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By Harsh Thakor

The outstanding Jamaica-born artist, Civil Rights activist and internationalist, Harry Belafonte, died from congestive heart failure at age 96, a week ago, on April 25, 2023.A mascot of people’s emancipation from injustice. His life story that shaped his life are amongst the most gripping commentaries ever.

Belafonte achieved gigantic fame almost 70 years ago, when he was only in his mid-20s. He popularized calypso music in the US, with a hugely successful concert and recording career in several different musical genres. His album Calypso (1956) became the first long-playing record to sell 1 million copies in a single year.

For the major part of his long life, Belafonte classed himself first and foremost a social and political activist, not a singer or actor. Few progressive  or radical artists were such powerhouses of talent or endowed with such extraordinary natural gifts. Rare in history to have witnessed musicians of actors transcending spirit of liberation or struggle to emancipate humanity at such a scale. His political speeches stirred the souls of people, more than the power with which his voice pulled crowds.

The singer  also went on to appear as a screen actor, including in a well-known role opposite Dorothy Dandridge in Otto Preminger’s ground-breaking, all-black Carmen Jones (1959), as well as major roles in Island in the Sun (Robert Rossen, 1957) and Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959). In the 1960s, however, Belafonte largely parted away from a career in Hollywood, complaining that the film studios were not interested in promoting socially conscious films he was searching for. He appeared in some later films, notably co-starring with Zero Mostel in The Angel Levine (1970) and appearing in several Robert Altman films in the 1990s: The Player (1992) and Kansas City (1996).

Background

Belafonte was born into a West Indian family in Harlem, although he spent part of his boyhood in Jamaica. After the Second World War, he met Sidney Poitier at the American Negro Theater and took acting classes at The New School under left-wing German theatre director Erwin Piscator. Belafonte traveled in left-wing circles around the Communist Party. He met actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee and singer Paul Robeson, whom he called a mentor.

Despite becoming the first Black person to win a TV Emmy award in 1960, a Broadway Tony award in 1954 and selling millions of recordings, Belafonte experienced racist discrimination firsthand, like most Black entertainers in the 1950s and 1960s, including his good friend, the late actor Sidney Poitier. Belafonte played a role of an important political organizer and financial backer of the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Impact of Paul Robeson on his life

Belafonte drew his lifelong inspiration personally and politically by the great singer and radical actor, Paul Robeson, who was a victim of the anti-communist, McCarthyite witch hunt that all but reduced him to dust.

In a speech before the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade/Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives meeting in New York City on April 27, 1997, Belafonte, a survivor of the witch hunt, stated, “And it was from Paul that I learned that the purpose of art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be. And that if art were put into the service of the human family, it could only enhance their betterment.”

“Paul said to me, ‘Harry, get them to sing your song, and they will want to know who you are. And if they want to know who you are, you’ve gained the first step in bringing truth and bringing insight that might help people get through this rather difficult world.’”

Belafonte ended his speech this way: “Thank you — and long live the Brigade and what it stands for — and long live each and every one of you — and give up smoking! Fidel Castro gave it up, you can give it up!” (University of Chicago)

Belafonte left no stone unturned in offering moral support for a just trial for the revolutionary journalist and African American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Support to Martin Luther King

Belafonte’s collaboration with and steadfast support for Martin Luther King Jr. is the political connection for which he is most well-known. The singer financially supported King and his family, including after King was assassinated in 1968. He bailed out King and others when they were jailed. He turned his spacious home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side into a virtual second home and unofficial office for the civil rights leader when he was in New York. It was in this apartment that the historically significant meeting dominated by a sharp exchange between King and Andrew Young, and referenced by Belafonte in his memoir, took place.

Belafonte first met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956, in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Both men, not yet 30 years old, had already become famous in their respective fields. The singer and civil rights leader immediately forged a bond, and Belafonte went on to help raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to develop a strong collaborative friendship with King. When King was in New York, he and his closest advisers—Belafonte among them—often met at the singer’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

No other entertainer immersed themselves in the very heart of  the Civil Rights Movement, in the depth of Belafonte.

