts in the lust for profit on human beings and the environment. If we do not know how corporate power works, and the lengths it will travel to exploit us and the ecosystem, we will not be able to fight it. Both in theological terms and literally, these corporate forces are forces of death.

There is a low-level insurgency, in many of the sacrifice zones and elsewhere, against the corporations that carry out destruction and plunder, including fracking. This is an insurgency worth joining. It is a battle far more important than the charade of presidential elections. Real change will come only from below. It will come from those participating in efforts such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the anti-fracking movement and the movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It will come from radical organizations that organize outside the system and physically impede corporate destruction. It will come through open revolt. Our fate as a species will be determined on these lonely and difficult battlegrounds.

The fracking industry, bolstered by the security and surveillance state, has devoted tremendous resources to monitoring, demonizing and criminalizing anti-fracking activists. Activists are followed, harassed, arrested and defamed in corporate-funded propaganda campaigns even as their communities see their drinking water poisoned, air polluted, greater earthquake activity, the dumping of radioactive waste on their land, and farm animals sickened, born with birth defects and killed by drinking contaminated water.

The oil and gas industry, often backed by state governments, routinely sues communities that have asserted their democratic rights to ban fracking. The corporations know that communities in most cases do not have the resources to challenge high-priced corporate legal teams and lobbyists. This means that for citizens seeking redress, the courts are largely useless. High-court decisions in Ohio, Colorado and New Mexico, along with a ruling by the state Senate in Texas and a law passed in Oklahoma, deny the right of communities to impose fracking bans. So, in effect, when you raise consciousness about the dangers of fracking, when you organize to protect yourselves and your children, when you pass a ban in a democratic vote, your action is nullified by the courts or the state. The consent of the governed becomes a farce.

"We are being sued by our own governor," Davis said of John Hickenlooper, whose Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has joined a lawsuit against the city of Longmont to challenge a vote by Longmont residents to ban fracking. "Communities cannot protect themselves. There are homes in Colorado where basements have filled up with explosive levels of gases from previous fracking industry operations, sending people to burn centers. There are homes where people can light their tap on fire because of high levels of thermogenic methane in the water. But the victims of fracking are prohibited by law from safeguarding themselves."

There are more than 15 million Americans, many of them children, who live within a mile of a fracking site. Most are being exposed daily to a deadly brew of toxins. Because the oil and gas industry is not required under law to disclose the chemicals used in fracking, communities are not told what is being injected into their groundwater. The array of carcinogens is known to the public only through analysis of samples taken at sites. These samples include endocrine disruptors and chemicals such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. Infrared cameras set up by activists show plumes of methane and other hydrocarbon gases, invisible to the naked eye, spiraling upward from underground fracking sites. Methane is a greenhouse gas whose potential for trapping heat and therefore for global warming has been estimated at 86 times greater than that of carbon dioxide.

Those who live around fracking sites often suffer skin rashes, nosebleeds, headaches, respiratory problems, premature births and cancers. Yet the corporations, along with our governments, doggedly refuse to link the diseases to fracking. This is a pattern familiar to all who live in sacrifice zones. Corporations have no intention of being held accountable for what they do. That would cost money.

"A lot of people around me have cancer," said Mossett. "I'm a cancer survivor. It has become something that is normal for us. It comes in all forms—bone cancer, lung cancer, uterine cancer and prostate cancer, amongst others. Even before the fracking began we had seven coal-fired power plants in North Dakota. Every inch of our over 11,000 miles of rivers, lakes and streams are already contaminated with mercury. Then fracking started to take off around 2006. People, at first, had no clue what was coming. Infrastructure started to be built. We got water towers through the rural water department. Many saw this as positive. A brand new bridge was built over Lake Sakakawea."

But once the infrastructure was in place it became apparent that it had been built to facilitate the extraction of oil by fracking, not improve the lives of those on North Dakota's reservations.

White people are not the only problem. The fracking corporations, Mossett said, easily bought off local tribal leaders. "Our tribal council [of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation] sold us out. The council gave away sovereignty rights to allow the oil industry to operate on tribal lands. The council signed contracts to give away parcels of land. It set up front companies, since you have to be native if you frack on native land." [The events that Mossett criticized occurred before the election of a new chairman last year.]

Cancer rages like a plague across the reservations.

