September 2019

Intro Below please find a letter I wrote more than 3 months ago to the Nordic bank, Nordea – present in roughtly 20 countries around the world. Since then, I have been waiting for an answer, but none has arrived. I believe it should have been possible for Chairman of the Nordea board, Mr Thorbjörn Magnusson, to have responded by now. As this is not the case and I have no reason to expect an answer will arrive from him, I hereby make the matter be known to a wider circle of people. Should anybody in the Swedish/Nordic press be willing to take it up, it would be good. But I also do not expect that given the political correctness practised, not the least around the issue of Iran and the primary and secondary sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran and on everybody else, Europe in particular. PS...

” width=”82″ height=”122″/>Jan Oberg, editor of The Transnational The reason is that you can rest assured there will be no genuine, diverse coverage of this – Chinese and world – event in the mainstream Western press. If not entirely ignored, the focus will be on the military parade and China as a growing threat and on China as a “dictatorship.” 1) You do not have to endorse everything Chinese. The Transnational doesn’t. But China’s socio-economic and cultural development over these 70 years – and in particular the last 40 years of opening up – is unique and so remarkable that it deserves our sincere, sustained interest and curiosity. To know more is also enabling us to look through the fake and omission. In our globalizing world, those who close their mind and watch only themselves as if the rest of the world did not exist will lose, sooner or later....

September 29, 2019 BEIJING, Sept. 22 (Xinhua)* — The blistering pace of expansion by China’s economy in the past decades has impressed the world as “China speed.” Now the term is taking on new meaning as the country enters a new development phase. The past 70 years have witnessed how “China speed” impacted the country and the rest of the world. From 1952 — when the earliest official national GDP data after the founding of New China was available — to 2018, China’s GDP soared 452.6 times in U.S. dollar terms, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The true economic takeoff started after 1978 when the country began its reform and opening up. China achieved an average annual GDP growth of 9.4 percent between 1979 and 2018 at constant prices, well above the 2.9-percent rate the world economy logged in the same period. The leap in the economy’s...

You’ve hear a lot about the US withdrawal – never mentioned that it was an international law violation – from the nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA). But you have probably not seen a couple of those Americans who are most responsible, on a day-to-day basis, for carrying out what is de facto an attempt to strangle Iran, its people and some of its leaders. In short, to undermine and in the long run destroy Iran. The two people are Sigal Mandelker of the US Treasury & Brian Hook, US State Department’s “Iran Action Group”. And the video below offer you insights in how they think – and how they justify what they do. It is a dialogue that took place recently at AIPAC. AIPAC is the acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which is one of the most influential and well-financed lobby groups in the world whose task...

Video comment The Leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution says Iran has totally lost hope in the European powers as they have failed to fulfill any of their promises under the 2015 nuclear deal. Iran’s PressTV asked me to comment on that which I do below. It is crystal clear that the European Union has not lived up to the spirit and letter of the nuclear deal JCPOA) with Iran of 2015. By not lifting the sanctions and cooperating with Iran – as long as Iran sticks to its commitments – it violates international law. Why? Because the JCPOA is embedded in a UN Security Council resolution and, thus, is a piece of international law. But the EU could have acted otherwise these four years – had it been a bit more ethical, intellectual and independent-minded. But it chose to accept US diktat about the secondary sanctions and, in consequence, has...

is likely to be seen by future generations as pathbreaking or, as they say today, iconic. One of several reasons she attracts so much attention is that she combines three factors that, in these dark times, seldom go together but which – undoubtedly – people worldwide long for: knowledge (facts), passion/emotions and a commitment to nonviolence. While politicians go populist, nationalist and militarist and many individuals tend to be obsessed with themselves, their body – looks, food, weight, ways to relate and how to show off (inner emptiness) – here is a 16-year young woman who speaks on behalf of humanity and does so as if she was Nature’s appointed ambassador too. She operates in a world in which there is more and more fake – and more important, omission – in which it’s great to keep cool and unemotional in public (and often say nothing of interest but delivering...

