“The Chinese government has very firmly and clearly stated its position,” stated Wang Yi as he stood beside Kerry outside the State Department building. “I believe for any country, for any society, no one would allow those illegal acts that violate public order. That’s the situation in the United States and that’s the same situation in Hong Kong.”

For his part, Kerry offered the Obama administration’s message that it objects to aspects of China’s anti-democratic policies in Hong Kong, specifically their refusal for universal suffrage, and said he hopes “that the Hong Kong authorities will exercise restraint and respect the protestors’ right to express their views peacefully.”

And though it’s a well-worn talking point—articulated here by the Guardian— that the US has “always walked a delicate tightrope in its relations with China, eager to improve trade and economic ties with the world’s second largest economy while also pressing for greater human rights”—Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, in an op-ed on Wednesday, argues that what’s most striking dynamic about the situation in Hong Kong is not how leaders like Wang Yi and Kerry are delicatedly skirting the realities of their own self-interest, but why voters in the U.S. don’t recognize how much they have in common with the tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents who have recognized how corrupt and nonexistence their democratic has become.

In Lessig’s opinion, when it comes to calling for democratic reforms and amassing in large numbers in the streets, U.S. voters “should be protesting, too.”

Invoking the legacy of William “Boss” Tweedy, known for masterminding New York and national politics on behalf of  his fellow elites in 19th century America, Lessig writes that contemporary voters in the United States have become as disempowered by the role of big money in electoral politics (he calls it the “green primary”) as have Hong Kong citizens under mainland China’s one-party rule.

“I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating,” Tweed famously said. And for Lessig, that is the mindset that draws a straight line between China’s Communist Party leaders and the corporate and wealthy elites in the United States who have so radically captured American democracy in recent decades.

Lessig writes:

Of course, we don’t have a democracy “dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite.” But as a massive empirical study by Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page published just last month shows, remove the word “pro-Beijing,” and the charge translates pretty well.

America’s government is demonstrably responsive to the “economic elite and organized business interests,” Gilens and Page found, while “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Boss Tweed would have been impressed.

The “green primary” isn’t a formal bar to election. But it is certainly an effective bar. There isn’t a single political analyst in America today who doesn’t look first to whether a candidate for Congress has the necessary financial support of the relevant funders. That money isn’t enough, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee victory. (Only 94 percent of candidates with more money win.) But no candidate ignores the money, or is ignorant of the views of the tiny fraction of the 1 percent that provides it. That’s not perfect control, but it turns out to be control enough to weaken the ability of ordinary Americans to have something other than a “non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The surprise in the Hong Kong plan is not that it fits Boss Tweed’s mold. The surprise is the reaction of her students, and now people. To imagine a proportionate number of Americans — 5 million — striking against our own version of Tweedism is to imagine the first steps of a revolution. But in America, we don’t protest our “democracy with Chinese characteristics.” In America, we have accepted it as as American as apple pie.

Swiss Red Cross worker killed in shelling from Kiev-controlled position – Moscow

The Swiss Red Cross worker, who died in Donetsk shelling on Thursday, was killed on a rebel-held territory as a result of an attack from the position controlled by Kiev’s armed forces, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“We note the hectic reaction of the Kiev authorities, who hurried to shift the blame for the death of the employee of this established international organization [Red Cross] from themselves,” the ministry said.

“Kiev doesn’t want to admit the obvious fact that while the [attacked] area in Donetsk was situated on territory controlled by the militia forces, the shelling itself was conducted from Ukrainian Army positions.”

Moscow condemned the incident as “a blatant violation” of international humanitarian law and insisted on an objective and thorough investigation into the matter.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has also expressed its condolences while putting the incident on the par with “the terrorists taking the OSCE employees hostage.” The ministry uses the term ‘terrorists’ to refer to anti-government forces in eastern Ukraine.

The attack was aimed at the “intimidation of the international organizations’ representatives, who help to bring the peace and calm back to Donbass,” Kiev added.

Laurent DuPasquier, 38, a Swiss national who was deputy head of the Red Cross mission in Donetsk, was killed on Thursday in shelling which was carried out allegedly from an Uragan (Hurricane) rocket system, a report by the OSCE said.