"The Centers for Disease Control do not show clusters of cancers in our communities," Mossett said. "This is because illness and sickness are coded out of the place where referrals are made. Since we don't have a hospital to treat these illnesses, patients are referred to a clinic like the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis. So the huge clusters of cancers on the reservation are not properly documented."

The fracking industry in much of North Dakota, rather than extract the subterranean gas, burns it off in jets of flame known as flares. It trucks out the more valuable oil.

"The flares burn all day and all night," Mossett said. "There are hundreds of them. They are loud. There is enough gas produced from these flares, some have estimated, to heat half a million homes every day. And all this is going into the atmosphere. Then came the waste injection sites. The trucks began to dump what they called 'produced water' [toxics and water injected underground and later brought to the surface as wastewater] onto the roads. It covered our roads. It filled our ditches with toxic chemicals. I drove past a ditch near Mandaree on the Fort Berthold Reservation and it was on fire. The fields and pastures along the roads are being poisoned."

The dilemma facing activists is that the enemy is not only the corporations but also the federal and state governments. Federal and state authority is a tool used by corporations to make legal what should be illegal. Nonviolent, democratic dissent is criminalized. This creates a terrifying dilemma. If, as it does, the law slavishly serves the interests of the corporate criminals, how is justice to be obtained? If the law, as it does, outlaws legitimate democratic and nonviolent dissent, how is dissent to be expressed? If we cannot receive, as we cannot, justice from the courts or state and federal legislators, where will justice come from? If we cannot legally impede the destruction of our communities, what are the physical methods we will have to employ to save ourselves?

"The corporations fight us with the government," said Aguirre. "The DOGGR [California's Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources] makes the claim that activists want to take jobs from neighbors and families. It claims we are killing the economy. … The acute health impacts that occur in the communities, the disproportionate toxic fumes that these communities breathe, are never factored in. Our community members are already marginalized. They live in low-income communities. They can't afford or don't have health care coverage. And they don't have a voice.

"I have been followed by numerous diesel engine trucks [as I made] toxic tours with my constituents, taking them to fracking projects and refineries to percolation ponds, evaporation ponds," Aguirre said. "I've been threatened at public hearings. I've been called a communist and a socialist. I've been called a mouth runner, someone who has been paid by some group to stir up the community. The board supervisors of my community have told me to stop doing what I am doing. These are the same elected officials who are cashing in on the industry."

Justice will come by defying the institutions that claim to maintain justice. Truth will be heard by defying the institutions that claim to speak truth. The law will be upheld by breaking the law. Power will be obtained by overthrowing the power of the corporation state. We will save ourselves by facing the grim and unpleasant truth that all of the established mechanisms designed to carry out reform, including what we still call American democracy, is in corporate hands. We must unleash the power of the powerless. We must use our bodies to obstruct these forces of death to protect life. We must refuse to cooperate in our own destruction. Fracking is one assault. There are many, many others. But they all will lead to the same fatal conclusion if we do not rise up and resist.

I admire these activists, men and women who soldier forward. They understand the imperative of a new radicalism. They speak in the language of revolution. They know if we are to have a future it will entail mass acts of sustained civil disobedience and jail time. This resistance will mean that we court violence, maybe even our deaths. Corporations will use every weapon in their vast arsenals to bend us to their will. But if we do not begin to openly rebel, if we do not reverse the corporate coup d'état that has taken place, the world bequeathed to our children will be a holocaust.

Chris Hedges previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43185.htm

Despite doomsday warnings from American politicians, Iran has no serious intentions of attacking Israel or the West.

By Marc Daalder

October 19, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “In These Times” –   On September 17, just hours before the deadline for Congressional review of President Obama's Iran deal, Senate Democrats repelled a resolution of disapproval, which would have scuttled the deal by preventing Obama from granting Iran sanctions relief, for the third time in two weeks. This marked the end of any legislative opposition to the deal, after months of Republican grandstanding—several of the GOP presidential candidates have even promised to tear up the deal on their first day of office—and intense lobbying by AIPAC and similar organizations.The fierce resistance to the deal by these conservatives is understandable. They see Iran as hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, the annihilation of the Jews and the downfall of Western culture and empire. Jennifer Rubin wrote a piece for theWashington Post decrying the deal simply titled "Obama won't defend Western civilization." During the second presidential debate, Mike Huckabee insisted that "This [deal] threatens Israel immediately, this threatens the entire Middle East, but it threatens the United States of America. This is really about the survival of Western civilization."

