Saturday 12 January 2019

Campaign to revoke Jewish National Fund charitable status important

By Yves Engler · January 11, 2019
Last week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), under pressure from Palestine solidarity activists, began an audit of the Jewish National Fund.
The audit is significant. Beyond weakening the oldest Israel-focused charity in the country, it will put other Israeli charities in Canada on notice and reflects the growth of Palestine solidarity activism.
Fulfilling the time-consuming audit will be a bureaucratic headache for a group that has eleven offices across Canada and has raised $100 million over the past five years. Already, the credibility of the second most powerful Israel-oriented charity in Canada has taken a hit with the CBC exposé headlined “Canadian charity  used donations to fund projects linked to Israeli military” and related  stories. If the CRA revokes the JNF’s charitable status it would be devastating for fundraising and deter politicians/celebrities from attending their events.
Similar to the JNF, other registered charities support the Israeli military in direct contravention of CRA rules. Additionally, some of these organizations — like the JNF — fund projects supporting West Bank settlements, which Global Affairs Canada considers in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
At a broader level, critical attention on the JNF could lead to questioning of why Canadian taxpayers subsidize hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to a wealthy country. Despite a GDP per capita greater than Spain or Italy (and equal to Japan), hundreds of registered Canadian charities deliver hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Israel. How many Canadian charities funnel money to Spain or Japan?
If the CRA revoked JNF’s charitable status it would boost Stop the JNF campaigns elsewhere. In England they convinced former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to withdraw as patron of the JNF (Theresa May seems to have also stayed away), and 68 members of parliament endorsed a bill to revoke the organization’s charitable status because “the JNF’s constitution is explicitly discriminatory by stating that land and property will never be rented, leased or sold to non-Jews.”
The CRA audit of a charity that’s found favour with numerous Canadian prime ministers is long in the making and reflects the growth of Palestinian solidarity consciousness. Born in a West Bank village demolished to make way for the JNF’s Canada Park, Ismail Zayid has been complaining to the CRA about its charitable status for 40 years. Lebanese Canadian Ron Saba “has been indefatigable over the years in writing to various Canadian government departments and officials, corporations, and media to rescind tax exemption status and endorsement of” what he calls the “racist JNF tax fraud”. During the Liberal party convention in 2006 Saba was widely smeared for drawing attention to leadership candidate Bob Rae’s ties to the JNF. Saba has put in multiple Access to Information requests regarding the JNF, demonstrating government spying of its critics and long-standing knowledge of the organization’s dubious practices. Under the headline “Event you may want to monitor,” Foreign Affairs spokesperson Caitlin Workman sent the CRA a communication about a 2011 Independent Jewish Voices event in Ottawa stating: “author of the Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Yves Engler, will give a talk on Canada and the Jewish National Fund.”
Former Independent Jewish Voices coordinator Tyler Levitan was smeared for working diligently on the issue. In addition to important organizing, he discovered that the Ottawa Citizen sponsored JNF galas they covered and, suggesting a formal financial relationship, ran an ad for the JNF’s 2013 Ottawa Gala the day after the event.
At the Green Party convention in 2016 Corey Levine pushed a resolution to revoke the JNF’s charitable status because it practices “institutional  discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.” The effort brought the issue into the mainstream though she, IJV and the entire Green  Party were smeared  as “hard core  Jew haters” for even considering the resolution.
Fifteen months ago IJV and four individuals filed a detailed complaint to the CRA and Minister of National Revenue over the JNF. For a number of years IJV has run a “Stop the JNF” campaign and for more than a decade activists across the country have picketed local JNF fundraising galas. These efforts have benefited from many in Palestine/Israel, notably the work of Uri Davies and Adalah.
As I have written before, the campaign to revoke the JNF’s charitable status is important beyond winning the specific demand. It draws attention to the racism intrinsic to Zionism and highlights Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession.
The CRA is undoubtedly facing significant behind-the-scenes pressure to let the JNF off with little more than a slap on the wrists. So, it’s important that people send their MP the CBC exposé and add their name to Independent Jewish Voices’ campaign  to revoke the Jewish National Fund’s charitable status.

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The way forward...

The-way-forward-for-SMFS.png
Dear Friends and Supporters,
As you know, last year the nonstop slanderous blitz against me escalated with the stated purpose of destroying my music career and ruining me financially. Blowing the whistle on the roots of the current dystopia, and even simply honest debate, has been exhausting and expensive. Thanks to you I am not fighting this war alone.
Many thousands of you donated to bail me out and a substantial portion of my legal costs have been covered. I was excited and encouraged that thousands of music lovers and freedom enthusiasts signed the petition against Islington Council and filed complaints against this fully compromised ‘Labour’ authority that was caught in bed with the Likud UK director.
In the last few days I gave a series of house talks with music events throughout California. In each city I visited I explored my ideas with people many of whom were relatively new to my work. The events were a great success. By speaking directly to a smaller group, I could convey my ideas and have the time to discuss questions raised by those in attendance. It is an incredible way to make people think about and analyse identity politics and other issues that have led to our current situation. I intend to offer more talks (and music) in as many different regions as I can. Please let me know whether you are willing to arrange such an event in your town.
The battle ahead is demanding and unfortunately will necessitate  expensive legal services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Fall of Empires: London, Washington & Paris on brink of collapse

George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. 
He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator.


