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SOTT Focus: Britain will remain in the EU: Why 'Brexit' outcome is a foregone conclusion

Cameron Obama
I'll go out on a limb here and predict that, regardless of the result in today's "in or out" referendum, Britain will remain in the EU. In fact, I want to make the case that the British regime never had any intention of detaching itself from the EU, and that this 'Brexit' campaign is a ruse to give Germany and other continental powers 'something to think about' while retaining a controlling interest in the EU's direction on behalf of joint Anglo-American interests.

After spending some two decades garnering support for holding this referendum, the British elite, from the moment they set a date for it, have overwhelmingly come out in favor of Britain remaining in the EU. Big business and most of the media, think-tanks, all political parties and most members of government are all encouraging voters to say 'remain'.

This, in itself, is illogical. The only apparent reason for developing a political movement towards some specific political goal is to reach that political goal, not deviate from it at the very last moment. Can you imagine the Scottish Nationalist Party, having spent decades lobbying for an independence referendum, achieving that first major step and then advising Scots to vote to remain in the UK?

And so, I suggest, we must look beyond the domestic scene to understand why this charade is playing out. British foreign policy, much like US foreign policy, is indistinguishable from domestic policy, at least from the point of view of their elites, who instinctively equate 'the national interest' with their own personal interests, most of which lie abroad in the framework of an increasingly integrated Western corporate global order.

Wall Street

IMF warns US on poverty and cuts its growth forecast

American poverty
The International Monetary Fund is warning the United States to tackle poverty, downgrading its forecast for the country's economy this year.

IMF released an annual assessment of the US economy Wednesday, saying approximately one in seven Americans live in poverty.

The fund also predicted a 2.2 percent growth for the US economy in 2016, which shows a 0.2 percent decline compared to that of the last year.

During the first three months of this year, the country's annual growth pace was 0.5 percent, down from 1.4 percent in the last three months of 2015.

Play

South Front: Daesh repels Syrian Army advance on Raqqa; Russia's response to NATO aggression (VIDEO)

south front
International Military Review - Syria, June 22


Black Magic

Report: The inhuman, barbaric conditions that led to detainee's death at CIA black site prison in Afghanistan

Gul Rahman
© Courtesy of Dr. Ghairat BaheerA photo taken from a book assembled to commemorate the life of Gul Rahman.
The CIA black site prison had 20 cells. Described as "stand-alone concrete boxes," the cell block was outfitted with stereo speakers that played music 24 hours a day to prevent captives from communicating with each other. Captives, who first arrived there in September 2002, were often held in total darkness. Some were subjected to mock executions.

Four of the cells at the black site — it was located in Afghanistan and code-named COBALT, but it was also referred to as the Salt Pit — had "high bars... to which prisoners can be secured." These four cells were designed specifically for sleep deprivation.

The prison is where a 34-year-old Afghan militant and suspected al-Qaeda operative named Gul Rahman froze to death in November 2002 after undergoing a brutal torture regimen that included being beaten, doused with cold water, and left half-naked while chained to the floor of his cell. Several of the techniques CIA interrogators used on Rahman were unauthorized; in August 2002, a Department of Justice attorney named John Yoo had written a legal memo sanctioning nearly a dozen torture methods for use on high-value captives.

The graphic description of the conditions of Rahman's confinement and the disastrous operations of COBALT were laid bare in 14-year-old, closely guarded CIA reports that probed the circumstances of his death; those reports [pdf at the end of this article] were just turned over to VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. Separately, the CIA also declassified and publicly posted to its website a trove of other documents related to its so-called "rendition, detention, and interrogation" program and the treatment of detainees in custody of the agency in response to separate FOIA lawsuits filed by VICE News and the ACLU.

Comment: Gruesome details exposed in CIA torture docs


Arrow Down

Burgeoning US-led aggression towards Russia

Paratroopers
© AFP 2016/Janek SkarzynskiPolish troops land with parachutes at the military compound near Torun, central Poland, on June 7, 2016, as part of the NATO Anaconda-16 military exercise.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's comparison of increasing US-led NATO aggression towards Russia to the attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union is advisedly apt.

