Category Archives: DISARMAMENT & SECURITY

USA: Following Iran Strike, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Score Huge Defense Contracts

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

An article by Peter Castagno in Citizen Truth (All Citizen Truth original articles licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. )

Defense companies Lockheed Martin and Raytheon scored huge Pentagon contracts in anticipation of military conflict with Iran following the Trump administration’s assassination of Iran’s most powerful general late Thursday. Lockheed won a $1.93 billion contract to expand production of the controversial F-35 fighter jet program and Raytheon gained a $758 million deal to manufacture advanced medium-range air to air missiles (AMRAAM).

Defense stocks have soared in recent days as investors have expressed excitement at the prospect of greater violence in the Middle East:

“Big-name defense stocks are rising, with Northrop Grumman leading the rally last Friday. Northrop has risen 8% in the last five days, while Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have jumped around 4% and 2%, respectively,” reported Forbes Monday.

“The S&P 500 Aerospace & Defense (Industry) Index rose 3.7%, while the Dow Jones U.S. Aerospace & Defense Index went up 3.6% in the past five trading sessions,” as per Nasdaq on Tuesday.

General Dynamics also scored a $98 million contract to work on docking phased maintenance with the Naval Sea Systems Command.

Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, notes that because top defense executives receive stock-based pay, they are already reaping a windfall from Trump’s military strike.
‘The Game Has Changed’

Amid escalating tensions with Iran, the US is deploying roughly 4,500 soldiers, as well as a wide array of ships, planes and other weapons to the Middle East.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who was Raytheon’s top lobbyist for seven years, said that “the game has changed” shortly before President Trump’s assassination of a top Iranian general on Thursday, which marked the first time the U.S. killed a top foreign military leader since World War II. Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi said that Soleimani was in Iraq by his invitation in an effort to deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqi parliament has since voted to expel U.S. forces from the country, which Trump responded to with threats of “very big” sanctions “like they’ve never seen before, ever.” Trump also threatened Iran with retaliation “perhaps in a disproportionate manner,” including destruction of cultural sites if the country takes military action, a threat the Pentagon has contradicted. The president has previously spoken of his support for torture and “taking out” the families of terrorists, all while civilian deaths abroad have sharply increased during his presidency.

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Question for this article:

Does military spending lead to economic decline and collapse?

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the assassination was to prevent an imminent attack on U.S. forces planned by the general, but provided no evidence for his claim, and other officials have offered divergent accounts. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Pompeo had been pushing the move for months.
Economist Dean Baker noted that some defense stocks suspiciously surged before the attack:

Revolving Door

As Citizen Truth wrote earlier this week, critics argue that the revolving door between private defense contractors and the Pentagon improperly influences public policy to benefit private weapons manufacturers:

“In November 2018, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) released an analysis of the Trump administration’s defense sector, finding 645 instances of federal employees working for the top 20 Pentagon contractors in fiscal year 2016. Most of them worked as lobbyists, where they used public funds allocated to them through Pentagon contracts to vouch for policies that would help their private employers profit.”

U.S. Department of Defense Secretary Mark Esper spent seven years as the top lobbyist at Raytheon, refused to recuse himself from decisions involving his former employer, and has refused to wait before returning to Raytheon after his public service. U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy is a former Lockheed Martin executive.

Former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, who resigned in 2019, was ranked by the nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as one of the “most corrupt members of Congress” for her work with Lockheed Martin. In 2015, Lockheed Martin paid a $4.7 million settlement to the Department of Justice after the revelation it had used taxpayer funds to hire lobbyists, including Wilson, for a $2.4 billion contract.

Critics argue that proponents of military action should disclose their ties to the arms industry. Beyond the numerous Pentagon officials connected to weapons manufacturers, many congressmembers are supported by companies like Lockheed Martin and hold stock in the defense industry. As Lee Fang reported Monday night, multiple pundits who have praised the recent assassination neglected to reveal their financial interests in the arms corporations preparing for war.

Defense Spending

The Intercept’s Lee Fang reported last year that Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson said that “bipartisan support for defense spending,” favored her company, in addition to geopolitical tensions with countries like Iran.

House Democrats approved a $738 billion military package last month, even as it was stripped of amendments that would have forbidden the president from starting wars without congressional approval. Congress approved the colossal spending package a week after the Afghanistan papers were published, revealing how the U.S. government systematically deceived the public about the war in Afghanistan for 18 years.

In October, an Ex-Pentagon official said he was fired for speaking out about defense companies ripping off taxpayers. A 2016 Politico profile described the official, Shay Assad, as “the most hated man in the Pentagon.”

“Traditionally, defense stocks tend to outperform the market during periods of budget growth,” reported CCN. A CNBC analysis found that “shares of defense companies outperform the broader market in the six months after a crisis event in the Middle East.”

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, North America

‘Atrocious’: 188 Democrats Join GOP to Hand Trump $738 Billion Military Budget That Includes ‘Space Force’

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

An article by Jake Johnson on December 12 in Common Dreams (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License)

More than 180 House Democrats joined a nearly united Republican caucus Wednesday night to pass a sweeping $738 billion military spending bill that gives President Donald Trump his long-sought “Space Force,” free rein to wage endless wars, and a green light to continue fueling the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen.

Just 48 members of the House, including 41 Democrats, voted against the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which increases the Pentagon budget by $22 billion. The final vote was 377-48.

“This NDAA is atrocious, and it’s very depressing that only 48 members of congress voted against it,” tweeted anti-war group CodePink.

In a floor speech ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the most vocal opponent of the NDAA in the House, said “there are many things you can call the bill, but it’s Orwellian to call it progressive.” Khanna was standing across the aisle from Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who hailed the measure as “the most progressive defense bill we have passed in decades.”

