The Cold War, Desegregation, and Affirmative Action
As the US Supreme Court aspires to drive a nail into the coffin of affirmative action, it is important to recognize how the Cold War helped to shape the mid-twentieth-century civil-rights people’s victories and the consequent policy of Affirmative Action in education.
Some may find that connecting the conflict between the US and the USSR to the formal establishment of African American citizen rights is far-fetched.
But the facts speak otherwise.
The US ruling class crudely portrayed the Cold War as a contest between those defending freedom and equality versus those imposing tyranny and enslavement. The US launched multiple cultural offensives to reinforce these views, sending books, movies, and diverse artistic figures and athletes throughout the world to signal its commitment to those lofty values.
But as the great postwar wave of decolonization swept the world and the US appeared too often on the side of the colonists, the moral high ground seemed impossible to maintain in the eyes of the critical non-aligned nations.
Even more devastating was the ugly face of racial segregation that existed de jure in the Southern, formerly Confederate states, and de facto in the rest of the US, with its accompanying violent enforcement. To the non-white majority of the world, this inhuman practice negated any proclaimed commitment to freedom or equality.
To meet this Cold War crisis, the US ruling class chose an approach that was both least costly to capital and its minions and most burdensome on the working people. Rather than returning to the unfinished business of post-Civil War Reconstruction, rather than attacking segregated housing patterns (disrupting profits in the finance, insurance, and real estate sector), rather than pressing fair employment (impacting corporate and business profits), rather than guaranteeing voting rights and fair representation (disrupting the political status quo), the US ruling class placed the burden of desegregation on those who were among the most vulnerable in US society: children. It was public schools and not neighborhoods, housing, public accommodations, businesses, government agencies, or corporations that would bear the brunt of desegregation.
With the Supreme Court decision-- Brown versus Board of Education-- US elites offered a “victory” against segregation to place before world public opinion. Because it was a court decision made by lifetime appointees, it had little negative impact on elected officials or the fate of their political parties.
Of course, the court decision was only symbolic unless backed up with enforcement. It is likely that Brown versus Board of Education would have remained symbolic and another gesture of self-righteousness in the cultural Cold War since officials took little interest in forcing it on the bastions of racial segregation.
But Brown versus Board of Education did elevate racism to a place in the public debate. Also, it energized a growing resistance to segregation, adding a new generation of fighters to the struggle and legitimizing the fight. Without the growth and militancy of the peoples’ struggle, any promise offered by the Supreme Court decision would have faded, however.
For the most part, officialdom and the Civil Rights movement operated on parallel tracks, with Federal policies focused on school desegregation in the South and the movement tackling voting rights and desegregating public spaces. Elites largely sought to confine and retard the struggle for racial justice.
Nonetheless, the movement for racial justice forced a series of civil rights acts in the mid-1960s that addressed the harshest aspects of Southern segregation, supporting voting rights and the use of public accommodations, as well as denying workplace and housing discrimination in the US.
With the murder of the most influential anti-racist leaders, the suppression of urban risings, and the political backlash of Southern reactionaries, the US ruling class called a halt to the school desegregation project. The landmark Millikin versus Bradley Supreme Court decision of 1974 settled the limits of public education desegregation at the border of wealthier suburbs. Desegregation was meant only for poor and working-class schools, and not for the schools of the elite. For US elites-- Cold War optics be damned-- the costs of racial justice would not be borne by wealth and power. No bus would transport urban Blacks to the rolling hills of suburbia; nor would any children of the petty-bourgeois find seats awaiting in city public schools.
Class critically intersected race at that juncture, a reality that continues to shape the contours of anti-racism going forward.
Of course, despite this setback, the struggle against racism continued, but as affirmative action-- a project to go beyond formal, level-playing field equality and place material support behind the economic mobility necessary for substantial equality. Behind affirmative action was the understanding that racial justice was an active process and not a static state of affairs, i.e. nominal equality. In other words, those disadvantaged by racism needed substantial advantages to continue their journey to equality.
Ideally, the impact of affirmative action would be race-neutral. African Americans could gain “advantages” without disadvantaging anyone else: jobs could be created in workplaces where they were underrepresented without denying jobs to any non-Black worker; mentorships and job-training could be made available to all; subsidized new or existing housing could be established; health care could be universal, etc. To use the term popular with pundits, affirmative action could be “win-win.”
When the win-win logic is true of society at large, it is the basis for socialism.
But that is not the logic of capitalism. Capitalism is relentless competition: what the same pundits call “zero-sum.” Someone must win, someone must lose. When someone applies to the best public school, there is room for one more. When someone applies to a private school, some win, some lose.
Consequently, the logic of capitalist society produces smug winners and disgruntled losers. And affirmative action that advantaged African Americans produced many who were or felt they were disadvantaged. Under capitalism, social progress is always the class struggle over who will sacrifice, who will pay.
Nevertheless, well-intentioned, anti-racist liberals pressed affirmative action on US capitalism with some success. Gertrude Ezorsky, a leading theorist of affirmative action, notes that “A dramatic increase in black employment and promotion occurred at specific companies that adopted affirmative action plans. These companies include AT&T, IBM, Levi-Strauss, and Sears Roebuck,” (Racism And Justice, the Case for Affirmative Action) She also noted that by ”...1982, 20,000 black officers had been added to police forces around the nation.” This squares with the ruling class’s determination to make police and military action against the colored peoples not look like white on Black or white on non-white violence.
Ironically, one of the greatest successes of the affirmative action era was Richard Nixon’s Justice Department-initiated Philadelphia plan to integrate the building trades. Blacks in the Philadelphia building trades went from one per cent of all workers to twelve per cent by 1982.
But as Ezorsky concedes, affirmative action declined drastically in the 1980s: “After 1980 there was a dramatic decline in the enforcement of AA [affirmative action] through the federal compliance program. The effectiveness of AA also declined as a result of Supreme Court decisions during the 1980s.”
With the courts, politicians, and the media fleeing affirmative action remedies that would address material class inequality, liberals and social democrats shaped anti-racism into “glass-ceiling” anti-racism. That is, the battle for racial justice became merely an effort to absorb more African Americans into the petty-bourgeoisie and into elite circles.
Token or role-model representation is sold as an incentive for working class and poor Blacks. This pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap version of anti-racism reached its zenith with the elevation of Barack Obama into the highest seat of political power. The celebration of Obama, and the relatively robust growth of a Black petty-bourgeoisie, left the inner-city impoverished, powerless, and nourished only by symbolic victories.
The gap between white and Black income and wealth remains relatively the same as half-century ago-- worse for most, better for some. Educational inequities, segregated housing, poor infrastructure, and marginal employment remain the fate of many, if not most African Americans. Urban ghettoization-- once a basis for a measure of racial solidarity-- has been shattered, not by emancipation, but by colonization: the brute force of gentrification.
For the “new” anti-racism-- with its rejection of the class dimension-- language, gestures, symbols, and manners are the target of self-satisfied justice warriors and not material deprivation or class exploitation. Where a leader like Martin Luther King found the continuation of the Black struggle in the fight of Memphis garbage workers seeking better pay, today’s NGO-sponsored “organizers” look to call out verbal clumsiness, historical anachronisms, and “microaggressions.” They look to create “safe spaces” where diversity can be smugly celebrated. They can locate the roots of racism in the twisted minds of white racists, but not in a socio-economic system that benefited, and continues to benefit, from the competition that racism generated and from the super-profits that flowed from a racial division of labor.
Accordingly, the “new” anti-racists are less attentive to the macroaggressions of inferior health care, low-paying jobs, substandard housing, and still segregated, poor education. Since exploitation, poverty, and despair have come into existence, privileged reformers have blamed the victims for the evils that exploitation, poverty, and despair spawn. It is no different with today’s liberals who organize marches, seminars, and rallies decrying the violence and drug use plaguing our poorest communities, while overlooking the meager material conditions that are the fertile soil of social self-destruction.
When commentators announce the death of affirmative action, citing the recent decision, Students for Fair Admissions versus Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, they are profoundly mistaken. Affirmative action has been dead for a long time, eviscerated, ignored, evaded, and demonized since the 1980s.
Racial preference is deemed necessary at elite, ruling-class training academies like the Ivies because their admissions policies are so riddled with legacy, athletic, donor, and faculty admissions. As guardians of ruling-class liberalism and custodians of ruling-class mythology, these largely private institutions hide the unjustifiable privilege shown to those without merit behind a cynical veneer of racial and ethnic sensitivity, hoping that it will mask class privilege. The Supreme Court decision was not a blow to long-abused affirmative action, but to a cynical system of elite privilege; it was a reminder of its hypocrisy.
Affirmative action in higher education-- offering, affirming, and sustaining opportunities for Black students-- is easily achievable today in community colleges, colleges, and public universities by simply eliminating the huge student-loan debt that burdens those without means now and going forward. The thousands of public institutions of higher learning are eager to accept students.
Free admissions-- a realistic demand for a peoples’ movement-- would be a long step toward restoring the promise of authentic affirmative action.
Rather than indulging the current class-blind anti-racist fashion of policing speech, humor, body language, books, and statues, an authentic anti-racism can seek to remove the material roadblocks to equality, as King and his predecessors sought. Of course, there is a cost to equality, a cost to real, and not fanciful, formal opportunity. And that burden should be borne by those who have benefited from racism: the rich and powerful.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2023/07/the ... n-and.html
The Nature of Foxes
Re: The Nature of Foxes
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
A Helpful Suggestion
Headlines in the 2020s are continually dominated by the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the US brinkmanship against China with Taiwan.
The US asserts that it has been well within its rights to bring NATO to Russia’s doorstep and convert Ukraine into a heavily-armed NATO asset, and that it is perfectly entitled to menace China with military encirclement and its provocations with Taiwan. When Russia and China contend that these actions pose a threat to their national security interests, US empire managers argue that no nation is entitled to a “sphere of influence” beyond their own territory, and that the US is just helping its good friends on the borders of its top two geopolitical rivals protect themselves.
If I may, I have a solution that could help the US make its arguments a bit more convincingly: simply welcome Russia and China to amass military forces in Latin America.
If the US made it clear that it would do nothing to prevent Russia and China from militarizing the nations south of the US border to the furthest extent possible, after those military presences begin to appear empire critics will no longer be able to claim that the US is the clear and obvious aggressor in its conflicts with Moscow and Beijing.
This would entail officially abolishing longstanding policies like the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary thereto which have led to the US continually intervening in Latin American affairs to crush socialism and advance its own interests, often with extreme violence and to the great detriment of the people who live there. Once the US has made it clear that Russia and China have an open path to establish an extensive military presence in Latin America using the same means the US has used to establish its military presence in eastern Europe and eastern Asia, opponents of Washington’s foreign policy will soon lose the ability to accuse the US empire of flagrant hypocrisy.
Let China militarize as much as it wants in socialist countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Let Russia make some military deals with Mexico and Brazil. Let them patrol their warships along the east and west coastline of the United States, and hang out in the Gulf of Mexico for as long as they like. Let them build bases. Let them build missile systems. Let them set up anything they like using whatever means they can get away with in the nations in that region, because according to the United States that’s all perfectly fine.
Then the US will have legitimacy in the arguments it has been making about its militarization around Russia and China. Then the objections from Moscow and Beijing to that militarization can legitimately be framed as unreasonable. Because the rules will be applied equally to all parties.
Of course, we all know this will never happen. If Russia or China began amassing military threats to US regional dominance in Latin America, it would immediately be treated as an act of war. The last time a foreign power placed a military threat to the United States near its coastline, it was responded to so aggressively that the world almost ended.
This is because the “rules” in the US empire’s much-touted “rules-based international order” do not apply to the US empire. They’re the for-thee-but-not-for-me kind of rules.
The drivers of the empire truly believe that the entire planet is their property, and that anyone who resists this claim is essentially attacking the United States. Its planetary hegemony is treated as the baseline norm, and any opposition to it is treated as a freakish affront to freedom and democracy.
The US empire claims to use its domination of the world stage to uphold the world order, yet it can only continue to dominate the world stage by endless violence, chaos and disorder. The US is the clear aggressor in its confrontations with Russia and China. It is an insatiable monster who feeds on human blood, and world peace will never be possible as long as it rules over us.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/07 ... uggestion/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
America’s Supersized Military: “The Greatest Fighting Force in Human History”
Posted on August 8, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Retired lieutenant colonel William Astore explains how the American “greatest” military is certainly the porkiest despite not having won a war since World War II (and even then the Soviets did more of the fighting than the Allies). He then amplifies this observation by looking at the budget (to the extent that tells the story…recall the unaccounted for $21 trillion) and our grandiose ambitions.
By William J. Astore. Originally published at TomDispatch
In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”
As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?
Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.
In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.
And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?
The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)
Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.
The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole
In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.
Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.
Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.
In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.
Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits — five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer) — as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.
Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.
No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat — the land, sea, and air — but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!
Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?
Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.
And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks” — and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.
And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries — nine! — that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.
A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear
Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.
America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.
Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?
Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Views so aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”
Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power — and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.
Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.
Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.
Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.
I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08 ... story.html
Posted on August 8, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Retired lieutenant colonel William Astore explains how the American “greatest” military is certainly the porkiest despite not having won a war since World War II (and even then the Soviets did more of the fighting than the Allies). He then amplifies this observation by looking at the budget (to the extent that tells the story…recall the unaccounted for $21 trillion) and our grandiose ambitions.
By William J. Astore. Originally published at TomDispatch
In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”
As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?
Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.
In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.
And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?
The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)
Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.
The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole
In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.
Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.
Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.
In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.
Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits — five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer) — as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.
Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.
No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat — the land, sea, and air — but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!
Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?
Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.
And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks” — and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.
And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries — nine! — that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.
A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear
Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.
America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.
Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?
Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Views so aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”
Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power — and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.
Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.
Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.
Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.
I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08 ... story.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
It’s Never About The US President, It’s About The US Empire
The president is just the face of the operation, the name they put on the door that they change every few years to create the illusion that the US government is responsive to the will of the electorate.
Caitlin Johnstone
August 10, 2023
We talk about US presidents all the time — Obama did this, Trump did that, blah blah blah. But really it’s never the president doing those things, it’s the empire. The president is just the face of the operation, the name they put on the door that they change every few years to create the illusion that the US government is responsive to the will of the electorate.
Really if you look solely at the raw data of the US power structure around the world (where the weapons are going, where the resources are going, where the money is and isn’t going, where the diplomats are and aren’t going, etc), you can’t tell from year to year when the White House is changing hands. You can’t tell from that raw data what political party the current president belongs to or what platform he campaigned on, and you can’t tell when he’s replaced by someone from the other party with another platform. The raw data of the empire keeps moving in basically the same way without any meaningful interruption.
So it’s not really true to say “Obama did this” or “Trump did that”; really they’re just the face that happened to be on the operation when it was time to kill Gaddafi or begin the Pivot to Asia or sanction Venezuela or start arming Ukraine or whatever. They’re not leaders leading the US government in various directions based on what they think the best policies are, they’re empire managers who are responding to whatever the needs of the empire happen to be each day — using whatever justifications or partisan leverage they can muster in that moment.
And Americans don’t get to vote on any of that stuff. They don’t get to vote on what will have to be done to facilitate the needs of a globe-spanning empire, or if there should be a globe-spanning empire at all. The behavior of the empire is never on the ballot. The only things that are ever on the ballot are issues which stand no possibility of ever interfering in the operation of the empire, like whether the president will appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion or support gun control. And the voting populace is continually kept at a 50/50 split on as many of those issues as possible to keep both sides tugging on the rope with all their might so they don’t look up and notice that the real large-scale behavior of their government is completely unaffected by the small back and forth gains and losses of the tug-o-war game.
Really the only reason to talk about US presidents in terms of “Obama did this” and “Trump did that” is to highlight this point. To highlight the fact that Obama continued and expanded all the most malignant policies of his predecessor, and that Trump continued and expanded all the most malignant policies of his. To disrupt all the dopey partisan narratives about things getting better under Biden or worse under Trump or that Obama was a progressive or Trump was a peacemaker.