Challenging racism

Belafonte was an important U.S. spokesperson for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

Belafonte whole heartedly supported left-wing progressive causes that threw a challenge to  the racist, white status quo; this includes being a vocal  opponent of imperialist war. In January 2006, Belafonte led a delegation, which included actor Danny Glover, farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta and professor Cornel West, to Caracas, Venezuela, to meet with the late President Hugo Chavez.

Belafonte told Chavez during a TV and radio broadcast: “No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people … support your revolution. . . .  We respect you, admire you, and we are expressing our full solidarity with the Venezuelan people and your revolution.” (jamaicaobserver.com. Jan. 9, 2006)

Supporter of the Cuban Revolution

Belafonte was Cuba’s Friendship Medal by the Council of State in 2020. When on July 23, 2020, Harry Belafonte held aloft the Friendship Medal, awarded by the Cuban state, traversing his mind, was a recollection of an unforgettable chain of events during his life when he shared the same luck, convictions and destiny of inhabitants of Cuba.

On that day, then Cuban ambassador in Washington José R. Cabañas stated:, “This distinction serves as recognition of your lifelong solidarity with Cuba, your respect and admiration for the Cuban revolutionary process.”

On the 95th birthday of the U.S. actor, musician and social activist — born March 1, 1927, in New York — Belafonte continues to be a source of inspiration for many of his compatriots and for those of us who appreciate him as an exceptional artist, extraordinary human being and dear friend.

One name cannot be overlooked in describing the development of such a special bond: Fidel Castro. The historic leader of the revolution and the actor and singer, a companion of Martin Luther King in the struggle, cultivated a very close relationship, after Belafonte reencountered Cuba in 1979, subsequently never foregoing his trips to Havana, as long as his health allowed.

Belafonte got to know the city in the 1950s, not without first exchanging words and experiences with many Cubans living in New York, and feeling an affinity for the music of the neighboring country, especially after listening to Chano Pozo with Dizzy Gillespie’s band.

In those same years, more than sensation of his films, the song “Matilda, Matilda” touched the core of the soul of the Cubans at that time, a song that dates back at least to the 1930s, when the calypso pioneer, Trinidad’s King Radio (aka Norman Span) released the song. Belafonte first recorded it in 1953, and it turned into immediate hit, further popularized with its inclusion on his second full-length album with RCA Victor in 1955.
In his memoirs, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance”, published in 2011, its Spanish version still unpublished in Cuba, he wrote: “When I became an artist and began to have some celebrity, I went to Cuba quite regularly, before ’59. I went there with Sammy Davis Jr., and to hear Nat King Cole, and to hang out with Frank Sinatra; the place where we most often gathered was the Hotel National.

“Everybody was performing there except me. When they came to me — and I had a work contract, when the Habana Riviera Hotel first opened — I was in an interracial marriage, as it was called in those days, and suddenly I became a persona non grata, in Cuba, everywhere.

Right around that time he filmed Robert Rossen’s film, “Island In The Sun,” in which he was cast as  a Black union leader in a fictitious West Indian country who lived a love story with a young white woman from the upper middle class (Joan Fontaine). The film ignited controversy when it was released in the United States in 1957, considering that racist elites considered its content an irresponsible transgression.

After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, Fidel, who, in addition to being an avid reader, enjoyed movies to the extent that his political and governmental responsibilities allowed, saw the film and talked about it with Belafonte, along with his wife Julie, and Sidney Poitier, a friend and colleague. For both Fidel and Harry, racism and discrimination based on skin colour were and intolerable cultural phenomena.

In this regard, Belafonte noted in his memoirs: “Many Cuban exiles say that in Cuba there was no racism before the Revolution, that Cuba was never racist, never like the United States. I think that Cuba, among all the Caribbean islands, all with racist practices, was the most racist . . .

