"He died like a dog." President Trump could not have scripted a better one-liner as he got ready for his Obama bin Laden close-up in front of the whole world.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fake caliph, ISIS/Daesh leader, the most wanted man on the planet, was "brought to justice" under Trump's watch. The dead dog caliph is now positioned as the ultimate foreign policy winning trophy ahead of 2020 reelection.

The climatic scenes of the inevitable-as-death-and-taxes movie or Netflix series to come are already written. (Trump: I "watched it like a movie.") Cowardly uber-terrorist cornered in a dead-end tunnel, eight helicopter gunships hovering above, dogs barking in the darkness, three terrified children taken as hostages, coward detonates a suicide vest, tunnel collapses over himself and the children.

A crack forensic team carrying samples of the fake caliph's DNA apparently does its job in record time. The remains of the self-exploded target - then sealed in plastic bags - confirm it: it's Baghdadi. In the dead of night, it's time for the commando unit to go back to Irbil, a 70-minute flight over northeast Syria and northwest Iraq. Cut to Trump's presser. Mission accomplished. Roll credits.

This all happened at a compound only 300 meters away from the village of Barisha, in Idlib, rural northwest Syria, only 5km from the Syria-Turkish border. The compound is no more: it was turned to rubble so it would not become a (Syrian) shrine for a renegade Iraqi.

There are virtually no ISIS/Daesh jihadis in Irbil, but lots of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, as in al-Qaeda in Syria, known inside the Beltway as "moderate rebels," including hardcore Turkmen brigades previously weaponized by Turkish intel. The only rational explanation is that the Caliph might have identified this Idlib backwater near Barisha, away from the war zone, as the ideal under-the-radar passport to cross to Turkey.

Russians knew?

The plot thickens when we examine Trump's long list of "thank yous" for the successful raid. Russia came first, followed by Syria - presumably Syrian Kurds, not Damascus - Turkey and Iraq. In fact, Syrian Kurds were only credited with "certain support," in Trump's words. Their commander Mazloum Abdi, though, preferred to extol the raid as a "historic operation" with essential Syrian Kurd intel input.

In Trump's press conference, expanding somewhat on the thank yous, Russia again came first ("great" collaboration) and Iraq was "excellent": the Iraqi National Intelligence Service later commented on the break it had gotten, via a Syrian who had smuggled the wives of two of Baghdadi's brothers, Ahmad and Jumah, to Idlib via Turkey.

There's no way US Special Forces could have pulled this off without complex, combined Turkish, Iraqi and Syrian Kurd intel. Additionally, President Erdogan accomplishes one more tactical masterpiece, juggling between performing the role of dutiful, major NATO ally while still allowing al-Qaeda remnants their safe haven in Idlib under the watchful eye of the Turkish military.

Significantly, Trump said, about Moscow: "We told them, 'We're coming in' ... and they said, 'Thank you for telling us.'" But, "they did not know the mission."

They definitely didn't. In fact, the Russian Defense Ministry, via spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov, said it had "no reliable information about US servicemen conducting an operation to 'yet another' elimination of the former Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the Turkish-controlled part of the Idlib de-escalation zone."

And on Trump's "we told them," the Russian Defense Ministry was emphatic: "We know nothing about any assistance to the flight of US aircraft to the Idlib de-escalation zone's airspace in the course of this operation."

According to ground sources in Syria, a prevalent rumor in Idlib is that the "dead dog" in Barisha could be Abu Mohammad Salama, the leader of Haras al-Din, a minor sub-group of al-Qaeda in Syria. Haras al-Din has not issued any statement about it.

ISIS/Daesh anyway has already named a successor: Abdullah Qardash, aka Hajji Abdullah al-Afari, also Iraqi and also a former Saddam Hussein military officer. There's a strong possibility that ISIS/Daesh and myriad subgroups and variations of al-Qaeda in Syria will now re-merge, after their split in 2014.

Who gets the oil?