Fall of Empires: London, Washington & Paris on brink of collapse (by George Galloway)
Despite the thrashing around of the NATO disinformation apparat, the imperial heartland has entered 2019 in a state of complete chaos.
Washington, London, and Paris – the three capitals of the Empire – are today effectively ungoverned, shutdown, tottering on the brink of collapse or under siege by their own people.
Their self-chosen Nemeses – Moscow and Beijing – meanwhile toast the New Year in a state of considerable optimism and self-confidence. These are the facts, this is the news.
We should start at the top of the Empire. The United States government has closed down amid stasis and a barrage of inter-governmental howitzers.
The defense secretary, ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, has resigned as have other uniformed subalterns angry at the president’s re-found determination to withdraw from costly and losing foreign wars. The actual “mad dog” – John Bolton – openly defies President Trump over Syria, Mueller closes in, and the new Democratic majority in the House gears up to “impeach the mother***er.”
Nobody knows if President Trump will be around for much longer, and the merest glance at the views of his putative successor – Vice President Mike Pence – recalls the famous picture of President Nixon with his vice president, Spiro Agnew, standing behind him. The satirical speech bubble had Nixon pointing over his shoulder and saying “nobody is going to shoot me with this guy next in line.”
In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May is a dead woman walking; Britain’s exit from the European Union is still a matter of total uncertainty, yet a mere 80 days away. Violence outside the Parliament has begun to erupt, no faction can command a majority, an election cannot be held because its most likely result would be the election of veteran anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn whom the ‘deep state’ would sooner see under arrest (alongside this writer, according to the coup-apparatus Integrity Initiative).
A no-deal Brexit will see the south of England grind to a halt given the lack of preparation for it, as trucks headed to and from the continent turn Kent, the ‘Garden of England’, into a car-park.
A Brexit in name only – otherwise known as Theresa May’s deal – cannot pass in the House of Commons next week given Labour’s opposition together with at least 50 of the government’s own MPs and the 10 members of the coalition partners, the DUP.
A third option, a new referendum, runs the risk of the same scenario being played out (but almost entirely unreported here) on the streets of Paris and other French cities. Defying the result of the first referendum, cheating 17.4 million people of that which they voted for, risks social peace in England. Millions of Brexit voters are among those in Britain with nothing left to lose.
In France, the Elysee has become Macron’s Bastille and it is not at all inconceivable that it will be stormed.
Last weekend his own spokesman had to be smuggled out of a back-door after a truck hijacked by protestors smashed through the door of his government building. The very conditions Macron strove so very hard to bring about in Damascus and that France DID help bring about in Kiev are now rocking the very foundations of the French Republic.
No amount of turning the ‘Nelson’s Eye’ (when famously England’s Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar was told that the French Navy were advancing on him, he put his telescope to the black patch covering his missing eye and said “I see no ships” – will alter the fact that for eight weeks and counting, hundreds of thousands of French people of all political stripes have been – increasingly violently – on the streets of cities throughout the country demanding that their president resign. And that Macron showering Euros down the Champs Elysees in concessions – in absolute defiance of the EU’s fiscal rules – has merely encouraged ‘les autres’ to keep on demonstrating.
This week, the EU (and NATO) government of Italy joined the side of the ‘Gilets-Jaunes’, with Italy’s Salvini personally denouncing the French president as being “against his own people.”
This Saturday, a mammoth demonstration will take place in London,leveling the same raft of anti-austerity demands on the British government as the Yellow Vests are making of Macron. The center cannot hold.
The old order is dying; the new one cannot be born. If we are not careful we will soon be alive in the time of monsters.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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«ISrael» IS «ISIS»



