Elite TV news anchors are gone: hypnotic effect crumbling

Source: Elite TV news anchors are gone: hypnotic effect crumbling « Jon Rappoport’s Blog

jonrappoport.wordpress.com

by Jon Rappoport

June 27, 2017

They’ve punched holes in their own ship.

Elite TV news anchors are gone: hypnotic effect crumbling

The ship is going down

There are many reasons why viewers are deserting mainstream news. This article is about one reason that has been overlooked. One vital reason…

Elite television news anchors are absolutely essential to the hypnotic delivery of fake news. They have always been a mainstay of the mind control operation.

From the early days of television, there has been a parade of anchors/actors with know-how—the right intonation, the right edge of authority, the parental feel, the ability to execute seamless blends from one piece of deception to the next:

John Daly, Douglas Edwards, Ed Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, Water Cronkite, Dan Rather, and more recently, second-stringers—Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Scott Pelley.

They’re all gone.

Now we have Lester Holt, David Muir, and an as-yet unannounced permanent replacement for Scott Pelley. Muir and Holt are decidedly junior varsity; they couldn’t sell water in the desert.

Lester Holt is a cadaverous timid presence on-air, whose major journalistic achievement thus far is interrupting Donald Trump 41 times during a presidential debate; and David Muir has the gravitas of a Sears underwear model.

The network news trance is falling apart.

The networks have no authoritative anchor-fathers waiting in the wings. They don’t breed them and bring them up in the minor leagues anymore.

Instead, armies of little Globalists and ideologues who don’t realize they’re working for the Globalists have been infiltrating the news business. At best, they’re incompetent.

This is one reason why mainstream news has been imploding.

When gross liars don’t have hypnotism, they don’t have anything.

And lately, things have gotten even worse for the mainstream. Their ceaseless attacks on Trump are backfiring. More members of the public are seeing through the puerile throw-ANYTHING-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach; and more important, the style of these attacks is breaking the time-honored rhythms and pace of traditional news presentation, and thus are failing to put the viewing audience into passive brain-states.

Fundamental and tested means for trance-induction are going out the window. When you add in rude and contentious interviews and thinly disguised editorializing by “news reporters” who have no business being within a mile of a broadcast studio, who spout random shots of venom, the news-production techniques that enable an ongoing illusion of oceanic authority collapse like magnetic fields that have been suddenly switched off.

The selective mood lighting, the restful blue colors on the set, the inter-cutting of graphics and B-roll footage, the flawless shifts to reporters in far-flung places…it’s as if all these supporting features have suddenly been overcome by actors in a stage play who are abruptly stepping out of character. The spell is broken.

Humpty-Dumpty is off the wall and lying in pieces on the floor.

Elite mainstream news is committing suicide. And in a fatuous attempt to save themselves, they are trying a democratic approach. Anchors are sharing more on-air minutes with other reporters. But this is counter-productive in the extreme. The News has always meant one face and one authority and one voice and one tying-together of all broadcast elements. It’s as if, in a hypnotherapist’s office, the therapist decides to bring in colleagues to help render the patient into an alpha-state.

Network news executives are clueless. News directors are clueless. The whole lot of them are too young and too foolish to remember what once made news dominate the public mind.

Plus they are swimming in shark-infested waters. The sharks are independent media.

Bottom-line?

This is a cause for celebration.

The movie called fake reality is packaged rolls of footage in the back of a very large truck moving slowly toward a graveyard.

The elite standard has always been: can we hypnotize the viewing audience and keep them hypnotized? And now the answer is leaning further toward NO on both counts.

Information mind control, as delivered by elite television news, depends entirely on the elite anchor. His modulated voice and presence and delivery are the glue that holds the illusion together. If by some miracle, the news bosses could raise Walter Cronkite, “the father of our country,” from the dead and put him back in the chair, they might have an outside chance of re-establishing their dominance. But too many years have gone by; years of unaccomplished anchors. Humpty-Dumpty is in pieces on the floor, the horse is out of the barn, the cat is out of the bag.

