Shady Dealing around Cannabis Yukon Store (Whitehorse Star coloumn 19 Oct. 2018)

Shady Dealing around Cannabis Yukon Store (Whitehorse Star coloumn 19 Oct. 2018)

And where, pray tell, were the ribbon-cutting politicians?

The windows are actually shaded into complete darkness, save for bare light bulbs — in fairness LED ones. 

There is more sinister architecture and demonizing design throughout, that are not retail business like at all. 

Walls, countertops, displays are matter-of-fact and with purity, no flower or anything to be humanly at ease with.

Bunker atmosphere, fittingly prison-like, perhaps, bus depot wash room with a hint of museum at best. Nothing of the dignified ambience quality one expects in a winery or deli store. 

Politely but forcefully, the observer or customer is guided in her judgement to observe a real-life, somewhat gangsterish operation, defined in its control obsession and security overkill.

A couple dozen, or so, staff included more or less half a dozen athletic, uniform-clad out-of-house security guards.

Only a fraction of those are actual cashier and sales staff. People are herded along with inch precision by hip-high fences and frequent barrier stops, manned by strategically placed guards that display a jovial front.

Didn’t see any barbed wire, guns or guard dogs, probably because they were not at hand.

Weirdly, as if out of nowhere, the Company of Adventurers comes to mind, which is what the HBC was called in the 1600s. 

Now here is a bit of technicolour historical vision to lighten up the drab and dreary scene. 

I thought of one particularly striking finding Peter C. Newman had dug up in the HBC archives in years before they were moved from Winnipeg back to their original starting point of corporate cartel colonialism, London, England.

In comparison, the French government, not the colonists per se, had been less trade and more pre-modern industry-oriented. 

Both seemed more honest about who they were and what they did, held side-by-side to the deceptive traits in the current neoliberal management of colonial affairs.

Time to pick up again and conclude my anecdote of recalling and contextualizing history, as to how I balanced the sensory impact of the schizoid 21st century Yukon Cannabis installation. 

The archived letters, orders in the operations manual info of the Bay, which at that point operated namely Hudson Bay shore operations, spells out to leave the trading room, small with big counter across, unheated and drafty at all times throughout winter.

The purpose was to manipulate fur prices to the disadvantage of the First Nation trappers by ushering them along in a frozen assembly line, and be rid of them quickly.

Emotional freeze out is what the Cannabis Yukon supply building achieves in hosting abusive interior design and repulsive, harm promoting labels that violate, in French and English, the most basic, undisputed in peer reviews, science.

“Up to 1 in 2 people who use cannabis daily will become addicted.” 

Total bunk. there literally is, world-wide, not one person on the record that died from cannabis use; a lethal dosage does not exist. 

It is how confused substance users come to distrust information and end up opiate-overdosed in morgues. That is where I owe to my own parents, who didn’t use junk science for the purpose of intimidation, and did not lie to us children.

U.S. president Richard Nixon’s Drug War continues in cannabis regulation of feds and YTG with new and up to 14-year-long and frivolous penitentiary sentences, simply for being human, for what might not constitute a minor misdemeanor, say in relation to smoking or drinking.

Yes, Nixon’s globalized Gulag attack on people continues in the Cannabis Act Bill C-45 from June 2018, along its provincial and territorial implementations and extensions. 

Not yet finished reading it, but clearly Bill-C-45 is permeated with a notion of demonizing non white people in order to dump over-policing and super-enforcement on them, toward mass incarceration. 

Far disproportionally, First Nations individuals count not as house owners, but dominate in renter and also homeless statistics. Now, in the Yukon, public cannabis consumption is forbidden, and most landlords say no to smoking, including the occasional marihuana joint.

If somebody explicitly designed a racialized entrapment framework to further increase mass incarceration of First Nations, they could not have done a better job.

This comes on top of an existing notorious over-policing paired with a mass incarceration that is already around tenfold for Indigenous people in Canada, over the general population.

Nobody dies from cannabis. 

Yes, it can be habit-forming badly, even to the extend of behaviours such as bull s****ting or even watching TV.  

What counts is this: cannabis continues to be consistently on the record as 100% non-addictive. 

Physical withdrawal effects, the definition of addiction, are non existent.

You see, the shivering in the physical cold is what once made the Bay factors and directors less deceptive colonizers than the current neoliberal herders. 

The latter might have planned along impressions from the typically warm surroundings of familiar tax havens, such as Panama and Bermuda. 

Drug war, gangster and bankster as well as prison industry money hold up these as brick and mortar structure. 

Which then comes available to smaller but vane entrepreneurs with elitist ambitions, such as senior management or executive individuals from neofeudal/neoliberal governments (Panama Papers).