When the word “terrorist” is mentioned, it would be normal to imagine a person with rugged features who places a bomb in an innocent family’s house. This same individual would be so cold-hearted that he might have shot a child the day before. He would be a dogmatic follower of fanatic beliefs which allow him to end people’s lives without losing any sleep. A terrorist is filled with hate and presumes himself to be higher on the righteousness scale. He believes that he has been a victim, that he has been hard done by. These feelings are what turn him from a naturally born compassionate human to a murderous sociopath.
The above can easily describe any member of “ISIS”. It is also a description of an “Israeli” soldier. They are both the same.
Terrorism is when heavily armed men abuse, verbally and physically, a young man walking back home with less than minimum pay in his wallet because their apartheid regime will not allow him to work unless he accepts peanuts for hard labor. Terrorism is when these armed men shoot a beautiful teenager through the books in the backpack she’s carrying; the amount of bullets piercing her innocent body make it seem like they were target practicing. It is when they drag an eight-year-old boy by the hair across the street and kick him with army boots into their vehicle; his mother suffers a broken jaw from the strike of a shoulder stock of a rifle while trying to hold on to him.
These are the terrorists that make up what is called “The Most Moral Army.”
Since the word “Moral” is definitely misplaced in this description, namely due to the atrocities that the free press of the world reports on a daily basis out of occupied Palestine, then every word in this sentence can be subject to error. The usage of the word “Army” is also misplaced if a person considers that an army has to belong to a country and the latter cannot be a fabricated entity void of indigenous culture.
Far from their destructive unlawful presence in the area which is based on murder and horror, it almost makes a person feel sympathy towards the “Israelis” for their lack of anything cultural that binds them to this land. They are so culturally bankrupt that they practically steal dishes and claim them for their own. The illegal settlers whose national dishes are Bigos, Banush, and Sauerbraten have suddenly claimed the Jordanian Hummus and the Lebanese Tabbouleh to be theirs. It is so sad.
Going at this pace, we will soon be seeing rabbis wearing Sherwals and dancing the famous Dabkeh, claiming that to be part of their folklore as well.
Shipping in a mix of foreigners to massacre locals and steal their land under biblical pretenses neither makes their claims nor their presence legal. If the Holy Bible sanctions murder and theft then the Pope of Rome will have a lot of explaining to do. But, we all know it doesn’t because the Christians of the Middle East have been amongst the fiercest defenders of the Holy Land against the Zionist infestation.
Latifa Abu Humaid’s house was surrounded and had explosives planted in it. The old woman’s home was demolished. This came after she had lost her six sons to assassination and incarceration. If this is not terrorism, what is?
It does not come as a surprise, though, that the “Israelis” operate this way. That they rely on subhuman unethical rules of engagement with anyone opposing their tyranny. After all, they walk in the footsteps of the creators of their unlawful geographical entity. Individuals like Golda Meir who, as “Prime Minister”, was a part of creating a list of 20-35 people tagged for assassination. She gave the green light to begin the killings and she supervised the process. Is the act of orchestrating assassinations not terrorism?
“Israel’s” terrorism is also practiced by proxy. It has foreign agents placed in top positions of other governments working for its benefit. Nicky Haley gave, yet, another cheap performance at the United Nations the other day. It was because the motion to name the Palestinian resistance a terror group did not see the light. The voting result of the international community caused her feelings to be hurt. Nicky doesn’t have any feelings when Palestinian children lose their lives at the hands of murderous settlers; her Zionist emotions are triggered only when “Israel” doesn’t get its way. She did that “I’ll huff and I’ll puff” routine against those who failed to vote in her masters’ favor. Threats are another shade of terrorism.
Just like the term “anti-Semitic” has been outrageously twisted, the term “terrorist” is becoming a joke because of how it is being wrongly slapped on all those who actually fight terrorism. The men of Hezbollah are “terrorists” for defending their land, Palestinians are “terrorists” for hanging on to their rights, the Syrians are “terrorists” for fighting “ISIS”, and the list goes on. I wonder if children in the US will begin suing their parents on terrorism charges for not buying them enough toys.
There is no doubt that many Jews were persecuted in the first half of the past century, but that is definitely not an excuse for anyone to be granted an international license to terrorize humanity and, definitely, not an excuse to turn Palestine into holocaust grounds for its people. This is said with the strong belief that those occupying Palestine and committing all the terror do not represent Judaism; rather, Zionism disguised as Judaism. In all cases, the people of Palestine did not have anything to do with the Zionist creation of the Nazi party and the subsequent conspiracy against Jews.
We’ve all watched the movie “Schindler’s List”. There weren’t any Nazi officers from Gaza or Ramallah or Nablus. Not a single one was called Omar or Khalid or Mohyi Eldeen. So, if it is a matter of reprisal, they have, without doubt, unleashed their malice and spite onto the wrong people.
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Placing the USA on a collapse continuum with Dmitry Orlov



Placing the USA on a collapse continuum with Dmitry Orlov
[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]
The West is rotting!
Yes, maybe, but what a nice smell…
Old Soviet joke
The word ‘catastrophe‘ has several meanings, but in its original meaning in Greek the word means a “sudden downturn” (in Greek katastrophē ‘overturning, sudden turn,’ from kata- ‘down’ + strophē ‘turning’).  As for the word “superpower” it also has several possible definitions, but my preferred one is this one “Superpower is a term used to describe a state with a dominant position, which is characterized by its extensive ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined-means of economic, military, technological and cultural strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence. Traditionally, superpowers are preeminent among the great powers” this one, “an extremely powerful nation, especially one capable of influencing international events and the acts and policies of less powerful nations” or this one “an international governing body able to enforce its will upon the most powerful states“.
I have mentioned the very visible decline of the USA and its associated Empire in many of my articles already, so I won’t repeat it here other than to say that the “ability to exert influence and impose its will” is probably the best criteria to measure the magnitude of the fall of the USA since Trump came to power (the process was already started by Dubya and Obama, but it sure accelerated with The Donald).  But I do want to use a metaphor to revisit the concept of catastrophe.
If you place an object in the middle of a table and then push it right to the edge, you will exert some amount of energy we can call “E1”.  Then, if the edge of the table is smooth and you just push the object over the edge, you exercise a much smaller amount of energy we can call “E2”.  And, in most cases (if the table is big enough), you will also find that E1 is much bigger than E2 yet E2, coming after E1 took place, triggered a much more dramatic event: instead of smoothly gliding over the table top, the object suddenly falls down and shatters.  That sudden fall can also be called a “catastrophe”.  This is also something which happens in history, take the example of the Soviet Union.

