TFF global posts 2018

  • We are soon going to have a clash between President Donald Trump and international law. This is predicable when one examines the presidential discourse over what to do about North Korea and its possession of nuclear-tipped rockets. He has threatened “fire and fury” which doesn’t sound like the opening words of the UN’s Charter: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…..and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained……and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.” There should be no question that if the Charter is followed that Trump cannot legally make a pre-emptive strike, either one nuclear or conventional, unless war is imminent because of threatening moves by the antagonist. He could...

Most bankers, economists and investors after a couple of drinks, will admit that money is not wealth. Money is a metric, like inches and centimeters, for tracking real wealth: human ingenuity and technological productivity interacting with natural resources and biodiversity undergirding all human societies along with the daily free photons from our Sun, as described in “Valuing Today’s Circular Services Information Economies”. So brainwashed are we by the false money meme of “money as wealth” that whenever anyone proposes needed infrastructure maintenance, better schools and healthcare or any public goods, we are intimidated by some defunct economist who says “Where’s the money coming from?” They ought to know better, since, of course money is not scarce, it’s just information as I pointed out in 2001 at the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in an invited talk “Information, The World’s Real Currency, Is Not Scarce “(see World Affairs, April-June, Vol. 5, 2001, Delhi,...

  By Richard Falk • More than 25 years ago I took part in a major conference in Kuala Lumpur affirming the importance of human rights. At the end of the second day, the convener of the conference, Chandra Muzaffar, a leading advocate of human rights and democracy in Malaysia, arranged for a few of the speakers to meet with the controversial leader of the country, Prime Minister, Mahathir. I was the only Westerner among the 4 or 5 of us given this opportunity. As soon as we entered the room, Mahathir looked straight at me while posing a rhetorical question: “Why do Western human rights NGOs and experts look only at our performance with respect to civil and political rights when our natural preoccupation is the promotion of economic and social rights?” Of course, his assertion was meant to challenge the complacent Orientalizing conventional wisdom, reducing the practice of...

  By Jan Oberg Commenting on PressTV – also on how the Western mainstream press that publishes any piece of hysteria about Russia and China keep virtually silent about this and also the equally dangerous US National Defence Strategy that appeared a few days before this. Photo collage above © Jan Oberg 2018        

  No it didn’t. The mainstream media are totally irresponsible in their priorities. At the moment of writing, five hours after the world’s most dangerous document was presented, no major Western media has featured it prominently. This means it won’t be. No chance it would go viral. The increasing risk of nuclear war isn’t important. While people talk about fake, a much larger issue is omission: What is hidden to you? What world order issues are deliberately down-graded? What threats to humanity end up at the bottom of page 38 after 10 pages of sports, entertainment and celebrity stories. Another technique is cover-up, talking about something else such as the ever convenient North Korean “threat” or Russia’s latest evil plot. It’s not only ignorance. There are media and other power elites who know exactly what to hand out to you and how. And what to fake, omit and cover up...

  – Pope Francis sent out a message that should have created headlines everywhere. It advocated a journalism for peace. The discussion of fake news has spread around the globe and there are all kinds of proposals on how to detect fake news and combat it – as the truly civilizational threat it is. Indeed one could day that fake is the debate 2017-2018. A quick DuckDuckGo search – no, I don’t use Google Search anymore because of its tracking and blatant censorship – reveals that a few leading US media took up the story, so did a series of religious media, of course, but the amazing statement didn’t obtain much attention. Objectively speaking, that is particularly strange since any editor and journalist should be professionally observant of a statement on their own profession from the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. But what can surprise you anymore...

Obituary Just a week after his 90th birthday Gene Sharp passed away. The journal New Statesman once described Gene Sharp as the “Machiavelli of Nonviolence” and Thomas Weber labelled him “the Clausewitz of Nonviolent Action.” Who was this man and what is his contribution to our understanding of the possibilities to use nonviolent actions in large scale societal conflicts? Gene Sharp completed his baccalaureate in 1949, just a few scant years after the close of World War II, and quickly turned his attention to the study of nonviolence. After serving nine months in prison for being a conscientious objector to the Korean War, Sharp worked as secretary for A.J. Muste. He next joined the editorial team of Peace News in London before accepting an invitation from Arne Næss to join him in Oslo with Johan Galtung and others to study the philosophy and practice of Mohandas Gandhi. Throughout this time,...

    President Donald Trump said it would never happen. Now it is. During the election he said he did not want more interventions – no more Iraqs, no more Afghanistans,  Libyas or Syrias. A year into his presidency the American military is involved in all these places and he’s aching to get boots on the ground in North Korea and perhaps even Iran. At least he’s not thinking about it in Ukraine – that would really set the cat among the pigeons. Last week his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said that waging war in Syria is “crucial to our national defence”. This is a big deal but few seem to be talking about it. The pundits and congressmen are either asleep at the switch or taking a holiday. It’s true that Barack Obama initiated this Syrian intervention but he never intended it to be an occupying force but...

  Af Jan Øberg Et tidssvarende og relevant forsvarsforlig ville være et hvor man fordomsfrit og med bred ekspertise havde spurgt: Givet at verden ser ud som den gør – og kan forventes at gøre i de næste 20-30 år – hvilken politik på de relevante militære og civile områder bør Danmark så vælge for at få færrest mulige fjender, bidrage til reduktion af krig og risici herfor hjemme og ude og i det hele taget bidrage til en fredelige verden? Det netop indgåede forsvarsforlig indebærer istedet en kraftig militær oprustning og øget beredskab for at deltage i international krige under USAs ledelse. Det åbner mulighed for at Danmark anskaffer Tomahawk-krydsermissiler og bygger helt på et postuleret, u-argumenteret trusselsbillede. Der køres en tur ad de udlagte skinner uden tanke på endestationen bare nogle få kilometer længere fremme. Og den endestation hedder ikke fred i nogen rimelig intellektuel forstand af bergebet....

    Excerpts from Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: “For decades the United States has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted. Today, every domain is contested air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.” In plain words: An admission of two things, namely that the US considers it right, or natural, to dominate the entire world and do what it pleases. And that it’s relative power is decreasing. • 
”Challenges to the U.S. military advantage represent another shift in the global security environment. Our network of alliances and partnerships remain the backbone of global security. China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system by exploiting its benefits while simultaneously undercutting its principles and ‘rules of the road.’...

By Javad Heirannia, The Tehran Times January 24, 2018   TEHRAN – Professor Farhang Jahanpour, part-time tutor on the Middle East in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford, tells the Tehran Times that “President Trump’s recent speech on Iran was the most belligerent speech by any U.S. president about Iran since the Iranian revolution.” “As everybody knows, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was not a bilateral agreement between Iran and the United States,” Jahanpour tells the Tehran Times in an exclusive interview. Following is the full text of the interview:   Q: President Trump has decertified the JCPOA. How important is this decision for the survival of the nuclear agreement? A: President Trump’s recent speech on Iran was the most belligerent speech by any U.S. president about Iran since the Iranian revolution. However, its importance for undermining the nuclear agreement should not be exaggerated....

By Jan Oberg • Interview on “Loud & Clear” of Radio Sputnik, New York, January 22, 2018   Other posts about this issue Jan Oberg, The 2018 US National Defence Stratgey In Plain Words: Tragi-Comic! Defence News