“Let’s speak in facts,” said Khanna. “This defense budget is $120 billion more than what Obama left us with. That could fund free public college for every American. It could fund access to high-speed, affordable internet for every American. But it’s worse. The bipartisan amendment to stop the war in Yemen: stripped by the White House. The bipartisan amendment to stop the war in Iran: stripped by the White House.”

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Question for this article:

Does military spending lead to economic decline and collapse?

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According to the New York Times, Smith—chairman of the House Armed Services Committee—negotiated several provisions of the NDAA directly with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

“It was Mr. Kushner who helped broker a deal to create the Space Force, a chief priority of the president’s, in exchange for the paid parental leave [for federal employees],” the Times reported Wednesday. “It was also Mr. Kushner who intervened on measures targeting Saudi Arabia that would have prohibited arms sales or military assistance to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. He said they were nonstarters for the White House.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser Matt Duss expressed outrage that Democrats allowed Kushner—who has close ties to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—to kill an amendment that would have helped end U.S. complicity in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who voted against the NDAA, noted in a statement that the final version also stripped out her House-passed amendment that would have repealed the 2002 Iraq Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).

“With the release of the Afghanistan Papers, it is especially imperative that we take a hard look at our military spending and authorizations,” said Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan in 2001. “I can tell you: it is an appalling, but not shocking read for those of us who have been working to stop endless war. It’s past time to end the longest war in United States history, withdraw our troops, and bring our servicemembers home.”

The 2020 NDAA now heads to the Republican-controlled Senate, where it is expected to pass. In a tweet ahead of the House vote on Wednesday, Trump praised the bill and said he would sign it into law “immediately.”

“New rule: Every member of Congress who voted to give the most corrupt, unhinged, and unstable president in history $738 billion to fight endless wars, fund a bogus space force, and put our troops at risk must never tell us that we cannot afford Medicare for All or a Green New Deal,” Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ senior adviser, tweeted Wednesday night. “Ever.”

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, North America

USA: Adding up the Cost of Our Never-Ending Wars

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

An analysis described by Mark Thompson for the Project on Government Oversight

Wars cost too much. That’s really not a surprise. The surprise is how much more they cost than we’ve been told.

It might help to think of the nation’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq like a pair of icebergs. The Pentagon has a web page that tells us how much we’ve each paid for the wars. But that only tells us how much of those icebergs we can see above the waves. While it includes totals for war fighting, it doesn’t track the Pentagon’s bigger war budget, interest paid on money we’ve borrowed to fight the wars, veterans’ care, and other ancillary costs. There’s a whole lot more hidden beneath the waves. The real issue isn’t whether the cost of war is high; the issue is why the U.S. government keeps under-estimating it, and why U.S. citizens and taxpayers keep tolerating it.


Direct spending by the Pentagon on the nation’s post-9/11 wars, shown in red, accounts for only 36 percent of their total cost. (Chart: United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion, page 6, by Neta C. Crawford for the Cost of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University)

The cost versus benefit of the nation’s post-9/11 wars was highlighted December 9 when the Washington Post began publishing a blockbuster series detailing how poorly the war in Afghanistan is going. The series is based on more than 400 internal government interviews that the Post largely pried from the congressionally created and independent Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction under the Freedom of Information Act. The stories show how U.S. government officials have misled the American public over the past 18 years by publicly declaring how well the war was going while privately acknowledging the opposite.

It echoes much of the analysis on Afghanistan we’ve done regularly here at the Military Industrial Circus (May 2017’s “What kind of military willingly walks onto a perpetual treadmill when the chance of prevailing is next to nil?”) about the rampant truth-fudging (August 2017’s “One can only take the constant spinning for so long before becoming dizzy and cynical over can-do officers who can’t-do.”), the hiding of key indicators about the war’s progress from the American people who are paying and dying for it (November 2017’s “When things are going well, there’s no shutting up the Pentagon.”), and the blindness of our national leaders through three administrations (last March’s “American hubris is always amazing to see, especially in hindsight.”).

For those too young to remember, the nation’s seemingly never-ending post-9/11 wars began as an invasion of Afghanistan. It was designed to crush its Taliban-run government for offering sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks. But it quickly morphed into a “Global War on Terrorism” that has involved U.S. military action in about 80 nations. In 2003, the U.S. also invaded Iraq, arguing—wrongly as it turned out—that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction and played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

The global war on terrorism has killed 7,028 Pentagon personnel, both military and civilian, since 9/11 (at least 7,800 others, employed by private U.S. contractors, have also died in Afghanistan and Iraq.) But its mission creep has also created a non-nuclear chain reaction: The U.S. repeatedly decided it needed more troops, which has led to more veterans. Many of those heroes thankfully have survived wounds that would have killed them in prior wars. But that will boost the cost of their care for decades to come. The Department of Homeland Security, which the government cobbled together from existing agencies in 2003, was padded out with its own bureaucracy. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development got their own off-budget accounts too. And the federal government began borrowing money to pay for all this.

You might think, as a taxpayer, that you could just wander over to defense.gov and look up the cost of those two wars. After all, they’ve been the Pentagon’s focus, fiscally and otherwise, for nearly 20 years. But you’d be wrong. The Pentagon, whether reporting on wars or weapons, is remarkably opaque when it comes to spelling out how much they cost. So outsiders have had to step in to make cents of how much our recent wars have cost.