The fate of all empires…
Some readers might recall how Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly declared in the 1980s that he was sure that the Soviet regime would collapse and that he would return to Russia.  He was, of course, vitriolically ridiculed by all the “specialists” and “experts”.  After all, why would anybody want to listen to some weird Russian exile with politically suspicious ideas (there were rumors of “monarchism” and “anti-Semitism”) when the Soviet Union was an immense superpower, armed to the teeth with weapons, with an immense security service, with political allies and supporters worldwide?  Not only that, but all the “respectable” specialists and experts were unanimous that, while the Soviet regime had various problems, it was very far from collapse.  The notion that NATO would soon replace the Soviet military not only in eastern Europe, but even in part of the Soviet Union was absolutely unthinkable.  And yet it all happened, very, very fast.  I would argue that the Soviet union completely collapsed in the span of less than 4 short years: 1990-1993.  How and why this happened is beyond the scope of this article, but what is undeniable is that in 1989 the Soviet Union was still an apparently powerful entity, while by the end of 1993, it was gone (smashed into pieces by the very nomenklatura which used to rule over it).  How did almost everybody miss that?
Because ideologically-poisoned analysis leads to intellectual complacence, a failure of imagination and, generally, an almost total inability to even hypothetically look at possible outcomes.  This is how almost all the “Soviet specialists” got it wrong (the KGB, by the way, had predicted this outcome and warned the Politburo, but the Soviet gerontocrats were ideologically paralyzed and were both unable, and often unwilling, to take any preventative action).  The Kerensky masonic regime in 1917 Russia, the monarchy in Iran or the Apartheid regime in South Africa also collapsed very fast once the self-destruction mechanism was in place and launched.
You can think of that “regime self-destruction mechanism” as our E1 phase in our metaphor above.  As for E2, you can think of it as whatever small-push like event which precipitates the quick and final collapse, apparently with great ease and minimum energy spent.
At this point it is important to explain what exactly a “final collapse” looks like.  Some people are under the very mistaken assumption that a collapsed society or country looks like a Mad Max world. This is not so.  The Ukraine has been a failed state for several years already, but it still exists on the map. People live there, work, most people still have electricity (albeit not 24/7), a government exists, and, at least officially, law and order is maintained.  This kind of collapsed society can go on for years, maybe decades, but it is in a state of collapse nonetheless, as it has reached all the 5 Stages of Collapse as defined by Dmitry Orlov in his seminal book “The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit” where he mentions the following 5 stages of collapse:
  • Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.
  • Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.
  • Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.
  • Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.
  • Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in “the goodness of humanity” is lost.
Having personally visited Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, and seen the Russia of the early 1990s, I can attest that a society can completely collapse while maintaining a lot of the external appearances of a normal still functioning society.  Unlike the Titanic, most collapsed regimes don’t fully sink. They remain about half under water, and half above, possibly with an orchestra still playing joyful music.  And in the most expensive top deck cabins, a pretty luxurious lifestyle can be maintained by the elites.  But for most of the passengers such a collapse results in poverty, insecurity, political instability and a huge loss in welfare.  Furthermore,  in terms of motion, a half-sunk ship is no ship at all.
Here is the crucial thing: as long as the ship’s PA systems keep announcing great weather and buffet brunches, and as long as most of the passengers remain in their cabins and watch TV instead of looking out of the window, the illusion of normalcy can be maintained for a fairly long while, even after a collapse.  During the E1 phase outlined above, most passengers will be kept in total ignorance (lest they riot or protest) and only when E2 strikes (totally unexpectedly for most passengers) does reality eventually destroy the ignorance and illusions of the brainwashed passengers.

