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The former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched a scathing attack on what he calls a US-backed coup in Ukraine, insisting the Crimean people have the right to align their territory with Moscow and characterising sanctions against Russia as “an act of war”.He also said providing economic aid to Ukraine was comparable to giving support to rebels in Syria knowing it would end up in the hands of al-Qaida.The libertarian guru’s remarks in an interview with the Guardian are almost diametrically opposed to those of his son, the Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul, who has called for stiff penalties against Russia and declared: “If I were president, I wouldn’t let [Russian president] Vladimir Putin get away with it.”Ron Paul, who retired from his Texas congressional seat in 2012, has always adopted a sceptical view of US foreign interventions. He said that although the US had not been involved in any military overthrow of the government in Kiev, it had facilitated a coup in the sense of “agitating” elements who wanted to usurp Ukraine’s former president, Victor Yanukovych.

“That is our how our country was started,” he said. “It was the right of self-determination, and voting, and asking and even fighting for it, and seceding. Of course libertarians were delighted with the secession of the various countries and units of government away from the Soviet Union, so yes, we want the people to make the decisions.”He added: “The people of Ukraine would probably have a loose-knit association, with a rather independent east and west, and an independent Crimea. It would work quite well.”

Official Washington’s influential neocons appear back in the driver’s seat steering U.S. policy in the Middle East toward a wider conflict in Syria and away from a “realist” alternative that sought a Putin-Obama collaboration to resolve the region’s crises more peacefully, reports Robert Parry.

There’s also the other finicky little problem that the action of arming and training rebels and unleashing them against a sovereign state is an act of aggression (if not terrorism depending on what they do), similar to what U.S. officials have piously condemned the Russians of doing in Ukraine. But this hypocrisy is never acknowledged either by U.S. policymakers or the mainstream U.S. press, which has gone into Cold War hysterics over Moscow’s alleged support for embattled ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine on Russia’s border — while demanding that Obama expand support for Syrian rebels halfway around the world, even though many of those “moderates” have allied themselves with al-Qaeda terrorists.

Though it’s been known for quite awhile that the Syrian civil war had degenerated into a sectarian conflict with mostly Sunni rebels battling the Alawites, Shiites, Christians and other minorities who form the base of support for Assad, the fiction has been maintained in Washington that a viable and secular “moderate opposition” to Assad still exists. The reality on the ground says otherwise. For instance, in Friday’s New York Times, an article by correspondent Ben Hubbard described the supposed Syrian “moderates” who are receiving CIA support as “a beleaguered lot, far from becoming a force that can take on the fanatical and seasoned fighters of the Islamic State.” But the situation is arguably worse than just the weakness of these “moderates.” According to Hubbard’s reporting, some of these U.S.-backed fighters “acknowledge that battlefield necessity had put them in the trenches with the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, an issue of obvious concern for the United States. …

For union organizers in Colombia, the dangers of their trade were intensifying. When workers at the country’s largest independent oil company staged a strike in 2011, the Colombian military rounded them up at gunpoint and threatened violence if they failed to disband, according to human rights organizations. Similar intimidation tactics against the workers, say labor leaders, amounted to an everyday feature of life. For the United States, these were precisely the sorts of discomfiting accounts that were supposed to be prevented in Colombia under a labor agreement that accompanied a recently signed free trade pact liberalizing the exchange of goods between the countries. From Washington to Bogota, leaders had promoted the pact as a win for all -- a deal that would at once boost trade while strengthening the rights of embattled Colombian labor organizers. That formulation had previously drawn skepticism from many prominent Democrats, among them Hillary Clinton. Yet as union leaders and human rights activists conveyed these harrowing reports of violence to then-Secretary of State Clinton in late 2011, urging her to pressure the Colombian government to protect labor organizers, she responded first with silence, these organizers say. The State Department publicly praised Colombia’s progress on human rights, thereby permitting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to flow to the same Colombian military that labor activists say helped intimidate workers.

At the same time that Clinton's State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation -- supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself -- Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact. Having opposed the deal as a bad one for labor rights back when she was a presidential candidate in 2008, she now promoted it, calling it “strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States.” The change of heart by Clinton and other Democratic leaders enabled congressional passage of a Colombia trade deal that experts say delivered big benefits to foreign investors like Giustra.

