Author: Dave LIndorff

This article was written for Salon Magazine
 

A funny thing is happening on the way to the June 8 snap election in the United Kingdom. Despite two vicious terror attacks apparently inspired by ISIS — the Manchester Arena bombing that killed at least 22 people, many of them children, and another on the iconic London Bridge that killed seven and left 22 critically injured — polls suggest that British voters aren’t fleeing in panic to the current Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May. In fact, contrary to all expectations, they continue to swing toward May’s hard-left Labour Party opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, with the latest poll showing the two parties neck-and-neck.

May launched her campaign on on April 18. With polls showing her party anywhere from 15 to 20 points up on Corbyn and Labour at the time, and the favorability gap between her and Corbyn even wider, she hoped for a blowout victory that would boost the Tories’ position in Parliament to a record level. But since then she and the Conservatives have been watching their support crumble as Corbyn’s has grown. Now many British news organizations are talking about a Tory “collapse.”

It’s now being suggested, even in the right-leaning media, that when the votes are counted Thursday evening, Britain could face an unexpected and murky situation…

Some polls have British PM Theresa May tied with Labour challenger Jeremy Corbyn in tomorrow's snap election
 

For the rest of this article, which appears in today’s Salon magazine, please click here or on the image above.

Beginning today, June 2, the Left Form (formerly the Socialist Scholars’ Conference), will conduct a three-day event featuring panel discussions on all manner of topics. As the organization states on its website: “Continuing a tradition begun in the 1960s, we bring together intellectuals and organizers to share perspectives, strategies, experience and vision.”

Unfortunately, this year the board, or at least a majority of the board, of the Left Forum has caved in to pressure from a Zionist individual and a group in Germany to cancel panels that include two individuals whom these critics condemn as being “anti-Semitic” or “holocaust deniers.” All four of the cancelled panels were part of a group of five panels organized to discuss issues involving the so-called Deep State and its impact on US and global affairs. The two individuals who were the target of the complaints are Islamic studies scholar and Veterans Today editor Kevin Barrett, and Anthony Hall, a tenured professor of liberal and global studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, whose position was attacked by the Canadian B’nai B’rith organization.
 

According to the organizers of the banned panels, the first decision to ban three of the five planned Deep State events was announced by the LF board on May 8, in a brief email message that offered no explanation for the decision, and that was reached without first offering either the panel organizers or the individuals defamed a chance to respond to the unacknowledged charges. Here’s the note that was sent out by the board on May 8 (less than four weeks before the start of the Left Forum event):
 

Unfortunately, we are writing to inform you that your panels
A) Panel Title: 9/11 Truth: Ground Zero for a Resistance Movement
B) Panel Title: False Flags: Staged, Scripted, Mass Psy-Op Events
C) Panel Title: “Terrorism”: Fake Enemies, Fraudulent Wars
have not been selected as a part of this year’s Left Forum program. We do not take for granted the time and effort organizers put in to the proposal process and understand that this news may come as a disappointment.
We do however want to express our appreciation for your interest in making a programmatic-contribution to the 2017 conference.

We wish you all the best with your work and in the future.
Registration fees already made for speakers can be refunded.

Thank you very much.
 

Note that no mention is made in this message of any reason for the “non-selection” (actually cancellation) of the panels, depriving the panel organizers and defamed individuals of any ability to challenge the decision.

US Constitution, Article II, Section 2 on pardon power of the president: ‘The President shall…have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.’
 

Whatever the truth regarding Deep State and Democratic Party charges of alleged Russian “meddling” in last year’s election (and I’m definitely in the camp that says there has been no hard evidence presented to show Russia hacked DNC emails), Donald Trump and his administration are now ensnared in a serious investigation by an independent prosecutor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, into obstruction of justice and other crimes that could technically lead to indictments of Trump aides and to Trump’s impeachment.

But don’t forget: Trump has one unassailable power as president — the power to pardon — and I predict he will wield it.

The US Constitution gives a president the almost absolute power to pardon, including to pardon someone before he or she has been convicted of a crime or even indicted. As President Gerald Ford proved, such pardon power can even be used to pardon someone — in his case the disgraced and resigned ex-President Richard Nixon — before he had even been charged with a crime.

