Jill Stein and Russia?

[Draft.]

Stein’s first foray into Russian politics

An examination of Jill Stein’s Twitter feed from the beginning of her political career shows no particular interest in Russia. Indeed, the only mention of Russia we found up in her previous election campaign was a curious tweet. By way of background, Dr. Stein had been arrested on October 16, 2012, as she tried to crash the presidential debates hosted by the Democratic and Republican parties. She was subject to some pretty harsh treatment, although she was released eight hours later, the entire period of the debate.

Stein compares her arrest with that of “#Left opposition leader #Udaltsov” at the hands of Russian strong man Vladimir Putin’s. Of Udaltsov, we can learn enough about his treatment at the hands of the Russian authorities from his Wikipedia page and sites which monitor human rights in Russia. They tell of kidnapping, torture, and years in a penal colony for a leader of a major political party base on a video which is almost certainly a forgery. He himself claims that he had been detained “100 times“.

Udaltsov himself is a problematic figure. Although he is not an old-line Stalinist, and even carried out a memorial demonstration at a monument for those who disappeared in Stalin’s gulags, he still has a soft spot for him and maintains contacts with open Stalinists, to the dismay of some of his followers, and declares that “Stalin was no criminal.” He considers the collapse of the USSR to have been a crime and applauded the annexation of Crimea. Shortly before Stein’s tweet, he was a campaigner for the Russian Communist Party’s presidential candidate. For more on him, see this very interesting interview.

As for her claim that Russia might be sinking to the level of American democracy, we can refer to Human Rights Watch’s summary of the year in Russian repression in 2012. Although some Russian police misbehavior will be familiar to American protesters, in other domains, particularly along the lines of press intimidation (including the abduction and beating of journalists) and and the murder of human rights activists, particularly those who have exposed Russian war crimes in Chechnya, quite a different story.

So what do we learn from this one tweet about Russia, the first and last I’ve found in her political career up to the 2016 elections? An extreme glibness and superficiality in her treatment of Russian society and a lack of interest in learning more about it and a nihilistic attitude towards the merits of American democracy, as deeply flawed as it is, in comparison.

Syria in Jill Stein’s 2012 Campaign

The Green Party participated in anti-war activity, before and during and after Stein’s 2012 campaign, in marked contrast to the Democrats, not to mention the Republicans. But the Syria crisis has become central to Stein’s ties with Russia and so it is important to examine her views on it.

Not Ready for Prime Time

A Google search under Syria “Jill Stein” gives no results for 2011, the year which saw the Arab Spring come to Syria, the mass demonstrations against repression, and the beginning of the armed resistance to the ensuing repression. In July 13, 2012, there was the following exchange on Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: What would you do in Syria right now?

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, you know, for starters, we would certainly uphold the international treaty which is being negotiated right now, which you covered, I believe, last week. Navi Pillay, the human rights coordinator with the United Nations, made the point that armaments, which are being sold to both sides of this conflict, have absolutely blown it up.

A Google search shows that a July 2 statement by Pillay was the apparent source of Stein’s citation. The UN’s report on Pillays statement includes the following; it is not clear if this is a summary of her statement or information included by the UN author to provide background:

The violations by [Syrian] Government forces include indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, targeted killings of activists and opposition supporters, arbitrary detentions, torture and rape, as well as attacks on hospitals and clinics and the use of health facilities for military operations.

Meanwhile, the violations by the opposition forces include killings of suspected government informers and perceived collaborators, and the increasing use of improvised explosive devices causing civilian deaths and injuries.

A comment by alJazeera’s report on Pillay’s statement comments, “She did not say where the weapons were coming from, though Russia and Iran are among the Syrian government’s key suppliers.”

It is worth pointing out that Pillay, a South African jurist of Tamil descent and the UN’s Human Rights Commissioner, had been calling for the international community to step in and protect the Syrian people from the Assad dictatorship’s violence as far back as October 2011, even before the country had slid into civil war, and was, even before Stein cited her,  a bitter critic of the UN’s paralysis on the crushing of human rights under the Assad dictatorship. This is in marked contrast to Stein’s almost total silence on the issue.

In subsequent mock debate, she continues to quote Pillay along the same lines:

As the human rights head for the United Nations, Navi Pillay, points out, that with arms flowing in to both sides in Syria, you have really a catastrophe in the making. We need to stop the flow of the arms. And in fact, the United States and the Obama government, in fact, undermined an international treaty that would have begun to slow down the international flow of arms. So the American role here has actually been to throw gasoline on the fires of virtually every ethnic, religious and national conflict around the Middle East through its—through its militaristic export of arms and the profiteering war industry.

First, the international Arms Trade Treaty, to which Stein was referring, would not have realistically had any impact on the fighting in Syria. First, Russia, which is the major supplier of arms to Syria, expressed its indifference to the treaty, according to an article in Ceasefire, a weapons-control journal. Second, according to that same article countries (such as the UK) have paraded as upholders of the of the treaty while blatantly violating its terms, agreeing to push weapons to countries which blatantly violate it.

Second, in the event, it was the United States which would sign the treaty in 2013, while Russia simply ignored it.

Third, precise information is hard to come by, the BBC reports that Russia is leading the way in selling weapons to the Syrian, followed by Iran. The chief aid to the rebels would include the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, most notably Qatar, with weapons being smuggled in by sectarian networks from Lebanon and Iraq. Croatian is informally selling weapons to the rebels, abetted by the US and Turkey.  (For more on Russia’s arms sales to Syria, see this and this.)

Indeed, arms embargoes have been tried before, most recently in the spring of 1983 during the Iran-Iraq war, where the American government tried to staunch the flow of weapons to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was prolonging the war long after Iraq had sued for peace. As documented by Kenneth R. Timmerman in his Fanning the Flames: Guns, Greed & Geopolitics in the Gulf War, although these efforts slowed down the Iranian war machine, it came far from stopping it because the arms manufacturers could not resist the top dollar being offered for weapons.

Comparing Stein’s gloss of Pillay’s statement with what she actually says shows how she manipulates the quote to cover up the UN commissioner’s condemnation of the regime’s record of wholesale mass murder in contrast with the opposition’s retail crimes of retribution, deplorable but common in revolutions. It shows how she focuses on a tiny part of her statement which she finds useful. Finally, she ignores Pillay’s already significant record of criticism of the Assad regime’s crimes against international law and the people of Syria, as mentioned above.

Last but not least, the idea of an arms embargo is a kind of dogmatic pacifism which neglects that the two sides are not moral equals. On the one side are the Syrian people, who rose up for freedom against a decade’s long dictatorship, and on the other is the regime that answered their cries for freedom with bullets. This led her to fall into all sorts of silly conspiracy theories about how this crisis got started.

As in the case of Russia, we see a very superficial understanding of the Syrian war in its domestic or international context, with a fact-free focusing on American policies, no matter how little their relevance was to the issue. This reminds me of what Louis Proyect, who planned to vote for the Green Party, wrote about her:

Stein, who likely never gave much thought to Syrian realities, but has relied on what she has read from … places like CounterPunch, Salon, The Nation, the London Review of Books, and ZNet.

Fighting against the Previous War

It is said that generals are always fighting the last war. We can add that anti-war movements are always fighting against the last war. The invasion of Iraq was thought of in terms of the Vietnam war; the Syrian war is thought of in terms of the Iraq war.

On July 23, 2012, Jihad Makdissi, Syria’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, declared that it had stockpiles of chemical weapons, but

Any chemical or biological weapons will never be used, I repeat, will never be used in the Syrian crisis, no matter what the internal developments in this crisis are. All varieties of these weapons are stored and secured by the Syrian armed forces and under its direct supervision, and will not be used unless Syria is subjected to external aggression.

A month later, Obama issued his famous “red line” declaration: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”

In December of that year, soon after the elections ended, the Green Party put out a statement calling “the presence of the USS Eisenhower in Syrian coastal waters a dangerous indication that the Obama Administration might be preparing a military intervention” and likening the “‘anonymous government sources’ citing intelligence reports, without any evidence, that President Assad might be preparing to deploy chemical weapons against his own people.”

The story of the USS Eisenhower appeared in pro-Assad disinformation outlets (InfoWars, Sputnik, RT, Sic Semper Tyrannis) which, in turn, drew their information from the Israel disinformation site Debka. The Debka page on which this information is based has vanished. This story is apparently fake news; according to the ship’s travel logs posted online, the ship dropped anchor at Palma de Mallorca, Spain, Rhodes, Greece, Hidd, Bahrain and Jebel Ali, U.A.E. during its last six month deployment ending December 14, 2012, which was to provide support for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Thus, the closest it got to stationing outside Syria put 500 miles of open ocean between it and that war-torn country. Another source involved in this disinformation campaign are this article published on December 5, 2012, in the London Times stating, “The US is ready to launch military action in Syria “within days” if President Assad resorts to mobilising chemical weapons in an attempt to repel rebel forces trying to seize Damascus, The Times has been told.” The article continued, “American-led military intervention, which would also involve Britain and other allies, is not imminent but the Pentagon and Central Command, which has authority for US operations in the Middle East, were ready to respond if necessary, sources said yesterday.” It is odd that the Green Party overlooked the real thing and embraced the fake news.

