Author: Alicia

Japan and the U.S. announced new Defense Cooperation Guidelines, the first revision since 1997, at a 2+2 meeting Monday of the countries’ defense and foreign affairs ministers/secretaries—Secretary of State John Kerry of State, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, and Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida.

Foreign Minister Kishida implied that the “reinterpretation” of the Constitution announced by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Cabinet last year, which would allow Japan to join in a U.S. war against China (or others) was a completed fact. But Abe deferred taking the issue to the Diet until next year, uncertain that it would pass (even many in his own party do not want to overthrow Japan’s post-war pacifist Constitution). The reinterpretation requires legislative changes which are far from certain to pass.

Kerry was explicit that this new concept was written into the Guidelines: “Today we mark the establishment of Japan’s capacity to defend not just its own territory, but also the United States and other partners as needed.” It would appear that U.S. approval supersedes Japan’s own constitutional procedures.

Equally egregious is the statement in the Defense Department release: “Other business in the meetings included the U.S. affirmation that the Senkaku Islands are territories of Japan and fall under the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security.” This totally contradicts the official U.S. position that it will not take sides in territorial disputes—China and Japan contest sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. President Obama last year belligerently asserted that he considered the contested islands to fall under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, but claimed it was only because the contested islands were being governed by Japan, not that he was taking sides on the sovereignty issue. Kerry, in his statement Monday to the press, maintained that cover story — but the Defense release dropped the pretense and asserted Japanese sovereignty—a blatant provocation of China.

The 2+2 leaders also announced the expansion of the U.S. missile defense posture in Japan, reporting that two more U.S. ballistic missile defense destroyers will be based in Japan, and that a second X-band radar construction site announced earlier will proceed. These also constitute direct military threats to China in the context of Obama’s first strike policy against China (Prompt Global Strike and Air-Sea Battle).

The resistance to the supranational straitjacket masquerading as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (TPP) continues to galvanize Democrats, especially in the wake of Obama’s callous, imperial dismissal that Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others were being “dishonest” in their criticisms. In fact, Arizona Democrat Raul Grijalva took the fight directly to Obama (and implicitly Hillary Clinton) telling Roll Call magazine this morning, that, “if the vast majority of Democrats in the House are willing to confront their President, it only makes sense that any candidate for that position is on the line.”

A lot of latitude has been handed to Clinton, about her equivocating statement that she is “closely watching” the TPP. Yesterday, Politico put the lie to those statements, running comments by White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Shultz at a press conference April 22, telling reporters that, as far as they know, Hillary Clinton is foursquare behind them and fully supportive of the TPP. “I haven’t seen anything to suggest any distance,” is the way Schultz put it, and, when asked if the White House considers Clinton an ally on trade, Schultz said “yes.”

For their part, Senators Warren and Sherrod Brown are not backing down. On April 25, they wrote a powerful letter to Obama, urging him to make the text of the TPP available to the public. “Your Administration has deemed the draft text of the agreement classified and kept it hidden from public view,” they say, “thereby making it a secret deal. It is currently illegal for the press, experts, advocates, or the general public to review the text of this agreement. And while you noted that Members of Congress may walk over … and read the text of the agreement — as we have done — you neglected to mention that we are prohibited by law from discussing the specifics of that text in public.”

They make the case that, in 2001, even George Bush made “portions” of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) deal public “several months” before the Congressional vote on fast track. At the time, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick noted that the release would “make international and its economic and social benefits more understandable to the public and would increase public awareness of and support” for the deal. “We respectfully suggest,” they say, “that characterizing the assessments of labor unions, journalists, Members of Congress, and others who disagree with your approach to transparency on trade issues as ‘dishonest’ is both untrue and unlikely to serve the best interests of the American people.”

Glass-Steagall promoter Ellen Brown wrote a piece over the April 25-26 weekend, in which she took aim at the supranational Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) courts. After quoting revelations made by Yves Smith and others, Brown concludes that, “something else besides attracting investment money and encouraging foreign trade seems to be going on. The TPP would destroy our republican form of government under the rule of law, by elevating the rights of investors — also called the rights of ‘capital’ — above the rights of the citizens. That means that TPP is blatantly unconstitutional.”

