tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88981414238730874782024-03-19T09:23:03.020+01:00AskWhy! BloggerAskWhy! blog focusing on politics, fairness and justice, paying attention to Rawls' Theory of Justice and Honderich's Principle of Humanity.AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.comBlogger306125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-9599068976858248642023-09-28T23:36:00.000+02:002023-09-28T23:43:30.521+02:00<p> <b>Extracts from Daniel J Levinson, in Bramson and Goethals, "War", 1968. </b><br /><br />Levinson refers to the people of the USA as "American", ignoring most of the nation of the continent of America ias if they do not exist. It was typical of thw time and remains so for many. In these extracts I try to remind people, at the risk of being tedious, that there are more than just US Americans on that huge continent, even though the Monroe Doctrine calls it the USA's "back yard" They are, in Levinson's terms mere "outgroups".<br /><br />Levinson extracts...<br /><br />»[US] American people tend to be relatively unsophisticated about and only partially involved in foreign policy issues.<br /><br />The [US] American nation as a symbol is glorified and idealised; it is regarded as superior to other nations in all important respects... <br />Like other forms of ethnocentrism, [nationalism] is based on a rigid and pervasive distinction between ingroups and outgroups. The primary ingroup in this case is the [US] American nation: all other nations are potential outgroups... <br />Other nations are seen as inferior, envious and threatening. At the worst, they are likely to attack us; at best, they seek alliances only to pursue their own selfish aims and to "play us for a sucker". Ethnocentric ideas about human nature rationalize a belief in the inevitability of war. <br />"Human nature being what it is and other races being what they are", so the reasoning goes, 'some nation is bound to attack us sooner or later'. Given this "jungle" conception of international relations, our best policy is to be militarily strongest of all nations so that no one will attack us.<br /><br />Perhaps the two main forms that [US} American nationalism has taken are isolationism and imperialism, though the two often go together. The guiding image of isolationism has been that of "Fortress America"; its aim is a nation which is militarily impregnable and culturally isolated. Imperialism on the other hand, is prepared to make foreign alliances and commitments, and it frequently uses internationalist terminology. Its aim, however, is the kind of "American Century" in which the development and and reconstruction of other nations can proceed only in terms set by us, for our supposed economic and strategic advantage. Isolationism and imperialism sometimes merge into a single approach as the lines of [US] American defence are conceived to to move outward into Europe and Asia as we extend support for all governments, whatever their character, in exchange for military support.<br /><br />Nationalists and internationalists show characteristic differences in ideology spheres apparently far removed from foreign policy and intergroup relations. Nationalism is associated, for example, with an autocratic orientation toward child-rearing, husband-wife relations, and other aspects of family life. Nationalists are inclined to conceive of the family in hierarchical terms. They regard the husband as properly dominant over the wife, the parents as strong authorities requiring obedience and respect above all from their children. They tend to be moralistic and disciplinarian in their child-rearing methods and to be guided by rigidly conventionalized definitions of masculinity and femininity.<br />Nationalism is associated with certain patterns of of religious ideology, notably those that may be characterised as fundamentalistic or conventionalistic. In these religious orientations God is regarded as a kind of power figure [father] who rewards the virtuous and punishes the sinful and who can be directly appealed to or ingratiated. Great emphasis is placed on the efficacy of ritual, and the precepts of ingroup religious authority are taken literally and unquestioningly.<br /><br />Nationalism appears most commonly within an autocratic approach to the social world. This approach embraces not only the domain of international relations but the individual's views concerning religion, family, politics, and other aspects of social life as well.<br /><br />The classic description of [US] American character by de Tocqueville, Bryce and others have brought out two sharply contrasting sides. On the one hand they, they find such traits as anxious conformism, emphasis on socially defined success, a tendency to escape into the crowd rather than look within, and emphasis of work over leisure, on quantity over quality, on varied activity rather than deep experience. [On the other hand are some equalitarian traits actually largely appearing within the overall authoritarian condition].«</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-47198607659753822152023-04-21T21:47:00.003+02:002023-04-21T22:32:28.052+02:00US Policy in the Middle East and the Rise of Terrorism<h1 style="text-align: left;"></h1><p>Professor Ramadani began his talk saying he would concentrate on two aspects of US policy in the Middle East:<br />1. the general political aspects<br />2. the human cost, which has fallen on people in the Middle East from Afganistan to Somalia.<br /><br />US propaganda escapes these consequences by portraying the events as a series of mistakes for which the US is not responsible because everyone knows they enter into these interventions for the very best of intentions. In fact, they are not mistakes, at all. They may not come out as they would ideally wish but they are nonetheless happy with the results because the true aims are to suit US monopoly capitalism and imperialism:<br />1. It suits US capitalism because it is the biggest of the world's suppliers of weapons<br />2. It suits US imperialism because it allows the US and its puppets to control resources that properly belong to other people.<br />The Western media mainly omit the true reasons or throw them in as disjointed snippets and soundbites which are deliberately confusing, hardly join together to reveal the proper story, and consequently amount to obfuscation and lying. Truth is lost in chaos. Confusion and the prevailing--but weakening--good will towards government and the media.<br /><br />US interventions go back decades, even to before the War (WWII). President Franklin D Roosevelt declared at that time that defence of Saudi Arabia was part of the defence of the USA--because of its oil! Post WWII, during the Cold War with communism, Saudi Arabia and then Israel became client states of the USA in the Middle East, so defence of both became "defence of the USA", and Saudi Arabia became important in the USA's fight against communism in the Middle East. To that end, US policy was to build a single Islamic state in the Middle East as a bulwark against communism. Thus Saudi Arabia was always influential in the USA's Middle Eastern policy but was always cagey and secretive about its role which has only become evident in public recently.<br /><br />Of course, the Arab Saudi princes have their own objectives which do not always tally with those of the US, so that the US finds it necessary to tick off the Saudi rulers from time to time, and local nationalist revolutions also gave the Saudi princes some leaway because the US was desperate to keep them under control, and consequently Saudi Arabia and even more so, Israel, found they had increasing independence and even power over the US.<br /><br />Public opinion in the USA prevented the launching of anti-nationalist actions at the drop of a hat, and so the great imperial power had to rely increasingly on its client states. Yet with the collapse of communism and particularly the USSR, the USA remained the world's only super power, and some in the US hoped for a "peace dividend". But the military industrial complex in the US would hear nothing of it. US rulers sought to flex its muscles on the world stage.<br /><br />Contrary to agreements with the USSR, which abandoned the Warsaw military pact between the communist countries, the US expanded its own Western military pact, NATO, to incorporate many of the former communist countries, right up to the borders of Russia. Among the Washington political elite, the neocons formulated the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) as its historical opportunity for imperial domination of the whole world, including military dominance and technological dominance. Then came the aggressive administration of G W Bush, which used the tragedy of 9/11 to launch the war to dominate Afghanistan because of its strategic position in central Asia and its valuable mineral resources.<br /><br />Having set the historic scene, the speaker showed the first of several illustrative videos, first of retired US general Wesley Clark, dated to 2 March, 2007. The video filmed by the US public affairs TV channel, Democracy Now, proved that the US planned to attack 7 countries in the Middle East in 5 years, ending with the conquest of Iran. The trouble about Iran, besides its geographical position, is its independent stance vis-à-vis the US, its revolution of 1979 having kicked out the US puppet king, the Shah of Iran. Consequently, the US foreign agencies like the CIA and others have fomented domestic troubles, ethnic problems and most recently hatred across the West because of the unsupported allegations, from Israel among others, that the Iranians are trying to build nuclear weapons.<br /><br />The largely neocon administration of G W Bush launched the PNAC with its attack on Iraq, supposedly for its involvement in the 9/11 atrocity, despite knowing that Iraq was not involved but that the Saudis were very much so. A CNN video of the US "shock and awe" murderous bombing of the 5 or 6 million population of Baghdad followed, by way of illustrating the continuing of the conquest project by deliberate paralysis of the people by military terror, and to impress the world by the irresistible might of US power.<br /><br />Though nominally long over, the war still goes on, not only in the multiply sectarian strife between many different factions including the Daesh (ISIS), financed and empowered largely from Saudi Arabia, but also in the many deaths resulting from the disruption to such essential services as electricity and water supplies, and the deaths still occurring from the callous use by the US of depleted uranium weapons leaving behind radioactive residues with very long half lives. The stories spread in the media that the war was quickly and almost painlessly ended was simply false propaganda--misinformation!<br /><br />Capitalists cannot adequately take resistance to their colonial ambitions into account. It is a perpetual trait of imperialists that they underestimate or fail to accept the ability of oppressed people to resist their oppressors, and actually the US was bogged down in Iraq without remotely achieving the peace it supposedly desired. The US underestimated the determination of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan they had hoped to subdue and colonise easily.<br /><br />Of course the US would not give up, so took to the idea of financing a proxy war using regional powers as a replacement for their direct involvement. They subsidised local terrorism, or made use of their regional puppets like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel to act on their behalf. Western media made out that terrorism was a blowback against US policy in the Middle East but in fact the US was encouraging it so that they could perpetuate destructive wars against the local nations and their leaders whom the US wanted to subvert in pursuit of its Project for a New American Century. The notion had actually been used in the area initially when the US supported the growth of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, financed by the CIA and Saudi Arabia, to destabilise the Russian backed communist government there. They were to become the Taliban under the control of the Saudi prince, Osama Bin Laden, but the tactic worked because the Russians were forced to withdraw.<br /><br />Al Qaida was the mysterious name the US and its media used to hide the reality of the terrorists. It stood for all of them and any of them, according to circumstances, and capable therefore of hiding every US planned atrocity as well as those it disavowed, and became singularly useful after the Iraq war. Because the US could not decimate Iraq it turned to the old imperial stand by, divide and rule.<br /><br />Useful in this respect was the Saudi Arabian royal family and its preferred sect of Islam, Wahhabism, considered by most Moslems not to be Islamic at all because of its predilection for violence. This sadistic mid eighteenth century reactionary Islamic sect was a tool of the Saud family in its conquest of the Arabian peninsula, and subsequent acceptance by the imperialists of the West as the legitimate rulers of the country whence its name Saudi Arabia! Both the family and the Wahhabis remain brutal, the reason why both are happy to persist in chopping off heads--the Saudi kings annually chop off more heads than the better publicised ISIS terrorists whose brutality originates in the Wahhabi mores and traditions of the Saud family. Their brutality and greed are now being illustrated in their unwarranted attacks on the poverty stricken Yemenis, again pleasing their protectors in the USA.<br /><br />Western media propagate the idea that Islam itself is violent when the people of the Middle East subject to the supposed Islamic Caliphate, themselves largely Moslems, suffer far more than has the West through Wahhabi terrorist attacks. The ISIS terrorists and their foolish followers have regularly blown up mosques full of innocent worshippers and perhaps even more regularly markets frequented often by Shia Moslems whom Wahhabis particularly hate--and the Saud family too--the reason they hate the Iranians, something that suits the US Americans who also hate Iran and Iranians. It is another piece of suspicious evidence that after the Iraq war, the US caught the present leader of the Daesh, Baghdadi, but he was never handed over to the Iraqi government, but instead reappeared as a senior member of ISIS.<br /><br />In Syria, the intervention began in 2003 not 2011, the date of the supposed "peaceful" demonstration against Assad, when several of the Syrian police were assassinated. The previous 8 years had been spent by the agencies of the USA offering sabotage and generally disruptive activities--purporting to be for more democracy--in an attempt to destabilise the regime. Thus we arrived at the present situation, which, far from being a civil war between good terrorists simply wanting better democracy and reviled Assad supporters, is an attack on the Assad regime's secular state by US, Saudi and Turkish backed Wahhabi fanatics who would impose their own brand of extreme Islam if Assad and the Syrian people were to submit.<br /><br />In the Middle East generally and Syria particularly, because it was a religiously diverse country, whence the need for the state to be secular (as it is here in the UK), there were usually more than one religious sect but historically they did not fight each other. It is a tribute to the peaceful nature of Islam. Terroristic violence is new to the region.<br /><br />Two more illustrative videos were shown, one again of General Wesley Clark admitting that the US had the policy of recruiting zealots as local disruptive agents, and one of Vice President Biden admitting that the USA used local proxies, the Saudis and Turks. Biden emphasised that the USA did not supply money or weapons to the terrorists but the local countries did, but this was disingenuous because Turkey was a member of NATO and could hardly have gotten away with unilaterally defying the USA within this alliance. The US therefore approved of the Turkish actions. Moreover the centre of operations in Turkey was populated and controlled by Western and Turkish generals meaning the USA could not have been ignorant of what the Turks were doing.<br /><br />And, of course, besides the US NATO ally, Turkey, Saudi Arabia was supplying ISIS in Syria and Al Qaida in Iraq and the USA could not stop them. The remaining US Middle Eastern puppet, Israel, was also involved in supporting the terrorist groups in the Golan Heights, part of Syria in fact illegally occupied by Israel and even more illegally used militarily to help the bandit groups--Israeli tanks have been stationed in the Golan Heights--and Netanyahu allows terrorist wounded to be treated there, as two videos illustrated.<br /><br />A former Mossad chief claimed that the problem Israel had with Syria was not the Syrians but foreign "elements", Hizbollah, the Iranians, and the Russians. The Israeli secret service man did not acknowledge that the terrorists were largely comprised of "foreign elements", mercenaries from a plethora of Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries. The Mossad chief claimed that Israel was indifferent to the ruler in Damascus as long as the Syrians were peaceful, and professed that Israel dealt with its enemies humanely! Lastly he boldly said Israel could do in Syria what it could not do elsewhere, presumably help Al Qaida style terrorists.<br /><br />The US feared, as Henry Kissinger said, the revival of an Iranian Shia empire across the Middle East. For the US ruling elite, a Sunni Caliphate of desperate head chopping Wahhabis was more manageable than a Shia power. ISIS allowed the US to maintain its presence across the whole of the region it claimed for the Caliphate. But the revival of the Iraqi army has allowed the Iraq state to fight back against ISIS in Iraq, and threaten to take back Mosul with Kurdish assistance.<br /><br />The terrorists there are losing and the US has been keen to ensure there is a corridor from Iraq into Syria to allow the terrorists to transfer from the lost cause of Iraq to one the US still hoped to win against Assad in Syria. Part of the continuing threat to Assad and Syria is the attention the media give to the Russian and Syrian fight to recover Eastern Aleppo, the quarter of the city still left in the hands of Al Qaida in Syria, otherwise known as Al Nusra. Three quarters of the city have already been recaptured by Syria and goes about its business as normally as possible even though it is continuously attacked by mortar shells, hell cannon fire and rockets from the bandits in the Eastern part of the city, something most people in the West are not aware of because it is rarely reported.<br /><br />In the West, the terrorist occupied part of the city is habitually called simply Aleppo as if the Syrians were bombing the whole city, yet the liberated three quarters has a population of 1.25 millions while it is estimated the East has a population of 200,000, so is far less even than a quarter in terms of population. The Syrians and Russians repeatedly refrain from attacking anyone leaving along the road reserved for escapers, but the terrorists keep doing their best to do the opposite by attacking anyone on the road and attempting to keep it shut.<br /><br />When the Russians and US Americans agreed a cease fire accepted by Assad,the terrorists refused to accept it, and attacked the peace convoy--which set out from Syrian occupied territory--when it was in terrorist occupied territory. The US supported the claim by the terroristic White Helmet (Western backed NGOs)--which curiously were granted $23 million to operate in the terrorist areas--that the convoy was hit by bombs from some Syrian night raider when there was no sign of bombs but plenty of evidence the trucks had been torched while they were laid up by the side of the road.<br /><br />The US, who, via John Kerry, had agreed the cease fire on condition that Al Nusra was separated from those the US claimed were not terrorists but freedom fighters then declared they could not separate the two elements, something the Syrians, Russians and even skeptics in the West had always said was impossible, mainly because there were no moderate terrorists, they all took their cues from the fanatic Wahhabis of Al Nusra. So, the USA spoiled their own plan by bombing quite callously Syrian soldiers who had resisted ISIS attacks on the desert town they were defending, killing over 60 of them and letting ISIS take the position they had long desired.<br /><br />The US said it was a sad mistake! Anyone who believes it is not being serious, any more than anyone imbued with western propaganda can believe that Bashar Al Assad is hated by his own people, yet can retain their loyalty and that of his soldiers throughout the 5 years of Western backed warfare against them. There were and still are some who would have preferred another leader to Assad, but no one now would wish to exchange him for any leader associated with the fanatical groups. Most Syrians are now united against US and Saudi Arabian backed madmen aiming for the Sunni monoculture in the Middle East desired by Western imperialism.<br /><br />The Israelis naturally back the USA. They are happy with divided Arab states in the Middle East so that they remain the main power there and the only nuclear one! Israeli leaders do whatever suits their and the US's permanent strategies and interests. Not everything can be planned in Washington or Tel Aviv, but objectives are always presented as being "humanitarian" even though they almost always end up being anything but. Of course little of this ever appears regularly in the main stream media, so it is difficult for anyone not ready to take a particular interest in it to get at the truth.<br /><br />Evidence of the US decision to train ISIS has been given by Lt General Michael Flynn of yet another US agency, the DIA, which was shown again as a video. It appears in a document (Nafeez Ahmed has reviewed it online) publicly available and heavily redacted but clear enough nonetheless, clearer anyway than Flynn's video statement, although he agreed it was tantamount to confessing. The object is to use humanitarian language to confuse opinion about what is willfully being done.<br /><br />More video evidence showed how truly callous US politicians are, including the famous instance of Madeleine Albright, a US representative to the UN who was also a Secretary of State, brutally admitting that the death of half a million Arab infants and children in Iraq under the Blair/Clinton sanctions regime was "a price worth paying"! It was a price that US Americans were not paying but that one imagines they would have had different views about if they were paying it. It is manifestly not a bit humanitarian to deprive a whole population of necessary medical supplies when they are already being starved of food.<br /><br />Questioned in Parliament, the UK Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, claimed impotence because the US had the power to do militarily what it liked--it spent more on war preparations (euphemistically called "defense") than the next 27 most powerful countries. So whatever the policy adopted by the British parliament, in foreign affairs it is obliged to be the US's puppet. And, of course, it does serve some interests of British business especially arms traders. The argument, at root, seems to be that the US would take revenge on the UK if it ever dared to defy the US in its policies of world intervention and its use of NATO for it.<br /><br />The speaker ended with some brief answers to questions from the audience but had to hurry off to catch his train back. The Frome Stop War Chair, Lara Bility, offered our thanks and mentioned the forthcoming meeting in November and this meeting ended with applause.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-50130304544014157192019-02-26T13:01:00.000+01:002019-02-27T01:13:39.920+01:00The Case Against the EU<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibE831vect9HETK-79VFTeNsmUmBx1B-pGoLLjOg1Y66fhoXY1KibHIf76tGqaUN3WUzzT8-n1DQj_B9zEwuGd23Z00VODsddS-fz6bJWQQutrlClnSUg6iHcW1lXKjtVm8bTmB5N8kI_T/s1600/bobcroweu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="552" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibE831vect9HETK-79VFTeNsmUmBx1B-pGoLLjOg1Y66fhoXY1KibHIf76tGqaUN3WUzzT8-n1DQj_B9zEwuGd23Z00VODsddS-fz6bJWQQutrlClnSUg6iHcW1lXKjtVm8bTmB5N8kI_T/s320/bobcroweu.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The response of the European Union to the 2007-9 global crisis lacked democratic solidarity, protection of individual rights and social renewal, exposing starkly the lack of proper democracy in the EU. Its forms of democracy were generally observed but not the content of them, and even the forms were sidelined by emergency measures.<br />
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National electorates had a free choice of whom they wanted in their parliaments but the parties thus elected had no freedom to choose their economic or social policies in response. Big business and big banks used an army of lobbyists to set the political agenda in Brussels and thus the equivalent policies by national governments. The electorate, especially the working class and those deprived of work, as well as small business owners, found themselves deprived of any voice in how they were governed—how they wanted to respond to the crisis.<br />
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Liberal democracy everywhere seemed blind to its own erosion, but the working class directly experienced the hardships of neoliberal EU policies which they had no means of influencing. The proletariat experience was that of a growing awareness of their loss of sovereignty, the issue that had motivated British trade unions, many in the Labour Party, and bold spokespeople like Tony Benn, to oppose the referendum of 1975 to Remain in the EEC—as the EU was then—after Heath had taken us in with no reference to the people's wishes.<br />
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Popular sovereignty is the working people and small business owners that rely on them having some influence on their living and working conditions. In ensuring the real participation of the lower class, liberal democracy has always been deficient and social democrats also failed to notice it. It has led to a growing sense of despair and powerlessness among poor workers who had seen their jobs and communities disappear. This was the cause of the mass protest visible in the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum. To ignore that protest will only exaggerate their despair, and lead to the response often seen in the last century, and increasingly today in the European Union—fascism.<br />
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The decline of democracy and loss of sovereignty indicate the shift the EU was intended to generate in favour of capital and against labour, leading to a escalating insecurity of employment, income, health care, social provision,pensions, etc. Meanwhile capitalists rapaciously appropriated national wealth, thereby vastly increasing inequality. These trends were happening throughout the capitalist world ever since Thatcher and Reagan had made greed and therefore neoliberalism respectable, but the EU with its "Social Chapter" conjured by Jacques Delors to persuade workers and particularly trade unions to get onside—and succeeding—rather than trying to counter inequality failed adequately to confront its own crises—like that of the Eurozone—continued to favour capital and worsened labour conditions, wages and social action needed to mitigate the problems.<br />
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On top of these systemic failures of the EU caused by its self inflicted legal obligations to favour competition, the migrant crisis—exacerbated by the US and Nato's military bullying of nations in the Middle East and North Africa—gave right wing, fascist and cryptofascist forces a perfect excuse to spread fear of a threat of alien hordes taking over white peoples' countries in Europe. Islam was again posited as the historic enemy of Christian Europe. It was an ideal excuse for the right to claim to be the guardians of national sovereignty as guardians of Christian Europe and claim popular leadership on all matter political.<br />
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Yet in the UK, for long a multicultural country with a national fondness for foreign food—Indian, Chinese, Italian—the fear was not of the Asian or African refugees so much as the impoverished workers from Eastern Europe entering because it was one of the EU's Four Freedoms, that of free movement, whereby these poor people were willing to undercut the wages and conditions of those working people here who were already suffering poverty and deprivation themselves. The aim of the free movement clauses of the four freedoms set in the concrete of EU law is precisely to boost capital at the expense of labour by the legal enforcement of the right of poor Poles, Rumanians and others to move to wealthier countries in Europe to undercut local wages and conditions, thereby cutting capital costs and maximising profits. <br />
