DEMOCRATIC WORLD FEDERALISTS
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Articles for This Issue:
DWF NEWS
June 22, 2023
Looking to UN Charter to Challenge US Empire
Emergence of a New Non-Alignment
Vijay Prishad
What Ended Democracy in U.S.-and-Allied Countries
Eric Zuesse
Defund the Military
Roger Kotila
Udo Ulfkotte - Confession of a Mainstream Journalist
Olga Peterson
Buried Alive
The Insanity of Solitary Confinement
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Editor's note: While the Non-Aligned nations look to the UN Charter to help free them from the colonizing grip of US Empire, these nations do not yet recognize that the Charter itself is inadequate for the job. As a result, the UN cannot protect them from US Empire's criminal actions such as crippling economic warfare or overthrowing governments. There is a movement underway from NGOs for the UN General Assembly to launch Article 109 Charter Review. The EARTH CONSTITUTION can be used as a model, guide, and authority to establish an urgently needed "new UN." -- Roger Kotila, PhD, DWF NEWS
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Looking to UN Charter to Challenge US Empire
Emergence of a New Non-Alignment
Vijay Prishad
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EXCERPTS
A new mood of defiance in the Global South has generated bewilderment in the capitals of the Triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan), where officials are struggling to answer why governments in the Global South have not accepted the Western view of the conflict in Ukraine or universally supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in its efforts to ‘weaken Russia’. Governments that had long been pliant to the Triad’s wishes, such as the administrations of Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye (despite the toxicity of their own regimes), are no longer as reliable.
Interestingly, this revival of sovereign politics is not being driven by inward-looking nationalism, but by a non-aligned internationalism. The BRICS ministers’ statement focuses on ‘strengthening multilateralism and upholding international law, including the purposes and principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations as its indispensable cornerstone’ (incidentally, both China and Russia are part of the twenty-member Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter).
The implicit argument being made here is that the US-led Triad states have unilaterally imposed their narrow worldview, based on the interests of their elites, on the countries of the South under the guise of the ‘rules-based international order’. Now, the states of the Global South argue, it is time to return to the source – the UN Charter – and build a genuinely democratic international order.
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What Ended Democracy in U.S. and Allied Countries
Eric Zuesse
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EXCERPTS
When virtually all of the news media in a country are owned and controlled by billionaires, those individuals (who are less than a thousand) collectively control the ‘news’-media and thus mentally control the masses and don’t just fund the careers of the winning political candidates but control the entire body-politic — both their public and their government. Those few billionaires are then the nation’s actual aristocracy or “Deep State,” who are, as a group, permanently in control of the government, ruling it quietly behind the scenes.
Why don’t the populations in U.S.-&-allied countries know that Ukraine’s February 2014 ‘democratic revolution’ at the Maidan Square in Ukraine was actually a U.S. coup just as much as had been America’s coups in 1953 Iran, 1954 Guatemala, 1973 Chile, and so many others that the ‘news’-media in U.S.-&-allied (or U.S. and its vassals’) countries had likewise falsely reported as-if they had been democratic revolutions, instead of as the U.S. coups that they actually were? Why don’t those populations — even now, nearly a decade after the event — know that it was a U.S. coup, and why it was done, and the planning that went into it? Why are all of those essential facts still being hidden from them?
The U.S. empire — unlike others that went before it — is NOT publicly announced, but it is very real, and it dominates today’s world. No nation today can be authentically democratic whose population believes that what happened in February 2014 Ukraine was a democratic revolution, instead of a U.S. coup (and one expert even slipped and admitted that it was “the most blatant coup in history”).
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Defund the Military
Roger Kotila
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Friends in the media - The San Francisco Chronicle published this letter today. It calls for more services for the homeless (unhoused), and less money for the U.S. military and its endless wars. I regret not mentioning the EARTH CONSTITUTION as a potential replacement for the outdated UN Charter in order to end wars between nations. -- Dr. Roger Kotila
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
San Francisco Chronicle
JUNE 16, 2023
Defund the military
I’m a retired psychologist whose experience includes the days when we had a state mental hospital system. I worked at Camarillo State Hospital, where we treated psychotics, alcoholics and drug addicts. In many cases, the treatment was court-ordered (involuntary) and life-saving.
To save more lives, we need a partnership with the state of California but should also seek federal help.
We don’t need to waste money on the Pentagon’s F-35 fighter (the plane that can’t fly right), billion-dollar aircraft carriers, nuclear first-strike missiles and endless wars. The war corporations drain the treasury.
Why do we need 800 foreign military bases while our homeless (unhoused) citizens and psychiatric causalities remain shamefully underserved?
Roger Kotila, Novato, California
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Udo Ulfkotte - Confession of a Mainstream Journalist
Olga Peterson
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Udo Ulfkotte Exposed the CIA's Role in Controlling Worldwide Media in his Book "Journalists For Hire" and Should be Celebrated Among the Great Whistleblowers of All-Time [A 2019 version of his book "Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA: A Confession from the Profession" is available on Amazon.]
EXCERPTS:
By serving as a correspondent in the Middle East, Ulfkotte was able to meet agents from the CIA, British M16, the Israeli MOSSAD, and the German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtungendienst (BND).
His editors used to readily cooperate in such operations of collating intelligence information, which the reporters would dutifully transcribe for the public back home.
The skill of unofficial reporting is when a reporter essentially works for the CIA and he or she is not employed in an official role, Ulfkotte explains.
He wrote: “I was in close contact with some European media or big private media companies—you cannot write or say what you feel like and what your views are necessarily. I can tell you that what I am saying here is what I have experienced everywhere. There are clear directives and everybody knows that one cannot publish what they want in the newspapers owned by Springer such as Bild or Welt—for instance the articles critical of Israel.
There is no way you can do that there! You have signed an agreement that you will not challenge the question of the existence of a country of Israel or the Israeli point of view. These directives exist in all big media companies.”[6]
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Editor's note: As a (retired) psychologist who worked in the California prison system for 20 years, I'm deeply disturbed when I think of journalist/publisher JULIAN ASSANGE who faces extradition from the UK to the US where he would most likely be placed in solitary confinement, which to me feels like being buried alive. Assange's crime? Exposing via WikiLeaks US war crimes.
-- Dr. R. Kotila, DWF NEWS
Buried Alive
The Insanity of Solitary Confinement
Special to Consortium News
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Isolated in a 6-by-10-foot cell 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he spiraled into paranoia and began engaging in shocking self-mutilation. Gay stabbed himself in the eye with a razor blade. He cut off pieces of his own flesh and ate them. He cut out one of his own testicles and left it hanging on a cell door. He then stitched his scrotum closed with a zipper.
Solitary confinement is the practice of isolating a prisoner from all human contact for an extended period of time. It is often used as a form of punishment or to control behavior, but it can have serious negative effects on mental health. Most countries around the world limit the time that a prisoner can spend in solitary to 15 days. The United States doesn’t. There are scores of prisoners across the U.S. who have been in solitary for years and, in some cases, decades. It should be clear to everybody — the courts, the states, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons — that solitary only worsens already bad situations. It shouldn’t be in use.
... The longer a person is held in solitary, the worse his mental state becomes. The younger a person is when he begins a sentence in solitary, the worse his mental state becomes. And the situation is usually hopeless when a person who is already mentally ill is placed in solitary whatever his age. It’s no wonder that the United Nations has declared the U.S. practice of solitary confinement to be a form of torture:
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