Well, the political leadership was altogether invisible and unheard of on this momentous and first Weed Wednesday, including Sandy Silver, Stacey Hassard, Doris Bill, Dan Curtis, Liz Hanson and Larry Bagnell, or any of their colleagues. Suffice it to say no proper ceremony such as ribbon cutting took place.

It signals certainly feds and YTG continue with a very clear message of zero accountability. 

As already touched upon, the drug war continues in and outside of Canada.

The Cannabis Act aligns with the Trudeau government’s signing of the Sept 2018 “Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem”, which was rejected by a strong majority of United Nations.

The Trudeau government’s signing of the pledge, drafted by the Trump Whitehouse to renew Nixon’s criminal, globalized and highly racialized Gulag attack on people, further casts a shadow into the future that signals caution.

It should be advisable to leave no long-lasting electronic charge tracks and pay for cannabis in cash only. Think of the despicable, extra-legal no-fly list process in which our government serves up innocent Canadians as cannon fodder for U.S. repression.

Persecution logic worded around substance nomenclature was introduced as core of Nixon’s white supremacist Southern Strategy that Bill Clinton came to love and double down on in achieving a worldwide unmatched U.S. incarceration level of her citizens. 

In the drumbeat of newspeak, the new Jim Crow it is glossed over and referred to as the War on Drugs.

Compliant to Prime Minister Trudeau’s and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s ring-kissing of President Donald Trump, racist class justice without accountability will continue.

Grief and honour were withheld on this first and important Weed Wednesday, from millions of dead and living casualties, after half a century of state-sponsored, globalized drug war crimes.

In the overstaffed, over-managed setting there was one hero who would have earned his pay on opening day — except that he wasn’t paid.

In the parking lot to the lined-up queue of people who waiting for to be let inside, a veteran Yukon musician and arts person (Eric Epstein) sang beautifully and played the guitar as self launched ceremonial volunteer.

After some venting I should also point out that history is full of surprises, and might come to understand Weed Wednesday as eventually constructive initiative for a turn-around.

And before that happens bona fide quality cannabis will surely, as before in Holland and Portugal, become a boost to the Canadian tourism industry.

Peter Becker, Whitehorse,  

(Donations welcome, just paste into URL window: paypal.me/yukonblogger )

Trudeau/Freeland hide dirty NAFTA Ch. 11 behind Filler-fluff Ch.19

Trudeau/Freeland hide dirty NAFTA Ch. 11 behind Filler-fluff Ch.19

Ottawa is noticeably quiet on a core U.S. demand to discontinue the undemocratic Chapter 11, a position forced by broad resistance.

All the while Trudeau/Freeland are insisting to keep Ch. 11, despite it having not even marginally to do with trade, unlike Ch. 19 and Ch. 20.

Remarkably so as under Ch. 11 American cartels negotiate from our government billions of dollars as reward for breaking Canadian laws. In zero reciprocity we never benefitted a single cent from the U.S. acc. to gov. info https://is.gd/9d4tvc .

Why this treasonous behaviour of Trudeau and Freeland, reminiscent of Brian Mulroney’s (Freeland's newly appointed NAFTA advisor) sell-out of Canadian interests?

Defending the Ch. 11 standard in NAFTA also upholds Canada’s racist bully status in globalization deals with poor countries, specifically shielding and rewarding death squad, rape, deportation, land theft collusion and other criminal activities of Canadian mining.

Richard Swift in the spring 2018 issue of Canadian Dimension observed that the NAFTA Ch. 11 principle of illegal/extralegal investor state arbitration privileges is enshrined essence of a multitude of bilateral so called free trade deals.

“The fix is in on investor state dispute settlement systems [article headline pp. 22/23]

The Canadian Impact [subsection]

[beginning of continuous quote] ... The U.S. has never lost an investor suit under NAFTA. There is every reason to believe that the Trudeau government’s support for Chapter 11 and willingness to pay up is encouraging the increasing number of investor claims against the country.

A few of these cases give an idea of the way in which Canada’s regulatory regime is a target for these suits. The Ethyl Corporation sued over the banning of what was considered a gasoline additive dangerous to public health. 

S.B. Myers challenged a temporary Canadian ban on the export of toxic PCB wastes. Lone Pine Resources (a Canadian company using its U.S. subsidiary) sued over Quebec’s moratorium on fracking. 

Other lost cases related to futile attempts to claw back some of the advantages from selling Canada’s resources — two notable ones were the refusal of U.S.-based Mobil Oil [currently double dipping with a rerun of the very same extortion against Canada] to contribute to R&D and education and training as part of its offshore projects in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

Another was a loss to AbitibiBowater (now Resolute Forest Products) for trying to take back lumber and water rights after the timber giant had shut down its last mill, also in Newfoundland.