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Those of us on the Left advocating leaving the EU do so because it cannot be a liberal--meaning free and fair—democracy when it is conditioned by immovable pro-capital, pro-competition laws built into the roots of its legal structures. It is "neoliberal", a modern economic ideology hearking back to Adam Smith's description of early capitalism in "The Wealth of Nations", but devoid of Smith's precautions. Smith considered Liberal to refer to the freedom of the bourgeoisie—the capitalist class—to do as it liked economically. Neoliberalism differs from it in that the precautions that Smith foresaw as needed in liberal capitalism—because it could be foolishly rapacious and potentially unstable, needing those limits to be placed upon it by the otherwise liberal state—could be bypassed and just applied in exceptional circumstances. Marx went much further in the next century, explaining that the intrinsic instability of capitalism meant that it could not be permanently managed. It was a sort of house of cards that could be built with care, and repaired to a degree, but ultimately would collapse. The periodic crises we find in capitalism are the equivalent of a few cards falling out of place and needing attention, but eventually there will be a terminal crisis leading to social revolution and socialism, often preceded by imperialist wars to grab the resources of other people like a burglar robbing a house when needing fresh funds.<br />
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These crises keep happening but so far the capitalist class, with the aid of its lackeys in government, have been able to avoid the collapse except in certain circumstances where the might of world capitalism us subsequently exerted by sanctions or military intervention to overthrow the revolution. So neoliberalism ultimately is a synonym for blatant capitalism and has little or nothing to do with what most people would understand as "liberal". Of course, the Liberal Party is capitalist as was New Labour, the remnants of which are still in the Parliamentary Labour Party and doing their utmost to stop us from leaving the EU.<br />
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Germany is the ascendant member of the EU, initially making use of its industrial leadership and favourable trade balance to become the EU's creditor nation, enabling it to force EU debtor countries to accept internally oppressive policies like market liberalism and austerity as conditions of its financial bail-outs—Greece being the archetypal example. Such adverse practices causing income maldistribution and weak demand, impacting on our high streets, is a consequence of the devotion of the EU to its capitalist and neoliberal bases in the treaties. Governments have to try to solve the crises in the interests of capital and competition at the expense of labour and the social policies that could mitigate the effects. Of course, the proper answer is to reject neoliberalism all together, as the Corbyn led Labour Party proposed to do, but for which an exit from the neoliberal restraints of the EU is essential. The social democratic attitude within the EU is precisely what is not needed—and the reason for its rapid decline—as exemplified by Martin Schulz, leader of the German Social Democratic Party in 2017 who argued that austerity could be stopped and national investment promoted by aiming to have a fully federal United States of Europe by 2025 (achieving what Hitler in Germany and his henchman Moseley in Britain wanted before the last war). As if to emphasise the EU attitude to democracy, he wanted to expel member states who opposed his plan. The UK could still be the first if leavers refuse to accept the establishment bullying and propagandising that has saturated the country in the three years since the decision was taken.<br />
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The social democratic left in the UK seem to hold similar views to Schulz, defending the EU in the name of socialist internationalism. They imagine the EU offers simply a neutral structure of union government and administration able to adopt and apply any policies based on their merits. The EU is, to repeat it yet again, structured in law to favour capital and obstruct labour. Inasmuch as this means industrial capital, it is the German industrial capitalists who benefit. The EU is beyond left wing reform. The notion that some campaign to co-ordinate left wing governments in enough countries simultaneously so that they can enforce a programme of anti-neoliberalism is utter fantasy, for even if it happened, restructuring the Eu would still be an almost insuperable problem. It is not in the least likely because the "democracy" of the EU is designed to make it essentially impossible. What is possible is to leave!<br />
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The democratic deficit of the EU is the reason for the popularity of the right wing authoritarian parties across Europe. The paradox is that the EU's own authoritarianism would suit them, if they were able to control the EU bureaucracy. To counter this menace the policies hitherto proposed by the Corbyn government need to be followed, and real socialist internationalism would be to use them to influence the left across Europe, whose own leaders have sold out to neoliberalism. These are policies to favour labour, strengthen democracy, regain sovereignty, and offer socialist rather than purely capitalist recipes for change could be spread from a successful implementation here.<br />
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In short the left must reject capitalist conformity and recapture its traditional radicalism. Not to do so leaves that field open to the bogus offerings of the ultra right and cryptofascists to gain even more strength from popular support, only to turn to their real masters, the capitalists and their militarists, once they believe the left has been out maneouvred and the working class have been conned.<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-4742523142928180262019-02-22T23:15:00.000+01:002019-02-22T23:15:49.433+01:00Standing by Venezuela and Why!Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, and their movement in Venezuela, are characterized as socialist demagogic authoritarians who have brought the country to economic disaster. Complaints about authoritarianism and the quashing of dissent ring hollow when the US just conducted a major sales deal with Saudi Arabia, a repressive monarchy that only months ago had one of its most prominent critics, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed in Turkey.<br />
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Never mind the “Lost Decade” of the 1980s or the extensive corruption scandals of the 1990s, creating the breakdown that made the rise of Chavez possible. Pre-Chavez Venezuela is presented as stable and prosperous, and while it was before the 1980s, most of its population lived in poverty like most capitalist countries in the underdeveloped world, while only a privileged few enjoyed the benefits of the country’s oil riches. Chavez’s cardinal crime was to direct those riches toward helping the poor, which even his critics admit he did.<br />
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The real victims here are the ordinary people of Venezuela. Whether Maduro goes or stays, the classes at war within the country will not be pacified, especially with the US stoking the fires until it gets the outcome it wants: a return to the plunder of Venezuelan resources to fuel US industries while most Venezuelans wallow in misery.<br />
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A Reuters news article on 1 February said that the US, Canada and several Latin American governments claim Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro “stole his second-term election” in May 2018. It’s worth recalling that, in Brazil, the election of fascist Jair Bolsonaro was recognized by the governments that now refuse to recognize Maduro, even though former Brazilian president Lula da Silva (who would have had a superb chance to win) was disqualified and imprisoned based on extremely dubious corruption allegations. Moreover, unlike Capriles and López, da Silva was not involved with several US-backed efforts to violently overthrow the government.<br />
<br />
The allegation Maduro stole the election doesn’t make sense. It is remarkable to see the Western media dismiss this election as “fraudulent”, without even attempting to show that it was “stolen” from Falcón. Perhaps that’s because it so clearly wasn’t stolen. Yet Trump and a new Iraq-style Coalition of the Willing have recognized an opposition legislator--Juan Guaidó--as Venezuela’s interim president. <br />
<br />
Guaidó didn’t even run in Venezuela’s May 2018 presidential election. In fact, shortly before the election, Guaidó was not even mentioned by the opposition-aligned pollster Datanálisis, the opposition-aligned pollster the international media has cited the most for nearly two decades, when it published approval ratings of various prominent opposition leaders. According to Venezuelan pollster Datanálisis before the election. Henri Falcón, a well known politician and former two-term governor of the Lara state (2008-2017), was tied with López for top stop in popularity among opposition leaders, and actually did run in the election (defying US threats against him). Falcón finished a very distant second in that election, over four million votes (47%) behind Maduro. Nobody has shown or even attempted to show that any votes, never mind millions of votes, were stolen from Falcón.<br />
<br />
In Venezuela’s electoral system, any amount of ballot stuffing is detectable in any contested election. That’s why, in 2012, Jimmy Carter said the electoral system was the best in the world. That soundness of the electoral system helps to explain the vitriol Falcón received from other Maduro opponents over his decision to run in the election. US officials threatened Falcón with sanctions if he ran. During the campaign, one of Falcón’s top advisors became exasperated enough to publicly ask the opposition party Voluntad Popular (Guaidó’s party) to “stop spreading lies” that a secret pact existed between Maduro and Falcón. Ballot stuffing aside, an election can be grossly unfair in other ways. Much was made about two prominent opposition candidates who were disqualified from running--Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles.<br />
<br />
Was Falcón denied access to media coverage during the election? No. He and his economic advisor, Francisco Rodríguez, travelled all over the country and appeared on Venezuela’s top private TV networks, where they lashed out at Maduro. In fact, Falcón launched his campaign with a 35-minute speech on Venezuelan state TV, in which he skewered Maduro as the “hunger candidate” who had turned the people into impoverished “slaves”.<br />
<br />
After Falcón lost, he then insisted on a new vote, despite having passionately urged people to vote because he had obtained electoral guarantees. The election was moved back by a month as demanded. His allegation was that the government had bribed voters at puntos rojos (tents set up near electoral centers which are used for exit polling). But there are gaping holes in that story:<br />
1. votes are secret in Venezuela, so offers of a chance at a prize or other inducements at these puntos rojos can, at best, increase turnout, but not the government’s share of the vote;<br />
2. there were four different groups of observers who monitored the election, and they concluded it was clean. Their reports are available;<br />
3. economic sanctions and threats by the US government were a massive attempt to sway the electorate--to send the message that voting for Maduro will bring intensified economic sanctions (which, in addition to being illegal, were already killing people). This US interference in Venezuela’s election makes a joke of the alleged Russian collusion with Trump in the 2016 presidential election that has received so much frenzied media attention.<br />
<br />
So why wasn’t Falcón "recognized" by Trump? What’s the argument for Trump anointing Guaidó? The US recognizes the 2015 national assembly election won by the opposition, as it would have recognized the 2018 presidential election had Falcón won. And part of article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution says that if the president “abandons” his post, the president of the national assembly takes over until new elections are held. Guaidó was very recently named the national assembly president. The constitutional argument that Trump and his accomplices have used to “recognize” Guaidó rests on the preposterous claim that Maduro has “abandoned” the presidency by soundly beating Falcón in the election. Caracas-based journalist Lucas Koerner took apart that argument in more detail. But, Maduro did not "abandon" the presidency by soundly beating Henri Falcón in a clean election that was marred, if anything, by murderous US interference. It’s also clear that Trump (and his Iraq-style "coalition of the willing" to oust Maduro) is not Venezuela’s Supreme Court.<br />
<br />
What about the Miami Herald‘s claim that Maduro “continues to reject international aid”? In November 2018, following a public appeal by Maduro, the UN did authorize emergency aid for Venezuela. It was even reported by Reuters (11/26/18), whose headlines have often broadcast the news agency’s contempt for Maduro’s government. It’s not unusual for Western media to ignore facts they have themselves reported when a major “propaganda blitz” by Washington is underway against a government. For example, it was generally reported accurately in 1998 that UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq ahead of air strikes ordered by Bill Clinton, not expelled by Iraq’s government. But by 2002, it became a staple of pro-war propaganda that Iraq had expelled weapons inspectors.<br />
<br />
And, incidentally, when a Venezuelan NGO requested aid from the UN-linked Global Fund in 2017, it was turned down. Setting aside how effective foreign aid is at all (the example of Haiti hardly makes a great case for it), it is supposed to be distributed based on relative need, not based on how badly the US government wants somebody overthrown. But the potential for “aid” to alleviate Venezuela’s crisis is negligible compared to the destructive impact of US economic sanctions. Near the end of Wyss’ article, he cited an estimate from the thoroughly demonized Venezuelan government that US sanctions have cost it $30 billion, with no time period specified for that estimate. <br />
<br />
The Miami Herald could have cited economists independent of the Maduro government on the impact of US sanctions—like US economist Mark Weisbrot, or the emphatically anti-Maduro Venezuelan economist, Francisco Rodríguez. National Security Advisor John Bolton announced that the US will freeze Venezuelan assets and block oil payments for Venezuelan oil imports to the US. This would not only be illegal, but would also be yet another crippling blow to the country, says co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)’s Mark Weisbrot<br />
<br />
Economist Francisco Rodriguez, who’s the economist who probably knows the Venezuelan economy better than anyone in the world-–he’s chief economist at Torino Capital, a Wall Street investment banking firm, and he had estimated that the economy would shrink 11 percent a year, but upped that to 26 per cent shrinkage of the economy this year, which is Great Depression levels. It would destroy what’s left of the economy, and it would kill a lot of people. The embargo has already killed many Venezuelans, because this is the source of dollars for the Venezuelan economy, and that’s what’s used to import medicines. You know, when when the government had money there were about $2 billion worth of medicines being imported, and the sanctions already took $6 billion out of oil production. And this would knock off about, again, the decision to recognize the parallel government would knock about half of their oil revenue off over the next year. So the numbers we’re talking about are enormous. They’re basically all the remaining imports that the country could have. So for sure that will kill a lot of people if they actually do it.<br />
<br />
It’s all illegal, of course. The sanctions that Trump imposed in August of 2017, or you can go back further to the Obama sanctions in March of 2015, the sanctions have always been illegal under the OAS Charter, under the UN Charter, under the treaties that the US has, various international conventions that the US is a party to. And also under US law, because the president has to state in order to impose these sanctions in the executive orders going back to 2015, both Obama and Trump, have had to say that, under our law, that Venezuela poses an unusual and extraordinary threat. To the national security of the United States, which everyone knows is false. And so on that basis it’s really not even legal under US law, because the president is stating something false in order to comply with the law.<br />
<br />
What can they do to without some help from other countries?--what can they do to make up for this kind of terrible blow to the economy? That’s the purpose of it. You know, for the past year or two, or more, there has been this narrative in the media that all of this is directed to pressure the Maduro government, the Venezuelan government, to do certain things. Now, the latest has been to hold new elections. Previously it was other demands.<br />
<br />
But this was never true. The purpose has always been to increase the suffering in Venezuela to the point where the government’s popularity falls so much that the military intervenes, or somehow, through violence, the government is overthrown. That’s the–that’s the actual strategy. And it’s, of course, become much clearer now.<br />
<br />
The international context is very important. It’s important for people to understand, because the media narrative is kind of a clash of civilizations narrative. On the one side you have this so-called authoritarian government in Venezuela, and you have China, and Russia, and Turkey recognizing the government. And then you have the so-called democratic countries. But the Latin American countries that are aligned with the US are almost all right-wing governments that are doing what the US wants.<br />
<br />
And in Europe it’s very interesting, too, because you have now Germany, and France, and the UK, and Spain all with this ultimatum, this eight-day ultimatum. And this was the result of one person, the prime minister of Spain, who some of the other countries, especially Germany, tend to follow on Latin America. Pedro Sanchez, who was opposed to the Trump sanctions, decided to go over to the Trump side. Who knows what the pressure was, or what they offered him.<br />
<br />
This is really kind of a coalition of the willing, as in the Iraq war. It’s not this clash of civilizations at all that’s presented in the media. And if you go back to 2013, you can really see this. Because in 2013, Maduro won the election, and there was absolutely no doubt about it whatsoever. No doubt about the vote count, no doubt about the election. And everyone in the world recognized it, except the United States. And at that time they had just the right-wing government of Spain and the head of the OAS. And then those two peeled off, and it was only the US by itself saying this election was not valid and the president was not legitimate. And that–and then they had to give in.<br />
<br />
So you see, even when the whole world recognized the election, the US tried to side with the opposition, who was in the streets with violent protests, trying to topple the government even though there were no doubts about the election whatsoever. So this is just–this shows you how fake the whole thing really is. It has nothing to do with elections, or democracy, or this clash of civilizations that they’re creating. It’s just about the same regime change that they’ve been trying to do for 17 years.<br />
<br />
Illegal US sanctions were first imposed in 2015 under a fraudulent “state of emergency” declared by Obama, and subsequently extended by Trump. The revenue lost to Venezuela’s government due to US economic sanctions since August 2017, when the impact became very easy to quantify, is by now well over $6 billion. That’s enormous in an economy that was only able to import about $11 billion of goods in 2018, and needs about $2 billion per year in medicines. Trump’s “recognition” of Guaidó as “interim president” was the pretext for making the already devastating sanctions much worse. Last month, Francisco Rodríguez revised his projection for the change in Venezuela’s real GDP in 2019, from an 11 percent contraction to 26 percent, after the intensified sanctions were announced.<br />
<br />
The $20 million in US “aid” that the Miami Herald is outraged Maduro won’t let in is a rounding error compared to the billions already lost from Trump’s sanctions. Former US Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield, who pressed for more sanctions on Venezuela, dispensed with the standard “humanitarian” cover that US officials have offered for them:<br />
“And if we can do something that will bring that end quicker, we probably should do it, but we should do it understanding that it’s going to have an impact on millions and millions of people who are already having great difficulty finding enough to eat, getting themselves cured when they get sick, or finding clothes to put on their children before they go off to school. We don’t get to do this and pretend as though it has no impact there. We have to make the hard decision—the desired outcome justifies this fairly severe punishment." (Intercept, 2/10/19)<br />
<br />
How does this gruesome candor get missed by reporters, and go unreported? Speaking of “severe punishment”, if the names John Bolton and Elliott Abrams don’t immediately call to mind the punishment they should be receiving for crimes against humanity, it illustrates how well the Western propaganda system functions. Bolton, a prime facilitator of the Iraq War, recently suggested that Maduro could be sent to a US-run torture camp in Cuba. Abrams played a key role in keeping US support flowing to mass murderers and torturers in Central America during the 1980s. Also significant that Abrams, brought in by Trump to help oust Maduro, used “humanitarian aid” as cover to supply weapons to the US-backed Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.<br />
<br />
In the Miami Herald, the use of US “aid” for military purposes is presented as another allegation made by the vilified Venezuelan president:<br />
“Maduro has repeatedly said the aid is cover for a military invasion and has ordered his armed forces not to let it in, even as food and medicine shortages sweep the country.”<br />
<br />
Calling for international aid and being democratically elected will do as little to protect Maduro’s government from US aggression as being disarmed of WMD did to prevent Iraq from being invaded—-unless there is much more pushback from the US public against a lethal propaganda system.<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-53887355381940282422018-01-07T00:12:00.000+01:002018-01-07T00:33:32.885+01:00Are we primarily egalitarian or authoritarian?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39tmrwfrJytIO1Dobzd8_p74ay5DTgkDtjBBcrdREooHmflK__M6fYOgit9_d0DcNxfEi7Gb63GBRShlHZK0CetP2pOnx9wwqCGz5Si_00pLRGmv_AaM6mYtpNX9AQnOdaaFkbWYjXrTk/s1600/thegame915.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="712" data-original-width="700" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39tmrwfrJytIO1Dobzd8_p74ay5DTgkDtjBBcrdREooHmflK__M6fYOgit9_d0DcNxfEi7Gb63GBRShlHZK0CetP2pOnx9wwqCGz5Si_00pLRGmv_AaM6mYtpNX9AQnOdaaFkbWYjXrTk/s640/thegame915.png" width="627" /></a></div>
In 1987, Harvard primatologist, Richard Wrangham, studying how human behaviour relates to that of our closest primate relatives, noticed that as humans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees share a recent ancestor and more than 98 percent of their genes, any behaviours these four species of apes shared today must also have been present in their common predecessor about seven million years ago--their“Common Ancestor”.<br />
<br />
Wrangham identified social behaviour shared by the four species like social life and attacking others of the same species. But Bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas had hierarchical societies, with often aggressive dominant alpha males. Yet human hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, apparently lacking innate hierarchical communities and any inclination to dominating leaders. Before 10,000 years ago, only essentially egalitarian human societies seemed to have existed on our planet. Human communities were tiny (no more than about 150) with no strong leaders at all. As genomes take at least a thousand generations to change our nature significantly, most human genes have evolved from the genetic makeup of people living in these small Paleolithic bands. Yet today, not only are there fairly egalitarian human societies in the world, but also some people are ruled by despots. Somehow, primitive communism degenerated into a more hierarchical and unequal world.<br />
<br />
How could evolution explain these curious and contradictory facts? Our primate relatives are hierarchical but our own ancestors were not, but we seem to have reverted at least partially in recent history. Discoveries in the fields of anthropology and primatology resolved the puzzle because all apes actually resent authority and being bossed around, and will form coalitions to resist it.<br />
<br />
Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California, suggested that though we may have a deeply rooted instinct to exert power over others, we also have what may be an equally strong aversion to abuses of power, along with some natural tendencies to punish people who commit those abuses.<br />
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Boehm surveyed 48 small, nonliterate societies spread across the globe, ranging from small hunting and gathering bands to more sedentary tribes, to see exactly how egalitarian they were, and why. He suggested that with the advent of anatomically modern humans who continued to live in small groups and had not yet domesticated plants and animals (hunter-gatherers), all human societies most likely practised egalitarianism and most of the time successfully--they maintained political parity among adults. Boehm identified the following mechanisms expressing ambivalence towards leaders, anticipation of domination, and countering the dominance hierarchy:<br />
• Public Opinion<br />
• Criticism and Ridicule<br />
• Disobedience<br />
• Extreme Sanctions.<br />
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Males who turned into selfish bullies, or even just tried to boss others around were treated brutally, as moral deviants. Because all hunter-gatherers faced bullies or self-aggrandizing political upstarts, and faced them in spite of their strong egalitarianism, if they had not so diligently worked against inequality, they would have turned hierarchical. Boehm wrote:<br />
"As long as followers remain vigilantly egalitarian because they understand the nature of domination and leaders remain cognizant of this ambivalence-based vigilance, deliberate control of leaders may remain for the most part highly routinized and ethnographically unobvious."<br />
<br />
So, an urge to dominate is still present in human nature, meaning that to stay egalitarian hunter-gatherers use ostracism, shaming, rejection by the group and sometimes murder to hold down power-hungry upstarts. In other words, by nature today’s hunter-gatherers still incline towards dominating one another, just like the other three species of living apes, and therefore fall in line with other primates, the Common Ancestor and humans all down the evolutionary line. Why then are these primate species with the common ancestor motivated to share power equally though apparently inclined to domination? Boehm's postulate is simply that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong. It is because the instinct to dominate is accompanied by a natural resentment to submitting to domination.<br />