By pointing out the horrible things that happened under each administration, regardless of party affiliation or platform, the illusion that Americans are controlling the behavior of their government using their votes can be worn away. You can in this sense use the illusion to fight the illusion — use people’s intense interest in presidents and electoral politics to draw them into the insight that it’s all a performance designed to keep the eyes of the masses away from the inner workings of the machine.
And then the possibility for real change opens up. The longer Americans are convinced that they can vote their way out of problems they never voted their way into in the first place, the longer they can be dissuaded from using the power of their numbers to force real material changes by real material means.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/08 ... us-empire/
A truth easily forgotten, especially in the heat of the moment. Foreign commentators on our side should keep that in mind. Mebbe they don't understand how things really work here but mebbe they're just scoring propaganda points, I dunno.
Trump is somewhat an exception to this rule. His overriding tendency to avoid personal responsibility made him reluctant at times to 'follow orders': at times and in places he wished to disengage, largely for paleo-conservative reasons, and had to be brought around thru 'threats' and appeals to is monstrous avarice. And that's why they won't let him be president again. So our foreign friends might lay off their hopes for the 2024 election. He's just a blowhard having his last hurrah.
And while there is an over-arching 'program' that the chief executive is expected to follow none of these bastards are blameless. Just as there is a history and a boatload of reasons that the USSR dissolved the fact remains the Gorbachev 'pulled the trigger' and he can never be forgiven.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Continuation of Epstein's list
August 29, 12:51
[img]
The American press published a continuation of the list of people associated with the owner of the "island of pedophiles" billionaire Epstein, who was strangled in an American prison and called it "suicide" to ensure the silence of this character.
Continuation of Epstein's list
Some of the most important people in the world are panicking after the news that Epstein's real list of elite pedophiles has been leaked to the Internet, reports Peoplesvoice.
The document penetrated the network, bypassing the obstacles of the US Department of Justice. It is alleged that employees of the ministry themselves were involved in its publication.
New York magazine presented readers with a list of VIP pedophiles who are known to have dated Epstein but who do not appear in his infamous little black book.
According to the magazine, these are:
- Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black;
- President of the College of Bards Leon Botshtein;
- Google co-founder Sergey Brin;
- CIA Director William Burns;
- Professor Noam Chomsky, whose meetings with Epstein included a dinner with filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife Sun-Yi Previn;
- Former First Lady of the U.S. Virgin Islands Cecile de Jong, who is accused of helping Epstein obtain visas for his alleged victims;
- Bill Gates, whose ties to Epstein have been well known for years;
- FedEx board member Joshua Cooper Ramo;
- former diplomat Terje Red-Larsen;
- Chairman of the Edmond de Rothschild group Ariane de Rothschild;
- Goldman Sachs General Counsel Katherine Rümmler;
- JPMorgan CEO Jess Staley;
- Former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers;
- PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.;
The list also includes Prince Andrew and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
However, the names of Andrew and Barack also appear in Epstein's black book.
In April, the Wall Street Journal reported on Epstein's very busy schedule of meetings.
For just one day, 9/8/2014, he had meetings scheduled with Gates, Black, Rümmler and Botstein, as well as with Hyatt Hotels chairman Thomas Pritzker, media owner Mortimer Zuckerman and adviser Barnaby Marsh.
Previously unpublished documents reviewed by the journal include thousands of pages of emails and timetables dated from 2013 to 2017.
The Times said it obtained Epstein's lists "through a request for public records to the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General, who sued Mr. Epstein's estate."
The persons appearing in the "mournful" list, one way or another, deny their connection with the pedophile Epstein.
For example, Barack Obama admitted that he often met with Epstein, but never "with girls or minors, or even adult women in an inappropriate context."
But Professor Noam Chomsky said that his connection with Epstein "is none of your business or anyone else's."
The remote Caribbean island, dubbed "Pedophile Island" by Epstein's efforts, hosted many high-ranking officials, bankers, politicians and other persons of power and influence with vicious inclinations.
No wonder Epstein was a regular visitor to the Clinton-era White House.
https://secretra.com/politics/5904-pani ... h-lic.html -
zinc and the list itself includes representatives of the neoliberal globalist elite associated with the Biden administration, this leak is very likely associated with the upcoming US presidential elections, which is already leading to an aggravation of the internal struggle in the American establishment.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8596894.html
Google Translator
Like that meme that I can no longer find sez: "you can technically be a child forever as long as you keep believing that noam chomsky is remotely radical". Chomsky is a prince of the limited hangout.
I pity anyone who believes that Epstein's death was a suicide. "cui bono?"
August 29, 12:51
[img]
The American press published a continuation of the list of people associated with the owner of the "island of pedophiles" billionaire Epstein, who was strangled in an American prison and called it "suicide" to ensure the silence of this character.
Continuation of Epstein's list
Some of the most important people in the world are panicking after the news that Epstein's real list of elite pedophiles has been leaked to the Internet, reports Peoplesvoice.
The document penetrated the network, bypassing the obstacles of the US Department of Justice. It is alleged that employees of the ministry themselves were involved in its publication.
New York magazine presented readers with a list of VIP pedophiles who are known to have dated Epstein but who do not appear in his infamous little black book.
According to the magazine, these are:
- Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black;
- President of the College of Bards Leon Botshtein;
- Google co-founder Sergey Brin;
- CIA Director William Burns;
- Professor Noam Chomsky, whose meetings with Epstein included a dinner with filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife Sun-Yi Previn;
- Former First Lady of the U.S. Virgin Islands Cecile de Jong, who is accused of helping Epstein obtain visas for his alleged victims;
- Bill Gates, whose ties to Epstein have been well known for years;
- FedEx board member Joshua Cooper Ramo;
- former diplomat Terje Red-Larsen;
- Chairman of the Edmond de Rothschild group Ariane de Rothschild;
- Goldman Sachs General Counsel Katherine Rümmler;
- JPMorgan CEO Jess Staley;
- Former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers;
- PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.;
The list also includes Prince Andrew and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
However, the names of Andrew and Barack also appear in Epstein's black book.
In April, the Wall Street Journal reported on Epstein's very busy schedule of meetings.
For just one day, 9/8/2014, he had meetings scheduled with Gates, Black, Rümmler and Botstein, as well as with Hyatt Hotels chairman Thomas Pritzker, media owner Mortimer Zuckerman and adviser Barnaby Marsh.
Previously unpublished documents reviewed by the journal include thousands of pages of emails and timetables dated from 2013 to 2017.
The Times said it obtained Epstein's lists "through a request for public records to the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General, who sued Mr. Epstein's estate."
The persons appearing in the "mournful" list, one way or another, deny their connection with the pedophile Epstein.
For example, Barack Obama admitted that he often met with Epstein, but never "with girls or minors, or even adult women in an inappropriate context."
But Professor Noam Chomsky said that his connection with Epstein "is none of your business or anyone else's."
The remote Caribbean island, dubbed "Pedophile Island" by Epstein's efforts, hosted many high-ranking officials, bankers, politicians and other persons of power and influence with vicious inclinations.
No wonder Epstein was a regular visitor to the Clinton-era White House.
https://secretra.com/politics/5904-pani ... h-lic.html -
zinc and the list itself includes representatives of the neoliberal globalist elite associated with the Biden administration, this leak is very likely associated with the upcoming US presidential elections, which is already leading to an aggravation of the internal struggle in the American establishment.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8596894.html
Google Translator
Like that meme that I can no longer find sez: "you can technically be a child forever as long as you keep believing that noam chomsky is remotely radical". Chomsky is a prince of the limited hangout.
I pity anyone who believes that Epstein's death was a suicide. "cui bono?"
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Will It Be Socialism or Barbarism for the Twenty-First Century?
Posted on September 8, 2023 by Yves Smith
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 469 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what we’ve accomplished in the last year,, and our current goal, continuing our expanded news coverage.
Yves here. Rob Urie was kind enough to provide us with a fundraiser post of sorts, so please thank him (Lambert’s Mr. Subliminal: And please make a detour to the Tip Jar if you haven’t yet!). It is too bad that the Red Scare of the 1950s also made socialism into a bad word for most people, even though the American economic system then, with its very high income tax rate and New Deal social programs, was well on the way to being European-style social democracy, and the Great Society programs of the 1960s moved it further in that direction. Having said that, during the Sanders campaigns, polls found a majority of young adults and teenagers approved of socialism. I confess I have not tracked more recent surveys to see if the rising voter cohort holds now holds similar views.
A major focus of this post is how de-industrialization has shaped politics in America.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
The nature of the American political system is often hidden behind theories of how democracy works. In these we, the people, choose politicians to represent ‘our’ interests within the realms of government, foreign affairs, and commerce. In contrast, at least according to the annual polls conducted by the Alliance of Democracies, fewer than half of Americans believe that the US is democratic; is a democracy. The reasons given against the US being a democracy are 1) corruption (73%), followed by 2) corporate control of the political system (72%). In other words, the reasons for this missing democracy are economic.
From the advent of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s to today, the US has been systematically deindustrialized. Capitalist industry has been the motivation for much modern political theory, fostering explanations of capitalist production such as ‘economics,’ as well as competing systems of political economy such as socialism, communism, and fascism that constitute the fault lines claimed to motivate geopolitics and wars. The deindustrialization of the US undertaken from the 1970s forward punished workers in the ‘old economy’ while directing Federal largesse toward favored industries such as finance and technology.
The ideological explanation for this shift was ‘markets.’ The US is subject to the immutable laws of nature, went the claim. Economic relations are subject to these immutable laws (continues the logic). There was therefore little that the American political and economic leadership could do in the face of ‘nature.’ That deindustrialization was undertaken at the behest of connected industrialists to break the back of organized labor was left out of this explanation. Likewise, Federal largesse toward Wall Street and Big Tech represented the evolution of markets which Wall Street existed to support, and which Big Tech sold into. In other words, markets uber alles.
Graph: the ‘enemies’ of the US (in red above) have a freakish, even preternatural, propensity for possessing large oil reserves. As if this weren’t bad enough, five of the ten nations with the largest oil reserves have ‘authoritarian’ leaders who tend toward insanity, if you believe what the CIA has to say about it. That the Americans are willing to slaughter a few million innocents abroad to control oil supplies begs the question of how many Americans they would be willing to kill to do so. The most likely answer given the substance of this essay? All of us. Source: worldometers.info.
In fact, the mercantilist relationship between the Federal government and favored industries represents capitalism in its truest form. Markets are a distraction; a misdirection with a purpose if you will. Deference to nature obviates class conflict by ‘naturalizing’ ruling class dominance. Sure, the Federal government supports some industries while crushing others according to the whims and wishes of corporate executives and oligarchs. But little Jimmy-Sue’s choice between a can of soda and a candy bar (‘micro’ foundations) explains the emergence of the union movement in nineteenth century Europe, runs this implausible logic.
The irony that the political class was selling the magical qualities of markets both going into the Wall Street bailouts of 2008 and coming back out of them illustrates the political use-value of economic misdirection. ‘Markets’ would have meant the demise of Wall Street and the American auto industry around 2008 had the Feds not intervened. Then consider the politics. Half of the US workforce had been cut loose and left to its own devices through deindustrialization while the other half was subsidized through Federal largesse for favored industries. How plausible was it then that ‘markets’ explained the mercantilist policies of neoliberal governance?
As the geography of economic production had it, from the start of the American industrial revolution until the 1970s, industry had been widely dispersed across the US. For better or worse, it represented the ‘structure’ of capitalism, providing livings for industrial workers who in turn supported local businesses, towns, cities, and ultimately the Federal government. The motive for deindustrialization was to crush labor unions, eviscerate environmental standards, and establish a center – periphery relationship (imperialism) with the rest of the world. Before 2007 or thereabouts, this program remained vaguely plausible to powerful constituencies.
The political divisions of 2023 follow the basic contours of these manufactured economic divisions. Deindustrialization gutted the heartland while Federal support for favored industries benefited large cities and suburbs. The prior group had been poorly served by the American political establishment while the latter group had its fortunes raised by it. The prior group turned away from the urban liberals who crafted these policies for their own benefit, while the latter group could not, or would not, admit its own role in ‘managing’ the transition away from industry. Intellectual honesty isn’t the strong suit of the technocrats of megalomania.
The class dynamic that was created was of urban and suburban workers in these Federally supported industries prospering while workers in the ‘old’ industries that had built the modern capitalist world were left to compete for jobs that don’t pay. Those who have seen the labor documentary Harlan County, USA, will recall articulate, anti-capitalist, coal miners in a battle against armed Pinkerton strike-busters and the state police. The miners’ explanation of ‘gun rights?’ To keep the Pinkertons from slaughtering them with impunity. The result in 2023: an urban bourgeois that ‘loves’ labor but that hates workers.
This dynamic can be seen in the enthusiastic disinterest that urban liberals have in labor issues beyond lip service. Joe Biden calls himself a ‘labor President’ while he has perpetuated the urban, bourgeois, war against displaced industrial workers. For instance, Mr. Biden promised to raise the minimum wage and then reneged. He promised to support labor activism and then crushed the railway workers’ strike. More recently, he reneged on the ‘just transition’ previously embedded in his environmental proposals in favor of the direct transfer of tax credits to corporate coffers. While the lip service suggests ‘liberal,’ Mr. Biden’s actual policies are neo-fascist.
Mr. Biden’s supporters contend that he, and they, are passionate about labor issues even though they conspicuously loathe actual workers. The propaganda and censorship industries now being supported by liberal Democrats target ‘extremists’ who are overwhelmingly refugees from the deindustrialized heartland. That half of the nation had their livelihoods destroyed by the neoliberal ‘center’ suggests that political dissolution was the goal of deindustrialization. Missing as explanation is the utter stupidity of the people now running the US. Joe Biden voted to admit China to the WTO (World Trade Organization). He is now trying to launch a war against China over the consequences of his own policy. Many of us knew better at the time.
Graph: American healthcare policy is substantially run by urban. liberal, technocrats. After decrying the Trump administration’s seeming indifference to the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, these technocrats adopted his libertarian posture as they fixed their pandemic response around the election schedule of Joe Biden. That Biden’s Covid-19 response was likely the worst in the world— 50% more Americans died from Covid-19 under Biden than Trump, is considered a problem of ‘messaging’ rather than substance. If the US really wanted to destroy Russia, why not send the American healthcare establishment to ‘help’ with its pandemic response? The entire nation would be dead in a week. Source: statista.com.
Reneging on the ‘just transition’ is especially pernicious as it was intended to elicit support for environmental policies by subsidizing displaced workers during the transition to less destructive energy technologies. After all, the Federal government thought nothing of shoveling tens of trillions of dollars in Federal largesse to ‘save’ Wall Street from its own dysfunction. Were Mr. Biden’s urban, bourgeois, supporters aware of the Federal aid dispensed during their own economic transition, they might understand the contribution to economic and political stability that the Federal government has occasionally brought about. But it is a political error to leave Federal spending to a captive political system. The interests of the people need to be re-asserted.
Following the 2016 election, the class divisions between displaced industrial workers and those laboring in the Federally subsidized ‘new economy’ were brought to the fore. The urban bourgeois imagined themselves to be the masters of their own fortunes as they benefited from Federal support for favored industries. Surveys taken around 2008 found cogs in the Wall Street wheel who were convinced that their paychecks matched the social value of their production. Sure, bond trading paid poverty wages before Wall Street was liberated from social accountability, but what does that have to do with them, runs the logic? This inability to see which social levers are being pulled and by whom would be heroic if Prosperity Theology hadn’t beaten then to the punch.
This isn’t to suggest that these urban, bourgeois, bureaucrats for capital have easy lives. The inability of capitalism to produce enough ‘good’ jobs for those who want them means that precarity rules lives and psyches. Following graduate school, I didn’t dare take a vacation for fifteen years. The word from management at the time was ‘if we can do without you for a week, we can do without you forever.’ (This was considered a very ‘good’ job). While the Covid-19 pandemic has now apparently killed or disabled enough workers to cause a labor shortage, this is hardly the ‘nature’ to whom economists so regularly refer.