The statement continues:

Greens questioned the reliability of “anonymous government sources” citing intelligence reports, without any evidence, that President Assad might be preparing to deploy chemical weapons against his own people.

“The Bush Administration used phony claims about WMDs, secret Iraq alliance with al-Qaeda, yellow cake uranium deals to justify the invasion of Iraq. The Obama Administration, which has adopted the Bush-Cheney neocon policy of military aggression for U.S. strategic goals, is equally capable of engaging in public deception and propaganda strategies,” said Darryl! Moch, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States.

But it is well known that Assad’s Syria boasted possibly the largest chemical weapons arsenal in the world. This is no deep secret, but has been known for decades. Moreover, after witnessing the manifold atrocities committed by the Assad regime against his people–the use of antipersonnel weapons and barrel bombs against civilian populations, collective punishment, including mass murder and the razing of entire neighborhoods, torture on an industrial scale, attacks on doctors and hospitals, rape, and other horrors–why should he be expected to balk at the use of chemical agents? Thus, whether or not the intelligence carried in the media is accurate and it was in the process of being readied for use, it was available and the regime’s spokesmen should not be trusted in their pious statements that they would never use them.

In conclusion, the statement says, “The Green Party strongly supports democratic movements and wants to see dictators like Assad ousted from power.” Even this rare token mention of the resistance to the butcher Assad would become unthinkable.

The next document we have is from half a year later. On May 8, 2013, Leah Bolger, Secretary of Defense, and David Swanson, Secretary of Peace, of the Foreign Affairs Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet issued a statement. “Syria,” they state, “Does not need a ‘no fly’ zone. It needs a ‘no weaponizing’ zone. The White House and its allies need to stop arming one side of a civil war, and to persuade Russia to stop arming the other.” Why it will be easier to sell a no fly zone to the Russians than to cease arming  one of Russia/USSR’s oldest clients is not explained. In any case, the statement passes over the people’s burning need for relief from the Syrian air force’s brutal bombardment in silence. During the October 2016 radicalization of Stein’s second attempt at the presidency, the call for no fly zones was tantamount to nuclear war.

On chemical weapons, the authors write that “it is not at all clear if chemical weapons have been used, and if so, by which side. U.S. media has a tendency to turn conjecture into accepted fact merely by repeating it.” One could, given what we know now, scoff at this skepticism, but in fact, there was at the time the statement was written hesitation to pin the chemical attacks on the Syrian government.  (On the other hand, there’s this.)

Finally, this statement says that “there are few if any ‘good guys’ among the combatants in Syria.” This is not the place to examine the composition of the Syrian opposition forces, but it should be noted that the next statement issued by the Green party (on  August 30, 2013) includes links to two lengthy articles which belie the notion that the Syrian opposition is a monolith of violent Islamic extremists.  (It does include a link to a typical work of Paul Craig Roberts, which includes this gem: “Indeed, one reason for the rush to war is to prevent the UN inspection that Washington knows would disprove its claim and possibly implicate Washington in the false flag attack by the ‘rebels,’ who assembled a large number of children into one area to be chemically murdered with the blame pinned by Washington on the Syrian government.”)

There are a number of relevant position papers issued by the Green Shadow Cabinet led by Jill Stein and including several dozen Green Party members and like-minded people. Unfortunately, these position papers have been deleted from the internet, although many have been cached in the internet archive the wayback machine. The first one, dated June 27, 2013, hails the election of Sayyed Mohammad Rouhani as president. The article concludes:

The recent decisions of Russia to provide anti-aircraft weapons to Syria, the U.S. positioning of thousands of troops in Jordan, combined with Obama’s decision to provide arms to the rebels, Israel’s bombing of Syrian assets, and Iran’s decision to send in troops are all very dangerous signals that portend an expansion of hostilities, and give one the feeling that it is going to get much, much worse before it gets better.

The Green Shadow Cabinet calls on all parties to cease providing weapons, advisors, and troops to the Syrian government and rebel forces.  It is imperative that the global community takes steps to deescalate the Syrian civil war, a conflict which threatens to erupt into a regional or world war if current White House policies continue.

Of course, the idea that there is a struggle for freedom in Syria is overlooked, but that’s been pretty much absent in the mainstream press as well, which pretty much frames the Syrian war in terms of geopolitics. What is noteworthy in the context of this article is that it is not explicitly slanted towards the Assad government. In particular, the Green Shadow Government led by Jill Stein even criticizes the role of the Russian government.

The next statement relevant to the subject at hand was issued on August 28, 2013 and concerns Obama’s rather pathetic response to the Ghouta chemical attack. A sufficient air of (as it turned out, inappropriate) ambiguity was maintained by the, for instance, the United Nations, and American’s NATO partners got cold feet and this combined with a general war-weariness in the West which allowed Assad to commit outrage after outrage without expecting a result. In the event, Russia and the Americans negotiated an agreement by September 14, 2013, to destroy Syria’s chemical warfare stockpiles and sign on to the Chemical Weapons Convention. This was hailed by the Green Shadow Government in a September 16, 2013 rather jarring statement, “The United States is not bombing Syria. Let’s savor that again: for the moment at least, the United States is not bombing Syria.” What kind of Western attack loomed is unclear, but, at least according to Obama’s speech, but what is clear is that the terror bombing of Syrian civilians by the Syrian government continued.

Assad’s Gas, Obama’s Bombs

Another peak in the Green Party’s interest in Syria came with the Ghouta, Syria, gas attack of August 2013. Then-president Obama declared that Assad had crossed a red line and threatened to bomb sites in Syria in reprisal, a threat he was compelled to back off from in the face of international indifference or hostility. Among other things, it triggered demonstrations in a number of Western countries, including the United States, where the Green Party took up the cause of non-intervention. The movement inevitably included Syrian Assadists and American leftist Assadists as well as the run of the anti-war activists, including the Green Party. (Indeed, skepticism about Obama’s threat reached well into the political establishment.) But the Green Party took a more balanced position in its August 30, 2012 statement (similar to its September 1 statement and September 2 statements):

“The U.S. should use its clout to broker a cease-fire, with diplomatic persuasion for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to stop arming the rebels and Russia and Iran to stop arming Assad,” said Jill Stein, 2012 Green presidential nominee. “U.S. military intervention will make it impossible for us to bring the two sides together for a political solution. We will sacrifice the only real pathway to peace for an act that can only pour gasoline on the fire. President Obama’s rush to war risks a repeat of 2003, when President Bush’s order to invade Iraq prevented U.N. inspectors from discovering that Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs, one of the stated reasons for war, did not exist.”

Unlike the other statements, this one continued,

The Green Party’s chief concern is the well-being of the Syrian people. Greens urge immediate humanitarian aid to Syrian civilians suffering in the conflict and expressed solidarity with Syrian democratic revolutionaries that oppose both the Assad regime and the Islamist sectarians in the conflict.

The call for immediate humanitarian aid amounts to a call to protect humanitarian workers and the people they are serving, which in turn would in practical terms mean a no-fly zone. But even as it stands, this is seems to me to be a vast improvement over Stein’s blindness towards Syrian realities.

What will get the Green Party in trouble is the suspicion, unwarranted in this case, that there was some conspiracy about the gas attack. On 6 September 2013, one website reported,

former CIA agent turned activist, Ray McGovern, speaking for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), posted a memo to his blog that absolved the Assad Regime of responsibility for the chemical weapons attack that took place in the Damascus area on 21 August 2013.

Not only does this group claim that the Syrian government did not carry out the attack, it claim it was done by the opposition with the support of agents from Qatar, Turkey and the US…

The result was a disgrace for Ray McGovern and VIPS, as detailed here, here, and here, as it emerged that their source was the disinformation site Global Research.

Still fighting against the last war (in Iraq), the Green Party ran with this, including VIPS’ statement in a  press release.

Shadow over Ukraine

By 2014, the Shadow Cabinet began to take interest in Ukraine as tensions arose between the central government in Kiev and the eastern Ukraine.

The first Green Party post on Ukraine was dated March 5, 2014. It starts off with the following questions:

– Who were the snipers?
– Why is no investigation underway?
– What is the composition of the neo-fascist parties on the street (Svoboda, Right Sector, UPA, etc.)?|
– What official positions have they assumed in the new interim Ukrainian government?
– Why did US undersecretary of State, Virginia [sic; should be Victoria] Nuland, admit to $5 billion spent by the US on Ukrainian politics?
– What are Nuland’s ‘Neocon’ credentials, and is there a ‘deep government’ in the US driving US foreign policy?

The first two questions are discussed below. The role of the far right in Ukrainian politics is complicated and subject to some debate among more or less informed observers (and not passive watchers of RT and readers of Global Research). Here is an article which stresses the significance of the far right in Ukrainian politics. Here is an informed rebuttal and some related pieces. Regarding the penultimate question, this was a rumor rolling around the internet at least since early February 2014. For a short and sweet take down, see this chat on Reddit. For more detail, see this. As for the last question, yes, she’s married to Robert Kagan, on the board of the Project for a New American Century. It seems a bit reactionary to assume that she takes her marching orders from her husband.

