The Nature of Foxes

[blindpig]

The self-isolation of the West
by GORDONHAHN
November 20, 2023

The division of the world is rapidly evolving into something that looks less like a division – if by “ division ” we mean a more or less balanced division between two parties – and more like the isolation of a small part of the international community. compared to a larger, significant or largely majority. Furthermore, this isolation resembles self-isolation, and the party that isolates itself is the West. It didn't have to be this way. Even before the Ukrainian war between NATO and Russia, Washington and Brussels congratulated themselves on having succeeded in isolating Russia, then China, from the “ community of democracies ” (even as Washington abandoned what would be appropriate to call not a democratic government, but a republican government). Instead, the opposite happens. Through its arrogance and obstinacy, the West, led by Washington, finds itself more and more isolated.

The West's isolation is largely an accidental self-isolation caused by a series of radical policy choices and a worrying inability, even refusal, to compromise not only with enemies but also, increasingly, with the friends. At the same time, the failure of the West's attempt to isolate Moscow and Beijing has encouraged the latter to work very closely to increasingly isolate the West and attract the Rest of the world to their side, some of which parties were once firmly allied or at least had very good relations with the West. Russia's estrangement from the West is not an isolated incident. NATO members India, Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia have turned away from the West and joined the Sino-Russian alternative. How did this happen?

First, against Russia's clearly expressed and firm wishes and the West's own promises not to expand NATO beyond a reunited Germany, there was the expansion of NATO , then even more NATO expansion, then the attempted expansion of NATO towards Georgia and Ukraine, countries bordering Russia and located in strategically crucial regions. “ Democracy promotion ”, including supporting, financing and organizing “ democratic movements ”, has given rise to color revolutions – pink (Georgia), orange and Maidan (Ukraine), white ribbon (Russia) , etc. – and the expansion of the EU paved the way for the NATO approach. At its 2007 summit, NATO declared that Georgia and Ukraine would one day join NATO, despite repeated objections from the Russian president, the earliest of which was made by Vladimir Putin at the Munich conference on security in 2007. Georgia began integrating NATO programs and structures, then attacked the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, an ally of Russia, killing hundreds of civilians and 19 Russian soldiers tasked with maintain the peace. Georgia was defeated in the Five Day War between Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia in August 2008, and NATO carried out an operational retreat.

Then came the US-backed Arab “Spring,” which briefly brought the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood to power, led to civil war and the destruction of Moammar Gaddafi and his regime, and triggered the Syrian Civil War . The latter allowed the expansion of jihadism in the Middle East through Iraq and eastern Syria. Jihadism, in the form of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, was born in the “ backlash ” of the engagement in Afghanistan against the Soviets and cut its teeth in the Middle East following the American invasion of Iraq after September 11, 2001. The destabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan following the US invasions of both countries after September 11 and the bizarre efforts at “nation building” and democracy promotion in these two ancient cultures provided safe havens for jihadist movements, which spread to eastern Syria, Lebanon and other parts of the Muslim world. The traditional Islamic world, which has become the main victim of the rise of jihadism, could not help but view the political and military interventionism of the United States and NATO in their regions as a catalyst for expansion of jihadism in their countries.

Ukraine's Maidan revolt—perhaps America's last color revolution—repeated the Georgian experience, which included among other key events: a U.S.-backed takeover ultimately executed by anti-nationalist elements. -Russians, a military attack by the new pro-Western regime against a pro-Russian region (Donbass replacing South Ossetia), threats against another pro-Russian region (Crimea replacing Abkhazia), strong involvement of NATO in the armed forces, and a Russian invasion. It is not surprising that the repetition of the Georgian scenario in Ukraine continued until the Russian military invasion, especially since the West almost entirely rejected Russia's attempt to avoid the necessity of an invasion through his December 2021 proposals to create a new security architecture in Europe and halt unilateral NATO expansion.

The NATO-Russia war in Ukraine forced the world to take sides, and only US allies supported Ukraine: NATO, EU, and Five Eyes members, as well than Japan. The latter is the only non-Western country to support NATO in Ukraine. Even NATO member Turkey has had it both ways or at least taken a somewhat neutral stance, although it has supplied drones to Ukraine. More importantly, the war strengthened the Sino-Russian quasi-alliance and both facilitated and accelerated efforts by Moscow and Beijing to create an alternative world order built on the pillars of BRICS, the Organization for Cooperation of Shanghai (OCS), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Chinese “ New Silk Roads ” initiative. BRICS became BRICS+, integrating six new countries, including former US allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Russia has announced that it will join the EAEU as part of the Silk Roads. BRICS began to build an alternative financial and monetary order to abandon the IMF, the World Bank and the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

The United States' economic development of China, which fueled its rise, may have been an even greater geostragic failure than the one that drove Moscow into Beijing's arms by expanding NATO to the borders of Russia. Together, these two miscalculations represent perhaps the greatest foreign policy blunder in all of modern history, surpassing Hitler's " excellent " two-front war and Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign to expand the community of “ liberty, equality, fraternity ”.

Then came the HAMAS terrorist attack on Israel and Israel's recklessly disproportionate response in the Gaza Strip. The United States unambiguously supported Israel's overreaction and its decision, which has still not been implemented, to carry out a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip, providing it with military assistance. However, Israel has enough means to seriously cripple Hamas without massacring civilians, and while it feels the unfortunately all-too-human need to exact revenge, it has already exacted more than enough. The United States should declare that enough is enough. Israel has sufficiently damaged Hamas through rudimentary military means, and Washington should therefore insist that its ally commit to a ceasefire immediately. While turning a blind eye for a period for a brief period to more surgical Israeli responses (special forces operations, assassinations) to finish weakening Hamas, Washington should join Turkey, Russia and the new global player, China , in a peace conference to achieve a two-state solution, perhaps in several stages: the creation of a state, then the partition of Jerusalem. Rather than adopting such a position of global leadership – a position now adopted by China and Russia – the United States is consolidating the West's isolation by siding with Israel and supporting its military operations against Hamas and the civilians of Gaza.

What is at stake today is much more than Israel and Gaza. America and the world are at stake, as the conflict is on the verge of escalating into a regional or even global war. The Muslim world witnesses daily the massive bombing of Gaza by Israel, the torn bodies of infants and children and therefore, logically, the rage and mass protests. Even supporters of the United States among Muslim states, such as Jordan, have condemned Israel's disproportionate response. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have taken similar positions, with Jordan's King Hussein Abdullah II and other Arab states refusing to meet with the US president as planned after his unprecedented show of unequivocal support for approach of Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Israel. The divide between Sunnis and Shiites is being overcome due to Israel's overreaction and support from the West. Saudi and Iranian officials met two weeks ago to discuss the Gaza war. On the ground, this resulted in the visit of representatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to Lebanon last week to meet Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

Beyond Islamic countries, the South is almost unanimously on the side of Gaza and the Palestinians against Israel. Even the usually pro-American ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian States) has harshly condemned Israel's policy and war in Gaza.

In fact, this is a global trend. Thus, in a recent vote by the United Nations Security Council on a Brazilian resolution calling for a ceasefire and talks to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question based on the coexistence of two states , the United States was totally isolated. They were the only ones to vote against the resolution, with two abstaining (including Russia, which has its own similar resolution) and twelve voting in favor.

So Moscow, Beijing and a large number of states on five continents are basically on the same page when it comes to Ukraine and Gaza. Shiites and Sunnis across the Muslim world are united on Gaza, and even NATO member Turkey supports Gaza and condemns Israel. Through BRICS+6, the Silk Roads and even the SCO, Moscow and Beijing unite the Global South with Eurasia. In short, the world is less divided than it was a few years ago. The US Biden administration is truly uniting the world against it. The rest of the world is distancing itself from the West and starting to turn against it.

https://gordonhahn.com/2023/11/20/lauto ... loccident/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

On the Perpetration of Mass-Death Events
NOVEMBER 23, 2023


Trail of Tears, Robert Lindneu (1942). Photo: National Library of Medicine/File photo.

By Roger Stoll – Nov 20, 2023

The holocaust now visited on Palestine by the US/Israel is unique in many ways. Rates of killing and maiming exceed those of previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the perpetrators announce their genocidal intent with unusual frankness, and Western media and official apologists are especially shameless.

But in a world under centuries of West European domination, this particular intentional genocide/mass-death event ought to seem familiar. These mass killings have always been necessary for the global system to function, providing land for settlement, cultivation and resource extraction, labor for hyper-exploitation, and geopolitical power.

In the “long 16th century” (~1450 to ~1650) the capitalist world system emerged, marked by the guiding imperative of endless accumulation of wealth. [1] This system rests on colonialism, neo-colonialism, settler-colonialism (subjugation, expulsion, and extermination of indigenous populations), chattel slavery, hyper-exploitation of labor, and now neoliberal globalization. It ensures that wealth flows steadily from Global South to Global North.

This system of plunder established chiefly by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British and Americans, would come to serve what is now loosely called the Global North, or “the triad,” of North America, Western Europe, and (last-added) Japan. Complex financial and production systems (“commodity chains”) now link labor and resources of the Global South to the triad and its smaller appendages (Australia, New Zealand, Israel). The system requires constant nurturing and prolific violence to suppress the costs of labor, resources, and non-monopoly-protected manufactures from the Global South. It is also imperative that the triad keep the vast majority of the world’s population from becoming affluent enough to compete for essential commodities. [2]

Today the US is the prime enforcer of this system, with at least 800 military bases encircling the globe, under military commands covering every inch of the Earth. [3] This global occupation is a gun, figuratively and literally, held to the head of every government and person on the planet. The overweening power of this occupation expresses itself through most of the world’s governments, including in the long-standing practice of exterminating and expelling Palestinians pursuant to Israel’s settler-colonial effort.

David Michael Smith’s Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire is an elegantly concise account of US responsibility, sole and shared, for mass deaths. [4] He counts roughly 300 million deaths. This includes North American slavery and the Indigenous genocide, naturally. But it also includes US complicity in the two world wars, through its profiteering and support for fascist regimes, East and West, in the period before World War II, and its calculated delay in entering that war, after much of the killing and destruction wrought by the Axis powers had been accomplished, aided by the US. [5] As many others have noted, both 20th century world wars and the ravages of fascism could have been avoided.

After World War II, the US helped bring mass death to countries too numerous to list here. For example, Greece (about 165,000), Korea (about 5 million), Cambodia/Laos/Vietnam (about 8 million), Indonesia (over 1 million), El Salvador/Guatemala/Honduras/Nicaragua (100s of thousands), Iraq (1 to 2 million), Iran (over half a million) Afghanistan (100s of thousands), Libya (100s of thousands), Syria (100s of thousands), Palestine (10s of thousands), Rwanda (1 to 2 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) (over 6 million), Somalia (100s of thousands), Yemen (100s of thousands), Ukraine (about 14,000 before February 24, 2022 and 100s of thousands since).

In the periods of 1945-1980, and 1980-2020, Smith counts 29 and 25 million deaths respectively [6], noting, “By 1980, the holocausts of Pax Americana resembled the global horrors that a reasonable observer might have expected from a fascist victory in the Second World War.” [7]

But the US is also a successor to the half-millenium project of the rich nations to own the world. Indeed, the US empire is the culmination of that ambition. [8] Accordingly, the US bears responsibility not just for its own mass-death events and those of proxies and collaborators, but also of previous empires to which the US is now the beneficiary. Thus to the deaths Smith attributes to the US, we should add pre-World War II mass death perpetrated on other continents by the British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian, German, and Italian empires, whose plunder of the Global South is legendary. An accounting would surely more than double Smith’s tally of 300 million killed in US-authored mass-death events.

Still, the very worst thing about these mass deaths is what they are for. They not only maintain Western imperial military and political prerogatives, but they enforce and entrench a global system in which the vast majority of humanity is confined to poorer countries with governments powerless to resist hyper-exploitation of their labor by the multinational corporations of the triad. The greater part of the value produced by their labor is then captured (not “earned”) by these corporations based in the triad. [9] As Intan Suwandi notes in her Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism, “So extreme is this overaccumulation that the twenty-six wealthiest individuals in the world, most of whom are Americans, now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population, 3.8 billion people.” [10] This is not merely unjust, it condemns a great part of the world’s eight billion people to lives of poverty, insecurity, hunger, disease, and violence.

It is hard to imagine an end to this macabre world regime, unless in nuclear omnicide. World-wide demonstrations, UN resolutions, labor action against weapons shipments, and wars have not stopped the century-long laceration of Palestine, let alone brought down the capitalist world system that produced it. But perhaps the movements, governments, and armed forces now rising in the South and East can, finally, transform the system which has tormented humanity for centuries.



Notes
[1] Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York/London: Academic Press, 1974); The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000); World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004).

[2] Patnaik, Prabhat. “Imperialism in the Era of Globalization.” Monthly Review, July-August 2015, Volume 67, Number 3.

[3] “The World With Commanders’ Areas of Responsibility,” Library of Congress. Vine, David “U.S. Military Bases Abroad, 2020.”

[4] Smith, David Michael. Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023, p. 15.

[5] Smith, Endless Holocausts, pp. 153-167.

[6] Smith, Endless Holocausts, pp. 209, 256.

[7] Smith, Endless Holocausts, pp. 170.

[8] Perhaps it began formally with the Treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Saragossa (1529), in which Spain and Portugal divided the world between them, like an apple.

[9] Suwandi, Intan. Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019.

[10] Suwandi, Value Chains, p. 65

https://orinocotribune.com/on-the-perpe ... th-events/

*********************

On 'Sub-Imperial Power' (by Arnaud Bertrand)

by Arnaud Bertrand
(reproduced with the author's permission)

I just finished reading “Sub-Imperial Power” by Clinton Fernandes, a former Australian intelligence officer and now professor of international and political studies at the University of New South Wales.

Full disclosure, Clinton sent me the book and wrote a nice dedication on it, calling me a “public educator”, which is a nice way of saying I tweet too much

But I wouldn’t write this if I didn’t really like the book, which I actually believe is essential reading if you want to understand Australian geopolitics, or are interested in geopolitics generally.

The book makes one of the best descriptions of the “rules-based international order” that I’ve read, describing in details how Australia isn’t a vassal or a client state of the U.S., like many believe, but rather a “sub-imperial power”. What this means is that Australia, as well as other “sub-imperial powers” like Israel or the UK, are essentially the henchmen of the US’s current “imperial” rule, tasked with preserving it in their respective regions. Which means that as henchmen they aren’t so much victims of an hegemonic US rule but instead feel that they derive such disproportionate benefits from it that they’re willing to go to great length to help the US preserve this rule against the actual victims, those who disproportionately lose out from the order.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how it departs from the theories of realism, championed by the likes of John Mearsheimer or Stephen Walt, who assert that all states - regardless of culture, religion, social hierarchy or political system - will act in the same way because they all prioritize survival and security above all else. They assert that given that maximizing power is the best way to survive in the international system, if they had the opportunity all states would seek to become hegemons like the US is today, or imperial Britain was yesterday.