Graph: what disaster has the American political class wrought? Beginning in the early 1980s, life expectancy (at birth) in the US began falling relative to similar nations abroad. Americans now live 6.3 years less on average than the citizens of France, Britain, Canada, and Australia. In a functioning society, this alone would motivate a revolution. Following the passage and implementation of the ACA (Obamacare), this disastrous result got even worse. Notably, the American Congress has its own healthcare system. They know better than to cast their lots with the ‘little people,’ formerly known as ‘citizens.’ Source: worldbank.org.
American liberals have assumed that the majority view that the US isn’t ‘a democracy’ is related to the 2016 election and its aftermath. In fact, subsequent polling hasn’t materially shifted this result. Moreover, the AoD poll results tie to those of other well-regarded polls that go back years. Ousting the liberal’s bete noir in 2020 didn’t result in a plurality of Americans suddenly believing the US to be democratic. This makes sense given the explanations of bipartisan corruption and democracy-suffocating corporate power offered. What they suggest is that without taking on corruption and corporate power, there is little hope for American democracy.
This social logic should in theory give solace to Left political movements and parties. Corruption and corporate power are endemic to capitalism. However, via the umbilical cord that ties the American Left to the Democratic Party, the results are perpetually placed within the frame of party politics. Forgotten is that prior to 2016, political difference emerged from different premises about the world. Republicans supported what they believed to be the capital accumulation and allocation functions of capitalism, while Democrats claimed that these had to be managed by the state to function well.
In the brief interregnum between the 2020 campaign and the introduction of the Democrat’s policy proposals, substantial bytes were spilled 1) admitting that liberal Democrats bore significant responsibility for the election of Donald Trump via their economic policies, and 2) that lessons had been learned and the mistakes of the past wouldn’t be repeated. Missing is that the national Democrats saw this as a problem of ‘messaging’ rather than substance. Again, these are extraordinarily not-bright people. If they were paid based on ‘merit,’ they would be paying us to employ them.
In fact, the alliance between liberals and capital long ago eliminated the ‘opposition party’ frame of American politics to create a ‘uniparty.’ From the start of the post-War period through the election of Jimmy Carter (1976), the reforms of the New Deal kept capital in check with respect to corrupting American politics, domestically at least. And while liberals tie the start of ‘money in politics’ to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have ruled as it did had capital not already controlled domestic politics. The liberal conceit that Democrats oppose the Citizens United ruling conflates empty posturing with principled opposition.
The ‘opposition party’ frame that had mimicked mediation between labor and capital was abandoned in favor of both parties seeking the favor of capital. The logic is both simple a corrupt. Wall Street was given the ability to create money via the capital allocation function. While government could likely do a better job of it (bankers lend against collateral, not business plans), ideology trumped both history and common sense to place the function with ‘private’ bankers. Surprisingly (not), these bankers began keeping more and more of the money they created for themselves.
Illuminating the depravity of late-stage capitalism is a fools errand without alternatives. The US— Left, Right, and Center, is beholden to the logic of capitalism. The ‘Left’ response to the failure of Covid-19 mitigation policies has been libertarian, not ‘Left.’ Lest this come as a surprise, libertarianism is the ethos of capital that claims that corporate executives and oligarchs should be ‘free’ to exploit labor, pollute with impunity, and cheat on their income taxes. It is the ethos of unaccountable power. It is approximately as compatible with Left politics as European fascism of the twentieth century was. The point: the US desperately needs Socialist and Communist political alternatives. Deference to libertarianism will leave fascism as the only ‘logical’ alternative.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/09 ... ntury.html
Posted on September 8, 2023 by Yves Smith
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 469 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what we’ve accomplished in the last year,, and our current goal, continuing our expanded news coverage.
Yves here. Rob Urie was kind enough to provide us with a fundraiser post of sorts, so please thank him (Lambert’s Mr. Subliminal: And please make a detour to the Tip Jar if you haven’t yet!). It is too bad that the Red Scare of the 1950s also made socialism into a bad word for most people, even though the American economic system then, with its very high income tax rate and New Deal social programs, was well on the way to being European-style social democracy, and the Great Society programs of the 1960s moved it further in that direction. Having said that, during the Sanders campaigns, polls found a majority of young adults and teenagers approved of socialism. I confess I have not tracked more recent surveys to see if the rising voter cohort holds now holds similar views.
A major focus of this post is how de-industrialization has shaped politics in America.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
The nature of the American political system is often hidden behind theories of how democracy works. In these we, the people, choose politicians to represent ‘our’ interests within the realms of government, foreign affairs, and commerce. In contrast, at least according to the annual polls conducted by the Alliance of Democracies, fewer than half of Americans believe that the US is democratic; is a democracy. The reasons given against the US being a democracy are 1) corruption (73%), followed by 2) corporate control of the political system (72%). In other words, the reasons for this missing democracy are economic.
From the advent of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s to today, the US has been systematically deindustrialized. Capitalist industry has been the motivation for much modern political theory, fostering explanations of capitalist production such as ‘economics,’ as well as competing systems of political economy such as socialism, communism, and fascism that constitute the fault lines claimed to motivate geopolitics and wars. The deindustrialization of the US undertaken from the 1970s forward punished workers in the ‘old economy’ while directing Federal largesse toward favored industries such as finance and technology.
The ideological explanation for this shift was ‘markets.’ The US is subject to the immutable laws of nature, went the claim. Economic relations are subject to these immutable laws (continues the logic). There was therefore little that the American political and economic leadership could do in the face of ‘nature.’ That deindustrialization was undertaken at the behest of connected industrialists to break the back of organized labor was left out of this explanation. Likewise, Federal largesse toward Wall Street and Big Tech represented the evolution of markets which Wall Street existed to support, and which Big Tech sold into. In other words, markets uber alles.
Graph: the ‘enemies’ of the US (in red above) have a freakish, even preternatural, propensity for possessing large oil reserves. As if this weren’t bad enough, five of the ten nations with the largest oil reserves have ‘authoritarian’ leaders who tend toward insanity, if you believe what the CIA has to say about it. That the Americans are willing to slaughter a few million innocents abroad to control oil supplies begs the question of how many Americans they would be willing to kill to do so. The most likely answer given the substance of this essay? All of us. Source: worldometers.info.
In fact, the mercantilist relationship between the Federal government and favored industries represents capitalism in its truest form. Markets are a distraction; a misdirection with a purpose if you will. Deference to nature obviates class conflict by ‘naturalizing’ ruling class dominance. Sure, the Federal government supports some industries while crushing others according to the whims and wishes of corporate executives and oligarchs. But little Jimmy-Sue’s choice between a can of soda and a candy bar (‘micro’ foundations) explains the emergence of the union movement in nineteenth century Europe, runs this implausible logic.
The irony that the political class was selling the magical qualities of markets both going into the Wall Street bailouts of 2008 and coming back out of them illustrates the political use-value of economic misdirection. ‘Markets’ would have meant the demise of Wall Street and the American auto industry around 2008 had the Feds not intervened. Then consider the politics. Half of the US workforce had been cut loose and left to its own devices through deindustrialization while the other half was subsidized through Federal largesse for favored industries. How plausible was it then that ‘markets’ explained the mercantilist policies of neoliberal governance?
As the geography of economic production had it, from the start of the American industrial revolution until the 1970s, industry had been widely dispersed across the US. For better or worse, it represented the ‘structure’ of capitalism, providing livings for industrial workers who in turn supported local businesses, towns, cities, and ultimately the Federal government. The motive for deindustrialization was to crush labor unions, eviscerate environmental standards, and establish a center – periphery relationship (imperialism) with the rest of the world. Before 2007 or thereabouts, this program remained vaguely plausible to powerful constituencies.
The political divisions of 2023 follow the basic contours of these manufactured economic divisions. Deindustrialization gutted the heartland while Federal support for favored industries benefited large cities and suburbs. The prior group had been poorly served by the American political establishment while the latter group had its fortunes raised by it. The prior group turned away from the urban liberals who crafted these policies for their own benefit, while the latter group could not, or would not, admit its own role in ‘managing’ the transition away from industry. Intellectual honesty isn’t the strong suit of the technocrats of megalomania.
The class dynamic that was created was of urban and suburban workers in these Federally supported industries prospering while workers in the ‘old’ industries that had built the modern capitalist world were left to compete for jobs that don’t pay. Those who have seen the labor documentary Harlan County, USA, will recall articulate, anti-capitalist, coal miners in a battle against armed Pinkerton strike-busters and the state police. The miners’ explanation of ‘gun rights?’ To keep the Pinkertons from slaughtering them with impunity. The result in 2023: an urban bourgeois that ‘loves’ labor but that hates workers.
This dynamic can be seen in the enthusiastic disinterest that urban liberals have in labor issues beyond lip service. Joe Biden calls himself a ‘labor President’ while he has perpetuated the urban, bourgeois, war against displaced industrial workers. For instance, Mr. Biden promised to raise the minimum wage and then reneged. He promised to support labor activism and then crushed the railway workers’ strike. More recently, he reneged on the ‘just transition’ previously embedded in his environmental proposals in favor of the direct transfer of tax credits to corporate coffers. While the lip service suggests ‘liberal,’ Mr. Biden’s actual policies are neo-fascist.
Mr. Biden’s supporters contend that he, and they, are passionate about labor issues even though they conspicuously loathe actual workers. The propaganda and censorship industries now being supported by liberal Democrats target ‘extremists’ who are overwhelmingly refugees from the deindustrialized heartland. That half of the nation had their livelihoods destroyed by the neoliberal ‘center’ suggests that political dissolution was the goal of deindustrialization. Missing as explanation is the utter stupidity of the people now running the US. Joe Biden voted to admit China to the WTO (World Trade Organization). He is now trying to launch a war against China over the consequences of his own policy. Many of us knew better at the time.
Graph: American healthcare policy is substantially run by urban. liberal, technocrats. After decrying the Trump administration’s seeming indifference to the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, these technocrats adopted his libertarian posture as they fixed their pandemic response around the election schedule of Joe Biden. That Biden’s Covid-19 response was likely the worst in the world— 50% more Americans died from Covid-19 under Biden than Trump, is considered a problem of ‘messaging’ rather than substance. If the US really wanted to destroy Russia, why not send the American healthcare establishment to ‘help’ with its pandemic response? The entire nation would be dead in a week. Source: statista.com.
Reneging on the ‘just transition’ is especially pernicious as it was intended to elicit support for environmental policies by subsidizing displaced workers during the transition to less destructive energy technologies. After all, the Federal government thought nothing of shoveling tens of trillions of dollars in Federal largesse to ‘save’ Wall Street from its own dysfunction. Were Mr. Biden’s urban, bourgeois, supporters aware of the Federal aid dispensed during their own economic transition, they might understand the contribution to economic and political stability that the Federal government has occasionally brought about. But it is a political error to leave Federal spending to a captive political system. The interests of the people need to be re-asserted.
Following the 2016 election, the class divisions between displaced industrial workers and those laboring in the Federally subsidized ‘new economy’ were brought to the fore. The urban bourgeois imagined themselves to be the masters of their own fortunes as they benefited from Federal support for favored industries. Surveys taken around 2008 found cogs in the Wall Street wheel who were convinced that their paychecks matched the social value of their production. Sure, bond trading paid poverty wages before Wall Street was liberated from social accountability, but what does that have to do with them, runs the logic? This inability to see which social levers are being pulled and by whom would be heroic if Prosperity Theology hadn’t beaten then to the punch.
This isn’t to suggest that these urban, bourgeois, bureaucrats for capital have easy lives. The inability of capitalism to produce enough ‘good’ jobs for those who want them means that precarity rules lives and psyches. Following graduate school, I didn’t dare take a vacation for fifteen years. The word from management at the time was ‘if we can do without you for a week, we can do without you forever.’ (This was considered a very ‘good’ job). While the Covid-19 pandemic has now apparently killed or disabled enough workers to cause a labor shortage, this is hardly the ‘nature’ to whom economists so regularly refer.
Graph: what disaster has the American political class wrought? Beginning in the early 1980s, life expectancy (at birth) in the US began falling relative to similar nations abroad. Americans now live 6.3 years less on average than the citizens of France, Britain, Canada, and Australia. In a functioning society, this alone would motivate a revolution. Following the passage and implementation of the ACA (Obamacare), this disastrous result got even worse. Notably, the American Congress has its own healthcare system. They know better than to cast their lots with the ‘little people,’ formerly known as ‘citizens.’ Source: worldbank.org.
American liberals have assumed that the majority view that the US isn’t ‘a democracy’ is related to the 2016 election and its aftermath. In fact, subsequent polling hasn’t materially shifted this result. Moreover, the AoD poll results tie to those of other well-regarded polls that go back years. Ousting the liberal’s bete noir in 2020 didn’t result in a plurality of Americans suddenly believing the US to be democratic. This makes sense given the explanations of bipartisan corruption and democracy-suffocating corporate power offered. What they suggest is that without taking on corruption and corporate power, there is little hope for American democracy.
This social logic should in theory give solace to Left political movements and parties. Corruption and corporate power are endemic to capitalism. However, via the umbilical cord that ties the American Left to the Democratic Party, the results are perpetually placed within the frame of party politics. Forgotten is that prior to 2016, political difference emerged from different premises about the world. Republicans supported what they believed to be the capital accumulation and allocation functions of capitalism, while Democrats claimed that these had to be managed by the state to function well.
In the brief interregnum between the 2020 campaign and the introduction of the Democrat’s policy proposals, substantial bytes were spilled 1) admitting that liberal Democrats bore significant responsibility for the election of Donald Trump via their economic policies, and 2) that lessons had been learned and the mistakes of the past wouldn’t be repeated. Missing is that the national Democrats saw this as a problem of ‘messaging’ rather than substance. Again, these are extraordinarily not-bright people. If they were paid based on ‘merit,’ they would be paying us to employ them.
In fact, the alliance between liberals and capital long ago eliminated the ‘opposition party’ frame of American politics to create a ‘uniparty.’ From the start of the post-War period through the election of Jimmy Carter (1976), the reforms of the New Deal kept capital in check with respect to corrupting American politics, domestically at least. And while liberals tie the start of ‘money in politics’ to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have ruled as it did had capital not already controlled domestic politics. The liberal conceit that Democrats oppose the Citizens United ruling conflates empty posturing with principled opposition.
The ‘opposition party’ frame that had mimicked mediation between labor and capital was abandoned in favor of both parties seeking the favor of capital. The logic is both simple a corrupt. Wall Street was given the ability to create money via the capital allocation function. While government could likely do a better job of it (bankers lend against collateral, not business plans), ideology trumped both history and common sense to place the function with ‘private’ bankers. Surprisingly (not), these bankers began keeping more and more of the money they created for themselves.
Illuminating the depravity of late-stage capitalism is a fools errand without alternatives. The US— Left, Right, and Center, is beholden to the logic of capitalism. The ‘Left’ response to the failure of Covid-19 mitigation policies has been libertarian, not ‘Left.’ Lest this come as a surprise, libertarianism is the ethos of capital that claims that corporate executives and oligarchs should be ‘free’ to exploit labor, pollute with impunity, and cheat on their income taxes. It is the ethos of unaccountable power. It is approximately as compatible with Left politics as European fascism of the twentieth century was. The point: the US desperately needs Socialist and Communist political alternatives. Deference to libertarianism will leave fascism as the only ‘logical’ alternative.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/09 ... ntury.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Wealthy Capitalist Accidentally Makes Great Argument For Revolution
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50 percent.”
Caitlin Johnstone
September 13, 2023
Recent comments from a wealthy Australian property developer named Tim Gurner are going viral on social media right now for the unusual frankness with which he discusses the inherent conflicts of interest between the working class and employers, saying workers who’ve grown lazy and arrogant during Covid need to experience economic pain in the form of unemployment to rein them in and put them in their place.
Gurner, who with a net worth of $912 million is ranked by the Australian Financial Review as the 154th richest person in Australia, made the remarks at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit on Tuesday.