Obama was truly the beginning of the end
I have lived in the USA from 1986-1991 and from 2002 to today and there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the country has undergone a *huge* decline over the past decades.  In fact, I would argue that the USA has been living under E1 condition since at least Dubya and that this process dramatically accelerated under Obama and Trump.  I believe that we reached the  E2 “edge of the table” moment in 2018 and that from now on even a relatively minor incident can result in a sudden downturn (i.e. a “catastrophe”).  Still, I decided to check with the undisputed specialist of this issue and so I emailed Dmitry Orlov and asked him the following question:
In your recent article “The Year the Planet Flipped Over” you paint a devastating picture of the state of the Empire:
It is already safe to declare Trump’s plan to Make America Great Again (MAGA) a failure. Beneath the rosy statistics of US economic growth hides the hideous fact that it is the result of a tax holiday granted to transnational corporations to entice them to repatriate their profits. While this hasn’t helped them (their stocks are currently cratering) it has been a disaster for the US government as well as for the economic system as whole.  Tax receipts have shrunk. The budget deficit for 2018 exceeds $779 billion. Meanwhile, the trade wars which Trump initiated have caused the trade deficit to increase by 17% from the year before. Plans to repatriate industrial production from low-cost countries remain vaporous because the three key elements which China had as it industrialized (cheap energy, cheap labor and low cost of doing business) are altogether missing.  Government debt is already beyond reasonable and its expansion is still accelerating, with just the interest payments set to exceed half a trillion a year within a decade. This trajectory does not bode well for the continued existence of the United States as a going concern. Nobody, either in the United States or beyond, has the power to significantly alter this trajectory. Trump’s thrashing about may have moved things along faster than they otherwise would have, at least in the sense of helping convince the entire world that the US is selfish, feckless, ultimately self-destructive and generally unreliable as a partner. In the end it won’t matter who was president of the US—it never has.  Among those the US president has succeeded in hurting most are his European allies. His attacks on Russian energy exports to Europe, on European car manufacturers and on Europe’s trade with Iran have caused a fair amount of damage, both political and economic, without compensating for it with any perceived or actual benefits. Meanwhile, as the globalist world order, which much of Europe’s population appears ready to declare a failure, begins to unravel, the European Union is rapidly becoming ungovernable, with established political parties unable to form coalitions with ever-more-numerous populist upstarts.  It is too early to say that the EU has already failed altogether, but it already seems safe to predict that within a decade it will no longer remain as a serious international factor. Although the disastrous quality and the ruinous mistakes of Europe’s own leadership deserve a lot of the blame, some of it should rest with the erratic, destructive behavior of their transoceanic Big Brother. The EU has already morphed into a strictly regional affair, unable to project power or entertain any global geopolitical ambitions.  Same goes for Washington, which is going to either depart voluntarily (due to lack of funds) or get chased out from much of the world. The departure from Syria is inevitable whether Trump, under relentless pressure from his bipartisan warmongers, backtracks on this commitment or not. Now that Syria has been armed with Russia’s up-to-date air defense weapons the US no longer maintains air superiority there, and without air superiority the US military is unable to do anything.  Afghanistan is next; there, it seems outlandish to think that the Washingtonians will be able to achieve any sort of reasonable accommodation with the Taliban. Their departure will spell the end of Kabul as a center of corruption where foreigners steal humanitarian aid and other resources. Somewhere along the way the remaining US troops will also be pulled out of Iraq, where the parliament, angered by Trump’s impromptu visit to a US base, recently voted to expel them. And that will put paid to the entire US adventure in the Middle East since 9/11: $4,704,439,588,308 has been squandered, to be preciseor $14,444 for every man, woman and child in the US.  The biggest winners in all of this are, obviously, the people of the entire region, because they will no longer be subjected to indiscriminate US harassment and bombardment, followed by Russia, China and Iran, with Russia solidifying its position as the ultimate arbiter of international security arrangements thanks to its unmatched military capabilities and demonstrated knowhow for coercion to peace. Syria’s fate will be decided by Russia, Iran and Turkey, with the US not even invited to the talks. Afghanistan will fall into the sphere of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.  And the biggest losers will be former US regional allies, first and foremost Israel, followed by Saudi Arabia.
My question for you is this: where would you place the USA (or the Empire) on your 5 stages of decline and do you believe that the USA (or the Empire) can reverse that trend?
Here is Dmitry’s reply:
Collapse, at each stage, is a historical process that takes time to run its course as the system adapts to changing circumstances, compensates for its weaknesses and finds ways to continue functioning at some level. But what changes rather suddenly is faith or, to put it in more businesslike terms, sentiment. A large segment of the population or an entire political class within a country or the entire world can function based on a certain set of assumptions for much longer than the situation warrants but then over a very short period of time switch to a different set of assumptions. All that sustains the status quo beyond that point is institutional inertia. It imposes limits on how fast systems can change without collapsing entirely. Beyond that point, people will tolerate the older practices only until replacements for them can be found.
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.
Internationally, the major change in sentiment in the world has to do with the role of the US dollar (and, to a lesser extent, the Euro and the Yen—the other two reserve currencies of the three-legged globalist central banker stool). The world is transitioning to the use of local currencies, currency swaps and commodities markets backed by gold. The catalyst for this change of sentiment was provided by the US administration itself which sawed through its own perch by its use of unilateral sanctions. By using its control over dollar-based transactions to block international transactions it doesn’t happen to like it forced other countries to start looking for alternatives. Now a growing list of countries sees throwing off the shackles of the US dollar as a strategic goal. Russia and China use the ruble and the yuan for their expanding trade; Iran sells oil to India for rupees. Saudi Arabia has started to accept the yuan for its oil.
This change has many knock-on effects. If the dollar is no longer needed to conduct international trade, other nations no longer have hold large quantities of it in reserve. Consequently, there is no longer a need to buy up large quantities of US Treasury notes. Therefore, it becomes unnecessary to run large trade surpluses with the US, essentially conducting trade at a loss. Further, the attractiveness of the US as an export market drops and the cost of imports to the US rises, thereby driving up cost inflation. A vicious spiral ensues in which the ability of the US government to borrow internationally to finance the gaping chasm of its various deficits becomes impaired. Sovereign default of the US government and national bankruptcy then follow.
The US may still look mighty, but its dire fiscal predicament coupled with its denial of the inevitability of bankruptcy, makes it into something of a Blanche DuBois from the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She was “always dependent on the kindness of strangers” but was tragically unable to tell the difference between kindness and desire. In this case, the desire is for national advantage and security, and to minimize risk by getting rid of an unreliable trading partner.
How quickly or slowly this comes to pass is difficult to guess at and impossible to calculate. It is possible to think of the financial system in terms of a physical analogue, with masses of funds traveling at some velocity having a certain inertia (p = mv) and with forces acting on that mass to accelerate it along a different trajectory (F = ma). It is also possible to think of it in terms of hordes of stampeding animals who can change course abruptly when panicked. The recent abrupt moves in the financial markets, where trillions of dollars of notional, purely speculative value have been wiped out within weeks, are more in line with the latter model.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost.
Within the US there is really no other alternative than the market. There are a few rustic enclaves, mostly religious communities, that can feed themselves, but that’s a rarity. For everyone else there is no choice but to be a consumer. Consumers who are broke are called “bums,” but they are still consumers. To the extent that the US has a culture, it is a commercial culture in which the goodness of a person is based on the goodly sums of money in their possession. Such a culture can die by becoming irrelevant (when everyone is dead broke) but by then most of the carriers of this culture are likely to be dead too. Alternatively, it can be replaced by a more humane culture that isn’t entirely based on the cult of Mammon—perhaps, dare I think, through a return to a pre-Protestant, pre-Catholic Christian ethic that values people’s souls above objects of value?