There's no plausible explanation whatsoever for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for years, enjoying the freedom of shuttling back and forth between Syria and Iraq, always evading the formidable surveillance capabilities of the US government.

Well, there's also no plausible explanation for that famous convoy of 53 brand new, white Toyota Hi-Luxes crossing the desert from Syria to Iraq in 2014 crammed with flag-waving ISIS/Daesh jihadis on their way to capture Mosul, also evading the cornucopia of US satellites covering the Middle East 24/7.

And there's no way to bury the 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) leaked memo that explicitly named "the West, Gulf monarchies, and Turkey" as seeking a "Salafist principality" in Syria (opposed, significantly, by Russia, China and Iran - the key poles of Eurasia integration).

That was way before ISIS/Daesh's irresistible ascension. The DIA memo was unmistakable: If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).

True, the fake caliph has been proclaimed definitely dead at least five times, starting in December 2016. Yet the timing, now, could not be more convenient.

The facts on the ground, after the latest ground-breaking Russia-brokered deal between the Turks and the Syrian Kurds, graphically spell out the slow but sure restoration of Syria's territorial integrity. There will be no balkanization of Syria. The last remaining pocket to be cleared of jihadis is Irbil.

And then, there's the oil question. The "died as a dog" movie literally buries - at least for now - an extremely embarrassing story: the Pentagon deploying tanks to "protect" Syrian oilfields. This is as illegal, by any possible interpretation of international law, as is, for that matter, the very presence in Syria of US troops, which were never invited by the government in Damascus.

Persian Gulf traders told me that before 2011, Syria was producing 387,000 barrels of oil a day and selling 140,000 - the equivalent of 25.1% of Damascus's income. Nowadays, the Omar, al-Shadaddi and Suwayda fields, in eastern Syria, would not be producing more than 60,000 barrels a day. Still, that's essential for Damascus and for "the Syrian people" so admired within the Beltway - the legitimate owners of the oil.

The mostly Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) did in fact take military control of Deir er-Zor when they were fighting ISIS/Daesh. Yet the majority of the local population is Sunni Arab. They will never tolerate any hint of a longtime Syrian Kurd domination - much less in tandem with a US occupation.

Sooner or later the Syrian army will get there, with Russian air power support. The Deep State might, but Trump, in an electoral year, would never risk a hot war over a few, illegally occupied oilfields.

In the end, the "died as a dog" movie can be interpreted as a victory lap, and the closure of a historical arc languishing since 2011. When he "abandoned" the Syrian Demoratic Forces Kurds, Trump effectively buried the Rojava question - as in an independent Syrian Kurdistan.

Russia is in charge in Syria - on all fronts. Turkey got rid of its "terrorism" paranoia - always having to demonize the Syrian Kurd PYD and its armed wing YPG as a spin-off of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) separatists inside Turkey - and this may help to settle the Syrian refugee question. Syria is on the way to recover all its territory.

The "died as a dog" movie can also be interpreted as the liquidation of a formerly useful asset that was a valued component of the gift that keeps on giving, the never-ending Global War on Terror. Other scarecrows, and other movies, await.

(c) 2019 Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is "Obama Does Globalistan." He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

The lawmakers are doing it. The candidates are doing it. The mass media are doing it. All are excluding from their arenas the leading citizen groups as never before, since the early nineteen sixties. The nonprofit national advocacy/research organizations that led the way for social reforms are being shut out of the political process. These groups were pioneers in consumer rights, environmental protections, labor rights, and whistle-blower protections. These groups fought for freedom of information laws and practices and access to justice in ways that have made our country better in so many ways.

Television anchors like Judy Woodruff (The News Hour, PBS) and Chuck Todd (Meet the Press, NBC) prefer to interview reporters, political consultants or tired columnists, instead of knowledgeable civic leaders who use facts and speak truth to power.