This is why major news outlets have been appealing to the new king: social media. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and You Tube are, in various ways, trying to shape the news the public receives and doesn’t receive. But their desperate attempt is failing, too.

It is crashing on the rocks of vast, uneven, open decentralization of information.

One veteran news director told me several years ago, “We’re losing the war. We don’t have the stars [elite anchors] anymore. The star system is dead. The same thing happened to Hollywood. Now it’s happening to us. You could comb all the local news outlets in America, and you wouldn’t find one face and voice who could really carry the freight. They’ve vanished. The up and coming people are lame and weak. We’ve made them that way. It’s some cockeyed standard of equality we’ve internalized. And now we’re paying the price.”

Yes, indeed.

Jon RappoportThe author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Remember When Ford ‘Cancelled’ That Plant In Mexico? Well, They’ve Just Moved It To China

Trump’s victory lap back in January after Ford cancelled plans for a brand new $1.6 billion production facility in Mexico may have been premature.  As it turns out, per a press release from earlier this morning, one of the first strategic actions taken by Ford’s new CEO, Jim Hackett, will be to relocate the company’s ‘Focus’ production to China rather than Mexico.

Source: Remember When Ford ‘Cancelled’ That Plant In Mexico? Well, They’ve Just Moved It To China | Zero Hedge

http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden

Jun 20, 2017 

Back in January, Trump took a very public victory lap when Ford decided to scrap plans to build a $1.6 billion manufacturing facility in Mexico and invest in its Michigan facilities instead (we discussed it here: Trump Takes Victory Lap After Ford Cancels $1.6 Billion Mexican Expansion Plan As “Vote Of Confidence” In President-Elect).

As Ford announced at the time, the decision was sold to the public and the United Auto Workers as an opportunity to permanently shift production capacity, that would have otherwise been built in Mexico, back to Wayne, Michigan.

To support the new era of vehicles, Ford is adding 700 direct new U.S. jobs and investing $700 million during the next four years, creating the new Manufacturing Innovation Center at its Flat Rock Assembly Plant.

Ford today announced it is cancelling plans for the new plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It also announced that, to improve company profitability and ensure the financial as well as commercial success of this vehicle, the next-generation Focus will be built at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. This will make way for two new iconic products at Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan, where Focus is manufactured today – safeguarding approximately 3,500 U.S. jobs.

This incremental investment in Flat Rock Assembly Plant comes from $1.6 billion the company previously had planned to invest in a new plant in Mexico.

“I am thrilled that we have been able to secure additional UAW-Ford jobs for American workers,” said Jimmy Settles, UAW vice president, National Ford Department. “The men and women of Flat Rock Assembly have shown a great commitment to manufacturing quality products, and we look forward to their continued success with a new generation of high-tech vehicles.”

But, as Ford points out today, Trump’s victory lap may have been premature as one of the first strategic actions taken by the company’s new CEO, Jim Hackett, will be to relocate the company’s ‘Focus’ production to China rather than Mexico.

Exciting new Ford Focus on the way for North American customers beginning in 2019 with more technology, more space and a number of new Focus models. Next-generation Focus for North America will be globally sourced primarily from China – rather than Hermosillo, Mexico – with production starting in the second half of 2019. Current model production ends in mid-2018

This manufacturing plan allows the company to further grow its leadership as an exporter and deliver world-class Focus to North American customers in a way that makes business sense – with no U.S. employees out of a job

Ford is saving $1 billion in investment costs versus its original Focus production plan, improving the financial health of its Focus business and further improving manufacturing scale in China – all helping create a more operationally fit company

And while Ford has suggested that the move will not cost a single UAW worker his/her job here in the United States, we have our doubts as manufacturing capacity, much like cash, is somewhat fungible…so unless Ford plans to massively grow market share and/or permanently increase overall demand, shifting production to China must mean that production will decline somewhere else…we suspect that ‘somewhere else’ will be somewhere in the U.S.

It’s high time for a new, multipolar world order

Source: It’s high time fora new, multipolar world order | Environment | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

By Lorenzo Marsili

Lorenzo Marsili is a writer, politic activist, and the founder of international NGO European Alternatives.

