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I've Seen for Myself How Western Sanctions Only Hurt the Poor |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27269"><span class="small">Patrick Cockburn, Independent</span></a>
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Sunday, 07 July 2019 08:35 |
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Cockburn writes: "The seizure of an Iranian oil tanker allegedly bound for Syria by British Royal Marine commandos off Gibraltar is the latest episode in the long and disastrous history of economic sanctions in the Middle East."
A view of the Grace 1 super tanker near a Royal Marine patrol vessel in the British territory of Gibraltar. (photo: AP)
I've Seen for Myself How Western Sanctions Only Hurt the Poor
By Patrick Cockburn, Independent
07 July 19
Sanctions will fail against Assad, just as they failed against Saddam Hussein 20 years ago, but they will do terrible damage to ordinary people
 he seizure of an Iranian oil tanker allegedly bound for Syria by British Royal Marine commandos off Gibraltar is the latest episode in the long and disastrous history of economic sanctions in the Middle East. The UK claims that it is implementing EU sanctions on Syria, but the act will be seen by Tehran – and most other states – as the British enforcing US sanctions on Iran that the EU said it opposes. An Iranian official said a British tanker should be seized in retaliation.
Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary and aspirant prime minister, eager to show himself walking tall on the international stage, tweeted: “Swift action has denied valuable resources to Assad’s murderous regime.”
But that is exactly what has not happened. Economic sanctions in the Middle East and elsewhere have invariably been a collective punishment of an entire people while leaders and their security forces come through unscathed. UN sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2003 did not stop Saddam Hussein building luxurious palaces and giant mosques while ordinary Iraqis were reduced to selling their furniture and crockery in the streets.
I visited a village called Penjwin in mountainous northeast Iraq in 1996 which was in the Kurdish-controlled area, but still subject to UN sanctions. I wondered why so many people in the main streets had lost an arm or a foot. The explanation given to me by the villagers lives in my mind as a grisly example of the straits to which people can be reduced by the impact of sanctions on top of their many other burdens.
People in Penjwin said they were very poor and lived in the middle of vast minefields laid during the Iran-Iraq war. The one way they could make money was by defusing one particular mine, the Italian Valmara, and selling the aluminium wrapped around the explosives.
The Valmara is a lethal device with five khaki-coloured prongs at the top that looked like dried grass. If any prong is disturbed a small charge was detonated making the mine jump into the air to waist height and the main charge explodes, spraying 1,200 metal balls over a range of 100 yards.
“I defuse the mine with a piece of wire,” Sabir Majid, a middle-aged man who had formerly been a farmer, told me. “Then I unscrew the top of it and take out the aluminium around the explosives. When I have taken apart six mines, I have enough aluminium to sell for 30 dinars (about 75 pence) to a shop in Penjwin.”
He said this was just enough to feed but not to clothe his family. Few of those who made a mistake in defusing a Valmara survived, but it was surrounded by small, difficult-to-spot anti-personnel mines which looked like large mushrooms and could easily take off a foot or a hand.
At that time, the UN estimated that between six and seven thousand Iraqi children were dying every month because of sanctions. The education and health services had collapsed: visiting foreign doctors “witnessed a surgeon trying to operate with scissors that were too blunt to cut the patient’s skin”.
I wrote many articles about the devastating effect of sanctions on millions of Iraqis, but nobody appeared to pay much attention. Foreign governments, such as the US and UK, blamed the continuation of sanctions, whose ill effects on the mass of the population they downplayed, on Saddam Hussein for not coming clean about his Weapons of Mass Destruction (that turned out not to exist) and not giving up power.
Two UN Humanitarian Coordinators for Iraq resigned in succession in protest against sanctions, but it did no good. It is worth recalling the prophetic words of one of them, Dennis Halliday, as he left his post in 1998, keeping in mind that this was five years before al-Qaeda took root in Iraq. “What should be of concern is the possibility of more fundamentalist Islamic thinking developing,” he said. “It is not well understood as a spin-off of the sanctions regime. We are pushing people to take extreme positions.”
Fast forward 20 years and compare Syria now to Iraq then. Three million people are trapped in Idlib province under Russian and Syrian government bombardment. There is a festering guerrilla war in the Kurdish-controlled but half-Arab area east of the Euphrates river.
All of Syria is subjected to economic sanctions by the EU and US which a leaked UN internal report in 2016 said were causing extreme suffering among ordinary Syrians. Basic medicines and medical equipment could not be purchased and imported into Syria by foreign aid agencies. The report, entitled “Humanitarian Impact of Syria-Related Unilateral Restrictive Measures” – in other words sanctions –and leaked to the investigative publication The Intercept, quotes a European doctor working in Syria as saying: “the indirect effect of sanctions … makes the import of medical instruments and other medical supplies immensely difficult, nearly impossible”.
