Monday 08.10.07 and Gordon Brown came in for a lot of flak for not calling a snap general election early November. A lot of the criticism centred around him being a 'coward' who 'dithered' due to not so good poll results following the Tory Party conference getting favourable media coverage. The decision not to go to the country was announced on Sunday morning 07.10.07 in a pre-recorded television interview for  'The Andrew Marr Show' broadcast at 9am. The interview had been recorded at Chequers, the PM's country house.

It was only in the Guardian on Monday the 8th that any mention was made of Gordon Brown having Rupert Murdoch with him at Chequers over the weekend, and then it was just one sentence, third from the end of a 1,000 word comment piece by Jackie Ashley . Nothing in the Times, Telegraph, Independent or Observer. The most important bit of information relating to the calling of an election and it was buried.

More about the Antipodean marsupial - the Tasmanian devil, aka Sarcophilus harrisii - later, along with my pre-no-election announcement suspicions without the knowledge of his meeting with Brown. It is worth considering before that some other events which occured over the summer when people were more interested in their annual holidays or scandal distractions in the USA.

If people didn't think climate change was happening then the weather records broken during the summer may have helped in disabusing some. In Britain a record wet summer and expansive floods was rounded off with a spate of tornados through the East Midlands.

Blue tongue was found for the first time amongst British live stock, requiring nation wide restrictions on movement and the slaughtering of infected animals. A bloom of midges, the vector spreading the disease, was blown across the Channel from the Netherlands where the disease has become established following its migration, either due to live stock importation from outside the EU or moving north from southern Europe with a warmer climate. This followed a new outbreak of Foot & Mouth in Surrey . The outbreak was traced to nearby Government and commercial research facilities at Pirbright.

As an aside. Pirbright has a military presence, PDF . There is extensive tank and infantry training ranges for the Aldershot garrison which is only a few miles south. I was stationed at Keogh Barracks in Ash Vale on the south-west edge of Pirbright ranges and just down the road from the town of Pirbright. Keogh Barracks is the Royal Army Medical Corps basic training depot and also has the Army's tropical disease and hygiene training centre in the grounds, or did have when I was there from 1965 to 1967.

The Arctic is losing record amounts of summer sea ice, to the extent that the fabled North West and North East Passages are now navigable during the northern summer months. The region has opened up for oil and gas exploration. Russia has laid claim to a continental shelf extending from the Siberian coast to the North Pole and Canada is laying claim to the North-West Passage by building a military base - used by NATO of course. Britain has joined the fray and is laying claim to a swathe of Antarctica seabed .

The planet is trying to re-adjust it's balance to changing variables in the atmosphere caused, in most part, by activities consequent to the way we human beings govern ourselves with a system predicated on class. And our response? Threaten the planet's Artic region with bombs and guns, drilling and oil spills; "If you don't stop melting we'll make it so hot for you that you'll.........."!!   Have humanities governmental leaders become this stupid or do they genuinely believe war against the planet can be won; that a privileged class can maintain its status while making the Earth incapable of allowing our species to reproduce ourselves?

The speed of the Greenland glaciers travels to the sea has increased, doubled in the five years from 2001 - 2006 . As the Greenland ice cap melts the water finds its way to the base of glaciers - that boundary where ice meets the metres thick moraine of boulders and rock being crushed between the weight of ice and the ground. Water lubricating the friction as efficiently as oil. This isn't small trickles of water, but 'moulins' , rivers cascading through cathedral size caverns beneath the glacial surface, down to the grinding zone.

A band of floods struck across the Sahal and sub-Sahara Africa, from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, displacing millions. This years harvest has been destroyed while still in the ground. Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' will kick in as the countries affected take emergency food aid to get through to the next harvest and then be inundated with subsidised stable crops like wheat and rice from the US and Europe, depressing African farmers prices. The four global seed companies will try and sell genetically modified seeds that they have intellectual property rights to, then demand the African farmers pay for the next years planting of any viable seeds collected when harvesting the crop. GM seeds are designed to be tolerant to heavy use of strong herbicides and insecticides manufactured by the agrochemical industry and are only economic when used for industrial scale mono-culture crop production. IMF and World Bank loans to facilitate the process, marketed as help to get through the crisis, will be conditional on structural adjustment programmes - privatisation and theft to you and me.