June 16, 2017

Pax Americana is over, but empowered cities and a reformed EU can take the lead for a better global governance model.

We have the opportunity of taking a step towards renewed, more enlightened global cooperation, writes Marsili [AP]

 

While the new US administration was busy reining in support for international trade and freedom of movement, China’s president, speaking at the annual Davos forum in the Swiss Alps, performed a stunning defence of globalisation. While Donald Trump was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, France’s newly elected President Emmanuel Macron was trolling him by demanding to “make the planet great again” – now an official website – and China’s leadership, meeting with the EU institutions, was reaffirming its commitment to leading the fight against climate change.

While we should take China’s new global role with a pinch of salt, one thing should be clear to all: global governance is in shambles. The recent failure of the G7 meeting in Taormina, Sicily, with the lack of agreement on measures to tackle climate change and the refugee crisis, is only the latest event to signal a breakdown of international cooperation. The unipolar world order of American hegemony is over.

This is not necessarily bad news: the so-called Pax Americana has been anything but peaceful, ushering in an endless string of wars that have inflamed the Middle East. But the risk of moving from a unipolar to an anarchic world system is real. A system where powers vie for influence – in Eastern Europe or in the South China Sea – in a zero-sum game of opposed national interests always one step away from catastrophe.

This is worrying, because today’s world requires cooperative global governance as never before. The list of new global challenges goes well beyond fighting climate change, as if that were not already enough: just take wealth distribution and economic globalisation. Brando Milanovic’s “elephant graph” (pdf) may be the reference chart for the decline of Western middle classes, but it also shows something else: the stunning rise of the wealthiest one percent globally. Excessive concentration of wealth creates distortions and inefficiencies, as even the International Monetary Fund now admits. Short of expropriation, the solution is progressive taxation – and here is the problem.

Multinational corporations are increasingly able to play one state against the other to drive a fiscal bargain all but unimaginable for small and medium enterprises. Well beyond Apple’s infamous 0.005 percent Irish tax rate, the scandal stretches to a majority of the largest corporations – from the furniture of Ikea to the toothpaste of Procter&Gamble. Only international cooperation can put a break to such practice. Yet, progress is stalling, at both European Union and global level, with the G7 failing spectacularly to take a position on the issue despite pressure from the Italian hosts.

The cooperative, transnational experiment of the European Union represents a powerful blueprint for a new multipolar world order, one where proud nations are no longer pitted one against the other but work through consensus and the rule of law to reach mutually beneficial solutions.

The list of crises that go well beyond the remit and reach of any nation-state keeps on growing. The refugee crisis is here to stay, fuelled by ongoing warfare and the nefarious effects of global warming, such as droughts, increasing in intensity in the most vulnerable African economies. Or, again, the need to regulate internet surveillance and data privacy, something Angela Merkel is hoping to raise at the upcoming Hamburg G20 summit in July. The list could be extended at length.

We need to reconstruct a global governance for this century or risk letting go of our capacity to govern some of the most important challenges of our time. 

One part of the answer comes from cities. Cities are taking an increasingly central role all across the world. Often, as the in the US experience of the sanctuary cities that offer protection to undocumented migrants, they go directly against central government policy. And cities are now creating elaborate networks that could turn into effective agents of transnational governance.

On June 10, Barcelona hosted a global summit, fearless cities, bringing together mayors from across the world to commit to joint initiatives to tackle precisely the global challenges that national leadership seems increasingly unable to address.

Actions on climate, for instance, with reinforced cooperation over the implementation of ambitious environmental standards are more than just rhetoric: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has just signed an executive order committing the city to the Paris agreement. Actions on refugees, with initiatives such as Solidarity Cities creating a pan-European network of municipal governments for the integration of migrants and refugees, are also taking place. Such initiatives need to be fostered, for cities matter enormously: More than half the world’s population and over 70 percent of Europeans live in urban areas, while the top 100 cities produce just under half the world’s GDP. They deserve political and economic recognition from national governments, constructing a space for global cooperation below the level of the nation state.