In Monday’s Australian blog MacroBusiness, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman expose that, after examination of the intellectual property and investment chapters that have been leaked via WikiLeaks, the TPP would establish a U.S.-style regulatory structure that would hand considerable monopoly-style power to U.S. pharmaceutical and digital firms. “Included in the draft intellectual property chapter was the proposal to extend patent protection and strengthen monopolies on clinical data. It also flagged the extension of patents for new forms of known substances, as well as on new uses on old medicines—an outcome that would lead to evergreening, whereby patents can be renewed continuously.”

The question remains as to whether this resistance can be galvanized into the larger question, of removal of Obama for his accumulating crimes, and for his future one, the imminent threat of global thermonuclear war.

By his blatant attacks on Senators of this own party who oppose his “trade policy,” President Obama has walked into a trap of his own making, as EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche has stressed in recent days. Obama has become “a question of dictatorship” for the United States, at the same time as his “regime change” wars in the Mideast and North Africa have unleashed terrorism throughout the region and are murdering thousands by drowning in the Mediterranean Sea.

Globally, a complete alternative to Bush’s and Obama’s disastrous policies has formed, in the “win-win” economic growth and scientific development policies of the BRICS’ and allied leaderships. Even Europe, made culpable in the mass deaths of refugees from Obama’s area of war operations, has had enough. With the world changed and an anti-Obama revolt from within, the time has come to force him out of office.

Obama has made his own evil trap. He tried to wreck the new international development banks China has initiated, by threats to keep nations out of them. That failed, and now he is attempting to force through a confrontation with China and the BRICS in the form of the notorious, secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) swindle disguised as a “trade agreement.” By continuing his fraud against Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, he is refusing to let American citizens see or ask about what their future livelihood depends on, and stumbling toward impeachment. The head of the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives said today, “The vast majority of Democrats in the House are willing to confront their President, [and] it only makes sense that any candidate for that position is on the line.”

Obama is actually an emblem of the British imperial policy of population reduction. His attack on the Congress for a Wall Street trade swindle reflects this, his unleashing of chaos and terror among ruined nations of the Mideast and North Africa, his pushing for nuclear confrontation with Russia and China which could destroy human civilization.

The mass deaths by drowning in the Mediterranean Sea off Obama’s “regime-changed” Libya, mark him indelibly as among the enemies of humanity. The political resources are coming together, in the world and within the United States, such that he can be forced out.

Chinese Professor Pan Guang was the guest of the Schiller Institute on April 24, 2015 at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Professor Pan spoke about the challenges and victories China has met in pursuit of the their recently initiated “New Silk Road” project.

Professor Pan Guang is Vice Chairman and Professor of the Shanghai Center for International Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Studies, Director of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Study Center in Shanghai, Dean of the Center of Jewish Studies Shanghai, and Vice President of the Chinese Association of Middle East Studies.

Professor Pan is the author of numerous works in a wide variety of areas related to the Middle East, Central Asia and the Asia Pacific as well as the role of the Jewish population in China throughout its history. He has been an authoritative commentator on Middle East policies for many years. And as the Middle East has experienced sweeping changes over the past few years, so has China become a much more significant player in the international arena. In particular, the proposal by Chinese President Xi Jinping in August 2013 for developing a Silk Road Economic Belt has created the parameters of a new development order which is destined to touch most of the countries in the world, including the countries in the Middle East region. As Geng Xiaosheng, China’s envoy to the Middle East, recently noted, the infrastructure projects envisioned by China’s “One Belt and One Road’’ are a necessary prerequisite for any durable Middle East peace. Therefore, for anyone interested in Middle East affairs, the enhanced role of China in the region will be of absolutely critical importance.

by EIR Staff

The evidence is clear: The Barack Obama who now comments, distant and seemingly uninvolved, on the death of 900 migrants in a single boat, is the murderer quietly viewing the scene of his crime, while media investigators scurry about pointing fingers at Europe. And his crime is not the murder of these 900 only.

