The Nature of Foxes

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 08, 2021 1:32 pm

Freedom Rider: How the Billionaires Rule
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist 08 Jul 2021

Freedom Rider: How the Billionaires Rule

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Predatory Capitalism Has Driven Down Wages and Created a Dystopia for Workers.

“Currently, 25 states out of 50 have rejected additional help for the unemployed.”

President Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.” The expression is memorable because it always rang true. But nearly 100 years later an old trite saying has taken on an ever more terrifying meaning.

The ruling class wield their power more blatantly than ever. There is little effort to conceal their determination to rule over the people and to control the politicians who are now little more than their personal minions.

When the people get a little help, as happened with additional stimulus funds for the unemployed, politicians across the country took up arms for the ruling class and turned down free money just to stay in the good graces of their bosses.

Currently 25 states out of 50 have rejected additional help for the unemployed. The money came from the federal government and didn’t impact state budgets, but politicians know who calls the shots. When called upon to help struggling people they chose to do just the opposite. They helped their exploiters and in the process made a mockery of what passes for democracy.

“Politicians across the country took up arms for the ruling class and turned down free money just to stay in the good graces of their bosses.”

There is no labor shortage in this country. Instead, there is a shortage of jobs that pay a living wage and that is because of the power of capitalists. They have grown richer precisely because they have forced workers to live in a constant state of precarity, and now it is quite literally better to stay home than to work for a pittance.

Of course, the richest man in the world, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is a master at coming up with new ways to subjugate workers. Any reports of job growth should be viewed with a very jaundiced eye as predatory capitalism has driven down wages and created a dystopia for workers. Bezos has mastered squeezing the most and giving the least.

“Capitalists have grown richer precisely because they have forced workers to live in a constant state of precarity.”

Amazon warehouse workers suffer from injuries at higher rates than other employees in similar jobs but the injuries are part of the cost of doing business. It is expected that the grueling working conditions will create high turnover which is exactly what Amazon wants. A revolving door of employees serves their needs quite nicely. Bezos made a big deal about a $15 per hour starting salary but he could certainly afford to pay a lot more, a real living wage. The tight-fisted billionaire who could potentially become a trillionaire got rich the old fashioned way. He cheats workers.

Bezos also comes up with new and ingenious ways to spread the suffering. Amazon Flex delivery drivers are hired by apps and fired by algorithms. They have no interaction with human resources or any humans at all and they must pay a $200 fee to contest terminations that are rarely decided in their favor.

Even when American workers lose their jobs they are still at the mercy of corporate giants. ID.me contracts with states to provide public access to web sites such as those used for unemployment claims. Their facial recognition software doesn’t verify everyone properly and desperate people wait days and weeks for their unemployment payments to arrive. As with Amazon there is no one to speak to for help. But state governments turn over millions of dollars to ID.me in order to cheat people out of benefits they have earned. Currently 30 states contract with ID.me to make sure that the most vulnerable are kicked while they are down.

“A revolving door of employees serves Amazon’s needs quite nicely.”

The algorithm hirings and firings and the facial recognition technology problems are not bugs in the system. They are features. They are doing precisely what they are intended to do, keep workers poor, desperate, and at the mercy of capitalists. Cruelty is the point.

One might ask who speaks for the people. Workers in several states had their unemployment saved by court decisions but those are few and far between. Politicians are as blatant as their corporate bosses and openly side with them against their constituents.

There is no way to reform this system. Democrats and republicans are equally eager to act at the behest of corporate interests. The people either vote in hopes of change that never comes or are apathetic because they see that the odds are against them.

The workers who refuse low pay under dangerous conditions are moving in the right direction. Whether they know it or not they are potentially building a new movement. A general strike is what the country needs. Of course that is why the hammer fell in an attempt to nip any resistance in the bud and get the cogs back into the machine. But the direction we must move in is clear. There is no salvation from a Biden or a Harris or any other name being floated. The people will have to move in a different direction if they are to save themselves.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/freed ... aires-rule

Um, just 'capitalism', Kimberley. There ain't no other kind. Samuel Delaney exhorts us to dispense with unnecessary adjectives, and that goes for Marxists too.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 26, 2021 2:04 pm

Responsibility to Protect: Analysis of the Subject and its Objectives
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 25, 2021
Jorge Arreaza Montserrat

“Our first objective is to prevent the emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration which must underline the new regional defense strategy and which demands that we strive to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources could suffice, under consolidated control, to engender a global power (…). Finally, we must maintain mechanisms to deter potential competitors from even aspiring to a greater regional or global role”.[1]

U.S. Defense Planning Guidance, 1992.

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population (…). In this situation we cannot help but be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the period ahead is to design a pattern of relations that will enable us to maintain this position of disparity without detriment to our national security”.2].

George Kennan, American Cold War ideologue.


After the Second World War (1939-1945), the reorganization of the correlation of geopolitical forces led to a new logic for managing relations and tensions between countries, opening the way to a new era of alleged weakening of the nation state under threat from the hegemonic powers that were expanding from the West. The creation of the United Nations (UN), as a guideline for diplomacy and relations between States, was based on a body of norms: Public International Law (PIL), which contemplates the responsibilities and prerogatives of the actors in the world system. The Charter of the United Nations is assumed by PIL as a fundamental instrument in this stage of international relations.

The pre-eminence of the victorious powers as determining actors in the fundamental decisions of the entire world was formalized. The clearest expression of this was the formation of the Security Council and the prerogative known as the “right of veto”, applicable to major issues of debate. The United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, now Russia), France, the United Kingdom and China agreed on a sort of “last word” for sensitive situations in international relations and their inevitable contradictions. In negotiating the provisions of the UN Charter, Washington put up resistance to approve the right of veto; however, for the Soviet Union its establishment was indispensable, otherwise it would have been subjected to an all-out war against the USSR.

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The Yalta and Potsdam conferences, whose protagonists were Josef Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, delineated the post-war international order. (Photo: Archive)

The crisis of the 1990s and the collapse of the socialist bloc, which served as a counterweight to capitalist hegemony, gave the forces of Atlanticism an apparent free hand and an atmosphere of moral and political superiority. With no understanding of the historical responsibility implied in the real administration of conflicts, trampling on the precepts of equality among States, a partisan and biased universalist re-signification of two fundamental concepts: democracy and freedom, is being arrogantly imposed. Notions that they manipulate at their convenience and dogmatize under the unilateral and reduced view of their own understanding of the world, in which economic, military and financial corporations pull the strings of power and seek to homogenize the world to create conditions of general domination. The Dominican thinker and politician Juan Bosch identified this alleged new model of world control under the category of “Pentagonism”.[3]

This new way of doing politics, based on the convenient interpretation of universal values, has been led by Washington and seconded by the forces aligned to the Atlantic geopolitical axis. It is a crusade for the legitimization of a univocal way of understanding and cataloguing the moral and political imperatives involved in relations between States. As a good crusade, this display of impositions is accompanied by a powerful inquisition. It initiates a kind of ongoing judgment of the way in which nation-states conduct their policies – both domestic and foreign. This dangerous operation of determining international moral justice is closely related to a powerful cartelized device of communication and opinion, in charge of “building the dossier”, reproducing it relentlessly and issuing tailor-made opinionated sentences.

At this point, it is worth recalling what the former Secretary of Defense of the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld, said in 2001, referring to how the United States should exercise its role as an empire: “We have two options. Either we change the way we live or we change the way others live. We have chosen the latter option.”[4]

Public International Law formally recognizes three elements that are fundamental to its spirit and meaning as pillars: equality among all States; respect for national sovereignty; and the right to self-determination of peoples. Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations, in its paragraphs 1 and 7, is crystal clear on these principles. Equality and respect for sovereignty lead irremediably to the recognition of diversity and respect for sovereign decisions. Public International Law allows the coexistence of all these voices and seeks the peaceful resolution of disputes, which inevitably arise from the plurality of views.

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United Nations Security Council, located in New York. (Photo: Johannes Eisele / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images)

The need on the part of Western hegemony to “channel” everyone through its narrow vision clashes with the spirit of diversity that governs international law. In other words, the principles of international law, as expressed in the Charter of the United Nations, represent a straitjacket for Western domination and its formulas of imposition. That is why it is forcing the development of alternative devices, anti-legal shortcuts (disguised as legality), which seek other ways for control and advocacy. After all, for Atlanticism, everyone must use the same alphabet and the same uniform with its infallible gringoes.

As a tactic of the strategy of ideological homogenization, concepts and theses such as the defense of democracy are developed, while human rights are instrumentalized, placing them at the service of the particular interests of the hegemonic powers, distorting their realization and meaning as ends in themselves. These powers are thus given a tool of intervention with moral and humanitarian overtones, with which they generate a convenient version to legitimize unspeakable objectives.

The English language, with its characteristic versatility, contains a precise verb to understand this way of doing politics with Human Rights (not of HR): to weaponize, to use HR as a weapon, the weaponizing of Human Rights. Under the delicate cloak of respect for the integrity of citizens, the aim is to undermine or break the quality and integrity of state sovereignty, when in fact ensuring human rights is the first constitutional power and responsibility of every state. There is no doubt that those precepts that serve life, as well as all the fundamental guarantees of dignity of citizens, are the responsibility of States and their institutions. The human rights banner is very sensitive to public opinion, which is also manipulated by the published opinion of media cartels at the service of hegemonic interests. This is why it has become fertile territory for sowing suspicions about countries and governments that are not subordinated to the political, economic and moral dictates imposed by the Western hegemonic vision.

International relations have constructed some incipient ways to deal with the eventual overflow that national States may suffer in their responsibility to guarantee human rights. The Rome Statute, for example, is the birth certificate of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and clearly typifies in Article 5 the crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression (the latter still with very partial validity depending on each ratifying state as of 2015). The ICC is an institution that aims to ensure the possibility of condemning the individual criminal responsibilities of state officials and other agents acting on behalf of the state, in matters of violation of crimes against humanity. It is not a perfect instance, nor is it exempt from interests unrelated to justice, but it is part of the agreements of a large number of States to address the most sensitive human rights situations, in the context of International Humanitarian Law.

The Responsibility to Protect or how to abuse the protection of Human Rights in order to unprotect them.

The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect is one of the formulas intended to be used to impose political and economic models without respecting the principles of international humanitarian law, under the pretext of protecting the human rights of a given population in the face of crimes against humanity. It comes from International Humanitarian Law and is applicable when there is a serious and massive violation of human rights in terms of crimes against humanity, nullifying the State’s capacity to protect its populations in the midst of armed conflicts. It is related to UN Peacekeeping Operations, except for two fundamental differences: the Responsibility to Protect can be invoked without being in the presence of a military conflict and even when the State concerned does not request or authorize it. The debate to extend this concept to non-war situations took place in the United Nations General Assembly in 1999, when the Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in the light of what happened in Srebrenica, Somalia and Rwanda, and in view of the resounding failure of NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, posed a dilemma for the international community: stand aside and allow genocides such as that in Rwanda or intervene, as in the case of Kosovo. Obviously, the notion of national sovereignty is violated, not to say ignored, if this doctrinaire prospect takes on legal force.

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People pick up debris left by a NATO bombing of Kosovo. (Photo: Scott Peterson/ Liaison / Getty Images)

In December 2001, before the turmoil of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York had dissipated, a report was presented by the UN International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which shifted the focus from the legitimacy of humanitarian military interventions to the responsibility to protect. However, it was at the 2005 United Nations Summit that the alleged doctrine was definitively enshrined, although reserving the prerogative of States to guarantee the human rights of their citizens, as stated in paragraph 139 of the Declaration of the Member States of that year:

The international community, through the United Nations, also has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we stand ready to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations where appropriate, if peaceful means are inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue to consider the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, as well as their consequences, taking into account the principles of the Charter and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, where necessary and appropriate, to assist States in building capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and to assist those under stress before crises and conflicts break out[5].

There are authors who try to infer the legal basis of the Responsibility to Protect from the letter and postulates of the preamble of the UN Charter and its first article. This pseudo-legal argument is very weak, it embraces a moral pretext and clashes, to the point of crashing and dying, with the principles and purposes of the Charter itself and the specific development of its network of provisions and articles.

The strength of the rule of law is what makes them the only spaces capable of guaranteeing the rights of their populations, as the contemporary evolution of constitutionalism points out, so that currents such as those that support the Responsibility to Protect intentionally pose a false dilemma between the violation of human rights and respect for the sovereignty of States. The ICISS itself states:

(…) the idea that sovereign states have the responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophes – mass murder, systematic rape and starvation – but that, if they are unwilling or unable to do so, this responsibility must be assumed by the community of states”[6].

Thus, in the absence of a rigorous normative system to regulate the scenarios of military intervention, the possibility is left open for the Security Council to authorize such extreme operations, based on assumptions that, by their nature, will always be subject to interpretation, bias and mediation. The verbs used alone give rise to any version: to will and to be able to.

In other words, the Security Council, or whatever body is finally chosen, would set itself up as a tribunal capable of determining whether a State wants to or can protect its population in a particular situation. And if they were to consider that it does not want to, or that it cannot (with only one of the assumptions would be enough), they would have the green light to bomb and send troops to that country to remedy the situation, under their criteria and conditions. And in good Western style, after “remedying” the situation and taking geopolitical control of the State concerned, construction, security, energy and mining companies from the Western evaluating countries will surely be able to enter to “rebuild” the country’s infrastructure and reactivate its economy. Don’t you think so? Let us read again an excerpt from the ICISS report: “to offer after a military intervention …, assistance for recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation”[7].

The responsibility to rebuild would be a consequence, inevitable and desired by many, of the Responsibility to Protect. We are talking about rebuilding the infrastructure and economy that these compassionate countries destroy with their bombs, missiles, tanks and economic sanctions. The objectives and the strategy for which they intend to use the Responsibility to Protect are obvious. Yet, there are many countries that are unwilling or unable to notice this, and support resolutions to advance the development of a doctrine dangerous to their own existential interests.

The hegemonic powers would have a sort of menu, an à la carte order to take advantage of complex human rights situations (including induced ones) by opening the legal doors to a “compassionate military intervention”. This situation does not allow to offer any kind of guarantees of justice, impartiality and transparency, which would correspond to a beneficent and truly protective procedure. It is intended to establish a “preventive” discretionality, when the possible occurrence of a “judiciable” fact that can be prosecuted is presumed. This is an advantageous permeability for the hegemon between the world of geopolitical domination and that of human rights, as if they belonged to the same nature, in order to provide it with legitimacy and a presumed legality, when the truth is that they are intrinsically and necessarily antagonistic. Nor is it defined how the responsibility of the State is transferred to the international community, so that it may protect the citizens of that State, without its prior acquiescence[8].

The Commission of experts also established a series of criteria for authorizing the use of force, under the Responsibility to Protect: the use of force: competent authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable possibilities[9]. The competent authority is the Security Council. However, the key is how to determine the justness of the cause and how to verify that its proponents do it with correct intentions. How to qualify as just or correct the use of force, without the authorization of the State concerned? Who guarantees proportionality in the use of force and is responsible for excesses? The fact that it is assumed as an option of last resort is logical and gives the doctrine a substantially preventive character. However, how are diplomatic and economic coercive measures prior to the use of force evaluated and considered effective, or not?