<br />
In a contemporary but undeveloped human hunting band, the upstarts who attempt to dominate the others are dealt with harshly. But both wild and captive male chimpanzees that have been studied extensively are extremely ambitious politically, and will form political coalitions to try to unseat the alpha male. Large coalitions can form in the wild to challenge domineering former alphas and run them out of the community.<br />
<br />
Evidence from the other species of apes does not support the notion of inevitably dictatorial hierarchies. A phylogenetic comparison among macaques suggests that despotic dominance styles were likely to have evolved from egalitarian dominance styles. Moreover being the "top dog" is not necessarily enviable. Alpha males suffer from their position. They commonly have higher metabolic rates and higher levels of stress hormones. In wild male baboons, the alpha male experiences high levels of both testosterone and glucocorticoid, causing high-ranking males higher stress levels, reducing health, fitness and life. These two hormones have immunosuppressant activity, permitting increased parasitic infestation and infection risks, thereby lowering survival rates. So alpha males enjoy high rank for a shorter time and accompanied by poorer health from the stress of his position.<br />
<br />
Now the lowest ranking males in the hierarchy also have high stress levels from being everyone's "underdog", leaving the intermediate beta males most fit, with less stress yet some reproductive and feeding opportunities. It follows that a society in which all were at the same level has advantages in group fitness.<br />
<br />
The main worry of the alpha male is to be ousted by a revolution. A tactic of older, subordinate male savanna baboons is forming alliances to combat higher-ranking males to get reproductive access to females. These lowest ranking males would get no opportunity to copulate otherwise. A fight broke out in Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania between Pimu, the alpha male, and four of his underlings. They killed him.<br />
<br />
Captive gorillas, like wild and captive chimpanzees, may attack a dominant silverback. But male bonobos do not form coalitions. They don’t need to. They don’t fight with neighbours, and they can’t really tell when a female is fertile, so there’s little reason to bicker over them. Instead males spend a lot of time with females with the hope that she will mate with them when the time is right.<br />
<br />
Two neighbouring troops of baboons had different group dynamics, one near a dump had plenty of food and were generally peaceful. The other lived further into the bush where food was scarcer, and the males were more competitive and aggressive. The aggressive troop would raid the dumps scaring off the local baboons while they fed, but were less picky in what to eat. On one occasion they gorged on some discarded food that was tainted, and that the local primates had learned not to eat. The consequence was that the raiding party of aggressive males all died. But now, with the most aggressive males gone, there were far fewer confrontations among the remaining males yielding a more peaceful culture which lasted more than a decade. Robert Sapolsky said:<br />
“If that can occur in a troop of baboons, you don't have a leg to stand on when claiming the inevitabilities and unchangeability of human societies.”<br />
<br />
Chimps often practice infanticide to get rid of rivals’ offspring and to hasten a female’s return to fertility, but this usually doesn’t happen in bonobos. Male bonobos are bigger than the females and have bigger teeth, but unlike male chimps they don’t boss the females around. Bonobos can form quite small female coalitions that nevertheless allow the females to challenge dominant males. Researchers saw an alpha male bonobo, who was also the son of the dominant female, attacking a young female carrying an infant. The females present immediately came to the unfortunate's defence. The doubly privileged male was driven off and evicted from the band. So the females bond sufficiently to dominate the males, and even powerfully enough to overthrow a male hierarchy. Indeed, primatologist Frans de Waal’s studies with captive chimpanzees show that females, too, can band together to partially control their alphas.<br />
<br />
Because Boehm's postulate, common to the apes, seems to stretch back to the common ancestor some seven million years ago, the Common Ancestor must have disliked dominating behaviour, and joined coalitions to trim the power of its alphas or those ambitious to be alphas. Egalitarianism conditioned by punishment for unfair behaviour may allow altruistic traits to spread, as game theory models predict. Based on model simulations, egalitarian punishment may also have been a precondition for adapting tools as weapons. <br />
<br />
The extent of our social groups is wide--from quite egalitarian to quite despotic. In his book, "Hierarchy in the Forest", Boehm traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. He examines the group structures of hunter-gatherers, then tribal segmentation, and finally at present-day governments to see how these conflicting tendencies are reflected. Human history has rebuffed political thinkers like Thomas Hobbes who thought strong, authoritarian leaders necessary to rule unruly commoners.<br />
<br />
Humans became both anatomically and culturally modern at least 45,000 years ago, and the insistence in today's foraging bands on an egalitarian society is much more distant back. The egalitarian bands arrived at a largely implicit “social contract”, by which individuals yielded any desire to dominate so as to remain equal with other group members. And these hunter-gatherers cooperated effectively because their societies were small. Today, a large nation can aim to limit power and uphold a common justice, but it must take precautions against would-be dictators who will still try to usurp a power over everyone.<br />
<br />
The capitalist system is a slow but steady accumulation of power by a tiny minority of uber wealthy people. We are failing to counter the concentration of power and will either become subordinates or slaves, or society will have to be destroyed and rebuilt. We ought not to let either of these happen, but should demand an egalitarian world now!<br />
<br />
(This summary primarily indebted to the work of Christopher Boehm)<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-66500594455914799782017-12-17T00:06:00.000+01:002017-12-17T00:06:52.503+01:00The meaning of Brexit<br />
Brexit does not mean Brexit unless the UK is a sovereign state after leaving the EU. That cannot be the case if the UK government has been required to accept "full alignment" with the rules of the internal market and the customs union because of the Irish border. PM May claims that "full alignment" does not mean we have to accept EU rules and regulations but that we use our own ways of achieving alignment!<br />
<br />
Mutually agreed standards obviously helps trade between nations, and those states which choose to trade harmoniously with each other will agree whatever standards assist the process providing that they do not make difficulties elsewhere. The EU already has trade agreements with other countries without making acceptance of EU rules a condition.<br />
<br />
And free trade does not necessitate regulating trade union activities, worsening conditions and pay, pensions or redundancy provisions, nor obliging industries that are not involved in exporting to implement the same standards necessary for exporting to any particular country, including the EU. It is for our own government to set the standards that we want for our own people to be able to provide for their own dependents, without being beholden to foreign corporations or, indeed, our own!<br />
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It means the UK must not be regulated as a member of the single market, or as if it were such a member. It must be free to set its own policies for its own people and subject only to those people--the electorate. If we were to accept the so-called soft-Brexit of leaving the EU but remaining in the single market, our governments, of whatever hue, would be a hostage to decisions in Brussels by the EU bureaucrats and their corporate puppet masters.<br />
<br />
EU harmonisation of labour, bankruptcy, taxation, and corporations is a delight to big business for whom the system is designed. The so-called Social Chapter, much vaunted by left Remainers, has repeatedly been proven to be bogus, even by the ECJ on the occasions when it has been appealed to, and in practice in all those particularly southern European countries that are suffering at the hands of the EU.<br />
<br />
Moreover, although the emphasis os constantly on external trade and therefore all those businesses involved in it, it is the vastly larger number of small local businesses that will benefit most from not having to regulate their products to no purpose for them. They will, of course, be subject to whatever regulations an independent UK government imposes on businesses as a whole, but, free of the EU bureaucracy, the UK government could make appropriate provision for small non-exporting businesses should it wish to.<br />
<br />
Blair promised us we should not be subject to the idiocies of the CAP during the New Labour period, yielding up some of the rebate on the £350m a week membership bill for it, and got absolutely nothing for it from the EU! Out of the EU we would be liberated from it, and could distinguish properly between needy smallholders and wealthy lowland multi-acre ranches.<br />
<br />
As for foreign trade, given that we remained subject to EU control, what would be the incentive for external countries to trade with us when our regulatory framework was the same as that of the EU. They will think they might as well trade directly with the EU and so we might as well have remained a full member anyway.<br />
<br />
A soft Brexit might as well be a no Brexit if it means remaining a member of the single market and subject to its decisions and not our own. A hard Brexit has always simply meant Brexit, plain and simple, then the agreement between free civilised countries over how relations between them including trade will be managed. That the EU trades with lots of the world's countries without the need for common regulations about almost everything proves that the obstruction of these negotiations by the EU is their usual tactic of trying to force a referendum reversal, as it did in other cases like Ireland and Denmark. No one on the left should be fooled.<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-46689803127215146642017-10-06T23:06:00.000+02:002017-10-07T01:05:10.091+02:00The Political Threat of Today<p>The political threat of today is the attempt by the billionaire backed radical right to undo democracy, centrally in the USA, but world wide.<br />
</p><p>That something was happening began to be realised in the early 2010s. Extreme decisions were being made by some US elected officials:</p><ul><li>In Wisconsin in 2011, the newly elected governor, Scott Walker, submitted legislation to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights, by new rules decimating their membership.</li>
<li>In New Jersey Governor Chris Christie started vicious attacks on teachers who were left wiondering why.</li>
<li>Some other GOP-controlled state legislatures were cutting public education by legalising unregulated charter schools and offering tax subsidies for private education.</li>
<li>In 2011 and 2012, legislators in forty-one states introduced more than 180 bills, mostly aimed at low-income and minority, young and less mobile elderly voters, to suppress voter turnout. </li>
<li>Finally the Republicans aimed a massive campaign to defeat Obama’s Affordable Care Act.<br />
</p></li>
</ul><p>Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, “we are destroying our institutions”. What he and other, even conservative, critics never considered was that was the objective!<br />
</p><p>Well, some did. William Cronon, a University of Wisconsin historian and the incoming president of the American Historical Association, having looked into Wisconsin Governor Walker’s attack on trade union rights, declared:<br />
“What we’ve witnessed [is part of a] well-planned and well-coordinated ‘national’ campaign”.<br />
He suggested that others look into the funding and activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose members were not revealed to the public. Every year Republican legislators could draw on hundreds of “model laws” for them to introduce to their states. Such laws covered:</p><ul><li>attacks on labour unions</li>
<li>rewriting tax codes</li>
<li>reversing environmental protections</li>
<li>privatizing public services</li>
<li>acting against illegal immigrants.</li>
</ul><p>A fifth of them succeeded in being passed!<br />
</p><p>What was going on? Jane Mayer, a well known investigative journalist, in 2010 drew attention to those who had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a “war against Obama”. She wrote <cite>Dark Money</cite> a book revealing that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch (each worth $48.7 billion in February 2017, according to Forbes) were training operatives to staff supposedly independent but really connected institutions like the Cato institute. Rich right-wing donors led by the Koch brothers were supplying masses of untraceable money to groups and candidates intent on crippling unions, restricting voting, deregulating corporations, taxing the poor, and denying climate change all informed by the schools of trained operatives they had built. The current vice president, Mike Pence, is an example having been with many of these organizations over the years.<br />
</p><p>Historian, Nancy MacClean, extended Mayer’s discoveries and this year published a controversial book, <cite>Democracy in Chains</cite>, explaining them. George Monbiot wrote that the book was “the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century”. She found James McGill Buchanan to be the intellectual source of the threat to democracy. Charles Koch became interested in Buchanan’s work in the early 1970s when he called on his help to start the embryonic Cato Institute. Buchanan became a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute.<br />
</p><p>Charles Koch was an entrepreneurial genius who had multiplied the earnings of the corporation he inherited by a factor of at least one thousand, but he also had a dream of liberty—not individual liberty for all, though that is how it is always presented, but of a capitalism all but free of governmental interference and thereby able to achieve the prosperity and peace that only this form of capitalism could produce—well that is his dream! How, though, could it be achieved in a democracy? Only by grooming the most promising libertarian thinkers to find a way. Koch had obsessively worked for three decades to do it.<br />
</p><p>From the outset, Charles Koch made it clear to Buchanan he wanted no one to know what the objective was. The people would not support the plan, so the cabal had to work in secret. Stealth was to be an intrinsic element of the conspiracy, and Buchanan agreed. They would use their knowledge of “the rules of the game”—how modern democratic governance works—to win.<br />
</p><p>Buchanan sought an economic definition of incentives to analyse and influence government behavior. Justice and fairness did not come into it for Buchanan. He was only aware of “collective” power, and that, once formed, democratic movements tended to persist, keeping tabs on government officials and sometimes using them to vote out those who stopped responding to their needs. The only fairness that concerned Buchanan and Koch was that the rich minority (and those who dreamt of joining them) suffered, and that was not “American”.<br />
</p><p>Buchanan regarded the need for elected representatives to respond to the demands of the electorate to win their votes as “government corruption”. He determined to stop it, but he recognised few politicians would risk electoral rejection to carry out his ideas. He named the study of how government officials make decisions (ie political behavior) “public choice economics”. His analysis of how the rules of government might be altered so politicians and administrators could not act on the will of the majority he called “constitutional economics”. The electorate and their organized social and political groups that sought to influence government representation became “the collective order”—the enemy!<br />
</p><p>So, by the end of the 1990s, Koch had from Buchanan the ideas he wanted. From then on, he donated generously to save capitalism from democracy—permanently! Buchanan’s deep analyses of how incentives guide government action was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 having initiated research on how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making!<br />
</p><p>Buchanan believed that government failed because of bad faith—because activists, voters, and officials alike used talk of the public interest to mask the pursuit of their own personal self-interest at others’ expense. By the 1970s, he was insisting that the people and their representatives must be permanently prevented from using public power as they had for so long. Those diligently representing their electorate had to be manacled. The plot is a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance.<br />
</p><p>The dream of this movement, its leaders will tell you, is liberty. Buchanan told an interviewer:<br />
</p><blockquote>I want a society where nobody has power over the other. I don’t want to control you, and I don’t want to be controlled by you.</blockquote><p>It sounds so reasonable, fair, and appealing. But the last part of that statement is by far the most telling, because the “you” Koch, Buchanan and their trained cadres do not want to be controlled by is the majority of the people. To them, unrestrained capitalism is freedom. What this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few, an elite. It is fascism.<br />
</p><p>The way forward was by shifting the focus from “who rules” to “changing the rules”. For “liberty” to thrive, Buchanan decided the task was to figure out how to put legal—indeed, constitutional—shackles on to public administrators and legislators. They would no longer have the ability to respond to the mass of the people to get government to do their bidding. Once these shackles were put in place, they had to be binding and permanent. Though euphemistically called the “constitutional revolution”, by legally enforcing the permanent rule of a capitalist elite, indeed, it was a stealth road to fascism!<br />
</p><p>Realising that the <i>vade mecum</i> of revolutionary organization had already been written by Vladimir Lenin, Koch appreciated the power of Lenin’s system of cadres. So, paradoxically it seems, he funded “cadres” of high-level operatives to build a movement that refused compromise. The cadres fed morsals of the plan to elements of the large active conservative grassroots base thereby gradually drawing them in. Indeed, after 2008, the cadres increasingly adopted a cloak of conservatism, seeing advantages in doing so, though contrary to their aim to destroy the democratic system. Similar opportunism motivated Koch’s courting of the religious right, even though many libertarian thinkers, Buchanan included, were atheists who looked down on believers. Their aims had considerable common ground with TV evangelical types—men like the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Tim Phillips, money grubbing exploiters themselves. So they were happy to sell libertarian economics to their flocks, especially campaigns against public schooling and calls for reliance on family provision or charity in place of public welfare.<br />
</p><p>The Koch team’s most important stealth move, beginning in the late 1990s, and the one that proved most critical to success, was to wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party, tough the plotters had no loyalty was to their own anti-democratic cause.<br />
</p><p>US senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, spotted the mischief makers, perceptively describing the infiltrators as “cannibals” seeking “the end of governing as we know it”. The Reagan Republican and six-term US senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, exploded after being targeted by a challenger from his own party in 2012 and declared:<br />
</p><blockquote>These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans. They’re radical libertarians… I despise these people.</blockquote><p>They were not what they claimed. This cause is different. Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. And the Republican Party is now controlled by fanatical believers in a selfish capitalist goal that brooks no compromise.<br />
</p><p>Although its spokespersons would like you to believe they are disciples of James Madison, the leading architect of the US Constitution, it is not true. One of their manifestos calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, DC. Their real eighteenth century hero is John C Calhoun. He developed his radical critique of democracy a generation after the nation’s founding, as the brutal economy of chattel slavery became entrenched in the South—and his vision horrified Madison.<br />
</p><p>Their cause, they insist, is liberty, by which they mean the separation of private property rights from the reach of government, and the takeover of social services (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations. For the many it is anything but liberty, it is slavery. The objective of the Kochites is to stop democratic resistance, and they have almost succeeded.<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-37272944433857852282017-08-31T23:50:00.000+02:002017-08-31T23:50:36.359+02:00The News from the East. Rome 20s AD<p>Interviewer for the <cite>World Last Month</cite> in the Roman Forum: We’re talking to Josephus the Rabbi, who is just come out of Judea.<br />
</p><p>Hi, everyone. I was sitting in an inn in Jerusalem a week and a half ago. At the table next to me was Herod’s personal translator. I sort of did a double take, I said, hi, how are you? I knew the guy. I’d known him for years and years. I said, are you okay? Fine, fine no problem, he was having a bread and wine with friends. He walked out. This is the same inn that later on I saw Pontius Pilate walk into with several special forces men to protect him and his guests for dinner. I have to ask myself sometimes what’s going on.<br />
</p><p>I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clearer example of an army that thought it was an army of liberation, and has become an army of occupation. It’s important, perhaps, to say that some of those soldiers attached to the tenth legion had a pretty shrewd idea of what was going on. You got different kinds of behavior from Romans soldiers. You got this very nice guy, Gallus, who had been a baker, very sensitive towards people, didn’t worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling. He just said that if people throw rocks at me or stones at me, I give them salt to lick. There was another soldier who went up to a middle aged man sitting on a seat and he said, “If you don't clear out of that seat, I’ll break your neck”, and there was quite a lot of language like that as well. There were good guys as well as bad guys among the Romans as there always are in armies, but the people who I talked to, the centurions and tribunes and so on, most of them acknowledge that something had gone wrong, that this was not going to be good.<br />
</p><p>One guy said to me, every time we go down to the river here—he was talking about the river area in Jordan—it runs into the Dead Sea—it’s like the German forest down there. You always get shot at and you always get stoned—I mean, have stones thrown at them. Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Jerusalem. One man told me—I heard twice before in Jerusalem itself, once from a Greek schoolmaster and once from a fairly senior officer in what we now have to call the Jerusalem Authority, the authority that’s hanging on there until they can create some kind of Jewish kingdom—they all say that the road into Jerusalem now comes under nightly bandit attack from the surroundings from Jews. Two of them told me that every time a military squadron comes in at night, it’s attacked. In fact, some of the Roman outriders are now going back to old Gallic tactics, they’re hounded so much. There is a very serious problem of security.<br />
</p><p>The Romans still officially call them “the remnants of Judas the Galilean” or just “terrorists”. But in fact, it is obviously an increase in the organized resistance and not just people who were in Judas the Galilean’s forces, who were in the Zealot Party or Judas the Galilean’s rebels. There was also increasing anger among the Herodean community, those who were of course most opposed to Judas the Galilean, and I think what we’re actually seeing, you can get clues in Judea, is a cross fertilization. Herodeans who are disillusioned, who don’t believe they have been liberated, who spent so long in Perea, they don’t like the Romans anyway. Essenes who feel like they’re threatened by the Herodeans, Herod’s former acolytes who’ve lost their jobs and found that their money has stopped. Samaritans who are disaffected and are beginning to have contacts, and that of course is the beginning of a real resistance movement and that’s the great danger for the Romans now.<br />
</p><p>Interviewer for <cite>The World Last Month</cite> in the Roman Forum: We’re talking to Josephus the Rabbi, who is just come out of Judea. There’s a rumour in Rome that legionaries in Judea are stalked by faceless enemies at night, and Josephus writes about how organized the resistance is, how it seems to come alive at night and that what’s clear, he says, is some attacks are premeditated, involve cooperation among small groups of fighters including a system of signaling the presence of Roman forces: talking about the use of secret messages when forces come and then the attacks begin.<br />
</p><p>Yes, I’ve heard this. I also know that in Bethphage, for example, there’s a system of placing water jars on a prominent rooftop. When the legions approach, the Roman convoy approaches, there’s a water jug on the highest point of the roof. When the last legionary goes by the same spot, the jug is taken down, and the purpose is to work out the time element between the jug going up and the jug coming down because by that, they know how big is the convoy and whether it’s small enough to be attacked. That comes from Simon Peter's mother, who joined the rebels and was taking part in an actual operation.<br />
</p><p>One of the problems with the Romans I think is that the top people in imperial circles and the Senate always knew that this wasn’t going to be human rights abuses ended, flowers and music for the soldiers, and everyone lives happily every after and loves Rome. You may remember when Pompey first came to Jerusalem, something your Emperor didn’t dare to do in the end, he came with a massive escoprt of legionaries.<br />
</p><p>Governor Pontois Pilatus made a speech which I thought was very interesting, rather sinister, in the big hall at the Antonia Tower. He said we still have to fight the remnants of Judas the Galilean and the terrorists in Judea, and I thought, hang on a minute, who are these people? And it took me a few minutes to realize, I think, what he was doing. He was laying the future narrative of the opposition to the Romans. That is, when the Romans get attacked, it could be first of all laid down to remnants of Judas the Galilean, as in remnants of the Parthians who seem to be moving around in Mesopotamia now in cohort strength—but never mind. It could be blamed on the Zealots, so Rome was back fighting its old enemies again. This was familiar territory.<br />
</p><p>If you were to suggest that it was a resistance movement, that would suggest the people didn’t believe they had been liberated, and of course, all good-natured, peace loving people have to believe they were liberated by the Romans, not occupied by them. What you’re finding for example is a whole series of blunders by Pontius Pilatus, the Roman head of the occupation authority in Jerusalem.<br />
</p><p>First of all, he marched into the temple with his legions’ standards. Well, I can’t imagine any army that better deserves to be dissolved. Then, he took the temple corban, the central funds that pay the wages and fund the rituals. It means that all but the richest priests of the many priestly families are deprived of their welfare and money. Now if you have thousands of educated Jews who suddenly don’t get paid any more, and they all know each other, what are they going to do? They are going to form some kind of force which is secret, which is covered. Then they will be called terrorists, but I guess they know that, and then of course they will be saying to people, why don’t you come and join us.<br />
