Economist Jeffrey Sachs: U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela & Killed Over 40,000 Since 2017 — Amy Goodman interviews Jeffrey D. Sachs

More than 40,000 people have died in Venezuela since 2017 as a result of U.S. sanctions, according to a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research co-authored by economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot. The report examines how U.S. sanctions have reduced the availability of food and medicine in Venezuela and increased disease and mortality. We speak with Jeffrey Sachs in our New York studio. In the report, he writes, “American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.”

The human cost of economic warfare.

Democracy Now!
Economist Jeffrey Sachs: U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela & Killed Over 40,000 Since 2017

Amy Goodman interviews Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development, and Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

See also

It is strange how the urgent installation of liberal democracy by force correlates so often with oil reserves not aligned to the USA, as in Libya, Iraq or Venezuela, while countries with massive oil reserves which permit US military domination and align with the West and Israel can be as undemocratic as they wish, eg Saudi Arabia. Venezuela is an imperfect democracy but it is far, far more of a democracy than Saudi Arabia and with a much better human rights record. The hypocrisy of Western media and politicians is breathtaking....

Craig Murray Blog
Venezuela and Binary Choice
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

Anne Gulland — Coalition forces killed more civilians than Islamic State, study finds

"We had to destroy the place to save it."

Defend Democracy Press
Coalition forces killed more civilians than Islamic State, study finds

Anne Gulland

See also

Israel wants to be ‘darkness unto the nations’ — to remove the mask so as to reveal the ugly face of ultranationalist Israel in all its repugnance

Nation-state Bill Heralds the End of Israel as a Jewish, Democratic State

Mordechai Kremnitzer

Zachary Keck — Report: Americans Support Use of Nuclear Weapons If It Saves Lives of U.S. Military

As Sagan and Valentino note, the results speak for themselves. “The main conclusions of these survey experiments are clear,” they write. “The majority of the U.S. public has not internalized either a belief in the nuclear taboo or a strong noncombatant immunity norm. When faced with realistic scenarios in which they are forced to contemplate a trade-off between sacrificing a large number of U.S. troops in combat or deliberately killing even larger numbers of foreign noncombatants, the majority of respondents approve of killing civilians in an effort to end the war.”

The results do strongly suggest the nuclear taboo and norm against targeting civilians have not taken hold, at least among the American public.…

Perhaps the most important lesson of the survey is that it is imperative to cultivate strong, far-sighted leaders to guide the country abroad. After all, respondents suggested they were willing to support a president’s decision even if it was not their preferred choice. The need for far-sighted leadership is especially pressing at a time when improved accuracy is giving America the ability to use smaller nuclear bombs that cause far less civilian casualties. In the wrong hands, these bombs could be tempting to use, even though doing so would let the nuclear cat out of the bag, with uncertain and potentially catastrophic repercussions.  

The National Interest
Report: Americans Support Use of Nuclear Weapons If It Saves Lives of U.S. Military
Zachary Keck

Robert Parry — Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo

US double-standard, because "exceptionalism." The larger title is. US, good; Russia, China, Iran and anyone else the US elite disagrees with, bad.

Meanwhile, Americans are distracted by pussy and booty.

Consortium News
Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo

Robert Parry

Reuters
Islamic State said to use human shields as coalition advances on Mosul

The United Nations has said the Mosul battle could leave as many as 1 million people homeless.

"There's a chance, maybe a significant chance, that it's going to be fewer people than we expect, but of course it would be dangerous to assume that," the senior State Department official said.

Reuters
For U.S. and Obama, Mosul campaign is calculated risk

RT
‘Get out, Erdogan!’ Huge demo in Baghdad protests Turkey’s Iraq presence

New Cold War — Grim toll of rising Ukrainian shelling in Donbas, eastern Ukraine

The following is a compilation of eleven news reports that provide some overview of the scale of the recent escalation of shelling and other military activity by the Ukrainian armed forces and the extremist paramilitary forces allied with it in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Below those news reports is the daily report for August 16, 2015 of the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This typical, daily report is especially lengthy.

The New Cold War.org website does not provide daily reports of the military situation in Donbas. Given the scale of Ukrainian violations of the Minsk-2 ceasefire agreement of Feb. 15, 2015, this would be a task beyond our means. We do report on the overall political and military situation. Readers who wish to read or research the situation day by day are recommended to go to the news sources cited below, among others.

As for relying on Western media sources, there are none which report in any detail on the ongoing situation in eastern Ukraine. A reader of Western media would be hard-pressed to know or learn that a ceasefire agreement is supposed to be in place, still less what are the terms and conditions of that agreement and who is living, and not living, up to them.

The New Cold War
Grim toll of rising Ukrainian shelling in Donbas, eastern Ukraine

Dar Jamail — Report Shows US Invasion, Occupation of Iraq Left 1 Million Dead

A recently published report has revealed that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was responsible for the deaths of approximately 1 million Iraqis, which is 5 percent of the total population of the country. The report also tallies hundreds of thousands of casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Authors of the report, titled "Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the 'War on Terror,'" have told Truthout that other casualty reports, like the often-quoted Iraq Body Count (IBC), which has a high-end estimate at the time of this writing of 154,563, are far too low in their estimates, and that the real numbers reach "genocidal dimensions."

Truthout

Report Shows US Invasion, Occupation of Iraq Left 1 Million Dead
Dahr Jamail

Their fanatics versus our true believers. Can you tell the difference?

Air Force F-15 Wing Commander to Subordinates: USA Is "Doing the Lord's Work" in the Middle East

Mikey Weinstein, AlterNet