“So, when I went to Cuba after the revolution, the first thing I noticed was the mixture of people, particularly among young people, there were still residues of the old customs, but certainly among the young, when I went to the university, and when I went to cultural sites, when I went to day care centers, wherever I went in Cuba among the young, I was deeply impressed by the extent of racial integration . . . . I am not suggesting that in Cuba there is no racism, but it is important to know that it is not an official state practice, nor is it institutionalized.”

The objective and subjective factors that leaned towards the resurrection of racist and discriminatory attitudes in Cuban life, and the struggle to erase them as an integral part of the Cuban revolutionary project, were the subjects of Belafonte’s conversations with Fidel more than once, and over the last two years, he has followed news of the implementation of our “National Program Against Racism and Racial Discrimination,” an effort inspired by Fidel’s ideas.

His unflinching solidarity and sense of justice, was illustrated in the manner with which he introduced a rally held at the Church of Reconciliation in New York on September 27, 2003. On that day he offered prayers for the five Cuban anti-terrorist heroes serving long prison sentences in the United States.

He [Belafonte] stated:, “What is happening with our policy toward Cuba is not the American way, it is not the true voice of the American people, it is not the true voice of those of us who believe deeply, profoundly, in the rights of all peoples, and the freedom of all people and in democracy…There is a great deal that the Cuban government, the Cuban people have achieved, that many of us here are still attempting to achieve.”

Belafonte was once asked why he supports the Cuban people, and he stated, “I don’t see it as a supreme effort. It is a way of life: if you believe in freedom, if you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people’s rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humanity.”

Weaknesses

Belafonte’s first political influences, in Stalinist circles, shaped his conversion toward Popular Front reformism, including the claim that the Democratic Party could be pushed to the left and could garner benefits for the working class. It was in this spirit that Belafonte supported the presidential campaigns of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Belafonte’s case, this was also entangled with an emphasis on race, and on support for nationalist opponents of US imperialism, such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. While he did not welcome the rhetoric of the black nationalists or identity politics fanatics, he distinguished the struggle against racism from the challenges facing the working class as a whole. This originated from his whole reformist outlook, rekindled by the experience of the postwar boom. He dismissed the role of the working class in the fight for socialism.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow, in his column this week paying tribute to Belafonte, quotes the entertainer at a speech he gave before an audience at the Ford Foundation 10 years ago. “We surrendered to greed,” said Belafonte. “We surrendered to our hedonist joys. We destroyed the civil rights movement. Looking at the great harvest of achievements we had, all the young men and women of our communities ran off to the feast of Wall Street and big business and opportunity.”

Belafonte targets   himself when he makes criticisms like these, as one of the most famous of the cream of American radicals, and not only African Americans, of course. It was this cream that reconciled with capitalism. Belafonte was shaken by this development. He could maintain complete silence; he could not be part of celebrations of Wall Street and the betrayal of the mass struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. Still, he had no alternative to offer, and joined hands with capitalist politicians, from John F. Kennedy to Obama and Bernie Sanders.

When King was assassinated, Belafonte stated that he quickly decided, after King’s death, to “help elect black candidates at every level of the political system… I helped persuade Andy Young to run for Congress in Georgia, gave him money, and staged a lot of free concerts.” Belafonte made “four- and five-figure contributions” to help elect black mayors in Cleveland; Gary, Indiana, and other cities. Where King had called to extinguish the “burning house” of capitalism, his followers took the opposite recourse.