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NATO bombing turned the Libyan city of Benghazi into a ruin of rubble. (Photo: Reuters)

The implementation of this Doctrine has been questioned by many UN member countries. The disastrous intervention in Libya in 2011 was based in the Security Council precisely on Responsibility to Protect arguments. Since 2005, the Council had approved several resolutions authorizing the use of force in African countries, but not under the allegations of this doctrine. Only in the case of Sudan was this motivation used. No one, not even the Western media, can deny that the result of such a collective action, to the detriment of Libya’s sovereignty, left in its wake a serious political, economic and humanitarian crisis, accompanied by the fracturing of the country, clashes between factions, massive migration towards the Mediterranean, absolute violation of the human rights of the population and the proliferation of terrorist groups in the region. All the reservations and objections that had been theoretically exposed in the debate on the risks of the pseudo-doctrine under study, were verified in the sad and catastrophic reality. For the peoples and the true International Community, what happened in Libya can rather be qualified as the Irresponsibility to Unprotect. The promptness of the Security Council’s decision left no room for preventive measures. A bloodbath that protected no one, destroyed everything and has lasted to this day, was endorsed at the time by the United Nations[10]).

Resolution 1973 of the UN Security Council, presented by France and the United Kingdom, was controversial. Russia, China, India, Germany, Brazil and abstained, the resolution was not blocked by a vote against by any of the permanent members (veto). The abstentions were largely the result of the lack of prior coercive measures and peace initiatives on the ground, precisely to avoid the use of force. The Arab League pushed for armed intervention. From every angle it was a hasty decision. Finally, with the approval of a no-fly zone, NATO took over military operations with the use of sophisticated lethal weapons, bombing, missiles, with the alleged intention of neutralizing the Libyan military forces. Thus opening the doors, still open today, to a hell on earth. A few days later, albeit belatedly, the countries that abstained expressed their reservations about the lack of proportionality in NATO’s military actions [11].

A few weeks after that erratic decision, the Security Council also approved the use of force through the Responsibility to Protect in Côte d’Ivoire. Although the attention of the case was different and there were calls and spaces for the negotiated resolution of that complex internal conflict, time showed that the UN supported with its intervention one of the parties, while it was confirmed that both had incurred in similar practices of massive crimes against human rights[12]).

Despite the failure of this UN operation, after the intervention in Libya, several resolutions approving the use of military force have been adopted (Ivory Coast, Mali, South Sudan, Somalia, Central African Republic, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo), while between 2005 and 2011 only one intervention was approved under that motivation[13]. In other words, contradictorily, the resounding failure of a UN-permitted action whose excesses and millions of continued crimes have gone unpunished, has not prevented the continued invocation of this doctrine. The possibility of promoting collective violence by the powerful, through the Responsibility to Protect, continues to be accepted. It must be recognized, however, that there has been no repetition of large-scale Western military intervention. In favor of the sense of the common good, the use of force was not authorized by the Security Council in the cases of Syria and Yemen. The lesson of Libya has at least limited the scale of R2P-based decisions and actions.

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The destruction of Libya resulted in a forced increase in migration and its exploitation from a slave logic. (Photo: Taha Jawashi / AFP / Getty Images)

The Responsibility to Protect conflicts with at least three of the fundamental principles of Public International Law (PIL). There is no practical equality among the nations of the world, in their daily political exercise. Simón Bolívar, when referring to the need to equalize citizens, was referring to established and practiced equality. In geopolitics, equality is indeed established as an essential principle of coexistence among nations, but it is evident that it is not a practiced equality, not even considered by the powerful. It also undermines the sacred right of states to exercise sovereignty and self-determination and even independence. The Responsibility to Protect is one of those ways that, while claiming to be part of the normative body of PIL, in practice tends to liquidate it. The pretension of its application to relativize the quality of self-determination of peoples in their sovereign States should be a global wake-up call. Human rights are a delicate and fundamental area within the United Nations system. It is the task of all States to ensure the correct management of this agenda and its derivations. The partial and biased use of this agenda for the purpose of intervening in the internal affairs of member countries is an act disloyal to international coexistence.

In analyzing the Responsibility to Protect, Professor Juan Manuel Rivero Godoy asks the following questions:

1) In what cases must action be taken? 2) How is it determined when action must be taken? 3) Who will act to fulfill the purpose of the Charter? 4) What will be the limits of the action? 5) Who is accountable for excesses and how? 6) What are the real objectives of the intervention?[14] The same author concludes that: “the Charter is not a mere avenue of action”.

The same author concludes: “the responsibility to protect lacks a concrete normative delimitation that would be useful in the cases in which it must be applied”. We add: beyond precise or effective regulations, there are no political (and geopolitical) conditions or unassailable legal foundations that can justify the adoption of such a dangerous mechanism as valid in such an unequal world.


As in other matters, the debate has extended to the point of considering that, although the Security Council is the only body with the power to analyze cases in which the use of force could be considered, its political composition and the right to veto would prevent the application of the Responsibility to Protect, for which reason they propose that this power be transferred to the General Assembly, claiming its more democratic and broad character. This proposal seeks to neutralize the right of veto of the permanent members of the Security Council and replace it with what would apparently be a decision of a more legitimate and democratic body.

The proponents seem to (or want to) ignore the coercive power, threats and political pressure that Western powers often impose on member states in decision-making in the General Assembly. If they do so openly in resolutions of little impact or in the election of positions and spaces in the UN bodies, we cannot even guess the size of the extortive pressure they would apply to approve a military operation that responds to their geopolitical and economic interests. This apparent “more democratic” proposal could lead to the expansion of the unilateral tyranny that imperialist powers usually impose within multilateral bodies.

Our America and the Responsibility to Protect

The dominant role of the United States globally “could not be exercised if any powerful and virulent nation is allowed to organize its part of the world according to a philosophy contrary to our own.”[15] The United States’ dominant role globally “could not be exercised if any powerful and virulent nation is allowed to organize its part of the world according to a philosophy contrary to our own.15]

Memorandum from Robert McNamara to President Lyndon Johnson.

The American continent deserves special mention when referring to disguised intervention modalities. Washington defines America as the Western Hemisphere (we still do not understand the meaning and validity of this expression). This “hemisphere” has been officially considered a zone of US influence and control since 1823, through the well-known Monroe Doctrine. If we add to this that in 1845 they developed the thesis of Manifest Destiny, according to which the US is predestined to dominate the world and to spread (or impose) its model of society, economy and property, thanks to its superiority and closeness to God, we can deduce the role that would correspond to the territories immediately surrounding the US under this supremacist viewpoint: the backyard. Not content with this, President Theodore Roosevelt fed the annexationist thesis of Washington’s domination of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 establishes the following:

Policy toward other nations of the Western Hemisphere: It is not true that the United States has a hunger for land or that it has an interest in anything concerning the other nations of the Western Hemisphere except for their welfare. All that this nation desires is to see neighboring nations stable, orderly and prosperous. Any nation whose people behave well with themselves can count on our heartfelt friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political affairs, and if it maintains order and pays its obligations, it need not fear any interference from the United States. Chronic malfeasance, resulting in a general loss of the bonds of a civilized society, whether in America or anywhere else, will ultimately require the intervention of some civilized nation[16].

The Roosevelt Corollary has been fulfilled to the letter in Our Latin America and the Caribbean, through countless invasions, destabilizations, coups d’état and conspiracies of all kinds. Note the similarities of the notion of Responsibility to Protect with that old Corollary of US foreign policy. Latin American and Caribbean states need not fear US interference if they behave in a “decent and reasonably efficient” manner (especially when paying their ill-gotten debts to the countries of the North). But, in addition, if Washington perceives that the “bonds of a civilized society” have been “lost”, it will have the right to intervene. And not only the US could do so, Roosevelt opened the door for “other civilized nations” to do the same: what today would be understood as the International Community, a concept of notorious ambiguity, which the Western powers have abrogated when it comes to expressing an opinion or meddling collectively in the affairs of sovereign states.

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U.S. Marines occupying the Dominican Republic in 1965, seizing a passerby. (Photo: Harry Benson)

The Organization of American States (OAS) became the instrument par excellence for Washington to count on the endorsement of its subordinate governments to obtain the green light for its meddling ambitions, disguising them with the opaque colors of a supposed regional multilateralism. It is rather one of the many modalities of group unilateralism, as described by Professor Antonio Remiro Brotons, which the U.S. has used to justify its interventionist actions. In recent years, the ineffable Luis Almagro, as Secretary General of the OAS, resolutely promoted the application of the Responsibility to Protect with the aim of generating the conditions for a US military intervention in Venezuela, endorsed by the OAS, through the outdated and never applied Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, TIAR. No one doubts at this point what interests Almagro responds to, who pays him and what he intends to do.

The highly unvirtuous OAS has already committed similar excesses under humanitarian pretexts. In 1965, the OAS authorized the sending of a “humanitarian mission” to the Dominican Republic. A few doctors and collaborators arrived, accompanied by thousands of U.S. Marines who, in order to prevent the reinstatement of the Constitution and the return of the legitimate President, Juan Bosch, the then President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, in the good style of the Roosevelt Corollary, recognized that the U.S. invasion was being carried out “so that the Dominican Republic would not become a second Cuba”.

The humanitarian justification, first to protect U.S. citizens in the Dominican Republic, and then to “protect the people”, was nothing more than an obvious cover for an ideological intervention, which led to death, constitutional rupture and the imposition of a repressive government obedient to Washington. Such was the brazenness of the surrender, that in 2016, the OAS itself agreed to a declaration in reparation to the Dominican people, for the role that the Organization played in 1965 by endorsing such a bloody political invasion.

Returning to Venezuela, between 2015 and 2020, the Secretary General of the OAS even convened a series of “experts” with two objectives in mind. On the one hand, to give argumentative support to the ideologized and flawed complaint filed before the ICC by a group of right-wing governments against Venezuelan officials. This action, of course, was ordered from the U.S. capital. Simultaneously, in an absurd manner, and in view of the unfeasibility of even discussing a military intervention against Venezuela in the Security Council (absurd in itself and which would never have the support of Russia and China), Almagro and the small group of satellite governments of Washington tried to apply the prospect of the Doctrine of Responsibility to Protect in Latin America, through the activation of a regional Military Treaty. The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, TIAR, signed in 1947 and never invoked, was revived by this group of countries in their anti-Venezuelan obsession. They even convened meetings of Foreign Ministers for its application. In this way, they intended to violate not only the OAS Charter, but also the UN Charter, Article 53 of which makes any decision by regional organizations to take coercive measures against a UN member state subject to the authorization of the UN Security Council. The Charter does not even mention, and therefore does not endorse, military operations agreed by regional bodies against another state.

It is worth asking: Will Washington and its satellites have any real concern for human rights in Venezuela, or do they have many interests in oil, gas, gold, water, diamonds, coltan and regional geopolitical control? Do they act with objectivity and ideological tolerance? Have they respected the self-determination of the Venezuelan people? Has the human rights situation in Venezuela actually suffered any overflow of the capacities of the competent national institutions? Would Washington intervene in Venezuela to protect the people, or to consolidate its dominance and unspeakable interests? The answers are so obvious that we know that the reader assumed the questions as an ironic didactic resource of the author. What is more, what the US and its subordinate governments have done is to apply a financial and commercial blockade of such magnitude against Venezuela, that it has been brought by Caracas before the ICC in view of the effects of the systematic and massive violation of human rights of these so-called sanctions, alleging with ample evidence that they constitute crimes against humanity against all Venezuelans.

Regarding the long-awaited phase of Responsibility to Rebuild in the Venezuelan case, it is enough to recall the words of John Bolton, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2019, when he admitted that U.S. oil companies were ready to enter Venezuela, at the moment of an exit of the government of Nicolás Maduro. In this way they ensured the best spoils of their “protective war”. The motivations of the West were so evident that the UK Foreign Office quietly created an Office for the Reconstruction of Venezuela[17].

The example of Venezuela illustrates the ease with which the Responsibility to Protect can be used to attack a country for reasons unrelated to the human rights situation, although argued under such a malleable and diffuse umbrella. If the principles of Public International Law were rigorously respected, if the Charter of the United Nations were a sacred instrument for all equally, perhaps, then, in an ideal situation that seems unfeasible today, the discussion of a collective Doctrine for the protection of Human Rights could be seriously considered. But to give this debate and to advance along this path in today’s world, is not only nonsense, but the naive granting of a license of mass destruction for the Western powers, with the aim of creating situations that allow them to dominate and control countries and natural resources with ease, under the false endorsement of a supposed concern for human rights. Let no one be deceived. There have already been enough bloody and cruel demonstrations of inhuman power by the Western powers in power to delegate to them the power to deal with such delicate national and human situations.

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The oil factor is an ever-present variable in US military interventions. (Photo: Haidar Mohammed Ali / AFP / Getty Images)

It is imperative to strengthen state capacities to guarantee human rights. Let us consolidate the role of nation states. In recent decades they have tried to undermine it by financing non-governmental actors, with agendas that often coincide with the purposes of those who finance them. It is essential for the United Nations to ensure compliance with its own Charter. We cannot take this lightly; we cannot weaken the UN and turn it, in practice, into the Donors’ Organization or a platform for NGOs. The national interests of the peoples are expressed in the States. The other actors can complement state action, not replace it, much less attack it and submit it to the will of private interests and corporate hegemonic states. From these combined actions of actors outside the national interest, it is possible to generate situations and fabricate matrices of “humanitarian concern”, in order to apply, at convenience, the Responsibility to Protect.

For this and other reasons of historical weight, from Venezuela we consider important the creation of the Group of Countries in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, to bring these major issues to the forefront of public opinion, the academic world, social movements, as well as within the UN General Assembly and in the chambers of the Security Council and the Human Rights Council, without false premises, or compassionate fantasies, without hypocrisy, without hidden agendas, without euphemisms. The decisions taken today could open or close the doors to a world of respect and peaceful coexistence. From the Global South we must neutralize any new tool of legalization of armed interventions for geopolitical or ideological purposes. Legitimizing and legalizing a doctrine that seeks to violate the most sacred principles of International Law with the supposed purpose of saving lives through the use, or rather abuse, of force, is an unacceptable contradiction for those of us who believe in peace and coexistence with respect for diversity.

Falling into the Western trap by endorsing the Responsibility to Protect is tantamount to killing the UN Charter through a suicidal action (consciously or not) of some States against their own sovereignty and self-determination. By their unchanged and unalterable nature, the only thing the Western ruling elites of the Global North know how to protect are their interests and profits. Too many proofs of this have been given throughout history. Let no one be deceived! Today more than ever, the main responsibility of peoples and sovereign states is to protect the principles of the UN Charter, to protect the right to life, to human rights, to the future, to peace.

We must advance in the alternative to the Responsibility to Protect, always within the normative framework of the founding Charter of the UN. Rigorous diplomatic methods, the promotion of dialogue between the parties in conflict, the political commitment of the UN bodies to a peaceful solution, the role of neighboring countries and regional and sub-regional organizations, attention to the victims. Positive, concerned, dedicated, truly humanitarian international pressure, without simultaneous plans for regime change or the search for lucrative gains in the reconstruction processes. Let us look at the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. They have been blows to the Charter of the United Nations and to the countries attacked, to humanity as a whole. From the United Nations, let us learn to make policy and build peace. Not to make war and impose a certain style of peace and model. Peace Diplomacy is the path of the peoples. Let us not mistake the means and the actors. Let us be just and humane. Be vigilant!