And then there is the level above. And here the cooperative, transnational experiment of the European Union represents a powerful blueprint for a new multipolar world order, one where proud nations are no longer pitted one against the other, but work through consensus and the rule of law to reach mutually beneficial solutions.

Emmanuel Macron has just won a landslide victory in France’s legislative elections. He has a clear mandate to be in the driving seat of a comprehensive reform of the European Union – something he has repeatedly advocated. After the upcoming German elections in September, there are signs that the traditional Franco-German engine will gear up for further integration of of the Eurozone, the EU’s core.There is a risk. We should not forget that the policy mix supported by Angela Merkel’s Germany over the long years of European crisis – rebranded “austerity” – has brought Europe to the brink of collapse. Nor should we be fooled by Macron’s youthful personality, when he seems to be supporting the same market-friendly economic policies that have led to the crisis in the first place.

Without a serious policy rethink – such as a comprehensive New Deal to put the continent back to work and a profound democratisation of EU institutions – Europe’s path towards greater integration risks becoming a fast-track to disintegration. This would be a shame for Europe as much as for the world.

Yes, we run the risk of stumbling towards a chaotic world of nationalism and conflict. But today’s crisis of global governance also offers the chance to move beyond a system that never truly worked in the first place. Crafting a new global role for cities and reforming Europe are the heart of this challenge.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Vladimir Putin: The Most Powerful Person In The World

Source: Vladimir Putin: The Most Powerful Person In The World – PaulCraigRoberts.org

PaulCraigRoberts.org

Paul Craig Roberts

June 12, 2017

 

It must be wonderful being Vladimir Putin and being the most powerful person on earth. And not even have to say so yourself. The US Democratic Party is saying it for Putin along with the entirety of the Western presstitute media and the CIA and FBI also. The Russian media doesn’t have to brag about Putin’s power. Megyn Kelly, the Western presstitutes, and Western leaders are doing it for them: Putin is so powerful that he is able to place in office his choice for the President of the United States.

I mean, Wow! What power! Americans are simply out of the game. Americans, despite a massive intelligence budget and 16 separate intelligence services plus those of its NATO vassals, are no match whatsoever for Vladimir Putin.

I mean, really! What is the CIA for? What is the NSA for? What are the rest of them for? Americans would do better to close down these incompetent, but expensive, “intelligence services” and pay the money to Putin as a bribe not to select our president. Maybe the CIA should get down on its knees and beg Putin to stop electing the President of the United States. I mean, how humiliating. I can hardly stand it. I thought we are the “world’s sole superpower, the uni-power, the exceptional, indispensable people.” It turns out that we are a nothing people, ruled by the President of Russia.

When the Democrats, CIA, and media decided to launch their PR campaign against Trump, they didn’t realize how inconsequential it would make the United States appear by putting American democracy into Putin’s pocket. What were they thinking? They weren’t. They were fixated on making sure Trump did not endanger the massive military/security complex budget by restoring normal relations with Russia.

There is no sign that American leadership in any area is actually capable of thought. Consider Wall Street and corporate leadership. To boost share prices Wall Street forced all corporations to desert their home country and move the production of goods and services sold to Americans offshore to where labor and regulatory costs were lower. The lower costs raised profits and share prices. Wall Street threatened resistant corporations with takeovers of the companies if they refused to move abroad in order to increase their profits.

Neither Wall Street nor corporate boards and CEOs were smart enough to understand that moving jobs offshore also moved US consumer incomes and purchasing power offshore. In other words, the financial and business leadership were too stupid to comprehend that without the incomes from high value-added, high productivity US jobs, the American consumer would not have the discretionary income to continue in his role as the economy’s driver.

The Federal Reserve caught on to Wall Street’s mistake. To rectify the mistake, the Fed expanded credit, allowing a buildup in consumer debt to keep the economy going on credit purchases. However, once consumer debt is high relative to income, the ability to buy more stuff departs. In other words, credit expansion is not a permanent fix for the lack of consumer income growth.

A country whose financial and business leadership is too stupid to understand that a population increasingly employed in part-time minimum wage jobs is not a big spending population is a country whose leadership has failed.