But it isn't. Despite what some leaders in the country say, Iran has no serious intentions of wiping out the Jews or the West. And while the deal prevents the country from developing a nuclear weapon for at least the next decade, even if Iranwere to gain access to such a weapon, the country's leaders would never attempt to use it for fear of Israeli retaliation.

Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, isn't stupid. He knows that, were he to order any sort of attack against Israel, the tiny Jewish country would respond with magnified force. While Israel has never admitted to having any nuclear weapons, NGOs and foreign governments estimate it has built as many as 300. And a hawk like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would not hesitate to respond to Iranian aggression with overwhelming nuclear force. Khamenei knows any nuclear strike would be suicidal.

And besides, such a scenario presumes that Iran even wants to attack Israel. But all historical evidence shows that it does not.

Iranian officials have, of course, spouted anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric since the 1979 revolution. Yet little has come of it. Certainly, Iran has funded and armed Israel's enemies—most notably Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad—and engaged in small proxy wars, but it has never put its full weight behind any of these conflicts.

A May 1996 Pentagon report indicated that Iran has probably produced biological warfare agents and weaponized at least a small quantity of them. But no evidence has ever shown that it has given any of these weapons to Hezbollah or Hamas. In fact, in the same year, during one of Israel's periodic wars with Hezbollah, Iran actually pressured both sides to a cease-fire. Israel's then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai later praised Tehran for its intervention and for helping to return Israeli hostages, saying, "As a goodwill gesture, I want to thank everyone who dealt in this humanitarian deed—in Lebanon, in Syria and in Iran." Hezbollah had effectively fought Israel to a stalemate, yet rather than encouraging greater damage and embarrassment to Israel—what you'd expect from a country hell-bent on a long-term project to annihilate Israel—Iran intervened to end the conflict.

This was no isolated occurrence: Iran has very often made diplomatic and trade overtures towards both Israel and the United States. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel sold weapons to Iran and pressured the United States to do the same. (This, of course, later led to the Iran-Contra affair.) In 2002, after the Taliban were ousted from Afghanistan, Iran helped negotiate the peaceful creation of a new government, and even offered to provide resources and training for 20,000 Afghan troops—all under American guidance.

Coinciding with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran offered to cut ties to its affiliated terrorist organizations, push Hezbollah to close its military wing, and even accept the Beirut Declaration of the Arab League, which would normalize relations between Arab states and Israel, if America would end sanctions and resume diplomatic relations with them. While the proposal gained the support of much of the Bush Administration, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney rejected it, saying, "We don't speak to evil." More often than not, Israeli and American hardliners are the ones who shut down peace talks and negotiations—as almost happened with this latest deal—as opposed to Iranians.

While Iran doesn't represent a real existential threat towards Israel and the West, life for Jews within Iran is hardly hindered by some kind of genocidal anti-Semitism. Jewish reporter Larry Cohler-Esses visited Iran recently, reporting for the Jewish Forward. He investigated Iran's Jewish community, which currently numbers somewhere between 9,000 and 20,000, making it the third-largest Jewish community in the Middle East behind only Israel and Turkey.

Cohler-Esses describes how Iran's Jews constitute "a broadly prosperous, largely middle-class community whose members have no hesitation about walking down the streets of Tehran wearing yarmulkes." Compare this to France, which a report by the Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism labelled"the most dangerous country for Jews today."Fifty-eight percent of British Jews feel they have no long-term future in Europe, according to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.

If world Jewry is facing any major threat, then, it's coming from the European right-wing—certainly not Iran. In fact, while Iranian ayatollahs and military officials have been promising to "wipe [Israel] off the map" since its 1979 revolution, it was only in the 1990s that Israel began to acknowledge these threats. Even as Iran sponsored an essay contest on the topic "Israel Must Be Erased from the Earth" in 1985, the two countries were negotiating arms deals and mediating peace accords.

What changed? In the 1980s, Iraq was the largest threat to Israel in the Middle East. It had the backing of the Soviet Union and was led by a bloodthirsty autocrat who actively sought Israel's demise. But, with the collapse of the Soviets, Saddam Hussein's defeat in the First Gulf War and his eventual execution, Iran became Israel's new nemesis.