The next Green Party article on Ukraine is dated March 17, 2014. The Ukrainian revolution of 2014 was centered in the Maidan of Kiev. On February 20, snipers shot into the crowd of protesters. The pro-Russian crowd, including, for instance, the Russian-allied Ukrainian chief of security, claimed that the snipers were provocateurs who were there to make Russia look bad. I recommend the following debunking of some of the rumors swirling around this event.

At issue was this recording of Catherine Ashton, who was on a mission to Ukraine from the European Union. The pre-Maidan Ukrainian security services picked up a cell phone conversation between her and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet, who had just come back from Ukraine and was reporting to Ashton about the chaotic situation there. The last third of the tape concerns snipers who were shooting into the Maidan crowd.  Essentially, Paet reports that he had spoken with one Olga (Dr. Olga Bogomolets),  an idealistic Ukrainian activist, who had witnessed a lot of chaos in Maidan from “the new coalition” who had “a dirty past”. (3:00) She saw them beating a Ukrainian politician in public. There had to be real reforms, not just a change of government. (4:15) She was clearly exasperated with the new coalition which arose through Maidan. So far, we have a report by Paet of what Olga thought. Now Paet talks about the troubles in eastern Ukraine, in which the ethnic Russians living there wanted to take over. Ashton said that the pro-Russian Party of Regions had to show some contrition, lay some flowers on the graves of the victims, the people were becoming furious seeing how the previous president, Yanukovich, was living. (7:00) Paet referred to the activist Porushenko; Ashton sounded dubious about him. (8:00) Then we get to the heart of the dispute:

She said that as [a] medical doctor she can, you know, say that it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. [8:58] So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind [the] snipers, they were … it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition. [9:10]

1. Even if we agree with Bogomolets that she could distinguish which bullets were being used by their “handwriting” (signature?), something which, if I’m not mistaken, would take a trained forensics expert to determine, all this would say is that the snipers were using the same bullets.
2. Bogomolets was in the Maidan encampment. There is absolutely no way she would have had access to wounded pro-Russian troops.
3. It is not, as the RT version and its followers claim, Paet ws not claiming that “it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” He was saying that there was a common belief (“understanding”) that this was true.
4. Paet’s source for his opinion is his Bogomolets, who was an idealist who was extremely alienated from the new leadership and was willing to believe that they were capable of deliberately killing their own people to incite them to further acts of rage.
5. Finally, suppose the shooting was indeed done by Maidan extremists. The phone call plainly recalls the utter surprise and dismay at this report. It is therefore totally incompatible with the “NATO-backed coup government in Kiev” narrative.

This is glaringly obvious and it would take a colossal exertion of political will to believe otherwise. RT, of course, was up to the task; in its article on the event, gave this quote as if Paet is actually speaking for himself and omits all reference to Olga entirely. (An excellent full annotated transcript of the call, which I’ve used above, is made by someone who, maddeningly enough, accepts the mendacious RT version of the crucial passage.)

In any case, a year after the events, some of the truth has come out, only some of it having anything to do with the issues raised in the purloined phone call. Bogomolets denied that she believed what she had been quoted as having said. Investigations were held, but with disappointing results.

Enter the Green Shadow Cabinet.

On March 24, 2014, Green Shadow Cabinet Federal Reserve chief Jack Rasmus invited one Steve Lendman to speak on “The Ukraine Crisis: Political & Economic Dimensions Update”. Rasmus is a professor of economics. Lendman is a columnist at Russia Insider, Lew Rockwell, OpEdNews, and other fringe outlets. He’s also edited a book on the Ukraine crisis featuring such luminaries as Robert Abele, Michel Chossoudovsky, Edward Herman, Cynthia McKinney, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Michael Parenti, James Petras, Jack Rasmus, Paul Craig Roberts, Rick Rozoff, and Rodney Shakespeare. Chossoudovsky and Nazemroaya are on the board  of Geopolitics, a journal upholding the views of the Russian fascist Alexander Dugin. Of course, no Ukrainians or anyone with any particular knowledge of  Ukraine was on the list of authors.

The podcast was based on this rambling post by Lendman, who, characteristically gives no sources for his claims. The most amusing part of this post is his slavish praise of Putin, the man of peace; if he believes that his Ukrainian, Georgian and Syrian policies were those of a misunderstood man of peace, there is always forgetting about his role in the Chechen wars. The occasion for this craven adulation is a nomination to Putin of the Nobel Prize. Hea was nominated for this prize by the  International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation Among the Nations of the World; a Google search for it yields no hits before the this nomination put it on the internet and just a few hits in the following years. It has no website. The only thing we know about it is the names of its two leading officers.  Of the group’s leader, Georgy Trapeznikov, almost nothing is known. He seems to have been critical of Russia getting reengaged with a fight with the Taliban (but see the following). He was also a great exponent of the Russian-backed break-away republic, of Nagorno-Qarabagh (Artsakh in Armenian). Beslan Kobakhiya, its vice president, was an Abkhazian activist who participated in a non-military capacity in the 1992-1993 Abkhaz insurgency against the Republic of Georgia backed by Russia. Its high point was the Russian bombardment of Sukhumi and the population transfer of a quarter of a million ethnic Georgians from there. (This is not the place to discuss the virtual merits of each side, both of which committed human rights violations; but the Russian-backed Abkhazian side was clearly responsible for the vast majority of atrocities.) An interview with him posted on the Lev Gumilev Center’s website reveals him to be a simply lackey–there is no other word for it–of the Russians. In the interview, he declares himself is a member of the Lev Gumilev Center. On Guilev and his connection with the Eurasian Movement, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The only other record we have for this prize being awarded was in 2005, to Gamzat Gamzatov, General Director of “Dagenergo” Power Company, having been “recently discussed in Berlin city (Germany) at the meeting of Presidium of International Academy of Spiritual Unity of the World Nations; the Presidium includes 6 Nobel Prize laureates and 8 national leaders from different counties.” The announcement continued,

It was decided to reward Magomedaly Magomedov, the chief executive of Daghestan Republic, for big contribution to peace, harmony and stability in Daghestan Republic, which is the southern outpost to Russia. Mr.Magomedov was granted the highest award of the Academy – Peter the Great Order.

This friend of spiritual unity was a board member of a Salafi mosque which was closed down by the Daghestani authorities. He demonstrated his attachment to spiritual values by accepting an exorbitant wedding lavished upon him by his father before the eyes of his starving compatriots.

Putin could put that prize on the shelf along side the Confucius Peace Prize he won for his work for the KGB and his conduct of the 1999 war of annihilation against Chechnya.

Click here for the full podcast.

The next article, dated May 17, 2014, is a rewrite of a presentation by Nebojsa Malic, who got his start writing for antiwar.com, which in turn got its start with conservative American resistance to intervention in the Yugoslav war. Malic has taken strongly Serb chauvinist positions, particularly on Serbian war crimes and related issues. The thesis is that “the Kiev coup-installed government” was threatening to take back the two regions, Donetsk and Lugansk, seized by Russian-backed separatist militias because there is shale oil there.  The idea that the Russians might have had an interest in keeping Ukraine from having access to shale oil never seems to cross the authors’ minds, and the idea that the central government might want to restore control over these two break-away regions is treated with scorn. (It is a bit rich calling the Ukrainian government “coup-installed” when talking about the Donetsk and Lugansk regions as being “pro-federalist.” For some extremely courageous coverage of the situation in these two regions, nothing matches Vice News.) The article mentions a UN report on casualties; since it gives no name or source for the document, it cannot be considered reliable. For references to the UN’s reports on the crisis in the UN, see this.

The next post on this topic appears on May 19, 2014; referring to Jill Stein’s statement “…stopping this rush to war in the Ukraine–the third world war–engaging Russia–that Obama seems hell-bent on–we need to have a movement that’s capable of flexing its muscle in the street.” The call linked to in this article is filled with the usual Kremlin rhetoric about the Ukraine crisis and the list of supporters of this call is plenty eloquent about the nature of these actions. In the event, a google search under the organizer’s names comes up with nothing but one instance of the call for action.

And then there’s this: “What China, Argentina, Greece, Venezuela, and Ukraine all share in common is an ongoing struggle with global shadow bankers, who continue to destabilize their financial systems and drive their real economies, at different rates, toward recession and worse.” Why? Cause they can.

A piece dated February 5, 2015 by Green Shadow Cabinet Attorney General and anti–war tanky blogger Kevin Zeese notes that both Noam Chomsky and Henry Kissinger share a common view about the Ukraine crisis and the West’s responsibility. And, indeed, the West bears its share of responsibility. However the chief burden of responsibility, as Zeese consistently fails to note, is Russia, which has kept Ukraine in bondage for centuries and is now executing a brutal war of aggression against it. Moreover, both Chomsky and Kissinger neglect the fact that the nationalist passions of people who have chafed under the Russian boot for centuries have a life of their own, independent of geopolitical consideration.

Another piece, dated February 16, 2015, seizes on calls by Lindsay Graham to arm the Ukrainian government. What is missing from this statement is any mention of the fact that these were attempts by the Republican hawks to pressure Obama to provide lethal support to Ukraine and did not represent a change of American foreign policy. The article, inter alia, cited a Human Rights Watch report correctly condemned Kiev for using cluster munitions against the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine. The Green Shadow Cabinet’s Kevin Zeese repeatedly and baselessly published attacks on HRW as an arm of the Empire. Moral consistency is not the Green Shadow Cabinet’s long suit.

