Syrian tribe declares popular war against US occupation

A member of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) stands guard in the countryside of the Hasakah province, on June 27, 2020. (Photo by AFP)

A Syrian tribe in the eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr has launched a popular resistance force against US troops and their allies, accusing the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) of stealing the country’s resources.

The US-based Rai al-Youm newspaper said on its website on Monday that the tribe of Akidat announced in a statement the formation of a military council and launching popular resistance against the US forces and their allied militants in an apparent direct accusation of the American troops of being behind the assassination of Matshar al-Hafl, a senior member of the tribe.

The statement also accused the SDF of stealing the country’s resources and killing its prominent figures.

According to the statement, the elders and notable members of the tribe had held a meeting to take action against the “American occupiers” and the US-backed mercenaries, and to liberate the Syrian territory.

The statement said they agreed to form a political council and a tribal army – to serve as its military wing – to manage the tribe’s affairs in cooperation with the relevant authorities.

It added that the council has begun the practical steps towards the formation of the Akidat army to liberate Syrian territory in coordination with the Syrian army.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes and operations against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a United Nations mandate. Damascus has repeatedly condemned the airstrikes.

The military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians.

The US has dispatched new deployments to the Syrian provinces of Hasakah and Dayr al-Zawr following President Donald Trump’s October decision to keep hundreds of US troops in Syria to “secure” the country’s oilfields which Syrian troops have yet to retake from militants.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated that US attempts to control Syria’s oilfields were “illegal” and amounted to “robbery.”

Damascus is in great need of its major oil deposits in order to address its energy needs and rebuild the country amid crippling Western sanctions.

The Arab country has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups that are wreaking havoc in the country.

The Arab country is currently extracting oil at only 10 percent of its pre-war capacity […]

 

via Syrian tribe declares popular war against US forces, SDF

This member of the banana tree family could help us cut COVID-19 plastic waste

(Volodymyr Hryshchenko, Unsplash)

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.

Author: Harry Kretchmer, Senior Writer, Formative Content

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• The abaca tree, a relative of the banana, produces fibre that’s being made into COVID-19 PPE products, including facemasks.
• Conservationists say single-use plastic PPE is adding to marine pollution.
• Abaca fibres – used in banknotes, teabags and Mercedes Benz cars – are as tough as polyester but break down organically.
• Philippines is leading producer of abaca fibre, delivering 85% of global supply.

In the Philippines, long golden fibres from the abaca tree hang drying in the sun. They could be part of your next face mask.

According to Bloomberg, the Philippine government expects demand for biodegradable abaca to grow exponentially in 2020, with 10% of all production being diverted to medical uses. Factories are doubling output.

It comes as the consequences of single-use plastic PPE are becoming clear. There are reports of plastic face masks washing up on beaches, adding to the estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic that enter the ocean each year.

 

[…]

via This member of the banana tree family could help us cut COVID-19 plastic waste — The European Sting – Critical News & Insights on European Politics, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Business & Technology – europeansting.com

Remote working and online shopping could drive 14 million cars off US roads – permanently

(Credit: Unsplash)

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.

Author: Sean Fleming, Senior Writer, Formative Content

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• In 2019, US motorists drove equivalent of 337 round trips from Earth to Pluto.
• Lockdown meant a 64% drop in car usage, according to a KPMG report.
• 14 million fewer cars may be needed if working and shopping trends continue.

As many as 14 million cars could disappear from American roads in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s one of the findings of a KPMG report that estimates almost 40% of all jobs in the United States could be done from home, drastically reducing reliance on the private motor vehicle.

The percentage of jobs that can be done remotely.
Image: KPMG

In 2019, US motorists collectively covered a distance equivalent to 337 round trips from Earth to Pluto – around 4.8 trillion kilometres. But as much of the country, and indeed the rest of the world, went into various forms of lockdown, there was a 64% drop in car usage, KPMG found. That decline refers specifically to something called vehicle miles travelled (VMT), an industry measure of cumulative car journeys.