Because, after all, Israel must have a nemesis. The Israeli narrative of a country surrounded by enemies on all sides, poised at all moments to invade and wipe Israel off the map, is integral to its survival in the international scene. Only by sustaining this farce can Israel continue to justify its illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. And so Netanyahu, who led the country as it turned against Iran in the mid-late 1990s, used Iran's overblown rhetoric to create the specter of a country motivated solely by a desire to destroy Israel.

By trumping up Iran as the next Nazi Germany, Netanyahu wins humanitarian and military aid for Israel, and victorious elections for his hard-right party Likud. Thus, Obama's Iran Deal, which singlehandedly banishes this specter of a nuclear Holocaust for the next decade or more, has helped to strip one more lie from the narrative of an Israel under attack. Ironically, Netanyahu's greatest weapon in his seemingly-eternal war on Palestine was the Iranian bomb. Without that weapon, perhaps he'll be forced to make peace at last.

Marc Daalder is a writer and student living in Massachusetts. He attends Amherst College, writes for the student publication AC Voice, and spends his spare timetweeting, blogging and writing fiction.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43191.htm

By Moon Of Alabama

October 19, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – The Aleppo power plant is a 1,000 megawatt thermal plant in five units build by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry in 1995-1998. It is situated some 25 kilometers east of Aleppo city center.  During the fighting around Aleppo various electricity distribution stations were damaged and electricity in parts of the city has become scarce and unpredictable. But the main power station had so far not been hit.

The plant is in the hands of the Islamic State but there is an informal agreementbetween the government, which controls the distribution network, and those who hold the power generating station:

[T]he agreement of understanding pertains to the division of the electricity supply between the parties, whereby ISIS will receive 60% of the quota and the Syrian regime will receive 40%.

Both sides will have some electricity and the civilian as well as fighters on both side will be better off than without electricity. No side has a motive to destroy that plant.

But last night the U.S. coalition bombed the Aleppo thermal power plant and destroyed parts of it:

A military source told SANA that warplanes of the Washington alliance violated Syrian airspace and attacked civilian infrastructure in Mare'a, Tal Sha'er, and al-Bab in Aleppo countryside on Sunday.The source added that the warplanes attacked the biggest electric power plant that feeds Aleppo city, which resulted in cutting off power from most neighborhoods in Aleppo city.

Just a week ago U.S. air attacks had attacked another power station and a big distribution transformer al-Radwaniye also east of Aleppo.

The electricity generation and distribution system is civil infrastructure. It is used and useful to everyone no matter what side of the conflict. After the first U.S. attack on a power station a week ago the Russian president Putin was asked about the strikes. He called them “strange”:

“On Sunday, the American aviation bombed out an electrical power plant and a transformer in Aleppo. Why have they done this? Whom have they punished there? What's the point? Nobody knows,” the president said at a meeting with the Russian government members.

The Russians and the Syrians are sure that it were F-16 planes from the U.S. coalition that bombed the power infrastructure even though the coalition reports do no mention the attacks. Why are these bombings not mentioned in the U.S. coalition reports?

The U.S. claims it is only fighting the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. It accuses Russia of not only attacking ISIS even though Russia, and Putin himself, always said that ISIS is not their sole target but that supporting the Syrian government against all its enemies is the overarching aim. The Russian just snuffed out a 16 vehicle ISIS convoy. Something that the U.S. somehow never manages to do. The U.S. itself, by the way, has killed and kills some non-ISIS “moderate rebels”. All its complains against the Russians are just nonsense.

But why would fighting ISIS or this or that “moderate rebel” terrorist necessitate the destruction of valuable infrastructure which serves all sides of the Syrian society?

Without the plant Aleppo city, with some 2-3 million inhabitants and refugees, as well as the surrounding areas in Aleppo governate have no electricity. The damage the U.S. bombing caused will make sure that any repair will take a long time. This will make life for people on every side of the war more unbearable and more people will leave to seek refuge in foreign countries.

Is that the purpose of the U.S. bombardment of electricity infrastructure in Syria? If not what else is this supposed to achieve?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43195.htm

Washington so-called war on ISIS is a complete fabrication. Russia's is the real thing. Its effectiveness is why Obama won't cooperate with Putin – even though both leaders claim they share the same goal.

In over a year of daily Syria bombing, America's vaunted military destroyed zero ISIS targets, nor those of other terrorist groups.