Putin was addressing the Russian State Duma this week on the occasion 75 years ago when the Nazi Third Reich launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

Nazi Germany's aggression, which led to the Great Patriotic War in which up to 30 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in order to gain victory against that fascist power, was at bottom an attack by Western imperialism. As Putin reminded, this fundamental fact is often omitted in Western commentary.

In that way, the significance of NATO's current military buildup - what else is that but aggression? - on Russian territory is all too often absent in Western media.

And, by extension, Western public appreciation is lacking on how sinister the unfolding situation is.

Russia's history over centuries is replete with examples of where Western imperialist powers have tried - and failed - to subjugate Russia with military attack from its Western flank.

It is consistent with historical precedent that Putin should describe "increasing aggression" by the American-led NATO military alliance in the same context as the repugnant Nazi assault on Russia.

The burgeoning US-led aggression towards Russia - in the form of provocative political campaigns to demonize and vilify with false accusations, economic sanctions and the spurning of diplomacy and dialogue, as well as the expansion of military forces, including the deployment of missile systems - is in a long, reprehensible tradition of Western belligerence towards Russia, going back to, among others, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler.

This congenital aggression towards Russia stems from the dynamic of the Western economic system of capitalism, which in turns begets imperialism as its necessary tool for expropriating natural resources and subjugating foreign nations.

Russia is not the only target of Western aggression, of course. But the largest nation by land mass on Earth is and always has been a prime target.

The little-known historical record - at least in Western media - is that Nazi Germany was fomented by American and British capitalism as a proxy with which to vanquish the Soviet Union. The subsequent Western alliance with Soviet Russia to defeat Nazi Germany was merely a cynical damage-control move by the Western powers who were witnessing their Nazi attack dog being muzzled and liquidated.

How could anyone who has a sound understanding of history - as opposed to the anesthetizing non-history common in the West - be not perplexed by the current US-led military menace on Russia's Western flank?

Star of David

Netanyahu approves spending additional $18 million for West Bank settlements

netanyahu Israel apartheid
© Ronen Zvulun / ReutersIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem June 13, 2016.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allocating an additional $18 million for West Bank settlements, describing the extra funds as "an assistance plan to strengthen communities," that would "strengthen security, assist small businesses and encourage tourism."

On Saturday, the ministerial committee on settlement affairs decided to supplement the $88 million already allocated to settlement issues. The 500 new housing units will be built in the Ma'ale Adumim, Gush Etzion, Kiryat Sefe, and Ariel settlements.

The European Union and the US have both called for Israel to cease new construction in the West Bank, as international law considers these settlements illegal and an obstacle on the path to peace with Palestine. Israel has refuted this, calling the area "disputed territory," and therefore not subject to laws forbidding the transfer of displaced peoples to occupied territory.

Roughly 600,000 Israelis currently occupy the settlements, built on lands Israel won from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Star of David

Best of the Web: How Israel's oppressive and humiliating occupation affects all aspects of Palestinian life and incites violent resistance

israeli checkpoint
© AP Photo
The news was familiar but no less alarming for the ugly déjà vu: four Israelis killed on Wednesday night by Palestinian gunmen in the heart of Tel Aviv. Israel's government, the most right-wing in the country's history, responded with measures that the UN promptly warned might count as collective punishment: flooding the West Bank with troops, sealing off the West Bank and Gaza, and revoking entry permits that had allowed 83,000 Palestinians to cross into Israel for work, worship and medical care.

On Thursday, the day after the shootings, Tel Aviv's Mayor Ron Huldai found the courage to state the obvious—that violence will persist until the occupation ends. Israel "is perhaps the only country in the world holding another nation under occupation without civil rights," Huldai said. Such frankness counts as bravery these days, but even Huldai was understating the truth. It's not the mere fact of a military occupation, of Israeli troops on Palestinian territory, that provokes such attacks. It can be difficult to comprehend from across the Atlantic, or even from usually tranquil Tel Aviv, but the occupation, as I have observed while reporting from the West Bank since 2011, functions as a massive mechanism for the creation of uncertainty, dispossession and systematic humiliation. It is not just soldiers and guns, but a far-reaching structure that affects all aspects of Palestinian life—a complex web of checkpoints, travel restrictions, permits, walls and fences, courts and prisons, endless constraints on economic possibilities, home demolitions, land appropriations, expropriation of natural resources, and, too often, lethal force.