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Sirte, Libya destroyed by NATO bombardments in 2011

References

↑1 This paper was prepared by the U.S. Department of Defense and was authored by I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad. It represents one of the first intellectual frameworks of the neoconservatives in the post-Cold War era.
↑2 Kennan, George. “Review of current trends in U.S. foreign policy,” Policy Planning Staff, No. 23, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, volume 1, part 2. Washington, Government Printing Office, 1976, pp. 524-525.
↑3 Bosch, Juan. (2005). El pentagonismo: sustituto del imperialismo, Dominican Republic, Aguilar.
↑4 Davies, Nicolas (2010). Blood on Our Hands, Nimble Books, p. 54.
↑5 Sixtieth session of the United Nations General Assembly. (2005). “2005 World Summit Outcome Document,” A/RES/60/1, p. 33. Retrieved from https://undocs.org/es/A/RES/60/1
↑6 Rivero Godoy, Juan Manuel. “The Responsibility to Protect, Security Council action and the defense of human rights: critique of the international system”, Revista Misión Jurídica, Vol. 10, Nº13, 2017, p. 161. Retrieved from https://www.revistamisionjuridica.com/w ... oteger.pdf
↑7 Idem, p. 165.
↑8 Añaños Meza, María Cecilia. “The United Nations’ Authorized Military Intervention in Libya: A Precedent for the Responsibility to Protect?”. International Studies, Vol. 45, Nº174, 2013. Retrieved from https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script ... 3000100003
↑9 Villar Martín, Marta. “The Responsibility to Protect. Analysis of Security Council Resolutions 1973 and 1975”. Universidad Pontificia de Comillas, Madrid, 2018.
↑10 Resolution 1973. Adopted by the Security Council at its 6498th meeting, held on 17 March 2011. Retrieved from https://www.undocs.org/es/S/RES/1973%20(2011
↑11 García Martín, Isabel. “The Responsibility to Protect Principle: Does it imply a new exception to the use of force?”. Enfoques Journal, Vol. XV, Nº27, 2017.
↑12 Resolution 1975. Adopted by the Security Council at its 6508th meeting, held on 30 March 2011. Retrieved https://undocs.org/es/s/res/1975%20(2011
↑13 Jiménez i Botías, Elena. “The Responsibility to Protect after Libya”, Notes Internacionals, CIBOD, 155. Retrieved from https://www.cidob.org/es/publicaciones/ ... s_de_libia
↑14 Rivero Godoy, Juan Manuel. “The Responsibility to Protect, Security Council action and the defense of human rights: critique of the international system”, Revista Misión Jurídica, Vol. 10, Nº13, 2017, p. 164. Retrieved from https://www.revistamisionjuridica.com/w ... oteger.pdf
↑15 Gardner, Lloyd C. (2008). The Long Road to Baghdad. A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present, New York, The New Press, pp. 12-13.
↑16 Morison, Samuel and Commanger, Henry. (1951). History of the United States of America. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, p. 451.
↑17 McEvoy, John. (May 13, 2020). “Revealed: Secretive British unit planning for ‘reconstruction’ of Venezuela”. The Canary. Retrieved from https://www.thecanary.co/exclusive/2020 ... venezuela/

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 15, 2021 5:15 pm

Creative Associates International (CAI): It’s Not Exactly the CIA, But Close Enough
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 13, 2021
Alan Macleod

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While mercenary armies like Blackwater have at least been subject to inquiry, making the company’s name infamous around the world, Creative Associates International has largely flown under the radar — exactly where the organization’s board wants it to be.

You have likely not heard of them, but Creative Associates International (CAI) is one of the largest and most powerful non-governmental organizations operating anywhere in the world. A pillar of soft U.S. power, the group has been an architect in privatizing the Iraqi education system, designed messenger apps meant to overthrow the government of Cuba, served as a front group for the infamous Blackwater mercenary force (now rebranded as Academi), and liaised with Contra death squads in Nicaragua. As such, it has functioned as “both as an instrument of foreign policy and as a manifestation of a broader imperial project,” in the words of Professor Kenneth Saltman of the University of Illinois, Chicago.

A G.O. posing as an N.G.O.

An ordinary person arriving at Creative Associates’ website — festooned as it is with images of smiling African children, Asian kids being taught how to read and happy Latino farmers harvesting their fields — would likely conclude that the outfit is some sort of progressive non-profit charity tirelessly working to empower vulnerable people around the world.

Yet subjecting the organization to a little more scrutiny, some red flags immediately begin to emerge. First is the indecipherable word-salad it uses when describing what it actually is in its “Us At A Glance” section. “Creative Associates International provides outstanding, on-the-ground development services and forges partnerships to deliver sustainable solutions to global challenges,” it says, as if this is any sort of answer to the question “Who are you?” Continuing, it boasts that “Creative is recognized for its ability to quickly adapt and excel in conflict and post-conflict environments” (emphasis added) — a statement that sounds worryingly like one private mercenary armies use to advertise their services.

In today’s world, the United States government does not use only overtly violent methods (wars, invasions, coups, training of domestic death squads, etc.) to achieve regime change; it also uses so-called “soft power” techniques — the training of leaders, education, economic coercion, etc. — to maintain a hegemonic grip on the world. And Creative Associates International is a crucial part of that system.

The company was founded in 1979 by M. Charito Kruvant, the scion of a wealthy landowning Bolivian family who fled the country after the progressive revolution there in 1952. Today, it has grown into a massive, for-profit behemoth working in at least 85 countries with a full-time staff of around a thousand (and countless more contractors). And while it is technically a private institution, the vast majority of its funding comes directly from Washington. Over the past 20 years, the government has given Creative Associates $1,998,138,515 in contracts, according to Tracey Eaton, a journalist who has studied the company’s activities in Cuba. Of this, USAID has supplied over $1.8 billion.

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Leland KruvantLeland Kruvant, acting President of CAI, speaks at a CAI symposium on violent extremism with top U.S. government officials in attendance.

Furthermore, the organization’s global advisory board underscores that this is not exactly some progressive arts charity, as its name and branding often imply. Of the seven members of its board, six are senior U.S. officials. These include Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, a four-star general, and the ex-under secretary of state for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights.

“Creative Associates is among the top U.S. government contractors entrusted with trying to help engineer political transitions. The company is part of that lucrative enterprise dubbed the ‘Democracy Industrial Complex,’” Eaton told Mintpress.

In a roundabout way, former head of USAID Andrew Natsios (another member of CAI’s board) seemed to agree with Eaton. When the Trump administration was considering cutting the foreign aid budget, Natsios argued vehemently against it. “What you’re basically doing is eviscerating the most important tool of American influence in the developing world, which is our development program,” he said. “I don’t think they understand what the role of USAID is, what USAID’s mission directors are. USAID’s mission directors are among the most influential foreigners in the country,” he added, apparently confirming that the organization’s focus is less helping others and more promoting Washington’s interests through American social and economic power.

“Even losing wars make money”

Afghanistan is by far and away the country where Creative Associates’ projects have secured the most funding. Combined with its Iraq enterprise, the company has raked in well over half a billion dollars worth of government contracts.

“Even losing wars make money. If you go to the D.C. area, in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, there are all these types of companies that exist because of the war. And the development industry got very wealthy off of it,” said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine captain and Department of Defense and State Department official. “The whole grift of it was simply breathtaking,” he added. In 2009, Hoh resigned his post in Afghanistan with the DoD in protest of the U.S.’ escalation of war.

Creative Associates has secured a number of lucrative contracts in the reconstruction of both countries, particularly with regard to their education systems — including building schools, writing and printing textbooks, training teachers, and administering and managing education systems. Hiring an American company to do this work rather than giving local governments the funding and power to plan their own futures fulfills a very important function, according to Saltman, who noted that this allows the U.S. to essentially retain complete control over Iraqi and Afghan society. Labelling it a classic example of “disaster capitalism,” Saltman describes the remodeling of Iraqi society as “a radical free-market experiment bent on demolishing the public sector and shifting control of civil society nearly completely to the private sector,” and “an attempt to essentially hand a nation over to corporations.”

Creative Associates schoolbooks in Afghanistan have purged any mention of the past few decades of Afghan history or the Taliban from its textbooks. “You can’t buy that kind of thought control — unless you have a few hundred million,” wrote one American educator.

Saltman also noted that working in warzones necessitated a high degree of security, and that companies like CAI were likely giving tens of millions of dollars of their contracts straight over to private mercenary groups like Blackwater.

Hoh was keen to stress that many people working at the lower levels of programs like these were well intentioned, but that as one went higher up the commitment to the benefit of others waned significantly. “Groups like CAI would do the [genuine] work but they would also be a front. It is a way for the CIA and other security services to get people into countries,” he said. In 2009, it was reported that Creative Associates’ headquarters in Peshawar, Pakistan, was being used as a front for Blackwater to stage military operations along the Afghan/Pakistan border.

Creative Associates have also secured lucrative contracts to work in other war zones, such as Libya and Yemen.

Cuba: rappers and regime change

For years, Creative Associates International worked closely with the CIA and other government agencies, operating and overseeing a complex set of projects targeting Cuba, all with one specific goal: the overthrow of the Communist government (or “sociopolitical change tak[ing] place in Cuba,” as its own documents preferred to describe its mission).

Creative Associates’ most infamous project was perhaps its creation of a Twitter-like app called Zunzuneo. Zunzuneo first operated as a very useful communication tool but, slowly, its creators injected it with regime-change messages, with the plan to eventually direct all users to attend demonstrations and foment a Caribbean color revolution. The app’s user base grew quickly, attracting 55,000 people by 2012 — a huge number for a poor country with little internet access. The U.S. government attempted to hide its own role in the app’s creation, secretly trying to convince Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to buy into the company as a front man. It is not clear what the outcome of these negotiations was. However, the Zunzuneo project was abruptly abandoned, leaving Cubans wondering why their service provider suddenly stopped working. Only two years later, through an investigation by the Associated Press, did the truth come out.

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USAID grant documents show CAI’s involvement in the ZunZuneo project. Source | Cuba Money Project

That was far from the last nefarious project Creative Associates was intimately involved in, however. Between 2009 and 2014, it was charged with recruiting regime-change operatives on the island. Creative Associates brought young activists from all over Latin America to Cuba under the guise of a phony HIV/AIDS awareness drive, which internal memos describe as the “perfect excuse” to ferry their people in and out of the country.

Creative Associates has also attempted to use the Cuban hip hop community as a vehicle to drive regime change to the Caribbean nation. In 2009, it sent Serbian music promoter and color-revolution expert Rajko Bozic to the island, where he attempted to identify and bribe rappers into joining his project.

Rap had exploded as a genre on the island in the previous decades, partly because of its new sound and partly because Afro-Cuban rappers were using the medium to bring attention to taboo subjects such as racism. Creative Associates — intersectional imperialists par excellence — smelled an opportunity to use it as a wedge issue.

Bozic found a handful of artists willing to participate in the project and immediately began aggressively promoting them and getting their music played on Western radio stations. He also bribed big Latino music stars to allow the rappers to open up for them at their gigs, thus buying them extra credibility and exposure. Zunzuneo helped in this endeavor, sending users links to this exciting new music that, it seemed, the whole island was buzzing about.

While Creative Associates’ role in this was exposed, the general tactic of using rappers for regime change is still clearly active. Grant publications from USAID and its sister organization the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) show that both groups are using hip hop as a vehicle for their goals. For instance, one project from the NED’s latest publications, entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” states that its goal is to “promote citizen participation and social change,” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Of course, for the United States, “democracy” in Cuba is synonymous with “regime change.”

In July of this year, Cuban rappers led a bungled insurrection. The movement’s face was Cuban expat Yotuel, an artist who is openly working with the U.S. government and whose song “Patria y Vida” was immediately promoted upon its release by American politicians and senior officials in Washington. “Patria y Vida” is consistently referred to in U.S. reports as a success story in “democracy promotion” activities.

It is not clear whether Creative Associates was directly involved in the July protests in Cuba. They appear to be relatively embarrassed about the press they have received; in fact, there is no mention of any Cuban activities whatsoever — historical or current — on the company’s website.

Latin America: intersectional imperialists

The United States invaded Nicaragua in 1933, setting up the Somoza dictatorship to look after its interests. With the Sandinista revolution in 1979, the U.S. lost control over the small Central American country. In an effort to turn back the clock, Washington funded, armed, trained and supported far-right Contra death squads infamous for their brutality. Direct support for the Contras ended in 1989. But at exactly the same time, the U.S. began employing Creative Associates to conduct all manner of operations involving the paramilitary organization, efforts that helped the U.S.-backed candidate, Violetta Chamorro, win the 1990 election. Local laws prohibiting foreign funding of political parties were circumvented by the establishment of a wide range of non-governmental organizations focusing on voter registration and political education, including programs aimed at uniting the anti-Sandinista opposition (including the Contras) behind Chamorro.

Now that the Sandinistas have returned to power, Creative Associates is back with avengence. As Nicaragua-based journalist Ben Norton told MintPress:

Creative Associates has been very active in destabilization operations targeting the Sandinista government. With plentiful funding from USAID, the CIA cutout has cynically exploited sensitive issues to increase social divisions, intentionally driving a [wedge] between Nicaraguans and their Sandinista government with programs targeting racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, the LGBT community, and at-risk youth.”

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USAID LGBT A Nicaraguan man poses at a USAID event about LGBT issues in 2018. Source | CAI

Norton noted that, while Creative Associates claims to be working purely to improve Nicaraguan society, it collaborates exclusively with opposition-aligned groups, thus effectively subsidizing the country’s right-wing. “One of several USAID programs run by Creative Associates in Nicaragua has targeted vulnerable groups in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. The CIA cutout plays off differences there, in the Miskito indigenous community and the Afro-Nicaraguan population,” he added.

Likewise, in El Salvador, U.S. efforts are branded as nonpartisan. But rather than help the leftist FMLN Party, Washington pumps millions into the country through a myriad of NGOs that promote neoliberal, private sector solutions to problems. “Behind the heartwarming photo ops, USAID’s projects in El Salvador are stealthily advancing the interests of the Salvadoran corporate class,” wrote Jacobin magazine. Creative Associates has been at the heart of this effort: since 2001, the organization has been awarded over $51 million for projects in El Salvador. It has also been at the forefront of propping up the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Honduras, helping the government militarize its response to unrest and other social problems there.

And while the organization describes itself as being in the democracy promotion business, it is often involved in quite the opposite. Saltman notes that the company was involved with the 1991 coup d’etat in Haiti, which removed the democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from power. When Aristide swept back to power in a landslide in 2000, Creative Associates went back to work, attempting to remold the Haitian media system based on the for-profit corporate American model.

Unsurprisingly, in Venezuela Creative Associates also supports U.S.-backed opposition leader Juan Guaidó. Its senior advisor Jeff Fischer called for the “regime” of Nicolas Maduro to acquiesce to an election organized by the OAS, a Washington-based group that played a key role in the overthrow of leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2019. In his recommendations, Fischer suggested that an “international” force would have to be flown in to provide security for any election, and that the process should be designed by outsiders and not subject to Venezuelan laws.