It is Obama’s jihadi killers in Libya — the ones who have shot and bombed their way into power in Tripoli since the Obama/British “regime change” bombing and invasion of 2011 — who are behind the boat smuggling operations in which unknown thousands of migrants have died at sea. The U.S. assassination of Muammar Qaddafi (“We came, we saw: He died,” intoned Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Qaddafi’s corpse) turned the former state of Libya into the fountainhead of terrorism for all of North Africa, the Sahel, and even Syria. Now the “winners” of Obama’s murder sweepstakes in Tripoli, are organizing the herding of refugees onto boats to drown by the thousands. “The Mediterranean is being made a cemetery,” cried Pope Francis, and it is Obama and Cameron who laid it waste.

Moreover: The same Obama crime, then further abetted by his close friend of the time, President Erdogan of Turkey, brought Islamic jihadis armed from Libya’s weapon stores into Syria; and with the growth of ISIS, into Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from those countries as well, trying now to reach Europe, have found themselves at the mercy of the Tripoli jihadi command which Obama fostered.

Consider the great debate over “responsibility” now going on among European governments, as a discussion of how to deal with the growing numbers of victims of Obama’s (and David Cameron’s) crime of unleashing and arming murderous terrorism throughout the entire Mediterranean region. Justice for this war policy by the great Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House, begins by throwing him out of it.

‘Saving Benghazi’

On the weekend of April 18-19, between 700 and 900 African migrants reportedly died in one of the largest shipwrecks in modern times in Libyan territorial waters. Since the start of 2014, the Los Angeles Times reports, there have been about 4,400 boat deaths of migrants coming from Libya — with 900 so far in 2015 before the latest incident. Some estimates say 20,000 have drowned, among 200,000 fleeing migrants.

These and other deaths as a result of the 2011 Libya war are not “collateral” damage — they were the intent. It was Obama and the British who rammed through the UN Security Council resolution in 2011, in the name of saving Libyan civilians from a “humanitarian” disaster in Benghazi; it was Obama and Cameron who lied to the UNSC, saying there was no plan for regime change; then a US-UK led military coalition eventually started the regime change by bombing Libya. For specific reasons which might have to do with his election campaign funding, French President Nicholas Sarkozy inaugurated the air strikes, informing his EU partners after the attack had started. And it was French Intelligence under Sarkozy which led rebels to capture and murder Qaddafi.

It was Obama, Britain and the Saudi and Qatari Wahhabis who put the al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)’s people into power, and later ran the ratline of arms from Libya to Syria, that built up Al Nusra and the Islamic State.

When U.S., UK, and French bombers and special forces “saved” the city of Benghazi from an imminent advance of Qaddafi’s armed forces in 2011, they were saving the powers in that city who had sent a greater proportion of foreign jihadis to fight U.S. forces in Iraq since 2003, than any other region.

The Obama Administration is effectively repeating that criminal folly today with its Saudi “ally,” saving al-Qaeda in Yemen from the “Houthi” rebel forces who were in process of defeating al-Qaeda until Saudi Arabia started bombing with Obama’s active backing. Al-Qaeda in Yemen is consequently expanding its murderous operations — the constant result of all Obama’s actions around the Mediterranean.

The Muslim Brotherhood-al Qaeda forces Obama “saved” in Benghazi (generally run by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group [lifg] of Muhammad Belhaj) went on to spawn and link up with other militias in chaotic Libya, murdering Americans at the Benghazi consulate in 2012, setting up terror training bases in the South and East of the country, and running weapons to Syria and Iraq. After Libyans elected a representative government in 2014, the LIFG and Muslim Brotherhood took over Tripoli, and forced the elected government to flee to Tobruk on the Egyptian border. Tripoli’s “mayor” al-Harati is a veteran of leading an al-Qaeda force of 600 jihadis in Syria.

Obama’s White House now insists that Libya’s elected government, in exile in Tobruk, must “negotiate” with the murderers in Tripoli to form a new government.