Conclusion

It is complex to analyse the phenomena that ultimately make Belafonte draw away from Marxism or a Communist party and be entrapped in the quagmire of capitalist circles. Still we should applaud him for against all odds withstanding counter-revolutionary tides, relentlessly backing progressive regimes of Cuba and Venezuela, speaking out against the Iraq War and apartheid in South Africa earlier ,ridiculing a tyrant like Donald Truump and delivering a death defying blow to racism. .His very character was manifestation of the spirit of liberation from the shackles of oppression and few ever as touched the very core of the soul of the oppressed. Regretful that unlike Paul Robeson Harry could not champion Marxism , Socialism and Contribution of Mao Tse Tung  or integrate with the radical black revolutionary movements like the black Panthers or militants like Malcolm X , but overall his positive impact overshadowed the negative art. Arguable it was the very weakness of the progressive Marxist forces that were unable to win over such an icon. It is vital that his likes are re-born in the world in the era of globalisation with oppression on an unparalleled scale, and most artists dancing it it’s tune, worldwide.

Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist who has done extensive research on progressive artists.

2 May 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

The foreign ministers of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq said on Monday after meeting in Amman said the government in Damascus should re-establish the rule of law on all of Syria’s territory, ending the presence of foreign armed groups and terrorists,.

Jordan hosted the meeting, the first of its kind since Syria’s membership in the Arab League was suspended in 2011. Prior to the multilateral meeting, Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad met with his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi to discuss refugees, border security and “water issues,” according to Amman.

In a joint statement distributed by state news agencies, the five ministers called for “ending the presence of terrorist organizations” as well as “armed groups” on the territory of Syria, and “neutralizing their ability to threaten regional and international security.” They also pledged to “support Syria and its institutions to establish control over all its territory and impose the rule of law.”

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq pledged to establish ties with the Syrian military and security institutions in order to “address security challenges.” The five ministers also called for stopping “foreign interference in Syrian domestic affairs.” Their joint declaration also called for setting up technical teams of experts that would follow up on the summit and implement practical measures to resolve the conflict in Syria.

The Amman meeting comes just weeks after Mekdad visited Saudi Arabia and received the kingdom’s endorsement for Syria’s territorial integrity. Currently, Turkish-backed militants control parts of northern Syria, while the northeast is under the control of US-backed Kurdish militias. Several hundred US soldiers are also in Syria, controlling most of the country’s oil wells.

Militants backed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia launched an uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2011. With the help of Russia and Iran, the government in Damascus eventually prevailed over the collection of rebels, including terrorists affiliated with Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). While Syria’s neighbors and regional powers have moved to improve relations with Damascus in recent months, the U.S. has not changed its “regime change” policy.

Saudi Arabia Holds Talks With Syria

Other media reports said:

Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad has completed a breakthrough visit to Saudi Arabia, the first such trip since Riyadh cut diplomatic relations with Damascus in 2012. In a joint press statement issued after the visit Saudi Arabia endorsed Syrian unity and integrity, condemned terrorism, and backed a political solution to the 12-year war.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud had invited his Syrian colleague to Jeddah to discuss “efforts to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis that preserves Syria’s unity, security, stability, Arab identity, and territorial integrity while also serving the interests of its brotherly people,” according to the statement cited by the state news agencies of both countries.

Prince Faisal and Dr. Mekdad agreed on the need to address humanitarian issues and allow aid “to reach all areas of Syria,” establish conditions for the return of refugees and displaced people, and “stabilize the situation in the entire Syrian territories.”

The two sides also committed to enhancing security and “combating terrorism in all its forms,” and agreed on the need to “support the institutions of the Syrian state to extend its control over its territories to end the presence of armed militias and external interference in the Syrian internal affairs.”

Parts of northern Syria are currently under control of Turkish-backed militants, while the area northeast of the Euphrates River is held by U.S.-backed Kurdish militias. Several hundred U.S. troops are also in the country in violation of international law, controlling most of the Syrian oil wells.

The two foreign ministers also discussed steps needed to reach “a comprehensive political settlement of the Syrian crisis,” so the country could return to the “Arab fold,” their joint statement said.