Creative solutions

Creative Associates International essentially serves as a semi-privatized government in many countries, overseeing education and healthcare systems, security services and local management. It also provides a wide range of clandestine services: spying, intelligence and regime-change operations.

Once the domain of the CIA and other three-letter agencies, this sort of work is now largely done by the private sector. As National Endowment for Democracy co-founder Allen Weinstein told The Washington Post, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

The utility of this is manifold. First, contracting out the work of nation building to U.S.-based third parties allows Washington to maintain control over a country without a formal occupation. In other nations, it trains an entire class of people to see the world in a manner conducive to American state and corporate interests. Furthermore, there are many opportunities to make enormous (private) profits from these projects. Outsourcing dirty activities to private companies also allows the U.S. government to distance itself from any scandals. Perhaps most importantly, however, is that there is no public oversight with private companies. As Hoh explained,

You can hide things by using these private companies. Private companies don’t fall under Freedom Of Information Act requests. So, if you are working in Nicaragua with USAID, theoretically, all your work should be available to U.S. citizens by way of the Freedom Of Information Act and other mechanisms. But if you are a private company, you don’t have that to any degree. So there is a lot that can be done with these private companies that the government can’t do, particularly with regard to plausible deniability.”

Ultimately, Creative Associates International has grown into an important part of the American military-thinktank-industrial complex. While technically a private company, the fact that virtually the entirety of its funding comes from Washington and that its board is full of high U.S. officials demonstrates that the organization is an integral part of Washington’s global strategy. However, the veneer of privatization helps it avoid the public scrutiny that a government department would receive. While mercenary armies like Blackwater have at least been subject to inquiry, making the company’s name infamous around the world, Creative Associates International has largely flown under the radar — exactly where the organization’s board wants it to be.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 22, 2021 5:12 pm

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Deb Haaland: Diversifying the established imperialist order
Posted Aug 16, 2021 by Peoples Anti-Colonial Press (PA-CP)

On Dec. 17, 2020, Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) was appointed by Joe Biden as Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). Celebratory headlines proclaimed it a “historic moment” and the identity politics-influenced left was quick to defend the appointment from questioning. The U.S. settler-empire, for the first time, has a Native woman leading a wing of government which was specifically designed to erase Indigenous people and manage stolen lands.

Immediately, Haaland’s nomination was touted as a “victory for Indigenous movements.” In these celebrations, Halaand’s history of being an establishment politician and her betrayals of internationalism, in support of U.S. imperialism, were not disclosed. These celebrations point to an assumption that Haaland, on the basis of her being an Indigenous woman, would automatically push for policies which are favorable to Indigenous relatives and the well-being of the land. The celebratory fervor did not take into account the fact that her politics are aligned with the Biden administration, and by extension, the U.S. empire.

Even under the best circumstances, individuals such as Haaland cannot move things forward for us; only mass movements, organized against capitalism and imperialism, can advance the struggle. Many people have been looking for a left analysis of this moment because they know, instinctually, that there is something more to be said about Haaland’s appointment and the apparatus in which she operates as the Secretary of the DOI.

This analysis seeks to understand the circumstances which have led to Haaland’s appointment, the reality of her leadership, and its implications on the movement for Indigenous liberation, moving forward. As Indigenous and other colonized revolutionaries, we offer a materialist antidote to the narrow and superficial narrative that has been put forward by corporate, non-profit, and even, left-media sectors. We invite our relatives and revolutionary comrades to receive and reflect upon the greater scope of Haaland’s positions and politics.

Broken Promises

Biden has now been in power for seven months, and Deb Haaland has served as Secretary of the DOI for that time. Yet despite the Biden administration’s campaign promises to end new drilling on federal lands and to rein in climate-changing emissions, approvals to drilling and fracking are now on pace to reach their highest level since the presidency of George W. Bush. In fact, under the leadership of Haaland and the newly appointed Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bryan Newland, ex-chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Community and known opponent of Enbridge’s Line 5 Pipeline, the DOI has approved over 2,500 drilling permits on public and tribal lands. Deb Haaland told Colorado Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing last month,

Gas and oil production will continue well into the future and we believe that is the reality of our economy and the world we’re living in.1

Meanwhile, there is also a mass struggle being waged against heavyweights of the extractivist industries. Land, water, and treaty protectors engaged in struggle against Enbridge’s Line 3, a pipeline that would bring nearly 1 million gallons of tar sands oil a day from Alberta, Canada through Anishinaabeg territory in Minnesota and Wisconsin to Lake Superior, have been teargassed, maced, and shot with rubber bullets and pepper balls. Contractors working on the pipeline were caught trafficking women, further adding to the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women.2 Various petitions have been raised, calling for Haaland to put a stop to Line 3. Furthermore, actions in the U.S. House of Representatives have indicated that the settler state is looking to take its violence to the next level in the form of HR 1374–a bill that would label land, water, and treaty defenders as “terrorists,” and equip states with the resources to further protect their “critical infrastructure” with lethal force.3

Despite the Biden Administration’s proposals to protect public lands from the fracking industry by suspending leasing, the extraction continued.4 The DOI’s promise to limit leasing on public lands does not entirely protect public lands from being privatized and sold off for unrestricted development and extraction. Furthermore, any promise to limit leases on public lands does not limit those leases already in effect nor apply to wells, infrastructure projects, or plans to deal with “produced water and the high emissions of methane.” There is an industry and policy trend towards reusing these hazardous and contaminated byproducts of oil and gas extraction to increase production for energy corporations.

Domestic Imperialism

The DOI originated as an arm of the settler-state whose purpose was to manage what is referred to as “Westward expansion,” the continued violent settlement of Turtle Island towards the Pacific coast. The U.S. seized large swaths of land, currently known as the “Southwest,” as spoils of victory from a competitive imperialist war with Mexico. The task of the DOI, on its initiation in 1849, was to “domesticate” these newly acquired “foreign” lands into the U.S. empire.

The DOI was united in expropriating and removing Native peoples from their lands but it was ideologically divided between managing the interests of small land-owning (land-grabbing) settlers and wealthy industrialists. The latter wanted to begin large-scale extractivist development, such as the construction of the trans-continental railroad, on the newly claimed resource rich territories. This contradiction was intensified after the U.S. completed its process of expanding Westward and shifted the duties of the DOI towards conservation of public land, despite being continuously lobbied by private industry to allow for development.5

Though the DOI maintained its guise of working to restrict extractivism at home, it increasingly worked to manage resource extraction abroad until those duties were passed onto other departments in an attempt to disassociate the DOI from its contributions to environmental degradation. This helped create the contemporary image of the DOI as the arm of government which works in the interests of the public and the environment. Today, the DOI’s responsibilities mainly revolve around the management of public lands and Native communities, presiding over the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The department that was designed to displace Native people from their land for the economic development of the U.S. settler-state is now the same department that maintains paternalistic control, serving settler access to land over the needs of tribal nations and Native peoples. For the first time, the DOI is headed by a Native woman; if we understand Halaand’s policies, career, and her place within the Empire, it’s not surprising that she was appointed to this position.

Agent of Colonialism

The U.S. military has been a major instrument of neocolonialism from the mid-20th century until today and has leached from the lives of Native people to accomplish that work. For example, one in four eligible Native men served in the Korean War. Still today, over 24,000 Native people are active in military service, bringing violence abroad. We must be clear that despite their sacrifices, this service has not broken a cycle of underdevelopment in Native communities and has, instead, further entrenched Native people in U.S. imperialism.

Haaland served on the House Armed Services Committee, responsible for budgeting decisions regarding the Department of Defense and Armed Forces, and continuously stresses her attachment to the military through her family affiliations. This appeals to the imperialist establishment, especially because it is a strong taboo in the Democratic Party–it seems especially with “minority” representatives–to fail in wholeheartedly endorsing the U.S. military. More importantly, it is one of the ways in which even seemingly progressive politicians from underrepresented groups perpetuate the U.S.’s many harms overseas, in the name of misguided patriotism. Critically overlooked, the United States military is objectively the biggest polluter on the planet. Support for the U.S. military means full on support for climate disaster.

This loyalty to imperial forces extends towards supporting the illegal Zionist occupation of Palestine. In her first year as a congress member, Haaland accepted an invitation from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an incredibly well-funded zionist lobbying group with massive influence on U.S. policy, to join a delegation to occupied Palestine. Accepting invitations from AIPAC is a must for political career advancement in the empire and only after immense pressure and calls to refuse the trip, did she change course at the last minute. Calls that she decline in solidarity with Palestinian people living in conditions of apartheid and ethnic cleansing came from many organizations such as CODEPINK and sitting representative, Rashida Tlaib.

Her validation of Israel as a legitimately democratic state also affirms the U.S.’s similarly deceitful claims of democracy on stolen land. Furthermore, she voted in support of Anti-BDS, a draconian measure designed to make boycotting Israeli industry and culture a punishable offence. Her choices to align herself with the state of Israel, place her in explicit alignment with settler colonial violence. If we excuse or disregard this, we align ourselves with settler colonial violence against Palestinian people and their homelands, and deeply limit the possibility of our own liberation from settler colonial occupation, as Indigenous nations.

Sustaining Settler Race Ideology

In 2019, Haaland co-introduced the reauthorization of the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act.6 This bill proposes funding for housing and infrastructure to all 574 federally recognized tribes. Over $62 million dollars would be annually allocated to the so-called 5 Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations). This is 10% of the money included in the overall bill, despite the 5 tribes making up less than 1% of all federally recognized tribes which receive funding. In previous iterations of this bill, protections were made for the Freedmen of these nations—descendants of African relatives victim to chattel slavery who were enslaved by citizens of these tribal nations and relatives who were here prior to European invasion. However, the protections, or the verbiage that would cover the Freedmen under the reauthorization of this bill, is no longer there.

This bill and the violent removal of protections for Freedmen are a part of the larger structure of settler-colonial anti-Black and anti-Indigenous race ideology which works to erase Black Indigenous identity, perpetuated through ideas like “blood purity” and “blood quantum.” The logic of racialization under the settler state says that you can be Black or you can be Indigenous, but you cannot be recognized as both. A group of Choctaw and Chickasaw Freedmen are calling on Deb Haaland 7 to right these wrongs and advocate for citizenship and equal rights for all Freedmen, a bare minimum demand which would provide some immediate relief in the form of housing, healthcare, and other essential needs if fulfilled.

Masses Struggle, Individuals Advance

Despite the advancement of Native individuals up ladders of US-defined success, such as government appointments and inclusion into academic institutions, the conditions of Native people have only grown worse. For example, a record-breaking six Native people were elected into Congress in 2020 and there has been an increase of Native women with professorships in academia since the turn of the century.8 Yet, the number of Native people in the U.S. experiencing poverty in the last decade has gone up nearly 20% [9, 10, 11, 12] and the average per capita income of Native people is less than the average per capita income of all Americans from over 30 years ago. Worse, these figures are pre-pandemic. In fact, on almost all economic, educational, and social outcomes, Indigenous people are behind all other U.S. citizens.

Curiously, Native struggles have been mass-based, the struggle against DAPL being a major recent example. Yet, recent advancements of Native people have been celebrated on an individual basis. We aren’t celebrating victories in Oak Flat, Shinnecock Hills, or Leech Lake. We aren’t even celebrating a minor decline in poverty. We are celebrating the success of an individual. Because individuals do not win victories for the masses, we cannot be fooled that the appointment of Haaland is an advancement for Indigenous people.

A World Free from Imperialism and Settler Colonialism

It is important to understand how uncritical support for establishment politicians is perpetuated in colonized communities. The non-profit industry is a self-correcting mechanism for the neoliberal order, meaning this sector’s sometimes unconscious, but more often conscious, contribution is to brand capitalism as something capable of self-reforming by advocating for social justice issues within corporate and governmental structures. This typically requires co-opting revolutionary language and rhetoric from organic people’s movements while discarding the actual political demands of these movements. This is why, for example, a Native-led non-profit can receive millions in funding from Amazon tzar, Jeff Bezos, and mass landlords, Bill and Melinda Gates, for Land Back campaigns [13, 14], while uncritically platforming an establishment politician within an establishment party. We understand the eagerness to support a candidate like Deb Haaland, without thorough criticism, to be a symptom of liberalism. We must refuse to support candidates simply because of their identity. This simply diversifies the established imperialist order and validates the material consequences of their appointment. We encourage relatives to be honest and critical about the reality around us. Being courageous will allow us to see and accept the truth, strengthening our position as leaders of mass change.

For many, the U.S. state’s rotten nature has become unmistakable. The glaring symptoms—rampant police brutality in response to protests against police brutality and anti-Black violence, the disrespect shown towards healthcare workers, the complete neglect of elders in the middle of a pandemic, the heightening of Cold War efforts while millions starve and become unsheltered, to name a few—are clearly understood by many as the characteristics of a degenerating capitalist empire.

As Indigenous and other colonized people, our struggles have always been at the forefront of the climate movement. We must organize and fight outside of colonial institutions which only serve the people who pillage the planet for profit, most violently in the Global South.

Diversity and inclusion at the table of imperialists should not erase our memories and understanding that the empire itself is the main enemy and its continued existence is the root issue. Instead of committing ourselves to impossibly reforming the imperialist nation-state, we have a duty to our human and other-than-human relatives to build the alternatives and power needed to end the occupation and heal our planet.

Notes:
↩ Matthew Brown, U.S. drilling approvals increase despite Biden climate pledge www.pbs.org
↩ AP, Six men, including two Line 3 workers, arrested in human trafficking sting www.mprnews.org
↩ Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Determination of Classification and Authorization for Sharing of Data Related to the Line 3 Replacement Project unicornriot.ninja
↩ Wenonah Hauter, Is Biden serious about climate? His 2,000 drilling and fracking permits suggest not? www.theguardian.com
↩ Megan Black, “Interior Imperialism: Fossil fuels, American expansion, and rebel park rangers,” n+1 Magazine (March 2017)
↩ H.R.5319 – Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Reauthorization Act of 2019, www.congress.gov
↩ Choctaw-Chickasaw Freedmen, Deb Haaland: Stand Against Modern-Day Jim Crow In Indian Country www.change.org
↩ TIAA Institute, Taking the measure of faculty diversity www.tiaainstitute.org
↩ Jens Manuel Krogstad, One-in-four Native Americans and Alaska Natives are living in poverty www.pewresearch.org
↩ Who lives in Poverty USA? www.povertyusa.org
↩ U.S. Census, Facts for Features: American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month: November 2018 www.census.gov
↩ National Congress of American Indians, Indian Country Demographics www.ncai.org
↩ Abby Wargo, NDN Collective expands its footprint with over $2 million in property purchases rapidcityjournal.com
↩ KOTA, NDN Collective gets awarded $12M from Jeff Bezos www.kotatv.com
About Peoples Anti-Colonial Press (PA-CP)
Peoples’ Anti-Colonial Press (pa-cp.org) was established as a vehicle for countering liberal-hegemonic ideas by publishing and promoting digestible writing and education grounded in anti-imperialism, feminism, materialism, and scientific socialism. Our role is to (1) provide educational resources towards anti-colonial applications of Marxism and to (2) study, analyze, and promote political struggles of the working class, anti-imperialist movements, struggles against racism and patriarchy, and the self-determination of nations in the periphery and semi-periphery, as well as Indigenous Nations in the Imperialist core. We are a Marxist-Leninist organization led by Indigenous and other colonized people.
https://mronline.org/2021/08/16/deb-haa ... ist-order/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 29, 2021 1:52 pm

What Makes the United States Richer than its G7 Partners? Imperialism, not Lower Taxes
Stephen Gowans Imperialism September 17, 2021 7 Minutes
September 17, 2021

By Stephen Gowans

Image

The Harvard economics professor, N. Gregory Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the US president from 2003 to 2005, points to lower GDPs per capita in Western Europe to warn against US Americans emulating Western Europe’s welfare states. The higher taxes that Western Europeans pay for robust social supports, he cautions, undermine incentives to work, leading to lower incomes. “Europeans work less than [US] Americans because they face higher taxes to finance a more generous social safety net,” Mankiw argues.