These are the same jihadi killers, now profiteering by herding people onto the ships of death.

Obama’s and al-Qaeda’s Mediterranean

Il Giornale war correspondent Gian Micalessin, in an Apr. 20 analysis, pointed to the Obama Administration-backed Tripoli “government,” as the entity running the traffic of human beings through the Mediterranean, in an April 20th article.

Since last August, when the Fajr Libya (Libyan Dawn, part of LIFG) jihadist militia took power in Tripoli, the Tripoli gang has been running the migrant racket, for purposes of financing its war against the elected government in Tobruk, Micalessin reports.

Fajr Libya is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and by former members of the LIFG. Tripoli has “intense relationships” with the jihadist militias that run the human traffic at the southern Libyan borders with Sudan, Chad and Niger. Since August, those militias have had a green light from the Tripoli gang to move tens of thousands of human beings through the desert, to the northern coast of Libya. The southern smugglers get $800 for each migrant, and the northern smugglers charge another $1,500 apiece. The “load” that sank on April 19, ensured an income of $900,000, he says, and the money is shared between the smugglers and the Fajr Libya leadership in Tripoli.

Micalessin identifies that the jihadi “coalition” not only has support from Qatar and Turkey, but is also close to Ansar al Sharia, a terrorist organization already “very close to the Islamic State.” Ansar al Sharia was the leading jihadi group in the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012, the anniversary of the 9/11 Saudi-backed terror attack in 2001.

A European Union emergency meeting called to address the migrants issue on April 23, reiterated support for Obama’s UN “negotiation” between the Tripoli terrorists and the Tobruk government. This, although all EU governments know the truth about the Tripoli gang.

That same meeting also failed to come up with any serious measures to either save human lives, or solve the roots of the migrants crisis. The EU refused to revive the successful Italian “Mare Nostrum” Operation, which had rescued over 100,000 migrants from October 2013 to November 1, 2014. Instead, they increased funding for the current “Triton” operation, which is a border patrol mission operating within EU territorial borders.

Furthermore, the EU failed to adopt a change in current immigration laws, which do not allow immigrants to reside in countries other than their country of arrival. This puts an enormous strain on Italy, the main target of migrant ships, and on bankrupt Greece. The most they could agree on, was that EU member countries can host contingents of immigrants “on a voluntary basis.” For the rest, the EU will re-patriate “unauthorized economic migrants to countries of origin and transit,” as the final communique states.

How this will be implemented is an open question. Most hypocritical on this was British Prime Minister Cameron, who offered British ships for the Triton operation, under the condition that rescued migrants are not carried to Britain! This is the same Cameron who is personally co-responsible for the immense human tragedy unfolding in Libya and northern Africa.

Furthermore, the EU Council has given a mandate to EU High Representative Federica Mogherini, to explore ways to destroy smugglers’ ships in Libyan ports, before they sail. This will hardly be possible, as international law prescribes that such operations require a UN mandate (possible) and an agreement with the target country (impossible).

The other root of the crisis,— poverty,— has not been addressed by the EU leaders. And yet, the fact that the 900 who died in the shipwreck on April 18 were coming from Sub-Saharan Africa (Sahel), identifies in poverty and hunger a clear cause of the problem. This is the area infested by Boko Haram terrorists, but there is at least a three decades-long history of migrations from the Sahel to Northern Africa and to Europe, due to poverty caused by desertification.

Conscious Depopulation

Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented on the situation in a webcast on April 22 [translated from German]:

“I see here in one glance, in the reactions to this situation, two completely different systems, two completely different paradigms. One, is really a form of a new fascism. One really has to see the absolutely cynical manner in which the EU replaced this Mare Nostrum program, maintained by Italy alone for the past year, with a program which no longer makes the attempt to save refugees from the Mediterranean Sea, but which rather says with complete cynicism, “The more of you who drown, the more the terror for those who will then be too frightened to come.” That is really the total moral bankruptcy of this EU…. We knowingly let thousands of human beings drown, to defend Fortress Europe somehow.