The only limitation on that presidential pardon power is that it cannot be used if the president is impeached, or to interfere with the impeachment process.

What this means is that as long as there has not been an impeachment of the president, or at least the launching of impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, there is no constraint on President Trump’s use of his pardon power. He can, according to many legal experts, even pardon himself, though in that case he could still be impeached and removed from office, just not prosecuted for any crimes (impeachment is not a criminal proceeding, but is simply a process for removing a person from office).

I believe it is likely therefore, that Trump, for whom appearances, tradition, propriety, and the good of the country are all meaningless notions, will use his pardon power to block investigations into, and block indictments of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his top advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and anyone else who gets caught up in the investigation into crimes committed by him and his administration, his transition team and his campaign.

While such actions — even more shocking than Nixon’s abrupt firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal — would likely stun the public and would, by most Americans, be viewed an admission of Trump’s guilt, it would effectively eliminate any chance for Mueller to prosecute or even to investigate anyone in the Trump administration. People who are pardoned cannot be pressured by fear of indictment and a promise of immunity into turning state’s evidence.

Canada’s affordable, efficient and widely popular single-payer system saves millions for U.S. corporations. That’s the main reason many of them shifted production into Canada. But if they know Canada’s system is so good, why aren’t executives of the parent companies here in the US lobbying for it?

To read this story by Dave Lindorff, please go to Salon.com

Delaware County, NY — If President Donald Trump is successful in getting key parts of his proposed budget passed by the Republican-led Congress — especially his cuts in Medicaid and in the Food Stamp program — he is certain to face a rebellion among people in places that went heavily for him in last November’s election. Places like Delaware County in heavily Republican Upstate New York.

My family owns a summer home in Delaware County where we have lived on and off, mostly during the summer (or on weekends before it gets too cold) for the last 31 years, making us, if not native upstate New Yorkers, then at least accepted neighbors and friends of people who are.

A main street in Delaware County, NY (Google street view)
 

Tucked up against the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania just at the point where the East and West Branches of the Delaware flow together to form the Delaware River, Delaware County in the Catskill Mountains is an area that was hit hard by the deliberate deindustrialization policies of the last half century or so promoted by alternating Democratic and Republican governments in Washington, DC. Once home to myriad large and small saw mills that supplied, for example, ash lumber stock for the Louisville Slugger company in Kentucky, to medical equipment manufacturers and the like, and to the usual array of auto dealerships, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, vacation resorts, day camps, etc., the county saw its well-paying and often unionized jobs move abroad or, after passage of NAFTA, down to Mexico. And those companies moved away or shut down, so did many of the smaller businesses that depended on paying customers. Today, the poverty rate in the county is officially at about 25%, drug use and alcoholism, as in much of rural America, are both rampant, joblessness is higher than the state average, with a third of households classified as distressed, meaning that they are spending more than 30% of the median family income of $32,500 just to meet mortgage payments or rent (that’s almost $20,000 a year less than the national median family income level and only $2000 above the official federal poverty level for a family of four!).

People here are white — about 97% of them, in fact, according to the latest US Census. Half of them have at best a high school education. Don’t get me wrong. These are clever, enduring and savvy folks who know how to get by on incomes that are often quite low. They know how to grow gardens, how to fish and to hunt for deer and other game, how to fix their own automobiles and pickup trucks — things that most urban and suburban Americans have entirely lost the ability to do.

Sputnik Radio's 'Loud&Clear' with host Brian Becker (click on the image to hear the segment with Lindorff and Zeese)

Democratic politicians, aided and abetted by their journalist supporters in publications like the Washington Post, New York Times and at electronic news organizations like CNN, MSNBC and NPR, are playing a dangerous game focusing their anti-Trump “resistance” energies on trying to revivify the moribund Cold War with Russia and China.

You hear almost nothing out of Democratic Party establishment figures about the continuing economic crisis facing most average and poor Americans, who continue to struggle trying to get by on lower paying jobs than what they had before the Great Recession (supposedly ended!), or working at part-time jobs, living from paycheck to paycheck while the rich get richer, and having the traditional tickets out of their family’s predicament — a quality public school education and then college for their kids, a home they can finance and ultimately own, and a secure support system for their parents, and eventually themselves when they reach retirement age — undermined and threatened with death by a thousand cuts — all taken from them.