Finally, Stein herself weighed in on July 6, 2015 in an interview with OnTheIssues.org. The pertinent passage is:

We should encourage Ukraine to be neutral–we helped foment a coup against a democratically-elected government, [resulting in a government] where ultra-nationalists and ex-Nazis came to power. Imagine the inverse: if Russia did that in Canada–installed a government hostile to us–we saw something like that in Cuban Missile Crisis–that would not be acceptable to us. So let’s not be single-issue–instead of fomenting a hostile Ukraine we should be leading the way in establishing a neutral Ukraine that would allow Russia to not feel under attack. We’ve made great strides–Putin is not a hero–but as Noam Chomsky points out, the Doomsday clock has moved closer to midnight than it has been since 1983. The hostile faceoff with Russia causes that and is entirely misplaced–led by war hawks in Obama administration–especially [Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs] Victoria Nuland, who cheered on an overthrow in Ukraine.

This pretty much uses all the Putinoid tropes on the Ukraine crisis. Maidan was not a coup. The Americans did not foment it. The government which emerged from the first post-Maidan election October 26, 2014 is far from the rote description presented by Stein. The Victoria Nuland myth has been addressed above.

Jill Stein Renominated

Then in June 2015, Stein announced her intention to run at the head of the Green Party ticket. Her first act was to attend the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris, which was held between November 30 to December 12, where she was supposed to speak. We have not been able to locate the text of her supposed post-conference statement. Her presence at this talk did not generate much interest, but it should have.

Before getting into specifics, a general remark. I was a member of a leftist party for thirteen years. When an official was sent to an event, it was expected that he or she would give a detailed report on returning. I have not seen a report back to her visit to COP 21; she did not even provide a link to her talk. The only report for her visit to Moscow was a by now infamous two minute video thanking her supporters but saying virtually nothing about what she did, whom she met, any indication of what impact her ideas did or didn’t have, etc.

Among the Environmentalists

It appears that she never spoke at COP 21, as she led her followers to believe, but she did play a major role in the panel hosted by a group meeting in conjunction with COP 21, the Belong Foundation.

The Belong Foundation (corporate website) was founded in 2013 has an active Facebook page, which began in December 2015 and a website. It held two conferences in 2015, one in Shanghai and the other in Beijing. It held a session at COP 21 in 2016; here is a list of its corporate sponsors. It scheduled a program in Beijing in 2017 with corporate sponsors which featured some ingenious and interesting innovative ideas. The website for this meeting gave the clearest view of its program and practice, which is to convince corporations that converting to a green model is good for business as well as the environment.

The foundation was founded when Nathalie Bastianelli, who worked for the public relations firm Havas in China for five years, so the need for it. She currently runs it.

The public relations firm Havas (Wikipedia page; creepy corporate website) goes back to the early nineteenth century and has become the very model of a multinational corporation.  Its portfolio includes green corporate campaigns.

On the other hand, it has been credibly accused of greenwashing. An example of this was the Hopenhagen, the tagline for the process in which “[t]he United Nations and an international coalition of advertising agencies today launched a global marketing campaign for the climate change treaty to be ratified in Copenhagen later this year.” Havas was shouldering its share of the burden along with the rest.

Some of Havas’ campaigns have been called a waste of energy at best and provided a harmless way for major corporations to buff up their environmental-friendly image at worst. As example of this is the  TCK TCK TCK campaign, described here.

More seriously, Havas was criticized for sponsoring Malaysian palm oil plantations (here, pp. 14-16). In another case, it defended nuclear power as low carbon.

Indeed, COP 21 itself came in for criticism for being sponsored by businesses which have fought environmental regulations (here, p. 19 and Democracy Now!’s coverage of the events from the point of view of the activists in the streets.)

In the case of COP 21, Havas and its offspring, the Belong Foundation, seem to have gotten the China account. While environmental activists were denouncing the corporatization of their cause, Belong, with Jill Stein in tow, held two panels hailing the Chinese government’s greening of the economy.

The panel was hosted by Belong’s Nathalie Bastianelli and Havas’ Laurence Brahm (his lovingly-scripted Wikipedia page here, his Ted Talk here) and author of about some twenty books, and in charge of a number of interesting projects. From what I can see, he is charismatic, intelligent, and energetic plus a mixture of Occupy and New Age and a bit of a wheeler dealer and a showman. The panels are posted on You Tube.

Brahm gave a slick presentation of China’s new ecological planning, mostly featuring himself in the role of the hero. (He was an aide to China’s Western-educated reformist ecology minister Chen Jining.) His soaring and inspiring multimedia presentation, however, needed some grounding in the facts on the ground, above all the bureaucratic inertia plaguing any reform in the one-party state with entrenched local interests. Although the change in the single party ruling China’s policies was at least in part motivated by public discontent, the people of China didn’t even play a cameo role; the green technocratic solutions started at the top and will be implemented at that level. There was no talk about how a green program would relate to lifting the heavy hand of repression and lead to a flowering of popular democracy.

In all, Brahm’s presentation had the saccharine quality of a PR firm’s promotional, which is a shame. There is a story here, although it is much more pedestrian than the one he presented. The Chinese have earned high marks for their desperate efforts to reverse

the ecological disaster their single-minded focus on economic growth brought about.

There followed a talk by Stein, whom Brahm introduced as the person most suited to being president of the United States and a dear friend, which it appears she is. Her talk was followed by some questions and answers as well as some later interventions, but we only present a transcription of the talk itself. Stein was a panelist in the first session (here) and had some comments to share in the second (here).

Thanks everyone for being here. Thank you to Laurence and to the Belong Forum for bringing us to a place where we can all belong. I’m not sure what the French meaning of “belong” is, but in English it is that we all have a place here together and we very much need to create this place where we can be human beings with each other, where we can be family, where we can grow in trust and community.

And in that spirit it’s very wonderful to be here with this celebration of China’s new leadership on environmental policy and in the same way that China is representing sort of the new leading edge of global environmental policy, we also have with us the ancient roots of environmental policy and sustainability and I welcome especially our indigenous and brothers and sisters who are here from the United States and let’s give them a round welcome and we’ll be hearing more from them as well. So as Laurence was saying, this is truly a game-changer and it challenges the United States, and I think all of the developing countries of the world, to look at what China is doing as one of these developing nations, how China has really turned a very remarkable corner here and raised the bar for all of us by prioritizing renewable energy and conservation, conservation of water, of land and ecosystems and of creating a whole new national ethic that puts conservation over consumption, and this is something that you know the US has been leading in the opposite direction making, really glorifying the culture of consumption. So it’s really a direct challenge, I think, to the United States to develop an entirely new vision going forward. And as Laurence pointed out, this is no longer a choice. I come to this as a medical doctor, actually, it’s my background.

I was a practicing internist in medicine for over two decades when I saw around me really an epidemic of rising rates of cancer and asthma and learning disabilities and Alzheimer’s and diabetes and obesity and I said to myself, I didn’t grow up with this, these aren’t things that used to be here in the prior generations. Yet now this is an epidemic. Clearly our genes have not changed that overnight. There are things going on in our environment that have massively impacted public health, particularly in developed countries but increasingly in developing countries, as well as our systems of energy and transportation and industrial food are adopted and I began to realize that it didn’t do a whole lot of good to be giving people pills and procedures and pushing them back out to the very things that are making us sick, everything from pollution of our air and water, in our food, to poverty and homelessness.

That’s actually how I came to be tricked into running for office for the first time many years ago when the Green Party. I was not the member of any party actually. I was simply a physician and a citizen and a mother trying to do what clearly our children and our families in our communities need, trying to work with our existing political structures in the United States and saying that they are really driven by the deep pockets, by the campaign contributions and by the lobbyists, and the Green Party came up and said to me, “Why don’t you just do what you’re doing fighting on behalf of our communities and families and call it a political campaign?”

At that point, I had looked around and saw that this truly is an emergency, that our health is really on the line, and not only our health, but certainly our water systems. We have a massive drought now going on in California, which supplies half of the fruits and vegetables for the entire country, and we have similar droughts all over the world. We are looking at heat waves again all over the world but we’ve seen recently in the Middle East, I believe it was in Iran, where we had a what’s called a heat index. Heat index means the temperature that your body actually feels, so it’s the combination of the heat plus the humidity, and we had a heat index recently of not 100 not 120 not 140 but 164 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes it unsafe to even be outside and exposed for very long, and this lasted for a matter of many days. We’ve seen a dramatic impact, for example, in India, where thousands of people were killed recently with a heatwave, and these are becoming increasingly the norm and not the exception. And recently we’ve heard most advanced science telling us that the rising sea level is not simply a matter of a few feet per century but that we are likely looking at 20 feet or more in the course of the next couple of decades on the trajectory that we’re on. This essentially means losing coastal and coastal areas all over the world. This is not something we want to have to think about fighting or adjusting to or coping with.

