Why Assange Is Now Likely to Be Freed

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

On May 20th, the AP headlined “Sweden requests detention order for WikiLeaks’ Assange”. This could oddly turn out to be the key event in order finally to set Assage free from his many years of imprisonment-without-trial. Here is why:

The meticulous journalist John Helmer reported on May 14th that the UK will likely extradite Julian Assange not to the U.S. but to Sweden, and Helmer gave reasons why Sweden almost certainly would never extradite him to the U.S.

The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, in its article on Helmer, smears him with an undocumented allegation that he is or was a secret KGB agent, but then alleges that he also is (or might be) “the journalist residing in Moscow who has been a pebble in Mikhail Prokhorov’s shoe since oligarchs have been collecting their billions under the protection of a corrupt, Fascist state…. the kind of journalist who turns up dead once a month or so inside Putin’s Russia.” So, the CIA’s contending accounts of Helmer suggest both that he is or was a KGB agent and that he is (or might be) in danger of being killed by the ‘fascist’ Putin. Obviously, the CIA doesn’t like what John Helmer reports. Maybe that’s the reason why this internationally respected Australian journalist who has long specialized in reporting about Russian foreign policy from Russia, chose to remain, instead of to leave, when Russia in 1991 ended the Cold War on its side (though the U.S. regime secretly continued it on its side).

Helmer’s lengthy article points out that:

“Identification of the Pentagon as Assange’s target is significant because his alleged offence is explicitly excluded from extradition under Article V Sections 4 and 5 of Sweden’s extradition law.”

That law is a treaty between U.S. and Sweden, and is therefore legally binding upon both countries, and it’s titled “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and SWEDEN Convention on Extradition (with. Protocol). Signed at Washington, on 24 October 1961” and it contains (and Helmer especially emphasizes) this:

Article V Extradition shall not be granted in any of the following circumstances: 1. When the person sought has already been or is at the time of the request being proceeded against in the requested State in accordance with the criminal laws of that State for the offense for which his extradition is requested. 2. When the legal proceedings or the enforcement of the penalty for the offense has become barred by limitation according to the laws of either the requesting State or the requested State. 3. When the person sought has been or will be tried in the requesting State by an extraordinary tribunal or court. 4. When the offense is purely military. 5. If the offense is regarded by the requested State as a political offense or as an offense connected with a political offense. 6. If in the specific case it is found to be obviously incompatible with the requirements of humane treatment, because of, for example, the youth or health of the person sought, taking into account also the nature of the offense and the interests of the requesting State.

However, there also is yet another reason why extradition by Sweden of Assange to the United States would violate that law, and it is that this law’s Article II says: “Extradition shall be granted, subject to the provisions of this Convention, for the following offenses:” and NONE of those 25 listed crimes fits the U.S. allegations against Assange.

The U.S. indictment of Assange, which was issued on 6 March 2018 and long kept “Under Seal” (or hidden from the public), and which was issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, is based entirely upon charges against, as the Indictment itself states in its opening, “Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, was an intelligence analyst in the United States Anny, who was deployed to Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq.” It is a case regarding “the unauthorized disclosure or retention or negligent handling of classified information.” It is entirely a U.S. military matter, which, as the indictment there directly continues, “could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to the advantage of a foreign nation.” The indictment does not assert that (if Manning actually did what is charged) his/her actions in this matter “did cause” but only that they “could cause” — and on this shoddy legal basis of a mere possibility, Manning is in prison, regardless of whether she “did” cause any harm, ever, to anyone (except to the U.S. officials who became embarrassed at what she disclosed). This is the police-state basis upon which Manning is — and now, dependently, Assange is — alleged to be, a “criminal,” by the U.S. regime, in the U.S. ‘democracy’.

So: if Sweden does receive, from UK, Julian Assange, then Sweden would need to violate Swedish law in order to honor the U.S. regime’s extradition-request.

As to whether Helmer’s argument that UK is likely to extradite Assange to Sweden is correct, I refer the reader to the entirety of Helmer’s article, for that information.

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

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How America Has Declared War Against Russia

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

How did America declare war against Iraq? It started in 1990 when the U.S. received an opportunity to win the approval of the American people and of much else of the world, to initiate economic sanctions against Iraq for having invaded Kuwait. This was an economic embargo against Iraq and destroyed Iraq’s economy.