One result of this marginalization is that the public discussion of key services and safeguards for the people is often vapid and fact-starved. For starters, the talking heads who are invited on news shows rarely, if ever, speak of the corporate crime wave, the corporate welfare scandals, or many preventable mass casualties that flow from corporate negligence and cover-ups. The few news articles on such subjects are often thin and untimely because reporters are not in regular touch with citizen groups, instead choosing to rely on irregular official leaks and occasional insider information.

Take, for example, the current discussion on Medicare-for-All or single-payer health insurance. The Democratic presidential candidates and other progressive lawmakers who support catching up with dozens of other industrial nations are not making the strongest case for this basic human right. They say that all Americans should have access to health care, referring to the unaffordable price of care.

The corporatists and some of these Democratic presidential hopefuls attack Medicare-for-All, asserting that the program would be prohibitively expensive by citing wild projections from biased think tanks. Bernie Sanders rebuts by proposing overdue restoration of higher taxes on the wealthy and big business. He asserts that whatever increases there are on the middle class would more than be made up by no longer having to pay health insurance premiums and out of pocket costs.

Moreover, most advocates of single payer do not stress the millions of ailments and injuries which persist because people cannot afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in a timely manner. According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly 30 million Americans are uninsured and 86 million Americans are underinsured. And about 40,000 of them die from that same deprivation each year. Such casualties due to lack of insurance do not happen in countries with universal insurance.

Furthermore, little mention is made of Canada's far more efficient single-payer (public insurance, private delivery of care) that covers every Canadian at half the average per capita cost of that in the U.S. Canada also has free choice of doctor and hospital, in contrast to the cruel, narrow networks in the U.S.

Canada has better outcomes, less billing fraud by far and fewer casualties due to "medical error and negligence." This is because the U.S. has a serious problem of over-diagnosis and over treatment, due to profit motives built into our chaotic, wasteful, corrupt, and profiteering system.

Single payer means one billing agent in Canada, not inscrutable bills from 1500 insurance companies with manipulated codes and discriminatory fees (for example, many hospitals charge the uninsured more in the U.S.).

In Canada, there is far less anxiety, dread, and fear about medical bills than in the U.S. Imagine what that is worth!

In the U.S. people worry that if they change jobs, they'll lose their insurance. In Canada, physicians practice medicine, not complex bookkeeping. In the U.S., physicians plead for permission to treat their patients, while slow-paying insurance companies look out for their corporate bottom line.

The sheer administrative costs in the U.S. are, as a percentage of overall costs, more than double the administrative costs in Canada. Health care in Canada is on average less than $5000 average per capita per year; in the U.S. it has just soared over $10,000 per capita per year. Canada spends 10% of its GDP on health care and covers everyone; the U.S. is reaching 18% of GDP while leaving out tens of millions of people.

No one in Canada has to go bankrupt due to medical bills, as is the case half a million times a year in the U.S. Drug prices for the same drugs are lower in Canada than in the U.S. due to the bargaining power of Canadian single-payer system. Just in terms of correlating health care data, single payer detects what works and what doesn't far better than the secret proprietary data of many U.S. insurance companies (which excessively compensate their executives). For example, in 2017, Aetna paid its CEO, Mark Bertolini, nearly $59 million as compensation (see the Hartford Courant article published on April 7, 2018). These salaries and compensation packages come out of your pockets, as do the co-pays, deductibles. The maddeningly complex fine-print exclusions add insult to injury.

In the U.S. people resort to GoFundMe campaigns to collect money for major operations that cost far more than they would in Canada. After all, to get the same procedures all Canadians have to do is show their Medicare card which is given to them at birth.

At the extreme, people in the U.S. commit minor crimes just to go to jail to get health insurance. Recently, a couple in their seventies in Washington state took their lives due to being so overwhelmed by their soaring medical bills.

These and other examples further illustrate the advantages of a single-payer system. These numerous points were conveyed in a printed pamphlet personally delivered to dozens of members of Congress (see "25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare for the 2020 Elections" and singlepayeraction.org). Some of these deliveries were followed by my personal calls. To date, not one office, other than Congressman Jamie Raskin's, acknowledged receipt. Nor have any of these lawmakers or the presidential candidates used such obvious arguments in this pamphlet or other available materials to rebut or to explain. Rarely do any media outlets present the overwhelming advantages of a single-payer health care system.