“You know, tradies [Australian slang for tradesmen] have definitely pulled back on productivity,” Gurner said. “They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years. And we need to see that change. I think the problem that we’ve had is that we have people who decided they didn’t really want to work so much anymore through Covid.”
Gurner continued:
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50 percent. In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. I mean, there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around.
“So it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy which is what the whole global world is trying to do. The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality, and we’re seeing it. I think every employer now is seeing it.
“I mean, there are definitely massive layoffs going off and people might not be talking about it, but people are definitely laying people off and we’re starting to see less arrogance in the employment market and that has to continue, because that will cascade across the cost balance.”
It’s not often that you’ll see a member of the ruling class reveal their hostile, slave-master attitude toward the working class so transparently. Perhaps Gurner got a little too careless showing off in front of his rich friends at a forum which, like most things that happen in Australia, never attracts much international attention. But it also wouldn’t be the first time Gurner drew headlines by publicly expressing his disdain for normal working people; in 2017 he became a meme for blaming the economic struggles of millennials on the idea that they spend too much of their money on avocado toast.
Whether he intended his remarks to gain attention or not, Gurner has gone viral once again, and opponents of the status quo he thrives on are making swift use of his comments.
“I like teaching lefty theory as much as the next guy but I can rarely do better at explaining the connection between capital and social-political domination than just pointing at what the guys with the capital do and say,” reads a popular tweet by Georgetown professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò.
“When Marxists say that capitalism, in order to function, literally requires unemployment and homelessness to discipline wages to ensure satisfactory profitability and maintain a useful social domination of the working class don’t take it from us, take it from capitalists,” reads another popular share of the Gurner video.
Gurner’s statements are unusual in their frankness and in their admission that unemployment is a weapon of the ruling class to bludgeon workers into working harder for less pay, but his push to decrease employment is also entirely in alignment with what influential economists like Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke and Olivier Blanchard have been saying in recent months. Workers making more money is seen by the ruling class as a freakish aberrational problem that needs to be fixed via economic pain instead of a good thing that should be celebrated and normalized.
It’s important to remember these frank admissions when they happen, because they don’t happen very often. Normally the capitalist class spends its time telling workers they’re an important part of the team and we’re all family here and hey, have a slice of pizza on us every now and then. But the fact of the matter is that all they really care about is their ability to siphon off the excess value generated by your labor, and they’ll come together with remarkable class solidarity to push the state to hurt you financially in order to ensure that they can skim the largest share of that value possible.
This is completely unsustainable. We cannot continue to tolerate systems which must necessarily abuse workers with financial pain in order to keep increasing profits and quarterly statements. We must transcend these competition-based models where people are manipulated by financial pain into stepping on each other’s heads in a rat race to show the ruling class that they can generate more profit for their employer than their neighbor can. We need to move into collaboration-based systems in which we all work together for the good of everyone and toward the thriving of our biosphere. Our current status quo systems are choking us to death.
Such changes aren’t going to happen until the people start using the power of their numbers to force them to happen. And Tim Gurner just made a splendid argument outlining why this should happen sooner rather than later.
Remember: a class war is already happening. That decision has already been made for us. The only thing we have a say in is whether we fight back or not.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/09 ... evolution/
Labor precedes and is superior to capital.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
How Much of the World Will the US Burn in the Transition to Multipolarity?
Posted on October 29, 2023 by Conor Gallagher
China recently marked the 10th anniversary of its Belt and Road Initiative ( BRI) by gathering national leaders from 23 countries across the world, including from South America, Africa, and Asia, in Beijing.
Europe essentially boycotted the Belt and Road Forum (BRF). The 2017 forum saw 10 representatives from European countries attend, and there were 11 in 2019. This year, just two European leaders made the trip: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
The US, of course, hasn’t attended any of the forums. As this most recent BRF was underway and following the BRICS expansion and the West’s increasing isolation on the Palestine-Israel issue, I couldn’t help but think of Beijing’s repeated invitations for the US to partner with them in the BRI:
[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1664103906987888641[/youtube]
Later in the video Thornton revealed that Kerry told him that not taking up China’s offer to jointly do the BRI was “the single biggest missed opportunity of my life”. pic.twitter.com/YHYw1MoxrX
[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1664103909311533056[youtube]
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) June 1, 2023
China has invited US to join in the Belt and Road initiative since 2013, China invites US almost every year, the last invitation was in March this year… pic.twitter.com/zqwyd0s5AL
— Lei
(@luckbeide001) September 19, 2022
The US initially dismissed the BRI and then became threatened by it.
Initially, US was convinced China was an idiot throwing money away on infrastructure for third world with no prospects of profitability. China invited US to join but was refused. Now US wants to copy. The world is already grateful if US doesn’t bomb the existing infrastructure… pic.twitter.com/6ZJP3Q4Nif
— America-China Watcher (@PandemicTruther) May 6, 2021
The US could have helped steer projects that would have also benefited the US if it had partnered with China, but it’s inconceivable that the US Blob would ever seriously entertain such a proposal, which would require a complete rethink of decades of US foreign policy that prioritizes rentierism and conflict over all else.
Instead we got the usual aggressive responses: the ill-fated TPP, sanctions, export bans, a new Cold War, a spy balloon scandal, the disastrous effort to weaken Russia before taking on China, the successful effort to sever Europe from Eurasia to disastrous effect for Europe, and the desire to see a Ukraine sequel in Taiwan.
It’s impressive what the BRI has already accomplished despite setbacks here and there. According to a Chinese white paper on the BRI, released just prior to the recent forum, Beijing has “signed more than 200 BRI cooperation agreements with more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations across five continents.” And while BRI lending has dropped in recent years, it will continue to be a major piece of China’s foreign and economic policy going forward.
Imagine what it could have done with a good faith US partner. The world’s two largest economies joining together to build a more prosperous world would have been quite the development.
Rather than all the billions the US has spent in recent years pointlessly extinguishing lives in Ukraine and elsewhere, the US could have spent that money at home, say, housing the millions of Americans living in modern day Hoovervilles. They could have asked the Chinese for help to build high speed rail lines. There could be massive infrastructure spending in Latin America rather than coups and drug wars. The possibilities are endless.
Instead, Washington will spend its time hatching plans to tear down efforts like the BRI and BRICS . The US, meanwhile, is on its umpteenth plan to rival the BRI. The India-Middle East-EU transport corridor (IMEC) is the latest iteration, but it’s already running into problems with the situation in the Middle East. Aspects of the plan appeared to have lacked thought from the outset:
Hilarious irony of the day. This is the map of the new India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) that’s presented as (yet another) initiative to “counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative”.
Where does the corridor end? In the port of Piraeus. Who owns that port? China
pic.twitter.com/fBAzGmklbx
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 11, 2023
The anti-democracy Trans-Pacific Partnership was another one, as was the G7 “Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment,” but none have had the impact or staying power of the BRI.
That could be because the goals behind China and the US efforts are not the same. China is attempting to spread development. Sure, it isn’t just a giveaway. The BRI helps Beijing to develop new trade ties, secure critical materials, open export markets and boost Chinese incomes. What exactly is the US-led West offering?
The Council on Foreign Relations admits that “Washington has struggled to offer participating governments a more appealing economic vision.” Or is it simply that the vision offered by Washington is increasingly dystopian, anti-democratic, and filled with austerity and plunder that only enriches the already-rich in the West.
A Classic Case of US Projection
For years US officials and their friends in the media have accused Beijing of practicing debt trap diplomacy with the BRI and other lending.
Deborah Bräutigam, the Director of the China Africa Research Initiative at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, has written that this is “ a lie, and a powerful one.” She wrote, “our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country.”
Even researchers at Chatham House admit that’s not the case, explaining that the lending has instead created a debt trap for China. That is becoming more evident as nations are unable to repay, largely due to the economic fallout from the pandemic and the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
So while it is not true that China engages in debt traps, the same can not be said of the West. The US plan for the world is centered on more debt, more austerity, more conflict, and more profits for American corporations, which it accomplishes by getting countries to forfeit natural resources and crack down on labor in order to deal with foreign debt and get western loans.As Michael Hudson writes in The Destiny of Civilization:
The aim is to persuade low-wage countries that they can rise into the middle class if they let the U.S. and European investors establish factories for local labor-intensive production. A vocabulary of deception has been crafted to block them from recognizing that U.S. and European diplomacy aims at locking them into a foreign-debt trap that turns their domestic policy making over to foreign creditors. This trap enables the IMF and related U.S.-centered diplomacy to ‘bail them out’ by imposing austerity and debt deflation – capped by U.S. demands to control their rent-yielding natural resources and infrastructure monopolies.
The problem is countries are increasingly aware of this trap as its methods have been laid bare, and the US is often times left attempting to install dictators that will “cooperate” by selling out their countries. This is of course sold as joining the “democratic” West, while China represents “autocracy.”
One of the US’ biggest problems with China’s lending is that it represents an alternative to the West – and one that has also been willing to cancel and restructure debt. That is leading for calls for the West to do the same. African political economists, for example, are hopeful that China’s public and private debt forgiveness during the pandemic will apply pressure on western financial institutions to “rethink the harshness of their debt repayment-austerity governance model.”
This is what is so alarming for Washington is that China’s increased lending to Global South countries provides another option for countries that can allow them to avoid the Western debt trap. While Chinese loans typically provide some sort of geopolitical benefit to Beijing in some way the loan terms are never anywhere near as onerous as the typical IMF loan terms
China’s white paper released prior to the BRF can be seen as speaking to the Global South, for instance when it states, “the economic globalization dominated by a few countries has not contributed to the common development that delivers benefits to all…Many developing countries have benefited little from economic globalization and even lost their capacity for independent development, making it hard for them to access the track of modernization. Certain countries have practiced unilateralism, protectionism and hegemonism, hampering economic globalization and threatening a global economic recession.”
In August, China announced the forgiveness of 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations, while also pledging to deepen its collaboration with the continent. Despite that gesture and its efforts to extend maturities, the West continues to hammer home the message that Beijing is engaged in debt-trap diplomacy with Yellen claiming multiple times that Beijing has become the biggest obstacle to “progress” in Africa.
While Beijing offers imperfect infrastructure-for-minerals deals, the US, offers up worthless token items like cultural ties (as Biden said at last year’s US-Africa Leaders Summit, the US has a significant population of African Americans. “I might add that includes my former boss,” he said.) and stuff like this:
Ghana’s debt problems will soon be behind us given that the US is sending a full-time resident debt advisor. This is the only ingredient that was missing. pic.twitter.com/62CUnJWX0C
— Grieve Chelwa (@gchelwa) March 27, 2023
It is becoming increasingly clear that the battle for hearts and minds in the Global South is over – a decisive victory for China. But much like the US’ new Cold War with Russia, the China version will also largely be decided in Europe.
Europe’s Big (Missed) Opportunity
Zhou Bo, a retired PLA colonel and current senior fellow of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, reveals the view from China:
The competition between the two giants won’t be in the Global South, where the US has already lost out to China, while in the Indo-Pacific, few nations want to take sides. Rather, it will be in Europe, where the US has most of its allies and China is the largest trading partner.
It wasn’t that long ago that it looked like Europe might wake up and join in the emerging multipolar world. Italy joined the BRI back in 2019. Other nations were increasing ties with Beijing and Russia (a few like Hungary still are). But that all came to a halt with the Ukraine war as the US has tightened its grip over Europe.
The contradictions and rudderlessness of the EU’s policy are evident in Italy’s attempts now to extricate itself from the BRI. Despite its economic struggles, Italy is tasked with doing so simply because that is the dominant attitude in the West now. Meanwhile Rome simultaneously seeks to boost economic ties with Beijing. Make sense? The South China Morning Post quotes Lorenzo Codogno, chief economist at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance from 2006 to 2015, saying the following:
“The issue for Italy right now is how to move out of the [belt and road], which is a political and not an economic tool, while maintaining or maybe strengthening the economic links with China. That is the challenge Meloni faces.”
The piece also mentions the belief that Italy has damaged its reputation in the West due to its wayward ways. As Rome plots its exit, it is unthinkable that an EU state would sign on to the BRI or attempt to strengthen ties with China in today’s climate.
Germany continues its self-immolation by erecting barriers between itself and its largest trading partner. And the EU has generally become a laughingstock on the world stage due to its self-harming subservience to Washington.
China, at least, still holds out hope, with repeated statements like the following from The Global Times:
China treasures its relationship with the EU, always considering Europe as an indispensable trade and economic partner, and more importantly, a benign force to maintain global diversity and plurality in an increasingly volatile world. China’s 1.4 billion people hope that Europe could maintain its soberness and impartiality – not to toe the political line set by the US government. The EU should judge China independently.
The US government has coerced European countries to play with bans, export controls and other restrictive measures to limit Chinese access to advanced tools and technologies, a blatant assault on China’s future development prospects.
By all metrics, acting as each other’s heavyweight trade partners, the EU and China have benefited a lot from their close economic relationship. The two giant economies should build up the favorable partnership, create a fair and nondiscriminatory business environment for each other’s enterprises, and always stick to the win-win mentality.
Beijing continues to humor EU leaders but the frustration is growing, as it is elsewhere with Brussels. Meanwhile events will continue to pass the EU by as Eurasian integration continues and Brussels clings to Washington. It may take true nationalist forces in Europe to emerge in order to break the EU and the US control over the bloc. As Michael Hudson writes:
There is still a tendency to think of nationalism as a retrograde step. But for foreign countries, breaking away from today’s unipolar global system of U.S.-centered financialization is the only way to create a viable alternative that can resist the New Cold War’s attempt to destroy any alternative system and to impose U.S.-client rentier dictatorships on the world.
Now no doubt Beijing has many of its own problems with neoliberalism, surveillance, etc, but in international affairs one thing is sure. China constantly harps on win-win arrangements.
It is aggressive US policies that are driving the new cold war, not China. Beijing has constantly called for peace and cooperation.
President Xi emphasized this again in his speech at the Belt and Road Forum on October 18, stressing “mutual benefit, common development,… pic.twitter.com/zYHG00MBR3
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 23, 2023
It attempts to find ways it can benefit in tandem with other nations. And it takes diplomacy seriously, thus far not resorting to force in an attempt to advance political objectives. In essence, on the world stage China is the opposite of the US, and it will continue to play an outsized role in the emerging multipolarity.
Right now, the US is making it easier for them to build a more China-centric alternative world order, helping countries overlook their differences because they see a common threat to their national interest, which is an overly aggressive declining hegemon in the US.
Indeed, it has become self-fulfilling. The more China, Russia, India, etc. build up that multipolar world order, the more the US works to undermine it with coups, sanctions, threats. This only hardens the resolve of the other powers and Global South countries. Meanwhile the US works harder trying to tear things down.
Maybe Biden will show some statesmanship at his upcoming meeting with Xi by rethinking the US aggressive stance towards China. It would be smart domestic politics, as well. According to recent polling by National Security Action and Foreign Policy for America, only 13 percent of Americans want an aggressive approach and 5 percent want a confrontational one with China. 78 percent of Americans want to focus more on working to avoid a military conflict with China. But relying on Biden or anyone in neocon-dominated Washington for deft foreign policy isn’t a smart bet.
The real question is just how much destruction the US will cause in the transition to a more multipolar world – one where it must practice actual diplomacy and work with other countries.
That day will likely come first in Europe where there are at least rumblings of throwing off the US shackles, throwing out US lackeys, and pursuing European interests (or the interests of individual European states). The EU project may have to die first but that one can envision. Whether its Brexit forces, or the AfD in Germany, or Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, there are increasing calls for national interests (even if their idea of nationalism seeks to serve local oligarchies or right wing fantasies). Speaking of Orban, according to the Chinese readout, of his BFR meeting with Xi, Orban stated that Hungary “will continue to be China’s trusted friend and partner in the European Union” and “opposes any decoupling and breakage of supply and industrial chains or the so-called ‘de-risking’ practices.” This goes directly against the European Commission’s economic security strategy.More governments are bound to follow Orban’s lead.