If that trend continues, Americans will drive 435 billion fewer kilometres per year. That’s a drop of just over 9% […]

via Remote working and online shopping could drive 14 million cars off US roads – permanently — The European Sting – Critical News & Insights on European Politics, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Business & Technology – europeansting.com

How carbon-smart farming can feed us and fight climate change at the same time

Credit: Unsplash

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum. Author: Poornima Parameswaran, Co-founder and VP of Science Technology and Innovation, Trace Genomics

• Soil is one of the least understood and untapped defenses against climate change.
• Soil is an efficient carbon sink.
• Switching to carbon-smart farming will help us meet food demands and combat climate change.

Farmers are the stewards of our planet’s precious soil, one of the least understood and untapped defenses against climate change. Because of its massive potential to store carbon and foundational role in growing our food supply, soil makes farming a solution for both climate change and food security.

The threat to food security

Farming is capital-intensive and farmers are at the mercy of volatile global commodity markets, trade disputes, regulatory changes, weather, pests, and disease. Factor in climate change and you can include droughts, floods and temperature shifts.

We need to change how we grow our food because:

• climate change will increasingly impact farm yields
• how we farm can help mitigate climate change
• helping our farmers unlock the full potential of soil will help them meet growing food demands while remaining profitable
• restoring the carbon-holding potential of our soil combats climate change.

Soil and climate change

The last few years have been among the hottest on record. As of May 2020, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2)​​​​​​​ in our atmosphere has been the highest it’s been in human history.

Studies show that soil removes about 25% of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions each year. This is done through carbon sequestration, a natural way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere through the soil with fewer impacts on land and water, less need for energy, and lower costs.

Soil can take in more CO2 from the atmosphere than it releases, making it a carbon sink. The carbon sink capacity of the world’s agricultural and degraded soils is 50 to 66% of what it has been historically. This means our soil can hold 42 to 78 gigatonnes more carbon. Increasing the amount of carbon in soil also makes it more productive for farmers.

Carbon can act as a natural ‘carbon sink’
Credit: Carbon Central, 2019

Soil is also a method for water retention and purification, and returns oxygen to the atmosphere through plants. A single tablespoon of soil contains billions of microorganisms. In other words, the soil is alive. If care for the soil on our farms it will greatly return the favour by providing us with the fibre, fuel and food we need, all while removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Farming with attention to the soil

Carbon-smart farming: The amount of carbon sequestered in our soils can be increased by adopting the right management practices. Reducing tillage, planting cover crops and using organic matter amendments such as compost have been shown to increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil.

Soil carbon also performs double duty as a resource in ensuring food security. Farmers can harness the power of carbon stored as soil organic matter, which is the fraction of soil composed of anything that once lived, such as decomposed plant and animal matter. Soil organic matter makes farmland more productive, reduces erosion and improves soil structure, which improves the quality of groundwater and surface waters. All of this reduces the negative impact of climate change across the entire ecosystem […]

via How carbon-smart farming can feed us and fight climate change at the same time — The European Sting – Critical News & Insights on European Politics, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Business & Technology – europeansting.com

Joe Biden is a Trojan Horse: Inside is the Democrats’ New Right Wing Coalition

Due Dissidence

by Russell Dobular

In spite of what you might have heard, Democrats aren’t stupid. Nor are they spineless, cowardly, incapable of messaging, or any of the other things offered as explanations for their decades-long failure to win most elections in most places, or to secure meaningful policy reforms for their voters. In the now famous words of Marco Rubio, spoken during his campaign-ending broken robot moment on the 2016 debate stage, “Lets dispel with this fiction that Barrack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Yes, he does.  And so does the rest of the Democratic Party.  If you understand the Democrats as a party whose first priority is to win elections and then serve their voters once in office, then you have to look for far-fetched explanations for their actions, which often appear to be completely at odds with those objectives. What party eager to win over the middle of the country would repeatedly vote to make a wealthy San Francisco doyenne like Nancy Pelosi their Speaker? She’s a walking advertisement for the image of Democrats as a party of out of touch elites, more concerned with arcane speech codes than labor laws. But if you understand the Democrats as a party primarily concerned with raking in big bucks from wealthy donors, while drawing enough superficial distinctions with their opponents to maintain their identity as a separate party, then everything they do is pretty frikkin’ brilliant. Like forcing Joe Biden on their voters.