The Clinton Foundation, Giustra and the State Department did not respond to International Business Times' requests for comment. Pacific Rubiales has denied that it has engaged in any violence toward union organizers. As Hillary Clinton readies a national apparatus for her likely presidential campaign -- one that will surely depend upon the support of American labor unions -- her family’s relationship with Giustra and Pacific Rubiales, her reversal on the Colombia trade pact and her subsequent move to bless Colombia’s human rights record complicate her efforts to present herself as a champion of worker rights.  These issues were amplified this week when the AFL-CIO cited persistent violence against Colombian union organizers in its push to block a new 12-nation trade deal that Clinton has championed.

As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and as bipartisan leadership in Congress pushes to approve as much as $4 billion to arm Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State. This confirms PJ Media’s reporting last week about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups. On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his forces were working with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate — both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations — near the Syrian/Lebanon border. “We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade. “We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal. “Let’s face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now in Qalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values,” he added.

In my report last week I noted that buried in a New York Times article last month was a Syrian “rebel” commander quoted as saying that his forces were working with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in raids along the border with Lebanon, including attacks on Lebanese forces. The Times article quickly tried to dismiss the commander’s statements, but the Daily Star article now confirms this alliance. Among the other pertinent points from that PJ Media article last week was that this time last year the bipartisan conventional wisdom amongst the foreign policy establishment was that the bulk of the Syrian rebel forces were moderates, a fiction refuted by a Rand Corporation study published last September that found nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hard-core Islamists.

Another relevant phenomenon I noted was that multiple arms shipments from the U.S. to the “vetted moderate” FSA were suspiciously raided and confiscated by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, prompting the Obama administration and the UK to suspend weapons shipments to the FSA last December. In April, the Obama administration again turned on the CIA weapons spigot to the FSA, and Obama began calling for an additional $500 million for the “vetted moderate rebels,” but by July the weapons provided to the FSA were yet again being raided and captured by ISIS and other terrorist groups. Remarkably, one Syrian dissident leader reportedly told Al-Quds al-Arabi that the FSA had lost $500 million worth of arms to rival “rebel” groups, much of which ended up being sold to unknown parties in Turkey and Iraq.

Venezuela seems to be following Ukraine on the neocon hit list for “regime change” as Washington punishes Caracas for acting against a perceived coup threat. But a broader problem is how the U.S. conflates “free markets” with “democracy,” giving “democracy” a bad name, writes Robert Parry.

The one common thread in modern U.S. foreign policy is an insistence on “free market” solutions to the world’s problems. That is, unless you’re lucky enough to live in a First World ally of the United States or your country is too big to bully.So, if you’re in France or Canada or – for that matter – China, you can have generous health and educational services and build a modern infrastructure. But if you’re a Third World country or otherwise vulnerable – like, say, Ukraine or Venezuela – Official Washington insists that you shred your social safety net and give free reign to private investors.

If you’re good and accept this “free market” domination, you become, by the U.S. definition, a “democracy” – even if doing so goes against the wishes of most of your citizens. In other words, it doesn’t matter what most voters want; they must accept the “magic of the market” to be deemed a “democracy.”Thus, in today’s U.S. parlance, “democracy” has come to mean almost the opposite of what it classically meant. Rather than rule by a majority of the people, you have rule by “the market,” which usually translates into rule by local oligarchs, rich foreigners and global banks.Governments that don’t follow these rules – by instead shaping their societies to address the needs of average citizens – are deemed “not free,” thus making them targets of U.S.-funded “non-governmental organizations,” which train activists, pay journalists and coordinate business groups to organize an opposition to get rid of these “un-democratic” governments.

Senior American officials are considering the deployment of US advisors to some largely isolated pockets of resistance in Iraq’s al-Anbar Province. Such a move would be fraught with risk since Anbar is mainly controlled by the Islamic State (ISIS or IS). These garrisons behind IS lines have been coming under greater pressure, and some have recently fallen. A handful of US advisors out there would make little difference, but other measures could help these garrisons hang on. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government has done practically nothing to reverse the dynamic in Anbar by turning Sunni Arabs against IS. Just as former PM Nouri al-Maliki senselessly drove most Sunni Arabs into IS’s arms through persecution, the Abadi government might rather see most Sunni Arabs crushed than empower them by making important concessions. That may sound bizarre, but not if Abadi and his Shi’a cronies believe the US would eventually feel compelled to intervene militarily with combat troops to smash IS (along with a lot of Sunni Arab Iraqis caught in the middle) if Iraqi forces cannot rebound. Baghdad also knows US Congressional hawks have been pressing for such military action.

Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey announced on October 30 that it was necessary to expand the American “train, advise and assist mission…into the al-Anbar Province.” US planners meant to reassure by stating they would not place advisors with units smaller than an Iraqi Army brigade (roughly 2,000 men), but several vulnerable garrisons either have that many soldiers or a composite force that large of soldiers, tribesmen, and in some cases Shi’a militiamen (presumably making them candidates for a US advisory presence—yet not especially safe ones). The makeup of the garrison of the sprawling al-Asad Airbase complex near the city of Hit is unclear, but the defenders of the vital Haditha Dam on the Euphrates are a mixed bag of soldiers and tribesmen, and those holding the city of Samarra and much of Baiji north of Baghdad are soldiers bolstered by Shi’a militiamen. The garrison of the city of Ramadi west of Baghdad consists of soldiers and tribesmen.

The hazards of deploying US advisors into isolated garrisons could be extreme. Since some garrisons were overwhelmed very quickly once their resistance cracked, there is no guarantee US advisors could be extracted quickly amidst the chaos of such a collapse. Advisors could be killed or captured. If captured, IS would showcase them, and then probably use them for televised beheadings. Additionally, in pockets with garrisons of Iraqi soldiers mixed with either Shi’a militiamen or tribesmen, US advisors could be threatened by their hosts. Many Shi’a militias are anti-American, harboring profound grudges. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army lost hundreds of fighters to US forces in Karbala in 2004 and Baghdad and Basra in 2008. American advisors could be killed by militiamen under murky circumstances. And garrisons nearing the end of their ability to defend themselves might even turn US advisors over to IS in exchange for guarantees of a safe passage out or better treatment.

In a landmark infrastructure bill passed in December, Congress finally penetrated the Fed’s “independence” by tapping its reserves and bank dividends for infrastructure funding. The bill was a start. But some experts, including Congressional candidate Tim Canova, say Congress should go further and authorize funds to be issued for infrastructure directly. For at least a decade, think tanks, commissions and other stakeholders have fought to get Congress to address the staggering backlog of maintenance, upkeep and improvements required to bring the nation’s infrastructure into the 21st century. Countries with less in the way of assets have overtaken the US in innovation and efficiency, while our dysfunctional Congress has battled endlessly over the fiscal cliff, tax reform, entitlement reform, and deficit reduction. Both houses and both political parties agree that something must be done, but they have been unable to agree on where to find the funds. Republicans aren’t willing to raise taxes on the rich, and Democrats aren’t willing to cut social services for the poor.

In December 2015, however, a compromise was finally reached. On December 4, the last day the Department of Transportation was authorized to cut checks for highway and transit projects, President Obama signed a 1,300-page $305-billion transportation infrastructure bill that renewed existing highway and transit programs. According to America’s civil engineers, the sum was not nearly enough for all the work that needs to be done. But the bill was nevertheless considered a landmark achievement, because Congress has not been able to agree on how to fund a long-term highway and transit bill since 2005. That was one of its landmark achievements. Less publicized was where Congress would get the money: largely from the Federal Reserve and Wall Street megabanks. The deal was summarized in a December 1st Bloomberg article titled “Highway Bill Compromise Would Take Money from US Banks”: The highway measure would be financed in part by a one-time use of Federal Reserve surplus funds and by a reduction in the 6 percent dividend that national banks receive from the Fed. . . . Banks with $10 billion or less in assets would be exempt from the cut. The Fed’s surplus capital comes from the 12 reserve banks. The highway bill would allow for a one-time draw of $19 billion from the surplus, which totaled $29.3 billion as of Nov. 25. . . . Banks vigorously fought the dividend cut, which was estimated to generate about $17 billion over 10 years for the highway trust fund.

On the face of it, these should be heady times for American workers. U.S. unemployment is as low as it’s been in nearly two decades (3.9% as of July) and the nation’s private-sector employers have been adding jobs for 101 straight months – 19.5 million since the Great Recession-related cuts finally abated in early 2010, and 1.5 million just since the beginning of the year. But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.

The disconnect between the job market and workers’ paychecks has fueled much of the recent activism in states and cities around raising minimum wages, and it also has become a factor in at least some of this year’s congressional campaigns.

After adjusting for inflation, however, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power it did in 1978, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.