Here’s what the CIA reports about the effectiveness of that economic blockade:

“GDP per capita went from approximately $2304 in 1989 to $938 in 1990. From 1991 until 1996 per capita GDP never rose above $507.” That was a 78% decline over that 7-year period. The CIA goes on to brag: “Following the war with Iran in 1988, Iraq was ranked 50th out of 130 countries on the 1990 UNDP Human Development Index (HDI). … By 1995, Iraq had declined to 106th out of 174 countries and by 2000 it had plummeted to 126th.”

This was America’s (and its allies’) ‘humanitarian’ response to Saddam Hussein’s violent disagreement with Emir Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah of Kuwait, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. It’s also paradigmatic for the way in which America (and its allies) initiate the empire’s wars, these days.

The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia’s article “United States sanctions against Iran” says that:

“The first United States sanctions against Iran were imposed by President Carter in November 1979 by Executive Order 12170 after a group of radical students seized the American Embassy and took hostage the people inside in Tehran after the U.S. permitted the exiled Shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment.[5] The Executive Order froze about $12 billion in Iranian assets, including bank deposits, gold and other properties. Some assets—Iranian officials say $10 billion, U.S. officials say much less—still remain frozen pending resolution of legal claims arising from the revolution. After the invasion of Iran by Iraq, the United States increased sanctions against Iran.”

So: America actually declared war against Iran in 1979, after the Iranian people overthrew the brutal dictator the Shah, whom the U.S. CIA imposed there back in 1953 in a coup which overthrew the democratically elected progressive Prime Minister of Iran, who wanted to nationalize the nation’s previously Western-controlled oil company. The aristocrats of America and of UK benefited enormously, but everbody else has suffered the consequences. And, so: after the U.S.-installed dictator finally got ousted in 1979, America immediately went to war against Iran, by imposing economic sanctions. All of this, too, is being done to Iran for ‘humanitarian’ reasons.

The Carter-imposed sanctions against iran were, however, weak. In 1980, Iran’s GDP was around $100 billion. by 1986, it was around $200 billion. Then it plunged back down to under $100 billion by 1986. (Reagan was far more hard-line than was Carter.) But from there it rose steadily, to around $600 billion in 2012, and it was $440 billion in 2017. But now it’s declining again, under Trump.

The Congressional Research Service issued on 22 April 2019, its “Iran Sanctions” study, which said:

Sanctions took a substantial toll on Iran’s economy, and sanctions relief caused Iran’s economy to rebound, although perhaps not to the extent that Iranians expected. The effects of the U.S. exit from the JCPOA have begun to register on Iran’s economy. …[During] 2010-2016 sanctions reduced Iran’s crude oil sales about 60% from the 2.5 mbd level of 2011, causing Iran to lose over $160 billion in oil revenues during that time.

So, America’s sanctions nowadays really are economic blockades. And any type of blockade constitutes an act of war. The United States is at war against Iran. That’s the reality — and it’s the U.S. regime’s fault, not Iran’s. Iran never threatened to invade America, but the U.S. regime now constantly threatens to invade Iran — the U.S. regime’s constant victim ever since 1953.

The ‘revolutions’ in the Arabic countries (“Arab Spring”) started in 2011. The U.S. and its allies generally supported them but not against America’s allies, such as Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. There, the U.S. regime opposed them. In Bahrain, for example,

On 1 April 2011, Hillary Clinton’s close aide Jacob “Jake” Sullivan sent this email to Vali Nasr (who left Iran in 1979 when the U.S. stooge there was ousted), who now is the Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (which trains America’s professional imperialists):

Word has it that Prince Bandar was in Pakistan last week asking for troops to be deployed in Kingdom and Bahrain to deal with civil unrest. Might also be used in other gulf states. There is precedence for this, when Pakistan deployed troops in the Kingdom in the 1980s to provide protection to the monarchy — and Pakistan was paid for it handsomely. Apparently Bandar also went to China to get Beijing’s support. Saudis are pushing Jordan to hang tough against reforms.

America’s military works for America’s billionaires and for their servants throughout the world.

On 4 September 2012, Glenn Greenwald headlined at Britain’s Guardian, “Why didn’t CNN’s international arm air its own documentary on Bahrain’s Arab Spring repression?” and he reported that, “A former CNN correspondent defies threats from her former employer to speak out about self-censorship at the network.” And:

In late March 2011, as the Arab Spring was spreading, CNN sent a four-person crew to Bahrain to produce a one-hour documentary on the use of internet technologies and social media by democracy activists in the region. Featuring on-air investigative correspondent Amber Lyon, the CNN team had a very eventful eight-day stay in that small, US-backed kingdom. … The portion Lyon and her team produced on Bahrain ended up as a 13-minute segment in the documentary. That segment, which as of now is available on YouTube, is a hard-hitting and unflinching piece of reporting that depicts the regime in a very negative light. … Upon returning from Bahrain in April, Lyon appeared on CNN several times to recount her own detention by security forces and to report on ongoing brutality by the regime against its own citizens, … As negative news stories of its brutal repression grew in the wake of the Arab Spring, the regime undertook a massive, very well-funded PR campaign to improve its image. … The long-time CNN employee said that “iRevolution” was vetted far more heavily than the typical documentary:

“Because Amber was relatively new in reporting on the region, and especially because of the vocal complaints from the Bahrainis, the documentary was heavily scrutinized. But nobody could ever point to anything factually or journalistically questionable in Amber’s reporting on Bahrain.” … On 19 June 2011 at 8pm, CNN’s domestic outlet in the US aired “iRevolution” for the first and only time. The program received prestigious journalism awards, including a 2012 Gold Medal from New York Festival’s Best TV and Films. Lyon, along with her segment producer Taryn Fixel, were named as finalists for the 2011 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. …

In March 2012, Lyon was laid off from CNN.

Her career was destroyed, because she was honest.

Her award-winning segment can be viewed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB2DeZBgTEk

She might be the most competent (and probably also the prettiest) reporter ever on U.S. TV, but she was totally blacklisted: no one would hire her. Her soaring career was simply finished.

Compare that U.S. protection of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa who owns Bahrain, versus what was done to Syria’s Government, and to its leader Bashar al-Assad, who is allied instead with both Iran and Russia. There are no sanctions against Bahrain. Ever since 1949 the CIA has been trying to overthrow Syria’s Government, and there are tons of sanctions against it, especially since 2005, and even more so after “May 01, 2012”.

The entire case for sanctions against Russia is pure lies. And that extends even all the way back to the Magnitsky Act in 2012 — pure lies. That lie-based law in 2012, authorizing the first anti-Russia sanctions, was the start of America’s war against Russia.

At least ever since 1990, sanctions have been not only an act of war by the United States and its allies, but the first stage in the escalating process toward, next, an attempted coup; and, if that fails to achieve the demanded “regime change,” then an outright U.S. invasion. It happens time and again, and a person would need to be an utter fool not to recognize the pattern by this time.

Recently, almost the entire U.S. Congress (419 to 3 in the House, and at first 97 to 2 in the Senate and then 98 to 2 there) voted to sanction Russia and to arm Ukraine however much will be necessary in order for Ukraine’s Government to conquer the two rejectionist parts of the former Ukrainian territory. But actually, the U.S., under Obama, had perpetrated a violent February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President and replaced him with fascists. That coup by the U.S. precipitated the breakaways of both Crimea and Donbass from Ukraine.

Furthermore, Congress wants to push Trump even harder on this — he hasn’t been globally suicidal enough to satisfy them; he’s not marching to WW III fast enough for them — and, so, they now have in the legislative hopper even more and harsher sanctions against Russia: S.3229 —

Energy Security Cooperation with Allied Partners in Europe Act of 2018, introduced by Republican Senator John Barrasso and co-sponsored by his fellow Republicans Steve Daine and Cory Gardner, 18 July 2018, 115th Congress, 2nd Session. Barrasso said when introducing the bill: “Germany and other countries are members of NATO, and the reason they are members of NATO is to protect themselves against Russian aggression.” For the U.S. regime, the Cold War never actually ended, but it did end on the Russian side, in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke apart and its communism ended and its Warsaw Pact mirror to America’s NATO military alliance ended. Secretly on the U.S.-and-allied side, it continued on, and has now intensified to exceed the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Maybe these sanctions, too, will win by a 98-to-2 margin. And this is in the time when there is no Soviet Union, and no Warsaw Pact (it has all been absorbed into NATO) and no Russian communism.

And, on 13 May 2019, Foreign Policy magazine bannered “EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Senate Threatens Sanctions Over Russian Pipeline: Washington and Berlin face off again over Nord Stream 2 as European ships are targeted.”

Could one then reasonably say that anybody who endorses the U.S. government, at least after it invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003 entirely on the basis of lies, is either stupid, or else evil? What third possible explanation for it could there possibly be? Is not the record, by now, crystal-clear, and repulsive to any decent person? Why aren’t people debating this question? There needs to be this public dialogue, in order to ward off a culmination of the vile direction in which things now are heading.

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

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The Best Analysis I’ve Seen of Current U.S. Geostrategy

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

On May 15th, Pepe Escobar, the globe-trotting independent international journalist who specializes in analyzing and explaining relations between the U.S., China, Russia, and Iran, delivered in Asia Times one of his finest columns, “What Putin and Pompeo did not talk about”.