In the medical profession and in the healing professions of all sorts, our first responsibility is to understand danger when it is clear and present and to declare that emergency and to be very clear about what it takes to actually address that emergency and that’s the state that we’re in right now. Fortunately, if we act on this emergency now, we can use this not only to treat the coming danger but to vastly improve what our economies look like, what justice looks like in our communities and across the planet and to improve our sustainability and the condition of the ecosystem. So we can turn what is really a breaking point for people and the planet and for peace, we can turn that breaking point into a tipping point to take back the peaceful, just, secure, green future that really is within our reach.

When the US entered into the Second World War, actually when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, we declared a national emergency. Do you know how long it took to convert the economy to cope with that wartime footing? It took 6 months. Only 6 months to go from 0 to 25% of GDP, to deal with that national emergency. Now we have have a national emergency which is actually far more grave, far more serious, a global emergency, from which there is truly no recovery, so what we are calling for now, my campaign and the Green Party in the US, we are calling for 100% clean renewable energy in the next 15 years by 2013. If we could convert the economy to 25% wartime footing in 6 months, we can convert the economy to a clean green and peaceful, I would add, economy in the course of 15 years. So this can be done. It is actually happening even without government support. In fact, currently, the government has the breaks on. It provides some assistance to renewable energy, but the US government provides far more assistance to fossil fuels and increasingly to nuclear energy, which is not a sustainable option either. So we could do the right thing, but even without that assistance, we’re now seeing renewable energy absolutely exploding, in a good way. The growth of solar, for example, was 100%. Solar increased, it absolutely doubled its size in the last year alone compared to natural gas, which is actually in retreat. Coal, which is just barely above zero, it’s close to going into retreat right now.

So the right things are beginning to happen and we as citizens, as people, as everyday communities and as small businesses and cooperative, we can push things in the right direction and in the political system in my view we must hold their feet to the fire and we must demand a new kind of politics, a new kind of energy, and a new kind of economy, not what is quote politically possible but rather what is ecologically essential and necessary for our survival. We should accept nothing less.

And I would acknowledge, you know, as an American presidential candidate, that the major impediment to actually reaching an agreement here at this COP has actually been disagreement around the global climate responsibility and the economic responsibilities for paying that climate debt, the climate debt of the great polluters to the developing nations who are bearing the consequences without having caused the problem and it is and has been documented actually that in large part [it is] the initiative of the United States that has prevented agreement from taking place, that has prevented that debt from being paid and I would just add that it’s really critical that that debt be repaid. We need an international and binding agreement. We may not come up with that here in this conference, but going forward I think we need to increasingly double down, that this is the solution that we need, a binding international agreement that does justice to the need for technology transfer for mitigation, for adaptation, for loss and damage, all the official terms that basically mean we need to give a helping hand from those nations which have concentrated the wealth of the planet into the hands of very few, that wealth needs to be shared for all to save the health of the planet that we are all depending on. We are on one small boat, as Laurence said, and either we will sink together or we will sail together. Let’s make it sail together.

Let me also say what it is specifically that were calling for, and this is very much in respect to what China is doing. We are calling for the United States to adopt a comparable policy and specifically we are calling for twenty million jobs, which is enough to put everyone back to work, and all those who are underemployed, which is a major problem in the United States right now, we’re calling for good full-time living wage jobs like the New Deal that helped get us out of the Great Depression in the 1930s, we are now calling for a Green New Deal, that would not only address the emergency of the economy but would also address the emergency of the climate and the environment. So what it would do is to provide subsidies and incentives and I’ll talk about the funding in a moment. It essentially funds itself and I’ll tell you how, it’s good news. We would provide that funding in order to provide those twenty million jobs in order to achieve 100% clean renewable energy by 2030. So its energy jobs and energy infrastructure and wind water and sun. It would also convert our agricultural system so that we move to sustainable healthy food systems that are not [only good for the] planet and the climate and our soil and our water systems, but also very good for our health, which is suffering enormously from the health impacts of the industrialized agribusiness food system that we currently have, and we are also calling for the investment in public transportation creating that infrastructure, along with safe sidewalks and bike path, so that we can actually use muscle power safely on our way to transit hubs, which is something that we in the West have been denied in our urban centers now. So we’ll be calling for that along with ecosystem restoration, which is critical for drawing down the carbon in our ecosystems that can naturally accelerate the drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere and the [    ] quick word about what this accomplishes.

It not only revives our economy, it turns the tide on climate change, but it also has the benefit of making wars for oil and fossil fuels obsolete and if you follow US foreign-policy, you’ll know that this is a major driver in the foreign policy are very misguided foreign policy, which has become obsolete, I must say which has been backfiring massively on us and the West of basically policies of regime change where we do not have administrations that are friendly to the US fossil-fuel needs and desires so this enables that very misguided US foreign policy to become obsolete. We now spend a trillion dollars a year if you add up the costs in the US, a trillion dollars a year on this military foreign policy and by cutting that in half, which is enabled by going 100% clean renewable energy, we can cut our military expenditures in half and put that money back into the Green New Deal and the job creation and the transition that we need. I might also mention that the US is currently targeting one trillion dollars over the next three decades on nuclear weapons, on creating a new generation of nuclear weapons and modes of delivery, which is another terrible threat to human survival that I think many of us consider on a par with climate change and I think the third would be militarization so the three grave threats to human survival can actually cancel each other out because we could get rid of the nukes, demilitarize our foreign policies, and put all those resources into greening our economy, not only the economies of the developed world, but also using those resources to ensure that all countries will have a fair just and sustainable global economy to be a part of and that is essentially how this funds itself. There is one other source of funding which is rarely mentioned. While we are spending in the United States a trillion dollars a year on the massive military industrial complex one trillion, we are spending three trillion on the sick care system.

I don’t want to call it a health care system because it doesn’t make us healthy. What it allows us to do is to tread water while we take medications that make us go bankrupt and sometimes have terrible side effects, so we’re spending three trillion dollars on the sick care system, but what studies have shown and actual real world experience has shown is it when you moved to a green economy, with a healthy and sustainable food system and a clean energy system and a public and active transportation system, you have a health revolution. This actually happened in the country of Cuba when they lost their oil pipeline as the Soviet Union collapsed and when Cuba lost its oil pipeline and the industrial agricultural system that goes with it as well as all their fossil fuels and transportation system, they basically did what I described in that is clean energy, healthy food, and active transportation. Their death rates from diabetes declined by 50% practically overnight, their death rates from heart attacks and strokes went down 25 to 35% again practically overnight, their all-cause mortality went down almost 20%, obesity rates went down 50% and how much did it cost them? Zero. So they had a health revolution simply by moving remove a green economy and the ecological civilization that China has been describing in it’s new policy. I hope we can all rise up to that standard and usher in a new era of health, of justice, of sustainability, and the major pay off of peace, and I hope at this Belong Forum, where we all learn how we belong together, that we can open this discussion. This is a first discussion and what I hope will be an ongoing dialogue and it is a great honor to be here and to be sharing the podium today with director Chen and with all of you so thank you all so much for being a part of this today.

There are many things worth pondering and many things worth criticizing in this talk. I only feel compelled to mention a few of them.

First, I have found no scientific source for the idea that the oceans are expected to rise by twenty feet in a matter of a few decades. Here is a fairly detailed  article and chart posted on NOAA’s site which gives a fraction of that number.

Second, I have never seen the Green Party suggest that the solution to our problems is to go back to a pre-industrial age. There is evidence that transition from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture led to a shortening of lifespans (which, however, did recover). In more modern times, there are people lived hard but simple and happy lives who lived well into their nineties with all their faculties in order.

Third, the Chinese plan, as far as I can see, does not counterpose consumption and conservation. The government intends to provide its desperately impoverished people with a rising standard of living. This is something only an affluent Westerner would say.

Fourth, there had been a long-standing gradual decline in cardiovascular diseases in Cuba under Cuban socialism; the steeper decline in this, as well as diabetes and other diseases, was a result of a decline in obesity, which was, in turn, a result of the poverty and hardship caused by the intensification of the imperialist blockade of the island and its abandonment by the new pro-Western leadership of the Soviet Union. As soon as the pressure was off, the feeding on pork, alcohol, and sugar returned, with predictable results.

Finally, in Moscow

In Moscow, on December 10, while COP 21 had was three days from closing, RT, the Russian Federation’s powerful propaganda and disinformation arm, held its tenth anniversary celebration. She was in on the first session, where she had about a quarter of an hour to air her views. Here is a transcript of her comments:

The panel’s chair, Oksana Boyko, asks:

Dr. Stein why do you think the narrative again is so simplistic? Cause it would seem that even in the United States, and I studied in the United States, I do not have the view of the American people that they are simpletons, I think people are increasingly waking up to what is happening around them in the immediate neighborhood and also around the world. Why do you think the narration is still so limited basic cartoonish lines?

She replies:

I think there is no doubt that we have a very powerful military industrial complex. The beast needs to be fed and it requires an enemy in order to continue to justify the massive funding which currently occupies about 50% of the discretionary budget of the US.

