- Iran Expected To "Go Nuclear" By Breaching Parts Of JCPOA, Europe Warns
Iran is expected to go nuclear, by backing out of some of the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA), at a sensitive time when Washington appears to be ramping up military readiness in response to what the White House says are credible threats against US assets in the Middle East by the Iranian regime.
Simply put, the European Union is not capable of facing US sanctions, and despite some meager past efforts, such as the attempt to establish a ‘SWIFT alternative,’ EU initiatives to salvage the deal have been too little too late, as Iran has already hinted to some European officials.
Image via CNN According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal Monday:
European diplomats warned Monday that Iran is preparing to abandon parts of a landmark nuclear deal in response to new U.S. sanctions, a step that risks inflaming tensions after the Trump administration dispatched warships to the Persian Gulf to deter potential Iranian attacks.
The WSJ likens it to a “partial withdrawal” after other international signatories such as France and China tried to keep the deal alive following Trump’s ordered US withdrawal last May.
Middle East based war reporter Elijah Magnier reports that Iran’s leaders “seem convinced that the only way to stand against the US sanctions is to go nuclear, gradually, pulling out from the Nuclear deal as the US unilaterally did.” He said “President Hassan Rouhani is expected to announce an important step this week.”
It appears the thinking in Tehran is that any future negotiation with the Trump administration are useless and pointless so long as White House rhetoric remains so aggressive, including the weeks ago formal terror designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), widely seen as a potential precursor to war.
Specifically, the WSJ cited European diplomats who say they were informed by the Iranians of Tehran’s intent to ramp up research efforts into centrifuges that could produce highly enriched uranium faster.
No doubt, national security advisor John Bolton’s Sunday night statements wherein he declared the US is sending an aircraft carrier and a bomber task force to the region in response to a “number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran helped Iran’s leaders reach this conclusion.
- Volodymyr Zelensky, The Donald Trump Of Ukrainian Politics
Submitted by SouthFront
Introduction
The parallels between the successor to Poroshenko and the current occupant of the White House are striking. Neither has had significant prior experience with national politics prior to launching a bid for the supreme executive office of their respective countries. Giving credit for Trump, he has had extensive experience in managing large businesses, Zelenskiy has none.
Both evaded compulsory military service citing health issues. Each owes his political success to their country’s population being worn down by a costly, endless war, and many-sided economic problems compounded by growing corruption and crony capitalism.
Both received support from major Jewish economic players with close ties to Israel (Igor Kolomoysky in Ukraine, Sheldon Adelson in the United States), with Trump subsequently repaying that debt of gratitude by transferring the US embassy to Jerusalem, designating it as the capital of Israel, and recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights.
Both follow presidents who came into office as presumptive saviors of their countries, namely “Hope and Change” Barack Obama who delivered 8 years of a gradual deterioration in living standards, and “Revolution of Dignity” Petro Poroshenko who promised to transform Ukraine into a country comparable to the advanced capitalist states of Western Europe. And, last but not least, each represents a pile of political “mystery meat”. Not having a career in politics also means not having a pool of loyal and capable cadres who can descend on the government and govern in the name of their boss. This problem was clearly evident in Trump’s case. Lacking political cadres of his own, he was unable to staff the large number of positions vacated by Obama’s political appointees and instead had to rely on the suggestions of his vice president who was a consummate party insider. Worse, when Trump attempted to staff his foreign policy team with individuals advocating a less confrontational approach to Russia, such as Rex Tillerson and Mike Flynn, he found himself faced with extreme opposition from entrenched “deep state” bureaucrats. As we know, that resistance culminated in the Mueller investigation the ostensible goal of which was to investigate Russian “meddling” and Trump’s “collusion” therewith, but whose actual goal appears to have been to steer Trump’s foreign policy into greater confrontation with Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and even North Korea. Now that US foreign policy is run by the likes of John Bolton (National Security Council), Mike Pompeo (State), and “Bloody Gina” Haspel (CIA) valiantly assisted by Military Industrial Complex friend Patrick Shanahan (Defense), Robert Mueller can confidently announce “mission accomplished” and shut down his investigation. Is this what the future has in store for Zelenskiy?
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
One key difference between US and Ukrainian “deep states” is that the Ukrainian one does not lead an independent existence. Rather, it is a creature of the US and Western European political establishments who provide it with direction and guidance. While US and EU political and economic objectives concerning Ukraine may differ on a few points (the EU is mainly interested in exploiting Ukraine’s agricultural and natural resources, whereas the US sees it as a military battering ram against Russia), for all intents and purposes they are united enough to treat them as a single entity.
If the Ukrainian “deep state” is the rock, the Ukrainian people who are plainly tired of the war, desire better relations with Russia, and a return to something resembling the normalcy of the late Yanukovych era when Ukraine was considerably more free and prosperous than it is after 5 years of post-Maidan reforms, are surely a hard place to be reckoned with. The stunning rejection of Poroshenko in the polls indicates the moral bankruptcy of the entire Maidan revolution camp, including the aforementioned Ukrainian “deep state”.