While it’s true that the United States’ G7 partners are less affluent in GDP per capita terms, to what extent is this due to higher taxes versus the United States’ ability to shape the international economic order to suit the interests of US investors and businesses at the expense of its G7 partners?


US politicians endlessly point to the post-World War II economic order, of which Washington was the chief architect, as the key to US prosperity. For example, in 2017, John McCain, a major figure in the US foreign policy establishment, remarked: “We are the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from our political and economic values. We have grown vastly wealthier and more powerful under those rules.” McCain warned that challenges to the US-created order threatened US prosperity.

Today, McCain’s “rules” are variously referred to as “the rules of the road,” the “rules-based international order,” and “international rules and norms.” What they refer to are US-created rules that make the United States “vastly wealthier and more powerful”—indeed, vastly wealthier and more powerful than even its G7 allies.

In an important article he wrote for the March/April 2020 edition of Foreign Affairs–the journal of the influential Wall Street-funded and directed policy formulation group, the Council on Foreign Relations–soon-to-be president Joe Biden noted that for the last 70 years, the United States has “played a leading role in writing the rules, forging the agreements, and animating the institutions that guide relations among nations.”

As McCain acknowledged, Washington constructed the rules to serve US economic interests.

US military might and economic leverage have allowed Washington to define the rules and enforce them. Our “ability to project power [is inter alia] the basis of how we … advance U.S. interests,” declared the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2017.

Washington’s obsession with “the rules,” who writes them, and who benefits from them, lies at the heart of US hegemonism, but also US hostility to China. China, and other powers such as Russia, North Korea, and Iran, which Washington denounce as revisionist, want to revise the rules of the road that put the United States ahead of all other countries, politically, militarily, and economically. These countries, along with others, have formalized their opposition to a global order based on US rules and US supremacy by founding The Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, an 18-nation alliance that promotes an international order based on international law and the equality of nations.

“Who writes the rules that govern trade? … The United States, not China, should be leading that effort,” insists Biden.

Until the end of World War II, Washington’s G7 partners, Germany, Japan, Italy, France, the UK, and Canada, were independent competitors of the United States, each seeking to carve up the world into their own spheres of trade, investment, and economic advantage. (Canada, as part of the British Commonwealth, followed London’s lead.)

The postwar international order, authored by the newly emergent hegemonic power, the United States, integrated the defeated Axis powers, along with the weakened French and British Empires, into an international order, defined by Washington, informed by Wall Street’s values, and aimed at promoting corporate USA’s prosperity.

To ensure its former imperial rivals would now accommodate, rather than compete with, US economic interests in a new US-defined world order, the United States occupied militarily Germany, Japan, Italy, and the UK. For almost 80 years, the United States has maintained a robust military presence in each of these countries. Why? In 2002, in an interview with United Press International, Alexander Haig, former Supreme Commander of NATO and US Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, explained.

Q — Why is the United States still stationing 70,000 troops in Germany?

A — A lot of good reasons for that. This presence is the basis for our influence in the European region and for the cooperation of allied nations…. A lot of people forget it is also the bona fide of our economic success. The presence of U.S. troops keeps European markets open to us. If those troops weren’t there, those markets would probably be more difficult to access.

Q — I didn’t forget. I just didn’t know that if the United States didn’t maintain 70,000 troops in Germany, European markets might be closed to American goods and services.

A — On occasion, even with our presence, we have confronted protectionism in a number of industries, such as automotive and aerospace.

In other words, the markets of former imperial rivals were integrated into the US market, and the glue that bound them to the United States, and continues to bind them–as The New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman once put it–is “the hidden fist” of “the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Washington would also integrate its former European imperial competitors into NATO, placing their militaries under formal US command, and thereby taking future inter-imperialist military rivalry off the table. At the same time, NATO allows Washington to exploit the fettered militaries of its former rivals as force multipliers in the pursuit of specifically US goals in the US-defined international realm.

After the war, Washington imposed a pacifist constitution on Japan, the United States’ main rival for domination of East Asia and the Pacific, effectively emasculating the country militarily, and ensuring it would not contest US primacy in the region. Washington is now pressuring Japan to lift the pacifist restrictions the United States itself imposed on Tokyo, in order to gear up for war on “revisionist” China, under US direction.

Additionally, the US military controlled, and continues to control, the world’s trade routes, and hence its former rivals’ access to markets and raw materials. “If you have a global economy, I think you need a global navy to look after that economy,” said U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Scott Swift. The global navy is none other than the US Navy. Author Gregg Easterbrook notes that “the US Navy is ‘the police force of nearly all blue water.” … It “has made the oceans … safer for commerce.” Specifically, US commerce.

Importantly, Washington keeps its hand on the Middle East oil spigot. Germany, France, Japan, and Italy are highly dependent on oil from West Asia. With Washington able to close the spigot at will, Western Europe and Japan have few options but to accept what Hugo Chavez called “the international dictatorship of the United States empire.”

Hence, the United States’ G7 partners emerged from the war as US vassals. Within the globe-girding US empire, they were assigned roles as junior partners—that is, subordinate components of the US imperium. Their economic interests would be junior and inferior to those of Wall Street and corporate USA.

Mankiw’s analysis is risibly superficial. The idea that taxation undermines incentives to work rests on the notion that effort is proportional to its return. Taxes reduce the return on effort and therefore discourage work. If this is true, the opposite is also true: the greater the return, the greater the effort. By this logic, Mankiw ought to advocate a robust increase in the minimum wage, reasoning that the more money people are able to make, the more likely they are to want to work. But he’s not. Instead, Mankiw’s prescriptions invariably favor employers over workers. The wealthy should not be burdened by high taxes. Governments ought to raise revenue through consumption taxes: those that hit low-income families the hardest and the wealthy the least. In invariably promoting the interests of capital, Mankiw illustrates why Karl Marx described economists of the Harvard professor’s color as “hired prize fighters” of the bourgeoisie, not “disinterested inquirers,” whose only concern was “whether this theorem or that was … useful to capital or harmful.”

Moreover, Mankiw divorces his analysis from the surrounding conditions and events. History, politics, the imbalance in political and military power between the United States and Western Europe, do not enter his field of vision. Notwithstanding Mankiw, the disparity in per capita income between the United States and its G7 partners can be explained by Washington building a post-WWII international order to privilege US economic actors at the expense of its defeated and weakened imperial rivals. In other words, the outcome of the three decades-long, 1914-1945, inter-imperialist struggle, was the emergence of a US leviathan—one that reordered the world to put, not business on top, but US business on top, with the consequence that US GDP per capita would top that of its former competitors.

Had Germany prevailed in the struggle, and had it subsequently integrated the United States into a German-led global economic order, German GDP per capita would almost certainly be greater than that of the United States, for the simple reason that German-authored rules would favor German businesses. Likewise, had Japan prevailed, the Japanese, not US Americans, would enjoy the higher GDP per capita.

This is not to say that the rivalry has come to an end. It hasn’t. That the G7 countries continue to compete among themselves for markets and investment opportunities can be seen in Germany forging a stronger trading relationship with Beijing than Washington favors; in rivalry between the EU and the United States in connection with Airbus and Boeing; in Germany and France flirting with strategic autonomy for Europe; and between the United States and France in arms sales. These are but a few examples. Even so, while competition persists, in does so within bounds defined by Washington, enforced by its ability to control its rivals’ access to markets and raw materials.

It is not, then, Western Europe’s welfare states, and the support they receive from higher taxes, that account for why Washington’s G7 partners are poorer. Instead, the lower GDPs per capita of the United States’ former imperial rivals can be explained as the outcome of their losing the inter-imperialist struggle of the first half of the twentieth century. Emerging victorious and strengthened from the thirty-year-war, the United States used its military and economic clout to impose a global economic order on its former rivals—an order which puts corporate USA first, and relegates its G7 partners to junior positions, provides them junior access to profit-making opportunities, and leaves them with junior incomes.

https://gowans.blog/2021/09/17/what-mak ... wer-taxes/

All of this crap promulgated by myriad suckers from infantile leftists to paranoid racists about the so-called New World Order, supposedly the rule of international corporations superseding the nation state, only serve to camouflage US imperialism and thus misdirect effective opposition. From the Right we can of course expect nothing but it would sure be nice if leftist adherents of this error would get their materialism on.
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 01, 2021 2:24 pm

A report by the Sanctions Kill Coalition
September 2021

“We don’t deserve this” / The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions

2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction …. 3
Findings … 4
Conclusions … 12
Recommendations … 14
Voices from the Sanctioned … 15
Impact of sanctions on specific countries … 17
Graphics and Photos …………… 25
Source of information on Sanctions / Unilateral Coercive Measures … 34

This report was produced by Rick Sterling, John Philpot and David Paul with support from other
members of the Sanctions Kill Coalition and many individuals in sanctioned countries.

“We don’t deserve this” / The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions
3
INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, the US has increasingly used sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy.
Some 39 nations1
and territories are under direct or indirect sanctions. Most of these sanctions are not
authorized by the United Nations Security Council and many of them are enacted by the US alone.
They are called “unilateral coercive measures” at the United Nations. These US decrees and legislation
are “extraterritorial” when they assume the right to impose regulations, restrictions and penalties on nonUS countries, companies and individuals.
There are many types of sanctions: economic or financial restrictions, trade prohibitions, and blocking or
seizing assets of individuals, organizations and countries. Greatly increasing the reach of sanctions,
“secondary sanctions”2
target non-US entities which are interacting with the “primary” target .
President Biden’s administration is currently reviewing US sanctions policy. On January 21, 2021, the
first National Security Memo3
of the Biden administration called for a review whether US sanctions are
hindering response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, administration leaders raised a second
concern, saying

4
“The goal of sanctions should not be to punish ordinary citizens for the actions of their
leaders.” Then, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed a third concern that sanctions are
undermining “the US’s leadership role in the global financial system.”
The Biden administration review of sanctions is being conducted by an inter-agency team including
State and Treasury Departments. As of this date (mid-September 2021), they have not released the
results of their review.
Because this issue is vitally important, a coalition of non-profit and human rights organizations called
“Sanctions Kill5
” has prepared the following report. The information and findings are the result of onthe-ground investigation in Syria plus questionnaires with citizens of some of the most severely
sanctioned countries such as Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
The title of this report is “We don’t deserve this.” This is what a Syrian woman said when asked about
the destructive impact of US sanctions on her country. The goal of this report is to inform North
Americans about the real-life consequences of US imposed sanctions.
This report begins with our findings, then goes on to conclusions and recommendations. After that, there
are quotes from some of the people interviewed and short synopses of the impact of sanctions in Cuba,
Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.
The final section includes resources which will be of interest to anyone looking further into this topic.
We invite your comments and collaboration. Contact us at info@SanctionsKill.org.
1 https://sanctionskill.org/2021/02/02/sa ... countries/
2 https://www.cnas.org/publications/repor ... -sanctions
3 https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsm/nsm-1.pdf
4 https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-admi ... 1614732627
5 https://sanctionskill.org/
“We don’t deserve this” / The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions
4

FINDINGS

FINDING 1: Sanctions primarily hurt civilians. Humanitarian “exceptions” have not worked.
As reported6
by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Targeted countries experience
economic contractions and, in many cases, are unable to import sufficient essential goods, including
essential medicines, medical equipment, the infrastructure necessary for clean water, health care, and
food. The effects are devastating for everyday citizens.”
Similar claims about the impact of sanctions are made by many others. For at least 25 years, study after
study has shown that coercive economic sanctions are hurting the most vulnerable and driving middle
class citizens into poverty.
An article at the Association of Certified Sanction Specialists acknowledges, “In Venezuela, the
sanctions’ regime has created a food deficit which in turn reduces the public’s caloric intake and
increases disease as well as mortality rates… sanctions appear to be more of a collective punishment
than an attempt to modify behaviors.”
A former US foreign service officer writes
7
, “Sanctions harm the poor and middle class the most.”
The report titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela8
” says, “We
find that the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and
health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018.”
Congressman Jim McGovern (MA02) recently wrote to President Biden saying9
, “I believe sanctions
like those the previous administration imposed on Venezuela are both misguided and immoral.”
The same is true of the dire suffering caused by US sanctions in the Middle East. US sanctions on the
Syrian Central Bank have collapsed the currency. Products are four times as expensive as they were just
one year before the imposition of these sanctions. Millions of Syrian civilians have been driven into
poverty. With an Orwellian touch, the sanctions are named the Caesar Civilian Protection Act10
.
As noted in a Carter Center report11
, “the exceptions process does not function as intended.”
6 https://cepr.net/the-case-against-economic-sanctions/
7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html
8 https://cepr.net/report/economic-sancti ... venezuela/
9 https://twitter.com/RepMcGovern/status/ ... 90592?s=20
10 https://original.antiwar.com/rick_sterl ... n-syrians/
11 https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/ ... ct2020.pdf

“We don’t deserve this” / The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions
5

FINDING 2: US sanctions have hindered the response to Covid-19. As a result, many civilians
have died, and the pandemic has spread further.


In March 2020, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said12, “We are at war with a virus.” He
appealed for “waving sanctions that can undermine countries’ capacity to respond to the pandemic.”
The Trump administration ignored these appeals and added new sanctions. In March 2020, a Venezuelan
request for an emergency $5B loan to fight the virus was rejected13 by the International Monetary Fund.
The report noted, “The US is the biggest shareholder and has a veto over major decisions.”
In April 2020, the Center for Economic and Political Research reported14 that Iran was having difficulty
obtaining “medical supplies, sanitation equipment, and other goods we now know are necessary to slow
the virus’ spread.” It commented, “While the United States is fighting COVID-19 here at home, US
sanctions against other governments are aiding the virus’ spread abroad. They’ve already likely
contributed to many unnecessary deaths in Iran.”
In October 2020, the UN Human Rights Office issued a press release saying “Unilateral sanctions make
it harder to fight COVID-19, must be dropped15
.” The report by Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan
notes, “Targeted countries face shortages of medications and medical equipment, including oxygen
supplies and ventilators, protective kits, spare parts, software, fuel, electricity, drinking water and water
for sanitation…”.
Because of extraterritorial sanctions, Cuba has had enormous difficulty obtaining syringes16 even as they
developed their own COVID-19 vaccine.
A few months ago, in early June 2021, Venezuela’s payment for 11 million COVAX vaccinations was
blocked17 by UBS Bank because of US sanctions. The funds ultimately went through, but only after a
delay and international protest.
In February 2021, twenty-seven Congressional representatives and senators sent a letter18 to President
Biden encouraging the review of sanctions policy. They said existing policy has led to “catastrophic
humanitarian consequences.” In March 2021, 55 human rights and religious organizations sent a letter
to President Biden19 with recommendations including the suspension of sanctions on aid necessary for
the treatment of COVID-19 and all sanctions on civilian sectors.
On June 17, 2021, the US Treasury Department announced new guidelines20 for Syria, Venezuela, and
Iran. General licenses will permit “certain activities” related to COVID-19 but such exceptions to the
extreme sanctions have not made a significant difference.