“This is being done in the same spirit as the destruction of the Greek economy through the Troika, in full awareness that the death rate in that country will be increased; the same thing can be seen in Italy, Spain and Portugal. And it is the same spirit which blocks real development, which simply refuses real help — to Africa in general. You see this inhuman behavior, which even accepts depopulation, reduction of population; so that if you take all these aspects together, you are forced to suspect that this is exactly the intention — namely, to cut the population down.”

Reports about the April 19 IMF report featured the warning of a general debt blowout if Greece leaves the euro, or the Federal Reserve raises interest rates too soon or too fast. But the report also contained a highly unusual and important admission: The biggest London banks have been running a trillion-dollar “carry trade” speculation into China, violating that country’s regulations and attempting to manipulate its currency, the yuan.

To take one exemplary story about the IMF report, that of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Telegraph April 20: “Borrowing in dollars outside the U.S. has surged from $2 trillion to $9 trillion over the past 15 years [due to Bank of Japan and Fed quantitative easing—ed.]. Half of this is now concentrated in emerging markets…. It includes at least $1.1 trillion of loans to Chinese companies, much of it through Hong Kong, and intended to circumvent China’s internal credit curbs. It is now clear that many banks and investors have been engaged in a currency “carry trade,” betting — wrongly, as it now turns out — that the dollar would weaken against the yuan.”

Much could be said about this in regard to why there are real estate and commodity bubbles in the Chinese economy.

But what is most relevant is that all of the trans-Atlantic governments, at every G7 and G20 meeting of this century, have relentlessly demanded that China allow the value of the yuan to rise, backed by tirades on the subject from members of Congress and European parliaments and from nearly all trade unions, chambers of commerce, etc.

It turns out, that they were all screaming at China, all that time, to support the City of London banks’ Hong Kong carry trade speculations, which required for their super-profitability that the yuan keep rising in value. Under that international pressure China did allow the yuan to rise, slowly but steadily, for years.

But the government of Xi Jinping reversed that policy in 2014, in order to finally enforce its own currency-control policies, which Evans-Pritchard referred to, against the operations of the London banks in Hong Kong.

Result: London and Wall Street speculations “reversed,” and big banks lost money. Result: Now some Congressional Democrats object to Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) swindle, not so much because it is an attack on the United States, but that it is not enough of an attack on China. Like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, they say they oppose the TPP; but, they might vote for it if accompanied by a “currency manipulator” designation on China.

Tell the truth, Senator: It is your “constituents” in Wall Street boardrooms, led by their more clever London counterparts, who have been manipulating China’s currency, along with rigging international interest rates, foreign exchange markets, gold prices, etc., etc. That has ended with the emergence of the new policy of the BRICS. Obama’s TPP is part of an attempt to provoke war with China and Russia. Oppose him.

The Russian Defense Ministry official representative, Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Thursday that Moscow hoped the Department of State would be rid of its status as a whirlpool of absurd declarations after the former spokesperson, Jen Psaki, quit her position, TASS reported yesterday.

“However, we were mistaken, since the claims voiced by the new spokesperson, Marie Harf, about the concentration of the highest amount of Russian air defense systems in eastern Ukraine since August, again astonish us with the level of their incompetence,” General Konashenkov said.

Marie Harf claimed earlier that the increasingly complicated nature of training courses for the Donbass separatists “leaves no doubt that Russia is involved” — i.e., as usual, the claims of troops, tanks, air defenses, etc. come with no effort to provide any evidence.

General Konashenkov joked: “The Russian Defense Ministry will not be surprised if it hears one of these days that Russia is accused of rolling out a strike group of aircraft carriers in the Lugansk region, or of an illegal entry into the First City Pond in Donetsk by a Russian nuclear submarine.”

He said such statements aim to stir public commotion ahead of the NATO summit, due in Antalya on May 13-14.