But perhaps the official enthusiasm for ISDS provisions in Ottawa is the fact that successive Canadian governments are in the back pocket of the Canadian mining sector. 

Several mining companies have sued under these provisions, including a suit for 4.4 billion by notorious Gabriel Resources against the Romanian government, which is desperately trying to protect the precious Rosa Montana region against a large open-pit gold and silver mine. 

Other suits have been brought by Canadian “miners” against Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala and many other countries. To date mining companies have sued over 40 governments a total of 100 times under these obscure trade-treaty provisions. 

Forget about human and worker rights and environmental standards. By most estimates, nearly three-quarters of the global mining industry is Canadian-based.” [end of quote] 

So called globalized free trade is all about a gangster agenda of race and class, effectively targeting for destruction Canada’s inter-cultural deep-law foundations, towards becoming another U.S. colony (Alberta Premiers lead the way and routinely consult with the White House in Washington, D.C.).

Under attack from within, Canada is unique among Western countries with their more or less European race-based, single-language, single religion ideals.

However, Ch. 11 has contributed to a political environment with a severe chill effect against legislating or even holding on to civic, environmental and economic development rights that benefit people. 

Life support systems such as drinking and ground water qualities are falling apart, child poverty is an international disgrace, predatory debts and structural unemployment are ballooning, incomes are declining.

Flash-points are a recolonizing of First Nations as pipeline hostages, and an anti-renewable carbon-tax Wall Street program that financializes bankster privileges in tandem with subsidizing an impoverishing, zero net-return tar and frack expansion.

Off course the neoliberal ideologues disagree and claim, all we wanted is peace, joy and pancakes. The 4th century BC philosopher Aristotle may have reminded them: To hell with excuses and psychobabble, plot is character; 

Neoliberals have earned their mess and own it. They are the ones in charge for 45 years since they largely destroyed, or perverted back to colonialism, the UN and Bretton Woods postwar institutions along with then imperfect but positive fairness ambitions.   

Late Milton Friedman deserves special credit as prominent voice for the Chicago school of economics, and as Nobel Laureate imposter with his actually received award from the Swedish central bank.

On 10 April 1947 in the Hotel du Parc in Pelerin, Switzerland Friedman had released a “Neoliberalism” doctrine that attempted to rescue, by renaming it, Mussolini’s version of colonialism through “Corporatism”.

On 10 April 1947 in the Hotel du Parc in Pelerin, Switzerland Friedman had released a “Neoliberalism” doctrine that attempted to rescue, by renaming it, Mussolini’s invention of “Corporatism” paired with neocolonialism.

Friedman deceptively claimed to follow the path of the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith by unleashing a social darwinism of elite privileges as a free market.

When in reality Smith had insisted that markets are to be regulated by (ethical) political leadership, not the other around. 

And that markets flourish when free of an uncompetitive (Friedman like) burden of rentier class scenarios dominated by slum lords, loan sharks and neo-feudal finance speculators.

During the 1970s Friedman became a senior advisor to the murder and torture regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile which true to his neoliberal dogma he referred to as “Miracle of Chile”.

How did the extremist hack’s organized crime program arrive on the main stage, with specialties such as NAFTA Chapter 11 like provisions through which corporate cartels get to de facto legislate through nullifying laws passed by parliaments? Reagan, Clinton, Thatcher, Kohl and Blair put it there.

Especially in recent weeks and months even neoliberal mainstream media have widely noted that dispute resolution, with regard to U.S. tariffs against Canadian softwood lumber, metals, automotive and other exports, under the still active fall-back GATT/WTO rules scenario, had been relatively more successful. 

Further exposing NAFTA Chapters 19/20 as filler-fluff provisions to mask organized crime and treason under Ch. 11.

Ch. 11’s UNCITRAL arbitration rules are tilted towards extending U.S. corporate legal structures and drawing in U.S. friendly lawyers as panel judges.

The text of NAFTA Ch. 11 mentions government “measure” 35 times, carefully probing for attack every conceivable nuance of responsible, lawful government to be dismantled.

Peter Becker, Whitehorse,  

(Donations Welcome paypal.me/yukonblogger )

.....

iran regime change deal

Regime Change Deal frames Iran with Fiction Nukes [1/2 + 2/2]

[two part coloumn originally published 3/4 May 2018 Whitehorse Star]

Western countries engage in a stubborn, century-long campaign of anti-Iranian aggression. U.S. President Donald Trump, aside to blustering, so far provides more continuity than change to the legacies of previous US.. administrations.

Enter Barack Obama, who in 2015 furnished JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) as touch stone in the way of an anti-Iranian good cop/bad cop routine by which trigger-happy Democrats and bellicose Republicans are let lose to outdo each other in their usual sew-saw, pro-war dialogue.