Fernandes makes a very different case, which I actually think is a far better explanation of how the world actually works, and of the historical behavior of various states. His point is that there’s something unique about US geopolitics, and that of Western colonial states before it, in that they have these extremely aggressive characteristics - the impulse to subjugate and pillage others - that actually often harm their security rather than safeguard it. And he explains this with the undue power the moneyed class has over the state in those systems of government. Which is hard to deny if one looks at things historically: for instance it is the East India Company that initiated the colonization and pillage of India, not the British state that only came afterwards to essentially pacify growing rebellion in India so as to perpetuate the ongoing pillage. Or take a more recent example: the war in Iraq. It makes very little sense from an American security or survival perspective but it makes eminently good sense from a US oil company or economic hegemony perspective. Or again the current conflict in Gaza, which is extremely negative for American security as it generates busloads of hatred throughout the Muslim world against America and diverts American attention from more consequential geopolitical challenges. But it makes sense if you look at it from the standpoint of perpetrating a hegemonic system.

In other words, Fernandes’ point is that the key characteristic of the “rules-based international order” relates to the actual structure of the American (or British, French, Australian, etc) social and economic system, which seeks to enforce an order where the whole world is open to the penetration and control of their respective national moneyed classes. Which is why the order is about hegemony, and not about security, and why the former so often comes at the expense of the latter.

It’s interestingly something that John Mearsheimer often laments about if you listen to him: “why would the U.S. act in such foolish ways that go against what my realist theories recommend?”. He was adamantly opposed to the war in Iraq, warned for many years about the risk of a clash with Russia in Ukraine if we expanded NATO, and keeps speaking out against the U.S.’s unequivocal support of Israel. And by doing so Mearsheimer actually admits that realism doesn’t quite explain the behavior of states and that his theories are therefore not quite right. Fernandes here offers an explanation that better predicts the actual behavior of the US and its “sub-imperial powers”: you cannot understand states’ behavior if you limit yourself to a state-centric view, you also need to look at the unique characteristics of their political, social and economic system.

A last interesting point is that, given the fact he argues that states’ political and economic systems play a key role in defining their geopolitics, Fernandes’s book implies a prediction that as China’s power rises, it will behave in vastly different ways than the U.S. and its imperial henchmen. Given the Chinese system, it will undoubtedly seek to maximize its power but this time it will actually be for its own security and survival, and not to serve the interests of its moneyed class, and as such will behave in much less aggressive ways than the US. Again, interestingly Mearsheimer kind of admits this too because he repeatedly says “when I am in China, I’m amongst my people”: as in they follow his realist theories much more faithfully than the US. We can already see the contours of this: it’s absolutely obvious that the Chinese state isn’t at the mercy of its moneyed class, quite the contrary, China is not exactly a country where billionaires have an easy life Same thing with respect to hegemony: China just doesn’t do military alliances (it doesn’t have any), foreign interference or coups d’états. In fact they haven’t as much as fired a single bullet abroad in over 4 decades. On the contrary, it seeks to create an order with indivisible security and mutual respect embedded in the system, where it’d ideally be the most powerful state - sure - but not for the purpose of pillaging or subjugating others but because this guarantees its security and stability. Which is exactly how it behaved for 1,800 years when it was the most powerful state on the planet before the industrial revolution: it never went around trying to colonize and pillage the world as it believed this would eventually come at the expense of its own security, much like it comes at the expense of American security and interests today. Instead it sought relationships of trade and mutual respect that maximize security and stability over the long term.

Anyhow you should really read the book, it’s all too rare that such a book gets written by Western academics. You typically get the usual utter bullshit about the inherent superiority of Western values and various ill founded theories as to why we should rule the world. This gives you a peak outside the matrix.


end of text by Arnaud Bertrand
---

b here.

You may dismiss the "sub-imperial power" discussed above as a "lame phrase so [the Aussie] wouldn't have to say vassal". There is some truth to that.

But to distinguish monetary hegemony from security driven imperialism as the root cause of the global mess is, to me, a new insight. Said differently: The survival and security aspect is only relevant as far as it concerns the moneyed class. Mearsheimer's realist view somewhat misses that aspect.

Posted by b on November 24, 2023 at 8:35 UTC | Permalink

http://www.thebellforum.net/forums/post ... 33#preview

Italics added, well said,b.

[blindpig]

A New Mood in the World Will Put an End to the Global Monroe Doctrine: The Forty-Seventh Newsletter (2023)

NOVEMBER 23, 2023


Tagreed Darghouth (Lebanon), from the series The Tree Within, a Palestinian Olive Tree, 2018.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Every day since 7 October has felt like an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, with hundreds of thousands gathering in Istanbul, a million in Jakarta, and then yet another million across Africa and Latin America to demand an end to the brutal attack being carried out by Israel (with the collusion of the United States). It is impossible to keep up with the scale and frequency of the protests, which are in turn pushing political parties and governments to clarify their stances on Israel’s attack on Palestine. These mass demonstrations have generated three kinds of outcomes:

They have drawn a new generation not only into pro-Palestine activity, but into anti-war – if not anti-imperialist – consciousness.
They have drawn in a new section of activists, particularly trade unionists, who have been inspired to stop the shipment of goods to and from Israel (including in places such as Europe and India, where the governments have supported Israel’s attacks).
They have generated a political process to challenge the hypocrisy of the Western-led ‘rules-based international order’ to demand that the International Criminal Court indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli government officials.
No war in recent years – not even the ‘shock and awe’ campaign used by the United States against Iraq in 2003 – has been as ruthless in its use of force. Most horrifying is the reality that civilians, penned in by the Israeli occupation, have no escape from the heavy bombardment. Nearly half (at least 5,800) of the more than 14,000 civilians that have been murdered are children. No amount of Israeli propaganda has been able to convince billions of people around the world that this violence is a righteous rejoinder for the 7 October attack. Visuals from Gaza show the disproportionate and asymmetrical nature of Israel’s violence over the past seventy-five years.


Vincent De Pio (Philippines), Back to the Future, 2012.

A new mood has taken root amongst billions of people in the Global South and been mirrored by millions in the Global North who no longer take the attitudes of US leaders and their Western allies at face value. A new study by the European Council of Foreign Relations shows that ‘much of the rest of the world wants the war in Ukraine to stop as soon as possible, even if it means Kyiv losing territory. And very few people – even in Europe – would take Washington’s side if a war erupted between the US and China over Taiwan’. The council suggests that this is due to the ‘loss of faith in the West to order the world’. More precisely, most of the world is no longer willing to be bullied by the West (as South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor put it). Over the last 200 years, the US government’s Monroe Doctrine has been instrumental in justifying this type of bullying. To better understand the significance of this key policy in upholding US dominance over the world order, the rest of this newsletter features briefing no. 11 from No Cold War, It Is Time to Bury the Monroe Doctrine.



In 1823, James Monroe, then president of the United States, told the US Congress that his government would stand against European interference in the Americas. What Monroe meant was that Washington would, from then on, treat Latin America and the Caribbean as its ‘backyard’, grounded by a policy known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Over the past 200 years, the US has operated in the Americas along this grain, exemplified by the more than 100 military interventions against countries in the region. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US and its Global North allies have attempted to expand this policy into a Global Monroe Doctrine, most destructively in Western Asia.


Stivenson Magloire (Haiti), Divided Spirit, 1989.

The Violence of the Monroe Doctrine
Two decades before Monroe’s proclamation, the world’s first anti-colonial revolution took place in Haiti. The 1804 Haitian Revolution posed a serious threat to the plantation economies of the Americas, which relied upon enslaved labour from Africa, and so the US led a process to suffocate it and prevent it from spreading. Through US military interventions across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Monroe Doctrine prevented the rise of national self-determination and defended plantation slavery and the power of the oligarchies.

Nonetheless, the spirit and promise of the Haitian Revolution could not be extinguished, and in 1959 it was reignited by the Cuban Revolution, which in turn inspired revolutionary struggles across the world and, most importantly, in the so-called backyard of the United States. Once again, the US initiated a cycle of violence to destroy Cuba’s revolutionary example, prevent it from inspiring others, and overthrow any government in the region that tried to exercise its sovereignty.

Together, US and Latin American oligarchies launched several campaigns, such as Operation Condor, to violently suppress the left through assassinations, incarcerations, torture, and regime change. These efforts culminated in a series of coups against left-wing forces in the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973), Argentina (1976), and El Salvador (1980). The military governments that were subsequently installed quashed the sovereignty agenda and imposed a neoliberal project in its place. Latin America and the Caribbean became fertile ground for economic policies that benefitted US-led transnational monopolies. Washington co-opted large sections of the region’s bourgeoisie, selling them the illusion that national development would come alongside the growth of US power.


Oswaldo Vigas (Venezuela), Duende Rojo (‘Red Elf’), 1979.

Progressive Waves
Despite this repression, waves of popular movements continued to shape the region’s political culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, these movements toppled the military dictatorships put in place by Operation Condor and then inaugurated a cycle of progressive governments inspired by the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and propelled forward by the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. The US response to this progressive upsurge was yet again driven by the Monroe Doctrine as it sought to secure the interests of private property above the needs of the masses. This counterrevolution has employed three main instruments:

Coups. Since 2000, the US has attempted to conduct ‘traditional’ military coups d’état on at least twenty-seven occasions, with some of these attempts succeeding, such as in Honduras (2009), while many others were defeated, as in Venezuela (2002).
Hybrid Wars. In addition to the military coup, the US has also developed a series of tactics to overwhelm countries that are attempting to build sovereignty, such as information warfare, lawfare, diplomatic warfare, and electoral interference. This hybrid war strategy includes manufacturing impeachment scandals (for example, against Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo in 2012) and ‘anti-corruption’ measures (such as against Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner in 2021). In Brazil, the US worked with the Brazilian right wing to manipulate an anti-corruption platform to impeach then President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and imprison former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018, leading to the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.
Economic Sanctions. The use of illegal, unilateral coercive measures – including economic sanctions and blockades – are a key instrument of the Monroe Doctrine. The US has employed such instruments for decades (since 1960 in the case of Cuba) and expanded their use in the twenty-first century against countries such as Venezuela. The Latin American Strategic Geopolitics Centre (CELAG) showed that US sanctions against Venezuela led to the loss of more than three million jobs from 2013 to 2017 while the Centre for Economic and Policy Research found that sanctions have reduced the public’s caloric intake and increased disease and mortality, killing 40,000 people in a single year while endangering the lives of 300,000 others.


Maya Weishof (Brazil), Between Talks and Myths, 2022.



End the Monroe Doctrine
US attempts to undermine progressive politics in Latin America, underpinned by the Monroe Doctrine, have not been entirely successful. The return of left-wing governments to power in Bolivia, Brazil, and Honduras after US-backed right-wing regimes illustrates this failure. Another sign is the resilience of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions. To date, while efforts to expand the Monroe Doctrine around the world have caused immense destruction, they have failed to install stable client regimes, as we saw with the defeat of US projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nonetheless, Washington remains undeterred and has shifted its focus to the Asia-Pacific to confront China.

Two hundred years ago, the forces of Simón Bolívar trounced the Spanish Empire in the 1821 Battle of Carabobo and opened a period of independence for Latin America. Two years later, in 1823, the US government announced its Monroe Doctrine. The dialectic between Carabobo and Monroe continues to shape our world, the memory of Bolívar instilled in the hope of and struggle for a more just society.


Sheena Rose (Barbados), Agony, 2022.

Today, the ugliness of the war on Gaza suffocates our consciousness. Em Berry, a poet from Aotearoa, New Zealand, wrote a beautiful poem on the name Gaza and the atrocities being inflicted upon its people by apartheid Israel:

This morning I learned
The English word gauze
(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word غزة or Ghazza
because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries

I wondered then

how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them

and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -doctrine/

[blindpig]

200 Years of the Monroe Doctrine Is 200 Too Many
Posted on November 27, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Some useful background on the Monroe Doctrine. Even early on, US ambitions exceeded its reach, and its view became more expansionist over time.

By John Raby, a retired history teacher and conscientious objector who is currently co-chair of Peace Action Maine. From 2014 to 2021, when he lived in New Hampshire, he was active with New Hampshire Peace Action and wrote the clean energy policy for New London, New Hampshire. He centers his activism around war and peace, environmental, and social justice issues. Originally published at Common Dreams

If the United States is serious about liberty and justice for all, respect for international law, and a rules based order that treats everyone fairly and even-handedly, it’s time to ditch the doctrine and its corollaries.


When those of us of a certain age were in school, we learned that the Monroe Doctrine committed the United States to protect the independence of Latin American nations, which had just freed themselves from Spanish and Portuguese rule. While it granted European nations the right to keep whatever colonies they still had in the Western Hemisphere, it declared that any attempt on Europe’s part to expand those colonies would be considered an unfriendly act against the United States. It looked like a brave and noble act, and a step forward for the U.S. on the world stage.

As the doctrine approaches its 200th anniversary December 2, we know it ain’t necessarily so.

At first, the U.S. couldn’t enforce it because its navy was too small to keep European powers out. However, the British navy was quite willing to do the job now that Latin markets were open to British trade. In that vein, British Foreign Secretary Lord George Canning suggested the U.S. and Britain issue a joint statement in defense of Latin independence. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams rejected the idea, arguing that it would make the U.S. “a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”

Instead, Adams drafted his own statement, which became the Monroe Doctrine, since president James Monroe approved the draft and could take credit for it. And so, the U.S. got the glory while the British did the work, which they were content to do for the sake of their own economic advantage.

There was more tricky business involved. The U.S. wouldn’t recognize Haitian independence from France until 1862, since Haiti rose from a brutal slave revolt. Nor did it have any quarrel with France’s demand that Haiti repay it for the loss of its slaves, an insistence which plunged Haiti deeply into debt and made it what it still is—the poorest, least stable nation in the Western Hemisphere. It was a nasty thing to do, since the Haitian revolution made the Louisiana Purchase possible.

Ever since then, there has been more and more tricky business. When Texas detached itself from Mexico in 1836, the U.S. immediately recognized it, along with its territorial claims out to the Rio Grande, which then included parts of New Mexico and Colorado. Mexico disputed those claims. Matters got worse when Texas became a U.S. state in 1845, the evident objective all along, and there was still the question of disputed territory. When President James K. Polk sent troops to Corpus Christi, which was just inside the disputed area, the Mexicans saw it as an invasion. War with Mexico followed, and in 1848, Mexico surrendered half its territory in return for a $15,000,000 payment.

During the mid-1850s, a Tennessee soldier of fortune named William Walker set off a series of coups in Central America, whereby he attempted to unite it into one slaveholding country and offer it to the U.S., either for annexation or as a client state. In 1853 and 1854, he had already tried to do something similar in northwestern Mexico. Though President Franklin Pierce recognized his short-lived regime in Nicaragua, the United States had too many problems at home to follow through with the idea. By 1860, both the offer and the daring Mr. Walker’s own life were finished.

Nonetheless, the U.S. did covet Cuba, and considered buying the island from Spain in the 1850s and 1870s. Spain wasn’t interested, but by the 1890s, the Cuban revolution was well enough along for the United States to see an opportunity and take it. When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, the U.S. blamed Spain and the Spanish-American War followed. And so we helped Cuba oust Spain, but with a catch. In 1902, the U.S. insisted on fastening the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution, which gave the U.S. the right to supervise Cuban foreign policy. In effect, the island was a U.S. protectorate until Fidel Castro took over in 1959.