Even more amazingly after nearly 20 years of war, keeping track of how much the U.S. is spending on the wars may be getting tougher. “In some instances, DOD, State Department and Department of Homeland Security Budgets are opaque,” notes a recent report by the Costs Of War Project, which consists of a team of about 50 experts. “Indeed, because of recent changes in budgetary labels and accounting at DOD, DHS, and the State Department, understanding the costs of the post-9/11 wars is potentially even more difficult than in the past.”

The U.S. has spent an estimated $5.4 trillion on its post-9/11 war on terror, with an additional $1 trillion due for veterans’ care in the future. (Table: United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion, page 3, by Neta C. Crawford for the Cost of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University)
Those interested in minimizing war’s costs will limit their ledger to what the Pentagon actually is spending on combat. A more complete accounting will add in additional military spending routinely ladled into Pentagon coffers during wartime. A still-fuller accounting will add veterans’ care, homeland security, and interest on the money we’ve borrowed to fight the war.

There’s a lot of wishful thinking involved when the U.S. is thinking of going to war. If the government were simply sloppy and slipshod, its estimates would be both low and high. But invariably, they are low, which suggests there’s a motive to the math: Low-balling the cost of war makes it more likely war will happen.

The bureaucratic imperative of how the Pentagon buys its wars and weapons is the “buy-in,” a rosy projection designed to show that the conflict or hardware is a relative bargain. Yet once the war or hardware has achieved escape velocity, its price begins escalating.

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Question for this article:

Does military spending lead to economic decline and collapse?

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The Pentagon argues the nation’s investment in any particular piece of shiny new weapon has grown so massive that abandoning the effort would send those sunk costs spinning down the drain. Likewise, war costs soar because of mission creep—rebuilding Afghanistan instead of simply ousting the Taliban following the attacks of September 11, 2001, for example—and concern that pulling out before achieving victory would mean the lives of those Americans already killed in the effort would have been wasted.

Of course, no one can predict the final cost of a war before it has begun. Yet before it begins the government tends to speak of a war’s monthly cost. In Iraq, for example, that led to an early claim that the war would cost $2 billion a month, totaling perhaps $50 billion. Those relatively low numbers, in Pentagon terms anyway, grease the skids to war.

But watch how they grow.

The litany of minimized post-9/11 war-cost estimates is long. It got off to an ignoble start when one White House official suggested the Iraq war might cost more than his finger-crossing political masters wanted to admit. In September 2002, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey played the skunk at the Garden of Eden party (Iraq has several sites vying to be the biblical paradise) when he suggestedthe Iraq war’s cost to the U.S. could range between $100 billion and $200 billion. He tried to gussy up his then-exorbitant estimate: “The successful prosecution of the war,” he argued in the Wall Street Journal, “would be good for the economy.”

Nonetheless, Lindsey was unceremoniously combat-booted from the White House three months later. Mitch Daniels, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget at the time, said the war’s cost couldn’t be estimated. But he declaredLindsey’s estimate was “likely very, very high.”

By January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld uncharacteristically deferred to Daniels’ bean counters when it came to projecting the war’s cost. “Well, the Office of Management and Budget has come up with a number that’s something under $50 billion for the cost,” saidRumsfeld, who seemingly rarely embraced others’ views when he believed strongly in his own.

In April 2003, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Pentagon saidthe Iraq war would cost about $2 billion a month. But three months later, Rumsfeld raised lawmakers’ eyebrows when he doubledits estimated monthly cost to $3.9 billion (along with nearly $1 billion a month for Afghanistan).

The avarice avalanche had begun.

By July 2006, nearly five years after the 9/11 attacks, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saidCongress “has appropriated about $430 billion to DOD and other government agencies for military and diplomatic efforts in support of GWOT [the Global War on Terrorism].” (You know you’ve reached the Big Time in Washington when your pet project rates its own acronym.) That translated into about $7.4 billion a month.

But the numbers were squishy. “GAO’s prior work found numerous problems with DOD’s processes for recording and reporting GWOT costs, including long-standing deficiencies in DOD’s financial management systems and business processes, the use of estimates instead of actual cost data, and the lack of adequate supporting documentation,” top U.S. Bean Counter David Walker (officially known as the Comptroller General of the United States, the position that runs the GAO), told a congressional panel. “As a result, neither DOD nor the Congress reliably know how much the war is costing.”

That’s quite a statement coming from the congressional Bookkeeper-in-Chief.

By 2014, the Congressional Research Service said that the U.S. had spent $1.6 trillion “for military operations, base support, weapons maintenance, training of Afghan and Iraq security forces, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the war operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks.” That worked out to about $10.3 billion a month.

But even that eye-watering sum misses the mark. The Costs of War Project has spent the past decade pawing through government documents to try to tote up the post-9/11 wars’ total cost. Its latest calculation, released in November, says the U.S. will have spent $5.4 trillion on the global war on terrorism by the end of the current 2020 fiscal year, along with an additional $1 trillion for veterans’ care beyond that. That’s about $20,000 per American.

“There are many hidden or unacknowledged costs of the United States’ decision to respond to the 9/11 attacks with military force,” the group, run out of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, says on its website. “We aim to foster democratic discussion of these wars by providing the fullest possible account of their human, economic, and political costs, and to foster better informed public policies.” The group’s work is largely funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Colombe Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and Boston and Brown universities.

“We go to war with optimistic assumptions” of duration, cost, and casualties, says Neta Crawford, head of Boston University’s political science department and one of the Costs of War Project’s leaders and author of its latest study. “Most people believe that force is effective, but the history of war is that [winning] doesn’t happen at least half the time,” Crawford told POGO.