At the same time, the removal of Poroshenko will weaken the positions of the “deep state” and enhance those of the Ukrainian oligarchs who, while not exactly friends of the Ukrainian people, are nevertheless interested for their own reasons in less confrontational relations with Russia. Poroshenko, being a political veteran with a respectable power base of his own, was able to curb their ambitions and impose his will on them. Under Zelensky, the oligarchs will almost inevitably become considerably more assertive in defending their economic interests, which is liable to lead to political pressure on Zelensky to moderate Ukraine’s policies toward Russia. The early sign of this was the decision by a court in Kiev that the nationalization of Igor Kolomoysky’s Privat-Bank was unlawful, though so far the Ukraine Central Bank shows no signs of abiding by that decision.
Will Zelensky be able to deliver policies that are genuinely different from Poroshenko’s? It remains to be seen whether he feels himself powerful enough politically to replace the entire national security team, including the likes of Avakov, Turchinov, Poltorak, Klimkin, and other national security and foreign policy players who are utterly compromised by their anti-Russian policies and the crimes committed by Ukrainian military and security services in the Donbass. If they remain in office, there is little reason to believe Zelensky is anything other than a figurehead.
An Offer Ukraine Can’t Refuse
Further complicating matters is the fact that Ukraine today is far weaker and more dependent on the West than it was 5 years ago. Successive IMF loan tranches and the vastly higher indebtedness of the Ukrainian state mean that Western powers have many levers of influence on Zelensky. The United States is showing no sign of losing interest in Ukraine, likewise the EU’s policies have shown no sign of moderation. Ukraine’s continued need of loans and loan restructuring alone give Western powers a de-facto veto on Ukraine’s foreign policies. While not wholly pleased with Poroshenko’s tenure in office, where he proved to be more interested in promoting his own interests rather than the interests of his Western sponsors (a key reason why the West now appears ready to sacrifice Poroshenko), he did deliver a confrontation with Russia which validated his support by the West. Should Zelensky attempt to pick up where Yanukovych left off, there is little reason to doubt that he would be quickly faced with yet another Maidan, which would once again receive both vocal and tacit support from Western powers. Also for that reason, we should not expect any progress on the question of the recognition of Crimea. This and many other issues are no longer Ukraine’s to decide. They are part and parcel of the West-Russia political and military stand-off, and can be only resolved as part of a general “peace treaty” between the two areas. In other words, Ukraine’s future is no longer in its own hands.
Conclusion
Given all of the above, while there are a few reason for optimism, one should also curb one’s expectations. Granted, the very fact of Zelensky embarrassing Poroshenko and the rest of the Ukrainian establishment is a cause for celebration. Ukrainian politicians have been shown to be out of touch with the Ukrainian people who do not share their political priorities and do not approve of their ineptitude and corruption. But since when does the will of the people affect Kiev’s policies, given the very direct influence Western governments have on shaping Ukrainian policies, both in the domestic and international realms? Moscow’s rather belated decision to impose a ban on petroleum exports to Ukraine, which is to enter force on June 1, 2019, suggests it is not expecting anything but a tough transition period to the new regime in Ukraine.
- 'Bunker Buster' Rocket Launchers Used In Army War Drill In Poland
The 358th Public Affairs Detachment said in a news release that soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, conducted a field training exercise with anti-tank weapons amid deteriorating Russia–US relations.
On May 2, American forces gathered at the Johana Range, Poland, to fire the M136 AT4 Light Anti-Armor Weapon, an 84-mm unguided, portable, single-shot recoilless rocket launcher, which is one of the most common light anti-tank weapons in the world.
“Today’s training gives the Soldier a familiarization with the weapon system,” said US Army Staff Sgt. Larry W. Kirby, a squad leader assigned to Charlie Company, 3rd BN, 66th AR, 1ABCT, 1ID.
The AT4 is intended to give soldiers a means to destroy armored assault vehicles, tanks, landing crafts, helicopters, and other aircraft, although it’s generally ineffective against modern main battle tanks.
“This is the first time I fired, we call them ‘bunker busters,’ since basic training,” said US Army Pvt. Luke T. Powers from Kailua Kona, Hawaii, rifleman assigned to 2nd Squad, 1st Platoon, Charlie Company, 3rd BN, 66th AR, 1ABCT, 1ID.
The 3rd BN, 66th AR, 1 ABCT, 1 ID is from Fort Riley, Kansas, and is deployed to Europe in support of Atlantic Resolve.
“I was excited when I heard we were coming to Europe,” said Powers. “It’s cool that we get to do our job out here and also get to interact with the locals.”
Atlantic Resolve builds readiness, increases interoperability and enhances relations with military partners in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. These deployments of ready, combat-credible soldiers are used as deterrents against Russia.
“Soldiers get first-hand experience with using this weapon system, so that they can quickly employ and destroy any armored threat that we may encounter,” said Kirby. Adding that “this type of training is important because these AT teams are paramount to (the) success of the armored fight.”
The purpose of the exercise is to prepare for future conflict along the Poland–Russia border, a 144-mile stretch that features the Russian Federation exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. The exclave hosts over 15,000 Russian troops, heavy artillery, long-range ballistic and anti-aircraft, assault armored vehicle, and the next-generation Russian main battle tank.
In the unlikely scenario of a future conflict in the next few years, maybe by the mid to late 2020s, a shooting war in the vicinity of Kaliningrad could be the epicenter of World War III.