The document also stated that 15 minutes after the shelling, the OSCE observers got a phone call from the head of the International Red Cross Committee (IRCC) in Kiev, who told them that the Donetsk office was under attack, and one of the employees was dead. He had been standing in front of the building when the shelling began.

Earlier on Friday, First Deputy Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic Andrey Purgin also claimed that the rocket that hit the Red Cross office was launched by the Ukrainian military.

“There’s no question about that. This was a rocket projectile of the Uragan system. It was, of course, launched by the Ukrainian side. Its range is up to 40km. That is to say they were shelling the center of Donetsk, without paying any attention to the location they were to hit. It just happened that it hit the Red Cross office,” according to Purgin.

Why Obama Lost His War in Ukraine

When President Obama took control of Ukraine in February 2014, via a coup d’etat against the democratically elected President, rather than by an outright invasion of U.S. troops, the new Government that he imposed in Kiev was democratically very vulnerable. The man whom Obama overthrew had been elected by overwhelming margins in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine’s southeast and by high margins elsewhere in the country’s southeast; those southeastern voters needed to be gotten rid of (exterminated &/or expelled from Ukraine) in order to make the new, pro-U.S. Ukrainian regime (which was supported only by the voters in Ukraine’s northeast), stick, if Ukraine was ever to be restored to democracy while being anti-Russian such as the the new rulers were, whom Obama had installed.

But Crimea immediately broke away from that new Government, Russian troops came into Crimea to protect them against military action that was planned by the U.S. to stop that breakaway,and Crimeans then immediately held a plebiscite in March which overwhelmingly supported reuniting Crimea with Russia — Crimea had never voluntarily  left Russia: the USSR’s leader Khrushchev had donated  Russia’s Crimean region to Ukraine in 1954, and Crimeans were always overwhelmingly opposed to that change.

Then, elsewhere in Ukraine’s southeast, locals took over government buildings and refused to accept the new coup-imposed, anti-Russian Ukrainian Government. Obama and his newly appointed leaders of Ukraine didn’t like that, and were determined to stop the rebellion. They commenced an ethnic-cleansing campaign to eliminate the voters in the southeast (except in Crimea, which was now being defended by Russian troops, so Obama wouldn’t support his coup-regime’s intent to extend the ethnic cleansing immediately into Crimea and even to destroy Russia; Obama viewed that intent as being premature; his ethnic-cleansing program would be only in other parts of the southeast).

No one can understand Obama’s defeat in Ukraine who does not know that he imposed upon Ukraine a Government that was committed to an ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of the people in the regions that had voted for the man whom Obama overthrew. That’s basic to know, in order to have any possibility to understand why Obama lost this war that he started with his February coup. In fact, the man whom the Obama-team chose to design the ethnic-cleansing program announced in June that there were going to be concentration-camps for everyone in the southeast who supported the breakaway-movement.

The official U.S. line was that the people in the southeast were ‘terrorists’ who were bombing their own people and causing their own problems; or, as Christia Freeland said in The New York Times, “This is not a civil war.” The U.S. regime always staunchly backed what the new Ukrainian Government was doing in the southeast, specifically the ethnic-cleansing campaign. One reason this line, that the southeasterners were bombing their own people (the southeasterners), was false (besides it’s being simply ridiculous) is that the civil war did not even start until May 2nd, when there was a massacre of peaceful opponents of the new Obama-imposed Government, carried out by supporters of the new government who were bussed into Odessa from Kiev in the northwest for that occasion, which massacre occurred at the Odessa Trade Unions Building. This massacre was co-masterminded and was funded by Ihor Kolomoyskyi, a Ukrainian billionaire who hired Joe Biden’s son and won a local governorship from Obama’s team.

The U.S. State Department opened a daily press conference on July 29th by asserting that the U.S. and EU are “united in their determination to respond to intensified Russian aggression.” The audience of ‘journalists’ (the usual group of stenographers of U.S. officialdom) asked this U.S. Government spokesperson questions designed to get her to pour yet more calumny against America’s victims in Ukraine (especially against the people who were being bombed there), and she said, “Of course, we support de-escalation. But for the most part, the vast majority of escalation has been from the Russian side … and the Russian separatists [the official Western term for the people we’re bombing].” She alleged that it is they, and not the Ukrainian Government (which was bombing those ‘separatists’ villages), that’s doing the “escalation,” in the Ukrainian civil war that the U.S. had started, and then was funding our nazi regime there to perpetrate against those Ukrainian villagers; that is, against the very people whom she was charging to be the source of the problem.