The UN sanctions against Iraq used to target “dual use” items, such as pencils and tyres for ambulance because they could have a military as well as civilian application. Much the same thing happens with sanctions in Syria today with bans on drilling equipment and pipes for water supply and sanitation according to the report.
A more recent survey by a UN body coordinating humanitarian affairs in Syria published this May is ominously similar to the ones I used to read about Iraq 20 years ago. It says that at least 83 per cent of Syrians were living below the poverty line: “a monthly food ration with staple items costs at least 80 per cent of an unskilled labourer’s monthly salary and 50-80 per cent of a public service employee’s monthly salary”. It describes people trying to cope by eating less, avoiding medical treatment because there is no money to pay for it, child labour and child marriage, and being recruited as fighters to pay off debts.
In other words, a whole society is in meltdown. Part of this is the result of eight years of civil war, but sanctions exacerbate the suffering and prevent recovery. Least affected are those, both government and opposition, who command the armed forces to make sure they never lack for anything. The economic blockade of Iraq did not get rid of Saddam Hussein and the same is true of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The political equivalents of Jeremy Hunt in the 1990s claimed that the aid agencies’ accounts of the misery inflicted on the civilian population by sanctions were phoney or exaggerated. Well-informed officials like Dennis Halliday, who protested about what was happening, could always be smeared as being soft on Saddam. Critics of sanctions in Syria can be similarly ignored or discredited as sympathisers with Assad, though rigorous sanctions have demonstrably failed to stop him tightening his grip on power.
Why are those who impose sanctions able to get their way despite past failures? To governments they are a soft option that avoids the risks of war. To many they may seem more humane because, unlike bombing and shooting, the process of destruction is slow. The casualties – the young, the old, the sick – die invisibly in their homes and there is seldom proof that sanctions had anything to do with their passing.
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Outsider or Insider? How Bernie Sanders Learned to Walk the Line |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51115"><span class="small">Glenn Thrush, The New York Times</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 July 2019 13:17 |
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Thrush writes: "Bernie Sanders was elected to the House in 1990 after branding himself an outsider and defying calls to join a Democratic Party he had long bashed as 'ideologically bankrupt.'"
Bernie Sanders talks to supporters during a rally at the University of Washington, in Seattle. (photo: Joshua Trujillo/Seattlepi.com)
Outsider or Insider? How Bernie Sanders Learned to Walk the Line
By Glenn Thrush, The New York Times
06 July 19
Mr. Sanders met with scorn when he arrived on Capitol Hill in 1990. But in the years since, he has evolved from a gadfly to a reliable team player.
 ernie Sanders was elected to the House in 1990 after branding himself an outsider and defying calls to join a Democratic Party he had long bashed as “ideologically bankrupt.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist who won Vermont’s lone House seat as an independent, quickly sank into a funk when Democratic conservatives circulated a list of nasty things he had said about them over the years — ostracizing him from their caucus and blocking his committee assignments for a few nerve-frazzling days.
“That was emotionally very difficult — it was a very, very difficult period,” Mr. Sanders, who is not known for his sentimentality, said in a recent interview. “I’ll never forget it. You come into the House, you expect to come to work, and you find that the majority leadership doesn’t know where they are going to sit you — if they are going to sit you.”
READ MORE
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FOCUS: The Border Patrol Is the American SS |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51114"><span class="small">Aaron Freedman, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 July 2019 11:50 |
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Freedman writes: "After decades of nurturing a culture of violent, racist abuse, Customs and Border Protection cannot be seen as just another working-class job. Like Hitler's SS, we must see CBP not as a place where good people do bad things, but where bad people do bad things."
Migrants from Honduras being taken into custody by Border Patrol agents near Granjeno, Texas. (photo: Tamir Kalifa/NYT)
The Border Patrol Is the American SS
By Aaron Freedman, Jacobin
06 July 19
After decades of nurturing a culture of violent, racist abuse, Customs and Border Protection cannot be seen as just another working-class job. Like Hitler’s SS, we must see CBP not as a place where good people do bad things, but where bad people do bad things.
 ver the past few weeks, the media has been saturated with debate over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term “concentration camps” to describe internment facilities for asylum seekers along the southern border. While critics have said the terminology is insulting to Jews and our forbearers who were murdered in the Holocaust, others (like myself) have insisted that “concentration camp” — first brought into widespread usage to describe the horrific internment of South Africans by the British during the Boer Wars — is a terrifyingly apt description of the abuses being committed on the border.