I very much agree with Mr. Livingstone that this is a policy that cannot justify itself. We need only look at the last 14 years in the United States, where we have have this massive war on terror which has backfired massively and has been extremely catastrophic. We have spent about five trillion dollars, we have killed over a million people in Iraq alone we have killed and maimed tens of thousands of US soldiers and all we have done actually is enhance the cause of terrorism and recruited far more people to Al Qaeda, which was initially a national movement and is now a global movement, the Taliban have more territory now than before the United States invaded and ISIS was really an outgrowth of the chaos that we brought to Iraq, so I think we have very clear evidence, if there was any doubt, that this policy of total economic and military domination, this very simplistic defining of who is our friend and who is our enemy, is extremely counter-productive and I think there’s an enormous opportunity right now for the United States and for Russia to transcend this very simplified, over-simplified, harmful stereotype of each other, because Russia is unfortunately following in the footsteps of the United States and carrying out the same kind of campaign of shock and awe against terrorism that only wins more people to the cause. As we know, even with drones which are supposed to be surgically accurate you know that we’re killing at a ratio of about 10 to 1 the wrong people and even that one person, you know the start of the direct target is an extremely arbitrary and usually on unjustified target as well.

So this is a chance for Russia and the US I think to act together because if you look at, underneath, the real drivers here you have the Saudis and Qatar which are funding terrorism globally. They’re funding a violent jihad in many countries around the world and you have arms flowing largely from the United States which supplies most of the arms to the Middle East. Russia is supplying some as well, but between the two of us we could create a weapons embargo which would basically shut down the power of terrorism. We could freeze or seize the funds of countries who continue to fund terrorism and we can lean on Turkey to shut down its border. It has managed to do that against refugees, how about it shuts down its border against the movement of jihadi militias so there is an effective way that we could work together in a peace offensive. Russia and the US really leading together across the West and the countries that Russia can bring with us, we could have, you know, we could do a 180 on this catastrophic response to terrorism and actually begin to move forward in a way that would benefit us all.

In response to the moderator’s asking if American troops should be sent in to fight ISIS, she replies,

I think it’s really important to look at this very dramatic lesson that history is getting us right now. We have thrown every possible weapon into this that we can, billions of dollars, tens of thousands of American lives, we have killed over a million people in Iraq alone, there was no stone left unturned to fight terrorism over the past 14 years and what has that accomplished? It has made terrorism far stronger, it has made it much more global as a force, it has created many new terrorist forces, it has created massive refugee migrations that are threatening the very substance of the European Union.

This is not helping, this is only hurting, and I think in the same way that the military industrial complex exerts inordinate and rather harmful interest, influence, on American policy and global policy, actually I think it’s very important for the president, whoever he or she is, to stand up and actually exert real leadership and not be a tool of the big money which is sponsoring the Democratic and Republican parties, who are creatures of their funders. Predatory banks, fossil fuel companies, and war profiteers are the three major funders of both of our establishment political parties and this is, you know, this is not the way forward. I think it’s important for our leaders to actually lead and not to mislead and to stand up for the way forward.

I think in a moment of incredible pain and loss and grief, there’s a very natural tendency to strike out and revenge and the United States did that after 9/11 and we’ve continued doing that. We are stuck in a quagmire where things are only getting worse, yet at the same time our good allies are actually empowering our enemies. It is our closest allies that are making ISIS possible. So why don’t we start with first principles and start by ending the funding and the arming of terrorist groups. That will lay them to rest in a moment.

Stein is critical of Russia for acting too much like American: “Russia is unfortunately following in the footsteps of the United States and carrying out the same kind of campaign of shock and awe against terrorism.” She is not specific in what she was referring to.  At the time, the Russians had just started their military operations in Syria the previous September and were in the process of being sharply ramped them up in December.  The following is a short video of the results of a Russian bomb landing in Arbin, Syria, around the time Jill Stein was heading for her RT conference in Russia.

But even assuming that she had that in mind, her answer is far to vague to have registered.

She then lays down her plan for a Russian-American condominium over the Middle East, that the West and the Russians should form an alliance against terrorism. (For more on this, see Sputnik, the Jill Stein campaign’s report, and Bexar (Texas) Greens.)

The following criticisms immediately arise:

1. The Green Party’s statements have called on the West and the Russians to reverse their policy of flooding the Middle East with weapons and cease selling weapons to the region at all. This is here confused with the West not arming two specific countries which are accused of arming “the terrorists”.  (This confusion is clear in the sentence, “So this is a chance for Russia and the US I think to act together because if you look at, underneath, the real drivers here you have the Saudis and Qatar which are funding terrorism globally.”) Does the Green Party indeed call on the Russians to cease arming Assad?
2. Assuming the governments themselves are not expected to disarm, although non-state violence is a severe problem in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, where the state has been weakened, the violence which afflicts much of the Middle Eastern is government violence. To reduce the problem of violence in the Middle East to non-state violence or terrorism is to look at it from a purely Western perspective.
3. Moreover, groups like ISIS were at first chiefly armed by seizing or buy weapons from the governments of the countries in which they reside.
4. It proved impossible to impose an arms blockade on Iran for the last few years of the Iran-Iraq war. How will it be possible to impose an arms embargo of indefinite duration around an area extending from Morocco to the Sudan and up through Central Asia?
5. Even in the event of such an embargo, once an insurgency becomes powerful enough, it can transform the industrial power of the territory it occupies into a source of weaponry and ammunition.
6. The definition of terrorism has proven elusive. Is the Free Syrian Army terrorist? Are the Houthi militias in Yemen? Here is an example: Supposing Egypt decides to permit the Holy Land Fund to operate on its territory. The Holy Land Fund sends money to HAMAS-linked charities. HAMAS is an organization which uses terrorist methods. Should the Western-Russian condominium sanction Egypt for abetting terrorism?

In any case, such an embargo would not, as she claims, “lay them [the terrorists] to rest in a moment.”

In her closing statement, Stein said that terrorism “has created massive refugee migrations which have threatened the very substance of the European Union.” This is not true. Most of the refugees are fleeing state violence and not terrorism.

Stein’s most famous post coming out of RT10 was her video message to her supporters. I have prepared a transcription for the reader’s convenience:

Hello campaign supporters and friends coming to you from Red Square in Moscow. Just wanted to thank you so much for making this wonderful and inspiring trip possible.

It has been really incredible to be here at the RT conference in Moscow meeting with press and policy people from all over the world, including from Russia and Europe and Paris and Germany [sic]. It’s been so inspiring to see rising up at this very critical and perilous moment that we’re in, a moment of great militarism, potential nuclear confrontation, climate meltdown and expanding war, it’s been so wonderful to see people come together from across all borders, and from across the political spectrum mainly, come together around basic human values, around human rights, around the need for international law, including the need to rein in US exceptionalism, and totally reform and revise our foreign policy so that it is based on international law, human rights, and diplomacy. It’s been very exciting to see our message and our vision really resonate with others who are really looking for a way to bring us all together around a world that works for all of us and that’s really what our message has been here, that we don’t need war in Syria, we don’t need nuclear confrontation, we don’t need climate meltdown, we do have a way forward based on a green economy, a peaceful economy, and on diplomacy and working with each other across our histories of conflict to transcend that and actually sit down in respect and replace a US policy of domination with a way forward based on respect, collaboration, international law, and human rights. We’ve seen that vision really resonate here and I’m so looking forward to the work ahead. Thank you so much for making this work possible.

As it happens, we only have a record of her meeting with press from Germany in the form of antikrieg.tv, a few American personalities who’ve landed jobs on RT, General Michael Flynn, the Russian MC on the panel she had been invited to, and a few Russian leaders. (More on this later.) With the exception of the Russian MC (who asked pro forma questions and gave pro forma answers), we have no idea of what words if any were exchanged. Were they “coming together around the principles of human values, around human rights, around the need for international law?” Did Stein believe that the polite comments at Putin’s address to the dinner the night of the meeting made by him represented a “resonating” of the Green Party’s “message and … vision”? Aside from “resonating,” did any concrete proposals emerge. Were there even any agreement to meet for continued discussions? 

A search on Twitter under “Jill Stein” “Red Square” will come up with angry remarks, like, “Jill Stein, in Red Square, on the need ‘to rein in US exceptionalism’ & ‘domination’.” This is not terribly shocking to me. As a member of an American anti-war party, this has been her program for years.

However, her silence on Russian policies is glaring.

She was a guest of Vladimir Putin and his brainchild, RT. Putin leaves behind himself a trail of war crimes. David Satter, a highly regarded scholar of the Soviet Union and its successor states, has documented this, above all, his role in the second Chechen war, which can be said to have launched his political career. This trail of blood leads through Russian-Georgian war of 2008 to enforce the facts on the ground established by previous acts of Russian aggression against Georgia. (See above.)

Most glaring was her silence on the Russian bombing of Syria which, as I said, was rapidly escalating while she was at RT10.

The Putin doctrine on nuclear weapons involves the integration of a first strike nuclear threat in the event of a severe military reversal, which threatens to escalate a conventional military conflict into a nuclear one.