Though Escobar often makes undocumented assertions, I have increasingly come to take them seriously because none of them, to my knowledge, has subsequently become disconfirmed, all have only stood stronger with the passage of time. I therefore include him among the very few writers whom my own articles occasionally link to though the given writer himself provides no links to his own sources. Apparently, he well vets all of his unnamed sources.

For the benefit of anyone who might question the veracity of Escobar’s chief allegation that the U.S. no longer possesses the capacity to play any role as (the self-appointed) policeman to the world, but cannot yet accept the fact, I link here to the video of the stunning verbal exchange that Escobar (though not providing any link to the source) quotes between U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo versus Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which verbal exchange occurred (though Escobar — as is sadly typical of him — fails to mention this) just before the formal meeting of the Arctic Council in Rovaniemi, Finland on May 6, 2019. This video-snip occurred right before Pompeo stood up German Prime Minister Angela Merkel on their scheduled meeting the next day May 7th in Berlin, and instead he flew (unscheduled) directly to Baghdad in order to persuade Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdel-Mahdi to allow U.S. military forces to use Iraq as a staging-area from which to invade Iran. (Mahdi seems to have said no.)

Anyway, here’s the exchange between Pompeo and Lavrov, which was telecast on May 13th in Russia but ignored by U.S.-and-allied ’news’-media, and it concerns yet another country where the U.S. regime is seeking regime-change, Venezuela:

Lavrov: I believe you don’t represent the South American region, do you?

Pompeo: We represent the entire hemisphere.

Lavrov: Oh, the hemisphere. Then what’s the U.S. doing in the Eastern Hemisphere, in Ukraine, for instance?

Pompeo, as is shown in that video, smiled and remained silent (presumably in order to protect the guilty).

Then, the next day, Pompeo snubbed Merkel and became yet another failure with Abadi-Mahdi. So: that’s three in a row: Lavrov , Merkel, and now Mahdi.

This is the type of Secretary of State that Trump hires to represent the United States (but really to represent just the Republican Party’s billionaires). One can only wonder what screws the Trump regime might turn, in order to punish Iraq for having said no to using their ground for launching an invasion of Iran. This is John Bolton’s strategy, and with successive failures like these, Trump might decide to fire him, and not to start World War III after all, and instead to accept that the U.S. Government should discontinue its efforts to become the dictator over the entire planet — the Western Hemisphere, and the Eastern hemisphere, and the poles: everything. Evidently, America’s billionaires aren’t satisfied to be dictators only over the United States. They demand more. And they can fool the American public into thinking that this is ‘patriotic’ instead of imperialistic (and to ignore that the public are paying the tab for this grotesquely corrupt military).

Escobar’s commentary goes on to place this verbal exchange into the broader context of the Trump regime’s similar failures regarding North Korea, Venezuela, and China. I therefore recommend that you read his “What Putin and Pompeo did not talk about”, and especially the following very well-informed debate going on among the reader-commenters there, regarding Escobar’s article. I therefore republish below that debate:

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COMMENTS:

Sushi8516 •

The best way to avoid a US imperialist war in Iran is for either Pakistan, Russia or China to donate nuclear warheads to the Iran so they can mate these to their missiles. The only language the US understands is deadly force! Only the price of millions of Americans dead will they learn not to mess with other countries. See the difference between North Korea and Syria/Libya/Iraq.

• 13 

Elvis •

The Trump administration is desperate to drive a wedge between Russia and China. They want to pull a Nixon on China, and they need Russia to do so. The problem that they have and they apparently can’t seem to comprehend is that the Russians consider the United States to be the problem.

Yes, the Russians don’t like the fact that China has become so wealthy. Neither do they like that China has become a technological power. Nor that China is becoming a military superpower. They see that billion+ people on the other side of their border as a threat to their lightly populated Siberia. They see a nation that is hungry, very hungry, for natural resources which are abundant in Siberia. They see a rising power whose influence is growing in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Fact is though that they have decided to basically ride China’s coattails. Russia is vehemently against a US led international order. They know that the only way that a multi-polar world will emerge is with the assistance of China. Moscow knows that only China is capable of knocking the United States off its position. Russia can live with a Far East that is dominated by China. They have even made the decision that they can live in a world where China has the most powerful navy, the world’s economy revolves around China, it has railways crisscrossing Eurasia, ports throughout the Indian Ocean, its 5G technology worldwide, and so on. What Russia cannot live in is a world where the United States is calling the shots. It’s that simple.