This week, the usage of “concentration camp” has been shown truer than ever, with the Department of Homeland Security watchdog sharing photos of inhumane overcrowding, described by one senior manager as “a ticking time bomb.” And a delegation of Congressional representatives — including Ocasio-Cortez — to the border reported the rampant physical and psychological abuse of detainees, including orders from guards to drink toilet water.
Yet even given this wanton, dehumanizing abuse, the Trump administration still insists that the conditions in these concentration camps are only a consequence of funding shortfalls. Give us more cash, and we’ll get some more mattresses, they say.
But in the past few days, what little credibility that narrative had has evaporated in the midst of a bombshell report from ProPublica on a far-right Facebook group of current and former agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP, the agency which runs the camps).
The details of the group are sickening: called “I’m 10-15” — Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody” — members have joked about the death of an immigrant in CBP custody, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting the camps, and even shared vulgar images of Ocasio-Cortez engaging in sexual acts with a detained migrant and President Trump.
This is no fringe group — it boasts roughly 9,500 members (CBP’s total force is about twenty-thousand agents), and, as Politico reports, has been known to Border Patrol leadership for three years. And this isn’t just harmless talk: during the House Democrat trip to the border, CBP agents displayed open hostility against the elected representatives, including taking their phones and cameras.
In response, Ocasio-Cortez called CBP “a rogue agency.”
I’ll go one step further: CBP is the American SS.
This is not a comparison I make lightly. The SS, of course, was the Nazi Party’s elite paramilitary, made up of ideological diehards who oversaw and carried out some of the regime’s worst crimes. In particular, it included the overseers of concentration and death camps, the SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) — literally, the “Death’s Head Units.” But, as a Jew whose family was murdered in the Holocaust, I feel especially responsible for taking the historical lessons of that era and applying them to this urgent moment.
There’s a reason that the SS ran the Nazi camps: they were true believers. Since the first concentration camp, Dachau, was built in March 1933, it was only the ideologically pure Nazi paramilitary who were to be trusted with overseeing them. Given their crucial role in abusing and murdering racial enemies, LGBT people, “enemies of the Reich” (including Communists and socialists), and “asocials” (including pacifists and draft dodgers), these camps had to be run by those who deeply believed in dehumanizing of their victims.
“Dehumanizing” may be the best word to describe the words and actions of CBP officers. At every level — from the senior staff that send immigrants to concentration camps instead of open shelters to the officers who joke about people dying in their custody to the guards who intentionally torment detainees — CBP is an agency whose very essence is about the dehumanization of immigrants.
And this isn’t new: CBP agent violence has long been pervasive. As Daniel Denvir recounted recently:
Complaints of abuse were so rampant in 1980 that two Hispanic agents were sent undercover, dressed as Mexican workers, to check out the San Clemente checkpoint on I-5. The result: the agents allegedly beat their undercover colleagues with a chair and flashlight — and were charged with beating others including a fifteen-year-old citizen.
Accounts like this have been corroborated by both former and current Border Patrol officers who have assailed a pervasive culture of cruelty. As one former CBP agent, Jenn Budd, put it, “cruelty is the point .?.?.? This is taught in the academy and reinforced by management.” When Budd tried to report abusive behavior to CBP, she got run over by an agent in the parking lot.
Of course, the CBP is not exterminating people by the millions. And the United States is not a fascist state. But my point is to emphasize that after decades of nurturing a culture of violent, racist abuse, CBP cannot be seen as just another working-class job. Like the SS, we must see CBP not as a place where good people do bad things (as many historians have suggested much of the Nazi Wehrmacht was), but where bad people do bad things. It is rotten to its very core.
In reading accounts of Border Patrol, one of the most chilling came in from Daniel Denvir:
What seems different now is there were also, as recently as ’94, frequent expressions of ambivalence. Agents who said things like: “A lot of times I’ve sat down and wondered, am I doing the right thing? .?.?.? I think, jeez, these are just poor people trying to feed their families.” If my sense of this is right — that Border Patrol agents have become yet more vicious and racist in recent years — that’s thanks to decades of politicians waging a bipartisan war that demonizes undocumented migrants as an economic, criminal, terrorist, and existential threat.
The SS was prized by Hitler for training its members to be totally unambivalent about the atrocities they committed. With Border Patrol now becoming the same, and using that right-wing ideological commitment to oversee dehmanizing and murderous concentration camps, the Left must be unequivocal in calling the agency what it is: the American SS.
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The Quake to Make Los Angeles a Radioactive Dead Zone |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 July 2019 11:16 |
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Wasserman writes: "Had Friday's 7.1 earthquake and other ongoing seismic shocks hit less than 200 miles northwest of Ridgecrest/China Lake, ten million people in Los Angeles would now be under an apocalyptic cloud, their lives and those of the state and nation in radioactive ruin."