By legitimizing the bomb lie to a wider public with the deceptive JCPOA, Obama perhaps did more than Trump or George W. Bush to tether down Iran as target for regime change and aggressive war to steal their oil.

Looking at the basics, bringing back a dose of objectivity might be helped by stepping away for a moment from unexamined assumptions that lack critical thinking, such as Obama policies as a given force for good or step in the right direction.

Unfortunately even highly experienced and competent observers, among them Gareth Porter, can’t quite get out from under the shadow of Obama’s marketing genius (Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, 2014).

It also means Mr. Porter doesn’t live by his own minutiously assembled evidence for an all-out deception and Iran demonization in JCPOA, when, in disjointed conclusion, he even now supports the toxic deal to supposedly have a positive impact.

Mr. Porter with his detailed evaluation and fact-finding, is joining the likes of Seymour Hersh in clearly demonstrating proof that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and no ambitions for one. Among sources to back up their findings are US and Israeli intelligence services.

( goo.gl/muxL5N Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, 6 June 20011

goo.gl/nHV9y8 James Risen, Mark Mazzetti, New York Times 24 Feb. 2012

goo.gl/ixt1Yw Seumas Milne, Ewen MacAskill, Clayton Swisher, Israel Spy Cables, 23 Feb. 2015).

Best hope against brinksmanship of the war mongers:

Intelligence services with governments most at risk to talk themselves into illegal shooting wars, had learned a lesson since Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair furnished fabricated phoney weapons of mass destruction evidence against Saddam Hussein in 2002/2003. And have developed a habit of going to the media while there is time.

Obama had acted toward Iran like a lawyer pressuring guilty plea bargains, in the way of a racialized class justice, on those innocent of what they are accused of, as trade-in for a shortened but lifelong besmirching prison sentence.

At gunpoint, Obama threatened, cajoled and blackmailed Iran to sign the JCPOA deal, backed up by a dangling and teasing of sanctions relief paired in the real world with ever-widening sanctions, naval blockades and other ongoing war measures.

A plea bargain deal by which Iran in effect confesses to nuclear weapons programs or ambitions with global reach, which it never had, and to regional deterrence, which it doesn't and didn't pursue, verifiably at least since 2003, according to consistent US and Israeli intelligence findings.

The thrust of JCPOA is non-co-operative and different to the Non-Proliferation Treaty because it singled out Iran for future regime change and, in essence, re-enforced Obama's doubling down on the criminal Bush Doctrine for aggressive wars.

With President Trump, and his advisor, John Bolton, in the Whitehouse, willing to cash in Obama’s pre-emptive war crime option, legitimized and implicit in the JCPOA narrative, the deal may have to be paid for dearly, rather sooner than later.

Colin Powell former chief of staff, Colonel Wilkerson, pointed at another often overlooked function of the JCPOA, to recruit a coalition of the willing to attack Iran

( goo.gl/RBZ5Cs  Laurence Wilkerson, U.S. News & World Report,  20 Aug. 2015).

Part 2/2 examines the warlike attitude of Western countries towards Iran in the context of petroleum economics, geopolitical and cultural fault-lines.

Peter Becker, Whitehorse

Obama Regime Change Deal frames Iran with Fiction Nukes [2/2]

Part one of my commentary shed light on the Orwellian content of the Iran nuclear deal and the language it projects, which claims to protect peace when the real purpose is to “let slip the dogs of war” (Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar”).

The old agenda of stealing the Iranian peoples' oil has, if anything become more deadly in the 2015 Barack Obama regime change deal, than with the violent British/American coup in 1953 (Operation Ajax).

The Iranian leadership is suspicious about a continuous regime change agenda based on the underlying objective of stealing Iran's oil, but perhaps makes the mistake of not being suspicious enough. 

An Iranian misjudgement in signing JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) is conceivable, partly from the vantage point of honest business characteristics in their conventional oil extraction. 

It seems possible to underestimate just how deceptive and dangerous the North American unconventional and economically wounded oil cartel beast has become, business converted into ideology.

One can get a sense when examining U.S. and Canadian tar and frack crude extraction, which has a marginal production cost of around $100 to 150 per barrel compared with $10 - 15 for profitable Iranian conventional oil.

North American oil cartels are heavily subsidized by carbon-pricing talk and policies, have morphed into a market-hostile, economically damaging mirage of an oil and gas industry that generates a creeping energy security/affordability crisis, structural unemployment, run away government debt, climate melt down and defrauds investors.

These backgrounds are well documented by independent oil & gas analysts ranging from Deborah Rogers to David Hughes and Art Berman, to studies of energy economics including from EUROSOLAR, the Indigenous Environmental Network, IEA, the IPCC, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 100-per-cent renewable lightning-speed conversion plans by Sussex and Stanford universities.