And it isn’t just fusty academics who feel that way. “No government-wide reporting consistently accounts for both DOD and non-DOD war costs,” advises an April reportfrom the Congressional Research Service. Not only hasn’t the government been able to win its post-9/11 wars; after nearly two decades it can’t tell us how much it has spent failing to do so.

Put that in your howitzer and light it.

The bottom line, so far: According to the Costs of War Project, we’re staring at a $5.4 trillion tab for the post-9/11 wars, through September 30, 2020, the final day of the current fiscal year.

That’s an average of $23.7 billion monthly for the past 228 months.

Something to keep in mind the next time the Pentagon predicts a war is going to cost $2 billion a month.

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, North America

USA: Sanders and Khanna Introduce New Bill to ‘Stop Donald Trump From Illegally Taking Us to War Against Iran’

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION

An article by Jake Johnson in Common Dreams (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License)

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna Friday night unveiled new legislation that would bar any Pentagon funding for “military force in or against Iran” without congressional approval, an effort to forestall what many in the U.S., Middle East, and around the world fear is a march to war by the Trump administration.


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)  and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)

“Today, we are seeing a dangerous escalation that brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East,” Khanna and Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said in a joint statement. “A war with Iran could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars and lead to even more deaths, more conflict, more displacement in that already highly volatile region of the world.”

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Questions related to this article:

Where in the world can we find good leadership today?

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Sanders and Khanna criticized their fellow members of Congress for handing President Donald Trump a $738 billion military budget that did not include any safeguards against a war with Iran. An amendment sponsored by Khanna and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was approved by the House last year, but the measure was stripped out of the final budget in bipartisan negotiations.

“Congress now has an opportunity to change course,” Sanders and Khanna said. “Our legislation blocks Pentagon funding for any unilateral actions this president takes to wage war against Iran without Congressional authorization.”

“We know that it will ultimately be the children of working-class families who will have to fight and die in a new Middle East conflict—not the children of the billionaire class,” the lawmakers added. “At a time when we face the urgent need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, to build the housing we desperately need, and to address the existential crisis of climate change, we as a nation must get our priorities right.”

In an interview on MSNBC Friday night, Khanna called on the House of Representatives to take up his and Sanders’ legislation as its first order of business when it returns from recess next week.

Sanders and Khanna’s legislation came just 24 hours after the U.S. assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike ordered by Trump.

Soleimani’s assassination sparked enormous protests in Iran and outrage from U.S. progressives, who warned the strike could result in a catastrophic regional—or even global—conflict.

“Right now is the moment to decide if you are pro-peace or not,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted Friday. “The cheerleaders of war, removed from its true cost, will gladly convince you that up is down—just as they did in Iraq in ’03. But war does not establish peace. War does not create security. War endangers us all.”

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION, North America

International Peace Bureau: the ‘carbon boot-print’

. . SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT . .

An information paper by Jessica Fort and Philipp Straub from the International Peace Bureau and a press release from the IPB

The US military is not only the most funded army in the world, it is also “one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries”. The Department of Defence’s daily consumption alone is greater than the total national consumption of countries like Sweden, Switzerland or Chile. And the US has been continuously at war, or engaged in military actions, since late 2001.

War and militarism, and their associated ‘carbon boot-prints’, are severely accelerating climate change. However, the military’s significant contribution to climate change has still received little attention. It is not only the US army that has a severe impact on climate change, Europe’s military is also running its bases and its various operations and contributing to the rise in carbon emissions. However, obtaining accurate data about any form of military energy consumption is very difficult.

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Question for this article:

What is the relation between the environment and peace

Despite the vested interests of companies and governments, Can we make progress toward sustainable development?

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The entire IPB Information Paper by Jessica Fort and Philipp Straub is available here: IPB Information Paper – the carbon boot-print

IPB stresses the COP25 to include the military in its climate action work and to adopt provisions covering military compliance. The COP25 must include military emissions in their calculations and the CO2 emissions laundering has to stop. It should also include a blueprint to reduce military emissions.

IPB urges the State Parties to the Paris Agreement to adjust its provision to military emissions, not leaving decisions up to nation states as to which national sectors should make emissions cuts.

IPB calls for an inclusion of military greenhouse gas emission into climate change regulations. Moreover, countries need to be obliged, without exemption, to cut military emissions and transparently report them.

IPB calls for more academic studies (in line with the study from Brown University report) and an IPCC or equal special report. The report needs to be a common project of academics and the civil society. [Crawford N (2019). Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War. Brown University, USA ]

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, global, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Cyprus: We have no alternative but peace, President Anastasiades tells Akinci

. .DISARMAMENT & SECURITY. .

An article from In-Cyprus

The status quo in Cyprus is not the choice of Cypriots, President Nicos Anastasiades said on Monday, adding that “there is no other choice or alternative but to bring peace to our land” while addressing Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci.


President Anastasiades attended this morning the ‘Imagine’ Head Teachers Conference, organised by the bicommunal Technical Committee on Education, in Ledra Palace, in the presence of Akinci, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative Elizabeth Spehar, the heads of the Technical Committee, as well as Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot head teachers.

In his address, President Anastasiades referred to the peaceful coexistence of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, he said however that the interventions by third parties “without excluding nobody” led to the problems that followed. “What we are looking for is Cypriots, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, to take on the fate of this country by creating the conditions for peaceful coexistence” and their future, the President added.

He also said that his presence in the conference, together with Akinci, aims at send a message of support for the actions and initiatives of the Technical Committee for Education.

Speaking about the status quo on the island, President Anastasiades said that it does not allow fellow compatriots to enjoy the rights, freedoms and the level of prosperity other EU citizens enjoy. We acknowledge the difficulties but with respect to each other’s sensitivities and concerns and through mutual respect, we ought to merge what we consider to be the joint interests of Cypriots, he added.