We’ve got to clear the land in Ukraine’s southeast, so as to enable our oil companies to frack Ukraine’s gas. Except that ‘we’ don’t own those fracking companies; the biggest one is owned by oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, whose U.S. agent is Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and who also hired someone from John Kerry’s clique. There are also many other benefits to the American aristocracy that would have resulted if Obama had won Ukraine, but most of those benefits will be lost if the gas fields in Ukraine’s southeast are no longer assets that can be sold off (“privatized”) to Western oil companies dirt-cheap by the Ukrainian Government desperate to repay the nearly $30 billion that the U.S., EU, and IMF lent to that Government to finance their ethnic-cleansing program, which is basic to that privatization. If those loans don’t work out, Western taxpayers will be forced to repay those lenders to Ukraine, as Western citizens pay taxes.

However, our Ukrainian Government ultimately did fail to get rid of enough Ukrainians. As the IMF’s Christine Lagarde had warned on May 1st (right before the massacre in Odessa that began the ethnic cleansing so as to eliminate the undesired voters from Ukraine’s southeast), a “loss of economic control over the east [loss of that fracking-income] that reduces [Ukrainian] budget revenue would require a significant recalibration of the [loan] program; and [end] additional financing, including from Ukraine’s bilateral partners,” the U.S. and EU.

As things turned out, those “bilateral partners” have, by now, already lent Ukraine all that they can or will, and the job was way short of being finished. The best that was in prospect for any continuation of it was a long-drawn-out guerilla war, for which the West had neither the money, nor the will.

So: our side’s “loss of economic control over the east” means that Obama has, in effect, lost his Ukrainian war, and that the West’s taxpayers and recipients of government services will be forced to reimburse the IMF (via increased taxes and reduced services) for losses on the more-than-$30-billion loans to Ukraine. The IMF acted as middleman for the West’s aristocrats (as it always does), protecting them from losses on their international investments, so IMF member-governments (taxpayers and service-recipients) absorb any aristocrat’s losses. Of course, on aristocrats’ winning bets, they get to keep all gains. Meanwhile, the public (those taxpayers and benefit-recipients) in any country that borrows from the IMF get voraciously stripped, as the citizens in Ukraine will increasingly recognize. But Obama’s Ukraine-deal was a bummer for just about everybody, except weapons-makers.

Poor Barack Obama — he’ll need to wait till he’s out of office before the billions start rolling his way (like they’re already starting to roll for his friend and former subordinate Timothy Geithner).

The reason Obama lost is that the residents in Ukraine’s southeast would rather fight to the death than yield to our nazis. Unlike the Jews in Nazi Germany, the ethnic Russians who live in Ukraine have their own guns, and also have the ones from Ukrainian troops they kill, and get some weapons also from Russia next door. But, above all, they’re willing to fight to the death, which only a few dedicated nazis on our side are.

There just aren’t enough dedicated nazis (i.e., not enough dedicated racist fascists), in any and all countries, for ‘our side’ to win there. Not enough anti-Russian racist fascists exist, for that victory to be able to happen. And, by the end of June, Obama finally recognized that: he threw in the towel. Of course, he wouldn’t directly stop his stooges from slaughtering people, but, fromJuly 1st on, he had no further appetite to increase U.S. Government debt to support that slaughter. The Obama-supporting Kyiv Post  had headlined back on May 26th (the very day after the election — but only in Ukraine’s northwest — of Petro Poroshenko, as Ukraine’s President), “Poroshenko Pledges to Step Up Anti-Terrorism Operation, Bring Success within ‘Hours,’ Not Months.” But, now, already more than a month had gone by, and yet Poroshenko-Kolomoisky-Obama-Yatsenyuk not only didn’t experience “success” within “days,” but they were beyond Poroshenko’s promised limit, “Not Months,” and yet they still were actually losing their war.

So, Obama lost this war. He quit it. And that’s why  Obama lost.