Such a free trade, corporate globalisation process, exploiting disaster, will be attempted. But with the crisis running through such bodies as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation due in great part to the campaigning activities of southern hemisphere activists and Social Forum participants, this is not a foregone conclusion.

The floods across Africa came after decades of drought and periodic famine because the rain clouds forming over the Equator failed to move north bringing the seasonal rains. The phenomena of 'global dimming' is implicated, which is about the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface decreasing over the two decades from the 1970s through the 1980s. Up to a 30% decrease across Russia. It looks like having been caused through heavy atmospheric pollution with particulates migrating to the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean, cooling the waters off Africa and which broke the African monsoon cycle. The particulates were produced when burning fossil fuels for energy in the 'developed' countries of America and Europe.

The use of catalytic converters on cars and trucks, the controls on coal fired power station emissions have helped clear the atmosphere somewhat of these particulates. Hence the rebound of heavy floods in Africa I would have thought. But global dimming has also kept global warming somewhat suppressed. As the skies continue to clear the rate of global warming will increase.  For the three days following the atrocity of 11th September 2001, all commercial aircraft in America were grounded. Vapour trails disappeared and the difference in temperature range between the cold of night and the warmth of day increased by 1'C. Something for conspiracy freaks - maybe the British government's policy of increasing air traffic in the coming years is a surreptitious attempt to keep global warming in check! An Horizon documentary from last year will give a much better understanding of what is happening than my fumbling for the vocabulary and weak wit to explain it.

As an entity, the American military is the world's fourth most profligate user, or more accurately, waster of oil. America itself is still top, even without the military's consumption. The killing machine's voracious appetite for oil is also out-done by the metronomic liar Cheney's lust for blood. And some of the geopolitical developments, the jockeying and maneouverings of the Anglo-American Alliance, Europe, Russia and China in the revivified Great Game to control the resources of the Eurasian landmass, are pointing more and more to a widening of the genocidal war on Iraq into a regional and possibly global catastrophe. As if climate change wasn't enough to try and deal with.

The most important resource in Eurasia is oil and its control and direction of flow is crucial for global influence. A detailed, extensively researched and illustrated article of the current state of pipeline deals and routes, the alliances and national interests they sustain by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya at Global Research , is a must read.

Iran is one of the focal points for any extension of the war, around which a macabre dance is circling, accompanied by the rhythmic, captivating chants of "More War. More War" by the weapons dealers. Bush added to this hypnotic drumbeat when he made a speech to an American veterans audience in Aug. He threatened Iran for destabilising Iraq by supplying the arms that are supposedly responsible for the deaths of American soldiers.

The genocide being orchestrated against the Iraqi people is not being conducted by Iran but by the occupying military of the Anglo-American Alliance and its mercenaries, of which Bush brags being the Commander in Chief. It was his order for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq which instigated and sustains the genocide - 1.2 million Iraqis dead . He cannot squirm his way out of the responsibility by cowardly blaming anybody else for the always inevitable, blood drenched consequences of his actions and the death of Americans in Iraq. The problem is though, his pronouncements and directions carry with them the weight of his position as President of the USA and will be acted on by apparatchiks in his administration. Acted on as well by true believers, the demented who are proud to proclaim their misanthropy with perpetual war, in a vain attempt to maintain an unsustainable mode of production.

The sabre rattling has been backed up with the financing of ethnic and religious groups opposed to the government of Iran. London is a base for some of these groups. They have the ear of elements in the government, the Foreign Office and the media, receiving funding channeled from gawd knows where. Certainly not from the average Iranian struggling to make ends meet.

Through last year and this, some bombs exploded in crowded areas in the south west provinces in Iran that the Iranians blamed on terrorist groups supported by the USA. Seymour Hersh wrote last year in The New Yorker that the US special forces were conducting intelligence and targeting operations in Iran. The provinces are where Iran's oil and gas fields are located and the population is predominantly Arab not Persian, the difference is a cultural space which is being 'wedged' in a destabilisation exercise. It is happening here in the British media when commentators do not join the rest of the world and see and say that the enemy of world peace is us, the Anglo-American Alliance. Not Tehran or Baghdad or Damascus but Washington and London. It being so fucking obvious what possible reason could they have in adding to the demonisation of Iran?