The only way to achieve this is by creating a viable and functioning bicommunal federal state, securing our joint future in a united Cyprus, member of the EU, without dependencies on any third parties.

The President called on teachers to continue educating critically thinking and active citizens who will search for creative solutions to the challenges that may arise in the future.

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Question for this article:

Can Cyprus be reunited in peace?

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He also welcomed the initiatives undertaken by the Technical Committee, particularly through the ‘Imagine’ programme that brought together more than 4,000 pupils and 650 teaches in the last 2,5 years.

He also pointed to educational activities in schools against racism and in order to develop a culture of peace. Among others, the President said that pupils are being taught Turkish Cypriot literary texts translated into Greek, while Turkish lessons are optional for high school pupils.

Before attending the conference, President Anastasiades made a statement calling for respect towards Cyprus, while saying that the country can not be a vassal of any third country.

He said that without disregarding the ethnic origin, the conference aims to cultivate a culture of peaceful coexistence, “an important element in the framework of the efforts we are making for peaceful coexistence if and when conditions allow us to work as Cypriots in order to solve the Cyprus problem as an independent country.”

These are steps to the right direction, but they are not enough for a Cyprus solution, the President added and called for respect towards Cyprus.

In his address, the Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci referred to the importance of cultivating a culture of peace in Cyprus and highlighted the value of education.

Speaking through an interpreter, Akinci said that people may have different views and goals, but it is important to have a culture of peace in order to address these issues.

He also noted the importance of dialogue while trying to solve differences and referred to the need to respect equality, multiple identities and pluralism. All these elements are essential for the federal government to work, Akinci added.

He said that the decision with President Anastasiades to form the bicommunal technical Committee back in 2015 was “the most important decision we took with my friend Nicos.”

He noted finally that the Technical Committee has a long way to go and referred to the curricula and the instruction of Greek and Turkish in the schools. We need to encourage these initiatives in order to see them implemented and have peace, Akinci concluded.

The conference was also addressed by the Heads of the Technical Committee for Education, Michalinos Zembylas and Meltem Onurkan Samani, while professor Tony Gallagher from Queen’s University in Northern Ireland delivered a speech about the transformational leadership for peace.

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, Europe

Despite destabilizing actions Venezuela lives a peaceful Christmas

. .DISARMAMENT & SECURITY. .

An article from Prensa Latina

Despite the US blockade and hostile measures, and destabilizing actions by the Venezuelan opposition, the Government of President Nicolas Maduro fulfills its commitment to guarantee for the nation a peaceful and stable year end.


The Government has deployed police force throughout the country to guarantee law and order, supplied basic foodstuff for Christmas and decorated squares and parks.

Undoubtedly, one action that foreigners and nationals appreciate alike is the Beautiful Venezuela Program to embellish cities. Hundreds of public squares, streets, highways have been repaired and decorated, as well as public lighting restored.

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Question for this article:

What is really happening in Venezuela?

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Those programs are an answer to plans by the extreme right to destroy the country through an escalation of violence to disturb peace and calm of the Venezuelan people, leaders and officials have said.

At the same time, other programs are being implemented like New Neighborhood, Tricolor Neighborhood, Culture Mission which are being supported by local governments.

Last week, President Maduro wrote in Twitter that ‘Christmas time is beautiful, full of glow and happiness for our people.
The cities are illuminated, colorful and beautiful with all the splendor of our traditions.’

He also highlighted the Venezuelan people deserved to celebrate Christmas in peace, following a hard year of economic war waged by Washington and political instability due to violent actions by the extreme right.

[Editor’s note: Another article in Prensa Latina, Venezuelan Armed Forces ready to defend national peace, points to the essential role of the military in defending against US intervention. This was not the case in Bolivia recently where President Morales was ousted in a military coup.]

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, Latin America

Bolivia: Post-Coup Update

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

An article by Eric Zuesse from the Transcend Media Service

 With every passing day, it becomes clearer that the military coup in Bolivia on November 10th was masterminded in Washington DC. This reality will create yet a new difficulty in relations between the U.S. regime and Mexico to its direct south, because the Mexican Government, under progressive President Lopez Obrador, took the courageous and very meaningful step of providing refuge to the U.S.-couped Bolivian President Evo Morales and therefore posed overtly a resistance to the U.S. dictatorship.


President Evo Morales

Unlike the U.S. itself, which has abandoned the substance of democracy while adhering to its fascist Supreme Court’s interpretations (distortions) of the original intent of the democratic America’s Founding Fathers in their U.S. Constitution, Bolivia’s imposed regime isn’t even nominally legitimate in any democratic sense, because it has abandoned that country’s Constitution, ever since it grabbed power there.

One of the first indications that this was another U.S. coup was that on November 10th, the New York Times, which along with the Washington Post is one of the regime’s two main mouthpieces, refused to call it a “coup” at all, though it obviously was. Headlining on November 10th with the anodyne “Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down”, they lied and alleged that “Mr. Morales was once widely popular” — as if there were any objective measures, such as polls, which indicated that he no longer was. Their concept of ‘democracy’ was like that of fascists everywhere: violent mob actions against a democratically elected Government. “Angry mobs attacked election buildings  around the country, setting some on fire.” Far-right mobs are ‘democracy to ‘journalists’ such as at the New York Times.  