Kaliningrad and Moscow would be defended with long-range artillery and Iskander ballistic missiles that would target NATO bases. In the event of a bombardment, NATO forces would launch retaliatory missiles strikes at Kaliningrad, Moscow, and along the European Russia border.
A ground war would be fierce, and that’s precisely why American forces are training with AT4s in Poland. Last year, we reported how the Pentagon sold 210 Javelin anti-tank missile and 37 launchers to Ukraine.
If a conflict did break out, if it’s in Poland or somewhere on the border with Russia, NATO leaders are banking that anti-tank rocket launchers will be some of the best weapons an infantry unit can utilize on the front lines.
- At The Frontiers Of Surveillance Capitalism
Authored by Katie Fitzpatrick via TheNation.com,
Before they started their successful wildcat strike last year, West Virginia teachers railed against the introduction of a workplace wellness program called Go365. The program coerced employees into downloading an app that would monitor their health, rewarding points for exercise and good behavior. Employees who failed to accrue 3,000 points by the end of the year would be penalized with a $25 monthly fee and increased deductibles. Although the program was made voluntary before the strike began (and has since been eliminated), the outrage over Go365 helped ignite the strike. As one teacher told The New York Times, “People felt that was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information.”
By resisting Go365, the West Virginia teachers waged two battles at once: They fought in the trenches of state austerity and on the front lines of private digital surveillance. The app presaged many of the worrying trends that Shoshana Zuboff describes in her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She explains that Silicon Valley firms are looking to wearable technologies and other smart devices to gain an increasingly detailed view of our physical and emotional health. Go365 measured teachers’ daily steps with the help of a Fitbit; Sleep Number beds measure the hours we keep and the quality of our rest; a new company called Realeyes plans to surveil our facial expressions as we watch advertisements, interpreting our emotions in real time.
Silicon Valley firms don’t want to simply monitor our behavior, however; they plan to shape it, too. Their influence over our actions might be indirect for now, effected through the prizes and penalties that Go365 weaponized against teachers. But by integrating these devices into our daily lives, these companies also set the stage for a future of more direct intervention. Zuboff quotes one software developer fantasizing aloud about the tech industry’s ability to push and prod us remotely: “We can know if you shouldn’t be driving, and we can just shut your car down…we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn’t be sitting so long.”
Drawing on thorough research as well as alarming interviews like that one, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers an urgent warning about our possible future. Zuboff discusses the technological innovations and market mechanisms that make ubiquitous surveillance increasingly likely. Although her diagnosis is chilling, her solutions are few. Throughout the book, she decries the abuses perpetrated by Silicon Valley companies and argues that they represent a radical break from an earlier, kinder form of capitalism. But by refusing to acknowledge the continuities between past modes of exploitation and the latest horrors of surveillance capitalism, she ultimately leads readers away from the most promising paths of resistance.
Zuboff has been hailed as a “maverick management guru” and a “prophet of the information age.” A former columnist at Fast Company and Businessweek and one of the first women tenured at Harvard Business School, she has been a leading voice on information technology, business, and the workplace for over 30 years. She first gained wide attention for her 1988 book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, an early and influential study of how computer technology would affect the American workforce. This project was notable in its ambition, and Zuboff set an even larger goal for herself in a 2015 article that sketched the fundamentals of surveillance capitalism: “Just a moment ago,” she writes, “it still seemed reasonable to focus our concerns on the challenges of an information workplace or an information society. Now, the enduring questions of authority and power must be addressed to the widest possible frame…information civilization.” In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which runs over 700 pages, she sets out to describe the dawn of a civilization—one that she argues will be dominated by Silicon Valley and its surveillance apparatus.
In the first section of her sprawling book, Zuboff traces the birth of surveillance capitalism to the moment in 2003 when Google filed a patent titled “Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising.” In Google’s early days, she explains, the company linked advertising only to search queries. Meanwhile, the vast quantities of data that it gathered about particular users (including “the number and pattern of search terms…dwell times, click patterns, and location”) were used only to improve users’ experience. The 2003 patent, however, promised to convert that “data exhaust” into “behavioral surplus” that could be used to increase the precision of targeted advertising, a much more lucrative venture. This approach to data collection became so successful, she argues, that it led to a new logic of accumulation: From 2003 on, Google was on a quest to gather and monetize as much user data as possible.
The “extraction imperative,” as Zuboff calls it, eventually migrated beyond Google. In 2008, Google executive Sheryl Sandberg (whom Zuboff dubs the “Typhoid Mary” of surveillance capitalism) left the search giant for a position at Facebook. Her aim was to monetize the intimate information that Mark Zuckerberg’s company has gathered from users, transforming Facebook from “a social networking site to an advertising behemoth.” From there, word spread fast, with giants like Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast joining the behavioral-surplus extraction business.
Today, companies of all kinds are trying to get into the game. Samsung’s smart TV records private conversations in living rooms across the country; the latest Roomba vacuum maps its users’ floor plans; the CEO of Allstate Insurance hopes, in his own words, to “sell this information we get from people driving around to various people and capture some additional profit source.” These companies belong to industries outside Silicon Valley’s traditional purview of high-tech devices and Internet platforms, but what they share with Google and Facebook is a desire to generate profit from their intimate knowledge of our behavior and experience.