12 https://www.un.org/en/coronavirus/war-n ... n-fight-it
13 https://apnews.com/article/business-hea ... ddcd8ac0a2
14 https://cepr.net/u-s-sanctions-in-a-tim ... ional-law/
15 https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pag ... 3&LangID=E
16https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/u-s-depriv ... needs-now/
17 https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... d-2021-06-
10/
18 https://omar.house.gov/sites/omar.house ... 5B1%5D.pdf
19https://www.afsc.org/sites/default/files/docume ... 0Biden_fin
al_3_26_21.pdf
20 https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0234

(Much, much more, 35pp, pdf.)

https://sanctionskill.org/wp-content/up ... ressed.pdf
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 03, 2021 1:58 pm

Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle
NOVEMBER 1, 2021

Dossier N°46

Image


A data ‘cloud’ sounds like an ethereal, magical place. It is, in reality, anything but that. The images in this dossier aim to visualise the materiality of the digital world we live in. A cloud is projected onto a chipboard. A vegetable is represented by a genetically modified patent. A cryptocurrency is ‘mined’ not by digging into the earth’s crust, but through energy-consuming computing processes. A GPS coordinate is mapped alongside the footsteps of soldiers. A piece of code is shown as a smoke screen of ones and zeroes. Together they remind us that technology is not neutral but serves the interests of those who wield control over it. Technology is, therefore, a part of class struggle.

Designed by the Art Department of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research based on photographs by Ingrid Neves



Image
Cloud Ccomputing, 2021.


‘The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned’.

– Antonio Gramsci


CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to the incapacity of the bourgeois state to prevent a health and social catastrophe while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared much more resilient.

The question of ‘new digital technologies’ presents itself as a challenge, one whose importance is growing in debates within popular movements. Not only is there unequal access to technology; there is also a permanent concern over the use of data for the purposes of repression, control, consumerism, and surveillance. Coupled with this is the fact that the largest corporations today are information technology firms, which makes the question of new digital technologies essential to understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. The effort to understand these concerns can be seen in the proliferation of related terms and concepts: digital economy, digital capitalism, platform capitalism, techno-feudalism, data capitalism, and surveillance capitalism, among others. Though there is still no agreed upon understanding about these phenomena, the challenge for those who dare to change the world is to construct a collective and objective analysis about the role of digital data and technology companies in contemporary capitalism.

With that in mind, our 46th dossier, Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle, is a product of the Seminar on Digital Technology and Class Struggle, a Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) project that sought to analyse these transformations in contemporary capitalism and their implications for how to organise our struggles, seeking to dig deeper than questions of digital security or competing narratives on social media.[1] This process of building knowledge mainly sought to initiate a debate and to study questions related to digital technology and class g for our movements. We sought to gather different perspectives on this issue and reflect on them in order to build a common understanding, starting not only from the analyses of researcher and expert, but also from the knowledge base of other organisations dedicated to studying digital technologies.

The following reflection is the result of this collective process of building provisional knowledge. The aim here is to understand technological transformations and their social consequences with an eye towards class struggle. It is beyond the scope of this study to provide an exhaustive discussion or conclusion on these themes. Rather, it is a first attempt at understanding issues we believe to be fundamental to social organisation today, drawing upon a broad range of works analysing how these technologies work as part of the dynamic of capital accumulation.



Technology and Capitalism

Within capitalist society, technology appears as an exceptional tool to transform the way we produce, distribute, and consume goods. Technology is not neutral, nor is it divorced from social structures; rather, it acts upon a world built by human labour which – in a capitalist society – is centred on the accumulation of profit by the propertied. The dominant ideology would have us believe that the development of technology and science occurs in a cumulative and inexorable fashion, that the advent of capitalism remains the pinnacle of this process, and that humanity has arrived at a system that produces everything in the best and most efficient way, making everything that came before it – and everything that still resists integration into it – irrelevant. This narrative obscures the fact that technologies are the products of labour, of social relations and dynamics in specific historical and cultural contexts.

The advance of technology is above all a process that emerges from the social organisation of labour. Great technological advances are not the products of exceptional individuals but of collective knowledge and interests that are linked to the ways that life is produced and reproduced and to the social relations that determine and are determined by these same forms of production and reproduction. As such, capitalist society often produces knowledge, techniques, and technologies that express its nature and contradictions. It appropriates what exists and seeks to mould reality in line with its needs. It creates its own industries and its own machines, ones that are not necessarily the best for human development, but which are certainly the most efficient for the process of capital accumulation.

Since the organisation of capitalist production is based on the exploitation of labour in the pursuit of profit, it seeks to use its technologies to control the productive process, dictating the rhythms of human labour to be just another cog in its machine. At the same time, owners of capital seek to centralise, concentrate, and dominate productive capacity to gain an advantage in the permanent competition amongst each other in order to appropriate profit from other economic sectors. As a result, poverty and squalor grow in tandem with the increase in the number of products we could theoretically consume.

Technology, therefore, is not neutral, since it is produced out of a social context of class society that benefits the propertied class over others. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are the technical and technological expressions of a much broader process. The cyclical and structural crises that characterise the capitalist system generate opportune moments for the emergence of new technologies. With the Microelectronic Revolution (the production of ever-smaller and faster integrated circuits, such as microchips), human communication at a global level was profoundly impacted and transformed while also allowing for the unprecedented mobility of capital. Companies were able to demolish factories and simultaneously install them in a range of countries, coordinating productive processes and financial transactions in real time across the planet through informatisation and standardisation. New technologies allowed for the outsourcing of productive processes and the circulation of commodities as well as for the fragmenting of the working class, now articulated on the basis of the flexibilisation of labour and the withdrawal of rights. This ability to relocate production gave capital even greater bargaining power over workers who had until then been concentrated and organised in huge industrial complexes located in one place.

Image
The Origin of GPS
, 2021.

Big Tech and the State

Information and Communication Technologies, developed on the basis of microelectronics and computation, were largely the product of military priorities, only later spreading into the civil sector for the expansion of capitalist accumulation. Aiming to enhance its military power, the US mobilised, coordinated, and supported collective efforts through governmental agencies, universities, and private enterprises. The space race fought during the Cold War also fostered technological development, which it continues to do today through continued space exploration.

The state is fundamental not only for developing technologies that create new markets, but also for advancing the technological frontier in order to hold onto or even compete for new market segments and support the expansion of external markets. High-tech companies are imbricated with their nation states and are structurally dependent on the systems of innovation driven by them – systems whose central objective is, at their origin, a military one. The ICT industry was established under the control of states and companies in the Global North; as a rule, transnational corporations continued to dominate the productive processes and high value-added goods associated with the control and development of the technological base, both to guarantee high profit margins and to make use of military and surveillance advances, thereby attempting to secure hegemony.

Therefore, to understand the ascent of the large technology corporations, known collectively as Big Tech (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.), we need to understand how they relate to the mechanisms of capital accumulation. As much as they present themselves as the ‘solution’ to current economic problems, these corporations are in fact symptoms of problems; that is, they express how capitalism in crisis tries to direct technology towards its own interests. Although these corporations are at the cutting edge of the technologies they deploy in terms of scale and sophistication, they represent a backwards step for civilisation through the flexibilisation of work and the withdrawal of rights, the overwhelming offensive against natural resources, the centralisation and concentration of capital, the power private corporations exercise over public spaces, and other processes that are characteristic of capitalist solutions for the crises it creates.

An infographic demonstrating the rapid growth of Big Tech over the last decade, which has surpassed that of financial and petroleum companies.

This is why the rise of Big Tech as an expression of contemporary capitalism is accompanied by a major ideological offensive rooted in individualism, the discourse of the entrepreneur, the negation of politics (the discourse of neutrality), and other social myths, which become ever more powerful as these same corporations take on the role of the media and privileged ideological agents in society. One of these foundational social myths is that of the ‘virtual world’ as a parallel reality, presented in various guises: cyberspace, global village, virtual world, world wide web, superhighway, metaverse, etc., all based on the illusion of a network defined by its horizontal nature in which all individuals are equal, provided they all have access to the same tools. They all have a voice and can both participate in and influence collective life. In this virtual world, networks and technologies are neutral and aim only, as the Big Tech slogan has it, to ‘create solutions and connect people’. However, behind this apparent horizontality is the work of spin doctors who are experts in disseminating specific politics among the public as well as an increasing number of data analysts and scientists. They have to work hard to prevent us from registering the reality, for instance, of the digital divide and of the erosion of leisure time for the majority of the population.

The frequent use of the term ‘cloud’ corroborates this idea of an abstract place where data produced by users is permanently available and organised almost magically according to democratic and universal criteria. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The ‘cloud’ is in reality a gigantic, extremely concrete, multi-technology infrastructure. It consists of a set of highly centralised and monopolised servers located predominately in US installations, where deregulation and the arbitrariness of both political and profitability interests reign over and above any democratic or universalising pretentions regarding user data. Moreover, they consume exorbitant quantities of energy and natural resources. Similarly, ‘artificial intelligence’ is a term often used to refer to software that analyses and processes large amounts of data with various and complex computational mathematical operations. The term suggests a notion of neutrality: though it seems that there is an autonomous machine ‘thinking’ and making decisions, in reality, the software that allows it to run carries the bias of the entity developing the technology.

Another fundamental Big Tech myth is that of the entrepreneur, a new version of the old fable of the self-made man, which understands success only as the result of individual effort and skill. This myth projects an image of garage-based geniuses – generally brilliant young white men – who revolutionise the world on their own and are billionaires purely as a result of their own merit. People like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg attain the status of business gurus and inspiring coaches, as if their life-courses were accessible to anyone – provided they have a good idea and perseverance. What is missing from this story is that these individuals studied at elite centres of excellence such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and Caltech. Although these centres are formally private, they rely on considerable public investment and major public policies as well as funding from civil and military government departments and policies that allow for brains and knowledge to be imported from other centres of excellence in peripheral countries.

Through the ideology of the ‘digital entrepreneur’, ICT’s links with financial and speculative capital – which invests millions in the creation and expansion of these companies – are also obscured. What is sold is the image of individuals who started ‘from nothing’, leaving out the fact that they already had access to million-dollar funds that are ultimately the result of the private appropriation of public knowledge and public technology, which in turn were publicly developed with the aid of vast public resources. The $500,000 that Zuckerberg received to start Facebook was only possible due to his connections to elite financial and speculative capital.

It is also curious that many of these ventures, such as Spotify and Uber, are not profitable, nor do they necessarily have to be. Their market value has become more important than their profitability; just the promise of value that can be speculated upon is enough. This financialisation has a material base: the exploitation of labour. Technology makes workers more productive, and technologies are incorporated into machines and into tools (constant capital in Marx’s terms), which transmit their embodied values to the newly created commodities. The more financialised an economy, the greater the pressure on the productive sector and the greater the exploitation of workers to be able to compensate for the sheer amounts speculated in the stock market.

Image
Mining Cryptocurrency, 2021.

Financialisation

The meeting of finance capital and ICT does not only happen through the financing and ownership of these enterprises. The combination of the lack of financial regulation typical of neoliberalism and the access to connectivity via smartphones has allowed for the emergence of fintechs. These are companies that develop digital financial products and are principally focused on the creation of digital payment platforms, seeking to operationalise online buying and selling and inserting billions of ‘unbanked’ people into the financial system.

The World Bank estimates that 1.7 billion people around the world do not have bank accounts. This group is generally made up of rural populations. In Latin America, for example, 50%-70% of the population does not have access to banking. It is not for nothing that it was in this region that financial businesses tripled in size in recent years. Out of the 1.7 billion people without access to banking, 1.1 billion have mobile phones.[2] With fintechs, having a bank account or a fixed address is not necessary, nor is having a minimum income or paying various fees. All that is needed is a mobile phone and an internet connection, meaning that this inclusion will principally take place among the most vulnerable populations.

Chinese fintechs also compete in the banking markets of the global periphery. Huawei works with local operators in Africa to offer secure services, loans, remittances, and even burial insurance in Kenya and Ethiopia. Similarly, the billionaire and founder of Beijing Kunlun Technology, Zhou Yahui, is an investor in a platform that offers loans via mobile phones in Kenya; the largest mobile phone retailer in Africa, Transsion, is headquartered in Shenzhen and has investments in another platform in Nigeria and in Ghana, while AliPay, part of the Alibaba group, developed a ‘super app’ for South Africa.[3] The commercial retail sector is another area in which ICT and finance capital act jointly. During the first SARS-CoV pandemic in the mid-2000s, there was an expansion of electronic commerce with the rise of companies like Alibaba and Tencent that are giant retailers today.

However, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Latin America was one of the regions that had least taken up internet commerce, whether due to the poverty rate or to a lack of access to banks and connectivity. For this reason, the US bank Goldman Sachs said that this pandemic could see a repeat of the Chinese electronic commerce phenomenon of the 2000s in Latin America. During the first outbreak of SARS (Sars-CoV1), there was an e-commerce boom in China and several online sales platforms emerged. Among them was Alibaba, which is today one of the largest retailers in the world in this sector. The Chinese population has increasingly made purchases online, a trend that Goldman Sachs predicts will develop e-commerce in Latin America. To this point, in her contribution to the seminar, researcher Larissa Packer highlighted a 50% increase in the number of transactions and in new online consumers in 2020 in Latin America, signifying a monthly revenue growth of 500% for online retailers connected to the food sector in the region – a jump from US$19 million to US$120 million. The Colombian company Rappi, for example, doubled in size in just six months.

Image
Genetic Patent, 2021


Big Tech against Nature

If, on the one hand, CoronaShock limited the movement of people and commodities and produced ruptures in global value chains due to problems in the import and export of commodities, on the other hand, it accelerated the demand for digitalisation. It also led to a deeper application of technology to the industrial base and to the mode of production and distribution, both in urban industries and in extractive and agricultural industries, and it deepened the non-separation of working and non-working time, productive and reproductive labour, and spaces of labour and leisure.

In agribusiness, there was a growth in mergers, acquisitions, and deals between agricultural giants, technology giants, and these fintechs. This new infrastructure has resulted in a reorganisation of these actors, a movement which tends, over time, to lead to oligopoly. Such a reorganisation increases the need for massive data-capture in practically all the stages of the agribusiness chain. Moreover, it deepens the precarisation of public services by decreasing the availability of public information while increasing the supply of private platforms and Big Tech infrastructures for public services. This clearly interferes with the process of governments being able to make decisions in their countries.

The companies John Deere and Bosch are hegemonic in the area of tractors and machinery, while in logistics and sales, Cargill, Archer Daniels, Louis Dreyfus, and Bunge dominate. Then there are the big retailers: Walmart, Alibaba, and Amazon, among others.