The next day, November 11th, that fascist ‘news’-paper headlined an editorial “Evo Morales Is Gone. Bolivia’s Problems Aren’t.” Here is how they expressed their contempt for democracy: “When a leader resorts to brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care by the electorate, as President Evo Morales did in Bolivia, it is he who sheds his legitimacy, and forcing him out often becomes the only remaining option. That is what the Bolivians have done.” ‘Bolivians’ — meaning there that extreme-rightist minority of Bolivia’s electorate. The NYT even had the gall to say contemptuously: “Predictably, Mr. Morales’s left-wing allies across Latin America, including President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, President-elect Alberto Fernández of Argentina and President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba, joined by the British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, cried ‘coup’.”

Britain’s BBC, on November 11th, was considerably more circumspect in their anti-democratic propaganda: for example, in this video, at 13:00, the BBC  asks
“Why are so many of the people out there on the streets now then do you think [demonstrating against Morales]?” and the respondent didn’t say that this is the way practically every CIA coup is done. So, the desired implication was left with gullible viewers, that this was an expression of a democracy instead of the expression of a fascist mob.

It was left to governments which are resisting U.S. rule to express more honestly, as the Turkish Government’s more honest propaganda-organ, the newspaper Yeni Safak, did finally on November 17th, “Bolivia’s Morales was overthrown by a Western coup just like Iran’s Mosaddeg”. Their columnist Abdullah Muradoğlu wrote:

There are indications that the U.S. was involved in the ousting of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in a military coup. Secret talks between American senators and Morales’ opponents were brought up before the elections on Oct. 20. The talks, which were leaked to the public, discussed action plans to destabilize Bolivia if Morales won the elections. It was stated that the Evangelical Church would support the coup attempt. The fact that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, known as “Tropical Trump”, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are passionate Evangelicals, points to the ideological link to the Evangelical architects of the Bolivian coup. …

Bolivia has abundant resources of tin, copper, silver, gold, tungsten, petroleum and uranium, as well as large quantities of lithium. Lithium is a strategic mine for space technology. Morales became the target of a pro-U.S. military coup, and policies aimed at allocating the country’s resources to the poor rather than a small group played an important role in his demise. …

But it wasn’t only foreign news-media but also a very few honest alternative-news media which were reporting the realities. For example, on November 11th, The Gray Zone headlined “Bolivia coup led by Christian fascist paramilitary leader and millionaire – with foreign support”. The next day, on November 12th, Moon of Alabama’s anonymous blogger bannered “Lessons To Learn From The Coup In Bolivia” and he summarized the popular democratically elected and re-elected overthrown leader Evo Morales’s enormously successful record of leadership there, such as:

During his twelve years in office Evo Morales achieved quite a lot  of good things:

Illiteracy rates:
2006 13.0%, 2018 2.4%

Unemployment rates
2006 9.2%, 2018 4.1%

Moderate poverty rates
2006 60.6%, 2018 34.6%

Extreme poverty rates
2006 38.2%, 2018 15.2%

It’s no wonder, then, that Morales is so popular in Bolivia.

Then, further about the fascist character of the U.S.-imposed regime, Mint Press News headlined on November 18th, “Media Silent as Bolivia’s New Right-Wing Gov’t Massacres Indigenous Protesters”.

On November 19th, Peoples Dispatch bannered “Hatred of the Indian. By Álvaro García Linera”, and presented a statement by Linera, who was Morales’s Bolivian Vice President. He opened:

Almost as a nighttime fog, hatred rapidly traverses the neighborhoods of the traditional urban middle-class of Bolivia. Their eyes fill with anger. They do not yell, they spit. They do not raise demands, they impose. Their chants are not of hope of brotherhood. They are of disdain and discrimination against the Indians. They hop on their motorcycles, get into their trucks, gather in their fraternities of private universities, and they go out to hunt the rebellious Indians that dared to take power from them.

In the case of Santa Cruz, they organize motorized hordes with sticks in hand to punish the Indians, those that they call ‘collas’, who live in peripheral neighborhoods and in the markets. They chant “the collas must be killed,” and if on the way, they come across a woman wearing a pollera [traditional skirt worn by Indigenous and mestizo women] they hit her, threaten her and demand that she leave their territory. In Cochabamba, they organize convoys to impose their racial supremacy in the southern zone, where the underprivileged classes live, and charge – as if it were a were a cavalry contingent – at thousands of defenseless peasant women that march asking for peace. They carry baseball bats, chains, gas grenades. Some carry firearms. …

On November 26th, the Libya 360 blog headlined “Bolivia: they are killing us, comrades!” and reported:

We are receiving audios all the time, from different parts of Bolivia: Cochabamba, El Alto, Senkata, La Paz… They bring desperate cries from women, from communities that resist with dignity, under the murderous bullets of the military, police, and fascist groups armed by the oligarchies with the support of Trump, Macri, and Bolsonaro. They also bring voices that denounce, voices that analyze, voices that organize, voices that are in resistance. There are weeping voices that are remade in slogans. The united peoples will never be defeated!

The racist, fascist, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist coup d’etat seeks to put an end to all these voices, silence them, erase them, make them inaudible. The communicational fence seeks to crush and isolate the words of the people. The conservative, capitalist restoration, goes for lithium, goes for the jungle, goes for bad examples.

The voices continue to arrive. New spaces of communication are generated. The social and family networks, the community radio stations, the home videos made from cell phones are functioning by the thousands. It is heartbreaking to hear bullets. To see their journey through the flesh, invading the bodies that rise from all humiliations. It generates anger, impotence, indignation, rage. …

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Question related to this article:

Why was Morales ousted from Bolivia by a coup d’etat?