There were reports earlier in the year of Iran chasing and shelling some Iranian Kurdish fighters into the northern, Kurdish region of Iraq. The group proclaimed a commitment to fighting for a federal Iran. That would entail Iran going through a process akin to Balkanisation, something no Iranian government can countenance, even a secular liberal one.

British troops have been pulled out of bases in Basra and re-deployed to the airport. They are though, conducting operations along the Iraq/Iran border .

Italian General, Fabio Mini, in an article translated by Diego Traversa and revised by Mary Rizzo for Tlaxcala and posted at PeacePalestine , thinks that when the new French Foreign Minister, Kouchner says; “we must prepare ourselves for the worst.”, then there will be war.

The article develops the idea of 'the emergency concept' where over the last 15 years "strange connections and affinities have come into being...........And one of the most unusual connections is the one that has been established between military staff, humanitarian workers and foreign policy, to such an extent that each of the three components can pass itself off as the other two. The main cement of this union is the emergency concept." It immediately struck me that the piece has affinities with Naomi Klein's latest publication "The Shock Doctrine".

In another must read article, Gen Fabio Mini claims that nearly all the components are in place for an attack on Iran and only require an event which can be amplified to provide a trigger for war.

The other focal point is Syria/Lebanon which may be attacked by the USA surrogate in the region, Israel. On the 6th Sept Israel conducted an air raid on Syria. It received substantial coverage on the internet and some press a few days later despite the refusal of Israel to admit to it (which they finally did a month after the event). A lot was made of it being an Israeli pre-emptive attack on nuclear or chemical/biological warfare facilities that Syria was building with the aid of North Korea and Iran. A line being peddled by Neocons like John Bolton. After the laughing died down reporters started seeing it as a practice run for an Israeli attack on Iran. I think other explanations need consideration as well.

As well as an attempt to cow Syria and de-couple its alliance with Iran as Jonathon Cook writes, I think the raid should also be seen as a probe to test the air-defence readiness of Syria and the abilities of the newly supplied Russian land-to-air missile batteries deployed around the Syrian ports on the Mediterranean. Russia is extending and upgrading the ports to facilitate the stationing of some of their Black Sea fleet for a presence in the eastern Med and which will be a counter to the NATO fleet cruising off Lebanon.

The air-raid was long distant requiring the aircraft to make a wide westward arc across the Mediterranean before entering Syrian territory via southern Turkey. It's not the USA's or Israel's preferred option. They want to upgrade the airfield at El Qlaiaat in northern Lebanon to use as the base for pushing the coastal corridor that is Lebanon, north to the Turkish border, the priority of any military campaign against Syria being it's land-locking. The subduing of the Palestinian refugee camp at Nahr el-Bared by the Lebanese army has just been completed. It is only a few miles south of the airfield and now makes its use a possibility. But they have a problem if they want to strike Syria within the ever closing time frame before the next USA presidential elections.

Hezbollah along with allies , including secular and Christian forces, like Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, the Lebanese Communist Party and Shia Amal, defeated a land invasion by Israel last year. So Israel's army cannot be used for the task. The Lebanese Army, despite its 'success' in Nahr el-Bared, is not capable and they would first have to disarm Hezbollah. Even if they wanted a civil war they couldn't do it. A disarmed Hezbollah is what the USA and Israel want but.....

There is another land army in Lebanon - NATO - with a large French contingent, the old coloniser of the Lebanese. They could be used to try and disarm Hezbollah and with the recent election of Sarkozy to the French Presidency and that statement by the new French Foreign Minister Kouchner, they may try. But it would not be a short campaign and any hope of co-ordinating a land push north with a surprise long distant air assault on Syria has been lost. They need El Qlaiaat and a land army, so an attack on Syria through Lebanon looks like not happening in the short term.