Damascus and Riyadh have begun the procedures needed to resume air travel and consular services between the two countries, while Syria thanked Saudi Arabia for the humanitarian aid provided after the catastrophic earthquakes in February. Much of the aid to Syria has been impeded by the U.S.-imposed ‘Caesar’ sanctions against Damascus.

Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Syria in February 2012, joining the U.S. in backing the militants that sought to overthrow President Bashar Assad. With the backing of Russia and Iran, the government in Damascus eventually prevailed over the collection of rebel militias that included terrorists affiliated with Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).

Rumors that Riyadh was preparing to reverse course began to circulate last month, shortly after China mediated an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to normalize relations. Since then, the kingdom has also launched peace talks to end the eight-year conflict in Yemen.

Damascus And Cairo Close To Restoring Ties

Another media report said:

Syria and Egypt are in advanced talks to restore diplomatic relations that were severed after the outbreak of the conflict in Syria back in 2011, informed sources have told the Wall Street Journal.

A summit is scheduled between Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, shortly after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends in late April, the U.S. outlet reported.

On Saturday, Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad made his first official visit to Cairo in more than a decade, holding talks with Egypt’s top diplomat Sameh Shoukry.

According to the Syrian Foreign Ministry, the two sides discussed “various aspects of bilateral cooperation and ways to strengthen brotherly relations,” during the meeting.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry in its statement reported that the ministers “agreed to intensify channels of communication between the two countries at different levels during the coming phase.”

Shoukry reiterated Cairo’s support for a “comprehensive political settlement to the Syrian crisis as soon as possible,” the statement read.

According to WSJ’s sources, the parties were also expected to discuss Syria’s possible return to the Arab League during the talks in Cairo. Damascus’ participation in the group of 22 nations was suspended 12 years ago when members accused Syria of a violent crackdown on opposition.

Assad’s government, which insists that it has been fighting international terrorism all those years, has by now been able to regain almost full control of Syrian territory with the assistance of its allies Russia and Iran.

Diplomatic relations between Cairo and Damascus were cut in 2013 under the previous Islamist Egyptian government of Mohamed Morsi, which backed the Syrian opposition. When announcing the closure of the embassy in Syria, Morsi also decried the involvement of Lebanese armed group Hezbollah in the conflict on the side of Damascus and urged that a no-fly zone be established above the country.

The mending of relations between Damascus and the rest of the Arab World has been spearheaded by the United Arab Emirates, which reopened its Syrian embassy in 2018 and has been visited by Assad twice over the past two years.

The Syrian armed turmoil began in 2011 with foreign backing, triggered a war that killed over 500,000 people and created a massive refugee crisis. Assad emerged victorious, regaining control of most of his country, thanks largely to military and economic support from Iran and Russia. Iranian officials hope that success will inspire other nations opposed to US hegemony.

CIA Chief Admits U.S. blindsided By Saudi-Iran Deal

CIA Director William Burns has told Saudi officials that the U.S. was caught off guard, after the kingdom agreed to a normalization deal with Iran brokered by China, according to the Wall Street Journal.

During an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia this week, Burns “expressed frustration” with Riyadh and said Washington “felt blindsided” by its renewed diplomacy with both Iran and Syria, multiple unnamed sources told the Journal on Thursday.

After years of strife as regional adversaries, Tehran and Riyadh concluded the normalization pact on March 10 following secret talks mediated by Beijing, agreeing to resume formal diplomatic relations after they cut ties in 2016. The deal marked a major diplomatic achievement for China and a significant shakeup in the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Since the agreement was announced, top diplomats from Saudi Arabia and Iran have spoken on the phone for a number of times, and hope to reach compromises on several outstanding issues – namely the war in Yemen, which has raged on for more than eight years and left hundreds of thousands dead.