Put simply, he wasn’t able to exterminate enough of the ‘enemy’. His extermination-program ran out of money, long before the people who live there ran out of their will to fight against it.

Of course, the main people who pay the price for this are the ones whose lives Obama’s team snuffed out, and who were crippled by it, and whose homes were destroyed by it. Western taxpayers and beneficiaries of government services won’t suffer nearly that much. And the West’s aristocrats are doing everything they can to weaken Russia’s economy, in order to win the bigger renewed Cold War, which Obama’s coup in Ukraine restarted. The owners of U.S. armaments-firms are especially booming as a result of Obama’s Ukraine-gambit.

Russia, for its part, is doing all it can to respond to Obama’s challenge of a renewed Cold War. They’re trying to turn into Russian lemonade, the pile of lemons that Obama has left them.

In a sense, then (and highly simplified): World War II created American dominance; the Vietnam War wasted American dominance; and the G.W. Bush-Obama wars might turn out to have ended American dominance. It’s especially worth noting, in this context, that whereas WWII was fought against nazis, Obama’s Ukrainian war installed nazis. America thus might have come full-circle with Ukraine, and become what in WWII had been our nemesis.

Replacing the former single nation of Ukraine, there’ll be two or more failed states. It will be an ongoing hell. The only hope for the Novorossiyan part(s) will be if Putin comes up with a Russian version of our post-WWII Marshall Plan, to restore Novorossiya. The rump northwestern half of Ukraine, which Obama had controlled since even a bit before the 22 February 2014 culmination of his coup, will be a very hot bloody war between the nazis there and everybody else there. Obama won’t any longer even want that half, and he’ll have lost the southeastern half, which was his real goal to control.

The dominance of the U.S., EU, and Japan, is ending. The Western Alliance is breaking up. Europe’s aristocrats gave America’s aristocrats the steering wheel, and America’s arrogant and reckless aristocracy has driven the Alliance into a deep ditch, from which it won’t be able to recover as anything like it was.

The post-WWII world, in which we all have been living, is over.

Obama, by his actions not his words, continues the George W. Bush tradition, of horrendous policies, leading to rather universally bad endings.

The Islamic State Opens Its First Consulate in Turkey`s Capital. Issuing Visas to Foreign Fighters

The Turkish daily Aydinlik said in a recent report that the consulate was founded in the Cankaya district of the capital Ankara.

The militants are said to be operating freely inside the country without much problem.

Other reports said the members of the Takfiri group have rented luxurious houses in the upscale neighborhood of the capital and Istanbul and use them for residence or as offices.

The terrorists are said to be using minibuses with black windows to get around the city.

The ISIL Takfiri terrorists currently control parts of Syria and Iraq. They have threatened all communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Izadi Kurds and others, as they continue their atrocities in Iraq.

Senior Iraqi officials have blamed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and some Persian Gulf Arab states for the growing terrorism in their country.

The terrorist group has links with Saudi intelligence and is believed to be indirectly supported by the Israeli regime.

The United States started conducting airstrikes on the ISIL only after US interests were threatened by the militants.

Activist Post

Argentina President Cristina Fernandez, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, exposes the debt vultures who enslave entire nations, the constantly changing definition of a terrorist, and the need for peace and self-determination for all nations. ‘In times of economic vultures and war falcons, we need more doves of peace’.

29th September 2014.

To the Members and Officers,

International Longshore & Warehouse Union,
ILWU Local 10,
400 North Point Street,
San Francisco, CA 94133.
Letter by Email.

Re: Message of Solidarity.

The Liverpool Dockworkers both past and present salute the actions of Local 10 and the Oakland Community Picket, taken against the Israeli government controlled Zim Line vessels. Furthermore their magnificent actions strike a blow against the Israel apartheid regime for their continued massacre and destruction of Gaza.

For far too long people in power have turned a blind eye to the Israeli slaughter of innocent Palestinian men, women and children, now we are seeing the labour and trade union movement in Oakland fighting back, and their actions must be supported by port and dockworkers the world over.

If we can be of any immediate help in terms of publicity or campaigning please let me know.

In Solidarity,

TERRY TEAGUE.   (DOCKS, WATERWAYS & FERRIES OFFICER.)