For the hell that is todays Iraq, more threats to its integrity as a state. On 09.10.07 the Guardian carried a report that the Turkish parliament is being asked to by Erdogan, the Turkish PM to support militarily interfere with the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Citing the presence of the PKK - Kurdish Communist guerillas - whom they claim are responsible for recent fatal attacks in Turkey launched from Iraq. The PKK has some influence with Turkey's large Kurdish population in the south-east of the country but have differences with the Iraqi Kurdish groups who dominate northern Iraq's politics. The attacks by the PKK are just an excuse and not the real reason for interference. The most important consideration for a military incursion by Turkey would be to stop an independent Kurdistan being established in Northern Iraq,  the preferred option of the US Senate which recently voted for the partition of poor, war ravaged Iraq. An independent Kurdistan, especially one with revenues from the oil wells of Kirkuk would give an example and beacon for the Turkish Kurds to follow. Turkey, like Iran is loath to losing a chunk of its territory. The American House of Representatives foreign affairs committee voted 10.10.07 to call the genocide committed against the Armenians by Turkey early last century, genocide. Which it was but the USA is committing genocide today in Iraq and I think the vote is called an 'hypocritical smokescreen'. A smokescreen that has angered the Turks giving them more reason to invade. Some timing! The Turkish Parliament has just voted to authorise attacks on the PKK in Kurdish Iraq.

Iran and Turkey may have more than the situation along their borders with Iraq in common. A pipeline is being proposed linking Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey taking oil to the Turkish Med and eventually via pipeline to Europe. See Nazemroaya above. The regional implications could see the dividing of Iraq between a northern Kurdish region controlled by Turkey and a southern Iraq under the influence of Iran and the centre in turmoil. The strategy to control the direction of oil flows by military means has effectively failed and betraying the Kurds again could be the route the USA chooses to get out of Iraq.

The Second Summit of Caspian Sea States is meeting in Tehran from 16th October. Putin, the Russian President is there , not primarily to discuss Iran's nuclear future as has been promoted by the BBC Radio 4 news, but to explore a Caspian Sea defence pact and determine the share of it's resources.  

Over Iran and Lebanon/Syria, America and Russia are faced off, their respective alliances conducting joint military exercises in other regions of the globe. The members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation - Russia, China, the central Asian states - held theirs in the Urals in August . The Russian Airforce is also exercising all across Russia at the same time as the wider Anglo-American alliance, which includes Canada and Australia, are carrying out theirs, right now, over the Arctic, in the USA and also in the Pacific. Details of the exercises, Vigilant Shield 2008, Pacific Shield and TOPOFF 4, by Michel Chossudovsky and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya are at Global Research. The exercises started 13.10.07. and are scheduled to finish on 20.10.07.

The Russians have re-instituted the long-range air patrols the Soviets used to conduct during the Cold War with nuclear capable planes. The patrols extend to the borders of Alaska and Britain. In Britain RAF Typhoons were scrambled.

China is a member of the SCO with a standing equal to Russia. It is also an independent power with leverage on international events. The Chinese are greatly dependent on Iranian oil and have joint contracts to develop Iranian gas fields. They are busily signing bilateral agreements with other oil producers, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan in competition with Anglo-American interests. China has pointed out to the USA that as they are both oil importing countries they have some common ground on energy security which should be explored. China also has huge amounts of USA debt, dollars and outsourced jobs. Any calling in of the debt or diversification of currency holdings away from the dollar, could have unpleasant consequences to an American economy which is fragile to say the least. It's a leverage Russia doesn't have and what China doesn't have and Russia does, is the ability to cause 'unsustainable damage' on mainland USA in the event of hostilities. Hence the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.

China, whose Communist Party is holding its 17th Congress right now, does not want a war, nor I believe does Russia and it is looking increasing like everyone but the USA is playing it long, waiting the outcome of the next USA presidential election. It is still very tense and as General Fabio Mini made clear, everything is ready to exploit any event and amplify it to the level of a trigger for an attack on Iran.
 
It is not just blocs or states that have agendas able to be deployed for power and leverage in geopolitical maneuoverings. Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Media, have the ability to affect global political direction with their control of the flow and price of energy, health and knowledge. The western giants have a symbiotic relationship within the Anglo-American Alliance - a revolving door of employment opportunities for executives, civil servants and advisors. All tied in.