There are also entrenched cultural misunderstandings at play. It has been observed by Western scholars that apparently the Iranian mullahs feel their religion of Shia Islam does not permit the pursuing of nuclear weapons and other WMDs.

During the Western-backed and armed Iraq attack on Iran (1980-88), including by way of chemical weapons, Iran deliberately never responded with chemical weapons.

The Imam Ali, founder of the Shia branch of islam, who set down that “People are brothers in religion or brothers in humanity” is much loved in Iran. 

Such moral teachings tend not to be restraint into academical or quasi-ecclesiastical confines, but evolve with a presence in everyday life.

After all, science says atom bombs are insane and not feasible, in terms of deterrence or nuclear winter.

By contrast it seems that in a Western mainstream interactions of man’s tools with the world have not been mythologically updated for a very long time, not perhaps since Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel ”Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.

Somehow spiritual death has settled in to such a degree that our elites and leadership can no longer even imagine such a big priority position, by of course flawed human beings, and to be guided not from a hollow dogma of frozen utilitarianism, but from a living ethical core.

Yes the JCPOA is installed, but energizing and covering up its evil direction with endorsements reminds of so-called liberals that still have not accounted for enabling Bill Clinton’s war crimes in Iraq during the ‘90s.

Clinton, silver-tongued, much like Obama, launched sanctions, naval blockades and bombs that, in Clinton’s case, killed more Iraqi children than the sum of two Bush presidents’ actions.

Accelerated escalations by the Trump administration, decertifying the JCOPA by May 12 or not, achieve traction that is enabled by Trump critics, who hide the pro-war long game and oil robbery meaning of Obama’s regime change deal. 

The deal’s drawn out actual legal content, of vast fabrications and unsubstantiated accusations, in its inertia of war propaganda is available to Trump, wether the JCPOA stays in place or not.

Opposers falsely claim the deal enables a nuclear threat supposedly posed by Iran. Defenders say that it protects peace while equally demonizing Iran with false nuke ambitions.

On his recent visit to Washington French President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated how to work Obama’s Iran deal synergistically.

Aside from a bit of showmanship performance of teasing Trump to get back in line with the deal, he went on to effortlessly explain away any difference between the Bush-Obama-Trump (supplementary) positions, as there really are none of substance. 

During his White House visit, Macron kicked into gear an all-out consolidation of the pro and contra duality of the deal perception, leaving dissenters of a potential war on Iran with their pants down, the point of the Obama Iran exercise to begin with.

(When coming up with up privatized Obamacare to push back Medicare majority ambitions, Obama had already proved a master of setting up such neoliberal Catch-22 traps) 

Most everybody, pro or contra, has effectively been coopted into the JCPOA war agenda by their unaware complicity in disguising the deal’s actual direction.

However, there is no excuse for wimpish or feeble-minded validations of the Obama war deal, wether it stays in place or evaporates.

Letting go of those by exposing its true pro-war core, logically works towards deflating Trump’s immediate war threat by pulling out the rug from underneath it.

Obama’s regime change deal already has generated geopolitical reverberations, lives lost and harms that cannot be undone, also by escalating the Syrian war more and more into an anti-Iranian and anti-Russian proxy war. 

Others are picking up the slack, more recently induced through the vacuums of Trump diplomacy

— such as the social-democratic former Italian foreign affairs minister Federica Mogherini who is also a promoter and deceiver on the war agenda of JCPOA.

In 2014 the European Union appointed her as liaison envoy with a security mandate that since amounted to a recruiting tour de force in tightening and escalating the NATO encirclement of Russia, and increasingly of China.

Those with or without illusions on the Iran deal should pay attention also to an increasingly explicit projection, through the JCPOA lens, of European/American aggressive colonial powers against Russia’s, Iran’s and Syria’s sovereign relations. 

Such dangerous geopolitical destabilization efforts are brought forward during G7 meetings as we speak, including by Macron, Donald Trump, British Prime MinisterTheresa May and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

The very same coalition of countries that in 1918 -1920 gratuitously attacked and invaded their First World War ally Russia, a bottomless treachery that likely caused the death of millions.

Rosa Luxemburg, a peace advocate and socialist organizer, had pointed at the cowardice of Social Democratic Party executives, especially in Germany, when through years prior to “The Guns of August” (the Barbara Tuchman book) in 1914 they betrayed their own iron-clad solidarity and peace contract with the people and switched sides to the war powers and death industries.

James Joyce knew what he talked about in his 1919 poem The Second Coming. The last lines of the first stanza seem especially foreboding and encapsulating a cowardly, softheaded kind of complicity with escalating wars so that the carnage never ends:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

Within the neoliberal one-party substance, lefties instinctively come across as even more dishonest than the right-wing populists along with the by name only liberal centrists, with their half-transparent gangsterism.