Technology giants tend to migrate to the agricultural sector with a sort of vertical integration taking place not among companies of the same sector, but along the value chain, which shows the capacity of these companies to absorb and reorganise the chain vertically from the field to the consumer. There are also tendencies towards the digitalisation of the planet in the realm of natural landscapes and resources as much as in the realm of genetic sequencing. For example, Microsoft is working in partnership with germplasm centres around the world to provide the infrastructure to digitalise these genetic banks. In 2018 at a World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, the Amazon Data Bank project was launched, aiming to catalogue and patent information relating to the genetic sequencing of seeds, seedlings, animals, and a variety of unicellular organisms on earth. This is merely the first step in the Earth Bank of Codes programme.[4]

An oligopolistic market with colonial characteristics is emerging: transnational corporations, mainly domiciled in the Global North, always grant themselves patents and intellectual property rights, which have long invested in science and technology at the cost of extracting low value-added raw materials in the countries of the Global South. Moreover, this technological leap also entails a greater demand for other mineral and energy raw materials (lithium, iron, copper, and rare earth metals, for example), driving towards a more aggressive organisation of the international division of labour to guarantee their supply. In Bolivia, for example, the 2019 coup was directly related to the nationalisation of its lithium reserves, one of the largest in the world.[5]

A reorganisation of the rural infrastructure sector is also underway. Over the last five years, companies like Syngenta, Bayer, and BASF have developed agricultural software and digital platforms which are installed on mobile phones to provide producers with agricultural recommendations. Today there are tractors equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) that collect information on soil humidity, composition, and the best location and the best season of the year to plant, etc. Farmers can also input their own data through their mobile phones. The collection of this data itself is not the problem, since in another social system this data could be harnessed to assist farmers in their work. In a capitalist system, however, the data is controlled by corporations for the benefit of their own profit-making. These companies own only the software but not the hardware, which is owned by other giants like John Deere and Bosch, who are developing AI and robotisation. The result of this is visible in robotic tractors, sensors, drones, etc.

These patents and the information produced by agribusiness giants need to be stored on the digital infrastructure of Big Tech companies: Microsoft has its cloud, Azure. Apple developed an Apple Watch for precision agriculture and created the Resolution app for farmers. Amazon has a storage function on Amazon Web Services intended for rural areas. Facebook is creating a digital consultancy app for farmers. Google has an institutional version of its Google Earth created for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, and so on. The primary consumers of these services are big agricultural producers in the commodity export market; meanwhile, 500 million peasant families do not have the means to access this new technology package. What they do have are their mobile phones, on which they can receive agronomic advice via SMS or WhatsApp based on information freely uploaded by other farmers. A large number of these applications are available ‘freely’ to small farmers in exchange for participating in a massive data-capture process.

This is where the issue of the integration of fintechs, Big Tech, and the agricultural giants emerges. In Kenya, Arifu – a company that belongs to the European telephony giant Vodaphone – offers agricultural consultancy via SMS and WhatsApp. Arifu has a partnership with Syngenta and DigFarm, enabling Syngenta to grow awareness of its seeds while DigFarm offers microcredit to Kenyan farmers. The structure of digital platforms makes this integration possible: they charge small fees, sell inputs, and allow for the use of digital currencies.[6] But how can artificial intelligence and the algorithm ‘read’ small farmers’ lands with their diversity of native seeds, for example, to enable corporations to offer free advice? Alas, this type of technology is intended for large extensions of land and monocultures. The integration of small farmers will not happen by selling technology packages but through microcredit and the digital currencies that have accompanied these platforms made available by the fintechs. For this to happen, it will be necessary to reduce state regulation of the economy and of agriculture.

This dynamic was seen most recently in India, where one million farmers occupied New Delhi, India between January and February 2021 demanding the scrapping of three laws that would put an end to the state regulation of the agricultural goods market. According to the new laws, instead of the state paying a fair price for peasants’ products, the market would be opened and deregulated, allowing big retail and technology corporations to take the place of and eliminate small retailers. In practice, this would mean that these large corporations would organise production and consumption in this sector.[7]

Image
The Fragmentation of Work
, 2021

Technology and Work

The combination of the data economy and financialisation has also transformed the world of work. ‘Uberisation’, the ‘platformisation of work’, and the ‘gig economy’ are some of the terms used to describe precaritised work in the era of Big Tech, and studies on this topic have gained relevance due to the mobilisations of Uber and app delivery drivers. Despite what these terms might suggest, it is not the applications themselves causing this shift – there isn’t some sort of technological determinism at work – but rather processes that have already been underway for decades and that are increasingly transforming workers into service-providers in fragile and permanently unstable labour relations.

According to the sociologist Ludmila Abilio (2019), these transformations need to be considered from the perspective of the experience of the periphery. In this historically unequal place, the formalisation of work through the acquisition labour rights was never the norm. Instead, life is built on a permanent imbalance between formal and informal labour relations, freelance work, and activities that are not recognised as work. What does it mean to speak of precarisation or flexibilisation in this context?

What is called ‘uberisation’ can be understood as the globalisation of elements that characterise the ways of life in the periphery. These companies have come to transform other layers of society, reorganising the lives of the middle class and of white men and women and finally making their way to the Global North. These are structural and structuring elements of capital’s periphery, where this reality never the exception. However, today more than ever, the informality and flexibilisation of work have become the rule.

We are witnessing a deepening of the neoliberal process of globalisation that has decentralised production by means of subsidiaries and outsourcing with the aim of making the forms of control and management of labour less identifiable. Little by little, international oligopolistic companies have taken over informal work, organising, regulating, and defining what work is. In the world of the supposed neutrality of algorithmic management, there is no work-time, workplace, or work tools. All the risks and costs are displaced onto the workers, who use their own belongings, houses, vehicles, sewing machines, and soles of their shoes in ‘subordinate self-management’, controlled in a centralised fashion by mechanisms that are obscure but extremely effective in the rationalised management of informal workers.

However, this radical move towards near-complete automation cannot be realised without the contribution of digital labour; that is to say, hidden human labour (such as through mining, cleaning, and formatting) is needed to produce AI and even data. Thousands of people in the Global South work for the conglomerates of the North, teaching machines to carry out tasks while receiving poverty wages for their work.[8]

As Ludmila Abilio (2019) concludes, the just-in-time model has won out and we are living through its consolidation. Technological developments now allow capitalists to manage labour that is constantly at their disposal, to be put to work only when needed. Perhaps the state of war experienced by workers in the distribution of goods can offer clues as to how to think through forms of resistance to the new configuration of exploitation, oppression, and domination in contemporary work.



Technology between Two Powers

In order to understand the rise of Big Tech, we must recognise that there is a global organisation of scientific and technological labour, and that this organisation concentrates the strategic stage of the production of technological knowledge in the core countries, while peripheral regions occupy the role of consumers of technology. This contrast between the core and peripheral countries is striking: in 2015, North America, the European Union, China, Japan, and South Korea accounted for 82% of both public and private global spending in research and development, and almost the entirety of the world’s scientific and technological production is controlled by some 30 countries. The US alone spent US$ 502 billion that year, accounting for 26% of global spending.[9]

China has also undertaken significant advances in the area of information technology. Chinese expansion in building infrastructure, knowledge, and production in this field is part of the country’s effort to consolidate itself as a global power. Moreover, China is also looking to safeguard its sovereignty and defence in relation to international systems of surveillance and control, preventing its domestic traffic from being routed through other countries. China’s advances have triggered responses from the US and its allies, especially because the ICT industry is on the verge of undergoing a qualitative leap forward with the upgrading of global telecommunications infrastructure through the implementation of 5G.[10] This new technology will allow larger quantities of data to be transmitted and received some twenty times faster than through 4G. This volume and speed will impact areas that consume or need to store a lot of data, such as autonomous vehicles or even entertainment, making high quality films available on mobile phones in seconds. This upgrading opens up an opportunity for technology companies and national economies to reposition themselves in the industrial system as a whole.

Though China’s state capacity has allowed it to be the first country to implement a commercial 5G network on a large scale, the country’s direct and indirect dependence on US integrated circuit products and technologies serves as the main choke-point for the US to delay or even block China’s progress. The US’s centrality to the production of cutting-edge semiconductors and the machines that produce them, as well as to the progress of the technological frontier in these segments, gives the country the ability to intervene in the global production network and to activate channels to block China’s development in ICT, given the latter’s critical dependence on these core components.[11] The complexity of the highly globalised ICT ecosystem and the centrality of the Chinese market inevitably fragments US capitalist interests by presenting a ‘geometry of heterogenous and tangled competition and complementarity, provoking resistance to the US government’s strategy of obstruction where complementarity predominates’ in the words of economics professor Esther Majerowicz.[12] As Huawei is the only company offering large quantities of the necessary equipment to implement a 5G network on a large scale, banning the company – as the US has suggested – would put those countries that do not have the ability to build their own infrastructures and compete in the telecommunications equipment market in a disadvantaged position in various other markets and set them back in the production of the specific masses of data needed for the development of artificial intelligence.[13]

As we can see, upgrading global telecommunications infrastructure creates an opening for the potential repositioning of nations in the industrial system as a whole. The spread of 5G to the capitalist periphery, which often does not have the capacity to build its own infrastructures, will lead to increased technological and financial dependence, as well as to the expansion of international surveillance systems.[14] The provision of financial resources to implement 5G in the periphery is one area where competition between the great powers as well as developed economies is on display. Without a sovereign development project, peripheral countries are left to follow the development models designed in the interests of and aligned with the objectives of the great powers or developed countries.

Image
Connected Cables
, 2021.



Starting Point

The main challenge for popular movements, organisations, and collectives is to overcome the hegemonic ideological narratives about the data economy. The data economy must be analysed as a central component of a contemporary capitalism that is seeking to consolidate the basic conditions for its expansion. These conditions include:

A free market (for data): if, on the one hand, user data is collected and used freely, the inverse is not true when it comes to technology companies, given that the data, metrics, and algorithms that they use are proprietary and held under lock and key. User data, meanwhile, which are generated in an unprecedent volume, have become commodities and financial assets that, in order to guarantee corporate profits, must circulate without regulation or control and without taking into account the interests of users who generate the data.

Economic financialisation: data capitalism companies depend on the flux of speculative capital to grow and consolidate. These companies bear witness to capital flight, shifting capital away from productive sectors and towards those that are merely speculative. This puts increasing pressure on productive sectors to increase exploitation and precarisation.

The transformation of rights into commodities: the spread of technological ‘solutions’ proffered by Big Tech and its derivatives has not spared public services, where governments have entered into multi-million-dollar contracts with Big Tech companies. Under the discourse of efficiency and sophistication, rights such as education, health, and transport are transformed into commodities. Part of public life has come to be mediated by algorithms and interests that are beyond the reach of the population at the same time as great sums of money are transferred to technology companies.

The reduction of public spaces: the reproduction of a view of society that is based only on individuals who are segmented into self-sufficient interest bubbles by means of ‘personalised content’ continues unimpeded. Public debate based on different opinions and objective data is militated against by the need for engagement, whose purpose is to provide feedback and reaffirm individual certainties at the expense of collective and common constructions.

The concentration of resources, productive chains, and infrastructure: the most profitable layers of the data economy require a high degree of centralisation. The concentration of resources, productive chains, and infrastructure in the hands of a few big corporations is a clear necessity of capitalism today – even when it operates through subsidiaries and a variety of enterprises, companies, and services. The great power concentrated in these corporations overrides any democratic and popular debate on political, economic, environmental, and ethical questions.

These characteristics are not unique to the so-called data economy; rather, they are integral to the broader capitalist system. Technological development does not happen autonomously from the social organisation in which it is embedded. A key element to understanding this relationship is to remember a fundamental characteristic of capitalism: the private ownership of the means of production. If technology were a common good and not the property of the few used to further the interests of capital, it would allow us to guarantee adequate production to meet human needs while significantly reducing the working day, leaving us with free time to realise ourselves more fully as human beings.

Once we understand how the data economy seeks to reproduce and expand the dynamics of capitalism itself, a challenge arises within movements, organisations, and popular collectives seeking to build alternatives. It is important that we look at our own organisations and reflect on some of these challenges. Mere access to technological resources and information do not in themselves reduce inequality. In fact, they can even increase it. Not every action or policy based on ‘intelligent’ devices is an intelligent action or policy. We must always remember that technology is the bearer of contradictions, containing within it the potential for liberation and for alienation at the same time, and that there will always be disputed in a society shaped by class struggle. For workers’ use of technology to be truly effective, it must always be linked to a tactical and strategic class project. We also cannot confuse cause and consequence neither in our analyses nor in practice. Electronic surveillance (be it individual or mass), fake news, the spread of hate speech and antidemocratic discourse, and the precarisation of work imposed by applications are the expression of a deeper economic logic. This debate is essential to calibrate our energies as to where and how to act, be it in the immediate, medium, or long term.

We cannot give ourselves the luxury of being technophobic, of negating the importance of technologies and their potential in the struggle. At the same time, we cannot believe in the idea that technology in itself will result in advances for the organised working class. Technological development is not autonomous from the form of social organisation into which it is inserted; the element of class struggle is our beacon for the appropriation of scientific knowledge and for the construction of viable alternative technologies. The debate about digital technologies and capitalism cannot be a niche debate, advanced by individuals or small groups interested in the subject. Given the issue’s impact on the economy, politics, geopolitics, education, culture, organisation, mobilisation, and struggle, it must be a debate carried out in all its dimensions, by all organisations. Only through a wider, collective, and participatory debate will we be able to redefine the terms of technological ‘solutions’ and ‘efficiency’ from a socialist perspective.

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Smoke Screen, 2021.



Endnotes

[1] Militants and scholars connected these issues contributed to this seminar and some bibliographic references are listed at the end of this dossier. We would like to thank, in particular, the contribution of Olívia Janequine (Consulta Popular) for drafting this dossier. We were also assisted by Carolina Cruz (IT Front – MST), Janelson Ferreira (Communications Sector of MST), Fabetz (Coordination of the ENFF), Miguel Stédile (National Coordination of MST), and Cristiane Ganaka and Daniel Tirado of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

[2] Grain, ‘Controle digital’, 2021.

[3] For more information, follow the weekly ‘News on China’ summary from the Dongsheng (Eastern Voices) Collective: https://dongshengnews.org/en/

[4] Schmidlehne, ‘Blockchain e contratos inteligentes’, 2020.

[5] Prashad, ‘Bolivia’s lithium’, 2019.

[6] Grain, ‘Controle digital’, 2021.

[7] Tricontinental, The Farmers’ Revolt, 2021.

[8] DigiLabour, ‘Uma Internet alternativa’, 2019a; DigiLabour, ‘A Invisibilidade do Trabalho de Dados’, 2019b.

[9] Moura, ‘Ensayo sobre la ceguera’, 2018.

[10] Tricontinental, Twilight, 2021.

[11] Majerowicz, ‘A China e a Economia Política Internacional’, 2020.

[12] Majerowicz, ‘A China e a Economia Política Internacional’, 2020.

[13] Majerowicz, ‘A China e a Economia Política Internacional’, 2020.

[14] Majerowicz, ‘A China e a Economia Política Internacional’, 2020.



Bibliography
Abilio, L. C. ‘Uberização: Do empreendedorismo para o autogerenciamento subordinado.’ Psicoperspectivas 18, no. 3 (2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5027/psicoperspect ... ltext-1674.