Zuboff shows that these increasingly frequent invasions of our privacy are neither accidental nor optional; instead, they’re a key source of profit for many of the 21st century’s most successful companies. Thus, these companies have a direct financial stake in the broadening, deepening, and perfecting of the surveillance they already profit from—and in making sure that it remains legal.
As a result of this boom in data extraction, new technologies are emerging as well: Engineers are intent on developing tools that will mine all sorts of dark data—the Silicon Valley term for those dimensions of human experience currently inaccessible to algorithmic analysis. To mine dark data, Google, Facebook, and others are developing smart homes and wearable devices, self-driving cars, drones, and augmented reality. They’re even striving to monitor the body’s inner workings through digestible sensors and to map a person’s inner life through so-called emotion analytics.
The primary purpose of these disturbing new technologies is not to influence consumer behavior but to generate accurate predictions about it. Yet that “prediction imperative,” as Zuboff calls it, naturally leads back to a desire for influence. For example, Facebook boasts a “loyalty prediction” service that identifies “individuals who are ‘at risk’ of shifting their brand allegiance” and prompts advertisers to intervene swiftly. The goal, Zuboff explains, is not just to get to know us better but also to find ways to manipulate and control our actions in the service of advertisers. As one chief data scientist told her, “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior.” The most persuasive (and terrifying) sections of her book chart this rapid growth of Silicon Valley’s ambitions, from mass data extraction to ubiquitous monitoring to widespread behavior modification.
The third section of Zuboff’s book is dedicated to describing a new ideology—instrumentarianism—that she says will dominate the 21st century. To explain this new species of power, she returns first to the midcentury work of the psychologist B.F. Skinner, who argued that free will was an illusion and that any action that seemed freely chosen or spontaneous was just a behavior that had yet to be predicted, explained, and conditioned by behavioral psychology. Eventually, Skinner posited, such analysis could be used to replace the chaos of individual “freedom” with large-scale social engineering. This idea, Zuboff argues, has now been taken up by leading researchers like MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland, whose 2014 article “The Death of Individuality” suggests that we ought to do away with the individual as the governing unit of rationality and focus on how our society is governed by a “collective intelligence.” Although most Silicon Valley developers seem to lack Skinner’s and Pentland’s utopian (or, rather, dystopian) ambitions, Zuboff warns that their quest to profit from behavior modification will eventually merge with instrumentarianism’s project of social control.
The book presents instrumentarianism as a “decisive break” from an earlier, apparently more beneficent form of capitalism. Zuboff praises market capitalism at length near the end of the book, arguing that it “awakened the unstoppable march toward liberty” in the United States and the United Kingdom and helped “lift much of humankind from millennia of ignorance, poverty, and pain.” But she worries that today’s surveillance capitalism violates some of the core tenets of this earlier model, including liberal individualism, the bourgeois home, the invisible hand, and what she terms the “organic reciprocities” between capital and labor. Drawing on Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, she complains that the vast amounts of data available to technology companies will make once-unknowable markets predictable, thus granting those companies an unprecedented power over our economic lives. She notes that Silicon Valley has relatively few employees and an unusual relationship to its customer base (depending on users whose data is extracted, as opposed to traditional consumers). For this reason, she argues, Mark Zuckerberg does not exist in the same mutually beneficial relationship to the public that Henry Ford once did.
It is in her discussion of market democracy that the limitations of Zuboff’s analysis come to the fore. For her, the market—before the rise of platform monopolies (and, to a lesser degree, neoliberalism)—was characterized by individual liberty and free choice. Accordingly, she is uninterested in how surveillance might deepen the forms of exploitation and coercion that always structured market capitalism, particularly for marginalized and racialized communities. Her commitment to the free market also explains why she spends very little time considering the role that the state might play in countering Silicon Valley’s power. In the recent essay collection Economics for the Many, Nick Srnicek advocates for the socialization of platform monopolies like Facebook. Though his proposal is flawed (Srnicek concedes that the state could put our private data to different dystopian ends), it rises to the scale of ambition necessary to address this threat. Zuboff, by contrast, spends a lot of time encouraging us to act but gives us very little sense of how.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism succeeds in painting a dark portrait of Silicon Valley’s growing power, but it ultimately fails in its political analysis. In whose service and at whose expense is the control of surveillance capitalism effected? Zuboff reaches for the grandest possible explanation: She argues that Silicon Valley is in the thrall of a radical instrumentarian ideology that aims to supplant liberal individualism with large-scale social engineering. But we don’t need a spooky new political theory to explain what’s going on; it’s already perfectly legible in the context of liberal capitalism. Companies do not pursue control in a quest for Skinner’s or Pentland’s engineered utopias. Their goals are much simpler: first, to accrue profits through targeted advertising and, second, to promote their direct economic and political interests. The problem with surveillance capitalism is as much the capitalism as it is the surveillance.
