Finian Cunningham

Neo-feudalism is what we are being offered in place of the “American dream”. This is why we are seeing growing efforts of workers to organize unions.

The following interview is a follow-up to an earlier one conducted this month with American writer and veteran labor rights activist Bruce Gagnon. He explains the current U.S.-led NATO conflict against Russia in a historical context. U.S.-dominated Western capitalism is addicted to war as a modus operandi going back to its original genocidal conquest and foundations in slavery through its colonial wars and other wars of aggression over the past century and more. The current conflict playing out in Ukraine is but a continuum of class war against the workers of the United States and other Western states.

American workers, however, are fighting back in the form of a resurgence in unionizing and strike actions. The crisis in capitalism is driving the U.S. ruling class and its European NATO associates to war against Russia, and ultimately a Third World War. The struggle for real democracy in the U.S. (and Europe) is part of the same challenge to defeat American-led Western imperialism. What’s at stake is the very future of the planet.

Bruce Gagnon coordinates the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He began his political career in 1978 organizing Florida fruit pickers for the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). While working for the UFW, he served on the union team negotiating contracts between the Coca-Cola Corporation (Minute Maid orange juice) and the UFW. He writes a daily blog called Organizing Notes.

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Finian Cunningham

"Tiny Baltic States Prepare to Hit Back at Mighty Russia..."

Every Russian maneuver is now being recklessly construed as a sinister war threat by the Western media - no matter that the Russian maneuvers are entirely in keeping with international law and are a normal part of any nation’s right to movement of its military forces.

The latest “incident” was reported by Britain’s Daily Mail in which a squadron of Russian warships was “escorted” by the British Royal Navy as it sailed through the English Channel.

The Daily Mail headline was spiced with sinister innuendo of Russia doing something untoward, illegal and threatening. ‘Royal Navy catches up with Russian warships to ‘keep an eye’ on Putin’s fleet sailing along the Channel.’

Note the sly demonization of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, by attributing the Russian leader as the personal owner of the warships - as if he were some kind of arch-villain in a cheesy James Bond movie.

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Finian Cunningham

Has Russia reached the limit of its diplomatic tolerance of the US and its NATO allies? The announcement this week that Moscow is to begin deploying long-range bombers in the Gulf of Mexico - America's own backyard - suggests so.

US warns Russia over bomber flights near American borders

The move may seem like a reckless ratcheting up of tensions between the old Cold War rivals. The Tupolev Russian strategic bombers in question are nuclear-capable, and as expected the decision to patrol the Caribbean seas sparked a stern response from Washington, warning Moscow of risks.

But the first point to note is that Russia is not doing anything illegal. It has a legal right to fly its warplanes in any international airspace it chooses, as do all nations, to perform training maneuvers.

Even Washington officials have begrudgingly acknowledged Russia's legal right to do so. The Christian Science Monitor quoted Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren as saying, "Russia has a right to fly in international airspace".

However, we can be sure that the hawks in Washington will be fuming at what they see as Vladimir Putin's "audacity" to order warplanes within striking distance of the US. For the de facto American War Party of Republicans and Democrats, the latest Russian move confirms their accusations that President Putin is trying to flex "Soviet-era muscles". Or, as American NATO commander General Philip Breedlove put it, Russia "is messaging us that they are a great power".

That's typical arrogant mis-reading by Washington of the situation. This is not Putin trying to be provocative or flaunting expansionist ambitions. It is simply Russia giving a taste of American medicine back and in language that the arrogant warmongers in Washington will understand.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US-led NATO military alliance has embarked on a relentless campaign of encircling Russia. In complete defiance of binding agreements, such as the 1997 Founding Act between NATO and Russia, the American military alliance has encroached on Russian borders with warplanes, warships, missiles and troops. It is Washington that is on an expansionist threatening drive, not Russia.

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Finian Cunningham

In an insightful geopolitical speech this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of instigating global instability and insecurity.

As if to underline Putin's point was the backdrop of major news stories during recent days: the national security alert that gripped Canada over the killing of two military personnel in Ottawa and Quebec; the near panic in New York City over an Ebola disease outbreak; and the Swedish hunt for a mystery submarine in its territorial waters.

To say that there was over-reaction in each instance is an understatement. But the disproportionate public response reflects the atmosphere of global insecurity that the US and other Western governments have engendered. The stoking of insecurity has partly been cynical as a way of manipulating the public into accepting greater state control measures or to promote a geopolitical agenda.

This was clearly the case in Canada, where the rightwing government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper framed the two deaths as a full-blown national terror alert, thus invoking more state powers over the public while at the same time justifying the recent deployment of Canadian military forces in the illegal US-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.

When the public has been whipped up into a fervour of insecurity, all sorts of irrational reactions can then become possible, as in the widespread anxiety over the Ebola disease that has broken out in West Africa. One or two cases of infection in the US and Europe has created a stampede-like fear of a pandemic - despite the fact that patients, such as the Dallas nurse, can be successfully treated with adequate medical care.

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Finian Cunningham

Coup plotters Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt greet the so-
called «President of Ukraine», Petro Poroshenko, in Warsaw.

In an ominous sign that the war in Ukraine is set to further escalate, US state department official Victoria Nuland arrived in Kiev where she met with senior members of the Western-backed regime.

In recent days the ceasefire brokered on September 5 has come under intense pressure as Kiev military forces have stepped up their barrage of the eastern city of Donetsk, with several civilian casualties reported almost on a daily basis.