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On the same day, that same blog bannered “The People Will Not Allow the Coup in Bolivia, says Venezuelan Ambassador”. This opened:

One of the first ‘promises’ made by the self-proclaimed, de-facto government of opposition senator Jeanine Áñez was to “hunt down” ex-minister Juan Ramón Quintana, Raúl García Linera – brother of vice-president Álvaro García Linera -, as well as the Cuban and Venezuelan people that live in Bolivia.

The threat was publicly declared by the interior minister Arturo Murillo, designated by Áñez.

Later on, the communications minister of the de facto government, Roxana Lizárraga, accused Cuban and Venezuelan diplomats of being responsible for the violence unleashed in the country.

The statements came after an attack on the Venezuelan diplomatic office in La Paz on November 11. Armed paramilitaries surrounded the embassy with explosives and threatened to invade the building.

However, the aggression did not begin with the coup. According to Crisbeylee González, who served as the Venezuelan ambassador in Bolivia for more than 10 years, since 2008, the embassy has suffered threats from the organizations in opposition to Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera.

During the days of tension, Crisbeylee, who is also a personal friend of Morales, decided to protect her team and she returned to her country.

On November 17, the Venezuelan diplomatic staff, made up of 13 functionaries and their family members, flew with the Venezuelan state company Conviasa from La Paz to Caracas.

Upon returning to her country, the ambassador spoke to Brasil de Fato and denounced the terror she suffered in the last couple of days.

Brasil de Fato:

How did you all take the news that you would have to leave the country? Was there any hostility before the coup?

Crisbeylee González:

For a while now, the opposition has talked about a “Chavista bunker” referring to the Venezuelan embassy, where we would supposedly be “ideologically orienting” the Bolivian people’s movements and youth. They even talked about us supposedly exerting pressure on Evo so that he would not abandon the socialist, Bolivarian proposal.

There were always certain times when the xenophobia increased, especially during elections. Every time that there were elections or a coup attempt, the principal target is always of course president Evo Morales but right after that, it’s the Venezuelan embassy. The diplomatic mission has always been an element that must be combated.

Since 2012 when there was a coup attempt by the police, they began to say that our embassy carried out military training with the Bolivians. A very similar discourse to what was created in Chile against the Cubans during the rule of Salvador Allende.

And with this, they were able to create a strong expression of xenophobia within the Bolivian middle classes against Venezuelans. The media also helped to create this adverse discourse against Venezuelans.

In these past couple of days [since the coup], one of the first things that they did was to say that the Venezuelans had to leave and that they were going to attack the Venezuelans. Before the elections on October 20, they already talked about attacking the embassy. …

The next day, on November 27th, they headlined “The U.S. Launches Itself in the Most Violent Way Imaginable to Definitively Seize Bolivia”. They interviewed Argentine sociologist Atilio Boron, one of the most internationally renowned political analysts today, so that in just three questions he can give us his vision of the crisis Bolivia is going through.

How would you characterize the coup d’état in Bolivia?

Without a doubt, the coup d’état in Bolivia is part of the tradition of the old military coups sponsored by the United States since the end of World War II. However, this practice dates back even further, as the history books show us. That means that the soft coup that was applied against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, Lugo in Paraguay and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, has been abandoned and the old formulas have returned. In Bolivia, the old formulas were applied, because in reality there was no possible propagandistic basis for the coup. There was no fraud in Bolivia and therefore the OAS avoided using that expression, instead making euphemistic recommendations.

Furthermore, recent studies from the United States convincingly prove that such fraud did not exist. The University of Michigan study (which is the most important center for electoral studies) confirms this. However, the coup plan was not going to stop in the face of these details. They wanted to get Evo out and take revenge. It was a very clear lesson against those Indians who, as they did in 1780, revolted against the Spanish viceroyalty. Somehow what is happening now is a replay of Túpac Katari’s deed. The scenarios have changed and imperialism is different, but the essence is the same. And now, as yesterday, it is being repressed with unprecedented ferocity. …

On November 28th, Peoples Dispatch and Libya 360 simultaneously headlined “Bolivia: What Comes After the Coup?” and opened:

It has been over two weeks since the coup d’état which forced the resignation and exile of President Evo Morales and Vice-president Álvaro García Linera. Since then, thousands of working-class and Indigenous Bolivians have been resisting on the streets the coup and the illegitimate government of Jeanine Áñez. They have been met with extreme violence from the Armed Forces and the National Police, over 30 have been killed, hundreds injured and hundreds have been arrested.

On Monday night, a new agreement was announced reached between the de facto government of Áñez and the legislators from the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) to hold elections in the country in the next 3-4 months.

Peoples Dispatch spoke to Marco Teruggi, an Argentine sociologist and journalist who spent several weeks in Bolivia before and after elections were held in order to understand the agreement reached on elections and the state of resistance in the country.

Peoples Dispatch:

Starting with the most recent, what do you think about the agreement that MAS made with the de facto government of Jeanine Áñez? Did they have another option? Was there enough force on the streets and in the Assembly to achieve anything else?

Marco Teruggi:

The first thing to keep in mind is that in the design of the coup d’état, from the beginning, the possibility of an electoral solution was always contemplated in order to gain legitimacy.

If you had to arrange it in steps, there is the first step which is the overthrow, a second step which is the creation of a de facto government, and all of this accompanied by persecution, repression and massacres. The third moment is the call for elections and the fourth moment is when the elections themselves happen.

This was always proposed in the basic design, it was never about an old-style coup d’état where a de-facto government is installed for an undetermined amount of time, but precisely part of its presentation was to show itself as a democratic process, recognized internationally, under the condition that later they would go to elections.