• 10 

Sushi8516  Elvis •

Second paragraph is wrong! Russia has nothing against China being rich – it wants China as a customer to the oil & gas it wants to sell. Same thing with Europe. Russia is not against China being a technological or military power either – China doesn’t threaten Russia, all border issues have been settled, they are working together to thwart imperialistic US ambitions, so they have interests in seeing each other being strong!

The fundamental reason why the US can’t pry them apart is because Russian and Chinese interests complement perfectly! Russia and China together is more than sum of its parts. Russia has the resources to sell, China wants to buy. Russia is weak on consumer goods, China is the manufacturing superpower. Russia has good military tech, China is rapidly catching up and has the manpower to boot. Russia lacks warm water ports to build powerful navy, China is building a powerful navy. Russia has thousands of nukes to deter the US, China can tag onto Russian nuclear deterrence.

• 10 

Upsidedown119 •

I quote Pepe: “It’s no secret in Moscow’s top diplomatic circles that the Chinese Politburo overruled President Xi Jinping’s effort to find an accommodation to Trump’s tariff offensive”.

This is potentially earth-shaking news if accurate. Politburo overrule President Xi?

• 5 

Fatfreddy  Upsidedown119 •

While I have no idea of the validity of Pepe’s assertion, it is not a surprise that the Politburo can overrule Xi. Thats why I laugh about those “emperor ruler for life” jibs. When you see in public the rubber stamping of Xi’s decisions, that’s because it’s all resolved behind the scenes. Not your typical “democracy” but still…..

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Why is such honest and informative news-reporting and analysis absent from all of America’s mainstream ’news’-media? Why does anybody subscribe to media such as those?

A less-pro-Putin but also excellent geostrategic writer is Andrew Korybko. He tends to present a much darker picture of Russia’s geostrategic situation — something that U.S. media might find more congenial, except that he doesn’t write nearly as well as does Escobar. A typical example of his commentary is Korybko’s May 16th “Russia’s Nord Stream II Concerns Reveal Its Severe Systemic Vulnerabilities”. Although he often uses specialists’ jargon and doesn’t even define it (such as “PP-24” in that article), his insights sometimes are worth the chore to read them. And, of course, he, too, is too good to be acceptable to, or commissioned by, any mainstream medium in the United States. After all: they have editors, who clean up any such spots of bad writing. What’s unacceptable in the U.S. isn’t actually bad writing; it’s just anything that exposes the corruptness of the U.S. regime — not of the office-holders who are merely part of partisan politics, but instead the people who are actually pulling the financial strings backstage. Exposing such actual stage-managers is simply out-of-bounds in the U.S.

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

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Why the Jewish Takeover of Palestine Increases Antisemitism Worldwide

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

On May 13th, Gilad Atzmon made a powerful case that “Antisemitism is now a mass movement in Britain” because British voters generally respond with strong hostility toward apartheid, and he says “I would actually expect Jews who seem to be upset by the Hitlerian concept of an ‘Aryans-only state’ to accept that the concept of a ‘Jews-only state’ is equally disturbing.” Why should German supremacism by pure-blooded Christians against people who are at least one-quarter descended from Jews be less acceptable than supremacism of people whom rabbis accept as being “Jews” against descendants of what for over a thousand years had constituted the vast majority of the residents there, Muslims? Why is one form of religious racism better than another? Perhaps it isn’t. (The Holocaust is irrelevant to this: it was perpetrated by Christians — mainly by “pure-blooded” ones — not by Palestinians, or any other Muslims. If the Holocaust were relevant, then the lands that participated in the Holocaust would have protected their Jews after the Holocaust and those victims’ property would have been immediately restored to them by those states, and compensation paid to them for their suffering, and those Jews would have been welcomed to stay there; but, instead, the residents in those lands supported the racist Jews called “Zionists,” who wanted to seize Arab Palestine and make it a Jewish-supremacist state. The lies simply abound, but the Holocaust didn’t cause this problem; the Holocaust was done overwhelmingly by Christians, in Europe, not by Muslims, in Palestine or anywhere else. Shoving the Holocaust-guilt off onto Palestinians as if they — or their religion — had been the cause, is simply shameful lying.) 