As the conflicts ramp up as part of the US effort to maintain its hegemony, we will unfortunately never know what might have been instead had the US said yes to one of Beijing’s invitations to partner in the BRI and accepted a peaceful transition to a multipolar world.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10 ... arity.html
Posted on October 29, 2023 by Conor Gallagher
China recently marked the 10th anniversary of its Belt and Road Initiative ( BRI) by gathering national leaders from 23 countries across the world, including from South America, Africa, and Asia, in Beijing.
Europe essentially boycotted the Belt and Road Forum (BRF). The 2017 forum saw 10 representatives from European countries attend, and there were 11 in 2019. This year, just two European leaders made the trip: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
The US, of course, hasn’t attended any of the forums. As this most recent BRF was underway and following the BRICS expansion and the West’s increasing isolation on the Palestine-Israel issue, I couldn’t help but think of Beijing’s repeated invitations for the US to partner with them in the BRI:
[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1664103906987888641[/youtube]
Later in the video Thornton revealed that Kerry told him that not taking up China’s offer to jointly do the BRI was “the single biggest missed opportunity of my life”. pic.twitter.com/YHYw1MoxrX
[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1664103909311533056[youtube]
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) June 1, 2023
China has invited US to join in the Belt and Road initiative since 2013, China invites US almost every year, the last invitation was in March this year… pic.twitter.com/zqwyd0s5AL
— Lei
(@luckbeide001) September 19, 2022The US initially dismissed the BRI and then became threatened by it.
Initially, US was convinced China was an idiot throwing money away on infrastructure for third world with no prospects of profitability. China invited US to join but was refused. Now US wants to copy. The world is already grateful if US doesn’t bomb the existing infrastructure… pic.twitter.com/6ZJP3Q4Nif
— America-China Watcher (@PandemicTruther) May 6, 2021
The US could have helped steer projects that would have also benefited the US if it had partnered with China, but it’s inconceivable that the US Blob would ever seriously entertain such a proposal, which would require a complete rethink of decades of US foreign policy that prioritizes rentierism and conflict over all else.
Instead we got the usual aggressive responses: the ill-fated TPP, sanctions, export bans, a new Cold War, a spy balloon scandal, the disastrous effort to weaken Russia before taking on China, the successful effort to sever Europe from Eurasia to disastrous effect for Europe, and the desire to see a Ukraine sequel in Taiwan.
It’s impressive what the BRI has already accomplished despite setbacks here and there. According to a Chinese white paper on the BRI, released just prior to the recent forum, Beijing has “signed more than 200 BRI cooperation agreements with more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations across five continents.” And while BRI lending has dropped in recent years, it will continue to be a major piece of China’s foreign and economic policy going forward.
Imagine what it could have done with a good faith US partner. The world’s two largest economies joining together to build a more prosperous world would have been quite the development.
Rather than all the billions the US has spent in recent years pointlessly extinguishing lives in Ukraine and elsewhere, the US could have spent that money at home, say, housing the millions of Americans living in modern day Hoovervilles. They could have asked the Chinese for help to build high speed rail lines. There could be massive infrastructure spending in Latin America rather than coups and drug wars. The possibilities are endless.
Instead, Washington will spend its time hatching plans to tear down efforts like the BRI and BRICS . The US, meanwhile, is on its umpteenth plan to rival the BRI. The India-Middle East-EU transport corridor (IMEC) is the latest iteration, but it’s already running into problems with the situation in the Middle East. Aspects of the plan appeared to have lacked thought from the outset:
Hilarious irony of the day. This is the map of the new India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) that’s presented as (yet another) initiative to “counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative”.
Where does the corridor end? In the port of Piraeus. Who owns that port? China
pic.twitter.com/fBAzGmklbx— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 11, 2023
The anti-democracy Trans-Pacific Partnership was another one, as was the G7 “Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment,” but none have had the impact or staying power of the BRI.
That could be because the goals behind China and the US efforts are not the same. China is attempting to spread development. Sure, it isn’t just a giveaway. The BRI helps Beijing to develop new trade ties, secure critical materials, open export markets and boost Chinese incomes. What exactly is the US-led West offering?
The Council on Foreign Relations admits that “Washington has struggled to offer participating governments a more appealing economic vision.” Or is it simply that the vision offered by Washington is increasingly dystopian, anti-democratic, and filled with austerity and plunder that only enriches the already-rich in the West.
A Classic Case of US Projection
For years US officials and their friends in the media have accused Beijing of practicing debt trap diplomacy with the BRI and other lending.
Deborah Bräutigam, the Director of the China Africa Research Initiative at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, has written that this is “ a lie, and a powerful one.” She wrote, “our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country.”
Even researchers at Chatham House admit that’s not the case, explaining that the lending has instead created a debt trap for China. That is becoming more evident as nations are unable to repay, largely due to the economic fallout from the pandemic and the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
So while it is not true that China engages in debt traps, the same can not be said of the West. The US plan for the world is centered on more debt, more austerity, more conflict, and more profits for American corporations, which it accomplishes by getting countries to forfeit natural resources and crack down on labor in order to deal with foreign debt and get western loans.As Michael Hudson writes in The Destiny of Civilization:
The aim is to persuade low-wage countries that they can rise into the middle class if they let the U.S. and European investors establish factories for local labor-intensive production. A vocabulary of deception has been crafted to block them from recognizing that U.S. and European diplomacy aims at locking them into a foreign-debt trap that turns their domestic policy making over to foreign creditors. This trap enables the IMF and related U.S.-centered diplomacy to ‘bail them out’ by imposing austerity and debt deflation – capped by U.S. demands to control their rent-yielding natural resources and infrastructure monopolies.
The problem is countries are increasingly aware of this trap as its methods have been laid bare, and the US is often times left attempting to install dictators that will “cooperate” by selling out their countries. This is of course sold as joining the “democratic” West, while China represents “autocracy.”
One of the US’ biggest problems with China’s lending is that it represents an alternative to the West – and one that has also been willing to cancel and restructure debt. That is leading for calls for the West to do the same. African political economists, for example, are hopeful that China’s public and private debt forgiveness during the pandemic will apply pressure on western financial institutions to “rethink the harshness of their debt repayment-austerity governance model.”
This is what is so alarming for Washington is that China’s increased lending to Global South countries provides another option for countries that can allow them to avoid the Western debt trap. While Chinese loans typically provide some sort of geopolitical benefit to Beijing in some way the loan terms are never anywhere near as onerous as the typical IMF loan terms
China’s white paper released prior to the BRF can be seen as speaking to the Global South, for instance when it states, “the economic globalization dominated by a few countries has not contributed to the common development that delivers benefits to all…Many developing countries have benefited little from economic globalization and even lost their capacity for independent development, making it hard for them to access the track of modernization. Certain countries have practiced unilateralism, protectionism and hegemonism, hampering economic globalization and threatening a global economic recession.”
In August, China announced the forgiveness of 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations, while also pledging to deepen its collaboration with the continent. Despite that gesture and its efforts to extend maturities, the West continues to hammer home the message that Beijing is engaged in debt-trap diplomacy with Yellen claiming multiple times that Beijing has become the biggest obstacle to “progress” in Africa.
While Beijing offers imperfect infrastructure-for-minerals deals, the US, offers up worthless token items like cultural ties (as Biden said at last year’s US-Africa Leaders Summit, the US has a significant population of African Americans. “I might add that includes my former boss,” he said.) and stuff like this:
Ghana’s debt problems will soon be behind us given that the US is sending a full-time resident debt advisor. This is the only ingredient that was missing. pic.twitter.com/62CUnJWX0C
— Grieve Chelwa (@gchelwa) March 27, 2023
It is becoming increasingly clear that the battle for hearts and minds in the Global South is over – a decisive victory for China. But much like the US’ new Cold War with Russia, the China version will also largely be decided in Europe.
Europe’s Big (Missed) Opportunity
Zhou Bo, a retired PLA colonel and current senior fellow of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, reveals the view from China:
The competition between the two giants won’t be in the Global South, where the US has already lost out to China, while in the Indo-Pacific, few nations want to take sides. Rather, it will be in Europe, where the US has most of its allies and China is the largest trading partner.
It wasn’t that long ago that it looked like Europe might wake up and join in the emerging multipolar world. Italy joined the BRI back in 2019. Other nations were increasing ties with Beijing and Russia (a few like Hungary still are). But that all came to a halt with the Ukraine war as the US has tightened its grip over Europe.
The contradictions and rudderlessness of the EU’s policy are evident in Italy’s attempts now to extricate itself from the BRI. Despite its economic struggles, Italy is tasked with doing so simply because that is the dominant attitude in the West now. Meanwhile Rome simultaneously seeks to boost economic ties with Beijing. Make sense? The South China Morning Post quotes Lorenzo Codogno, chief economist at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance from 2006 to 2015, saying the following:
“The issue for Italy right now is how to move out of the [belt and road], which is a political and not an economic tool, while maintaining or maybe strengthening the economic links with China. That is the challenge Meloni faces.”
The piece also mentions the belief that Italy has damaged its reputation in the West due to its wayward ways. As Rome plots its exit, it is unthinkable that an EU state would sign on to the BRI or attempt to strengthen ties with China in today’s climate.
Germany continues its self-immolation by erecting barriers between itself and its largest trading partner. And the EU has generally become a laughingstock on the world stage due to its self-harming subservience to Washington.
China, at least, still holds out hope, with repeated statements like the following from The Global Times:
China treasures its relationship with the EU, always considering Europe as an indispensable trade and economic partner, and more importantly, a benign force to maintain global diversity and plurality in an increasingly volatile world. China’s 1.4 billion people hope that Europe could maintain its soberness and impartiality – not to toe the political line set by the US government. The EU should judge China independently.
The US government has coerced European countries to play with bans, export controls and other restrictive measures to limit Chinese access to advanced tools and technologies, a blatant assault on China’s future development prospects.
By all metrics, acting as each other’s heavyweight trade partners, the EU and China have benefited a lot from their close economic relationship. The two giant economies should build up the favorable partnership, create a fair and nondiscriminatory business environment for each other’s enterprises, and always stick to the win-win mentality.
Beijing continues to humor EU leaders but the frustration is growing, as it is elsewhere with Brussels. Meanwhile events will continue to pass the EU by as Eurasian integration continues and Brussels clings to Washington. It may take true nationalist forces in Europe to emerge in order to break the EU and the US control over the bloc. As Michael Hudson writes:
There is still a tendency to think of nationalism as a retrograde step. But for foreign countries, breaking away from today’s unipolar global system of U.S.-centered financialization is the only way to create a viable alternative that can resist the New Cold War’s attempt to destroy any alternative system and to impose U.S.-client rentier dictatorships on the world.
Now no doubt Beijing has many of its own problems with neoliberalism, surveillance, etc, but in international affairs one thing is sure. China constantly harps on win-win arrangements.
It is aggressive US policies that are driving the new cold war, not China. Beijing has constantly called for peace and cooperation.
President Xi emphasized this again in his speech at the Belt and Road Forum on October 18, stressing “mutual benefit, common development,… pic.twitter.com/zYHG00MBR3
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 23, 2023
It attempts to find ways it can benefit in tandem with other nations. And it takes diplomacy seriously, thus far not resorting to force in an attempt to advance political objectives. In essence, on the world stage China is the opposite of the US, and it will continue to play an outsized role in the emerging multipolarity.
Right now, the US is making it easier for them to build a more China-centric alternative world order, helping countries overlook their differences because they see a common threat to their national interest, which is an overly aggressive declining hegemon in the US.
Indeed, it has become self-fulfilling. The more China, Russia, India, etc. build up that multipolar world order, the more the US works to undermine it with coups, sanctions, threats. This only hardens the resolve of the other powers and Global South countries. Meanwhile the US works harder trying to tear things down.
Maybe Biden will show some statesmanship at his upcoming meeting with Xi by rethinking the US aggressive stance towards China. It would be smart domestic politics, as well. According to recent polling by National Security Action and Foreign Policy for America, only 13 percent of Americans want an aggressive approach and 5 percent want a confrontational one with China. 78 percent of Americans want to focus more on working to avoid a military conflict with China. But relying on Biden or anyone in neocon-dominated Washington for deft foreign policy isn’t a smart bet.
The real question is just how much destruction the US will cause in the transition to a more multipolar world – one where it must practice actual diplomacy and work with other countries.
That day will likely come first in Europe where there are at least rumblings of throwing off the US shackles, throwing out US lackeys, and pursuing European interests (or the interests of individual European states). The EU project may have to die first but that one can envision. Whether its Brexit forces, or the AfD in Germany, or Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, there are increasing calls for national interests (even if their idea of nationalism seeks to serve local oligarchies or right wing fantasies). Speaking of Orban, according to the Chinese readout, of his BFR meeting with Xi, Orban stated that Hungary “will continue to be China’s trusted friend and partner in the European Union” and “opposes any decoupling and breakage of supply and industrial chains or the so-called ‘de-risking’ practices.” This goes directly against the European Commission’s economic security strategy.More governments are bound to follow Orban’s lead.
As the conflicts ramp up as part of the US effort to maintain its hegemony, we will unfortunately never know what might have been instead had the US said yes to one of Beijing’s invitations to partner in the BRI and accepted a peaceful transition to a multipolar world.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10 ... arity.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
From the Donbass to Gaza: What International Order?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 7, 2023
Thierry Meyssan
We reproduce the text of Thierry Meyssan’s speech in Magdeburg (Germany), at the conference organized by the magazine Compact, “Amitié avec la Russie” , on November 4, 2023. In it, he explains what, in his view, constitutes the fundamental difference between the two conceptions of the world order now clashing from the Donbass to Gaza: that of the Western bloc and that to which the rest of the world refers. The question is not whether this order should be dominated by one power (unipolar) or by a group of powers (multipolar), but whether or not it should respect the sovereignty of each. He draws on the history of international law, as conceived by Tsar Nicholas II and Nobel Peace Prize winner Léon Bourgeois.
We’ve seen NATO’s crimes, but why affirm our friendship with Russia? Isn’t there a risk of Russia behaving tomorrow like NATO does today? Are we not substituting one form of slavery for another?
To answer this question, I would draw on my successive experience as advisor to five heads of state. Everywhere, Russian diplomats have told me: you’re on the wrong track: you’re committed to putting out one fire here, while another has started elsewhere. The problem is deeper and broader.
I would therefore like to describe the difference between a world order based on rules and one based on international law. This is not a linear story, but a struggle between two worldviews – a struggle we must continue.
In the 17th century, the Treaties of Westphalia established the principle of state sovereignty. Each is equal to the others, and no one may interfere in the internal affairs of others. For centuries, these treaties governed relations between the present-day Länder, as well as between European states. They were reaffirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Napoleon I was defeated.
On the eve of the First World War, Tsar Nicholas II convened two International Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) in The Hague to “seek the most effective means of assuring all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace”. Together with Pope Benedict XV, he prepared them on the basis of canon law, not the law of the strongest. After two months of deliberation, 27 states signed the final proceedings. The president of the French Radical [Republican] Party, Léon Bourgeois, presented his thoughts [1] on the mutual dependence of states and their interest in uniting despite their rivalries.
At the instigation of Léon Bourgeois, the Conference created an International Court of Arbitration to settle disputes by legal means rather than by war. According to Bourgeois, states would only agree to disarm when they had other guarantees of security.
The final text instituted the notion of “the duty of States to avoid war”… by resorting to arbitration.
At the instigation of one of the Tsar’s ministers, Frédéric Fromhold de Martens, the Conference agreed that, during armed conflict, populations and belligerents must remain under the protection of the principles resulting from “the usages established between civilized nations, the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience”. In short, the signatories undertook to stop behaving like barbarians.
This system only works between civilized states that honour their signatures and are accountable to public opinion. It failed, in 1914, because states had lost their sovereignty by entering into defense treaties that required them to go to war automatically in certain circumstances that they could not assess for themselves.