Time and again, populations tend to dismiss the by vanity/identity politics disguised wussy avant-garde.

Regime Change Deal frames Iran with Fiction Nukes

Regime Change Deal frames Iran with Fiction Nukes [1/2 + 2/2]

[two part coloumn originally published in the Whitehorse Star, 3/4 May 2018]

Western countries engage in a stubborn, century-long campaign of anti-Iranian aggression. U.S. President Donald Trump, aside to blustering, so far provides more continuity than change to the legacies of previous U.S. administrations.

Enter Barack Obama, who in 2015 furnished JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) as touch stone in the way of an anti-Iranian good cop/bad cop routine by which trigger-happy Democrats and bellicose Republicans are let lose to outdo each other in their usual sew-saw, pro-war dialogue.

By legitimizing the bomb lie to a wider public with the deceptive JCPOA, Obama perhaps did more than Trump or George W. Bush to tether down Iran as target for regime change and aggressive war to steal their oil.

Looking at the basics, bringing back a dose of objectivity might be helped by stepping away for a moment from unexamined assumptions that lack critical thinking, such as Obama policies as a given force for good or step in the right direction.

Unfortunately even highly experienced and competent observers, among them Gareth Porter, can’t quite get out from under the shadow of Obama’s marketing genius (Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, 2014).

It also means Mr. Porter doesn’t live by his own minutiously assembled evidence for an all-out deception and Iran demonization in JCPOA, when, in disjointed conclusion, he even now supports the toxic deal to supposedly have a positive impact.

Mr. Porter with his detailed evaluation and fact-finding, is joining the likes of Seymour Hersh in clearly demonstrating proof that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and no ambitions for one. Among sources to back up their findings are US and Israeli intelligence services.

( goo.gl/muxL5N Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, 6 June 20011

goo.gl/nHV9y8 James Risen, Mark Mazzetti, New York Times 24 Feb. 2012

goo.gl/ixt1Yw Seumas Milne, Ewen MacAskill, Clayton Swisher, Israel Spy Cables, 23 Feb. 2015).

Best hope against brinksmanship of the war mongers:

Intelligence services with governments most at risk to talk themselves into illegal shooting wars, had learned a lesson since Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair furnished fabricated phoney weapons of mass destruction evidence against Saddam Hussein in 2002/2003. And have developed a habit of going to the media while there is time.

Obama had acted toward Iran like a lawyer pressuring guilty plea bargains, in the way of a racialized class justice, on those innocent of what they are accused of, as trade-in for a shortened but lifelong besmirching prison sentence.

At gunpoint, Obama threatened, cajoled and blackmailed Iran to sign the JCPOA deal, backed up by a dangling and teasing of sanctions relief paired in the real world with ever-widening sanctions, naval blockades and other ongoing war measures.

A plea bargain deal by which Iran in effect confesses to nuclear weapons programs or ambitions with global reach, which it never had, and to regional deterrence, which it doesn't and didn't pursue, verifiably at least since 2003, according to consistent US and Israeli intelligence findings.

The thrust of JCPOA is non-co-operative and different to the Non-Proliferation Treaty because it singled out Iran for future regime change and, in essence, re-enforced Obama's doubling down on the criminal Bush Doctrine for aggressive wars.

With President Trump, and his advisor, John Bolton, in the Whitehouse, willing to cash in Obama’s pre-emptive war crime option, legitimized and implicit in the JCPOA narrative, the deal may have to be paid for dearly, rather sooner than later.

Colin Powell former chief of staff, Colonel Wilkerson, pointed at another often overlooked function of the JCPOA, to recruit a coalition of the willing to attack Iran

( goo.gl/RBZ5Cs  Laurence Wilkerson, U.S. News & World Report,  20 Aug. 2015).

Part 2/2 examines the warlike attitude of Western countries towards Iran in the context of petroleum economics, geopolitical and cultural fault-lines.

Peter Becker, Whitehorse

Obama Regime Change Deal frames Iran with Fiction Nukes [2/2]

Part one of my commentary shed light on the Orwellian content of the Iran nuclear deal and the language it projects, which claims to protect peace when the real purpose is to “let slip the dogs of war” (Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar”).

The old agenda of stealing the Iranian peoples' oil has, if anything become more deadly in the 2015 Barack Obama regime change deal, than with the violent British/American coup in 1953 (Operation Ajax).

The Iranian leadership is suspicious about a continuous regime change agenda based on the underlying objective of stealing Iran's oil, but perhaps makes the mistake of not being suspicious enough. 

An Iranian misjudgement in signing JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) is conceivable, partly from the vantage point of honest business characteristics in their conventional oil extraction. 