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.
All is very murky at the moment, but I would venture to guess that most people in the US are too distracted, too stressed and too preoccupied with their own vices and obsessions to pay much attention to the political realm. Of the ones they do pay attention, a fair number of them seem clued in to the fact that the US is not a democracy at all but an elites-only sandbox in which transnational corporate and oligarchic interests build and knock down each others’ sandcastles.
The extreme political polarization, where two virtually identical pro-capitalist, pro-war parties pretend to wage battle by virtue-signaling may be a symptom of the extremely decrepit state of the entire political arrangement: people are made to watch the billowing smoke and to listen to the deafening noise in the hopes that they won’t notice that the wheels are no longer turning.
The fact that what amounts to palace intrigue—the fracas between the White House, the two houses of Congress and a ghoulish grand inquisitor named Mueller—has taken center stage is uncannily reminiscent of various earlier political collapses, such as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire or of the fall and the consequent beheading of Louis XVI. The fact that Trump, like the Ottoman worthies, stocks his harem with East European women, lends an eerie touch. That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Jillettes Jaunes movement (just as an example) are definitely not.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost.
I have been saying for some years now that within the US social collapse has largely run its course, although whether people actually believe that is an entire matter entirely. Defining “your people” is rather difficult. The symbols are still there—the flag, the Statue of Liberty and a predilection for iced drinks and heaping plates of greasy fried foods—but the melting pot seems to have suffered a meltdown and melted all the way to China. At present half the households within the US speak a language other than English at home, and a fair share of the rest speak dialects of English that are not mutually intelligible with the standard North American English dialect of broadcast television and university lecturers.
Throughout its history as a British colony and as a nation the US has been dominated by the Anglo ethnos. The designation “ethnos” is not an ethnic label. It is not strictly based on genealogy, language, culture, habitat, form of government or any other single factor or group of factors. These may all be important to one extent or another, but the viability of an ethnos is based solely on its cohesion and the mutual inclusivity and common purpose of its members. The Anglo ethnos reached its zenith in the wake of World War II, during which many social groups were intermixed in the military and their more intelligent members.
Fantastic potential was unleashed when privilege—the curse of the Anglo ethnos since its inception—was temporarily replaced with merit and the more talented demobilized men, of whatever extraction, were given a chance at education and social advancement by the GI Bill. Speaking a new sort of American English based on the Ohio dialect as a Lingua Franca, these Yanks—male, racist, sexist and chauvinistic and, at least in their own minds, victorious—were ready to remake the entire world in their own image.
They proceeded to flood the entire world with oil (US oil production was in full flush then) and with machines that burned it. Such passionate acts of ethnogenesis are rare but not unusual: the Romans who conquered the entire Mediterranean basin, the barbarians who then sacked Rome, the Mongols who later conquered most of Eurasia and the Germans who for a very brief moment possessed an outsized Lebensraum are other examples.
And now it is time to ask: what remains of this proud conquering Anglo ethnos today? We hear shrill feminist cries about “toxic masculinity” and minorities of every stripe railing against “whitesplaining” and in response we hear a few whimpers but mostly silence. Those proud, conquering, virile Yanks who met and fraternized with the Red Army at the River Elbe on April 25, 1945—where are they? Haven’t they devolved into a sad little subethnos of effeminate, porn-addicted overgrown boys who shave their pubic hair and need written permission to have sex without fear of being charged with rape?
Will the Anglo ethnos persist as a relict, similar to how the English have managed to hold onto their royals (who are technically no longer even aristocrats since they now practice exogamy with commoners)? Or will it get wiped out in a wave of depression, mental illness and opiate abuse, its glorious history of rapine, plunder and genocide erased and the statues of its war heros/criminals knocked down? Only time will tell.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in “the goodness of humanity” is lost.
The term “culture” means many things to many people, but it is more productive to observe cultures than to argue about them. Cultures are expressed through people’s stereotypical behaviors that are readily observable in public. These are not the negative stereotypes often used to identify and reject outsiders but the positive stereotypes—cultural standards of behavior, really—that serve as requirements for social adequacy and inclusion. We can readily assess the viability of a culture by observing the stereotypical behaviors of its members.
  • Do people exist as a single continuous, inclusive sovereign realm or as a set of exclusive, potentially warring enclaves segregated by income, ethnicity, education level, political affiliation and so on? Do you see a lot of walls, gates, checkpoints, security cameras and “no trespassing” signs? Is the law of the land enforced uniformly or are there good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods and no-go zones where even the police fear to tread?
  • Do random people thrown together in public spontaneously enter into conversation with each other and are comfortable with being crowded together, or are they aloof and fearful, and prefer to hide their face in the little glowing rectangle of their smartphone, jealously guarding their personal space and ready to regard any encroachment on it as an assault?
  • Do people remain good-natured and tolerant toward each other even when hard-pressed or do they hide behind a façade of tense, superficial politeness and fly into a rage at the slightest provocation? Is conversation soft in tone, gracious and respectful or is it loud, shrill, rude and polluted with foul language? Do people dress well out of respect for each other, or to show off, or are they all just déclassé slobs—even the ones with money?
  • Observe how their children behave: are they fearful of strangers and trapped in a tiny world of their own or are they open to the world and ready to treat any stranger as a surrogate brother or sister, aunt or uncle, grandmother or grandfather without requiring any special introduction? Do the adults studiously ignore each others’ children or do they spontaneously act as a single family?
  • If there is a wreck on the road, do they spontaneously rush to each others’ rescue and pull people out before the wreck explodes, or do they, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, “get on the phone and call up some flakes” who “rush on over and wreck it some more”?
  • If there is a flood or a fire, do the neighbors take in the people who are rendered homeless, or do they allow them to wait for the authorities to show up and bus them to some makeshift government shelter?
It is possible to quote statistics or to provide anecdotal evidence to assess the state and the viability of a culture, but your own eyes and other senses can provide all the evidence you need to make that determination for yourself and to decide how much faith to put in “the goodness of humanity” that is evident in the people around you.
Dmity concluded his reply by summarizing his view like this:
Cultural and social collapse are very far along. Financial collapse is waiting for a trigger. Commercial collapse will happen in stages some of which—food deserts, for instance—have already happened in many places. Political collapse will only become visible once the political class gives up. It’s not as simple as saying which stage we are at. They are all happening in parallel, to one extent or another.
My own (totally subjective) opinion is that the USA has already reached stages 1 through 4, and that there are signs that stage 5 has begun; mainly in big cities as US small towns and rural areas (Trump’s power base, by the way) are still struggling to maintain the norms and behaviors one could observe in the USA of the 1980s.  When I have visitors from Europe they always comment how friendly and welcoming US Americans are (true, I live in small-town in East-Central Florida, not in Miami…).  These are the communities which voted for Trump because they said “we want our country back”.  Alas, instead of giving them their country back, Trump gifted it to the Neocons…
Conclusion: connecting the dots; or not
Frankly, the dots are all over the place; it is really hard to miss them.  However, for the doubleplusgoodthinkingideological drone” they remain largely invisible, and this is not due to any eyesight problem, but due to that drone’s total inability to connect the dots.  These are the kind of folks who danced on the deck of the Titanic while it was sinking.  For them, when the inevitable catastrophe comes, it will be a total, mind-blowing, surprise.  But, until that moment, they will keep on denying the obvious, no matter how obvious that obvious has become.