</p><p>It was very interesting that in Arimathea, a young man came out to see me from a shop just after the Roman searches there had ended and said some people came from the resistance a few nights ago and asked him to join. I said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn’t do that. But now, he said, I might think differently. I met a Herodean Jewish family in Jerusalem who moved into the former home of a Galilean spook. This family had been visited three nights previously by armed men who said, you better move out of this house. It doesn’t belong to you unless you want to join us. The guy in Arimathea said that the men, the armed men who came to invite him to join the resistance, had weapons, showed their knives to identify themselves as Sicari, and said, we’re still proud to hold our weapons for Yehouah and <cite>ha Eretz</cite>. So, now you have to realize that Arimathea and other towns like it are very unlike Caesarea, are very much pro-Judas the Galilean. Arimathea is the site of great resistance activity by the Zealots, it gives people massive employment. They all loved Herod in the way Romans love their emperors or go to prison otherwise. They’d rather not, but now there is a serious resistance movement.<br />
</p><p>On top of this, you can see the measure of what I think is basically desperation. I’ve been thinking about this, and Pontius Pilate now asked the legal side of the Jerusalem authority to set up the machinery of Jewish torture. In other words, Jews are going to be tortured and murdered. “Controlled”, I think, is the official word they use, but it means tortured and killed. That is the kind of language that Herod used. Jews are used to torture and death. After all, they lived with it for more than 40 years under Herod and his son. Now when you question the Romans about it, first of all they deny it. Then the bolder ones accept it, then other people involved in the administration say, well, it’s probably true, yes, it is true.<br />
</p><p>But the problem is the wild rumours appearing in Judea. Now, of course there’s no tradition of Philosophical fairness in Judea. There are those that say it’s a good idea, no tradition for example of letting the other side have a say, checking the story out, going back on the ground and asking the other side for their version of events, Socratic method. It doesn’t exist. It’s a little bit, but not much. What you get after saying that Romans are going with Jewish prostitutes, Roman troops are chasing Jewish women, that Jewish women are being invited to marry Pagan foreigners, is that this is worse than it was under Herod the Great. Other rumours are of of Roman beatings. There are also rumours of “I was Herod’s double”, and the opening of the mass graves of children. They’re not totally one sided against the Romans.<br />
</p><p>But you can see how the occupation forces, let’s call them by their real name, are troubled by this kind of news because it seems to them to provoke or incite animosity towards the liberators of Judea, which it is not meant to do. But of course the problem is that the Rabbis in the synagogue are saying the same thing about the Romans. Now, the last quote I read from Roman official bulletins said that it may be necessary to control what the Rabbis were saying in the synagogues. Well, this is preposterous. I sat on Solomon’s Portico in the Temple a few weeks ago and listened to a speaker teaching a sermon there. I think he was saying the Romans must leave immediately, now. Well, under the new rule presumably he’s inciting the people to violence. What are we going to do? Arrest all the Rabbim in the synagogues, arrest all the scribes who won’t obey, close down the synagogues? I mean what Jewish scribes need are courses in democracy from Greek philosophers brought up in real democracies.<br />
</p><p>You can come along and say, look, by all means criticize the Romans and put the boot in if you want to, but make sure you get it right. And if you also do that you have to look at your own society and what is wrong in it and how Herod the Great ever came about. He didn’t just come about because Rome supported Herod, which my goodness they did. But Pilate is not interested in this. What Pilate wants to do is control, control the scriptures, control the Rabbis, and it doesn’t work. A lot of the incidents taking place now, the violent incidents are not being divulged.<br />
</p><p>Interviewer for <cite>The World Last Month</cite> in the Roman Forum: We’re talking to Josephus the Rabbi, who is just come out of Judea. Josephus, you were just talking about a lot of the attacks we’re hearing about—what seems like a good number, a lot of the attacks—on Roman forces are not being reported.<br />
</p><p>Right, I have a colleague, for example, who went down to Arimathea before the incident I was describing to you earlier, after two pikemen, one Roman had been killed in the sword fight, he reported, I spoke to both sides. On his way back he was traveling past the town of Herodian a rather sinister place where the huge prison is where Herod executed so many prisoners, including a well known Baptizer back in the late 20’s. As we were, as the colleague was passing by the town, he saw a young man come up and throw a spear at a Roman centurion leading on a horse. The spear missed them and hit a donkey carrying a Jewish mother and children, wounding two small Jewish children, a very clear account of what happened. No bulletin ever emerged that this incident had occurred.<br />
</p><p>Now, over and over again we keep seeing things, seeing small incidents occur, soldiers threatening people outside custom’s houses because people are trying to jump the line and escape without paying. And it just doesn’t make it back into the Roman record of what’s actually happening in Judea. The danger here is not so much that we’re not being told about it because we can see and find out for ourselves. The danger is that the Roman leadership in Jerusalem, and of course, especially back in the Capri and Rome is also not being told about it. Or if it is, information is only going to certain people who can deal with that information.<br />
</p><p>It’s very easy to say, well Judea’s been a great success we’ve got rid of a dictatorship, an unruly people are being pacified under Roman rule or whatever interpretation you want to put on that. Human rights abuses have ended, certainly the Herodean kind. But if you try and if this information goes up the ladder every bit of it to people like Pilate, I’m not sure it all is—I think it should be—then you can see how the authority doesn’t represent the reality.<br />
</p><p>One of the big problems at the moment is the Romans and, to some extent the Greeks, particularly the Romans in Jerusalem. They’re all ensconced in this chic gleaming marble palace, largest, most expensive palace. There they sit with their advisors trying to work out with Rome how they’re going to bring about this new democracy in Judea. They rely upon for the most part former Jewish exiles who never endured Herod the Great, who are hovering around making sure that they get the biggest part of the pie possible. When they leave the palace, when they go into the streets of Jerusalem, the dangerous streets of Jerusalem, they leave in these military convoys with legionaries in the front and back, soldiers, plain clothes guys with turbans and weapons.<br />
</p><p>One Jew said to me the other day, “who did you think was the last person we saw driving through town like this?” I said, Herod the Great? They all burst out laughing, of course, they said, exactly the same.<br />
</p><p>We are used to this just like they’re used to censorship. I think it’s difficult—you need to be in Jerusalem to understand the degree to which there’s been this slippage of ambition and slippage in the ideological war. I was in small hotel called the Angel the other day—it has a cool bath, slaves continuously fanning the air. Just going to have a meal in the evening, I came across two westerners, each with drawn swords passing me in the hallway.<br />
</p><p>I said, “Who are you?”<br />
</p><p>He said, “Well, who are you?”<br />
</p><p>“I’m a guest in the hotel. You have swords. Who are you?”<br />
</p><p>He said, “We work for D.O.D”<br />
</p><p>“Department of Defense, right?” (But he was obviously Greek—he had a Greek accent.) “Hang on a second you’re not Roman.”<br />
</p><p>“No, we’re a Greek outfit hired to look after D.O.D. employees in Jerusalem. That’s why we’re armed.”<br />
</p><p>I said, “Who gives you permission to have weapons?”<br />
</p><p>He said, “The Jerusalem Authority, we’re here protecting them.”<br />
</p><p>Now, how often have Jews seen armed plain clothes men moving in and out of inns, they have for more than 20 years, now seeing them again. Well these guys are not going to string them up by their fingernails and electrocute them in torture cells. But again, the image, the picture is the same. The armored escort, war horses in the street, soldiers kicking down the doors searching for, “terrorists”. The censorship plans. Plain clothes armed men going into an inn asking who you are immediately by asking them who they are, same system as before. It has this kind of ghastly ghostly veneer of the old regime about it. The Romans are not Herod the Great, they’re not gratuitously murdering first born children, they’re not lining up people at mass graves, of course they’re not. But if you see through the eyes of the Jews, it doesn’t look quite that simple.<br />
</p><p>And your emperor only mildly, rather pathetically and rather cowardly, criticized the Authority for an alleged atrocity. This was an attack which was meant to kill the political head of the Essenes. And in the ghastly role which the Jews and Romans play in their bloody and useless conflict, I can understand why the attack was made in that context.<br />
</p><p>But that attack did not kill the Righteous Teacher, it killed a little child of five and a young woman. Now your leader said that that was "troubling". That isn’t troubling that’s a shameful act, that’s a despicable thing to do. But there was no strong condemnation from Tiberius, he just said it was troubling. If an Essene had attacked Roman forces or a Roman political leader involved in encouraging violence, had killed a little Roman girl, and a young innocent Roman woman Mr Tiberius would not have called it troubling. He would have said it was a shameful, terrorist act, which it would have been. How can it work when the most powerful emperor of the most powerful state in the world, Rome, can be so gutless and cowardly in condemning the killing of two innocent people.<br />
</p><p>It is not troubling. It is an outrage that those two innocent people died. Just as it would be if the Jews had done it. Just as it <em>is</em> when the Jews do do it. For Tiberius it is not an outrage. Not a tragedy. Not shameful. It is merely troubling. Like a flood is troubling or a heavy rainfall that kills people or a storm is troubling. In that context how can this new peace possibly work.<br />
</p><p>It’s called a Roman road map, who invented the phrase road map? I suppose the poor old Senate and all the historians dutifully used the word Roman road map. They can’t use “peace process” because to bring peace they have to create a desert.<br />
</p><p>At large and continuing to expand Roman settlements, the Romans and Roman retired soldiers only in occupied Jewish land. What have the Jews done? Caiaphas says I’m going to finish terrorism, there’s going to be no more violence by the Jews and, bang, there immediately is. We have the three main violent groups, Essenes, Zealots and Galileans immediately carrying out the banditry.<br />
</p><p>And then praised by Jesus, I remember thinking, he’s praising them, that’s against the Roman road map so Romans have got a green light to knock him off and they tried and failed. I remember interviewing Jesus along similar lines about six months ago in Galilee, as I was talking to him I saw a Roman equestrian pass by the window and his body guard, Simon, looked around very nervously and I thought, oh, no, please go away and so I finished the interview.<br />
</p><p>But I always thought he was a target, he always had two sicari with him all the time. That’s not the point. Jesus is a very tough Jew, a very ruthless Jew. He was one of the Jews who was driven from Galilee into Tyre and Sidon in 0-20. I actually met him there in southern Tyre in the hills, when he was living rough, months after months on Mount Hermon.<br />
</p><p>This is a very rough character, very tough guy—grew up the hard way in guerrilla warfare as well as politics.<br />
</p><p>But when you’re going to have a situation where you have an Roman Governor who doesn’t want to end the settlements, who is indeed the creator of the settlements, and a Jewish High Priest who can’t stop the holy war and a Roman emperor who is so gutless he can only call a killing of a woman and a child troubling, what chance is there for a Roman road map or peace process or any other kind of agreement in eastern marches?<br />
</p><p>I wanted to end, back in Judea. Joseph Caiaphas who has addressed the Sanhedrin is saying that Jesus the Galilean is moving in an arc around the Jordan River starting northeast of Jerusalem. He said finding Jesus the Galilean would just be a matter of knowing whom to talk to. He says based on information from credible sources, he believes the Jewish rebel wants revenge and has obtained two awords for attacks on Roman forces. Caiaphas says Jesus the Galilean is paying bounty for every Roman soldier killed. Your response?<br />
</p><p>I long ago gave up putting any credit in anything that Joseph Caiaphas says. The real issue is not where is Judas the Galilean, he could be sitting in Athens or Ecbatana or he could be sitting in Lydda or in the Jewish countryside somewhere. Obviously there were plans to hide him in advance. You know this goes back to another issue of the degree of real effort to find him. Just look back, the Romans wanted to arrest Cleopatra and bring her to Rome. We were going to capture Simon Peter, he’s still on the loose. We were going to capture James the Less, a dwarf, not difficult to identify. But he’s still on the loose. We can’t get John in Judea or Simon, the sons of Judas the Galilean. We can’t get Jesus the Galilean himself. We only got Judas Iscariot because he killed himself.<br />
</p><p>Joseph Caiaphas says that Jesus the Galilean is moving in an arc, he maybe moving in a circle or square for all I know but it’s clear he’s still alive. That’s the point.<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-69631013286225986972017-08-30T21:28:00.001+02:002017-08-31T23:52:38.626+02:00War Starts Here - Let's Stop It Here<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6X6iePpqqus" width="480"></iframe><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-62331609072900281642017-08-06T22:35:00.000+02:002017-08-08T00:39:39.551+02:00A Briefing on US Military Interventions, Zoltán Grossman, October 2001<p>Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, most people in the world agree that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice, without killing many thousands of civilians in the process. But unfortunately, the US military has always accepted massive civilian deaths as part of the cost of war. The military is now poised to kill thousands of foreign civilians, in order to prove that killing US civilians is wrong.<br />
</p><p>The media has told us repeatedly that some Middle Easterners hate the US only because of our “freedom” and “prosperity.” Missing from this explanation is the historical context of the US role in the Middle East, and for that matter in the rest of the world. This basic primer is an attempt to brief readers who have not closely followed the history of US foreign or military affairs, and are perhaps unaware of the background of US military interventions abroad, but are concerned about the direction of our country toward a new war in the name of “freedom” and “protecting civilians”.<br />
</p><p>The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the <b>Philippines</b>, <b>Cuba</b>, and <b>Puerto Rico</b> from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in <b>World War I</b> in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to “protectorates” such as <b>Nicaragua</b>, <b>Honduras</b>, <b>Panama</b>, <b>Haiti</b>, and the <b>Dominican Republic</b>. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers. Many of the uses of US combat forces are documented in A History of US Military Interventions since 1890: <a href="http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html">http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html</a><br />
</p><p>US involvement in <b>World War II</b> (1941-45) was sparked by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and fear of an Axis invasion of North America. Allied bombers attacked fascist military targets, but also fire-bombed German and Japanese cities such as Dresden and Tokyo, partly under the assumption that destroying civilian neighborhoods would weaken the resolve of the survivors and turn them against their regimes. Many historians agree that fire-bombing’s effect was precisely the opposite–increasing Axis civilian support for homeland defense, and discouraging potential coup attempts. The atomic bombing of Japan at the end of the war was carried out without any kind of advance demonstration or warning that may have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.<br />
</p><p>The war in <b>Korea</b> (1950-53) was marked by widespread atrocities, both by North Korean/Chinese forces, and South Korean/US forces. US troops fired on civilian refugees headed into South Korea, apparently fearing they were northern infiltrators. Bombers attacked North Korean cities, and the US twice threatened to use nuclear weapons. North Korea is under the same Communist government today as when the war began.<br />
</p><p>During the Middle East crisis of 1958, Marines were deployed to quell a rebellion in <b>Lebanon</b>, and <b>Iraq</b> was threatened with nuclear attack if it invaded Kuwait. This little-known crisis helped set US foreign policy on a collision course with Arab nationalists, often in support of the region’s monarchies.<br />
</p><p>In the early 1960s, the US returned to its pre-World War II interventionary role in the Caribbean, directing the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs exile invasion of <b>Cuba</b>, and the 1965 bombing and Marine invasion of the <b>Dominican Republic</b> during an election campaign. The CIA trained and harbored Cuban exile groups in Miami, which launched terrorist attacks on Cuba, including the 1976 downing of a Cuban civilian jetliner near Barbados. During the Cold War, the CIA would also help to support or install pro-US dictatorships in <b>Iran</b>, <b>Chile</b>, <b>Guatemala</b>, <b>Indonesia</b>, and many other countries around the world.<br />
</p><p>The US war in <b>Indochina</b> (1960-75) pit US forces against <b>North Vietnam</b>, and Communist rebels fighting to overthrow pro-US dictatorships in <b>South Vietnam</b>, <b>Laos</b>, and <b>Cambodia</b>. US war planners made little or no distinction between attacking civilians and guerrillas in rebel-held zones, and US “carpet-bombing” of the countryside and cities swelled the ranks of the ultimately victorious revolutionaries. Over two million people were killed in the war, including 55,000 US troops. Less than a dozen US citizens were killed on US soil, in National Guard shootings or antiwar bombings. In Cambodia, the bombings drove the Khmer Rouge rebels toward fanatical leaders, who launched a murderous rampage when they took power in 1975.<br />
</p><p>Echoes of Vietnam reverberated in <b>Central America </b>during the 1980s, when the Reagan administration strongly backed the pro-US regime in <b>El Salvador</b>, and right-wing exile forces fighting the new leftist Sandinista government in <b>Nicaragua</b>. Rightist death squads slaughtered Salvadoran civilians who questioned the concentration of power and wealth in a few hands. CIA-trained Nicaraguan Contra rebels launched terrorist attacks against civilian clinics and schools run by the Sandinista government, and mined Nicaraguan harbors. US troops also invaded the island nation of <b>Grenada</b> in 1983, to oust a new military regime, attacking Cuban civilian workers (even though Cuba had backed the leftist government deposed in the coup), and bombing a hospital.<br />
</p><p>The US returned in force to the Middle East in 1980, after the Shi’ite Muslim revolution in <b>Iran</b> against Shah Pahlevi’s pro-US dictatorship. A troop and bombing raid to free US Embassy hostages held in downtown Tehran had to be aborted in the Iranian desert. After the 1982 Israeli occupation of <b>Lebanon</b>, US Marines were deployed in a “neutral peacekeeping” operation. They instead took the side of Lebanon’s pro-Israel Christian government against Muslim rebels, and US Navy ships rained enormous shells on Muslim civilian villages. Embittered Shi’ite Muslim rebels responded with a suicide bomb attack on Marine barracks, and for years seized US hostages in the country. In retaliation, the CIA set off car bombs to assassinate Shi’ite Muslim leaders. Syria and the Muslim rebels emerged victorious in Lebanon.<br />
</p><p>Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US launched a 1986 bombing raid on <b>Libya</b>, which it accused of sponsoring a terrorist bombing later tied to Syria. The bombing raid killed civilians, and may have led to the later revenge bombing of a US jet over Scotland. Libya’s Arab nationalist leader Muammar Qaddafi remained in power. The US Navy also intervened against <b>Iran</b> during its war against Iraq in 1987-88, sinking Iranian ships and “accidentally” shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner.<br />
</p><p>US forces invaded <b>Panama</b> in 1989 to oust the nationalist regime of Manuel Noriega. The US accused its former ally of allowing drug-running in the country, though the drug trade actually increased after his capture. US bombing raids on Panama City ignited a conflagration in a civilian neighborhood, fed by stove gas tanks. Over 2,000 Panamanians were killed in the invasion to capture one leader.<br />
</p><p>The following year, the US deployed forces in the Persian Gulf after the Iraqi invasion of <b>Kuwait</b>, which turned Washington against its former Iraqi ally Saddam Hussein. US supported the Kuwaiti monarchy and the Muslim fundamentalist monarchy in neighboring <b>Saudi Arabia </b>against the secular nationalist <b>Iraq</b> regime. In January 1991, the US and its allies unleashed a massive bombing assault against Iraqi government and military targets, in an intensity beyond the raids of World War II and Vietnam. Up to 200,000 Iraqis were killed in the war and its immediate aftermath of rebellion and disease, including many civilians who died in their villages, neighborhoods, and bomb shelters. The US continued economic sanctions that denied health and energy to Iraqi civilians, who died by the hundreds of thousands, according to United Nations agencies. The US also instituted “no-fly zones” and virtually continuous bombing raids, yet Saddam was politically bolstered as he was militarily weakened.<br />
</p><p>In the 1990s, the US military led a series of what it termed “humanitarian interventions” it claimed would safeguard civilians. Foremost among them was the 1992 deployment in the African nation of <b>Somalia</b>, torn by famine and a civil war between clan warlords. Instead of remaining neutral, US forces took the side of one faction against another faction, and bombed a Mogadishu neighborhood. Enraged crowds, backed by foreign Arab mercenaries, killed 18 US soldiers, forcing a withdrawal from the country.<br />
</p><p>Other so-called “humanitarian interventions” were centered in the Balkan region of Europe, after the 1992 breakup of the multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia. The US watched for three years as Serb forces killed Muslim civilians in <b>Bosnia</b>, before its launched decisive bombing raids in 1995. Even then, it never intervened to stop atrocities by Croatian forces against Muslim and Serb civilians, because those forces were aided by the US. In 1999, the US bombed Serbia to force President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw forces from the ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, which was torn by a brutal ethnic war. The bombing intensified Serbian expulsions and killings of Albanian civilians from <b>Kosovo</b>, and caused the deaths of thousands of Serbian civilians, even in cities that had voted strongly against Milosevic. When a NATO occupation force enabled Albanians to move back, US forces did little or nothing to prevent similar atrocities against Serb and other non-Albanian civilians. The US was viewed as a biased player, even by the Serbian democratic opposition that overthrew Milosevic the following year.<br />
</p><p>Even when the US military had apparently defensive motives, it ended up attacking the wrong targets. After the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa, the US “retaliated” not only against Osama Bin Laden’s training camps in <b>Afghanistan</b>, but a pharmaceutical plant in <b>Sudan</b> that was said to be a chemical warfare installation. Bin Laden retaliated by attacking a US Navy ship docked in <b>Yemen</b> in 2000. After the 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the US military is poised to again bomb <b>Afghanistan</b>, and possibly move against other states it accuses of promoting anti-US “terrorism”, such as <b>Iraq</b> and Sudan. Such a campaign will certainly ratchet up the cycle of violence, in an escalating series of retaliations that is the hallmark of Middle East conflicts. Afghanistan, like Yugoslavia, is a multiethnic state that could easily break apart in a new catastrophic regional war. Almost certainly <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1740538.stm">more civilians would lose their lives</a> in this tit-for-tat war on “terrorism” than the 3,000 civilians who died on September 11.<br />
</p><p>Some common themes can be seen in many of these US military interventions.<br />
</p><p>First, they were explained to the US public as defending the lives and rights of civilian populations. Yet the military tactics employed often left behind massive civilian “collateral damage”. War planners made little distinction between rebels and the civilians who lived in rebel zones of control, or between military assets and civilian infrastructure, such as train lines, water plants, agricultural factories, medicine supplies, etc. The US public always believe that in the next war, new military technologies will avoid civilian casualties on the other side. Yet when the inevitable civilian deaths occur, they are always explained away as “accidental” or “unavoidable”.<br />
</p><p>Second, although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of “freedom” and “democracy,” nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-US elites. Whether in Vietnam, Central America, or the Persian Gulf, the US was not defending “freedom” but an ideological agenda (such as defending capitalism) or an economic agenda (such as protecting oil company investments). In the few cases when US military forces toppled a dictatorship–such as in Grenada or Panama–they did so in a way that prevented the country’s people from overthrowing their own dictator first, and installing a new democratic government more to their liking.<br />
</p><p>Third, the US always attacked violence by its opponents as “terrorism”, “atrocities against civilians”, or “ethnic cleansing”, but minimized or defended the same actions by the US or its allies. If a country has the right to “end” a state that trains or harbors terrorists, would Cuba or Nicaragua have had the right to launch defensive bombing raids on US targets to take out exile terrorists? Washington’s double standard maintains that an US ally’s action by definition “defensive”, but that an enemy’s retaliation is by definition “offensive”.<br />
</p><p>Fourth, the US often portrays itself as a neutral peacekeeper, with nothing but the purest humanitarian motives. After deploying forces in a country, however, it quickly divides the country or region into “friends” and “foes,” and takes one side against another. This strategy tends to enflame rather than dampen a war or civil conflict, as shown in the cases of Somalia and Bosnia, and deepens resentment of the US role.<br />