It seems possible to underestimate just how deceptive and dangerous the North American unconventional and economically wounded oil cartel beast has become, business converted into ideology.

One can get a sense when examining U.S. and Canadian tar and frack crude extraction, which has a marginal production cost of around $100 to 150 per barrel compared with $10 - 15 for profitable Iranian conventional oil.

North American oil cartels are heavily subsidized by carbon-pricing talk and policies, have morphed into a market-hostile, economically damaging mirage of an oil and gas industry that generates a creeping energy security/affordability crisis, structural unemployment, run away government debt, climate melt down and defrauds investors.

These backgrounds are well documented by independent oil & gas analysts ranging from Deborah Rogers to David Hughes and Art Berman, to studies of energy economics including from EUROSOLAR, the Indigenous Environmental Network, IEA, the IPCC, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 100-per-cent renewable lightning-speed conversion plans by Sussex and Stanford universities.

There are also entrenched cultural misunderstandings at play. It has been observed by Western scholars that apparently the Iranian mullahs feel their religion of Shia Islam does not permit the pursuing of nuclear weapons and other WMDs.

During the Western-backed and armed Iraq attack on Iran (1980-88), including by way of chemical weapons, Iran deliberately never responded with chemical weapons.

The Imam Ali, founder of the Shia branch of islam, who set down that “People are brothers in religion or brothers in humanity” is much loved in Iran. 

Such moral teachings tend not to be restraint into academical or quasi-ecclesiastical confines, but evolve with a presence in everyday life.

After all, science says atom bombs are insane and not feasible, in terms of deterrence or nuclear winter.

By contrast it seems that in a Western mainstream interactions of man’s tools with the world have not been mythologically updated for a very long time, not perhaps since Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel ”Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.

Somehow spiritual death has settled in to such a degree that our elites and leadership can no longer even imagine such a big priority position, by of course flawed human beings, and to be guided not from a hollow dogma of frozen utilitarianism, but from a living ethical core.

Yes the JCPOA is installed, but energizing and covering up its evil direction with endorsements reminds of so-called liberals that still have not accounted for enabling Bill Clinton’s war crimes in Iraq during the ‘90s.

Clinton, silver-tongued, much like Obama, launched sanctions, naval blockades and bombs that, in Clinton’s case, killed more Iraqi children than the sum of two Bush presidents’ actions.

Accelerated escalations by the Trump administration, decertifying the JCOPA by May 12 or not, achieve traction that is enabled by Trump critics, who hide the pro-war long game and oil robbery meaning of Obama’s regime change deal. 

The deal’s drawn out actual legal content, of vast fabrications and unsubstantiated accusations, in its inertia of war propaganda is available to Trump, wether the JCPOA stays in place or not.

Opposers falsely claim the deal enables a nuclear threat supposedly posed by Iran. Defenders say that it protects peace while equally demonizing Iran with false nuke ambitions.

On his recent visit to Washington French President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated how to work Obama’s Iran deal synergistically.

Aside from a bit of showmanship performance of teasing Trump to get back in line with the deal, he went on to effortlessly explain away any difference between the Bush-Obama-Trump (supplementary) positions, as there really are none of substance. 

During his White House visit, Macron kicked into gear an all-out consolidation of the pro and contra duality of the deal perception, leaving dissenters of a potential war on Iran with their pants down, the point of the Obama Iran exercise to begin with.

(When coming up with up privatized Obamacare to push back Medicare majority ambitions, Obama had already proved a master of setting up such neoliberal Catch-22 traps) 

Most everybody, pro or contra, has effectively been coopted into the JCPOA war agenda by their unaware complicity in disguising the deal’s actual direction.

However, there is no excuse for wimpish or feeble-minded validations of the Obama war deal, wether it stays in place or evaporates.

Letting go of those by exposing its true pro-war core, logically works towards deflating Trump’s immediate war threat by pulling out the rug from underneath it.

Obama’s regime change deal already has generated geopolitical reverberations, lives lost and harms that cannot be undone, also by escalating the Syrian war more and more into an anti-Iranian and anti-Russian proxy war. 

Others are picking up the slack, more recently induced through the vacuums of Trump diplomacy

— such as the social-democratic former Italian foreign affairs minister Federica Mogherini who is also a promoter and deceiver on the war agenda of JCPOA.

In 2014 the European Union appointed her as liaison envoy with a security mandate that since amounted to a recruiting tour de force in tightening and escalating the NATO encirclement of Russia, and increasingly of China.

Those with or without illusions on the Iran deal should pay attention also to an increasingly explicit projection, through the JCPOA lens, of European/American aggressive colonial powers against Russia’s, Iran’s and Syria’s sovereign relations. 