Now let’s backtrack a bit. In 1895, there was a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana. By that point, U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney felt confident enough to issue a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the U.S. had the right to mediate all such disputes, which the U.S. did in this instance, without objection from either side.

In 1901, Britain and America reached a further understanding in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Britain recognized America’s predominance in the Western Hemisphere, while America did the same for Britain in the East. And so the English-speaking nations went halfsies on the entire planet.

By the early 1900s, the United States was getting used to rearranging Latin America to its liking. When Colombia insisted on more money from the United States than the U.S. was willing to pay to dig the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt purchased a Panamanian revolt which let him have his way. He openly boasted, “I took Panama!” He was right, since he created the country. In 1989, when Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega became inconvenient to U.S. interests there, the U.S. removed him. The operation featured the bombardment of Panama City.

In 1905, Roosevelt added a corollary of his own to the Monroe Doctrine, announcing that whenever the United States thought a Latin American nation was unable to protect foreign lives or property, or pay debts to foreign lenders, the U.S. had the right to intervene and put its affairs in order. During the first half of the 1900s, military interventions and occupations followed in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Marine General Smedley Butler, who took part in several such actions, confessed that he had become a bag man for U.S. corporations, and concluded that “war is a racket.”

The interventions continued during the Cold War. In 1954, after Guatemala’s democratically elected government nationalized United Fruit Company’s idle holdings there, intending to turn them over to small farmers, the CIA moved in and installed a dictatorship, in part because Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA boss Allen Dulles were major stockholders in United Fruit and were annoyed. Then there was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, followed by economic sanctions which continue to this day. In 1964, when the Dominican Republic’s democratically elected government decided to pursue a friendlier policy toward Cuba than the Johnson administration liked, the Marines moved in and set up a dictatorship there. The next year, the U.S. backed a military coup in Brazil.

The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw no essential change, with ethnic massacres, interventions, overthrows, and assassinations in Guatemala, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, and the previously mentioned one in Panama. Quite often, Latin troops and officers trained in the U.S. took part. Nor did our government bat an eye when a Salvadoran death squad murdered archbishop Oscar Romero, who had protested against what the death squads were doing across that suffering country. In 1999, as part of the U.S. drug war, President Bill Clinton initiated Plan Colombia, which included aerial bombardment in that country.

The most glaring example was against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. By 1973, Allende had nationalized International Telephone and Telegraph’s holdings in Chile. ITT head Harold Geneen was furious about what he thought was inadequate compensation. He complained to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who had been working to destabilize the Allende government, and who were ready to arrange Allende’s overthrow and murder. A 17-year dictatorship under the more agreeable Augusto Pinochet followed, and Geneen cleaned up when he got back his business in Chile.

Economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have continued in this century. And in 2009, the U.S. shrugged its shoulders when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Zelaya government in Honduras. The unlucky President Manuel Zelaya had supported Indigenous objections to U.S. investments there that were doing environmental damage. In that same country, the fate of Berta Cáceres was worse. She had successfully blocked the building of a dam that would have flooded her Indigenous homeland and fouled its waters. Her murder in 2011 was the price she paid for that success. No condolences or protests came from our government.

Readers of this column quite likely know about all these things and more. After all, there is extensive literature and broadcast reporting on the subject. The essential point of this modest offering is a simple one. If the United States is serious about liberty and justice for all, respect for international law, and a rules based order that treats everyone fairly and even-handedly, it’s time to ditch the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries. Adios, Olney. Adios, Roosevelt. Adios, Adams. Adios, Monroe.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11 ... -many.html

[blindpig]

BIOCHEMICAL WEAPON FOR RACE WAR — URANIUM WARHEAD POISONING IS THE SPECIALTY OF US AGAINST RUSSIANS, ISRAEL AGAINST PALESTINIANS



by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Long before the British intelligence agency MI6 invented the story that Russian military agents had carried the nerve agent weapon Novichok into England, fired it at two Russians, and left it in a dustbin for a local scavenger to find, take home and kill his girlfriend, there was depleted uranium poisoning.

This is a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

In the past thirty years it has been used by the US, British, and Israeli armies in their wars against Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (Gaza), Serbia, and recently against the Russians on the Ukrainian battlefield. As a US invention, however, depleted uranium dispersal as a gas to contaminate terrain for enemy soldiers has been acknowledged in secret since 1943.

In the official military manuals, depleted uranium rounds are used because their metal concentration and intense heat burn their way through armour plate. In practice, they vaporise high concentrations of radioactive particles to cover large swathes of territory, civilian and military.

The US Department of Homeland Security defines a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) as “a nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological, or other device that is intended to harm a large number of people.” DU harms a relatively small number of soldiers on a battlefield operating in tanks, other armoured vehicles, self-propelled artillery and reinforced bunkers. DU strikes a much larger number of people through the release of radiation downwind of the battlefield by penetrating their bodies, attacking their genetic codes, and triggering cancers, birth defects, miscarriages of the unborn, and premature death of adults.

According to Homeland Security, it “works every day to prevent terrorists and other threat actors from using these weapons to harm Americans.” But when the US supplies its DU weapons to the Israeli and Ukrainian armies, it intends to cause this mass destruction by not caring for the harm they do — in fact concealing this harm, and publicly pretending DU ordnance is not what it is.

DU is a WMD by stealth. The US knows this because US and British soldiers who participated in the first battlefield use of DU shells and bombs, the war against Iraq in 1991, have been the long-term victims of their own weapons.

When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) fire their DU shells and bombs into the buildings of Gaza, they are not aiming at Hamas tanks, armoured personnel carriers, or howitzer units – the Palestinian forces have none of those. Instead, the Israelis are aiming at the mass destruction of the Palestinian people, including those still unborn. The supply chain for this WMD includes the Cypriot, Greek, German and British governments.

In Gaza, and in the Ukraine, they are all witting participants in targeting a race of people for extermination, now and for the future.

According to US Government publications, the use of depleted uranium (DU) as a super-burning, heavy-metal weapon began in the US in the 1970s.

“Naturally occurring uranium ore is abundant in nature and contains several forms of uranium called isotopes. All uranium isotopes are radioactive; however, only one of these isotopes, Uranium-235 (U-235), provides the fuel used to produce both nuclear power and the powerful explosions used in nuclear weapons… In nature, U-235 only makes up a very small part of the uranium ore. Given its importance for nuclear power and nuclear weapons technology, U-235 is often removed from the natural uranium ore and concentrated through a process called uranium enrichment. Depleted uranium hexafluoride, also known as DU, is the material left behind after enrichment. Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive. DU mainly emits alpha particle radiation.”

<snip>

The arsenal explosion at Camp Doha, Kuwait, on July 11, 1991, involved the detonation of 155-mm artillery shells with DU warheads. A defective heater in an ammunition carrier started a fire, then an explosion “scattering artillery submunitions (bomblets) over nearby combat-loaded vehicles and ammunition stocks. This set off an hours-long series of explosions and fires that devastated the vehicles and equipment in the North Compound and scattered unexploded ordnance (UXOs) and debris over much of the remainder of the camp.The fires produced billowing black and white clouds of smoke that rose hundreds of feet into the air and drifted to the east-southeast, across portions of both the North and South Compounds, in the direction of Kuwait City.”



US soldiers running away from the depleted-uranium explosions at Camp Doha, Kuwait, July 11, 1991. “From viewing contemporary logs and other data, it is clear that the 22nd Support Command (SUPCOM), which supported theater combat units, was aware of the potential for DU contamination. Entries from the SUPCOM log provide evidence of this awareness”. The Washington Post report of the blast did not mention the radiation release and the long-term hazard for the US and British soldiers exposed, or the Arabs living downwind of the blast in Kuwait.

The Pentagon acknowledges the long-term radiation hazards of DU exposure. “In 1998, the program was expanded to include Gulf War veterans who may have been exposed to DU through close contact with DU munitions, inhalation of smoke containing DU particulate during a fire at the Doha depot, or while entering or salvaging vehicles that were hit with DU projectiles. The published results of these medical evaluations indicate that the presence of embedded DU fragments is the only scenario predictive of a high urine uranium value, and those with embedded DU fragments continue to have elevated urine uranium levels ten years after the incident.”

A decade of biochemical poisoning was not revealed in the Washington Post report of the detonation of the Camp Doha arsenal. Equally unrevealing – make that covering up — is the European Commission report on DU, dated 2010, which concluded that “environmental and human health risks due to a potential widespread distribution of DU are not expected. Exposure to DU is very limited compared to background exposures. In combat zones, vehicles hit by DU should be made inaccessible to the general public and be properly disposed of. Used DU ammunition should also be collected and disposed of.” Neither the European Commission nor NATO has acknowledged the use of DU weapons against Serbian forces in Serbia and Kosovo during the NATO war of 1999.


https://johnhelmer.net/wp-content/webpc ... &nocache=1

<snip>

The Khmelnitsky Ukraine Uranium explosion revisited.
The calculated source term is approximately 50 tons.
Public health implications for Poland and Western Ukraine.
By Christopher Busby, PhD
Abstract

The explosion which occurred at Khmelnitsky, Ukraine on May 13th involved significant quantities of Uranium contamination of the air. This was unequivocally shown by the arrival of measured excess amounts of Uranium particles in High Volume Air Samplers deployed by the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermaston, near London, in May and June 2023. This is something that is therefore known. What is not known, is the source term, how much Uranium was dispersed in the explosion, and secondly where did go before arriving in England? Also, the question of its health effects on populations living in the plume area is one that is addressed here. Using radiation measurement increase of 32nSv/h recorded on gamma detectors at the Poland Ukraine border it is possible to back calculate the source term by using tables published by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the gamma emission at 63keV and 92keV of the Uranium-238 daughter Thorium 234 and 1000keV of the daughter Protoactinium 234m. This gives the activity of U-238 in the cloud as it passed the detector. The source term is obtainable from the Gaussian Plume equations and air models of the UK National Radiological Protection Board. The result gives a source term of around 50 metric tons of Uranium-238. The activity levels in the plume per unit area are similar to those that caused genetic effects in Iraq following the Gulf War, and similar health consequences are therefore predictable. These were measured in Iraq by many researchers and included infant mortality, birth defects and cancer risk increase. Other possible scenarios are discussed.

Background

The explosion at the 649th Aviation Depot, Grushevitsa, Khmelnitsky, occurred at 4.54am local time on Tuesday May 23rd if we employ the seismometer spike of 3.4 on the Richter Earthquake scale detected to the North West of the site (Fig 1). It led to a huge black mushroom cloud (Fig 2) and the crater was reported as being 800m across (Fig 3) [1]. The explosion was widely believed to involve the burning of Depleted Uranium weapons donated by the UK and USA which were stored at the site. The existence of a radiological event was supported by the sudden increase in gamma radiation levels shown by detectors situated on the border between Poland and western Ukraine in the path of the plume. However, the Uranium suggestion was attacked on the web by so-called fact-checkers, fake news websites and other commentators. A Freedom of Information request by this author to the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston, Berkshire, some 50 miles West of London, revealed a clear and statistically significant increase in Uranium in the High-Volume Air Samplers (HVAS) deployed around the AWE site and further afield in the 4 weeks following the explosion. Thus, it is clear that the explosion was indeed one that produced a cloud of Uranium dust, some of which eventually came to the UK. This raises a number of questions which are addressed here.

What was the track of the plume from the explosion?
What was the concentration (or activity) of the Uranium in the plume?
What was the Source Term, that is, how much Uranium exploded and burned?
What likely weapons or radioactive materials were stored at Khmelnitsky?
What are the likely health effects in West Ukraine and Poland in those exposed?

(Much more at link, jfc.)

https://johnhelmer.net/biochemical-weap ... more-88908

[blindpig]

The Pentagon Fails Its Audit Again—and Again and Again and Again and Again and Again
Posted on December 2, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. The idea of a favorite scandal no doubt sounds like an oxymoron. But you may have books or movies you went back too often, or enjoy ritual performances holiday music or traditional dances. One of their appeals is that they are immutable and provide an anchor of sorts. The long-standing Pentagon audit failure is like that.

The Pentagon already has a huge black budget but that’s apparently not good enough to feed its maw of unending need (correct me if I have this wrong, but isn’t that a lot like always hungry Rahu?) And the inability to keep proper books is just a remarkable way to syphon off even more funds. It also proves, BTW, that MMT is indeed an accurate description of how the funding of a currency issuer like the US works. As one wag said, “We never worried about where the money for the next bombing run in Iraq was coming from.”

Consider this as support for the idea that poor records, whether by accident or design, covers for overspending. From The Cradle:


Furthermore, in 2019 alone, the Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments – a figure larger than the entire US economy.The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste – from vast overcharges for spare parts, and weapons that don’t work, to forever wars with far reaching human and economic consequences.

These shadowy practices have, however, boosted the profits of US weapons makers like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, with major gains made despite the challenges posed by inflation and supply chain issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

By Lindsay Koshgarian, who directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Originally published by OtherWords.org.

The Pentagon just failed its audit — again. For the sixth time in a row, the agency that accounts for half the money Congress approves each year can’t figure out what it did with all that money.

For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed one.

Since then, the Pentagon has done an audit every year and given itself a participation prize each time. Yet despite this year’s triumphant press release — titled “DOD Makes Incremental Progress Towards Clean Audit” — it has failed every time.

In its most recent audit, the Pentagon was able to account for just half of its $3.8 trillion in assets (including equipment, facilities, etc). That means $1.9 trillion is unaccounted for — more than the entire budget Congress agreed to for the current fiscal year.

No other federal agency could get away with this. There would be congressional hearings. There would be demands to remove agency leaders, or to defund those agencies. Every other major federal agency has passed an audit, proving that it knows where taxpayer dollars it is entrusted with are going.

Yet Congress is poised to approve another $840 billion for the Pentagon despite its failures.

In fact, by my count Congress has approved $3.9 trillion in Pentagon spending since the first failed audit in 2018. Tens of billions have gone through the Pentagon to fund wars in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now Israel. Accountability for those “assets” — including weapons and equipment — is also in question.

At this point, lawmakers surely know those funds may never be accounted for. And year after year, half of the Pentagon budget goes to corporate weapons contractors and other corporations who profiteer from this lack of accountability.

There is an entity whose job it is to prevent this sort of abuse: Congress. With each failure at the Pentagon, Congress is failing, too. Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached, they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.

Meanwhile, all those other agencies that have passed their audits could put those funds to much better use serving the public. Too many Americans are struggling to afford necessities like housing, heat, health care, and child care, and meanwhile our country is grappling with homelessness, the opioid epidemic, and increasingly common catastrophic weather events.

With another government shutdown debate looming in early 2024, you’ll hear lawmakers say we need to cut those already inadequate investments in working families. But if they’re worried about spending, they should start with the agency that has somehow lost track of nearly $2 trillion worth of publicly funded resources.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/12 ... again.html

*******

Making It to the Manger: Why Are Women in Nicaragua More Likely To Survive Childbirth Than Women in the US?
DECEMBER 1, 2023


Newborn baby in an incubator. Photo: Jennifer Aniston.