On Friday, Russia's General Staff said its warplanes destroyed 456 ISIS targets since September 30, striking them with pinpoint accuracy. Its Main Operations Directorate chief Colonel-General Andrei Kartapolov said:

Most armed formations are demoralized. There is growing discontent with field commanders, and there is evidence of disobedience. Desertion is becoming widespread.-

Intelligence shows about 100 terrorists enter Turkey from Syria daily. They're leaving front line positions through refugee routes, fleeing for their lives.

Kartapolov said Russian "aircraft carry out strikes against the militants infrastructure based on data provided through several intelligence channels as well as intel supplied by the information center in Baghdad. We only attack targets held by internationally-recognized terrorist groups."

Washington's campaign targets Syrian infrastructure sites, not ISIS or other terrorist groups, falsely claiming otherwise, willfully deceiving the US public.

"It is against our principles to advise our colleagues which targets to strike," said Kartapolov. "However, on October 11, a power plant and an electrical substation were destroyed by coalition warplanes in the vicinity of Tell-Ala."

US and allied warplanes are"deliberately destroying the civilian infrastructure in population centers making them unfit for habitation. Because of that civilians are fleeing these towns and contribute to the flow of refugees to Europe."

Washington refuses to share intelligence data on ISIS and other terrorist groups' locations. "So we went ahead and created a comprehensive map of areas controlled by ISIL, based on our intel and on data provided by the information center in Baghdad, Kartapolov explained.

In Beijing at the 6th Xiangshan Security Forum, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov addressed what Putin repeatedly stresses.

Russia seeks cooperative relations with all nations. Washington rejects it, especially Moscow's outreach to coordinate efforts on each nation's Syrian operations.

"We are constantly in touch with the Syrian army," Antonov explained. "All of our strikes are surgical and delivered with precision, exclusively against Islamic State infrastructures. We have not hit any other military or civilian facilities, let alone communities and mosques, contrary to what some western media have been claiming."

"We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that individual countries (notably America, Britain, France and Israel) help terrorist groups, counting on achieving their own selfish national objectives"– while duplicitously claiming otherwise.

Russia's righteous campaign has Washington flummoxed, on its back foot, its regional imperial strategy taking a  major body blow, its imported anti-Assad death squads getting pummelled.

Syrian ground and air forces killed hundreds of ISIS and other terrorists since their major offensive began days earlier – a sustained effort to regain lost territory, liberating one village after another, reversing past setbacks, US proxies taking heavy losses.

No wonder Washington rejects cooperating with Russia. Putin's righteous mission means its Middle East agenda is no longer unchallenged – maybe prologue for contesting it on a broader scale.

America's dark side reflects pure evil, humanity's greatest ever threat, its survival literally up for grabs.

Paul Craig Roberts calls Washington's criminal agenda "unmatched anywhere on earth or in history." Its rage for world dominance may kill us all.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-rejects-cooperation-with-putin-on-syria-washingtons-war-on-terror-is-a-fabrication-zero-isis-targets-destroyed/5482832

“Aristocracy Aren't Satisfied; They Demand More”

A new analysis of the Obama-proposed TTIP 'trade' treaty, which the U.S. would have with Europe, finds that it was initiated and shaped by large international corporations, which will, also according to the only independent economic analysis that has thus far been done of TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), be the only beneficiaries of the proposed Treaty — all at the expense of the publics in each one of the participating countries.

This new study is titled «Public Services Under Attack», but it's about more than just the proposed treaty's impacts upon replacing «Public Services» by private services.

Corporate Europe headlined about this study on October 12^th, «Public services under attack through TTIP and CETA», and listed 15 of what they consider to be the report's highlights. The following will instead quote extensively from the study itself, so that this summary will come mainly from  the report itself:

The study is »Published by Association Internationale de Techniciens, Experts et Chercheurs (AITEC), Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), European Federation of Public Services Unions (EPSU), Instytut Globalnej Odpowiedzialności (IGO), Transnational Institute (TNI), Vienna Chamber of Labour (AK Vienna), and War on Want». So: it reflects a concern for workers, and for the poor, not mainly for corporate owners — the latter being the proposed Treaty's sole sponsors and beneficiaries.