The most pernicious of these is Big Media. As well as controlling the flow of knowledge, it reinforces the dominant ideology, shapes political debate in the population, distracts and dumbs down. (The marketing strategy of the Sun is to write for a reading age of 11 and it sells 4.5 million copies). Big Media has immense influence.

The most prominent, malign and ferocious of Big Media is News Corp controlled by Sarcophilus harrisii, aka Rupert Murdoch. The poor Tasmanian devil - the real one - is being decimated in its homeland by a cancer that is presenting ugly, painful tumours around it's mouth. Sarcophilus harrisii has been put on the vulnerable species list by the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. The bile that incessantly dribbles from the pages or TV screens around the world that Murdoch controls is as carcinogenic to the intellect. It cheerled for the neocons drive to war against Iraq, repeating lies ad nauseam.

The breadth of Murdoch's media and other holdings is truly global. He has the rabid Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones (NYSE) in the USA; Sky TV, The Times, Sun and News of the World in Britain; The Australian down under; newspaper titles, book publishers and TV stations to numerous to mention around the rest of the world, except Star TV in Asia with a big 'footprint' across China. (An authoritarian use of the word 'footprint' to explain the shadow cast on the Earth by a satellite's transmission and indicative of a domineering mindset.)

Along with acquiring satellite broadcasting rights through Star TV in China, Murdoch started a Chinese family to compliment his Australian one and leave a Chinese heir. Talk about dynasty building and cementing Sino-Aussie relations! Yeh. I know. He's an American citizen.

Due to this power Murdoch has the ear of presidents and prime ministers to dribble in. Which brings me back to the weekend of Brown's no-election announcement. Its well known that the Murdoch press is opposed to Britain integrating with Europe, his media campaigns to that affect, and coming up is a decision to have a referendum on a European 'constitution' or not.  It would be just one aspect of Murdoch's influence on Brown calling an election or not and why a PM listens to him. Another reason could be that with his Chinese satellite holdings, Murdoch becomes a conduit or back channel between China, USA and Britain, and brings with him other considerations for Brown to calculate.

I had originally thought Brown would go for a November election because with the build up in rhetoric demonising Iran, it would strengthen a USA decision to attack earlier than later. The deviousness of my thinking is such that whoever was PM when Iran is attacked would have another 4-5 years before the next election to weather the outcry in Britain and try and maintain the Anglo-American Alliance . That was without the fore knowledge of Murdoch being at Chequers. To put it bluntly, I forgot about him and his malign influence. I don't read his press or watch his TV.

Now, as an overheated week of speculation on Brown's intestinal fortitude starts to cool, Howard, the prime minister of Australia has decided to call an election on November 24th. Somehow I think Murdoch knew this and possibly Brown too. (Anyway the Australians kick-off. No mention of the Rugby World Cup here of course - not! He-he-he.)

The Howard government is an avid participant in the Anglo-American Alliance and is extremely disliked in Australia, with the opposition led by Kevin Rudd a far distance ahead in the polls. The early editorials of the Australian are concentrating on national issues, keeping out any mention of Australia's participation in the war on Iraq. To be expected. The Australian is also hedging it's bets, claiming that Rudd, who has called for the weak option of a review of military priorities not an end to the war, would be acceptable as long as he confronts the unions. Where have I heard that before? It seems like The Australian's latest poll "offers hope to Howard".  

Can the war be made the central issue of an election in Australia? If it can, then it will help weaken the Anglo-American Alliance. The Australian left have an opportunity to make it so. Murdoch will be using the election results and the campaign to judge popular sentiment and level of political activity, as will all others with an interest.

I still think the only chance we have to try and somehow mitigate the species killing effects of climate change is to stop the war. And once and for all put an end to treating people as disposable commodities traded in the Great Game.

One thing about Australia is that it is in the global south, and the global south is where the opposition to globalisation for the rich and the destruction of the environment is being fought the hardest and with the greatest ingenuity; "Environmental Movement in the Global South: The Pivotal Agent in the Fight against Global Warming" as Walden Bello writes .    

Reasons to be cheerful.

A study of the human genome has uncovered new genetic variations associated with multiple sclerosis. Another recent development in MS is the Mayo Clinic announcing they have found an antibody able to trigger remyelination in mice which could offer the possibility of slowing or halting progress of the MS.