Instead, the American public hears from Democrats and a liberal media how President Trump is in some kind of conspiracy with the evil Russians, who we’re told insidiously helped destroy America’s election system, handing the presidency to Trump instead of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

There are so many things wrong with this picture.

First off, Russia these days, almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is not America’s enemy — something that at least half of Americans understand instinctively, including most of those who voted for Trump in November. 86,000 US tourists and business people visited Russia in 2015, part of some 33 million who visited the country from around the globe to make it the ninth-most-visited country in the world.

XX
 

Forbes magazine, when tensions between the US and Russia were high amid Democratic Party charges that Russia was trying to throw the election to Trump last August, published an article reporting that billions of investment dollars were flowing from the US into Russia from a Fortune 500 list of America’s biggest firms, including PepsiCo, Procter&Gamble, McDonald’s, Mondelez International, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson as well as resource companies like Cargill, Alcoa, and General Electric.

Russia, let us not forget, has been keeping the primarily US-owned and funded ISS space station staffed with its Soyuz rocket ferries, while the US flounders, trying to find the funding to develop a reliable transport system of its own following the forced retirement of the ill-conceived space shuttle.

North Korea is threatening to destroy the US with its thus far largely undeliverable and sometimes unexplodable nuclear weapons, while the US, after an embarrassing navigational “mishap” that saw it steaming in the opposite direction, has successfully dispatched the USS Carl Vinson carrier battle group to a position reportedly within “strike range” of North Korea (albeit actually still in the South China Sea near the Philippines, some 1200 miles distant from North Korea). Now President Trump is threatening a possible attack on that country if it won’t halt its nuclear weapons program.

So is the Korean War, which never really ended, going to be reactivated, as scare stories are now warning?

While I often find myself the pessimist in these kinds of crises, given the penchant for US presidents to turn to war as a default foreign policy option, I’m guessing that won’t happen in this case, and for the same reason I don’t think we will see US troops confronting the determined ethnic Russian secessionists in eastern Ukraine.

It’s clear that for years the imperialist policy of the US government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has been to create chaos in regions of the world from the Middle East to Africa and Latin America, the better to control uppity countries like Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil, whose leaders try to buck or stand up to US dictates. But it’s one thing to overthrow a government and decapitate its leadership in a place like Libya or Syria, where no powerful state is located nearby to defend that country. It’s altogether another to take on a country that lies right on the border of another nuclear power, as does Ukraine and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

There was nobody to come to Col. Gaddafi’s aid when US-led NATO forces attacked his government, backing rebels seeking his overthrow, and left the country a chaotic mess, which it has remained now for six years. And until Russia stepped in, the same was true of US backing for Islamic rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Basher Al-Assad. Ukraine was something of an exception, with the US backing a coup in 2014 that ousted the country’s elected pro-Russian president, installing in his place a pro-US regime, despite its bordering Russia. My sense is that US warmongers still thought Russia was a backwards mess in 2014, incapable of standing up and with a dysfunctional military. When Russia acted, though, and made it clear, with the annexation of Crimea and with material support of ethnic Russians in breakaway Lugansk and Donetsk, that it would brook no departure of Ukraine into NATO’s fold, the US backed off, despite plenty of bluster from the Obama White House and its laughably inept Secretary of State John Kerry.

The USS Carl Vinson, somewhere in the Pacific…or the Indian Ocean
 

I’m predicting that the same thing will happen in the case of North Korea (which borders both China and Russia). The Trump administration may threaten to attack, but the bottom line is that a US attack on North Korea, or even a so-called “surgical strike” on its nuclear weapons development facility or a special forces attack on its leader, Kim Jong-un, would be viewed by China’s government as a mortal threat to their country’s national security, just as Russia views any effort to turn Ukraine into a US puppet and NATO member as a mortal threat to itself.