As civilian homes burn in Donetsk, the Kiev regime has also begun openly talking about resuming its war footing by «raising combat readiness» and mobilising new army units toward the eastern Donbass regions, where it is trying to suppress a pro-independence movement in the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

For the past month, the Kiev regime has been talking out of both sides of its mouth. At times it has been declaring commitment to a ceasefire brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At other times, hardliners in the regime have been warning that there was no such truce in practice, and that it was on the verge of an all-out war with Russia.

All the while, the putative ceasefire has been in tatters largely because Kiev’s forces have refused to withdraw from the conflict lines and continued to shell civilians centres.

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Finian Cunningham

Listening to American and British leaders this week one would think that Barack Obama and David Cameron are knights in shining armor on an epic crusade to defeat global evil.

Of course, that is exactly what Washington and London are trying to inculcate in popular perception – that the US and Britain are the saviors of the world leading a military campaign to destroy the extremist network known as so-called Islamic State (IS, or ISIL/ISIS).

This is a massive public relations scam to burnish the image of America and Britain – the two countries that, rightly, are most associated with illegal war making over the past decade, from Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011) to ongoing deadly drone warfare in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Between them, Washington and London are responsible for the deaths of more than 1.5 million people over the past 13 years.

What better way to rehabilitate the war criminals than to present them now as leading a moral crusade to defeat a global evil? Unbelievably, too many states seem to be going along with this ridiculous charade, as can be gleaned from the way Obama and Cameron’s posturing was indulged this week at the United Nations General Assembly.

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Finian Cunningham

A wounded girl receives treatment in the emergency room of
the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. (Photo: Khalil Hamra/AP)

The Israeli regime is cynically using “humanitarian ceasefires” as a way of luring Palestinian civilians into further killing zones with the diabolical aim of “improving” its genocidal operation, which has been dubbed with the Orwellian name “Protective Edge.”

On Friday morning, the Tel Aviv administration of Benjamin Netanyahu had declared a 72-hour truce. But the so-called cessation of Israeli violence was no reprieve for the death-trapped Palestinian population. Far from it.

In the next hours more than 40 Palestinians were slaughtered when Israeli tanks and soldiers started firing on the Rafah Crossing on the Gaza border with Egypt.

In another location, near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, a whole village was flattened by Israeli tanks, also on Friday. The number of dead is not yet known but media reports described the “stench of death everywhere.” In other words, a day of supposed “peace” was just another day of killing, wounding and destruction by Israeli forces.

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Finian Cunningham

Israeli genocide is American-sponsored genocide

US top diplomat John Kerry says a ceasefire deal in Gaza is close but there is still a way to go for one to be implemented.

What's the hold-up? Men, women and children are being slaughtered in their hundreds. Hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, the wounded are being attacked against all norms of international law and morality.

The main Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, says that any truce must be the basis for further talks on the underlying issues of Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and by extension on other parts of Palestinian territory in the West Bank. That is inarguably reasonable and common sense.

But the Israeli regime doesn't want to engage in discussions about the bigger issues. It says that a ceasefire should be negotiated first and then, at some unspecified later time, talks about underlying issues can be held. Of course, this seemingly two-part deal from the Israeli side is but a cruel, cynical joke. It will never talk to Hamas. Indeed, the Israeli regime will never seriously talk to any Palestinian faction about the wider issues. A ceasefire for them is just a punctuation mark in a long story of ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their historic homeland.

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Finian Cunningham

In a devastating twist to emerge over the weekend it now seems that the Malaysian civilian airliner downed over Ukraine was most probably brought down as a result of sabotage by the US-backed Kiev regime.

The purpose of this audacious act of mass murder – in which 298 lives were lost – was carried out with the intention of framing the Russian government. Washington, the chief sponsor of the Kiev regime, must have known about the plot, if not being fully complicit in it.

The key to this dramatic twist is the identification of incriminating audio tapes over the weekend as fake – tapes that were created initially to implicate Moscow, as part of a massive black operation involving the destruction of the civilian airliner and all those onboard. Nationals from more than 12 countries were onboard the doomed Boeing 777, most of them Dutch, Malaysian, Australian, as well as American, Canadian, British and several other European states.

Within hours of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crashing into a wheat field in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine last Thursday, Western governments and media have gradually stoked a frenzy of accusations that Moscow had a hand in the disaster. US President Barack Obama announced that unnamed American intelligence sources said that the suspected surface-to-air missile believed to have taken the jet down was fired from territory held by anti-Kiev self-defence militias. Or as Obama put it: «Russian-backed separatists».

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Finian Cunningham

The Western propaganda machine is trying to sell Ukraine's so-called Candy King as the democratically elected new president of that crisis-torn country.

The billionaire Petro Poroshenko is being presented as a self-made entrepreneur-turned-politician, who will bring to Ukraine "enlightened Western democracy and free markets".

As usual, this is typical Western propaganda inverting reality. The 48-year-old Poroshenko is certainly pro-Western, but not for benign reasons. He made his wealth, along with his father and several other oligarch figures, by operating ruthlessly as a vulture capitalist, seizing state assets belonging to the old Soviet Ukraine during the 1990s.

One of his businesses is the manufacture of chocolates, but Poroshenko has several other "interests" including ownership of news media that engages in gutter journalism to spread his belated "anti-Russian" politics and further his own selfish ambitions.

The Chocolate King has fingers sticking with corruption, with serious accusations against him over underworld dealings in drugs, prostitution and illegal arms trade. That such a sinister figure is now being presented by the US and European governments in such a positive light is like a dizzying sugar rush to the head.

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