No amount of preventive repression or collective punishment will bring an end to the bloodletting in Tel Aviv or elsewhere. As long as this oppressive system stands, and the United States continues to support it with billions of dollars a year in military aid, despair will spread, and with it death.

USA

The con vs. con

HilDon face parts
© www.cnn.comThe facades of corporate governance and their shrinking window of influence.
The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the "least worse" makes things worse.

Change will not come quickly. It may take a decade or more. And it will never come by capitulating to the Democratic Party establishment. We will accept our place in the political wilderness and build alternative movements and parties to bring down corporate power or continue to watch our democracy atrophy into a police state and our ecosystem unravel.

The rise of a demagogue like Donald Trump is a direct result of the Democratic Party's decision to embrace neoliberalism, become a handmaiden of American imperialism and sell us out for corporate money. There would be no Trump if Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party had not betrayed working men and women with the North American Free Trade Agreement, destroyed the welfare system, nearly doubled the prison population, slashed social service programs, turned the airwaves over to a handful of corporations by deregulating the Federal Communications Commission, ripped down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks that led to a global financial crash and prolonged recession, and begun a war on our civil liberties that has left us the most monitored, eavesdropped, photographed and profiled population in human history. There would be no Trump if the Clintons and the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, had not decided to prostitute themselves for corporate pimps.

Con artists come in many varieties. On Wall Street, they can have Princeton University and Harvard Law School degrees, polished social skills and Italian designer suits that are priced in the tens of thousands of dollars. In Trump tower, they can have cheap comb-overs, fake tans, casinos and links with the Mafia. In the Clinton Foundation, they can wallow in hundreds of millions of dollars from corporate and foreign donors, including the most repressive governments in the world, exchanged for political favors. But they are all crooks.

Comment: What is clear is that neither candidate will ever benefit the people, nor will the corporates and factions they represent. They are but the faces put on parade promoting a public hallucination in order to buy time and disguise the scam.


Chess

Despite no evidence, Western propaganda rag The Guardian sees football hooligans as Putin's hybrid warriors

soccer fans
© Eddie Keogh / Reuters
Is Vladimir Putin using football hooligans to conduct "hybrid warfare" against the EU? While there is no evidence of this, that hasn't prevented the Guardian from presenting this sensational premise as a serious proposition.

It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when The Guardian, along with its Sunday sister title The Observer, was perceived to have the best foreign affairs coverage of any British newspaper. Then two things happened. Tony Blair's "New Labour" project hijacked the UK left and the internet changed journalism. While the world wide web is generally regarded as good thing, it has had a terrible effect on The Guardian. The information superhighway helped transform a progressive organ into an establishment mouth-piece.

The old Guardian would have used its media supplement to lacerate competitors who published Whitehall diktats without massive caveats. Yet, former editor Alan Rusbridger's questionable legacy has seen The Guardian replace The Times as the UK state's house journal, with all the journalistic compromises that entails. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its coverage of Russia.

This weekend, in the Observer, things reached a new low. The paper's "policy editor," Daniel Boffey, published a single-source story headlined "Whitehall fears Russian football hooligans had Kremlin links."

Stock Up

Foreign investment in Iran skyrockets after lifting of sanctions

tehran
© Flickr/ peyman abkhezr
Now that the historic Iran nuclear deal has opened Tehran to world markets, the Islamic republic has seen a rapid increase in foreign investment.

On Tuesday, Boeing Co confirmed a landmark deal to sell 100 of its 737 and 777 aircraft to Tehran for roughly $25 billion. This marks the first time the aerospace giant has done business with the Islamic republic since 1979.

Boeing isn't the only company jumping into the game. According to a new report from The Financial Times measuring foreign direct investment (FDI), Iran is now ranked 12th out of 14 in Middle Eastern nations in terms of foreign investment.

While Tehran's FDI has been climbing steadily since 2013, the real boom began after the lifting of sanctions in January. The country has gained 22 FDI projects during the first quarter of 2016.

This quarter accounted for 40% of all FDI since 2013.