At the close of her book, Zuboff seeks to stir her readers to collective action against the behemoths of Silicon Valley. She argues that we cannot treat the invasion of our privacy as a personal problem to be managed with new forms of encryption or evasion. Instead, we must treat it as a social problem to be tackled through widespread democratic contestation. “The individual alone cannot shoulder the burden of justice,” she writes, “any more than an individual worker in the first years of the twentieth century could bear the burden of fighting for fair wages and working conditions…. A century ago, workers organized for collective action and ultimately tipped the scales of power…today’s ‘users’ will have to mobilize in new ways.” For an example of such inspiring collective action, she looks to an activist group called None of Your Business, which aims to impose significant fines on companies that fail to uphold existing privacy regulations.
While her desire to fight back is, of course, noble, Zuboff’s subtle rhetorical slide from “workers” to “users” is troubling. For her, the battle for “fair wages and working conditions” is apparently a thing of the past, resolved a century ago when workers finally “tipped the scales of power.” Of course, we know that these fights are far from over—and surveillance capitalism is poised to make them much more difficult. Silicon Valley doesn’t just harm workers in Amazon fulfillment centers or Chinese iPhone factories, although these violations are horrific enough. It also makes all workers more vulnerable to the spying and prying of their bosses. Zuboff describes a new service for employers (and landlords) that scrapes and analyzes applicants’ social-media activity, including private messages, to assess their character. Meanwhile, Pentland proposes the use of “unobtrusive wearable sensors” called sociometers that would help managers “infer the relationships between colleagues.”
Although Zuboff notes these examples, she spends very little time discussing them, instead focusing on how surveillance capitalism can affect us during our leisure hours, when we approach technology primarily as users. She emphasizes surveillance in the home over surveillance in the office; she is more worried about how we’re manipulated while shopping than working. Once again, her nostalgia for an earlier form of market capitalism limits the power of her critique: Zuboff is so intent on protecting an idealized image of the liberal individual (someone who exchanges freely on the market and then returns to the privacy of home) that she gives little attention to the corners of our society that capitalism has always subjected to surveillance: prisons, hospitals, borders, workplaces.
The good news, though: While Zuboff may ignore it, labor also offers a site of resistance that is much more promising than the regulations and fines advocated by None of Your Business. If those at the margins of our society are the most likely to be directly affected by surveillance, then building power at those margins—among tenants, debtors, immigrants, prisoners, and, of course, workers—will allow us to resist the worst abuses of surveillance capitalism at the point of their application. The teachers in West Virginia knew that Go365 threatened their dignity and their livelihood. They used the power of their union to fight back and win. In resisting the rise of surveillance capitalism, we should look to examples like theirs.
- "Final Showdown" On Horizon In Idlib As Russia Ramps Up Airstrikes After Rocket Attacks
Though Syria has largely been out of the headlines for over the past half-year, there’s multiple indicators to suggest we could soon be headed for a major escalation over Idlib.
The last time a large Syrian-Russian joint force mustered to retake the al-Qaeda held province in the country’s northwest, the United States threatened major military response (in Sept. 2018), also citing that even should so much as an accusation of chemical weapons usage surface, US strikes would ensue.
Russian Air Force Su-30s have continued to be active over Syria, image via The Drive Over the past weeks both Syrian and Russian jets have conducted airstrikes over parts of Idlib in retaliation for stepped up HTS operations (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham/Syrian AQ/formerly Nusra) against government areas in a pattern of escalation that looks to continue. And now Russia’s Khmeimim airbase is facing more severe attacks via HTS rockets, mortars, and terror drones.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) confirmed two targeted attacks against its key air base in Syria on Monday, near Latakia, which reportedly involved 36 rockets. Russian officials said Khmeimim’s air defense systems repelled the attacks, which they said also involved the coordination of drones.
RT News cited officials to describe “the militants used a drone to direct the fire from multiple launch rocket systems, but the attacks were repelled by Khmeimim’s air defense systems.” Insurgents have long used drones to attempt to penetrate the air base’s defenses. In response, Russia launched a series of air strikes across the Idlib ‘de-escalation’ zone, which is administered based on a joint agreement with Turkey.
Later in the day Beirut-based Al Masdar News confirmed citing Syrian military sources major Russian airstrikes in and around Idlib:
The Russian Air Force has unleashed a massive assault across northwestern Syria this morning, targeting several areas under the control of the militants in Hama, Aleppo, and Idlib.
According to a military source in the government stronghold of Mhardeh, the Russian Air Force began their aerial bombardment of northwestern Syria just minutes before the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) made their push in northern Hama.
Following a series of terror attacks and insurgent shelling on civilian areas of Hama and Aleppo, Syrian and Russian forces have cited the breach of ceasefire terms as justifying the new waves of air strikes.
Meanwhile, international media reports have again begun spotlighting the potential for mass humanitarian disaster and refugee displacement as Idlib again finds itself increasingly targeted by warplanes above — also given the mainstay of al-Qaeda’s force in Syria is now lodged among some three million civilians in the area.
The Washington Post on Monday said that “a final showdown” is looming over Idlib, which could bring Syria straight back into the international spotlight once again, also as both the US and Israel ramp up efforts against “Iranian expansion” in the region, and as John Bolton announced the deployment of a US carrier strike group and bomber task force to the Middle East.