Recently, liberal columnist, Mark Shields appeared on the PBS News Hour and mindlessly characterized single payer as being too expensive.

When Medicare was established in 1965, the elderly had no trouble giving up their private health insurance plans that could at any time have been weakened, dropped, or not renewed. Just as today, workers with private company plans can be forced to accept less coverage or be laid off without any coverage. Mr. Shields seemed to have forgotten the fear that workers have about the unilateral power of companies to change the rules and delay or limit the benefits.

The foregoing case for a single-payer health insurance system is just one example of how corporate power prevails when there is media and political exclusion of the informed and experienced civic community. Speak up, people!

John Conyers' long career is a window on the decline of Black politics in the two generations since the demise of the mass Black movement.

John Conyers passed away at age 90 this week, the sixth longest-serving U.S. Representative in history, having spent more than half a century representing Detroit, and the longest-serving Black congressperson, by far.

I remember Conyers with great affection, both as a friend and as the last vestige of a time when it still could be imagined that some Black Democratic politicians might play a positive role on the road to Black liberation and world peace. He was also a jazz lover who liked to smoke a little herb - a detail that's shareable now that Michigan has legalized recreational pot.

As a standard-bearer of the progressive Black petit bourgeoisie, attorney Conyers was the best of the early Congressional Black Caucus, which he helped found in 1971 along with 12 other lawmakers. Conyers was already on President Nixon's enemies list, a distinction he shared with fellow Black congressman Ron Dellums, of California.

Immediately upon entering office in 1965, after a hairs-breadth election victory, Conyers hired campaign worker Rosa Parks, the exiled and jobless heroine of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. "If it wasn't for Rosa Parks, I never would have gotten elected," Conyers told a Parks biographer. Parks remained on his payroll until she retired in 1988.

Conyers was one of only seven lawmakers to vote against funding the Vietnam War in 1965, the year of the first massive U.S. troop buildup under President Lyndon Johnson. In 1972, Conyers introduced a resolution to remove Nixon from office for his conduct of the war. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Conyers quickly put forward a bill to make the martyred leader's birthday a national holiday, which finally became law in 1983. Along with Rep. Dellums and future Georgia congressman John Lewis, Conyers was among those that sponsored the "call" for the formation of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, founded in 1973 and most closely associated with communist former political prisoner Angela Davis. (The Alliance was later dissolved, but will be "refounded" in Chicago, at a November 22 conference.)

The mass movement of the previous decade was not yet fully dead in the mid-Seventies. It was not considered scandalous - certainly, not in Black America -- that Conyers and Dellums (who died in 2018) were openly socialist members of Congress. Both lawmakers would later become active in the socialist-lite DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America.

On a train ride with Conyers from Washington to New York in early 1977, I asked him why he didn't run on a socialist ticket, since he was winning as much as 86 percent of the vote in his district. His mouth fell open in horror. "But...the Party would destroy me," he replied - as if that was as obvious as daylight. I didn't pursue the subject any further, preferring not to cause my friend further trauma.

Conyers had done me a great favor by agreeing to be featured in the pilot program of "America's Black Forum" (ABF), the first nationally syndicated Black news interview show on commercial television, which I co-founded and hosted starting in January, 1977, the week that "Roots" debuted on ABC. It was a selfless contribution on Conyers' part, since the pilot would be dated and never air once the syndication had signed up enough affiliated stations to begin weekly production. Beginning with its first broadcast, taped in the studios of the ABC affiliate in Washington, "America's Black Forum" did what no other Black news entity in journalism history had accomplished: it made news, consistently generating stories picked up by U.S. and international news agencies and aired on network radio and TV newscasts.

Within months, ABF had interviewed nearly all of the 16 or so members of the Congressional Black Caucus, often in twos and threes. When Conyers appeared on the show, we beat him up from the left, just as we did every other elected official. But John didn't complain; he was glad to have been useful to the project.

