While Trump tweeted and sniffled, grown-up leaders planned major global projects By The Wayne Madsen Report

While Trump tweeted and sniffled, grown-up leaders planned major global projects By The Wayne Madsen Report
While Donald Trump displayed his immaturity by tweeting threats and sniffling during televised interviews, the world's grown-up leaders were meeting in Beijing to plan major and ambitious global projects foreseen by China's "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) recreation of the ancient Silk Road. Chinese President Xi Jinping told assembled world leaders, who included Russian President Vladimir Putin, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, that China's vision of a new Silk Road would expand beyond its ancient predecessor to include global highways, railways, and maritime routes.

Xi spoke of the ancient road that linked  the "Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Ganges, and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers" via trade routes that extended through "Jiuquan, Dunhuang, Tulufan, Kashi, Samarkand, Baghdad and Constantinople, as well as ancient ports of Ningbo, Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Beihai, Colombo, Jeddah, and Alexandria." The discussions in Beijing were a far cry from the "he said, she said" antics occurring in Washington, DC, the capital of what has truly become, in Mao Zedong's famed words, a "paper tiger."

The one clear message the Beijing meeting sent out to the world is that America’s “unipolar” vision of the world lies dead and buried. Even among Washington’s longtime friends and allies, one will not hear Donald Trump referred to as the “leader of the Free World.” That phrase has been discarded into the waste bin of history, along with America’s insistence that it is the world’s only “superpower.” The United States is a power, a second-rate one that happens to possess a first-rate nuclear arsenal.
The United States almost ignored the Beijing meeting completely. Its pathetic representation was carried out by Matt Pottinger, a little-known special assistant to Trump and the senior director for East Asia for the National Security Council. The only reason Trump sent anyone to represent the United States in Beijing was because President Xi made a special request for American representation during his recent meeting with Trump at the president’s private Mar-a-Lago Club resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Perhaps Trump was disinterested in OBOR because there were no projects for which his Trump Organization could profit. The gathered leaders were not discussing hotels and golf courses but trans-Eurasian transportation systems, South American regional infrastructure, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Western Balkans extension of Eurasian transport networks, and the very important environmental issues of "conserving and sustainably using oceans and seas, freshwater resources, as well as forests, mountains and drylands, protecting biodiversity, ecosystems and wildlife, combating desertification and land degradation." China announced two major environmental initiatives in Beijing: the Big Data Service Platform on Ecological and Environmental Protection and the Joint Initiative to Establish the International Coalition for Green Development on the Belt and Road with the United Nations Environment Program.

Why would Trump want to participate in a conference in which 1) he saw no profit motivation and 2) the assembled leaders were discussing issues that stand diametrically opposite from policies being enacted by Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke?

It is reassuring that other world leaders are taking the environment into consideration when planning major projects like the Eurasian Land Bridge and the East-West Middle Corridor, the latter running from Xian in China to Rotterdam in Europe. Land bridges, comprising highway and rail routes, are planned throughout Eurasia, including China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Central and West Asia, China-Indochina Peninsula, China-Pakistan, and Bangladesh-China-India-Burma.

Xi announced that a China-Russia Regional Cooperation Development Investment Fund would have a initialization capital of $14 billion in capital to begin funding One Belt, One Road projects. Meanwhile, Trump's Congressional allies were talking of economic sanctions on China over North Korea and increased sanctions on Russia over everything from Syria to Ukraine. It is noteworthy that among the governments represented by influential political players in Beijing were both North and South Korea, as well as Syria -- the government, not the "regime," as it is referred to by Trump's chest-thumpers in the White House.



Further plans were enacted in Beijing to expand the Interbank Association of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an alternative to the SWIFT interbank financial transfer network that is subject not only to surveillance by the Five Eyes (FVEY) signals intelligence allies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but also Western-imposed sanctions. The chiefs of the Washington, DC-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund listened to Chinese officials explain how the new Silk Road would bypass the Western and European Union political strings attached to both their institutions. China has initiated a Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme and Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme for Infrastructure Development that will allow participant nations to kiss the World Bank and IMF, with all of their "austerity" measures, goodbye. There is little wonder why the prime ministers of Greece, Spain, and Italy were in Beijing to find out more about loosening the financial shackles placed on them by the IMF, World Bank, and their European Union surrogates.