Léon Bourgeois’s ideas gained ground, but met with opposition, including from his rival in Georges Clemenceau’s Radical Party. Clemenceau did not believe that public opinion could prevent wars. Nor did the Anglo-Saxons, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George. At the end of the First World War, these three men substituted the might of the victors for the fledgling international law. They shared the world and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires. They blamed Germany alone for the massacres, denying their own. They imposed disarmament without guarantees. To prevent the emergence of a rival to the British Empire in Europe, the Anglo-Saxons began to pit Germany against the USSR, and secured France’s silence by assuring her that she could plunder the defeated Second Reich. In a way, as the first President of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, put it, they organized the conditions for the development of Nazism.
As they had agreed among themselves, the three men reshaped the world in their own image (Wilson’s 14 points, the Sykes-Picot agreements, the Balfour Declaration). They created the Jewish homeland of Palestine, dissected Africa and Asia, and tried to reduce Turkey to its minimum size. They organized all the current disorders in the Middle East.
Yet it was on the basis of the ideas of the late Nicholas II and Léon Bourgeois that the League of Nations (League) was established after the First World War, without the participation of the United States, which thus officially rejected any idea of International Law. However, the League also failed. Not because the United States refused to join, as some say. That was their right. But firstly, because it was incapable of re-establishing strict equality between states, as the United Kingdom was opposed to considering colonized peoples as equals. Secondly, it did not have a common army. And finally, because the Nazis massacred their opponents, destroyed German public opinion, violated the Berlin signature and did not hesitate to behave like barbarians.
As early as the Atlantic Charter in 1942, the new U.S. President, Franklin Roosevelt, and the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, set themselves the common goal of establishing a world government at the end of the conflict. The Anglo-Saxons, who imagined they could rule the world, did not, however, agree amongst themselves on how to go about it. Washington did not wish London to meddle in its affairs in Latin America, while London had no intention of sharing the hegemony of the Empire over which “the sun never set”. During the war, the Anglo-Saxons signed numerous treaties with Allied governments, including those in exile, which they hosted in London.
Incidentally, the Anglo-Saxons failed to defeat the Third Reich, and it was the Soviets who overthrew it and took Berlin. Joseph Stalin, First Secretary of the CPSU, was opposed to the idea of a world government, and an Anglo-Saxon one at that. All he wanted was an organization capable of preventing future conflicts. In any case, it was Russian conceptions that gave birth to the system: that of the United Nations Charter, at the San Francisco conference.
In the spirit of the Hague Conferences, all UN member states are equal. The Organization includes an internal tribunal, the International Court of Justice, responsible for settling disputes between its members. However, in the light of previous experience, the five victorious powers have a permanent seat on the Security Council, with a veto. Given that there was no trust between them (the Anglo-Saxons had planned to continue the war with the remaining German troops against the USSR) and that it was unknown how the General Assembly would behave, the various victors wanted to ensure that the UN would not turn against them (the USA had committed appalling war crimes by dropping two atomic bombs against civilians, while Japan… was preparing its surrender to the Soviets). But the great powers did not understand the veto in the same way. For some, it was a right to censor the decisions of others; for others, it was an obligation to take decisions unanimously.
Except that, right from the start, the Anglo-Saxons didn’t play ball: an Israeli state declared itself (May 14, 1948) before its borders had been agreed, and the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy to oversee the creation of a Palestinian state, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish supremacists under the command of Yitzhak Shamir. Moreover, the seat on the Security Council allocated to China, in the context of the end of the Chinese civil war, was given to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and not to Beijing. The Anglo-Saxons proclaimed the independence of their Korean zone of occupation as the “Republic of Korea” (August 15, 1948), created Nato (April 4, 1949), and then proclaimed the independence of their German zone of occupation as “Federal Germany” (May 23, 1949).
The USSR considered itself fooled, and slammed the door (“empty seat” policy). The Georgian Joseph Stalin had mistakenly believed that the veto was not a right of censure, but a condition of unanimity of the victors. He thought he could block the organization by boycotting it.
The Anglo-Saxons interpreted the text of the Charter they had drafted and took advantage of the Soviets’ absence to place “blue helmets” on the heads of their soldiers and wage war on the North Koreans (June 25, 1950) in the “name of the international community” (sic). Finally, on August 1, 1950, the Soviets returned to the UN after an absence of six and a half months.
The North Atlantic Treaty may be legal but NATO’s rules of procedure violate the UN Charter. It places the Allied armies under Anglo-Saxon command. Its Commander-in-Chief, the SACEUR, is necessarily an American officer. According to its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, the Alliance’s real aim was neither to preserve the peace nor to fight the Soviets, but to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans under control” [2]. In short, it was the armed wing of the world government that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to create. It was in pursuit of this goal that President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany.
At the Liberation, MI6 and OPC (the future CIA) secretly set up a stay-behind network in Germany. They placed thousands of Nazi leaders in this network, helping them to escape justice. Klaus Barbie, who tortured French Resistance coordinator Jean Moulin, became the first commander of this shadow army. The network was then incorporated into NATO, where it was greatly reduced. It was then used by the Anglo-Saxons to interfere in the political life of their supposed allies, who were in reality their vassals.
Joseph Goebbels’ former collaborators created the Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit. With the help of the USA, they persecuted German communists. Later, NATO’s stay-behind agents were able to manipulate the extreme left to make it detestable. A case in point is the Bader gang. But as these men were arrested, the stay-behind came and murdered them in prison, before they could stand trial and speak out. In 1992, Denmark spied on Chancellor Angela Merkel on NATO instructions, just as in 2022, Norway, another NATO member, helped the USA sabotage Nord Stream…
Returning to international law, things gradually returned to normal, until in 1968, during the Prague Spring, the Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev did in Central Europe what the Anglo-Saxons were doing everywhere else: he forbade the USSR’s allies to choose an economic model other than their own.
With the dissolution of the USSR, things began to get worse. The US Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, drew up a doctrine according to which, to remain masters of the world, the United States had to do everything in its power to prevent the emergence of a new rival, starting with the European Union. It was in application of this idea that Secretary of State James Baker imposed the enlargement of the European Union to include all the former states of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. By expanding in this way, the Union deprived itself of the possibility of becoming a political entity. It was again in application of this doctrine that the Maastricht Treaty placed the EU under NATO’s protection. And it is still in application of this doctrine that Germany and France are paying for and arming the Ukraine.
Then came Czech-US professor Josef Korbel. He proposed that the Anglo-Saxons should dominate the world by rewriting international treaties. All that was needed, he argued, was to substitute Anglo-Saxon law, based on custom, for the rationality of Roman law. In this way, in the long term, all treaties would give the advantage to the dominant powers: the United States and the United Kingdom, linked by a “special relationship”, in the words of Winston Churchill. Professor Korbel’s daughter, Democrat Madeleine Albright, became Ambassador to the UN, then Secretary of State. Then, when the White House passed into Republican hands, Professor Korbel’s adopted daughter, Condoleeza Rice, succeeded her as National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State. For two decades, the two “sisters” [3] patiently rewrote the main international texts, ostensibly to modernize them, but in fact to change their spirit.
Today, international institutions operate according to Anglo-Saxon rules, based on previous violations of international law. This law is not written in any code, since it is an interpretation of custom by the dominant power. Every day, we substitute unjust rules for International Law and violate our own signature.
For example:
• When the Baltic States were created in 1990, they made a written commitment to preserve the monuments to the sacrifices of the Red Army. The destruction of these monuments is therefore a violation of their own signature.
• Finland made a written commitment in 1947 to remain neutral. Joining NATO is therefore a violation of its own signature.
• On October 25, 1971, the United Nations adopted Resolution 2758 recognizing Beijing, not Taiwan, as the sole legitimate representative of China. As a result, Chiang Kai-shek’s government was expelled from the Security Council and replaced by that of Mao Zedong. Consequently, China’s recent naval manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait do not constitute aggression against a sovereign state, but the free deployment of its forces in its own territorial waters.
• The Minsk agreements were intended to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from harassment by “integral nationalists”. France and Germany vouched for them before the Security Council. But, as Angela Merkel and François Hollande have said, neither of them had any intention of implementing them. Their signatures are worthless. If it had been otherwise, there would never have been a war in Ukraine.
The perversion of International Law reached a peak with the appointment, in 2012, of the American Jeffrey Feltman as Director of Political Affairs. From his office in New York, he oversaw the Western war on Syria. Using the institutions of peace to wage war [4].
Until the United States threatened it by stockpiling weapons on its border, the Russian Federation respected all the commitments it had signed or that the Soviet Union had signed. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obliges the nuclear powers not to spread their nuclear arsenals around the world. The United States, in violation of its signature, has been stockpiling atomic bombs in five vassal countries for decades. They train allied soldiers in the handling of these weapons at the Kleine Brogel base in Belgium, the Büchel base here in Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate), the Aviano and Ghedi bases in Italy, the Volkel base in the Netherlands and the Incirlik base in Turkey.
Then they say, by virtue of their coups de force, that this has become the custom.
Now, the Russian Federation, considering itself under siege after a US nuclear bomber flew over the Gulf of Finland, has also played with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and installed atomic bombs on the territory of Belarus.Of course, Belarus is not Cuba. Placing Russian nuclear bombs there changes nothing.It’s just a message sent to Washington: if you want to re-establish the Law of the Strongest, we can accept that too, except that, from now on, we’re the strongest.Note that Russia has not violated the letter of the Treaty, as it is not training the Belarusian military in these weapons, but it has taken liberties with the spirit of the Treaty.
Until the United States threatened it by stockpiling weapons on its border, the Russian Federation respected all the commitments it had signed or that the Soviet Union had signed. Last May, however, it in turn violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This treaty obliges nuclear powers not to spread their nuclear arsenals around the world. For decades, the United States has been stockpiling atomic bombs in five vassal states, in violation of its signature. At Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Büchel here in Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate), Aviano and Ghedi in Italy, Volkel in the Netherlands and Incirlik in Turkey.
Then they say, by virtue of their power moves, that this has become the custom. However, the Russian Federation, considering itself under siege, has also violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty and installed atomic bombs on the territory of Belarus. Of course, Belarus is not Cuba. Placing Russian nuclear bombs there changes nothing. It’s just a message sent to Washington: if you want to re-establish the Law of the Strongest, we can accept that too, except that, from now on, we’re the strongest. Note that Russia has not violated the letter of the Treaty, as it is not training the Belarusian military in these weapons, but it has taken liberties with the spirit of the Treaty.
As Léon Bourgeois explained in the last century, to be effective and lasting, disarmament treaties must be based on legal guarantees. It is therefore urgent to return to international law, failing which we will plunge headlong into a devastating war.
Our honour and our interest lie in re-establishing international law. It’s a fragile construction. If we want to avoid war, we must re-establish it, and we can be sure that Russia thinks as we do, that it will not violate it.
Or we can support NATO, which brought its 31 defense ministers together in Brussels on October 11 to listen to their Israeli counterpart announce, via videoconference, that he was going to raze Gaza to the ground. And none of our ministers, including Germany’s Boris Pistorius, dared to speak out against the planning of this mass crime against civilians. The honor of the German people has already been betrayed by the Nazis, who ultimately sacrificed you. Don’t let yourselves be betrayed again, this time by the Social Democratic Party and the Greens.
We don’t have to choose between two overlords, but to protect peace, from the Donbass to Gaza, and, ultimately, to defend International Law.
Translation by Roger Lagassé
Notes
[1] “Solidarism” became the dominant ideology of the French Third Republic.
[2] Note, “the Russians outside”, not the Soviets.
[3] Condoleeezza Rice was never legally adopted, but she lived with Professor Korbel. Madeleine Albright considered her her younger sister.
[4] “Germany and the UNO against Syria”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Al-Watan (Syria) , Voltaire Network, 28 January 2016.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/11/ ... nal-order/
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 7, 2023
Thierry Meyssan
We reproduce the text of Thierry Meyssan’s speech in Magdeburg (Germany), at the conference organized by the magazine Compact, “Amitié avec la Russie” , on November 4, 2023. In it, he explains what, in his view, constitutes the fundamental difference between the two conceptions of the world order now clashing from the Donbass to Gaza: that of the Western bloc and that to which the rest of the world refers. The question is not whether this order should be dominated by one power (unipolar) or by a group of powers (multipolar), but whether or not it should respect the sovereignty of each. He draws on the history of international law, as conceived by Tsar Nicholas II and Nobel Peace Prize winner Léon Bourgeois.
We’ve seen NATO’s crimes, but why affirm our friendship with Russia? Isn’t there a risk of Russia behaving tomorrow like NATO does today? Are we not substituting one form of slavery for another?
To answer this question, I would draw on my successive experience as advisor to five heads of state. Everywhere, Russian diplomats have told me: you’re on the wrong track: you’re committed to putting out one fire here, while another has started elsewhere. The problem is deeper and broader.
I would therefore like to describe the difference between a world order based on rules and one based on international law. This is not a linear story, but a struggle between two worldviews – a struggle we must continue.
In the 17th century, the Treaties of Westphalia established the principle of state sovereignty. Each is equal to the others, and no one may interfere in the internal affairs of others. For centuries, these treaties governed relations between the present-day Länder, as well as between European states. They were reaffirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Napoleon I was defeated.
On the eve of the First World War, Tsar Nicholas II convened two International Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) in The Hague to “seek the most effective means of assuring all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace”. Together with Pope Benedict XV, he prepared them on the basis of canon law, not the law of the strongest. After two months of deliberation, 27 states signed the final proceedings. The president of the French Radical [Republican] Party, Léon Bourgeois, presented his thoughts [1] on the mutual dependence of states and their interest in uniting despite their rivalries.
At the instigation of Léon Bourgeois, the Conference created an International Court of Arbitration to settle disputes by legal means rather than by war. According to Bourgeois, states would only agree to disarm when they had other guarantees of security.
The final text instituted the notion of “the duty of States to avoid war”… by resorting to arbitration.
At the instigation of one of the Tsar’s ministers, Frédéric Fromhold de Martens, the Conference agreed that, during armed conflict, populations and belligerents must remain under the protection of the principles resulting from “the usages established between civilized nations, the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience”. In short, the signatories undertook to stop behaving like barbarians.
This system only works between civilized states that honour their signatures and are accountable to public opinion. It failed, in 1914, because states had lost their sovereignty by entering into defense treaties that required them to go to war automatically in certain circumstances that they could not assess for themselves.
Léon Bourgeois’s ideas gained ground, but met with opposition, including from his rival in Georges Clemenceau’s Radical Party. Clemenceau did not believe that public opinion could prevent wars. Nor did the Anglo-Saxons, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George. At the end of the First World War, these three men substituted the might of the victors for the fledgling international law. They shared the world and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires. They blamed Germany alone for the massacres, denying their own. They imposed disarmament without guarantees. To prevent the emergence of a rival to the British Empire in Europe, the Anglo-Saxons began to pit Germany against the USSR, and secured France’s silence by assuring her that she could plunder the defeated Second Reich. In a way, as the first President of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, put it, they organized the conditions for the development of Nazism.
As they had agreed among themselves, the three men reshaped the world in their own image (Wilson’s 14 points, the Sykes-Picot agreements, the Balfour Declaration). They created the Jewish homeland of Palestine, dissected Africa and Asia, and tried to reduce Turkey to its minimum size. They organized all the current disorders in the Middle East.
Yet it was on the basis of the ideas of the late Nicholas II and Léon Bourgeois that the League of Nations (League) was established after the First World War, without the participation of the United States, which thus officially rejected any idea of International Law. However, the League also failed. Not because the United States refused to join, as some say. That was their right. But firstly, because it was incapable of re-establishing strict equality between states, as the United Kingdom was opposed to considering colonized peoples as equals. Secondly, it did not have a common army. And finally, because the Nazis massacred their opponents, destroyed German public opinion, violated the Berlin signature and did not hesitate to behave like barbarians.
As early as the Atlantic Charter in 1942, the new U.S. President, Franklin Roosevelt, and the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, set themselves the common goal of establishing a world government at the end of the conflict. The Anglo-Saxons, who imagined they could rule the world, did not, however, agree amongst themselves on how to go about it. Washington did not wish London to meddle in its affairs in Latin America, while London had no intention of sharing the hegemony of the Empire over which “the sun never set”. During the war, the Anglo-Saxons signed numerous treaties with Allied governments, including those in exile, which they hosted in London.