By Becca Renk – Nov 30, 2023

Becca Renk is originally from the U.S. but has lived and worked in Nicaragua since 2001 with the Jubilee House Community and its project the Center for Development in Central America.

It wasn’t quite a manger, but after I was born, my parents wrapped me in swaddling clothes and laid me in a dresser drawer lined with a blanket. They had a crib prepared for me at home, but home was a log cabin in the woods more than an hour away on a bumpy road. So, when my mom and I were released from the hospital, they brought me to an upstairs room they had rented from the widow Mrs. Long in Sandpoint, Idaho. They had gone into town to wait there until it was time to go to the hospital, and we would also spend the next couple of days there until my mom and I were well enough to make the journey.

In 1977 with CB radios as their only form of communication in the mountains, it was dangerous for my mom to make the trip to the hospital while in labor, and even more dangerous to give birth out in the wilds of North Idaho.

Today, it remains true that pregnancy and childbirth can be dangerous – but 80 percent of maternal deaths are entirely preventable. Nicaragua, where I now live, has proven this over the past 15 years: despite being one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it has managed to reduce maternal mortality by 70 percent and infant mortality rates by 56 percent.

Through the country’s universal free healthcare system, all prenatal, childbirth and post-natal care in Nicaragua is offered countrywide free of charge – premature births, c-sections, neonatal ICU stays and, incredibly, even fetal surgeries are all free. Home births, previously common especially in rural areas, are now nearly unheard-of – 97% of all births are in hospitals. Lay midwives who once attended home births have now been incorporated into the healthcare system to provide prenatal and in-hospital birth support.

In Nicaragua, 25 hospitals have been built new and 46 remodeled since 2007 to make giving birth in hospital a possibility even for rural families. Respect for Nicaragua’s diverse cultures has been incorporated into new hospital birthing facilities so that Indigenous women can safely give birth squatting or standing up, the way that women in their communities have traditionally given birth.

For parents who still live far from hospitals, a network of 181 maternity waiting homes around the country provide space for nearly 70,000 women per year to stay near a hospital for the last two weeks of their pregnancy. Food, housing and vocational training are provided free of charge; women rest and are checked by medical staff regularly and, when they go into labor, they give birth safely in the hospital next door.

More than four decades after my mother went to stay in town with Mrs. Long in her self-made maternity waiting home, the situation for women in rural Idaho hasn’t improved…in fact, it has gotten worse.


There has been only one maternity-related death in Ciudad Sandino over the past three years. (Photo: Becca Renk)

Today, Nicaraguans are less likely to die during pregnancy than Idahoans, although both places have significant rural populations: Nicaragua had 31.4 deaths compared to Idaho’s maternal mortality rate of 40.1 deaths per 100,000 births in 2021, up from 13.6 in 2019. What is behind this sudden leap in maternal mortality?

In March of this year, the hospital where I was born – Bonner General Hospital – announced it would stop attending births. The hospital said that it simply can’t find doctors willing to staff an obstetrics unit in Idaho – doctors are worried that providing routine care for a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy could violate Idaho’s strict abortion laws, causing them to lose their license or even go to prison.

With this closure, the nearest hospital with perinatal care is now at least an hour away. But many families in rural North Idaho are low-income, lacking health insurance and with limited access to reliable transport. For these families, the journey to the hospital might be as long as three hours in good weather, and longer in a North Idaho winter. To put it simply, there are women and babies who will die.

Unfortunately, while Idaho’s case is extreme, it is not alone: according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, maternal mortality rates increased by 40% in 2021 across the U.S.

How is it that a third world country like Nicaragua has better maternity care than the richest country in the world? The answer is that the Nicaraguan government has the political will to provide that care. Over the past 15 years eradicating maternal and infant mortality has been a top priority that is carefully followed up on at all levels.

Recently the director of the local hospital where I live in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua told me a story about a young pregnant woman with preeclampsia from our city of 200,000 people. This woman went to the local free health clinic with a headache and when the staff took her blood pressure it was very high. Over the next few hours, several dozen healthcare workers from local lay workers right up to the Minister of Health herself followed up to save the life of this young mother and her baby, with the hospital director personally going to the patient’s home to transport her to the maternity hospital in Managua for specialized care.

For Nicaragua’s healthcare system, a pregnant woman or her baby dying was an unacceptable outcome, and healthcare workers took every possible measure to prevent that. The result of this is that there has been only one pregnancy-related death in Ciudad Sandino over the past three years – nationwide, only 37 women died last year in a country of just over 7 million people. Each death was investigated and the details are available to the public.

Meanwhile, this past July, Idaho with its 1.9 million people became the only state in the nation with no legal requirement or specialized committee to review maternal deaths related to pregnancy.

As winter falls on Idaho with its icy roads, heavy snowfalls and treacherously long journeys to the hospital, I pray that there is a legion of Mrs. Longs who can rent rooms near the hospital to expecting families. Or better yet, that Idahoans begin to follow Nicaragua’s example of maternity waiting homes. Because if nothing changes, too many mothers in Idaho won’t live to lay their new babies in a manger.

https://orinocotribune.com/making-it-to ... in-the-us/

USA! USA!

[blindpig]

Boeing CEO David Calhoun Made $22.5 Million in 2023 While Boeing’s Weapons Kill Civilians in Senseless U.S. Wars
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - December 4, 2023 0


Boeing CEO David Calhoun [Source: foxbusiness.com]

Calhoun Also Received $15 Million in Extra Stock Shares! He and Other Top Defense Contractor Executives Are Being Put on Trial by Citizen-Peace Group Holding Them Accountable for Their Crimes

Life is great for Boeing CEO David Calhoun,[1] who was paid a salary of $22.5 million in 2023 and received a bonus of $15 million in extra Boeing stock shares.

But Calhoun is now a defendant in a tribunal run by Brad Wolf a former prosecutor from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and other peace activists who have charged him and the CEOs of top defense contractors with war crimes for producing weapons that have been used to kill civilians in illegal wars undertaken in violation of the Geneva Convention and UN Charter.


[Source: merchantsofdeath.org]
The model for the tribunal is the Nuremberg trials after World War II which tried and convicted the executives of German war industries, notably I.G. Farben, Krupp and Flick, for war crimes.


Friedrich Flick receives his sentence during the Nuremberg trial. [Source: wikipedia.org]

CovertAction Magazine previously reported on the opening session of the tribunal on November 12, which focused on corporate arms sales to Israel and Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

The second session of the tribunal was held on November 19 and focused on U.S. war crimes in Syria and corporate complicity in them.

Wolf narrated a short documentary explaining that the U.S. intervened in Syria starting in 2011 by supporting opposition groups that aimed to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and justified further military operations by claiming to be fighting against the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIS), which was trying to take over the country.

The CIA has spent billions of dollars in Syria in its largest operations since Afghanistan in the 1980s.


CIA proxies in Operation Timber Sycamore. [Source: adamfitzgerald911.wordpress.com]

According to Wolf, the real reason for the U.S. intervention was not to fight ISIS, but rather to secure control over Syria’s northern oil fields. The U.S. military functions as a “privatized corporate police force” in Syria, enabling the theft of the country’s oil.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that the United States “was in Syria illegally” as they had not been invited into the country by the current government. The cover story was Iran, but the U.S. military was really in Syria to “protect the oil flow to Israel, with Syria’s oil going to Israel at discounted prices and Israel attacking Syria too from time to time.”

Wilkerson added that none of this was reported anywhere in the U.S. media: “It may have been reported in Syria or Turkey but not in our media. The American public is not told even that we have troops in Syria.”

According to Wolf, U.S. leaders have claimed as a legal pretext for intervention Congress’s authorization for the use of military force against terrorist forces that allegedly attacked the U.S. on 9/11, though Syria actually had nothing to do with 9/11 and ISIS is “not part of al-Qaeda.”


Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson [Source: sott.net]


Brad Wolf [Source: merchantsofdeath.org]

The injustice of the illegal U.S. involvement in Syria has been compounded by egregious war crimes such as the March 2017 bombing of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River using BLU-109 bunker-busting bombs made by General Dynamics.


Tabqa Dam [Source: wikipedia.org]

U.S. bombers also struck a school in the city of Raqqa, which was devastated after ISIS took it over in what Amnesty International called a “U.S.-led war of annihilation.”

Wolf’s documentary quoted Raqqa residents who said they did not understand why the U.S. had bombed their city and compared the level of destruction to Dresden during World War II.

More than 11,000 buildings were destroyed and an unknown number of civilians were killed.


Scene from Raqqa, Syria, after U.S. bombing. [Source: nytimes.com]

One of the chief bombers carrying out the attack was the F-18 made by Boeing.

Artillery rounds and howitzers that contributed to the destruction of buildings were made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon—another defendant in the tribunal—and drones were made by General Atomics, another defendant.


Lockheed AC-130 gunship. [Source: getwallpapers.com]


General Atomics Reaper drone. [Source: britannica.com]

This war, according to Wolf, was again driven by oil and profiteering by U.S. oil companies, which hoped to access billions of barrels from off-shore oil deposits. John D. Harris, a member of the ExxonMobil Board of Directors, is the former CEO of Raytheon Interntional and Vice President of Business Development of Raytheon, whose weapons have killed innocent civilians over the last decade.


John D. Harris [Source: corporate.exxon-mobil.com]

The target of the drone strikes is the militant Islamic group al-Shabaab, which formed after the U.S. backed the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 that devastated the country and led to the removal of the country’s government, which had made peace overtures to the U.S.

Since 2007, Washington has launched 139 drone attacks in Somalia, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which have killed 965 people. U.S. air strikes in Somalia were expanded by the Trump administration and increased by another 30% in 2022 under President Biden.


2013 protest in Minneapolis against killer drones. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Wolf’s presentation juxtaposed the suffering of Somali civilians who lost loved ones and were terrorized by drone strikes with the cavalier attitude of U.S. drone operators who celebrated when drone strikes successfully killed people—even if they were non-combatants.

Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator interviewed by Wolf, said that he never saw anyone in the military show any remorse or concern when civilians were killed, and that drone operators labeled women and children using terms from Greek mythology.

According to Bryant, “the drone technology was terribly precise and that is the terror of it.” Civilian deaths did not result from technical mistakes but rather from drone operators who knew almost nothing about Somalia and were prone to target any activity going on that they could not explain—which could really be anyone.


Brandon Bryant [Source: news.com.au]

Wolf showed that one of the drone missiles made by Lockheed struck farmers in a small village north of Mogadishu who were digging an irrigation canal in the middle of the night.

Another killed a prominent businessman, Mohamud Salad Mohamud in Jilib, a city in middle Juba, while another killed an 18-year-old girl and her two sisters and grandmother in Jilib after their home was struck while they were eating dinner.



A Somali woman featured in Wolf’s presentation, who said that she witnessed people being obliterated and cattle slaughtered and killed from U.S. air strikes in Somalia and said that they had lost everything. [Source: youtube.com]


[Source: amazon.com]

While watching Wolf’s presentation, I thought about the book Voices From the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War written in 1972 by an International Voluntary Services (IVS) employee named Fred Branfman who got Lao villagers to draw pictures about what life was like for them living in under the weight of U.S. bombardment.

Observing how modern technologies helped distance the perpetrators of war crimes from their victims, Branfman wrote of “a new type of warfare…fought not by men but machines and which could erase distant and unseen societies clandestinely, unknown to and even unsuspected by the world outside.”

Which is exactly what we see going on today.

One of the drone attack witnesses featured in Wolf’s short film, Halima Mohamed, said that she lost her son, son-in-law and nephews—none of whom had any association with al-Shabaab—in a U.S. drone strike and now lives in an internally displaced people’s camp because her home was destroyed.


Excerpt from Voices From the Plain of Jars [Source: apjjf.org]

Ms. Mohamed said that she knew the drones belonged to the Americans who flew planes from the Baledogle Airfield, but that there was no way she could seek justice for the deaths of her family members. She asked: “How do people who get bombed in the dark of night by a plane get justice?”


Baledogle Airfield. [Source: nara.getarchive.net]

The latter is the precise question that the Merchants of Death tribunal is trying to answer. Its main aim is to hold accountable some of the main culprits who have grown wealthy off the suffering of people like Ms. Mohamed and so many others like her.


1.A graduate of Virginia Tech with a degree in accounting who was born in Philadelphia, Calhoun worked for General Electric for 26 years overseeing transportation and aircraft engines and served as a member of the company’s Board of Directors before becoming a senior managing director at the Wall Street private equity firm Blackstone Group, and then becoming chairman and director of Boeing and then its CEO. In 2018, Calhoun gave $20 million to his alma mater to create the Calhoun Honors Discovery Program that supports research on driverless cars. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/1 ... -u-s-wars/

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Elections Won’t Fix What Ails the West
Posted on December 5, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. As a wag said, “If voting changed things, they wouldn’t allow it.” But why are so many in the Anglosphere and Europe convinced we live in a well-functioning and fair system as evidence otherwise mounts?

By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

With apologies for stating the obvious, the world is in a bad way right now. And while a large number of decisions and events have brought ‘us,’ the collective inhabitants of the planet, to this point, it is the good ole US of A that is now leading the dysfunction and depravity. And here’s the punchline: elections aren’t going to fix what ails us. Joe Biden, the imperial ‘solution’ that might have worked thirty years ago in a world less able to fight back, has been consistently less popular than the relentlessly demonized Donald Trump, meaning that a deeper and more ominous political malady is afflicting the US at present.


Realizing that the old tricks— war hysteria, culture war distractions, and hypocritical twaddle about human rights, aren’t driving the flock back into the fold, American power is taking an authoritarian turn. In evidence is that two-plus centuries of ‘rights,’ to life and liberty, speech, and self-determination, are under attack. From the minute that speech, in the form of challenges to official power, was perceived to be a threat, it was censored, misrepresented, and / or silenced. Implied is that ‘rights’ were always considered a gift— that could be rescinded at their discretion, by our betters in the oligarchy.



Graph: mass incarceration presents a conundrum for American Liberals. The US imprisons a much larger percentage of its population than so-called ‘authoritarian’ nations. What is this high rate of imprisonment if not authoritarian? It has a particular explanation— Richard Nixon’s war on drugs launched mass incarceration. But Nixon’s goal was to repress his political opposition, not to solve a public health emergency. What logic then led Liberals Bill Clinton and Joe Biden to double down on Nixon’s political repression with their 1994 Crime Bill? Source: worldpopulationreview.com.

This seeming American obsession with ideology rather than coalition politics emerges from the detachment from actual governance that the demos in the US faces. Over the last half-century, the political parties have consolidated their control over the electoral system. Through onerous registration procedures that require substantial and well-funded campaign infrastructure to get past, the US has a de facto duopoly electoral system in which Party leaderships, in consultation with their donors, decide who the candidates will be. This is why widely despised candidates end up as the only available choices in American elections.

Assertions from abroad, and occasionally from within the US, that Americans are politically, legally, and morally culpable for US foreign policy ignore that the electoral system is structured to assure that we, the people, not only don’t have a say, but that Federal censorship and propaganda efforts mean that most Americans are only fed lies regarding US actions in the world. The internal ‘debate’ within the US consists of CNN talking points versus MSNBC talking points, meaning that they are all State Department / CIA talking points.