Let’s be absolutely clear: Bernie Sanders would undoubtedly have been the party’s nominee this year without the interference of its leadership. A lot of ink has been spilled about the failings of Bernie 2020, and some of those points are valid, but let’s not forget that Sanders won the first three states in the primary calendar, all while facing unprecedented hostility from the corporate media and party elites, so clearly he did a lot of things right. No other candidate has ever won the first two states without going on to secure the nomination, much less all three.

But no other candidate so universally feared and loathed by the money people and the consultant class has ever gotten so close to the big prize. Close enough that they were willing to drop all pretense of neutrality and fairness to ensure on the eve of Super Tuesday that instead of facing a fractured field of milquetoast moderates, Sanders would be going mano a mano with only Joe Biden, a man who voters had completely rejected in humiliating fashion right up until South Carolina. Remember, this was before we understood exactly how bad the coronavirus was going to be, or how badly Trump and the GOP would botch their response. No modern Democrat has ever won without high youth voter turnout, and there’s no way they didn’t understand that crushing the candidate of young voters was going to suppress their vote. Nor has any modern Democrat ever won without a high share of the Latino vote, and yet they chose to publicly and openly conspire against the candidate who was the clear choice of Latino voters.

All this in order to run a notoriously thin-skinned politician in the obvious throes of cognitive decline against the world’s most infamous bully. Without coronavirus, Biden was a sure loser and there’s no way the party’s decision makers and strategists didn’t understand that. No, they aren’t that stupid. If you consider that the battle they’re fighting is only secondarily against the GOP, and primarily against the left wing of their own party […]

via Joe Biden is a Trojan Horse: Inside is the Democrats’ New Right Wing Coalition — Due Dissidence

Trump Thwarted in Sending Military to Quell Urban Protests

Keith Preston

Notice that Trump didn’t get to deploy the military to quell the protests in early June and that Raytheon frontman Mark Esper is still in place. Essentially, the Deep State overruled Trump twice, first on sending out the military, and then on firing Esper. Clearly, this shows that Presidents are merely managers. It’s the Board of Directors who really calls the shots. Notice how frequently the media will report that Trump has changed his mind after “talking with advisors,” i.e. his bosses.

By Gordon Lubold

Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON—President Trump last week was on the brink of firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper over their differing views of domestic use of active-duty military, before advisers and allies on Capitol Hill talked him out of it, according to several officials.

The officials said Mr. Trump was furious with Mr. Esper for not supporting his inclination to use active-duty troops to quell protests in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and elsewhere following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

Mr. Trump consulted several advisers to ask their opinion of the disagreement, intent that day on removing Mr. Esper, his fourth defense secretary since taking office in January 2017, according to the officials. After talks with the advisers, who cautioned against the move, Mr. Trump set aside the plans to immediately fire Mr. Esper […]
via Trump Wanted to Fire Esper Over Troops Dispute

“We Will Coup Whoever We Want”: U.S. Empire’s Mask Slips Off

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, July 27, 2020
July 28, 2020

Last week, when the billionaire neo-colonialist Elon Musk was confronted on Twitter about how his company is benefiting from the Washington-perpetrated coup in Bolivia, he replied with a statement that encapsulates the ugly nakedness of current U.S. imperialism: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” I have a feeling that when the world looks back on 2020, the time when the U.S. lashed out with such great violence when faced with its imperial decline, Musk’s declaration will be seen as the moment when the mask of the empire came off.

Since World War II, the U.S. has interfered in the elections of at least 85 countries and engaged in military warfare against at least 36 countries, with between 20 and 30 million people estimated to have been killed throughout this time by all of the U.S.’ foreign operations. The CIA’s covert operations alone have led to the deaths of at least half a dozen million people, according to the Association for Responsible Dissent. The report which showed that U.S. sanctions killed over 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017 and early 2019 gives a small hint of how many have been killed by Washington’s economic warfare. Built on the colonial genocide of indigenous peoples and Africans, the U.S. has been and continues to be a genocidal empire that’s comparable to Nazi Germany.

The fact that now is the moment when a U.S. oligarch like Musk feels the need to so openly boast about U.S. imperialism shows that as the U.S. struggles for continued hegemony, its genocidal nature is becoming more apparent. Essentially gone is the veneer of “humanitarianism” and “democracy” which the empire has used to cloak the nature of its actions. A representative of the Washington imperialists has stated that they’ll coup whoever they want, even if it leads to the creation of a dictatorial regime which enacts ethnic cleansing against Bolivia’s indigenous people […]

 

via “We Will Coup Whoever We Want”: U.S. Empire’s Mask Slips Off, by Rainer Shea

The CIA Democrats–Part one

By Patrick Martin
7 March 2018

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.