. It may well come to be seen in the future as an indicator of the beginning of the end. Earlier that same day, Britain’s highest court ruled PM Boris Johnson’s suspension of Parliament unlawful and in the evening, the US House launched an impeachment inquiry against President Trump. These are huge matters. They are not momentary crises. It is entire systems approaching existential breakdown – and not because of foreign adversaries but because of their own morally corrupt actions and policies – or system fatique: systems so worn out and tired (of itself, too) that they don’t have the energy needed for re-vitalization. The two most important Western leading societies in contemporary history – a former Empire and the present one – increasingly look like failed states, failed societies, and failing their own ideals and laws. What we see is a decay of morals, an erosion of democracy and...

“What idiocy”, exclaims Jack Matlock on Facebook. Matlock is one of my “Facebook Friends” because I judge his knowledge of Russia as second to none, having been under President Ronald Reagan the White House’s senior advisor on the Soviet Union and, later, his ambassador to Moscow. The object of his ire is based on a Newsday article earlier this month. (The Russian, nation-wide, NTV channel carried the same story in a broadcast yesterday.) It concerns Russia’s anger following the US military’s claim that it could take down the air defences of the Kaliningrad region. They are the highly sophisticated S-300 and S-400 anti-missile systems. Moreover, it has practiced doing so earlier this year. (Kaliningrad is an internationally recognised enclave of Russia that is sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.) General Jeff Harrigan, the commander of US Air Forces in Europe, told reporters, “If we have to go in there to take down...

By Sabena Siddiqui September 20, 2019 Facing an economic crisis in large part due to US sanctions, Iran soon may be aligning its policies toward China’s. Having recently updated the terms of a 25-year strategic partnership signed with Beijing in 2016, it looks like Tehran is indeed returning to its Look East foreign policy. Originally posted on Al-Monitor’s website September 17, 2019 here Considered an important player in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) megaproject, introduced in 2013, Iran has been pursued by Beijing for its energy resources and strategic location. But when economic sanctions on Iran were lifted under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal in 2015, Iran preferred to do business on a global basis. Instead of committing to an eastward-looking foreign policy at that time, Tehran tried to maintain a balance. However, since the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal in May 2018, Europe...

By Pressenza New York September 18, 2019 Originally posted on Pressenza New York’s website on September 09, 2019 here On this show we speak with Alice Slater about the historical process of nuclear weapon treaties and the relationship between the US and Russia. Alice is the UN NGO Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, sits on the boards of World Beyond War, Nuclear Ban US, and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and is a member of the Global Council of Abolition 2000. She is on the NYC Working Group for the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) ‘s campaign to promote the newly passed treaty to ban the bomb. Alice is a member of the NYC Bar Association and has written numerous articles and op-eds for Pressenza. Political actions you can take to ban the bomb and cut down the war...

A new book I would like to announce the publication of a new book, entitled “Fascism, Then and Now”. It can be freely downloaded here. Please circulate the link to your friends who might be interested. Parallels between fascism of the 1930’w and neo-fascism today There are many extremely worrying similarities between fascism in Europe in the 1930’s and the neo-fascism that we can see around us today. For example, Donald Trump, according to his first wife, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches beside his bed, and studied it thoroughly. Today, he imitates Hitler’s rhetoric, as is discussed in Appendix A. The white supremacist supporters of Donald Trump have revived Nazi ideology, language and symbols. Neo-fascism and neo-Nazism are not confined to the United States, but exist in many countries. Why was Germany allowed to rearm during the period before World War II? Chapters 1 and 2 of this book...

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has long been controversial. Back in the days of the Soviet Union, Moscow protected communist and ultra-socialist dictators around the world from any attack on their human rights abuses. At the same time routine attacks on Israel, even the extravagant ones, were given free reign in the Council. Indeed, this still continues with the protagonists often unable in their minds to separate criticizing Israel, which deserves it, with criticizing the religion of Judaism, so-called anti-Semitism. (One should add that many Jews conflate the two as well.) This month a new controversy has flared. According to the Swiss organisation, UN Watch, the Human Rights Council is censoring a human rights complaint about the mass incarceration of Moslem Uighurs who live in northwest China. More than a hundred NGOs from around the world have co-sponsored the complaint. A letter has also been written by the same...