It is strictly impossible to boost profits by offshoring jobs without also offshoring US consumer incomes. Therefore, the profits from offshoring are temporary. Once enough jobs have been moved offshore that aggregate demand is stymied, the domestic market stagnates and then declines.

As I have demonstrated so many times for so many years, as has John Williams (shadowstats.com), the jobs reports from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics are nonsense. The jobs in the alleged recovery from June 2009 are largely low income domestic service jobs and the product of the theoretical birth/death model. The alleged recovery from the 2007-08 financial crisis is the first recovery in history in which the labor force participation rate declined. Labor force participation rates decline when the economy offers scant job opportunities, not when employment opportunities are rising.

What we know about US jobs is that the jobs are increasingly part-time minimum wage jobs. According to a presstitute news report that might or might not be true, there are only 12 counties in the entirety of the United States in which a person can rent a one-bedroom home on a minimum wage income. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/08/minimum-wage-affordable-housing-rentals-study

In response to this report, a professor at Virginia Tech suggested that the government offer increased rental assistance and boost programs such as the National Housing Trust Fund, which invests in affordable housing.

In other words, taxpayers are to pick up the costs to Americans of US corporations deserting the US labor force. Those Americans who still have middle class incomes will be taxed to cover the lost incomes that the offshoring corporations and Wall Street have snatched away from American workers who can no longer earn enough to pay for their own housing.

In other words, capitalism has reached the point in its descent that it cannot exist without public subsidies for the people dispossessed by capitalism.

On a number of occasions I have written about how many costs of production are imposed on third parties, such as the environment. A significant percentage of the profits of capitalist corporations comes from the political and legal ability of the corporations to impose their costs of production on third parties. In other words, capitalism makes money because it can impose its costs of production on the environment and on people who do not share in the profits. I have provided many examples of this, especially in the area of real estate development. The developer is able to shift a large part of his costs to others.

This cost shifting has now reached the level of inducing Armaggedon. There is an effort to impeach Trump and put the warmonger VP Pence in the presidency. As Trump campaigned on restoring normal relations with Russia, a defeat of the attempt to reduce tensions would reinforce the recent conclusion of the Russian military high command that Washington is planning a first strike nuclear attack on Russia.

This is the risk that the entire world faces due to the dependence of the power and profit of the US military/security complex on war and enemies.

In other words, there is only one remaining rationale for the existence of the United States of America — the interests of the military/security complex — and these interests require a powerful enemy whether real or orchestrated.

Former CIA official John Stockwell wrote: “It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms.” The hatred and distrust of Russia that the West is currently being force-fed reflects Stockwell’s revelation, as does the orchestrated hatred and distrust of Muslims that has supported Washington’s destruction in whole or part of seven countries and trillions of dollars in new US war debt.

Globalism, that is, labor arbitrage across national boundaries, and financialization, the diversion of consumers’ incomes into interest and fees to banks, have wrecked the US economy. The “opportunity society” has vanished. Children have poorer economic prospects than their parents. The offshoring of manufacturing and professional service jobs such as IT and software engineering has collapsed the growth of aggregate demand in the US. The Federal Reserve’s credit expansion was only a temporary reprieve.

Formerly prosperous areas are in ruins. States’ budgets and pension systems are failing. There is no payoff to a university education. Americans’ economic prospects have been erased by globalism. Getting ahead requires connections as it did in the aristocratic systems. The high concentration of income and wealth has negated democracy. The government is only accountable to the rich.

American political and business leadership not only destroyed the image of US sovereignty by placing American democracy in Putin’s pocket, but also destroyed the formerly vibrant American economy, once the envy of the world.

Where can Americans find leadership? Certainly not in the Democratic Party, nor in the Republican Party, nor in the media, nor in the corporate community. How then does the US compete with Russia and China, two countries with good leadership? Is war the only answer to the question?

Putin aligns with Xi in crafting the new world (trade) order

Source: Putin aligns with Xi in crafting the new world (trade) order — RT Op-Edge

RT Op-Edge

Pepe escobar

May 15, 2017

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping © Kenzaburo Fukuhara / Reuters

History will record the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing marked the juncture where the 21st century New Silk Roads assumed their full character of Globalization 2.0, or “inclusive globalization,” as defined by President Xi Jinping in Davos earlier this year.