Such dangerous geopolitical destabilization efforts are brought forward during G7 meetings as we speak, including by Macron, Donald Trump, British Prime MinisterTheresa May and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

The very same coalition of countries that in 1918 -1920 gratuitously attacked and invaded their First World War ally Russia, a bottomless treachery that likely caused the death of millions.

Rosa Luxemburg, a peace advocate and socialist organizer, had pointed at the cowardice of Social Democratic Party executives, especially in Germany, when through years prior to “The Guns of August” (the Barbara Tuchman book) in 1914 they betrayed their own iron-clad solidarity and peace contract with the people and switched sides to the war powers and death industries.

William Butler Yeats knew what he talked about in his 1919 poem The Second Coming. The last lines of the first stanza seem especially foreboding and encapsulating a cowardly, softheaded kind of complicity with escalating wars so that the carnage never ends:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

Within the neoliberal one-party substance, lefties instinctively come across as even more dishonest than the right-wing populists along with the by name only liberal centrists, with their half-transparent gangsterism.

Time and again, populations tend to dismiss the by vanity/identity politics disguised wussy avant-garde.

Peter Becker is a Canadian writer and researcher who works in Whitehorse    (donations welcome: paypal.me/yukonblogger )

Presentation of coast-to-coast-to-coast trip disappointed, 2018 Jan.

Presentation of coast-to-coast-to-coast trip disappointed  (16 Jan. 2018 Whitehorse Star Coloumn)

The legacy of Canada 150 was given stale, narrow reference while ignoring and outright rejecting the foundational and non-European meanings of continuous adaptations in Canadian constitutional laws, that are still to shape inclusivity, reciprocity and stability.

Crucial meanings consolidated out of Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine’s premiership as Canada’s first prime minister of a responsible government following March 11, 1848. 

Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin had launched comprehensive human rights, democratic, electoral, education and governance reforms unknown to other Western powers.

On Jan. 7, an almost house-filling crowd at the Yukon Beringia Interpretative Centre witnessed a reminiscing evening from a 2017 Canada 150-inspired icebreaker voyage from Toronto to Victoria with seven Yukoners on board for increments of it. 

This, along with observing images and stories, recalling opportunities along the journey for exchange and experiential inter-cultural learning, that were no doubt stimulating. 

But unfortunately, a limiting vision of Canada seemed to hamper the striving. 

On questioning by the author, this was explicitly asserted by one of the program leaders, who
dismissed and trivialized our constitution as “legalistic”.

The evening parroted the silly idea that Canada’s constitutional roots are of European characteristic, when really they were derived of Indigenous deep laws all along.

In fact, they grew out of this land, through 40 000 years, through 400 years and through 40 years, an arc that kindled a re-birth of a nation-to-nation space.

Multiple-personality-order is an ancient Indigenous achievement and, not surprisingly, First Nations are still, or are again, leading and defining discourse of substance in Canada.

Cutting off memory is undemocratic because it is cutting off accountability, which is at the heart of the neo-colonizing nonsense an all party political leadership in Ottawa, or in Whitehorse, has adopted. 

Succinctly summarized by Mi’kmaq lawyer Pamela Palmater as “Trudeau’s Forked Tongue ...” (Canadian Dimension 8 Dec. goo.gl/pSXbZg ).

More than uninspired, people don’t care for neoliberal elites who don’t speak the language of our country. 

It is precisely the phoney weasel words of a globalizer provincialism that puts reactionary armies into the field, and supercharges racism. 

Just wait for a few elections to come in Canada.

To a large part, such dysfunctionality is where blockage comes from; that fails a vibrant Canadian future which is already inseparably dependent on releasing constructive energies inherent to reconciliation and colonialism reparation. 

We are talking about a serious inability to co-shape a future in the land and partnering with First
Nations, not above nature, and not talking down to people more or less in the style of self referential European aristocrats and technocrats.

I can only speak from the vantage point of a citizen who is also a settler immigrant.

And it seems to me that guiding youth in the C3 program towards diminished meanings and ignored memory is an expensive disservice to our country. 

Such fostering of a spiritual and political lightweightness of non-Aboriginal Canadians is out of touch with the confidence of mothers and fathers of our Constitution.

A lack of confidence is harmful also because it freezes change and neuters courage necessary to become allies of First Nations, and be more than talk.

Being better than hollow words could mean listening. 

It could mean returning some Crown land, tripling Aboriginal language and double education investment, strengthening labour and medicare rights, quitting nickle-and-diming, and stopping the technocratic standard for the frivolously litigious denial of many First Nations’ existence, even.

Warnings abounded under dark clouds over the C3 evening, from New Age identity politics and consumer feminism to ecocide-complicit carbon-pricing ( report released at  COP23, goo.gl/KRUFEH ).

The reconciliation resolutions of some are un-grounding into another eternal pop culture notion without resolve or urgency.