Back in the 18th century, there was an unwritten understanding in the conduct of warfare that one didn’t kill the generals in battle. This wasn’t about protecting the elite while the “grunts” of the day slaughtered each other. It was a matter of common sense: If you killed the general, there was no one in a position to order a withdrawal or to surrender, once it became clear that one side was winning. With no general in command, things could become chaotic, leading to more bloodshed than necessary.

In the US, ever since the brief presidency of Gerald Ford, and in the wake of the Senate’s Church Committee hearings into the nefarious activities of the CIA and other secret agencies during the Nixon administration and earlier — particularly efforts to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro and some other national leaders — it has been US policy not to kill heads of state. In fact, a Ford executive order, number 12333, signed by President Ford in the mid 1970s, specifically bans the killing of government leaders, however brutish.

If one wants to see an example of why this is a logical policy, just look at what happened during the Obama administration, when Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafy was murdered by his US-backed captors (with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s enthusiastic support), leaving Libya in a state of total chaos from which it has never really recovered.

Yet now there is talk by President Trump and his increasingly neoconservative- dominated National Security and Pentagon team of advisors of “taking out” North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, even as an aircraft carrier attack group steams towards the Korean peninsula.

Trump's using a carrier battle group to 'take out' North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un could lead to unintended consequences
 

Getting rid of Ford Executive Order 12333 would be no difficult hurdle for President Trump, who has been “governing” the country through ill-though-out executive order issuance — most of them written by his political strategist Stephen Bannon, since he assumed office Jan. 20. Bannon, now being sidelined by more traditional cold war neo-cons, may not be writing those orders for his boss now, but someone else could easily do it, erasing E.O 12333 with the stroke of a pen.

What would such a change mean?

 
NOTE: To find an anti-Syria War protest near you, go to: UNAC’s Facebook page
 

President Donald Trump campaigned last year making the sensible argument that the US should no longer engage in a policy of regime change, and should attempt to have friendly relations with other countries like Russia and China. Yesterday he blew those ideas out of the water by launching 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria’s Shayrat airbase (reportedly killing nine civilians and injuring more) and by calling for the removal of Syria’s leader, Bashar al Assad.

The pretext for the US cruise missile blitz, an alleged attack on a rebel-held town called Khan Shiekhun in Idlib province, where some 70 people, including children, were reported to have died from illegal Sarin-gas bombs said to have been dropped by Syrian planes, has yet to be investigated by any independent observers. US aircraft also recently killed over 200 civilians, mostly women and children, in bombings in Mosul in Iraq.

Like many pretexts for war that have been used by the US to justify its illegal attacks on other nations over the years, dating back at least to the faked claim of a North Vietnamese attack on a US destroyer of the country’s coast in the Gulf of Tonkin which led to an all-out US war against the peoples of Indochina, and the fraudulent claim that Saddam Hussein was building “weapons of mass destruction” that led to the US invasion of Iraq, there are many questions about who really used Sarin gas at Khan Shiekhun, a city under the control of an Al-Qaeda rebel group. All information about the attack has come from sources there, where no Western reporters or independent investigators are allowed, and from the so-called “White Helmets” — a supposedly humanitarian volunteer organization that calls for the overthrow of the Syrian government and that openly backs Al-Qaeda rebels. (Critics have noted that high-quality photos of the dead appear staged, with White Helmet rescuers shown not using any protective clothing or even gloves, even though residue of Sarin, a nerve gas, can kill or injure even those whose skin touches it.)

Syrias Shayrat air base in Homs Province after a massive attack by 59 US Tomahawk cruise missiles ordered by President Trump
 

We already know that the supposed Sarin gas attack on a neighborhood in Damascus, which nearly led to an all-out attack on Syria by the US under President Obama in 2013 — a criminal war that was only prevented by Russia stepping in with a deal to supervise the removal and destruction of all of Syria’s stocks of chemical weapons — was actually a “false flag” attack conducted by Syrian rebels using Sarin supplied from Turkey — the same rebels who now control Khan Shiekhun. Unmentioned in US reports and government statements about the missile attack is the fact that the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had already investigated and monitored the removal and the destruction of all Syria’s chemical weapons by 2016, and had declared that such chemicals and weapons had all been eliminated or removed from the country under the terms of an agreement reached between the US, Russia and Syria.