DigiLabour. ‘Uma Internet alternativa deve combinar serviço público e cooperativas de plataforma: entrevista com Christian Fuchs.’ DigiLabour, September 2019a, https://digilabour.com.br/2019/09/13/ch ... o-digital/.

DigiLabour. ‘A Invisibilidade do Trabalho de Dados: entrevista com Jérôme Denis’, DigiLabour, March 2019b. https://digilabour.com.br/2019/03/27/o- ... ome-denis/

Grain. ‘Digital control: How Big Tech moves into food and farming (and what it means)’. GRAIN, 21 January 2021. https://grain.org/en/article/6595-digit ... t-it-means.

Majerowicz, E. ‘China and the International Political Economy of Information and Communication Technologies’. Geosul 35, no. 77 (December 2020): 73-102. https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ge ... view/77503.

Moura, B. D. ‘Ensayo sobre la ceguera: la industria 4.0 en América Latina’. Hemisferio Izquierdo, 20 June 2018. https://www.hemisferioizquierdo.uy/sing ... ica-latina.

Prashad, Vijay. ‘Bolivia’s lithium and the urgency of a coup’. Brasil de Fato, 12 November 2019. https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2019/11 ... -of-a-coup.

Schmidlehne, Michael F. ‘Blockchain e contratos inteligentes: as mais recentes tentativas do capital de se apropriar da vida na Terra’. World Rainforest Movement, no. 247 (January 2020). https://wrm.org.uy/pt/artigos-do-boleti ... -na-terra/.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. CoronaShock: A Virus and the World. 5 May 2020. https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-28-coronavirus/.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The Farmers’ Revolt in India. 14 June 2021. https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-4 ... riculture/.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future. 4 January 2021. https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-36-twilight/.

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 01, 2021 3:03 pm

Pentagon: U.S. military footprint staying right where it is
The long-awaited Global Force Posture review shows that status quo is the key refrain as the China song remains the same.

NOVEMBER 30, 2021
Written by
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

An unclassified summary of the Defense Department’s Global Posture review was released Monday and in the words of the indomitable Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the song of American military primacy worldwide pretty much “remains the same.”

Of course the summary of the GPR, which has been long anticipated, doesn’t offer much detail, but the bottom line is this: China remains a key “pacing threat” and it will be met. There seems to be no plan, however, for reshuffling U.S. military forces from other theaters to grow the foot print in East Asia. Instead, Washington aims to build upon its strategic partnerships in the region. Where there is actual growth in the footprint, mentioned below, much of that had already been announced previously:

(The GPR) directs additional cooperation with allies and partners to advance initiatives that contribute to regional stability and deter potential Chinese military aggression and threats from North Korea. These initiatives include seeking greater regional access for military partnership activities; enhancing infrastructure in Australia and the Pacific Islands; and planning rotational aircraft deployments in Australia, as announced in September. The GPR also informed Secretary Austin’s approval of the permanent stationing of a previously-rotational attack helicopter squadron and artillery division headquarters in the Republic of Korea, announced earlier this year.

Most of the hullabaloo over the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) agreement in September had been over the transfer of nuclear submarine technology to Australia. But as David Vine pointed out in this RS article, AUKUS is also allowing the U.S. to station more assets and personnel Down Under, including, “combined logistics, sustainment, and capability for maintenance to support our enhanced activities, including…for our submarines and surface combatants” and “rotational deployments of all types of U.S. military aircraft to Australia.”

As the Wall Street Journal noted Monday in its summary of the summary, the Biden administration’s goal of meeting “China’s military buildup and more assertive use of power” doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense of U.S. force posture in other parts of the world. Those forces are largely staying put.

According to the DoD summary, in Europe, the GPR “strengthens the U.S. combat-credible deterrent against Russian aggression and enables NATO forces to operate more effectively.” This includes leaving the 25,000 troops President Trump wanted to take out of Germany right where they are in the region (which we already knew about). There is no further detail on how Washington plans to “strengthen the deterrent” against Russia, though we know there have been plenty of efforts on Capitol Hill to send more troops to Europe.

Those hoping to see the Biden administration begin to extricate from the Middle East won’t find much solace in this summary either. Without committing either way, the DoD says “the GPR assessed the department’s approach toward Iran and the evolving counterterrorism requirements following the end of DoD operations in Afghanistan. In Iraq and Syria, DoD posture will continue to support the Defeat-ISIS campaign and building the capacity of partner forces. Looking ahead, the review directs DoD to conduct additional analysis on enduring posture requirements in the Middle East.”

The big news here is that Washington is not even considering leaving Iraq and Syria, which many smart analysts deem essential not only for American interests, but for the security of the region. On the greater question of whether there will be a major shift toward reducing the U.S.-led security obligations in the Middle East, the summary, at least, seems to punt. On Africa and the Americas, as indicated by the release yesterday, no discernible change in posture.

This shouldn’t come as any surprise, as the signs of status quo are all around us — just read the RS piece by Nick Turse on U.S. commando presence in Africa, and then in Europe. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, National Guard units from Virginia and Kentucky sent 1,000 troops to Africa for “Task Force Red Dragon.” As Page/Plant wrote, “everything that’s small has got to grow,” and this footprint isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/ ... ere-it-is/

Goddamn good thing a Democrat got elected, huh?The USA makes Imperial Rome look like pikers. And wherever it goes, like the Romans, "it makes a devastation and calls it peace."
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 10, 2022 3:36 pm

Holmes verdict: In the US, it is fine to lie to consumers, but not investors

Hyper-capitalism has systematically weakened regulations to help capital at the cost of consumers. The verdict on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos simply illustrates the growing post-90s disregard for consumers

January 10, 2022 by Prabir Purkayastha

Image
Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos.

The verdict on Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos, who was tried for fraud in a US court, is in and she has been declared guilty. Theranos was a company set up by Holmes and her former partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, which had promised to revolutionize testing. Their advanced biotech equipment—they claimed—would provide results for a whole battery of tests with just a few drops of blood. Theranos was worth $9 billion in its heyday, and Holmes was looked upon as the Steve Jobs of the Silicon Valley’s impending biotech revolution. Hers was the face that launched billion-dollar stock sales to private equity and venture funds. She figured in the Times list as one of 100 most influential persons of 2015 and was feted by Wall Street as the world’s youngest billionaire.
The trial evidence showed that Theranos technology did not work, and she knowingly falsified the results and forged documents. These documents show that major pharmaceutical companies endorsed her products, and even the US military was using Theranos equipment in the field.

Holmes got major names in the industry to invest almost a billion dollars into Theranos. The investors included the Walton family who owns Walmart, Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul, Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos and her family, Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, and many other moneybags. Theranos’s board of directors had dazzling names, including former US secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and former US secretaries of defense James Mattis and William Perry.

This is the characteristic of today’s stock market: it is dominated by trillions of dollars of private wealth, estimated by The Economist in 2018 in the range of $9 trillion.

The twist in this tale of fraud and greed is that the court did not convict Holmes of defrauding thousands of patients who used Theranos’ faulty tests. On those counts, she walked free. In the heartland of capital, the real sin is to defraud investors, not your customers! This is good, old fashioned American justice: customers are suckers, it is alright to treat them as such, but not the investors who are big money. In the Theranos case, investors had put $945 million into a technology hyped by Holmes in the best tradition of Silicon Valley: fake it till you make it!

What was Theranos faking? It claimed that it is unlike conventional blood testing methods, which need to take about 3 cubic centimeters (or millilitres) of blood, normally from our veins (venipuncture) in the crock of our arms. The amount could increase to 30 ccs depending on the number and type of tests. But Theranos claimed that they used a small container called a “nanotainer” and a special machine called Edison to take only a few drops of blood—1/100th to 1/1000th of conventional tests—to run a battery of tests. Later on, the Edison was replaced by a miniLab, which was supposed to deliver even better results and a larger number of tests.

It was not that Edison or miniLab did not deliver results; they did. But the results had very large errors. Theranos’s faking did not stop at merely the accuracy of its tests. It claimed it could do more than 1,000 tests using its miniLab; it could do only 12. It claimed it did not use any equipment but its own in the Theranos chain of diagnostic labs. It did: contrary to claims, the bulk of its tests was performed on commercially available machines from other companies. They used the small nanotainer samples by diluting them to increase the volumes required by commercial machines.

Not surprisingly, the tests carried out in either Edison or, after dilution of the samples on other machines, had very significant errors. The patients were the victims of these results. For example, evidence during the trial showed that a Theranos test indicated a patient had suffered a miscarriage when she had not.

In June 2014, reporter Roger Parloff wrote in a cover story for Fortune, the US financial magazine, how Theranos was revolutionizing the testing industry using the fingerstick method and the large number of tests it could perform. He wrote, “To me, it felt more like a tap than a puncture… and the sheer number of tests the company could do at a lower cost than competitors.” A fingerstick is a routinely used device, for example, to check our blood sugar at home. It does not draw blood from our veins but the capillaries close to the skin, and only a drop or two.

Parloff wrote, “Theranos’s tests can be performed on just a few drops of blood, or about 1/100th to 1/1,000th of the amount that would ordinarily be required, an extraordinary potential boon to frequently tested hospital patients or cancer victims, the elderly, infants, children, the obese, those on anticoagulants, or simply anyone with an aversion to blood draws.” He corrected his story in December 2015, after John Carreyrou started a series of exposes in The Wall Street Journal in October 2015. The Journal series started the unraveling of the media image of Theranos and ultimately its downfall.

It was articles like Fortune’s, supported by high-profile people in Silicon Valley, that put Holmes on the road to stardom and made her company into a biotech heavyweight. She was selling an idea that was easy to grasp and, with technology hurtling at a breakneck speed, believable to billionaires out to make a killing through early investments in successful ideas. The Theranos problem was that Holmes faked it too far and left too long a paper trail to her verifiably wrong claims.

Holmes was a 19-year old dropout from Stanford who used the money her family had set aside for her education. She teamed up with Sunny Balwani, a tech-entrepreneur, who had successfully sold out from a start-up, netting reportedly $40 million during the 90s dot-com bubble. He joined as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Theranos, and Holmes became CEO. Balwani is also being sued separately for fraud.

The media, including those disturbed by the trial focusing on investor fraud, not the patients who got erroneous results, do not understand bourgeois law. Protecting private property is central to bourgeois law, not people. It is the task of regulations to see that the public is protected from harm by companies acting to maximize their profits. These regulations have been systematically weakened to help capital against consumer interests during the hyper-capitalist regime that started in the 90s, which we call neoliberalism.

The case against Holmes was about supplying doctored evidence or making false statements to investors. Lying to the users of Theranos tests is apparently not fraud; or as Elizabeth Lopatto put it in The Verge, “For the charges to stick, jurors had to believe Holmes had intended to defraud patients, not merely give them bad results.” Giving bad results knowingly to patients is not a crime; but giving wrong information to your investors is!

Why did not regulators look at Theranos’ Edison and miniLab instruments? At its height, Theranos was generating nearly 9,00,000 tests a year without its lab or instruments needing to conform to any US regulation or law. Here is the big loophole in US regulations: any laboratory-developed diagnostic tests designed, manufactured and used within a single laboratory is not regulated. It is not only true for Theranos tests but also a number of other tests, notably those for cancer, that use the same loophole. Will this case and verdict change the laboratory test industry and plug the Theranos loophole? Nothing we currently see shows any inclination of the US authorities to regulate the biotech industry on this count; unless more Theranos happen.

Theranos ceased operations in 2018, and Holmes is now awaiting her sentencing. The companies stock and its technology are now worthless. The house of cards that Holmes and Balwani built has collapsed. But has ‘fake it till you make it’ collapsed in Silicon Valley? Lopatto takes a more cynical view that it will only make the Valley more cautious not to get caught red-handed lying to your investors. Lying to the people is OK—as the Theranos verdict shows—but not to the moneybags.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/01/10/ ... investors/

As is to be expected in a country like this...The only thing startling here is that there are still people so naive and dumb that they are surprised and shocked by this basic fact of our existence in this place where only the rich are truly free.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:27 pm

And now a word from NATO's favorite think tank.

Washington Must Prepare for War With Both Russia and China
Pivoting to Asia and forgetting about Europe isn’t an option.
By Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

FEBRUARY 18, 2022, 2:18 PM
As Russia threatens the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II, the most consequential strategic question of the 21st century is becoming clear: How can the United States manage two revisionist, autocratic, nuclear-armed great powers (Russia and China) simultaneously? The answer, according to many politicians and defense experts, is that Washington must moderate its response to Russia in Europe to focus on the greater threat posed by China in the Indo-Pacific.

This would be a mistake.

The United States remains the world’s leading power with global interests, and it cannot afford to choose between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Instead, Washington and its allies should develop a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating Russia and China at the same time.

In recent weeks, Biden has sent several thousand U.S. troops to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank—and for good reason. A major war in Ukraine could spill across international boundaries and threaten the seven NATO allies that border Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Moreover, if Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds in Ukraine, why would he stop there?

Putin has shown a clear interest in resurrecting the former Russian Empire, and other vulnerable Eastern European countries—Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states—might be next. A successful Russian incursion into a NATO ally’s territory could mean the end of the Western alliance and the credibility of U.S. security commitments globally.

The threat posed by China is also serious. Adm. Philip Davidson, former commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, predicted China could invade Taiwan within the next six years. This is a war the United States might lose. If China succeeds in taking Taiwan, it would be well on its way to disrupting the U.S.-led order in Asia, with an eye to doing the same globally.

<snip>

... the United States and its allies must design a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating both Russia and China in overlapping time frames. The pause in releasing Biden’s defense strategy provides an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and get this right.

o be sure, developing such a strategy will be challenging, but there are a number of ways to begin to square the circle.

First, Washington should increase defense spending. Contrary to those who claim that constrained resources will force tough choices, the United States can afford to outspend Russia and China at the same time. The United States possesses 24 percent of global GDP compared to a combined 19 percent in China and Russia. This year, the United States will spend $778 billion on defense compared to only $310 billion in Russia and China.

Moreover, the United States could go so far as to double defense spending (currently 2.8 percent of GDP) and still remain below its Cold War average (close to 7 percent of GDP). Indeed, given that this new Cold War is every bit as dangerous as the last one, a meaningful increase in defense spending, focused on the 21st century’s emerging defense technologies, is in order.

<snip>

European allies should invest in armor and artillery while Asian allies buy naval mines, harpoon missiles, and submarines. The U.S. Army should prioritize Europe while the U.S. Navy takes the Indo-Pacific and a larger U.S. Air Force plays a significant role in both theaters. In addition, the United States should provide strategic capabilities like its nuclear umbrella; global conventional strike capabilities, including hypersonic missiles; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Finally, if necessary, Washington could always take a page from its Cold War playbook and rely more heavily on nuclear weapons to offset the local, conventional advantages of its rivals. The presence of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe helped deter the massive Soviet Red Army for decades. Similarly, the United States could rely on threatening nonstrategic nuclear strikes to deter and, as a last resort, thwart a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan or a Russian tank incursion into Europe.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/18/us ... -dialogue/

Here's a few more headlines from this page:

If Russia Invades Ukraine, Sanction China

Chinese Support for a Russian Attack on Ukraine Cannot Be Cost-Free

Liberal Illusions Caused the Ukraine Crisis


Now tell me: who is itching for a fight? NATO is the Delian League of steriods
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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