He added, however, that the very real concern is that the U.S. training of Kiev troops, which began this week, is on the storming of buildings in urban districts, and is taking place “in the areas adjoining the zones of conflict in Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Artyomovsk, and Volnovakha,” despite claims to the contrary from Washington.

The world is on the verge of thermonuclear World War III. The reasons usually given for the confrontation between the US and Russia are bullshit. Rather, there are some people who intend for this to happen. “We are on the verge of virtual extinction, as the result of chain-reaction effects” of the madness of the British Empire and their Wall Street lackies faced with the end of their bankrupt system, Lyndon LaRouche said on April 21. Their failure to surrender their weakening grip on power, will drive them, in desperation, to have Obama launch World War III. “This is the first threat of human extinction in modern history,” LaRouche concluded.

Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, and retired Russian General Vladimir Dvorkin, warned, in an April 19 op-ed in the New York Times entitled “How To Avert a Nuclear War,” against one highly likely scenario for how World War III might happen. Cartwright, prior to joining the Joint Chiefs, was commander of US Strategic Command. Dvorkin, in a long career that spanned from 1958 until 2001, played a key role in the 1960’s development of Russia’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent, and later in the strategic arms talks of the 1970’s. These are two men intimately familiar with the strategic nuclear forces of their respective countries, including the command and control systems over those forces.

In their op-ed, Cartwright and Dvorkin proposed that both the US and Russia should eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies. They note, at the outset, the increasing strategic tensions between the US and Russia—tensions that diplomacy has done little to ease. “This makes it all the more critical for Russia and the United States to talk, to relieve the pressures to ‘use or lose’ nuclear forces during a crisis, and minimize the risk of a mistaken launch,” they write. “The fact is that we are still living with the nuclear-strike doctrine of the Cold War, which dictated three strategic options: first strike, launch on warning, and post-attack retaliation.” From there, they focus their attention on launch-on-warning, for which the potential of an accidental launch, or a launch based on false information, is very high,— aggravated by short warning times and Russia’s compromised warning systems (Russia currently has no operating early warning satellites, depends only on ground-based radar systems). As a result, the timelines, they write, “are very compressed and the opportunities for ill-considered decisions very real.”

“This risk should motivate the presidents of Russia and the United States to decide in tandem to eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies,” they write. “They should reinstitute military-to-military talks, which were suspended over the Ukraine crisis, to pursue this stand-down as an urgent priority.” Such talks, however, are very unlikely as long as the insane Barack Obama is president of the United States.

“In periods of heightened tensions and reduced decision times, the likelihood of human and technical error in control systems increases,” they conclude. “Launch-on-warning is a relic of Cold War strategy whose risk today far exceeds its value. Our leaders urgently need to talk and, we hope, agree to scrap this obsolete protocol before a devastating error occurs.”

Now you can’t say that you weren’t warned.

Thousands of people are dying in the Mediterranean trying to flee the horror created by President Barack Obama’s criminal wars across the North Africa and the Middle East, leaving nations like Libya, Syria and Yemen in chaos under terrorist gangs backed by America’s “ally” Saudi Arabia. An estimated 3,000-5,000 people are crowding into boats every day, willing to die at sea rather than live in the Hell created by Obama’s insanity.

In discussion with the LaRouchePAC Policy Committee earlier this week, LaRouche emphasized:

President Barack Obama admitted Thursday morning to killing three more Americans in January in drone strikes on the Pakistan-Afghan border area. In speaking to the press, he expressed “tremendous sorrow” that two Western hostages—American Dr. Warren Weinstein, a USAID worker held by al-Qaeda since 2011, and Italian Giovanni LoPorto, held since 2012—had been killed in one drone strike.