It also rankled the feathers of Trump's key Zionists in his administration -- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, special adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and National Economic Council chairman Gary Cohn -- to see the China Development Bank sign Silk Road memorandums of understanding with two banks that have been subjected to sanctions by the West: Tejarat Bank of Iran and Raiffeisen Bank International of Austria. The Chinese are beginning to supplant the Zionists in their own playground of international banking and finance, something that irritates the Goldman Sachs players who surround Trump in his White House and Cabinet.

Serving to further irritate the interests of the Zionists of Trump World, China signed an agreement with Palestine on establishing a Think Tank Cooperation Program on Enhancing People-to-People Connectivity. The initiative is part of the Silk Road Think Tank Network (SiLKS). And in a show of force to George Soros and his friends at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), China announced that the China NGO Network for International Exchanges and over 150 civil organizations are jointly establishing the Silk Road NGO Cooperation Network. China has a long memory and will not forget Soros and USAID/NED meddling in Tibet, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

The Western corporate media tried to spin the One Belt, One Road summit as a disappointment because Britain, France, and Germany were not represented. It was a specious argument from the likes of The Washington Post and Associated Press. British Prime Minister Theresa May would have been in Beijing except for the tiny little issue of her waging a general election campaign. In her place was Chancellor of the Exchequer Phil Hammond. At least May did not copy Trump and send some middle-grade civil service flunkie. Speaking of elections, France had just seen a presidential election and President Francois Hollande had an excuse not to be in Beijing as he was preparing to hand over the presidency to his successor. France was represented by former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Politics kept the prime minister of Japan and Chancellor of Germany away from Beijing, but both nations were represented by important personal representatives of Shinzo Abe and Angela Merkel, respectively.

Only Donald Trump saw fit to send a virtual nobody to Beijing. Perhaps it is fitting because on the world stage, Trump, in every way, increasingly shows that he, too, is a nobody in charge of a bloviating, meandering, and listless former "superpower." Trump vowed to "Make America Great Again." America's "greatness" died decades ago and Trump neither has the power nor the inclination to change that sobering fact of life regardless of all the red ball cap and t-shirt slogans to the contrary.