- Escobar: The Eagle, The Bear, & The Dragon
Authored by Pepe Escobar via ConsortiumNews.com,
The eagle has conveniently forgotten that the original, Ancient Silk Road linked the dragon with the Roman empire for centuries – with no interlopers outside of Eurasia…
Once upon a time, deep into the night in selected campfires across the deserts of Southwest Asia, I used to tell a fable about the eagle, the bear and the dragon – much to the amusement of my Arab and Persian interlocutors.
It was about how, in the young 21stcentury, the eagle, the bear and the dragon had taken their (furry) gloves off and engaged in what turned out to be Cold War 2.0.
As we approach the end of the second decade of this already incandescent century, perhaps it’s fruitful to upgrade the fable. With all due respect to Jean de la Fontaine, excuse me while I kiss the (desert) sky again.
Long gone are the days when a frustrated bear repeatedly offered to cooperate with the eagle and its minions on a burning question: nuclear missiles.
The bear repeatedly argued that the deployment of interceptor missiles and radars in that land of the blind leading the blind – Europe – was a threat. The eagle repeatedly argued that this is to protect us from those rogue Persians.
Now the eagle – claiming the dragon is getting an easy ride – has torn down every treaty in sight and is bent on deploying nuclear missiles in selected eastern parts of the land of the blind leading the blind, essentially targeting the bear.
Dragon bridge, Ljubljana. (Ali Eminov/Creative Commons)
All That Glitters is Silk
Roughly two decades after what top bear Putin defined as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20thcentury”, he proposed a form of USSR light; a political/economic body called the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
The idea was to have the EAEU interact with the EU – the top institution of the motley crew congregated as the blind leading the blind.
The eagle not only rejected the possible integration; it came up with a modified color revolution scenario to unplug Ukraine from the EAEU.
Even earlier than that, the eagle had wanted to set up a New Silk Road under its total control. The eagle had conveniently forgotten that the original, Ancient Silk Road linked the dragon with the Roman empire for centuries – with no interlopers outside of Eurasia.
So one can imagine the eagle’s stupor when the dragon irrupted on the global stage with its own super-charged New Silk Roads – upgrading the bear original idea of a free trade area “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” to a multi-connectivity corridor, terrestrial and maritime, from eastern China to western Europe and everything in between, spanning the whole of Eurasia.
Facing this new paradigm the blind, well, remained blind for as long as anyone could remember; they simply could not get their act together.
The eagle, meanwhile, was incrementally raising the stakes. It launched what amounted for all practical purposes to a progressively weaponized encirclement of the dragon.
The eagle made a series of moves that amount to inciting nations bordering the South China Sea to antagonize the dragon, while repositioning an array of toys – nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter jets – closer and closer to the dragon’s territory.
All the time, what the dragon saw – and continues to see – is a battered eagle trying to muscle its way out of an irreversible decline by trying to intimidate, isolate and sabotage the dragon’s irreversible ascent back to where it has been for 18 of the past 20 centuries; enthroned as the king of the jungle.
A key vector is that Eurasia-wide players know that under the new laws of the jungle the dragon simply can’t – and won’t – be reduced to the status of a supporting actor. And Eurasia-wide players are too smart to embark on a Cold War 2.0 that will undermine Eurasia itself.
The eagle’s reaction to the dragon’s New Silk strategy took some time to swing from inaction to outright demonization – complementing the joint description of both the dragon and the bear as existential threats.
And yet, for all the spinning crossfire, Eurasia-wide players are not exactly impressed anymore with an eagle empire armed to its teeth. Especially after the eagle’s crest was severely damaged by failure upon hunting failure in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Eagle aircraft carriers patrolling the eastern part of Mare Nostrum are not exactly scaring the bear, the Persians and the Syrians.
James Audubon and His Journal, published in 1899 in the Public Domain. (Wikimedia Commons)
A “reset” between the eagle and the bear was always a myth. It took some time – and much financial distress – for the bear to realize there won’t be any reset, while the dragon only saw a reset towards open confrontation.
After establishing itself, slowly but surely, as the most advanced military power on the planet, with hypersonic know-how, the bear came to a startling conclusion: we don’t care anymore about what the eagle says – or does.
Under the Raging Volcano
Meanwhile, the dragon kept expanding, inexorably, across all Asian latitudes as well as Africa, Latin America and even across the unemployment-infested pastures of the austerity-hit blind leading the blind.
The dragon is firmly assured that, if cornered to the point of resorting to a nuclear option, it holds the power to make the eagle’s staggering deficit explode, degrade its credit rating to junk, and wreak havoc in the global financial system.
No wonder the eagle, under an all-enveloping paranoid cloud of cognitive dissonance, feeding state propaganda 24/7 to its subjects and minions, keeps spewing out lava like a raging volcano – dispensing sanctions to a great deal of the planet, entertaining regime change wet dreams, launching a total energy embargo against the Persians, resurrecting the “war on terra”, and aiming to punishlike a Bat Out Of Intel Hell any journalist, publisher or whistleblower revealing its inner machinations.
It hurts, so bad, to admit that the political/economic center of a new multipolar world will be Asia – actually Eurasia.
As the eagle got more and more threatening, the bear and the dragon got closer and closer in their strategic partnership. Now both bear and dragon have too many strategic links across the planet to be intimidated by the eagle’s massive Empire of Bases or those periodic coalitions of the (somewhat reluctant) willing.
Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch, the mythical creature dragon, 1806. (Wikimedia Commons)
To match comprehensive, in-progress Eurasia integration, of which the New Silk Roads are the graphic symbol, the eagle’s fury, unleashed, has nothing to offer – except rehashing a war against Islam coupled with the weaponized cornering of both bear and dragon.
Then there’s Persia – those master chess players. The eagle has been gunning for the Persians ever since they got rid of the eagle’s proconsul, the Shah, in 1979 – and this after the eagle and perfidious Albion had already smashed democracy to place the Shah, who made Saddam look like Gandhi, in power in 1953.
The eagle wants all that oil and natural gas back – not to mention a new Shah as the new gendarme of the Persian Gulf. The difference is now the bear and the dragon are saying No Way. What is the eagle to do? Set up the false flag to end all false flags?
This is where we stand now. And once again, we reach the end – though not the endgame. There’s still no moral to this revamped fable. We continue to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Our only, slim hope is that a bunch of Hollow Men obsessed by the Second Coming won’t turn Cold War 2.0 into Armageddon.
* * *
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- Beijing Puts Army On "Heightened Alert" Over US Warships In South China Sea As Tensions Soar
While investors from around the globe are desperately looking for clues if the simmering trade war between the US and China is about to get rather hot at midnight on Friday, when as the US Trade Rep warned after the close, the US will hike tariffs to 25% on Chinese imports, the not so veiled geopolitical conflict between the two superpowers which has a far greater chance of mutating into a “kinetic” exchange after China expressed its “strong opposition” on Monday after two US warships sailed near disputed islands in the South China Sea.
It was the third time this year that Washington has challenged Beijing’s maritime claims in the region which China has expressly claimed as its national interest, amid escalating rivalry between the two powers.
As we reported this morning, guided-missile destroyers USS Preble and USS Chung-Hoon passed within 12 nautical miles of Gaven and Johnson reefs in the Spratly Islands on Monday, Commander Clay Doss, a spokesman for the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet, said according to Reuters. The territory is also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan.
USS Preble, one of two guided-missile destroyers that took part in Monday’s freedom of navigation exercise in the South China Sea. Quoted by the SCMP, Commander Doss said the move aimed to assert international rights to “innocent passage” and “challenge excessive maritime claims” in accordance with international law, although Beijing hardly saw the latest US intervention in Chinese backwaters as “innocent.” The incident was the third time this year that the US has conducted so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, compared to five publicly reported passages last year and four in 2017.
Predictably, with Trump set to pull the plug on a trade deal between Washington and Beijing, the move drew criticism from Beijing, with the foreign ministry calling for the US to end the provocation.
“The US warships’ actions have violated China’s sovereignty and disturbed the peace, security and order of the region,” ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said. “The Chinese side is strongly dissatisfied and firmly opposed to that.”
Senior Colonel Li Huamin, a spokesman for the Southern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army, said in a message on the PLA Daily’s social media account that the PLA Navy “identified” and “warned off” the US vessels.
The command was on “heightened alert” and would “take all necessary measures” to safeguard China’s sovereignty over the South China Sea, he said.
In a clear escalation compared to recent previous diplomatic retorts, on Monday, Senior Colonel Li Huamin, a spokesman for the Southern Theatre Command of the People’s Liberation Army, said in a message on the PLA Daily’s social media account that the PLA Navy “identified” and “warned off” the US vessels.
Confirming just how infuriated Beijing was with the latest “innocent passage” by US warships, the Colonel said that the Chinese army was on “heightened alert” and would “take all necessary measures” to safeguard China’s sovereignty over the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, signaling that such provocations will not stop any time soon, US Commander Doss said the freedom of navigation operations “are not about any one country, nor are they about making political statements,” which of course, is only half a lie: it is indeed about two countries, the US and China, however such operations are all about making a political statement.
Luckily, so far these statements have not resulted in any major provocative escalations, but if and when the Chinese feel they have nothing more to gain by remaining cordial with the Trump administrations, expect something to break, especially since as Admiral Phil Davidson, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, suggested in February, naval operations by the US and its allies like Britain would become more frequent.
A similar patrol in September, also near Gavin and Johnson reefs, resulted in a near collision when a US destroyer was forced to make a last-minute manoeuvre to avoid hitting a Chinese warship. Next time when a US and Chinese warship go head to head, it is almost certain that there will be no last-minute evasive manoeuvers.
- Gundlach Reveals His Top Trade For 2019
Never one to shy away from voicing his often radical, contrarian view (he was the first to correctly predict Trump would become the next US president back in mid-2015), DoubleLine’s Jeff Gundlach was the last to take the mic at today’s Ira Sohn conference, where like most other high caliber hedge fund managers, he revealed his top trade.
Starting off in typical whimsical fashion, he prompted a gasp of surprise from the audience when he urged those present to short the 12 low-polling democrats – perhaps on PredictIt – calling them the 1%-ers, in reference to their 1% polling rating.
“No Joe, I don’t want you grabbing my shoulders or giving me an Eskimo kiss,” Gundlach said of Joe Biden while showing a slide with several pictures of Joe Biden being very close to women, titled “Space Invaders”, suggesting that he probably does not see the former vice president emerging as the next leader of the “free world.” He continued the political theme, saying “at least Trump can’t go right at him with a nickname Groping Joe.” Think about how that would sound coming from Trump, the DoubleLine CEO said.