He did not mention, however, that two additional Americans had also been killed in these raids. That was left to a statement released by the White House yesterday morning, which described Americans Ahmed Farouq and Adam Gadahn as “fighters” for al-Qaeda, and expressed no regret, nor gave any excuse for the President of the United States killing Americans on his own volition without following explicit Constitutional due process requirements. The White House statement claimed they had not been personally targeted, but only showed up among the dead in a drone attack on an al Qaeda camp. Obama insists that he has the right to determine who is a terrorist and who is not, and to kill anyone he wants to, along with whoever happens to be with them.
Lyndon LaRouche has stated that the world is now closer to global thermonuclear war than anytime in modern history, driven by Obama’s support for a Ukrainian regime which has restored the Nazi battalions which fought alongside Hitler in World War II, committed to a war on Russia, while also supporting al- Qaeda linked terrorist groups in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, and fully supporting the Wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia which created and funds these terrorist groups.

The powers of Wall Street and the City of London are faced with the collapse of the derivative bubble, now far larger than it was before the 2008 collapse due to Obama’s subservience to the too-big-to-fail banks. The coming Greek default, the collapse of the oil patch speculation, or a number of other sparks could blow out the entire system. A revolt is growing within the Democratic Party against Obama and his controllers, as potential Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley has launched a war on Wall Street, demanding the restoration of Glass-Steagall, while he and others are standing up to Obama’s effort to ram the TPP through Congress, denouncing it as a “race to the bottom” which does not facilitate trade, but undermines sovereignty of those foolish enough to join it—including the U.S. itself.

But they must stop the madness now, before economic collapse and war decimate the world population, by ending Obama’s murderous reign of terror, removing him from office now.

Tsinghua Professor Hu Angang, a staunch defender of China’s directed credit and SOE system, was given pages in the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs May/June issue to write on China’s “New Normal” — centered on slower growth. He debunks the western pundits talking about the failure and inevitable crash of China’s economy.

With all the various measures of China’s economy being used to show China’s economy to be bigger or smaller than that of the US, Hu writes: “The best method for comparing the two economies objectively is power generation, since it is physical and quantifiable. It also closely tracks modernization: without electricity, after all, or at least without a lot of it, one can’t run factories or build skyscrapers.

“In 1900, China generated 0.01% of the power the United States did. That figure rose to 1.2% in 1950 and 34% in 2000, with China surpassing the United States in 2011.” The article has a graph showing electricity generation for the two countries from 1980 to 2012, showing the lines cross in 2011.

Hu provides other meaningful statistics:

• Chinese life expectancy at 76, compared to 79 in the US;
• comparable educational standards;
• income inequality now lower in China than in the US.

Hu notes that the 2011-2015 12th Five Year Plan already called for a growth rate of about 7%, and that China had achieved five of its critical goals:

1- To create 45 million new urban jobs — 50 million were created;

2- expansion of service sector jobs from 43% to 48% — achieved;

3- lifting spending on scientific innovation from 1.75% of GDP to 2.20% – reached, resulting in 50% more patent applications in China than in the US

4- expansion of healthcare, which now covers 95% of the population

5- environmental indicators, which have improved but have far to go.

In an interview with France2 on April 21, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad delivered a stinging denunciation of France and other Western governments for their material support for the jihadists—the nonexistent “moderate opposition”—and for creating the chaotic conditions in the region which led to ISIS’s emergence.

Responding to France2‘s hostile and provocative interviewer, David Pujadas, who quoted “analysts” charging that it was Assad who helped ISIS emerge, Assad shot back that ISIS “was created in Iraq in 2006 under the supervision of the Americans. I’m not in Iraq and I wasn’t in Iraq, and I wasn’t controlling Iraq. The Americans controlled Iraq, and ISIS came from Iraq to Syria, because chaos is contagious.” When there is chaos in a certain country, he continued, “this is a fertile soil for the terrorists to come. So, when there is chaos in Syria, ISIS came to Syria. Before ISIS, came al-Nusra Front, which is al-Qaeda, and before that you had the Muslim Brotherhood. They all represent the same grassroots for ISIS to come later.”

The Syrian President repeatedly debunked Pujadas’s assertions that the Syrian army uses chemical weapons, chlorine gas, barrel bombs, etc. returning to the central point that the intervention of Western nations created the conditions for ISIS’s creation. Look at the air raids carried out by the 60-nation “coalition,” he said. Syria is a small country, but “what we do is tenfold sometimes, than what they do in one day. Is that serious?…they’re not serious so far. And the other proof is that ISIS has expanded in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in the region in general. So how can you say it was effective? They’re not serious, that’s why they don’t help anyone in this region.”