THE ROVING EYE - Return of the living (neo-con) dead By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Return of the living (neo-con) dead By Pepe Escobar Amid much hysteria, the notion has been widely peddled in the United States that President Obama's "new" foreign policy doctrine, announced last week at West Point, rejects neo-cons and neo-liberals and is, essentially, post-imperialist and a demonstration of realpolitik. Not so fast. Although stepping back from the excesses of the Cheney regime - as in bombing whole nations into "democracy" - the "desire to lead" still crystallizes might is right. Moreover, "exceptionalism" remains the norm. Now not so blatant, but still implemented via a nasty set of tools, from financial warfare to cyber-war, from National Endowment for Democracy-style promotion of "democracy" to Joint Special Operations Command-driven counter-terrorism, drone war and all shades of shadow wars. In the early 2000s, the model was the physical destruction and occupation of Iraq. In the 2010s the model is the slow-mo destruction, by proxy, of Syria. And still, those who "conceptualized" the destruction of Iraq keep rearing their Alien-like slimy head. Their icon is of course Robert Kagan - one of the founders of the apocalyptically funereal Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and husband of crypto-Ukrainian hell raiser Victoria "F**k the EU" Nuland (thus their dream of Ukraine as the Khaganate of Nulands, or simply Nulandistan.) Kagan has been devastatingly misguided on everything, as in his 2003 best-seller Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, an eulogy of "benign" Americans standing guard against the "threats" (as in Muslim fundamentalism) emanating from a Hobbesian world way beyond the cozy Kantian precinct inhabited by Europe. Then, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008), the "evil" was not Muslim fundamentalism anymore (too shabby), but the emerging of those vast autocracies, Russia and China, antithetical to Western democracies. But with The World America Made (2012), the paradisiacal shining city on the hill would once again triumph, more than capable to see those autocracies off; after all, the only reliable guarantee of global peace is American exceptionalism. Kagan still commands the attention even of the otherwise aloof Commander-in-Chief, who avidly consumed The World America Made before his 2012 State of the Union Address, in which he proclaimed "America is back". It's enlightening to flash back to Kagan writing in the Weekly Standard in March 2011, sounding like an awestruck schoolboy praising Obama; "He thoroughly rejected the so-called realist approach, extolled American exceptionalism, spoke of universal values and insisted that American power should be used, when appropriate, on behalf of those values." Any similarity with Obama's "new" foreign policy doctrine is, indeed, intentional. Catfight at the Singapore corral Now comes Kagan's latest opus, "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire: What our tired country still owes the world", with a sorry mess already inbuilt in the title (he's never read Paul Kennedy after all). History tells us that superpowers do retire because of over-extension - not only military but mostly economic and fiscal, as in facing bankruptcy. Yet it's hopeless to expect from Kagan and the neo-con nebula anything other than blindness to the lessons of history - with a special, tragic mention of Shock and Awe, trampling of Geneva Conventions, and institutionalized torture. Their parochial dichotomy is either eternal American global hegemony or outright chaos. Progressives in the US still try to save the day, frantically calling for a core "restoration" of American economic and democratic health; a rather impossible undertaking when casino capitalism rules and the US is now for all practical purposes an oligarchy. These dreamers actually believe this "restoration" is what Obama has done or is trying to do; and that would project the US once again as a global model - and thus "encourage" democracy everywhere. Sorry to break the news, but for the overwhelming majority of the genuine, fact on the ground "international community", the notion of the US promoting democracy is now D.O.A. So under the banner of exceptionalism - versus the competing birth of a Eurasian century - it's been a fascinating exercise to witness the catfight at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, which I described last year as the Spielbergs and Clooneys of the military sphere all locked up in a Star Wars room (actually a ballroom with chandeliers at the Shangri-La Hotel.) It all started with Shinzo Abe, the militaristic prime minister of that American protectorate, Japan, denouncing "unilateral efforts" to alter the strategic status quo in Asia. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, piled up, saying Asia-Pacific was becoming less stable because of "coercion and provocation" by China. And Pentagon supremo Chuck Hagel also blasted Beijing, accusing it of "destabilizing, unilateral actions" in the South China Sea. But then Lt Gen Wang Guanzhong, the deputy chief of general staff of the PLA, counterpunched in kind, saying Hagel's talk was "full of hegemony, full of words of threat and intimidation" and part of "a provocative challenge against China". Major General Zhu Chenghu even allowed himself to be condescending (oh, those barbarians ... ); "The Americans are making very, very important strategic mistakes right now ... If you take China as an enemy, China will absolutely become the enemy of the US." Major General Zhu also accused Hagel of hypocrisy; "Whatever the Chinese do is illegal, and whatever the Americans do is right." Zhu was quick to register Hagel's own threat, as in "the US will not look the other way when fundamental principles of the international order are being challenged." Translation: Don't mess with the exceptionalist. WE are the international order. It's as if everyone was reading from Kagan's playbook. The difference is that Beijing is not Baghdad, and will not respond to threats by lying down. Instead, it is deploying selective, savvy, tactical moves all across the Western Pacific chessboard. Washington's Asian network of vassals/clients/protectorates is and will be slowly but surely undermined. And on top of it, Beijing clearly sees that both Hagel and Kerry - who know next to nothing about the complexities of Asia - are clearly panicking. Those Deng Xiaoping dictum days - from "crossing the river by feeling the stones" to "carry a low profile" - are in the past. Now we're talking about the imminent number one economic power, already the world's top trading nation and America's top creditor. Highway to Hillary Russia - and not the US - is now the key partner or broker in negotiating hardcore international conflicts. The recent flurry of China-Russia energy and trade agreements, an essential part of their strategic partnership; the progressive integration and concerted economic/financial strategy of the BRICS; and even the slow moving process of Latin American integration all point towards a multipolar world. Which bring us back to Obama's "new" foreign policy doctrine. Let's quickly survey the recent record. Obama only refrained from pursuing his reckless, self-imposed red line and bombing Syria because he was saved (from himself) at the eleventh hour by Russian diplomacy. The Iran dossier remains vulnerable to relentless pressure by neo-cons/Israel lobby/sectors of the weaponizing industry, with the Obama administration introducing extraneous factors bound to sidestep the negotiation. Obama's sanctions on Russia because of Ukraine were not only unlawful; they are peripheral, as astute European Union business leaders quickly recognized. A simulacrum of withdrawal is being pushed in Afghanistan - to be replaced by all-out shadow war. And the Obama administration - covertly and not so covertly - has been supporting neo-nazis in Ukraine and jihadists in Syria. All this is still not enough for the Kagan bunch - the "conceptual" architects of the 9/11 wars, who always wanted Obama to bomb Syria; bomb Iran; start a war with Russia over Crimea; and even, sooner rather than later, bomb China to prevent it from getting back to number one. Hobbesians gone mad - wallowing in their psychotic sense of perennial entitlement - will stop at nothing to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world. It's Exceptionalist Empire with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as global Robocop, or hell. Moscow and Beijing, to say the least, are not exactly impressed; rather, they detect desperation. Yet things could - and should - get much nastier, irrespective of imploding Khaganates. Just wait for the Hillary doctrine. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Can Washington overthrow three governments at the same time? by Thierry Meyssan