The Black Caucus was almost uniformly "progressive" back then, by today's tepid standards. The Democratic Party had not yet begun aggressively gerrymandering districts to spread the reliably Black vote around in order to make up for wavering white support. The Caucus was pro-labor, with virtually all of its members heavily dependent on union contributions to ward off primary election challenges. Gus Savage, from Chicago, and Harold Ford Sr., of Memphis, were outstanding union stalwarts, and reliably progressive on the whole range of issues, as were most other CBC members. (Two decades later, Rep. Ford bequeathed his seat to his misbegotten son, Harold Ford Jr., who became George Bush's favorite Black congressman.)

After four years of broadcast, as the Age of Reagan was dawning my co-founder and I sold our shares in "America's Black Forum" (ABF) to a group of unscrupulous Black hustler/entrepreneurs. ABF remained on the air for the next 20 years without ever again generating a millisecond of news, devolving into a showcase of collaboration with the most rightwing forces in the nation (as detailed in a December, 2002 issue of The Black Commentator).

The Democrats lurched rightward in the Eighties, when for the first time General Motors' financial arm registered bigger profits than its manufacturing division - signaling the triumph, and soon hegemony, of financial capital. Black electoral politics in general, and Black congressional representatives in particular, embraced a politics of symbolism over substance. John Conyers wracked up the biggest symbolic victory of all, when his MLK Birthday bill became law in 1983. But he was USEFUL to movement politics, as well, holding hearings in localities across the country on criminal justice system abuses, South African apartheid, and a host of other issues. The Black Caucus was in the legislative vanguard in the ultimately successful fight to divest from South African apartheid, a great defeat for the Reagan administration. And Conyers will always be known for introducing H.R.40, his Black reparations study bill, in 1989, and reintroducing it (almost) every year later until his death.

The rot was palpable, however. By 1994, a majority of the Black Caucus was hunting for young Black "predators," in sync with their Democratic Leadership Council-founding president, Bill Clinton, as detailed by Michelle Alexander a generation later. Only 11 Black Caucus members voted against the crime bill that led to an exponential increase in the incarceration of African Americans.

The year after the crime bill debacle, Conyers became the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. His behavior from that point on was clearly tailored towards winning the coveted chairmanship. When the Katrina catastrophe hit in 2005, forcing over 100,000 Blacks into exile from New Orleans, the entirety of the Congressional Black Caucus -- except for Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney -- slavishly obeyed House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi's dictate that there be no Democratic hearings on Katrina-related crimes against the people. Pelosi feared that Katrina hearings would taint the party as too pro-Black, endangering Democrats' chances to retake control of the House in 2006. John Conyers also rolled over for his party leader, knowing his chairmanship depended on Democratic victory and Pelosi's favor. From then on, he would be far less useful to progressive causes, despite heading one of the most important committees from 2007 to 2011.

At no time during my social interactions with John Conyers did ever impress me as the kind of man that would be brought down by the #MeToo movement. But the former congressional firebrand was, indeed, laid low by a woman: Nancy Pelosi.

In the absence of Democratic Katrina hearings, Rep. McKinney attended House Republican hearings on the catastrophe, incurring the wrath of Pelosi and ritual shunning by the rest of the Black Caucus, marking the definitive end of that body's claim to relevance in Black America. McKinney became a Black Caucus of One, but lost her seat for the second time in 2006.

By now, the Black Caucus had lost all political coherence, and was home to a gaggle of right-wingers - a faction that had not existed in the previous decade. In a critical 2005 vote on corporate telecoms' bid to gut public protections in the new era of digital communications, the Black Caucus voted more in favor of telecoms than the Democratic Caucus as a whole.

Conyers did tentatively take action on impeachment of President Bush for invading Iraq. Conyers filed a resolution to consider impeachment, in 2005, when he was still ranking Judiciary Democrat. But Pelosi was opposed to impeachment, and Conyers let others - notably Keith Ellison (MN), Cynthia McKinney (GA) and Dennis Kucinich (OH) -- carry the ball, which became a dribble to nowhere.