</p><p>Fifth, US military intervention is often counterproductive even if one accepts US goals and rationales. Rather than solving the root political or economic roots of the conflict, it tends to polarize factions and further destabilize the country. The same countries tend to reappear again and again on the list of 20th century interventions.<br />
</p><p>Sixth, US demonization of an enemy leader, or military action against him, tends to strengthen rather than weaken his hold on power. Take the list of current regimes most singled out for US attack, and put it alongside of the list of regimes that have had the longest hold on power, and you will find they have the same names. Qaddafi, Castro, Saddam, Kim, and others may have faced greater internal criticism if they could not portray themselves as Davids standing up to the American Goliath, and (accurately) blaming many of their countries’ internal problems on US economic sanctions.<br />
</p><p>One of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century was that “people like us” could not commit atrocities against civilians.<br />
</p><ul><li>German and Japanese citizens believed it, but their militaries slaughtered millions of people.</li>
<li>British and French citizens believed it, but their militaries fought brutal colonial wars in Africa and Asia.</li>
<li>Russian citizens believed it, but their armies murdered civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.</li>
<li>Israeli citizens believed it, but their army mowed down Palestinians and Lebanese.</li>
<li>Arabs believed it, but suicide bombers and hijackers targeted US and Israeli civilians.</li>
<li>US citizens believed it, but their military killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere.</li>
</ul><p>Every country, every ethnicity, every religion, contains within it the capability for extreme violence. Every group contains a faction that is intolerant of other groups, and actively seeks to exclude or even kill them. War fever tends to encourage the intolerant faction, but the faction only succeeds in its goals if the rest of the group acquiesces or remains silent. The attacks of September 11 were not only a test for US citizens attitudes’ toward minority ethnic/racial groups in their own country, but a test for our relationship with the rest of the world. We must begin not by lashing out at civilians in Muslim countries, but by taking responsibility for our own history and our own actions, and how they have fed the cycle of violence.<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-1937554282609277912017-07-16T16:26:00.000+02:002017-07-16T16:40:58.624+02:00Halt the U.S. Drive to War with North Korea!<br />
Posted by Nick Wright, July 15, 2017, <a href="https://21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/halt-the-u-s-drive-to-war-with-north-korea/">https://21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/halt-the-u-s-drive-to-war-with-north-korea/</a><br />
<br />
From the US Peace Council<br />
<br />
US television news programs (CNN, MSNBC, and Fox) have been pounding the war drums in the last few weeks and days, since North Korea successfully launched a long- range missile. The long drift to war with North Korea[1] has seemingly become, overnight, a US drive to war with North Korea.<br />
<br />
With his usual bluster and saber-rattling, President Trump on his recent tour of Europe continued to threaten “severe action” against North Korea. Trump has made matters worse by devolving authority to battlefield commanders who inflame tensions with their own incendiary statements. Example: the US commander in Korea, General Vincent Brooks, stated publicly “the only thing which separates armistice from war” with North Korea is “our self-restraint, which is a choice.”<br />
<br />
Anyone is the US could conclude, quite reasonably, that the US is the aggrieved and threatened party; that North Korea obviously wishes to harm the US people; that the US confronts a new danger; that North Korea is the aggressor; that an innocent and remarkably patient US is the intended victim.<br />
<br />
Such a conclusion — all of it — would be false. Almost nothing of what the US mainstream media says about North Korea is true. Only a grasp of the history and the broader context can shed light on this Korea Crisis.<br />
<br />
A few key facts:<br />
<br />
The US refusal to accept the legitimacy of the North Korean government (DPRK) is part of its long-term policy that any state in the world that follows an independent course is subject to being overthrown by the United States. Economic independence and sovereignty are considered by the US financial and corporate elite as an act of aggression. Therefore, the DPRK, Viet Nam, Cuba, the USSR and now Russia, Syria, Venezuela, China and others have all been targeted by the US politically and militarily. US policy insists that it has the right to curb independent states, to determine a country’s political leaders and socioeconomic system, and to use whatever means it takes – economic sanctions, sabotage, assassination, war — to achieve those goals.<br />
• North Korea acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985.<br />
• In 1994, the DPRK agreed to freeze its nuclear program in return for the US providing energy materials and generating stations. In January of 2002, President George W. Bush announced that the DPRK was part of the “Axis of Evil,” and subject to regime change and even nuclear annihilation by the US. By the end of 2002, the DPRK had essentially exited the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.<br />
• The notion that North Korea poses a threat to the US is false and absurd. It would be national suicide for the DPRK to start a war with the US or South Korea, which have massively superior military capabilities. The DPRK has never threatened to start such a war, rather it has always asserted that it developed weapons of mass destruction in order to deter the US and its allies from an (often threatened) US attack such as those that decapitated Iraq and Libya. The constant denigration and demonization of the North Korean leadership (they are portrayed invariably as madmen, or clowns, or both) is a strategy to make the Big Lie of a threat from North Korea believable to an ill-informed and fearful US public.<br />
• The DPRK has offered to freeze its nuclear weapons program if the US freezes its war practices targeting that country, actions aimed to precede negotiations. Russia and China have endorsed this approach. The US, however, refuses.<br />
<br />
<b>The US is Provoking the Crisis</b><br />
<br />
North Korea would not have a nuclear weapons program if it were not under increasing threat from the US, which has been trying to force regime change in the North since 1945 by war, subversion, diplomatic isolation, and economic strangulation.<br />
<br />
A recent article noted that:<br />
<br />
1. As University of Chicago history professor Bruce Cumings [a leading US historian of the Korean War], writes, for North Korea the nuclear crisis [1] began in late February 1993, when General Lee Butler, head of the new US ‘Strategic Command,’ announced that he was retargeting strategic nuclear weapons (i.e., hydrogen bombs) meant for the old USSR, on North Korea (among other places.) At the same time, the new CIA chief, James Woolsey, testified that North Korea was ‘our most grave current concern.’ By mid-March 1993, tens of thousands of [US] soldiers were carrying out war games in Korea…and in came the B1-B bombers, B-52s from Guam, several naval vessels carrying cruise missiles, and the like: whereupon the North pulled out of the NPT.” [2]<br />
<br />
2. It is the US that has been provoking the DPRK with its stationing of THAAD missile (“Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense”), a first-strike weapon, in South Korea over the last year. The US is now testing the THAAD missiles. US-South Korea practice military maneuvers, which used to recur several times a year, are now almost incessant.<br />
<br />
3. Moreover, the US is further militarizing South Korea. Residents of the South Korean island of Jeju have strongly object to the South Korean military setting up a base on the island, with the possible deployment of the US Navy’s newest Zumwalt-class destroyer “to deter North Korean aggression.” At the end of World War II, after the Japanese Imperialists had been defeated, Jeju Islanders rose up against the US-installed colonial dictatorship of Syngman Rhee. The US responded by employing the former brutal Japanese military rulers to violently put down the protests.<br />
<br />
It is the US that, again and again, has refused talks with North Korea’s leadership:<br />
• In January [2017], North Korea offered to “sit with the US anytime” to discuss US war games and its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Pyongyang proposed that the United States “contribute to easing tension on the Korean peninsula by temporarily suspending joint military exercises in south Korea and its vicinity this year, and said that in this case the DPRK is ready to take such responsive steps as temporarily suspending the nuclear test over which the US is concerned.”<br />
• The North Korean proposal was seconded by China and Russia and recently by South Korea’s new president Moon Jae-in. But Washington peremptorily rejected the proposal, refusing to acknowledge any equivalency between US-led war games, which US officials deem ‘legitimate’ and North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests, which they label ‘illegitimate.” (Stephen Gowans, ibid.)<br />
• Having partitioned Korea in 1945, the US permanently stationed about 40,000 of troops in South Korea after the end of 1950-1953 hostilities and the 1953 armistice. The U.S. still denies Korea a peace treaty, which the DPRK has insisted on. But peace was never the intention of US imperialism. US foreign policy sees Northeast Asia only through the lens of domination.<br />
• The permanent occupation of South Korea was aimed at geopolitical control of the region, including elimination of the DPRK and moving US missile and military forces right up to the Chinese and Russian borders. The occupation was symbolized by the giant, yearly provocative military maneuvers by the US and its regional allies, such as South Korea. Such rehearsals for real war with the DPRK have stepped up dramatically in recent months.<br />
<br />
Few Americans grasp the enormity of the trauma suffered by millions of Koreans in the war of 1950-53. The war devastated dozens of Korean cities. The US dropped over 428,000 bombs over the capital Pyongyang alone, and killed 1.2 million people. The US war on Korea included the use of napalm. The US war’s brutal and blatant violations of international humanitarian law remain unpunished.<br />
<br />
The real nature of US policy to the Korean peninsula is neo-colonial domination, through occupation and partition. This has been so since 1945. The US has stooped to employ the same quislings that had run Korea as a Japanese colony. Prof. Cumings wrote in the London Review of Books:<br />
• To shore up their [1945] occupation, the Americans employed every last hireling of the Japanese they could find, including former officers in the Japanese military like Park Chung Hee and Kim Chae-gyu, both of whom graduated from the American military academy in Seoul in 1946. (After a military takeover in 1961 Park became president of South Korea, lasting a decade and a half until his ex-classmate Kim, by then head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, shot him dead over dinner one night.)<br />
• After the Americans left in 1948 the border area around the 38th parallel was under the command of Kim Sok-won, another ex-officer of the Imperial Army, and it was no surprise that after a series of South Korean incursions into the North, full-scale civil war broke out on 25 June 1950. Inside the South itself – whose leaders felt insecure and conscious of the threat from what they called ‘the north wind’ – there was an orgy of state violence against anyone who might somehow be associated with the left or with communism.<br />
• The historian Hun Joon Kim found that at least 300,000 people were detained and executed or simply disappeared by the South Korean government in the first few months after conventional war began. My own work and that of John Merrill indicates that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people died as a result of political violence before June 1950, at the hands either of the South Korean government or the US occupation forces. In her recent book Korea’s Grievous War, which combines archival research, records of mass graves and interviews with relatives of the dead and escapees who fled to Osaka, Su-kyoung Hwang documents the mass killings in villages around the southern coast. In short, the Republic of Korea was one of the bloodiest dictatorships of the early Cold War period; many of the perpetrators of the massacres had served the Japanese in their dirty work – and were then put back into power by the Americans.<br />
• The most important new factor is the destabilizing THAAD missiles. According to the US peace organization, Global Network, an authority on questions of war technology, the US has recently deployed the THAAD “missile defense” system in Seongju, South Korea despite massive protests by South Koreans. It is claimed by US authorities that THAAD is there to intercept missiles from North Korea. But many experts believe China and Russia are the real targets, given the enormous range of THAAD radar, which counterproductively intensifies unnecessary military tension in the region. The US has also deployed other “missile defense” systems through the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the Middle East to encircle Russia and China. “Missile defense” is a key element in Pentagon first-strike attack planning.<br />
<br />
<b>De-escalate Tensions Now!</b><br />
<br />
The US Peace Council joins with other US antiwar organizations in demanding that:<br />
• The US must reverse course. De-escalate tension now. No more provocations from the US. The United States and South Korea must immediately cease military maneuvers in the region, providing North Korea with an opportunity to reciprocate. The THAAD missiles near the North Korea-South Korea border must be de-activated and removed.<br />
• The United States must engage in good faith, direct talks with North Korea. Such talks should include the perspective of a peace treaty to end the Korean War. A commitment to denuclearization should not be a precondition for talks with North Korea.<br />
• The United States and all states in the region must stop military actions that could be interpreted as provocative, including such actions as forward deployment of additional military forces by the United States, and the testing or assertion of territorial claims by deploying of military forces in contested areas by any state. Withdrawing U.S. naval forces newly concentrated near the Korean peninsula would be an important confidence-building step.<br />
<br />
Korea — all of it — has a right to its sovereignty and independence. The recently elected South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, represents a break with the repressive and reactionary leaders of the past. He campaigned on a number of progressive ideas — more independence from the US; more engagement with the North. But he has had to contend with bullying by a U.S. Administration bent on heightening tensions. The U.S. has no right to enforce the partition of the Korean peninsula and to block steps to unity and social progress desired by the people of Korea, North and South.<br />
War can still be prevented, but only if the antiwar movement compels the U.S. to reverse course.<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
[1] More properly, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the DPRK. Here the terms will be used interchangeably.<br />
<br />
[2] Stephen Gowans in “The Real Reason Washington is Worried about North Korea’s ICBM Test” (What’s Left, July 5, 2017 https://gowans.wordpress.com)<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-86566095109421153092017-07-04T22:00:00.000+02:002017-07-04T22:08:36.857+02:00Urgently needed: a responsible US attitude to North Korea<p><strong>Professor Martin Hart-Landsberg</strong> here gives details of US relations with North Korea, showing that the perverse state is not the North Korean entity but the US itself which has proven to be utterly unreliable and deliberately provocative in its dealing with North Korea…<br />
</p><p><strong>The US government</strong> remains determined to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and continues to plan for a military strike aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear infrastructure. And the North replies that it would respond to any attack with its own strikes against US bases in the region and even the US itself. What is happening is not new.<br />
</p><ul><li>The US began conducting war games with South Korean forces in 1976 and it was not long before those included simulated nuclear attacks against the North. That was before North Korea had nuclear weapons.</li>
<li>In 1994, President Bill Clinton was close to launching a military attack on North Korea with the aim of destroying its nuclear facilities.</li>
<li>In 2002, President Bush talked about seizing North Korean ships as part of a blockade of the country, which is an act of war.</li>
<li>In 2013, the US conducted war games which involved planning for preemptive attacks on North Korean military targets and “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership and even a first strike nuclear attack.</li>
</ul><p>The cycle of belligerency and threat-making is intensifying, and a miscalculation could trigger a new war, with devastating consequences. Even if a war is averted, the ongoing embargo against North Korea and continual threats of war are costly. They promote/legitimatize greater military spending and militarization more generally, at the expense of needed social programs, in Japan, China, the US, and the two Koreas. They also create a situation that compromises democratic possibilities in both South and North Korea and worsen already difficult economic conditions in North Korea.<br />
</p><p><strong>An alternative</strong> that the US government is unwilling to consider, much less discuss is for the US to accept North Korean offers of direct negotiations between the two countries, with all issues on the table. The US government and media dismiss this option as out of hand. We are told:<br />
</p><ol><li>the North is a hermit kingdom and seeks only isolation</li>
<li>the country is ruled by crazy people hell-bent on war</li>
<li>the North Korean leadership cannot be trusted to follow through on its promises.</li>
</ol><p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>None of this is true.</strong></span><br />
</p><ol><li><p>If being a hermit kingdom means never wanting to negotiate, then North Korea is not a hermit kingdom. North Korea has been asking for direct talks with the United States since the early 1990s. The North was dependent on trade with the communist countries and their fall to capitalism left the North Korean economy isolated. Since then, they have repeatedly asked for unconditional direct talks with the US in hopes of securing an end to the Korean War (it is still not over because no peace treaty was ever agreed) with a peace treaty as a first step toward their desired normalization of relations. They have been repeatedly rebuffed. The US has always put preconditions on those talks, preconditions that constantly change whenever the North has taken steps to meet them.<br />
</p><p>The North has also tried to join the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB), but the US and Japan have blocked their membership. The North has tried to set up free trade zones to attract foreign investment, but the US and Japan have worked to block them. So, it is not the North that is refusing to talk or broaden its engagement with the global economy; it is the US that seeks to keep North Korea isolated.</p></li>
<li><p>The media portray North Korea as pursuing an out-of-control militarism that is the main cause of the current dangerous situation. But it is important to recognize that South Korea has outspent North Korea on military spending every year since 1976. International agencies currently estimate that North Korean annual military spending is $4 billion, while South Korean annual military spending is $40 billion. And then we have to add the US military build-up. North Korea has largely been responding to South Korean and US militarism and threats, not driving them. As for the development of a nuclear weapons program, it was the US that brought nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula. It did so in 1958 in violation of the Korean War armistice and threatened North Korea with nuclear attack years before the North even sought to develop nuclear weapons.<br />
</p></li>
<li><p>North Korea has been a more reliable negotiating partner than the USA. Here, we have to take up the nuclear issue more directly. The North has tested a nuclear weapon five times: 2006, 2009, 2013, and twice in 2016. Critically, North Korean tests have largely been conducted in an effort to pull the US into negotiations or fulfill past promises. And the country has made numerous offers to halt its testing and even freeze its nuclear weapons program if only the US would agree to talks.<br />
</p></li>
</ol><p><strong>North Korea</strong> was first accused of developing nuclear weapons in the early 1990s. Its leadership refused to confirm or deny that the country had succeeded in manufacturing nuclear weapons but said that it would open up its facilities for inspection if the US would enter talks to normalize relations. As noted above, the North was desperate, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, to draw the US into negotiations. In other words, it was ready to end the hostilities between the two countries. The US government refused talks and began to mobilize for a strike on North Korean nuclear facilities. A war was averted only because Jimmy Carter, against the wishes of the Clinton administration, went to the North, met Kim Il Sung, and negotiated an agreement that froze the North Korean nuclear program.<br />
</p><p>The North Korean government agreed to end their country’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid and normalization. And from 1994 to 2002, the North froze its plutonium program and had all nuclear fuel observed by international inspectors to assure the US that it was not engaged in making any nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the US did not live up to its side of the bargain; it did not deliver the aid it promised or take meaningful steps toward normalization.<br />
</p><ul><li>In 2001, President Bush declared North Korea to be part of the “axis of evil” and the following year unilaterally canceled the agreement. In response, the North restarted its nuclear program.</li>
<li>In 2003, the Chinese government, worried about growing tensions between the US and North Korea, convened multiparty talks to bring the two countries back to negotiations.</li>
<li>In 2005, under Chinese pressure, the US agreed to a new agreement, in which each North Korean step toward ending its weapons program would be matched by a new US step toward ending the embargo and normalizing relations.</li>
<li>Exactly one day after signing the agreement, the US asserted, without evidence, that North Korea was engaged in a program of counterfeiting US dollars and tightened its sanctions policy against North Korea.</li>
<li>In 2006, The North Korean responded by testing its first nuclear bomb. And shortly afterward, the US agreed to drop its counterfeiting charge and comply with the agreement it had previously signed.</li>
<li>In 2007, North Korea shut down its nuclear program and even began dismantling its nuclear facilities—but the US again didn’t follow through on the terms of the agreement, falling behind on its promised aid and sanction reductions. In fact, the US kept escalating its demands on North Korea, calling for an end to North Korea’s missile program and improvement in human rights in addition to the agreed-upon steps to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. And so…</li>
<li>In 2009, frustrated, North Korea tested another nuclear weapon.</li>
<li>The US responded by tightening sanctions.</li>
<li>In 2012, the North launched two satellites. The first failed, the second succeeded. Before each launch the US threatened to go to the UN and secure new sanctions on North Korea. But the North asserted its right to launch satellites and went ahead.</li>
<li>In 2013, after the December 2012 launch, the UN agreed to further sanctions and the North responded with its third nuclear test.</li>
</ul><p><strong>This period</strong> marks a major change in North Korean policy. The North now changed its public stance. It declared itself a nuclear state, and announced that it was no longer willing to give up its nuclear weapons. However, the North Korean government made clear that it would freeze its nuclear weapons program if the US would cancel its future war games. The US refused and its March 2013 war games included practice runs of nuclear equipped bombers and planning for occupying North Korea. The North has therefore continued to test and develop its nuclear weapons capability.<br />
</p><p>So, the history shows that whenever the US shows willingness to negotiate, the North responds favourably, and when agreements are signed, it is the US that abandons them. The North has pushed forward with its nuclear weapons program largely in an attempt to force the US to engage seriously because it believes that this program is its only bargaining chip. It is desperate to end the US embargo on its economy.<br />
</p><p>We lost the opportunity to negotiate with a non-nuclear North Korea when we cut off negotiations in 2001, before the country had a nuclear arsenal. Things have changed. Now, the most we can reasonably expect is an agreement that freezes that arsenal. However, if relations between the two countries truly improve it may well be possible to achieve a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, an outcome both countries profess to seek.<br />
</p><p>So, why does the US refuse direct negotiations and risk war? The logical reason is that there are powerful forces opposing them. The tension is useful to the US military industrial complex, which needs enemies to support the build-up of the military budget. The tension also allows the US military to maintain troops on the Asian mainland and forces in Japan. It also helps to isolate China and boost right-wing political tendencies in Japan and South Korea. And now, after decades of demonizing North Korea, it is difficult for the US political establishment to change course.<br />
</p><p>The outcome of the recent presidential election in South Korea might open possibilities to force a change in US policy. Moon Jae-in, the winner, has repudiated the hardline policies of his impeached predecessor, Park Guen-Hye, and declared his commitment to re-engage with the North. The US government was not happy about his victory, but it cannot easily ignore Moon’s call for a change in South Korean policy toward North Korea, especially since US actions against the North are usually presented as necessary to protect South Korea. Thus, if Moon follows through on his promises, the US may well be forced to moderate its own policy toward the North.<br />
</p><p><strong>US Americans and we, onlookers and passive supporters of this perfidy, have a responsibility to become better educated about US policy toward both Koreas, to support popular movements in South Korea that seek peaceful relations with North Korea, to progress toward reunification, and to work for a US policy that promotes the demilitarization and normalization of US-North Korean relations.</strong><br />
</p><p>Professor Martin Hart-Landsberg is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon; an Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea. His areas of teaching and research include political economy, economic development, international economics, and the political economy of East Asia. He is also a member of the Workers' Rights Board (Portland, Oregon) and maintains a blog, ‘Reports from the Economic Front’. Here he gives details of US relations with North Korea, showing that the perverse state is not the North Korean entity but the US itself which has proven to be utterly unreliable and deliberately provocative in its dealing with North Korea.<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-56196036175160896692017-06-16T12:52:00.000+02:002017-06-16T13:20:50.041+02:00Jo Cox fell short of Sainthood<p>Jo Cox, the former MP for Batley and Spen, was cruelly murdered by a fascist admirer a year ago. No doubt she was a popular MP and an all round nice person, and as Jeremy Corbyn often said, “any killing is unacceptable”. All of it! So, on the anniversary of her death, the media uniformly offer up eulogies for her as a promising MP and a great humanitarian.<br />