"BEFORE OUR EYES"

Can Washington overthrow three governments at the same time?

by Thierry Meyssan

The power of a state is measured by its ability to defend itself and to attack on one or more fronts. In this context, Washington is trying for the first time to show it can overthrow three governments simultaneously: Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. If it succeeds, no government would be henceforth able to resist it.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS | 23 FEBRUARY 2014 

عربي  FRANÇAIS  DEUTSCH  РУССКИЙ  فارسى  ESPAÑOL  ITALIANO  PORTUGUÊS  ARMENIAN  TÜRKÇE ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ  POLSKI 

Since when are revolutions supported by imperialism? (here: Maidan , Kiev).

Washington, which failed in 2011 to bomb Libya and Syria simultaneously, is now engaged in a new demonstration of its strength: organizing regime change in three states at the same time, in different regions of the world: Syria (CentCom), Ukraine (EuCom) and Venezuela (SouthCom).

To do this, President Obama has mobilized almost the entire National Security Council team.

First, Advisor Susan Rice and Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. These two women are champions of "democratic" talk. They have for many years specialized in advocating interference in the internal affairs of other countries under the pretext of preventing genocide. But behind this generous rhetoric, they couldn’t care less about non-US lives as shown by Ms. Power during the chemical weapons crisis in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The ambassador, who was aware of the innocence of the Syrian authorities, had gone to Europe with her husband to attend a film festival dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, while her government denounced a crime against humanity, the responsibility for which was placed upon President al Assad.

Then, the three regional co-ordinators: Philip Gordon ( Middle East and North Africa ), Karen Donfried (Europe and Eurasia ) and Ricardo Zuñiga ( Latin America). 

• Phil Gordon (personal friend and translator of Nicolas Sarkozy) organized the sabotage of the Geneva 2 Peace Conference as long as the Palestinian issue is not settled to the U.S. liking. During the second session of the conference, while John Kerry spoke of peace, Gordon met with the heads of Jordanian, Qatari , Saudi and Turkish intelligence services in Washington to prepare for yet another attack. The plotters have gathered an army of 13,000 men, of whom only 1,000 were given brief military training, to drive tanks and take Damascus. The problem is that the column may be destroyed by the Syrian Army before arriving in the capital. But they fail to agree on how to defend it without distributing anti-aircraft weapons that could later be used against Israel. 

• Karen Donfried is the former national intelligence officer for Europe. She has long led the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. Today, she manipulates the European Union to hide Washington interventionism in Ukraine. Despite the leak of a phone conversation involving Ambassador Victoria Nuland, she succeeded in convincing Europeans that the opposition in Kiev wanted to join them and was fighting for democracy. Nonetheless, more than half of the Maidan rioters are members of the Nazi party and brandish portraits of collaborator Stepan Bandera. 

• Finally, Ricardo Zuñiga is the grandson of the namesake President of the National Party of Honduras who organized the coups of 1963 and 1972 in favor of General López Arellano. He directed the CIA station in Havana where he recruited and financed agents to form opposition to Fidel Castro. He mobilized the extreme Trotskyist Venezuelan left to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, accused of being a Stalinist.

The whole process is hyped under the leadership of one Dan Rhodes. This propaganda specialist has already written the official version of September 11, 2001, drafting the report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry. He managed to remove all traces of the military coup (power was removed from the hands of George W. Bush at about 10am and it was returned that evening; all the members of his cabinet and those of Congress were placed in secure bunkers "to ensure their safety") so that we remember only the attacks.

In all three cases, the U.S. narrative is based on the same principles: accuse governments of killing their own citizens, qualify opponents as ’democratic’; impose sanctions against the "murderers" and ultimately operate coups.

Each time, the movement begins with a demonstration during which peaceful opponents are killed, and where both sides accuse each other of violence. In fact U.S. or NATO special forces placed on rooftops shoot at both the crowd and the police. This was the case in Daraa (Syria) in 2011, Kiev (Ukraine) and Caracas (Venezuela) this week. Alas for bad luck: autopsies in Venezuela show that two victims, one opponent and one pro-government, were killed by the same weapon.