Incidentally, the Anglo-Saxons failed to defeat the Third Reich, and it was the Soviets who overthrew it and took Berlin. Joseph Stalin, First Secretary of the CPSU, was opposed to the idea of a world government, and an Anglo-Saxon one at that. All he wanted was an organization capable of preventing future conflicts. In any case, it was Russian conceptions that gave birth to the system: that of the United Nations Charter, at the San Francisco conference.
In the spirit of the Hague Conferences, all UN member states are equal. The Organization includes an internal tribunal, the International Court of Justice, responsible for settling disputes between its members. However, in the light of previous experience, the five victorious powers have a permanent seat on the Security Council, with a veto. Given that there was no trust between them (the Anglo-Saxons had planned to continue the war with the remaining German troops against the USSR) and that it was unknown how the General Assembly would behave, the various victors wanted to ensure that the UN would not turn against them (the USA had committed appalling war crimes by dropping two atomic bombs against civilians, while Japan… was preparing its surrender to the Soviets). But the great powers did not understand the veto in the same way. For some, it was a right to censor the decisions of others; for others, it was an obligation to take decisions unanimously.
Except that, right from the start, the Anglo-Saxons didn’t play ball: an Israeli state declared itself (May 14, 1948) before its borders had been agreed, and the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy to oversee the creation of a Palestinian state, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish supremacists under the command of Yitzhak Shamir. Moreover, the seat on the Security Council allocated to China, in the context of the end of the Chinese civil war, was given to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and not to Beijing. The Anglo-Saxons proclaimed the independence of their Korean zone of occupation as the “Republic of Korea” (August 15, 1948), created Nato (April 4, 1949), and then proclaimed the independence of their German zone of occupation as “Federal Germany” (May 23, 1949).
The USSR considered itself fooled, and slammed the door (“empty seat” policy). The Georgian Joseph Stalin had mistakenly believed that the veto was not a right of censure, but a condition of unanimity of the victors. He thought he could block the organization by boycotting it.
The Anglo-Saxons interpreted the text of the Charter they had drafted and took advantage of the Soviets’ absence to place “blue helmets” on the heads of their soldiers and wage war on the North Koreans (June 25, 1950) in the “name of the international community” (sic). Finally, on August 1, 1950, the Soviets returned to the UN after an absence of six and a half months.
The North Atlantic Treaty may be legal but NATO’s rules of procedure violate the UN Charter. It places the Allied armies under Anglo-Saxon command. Its Commander-in-Chief, the SACEUR, is necessarily an American officer. According to its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, the Alliance’s real aim was neither to preserve the peace nor to fight the Soviets, but to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans under control” [2]. In short, it was the armed wing of the world government that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to create. It was in pursuit of this goal that President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany.
At the Liberation, MI6 and OPC (the future CIA) secretly set up a stay-behind network in Germany. They placed thousands of Nazi leaders in this network, helping them to escape justice. Klaus Barbie, who tortured French Resistance coordinator Jean Moulin, became the first commander of this shadow army. The network was then incorporated into NATO, where it was greatly reduced. It was then used by the Anglo-Saxons to interfere in the political life of their supposed allies, who were in reality their vassals.
Joseph Goebbels’ former collaborators created the Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit. With the help of the USA, they persecuted German communists. Later, NATO’s stay-behind agents were able to manipulate the extreme left to make it detestable. A case in point is the Bader gang. But as these men were arrested, the stay-behind came and murdered them in prison, before they could stand trial and speak out. In 1992, Denmark spied on Chancellor Angela Merkel on NATO instructions, just as in 2022, Norway, another NATO member, helped the USA sabotage Nord Stream…
Returning to international law, things gradually returned to normal, until in 1968, during the Prague Spring, the Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev did in Central Europe what the Anglo-Saxons were doing everywhere else: he forbade the USSR’s allies to choose an economic model other than their own.
With the dissolution of the USSR, things began to get worse. The US Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, drew up a doctrine according to which, to remain masters of the world, the United States had to do everything in its power to prevent the emergence of a new rival, starting with the European Union. It was in application of this idea that Secretary of State James Baker imposed the enlargement of the European Union to include all the former states of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. By expanding in this way, the Union deprived itself of the possibility of becoming a political entity. It was again in application of this doctrine that the Maastricht Treaty placed the EU under NATO’s protection. And it is still in application of this doctrine that Germany and France are paying for and arming the Ukraine.
Then came Czech-US professor Josef Korbel. He proposed that the Anglo-Saxons should dominate the world by rewriting international treaties. All that was needed, he argued, was to substitute Anglo-Saxon law, based on custom, for the rationality of Roman law. In this way, in the long term, all treaties would give the advantage to the dominant powers: the United States and the United Kingdom, linked by a “special relationship”, in the words of Winston Churchill. Professor Korbel’s daughter, Democrat Madeleine Albright, became Ambassador to the UN, then Secretary of State. Then, when the White House passed into Republican hands, Professor Korbel’s adopted daughter, Condoleeza Rice, succeeded her as National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State. For two decades, the two “sisters” [3] patiently rewrote the main international texts, ostensibly to modernize them, but in fact to change their spirit.
Today, international institutions operate according to Anglo-Saxon rules, based on previous violations of international law. This law is not written in any code, since it is an interpretation of custom by the dominant power. Every day, we substitute unjust rules for International Law and violate our own signature.
For example:
• When the Baltic States were created in 1990, they made a written commitment to preserve the monuments to the sacrifices of the Red Army. The destruction of these monuments is therefore a violation of their own signature.
• Finland made a written commitment in 1947 to remain neutral. Joining NATO is therefore a violation of its own signature.
• On October 25, 1971, the United Nations adopted Resolution 2758 recognizing Beijing, not Taiwan, as the sole legitimate representative of China. As a result, Chiang Kai-shek’s government was expelled from the Security Council and replaced by that of Mao Zedong. Consequently, China’s recent naval manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait do not constitute aggression against a sovereign state, but the free deployment of its forces in its own territorial waters.
• The Minsk agreements were intended to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from harassment by “integral nationalists”. France and Germany vouched for them before the Security Council. But, as Angela Merkel and François Hollande have said, neither of them had any intention of implementing them. Their signatures are worthless. If it had been otherwise, there would never have been a war in Ukraine.
The perversion of International Law reached a peak with the appointment, in 2012, of the American Jeffrey Feltman as Director of Political Affairs. From his office in New York, he oversaw the Western war on Syria. Using the institutions of peace to wage war [4].
Until the United States threatened it by stockpiling weapons on its border, the Russian Federation respected all the commitments it had signed or that the Soviet Union had signed. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obliges the nuclear powers not to spread their nuclear arsenals around the world. The United States, in violation of its signature, has been stockpiling atomic bombs in five vassal countries for decades. They train allied soldiers in the handling of these weapons at the Kleine Brogel base in Belgium, the Büchel base here in Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate), the Aviano and Ghedi bases in Italy, the Volkel base in the Netherlands and the Incirlik base in Turkey.
Then they say, by virtue of their coups de force, that this has become the custom.
Now, the Russian Federation, considering itself under siege after a US nuclear bomber flew over the Gulf of Finland, has also played with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and installed atomic bombs on the territory of Belarus.Of course, Belarus is not Cuba. Placing Russian nuclear bombs there changes nothing.It’s just a message sent to Washington: if you want to re-establish the Law of the Strongest, we can accept that too, except that, from now on, we’re the strongest.Note that Russia has not violated the letter of the Treaty, as it is not training the Belarusian military in these weapons, but it has taken liberties with the spirit of the Treaty.
Until the United States threatened it by stockpiling weapons on its border, the Russian Federation respected all the commitments it had signed or that the Soviet Union had signed. Last May, however, it in turn violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This treaty obliges nuclear powers not to spread their nuclear arsenals around the world. For decades, the United States has been stockpiling atomic bombs in five vassal states, in violation of its signature. At Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Büchel here in Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate), Aviano and Ghedi in Italy, Volkel in the Netherlands and Incirlik in Turkey.
Then they say, by virtue of their power moves, that this has become the custom. However, the Russian Federation, considering itself under siege, has also violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty and installed atomic bombs on the territory of Belarus. Of course, Belarus is not Cuba. Placing Russian nuclear bombs there changes nothing. It’s just a message sent to Washington: if you want to re-establish the Law of the Strongest, we can accept that too, except that, from now on, we’re the strongest. Note that Russia has not violated the letter of the Treaty, as it is not training the Belarusian military in these weapons, but it has taken liberties with the spirit of the Treaty.
As Léon Bourgeois explained in the last century, to be effective and lasting, disarmament treaties must be based on legal guarantees. It is therefore urgent to return to international law, failing which we will plunge headlong into a devastating war.
Our honour and our interest lie in re-establishing international law. It’s a fragile construction. If we want to avoid war, we must re-establish it, and we can be sure that Russia thinks as we do, that it will not violate it.
Or we can support NATO, which brought its 31 defense ministers together in Brussels on October 11 to listen to their Israeli counterpart announce, via videoconference, that he was going to raze Gaza to the ground. And none of our ministers, including Germany’s Boris Pistorius, dared to speak out against the planning of this mass crime against civilians. The honor of the German people has already been betrayed by the Nazis, who ultimately sacrificed you. Don’t let yourselves be betrayed again, this time by the Social Democratic Party and the Greens.
We don’t have to choose between two overlords, but to protect peace, from the Donbass to Gaza, and, ultimately, to defend International Law.
Translation by Roger Lagassé
Notes
[1] “Solidarism” became the dominant ideology of the French Third Republic.
[2] Note, “the Russians outside”, not the Soviets.
[3] Condoleeezza Rice was never legally adopted, but she lived with Professor Korbel. Madeleine Albright considered her her younger sister.
[4] “Germany and the UNO against Syria”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Al-Watan (Syria) , Voltaire Network, 28 January 2016.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/11/ ... nal-order/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Rob Urie: Biden Visits Hitler’s Bunker, Sends for a Decorator: Israel and Ukraine Edition
Posted on November 10, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Given the givens, I trust readers will not overreact to the Godwin’s Law violation in the headline. Israel’s conduct in Gaza is well into genocide terrain. And many commentators have pointed out that a recent Time piece on Zelensky was awfully evocative of a Furherbunker.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
‘In Palestine, the Mandate (for Palestine) required Britain to put into effect the Balfour Declaration’s “national home for the Jewish people” alongside the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population…’ Mandate for Palestine, Wikipedia.
The role of the US in the creation and ongoing support of Israel makes it uniquely culpable for Israel’s actions. When the Western powers first considered the creation of a Jewish state in what was then Palestine (1916 or thereabouts), the problem of inserting a new nation atop an existing land and people was understood to be problematic. Following WWII, with much of the West in ruins and the US perceiving itself to be the ruler of the world, the US moved forward with the creation of Israel atop Palestine.
What then is the US interest in Israel? Writer Caitlin Johnstone found a brief video of a much younger Joe Biden claiming that ‘if Israel did not exist, the US would have to invent it to support US interests in the Middle East.’ The US interest in the Middle East has always been to control the distribution of oil and gas. Israel is strategically located on the Eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, between the sea and the major oil and gas producers of the Middle East. Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon are as well. But these nations are controlled by not-white, not-European, not-settlers.
Graph: since 1948, the year that Israel was ‘founded’ on land already occupied by Palestinians, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid. The persistence of this aid makes the US uniquely responsible for Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Given the extensive history of US imperialism, that Israel has received the most US aid isn’t because it was the first nation to begin receiving it. It is because the US sees Israel as an outpost for white, European, and US interests in the oil and gas rich Middle East. Source: usafacts.org.
US strategic ambitions in the Middle East have been deemed by recent American administrations to outweigh the regional political instability created by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. However, given the rapidly diminishing status of the US in world affairs due to its decrepit, incapable, and stunningly uninformed political leadership, the geostrategic costs of maintaining Israel in its current configuration appear to be rising exponentially. But don’t count on anyone in Washington figuring this out.
As US Secretary of Defense Austin states below, Israel would n’existe pas (would not exist) without US military backing and financial assistance, so why not 1) force an end to Israeli control of Palestine through a two-state solution while 2) keeping the strategic outpost that Israel represents in a politically viable form? From a US strategic perspective, who cares what the Israelis think of this? The US has overthrown a minimum of sixty-four independent, sovereign, nations since 1948. Again, Israel would not exist without support from the US.
Graph: in 2022, Israelis lived almost ten years longer than the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. This strongly suggests that the Israeli – Palestinian relationship is one of class, akin to the impact of racial difference in the US. This would fit one storyline if Israel were self-sustaining, but quite another given its client relationship with the US. Additionally, the ten-year difference in life expectancy is almost exactly the difference found between whites and Blacks in the US. Source: healthpolicy-watch.news.
The people of Israel were about to toss Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister, into prison for corruption before the events of Oct. 7th saved him. The geostrategic benefit of prosecuting Netanyahu would be that he and the Likud Party represent the exterminationist Zionist impulse. They don’t want a two-state solution because they want Palestinian land for Israel. Why the US isn’t quoting Billy Bob Thornton to the Israelis— ‘wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which hand fills up first,’ represents a failure of American leadership.
I’m not being flippant here. If Netanyahu and Likud continue to run Israel, the US will quickly be dragged into a regional war. It may be too late to prevent this already. So, the geostrategic interest of the US more likely than not depends on forcing a resolution of the problem of Palestine before the wider Middle East is lit on fire. If Israel proceeds on its current path without ousting Netanyahu and marginalizing Likud, Israel should be freed (from US support) to suffer the consequences. Otherwise, the US is complicit in Israel’s crimes.
As recent protests in the US against the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza suggest, US foreign policy is suddenly being questioned again after seven years of near total domestic capitulation to the warfare state via the Russiagate fraud. Although the protesters appear to understand that the Biden administration is complicit in the genocide because of US support for Israel, no such understanding has been evident with respect to the US-led slaughter in Ukraine. In both cases, one’s choice of historical starting point determines culpability for launching these conflicts.
Question: how can Israel claim a right of self-defense against a land that it occupies (Palestine)? This is like Nazis claiming a right of self-defense against the people they put into concentration camps. In history, there were ‘unprovoked’ rebellions in Nazi concentration camps that were quickly and viciously put down. But the doctrine governing the Nazis was ‘might makes right,’ and not (classical) liberal twaddle about a right of self-defense. Conversely, what of the Palestinian right of self-determination? How plausible is it that an occupied people have self-determination?
The immediate impediment to clearly conceiving what is motivating rebellion against Israeli rule inside Palestine is the question of the relevant starting point. Is it 1948, or October 7, 2023? The answer is 1948, when Israel was inserted atop the existing Palestinian population. When the idea to do so was first considered, the fear that it would create an unstable apartheid regime in a politically unsettled (de-settled) region was at least given lip service. The decision by the US to move forward without first resolving the question of Palestine lies at the heart of most of what has followed.
Back in Ukraine, in 2014 the US used CIA cutouts and self-described Ukrainian fascists to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine in order to install a government beholden to US interests. The US then spent the next eight years building a proxy army there to attack Russia with. The Russians were drawn into Ukraine following genocidal attacks against Russian-speaking Ukrainians that were politically impossible for the Russian leadership to ignore. Why these facts weren’t compelling to American protesters two years ago, when it would have mattered, is a mystery.
In his recent Congressional testimony, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered (starts 2:48) that the nominally sovereign states of Israel and Ukraine are wholly dependent on US military support for their continued existence. Blue Dog Democrat Joe Manchin asked Austin, given the depletion of US munitions in Ukraine, where the ability of the US to sustain itself militarily stands should the need arise? Austin’s non-answer was that the US plans to be ready should the need arise, with emphasis placed on the future-tense.
Graph: the US far and away has the largest military expenditures in the world, with mostly death and destruction to show for it. The purpose of US Senator Joe Manchin’s questions for Secretary Austin was to assure that the US can defend itself, if need be, when the real question is: what in the hell happened to all of that money? One place to look is in the 35-room mansions that now fill suburban Washington, DC. Otherwise, the scale of these expenditures ties much of military strife in the world directly back to Washington. Source: statista.com.