Don’t expect these two losers to fix anything,
they will only make things worse…
In the meantime, the US ruling elites are locked into an ugly internal struggle which only further weakens the USA.  What is so telling is that the Democrats are still stuck with their same clueless, incompetent and infinitely arrogant leadership, in spite of the fact that everybody knows that the Democratic Party is in deep crisis and that new faces are desperately needed.  But no, they are still completely stuck in their old ways and the same gang of gerontocrats continues to rule the party apparatus.
That is another surefire sign of degeneracy: when a regime can only produce incompetent, often old, leaders who are completely out of touch with reality and who blame their own failures on internal (“deplorables”) and external (“the Russians”) factors.  Again, think of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, the Apartheid regime in South Africa under F. W. de Klerk, or the Kerensky regime in 1917 Russia.  It is quite telling that the political leader whom the AngloZionists try to scare the most simply thinks of them as “first-rate idiots“, it is not?
As for the Republicans, they are basically a subsidiary of the Israeli Likud Party. Just take a look at the long list of losers the Likud produced at home, and you will get a sense of what they can do in its US colony.
Eventually the USA will rebound; I have no doubts about that at all.  This is a big country with millions of immensely talented people, immense natural resources and no credible threat to it’s territory.  But that can only happen after a real *regime* change (as opposed to a change in Presidential Administration) which, itself, is only going to happen after an “E2 catastrophe” collapse.
Until then, we will all be waiting for Godot.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