Reflected in this dearth of national candor is an uninformed arrogance amongst individualists and collectivists alike with respect to world affairs. ‘We’ have strong views regarding events that this same we have little to no control over. The US proxy war in Ukraine and the genocide currently underway in Gaza have been underway is less visible forms for decades. And the bi-partisan gerontocracy in Washington is doing what it has always done. It is lying to we, the people, regarding its service to capital in the form of the MIC (military-industrial complex).



Graph: anyone who follows US foreign policy will recognize the names on this ranking of proved oil reserves by nation. The US has been trying to control Venezuela militarily since the start of the 20th century. Iran was a client state of the US until the Iranian Revolution (1979). It has been an enemy since. Iraq was substantially destroyed in George W. Bush’s misbegotten war begun in 2003. Russia is the object of the current US proxy war in Ukraine. And Libya was completely destroyed by Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the early 2010s. Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com.

The reigning ethos of Liberalism, enshrined in the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, has long represented one of the only true ‘isms,’ or political belief systems, by having so few of its expressions or corollaries found naturally in the world. For instance, ‘individuals’ rarely prosper outside of human societies. But Liberalism is hegemonic in Gramsci’s sense of a governing ideology that is so entrenched that it is invisible to those who embody it. This latter point is what makes Liberalism so easy to use as a demagogic battering ram. Appealing to received wisdom, whether correct or not, is much less onerous than challenging it.

However, knowingly reinforcing dubious received wisdom is a recipe for social catastrophe, witness the current situation. By withholding true information while promoting false information regarding US foreign policy, the US is currently engaged in two potentially-world-ending conflicts with only moronic delusion to guide it. After killing or permanently maiming 400,000 Ukrainians from some grotesque, geostrategic, brain-fart, the political leadership in the US is supporting and funding a WWII-like genocide in Gaza. These are Liberalism’s facts in 2023.

From a Marxist perspective, Liberalism is the ethos of capitalism with individuals as its alleged heroes. In this way, challenges to Liberalism have been easy to portray as threats to individuals and ‘rights.’ Question: if rights are given, why must they be fought for? The Civil Rights movement in the US didn’t claim pre-existing ‘rights,’ it was a power struggle against repressive forces. Had these rights pre-existed (e.g. speech), the Federal government would have been the arbiter. Instead, people died and got their heads cracked when forcing both the Federal government and states to honor what were claimed to be rights.



Graph: in 2022 Democrats were the Party of the existing order. Democratic Congressional Districts tended to have more rich and fewer poor people than Republican Districts. In class terms, this broadly breaks down as the ruling class— industrialists, financiers, and corporate executives, and the PMC (Professional Managerial Class), versus the poor, the dispossessed former Middle Class, and the petite bourgeoisie that finds itself on the wrong side of neoliberal reforms. Subsequently, as if on cue, Republicans dumped their fake anti-establishment persona when their favored colonial administrators (Israel) needed help with their genocide. The question in need of an answer is why Americans believe non-stop lies given how many ‘reveals’ after the fact they have been through. Source: axios.com.

An important difference between Liberalism and Marxist analysis with respect to ‘individuals’ centers on the social conditions necessary for self-realization, and not on individualism versus collectivism per se. Ironically, American Liberals are fine with employers telling people when to wake and when to sleep, where to go and what to do with their time, what to wear, the range of acceptable discourse, and which expressions of who we ‘really’ are are acceptable, and which aren’t. Why having an employer decide your life is ‘freedom,’ while having the Federal government do so is ‘authoritarian,’ isn’t precisely clear.

In the present, serial deception has divided the US into those who believe official lies and those who don’t. While much of this difference is Party partisans mindlessly believing whatever ‘their’ party puts forward, with it being changeable with their party’s fortunes, the widespread loathing of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump suggests underlying political currents that defy partisan explanations. It seems that the people who have benefitted economically from the established order and their ‘explainers’ in academia and the press by-and-large support the established order. Those on the outside, not so much.

American politics has long had a quasi-religious character through the distinction between what people believe and what they do, between faith and acts. So and so candidate believes what you believe, so you vote for them. But the electoral system— and with it ballot access, is controlled by the duopoly parties for the benefit of corporate executives and ‘investors.’ What the candidate believes has little bearing on how they legislate. For instance, Joe Biden ‘believes’ that the minimum wage should be higher. But he isn’t willing to favor the will of the people over the economic interests of his donors to raise it.

Along these lines, a recent editorial in the New York Times entitled ‘Why I am a Liberal,’ written by Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, lays out a theoretical case for Liberalism, and in-so-doing, implies that the historical case is unsupportive by default. Despite having several centuries of history to draw from, Sunstein begins his piece with ‘this is what Liberals believe,’ signaling that he will define Liberalism aspirationally. Doing so is a good trick when it works. It keeps critics fantasizing in the realm of hypotheticals, and well away from the substance of history.

“Liberals believe in six things: freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy. They believe not only in democracy, understood to require accountability to the people, but also in deliberative democracy, an approach that combines a commitment to reason giving in the public sphere with the commitment to accountability.” Cass Sunstein, New York Times.

In fact, few in the West would take issue with this list, most particularly ‘Left’ critics of Liberalism. That critique is 1) this is vague, virtue signaling, bullshit being used to cast the established order in a favorable light, not a political program, 2) that implies that a few simple reforms would align Liberal fantasies with the facts of actually existing capitalist democracy when over two hundred years of history have failed to do so, and 3) assumes no responsibility for the acts and policies of American Liberals who claim their actions are based in Liberal theory. A current favorite is the rehabilitation of Ukrainian Nazis by people who describe themselves as anti-fascists. What’s next, an ‘approved Nazis’ list?

The Times’ piece claims that Liberals value ‘freedom.’ The question then arises as to why the ‘free’ US has the largest proportion of its people in prison amongst peer, as well as ‘authoritarian,’ nations (chart above)? At least part of the answer lies with former US President Richard Nixon’s decision to launch the ‘war on drugs’ as a pretext for repressing domestic political opposition to his policies. That ‘Liberals’ Bill Clinton and Joe Biden followed Nixon’s political repression gambit with their 1994 Crime Bill illustrates the bi-partisan, and systematic, nature of domestic political repression.

For context, the US has about five times the proportion of its citizens in prison as ‘authoritarian’ China (chart above). It also holds multiples greater than Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. Through so-called plea bargains— which are legalized extortion in most cases, those who can’t afford full-blown legal representation are given a choice between extortionate jury trial sentences and fractional plea bargain sentences. This has turned US prisons into warehouses for those for whom capitalism can’t create enough jobs, aka ‘the poor.’

Americans are repeatedly told that serial military mal-adventures are intended to liberate oppressed people from malevolent tyrants. If so, with 195 nations in the world today, why are the same half-dozen or so nations with the largest proved oil reserves (chart above) the main targets of US regime-change operations? A half-dozen is roughly three percent of 195 nations. And if fossil fuel reserves attract tyrants, what does this say about the most fossil-fuel obsessed nation on the planet, the US? In fact, it is American imperial interests that motivate US foreign policy.

From a different angle, at fifty-eight pages, this list of US military operations finds many of the same states and political actors being invaded and re-invaded by the US over this history, with a notable focus on those resource rich nations that the US political leadership used to loudly proclaim (see Eisenhower’s comments at opening of film) hold resources important to American oligarchs and corporations. From Teddie Roosevelt through Joe Biden, ‘kick their ass and steal their gas’ has been the operating ethos of the US military.



Chart: through the US MIC (Military Industrial Complex), the rich benefit economically from wars that are generally fought by the not-rich. This bifurcation, where one group reaps the benefits while another pays the costs, goes far in explaining the otherwise lunatic militarism of the US since WWII ended. Notably, the US never ‘wins’ these wars, whatever winning a war might look like. They feature twenty years of bombing wedding parties and Mosques before troops are withdrawn to be redeployed to the next manufactured catastrophe. Source: CFR.org.

But it isn’t the likes of the PMC who ‘kick their ass,’ a grotesque metaphor for wildly homicidal militarism. Despite Mr. Sunstein being a few years older than yours truly, there is no record of his military service during the Vietnam War. In the self-serving parlance of American political discourse, Liberals value ‘freedom,’ but leave it up to ‘the little people’ to secure it. Never mind that US foreign policy has always been imperialist slaughter for the benefit of capital, American Liberals so lack historical knowledge that they recently deemed all inconvenient history ‘whataboutism.’

“Liberals connect their opposition to censorship to their commitment to free and fair elections, which cannot exist if people are unable to speak as they wish. They cherish the right to vote.” Cass Sunstein, New York Times.

Using language intended to assuage Liberal sensibilities rather than to engage in critical analysis, Mr. Sunstein is apparently unaware that Liberal institutions in the US have engaged in full-throated censorship of political discourse and created and distributed state propaganda for most of the last century. From Operation Mockingbird through Carl Bernstein’s too-carefully-worded expose of CIA media manipulation to the revelations of the ‘Twitter Files,’ major American institutions (CIA, FBI, DNC) have not only censored inconvenient political analysis for decades, they have lied about doing so, occasionally under oath.



Picture: before Ukraine’s Azov Battalion were ‘freedom fighters’ they were Nazis. They weren’t ‘far-Right’ and they certainly weren’t ‘Liberal’ in the sense offered up by the New York Times. And then in Orwellian ‘Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia’ fashion, Adolf Hitler loving, Holocaust denying,’ Nazis’ were the best friends of American Liberals. The criticism isn’t just hypocrisy. Left critics of Liberalism actually do not support Nazis, be they Ukrainians or the American Liberals who support them. Source: wsws.org.

The methods of skirting domestic restrictions on censorship and propaganda are twofold: first, by getting so-called private institutions— corporations and NGOs, to carry out acts that would be illegal if the CIA were conducting them directly. And secondly, through institutional alliances like the Five Eyes, whereby foreign intelligence services can carry out acts that would be illegal if done domestically. With MI6 (Brits) maintaining the relationship with Ukrainian Nazis for the CIA after WWII, the CIA could deny that it ‘worked with Nazis’ while it worked with Nazis.

This ’wink and nod’ that has long facilitated CIA propaganda inside the US has also been insinuated into the cultural belief system through popular entertainment. The myth of ‘Liberal’ Hollywood, even through militaristic twaddle like Top Gun and American Sniper, has turned self-described Liberals into willing propagandists much like Leni Riefenstahlwas for the Third Reich. The myth of ‘good’ Nazis in Ukraine is a classic of the genre. Another is ‘just retribution,’ and another still is the exaggeration of US capabilities. For instance, pandemic films present intelligent and capable public health officials long after public health in the US had been abandoned.

With respect to ‘free and fair’ elections, by controlling ballot access, the duopoly parties control the choice of candidates. In the run-up to the 2016 election, the DNC not only openly cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination, it argued that it had no legal obligation to hold ‘free and fair’ Democratic Party primaries. This would mean one thing if the duopoly parties hadn’t spent decades creating the infrastructure needed to effectively exclude third parties from competing in US elections, and another given that they now have effective control of the electoral process.

The obvious push-back to rigged primaries is that primaries aren’t national elections. But again, duopoly party control over ballot access limits the range of political views / interests represented in ‘official’ politics to those favored by the power behind the duopoly parties. This is to write that while Donald Trump isn’t Joe Biden— they are separate and distinct people, they both represent the views and interests of the power behind the duopoly parties. Conversely, implied in the fact of duopoly party control of ballot access is that political decision making must not be left to the demos.

As the saying goes, ‘if voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.’ In fact, as the duopoly parties have learned, by constraining the choice of candidates through control of ballot access, they have maintained the illusion of democratic choice while assuring that doing so poses no danger to entrenched political and economic power. The result: voters have been fleeing the duopoly parties for three decades now. But with nowhere else to go when it’s time to vote, widely detested establishment candidates continue to be the public face of this fake democracy.

His being a law professor suggests that Mr. Sunstein should know this history. And his being a law professor suggests that Mr. Sunstein shouldn’t know this history. By analogy, here The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal interviews a representative of CIA cutout NED (National Endowment for Democracy), Leslie Aun, who appears to know absolutely nothing about the agency she is defending. What Aun does do well is put up theoretical defenses of NED in place of defending its history. The point: theoretical defenses loaded with emotive drivel about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are intended to hide their subjects, not to illuminate them.

Ironically, Liberal critiques of other purported ideologies such as Socialism and Communism tend to be based on divergences between theory and realized fact. Noam Chomsky’s Liberal critique of Lenin and the Russian Revolution amounts to the complaint that actual history failed to comport with explanations of how Socialism should work in theory. While actual Socialists and Communists have long grappled with this distance between their political aspirations and the burden of history, the tendency of Western Liberals has been to restate their own moral superiority through what they believe, rather than how they act.

Why this matters, with a superficial irony alert, is that Socialist and Communist critiques of Liberalism tend towards its facts as the ethos of capitalism, and not a rejection of the concept of self-determination as Liberals generally claim. To pull these obvious but necessary abstractions together, much of the ‘Left’ quarrel with Liberalism is that it doesn’t do what its proponents claim that it does. If it did, Mr. Sunstein would be deferring to this supporting history. But actual American history looks almost nothing like what its Liberal apologists claim.

In terms of ‘principles,’ American Liberals invested tremendous energy into politically hobbling and then ousting Donald Trump, the man who unambiguously won an election in what they (Liberals) regularly proclaim to be a free and fair electoral system. Where was the principle that Trump was the duly elected President of the United States to be found? Half the country voted for the guy. What of their ‘right’ to be represented by the person they voted for? While my take is that Trump is at least 10% as evil as Joe Biden, I’ve never voted for either of them. And I have no intention of doing so in the future. The problem is the system, not the candidates.

Question: who spends four years denying the validity of an election because they don’t like the outcome? If the problem is the electoral system, that is what needs to be addressed. But the Liberal argument was / is that the system is fine. Likewise, the CIA and FBI don’t have standing to opine on domestic politics unless a ‘process’ charge that an election wasn’t on the up-and-up has been raised. But the only process charge that was raised regarding the 2016 election, Russiagate, was a fraud invented by the losing candidate to take the focus off of her venality, incompetence, and widespread unpopularity.

Luckily for readers, Hollywood has already provided comic relief with the (Klaus) Barbie Museum. In real life, Mr. Barbie (aka the ‘Butcher of Lyon’) lived out his post-WWII years as a ‘torture consultant’ to the CIA. His contributions included murder, torture, and managing local and regional Black Ops, including the murder of Che Guevara, for the CIA. This is a fact of Liberalism that its theorists choose not to explain. Why? Because there is no gain to be made from doing so. Spouting platitudes is easier, causes less consternation, and garners pats on the back from the War Crimes R Us crowd.

This entry was posted in Banana republic, Economic fundamentals, Free markets and their discontents, Guest Post, Income disparity, Politics, Social policy, Social values, The destruction of the middle class on December 5, 2023 by Yves Smith.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/12 ... -west.html

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BILLIONAIRES DO NOT CREATE WEALTH OF THEIR OWN, THEY INHERIT IT
Dec 4, 2023 , 3:22 pm .


Among the 137 new billionaires, a total of 150.8 billion dollars were inherited to 53 heirs during the last year (Photo: File)

A report from Swiss bank USB reveals that global billionaires have for the first time accumulated more wealth through inheritance than through entrepreneurship, in a period when the transfer of capital is gaining momentum. The study titled "Billionaire Ambitions 2023" also notes that the number of billionaires increased and their global wealth increased last year.