As for talk of a green economy to forestall ecological disaster, Putin has shown cruel indifference to sustainable development. The best example of this is his stationing a paper mill on Lake Baikal, one of the world’s largest reservoirs of fresh water. This article gives a good picture of Putin’s interest in ecology before Stein’s visit as do incidents like this, this, this, and this. A 2004 World Bank report of environmental policy and outcomes during the early Putin period shows that upon coming into office, Putin decentralized and reduced inspections; results were not uniformly bad, but the overall situation was not positive. A 2006 report by the OECD says:

On balance, therefore, these pressure indicators have generally improved since the later 1990s, including the period of the major institutional changes in the regulations of the environment in 2000. Unfortunately, the reality is not so favorable when one looks at some of the ambient environmental indicators at the Federation level. Air and water quality continues to be a serious and growing problem in many cities. Land contamination is a major issue that is not being tackled. Hazardous waste is accumulating at a rapid rate and its storage is often in inadequate conditions. Protected areas are often under-funded and hence not effectively managed, and forests are losing a lot from fires and high impact illegal logging. (p. 43)

These problems indicated a lack of administrative experience, a holdover from the Soviet period (p. 16), and a further decentralization of policy implementation (p. 34), a focus on industrial self-policing (p. 39) and not permitting inspections at intervals of less than two years (p. 37), and a defunding of data collection (pp. 40-41)  as a few of the many issues which had not been dealt with.

A very good 2008 academic study indicates that Russian environmentalists saw Putin’s environmental reforms as putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop:

In spite of the state agencies’ mixed performance, environmental advocates were indignant that protecting the environment now would fall under the purview of the ministry charged with exploiting natural resources for economic gain. Assessments of the state of environmental protection since 2001 have been largely negative. (p. 440)

Particularly interesting is its reference to environmental organizations and their difficulty working in an atmosphere in which the most basic information is classified and environmental NGOs and activists are smeared as spies, something which has had a significant effect on their public reception. (p. 450)

Among Putin’s ideas was to import nuclear waste, something which has met with some popular resistance. Then there is Putin’s own contribution to the nuclear waste problem.

This, this, this, this, this, this, and this appeared after Stein’s visit; we can see how much her ideas “resonated” with Putin, including further persecution of green activists. I am unaware of any of this being reported in the Green media.

We will return to this issue later.

Jill Stein, Green Party Candidate for the Presidency

Stein was officially nominated by the Green Party for the presidency on  August 6, 2016 at a convention in Texas. A few days before, she declared Ajamu Baraka her running mate, who remains to this day a bit of a cypher. This choice immediately raised alarms. For one thing, he was an ardent supporter of the Assad dictatorship. At one point, he wrote:

This was evident when the Bush administration and then the Obama administration decided to re-empower these radical jihadists as part of their strategy to put pressure on the al-Maliki government in Iraq and effect governmental change in Syria. In short, they encouraged a jihadist invasion and then framed it as a “civil war.”  Western governments pretended not to notice and certainly didn’t seem to care in the early days of the war that more and more of their nationals were traveling to Turkey to enter the conflict zone in Syria.

His proof for this is an article written by the erratic Seymour Hersh in March 2007, i.e., almost a year before Obama entered the White House, and which had Hillary Clinton say,

 “We have all learned lessons from the conflict in Iraq, and we have to apply those lessons to any allegations that are being raised about Iran. Because, Mr. President, what we are hearing has too familiar a ring and we must be on guard that we never again make decisions on the basis of intelligence that turns out to be faulty.”

There are other howlers in this piece, like “Abu Baka [sic] al-Baghdadi, an alleged former CIA asset and subsequent leader of ISIS,” “From the tens of thousands of displaced Syrians who found themselves as political pawns in the manufactured ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe [manufactured crisis or the natural flight of hundreds of thousands from a murderous onslaught from the central government] to the Puerto Rican patrons of Pulse nightclub in Orlando [who had exactly what to do with the Syrian war?]”

There were two interventions of his which particularly shocked the mainstream media. One was a contribution to an anthology for an anthology, ANOTHER French False Flag?: Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernardino, edited by Kevin Barrett. It was noted that the other contributions to this anthology were extremists and conspiracy theorists, to wit:

Gilad Atzmon, who was denounced by leading Palestinian activists for smuggling in virulent anti-Semitism into the Palestinian cause.

Alan Soral, an open admirer of National Socialism, purveyor of Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theories, etc.

Ken O’Keefe, another admirer of Nazism whose gross corruption, mendacity, and brutality alienated even his Nazi colleagues, many of them years before this book came out. O’Keefe was on the crew of the Mavi Marmara, which tried to run the blockade of Gaza; his comrades on this venture have turned their backs on him in disgust.

Catherine Shakdam writes at Katehon, the main website of the fascist Duganist movement. She is ” a regular pundit on RT and other networks her work has appeared in major publications: MintPress [a pro-Putin, pro-Islamic Republic of Iran site], the Foreign Policy Journal, [a site run by a Libertarian, strongly pro-Putin, pro-Islamic Republic of Iran; has ejected some of its more fascist-minded authors in an apparent bid for respectability], Mehr News [Iranian news agency linked with the conservative wing of the Islamic Republic] and many others.”

David Dees, specializes in lurid Jewish Zionist conspiracy theories and Putin hero worship, along with pretty much every other conspiracy theory out there.

Robert David Steele (Wikipedia page here), who claims that NASA is running a secret child labor colony on Mars.

A.K. Dewdney (Wikipedia page here) was a distinguished mathematician turned conspiracy theorist. A convert to Sufi Islam, he was particularly pained by the portrayal of Muslims in the media; when the 9/11 attacks took place, he refused to believe that Muslims had carried them out and came up with this rather elaborate conspiracy theory for how they were carried out.

James Petras, formerly a leading light of the New Left, has veered into anti–Semitic rants in his old age.

Imran Hosein, a pro-Putin Muslim leader.

Zaid Hamid (Wikipedia page here), a Pakistani Muslim cleric, strongly pro–Putin. A friend of ex-ISI General Hamid Gul. Declared that the Mubai attack was a false flag operation staged by Hindu Zionists. Zaid Hamid drama.

Mujahid Kamran believes that “The US and British governments are controlled by a “high cabal” of banking families who seek to manipulate each of us by putting microchips in our brains and who sponsor terrorist attacks in Pakistan.” In the meantime, he has been widely investigated for abusing his post as Vice Chancellor of Punjab University.

Anthony Hall is part of Kevin Barrett’s general movement. Here are some comments about his contribution to scholarship from, admittedly, a pro-Israel site. This is from the CBC as is this.

Henry Makow (website here, Rational Wiki page here) Amazon list of books here). His website is devoted to “Exposing Feminism and The New World Order” and opens with the entry: “Hitler was false opposition. He was put in power by the Masonic Jewish bankers who he pretended to oppose. Wars are Jewish banker pogroms against the goyim.” ’nuff said.

Nick Kollerstrom, who has been credibly labeled a Holocaust denier (and conspiracy theorist and a general crackpot), despite his claims otherwise.

Ole Dammegard, conspiracy theorist who believes that Whitney Houston, Richard Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and Marilyn Monroe were victims of political assassinations. Dabbled in Holocaust revisionism, of course…

Eric Walberg, on whom see this.

Barry Kissin, in comparison, seems like a lightweight, your usual 9/11 Truther contributor to fringe sites such as OpEd News.

Brandon Martinez is your usual White Nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti–Semitic, except that his fanatical anti-Bolshevism has led him to be an enemy of Putin. He sticks out in this list of extreme Putinoid conspiracy theorists in this last regard.

Paul Craig Roberts, champion of extreme deregulation and tax-slashing, apologist for the Pinochet regime, and staple on the far right and far left particularly the conspiracy theory set.

Stephen Lendman has already been discussed.

Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei needs no introduction…

I have not obtained the book much less read the articles in it.

The other was his interview on No Lies Radio, which features commentators with a well-known penchant for spinning outlandish conspiracy theories focused on shadowy Mossad agents, whose only proof is the cui bono argument preferred by conspiracy theorists: Who benefits. Well, the answer always comes back, obviously, Israel does. This program, No Lies Radio, featured Jim Fetzer, (an old Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist (Mossad did it) turned leading light in the 9/11 Truther movement (Mossad did it), the Sandy Hook massacre (Mossad didn’t do it, but faked it), Holocaust denial, and so on; formerly of Veterans Today until he was ousted in a palace coup; here is a biography of him), and Kevin Barrett of Truth Jihad, whose stock in trade is to label any act of violence carried out by Muslim extremists a false flag operation, generally by Mossad agents intending to discredit Islam.

Although reporters on the Barrett-Baraka connection refer to more than one or at least two interviews Baraka gave Barrett, a google search under their names yields six interviews, dating from September 2013. A full analysis of this material and Baraka’s writing will have to wait. Of the two interviews I listened to, in one, Barrett and Baraka agreed that the 2014 killing of three Israeli youths by Hamas as a result of a botched kidnapping-prisoner swap plan was actually a false flag operation to prepare the way for the subsequent Israeli attack on Gaza, although it was the intensifying rocket fire coming from Gaza which was Israel’s casus belli. Unless all the Palestinian political parties were patsies in this elaborate conspiracy, it should be rejected out of hand. A few minutes later, Baraka changes the subject to the Ukraine.