أجّلتم الحكومة لتمرّروا القمة… فلتأجّلوا القمة لتشكّلوا الحكومة



يناير 10, 2019

ناصر قنديل

– الأجواء الآتية من كواليس المشاورات العربية حول دعوة سورية لحضور القمة العربية الاقتصادية في بيروت، تكشف حجم التلاقي بين لائحة من الأطراف الداعية للتمهل في عودة سورية إلى الجامعة العربية ودعوتها إلى القمم العربية، وحيث تحمل التمنيات الأميركية رائحة الحسابات الإسرائيلية، تحت شعار «أن الأهم ألا يبدو أن خصوم سورية قد هزموا وأن سورية قد انتصرت»، تسمح بفهم حجم لائحة الذين يجمعهم هذا الشعار، والتدقيق باللبنانيين من بينهم، ولكن خصوصاً ما تبرزه الأجواء من مساعٍ حثيثة بذلها الرئيس المكلف بتشكيل الحكومة سعد الحريري، لطلب عدم إحراجه وفريقه وحلفائه بدعوة سورية، وتقديم غياب حكومة فاعلة كعذر للعجز عن اتخاذ قرار لبناني موحّد، يكشف العلاقة بين تشكيل الحكومة وانعقاد القمة ودعوة سورية لحضورها.

– خلال ثمانية شهور نجح الرئيس المكلف بتأجيل ولادة الحكومة، متنازلاً عن صفته كصاحب صلاحية أولى في إنتاج التشكيلة الحكومية، بهدف رمي المسؤولية بالفشل الحكومي، الشبيه بالفشل الكلوي في الأجساد البشرية، على سواه، فهو مرّة غير معني لأن القضية بين التيار الوطني الحر والقوات اللبنانية، ومرّة بين القوات ورئيس الجمهورية حول منصب نائب رئيس الحكومة أو حول الحقيبة السيادية، ومرّة بين رئيس الجمهورية والحزب التقدمي الاشتراكي حول المقعد الدرزي الثالث، وبعد حين يكشف أنه تجاهل طلب ثنائي حركة أمل وحزب الله بتمثيل نواب اللقاء التشاوري، والتجاهل لتظهير المطلب كعقدة في طريق التشكيل، وترك البلد بلا حكومة، وبقاء الرئيس المكلف بلا مسؤولية، وصولاً للقول إن العقدة هي في الثلث المعطل الذي يطلبه رئيس الجمهورية ورئيس التيار الوطني الحر، بينما يحتفظ الحريري وحده بالثلث المعطل مرتاحاً، متفرجاً تاركاً البلد بلا حكومة، وطريق ولادتها سهل وستظهر سهولته عند ولادتها ويكون السؤال مشروعاً: لماذا تمّ هذا الآن ولم يتم من قبل، كما في كل مرة؟

– نصب الحريري ومن وراءه فخاخاً للجميع، ويجب الاعتراف أنهم وقعوا فيها، عندما أوحى لهم أنه يتنازل عن دوره في تشكيل الحكومة لهم، وهو في كل مرة يؤكد أنه يفعل ذلك ليحمل سواه مسؤولية عدم ولادة الحكومة، لا أن يمنحه شرف حل عقدها، فتهرّب الحريري من معادلة عادلة لتوزيع المقاعد بين فريقي 14 و8 آذار وفاز مع حلفائه في 14 آذار بضعف عدد مقاعد خصومه في 8 آذار تقريباً، وتبادل مع رئيس الجمهورية مقعداً سنياً بمقعد ماروني ليحمله مسؤولية تمثيل اللقاء التشاوري، ويحتفظ بحق الفيتو في التمثيل ليضمن الفشل، والحصيلة أمامنا، تنازلات من الجميع والحريري رابح، لكن الآخرين يحملون مسؤولية بقاء البلد بلا حكومة، وهو هنا رابح مرة ثانية، لأن القضية أن تبقى البلد بلا حكومة حتى تنعقد القمة العربية، بحضور سورية فيغيب كرئيس حكومة تصريف أعمال، أو بغيابها فيحضر، وفي الحالين تولد الحكومة بعد القمة.

– المعادلة التي أعلنها رئيس المجلس النيابي نبيه بري بالدعوة لتأجيل القمة بسبب غياب حكومة في لبنان، تجيب على كل الأسئلة وتقول ضمناً، أجلتم الحكومة لتمرّروا القمة، فلتأجّلوا القمة حتى تشكلوا حكومة.

– هل يتلقف رئيس الجمهورية دعوة بري، لوضع النقاط على الحروف؟

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River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!