Conyers had introduced single payer health care legislation in 2003, when there was no chance that the Republican Congress would pass it, or that George Bush would sign it. Presidential candidate Barack Obama deceptively deployed buzz words like "universal" health care to cause the public to believe that he, too, favored single payer. But when Obama launched his meticulously choreographed health care offensive in 2009, the doors to the White House were shut to Conyers and other single payer advocates. Inside the executive mansion lobbyists for Big Pharma and the insurance industry crafted a bill designed to forestall single payer for another generation, while boosting corporate profits to new heights. Conyers was unceremoniously pushed aside, humiliated and rendered irrelevant in chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's White House, where progressives were derided as "nutty."

In the end, the single payers caved to the First Black President.

Conyers would have to look to the past for his Last Hurrah. The "Dean of the Caucus's" political end came with awful ignominy. But Conyers managed to preserve some shred of dignity years longer than the Black Caucus as a whole, which collapsed into incoherence and rank opportunism at the first intrusion of big corporate capital at the turn of the 21st century. In 2014, 80 percent of the Black Caucus voted to continue the infamous 1033 program that funnels billions in military weapons and gear to local police, and in 2018 75 percent of Black lawmakers voted to make the cops a protected class, with assaults against police punishable as hate crimes. (See "The Black Caucus Sells Out Its Constituents Again - to the Cops" - May 23, 2018.) The Caucus had passed from pitifully useless to actively evil.

But, until his forced exit, John Conyers voted right almost every time, earning a 100 percent rating from the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, and a 90 percent legislative score from Americans for Democratic Action. Black Agenda Report's CBC Report Card gave Conyers a 90 percent score for his votes in 2017, his last year in office. Fourteen other Caucus members earned the same score - an unusually high number, due to the dearth of controversial bills that year. None of the Caucus got a perfect grade, we wrote, because "all of the full-voting Black Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives lost ten points for prostrating themselves before the power of the Israel lobby."

Black elected officials have no fear of voting against the interests of their constituents -- the people the cops prey on - but are horrified at the very thought of running afoul of the Israel lobby.

I'm reminded of that Amtrak trip to New York with Conyers, 42 years ago, when I asked why he didn't run on a socialist ticket. "The Party would destroy me," he said.

It took a long time, but they finally destroyed him, anyway.

Do you shop at a Kroger supermarket? Or maybe at Ralph's, Fred Meyer, King Sooper's, or... well, never mind, all of these and more are part of the vast Kroger fiefdom of 2,759 grocery stores spanning the US, plus owning 38 food processing plants, 1,556 gas stations, and 251 jewelry stores. In short, Kroger is BIG - sacking up revenues topping $121 billion a year from us consumers.

Yet, for all of its mass and money, Kroger has recently shown itself to be pathetically small - small as in petty, snooty... bullying.

The chain's carefully crafted PR image portrays it as "America's Grocer" - wherever you are, they claim to be your friendly neighbor and dedicated community supporter. So imagine the surprise of real neighbors this month when aloof executives in Kroger's faraway Cincinnati headquarters turned on hundreds of communities in 35 states by arbitrarily tossing out all local newsweeklies and community papers that had been distributed in the stores free of charge.

While establishment newspapers that peddle the corporate line - from hedge fund-owned dailies to the Wall Street Journal - are still allowed to sell their papers inside Kroger, customers can no longer find racks of their free local papers. In such major cities as Colorado Springs, Lansing, Louisville, Memphis, Omaha, and Salt Lake City, these unique papers are in the historic tradition of America's pamphleteers,and independent populist weeklies. They cover a wide diversity of local stories, offer alternative viewpoints, publish investigative exposes, report on community events, and otherwise actually let people know what's happening in their town.

By shutting out these community papers, Kroger is literally banning the free press from its stores. That's not only unneighborly - it's unAmerican.