In America, apartheid against Blacks is widely condemned (because of America’s racist history, which is too blatant to be ignored), but apartheid against the non-Jews in Palestine (or “greater Palestine” if one is to distinguish between the area that Jews took from Arabs, versus the areas where Jews keep Arabs in huge outdoor prisons called “Gaza strip” and “West Bank”) is widely approved-of. American media reflect the agenda of the American Government, which reflects the agenda of only the political mega-donors, whom each Party relies upon in order to be able to compete effectively against the other. Consequently, American minds are essentially bought (i.e., controlled) simply by American dollars, and those dollars are the extremely concentrated and focused wealth of America’s 585 billionaires, some of whom are Jews, but the vast majority of whom are not. What they all are, however, is people whose class-interests are overwhelmingly against the public’s interests (such as for progressive taxation, tax-funded basic health care, ending all of the federal subsidies to fossil-fuels investors, and spending less on private corporations such as Lockheed Martin and more on public services such as education and healthcare — and on public infrastructure such as maintenance of highways and bridges). The economic class-interests of every billionaire are overwhelmingly against the public interest — against the nation, if one identifies the overwhelming majority of a land’s inhabitants as constituting “the nation.” (Of course, in America, it’s the overwhelming minority who do, and they selected the nominees in both Parties in 2016.) In America, the taxpayers are donating, each and every year, $3.8 billion to the Jewish-controlled part of Palestine so that the Jews there can buy weapons from America’s billionaire-controlled weapons-makers such as Lockheed Martin in order to protect the Jews there from what their victims — the Palestinians — might want to do to them, and maybe even in order to help U.S. billionaires grab back from Iranians (who still support the Muslim Palestinians) the oil company that the U.S. regime had grabbed in its 1953 coup which was done to Iran for America’s oil companies, whose American owners didn’t want Iran’s oil to be nationalized and those profits to go to the Iranian public instead of to themselves. But, of course, America’s current President, Donald Trump, is trying to be a hero to his (fellow-)billionaires by grabbing back from Venezuelans the profits from that nation’s oil, and so he now is trying to choose whether to grab their oil first, or Iran’s oil first. And Americans consider his attempt to grab Venezuelans’ oil to be good (the ‘humanitarian’ thing to do), and so why shouldn’t Americans likewise be approving of what Jews in Palestine are doing to non-Jews there?

The Jewish takeover of Palestine increases antisemitism — hatred of Jews — because most people in the world despise bigots of any sort, and the supporters of Jews’ apartheid against non-Jews in Palestine are, batantly obviously, bigots. The U.S. President supports their bigotry because he supports all forms of bigotry because he supports billionaires against the public, and that’s actually the master-slave form of bigotry, the master-form of bigotry, which knows no skin-color nor religion nor ethnicity but only the billionaires (of all political Parties) (in earlier centuries called “the aristocracy”) versus the public, in all lands.

Wherever the inequality of wealth is extreme (such as in America), this problem exists, and though it has no real relevance to Jews versus non-Jews, any country in which the public approval of social inequality is high will intensely display the master-form of bigotry. During the current era in history, no nation is more approving of such supremacism — institutionalized inequality of basic rights — than is Palestine, especially among the religious dictatorship there, which is perpetrated by its Jews against everyone else. Consequently, what many non-Jews there commonly refer to as “the Jewish entity” (or “the zionist entity,” but in either case referring to the Jewish-supremacist nation, which unfortunately does now exist there) is rabidly spreading antisemitism around the world, at least outside the United States (where the billionaires make too much money from milking their own taxpayers so that those billionaires’ weapons-makers will be able to sell more of their weaponry to the racist Jews’ — the zionists’, the supremacist Jews’ — “entity,” and so the billionaires’ media do support this $3.8 billion per year U.S. taxpayers’ give-away, to those Jews, for buying these U.S. weapons, $3.8B worth, each and every year).

On May 15th, Britain’s Guardian headlined “One million face hunger in Gaza after US cut to Palestine aid” and reported that, “the EU member states are too preoccupied with themselves, so it is probably unrealistic to expect the EU to play a role” in filling the financial void. Furthermore, since the Holocaust was perpetrated almost exclusively in those countries (Europe), which since have supported the Jews in Palestine instead of the Jews’ victims there, European nations might be especially sensitive to possible ‘antisemitism’ charges if they were to assist the non-Jews there. Therefore, now that the U.S. is no longer even pretending to be a neutral arbiter between the oppressors and the oppressed in Palestine, the Europeans aren’t stepping in to fill the void left by the U.S. Government’s dropping its previous pretense. So, “The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which provides food for more than 1 million people in the Gaza strip” is making do with less — far less. For example, “The agency slashed its mental health budget by 50% in the second half of 2018, which reduced the availability of counselling for children in the war-torn region.”