A powerful earthquake with a magnitude of 7.1 was recorded in Southern California. (photo: Reuters)
The Quake to Make Los Angeles a Radioactive Dead Zone
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
06 July 19
 e are THIS CLOSE to an unimaginable apocalyptic horror:
Had Friday’s 7.1 earthquake and other ongoing seismic shocks hit less than 200 miles northwest of Ridgecrest/China Lake, ten million people in Los Angeles would now be under an apocalyptic cloud, their lives and those of the state and nation in radioactive ruin.
The likely human death toll would be in the millions. The likely property loss would be in the trillions. The forever damage to our species’ food supply, ecological support systems, and longterm economy would be very far beyond any meaningful calculation. The threat to the ability of the human race to survive on this planet would be extremely significant.
The two cracked, embrittled, under-maintained, unregulated, uninsured, and un-inspected atomic reactors at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, would be a seething radioactive ruin.
Their cores would be melting into the ground. Hydrogen explosions would be blasting the site to deadly dust. One or both melted cores would have burned into the earth and hit ground or ocean water, causing massive steam explosions with physical impacts in the range of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The huge clouds would send murderous radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere that would permanently poison the land, the oceans, the air … and circle the globe again and again, and yet again, filling the lungs of billions of living things with the most potent poisons humans have ever created.
In 2010, badly maintained gas pipes run by Pacific Gas & Electric blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno, killing eight people. PG&E’s badly maintained power lines have helped torch much of northern California, killing 80 people and incinerating more than 10,000 structures.
Now in bankruptcy, with its third president in two years, PG&E is utterly unqualified to run two large, old, obsolete, crumbling atomic reactors which are surrounded by earthquake faults. At least a dozen faults have been identified within a small radius around the reactors. The reactor cores are less than fifty miles from the San Andreas fault, less than half the distance that Fukushima Daiichi was from the epicenter that destroyed four reactors there.
Diablo cannot withstand an earthquake of the magnitude now hitting less than 200 miles away. In 2014, the Associated Press reported that Dr. Michael Peck, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s site inspector at Diablo, had warned that the two reactors should be shut because they can’t withstand a seismic shock like the one that has just hit so close. The NRC tried to bury Peck’s report. They attacked his findings, then shipped him to Tennessee. He’s no longer with the Commission.
All major reactor disasters have come with early warnings. A 1978 accident at Ohio’s Davis-Besse reactor presaged the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island. The realities were hidden, and TMI spewed radiation that killed local people and animals in droves.
Soviet officials knew the emergency shut-down mechanism at Chernobyl could cause an explosion — but kept it secret. Unit Four exploded the instant the rods meant to shut it down were deployed.
Decades before disaster struck at Fukushima Daiichi, millions of Japanese citizens marched to demand atomic reactors NOT be built in a zone riddled by fault lines, washed by tsunamis.
In California, ten thousand citizens were arrested demanding the same. Diablo’s owners hid the existence of the Hosgri Fault just three miles from the site. A dozen more nearby fault lines have since been found, capable in tandem of delivering shocks like the ones shaking Ridgecrest. No significant structural improvements have been made to deal with the newfound fault lines.
The truly horrifying HBO series on Chernobyl currently topping all historic viewership charts shows just a small sample of the ghastly death and destruction that can be caused by official corruption and neglect.
Like Soviet apparatchiks, the state of California has refused to conduct independent investigations on the physical status of the two Diablo reactors. It has refused to hold public hearings on Dr. Peck’s warnings that they can’t withstand seismic shocks like the ones now being experienced so dangerously nearby. If there are realistic plans to evacuate Los Angeles and other downwind areas during reactor melt-downs/explosions, hearings on them have yet to be held.
In the wake of the 2011 explosions at Fukushima, the NRC staff compiled critical reforms for American reactors, including Diablo. But the Commission killed the proposed regulations. So nothing significant has been done to improve safety at two coastal reactors upwind of ten million people that are surrounded by earthquake faults in a tsunami zone like the one where the four Fukushima reactors have already exploded.
There are no excuses. These seismic shocks will never stop. Diablo is scheduled to shut in 2024 and 2025. But massive advances in wind, solar, batteries and efficiency have already rendered the nukes’ power unnecessary. A petition demanding Governor Newsom and the state independently investigate Diablo’s ability to operate safely is at www.solartopia.org.
That petition began circulating before these latest quakes. The continued operation of these two reactors has now gone to a whole new level of apocalyptic insanity.
Harvey Wasserman’s Green Power & Wellness Show is podcast at prn.fm; California Solartopia is broadcast at KPFK-Pacifica, 90.7 fm, Los Angeles. His book The People’s Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to Solartopia will soon be at www.solartopia.org.
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