According to the report, the number of billionaires rose 7% worldwide, reaching 2,544 people, while their total wealth increased 9%, reaching approximately 12 trillion dollars.

This is the first time, since the study began in 2015, that billionaires accumulate more wealth through inheritances than through their own business activities, which suggests that in that world the much-touted meritocracy of the rich does not exist.

Among the 137 new billionaires, a total of $150.8 billion was inherited to 53 heirs over the past year, surpassing the $140.7 billion generated by the 84 new self-made billionaires, the bank said.

One of the most interesting findings is that a time has been reached in which there are numerous multi-millionaire families made up of several generations, in which the owners and still in charge of industries and conglomerates can be up to octogenarians, with children over 50 years old. that they will soon inherit and take over. This trend is expected to continue for the next 20 years.

https://misionverdad.com/los-multimillo ... la-heredan

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Amid Mushrooming Wars and Other Global Crises, the WEF’s Corporate Takeover of the UN Continues Apace
Posted on December 12, 2023 by Nick Corbishley

The multistakeholder model being embraced by the UN gives corporations even more power over society, the economy and the environment, at the expense of national democratic institutions.

At last week’s COP 28 Summit, held in Dubai, which as Yves pointed out is one of the most air conditioned cities on the planet, indigenous groups kicked up a storm about the unprecedented number of fossil fuel lobbyists attending the UN talks. At least 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists had been granted access to the negotiations, according to an analysis cited by the Guardian. That’s four times the number registered for COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, itself a record year, and seven times the number of official indigenous delegates.

Also heavily represented at the negotiations were Big Ag corporations — hardly surprising given that one of the main talking points at this year’s event was tackling emissions from the food sector. From De Smog:


Attendees are present from some of the world’s largest agribusiness firms – such as meatpacker JBS, fertiliser giant Nutrien, food giant Nestlé and pesticide firm Bayer – and powerful industry trade groups.

Meat and dairy interests are especially well represented with 120 delegates in Dubai, triple the number that attended COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

Overall the analysis of the delegates list by DeSmog shows that the total number of people representing the interests of agribusiness has more than doubled since 2022 to reach 340.

In addition, the analysis reveals that over 100 delegates have travelled to Dubai as part of country delegations, which grants privileged access to diplomatic negotiations. This number is up from just 10 in 2022…

“With greater scrutiny over emissions from meat and dairy companies, it is not surprising they are stepping up their game to head off any COP outcome that might hinder their operations,” Ben Lilliston, from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy told DeSmog.

“Even so, a tripling of delegates is alarming – it drives home the urgent need for reforms that limit corporate influence at UN climate meetings.”

A Shift in Global Governance

If anything, the opposite is happening. The rapid rise in both the number and, presumably, influence of corporate lobbyists at the UN climate summit is part of a rarely discussed but hugely significant shift in global governance that has been under way for decades but is dangerously close to completion: the corporate takeover of the United Nations. The process is poised to accelerate further at next year’s UN Future Summit, as the renowned German financial journalist Norbert Häring recently warned on his blog:

The complete subjugation of the UN to corporate interests, which the World Economic Forum outlined with its Global Redesign Initiative in 2010 and has successfully pursued since then, is to be enshrined in the rules and regulations of the world organisation at the UN Future Summit in 2024. This is important not least because of the planned pandemic agreement, which is to give WHO excessive powers.

In his 2021 report “Our Common Agenda”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres outlined his ideas for reforming the way international organisations work (global governance) and set up a High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism to draw up reform proposals. These were then supposed to be discussed at the UN General Assembly in September 2023 and translated into concrete resolutions.

However, there was resistance from the G77 group, which represents countries of the Global South. The discussion of the High-Level Advisory Board’s proposals was therefore postponed until next year. This “multi-stakeholder future summit” is now to take place in September 2024 and decide on the main features of the UN reform.

The High-Level Advisory Board has already published an 83-page report outlining the steps needed to modernise the world’s foremost multilateral institution. It includes the following paragraph (on page 18):

Our global governance system has a glaring hole: the private sector. Companies of all sizes drive advancements in new technologies; energy, industrial, and agricultural companies are responsible for a huge portion of our global carbon emissions and pollution; banks and
finance companies handle our global financial flows; and private companies deliver most of our goods. But our multilateral treaties largely ignore these actors, wrongly assuming that State action is sufficient to regulate this global network of private actors.

This paragraph could have been lifted straight out of the World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative (2010), which was led by the WEF’s three most senior executives – Klaus Schwab, its Executive Chairman; Mark Malloch-Brown, then its Vice-Chairman; and Richard Samans, its Managing Director. In its final report, titled “Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World,” the GRI proposed the creation of a system of multi-stakeholder governance as a partial replacement for intergovernmental decision-making.

That is essentially what the High-Level Advisory Board is also calling for: the replacement of multilateralism — the process of organising relations between the governments of multiple countries, ideally governed democratically, that has been the model of global governance for the past century — with the World Economic Forum’s model of “multi-stakeholder partnerships,” which would bring together the private sector, governments and civil society groups across all areas of global governance. As mentioned, this process has been in the works for decades, as the GRI project directors explained almost 15 years ago:

“While experimentation with individual public—private and multistakeholder partnerships has flourished over the past decade, including in many international organisations, they continue to play an incremental, even experimental, role in the international system rather than a systematic one. For this to change, policy-making processes and institutional structures themselves will need to be adapted and perhaps even fundamentally repositioned with this in mind.”

The WEF’s Main Stakeholder: Transnational Corporations

If enshrined in the UN’s rules and regulations at the UN Future Summit, the WEF’s multi-stakeholder model will grant corporations, many of them partly or even largely to blame for the major crises the world faces, even more power and influence over society, the economy and the environment, at the expense of national democratic institutions. It will mean even less democratic representation and accountability in the decisions taken by UN institutions. In the WEF’s vision — laid out in the GRI’s final report — the government voice “would be one among many without always being the final arbiter.”

It’s not hard to guess who that role will generally fall to. After all, the WEF represents some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people and corporations. On its website, it has kindly laid out, in alphabetical order, all of its partners, strategic partners and associate partners. It reads like a Who’s Who of many of the world’s largest corporations and philanthro-capitalists, primarily (but not exclusively) from the US and Europe. A is for Apple, B is for Blackrock (or Blackstone Group), C for Citi, D for Deutsche Bank, E for Exxon Mobil, F for Foxconn, G for Glencore, etc.

In a 2016 article for the Transnational Institute, Harris Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability and former chief of the NY Office of UNCTAD, distilled the three core elements of the WEF’s multi-stakeholder model of governance:

First, that multi-stakeholder structures do not mean equal roles for all stakeholders; second, that the corporation is at the centre of the process; and third, that the list of WEF’s multi-stakeholders is principally those with commercial ties to the company: customers, creditors, suppliers, collaborators, owners, and national economies. All the other potential stakeholders are grouped together as “government and society”. Note that [Klaus] Schwab says nothing about democracy in this approach to multi-stakeholder activities.

The WEF already plays a significant role in shaping global policy, in part through its Young Global Leaders Forum (2005-today) and its predecessor, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program (1993-2003). These two programs have helped to create a transnational clique of would-be elitists, some of whom have gone on to fill very important roles in both the public and private spheres. It is almost the epitome of George Carlin’s “Big Club” that you and I ain’t in.

BusinessWeek‘s Bruce Nussbaum described the program as “the most exclusive private social network in the world”, while the WEF itself says the selected leaders represent “the voice for the future and the hopes of the next generation.”

Graduating from one of the two programs is presumably still a badge of honour within corporate and elitist circles, but it is one that is increasingly concealed from public view as scrutiny of the program grows. Today, it seems that as soon as an alum reaches a senior government position in the US or a major European country, their names are scrubbed from the WEF’s YGLs community page. The lists of participants in the WEF‘s Global Leaders for Tomorrow program are also no longer available on the WEF’s website, but have been preserved for posterity on the Wayback Machine (here’s the list for the inaugural class of ’93).

Combined, the WEF’s two apprenticeship programs have accumulated well over a thousand current members and alumni from the worlds of business, politics, science, culture and sport, including:

From the private sector: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Paul Allen (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Peter Thiel (Palantir), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Jack Ma (Alibaba Group), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Niklas Zennström (Skype), Ana Botín (Grupo Santander) Richard Branson (Virgin), Stéphane Bancel (Moderna) Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt (Google) and Larry Page (Google).

From the public sector (excuse the bullet points):

Former UK Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown,former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, (all four from the inaugural class of ’93, years before they become national leaders; Angela Merkel was Germany’s Minister for Women and Youth);
Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers;
France’s former President Nicholas Sarkozy (also in the class of ’93) and its current President Emmanuel Macron;
Former European Commission Presidents Manuel Barroso and Jean Claude Juncker.
Thiery Breton, the former head of the European Commission’s vaccines task force who unveiled the first European “health passport” in March 2021. As EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, Breton also recently launched the EU’s highly controversial Digital Services Act, which sets the regulatory guardrails for a global digital censorship regime.
Guy Verhofstadt – former Prime Minster of Belgium 1999-2008, who then became a prominent Euro-politician.
Taoiseach of Ireland (both former and current) Leo Varadkar;
Alexander de Croo, the current prime minister of Belgium;
Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, who is now specialising in technology governance at Harvard;
Juan Guaidó (no introduction needed).
Anna Baerbock, Germany’s disastrous foreign minister.
Sanna Marin, the former prime minister of Finland and now a strategic counselor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Mykhailo Fedorov, who until recently served as Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation;
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his deputy and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, who also sits on the WEF’s board of trustees;
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California who is widely tipped to enter the ring for next year’s presidential elections should Joe Biden fail to make it that far.
Other US politicians that have attended the YGLs program include Nikki Haley, Dan Crenshaw, Pete Buttigeig, Ivanka Trump, Samantha Power and Tulsi Gabbard. Both Gabbard and Crenshaw deny attending the program.

This is just a small sample of some of the more prominent figures that have passed through the program over the past 30 years. In 2017, WEF Founder Klaus Schwab hinted that even Russian President Vladimir Putin had attended the program, though that has not been fully confirmed. Speaking at an event organised by the Harvard Kennedy School of Governance, Schwab bragged that the WEF was “penetrat[ing] the cabinets” of governments around the world through its new generation of Young Global Leaders. He cited the example of Canada, where more than half of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet had participated in the program.


Happier times: in this picture from the 2007 G8 Summit George W Bush is flanked by three alumni of the Global Leaders of Tomorrow program (Blair, Barroso and Merkel) as well as a suspected alum (Putin). Another alum, Sarkozy, didn’t make it into the frame.

But it’s not just the cabinets of national governments that the WEF has been infiltrating. In November 2019, just three months before the COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest, the Davos-based club pulled off the mother of all public-private partnerships when it signed a strategic partnership agreement with the UN.

The International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which connects over 280 NGOs, social movements and advocates across more than 75 countries, warned that “the agreement gives transnational corporations preferential and deferential access to the UN system at the expense of States and public interest actors.” At the time, this development was barely reported upon but NC featured an interview by Lynn Fries of Harris Gleckman. A key excerpt:

LYNN FRIES: Civil society is calling the World Economic Forum-UN Agreement a corporate takeover of the UN.

HARRIS GLECKMAN: The UN Charter starts with the words “We the Peoples”. What the Secretary-General is doing through the Global Compact and now through the partnership with the World Economic Forum is tossing this out the window. He is saying: I’m going to align the organization with a particular structural relationship with multinationals, with multistakeholderism, and set aside attention to all the different peoples of the world in their particular interests of environment, health, water needs and really talk about how to govern the world with those who have a particular role in creating problems of wars from natural resources, of creating problems relating to climate, creating problems relating to food supply and technologies. That is undermining a core element of what the United Nations has been and should be for its next 75 years.

LYNN FRIES: It’s striking that the Agreement was signed as the UN is celebrating 100 years of multilateralism, the centenary year 1919 to 2019. And next year 2020 will mark the 1945 signing of the UN Charter 75th anniversary.

HARRIS GLECKMAN: Lynn, if I could give you an overview of what I’m concerned about the aspect of this about multistakeholderism is that the Secretary-General is the leading public figure for the multilateral system, the intergovernmental system. The World Economic Forum is the major proponent or one of the major proponents that a multi-stakeholder governance system should replace or marginalize the multilateral system. So the Secretary-General is taking steps to just jump on the bandwagon of multistakeholderism without a public debate about the democratic character of multistakeholderism, about a public debate about whether this is effectively able to solve problems, without a public debate about how stakeholders are selected to become global governors or even a public debate about what role the UN should have with any of these multistakeholder groups.

This lack of accountability or transparency is, as always, a feature, not a bug. In 2021, the WEF and the Office of the Secretary-General concluded a memorandum of understanding on the corporate sector’s involvement in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, which was never made publicly available by the UN nor submitted to the General Assembly.

A few months ago, Gleckman issued another warning, this time in an op-ed for Al Jazeera:

Instead of expanding access to the UN system to communities of people impacted by today’s crises, [UN Secretary Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s vision, as set out in his report to the General Assembly, Our Common Agenda) gives more influence and power to corporate actors who are most culpable of bringing us to the precipice of ecological and social disaster.

The secretary-general’s approach, called multistakeholder governance, would increase corporate influence over global governance, deepening the damaging consequences of prioritising ‘return on investment’ above social and ecological needs. In a multistakeholder world, corporate executives and other founders bring together a friendly group of civil society organisations, governments, academics, UN staff, and other non-state organisations to take on a global governance role.

This would marginalise over two-thirds of the nations of the UN. Instead, a new vision and institutional arrangement that focus on people and the planet should be at the heart of the Summit for the Future.

Instead, the UN, like the WHO, is pushing for increasingly authoritarian solutions such as digital identity, modelled on Ukraine’s State in a Smartphone model of digital governance, and online censorship, which are precisely the sorts of things the WEF has been calling for in its Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution. The only thing potentially standing in the way of the WEF’s takeover of the UN, it seems, is opposition from the G77 group of “Global South” countries. Long may it stay firm!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/12 ... -pace.html

[blindpig]

THE FIVE GLOBAL CONFLICT FRONTS OPENED BY THE US.
Dec 14, 2023, 3:42 pm.


The war in Ukraine is one of the fronts in which the United States, in command of NATO, does not generate results in its favor (Photo: Flickr)

The crossroads at which the Western establishment led by the United States finds itself has materialized in the concern of a political sector inside and outside that country. The war in Gaza threatens to reduce US arms supplies to Taiwan, as does the war in Ukraine. In recent days, US President Joe Biden has been seeking war aid for Ukraine and Israel, which also includes more money for Taiwan.

A note by the Russian philosopher and geopolitical analyst Alexander Dugin refers to five potential or real fronts in which multipolarity and unipolarity are they face. Below they are presented along with the approach that Misión Verdad has made regarding these cases.