</p><p>She spent time as an aid worker for Oxfam in such places as Darfur, Uganda and Afghanistan before being selected as a Labour MP in 2015, and yes, she supported Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, and called for the lifting of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, as well as opposing efforts by the government to curtail the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, correctly saying:<br />
</p><blockquote>I believe that this is a gross attack on democratic freedoms. Not only is it right to boycott unethical companies but it is our right to do so.</blockquote><p>She also said:<br />
</p><blockquote>I opposed the war in Iraq because I believed the risk to civilian lives was too high.</blockquote><p>But, for all these humanitarian credentials, she seemed to be oddly gullible in other ways, which ought not to be forgotten, particularly in regard to Syria. Because of her background with Oxfam, she seemed to speak with some authority when she said she had met Syrian doctors, humanitarians and activists and heard that they wanted a stop to the aerial attacks that she said were the biggest killer of civilians. She maintained these attacks came, most notoriously in the form of barrel bombs, a concept manufactured by the terrorists in the areas under attack from the Syrian Arab Army to hide or excuse their own shrapnel shells fired into Syrian areas from their aptly named “hell cannon” and “hellfire rockets”. UN envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, described them as “basically gas canisters full of nails, stones and iron, which are being thrown in a rudimentary way across the other side of the line and to kill civilians”.<br />
</p><p>She wanted what the US and British themselves wanted to be able to duplicate the blood and mayhem spread in Libya in another Arab country troublesome to US/NATO power grabbing—a “no-fly zone” allegedly simply to make it harder for Assad to bomb what she made out were his own civilians—in reality the areas fortified by ISIS/Al Qaida. She abstained on the 2013 vote on air-strikes in Syria, not out of a desire to stop civilian deaths, but because she wanted action to deal also with President Assad, not just ISIS, adding:<br />
</p><blockquote>I am not against airstrikes <i>per se</i>, but I cannot actively support them unless they are part of a plan.</blockquote><p>The majority of legal scholars agree that enforcing a “No Fly Zone” is an act of war because it violates an independent country’s sovereignty, in direct violation of fundamental principles which underpin authentic humanitarian work. But she must have known what the “no fly zone” meant in Libya—a merciless continual bombing to cover the terrorists who had been shipped into the country from elsewhere in the middle east to unseat Gadaffi in support of US policy. It led to many deaths indeed in that country, far more than the Libyan leader was supposed to have had caused. She co-authored an article in The Observer with Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, arguing that British military forces could help achieve an ethical solution to the conflict, including the creation of “civilian safe havens” in Syria (Andrew Mitchell and Jo Cox, 11 October, 2015). It seems to follow logically that an extension of a no fly zone in Syria must also lead to many many more deaths of Syrian people, the very thing that Jo said appalled her.<br />
</p><p>These Syrian people and doctors also could not have be the ones that Jo Cox claims to have been meeting because the fake news that fake journalists had been passing off when legitimately allowed in Syria had led to Assad banning all western agents, so she could not have been speaking with “Syrian” doctors, etc, but only with those in areas not governed by the Syrian authorities and so who were supporting Al Qaida and ISIS, the terrorists opposed to Assad. She confirmed her view that Assad and ISIS were no different from each other, something that proves she had no knowledge of the views of ordinary Syrians who were very sure that however bad the West likes to paint their “dictator”, they knew from direct experience that he was infinitely preferable to the terrorists. And that, of course, is why Assad has been able to lead the Syrian people in a war that has lasted longer than WW2 against a brutal invasion of foreign mercenaries financially and militarily supported by Saudi Arabia whose armaments we and the US were supplying at great profit to the arms manufacturers.<br />
</p><p>Supporting her argument, she claimed as true the Western propaganda that Assad has killed 600,000 people, everyone that had died in the intervention, seven times the number of civilians as ISIS, had helped nurture ISIS and been its main recruiting sergeant, absurd statements that any Syrian would consider laughable if it were not so dangerous. She would not or could not see that the USA were the actual “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS!<br />
</p><p>So, as an MP, Jo Cox repeatedly appealed for the UK to lead international efforts to airdrop aid to “civilians” besieged by Assad, but really enclaves of ISIS beheaders, while the innocents who really suffered were the villages of Syrian loyalists besieged by ISIS, Kafarya and Foua. These are two Idlib villages under full siege by Ahrar al Sham and Nusra Front (Al Qaida in Syria) since March 2015. But Jo Cox had admitted she could not tell the difference.<br />
</p><p>She was also a founder and co-chair with Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell of the All Party Parliamentary Group, Friends of Syria. It was a gross misnomer for the people whom the group were friends of were not Syrians loyal to Syria and its elected leader, but were so-called “rebels” who were a front for the foreign mercenaries encouraged by the US in their task of overthrowing Assad whom the US regarded as the real enemy, rather as Jo Cox did. She in turn was supported by the Syria Campaign, supposedly a non-political solidarity NGO but one set up to push the US into toppling another formerly stable Middle Eastern government, according to Middle East authority, Max Blumenthal.<br />
</p><p>Jo was a passionate advocate of the White Helmets—supposedly a self-sacrificing voluntary NGO to help the casualties in war zones—writing to the Nobel Committee praising their work, and nominating them for the Nobel Peace Prize:<br />
</p><blockquote>In the most dangerous place on earth these unarmed volunteers risk their lives to help anyone in need regardless of religion or politics.</blockquote><p>In fact they were a US, UK, EU creation established in 2013, and not an independent NGO. The White Helmets receive assistance from the US government’s Agency for International Development—something they have not denied—so it is a multi-million dollar US Coalition funded organisation. In short, it is funded by the governments involved and invested in the Syrian conflict, and not at all a grass-roots Syrian organisation. The White Helmets funding was, from the UK ($65m via UK Foreign Office), the US (US State Dept via USAID $23m), Holland ($4.5m), Germany ($ 7.87m) and Japan (undisclosed sum from the International Cooperation Agency), Denmark (undisclosed sum)—all via the Mayday Rescue “foundation” set up by James Le Mesurier, a former British Army officer working as an adviser on Syria civil defence at the UAE. They are based in Gaziantep, Turkey and largely trained in Turkey and Jordan not inside Syria.<br />
</p><p>Curiously, the White Helmets are embedded exclusively in areas of Syria occupied by listed terrorist organisations including Al Nusra Front and ISIS, along with various so-called “moderate rebels” such as Ahrar al Sham (JFS) and Nour Al Din Zinki. CBC Canada now tells us, curiously enough, “Al Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, formerly known as Al Nusra Front and then Jabhat Fateh Al Sham, has been removed from the US and Canada’s terror watch-lists, since July 2016, after it merged with fighters from Zenki Brigade and hardline jihadists from Ahrar al Sham and rebranded itself as Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) in January this year’. The US gradually reveals its previously officially undisclosed associations with the terrorist groups. Even so plenty of investigators have discovered and attempted to publicise these links but the main stream media have kept them hidden from the general public in the interests of fomenting war.<br />
</p><p>The US State Department is hesitant to label Tahrir al-Sham a terror group, despite the group’s link to al-Qaida, as the US government has directly funded and armed the Zenki Brigade, one of the constituents of Tahrir al-Sham, with sophisticated weaponry including the US-made antitank TOW missiles.<br />
</p><p>Adulatory publicity about the White Helmets is the result of a multimillion dollar sustained commercial marketing and social media promotional campaign via a network that is funded by George Soros and various US, UK and Middle Eastern enterprises. The PR network is as follows: Avaaz–Purpose–Syria Campaign–White Helmets.<br />
</p><p>The White Helmets claim to be neutral and “non-aligned”, yet they actively promote and lobby for US/NATO state intervention, including the “no fly zone”. The White Helmets are also referred to as the “Syria Civil Defence”. However, there is an existing Syria Civil Defence—the REAL Syria Civil Defence—established in Syria in 1953 and recruited and trained inside Syria. It operates in both terrorist and government held areas.<br />
</p><p>The day after Cox died, 17 June 2016, her husband set up a GoFundMe page named “Jo Cox’s Fund” in aid of three charities which he described as “closest to her heart”: the Royal Voluntary Service, Hope not Hate, and the White Helmets.<br />
</p><p>She was also a friend of Staffan de Mistura, a man of dubious affiliations in this connection. Thus, in January 2010, Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, revealed de Mistura had been offered the job as the UN special representative in Afghanistan, suggesting if, indeed, he was not the USA’s own nominee, he was regarded as a politically safe pair of hands from their viewpoint. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, himself a US puppet, confirmed the appointment soon afterwards. He was similarly regarded by the EU a little later in late 2011 when it obliged Italy to accept an EU government of technocrats headed by Mario Monti, Mistura being nominated Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs. Then, in May 2014, de Mistura was named president of the board of governors for the European Institute of Peace (an EU-backed NGO) in Brussels. The EIP is the putative facilitator of the European Union’s global peace agenda, pursuing “multi-track diplomacy” and promoting conflict resolution. Yet the EU is multiply involved in NATO which is the USA’s main military ally in everything it does wherever it does it, like Syria, the member states being obliged to help each other! Mistura therefore was practiced in the art of seeming to be what he was not—a peacemaker—when he was really covering for militarism via NATO. On 10 July 2014, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that he had appointed de Mistura as the new special envoy tasked with seeking a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Syria. Can we be sure he was actually ever intent on peace or was ever fair in his assessment of the warring parties? Plenty of evidence suggests not. Thus, he stated in one of his briefings:<br />
</p><blockquote>To defeat Islamic State, you have to have a political approach that also includes those that feel disenfranchised, the Sunnis.</blockquote><p>Yet the terrorists who are trying to bring down the Assad regime are Sunnis, and Sunnis of the extreme and odious Saudi sect called Wahhabis—the ones fond of punishment by chopping off bits of the human body, including heads! Mistura does not sound at all objective in this statement, but it does suits US/NATO/Saudi policy of bringing all dissident nations in the middle east to heel.<br />
</p><p>To end the successful Syrian/Russian air campaign against the terrorist stronghold of Aleppo, the UN special envoy wanted to give the 900 or so head-lopping fighters from Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly linked to al-Qaida and known as al-Nusra Front, safe passage to leave Aleppo for another Syrian city. At the same time, the Syrian government had to agree to recognise the current anti-Assad political administration in eastern Aleppo, led by Brita Haj Hassan, and leave it in power at least in the short term—effectively allowing the terrorist rulers of the city to remain in power though they had lost the power struggle! De Mistura even offered to accompany the terrorists personally if they were willing to leave Aleppo, but reneged on his offer when a humanitarian lane was actually opened to let them leave. He plainly thought it a risky business.<br />
</p><p>De Mistura explained in a briefing that President Assad had discussed with him the issue of his concerns about Da’esh, and his feeling that he himself was concerned about terrorism—ISIS and basically Al-Nusra. He said he had been listening to that and hearing that this could be an opportunity for him [De Mistura] also to prove whether he [Assad] was, as he [de Mistura] wanted to believe—against Da’esh and Al-Nusra. Since those terrorist organisations were trying to eliminate Assad and the secular Syria he was defending, and de Mistura had admitted, “Syrians overall emphasize their own vision for a united, sovereign, independent—they’re very proud people—non-sectarian, multi-confessional, all-inclusive state with territorial integrity...” it is remarkable, indeed unbelievable, that de Mistura could have doubted that Assad was “against” the terrorists! Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies thought de Mistura should resign.<br />
</p><p>Finally, Cox was a “Remain” supporter in the campaign leading to the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, which working people largely rejected. She and fellow MP Neil Coyle both nominated Jeremy Corbyn as leader, then when he did better than they had exppected, regretted it. Well she did say:<br />
</p><blockquote>I never really grew up being political or Labour.</blockquote><p>So there we have it. A promising talent but with deep flaws of discernment and judgement regarding imperial military designs, little internationalist human feeling despite her experience in disaster zones abroad, and no soundly entrenched political convictions to give her a solid basis for it anyway.<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-50347492619363770722017-05-15T18:47:00.000+02:002017-05-15T18:47:36.260+02:00Labour’s manifesto recognises the economic status quo can’t be kept going for much longer.»Ten years ago this month, Tony Blair was going to stand down as prime minister after 10 years in the job, during which time he had won three elections on the trot with his "New Labour" (read "NOT Labour") neoliberal (read Tory) policies. His legacy?<br />
• Britain was in debt<br />
• the public sector was on the brink of meltdown<br />
• the country was trying to play the part of world policeman on the cheap<br />
• the growing trade deficit exposed the perils of allowing manufacturing to shrivel<br />
• then, a month after Blair’s departure from Downing Street, the biggest financial crisis in a century erupted!<br />
<br />
Remember, it was "NOT labour" not Labour that brought all this on.<br />
<br />
As in 2007, the economy is still over-dependent on the financial sector and on the willingness of households to load up on debt. When the housing market slows--as in 2011-12 and currently--so does the economy. Income and wealth are highly concentrated because not only has growth been slow it has also been unevenly distributed. In the workplace, management is strong and unions are weak, which helps explain why real wages have grown more slowly since 2007 than in any decade since the 19th Century. London is rich and thriving but might as well be a separate country given how different it is from other, less prosperous, regions. Relative poverty, as the former prime minister Gordon Brown has shown, is heading for levels not experienced even under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.<br />
<br />
Labour’s draft manifesto at least tries to tackle some of these glaring weaknesses. There is plenty of good in the manifesto:<br />
• Employers who whinge constantly about the poor quality of school leavers and graduates will be asked to contribute more to the education budget through higher corporation tax.<br />
• Labour plans to broaden stamp duty to a wider range of financial instruments, including derivatives, which will raise £5bn and help lessen volatility.<br />
• There is a recognition that macro-economic policy since the crisis has been flawed, with far too much emphasis on ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing and too little on tax and spending measures.<br />
• Austerity has been tested to destruction, with both deficit reduction and growth much weaker than envisaged.<br />
• There is a strong case, as the International Monetary Fund has noted, for countries to borrow to invest in infrastructure, especially when they can do so at today’s low interest rates.<br />
<br />
It is sign of how much ground has been ceded by the left since Blair's "NOT Labour" took over the Labour party, that these ideas are seen as dangerously radical. They were not radical in 1945 when a mild mannered Labour leader, Clement Attlee, was given no chance of winning against the victorious war leader, Winston Churchill.<br />
<br />
Germany and France have higher levels of corporation tax than Britain, but they also have better trained workforces and higher levels of productivity. A group of countries are planning a financial transactions tax. Balancing day-to-day spending while borrowing for roads, railways and superfast broadband, which is what John McDonnell is suggesting, is more Keynesian (the principles applied for the first 35 post war years--until Thatcher in this country and Reagan in the USA abandoned them to give wealthy people even more wealth!--when the Western world had more equal societies and more productive economies) than Marxist--the fake fact the Tory press apply to Corbyn's policies. What’s more, these essentially social-democratic ideas will seem even more mainstream if--as is entirely possible--there is another crisis.<br />
<br />
And where we are is that:<br />
• Real incomes are falling.<br />
• Inequality is rising.<br />
• The NHS is kept going on a wing and a prayer.<br />
• The economy is barely rising despite more than eight years of unprecedented stimulus from the Bank of England.<br />
• Personal debt is heading back towards its previous record levels.<br />
• International co-operation has rarely been weaker.<br />
• There is a profound disconnect between the financial markets, where asset prices regularly scale new heights, and the state of the real economy. <br />
<br />
Now ask yourself this. As this is so, what is the real fantasy, Labour’s manifesto ideas that income, wealth and power should be more evenly distributed or the idea that the current state of affairs can be sustained very much longer?<br />
<br />
We just cannot risk the current state of affairs being perpetuated under May's complacent Tories.«<br />
(Adapted from Larry Elliott, The Guardian)<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-20042416902069404382017-05-13T00:36:00.002+02:002017-05-13T00:36:59.166+02:00Media on Trial: Contextual Notes Probably every conflict is fought on at least two grounds—the battlefield and the minds of the people, via propaganda. Propaganda is to rally people behind a cause, often a miliary or political one, by publicising it, but also by exaggerating, misrepresenting, and lying about it. Some of the tactics used in propaganda include:<br />
<br />
• selective stories<br />
• partial facts and background<br />
• exaggerating threats to people’s security and reinforcing reasons and motivations for them to respond to them<br />
• offering only a narrow range of insights into the situation, vouchsafed as undeniable (rather than one viewpoint among others that are not considered) and needing to be confirmed—viz, only official government sources or retired military personnel for conflicts<br />
• denigrating as “bad guys” and name-calling the opponent or the enemy for supposed dastardly acts<br />
• jumping to judgement based on inadequate information and before adequate or often any valid discussion, especially of the facts and the options available, has been considered.<br />
<br />
These ploys are constantly used by our media to “persuade” people to the stance preferred by the group controlling the sources of propaganda—usually the vested interests of big businesses or the party of the ruling clique, and internationally, the USA, NATO and the West generally. All of these approaches have been used in the latest interventions by the West in Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, but extend back over much of recent history through a multiplicity of US interventions since WWII including Chile, Vietnam, Korea, the Cold War against the USSR and China, and continue still against Venezuela, Brazil and other South American states. Since the end of WWII, the United States has:<br />
<br />
• attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected<br />
• dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries<br />
• attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders<br />
• attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries<br />
• grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries<br />
• been more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world for over a century (although not easily quantified), not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.<br />
<br />
These are facts not loony “alternative facts” or “fake news” and can be found in the Western liberal media (WLM), but are not constantly plugged as the propaganda points are, so are quickly forgotten even if they were originally noticed at all by the typical receiver of the media’s news. The WLM pretends to have a “watchdog” role, an independent voice that somehow assists social accountability. Yet it has really been the source of propaganda and public enthusiasm for wars like those on Iraq, Libya and Syria. By describing bloody and vicious interventions as being “humanitarian”, journalists deliberately switched off their critical faculties and thereby switched off ours! Thus they hid a murderous spree of US/NATO “regime change” across the region.<br />
<br />
For the US and the UK criminal enterprise against Syria, the challenge was as ever selling it to their electorates—public relations! Justifying the dirty war called on mass disinformation. Seeking “regime change” the US and its NATO allies hid behind proxy armies of “Islamists” accusing the Syrian Government of atrocities, and so a narrative had to be built and promoted. It required a relentless propaganda campaign demonizing the Syrian government and everything it did. So, the mild-mannered optometrist, Syrian President, Bashar al Assad, was described as worse than Hitler. They did this by constant reliance on partisan sources, such as the UK-based Rami Abdul Rahman (SOHR, the self-styled Syrian Observatory on Human Rights), the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI), the latter two firmly embedded in a “revolving door” relationship with the US State Department, at least under Democrat administrations.<br />
<br />
As western peoples we have been particularly deceived by this dirty war, reverting to our worst traditions of intervention, racial prejudice and poor reflection on our own histories. The popular myths (manufactured lies) of the dirty war are that…<br />
<br />
• It is a “civil war”—a “popular revolt” in 2011 was violently quashed by Assad.<br />
• Assad is a brutal dictator who enjoys killing “his own people”.<br />
• The opposition are actually Syrian rebels who want rid of their hated leader.<br />
• The US/NATO/Saudi Arabia/Qatar are justified in backing the rebels.<br />
• So “terrorists” in Syria are really just dissident Syrians fighting for their freedom.<br />
• The Syrian forces backed by their ally Russia’s airforce are deliberately killing Syrian people not terrorists.<br />
• The Syrian people will welcome regime change and the replacement of Assad with a US/Nato approved government.<br />
<br />
Each and every one of these assertions can be shown to be lies from the Western press itself, though finding the rebuttals is not easy amid the mass of propaganda. It is easier to find the detailed rebuttals from the alternative media as represented by some of the speakers here (and listed below), and sometimes from honest academics, also represented in tonight’s addresses. Their articles will often cite the confirmatory references in the main stream media.<br />
Some reliable authorities worth looking up online and reading…<br />
<br />
Prof Tim Anderson<br />
Chris Hedges<br />
Craig Murray<br />
Finian Cunningham<br />
Glen Greenwald<br />
Jon Pilger<br />
Jonathan Cook<br />
Pepe Escobar<br />
Thierry Meysanne<br />
William Blum<br />
Robert Parry<br />
Neil Clark<br />
Michel Chossudovsky<br />
Piers Robinson<br />
<br />
And some of the websites and political online magazines where counter propagandist material can be found…<br />
<br />
Global Research<br />
Counterpunch<br />
Dissident Voice<br />
21st Century Wire<br />
BS News<br />
Consortium News<br />
Truthdig<br />
Naked Capitalism<br />
Zero Hedge<br />
Truthout<br />
Morning Star<br />
<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-38676866712527199232017-05-05T01:33:00.001+02:002017-05-05T01:33:36.084+02:00What is at stake in terms of inequality in the UK General Election Danny Dorling at Class explains what's at stake in terms of inequality.<br /><br />"Whether measured by the Gini coefficient for OECD countries, or by the take of the top 10%, income inequality rates in the UK today are the worst in all of Europe. Of all the countries of Europe, the UK was the only country to see no improvement in life expectancy between 2011 and 2015 (the latest year for which data has been released). In most countries economic inequalities have been reducing or stable in recent years. Our main problem is being governed by people who have no interest in policies that address inequality, and in telling the public that they believe most people do not deserve to be well off."<br />