It was always expected, the question was in what moment, with what conditions, both for the coup supporters and for those who are confronting it. In this sense, this issue was being discussed in the Assembly, where MAS has a majority, and as they had been announcing, they gave the OK for an agreement, in law, to call for elections, wherein the results of the elections of October 20 are also annulled.

I think that just as it was clear that the coup strategy counted with an electoral resolution to legitimize itself, it also was clear early on that the strategy of the MAS legislators was to hold these elections in the most favorable conditions possible. Basically that MAS could present itself in the elections, which it achieved, and with guarantees for Evo, not to participate, but to prevent political-juridical persecution. And also the retreat of the soldiers, for them to return to their barracks, and that the decree which exempts them from penal responsibility in operations of “re-establishing order” is withdrawn.

As such, it is not surprising that MAS has said yes to the elections because it was not going to be possible to remove Áñez through street pressure, even though the actions on the streets conditioned the initial strategy of the coup. It is very important to keep this in mind because otherwise, one could think that MAS proposed a change of tactics, of strategy. But no, it was always the electoral solution, and either way, the streets were an important component to accelerate this process on both ends. …

So, in short: rigged ‘elections’ will be held, in which Evo Morales is to be excluded, and in which there will be no repercussions against the U.S.-stooge-regime participants if their side fails to win those ‘elections’. The Bolivian people won’t have any legal right to hang the coupsters. The U.S. regime will see to that.

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, Latin America

UN commemorates International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

TOLERANCE & SOLIDARITY .

An article from the United Nations

The United Nations has underlined its unwavering commitment to the Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle to achieve self-determination, independence and sovereignty.


(Click on image to enlarge and to read caption)

Senior officials joined ambassadors and other representatives from the international community in New York on Wednesday to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, officially observed each year on 29 November.

Established in 1977, it marks the day in 1947 when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution partitioning Palestine into an Arab State and a Jewish State.

No alternative to two-state solution

Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most intractable challenges facing the international community, UN Secretary-General António Guterres observed in his message for the day. 

As there is no viable alternative to the two-State solution, he called on both sides, and their supporters, to work towards restoring faith in the process.

“Only constructive negotiations between the parties, in good faith, with support from the international community and adhering to long-standing United Nations resolutions and long-agreed parameters, will bring about a just and durable solution, with Jerusalem as the capital of both states”, the UN chief said.

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Question related to this article:

Presenting the Palestinian side of the Middle East, Is it important for a culture of peace?

How can a culture of peace be established in the Middle East?

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“What is needed, first and foremost, are leadership and political will. The efforts of civil society and those on all sides who seek to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians also need to be supported.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said his people have endured more than 70 years of tragedies and crises, yet remain steadfast.

“Despite decades of disappointment and setbacks, we remain committed to a multilateral order that respects and ensures respect for international law,” he said in a message read by Palestinian Permanent Observer to the UN, Riyad Mansour.

“The State of Palestine will continue engaging in efforts aimed to advance the rule of international law, including through the building of our national institutions, spreading the culture of peace and empowering our people, especially women and youth.”

Humanitarian support vital

The roughly eight million Palestinians live primarily in territory occupied by Israel, but also across the Middle East in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

UN General Assembly President Tijjani Muhammad-Bande called for action to ensure critical humanitarian support.

“This must be tackled by strengthening the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), to ensure that it can meet the humanitarian needs of over 5.4 million Palestinian refugees. It is important that we collectively safeguard the Agency against the political and financial challenges it faces,” he said.

Niang Cheikh, Chair of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, maintains hope that the two-State solution will be realized.

“Despite all the contrary winds, this day will come and we will then celebrate the realization of a just peace in the interest of the Palestinians and indeed all the peoples of the region,” he stated.

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, Mideast, United Nations,

Pope Francis’ declaration in Hiroshima marks another historic step in the fight for the total elimination of nuclear weapons

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

A press release from 7ZEIZH

Pope Francis’ declaration in Hiroshima is another historic step in the fight for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, Roland Nivet and Edith Boulanger, national co-spokespersons of Mouvement de la Paix, have jointly declared.

The declaration of Pope Francis in Hiroshima on November 23, 2019 in which he states that “the use of atomic energy for military purposes is a crime” and that “a world without nuclear weapons is possible and necessary” and finally that “The time has come to renounce nuclear weapons and build a collective and concerted peace” is another historic step in the struggle for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. In his time the academician Jean Rostand speaking of the atomic weapon said “to prepare a crime it is already a crime”.

(Click here for the French version of this article.)

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Question related to this article:

Can we abolish all nuclear weapons?

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Six months into the beginning of the work of the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the UN in May 2020 which will bring together all states, we can only welcome the fact that the Pope also calls “To support all international instruments of nuclear disarmament, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Weapons Banning Treaty” adopted at the United Nations on 7 July 2017.

Pope Francis’ proposal for the money devoted to these works of death to be devoted to human development and the struggle for the climate corresponds to the slogan adopted by the 160 or so organizations of the Collective On the Move for Peace, which called for September 21 (International Day of Peace) to march “for peace, climate, social justice and nuclear disarmament”.

All peace-loving people, regardless of their ideological, religious, trade union or political beliefs or affiliations, will, we believe, find an additional reason to act for a world without nuclear weapons.

A few days ago we sent a letter to all French Parliamentarians proposing the adoption, as part of the preparation of the Budget 2020 of France, an amendment to this Finance Act to freeze the credits planned in 2020 to the modernization of nuclear weapons.

While the majority of the government has voted to double the funds earmarked for atomic weapons, we hope that the Pope’s statement will perhaps cause them to reflect and take into consideration our amendment proposal.

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, East Asia, Europe, global, ,