This new study opens by defining (page 8) «Public Service»: «Public services are those provided by a government to its population, usually based around the social consensus that certain services should be available to all regardless of income». Another way of stating this is that a «public service» is one provided to citizens as a right, available to all equally, instead of as a privilege, available only upon the basis of ability-to-pay. The «social consensus that certain services should be available to all regardless of income» is repudiated in treaties like this, because they reflect instead a «libertarian» (to use the U.S. term) or «liberal» (to use the European term) viewpoint, that a person's wealth reflects that person's contribution to society, so that no poor person possesses any rights at all. (Supporting this viewpoint, Adam Smith, in his 1762 Glasgow Lectures on Jurisprudence, said: «Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor».

He wrote this in a society and age in which virtually all wealth – or else poverty – was inherited from one's parents, not earned. He portrayed the poor as being the enemies. Their rights were no more than their wealth, in his view. He retained that aristocratic view throughout his life.) This viewpoint is also often referred to as being «conservatism», because it conserves the existing power-structure, with the richest (the aristocracy) being the most powerful in the future, as they have been in the past. Consequently, in the West at least, the ideological polarity is between «liberalism» versus «conservatism», both of which are fundamentally the same. Progressivism hardly even has a name, as of yet. (In other words: the ideological 'debate' is bogus, and is shaped on 'both' sides by the aristocracy.)

Therefore, proponents of Obama's proposed 'trade' treaties call themselves, variously, «liberals», «libertarians», and «conservatives»; but only the terminology varies, because the reality does not.

The same section of the study says: «With free trade treaties like CETA and TTIP, governments will lose policy space to organise public services according to societies' preferences by locking in liberalisation and privatisation. This is raising great concerns about whether profit will distort the ability of these services to be run in the public interest. Moreover, government attempts to regulate them could be deemed 'barriers to trade' and overturned».

The report's Table of Contents is also something of a summary of the report:

Executive summary…3

1. Introduction…6

2. Dangerous liaisons: business, services, and trade…9

2.1 A brief history of services lobbying: the birth of GATS and ESF…10

2.2 Brothers in arms: the EU negotiators soliciting corporate lobbying…10

2.3 Systemic collusion: DG Trade's calls for support…12

3. Business wish-list for Europe's public services…14

3.1 Public services: everything must go!…15

3.2 Dismantling public health…16

3.3 Competitive tendering: bidding for health contracts…17

3.4 Financial industry: a major player in services liberalisation…19

3.5 Procurement: attack on public utilities…20

3.6 Public Private Partnerships: profiting from austerity…20

3.7 Post: eroding universal service…21

3.8 Hollywood: fighting the cultural exception…22

3.9 Future proofing TTIP: digital trade in public services…23

3.10 Locking in privatisation…24

3.11 Protecting investment – endangering welfare…24

4. Rolling out the red carpet: how the EU bows to corporate demands…26

4.1 An ESF win: privatising everything but the kitchen sink?…27

4.2 Pleasing BusinessEurope: negotiating PPPs…30

4.3 Standstill: no backtracking from postal services liberalisation…31

4.4 Water utilities unprotected…32

4.5 Energy services: blocking policy space…33

4.6 On the rise: privately funded services…33

4.7 TNCs and the commodification of education…34

4.8 NHS: the sell-off of public health…37

4.9 Audiovisual services: nixing an exemption…39

4.10 Cashing in: the financialisation of social services…40

4.11 ISDS: defending a corporate privilege…42

4.12 Private tribunals adjudicating on public services…43

5. Conclusion: democracy and social justice, not trade deals threatening public services…45

Here is the opening of:

3.1 Public services: everything must go

To ensure maximum coverage of services in TTIP, the powerhouse lobby groups on both sides of the Atlantic, ESF and CSI, recommended a particular negotiation strategy known as a 'negative list' which means that all public services are subject to liberalisation unless an explicit exception is made. 

This 'list it or lose it' approach dramatically expands the scope of a trade agreement as governments make commitments in areas they might not even be aware of, such as new services emerging in the future (see box 7 on page 28). It marks a departure from the positive lists used so far in EU trade agreements containing only those services which governments have agreed to liberalising. 