<br />Yet, the Conservatives on present trends are likely to win a large majority of seats without a large majority of votes (because the media have succeeded in portraying the Labour leader as ineffective, when he is in fact the only leader to have presented policies capable of changing our situation) and, unless the electorate realise it and return to supporting Labour, the growth of inequality and the decline of Britiain will continue. The Tories, along with most other parties are hoping to benefit from the media denigration of the Labour leader, abetted by far too many Blairite MPs still in parliament.<br /><br />Danny Dorling tells us the 2017 General Election will determine whether the many negative changes in life chances that began in 2011 become cemented for a generation. For example:<br />• For the first time ever, as you became older in Britain you now become less likely to escape private renting. If current trends continue, then most people aged under 50 should assume they will spend the rest of their lives renting from a private landlord. The wealth of private landlords rose by £177bn between 2010 and 2015 as landlords bought up more and more properties and as the price of all properties rose because of their frantic purchases, all fuelled by high and rising rents.<br />• The failure of the Conservative government to see any improvement in public health since coming to office is the worse health record of any UK government since at least 1945. People in the UK now live shorter lives than people in Greece. Life expectancy in Greece, at 81.1 years, is today higher than in the UK, at 81.0 years. Greece fared worse than the UK in 2011. Now it does better. If the Conservative majority is greatly increased, we should not expect to live as long as other people in Europe. <br />• The average child in the UK should expect to be taught at schools that are increasingly poorly resourced compared to what school children elsewhere in Europe will experience, and more than one in four children will be poor.<br />• For working adults wages will remain low, rents will climber even higher, even more people will be forced to take any job, or any number of jobs, they can find. Most will spend most of their adult lives working to allow their landlord to become richer. Adults not in work will suffer even more.<br /><br />To address inequality in the UK, Dorling says we need a bold package of interventions. The package should include<br />• good job creation<br />• the universal provision of high quality, affordable childcare<br />• a fairer, more progressive tax system<br />• a programme for affordable housing.<br /><br />There is no lack of available policies. Labour are offering them. The Tory problem is a refusal to identify inequality as a problem in the first place. In fact, the Conservative party has celebrated high and rising economic inequality. <br /><br />Even under Blair Labour were not as bad as the Tories became! Twenty years ago in 1997, 27% of all children and 26% of all pensioners in the UK lived in poverty. By the time Labour were replaced by the LibDem Tory coalition power in 2010, those proportions had fallen to 18% and 17% respectively, a reduction in economic inequalities. The reductions could have been greater had the take of the top 1% not been allowed to continue to rise under Labour, but that was a critical failing of New Labour. It was, as Mandelson said, "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich".<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-40979989756460938692017-04-28T17:39:00.001+02:002017-04-28T17:39:41.449+02:00The Media: Railroading the ElectorateThe Guardian correspondent, Jonathan Steele, continues to plug the insane Guardian line of opposing the UK referendum decision to leave the EU. He goes so far as to say the Labour Party manifesto should declare that an incoming Labour government would abort the negotiations immediately. There will be no Brexit and no talks about how to achieve one!<br /><br />Steele and his paymaster, the Guardian, seem to think it makes sense to defy a democratic decision, taken by 52% of the electorate, to pander to the 48% who did not get the result to remain in the EU that they wanted. He backs this up by saying over 60% of Labour supporters voted to remain, and are now "in despair", he claims. That is, of course, utter rubbish. Even if it were originally true, many of those Labour remainers are now pig sick of the LibDems and Greens harping on in defiance of a decision we have already taken--TO LEAVE!<br /><br />Moreover the "two thirds of labour supporters" actually includes mostly urban liberals tempted to Labour by the Liberal Labour focus-group mentality of the Blairite years when winning the election was more important than having socialist policies. Traditional Labour Party members were already asking, "what is the point of winning then implementing Tory policies?". Quite! And the result was an erosion of faith in Labour and consequently loss of support in successive elections until we were conned into the unelected ConDem coalition of 2010 that led to our present sorry state (and the deserved collapse of the Liberal Democrats!).<br /><br />Steele and the Guardian will be glad to see the present continuous false emphasis on Brexit and the perpetual attacks on Corbyn confusing the electorate to the extent that they achieve a similar collapse of Labour. We need to remember that most of the traditional Labour areas outside the metropolitan zone are the very areas (and some LibDem areas) that voted to leave, and the reason is plain--it is because the neoliberal policies of all the main parties for more than 50 years neglected the concerns of the voters in those deprived places--the "rust belt" of the UK--abandoned since Thatcher to decay with no prospects for their futures.<br /><br />Labour must campaign vigourously for the votes of those neglected working people, and to persuade them that the Party is not backward looking, as the media are trying to persuade the young, but has a policy of "back to the future" to restore all that was good that Labour brought in after WWII and that successive right wing governments have been eroding ever since, and especially in the last 7 years. <br /><br />The media and the present government in power are doing their utmost to persuade people that Corbyn is an ineffective leader, but that is not true. He has put forward a prospective programme that would benefit us all (except the over rich!), none more than the young! What is true is that the media are refusing to cover what Labour is offering, so the policies that everyone agrees are what are needed are not being associated with the Labour leader and his party in the minds of the electorate. Instead only negative associations are being propagated.<br /><br />It is quite deliberate. One lesson that is always difficult to get over is that the media are not, and never have been fair. They offer biased views constantly, one of which is, of course, that they are actually fair, and it would be undemocratic to change the situation. The hacking scandal and the Leveson enquiry prove otherwise. An important question we should always ask when considering potential bias is, "who benefits from this opinion being accepted as true?" (Cui Bono? in Latin). In other words, in this case is the beneficiary of the view or the policy the rich or the poor? If it is not beneficial to poor people, or if it is vastly more beneficial to the rich, then there is cause for doubting it as a fair viewpoint. Why? Because the newspapers are owned by a handful of very rich people who run them for the benefit of their own kind--the very rich! Note, the VERY rich, not the slightly richer than the rest!<br /><br />The Morning Star is the only daily paper in the UK to be biased toward the ordinary people, and the Peoples World is the equivalent in the USA. Yes, they are biased too, but they are biased against the rich. But an unbalance can only be corrected by an opposite force. If you must read media like the Guardian, then the opposite pan in the scales should be equally weighted by reading the Morning Star (or Peoples World) to get a balance.<br /><br />The media are trying to railroad the electorate into a dead end by bad mouthing the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, though the failures of Labour are the failures of Corbyn's predecessors like Tony Blair (who always has a platform in the anti-Corbyn media). Corbyn, like the late Tony Benn, does not engage in slagging matches. That is not a sign of weakness but of strength. Anyone dismayed by Corbyn's fairness and politeness has the answer, as did Benn, in his policies, in the issues. Corbyn's policies address the issues important to working people, May and the Tories aggravate them because they aim to benefit the rich, and that they do at the expense of the poor!<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-32783506948670833632016-12-07T01:15:00.000+01:002016-12-07T01:15:39.529+01:00Cut the smearing, Washington Post, if you get what that means.We still don’t have any sort of apology or retraction from the Washington Post for promoting “The List” — the highly dangerous blacklist that got a huge boost from the newspaper’s fawning coverage on Nov. 24. The project of smearing 200 websites with one broad brush wouldn’t have gotten far without the avid complicity of high-profile media outlets, starting with the Post.<br /><br />On Thursday — a week after the Post published its front-page news article hyping the blacklist that was put out by a group of unidentified people called PropOrNot — I sent a petition statement to the newspaper’s executive editor Martin Baron.<br /><br />“Smearing is not reporting,” the RootsAction petition says. “The Washington Post’s recent descent into McCarthyism — promoting anonymous and shoddy claims that a vast range of some 200 websites are all accomplices or tools of the Russian government — violates basic journalistic standards and does real harm to democratic discourse in our country. We urge the Washington Post to prominently retract the article and apologize for publishing it.”<br /><br />After mentioning that 6,000 people had signed the petition (the number has doubled since then), my email to Baron added:<br />“If you skim through the comments that many of the signers added to the petition online, I think you might find them to be of interest. I wonder if you see a basis for dialogue on the issues raised by critics of the Post piece in question.”<br /><br />The reply came from the newspaper’s vice president for public relations, Kristine Coratti Kelly, who thanked me “for reaching out to us” before presenting the Post’s response, quoted here in full:<br /><br />“The Post reported on the work of four separate sets of researchers, as well as independent experts, who have examined Russian attempts to influence American democracy. PropOrNot was one. The Post did not name any of the sites on PropOrNot’s list of organizations that it said had — wittingly or unwittingly — published or echoed Russian propaganda. The Post reviewed PropOrNot’s findings and our questions about them were answered satisfactorily during the course of multiple interviews.”<br /><br />But that damage-control response was as full of holes as the news story it tried to defend. For one thing, PropOrNot wasn’t just another source for the Post’s story. As The New Yorker noted in a devastating article on Dec. 1, the story “prominently cited the PropOrNot research.” The Post’s account “had the force of revelation, thanks in large part to the apparent scientific authority of PropOrNot’s work: the group released a 32-page report detailing its methodology, and named names with its list of 200 suspect news outlets…. But a close look at the report showed that it was a mess.”<br /><br />Contrary to the PR message from the Post vice president, PropOrNot did not merely say that the sites on its list had “published or echoed Russian propaganda”. Without a word of the slightest doubt or skepticism in the entire story, the Post summarized PropOrNot’s characterization of all the websites on its list as falling into two categories:<br />“Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were ‘useful idiots’ — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.”<br /><br />As The New Yorker pointed out, PropOrNot’s criteria for incriminating content were broad enough to include “nearly every news outlet in the world, including the Post itself”. Yet “The List” is not a random list by any means — it’s a targeted mish-mash, naming websites that are not within shouting distance of the US corporate and foreign policy establishment.<br /><br />And so the list includes a few overtly Russian-funded outlets; some other sites generally aligned with Kremlin outlooks; many pro-Trump sites, often unacquainted with what it means to be factual and sometimes overtly racist; and other websites that are quite different — solid, factual, reasonable — but too progressive or too anti-capitalist or too libertarian or too right-wing or just plain too independent-minded for the evident tastes of whoever is behind PropOrNot.<br /><br />As The New Yorker’s writer Adrian Chen put it:<br />“To PropOrNot, simply exhibiting a pattern of beliefs outside the political mainstream is enough to risk being labeled a Russian propagandist.” And he concluded:<br />“Despite the impressive-looking diagrams and figures in its report, PropOrNot’s findings rest largely on innuendo and conspiracy thinking.”<br /><br />As for the Post vice president’s defensive phrasing that “the Post did not name any of the sites on PropOrNot’s list”, the fact is that the Post unequivocally promoted PropOrNot, driving web traffic to its site and adding a hotlink to the anonymous group’s 32-page report soon after the newspaper’s story first appeared. As I mentioned in my reply to her:<br />“Unfortunately, it’s kind of like a newspaper saying that it didn’t name any of the people on the Red Channels blacklist in 1950 while promoting it in news coverage, so no problem.”<br /><br />As much as the Post news management might want to weasel out of the comparison, the parallels to the advent of the McCarthy Era are chilling. For instance, the Red Channels list, with 151 names on it, was successful as a weapon against dissent and free speech in large part because, early on, so many media outlets of the day actively aided and abetted blacklisting, as the Post has done for “The List.” Consider how the Post story described the personnel of PropOrNot in favorable terms even while hiding all of their identities and thus shielding them from any scrutiny — calling them “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”<br /><br />So far The New Yorker has been the largest media outlet to directly confront the Post’s egregious story. Cogent assessments can also be found at The Intercept, Consortium News, Common Dreams, AlterNet, Rolling Stone, Fortune, CounterPunch, The Nation and numerous other sites. But many mainline journalists and outlets jumped at the chance to amplify the Post’s piece of work. A sampling of the cheers from prominent journalists and liberal partisans was published by FAIR.org under the apt headline “Why Are Media Outlets Still Citing Discredited ‘Fake News’ Blacklist?”<br /><br />FAIR’s media analyst Adam Johnson cited enthusiastic responses to the bogus story from journalists like Bloomberg’s Sahil Kupar and MSNBC’s Joy Reid — and such outlets as USA Today, Gizmodo, the PBS NewsHour, The Daily Beast, Slate, AP, The Verge and NPR, which “all uncritically wrote up the Post’s most incendiary claims with little or minimal pushback.” On the MSNBC site, the Rachel Maddow Show’s blog “added another breathless write-up hours later, repeating the catchy talking point that ‘it was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign.’”<br /><br />With so many people understandably upset about Trump’s victory, there’s an evident attraction to blaming the Kremlin, a convenient scapegoat for Hillary Clinton’s loss. But the Post’s blacklisting story and the media’s amplification of it — and the overall political environment that it helps to create — are all building blocks for a reactionary order, threatening the First Amendment and a range of civil liberties.<br /><br />When liberals have green-lighted a witch-hunt, right wingers have been pleased to run with it. President Harry Truman issued an executive order in March 1947 to establish “loyalty” investigations in every agency of the federal government. Joe McCarthy and the era named after him were soon to follow.<br /><br />In media and government, the journalists and officials who enable blacklisting are cravenly siding with conformity instead of democracy.<br /><br />(Norman Solomon is co-founder of the online activist group RootsAction.org) <div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-17752669451749839192016-12-06T21:14:00.000+01:002016-12-06T21:14:23.007+01:00The End of Democratic Capitalism: Pity they Couldn't Resist the Nuclear WarSabres are rattling again in Washington towatd Moscow and Beijing. Could nuclear war still happen? The US and Russia possess about 14,000 nuclear warheads, but other countries possess them too, like India, Pakistan, Israel.<br /><br />According to simulations by Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Jersey and Michael Mills at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado even a nuclear war between say India and Pakistan could devastate the world. The fires from bombed cities would send about 5 million tonnes of hot black smoke into the stratosphere, where it would spread round the world. This smog would cut solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface by 8 per cent – enough to drop average winter temperatures by a startling 2.5 to 6 °C across North America, Europe and much of Asia, and not just for a few days. It would take around five years for the impacts to peak, and the repercussions would still be felt strongly after a decade.<br /><br />Near-ice-age temperatures would cause frosts capable of reducing the growing season in the world’s mid-latitude bread baskets by up to 40 days. This, combined with meagre rainfall and blistering UV, would cause crop yields to plummet. Nuclear winter would deliver global famine. The smoke would also heat the normally chilly stratosphere by around 30°C, unleashing nitrogen chemistry that would destroy much of the ozone layer.<br /><br />Moreover, climate models predict that rainfall would be reduced as weather systems lost energy. The Asian monsoon would collapse... that’s two billion people with as much as 80 per cent less water. The Amazon basin and the already arid Southwestern US and western Australia would scarcely do better. All from a small regional but nuclear war.<br /><br />Steven Starr of the University of Missouri has calculated that a nuclear exchange between the major nuclear powers, US and Russia (and perhaps China), could throw 150 million tonnes of smoke into the air. That would block 70 per cent of sunlight and cool much of the world by 20°C or more. Unable to grow food, most people would starve to death. Those who hope to hide from the starvation in deep bunkers or whatever will have a long wait for the radioactice fallout from such a massive nuclear exchange to reduce--thousands of years, and it is unlikely anyone could survive. One of the greatest geopolitical achievements of the past 60 years was to avoid a nuclear war. The next 60 look just as gloomy.<br />
<br />(Adapted from Fred Pearce, New Scientist)<div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-34641203567424053572016-05-09T21:32:00.003+02:002016-05-09T21:40:21.475+02:00Socialism, a US ViewSixty years after McCarthyism made socialism “un-American”, Bernie Sanders has placed it back on the agenda. “Back” because socialism has a long history in our country, with such prominent advocates as Helen Keller and Albert Einstein. In the Sanders era, advocates of socialism are challenged to think and talk about what socialism really is, its essential promise, how it fits the American experience, what it might look like for the US, and how it’s a goal every American can embrace and help make a reality. But first, here’s what Bernie Sanders had to say about socialism. <br />
<h2>
Bernie Sanders showed how socialism makes sense for America</h2>
Sanders made a powerful case for his vision of socialism in a speech at Georgetown University on 19 Nov. In the New Deal of the 1930s, Sanders said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted “against the ferocious opposition of the ruling class of his day, people he called economic royalists”: “Roosevelt implemented a series of programs that put millions of people back to work, took them out of poverty and restored their faith in government. He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our country. He combatted cynicism, fear and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country. And that is what we have to do today.” <br />
Sanders noted both FDR and Lyndon Johnson, who enacted Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, were assailed by the right wing as socialists in their day. He did not mention the enormous mass movements of the 1930s and 1960s that pushed both Roosevelt and Johnson to act. But he acknowledged it implicitly when he declared that today: <br />
<blockquote>
“We need to develop a political movement which, once again, is prepared to take on and defeat a ruling class whose greed is destroying our nation. The billionaire class cannot have it all. Our government belongs to all of us, and not just the one percent”. </blockquote>
“A ruling class whose greed is destroying our nation”, Sanders didn’t say it specifically, but that is the essence and logic of capitalism. Defeating this ruling class, according to Sanders, means bringing about “a culture which, as Pope Francis reminds us, cannot just be based on the worship of money”. <br />
Sanders cited calls by Roosevelt in 1944 and Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s for an economy that serves the people. In their view, he said, you cannot have freedom without economic security—as Sanders put it: <br />
<blockquote>
“The right to a decent job at decent pay, the right to adequate food, clothing, and time off from work, the right for every business, large and small, to function in an atmosphere free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. The right of all Americans to have a decent home and decent health care”.</blockquote>
Getting to that freedom means reshaping political power in our country, Sanders said, because “today in America we not only have massive wealth and income inequality, but a power structure which protects that inequality”. <br />
<blockquote>
“Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice. It also means that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote”.</blockquote>
<h2>
How socialism can transform our society to serve the people</h2>
The connection between our economic and political structures is stronger than Sanders indicated. They are not two parallel systems. We have a political power structure that maintains, protects and preserves an economic system that fuels inequality and injustice. Our economic system based on greed drives (in many ways or in important ways) our political system. The right-wing-dominated Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United ruling is just one illustration of the role of Big Money—Big Capital—in politics. This is why it’s called “capital”-ism. <br />
Socialism is simply about rebuilding our society so that working people of all kinds, all colors, all languages, all faiths—the car worker, the nurse, the computer technician, the McDonald’s worker, the teacher, the gay family farmer and the farm laborer, the musician, the truck driver, the scientist, the customer service rep, the college student, the teenager trying to land a first job, the Muslim, the Jew, the Catholic, the Methodist, the Anglican, the Quaker, and so too many others. The people who make this country run, not a tiny group of super-rich corporate profiteers, are the deciders, the planners, the policymakers. The driving force is not the ruthless quest for ever-larger individual profit, as it is under our current capitalist system, but pursuit of the common good, equality, freedom from want and fear, expanding human knowledge, culture and potential, providing a chance for everyone to lead a fulfilling life on a healthy planet. <br />
Sanders showed how socialism is rooted in American values. Socialism is about deep and wide democracy. It is not about an all-powerful central government taking over and controlling every aspect of life. It is not only about nationalizing this or that or especially every company. But it does mean that the public will have to take on and take over a few key “evil-doers”. <br />
<h2>
Taking on Big Oil and Big Finance</h2>
<ol>
<li>The giant energy corporations, Big Oil, the coal companies, the frackers. This section of corporate America plays a central role in the US economy, but also in its politics—and it’s a dangerous and damaging one. People know that they not only ravage our environment and worker health and safety, and hold communities hostage with the threat of job loss if they are curbed, while at the same time blocking progress on a green economy, but they also back and fund far-right policies on a whole range of issues. (It’s not just the Koch brothers.) This sector of the economy will clearly have to be restructured in the public interest.</li>
<li>The giant banking and financial companies—commonly known as “Wall Street” although they are sprinkled around the country. We’ve seen how they wrecked our economy and destroyed lives and livelihoods. For what? Simple greed. They will need to be returned to their socially needed function—to protect ordinary people’s savings and to fund investment in the social good, driving a thriving economy and society: <ul>
<li>new technologies to save our planet from climate change disaster, flood protection for example</li>
<li>a 21st century public education system rich in resources to enable the next generations to flourish </li>
<li>expanded medical research and a national health system that serves every American with top quality, humane, state of the art care from one end of life to the other</li>
<li>exploration of space and our own planet to enrich human society</li>
<li>and so many more.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
You may have a few others to add to the list of key evil-doers that will probably be on top of the list to be challenged and taken over. But aside from that, socialism can mean a mix of: <br />
<ul>
<li>Worker and community-owned co-ops</li>
<li>Companies democratically owned and run by local or state entities. This is not new—we already have, for example, more than 2,000 community-owned electric utilities, serving more than 48 million people or about 14 percent of the nation’s electricity consumers. Then there’s the state-owned Bank of North Dakota</li>
<li>Privately run companies</li>
<li>Individually owned small businesses.</li>
</ul>
For socialism to work, public expression and participation will have to be mobilized and expanded, in the economy and in all other areas of life, for example, by measures like: <br />
<ul>
<li>Strengthening and enlarging worker-employee representation and decision-making</li>
<li>Expanding the New England town hall meeting concept</li>
<li>Implementing proportional representation and other measures to enable a wide range of views to be represented in our government at every level.</li>
<li>Taking money out of political campaigns</li>
<li>Making voting easy.</li>
</ul>
Obviously there’s a lot more to think about and figure out—these are just a few suggestions. <br />
<h2>
Shedding stereotypes about socialism</h2>
Bernie Sanders and others take pains to call themselves democratic socialists. That’s because the concept of socialism—in essence, a society based on the “social” good—has been tainted by what happened in the Soviet Union, and some other countries, and its exploitation for propaganda purposes by the capitalist media. But there’s nothing in socialism that equates to dictatorship, political repression, bureaucracy, over-centralization, commandism, and so on. <br />
Those features of Soviet society arose out of particular circumstances and personalities. But they were not “socialist”. As events have shown, in fact, socialism requires expanded democracy to grow and flourish. <br />
Socialism does not mean a small group “seizing power”. It doesn’t mean radical slogans either. Red flags and images of Che or Lenin not required. Socialism means an energized, inspired, mobilized vast majority from all walks of life, from “red” state and “blue”, coming together to make changes, probably one step at a time. <br />
Socialism is not a “thing” that will “happen” on one day, in one month, one year or even one decade. History shows that vast and lasting social change rarely happens that way. It will be a process of events, many small steps and some big ones—and elections will play a big and vital role—creating transformations that perhaps we won’t even recognize as “socialism”. Perhaps it will only be in hindsight that we will look back and say, “Oh yes, we’ve got something new”. And it’s not an end product. There is no “end of history”. <br />
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels became famous for analyzing capitalism and how it exploits and oppresses the 99 percent—OK they didn’t use that term, but that’s what they were talking about. Capitalism started out as a productive and creative force, they wrote, but it contained the seeds of its own decline. It has created a massive and ever-widening working class but most of the wealth this class produces and sustains goes into the pockets of an ever-smaller group of capitalists—that’s called exploitation. It creates so many problems that eventually it will have to be replaced. Change is on the agenda. Thank you Bernie Sanders.<br />
<br />