I think that Atzmon is correct: Jews throughout the world (not only the ones in Palestine) get the blowback from the evilness of the “Jewish entity.” If that “entity” (the supremacist-Jewish nation that currently exists there) represents all Jews, then all Jews are evil, but it doesn’t, and so not only are the non-Jews there suffering from this, but so too do non-bigoted Jews, everywhere — if any such still exist. (If they do exist, then they need to organize to end “the Jewish entity.” But good luck to them then trying to find any Jewish billionaires who would help to fund such an organization. Are there any? Are there any non-Jewish billionaires who would? Good luck trying to find any. Such efforts — efforts for real justice, justice that’s systemically instead of merely individually significant — seem to be alien to the billionaire-class, everywhere.)

The Palestinians are being abandoned by the rest of the world, and the U.N. is left with the burden. And then the U.N. gets the blame, for ‘its failure’. No billionaires — really none — really cares. Maybe billions of people do, but no billionaire does. Or, at least, none has come forward. For example, a Google-search for “billionaire backer of the palestinian cause” produces “No results found for ‘billionaire backer of the palestinian cause’.” But it shows “About 895,000 results” and all of them report billionaire backers for the supremacist-Jewish nation that’s there now. This is the way billionaires are: they are obsessively classist (economic-supremacist), regardless of whether or not they also are racist (ethnic-supremacist). And, so, if they continue controlling the world, then things are going to become hellish everywhere. Not only hellish for Palestinians, and not only hellish for Jews, but hellish for everybody. Unrestrained grab grab grab … produces, ultimately, only hell, for everybody.

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

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Gallup: Ranking Countries for Happiness-Sadness

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

The “2019 Gallup Global Emotions Report” (which until May 20th was available only in a highly truncated release on April 25th) ranks 142 nations for the residents’ happiness and sadness. The international Gallup poll’s most relevant four questions for that are summarized below. The top-ranked and bottom-ranked five nations for each one of those four questions will be shown here. Also, the scores will be shown (but not the ranks) for each of specifically five countries: U.S., Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, and Venezuela. They were chosen by me to display the score for each on each of these four questions, and the reasons I chose those specific five nations are:

U.S. is the imperial center, the hub of the global wheel, and therefore no other nation is as much the center of the world and deeply impacting every other nation.

Saudi Arabia is the only country that in the early 1970s became the indispensable partner to America controlling the value of America’s currency the dollar in foreign exchanges and thus enabling the dollar to be the global reserve currency. That’s when the U.S. went off the gold standard and onto the petroleum standard — dollars per barrel of oil — as the currency’s base. It was a verbal agreement between President Nixon and King Saud and has remained consistently in effect ever since.

Israel is Saudi Arabia’s second-most-important partner (after the U.S.) because if Israel were to end its alliance with the Saud family (stop using Israel’s political influence in Washington in ways that advance instead of impede the Sauds’ main international objective of conquering or controlling Iran), then the Saudi rulers’ political and personal corruption and barbarism and their financing of Al Qaeda and other such organizations, would seriously jeopardize the U.S.-Saudi alliance and the continuance in power of that family. The Sauds need the U.S. to do their bidding, but also need Israel to do their bidding (against Iran). The U.S. basically sides with Sunni Islam against Shia Islam. So does Israel. They both do the Sauds’ bidding. (The Sauds have been against Iran ever since 1744 when its name was instead “Persia.) One might even make a case that the Saud family are the hub, and that America is instead the most important spoke.

Russia is America’s main target-nation or ‘enemy’ — the single nation that America’s rulers are the most-obsessed ultimately to conquer. This is the reason why virtually every ‘dictator’ that the U.S. Government tries to overthrow is either friendly toward, or actually allied with, Russia. The safest path for the leader of any nation is to join the U.S. alliance and become hostile toward Russia. Any leader who fails to do that becomes himself or herself a target for overthrow by the U.S. Consequently, Russia therefore tends to be isolated and is supported only by foreign leaders that are more concerned to protect their nation’s sovereignty than to protect their own personal safety. The U.S. perpetrates almost 100% of the world’s invasions and coups; every nation’s rulers fear the U.S. Government.

Venezuela is perhaps the hottest current hot-spot where the nation’s leader is clearly being targeted by the U.S. for overthrow and replacement by a U.S.-selected ruler. So: my selection of countries is determined here mainly by these geostrategic factors.