At the same time, transatlantic lobby groups are trying to prevent negotiators from exempting any public services from the trade agreement. Their alarm bells started to ring in February 2015 when the European Parliament's Committee on International Trade (INTA) drafted a TTIP resolution asking for «an adequate carve-out of sensitive services such as public services and public utilities (including water, health, social security systems, and education) allowing national and local authorities enough room for manoeuvre to legislate in the public interest».21 …

Then, there is:

3.2 Dismantling public health

The public health sector is one of the main targets of business lobbyists advocating for TTIP, hoping to capitalize on increasing health expenditure driven by aging populations in both the EU and the US, while public health sectors continue to suffer from fiscal pressures and harsh austerity measures. For instance, the powerful Washington-based Alliance for Healthcare Competitiveness (AHC) assembles companies and associations representing service providers, hospital operators, insurers, producers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, as well as IT and logistics companies (including Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, UPS, Intel, United Health Group, CSI, PhRMA, and USCIB). It prides itself on being «the only coalition advocating for the freer flow of health goods and services at the healthcare sector level». 26 

AHC complains that «today's world of health care services is highly restricted and fragmented», but an «open trading world for these services would create a large new flow of revenue into the United States [to executives and major stockholders of those companies]». …

Then, there is:

3.10 Locking in privatisation 

Beyond prising open services markets, one of the central features of free trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA is their capacity to effectively lock in previous and future liberalisations and privatisations – regardless of any government that gets voted in or what its mandate or policies might be. 

Apart from 'standstill' clauses irreversibly binding existing policies, business groups further demand the inclusion of a so-called 'ratchet' provision which would effectively lock in future deregulations. … 

Then, there is:

3.11 Protecting investment – endangering welfare 

Business lobbyists are united in their call to have a broad investment protection chapter in TTIP, including the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism (ISDS), granting foreign investors the exclusive right to bypass international tribunals. One of the overarching corporate aims is to prevent governments from any regulatory changes limiting private profits. 

Then, there is:

4.1 An ESF win: privatising everything but the kitchen sink?

Heeding the demands of the business lobby, CETA and TTIP apply to virtually all public services … at best excluding some core sovereign functions such as law enforcement, the judiciary, or the services of a central bank.84 [In common parlance, as Grover Norquist has phrased the matter, «reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.»]

Then, there are sections indicating that postal services and also the water utility are to be privatized so as to be available only only on a for-profit basis: excluding or else prohibitively charging regions where those services are unprofitable:

4.3 Standstill: no backtracking from postal services liberalisation

4.4 Water utilities unprotected 

Education gets treated similarly. Then, there is:

4.8 NHS: the sell-off of public health

TTIP and CETA will allow investors domiciled in North America to exploit liberalisations already undertaken in Europe's public health sectors to force through further market openings and to lock in past privatisations. The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is an important case in point. … 

Then, there are several sections devoted to such things as:

Regulatory changes, such as new laws or taxes diminishing private profits, may be seen as breaches of an investor's «legitimate expectations» justifying multi-billion euro payouts in compensation [to companies that have been prohibited from activities by regulations, or even to the violating companies that have been fined]. 

and,

Thus, «indirect expropriation» lends itself to an extremely broad range of interpretation. For example, tribunals have already denounced many public interest regulations as measures «tantamount» or «equivalent» to expropriation – and ordered states to pay multimillions of euros in compensation. 

THE STUDY'S MAJOR FAILINGS

A major failing of this study is that it ignores such things as: Locking in food, drug, automobile-safety, and other existing regulations, so that, for example, when new scientific studies or else newly developed technologies indicate that an updating of a regulation would save lives or otherwise help the public, the regulation under TTIP and similar treaties cannot be updated (except by subjecting the government to potentially crippling lawsuits), which crippling of government will produce ever-increasing numbers of diseases and deaths as government is frozen even while science and technology continue to advance.

This is feudal. Fascism is to the industrial age what feudalism was to the agrarian age; and this is fascism, but on an international or imperial scope, perhaps even an emerging fascist world government — the exact opposite of what the United Nations was founded in order to promote.

U.S. President Barack Obama was elected to office in 2008 with the promise and public expectation that he opposed anti-democratic, pro-aristocratic, initiatives such as this. The fact that he now goes even far beyond the extremists Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in them, is virtual proof that the United States is no longer a democracy. (At least those candidates were honest about their conservatism.) Is the EU at all a democracy? Or will they accept Obama's global-aristocratic monstrosity, and push for the aristocracy against the public, like the U.S. government does? The hypocrisy is mind-boggling.

Anyone who wants to know the mechanisms by which Obama's mega 'trade' treaties — TTIP, TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), and TiSA (Trade in Services Agreement)  — will operate, can find that machinery (the means to enslave the public to the aristocrats) described here.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-proposed-atlantic-ttip-trade-deal-with-europe-public-services-under-attack/5482970