I have dealt with the monumental stakes here and here. Terminology, of course, remains a minor problem. What was once defined as One Belt, One Road (OBOR) is now promoted as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Much is still somewhat lost in translation in English, what matters is that Xi has managed to imprint the myriad possibilities inbuilt in the concept especially across the Global South.

An amiable host, Xi in Beijing went ‘no holds barred’ extolling the inclusive integration merits of OBOR/BRI. It also helps that along the way, this being China, his spin doctors came up with a lovely metaphor to illustrate how OBOR/BRI should find its force as a common, pan-Eurasian effort; “Wild Swan geese [found across Asia but not in Europe] are able to fly far and safely through winds and storms because they move in flocks and help each other as a team.”

And arguably the key member of this flock of wild swan geese happens to be Russia.

Follow the geese

President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were guests of honor at the forum – alongside leaders such as Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev and Turkey’s Erdogan. At a business breakfast discussion, Xi seated Putin to his right and Lavrov to his left.

At a Leaders Roundtable summit on the second day of the forum – a sort of Silk Road United Nations, with the microphones open equally to all – Putin touched on a key point; the symbiosis, formalized since 2015, between OBOR/BRI and the Russia-driven Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), currently formed by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia.

As Putin said, “some 50 European, Asian and Latin American states” are interested in cooperation with the EEU. While the EEU and China are discussing their own, wide-ranging trade/economic deal, the EEU is also consulting, among others, with Iran, India, Serbia, Singapore, and Egypt.

But it was during his speech at the inaugural session of the forum that Putin managed to distill what amounts to a concentrate of Russian foreign policy.

Here are the key topics.

– Through “integration formats like the EEU, OBOR, the SCO, and ASEAN, we can build the foundation for a larger Eurasian partnership.”

– There is now a “unique opportunity to create a common cooperation framework from the Atlantic to the Pacific – for the first time in history.” Essentially, this is what Putin himself had once proposed – then shunned by EU/NATO – even before Xi announced OBOR in 2013.

– “Russia is not only willing to be a reliable trading partner but also seeks to invest in the creation of joint ventures and new production capacities in partnering states, to invest in industrial facilities, sales, and services.”

– Russia is investing in building “a system of modern and well-connected transport corridors,” “expanding the capacity of the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the Trans-Siberian Railway, investing significant resources into improvements to the Northeast Passage.”

– And then, looking at the Big Picture, “the infrastructure projects within the EEU and the One Belt, One Road initiative in conjunction with the Northeast Passage can completely reconfigure transportation on the Eurasian continent.”

– Putin expects “newly established financial institutions like the New Development Bank (BRICS Development Bank) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to offer a supporting hand to private investors.”

 And then, the clincher, fully aligned with Xi’s vision; “Greater Eurasia is not an abstract geopolitical arrangement but, without exaggeration, a truly civilization-wide project looking toward the future.”

When in doubt, call the SCO

Compared with the depth and breadth of this shared vision, nothing could be more pedestrian than the official India attitude; not only sending a low-level delegation to Beijing, but imprinting on mainstream Indian media the notion that OBOR/BRI is “little more than a colonial enterprise [that would leave] debt and broken communities in its wake”.

The flock of wild swan geese flying toward Eurasia integration is now a fact of life. East Asian output, for that matter, will surpass North America’s during the Trump era. The future, rather, the dissolution of unipolar hegemony will be decided in Eurasia, particularly East Asia.

India may certainly harbor its own strategic agenda. But self-marginalization of the one and only integrated development project in the 21st century hardly qualifies as savvy diplomacy.

So it looks like Putin once again will have his work cut out for him. India, a historical partner of the former USSR, still maintains good trade relations with Russia. Iran, for its part, is as much a key Indian energy partner as China’s. So the road map ahead spells out Moscow, alongside Tehran, playing the go-betweens trying to sweeten India into the Eurasia integration path.