1. UNSUNG DEFEAT IN UKRAINE
After the Minsk Agreement (2015) served as a mechanism to buy time, the so-called "Collective West" led by the United States went to war against Russia in Ukraine since March 2022. Analysts like Dugin describe that, essentially, it is a civil war between Russians : patriotic Russians against Atlanticist Russians who have betrayed their Russian identity, but the "Russians" Atlanticists are being used by the unipolar forces of the West.

The confrontation continues to generate negative results and perspectives for the Western side. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr's efforts Zelensky, during his second visit to Washington in three months, "did little" to change the opinion of Republican congressmen, who oppose continuing to finance the escalation of the war. During that same visit, and meeting with the Ukrainian leader, President Biden promised Kiev a new $200 million military aid package, while noting that it could be the last.

Days earlier, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that he believes that the position on the Ukrainian front could worsen if the West does not increase its arms supply. He detailed that kyiv is in a "critical situation", as members of the Atlantic Alliance were unable to meet the growing demand for ammunition. "We have to prepare for bad news," he declared on December 3 in an interview with the German television channel 3>Das Erste.

In an interview with AP, Zelensky admitted that his fighters were unable to make significant progress in their failed counteroffensive. "We wanted faster results. From that perspective, unfortunately we did not achieve the desired results. "And this is a fact," he asserted, blaming the West for not having provided sufficient weapons.

He also expressed fear that events in the Gaza Strip could jeopardize the flow of military aid to kyiv. In this way, the Ukrainian conflict would be eclipsed by the destruction of Gaza implemented by Israel with the support of Western powers.

Researchers Diego Sequera and Ernesto Cazal published a series of articles (I, II) with a geopolitical balance of the war in Ukraine.III and
2. GAZA: "ISRAEL IS THE WEST"
Precisely, the second American war front is in Western Asia. The genocide against the Palestinian population carried out by Israel has the support of the West; This has been demonstrated not only by the forms but also by the concepts.

Last November, the official American military magazine Army University Presspublished an article written on behalf from that country's Department of Defense calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the destruction of Lebanon.


The destruction of Gaza is not only advancing with irreversible damage to its buildings (15%) but also to its arable lands (22%) (Photo: France24)

The article, written by an organic intellectual of Zionist nationalism, Omer Dostri, proposes as an "ideal option" for Israel to reoccupy Gaza in the long term, ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents, exponentially expand the size of the killing zone, and establish settlements within Gaza.

Dan Cohen, American journalist and documentary filmmaker, review that the text adds to the numerous statements that, in the case of a trial for war crimes, would serve as clear evidence of the intent to carry out genocide, which is notoriously difficult to establish. The fact that this call was published on behalf of the Department of Defense and in the main media branch of the United States Army raises doubts about American culpability in the Gaza genocide, which is being carried out mainly with factory-made bombs and missiles. of the North American country, and about what the true intentions of its government are.

Israeli occupation forces have attacked residential buildings, schools, hospitals, ambulances, medical personnel, rescue and first aid teams, journalists, United Nations employees, mosques, Christian churches, infrastructure, and have cut off electricity and communication services. According to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the death toll as a result of the Israeli bombings against the Gaza Strip increased to 18,608, while other 50,594 people have been injured. 18% of the total structures and 22% of the arable lands in the Gaza Strip have been damaged as a result of Israel's aggression against this Palestinian enclave.

The destabilization of the Arab and Islamic world is a necessity of the West and its advance requires a systematic genocide of the Arab population like the one carried out in Gaza. Washington's supervisory role, demonstrated in the recurring visits of the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has to do with maintaining control over an eventual overflow of elements of the Palestinian resistance, gas fields< /span> such as Leviathan and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).

Disinformation has been the usual currency in the exercise of extermination, numerous fake news have served to bestialize the Palestinian population affected from moment zero.

Two research papers by Sequera (I and II) have been published on this portal to describe the plot, in addition to a recent interview with analysts Christian Nader and Javier Couso conducted by Ernesto Cazal.< /span>
3. IN AFRICA, "UNIPOLARITY"
Dugin states that "the bloc of anti-colonial countries in West Africa (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Central African Republic, Gabon) is united against the pro-colonial (Atlantist) regimes and against Macron's globalist France." However, Washington's hand is not far from that front, maneuvering to retain control of the region (or at least dispute influence with the multipolar powers) and depose the influence of France. This would demonstrate that unipolarity is not so much a Euro-Atlantic vision as a purely American one.

Three Sahel countries, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, signed in September a pact to establish a collective defense and assistance architecture mutual for the benefit of their populations.

After the coup d'état in Niger against President Mohamed Bazoum by officers at the head of the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Homeland (CNSP), the confrontation against Paris was manifest. The coup plotters alleged that the decision was due to the "continuous deterioration of the security situation" and "poor economic and social management."

With the destruction of Libya as a turning point, the Sahel region has become the epicenter of armed conflicts caused by terrorist groups along the entire strip; These opened greater markets for the smuggling and trafficking of weapons, drugs, slaves and raw materials, and facilitated the rise of the illicit economy around the energy enclaves and minerals in the area, while mass displacement increased and a trail of chaotic destruction occurred in its wake.


Supporters of the military junta that took control of Niger through a coup d'état marched towards the capital waving Russian flags and denouncing France, the former colonial power (Photo: Sky News)

Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, visited the African country in order to anticipate the increase in Russian influence. The rejection of the French could lead to their total expulsion from the continent and the subsequent security vacuum, which seems an irreversible process, even if it makes use of force, either directly or through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

The formation of the mutual defense pact by the three Sahel countries attempts, precisely, to confront the threats from Cedeao, which has a history of military interventions successful through its military arm.

In the region the dispute between the unipolar order and the emerging multipolar order, one led by the Euro-Atlantic Axis with the United States, has been expressed at the head and the other by China and Russia, among other countries. The latter have dedicated themselves to establishing cooperative relations in the areas of diplomacy and international relations, economics, finance, trade and security—the Asians have been forging them for three decades. Washington, for its part, has become involved in the fields of financial investment in strategic resources and its military deployment has filled almost the entire African continent via Africom.

To expand on the complex African geopolitical dynamics, you can consult the works published by Eder Peña and Diego Sequera.
4. NATOIZING THE PACIFIC AND PROVOKING CHINA
The global dispute that fuels the United States reaches close to China's borders, as demonstrated by the continued interference in the conflict between the Asian country and the island of Taiwan, recognized as part of its territory even by Washington, which has maintained a " strategic ambiguity" increasingly difficult to prove.

It is essential for China's foreign relations that its "One China" be recognized. Its territorial reunification process, adopted by the National People's Congress through the Anti-secessionist Law of 2005, reserves the government the right to use "non-secessionist means. peaceful" before an eventual declaration of independence by Taiwan, after accepting that the Taipei administration represents an autonomous province.

For its part, since 1949, Taiwan has claimed the government of all of mainland China, in addition to the archipelago of the same name, which keeps alive the conflict that Washington constantly encourages through political, economic and military support.

After the United States switched diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to China in 1979, it continued to sell weapons to the island under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act. The key was to sell enough weapons so that Taiwan could defend itself from a possible Chinese attack, but not so many that it would destabilize relations between Washington and Beijing. However, it has sold him more than 14 billion dollars in military equipment.

Last August, Biden approved a grant of $80 million from American taxpayers under a program called Foreign Military Financing (FMF). , for its acronym in English), which until now had been used to send military aid to Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, among other countries. The new thing is that it had only been granted to countries or organizations recognized by the United Nations, and Taiwan is not.


Map demonstrating US military pressure against China. In red the defense systems installed by Beijing, in green the bases and presence of the United States and its allies (Photo: The Economist)

Biden has not only used discretionary powers to approve another $500 million in operational readiness to Taiwan, but ground battalions will receive training in the United States. It has sought to increase the siege of China by strengthening the Seventh Fleet in Japan, it is the largest in the North American country with 40 thousand troops, 70 ships and submarines and some 300 planes. Such a deployment, which seeks to otanize the Pacific region, has been seen in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars (1991), and would be focused on supporting South Korea against Pyongyang and Taiwan against China in possible armed conflicts.

A report from the BBC indicates that the United States is running out of time to update and equip the Taiwanese military, especially knowing that the equipment is old, there is no island counterintelligence in the rival country and, perhaps most importantly, taking into account its inferiority in every sense compared to China.

So much so that China has its People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, the largest in the world with 340 ships compared to the United States' 280 ships. In recent years, the PLA has advanced construction of dozens of warships, including the Type 052D destroyers and Type 055, the amphibious assault ship Type 075 and the Fujian aircraft carrier of 80 thousand tons, according to published in November 2022.a Pentagon report

In addition, Taiwan plays a fundamental role in the supply and value chain of the American industry, specifically in the race for the semiconductor market, fundamental for technological development. TSMC, short for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is the largest chip manufacturer in the world, with a global market share of 54%, while the Also Taiwanese UMC comprises only 7%. Voices from the US political establishment have proposed destroying its facilities in the event that China exercises military control of the island.

The most recent works of Misión Verdad in this regard can be consulted here:

The latest pro-Taiwan steps by the US that fuel the conflict with China
The US is (no longer so) quietly arming Taiwan
How China is preparing for an escalation in Taiwan
MILITARIZATION OF DIPLOMACY: ESSEQUIBO CASE
The Global North continues to search for oil and Venezuelan territory is in its sights. About 10 years ago, the oil company ExxonMobil activated an oil and gas extraction plan in the territorial waters of Essequibo, a geographical space in dispute between Venezuela and Guyana as a result of the imperial dispossession of the United Kingdom during the 19th century.

Venezuela has responded to the Guyanese claim, lacking legal and historical support, demanding dialogue and bilateral agreements stipulated in the so-called Geneva Agreement of 1966. However, acting as a subsidiary of the transnational oil company and supported by the United States, Guyana has resorted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after the last two secretaries general of the UN referred the dispute to that international court without take into account the endorsement of the Venezuelan side.

Between 2015 and 2016, the Venezuelan government denounced the so-called "operation pincers" with which the United States, through Colombia and Guyana, would provoke a military conflict against Venezuela that would facilitate its subsequent intervention.

In this framework, the United States Southern Command has arranged to include the neighboring country in its military maneuvers known as "Tradewinds", in the Caribbean Sea, since 2015, just when ExxonMobil began to illegally explore the deposits and sign contracts with Georgetown.

The US military arm is the one that manages diplomatic relations with increasing prominence; This is demonstrated by the face-to-face and discursive belligerence of his boss, General Laura Richardson. It was this official who received and introduced the new American ambassador in Georgetown, Nicole Theriot.

The most recent version of "Tradewinds" It was attended by 21 countries, including three European nations (France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom). They gathered in Guyana for the second time since they took place to carry out various activities on land, air, sea and cyberspace, distributed in different locations in the country, many of them along the Essequibo River.


Guyana illegally granted concessions to ExxonMobil in territorial maritime space disputed with Venezuela (Photo: El Universal)

Also this year, as a sign that his diplomacy is always linked to the conflictive imprint, Secretary Blinken visited Guyana and discussed energy investment issues for its companies and territorial security. There was already a precedent of interference dressed as diplomacy: in 2019 the Lima Group, a group of countries aligned with the regime change operation against Venezuela directed from the United States, issued a statement a>. of the signatories recanting recognizing the supposed Guyanese sovereignty over the territory of Essequibo. This led to notes of protest from the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against the signatory states of the statement and led to the majority

After the overwhelmingly positive result of the consultative referendum on December 3, the Venezuelan State decided to take the first actions to protect Guayana Esequiba. President Nicolás Maduro ordered state companies to explore and exploit oil and minerals in the area, which prompted the President of Guyana, Irfaan Ali, to say who assumed the fact as hostility.

The war scenario is designed by the United States. The Organization of American States (OAS), the spearhead for interventions and interference, has expressed itself around the dispute, supporting Guyana, what it seeks mobilize the focus towards what the ICJ rules, whose decisions are known to be biased towards the Global North, and recognized if they are harmed.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/lo ... s-por-eeuu

[blindpig]

Ex-Colonel Calls CEOs of Defense Contractors Predatory Capitalists and Arch-Criminals of Empire at War Crimes Tribunal
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - December 20, 2023 1


Colonel Larry Wilkerson [Source: wikipedia.org]

Born in Gaffney, South Carolina, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson achieved the rank of full Colonel during a distinguished 31-year career in the U.S. Army from 1966 to 1997 in which he served as an assistant to Colin Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Wilkerson later served as Powell’s chief of staff when he was U.S. Secretary of State, though he admitted he made a mistake in prepping Powell for a UN address on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War in which Powell falsely claimed that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).


Colonel Larry Wilkerson and Colin Powell. [Source: japan-forward.com]

Today, Wilkerson publicly denounces U.S. war-making in terms that recall Major General Smedley Butler who wrote upon his retirement from the military in 1935 that he had been a muscleman for Big Business, Wall Street and the Bankers and could have “given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”[1]


General Smedley Butler [Source: yesterdaysamerica.com]


[Source: merchantsofdeath.org]

In December, Wilkerson was one of the chief witnesses at a war crimes tribunal run by Brad Wolf, a former prosecutor from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and other peace activists who have charged the CEOs of top defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and General Atomics—with war crimes for producing weapons that have been used to kill civilians in illegal wars undertaken in violation of the Geneva Convention and UN Charter.

Wilkerson referred to the CEOs of these defense contractors as “arch-criminals of empire” and “predatory capitalists par excellence,” who profit from endless wars and buy off members of Congress.

Wilkerson explained that CEO pay is now 500-600 times that of the average floor worker and that the CEOs of the major defense contractors funnel their money into the chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and members of those committees who vote on huge military budgets, which normally exceed even the President’s requests.


[Source: politicalcartoons.com]

When Wilkerson worked for Colin Powell in the early 1990s, he attended a meeting with the CEOs of major defense contractors who correctly predicted that six or seven corporations were poised to monopolize the defense industry.

The result of this monopolization, Wilkerson said, is that we are now increasingly getting “crummy products at a very high price.” Notorious for its high cost overruns and underperformance, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, is a prime example. Wilkerson called it a “pig in a poke” that simply does not do what it is supposed to do.


Lockheed Martin F-35: an overpriced lemon. [Source: taskandpurpose.com]

A key part of the problem, according to Wilkerson, is the lack of a competitive bidding process for major weapons systems and the revolving door in which former Pentagon and other government officials go to work directly for defense contractors, ensuring that these corporations get huge contracts without being held accountable when they produce shoddy products.

Though not one of the defendants at the tribunal, Wilkerson said that ExxonMobil is among the predatory capitalist corporations that help fuel the U.S. war machine by supplying its oil and is gouging the world with the Ukraine War, which has given it windfall profits.

Another defendant could be Halliburton, the oil services company run for a period by Dick Cheney, which made $44 billion after the outbreak of the Iraq War.


[Source: blogs.ubc.ca]

Wilkerson said that the U.S. today displays many features of a “traditional empire” since it has over 700 overseas military bases.

When U.S. leaders talk of an international rules-based order, they really mean an imperial order that follows U.S. rules and dictates.

Like all other empires, the U.S. routinely violates international law, carrying out drone strikes and bombings in countries with which it is not legally at war, and killing tens of thousands of civilians with impunity, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or elsewhere.

The lawlessness of the U.S. empire was on vivid display in Iraq where, Wilkerson said, $30 billion intended to administer the U.S. occupation disappeared.