That’s a whole ‘nother kind of conversation. If you look at the Ukraine for example, if you look at the kind of oppositional violence which was taking place when the so called revolutionaries were fighting Yanukovich [the pro-Russian sitting president of the Ukraine], there was always calls by the US for restraint… As soon as that the people in the east who are suggesting that they do not recognize the government in the west and they have the right to they have the right to determine their own relationships, they are now susceptible to the full power of the Ukrainian state, they are not just Ukrainian citizens who have concerns, legitimate concerns, but they are called pro-Russian separatists, terrorists if you will, which means they are now eligible for any kind of reprisal, violence, any kind of systematic atrocities that one can imagine they are now being subjected to. It goes to the power of who can define reality.

Barrett turns to the July 17, 2014, Malaysian plane downing carried out by “the Kiev Zio-Nazi government, which is what it is, these Zionist Jewish oligarchs billionaire criminal dons [who] are are funding Nazi street thugs who overthrew the legitimate government elected government and installed a fascist junta.”

Baraka: “And when it’s raised, it’s raised as a conspiracy.”

Barrett called this an effort to assassinate Vladimir Putin; however this RT-sourced story became untenable when it came out that Putin’s plane’s trajectory was hundreds of miles to the north of the event. Moreover, the pro-Russian scenarios put forth later did not mention this alleged assassination attempt, including a particularly gruesome one conspiracy theory proposed by pro-Russian secessionists from Ukraine. He claimed that the Russian-backed separatists were not armed with the missile launching system which brought the plane down; reports prove otherwise. Barrett “Kiev Zio-Nazi government” has nothing to explain in this regard.

Indeed, Baraka has a fascination with the Ukrainian government, second only to his fascination with Assad’s enemies. Thus, in his August 16, 2017 piece, “The Story of Charlottesville Was Written in Blood in Ukraine,”  wrote, “The alt-right that showed up in Charlottesville this past weekend was mimicking the tactics of the frontline neo-fascist soldiers who orchestrated the coup in the Ukraine, yet everyone is saying this is a result of Trump.” In simple terms, it was Obama’s Ukraine policy which led to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Now, I’ve seen no Ukrainian flags in among Charlottesville’s crew-neck and slacks storm troopers, but there was plenty of support for Vladimir Putin there.

Now consider the main picture in this article. Nazi flag carried by the notoriously pro-Nazi Azov Battalion. Bad. Stars and Bars on a Ukrainian tank. Really bad.

But an image search leads me to the following: the “Confederate flag” does not have any stars in it. Nor is it even the Ukrainian flag. It is, in fact, the flag of the Russian-backed break-away Donetsk republic’s flag. 

Nor does the second picture hold up much better. An enterprising researcher had a forensic analysis done one it and found it was photoshopped. Another researcher found what is pretty clearly the original flag; oddly enough, it is the flag of the Donetsk region (without the word (“Respublika” added.) It sits oddly with the flag of NATO, which Azov The picture is not without difficulties. Of course, this is the Azov Battalion, was founded by unadulterated adopters of Nazism to Ukrainian politics. Thus, the fascist salutes are all too real.

In concluding this section, Baraka responded to Gawker‘s expose about his peculiar taste in extremist friends, and he answered,

I often get requests to reprint my articles, and since I look at my work as belonging to the public I don’t often pay a lot of attention to the outlets,” Baraka said in a lengthy statement provided to Gawker… When Kevin Barret [sic; Barrett], someone who has interviewed me in the past, contacted me to ask if he could include my piece in a compilation on the Paris Attacks, I didn’t see any problem with it. I didn’t inquire as to the other authors and don’t know much about some of them or their positions on various issues. I stand by everything I wrote in that article and would be happy to discuss the details.

Taken at face value, this shows a profound ignorance about someone with whom he’s had a working relationship for at least three years. Surely he had to have had some idea of the extremist views of the other people he hosted–heck, he was even on the show only minutes before. Everyone understands that Baraka is not a Holocaust denier. But almost everyone else on this program, including its host, were, and were extremely vocal about it. Thus, his statement is a dodge.

What appears to me to be the case is that Baraka and Barrett share a conspiracy theory view of the world. They appear to share a belief in the ability of Mossad to secretly shape international events and a mentality in which nothing is what it appears to be: the slaughter of three Israeli Jewish teens was not bungled attempt to kidnap victims for a prisoner swap, but a false flag operation; a loose missile fired over a war zone bringing down a civilian airliner was actually an attempt by the Mossad-run Ukrainian government to assassinate Putin and sow chaos in the region; a group of Sunnis who had been radicalized and battle-hardened in the resistance to the American invasion of Iraq were really a CIA-Mossad creation, and on and on. No knowledge of the facts are needed for shot and brew politics; all that is needed is an ability to weave together disparate, cherry-picked facts into a plausible-looking story for those who are suitably prepared to accept it. That is, all that is needed is a bent for the conspiracy theory.

The Great Green Nuclear War Scare

Six months into the Syrian uprising against Assad broke out and the death toll reached 3000, the opposition started raising calls for a no-fly zone. This, this, this, and this article nicely sum up the state of this demand as of the first month it was formally raised by elements of the Syrian opposition. These calls continued as more and more soldiers defected, not wanting to fire on the people. But the international community blocked from taking steps by China and Russia’s UN veto.  It should be mentioned that, predictably, American calls for a no fly zone were heard from the two most hawkish politician, Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who made the unfortunate statement, “Now that military operations in Libya are ending, there will be renewed focus on what practical military operations might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria.” The death of Moammar Qaddafi encouraged the opposition in the Libyan revolution, but no fly zones was replaced by a war against the regime and their logic fell into discredit.

Plans for a no fly zone were revived in 1982 after Syria’s Minister of Foreign Ministry’s spokesman declared Syria’s readiness to use poison gas–against foreign enemies. Of course, this qualification was not reassuring. Turkey, which had already absorbed 50,000 Syrian refugees, a third of the total, with two or three thousand more arriving every day, became concerned that the use of poison gas be used on Syria’s opposition would lead many more times that seeking shelter there. John Brennan, Mr Obama’s senior counter-terrorism adviser, refused to rule out a no fly zone, although Secretary of State Clinton was careful to state that that was only one of many options being considered.

NATO expressed no interest in a no fly zone for the time being. As “Britain’s outgoing army chief David Richards” put it,

If you wanted to have the material impact on the Syrian regime’s calculations that some people seek, a no fly zone per-se is insufficient. You have to be able, as we did successfully in Libya, to hit ground targets. You have to take out their air defences. If you want to have the material effect that people seek you have to be able to hit ground targets and so you would be going to war if that is what you want to do.

The American military expressed no interest in a no fly zone. John McCain accused the Pentagon of dragging its feet, but the scenario he offered was daunting:

McCain said a realistic plan for a no-fly zone would include hundreds of planes, and would be most effective if it included destroying Syrian airplanes on runways, bombing those runways, and moving U.S. Patriot missile batteries in Turkey close to the border so they could protect airspace inside northern Syria.

In April, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense that the military was planning for a range of options in Syria but that he did not necessarily support using those options.

“We’re prepared with options, should military force be called upon and assuming it can be effectively used to secure our interests without making matters worse,” he said. “We must also be ready for options for an uncertain and dangerous future. That is a future we have not yet identified.”

Another blow to the no fly zone plan was Russia’s sending sophisticated ground to air missiles to Syria in May 2013.

Finally, one analyst observed that Europe is uninterested in the Syria war because “[t]he propaganda claims — that Syrians are all “terrorists” and the uprising in Syria is one of Islamist extremists supported by Al Qaeda working in collusion with the CIA — is so strong here in Europe that there is next to no public support for any kind of intervention.”  The RT-ification of European public opinion runs that deep.

And so, 2013 came and went.

The same with 2014, except that ISIS took center state in Western eyes. Turkey still called for a no fly zone or a buffer zone, but no one listened.

Finally, in the beginning of November 2015, the Americans sent some F-15Cs, which are only good for air to air combat, to Turkey, reaching their destination mid-December.  This journalists found mysterious and maybe a little troubling.  The Voice of America stated plausibly, “That deployment came after two Russian warplanes, active in Syria, strayed into Turkish airspace last month, triggering strong condemnations from Turkey and its NATO allies.” which is a bit at odds with the headline, “US Deploys 6 F-15E Fighter Jets in Turkey to Attack IS.” Debka added that “they will be used against the Russian fighters if they interfere with the US and Turkish bombing missions in Syria,” which I think is also a reasonable explanation.

Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders’ running mate sounded the alarm on this. In addition to being a strong economic populist, Gabbard had a strong Islamophobic streak, close to the Zionist far-right, and close to the Assad regime, even meeting with him secretly. This latter fact probably had much to do with her alarmism over this deal. Questioning Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, she argues that the Americans’ stationing the 6 F-15 to picket the Turkish-Syrian border will lead to nuclear war and the possible destruction of all life on earth. Given that American and Russian jets have been buzzing each other for years, this seems just a bit demagogic. (A better contribution to disarmament might be to have her friends in the Hindu-chauvinist Indian government talk with the Islamic-chauvinists in the Pakistani government about scaling back and eliminating their respective nuclear weapons.) But this set the tone for the Green Party’s campaign over Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of a no fly zone.

A google search under “Jill Stein” “no fly zone” turns up no statement by her on the issue.