A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, “homeland defense” and cyber warfare.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called “Red to Blue” program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats—in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop.

The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle. There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic primary campaigns that, with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call “spy vs. spy.”

The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings. The latter’s website describes him as a former national security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election […]

 

via The CIA Democrats–Part one

Mothers’ Power in U.S. Protests Echoes a Global Tradition

The Wall of Moms in front of the federal court building in Portland, Ore., on Monday. Credit…Mason Trinca for The New York Times

By Amanda Taub

When mothers take to the streets — particularly those from privileged groups — governments take note. The “wall of moms” in Portland has taken up the cause against police violence.

Wearing matching shades of white or yellow, the women of the “Wall of Moms” in Portland, Ore., have become instant icons of the city’s protests, though the mothers nightly gatherings only began last Saturday and the city’s protests have been going on for more than a month.

They join a long line of mothers’ protests against state violence and what they view as authoritarianism around the world, including in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Armenia, which have shown that mothers can be particularly effective advocates for a cause — but also that there is a catch.

History suggests that mothers’ power is most potent when they are able to wield their own respectability, and the protections it brings, as a political cudgel. But that is easiest for women who are already privileged: married, affluent, and members of the dominant racial or ethnic group.

Mothers who are less privileged often struggle to claim that power, even though they are often the ones who most urgently need it […]

Members of the Black Sash movement demonstrating against apartheid in Mmabatho, South Africa, in 1991. Credit…Gallo Images, via Shutterstock

via Mothers’ Power in U.S. Protests Echoes a Global Tradition ~ NYT — The Rōbert [Cholo] Report (pron: Rō’bear Re’por)

New Zealand: Chocolate fish, red herrings and billionaires

Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement takes a look at New Zealand’s richest capitalist

The rich become that way because they work hard to provide the everyday things that our nation needs. So runs the story that underpins the economic system we live under. It’s something that is so taken for granted, it often goes uncommented upon. It seems as natural and obvious as sun in summer or chocolate fish tasting like chocolate rather than fish. Other times you will see the corporate media actively propagating this idea somewhere in the business section of your paper. By the way, that’s the bit you often skip over to get to the crossword at the back, in case you weren’t sure what that was. Overall, it feels like there’s not much to be said about it, right? Wrong.

The National Business Review (https://www.nbr.co.nz/) is one of the key information organs of those who run capitalism here. It’s worth reading now and then. It tells you what our masters think is important. The NBR publishes an annual list of the local richest individuals. At present the top person on that list is Graeme Hart, with a fortune of approximately $10 billion. However, the news of the moment is that he may be eclipsed by somebody called Peter Thiel. If you know who he is, that’s great, but chances are most of us don’t. Stop and think about that for a second. Here is nearly the richest individual on these islands and you probably don’t know his name, what exactly he does or what he looks like.

So who is Thiel? He was born in Germany but mostly grew up in the United States and was living in California when he first came to attention here. That’s because it was discovered in 2017 that he had been granted fast-tracked New Zealand citizenship in 2011 despite only having spent 12 days here! (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11883554). The reason was not that he had escaped a war-torn country and desperately needed asylum, but simply he had put lots of money into some businesses here.

There are some aspects of his investment history that (if you wanted to be very generous), you could argue have been relatively benign and possibly even useful, such as PayPal. In other cases he got in on the groundfloor of things and did well for himself, such as an early stake in Facebook. On the other hand, there are some downright dodgy aspects to how he accumulated his wealth.

In 2004 Thiel co-founded an outfit called Palantir. This is a software company that could best be described as handmaidens to the totalitarian surveillance society. That’s because they work closely with an alphabet soup of nice organisations like the CIA, NSA, ICE and the FBI to mine huge amounts of online data from electronic surveillance. As for a connection to local spies, according to media sources here, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) will neither confirm or deny if they are clients of Palantir. However, they have an office in Wellington and the GCSB have advertised for staff that know Palantir’s software […]
via Chocolate fish, red herrings and billionaires