The point is, he emphasized, “the coalition against terrorism cannot be formed by countries who support the terrorists at the same time…they send weapons to the same terrorists under the title of ‘moderate opposition’…So, this is a contradiction. It doesn’t work.”

Al-Assad reserved his harshest words for the French. In response to Pujadas’s asking al-Assad whether he takes any responsibility for what’s happened in Syria in recent years, Assad replied “thing are not absolute… Everybody has a responsibility. We have our own problems in Syria…but now I’m talking about what brought ISIS here: the chaos, and your government, the government—or if you want to call it regime—the French regime, as they call us, is responsible for supporting those jihadists that they called the moderate opposition.”

As for his willingness to engage in dialogue with France, Assad stated, “We’re always interested in dialogue with anyone, but that is based on the policy. How can we make dialogue with a regime that supports terrorists in our country, and what for?… When they change their policy, we’ll be ready to make dialogue….” Assad made a point of noting that Francois Holland is the most unpopular president in the history of France since the 1950s.

When Pujadas mentioned that the French Prime Minister had denounced Assad as a butcher, Assad caustically replied, “the statements of the officials in France, no one is taking them seriously now, for one reason: because France is a satellite somehow to the American policy in the region; it’s not independent, it doesn’t have the weight, it doesn’t have the credibility.” He underscored that he was interested in what Syrian people think, not the French.

While a decision is expected by the emergency meeting of EU government leaders on April 23 (the first one since 9/11), the recent refugee tragedy is spurring a debate in Italy on: 1. What to do immediately? 2. What to do in the long-term? 3. Who is responsible for the mess in Africa?

Hardly anyone objects to the assertion that a standard of rescue operations must be re-established, which should at least be equal to the Mare Nostrum operation. Mare Nostrum allowed Italian ships to save human lives regardless of whether they were in international, Italian, or Libyan territorial waters. Mare Nostrum cost EU9 million per month, entirely financed by Italy. Triton has been funded with EU3 million per month.

The Renzi government is also pushing the “go and destroy” policy, i.e., sink the smugglers’ boats, which on one side won’t prevent smugglers from getting vessels elsewhere, and at the same time runs the risk of producing collateral damage to innocent people.

The real issue is how to eliminate the two roots of African emigration: war and poverty. On one hand, the Libyan state must be rebuilt, and on the other side, capital must be invested to develop those countries. Nothing on this can be expected from the EU, as it would mean getting rid of British geopolitics, challenging London and Obama and the financial markets.

However, there is a lot of resentment in Italy against the Anglo-French coalition that initiated the Libyan war, and the Obama administration which has backed it. Everybody knows that Washington is currently backing the pro-terrorist factions in Tripoli and thereby making any political solution impossible.

A preferred target of attacks is former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, “who had the gall to inform his allies that he had given the order to attack, after his bombers had taken off,” as the weekly Panorama writes.

“Does anyone remember Sarkozy, Cameron and Erdogan’s triumphant speeches in 2011 in Benghazi?” asks Il Sole 24 Ore strategist Alberto Negri.

And the conservative daily Il Foglio even calls for “Bringing Sarko la Racaille to the UN Court,” using the term “racaille” — vermin, riffraff — that then Interior Minister Sarkozy used to characterize the immigrants who rioted in the French suburban slums, the banlieues.

In Great Britain, UKIP MEP Nigel Farage issued a scathing attack on Cameron and Sarkozy, as reported by the Daily Telegraph, which asked whether a “stronger Europe” wouldn’t help solve the problem. He shot back, “It was the European response that caused this problem in the first place. The fanaticism of Sarkozy and Cameron to bomb Libya. They have completely destabilized Libya, to turn it into a country with much savagery, to turn it into a place where for Christians the place is now virtually impossible. We ought to be honest and say we have directly caused this problem.”