Following are the four most-relevant questions that Gallup asks regarding the respondent’s happiness or sadness. Gallup poses its questions on the basis of the respondent’s reporting specifically the individual’s own estimate of how he/she felt on exactly the prior day. That’s a day that is in the past (and so is not at all speculative), and it’s also the most recent such day; and, therefore, Gallup’s findings are based on the respondent’s clearest possible recollections of what that specific day was subjectively like, for them. Although, for some respondents, that day might have been atypical, either happier or sadder than the individual’s average, those differences (both plus and minus) average-out for the large samples which are being employed by the pollster. Here are the questions, and the findings, regarding the four key variables that were tapped: anger, sadness, pain, and enjoyment. Gallup didn’t include any question for “happiness” because social ’scientists’ have an aversion to that term as being ’too subjective’, but “enjoyment” was used by Gallup instead (even though it’s just as ’subjective’ as is “happiness”), and it probably taps into very close to the same thing as “happiness”:

“Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about anger?”

TOP 5

1 Armenia 45%

2 Iraq 44%

3 Iran 43%

4 Palestinian Territories 43%

5 Morocco 41%

U.S.=22%

BOTTOM 5

1 Estonia 6%

2 Singapore 7%

3 Finland 7%

4 Mauritius 8%

5 Mexico 8%

     OTHERS

     U.S.=22%

     Saudi Arabia=26%

     Israel=24%

     Russia=13%

     Venezuela=24%

“How about sadness?”

TOP 5

1 Chad 54%

2 Niger 49%

3 Liberia 47%

4 Sierra Leone 46%

Guinea 45%

BOTTOM 5

1 Taiwan 5%

2 Singapore 7%

3 Kosovo 9%

4 China 12%

5 Sweden 12%

     OTHERS

     U.S.=21%

     Saudi Arabia 23%

     Israel=22%

     Russia=22%

     Venezuela=34%

“How about physical pain?”

TOP 5

1 Chad 66%

2 Sierra Leone 62%

3 Gambia 56%

4 Iraq 56%

5 Benin 55%

BOTTOM 5

1 Vietnam 14%

2 N. Cyprus 15%

3 Poland 15%

4 Taiwan 15%

5 Sweden 17%

     OTHERS

     U.S.=33%

     Saudi Arabia=37%

     Israel=28%

     Russia=25%

    Venezuela=38%

“How about enjoyment?”

TOP 5

1 Paraguay 91%

2 Mexico 88%

3 China 87%

4 Costa Rica 87%

5 Denmark 87%

BOTTOM 5

1 Sierra Leone 41%

2 Belarus 42%

3 Lithuania 43%

4 Egypt 44%

5 Turkey 44%

     OTHERS

     U.S.=82%

     Saudi Arabia 73%

     Israel=65%

     Russia=67%

     Venezuela=72%

NOTE: Syria and Cuba were not among the 142 sampled countries, and thus weren’t included in these rankings.

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Gallup is the only pollster that is in this business of ranking countries for subjective well-being or happiness-sadness. However, a team of economists, headed by Jeffrey Sachs and two others, produce what they presumptuously call the “World Happiness Report 2019”, ranking 156 countries on various economic factors, such as GDP per capita, life expectancy, and ‘freedom to make life choices’ and they define that as “Freedom to make life choices is the national average of binary [“Yes”-or-“No”] responses to the GWP [Gallup World Poll] question ‘Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?’” Obviously, such “freedom” is far higher in rich countries than in poor ones, simply because it largely reflects how wealthy the person is. If you’re poor, you don’t have much of that “freedom.” For many, to “choose what you do with your life” is basically to survive instead of to die. They’re “free” to do that. Economists understand almost nothing, and tend to produce ‘findings’ that the people who hired them want them to ‘find’ — such as ‘finding’ that per-capita GDP is the main determinant of a nation’s ‘welfare’ (which was their basic assignment to ‘find’ — and they ‘found’ it).

Actually, only direct ’subjective’ questions, such as “Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday?” are relevant to determining whether a person is “happy” or “sad”; and any attempt to “objectify” by referring instead (either directly or indirectly) to GDP-per-capita, won’t honestly indicate how much the people who live in a given country are happy or sad. The social sciences aren’t only about how much people own. Maybe in some countries, too much of what they own are weapons to protect themselves against thieves, rapists, murderers, etcetera; or else are unreliable and unregulated medications, or products and services that don’t do what their advertisers claim. Economists have a very warped sense of “welfare”: they count the dollars, and what can be converted into dollars, and place too much value on that, and too little on all else. In order to determine a nation’s “welfare,” or “happiness,” only questions which tap directly into people’s actual “feelings” are appropriate, at all. Any ‘social science’ that’s only about property is no social science at all; it’s merely aping the physical sciences, and it’s neither an ape nor a science, whatever the aristocratic funders of economists might want it to be (a fake ’social’ ’science’ that’s only about property).

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

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