Qualifying opponents as democratic activists is a simple game of rhetoric. In Syria, they are Takfirists supported by the worst dictatorship in the world, Saudi Arabia. In Ukraine, a few sincere pro-Europeans surrounded by many Nazis. In Venezuela, young Trotskyists from good families surrounded by goon squads. Everywhere the false U.S. opponent, John McCain, brings his support to true and false on site opponents.

Support for opponents rests with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This agency of the U.S. government falsely presents itself as an NGO funded by Congress. But it was created by President Ronald Reagan, in association with Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is headed by the neoconservative Carl Gershman and the daughter of General Alexander Haig (former Supreme Commander of NATO, then Secretary of State ), Barbara Haig. This is the NED (actually the State Department), which employs the "opposition" senator John McCain.

To this operating group, you must add the Albert Einstein Institute, an "NGO" funded by NATO. Created by Gene Sharp, it trained professional agitators from two bases: Serbia (Canvas) and Qatar (Academy of currency).

In all cases, Susan Rice and Samantha Power take on airs of outrage before imposing penalties, soon echoed by the European Union, while they are in fact the sponsors of the violence.

It remains to be seen whether the the coups will be successful. Which is far from being certain.

Washington is thus attempting to show the world it is still the master. To be more sure of itself, it launched the Ukrainian and Venezuelan operations during the Olympic Games in Sochi. It was certain that Russia would not move for fear of having its party upset by Islamist attacks. But Sochi ended this weekend. Now it’s Moscow’s turn to play.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Roger Lagassé

Source
Al-Watan (Syria)

For social justice in the face of permanent aggression

• Interview with Venezuelan-American researcher and lawyer Eva Golinger

Olga Díaz Ruiz and Geisy Guía (Journalism student)

THE Havana Book Fair has accustomed us to good, interesting publications. Its 19th edition brings us Eva Golinger, the Venezuelan-American writer and lawyer, for the launch of her book, USAID, NED and the CIA: Permanent Aggression, an ambitious compilation and analysis of current situations, written by Golinger and Jean-Guy Allard, a Canadian journalist resident in Cuba.
On this occasion, the perspicacity of Golinger, who is participating in the international fair for the second time, impelled her to expose the constant onslaught of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, "which, to date, we have been unable to halt," after studying the cases of Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras and Venezuela.
"This is a visit of exposé, to achieve maximum impact and, in one way, a pretext to outline that message and to prompt reflection on the constant imperial acts of aggression and their various manifestations." Moreover, it lays out "all the marvelous things that we have achieved" in the subcontinent, she affirmed in an interview with Granma.
Golinger proposes to take up this selection of political, economic, cultural and social events that are evidence of Washington’s tactics and strategies in 2009, maintaining its interference in the region, as "a weapon in the defense of our revolutions."
At this point in the conversation, she stops to observe that the coup d’état in Honduras last June "has taught us the need to take care of our spaces, to recognize that the enemy is everywhere," adding that the book is to be published in Honduras this year.
Likewise the author of The Chávez Code (2005) and Bush vs. Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela, the writer believes that the strengthening of Latin American integration, fundamentally through the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) has prompted an increase in U.S. right-wing aggression, "Because we constitute a threat to its domination in the region."
Integration that has expanded its borders to the rest of the world, and that "seeks to lift up our countries without exploitation, or competition, through the principles of solidarity, integration and cooperation," she notes, commenting that Cuba and Venezuela constitute the vanguard of this South-South union.
Despite the fact that she was born and raised in the United States and "talks like a gringo" – as she reproaches herself – Golinger directs all her energy and passion into fighting for social justice, and emphasizes that cooperation among ALBA countries "is perceived outside of our bloc with much hope, because we are constructing a more just social model."
She gives the example of the Bolivarian Revolution, which has transformed all sectors of Venezuelan society, as well as making an impact at international level on account of that nation’s significance to the world, with the figure of Chávez. "We are constructing a country that was in ruins, despite its natural resources. Then this president comes along, without experience in politics, moreover, and look what he’s done!"
In this struggle against constant aggression, the writer notes the leading role of the alternative media: "Telesur has had a fundamental role in dismantling the received opinions of the international media and in promoting another class of journalism, which consists of going into and bearing witness to the facts."
At the same time, she expresses her enthusiasm at one of the first printed copies of the only Venezuelan English-language newspaper, Correo de Orinoco International. "It is the first time that there is information in English from a Venezuelan perspective, from the Venezuelan revolution," she affirms with pride.
Golinger told us that she intends to continue exposing the principal maneuvers of the powerful in Latin America and in that proposition, she says, she can count on her friend and colleague Jean-Guy Allard.

Translated by Granma International