Favored Iraqi politicians like Ahmed Chalabi became millionaires overnight, while little money was utilized for its intended purpose—reconstruction.


Ahmed Chalabi [Source: blog.voanews.com]

Barbara Bodine, who was appointed by the U.S. occupying authority as “Mayor” of Baghdad after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, found no working telephones and that all government ministries, except the oil industry characteristically, were destroyed.


Barbara Bodine [Source: news.bbc.co.uk]

Wilkerson, who was by then working for the State Department, said that his budget director came into his office one day to tell him of the disappearance of the $30 billion and said that we are all going to jail, though nothing ever happened to them.

Wilkerson says that the real purpose of the Iraq War was to get oil at a discounted price to Israel, the leading predatory capitalist state in the world next to the U.S.

According to Wilkerson, “once you become an empire, your whole focus as a society becomes on maintaining that empire.”

The tentacles of the so-called military-industrial-congressional complex have sadly extended to institutions of higher education, which are becoming more militarized and integrated into the national security establishment.

“Just look at my own school, the College of William & Mary,” Wilkerson, who teaches there, said. “It is getting enormous amounts of money from the Department of Defense and appointed former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as its Chancellor, resulting in an expanded CIA presence on campus and expanded efforts at CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] recruitment.”


Robert Gates giving address as Chancellor of the College of William & Mary. [Source: wm.edu]

The hold of the military over society, according to Wilkerson, is helping to accelerate a trend toward domestic authoritarianism, and raising the prospect of nuclear war as weapons makers push for a new nuclear arms race.

Wilkerson’s testimony helps to make the case for the prosecution in Wolf’s tribunal, which aims to hold the “merchants of death” accountable for their crimes.

Wilkerson said that confronting the U.S. empire was like going up against Darth Vader but that, if the American public were better informed, then a genuine revolution could one day come about.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/1 ... -tribunal/

******

Transnational Corporations Provoke a Single Scream of Horror that Runs through the Vertebrae of the World: The Fifty-First Newsletter (2023)

DECEMBER 21, 2023


Quentin Matsys (The Netherlands), The Tax Collectors, c. 1525–1530.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Within the United Nations, there is a little-known debate about the status of global tax regulation. In August 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a draft document called ‘Promotion of Inclusive and Effective International Tax Cooperation at the United Nations’. This document comes out of a long debate led by the Global South about the unregulated behaviour of transnational corporations (especially the ways in which they avoid taxation) and about the fact that discussions regarding regulations have been dominated by Global North countries (notably those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, an intergovernmental platform largely made up of the richest countries in the world). In October of last year, the government of Nigeria spearheaded a resolution in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) that advocated for an international tax cooperation treaty and proposed that the UN take over jurisdiction of the debate about tax regulation. In December 2022, the UNGA passed the resolution, which asked Guterres to move forward with a report on the topic and develop a new international tax agenda.

Guterres’s August 2023 report affirmed the need for an ‘inclusive and effective’ tax treaty, arguing that the two-pillar solution laid out in the OECD and G20’s Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting is insufficient. The second pillar in this solution discusses the development of a global minimum effective tax on ‘excess profits’. However, this tax would be levied on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, which would open the entire process to chaos. Furthermore, even though the OECD-G20 policy has been developed by a minority of countries, it is intended to become the global norm for all countries. Even when the OECD and G20 ask for inputs from other countries, Guterres writes, ‘many of those countries find that there are significant barriers to meaningful engagement in agenda-setting and decision making’. This, Guterres said, is unjust. The UN should be the site where a new international taxation treaty is created – not a site for arbitrary bodies such as the OECD and the G20 to impose their agendas.


Arturo Rivera (Mexico), El Encuentro (‘The Meeting’), 2016.

To be fair, the OECD has developed a number of important proposals, including a global tax deal in 2021 that was agreed upon by 136 countries. However, due to pressure from transnational corporations (and the United States government), the implementation of this agreement was delayed until 2026. Nonetheless, leaks from illicit tax havens (such as the Paradise Papers, beginning in 2017, and the Luxembourg Leaks, beginning in 2014) brought the issue of regulating of financial flows to the fore, pressuring the OECD and the G20 to act on its promises. An outcome statement from the OECD in July 2023 put the issue back on the table, with the two-pillar tax regime coming into effect in 2024. This regime institutes a global tax of at least 15% on transnational corporations’ profits that exceed €750 million in each jurisdiction. Even here, the regulations offer transnational corporations a safe harbour until June 2028 through practices such as a simplified effective tax rate, a routine profits test, and a de minimis test – all instruments that require some accounting training to properly understand. In other words, the system designed to regulate transnational corporations merely creates business opportunities for global accounting firms that help these companies continue to shield their profits. In 2022, the main four accounting firms earned between $34 and $60 billion each in revenues, and Deloitte alone earned $64.9 billion in 2023 (a 9.3% increase since last year).

The Tax Justice Network’s annual report, published in July 2023, noted that the entire debate over taxes ‘boils down to one number: $4.8 trillion. That is how much tax we estimate wealthy corporations and individuals will avoid and evade over the next decade under the current direction of OECD tax leadership’. The data shows that ‘higher income countries lose the greatest amounts of revenue in absolute terms and also that they are responsible for the greatest share of the problem, globally’. The top ten contributors to global tax theft are, in descending order, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia, Luxembourg, Bermuda, the United States, Singapore, Ireland, and Hong Kong (it is worth noting that both the Cayman Islands and Bermuda are British territories). Lower income countries, however, ‘incur the most intense losses, losing by far the greatest share of their current tax revenues or public spending needs’. For instance, as the OECD report Tax Transparency in Africa 2023 shows, the continent loses up to $88 billion each year due to illicit financial flows. In its report, the Tax Justice Network issued a clarion call:

Countries have a choice to make: forfeit the money now, and with it our future, to the wealthiest handful of people in the world, or claim it, and with it a future where the power of the wealthiest corporations and billionaires, like the kings and barons before them, is reined in by the march of democracy. A future where tax is our most powerful tool for addressing the challenges our societies face and for building a fairer, greener, and more inclusive world.


Wifredo Lam (Cuba), El Tercer Mundo, 1965–1966.

In 1975, the United Nations established the Information and Research Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC). Two interconnected events led to its inception: first, the UNGA’s passage of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974, and second, the coup against the Popular Unity government of Chilean President Salvador Allende in September 1973. By 1972, Allende had taken leadership of the process to create the NIEO to allow countries such as Chile sovereignty over their raw materials. Allende spoke forcefully on these issues at the UNCTAD III meeting in Santiago in April 1972 and at the UNGA in December 1972 (which we discuss in more depth in our dossier The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973). The coup against Allende strengthened the will in the Third World to oversee and regulate transnational corporations such as the former telecommunications giant International Telegraph and Telephone Company (ITT) and copper firm Anaconda, both of which played a decisive role in the coup in Chile. The UNCTC was, therefore, the child of both the NIEO and the coup.

The UNCTC’s mission was straightforward: build an information system about the activities of transnational corporations, create technical assistance programmes that help Third World governments negotiate with these firms, and establish a code of conduct that these firms would need to abide by with respect to their international activities. The UNCTC, with thirty-three employees, did not begin its work until 1977. From the start, it found itself under pressure levied by the International Chamber of Commerce as well as various US-based think tanks, which lobbied the US government to prevent it from functioning.

Nonetheless, in its fifteen years of existence, UNCTC staff produced 265 documents that covered areas such as bilateral investment treaties and the social impact of transnational corporations. The UNCTC’s work was slowly inching toward creating a code of conduct for transnational firms, which would have hampered the ability of these firms to create a system of financial plunder through illicit financial flows (including transfer pricing and remittance of profits). In 1987, the UNGA urged the UNCTC to finalise the code of conduct and hold a special session to discuss the code.

That same year, the Heritage Foundation, based in the US, argued that the UNCTC had a ‘deliberate anti-West and anti-free enterprise motive’. In March 1991, the US State Department sent a démarche to its embassies to lobby against the code of conduct, which it saw as a ‘relic of another era, when foreign direct investment was looked upon with considerable concern’. The session to finalise the code of conduct never took place. The US pushed the incoming UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to abolish the UNCTC, which he did as part of a broader UN reform agenda. This was the sunset of tax regulation. When the OECD picked up the mantle, it did so almost to ensure that a patina of liberalism would remain in place while transnational corporations operated in a largely lawless global environment.



In 1976, the radical Peruvian poet Magda Portal (1900–1989) wrote ‘A Poem for Ernesto Cardenal’ (a Nicaraguan poet). The poem acknowledged that inequality and misery had been in our towns for centuries, but that what the ‘transnational corporations and their henchmen’ are doing is worse. As she wrote:

On this side of America, you can feel the nauseating and toxic breath of those who only want our mines, our oil, our gold, and our food.
…
Never was more torment spread over the sleepless earth.
It was not more execrable to continue living without shouting at the top of
our lungs in a howl, the protest, the rejection, the demand for
justice. To whom?

How can we continue living like this on a daily basis,
ruminating on food, loving and enjoying life when
hundreds of thousands of condemned people on
Earth are drowning in their own blood? And in Black Africa, with its apartheid
and its Sowetos, and in Namibia and Rhodesia, and in Asia,
in Lebanon and in Northern Ireland, on the rack
of the executed? Can we continue living like this
when a single scream of horror runs through
the vertebrae of the world?

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... egulation/

******

World Bank Enables Private Capture of Profits, Public Resources
Posted on December 20, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Even as geopolitical crises eat up the news, there are plenty of new chapters in ongoing struggles that also merit attention. One big one is the way developing countries are serially abused by Western institutions, famously the IMF and the World Bank, but there are plenty of others. As you can see here, the World Bank continues to sell the snake oil of private financing of public and “sustainable” development. The World Bank acts as if it genuinely believes that what is good for private investors will of course be good for citizens as large in poor and seldom powerful countries.

A colleague at McKinsey, whose father had been chairman of Aramco, went to the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation to set up capital markets in emerging economies. Top development economist Dani Rodrik has argued that neither open trade nor open financial markets are good for young economies. They need restrictions to protect infant industries and let them get tough enough to compete abroad, and they also need particularly to discourage if possible the in and out flux of destabilizing hot money. But that sort of thing never seemed to occur to the true believers at the IFC.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, former UN Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development. Originally published at Jomo’s website

The World Bank insists commercial finance is necessary for achieving economic recovery and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but does little to ensure profit-hungry commercial finance serves the public interest.

By failing to address pressing challenges within their purview, the second-ever Bretton Woods institutions’ (BWIs) annual meetings on the African continent, in Marrakech in October 2023, set the developing world even further back.

The International Monetary and Financial Committee, which oversees the International Monetary Fund (IMF), could not agree, by consensus, on the usual end-of-meeting ministerial communique for ‘geopolitical’ reasons. The Development Committee, which governs the World Bank Group, fared little better.

New World Bank Playbook

Little was achieved on crucial outstanding issues of governance reform and sovereign debt. Implicitly acknowledging past failure, World Bank Governors endorsed a “new vision to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet”.

After all, even the World Bank now acknowledges recent increases in global poverty have been the worst since the Second World War as economic stagnation, debt distress and inflation spread across the developing world.

The Bank’s new Evolution Roadmap proposes a just energy transition plan to mobilise private capital to scale up, secure and deploy climate finance. This is mainly for mitigation, rather than adaptation, let alone losses and damages.

The blueprint wants international financial institutions to help developing country governments de-risk private investments. For Muchhala, this reflects “the failure of the Bank’s wealthy shareholders to help ensure a more equitable multilateral system that is truly fit for purpose to meet the challenges of the 21st century”.

Blending Finance for Private Profits

The strategy proposes ‘de-risking’ foreign investment with various types of ‘blended finance’ – such as co-financing, loan guarantees, political risk insurance or public equity co-investments – as well as complementary legal and other reforms.

The Bank and its allies have been promoting ‘blended finance’ for development, the environment and global warming since before the 2008 global financial crisis. Their main recommendation has been to induce profit-seeking private capital to fill growing financing gaps.

Undoubtedly, most poor developing countries have limited public resources to make needed social and environmental, including climate investments. In such arrangements, public funds are used to ‘de-risk’ or otherwise subsidise commercial finance, ostensibly to serve public policy priorities.

However, private commercial involvement in public services and infrastructure is costly and risky for the public sector and citizens, by deploying limited public resources for private gain. Civil society and other critics have already expressed grave concerns about the new Roadmap.

The World Bank Group also set up a Private Sector Investment Lab to scale up private finance in developing economies. It claims to be creating a “business enabling environment that unleashes private financing”.

Billions to Trillions

The World Bank’s ‘billions to trillions’ slogan has been the pretext for privileging commercial finance as supposedly necessary to achieve the SDGs. But it has done little to ensure that such profit-seeking private investments will help achieve the SDGs or otherwise serve the public purpose.

The Bank does not consider that profit-seeking private investments expecting attractive returns may not serve the public interest and priorities. Nor do they necessarily support desirable transformations. Worse, their economic, social and environmental consequences may be for the worse.

The privatisation of previously public social services and infrastructure has worsened development and distribution. Unequal access to public services – increasingly linked to affordability and ability to pay – threatens hundreds of millions.

Such blended finance arrangements have also contributed to the debt explosion in the Global South – exacerbating, rather than alleviating developmental, environmental and humanitarian crises.

Debt Distress Spreading

Developing countries are in their worst-ever debt crises, with debt service obligations higher than ever before. Current debt-to-GDP ratios are more than twice those of LICs before the 1996 HIPCs’ debt relief came into effect, and even higher than for Latin American nations before the 1989 Brady plan.

Unlike the 1980s’ sovereign debt crises, market finance is now more important. Much more government debt from commercial sources involves relying on bond markets, rather than commercial bank borrowings.

With official credit much less important, commercial finance has become much more important compared to the 1980s. Unlike official creditors, most private creditors typically refuse to participate in debt restructuring negotiations, making resolution impossible.

Debt servicing costs equal the combined expenditure for education, health, social protection and climate. In Africa, debt servicing has risen by half. Debt service levels of the 139 World Bank borrowers are higher than during the heavily indebted poor countries’ (HIPCs) and Latin American debt crises peaks.

Debt service is absorbing 38% of budget revenue and 30% of spending on average by developing country governments. In Africa, the levels are much higher, at 54% of revenue and 40% of spending!

The BWIs’ joint debt sustainability framework insists debt-distressed economies must have lower debt-to-GDP ratios than other countries, limiting this LICs’ external ratio to 30% or 40%. This BWI policy effectively penalises the poorer and more vulnerable nations.

In 38 countries with over a billion people, loan conditionalities during 2020-22 resulted in regressive tax reforms and public spending cuts. Less expenditure has hit fuel or electricity subsidies and public wage bills, deepening economic stagnation.

Despite severe debt distress in many developing countries, no meaningful debt relief has been available for most. The most recent debt restructuring deals have left debt service levels averaging at least 48% of revenue over the next three to five years.

Debt distress limits government spending capacity, desperately needed to address social and environmental crises. Hence, overcoming stagnation and achieving the SDGs will require much more debt cancellation, relief and borrowing cost cuts.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/12 ... urces.html