Gundlach also had some choice words for the “1/1024th” candidate, Elizabeth Warren, saying “it’s like being trapped with a mother-in-law from hell. Who wants four years of this? Who wants even four hours of this?”
Gundlach then turned to his favorite topic, the soaring US public debt, and took yet another victory lap, saying that four years ago at this very podium he predicted Trump would win, and that the debt level would explode, and with over $22 trillion in Federal debt today, he was also correct in this particular forecast, although one hardly needs to be a rocket surgeon to figure out the trajectory of US public debt.
Of course, there was a trade off, because if national debt did not explode higher, Gundlach said US GDP would be negative the last three years.
Gundlach also touched on a familiar topic from his latest DoubleLine presentation, namely the surging US debt interest, and echoed what we said last week, warning that he is “concerned” about the future direction of interest rates (as were we back in March).
As a reminder, last week we showed a chart from the latest Presentation to the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, which showed the OMB’s forecast for annual US debt issuance, broken down between its three component uses of funds: Primary Deficit, Net Interest Expense, and “Other.” We said that chart was “troubling” because while in 2019 and 2020 surging US interest expense is roughly matched by the other deficit components in the US budget, these gradually taper off by 2024, and in fact in 2025 become a source of budget surplus (we won’t be holding our breath). But the real red flag was that starting in 2024, when the primary deficit drops to zero according to the latest projections, all US debt issuance would be used to fund the US net interest expense, which depending on the prevailing interest rate between now and then will be anywhere between $700 billion and $1.2 trillion or more.
Of course, both the current national debt and interest expense are tiny compared to what they would look like should MMT eventually become the monetary ideology du jour, and it is no secret that Gundlach does not harbor too many warm feelings for the “Magic Money Tree”, saying that MMT “It’s not modern, it’s not monetary and it’s not much of a theory,” which he may have borrowed from a recent GaveKal blog post.
Countless political and macro tangents aside, Gundlach – who at last year’s Ira Sohn said to buy oil producers and short Facebook – did in fact have a top trade reco for 2019: arguing that since interest rates cannot maintain the low volatility they’ve experienced in the past eight years for an extended period of time, his investment thesis was simple: buy interest-rate volatility on long-maturity U.S. Treasuries via a put-call straddle on TLT.
Quoted by Bloomberg, Gundlach said that “all one needs is a 50 basis-point change in the long-bond in the next year to make money on this trade. Six months from now, if volatility has doubled, investors would have a 40 percent gain even if interest rates haven’t moved”, he said.
“Just the volatility doubling sometime in the next year is very likely to make you money,” he said.
Of course, if rate vol doubles, central banks will be scrambling to mute it as the cascading effect would promptly lead to tremors across all other asset classes, from equities to FX, so in effect Gundlach is urging investors to fight the Fed (and other central banks, who are now all in on vol suppression).
Gundlach’s final words were also familiar to those who follow his public statements: “Respect everyone. Know life is unfair. Take risk. Step-up in the tough times. Face down bullies. Lift the downtrodden. And never, ever give up”…. which of course was not only pulled from his own April 6 tweet, but was also apparently borrowed from the UTexas 2014 commencement speech delivered by Naval Admiral William McRaven.
- Children At Philadelphia Muslim Society Say They Will "Chop Off Heads" For Allah
Footage has surfaced of Muslim children at an Islamic center in Philadelphia saying that they would sacrifice themselves, “chop off heads” and even kill for the “army of Allah”.
The Muslim American Society (MAS) Islamic center in Philadelphia posted the video to its Facebook page in celebration of “Ummah Day”. Young children are seen in the video wearing Palestinian scarves and reading poetry about killing for Allah.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) told Fox News:
“These are not isolated incidents; they are happening in major centers of the country – including in Pennsylvania.”
MEMRI translated the video, where children can be heard singing: “The land of the Prophet Muhammad’s Night Journey is calling us. Our Palestine must return to us.”
One girl even talks about martyrs sacrificing their lives to conquer Jerusalem. In the video, she says:
“We will defend the land of divine guidance with our bodies, and we will sacrifice our souls without hesitation. We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque. We will lead the army of Allah fulfilling His promise, and we will subject them to eternal torture.”
MAS Philly belongs to the Muslim American Society, which has 42 chapters in the U.S.
The MAS put out the following statement on Friday: “While we celebrate the coming together of different cultures and languages, not all songs were properly vetted. This was an unintended mistake and an oversight in which the center and the students are remorseful. MAS will conduct an internal investigation to ensure this does not occur again. As a faith-based organization dedicated to moving people to strive for God-consciousness and a just and virtuous society, we affirm our long-standing position on our shared values of humanity. We stand resolutely in our condemnation of hate, bigotry, Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and all the illnesses of hate that plague our society.”
And, as you may have guessed, CNN was right on the case, reporting its “most trusted name in news” take. Or not.
CNN wrote 23 articles on Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann
CNN has *not* reported on the kids in Philadelphia who were allegedly singing about chopping people’s heads off. pic.twitter.com/Jdeuz1ImKh
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) May 5, 2019
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