That could well take place within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which from now on will have a full plate not only trying to smooth out a feasible Afghan peace process but making sure India and Pakistan find a political entente cordiale.

It will be a bit like older brothers trying to instill some sense into younger ones – as Russia and China, as part of their strategic partnership, have already worked hard to manage the twin admission of India and Pakistan into the SCO.

Iran will also become a full member shortly. So we will soon have an active SCO from Southwest Asia all the way to South Asia, with a political-economic integration agenda expanding the initial drive to fight myriad manifestations of Salafi-jihadi terror.

This slowly but surely progressive convergence fits into the larger goals of the Russia-China strategic partnership, which once again, as demonstrated during the Beijing forum, is all about Eurasia integration.

The invisible story at the Beijing forum was that as much as Turkey is a key node of OBOR/BRI and Kazakhstan is a key node between OBOR/BRI and the EEU, it’s China and Russia that will truly advance the complex roadmap of this “civilization-wide project.”

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of “Globalistan” (2007), “Red Zone Blues” (2007), “Obama does Globalistan” (2009) and “Empire of Chaos” (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is “2030”, also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

John Pilger: The Universal Lesson of East Timor

“In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament estimated that “at least 200,000” East Timorese, a third of the population, had perished under Suharto.”

Source: The Universal Lesson of East Timor

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by John Pilger

May 9, 2017

Filming undercover in East Timor in 1993 I followed a landscape of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses marching down the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the eye.

The inscriptions on the crosses revealed the extinction of whole families, wiped out in the space of a year, a month, a day.  Village after village stood as memorials.

Kraras is one such village. Known as the “village of the widows”, the population of 287 people was murdered by Indonesian troops.

Using a typewriter with a faded ribbon, a local priest had recorded the name, age, cause of death and date of the killing of every victim. In the last column, he identified the Indonesian battalion responsible for each murder. It was evidence of genocide.

I still have this document, which I find difficult to put down, as if the blood of East Timor is fresh on its pages.

On the list is the dos Anjos family.

In 1987, I interviewed Arthur Stevenson, known as Steve, a former Australian commando who had fought the Japanese in the Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1942. He told me the story of Celestino dos Anjos, whose ingenuity and bravery had saved his life, and the lives of other Australian soldiers fighting behind Japanese lines.

Steve described the day leaflets fluttered down from a Royal Australian Air Force plane; “We shall never forget you,” the leaflets said. Soon afterwards, the Australians were ordered to abandon the island of Timor, leaving the people to their fate.

When I met Steve, he had just received a letter from Celestino’s son, Virgillo, who was the same age as his own son. Virgillo wrote that his father had survived the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, but he went on: “In August 1983, Indonesian forces entered our village, Kraras. They looted, burned and massacred, with fighter aircraft overhead. On 27 September 1983, they made my father and my wife dig their own graves and they machine-gunned them. My wife was pregnant.”

The Kraras list is an extraordinary political document that shames Indonesia’s Faustian partners in the West and teaches us how much of the world is run. The fighter aircraft that attacked Kraras came from the United States; the machine guns and surface-to-air missiles came from Britain; the silence and betrayal came from Australia.

The priest of Kraras wrote on the final page: “To the capitalist governors of the world, Timor’s petroleum smells better than Timorese blood and tears. Who will take this truth to the world? … It is evident that Indonesia would never have committed such a crime if it had not received favourable guarantees from [Western] governments.”

As the Indonesian dictator General Suharto was about to invade East Timor (the Portuguese had abandoned their colony), he tipped off the ambassadors of Australia, the United States and Britain. In secret cables subsequently leaked, the Australian ambassador, Richard Woolcott, urged his government to “act in a way which would be designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and show private understanding to Indonesia.” He alluded to the beckoning spoils of oil and gas in the Timor Sea that separated the island from northern Australia.

There was no word of concern for the Timorese.

In my experience as a reporter, East Timor was the greatest crime of the late 20th century. I had much to do with Cambodia, yet not even Pol Pot put to death as many people – proportionally — as Suharto killed and starved in East Timor.