Slightly Adapted from Susan Webb, <span class="_5yi_">People’s World</span> <div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-90385661125349502122016-03-08T23:26:00.000+01:002016-03-08T23:26:27.316+01:00Why Socialism is Effectively Impossible in the EUIt is because the EU Treaties not only contain procedural protections for capitalism, they also entrench substantive policies which correspond to the basic tenets of neoliberalism. <br /><br />The EU is based on two core functional treaties, the Treaty on European Union (TEU, originally signed in Maastricht in 1992) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, originally signed in Rome in 1958 as the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community). These lay out how the EU operates, and there are a number of satellite treaties which are interconnected with them. Mostly they have been repeatedly amended by other treaties over the years since they were first signed, so a consolidated version of the two core treaties is regularly published by the European Commission. The EU can only act within the competences granted to it through these treaties and amendment to the treaties requires the agreement and ratification (according to their national procedures) of every single signatory.<br /><br /><b>Reforming the EU to make Socialism Possible</b><br /><br />The methods of Treaty amendment are laid down in Article 48 TEU. Under the ordinary revision procedure, Member States must agree by common accord the amendments to be made to the Treaties. Under simplified revision procedures (used to revise Union policies), the European Council also must act unanimously. In each case, changes must be confirmed by all the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. Crucially, irrespective of which procedure is used, only one national government can veto treaty change. All 28 governments would have to want to give up capitalism simultaneously to change the Treaties such that socialism is possible. In other words, the treaties are designed to make socialist change impossible<br /><br /><b>Privatising Public Utilities</b><br /><br />The socialist position would be that Member States should determine how big their own public sectors are. But EU liberalisation legislation consolidates privatisation. Nationalising sectors such as gas, electricity, telecommunications and postal services is prevented by giving corporations the right of accessing any market. The sort of extension of public ownership brought in by the 1945 Labour government could therefore be prohibited because the new public enterprises would have to compete with private firms in a capitalist market, and that is not socialism! It is the “competitive public ownership” sought by Labour right winger, Anthony Crosland, trying to undermine the efforts of the Attlee government and the welfare state it introduced after 1945. The EU makes publicly owned companies act like private companies--eg run for profit not for public benefit like the NHS--particular when the Treaty provisions on state aids are taken into account. Similar legislation on railways is presently going through the EU institutions.<br /><br />All legislation in the EU has to come from the EU Commission and be submitted to the Council and Parliament. Supposing that a socialistic national government sought to introduce EU legislation to allow all Member States a free choice over the public or private ownership of their energy, postal, telecommunications and rail sectors, it has to rely on the Commission to make and submit the proposal. Under Article 352 TFEU the Council must act unanimously, so a single national government can instruct its minister in the Council to veto the proposal, and ALL 28 must therefore agree from the outset their support. Once again it is impossible.<br /><br /><b>TTIP</b><br /><br />Assuming TTIP is agreed before the next UK general election, the prospects of the EU discarding it are even less likely. Assuming withdrawal is permissible, the TEU and TFEU do not make provision for how the EU actually does it. On the face of it, Article 352 TFEU with its unanimity requirement would have to be used, again allowing a single government to stop withdrawal from the TTIP. Again it is easier to do for a single independent state.<br /><br /><b>Facing up to the Constitutional Obstacles to Socialist Advance</b><br /><br />Campaigners claiming it is possible to make the EU more left-wing, have the duty to explain it can be done in the face of EU treaty requirements of unanimity and common accord. At present, these requirements make socialism within the EU nigh on impossible. Those pretending there is a way forwards within the EU like Yanis Varoufakis, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 2025), and “Another Europe is Possible”--have to show what the practical means are they propose to use to make progress against the EU constitution without tearing up the treaties which amounts to all 28 Member States rejecting the EU as it is. <br /><br /><b>Let us leave now, while we have a reasonable chance.</b><br /><br />D. Nicol, ‘Is Another Europe Possible?’ U.K. Const. L. Blog (29th Feb 2016) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-40945699497656670902016-01-13T21:20:00.000+01:002016-01-13T21:20:51.986+01:00Banksters, Banking Gangsters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguySQM5b0X_djjHgkYP6ymgSUuw-D4NNo2Xz3qADTDBKb2Mzz_5sZE5wWrC16-8Y9AnXp289LAswJD9J3vk3kUrOntsh8WKZWdlGE1qmTXx_2Le5zKCiIXaUybU9AQQlEYBG4zG8__wz28/s1600/hsbcprivatebankgeneva0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguySQM5b0X_djjHgkYP6ymgSUuw-D4NNo2Xz3qADTDBKb2Mzz_5sZE5wWrC16-8Y9AnXp289LAswJD9J3vk3kUrOntsh8WKZWdlGE1qmTXx_2Le5zKCiIXaUybU9AQQlEYBG4zG8__wz28/s1600/hsbcprivatebankgeneva0.jpg" /></a></div><p>There has been a vast amount of propaganda directed at FIFA this year for corruption, said by the Americans to amounts to $150 million. Yet the media do not extend the same degree of opprobrium to the financial institutions that a few years ago walked off with the contents of the Exchequer and continue to purloin money from ordinary people in manifest acts of criminality. For example, British bank HSBC was caught running tax evasion, money-laundering for drug cartels and other illicit schemes estimated at $180 billion--more than a thousand-fold the level of criminality alleged at FIFA.<br />
</p><p>Wall Street banks, like JP Morgan, systematically rigged gold price markets a shady bid to shield the US dollar value, affecting the price of basic commodities and livelihoods for billions of people worldwide, and estimated to be of the order of trillions of dollars—a thousand thousand-fold the FIFA fraud.<br />
</p><p>These banks, with Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole among many others, all promoted the toxic financial derivatives that made their executives multimillionaires but which led to the global financial and economic meltdown in 2008, and the robbing of the world national treasuries. Millions of lives have ruined from unemployment and the collapse of pensions and savings funds to feed the greed of the banking and financial executives and the ensuing austerity imposed on the public to pay for the financial catastrophe, deliberately and recklessly engineered by the major banks, hedge funds and other capitalist investment agencies.<br />
</p><blockquote>The meltdown of financial markets in 2008-2009 was the result of institutionalised fraud and financial manipulation. The ‘bank bailouts’ were implemented on the instruction of Wall Street, leading to the largest transfer of money wealth in recorded history, while simultaneously creating an unsurmountable public debt.<div align=right>Michel Chossudovsky, The Global Economic Crisis</div></blockquote><p>Generations of children to come will be forced to pay for the trillions of dollars of debt created by the banks. Thousands of people have already died from the austerity governments imposed on their public to pay for the massive corporate fraud, tax evasion, fixing and embezzlement that has occurred.<br />
</p><p>Yet not one board member or executive from the major banks involved has been charged, let alone prosecuted or imprisoned, and the baks have rewarded their political puppets, Barack Obama and David Cameron by donating cash to help to re-elect them.<br />
</p><p>Source, Finian Cunningham, Strategic Culture Foundation<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-76136881617680907992015-09-28T23:10:00.000+02:002015-09-28T23:11:48.935+02:00Jews Against Zionist "Israel"<p>Rare video must share!! Jews against Zionist State Israel!!!<br />
</p><p>Daughter of Mossad Chief: <br />
</p><blockquote>"I Refuse to serve in the Israeli Military"<br />
</blockquote><div align="center"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=a9c54378f025" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
</div><p>Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=630_1436465294#zOjdIzEWef1kumpa.99<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-70514519015100371992015-06-13T23:51:00.000+02:002015-06-13T23:57:28.440+02:00Recent History of Ukraine—Western Interference<p>Ukraine currently stands at the centre of a geo-political battle by the United States and the European Union to isolate and militarily surround Russia and China and minimise the wider influence of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Customs Union of Russian, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In this battle the United States and Germany have adopted somewhat different tactics and have somewhat divergent interests but were both deeply implicated in the February 2014 coup against the elected government of Ukraine and in the subsequent establishment of a regime in which openly fascist forces have a significant place. These notes seek to explain the background<br />
</p><p>In 1990 the Ukraine had the second biggest GDP in the SU after the Russia Federation. It specialised in metallurgy, coal, aircraft, motor production and space craft as well as agriculture. Its population grew from 38m in 1952 to 52m in 1991. In the ten years after the dismantling of the Soviet Union its GDP fell to 40 per cent of the previous level. Almost all sectors of the economy were privatised. The population has fallen sharply, to 45m in 2012. Living standards collapsed. Per capita income is now $6,700.<br />
</p><h4>A multi-national country</h4><p>The borders of Ukraine today were defined in 1945. Historically this geographical area had straddled the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russia empires and included Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Slavic Ukrainians, Russians and Europe’s largest Jewish community. Kiev had been the historic base for Russian Orthodox Christianity and for the first Russian state.<br />
</p><p>In December 1917, a Soviet government was declared in Kiev. It was quickly driven east by pro-Axis forces of Germany and Austria and, after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, into exile. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1918 the revolutionary movement redeveloped and a Ukrainian Soviet Republic was formed in March 1919. In the wars of Western intervention that followed most of western Ukraine was absorbed into Poland and the south-west into Romania. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became a member state of the USSR in 1922, although western, mainly British, intervention sustained right-wing nationalist resistance into the 1930s.<br />
</p><p>In the late 1930s the Ukrainian nationalists in both Polish occupied Ukraine and the Soviet Ukraine switched allegiance to Nazi Germany and were heavily financed to undertake subversive activities. In June 1941 their leader Stepan Bandera established a quisling state and adopted an “elimination” policy against the very large Jewish population. Bandera was removed by the Nazis in December 1941 but reinstated in November 1944 to mobilise resistance to the advancing Soviet army. Under the Nazis about 3m Ukrainians were killed, most of them Jewish but including many non-Jews involved in the resistance. The great bulk of the population in Soviet eastern Ukraine, industrialised in the 1920s and 30s, opposed the Nazi occupation and fought with Soviet forces.<br />
</p><h4>Post-Soviet Ukraine</h4><p>In 1991, after Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, the previous third Secretary of the Ukrainian party, Leonid Kravchuk, became President, took pro-Western positions and initiated a process of rapid privatisation, creating powerful clans of industrial oligarchs. He was replaced in 1994 by Leonid Kuchma, whose power base was in Eastern Ukraine, and who followed a policy of closer alignment with Yeltsin’s oligarch government in Russia. He left office in 2004. All the contenders for political power in the period since served as ministers under Kuchma: Julia Timoshenko, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. All head, or headed, oligarch clans. The Communist Party was re-formed in the 1990s. The party has a significant base in southern and eastern Ukraine, mainly among industrial workers. It has actively campaigned against privatisation and oligarch rule. In the 2012 parliamentary elections it secured 13.1 per cent of the vote.<br />
</p><p>The replacement of Yeltsin by Putin in 2000 saw the United States revising its policies in Eastern Europe and seeking to pull frontline states, Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine, into alignment with NATO. It gave active backing to Viktor Yushchenko and Julia Timoshenko in their bid to prevent Viktor Yanukovych succeeding Kuchma in the 2004 presidential election. Yushenko, a leading oligarch, had previously been a member of Bandera’s OUN. His wife, a US citizen, had worked in the State department and White House under Reagan and was Vice Chair of the US-Ukraine Committee.<br />
</p><p>The Orange Revolution was the result, with major mobilisations in the nationalist west forcing the annulment of the election and the holding of new elections which returned Yushchenko as president and Timoshenko as prime minister. In 2010 Yushenko awarded Bandera the title of “Hero of the Ukraine”. Ukrainian troops were sent to assist NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two oligarch clans of Yushenko and Timoshenko subsequently fell out, and this, combined with the impact of the 2008 economic crisis, allowed Yanukovych to return as president in the 2010 election on a policy of non-alignment. Yanukovych represented oligarch interests principally oriented towards trading with Russia but has pursued highly opportunist policies, playing off the EU and Russia for the best results. In October 2013, he won a vote in parliament allowing him to negotiate for associate membership of the EU. Only the Communist MPs voted against. Then in December he reversed his position to seek a closer relationship with the proposed Customs Union of Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan. This resulted in mass protests and the occupation the central square and adjacent public buildings in Kiev, the Maidan. By January 2015 the occupation was dominated by right-wing nationalists and fascists.<br />
</p><h4>The Communist Party of Ukraine</h4><p>The party had approaching 100,000 members in 2014. In 2012 it secured 32 seats in the parliament. The party characterised the February events at the time as a coup which threatened civil war and the disintegration of the Ukrainian state. Since the February coup it has been the main target of right-wing and fascist violence. Its offices have been burnt, members killed and its deputies repeatedly excluded from the parliament. On 22 July, President Poroshenko signed into law a decree giving parliament the power to ban political parties from the Rada. On 24 July, the speaker of the Rada, Fatherland Party member, Turchynov, successfully moved a motion banning the party from Rada. The public prosecutor was ordered to set in motion court action to proscribe membership of the party. The court hearings began in July 2014. In February 2015 the judges collectively resigned claiming that they had been subjected to undue pressure to ban the party.<br />
</p><p>Although the CP Ukraine opposes any alignment with the EU, it had called in 2013 for a referendum on the issue. It also called for an end to the presidential system and the establishment of a parliamentary republic with a significant measure of federalism and elections based on proportional representation.<br />
</p><p>It points out that any free trade treaty with the EU would wipe out the Ukraine’s shipbuilding, motor and aircraft industries and only benefit those oligarch clans trading in raw materials and those who have seized control of Ukraine’s land resources.<br />
</p><p>In December 2013, it condemned the Yanukovych government’s handling of the protests but highlighted the level of US, German and NATO intervention and the degree to which there has been active support for extreme right-wing politicians. Senator John McCain shared a platform in December with the leader of the fascist Svoboda party, Oleh Tyahnybok, who shortly before had led a 15,000 march through Kiev in honour of the Nazi, Stepan Bandera. The Secretary General of NATO, Anders Rasmusen, described the proposed EU pact as “a major boost to Euro-Atlantic security”.<br />
</p><p>In the October 2014 elections the CP Ukraine secured just under 4 per cent of the vote, and failed to secure a place in the Rada after losing its main voting bases in the East of the country and Crimea.<br />
</p><h4>The pro-coup forces</h4><p>The main pro-coup forces were:<br />
</p><ul><li>Timoschenko’s Fatherland Party, based in the west and with 25 per cent of the vote in the 2012 election, historically looking back to Bandera and with strong US links.</li>
<li>the pro-EU German-funded Democratic Alliance of “the boxer” Klychkov (13 per cent in 2012).</li>
<li>the fascist Svoboda (9 per cent in 2012). The Fatherland Party and Svoboda fought the 2012 election in an electoral pact. Svoboda controlled several cities in Western Ukraine and had been erecting statues to Bandera and destroying Soviet war memorials.</li>
<li>However, much of the street mobilisation was organised by even harder line neo-Nazi elements, Spilna Sprava (Common Cause), Trizub (Trident) and Right Sector.</li>
</ul><h4>US involvement</h4><p>The US state department was closely involved in mobilising support for the Maidan protests and subsequent events. The official with primary responsibility is Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia. Previously foreign policy adviser to Cheney, she is married to Robert Kagan, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century. On 13 December 2013, she told an International Business Conference on Ukraine that the US was committed to defending democratic forces in Ukraine and had spent $5bn over the previous decade inside Ukraine to support them.<br />
</p><p>On 5 February, two weeks before the coup, she was recorded talking on the phone to the US Ambassador in Kiev. She described the need for urgent intervention to pull together a replacement government, and her discussions with Ban Ki-Moon, UN Sec Gen, to send an envoy to Kiev, the previous Dutch ambassador, to do so, and openly said “F..k the EU” which she accused of failing to act. She named Yatseniuk as the man the US backed as the new prime minister.<br />
</p><p>On 19 February , five days before the coup, the Wall Street Journal carried a feature quoting State Department sources calling for action. “Ceding Ukraine to Moscow could turn into a broader undermining of Western credibility”. The feature reminded readers of the active policy previously pursued by the Bush administration in containing Russia and expanding the sphere of Western influence in Eurasia. Support had been given to the Rose Revolution in Georgia, trade and military agreements made with the central Asian republics and backing accorded to the Orange revolution in the Ukraine in 2004. The Obama administration, it argued, had squandered these gains by concentrating on the domestic agenda, shifting its foreign policy focus to Asia and believing it could secure a detente with Russia.<br />
</p><p>Recently, however, perceptions had started to change. Outwitted over Syria, the State Department had hardened its position on Putin’s Russia and what it saw as the attempt to build a counterweight to the US in world affairs. More specifically the State Department saw the possibility of exploiting a “policy asymmetry” in Eastern Europe.<br />
</p><p>For the West the Ukraine was not itself of great economic significance. For Putin, by contrast, it was central. Any attempt to redevelop an economic and political bloc in Eastern Europe and Asia, depended for its credibility on the involvement of Ukraine. Belarus and Kazakhstan by themselves would not be enough. By intervening here, the West could land a major strategic blow on Russia at only limited economic cost. The US had therefore given full backing to the initiative of the European Union last year to offer “associate status” to the Ukraine in return for internal “economic and political reform”.<br />
</p><h4>Poroshenko, War, NATO</h4><p>In 1989-1992, Poroshenko used his position in the Kiev State University International Economic Relations Department to start international trading in cocoa beans. By the 1990s he had developed a monopoly control over Ukraine’s confectionary industry. Politically he supported Kuchma and added the auto-industry, shipyards and a major TV channel (Channel 5) to his holdings in the 2000s. He was associated with Yushchenko in the Orange revolution and became a member of subsequent governments. He faced a number of accusations of corruption and it was mutual accusations of corruption between Poroshenko and Yulia Timoshenko that led to the fall of her government. He became Foreign Minister under Yushchenko in 2009-2010 when he supported closer links with the EU and NATO. He gave financial support to the Maidan protest in December 2013 and used his TV Channel 5 to mobilise support. He represents a “centrist” or opportunist position in Ukrainian politics, not the ideologically nationalist right, and has close links with the EU.<br />
</p><p>The military action by the Kiev regime against the Eastern regions had by early 2015 resulted in over 5,000 deaths, many of them civilians, and the displacement of over 300,000 people as refugees. Some estimates put the number at closer to one million, if those moving to relatives in Russia are included. The spearhead of the Kiev forces was composed of “volunteer battalions” made of extreme right wing elements. The biggest, the Azoz battalion, uses the same emblems and flags as the Nazi SS in the last war.<br />
</p><p>In the final year of the Soviet Union, the US and the Soviet Union announced an agreement that the former SU territories would remain neutral and never become part of NATO—Baker Gorbachov agreement, 9 February 1990. Under GW Bush’s presidency the US adopted an aggressive strategy of NATO expansion in violation of this agreement. Russia has maintained its position that Ukraine should remain non-aligned.<br />
</p><p>On 29 August 2014, the prime minister Yatseniuk asked the Rada to annul Ukraine’s non-aligned status ahead of the NATO summit to enable a request for NATO membership. The NATO summit, in September 2014, announced the intent to take Ukraine into membership.<br />
</p><p>The US has taken the lead in introducing sanctions and pressurising the EU to follow. The US introduced sanctions against senior Russian political figures in March 2014. In August, EU/US discussions resulted in an agreement for joint economic sanctions. These mainly targetted financial institutions and became operative from 12 September. Russian gas, on which most EU countries rely, was excluded. In response, Russia has announced sanctions against imports from EU countries. The economic impact is likely to be far more severe for the EU than the US.<br />
</p><p>The ceasefire 12 point proposals agreed at Minsk, on 5 September, were pushed through by Poroshenko, an ally of Merkel, and opposed by Yatseniuk, closely aligned with the US and the far-right.<br />
</p><p>If adhered to, the Poroskenko 12 points offer most of what the Russian speaking districts want: federalism, local economy autonomy, amnesty, prisoner exchange. On 16 September, the Rada passed a law ratifying autonomy despite opposition from the Fatherland party and Yatsenyuk. However, the October 2014 election results, in which, in a very low poll, right-wing revanchist parties outperformed Poroshenko, could well presage further military action. (CPB Notes)<br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8898141423873087478.post-77479055205825360982015-04-10T02:16:00.000+02:002015-04-10T02:16:11.492+02:00Resisting the Financial Oligarchy and Globalisation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNwOULeCxc5_n2F87ZHkcO9EAOeF1iMEKSMPkoUN5Jt7AQjuipBepXprbqvsCooFD-TB5Z9f4M1ywnNFg_vLxRz8AXCxAMswRGeHr3SpUcDlFOPyThK9LTWDcwg3sWCwAv1oQrR9kjpqJP/s1600/money-banking-loan-bailout-government_bailout-risk-risks-llan527_low.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNwOULeCxc5_n2F87ZHkcO9EAOeF1iMEKSMPkoUN5Jt7AQjuipBepXprbqvsCooFD-TB5Z9f4M1ywnNFg_vLxRz8AXCxAMswRGeHr3SpUcDlFOPyThK9LTWDcwg3sWCwAv1oQrR9kjpqJP/s1600/money-banking-loan-bailout-government_bailout-risk-risks-llan527_low.jpg" /></a></div><p>Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, concluded that the rich on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of—or even against—the will of most voters. America has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy—power is wielded by wealthy elites.<br />
</p><p>It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age. The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called <cite>The Collapse of Democratic Nation States</cite> by Dr John Cobb.<br />
</p><p>He points to the rise of private banks, several centuries back, when they usurped the power to create money from governments. Banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. That tradition goes back to the 17th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England's money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown.<br />
</p><p>Similarly, the US colonies won their revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold. This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks' privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults.<br />
</p><p>President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists' paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. When Lincoln was assassinated, Greenback issues were discontinued. Presidential elections from 1872 to 1896 always had a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Organized by labour or farmer organizations, they were parties of the people not bankers like the Populist Party, the Labor Reform Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reforming the banking system, and democratically controlling the financial system. Financial historian, Murray Rothbard, says politics after the turn of the century was a struggle between competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. Parties sometimes changed hands, but always pulling the strings was one of these two bankers.<br />
</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRrhdHT9oXCRI6drOoWycyCZdhyphenhyphenEoE3MC09hJroHYHdZxM9bWnkPV_MvVqIGVW9Vlf3aAIpEFxCK_dVTjN948Zm_hSeTHgmppAiZi6u_uzpl2bPWgxZckfKEDr1PSFwjzKVz98G-U1ILr/s1600/wall-street-lobbyist-congress-law.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRrhdHT9oXCRI6drOoWycyCZdhyphenhyphenEoE3MC09hJroHYHdZxM9bWnkPV_MvVqIGVW9Vlf3aAIpEFxCK_dVTjN948Zm_hSeTHgmppAiZi6u_uzpl2bPWgxZckfKEDr1PSFwjzKVz98G-U1ILr/s400/wall-street-lobbyist-congress-law.jpg" /></a></div><p>The US Populist movement of the 1890s was the last serious challenge to the bankers' monopoly over the right to create the nation's money. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks. Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then allowed the other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government. Dr Cobb says globalization is the final blow to democracy by overriding national interests:<br />
</p><blockquote>Today’s global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments… Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments.<br />
</blockquote><p>The awful TTIP and its accompanying legal structure, the ISDS, show exactly how serious this threat is.<br />
</p><p>So, if people wish to re-establish their sovereign powers, they should start by reclaiming the power to create money, usurped by private interests while people were gloating over their achievements so far! State and local governments cannot print their own currencies, but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England has acknowledged.<br />
</p><p>A people's government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own treasury notes, as Abraham Lincoln did. Or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.<br />
</p><p>The left has always known that freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom—the freedom to work and to have food, housing, education, medical care and a decent retirement. <br />
</p><hr /><p><i>Abbreviated from <cite>How America Became an Oligarchy</cite> by Ellen Brown in <cite>Counterpunch</cite>.</i><br />
</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">AskWhy! Economo-Political Blog</div>AskWhy! Bloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06730182811999790194noreply@blogger.com0