Several issues of concern emerge from Austin’s testimony. The first is that the pretense that Ukraine and Israel are sovereign nations, in the sense of being self-sustaining militarily, was called into question. What this in turn implies is what much of the rest of the world has long known— that the US is substantively responsible for the lost war in Ukraine and the genocide currently unfolding in Gaza. The US goaded the Russians into Ukraine, refused serial agreements between Ukraine and Russia to end the conflict, and in the process, destroyed Ukraine.
With respect to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, readers will recall that US President Joe Biden flew to Israel following the Hamas attacks of October 7th to restate his unequivocal support for whatever response the Israelis deemed appropriate. Biden’s comments would have had one meaning if the US hadn’t supported the creation of Israel on land occupied by the Palestinians, and another given the history of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. This brieffrom the Center on Constitutional Rights provides the history of the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.
In a recent interview, retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor recounted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Turkey, in which Blinken was barely acknowledged by the Turkish government before departing Turkey without a commitment of support for US actions in the region. For younger readers, had a US Secretary of State travelled to Turkey twenty years ago, s/he would have been greeted with a degree of respect notably lacking in Blinken’s visit. Implied in the snub is precisely how far the US has fallen in terms of international esteem.
While international esteem and seven dollars might buy one a cup of coffee, also implied is that the US is no longer feared for its skill at mass, wanton, destruction, and gratuitous, pointless, slaughters. In the interview, MacGregor did an excellent job articulating the US – Israeli logic of genocide without internalizing it. This ability to understand the other side’s perspective—called ‘empathy,’ is crucial to settling disputes. I have no idea if MacGregor has negotiating skills, but my bet is that he wouldn’t get rolled every time he opens its mouth like the Biden administration currently is.
The implications of the Turkish snub are troubling for the US. In a warning that former US President George W. Bush should have heeded before launching his catastrophic war against Iraq, when ‘the world’ perceived that the US has great military strength, the risk was that by deploying it, this notion of power gets disproved. Joe Biden and the American foreign policy establishment arrogantly dismissed the Russian military’s ability to crush the proxy force it created in Ukraine, making is appear delusional and stupid now that Russia has prevailed.
In almost two years of attrition warfare, the Russians managed to keep the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine to 10,000. With upwards of 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, the Russians are conspicuously engaged in a targeted state-vs-state battle. In the month since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the Israelis have killed 10,569 civilians, and possibly a few hundred Hamas soldiers. What the Israelis are doing in Gaza isn’t warfare, it is the extermination of a civilian population. This fits the exterminationist impulse of the Zionist-Right in Israel. If the Biden administration believes that what Israel is doing in Gaza is in any way constructive, the world has a problem.
The US is now reportedly telling (substantially destroyed) Ukraine that it is time to negotiate with Russia. This is 10,000 Ukrainian civilian deaths, 400,000 Ukrainian military deaths, and at least two negotiated settlements between Ukraine and Russia that were put on ice by the Americans, too late. The same adult infants who ‘managed’ this fiasco from the American side are now in charge of US-Israel policy. The only possible worse scenario would have been to have Hillary Clinton— the butcher of Libya, in the White House.
The idea that this is all going to work out because ‘fortress America’ misses that the US is rapidly, and deservedly, becoming a pariah state. Adult infant Blinken is now passing warm gas about a ‘two-state solution’ while Israel exterminates one of the two states he claims to be endorsing. And why would Israel care what Blinken has to say? Joe Biden just assured the Israelis that they can exterminate the entire Middle East and he ‘has their back.’ What a farce. And don’t forget those nuclear weapons.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11 ... ition.html
*********
What Do You Know...
I speak about this constantly--American success in the XX century was in productive capacity which gave us many a splendored things--from style, to a vision of a future, to industry, to Old Hollywood, to American technological and entrepreneurial genius, to a vibrant modern culture... until the United States decided that it has a say in the continental warfare. This is when things started to go haywire. Russians decided to do what any father would do:
And now Mr. Peskov does "correcting"--a thing I was warning about for 10+ years.
There is no way the Russian military can be defeated, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has insisted. His comments follow recent claims by President Vladimir Putin that Western governments were lowering their expectations regarding the outcome of the Ukraine conflict. Speaking to Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin on Thursday, Peskov stated “it is high time that everyone in Kiev and Washington realized: it’s impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”
It is difficult to explain to people who bought Wehrmacht's fairy tales about fighting Russians and killing like... one trillion of them and still losing the war, that the real war has nothing to do with their academics. But that what is taught in the US military academies whose tactical and operational curricula was written by Nazi generals, including Colonel Macgregor's favorite shtick about Stalin executing "one million" Red Army soldiers. But, one cannot deny the fact that Manstein, Model, Guderian, Hoth and many others have been much better than any American general and all of them have been defeated by Russians. You know, those peasants from the Red Army. So, Russians, as of today--November 9, 2023, "corrected" all that. I am on record, quoting Sasha Rogers, US cannot do strategy, it does business plans only.
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/11 ... -know.html
Posted on November 10, 2023 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Given the givens, I trust readers will not overreact to the Godwin’s Law violation in the headline. Israel’s conduct in Gaza is well into genocide terrain. And many commentators have pointed out that a recent Time piece on Zelensky was awfully evocative of a Furherbunker.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
‘In Palestine, the Mandate (for Palestine) required Britain to put into effect the Balfour Declaration’s “national home for the Jewish people” alongside the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population…’ Mandate for Palestine, Wikipedia.
The role of the US in the creation and ongoing support of Israel makes it uniquely culpable for Israel’s actions. When the Western powers first considered the creation of a Jewish state in what was then Palestine (1916 or thereabouts), the problem of inserting a new nation atop an existing land and people was understood to be problematic. Following WWII, with much of the West in ruins and the US perceiving itself to be the ruler of the world, the US moved forward with the creation of Israel atop Palestine.
What then is the US interest in Israel? Writer Caitlin Johnstone found a brief video of a much younger Joe Biden claiming that ‘if Israel did not exist, the US would have to invent it to support US interests in the Middle East.’ The US interest in the Middle East has always been to control the distribution of oil and gas. Israel is strategically located on the Eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, between the sea and the major oil and gas producers of the Middle East. Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon are as well. But these nations are controlled by not-white, not-European, not-settlers.
Graph: since 1948, the year that Israel was ‘founded’ on land already occupied by Palestinians, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid. The persistence of this aid makes the US uniquely responsible for Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Given the extensive history of US imperialism, that Israel has received the most US aid isn’t because it was the first nation to begin receiving it. It is because the US sees Israel as an outpost for white, European, and US interests in the oil and gas rich Middle East. Source: usafacts.org.
US strategic ambitions in the Middle East have been deemed by recent American administrations to outweigh the regional political instability created by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. However, given the rapidly diminishing status of the US in world affairs due to its decrepit, incapable, and stunningly uninformed political leadership, the geostrategic costs of maintaining Israel in its current configuration appear to be rising exponentially. But don’t count on anyone in Washington figuring this out.
As US Secretary of Defense Austin states below, Israel would n’existe pas (would not exist) without US military backing and financial assistance, so why not 1) force an end to Israeli control of Palestine through a two-state solution while 2) keeping the strategic outpost that Israel represents in a politically viable form? From a US strategic perspective, who cares what the Israelis think of this? The US has overthrown a minimum of sixty-four independent, sovereign, nations since 1948. Again, Israel would not exist without support from the US.
Graph: in 2022, Israelis lived almost ten years longer than the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. This strongly suggests that the Israeli – Palestinian relationship is one of class, akin to the impact of racial difference in the US. This would fit one storyline if Israel were self-sustaining, but quite another given its client relationship with the US. Additionally, the ten-year difference in life expectancy is almost exactly the difference found between whites and Blacks in the US. Source: healthpolicy-watch.news.
The people of Israel were about to toss Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister, into prison for corruption before the events of Oct. 7th saved him. The geostrategic benefit of prosecuting Netanyahu would be that he and the Likud Party represent the exterminationist Zionist impulse. They don’t want a two-state solution because they want Palestinian land for Israel. Why the US isn’t quoting Billy Bob Thornton to the Israelis— ‘wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which hand fills up first,’ represents a failure of American leadership.
I’m not being flippant here. If Netanyahu and Likud continue to run Israel, the US will quickly be dragged into a regional war. It may be too late to prevent this already. So, the geostrategic interest of the US more likely than not depends on forcing a resolution of the problem of Palestine before the wider Middle East is lit on fire. If Israel proceeds on its current path without ousting Netanyahu and marginalizing Likud, Israel should be freed (from US support) to suffer the consequences. Otherwise, the US is complicit in Israel’s crimes.
As recent protests in the US against the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza suggest, US foreign policy is suddenly being questioned again after seven years of near total domestic capitulation to the warfare state via the Russiagate fraud. Although the protesters appear to understand that the Biden administration is complicit in the genocide because of US support for Israel, no such understanding has been evident with respect to the US-led slaughter in Ukraine. In both cases, one’s choice of historical starting point determines culpability for launching these conflicts.
Question: how can Israel claim a right of self-defense against a land that it occupies (Palestine)? This is like Nazis claiming a right of self-defense against the people they put into concentration camps. In history, there were ‘unprovoked’ rebellions in Nazi concentration camps that were quickly and viciously put down. But the doctrine governing the Nazis was ‘might makes right,’ and not (classical) liberal twaddle about a right of self-defense. Conversely, what of the Palestinian right of self-determination? How plausible is it that an occupied people have self-determination?
The immediate impediment to clearly conceiving what is motivating rebellion against Israeli rule inside Palestine is the question of the relevant starting point. Is it 1948, or October 7, 2023? The answer is 1948, when Israel was inserted atop the existing Palestinian population. When the idea to do so was first considered, the fear that it would create an unstable apartheid regime in a politically unsettled (de-settled) region was at least given lip service. The decision by the US to move forward without first resolving the question of Palestine lies at the heart of most of what has followed.
Back in Ukraine, in 2014 the US used CIA cutouts and self-described Ukrainian fascists to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine in order to install a government beholden to US interests. The US then spent the next eight years building a proxy army there to attack Russia with. The Russians were drawn into Ukraine following genocidal attacks against Russian-speaking Ukrainians that were politically impossible for the Russian leadership to ignore. Why these facts weren’t compelling to American protesters two years ago, when it would have mattered, is a mystery.
In his recent Congressional testimony, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered (starts 2:48) that the nominally sovereign states of Israel and Ukraine are wholly dependent on US military support for their continued existence. Blue Dog Democrat Joe Manchin asked Austin, given the depletion of US munitions in Ukraine, where the ability of the US to sustain itself militarily stands should the need arise? Austin’s non-answer was that the US plans to be ready should the need arise, with emphasis placed on the future-tense.
Graph: the US far and away has the largest military expenditures in the world, with mostly death and destruction to show for it. The purpose of US Senator Joe Manchin’s questions for Secretary Austin was to assure that the US can defend itself, if need be, when the real question is: what in the hell happened to all of that money? One place to look is in the 35-room mansions that now fill suburban Washington, DC. Otherwise, the scale of these expenditures ties much of military strife in the world directly back to Washington. Source: statista.com.
Several issues of concern emerge from Austin’s testimony. The first is that the pretense that Ukraine and Israel are sovereign nations, in the sense of being self-sustaining militarily, was called into question. What this in turn implies is what much of the rest of the world has long known— that the US is substantively responsible for the lost war in Ukraine and the genocide currently unfolding in Gaza. The US goaded the Russians into Ukraine, refused serial agreements between Ukraine and Russia to end the conflict, and in the process, destroyed Ukraine.
With respect to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, readers will recall that US President Joe Biden flew to Israel following the Hamas attacks of October 7th to restate his unequivocal support for whatever response the Israelis deemed appropriate. Biden’s comments would have had one meaning if the US hadn’t supported the creation of Israel on land occupied by the Palestinians, and another given the history of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. This brieffrom the Center on Constitutional Rights provides the history of the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.
In a recent interview, retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor recounted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Turkey, in which Blinken was barely acknowledged by the Turkish government before departing Turkey without a commitment of support for US actions in the region. For younger readers, had a US Secretary of State travelled to Turkey twenty years ago, s/he would have been greeted with a degree of respect notably lacking in Blinken’s visit. Implied in the snub is precisely how far the US has fallen in terms of international esteem.
While international esteem and seven dollars might buy one a cup of coffee, also implied is that the US is no longer feared for its skill at mass, wanton, destruction, and gratuitous, pointless, slaughters. In the interview, MacGregor did an excellent job articulating the US – Israeli logic of genocide without internalizing it. This ability to understand the other side’s perspective—called ‘empathy,’ is crucial to settling disputes. I have no idea if MacGregor has negotiating skills, but my bet is that he wouldn’t get rolled every time he opens its mouth like the Biden administration currently is.
The implications of the Turkish snub are troubling for the US. In a warning that former US President George W. Bush should have heeded before launching his catastrophic war against Iraq, when ‘the world’ perceived that the US has great military strength, the risk was that by deploying it, this notion of power gets disproved. Joe Biden and the American foreign policy establishment arrogantly dismissed the Russian military’s ability to crush the proxy force it created in Ukraine, making is appear delusional and stupid now that Russia has prevailed.
In almost two years of attrition warfare, the Russians managed to keep the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine to 10,000. With upwards of 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, the Russians are conspicuously engaged in a targeted state-vs-state battle. In the month since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the Israelis have killed 10,569 civilians, and possibly a few hundred Hamas soldiers. What the Israelis are doing in Gaza isn’t warfare, it is the extermination of a civilian population. This fits the exterminationist impulse of the Zionist-Right in Israel. If the Biden administration believes that what Israel is doing in Gaza is in any way constructive, the world has a problem.
The US is now reportedly telling (substantially destroyed) Ukraine that it is time to negotiate with Russia. This is 10,000 Ukrainian civilian deaths, 400,000 Ukrainian military deaths, and at least two negotiated settlements between Ukraine and Russia that were put on ice by the Americans, too late. The same adult infants who ‘managed’ this fiasco from the American side are now in charge of US-Israel policy. The only possible worse scenario would have been to have Hillary Clinton— the butcher of Libya, in the White House.
The idea that this is all going to work out because ‘fortress America’ misses that the US is rapidly, and deservedly, becoming a pariah state. Adult infant Blinken is now passing warm gas about a ‘two-state solution’ while Israel exterminates one of the two states he claims to be endorsing. And why would Israel care what Blinken has to say? Joe Biden just assured the Israelis that they can exterminate the entire Middle East and he ‘has their back.’ What a farce. And don’t forget those nuclear weapons.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11 ... ition.html
*********
What Do You Know...
I speak about this constantly--American success in the XX century was in productive capacity which gave us many a splendored things--from style, to a vision of a future, to industry, to Old Hollywood, to American technological and entrepreneurial genius, to a vibrant modern culture... until the United States decided that it has a say in the continental warfare. This is when things started to go haywire. Russians decided to do what any father would do:
And now Mr. Peskov does "correcting"--a thing I was warning about for 10+ years.
There is no way the Russian military can be defeated, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has insisted. His comments follow recent claims by President Vladimir Putin that Western governments were lowering their expectations regarding the outcome of the Ukraine conflict. Speaking to Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin on Thursday, Peskov stated “it is high time that everyone in Kiev and Washington realized: it’s impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”
It is difficult to explain to people who bought Wehrmacht's fairy tales about fighting Russians and killing like... one trillion of them and still losing the war, that the real war has nothing to do with their academics. But that what is taught in the US military academies whose tactical and operational curricula was written by Nazi generals, including Colonel Macgregor's favorite shtick about Stalin executing "one million" Red Army soldiers. But, one cannot deny the fact that Manstein, Model, Guderian, Hoth and many others have been much better than any American general and all of them have been defeated by Russians. You know, those peasants from the Red Army. So, Russians, as of today--November 9, 2023, "corrected" all that. I am on record, quoting Sasha Rogers, US cannot do strategy, it does business plans only.
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/11 ... -know.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."