In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament estimated that “at least 200,000” East Timorese, a third of the population, had perished under Suharto.

Australia was the only western country formally to recognise Indonesia’s genocidal conquest. The murderous Indonesian special forces known as Kopassus were trained by Australian special forces at a base near Perth. The prize in resources, said Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, was worth “zillions” of dollars.

In my 1994 film, Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy, a gloating Evans is filmed lifting a champagne glass as he and Ali Alatas, Suharto’s foreign minister, fly over the Timor Sea, having signed a piratical treaty that divided the oil and gas riches of the Timor Sea.

I also filmed witnesses such as Abel Gutteras, now the Ambassador of Timor-Leste (East Timor’s post independence name) to Australia. He told me, “We believe we can win and we can count on all those people in the world to listen — that nothing is impossible, and peace and freedom are always worth fighting for.”

Remarkably, they did win. Many people all over the world did hear them, and a tireless movement added to the pressure on Suharto’s backers in Washington, London and Canberra to abandon the dictator.

But there was also a silence. For years, the free press of the complicit countries all but ignored East Timor. There were honourable exceptions, such as the courageous Max Stahl, who filmed the 1991 massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery. Leading journalists almost literally fell at the feet of Suharto. In a photograph of a group of Australian editors visiting Jakarta, led by the Murdoch editor Paul Kelly, one of them is bowing to Suharto, the genocidist.

From 1999 to 2002, the Australian Government took an estimated $1.2 billion in revenue from one oil and gas field in the Timor Sea. During the same period, Australia gave less than $200 million in so-called aid to East Timor.

In 2002, two months before East Timor won its independence, as Ben Doherty reported in January, “Australia secretly withdrew from the maritime boundary dispute resolution procedures of the UN convention the Law of the Sea, and the equivalent jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, so that it could not be compelled into legally binding international arbitration”.

The former Prime Minister John Howard has described his government’s role in East Timor’s independence as “noble”. Howard’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, once burst into the cabinet room in Dili, East Timor, and told Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, “We are very tough … Let me give you a tutorial in politics …”

Today, it is Timor-Leste that is giving the tutorial in politics. After years of trickery and bullying by Canberra, the people of Timor-Leste have demanded and won the right to negotiate before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) a legal maritime boundary and a proper share of the oil and gas.

Australia owes Timor Leste a huge debt — some would say, billions of dollars in reparations. Australia should hand over, unconditionally, all royalties collected since Gareth Evans toasted Suharto’s dictatorship while flying over the graves of its victims.

The Economist lauds Timor-Leste as the most democratic country in southeast Asia today.  Is that an accolade?  Or does it mean approval of a small and vulnerable country joining the great game of globalisation?

For the weakest, globalisation is an insidious colonialism that enables transnational finance and its camp-followers to penetrate deeper, as Edward Said wrote, than the old imperialists in their gun boats.

It can mean a model of development that gave Indonesia, under Suharto, gross inequality and corruption; that drove people off their land and into slums, then boasted about a growth rate.

The people of Timor-Leste deserve better than faint praise from the “capitalist governors of the world”, as the priest of Kraras wrote. They did not fight and die and vote for entrenched poverty and a growth rate. They deserve the right to sustain themselves when the oil and gas run out as it will.  At the very least, their courage ought to be a beacon in our  memory: a universal political lesson.

Bravo, Timor-Leste. Bravo and beware.

On May 5, John Pilger was presented with the Order of Timor-Leste by East Timor’s Ambassador to Australia, Abel Gutteras, in recognition of his reporting on East Timor under Indonesia’s brutal occupation, especially his landmark documentary film, Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy. 

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

Is our civilization on the brinks of collapse? The Reproduction of Real Life. The Privatization of Politics – Prof. Michel Chossudovsky (15 min)

Is our civilization on the brinks of collapse? All systems say yes.

May 5, 2017

From political and social chaos to economic instability and global warfare, the crises created by the privatization of politics are increasingly spinning out of control. Today on the GRTV Feature Interview, Michel Chossudovsky examines how all of these crises are converging on one point: the systematic destruction of the reproduction of real life.