Tehran is also working to reestablish contacts with the United Arab Emirates, another Gulf monarchy long at odds with the Islamic Republic. Earlier this week, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri said his country had appointed an ambassador to Abu Dhabi for the first time in nearly a decade. Riyadh is also reportedly seeking to reach a similar understanding with Syria, and hopes to invite President Bashar al-Assad for a visit later this year, according to Reuters.

While the White House has welcomed the new diplomacy in public, Burns’ reported complaints to Saudi officials this week could highlight concerns over Beijing’s growing influence in the region. Tensions between Riyadh and Washington have also been on the rise since last year, when OPEC+, a group of major oil exporters led by Saudi Arabia, opted to slash production. The move reportedly “angered” U.S. President Joe Biden, who claimed the cut would benefit Russia, another large energy exporter.

2 May 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dan Lieberman

Russian President, Vladimir Putin, realized early, in his country’s invasion of Ukraine, that adversaries do not always fight wars on a battlefield. The realization that Russian military superiority could not easily overcome Ukraine’s moral superiority and its defensive capabilities succeeded the recognition by Ukraine’s NATO allies that Russia could not be defeated militarily and might be defeated by imposing sanctions that throttle Russian industry, including its agriculture. Defeat will be accomplished by economic warfare, reaching eventually to a politics of starvation ─ starve the industry, starve the body, and starve the mind. A defeated and succumbed people will force its government to capitulate.

The Russian leader heeded NATO’s thrust and abruptly adopted a militarized economic warfare strategy that sits well with the Russian people ─ Russian casualties will be minimal and Ukraine casualties will not be reported in the Russian Press. Russian armies have slowed their offensive actions and concentrated on destroying Ukraine’s energy sources and laying waste to its agriculture. In a move to show the futility of supporting Ukraine, Russia extended its politics of starvation to include blocking Ukraine grain shipments to nations throughout the world. The latter maneuver proved counterproductive and the Kremlin retreated from this drastic action.

In the early months of the Ukraine invasion, battles occurred on a front that extended from Southeast Ukraine to western Ukraine and to northeast Ukraine. Casualties grew on both sides as the battles intensified. In 2023, battles have diminished and are confined to a small strip of land in the Donets Basin. Escalating economic warfares, in which the Russian military pounds economic targets and NATO sanctions pound the Russian economy, have become the decisive and deciding strategies of the war. Which strategy, in this new war of attrition, will prove more decisive and has the greater possibility of achieving its goal can be analyzed by examining previous examples of economic warfare.

Examples of militaries waging economic warfare are the allied World War II bombings of German and Japan infrastructure and the U.S. bombing campaigns of North Vietnam and Vietcong territories. The World War II bombing campaigns did not have the precision and firepower of present day weapons but the intensity, number of sorties, and years of carpet bombings intended to overcome the limitations. Did these attempts to cripple economies prove vital in ending the wars?

Germany
A Table on P.191, Die Deutsche Industrie im Kriege (The German War Industry), R. Wagenfuhr, indicates that at the end of World War II, German industrial production was 10 percent higher than in 1942 and consumption had not diminished. The German industry circumvented the carpet bombings that destroyed German cities. Nazi Germany continued manufacturing tanks, airplanes, and munitions in factories throughout Europe, some of them underground, until military forces captured the ground where the factories existed. The German people maintained morale and endured the economic hardships until final surrender. Economic warfare did not defeat Germany. Defeat came on the battlefield from the combined strength of Soviet and allied ground forces.

Japan
The December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor started a military war between the United States and Japan. Before that date, the two antagonists were already engaged in an economic war. Concerned with Japanese military moves into Asia and the Empire’s seizure of resources that increased Japan’s military and economic might, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dictated measures to contain Japan. From The Path to Pearl Harbor

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in July 1940, cut off shipments of scrap iron, steel, and aviation fuel to Japan even as he allowed American oil to continue flowing to the empire. Japan responded by entering resource-rich French Indochina, with permission from the government of Nazi-occupied France, and by cementing its alliance with Germany and Italy as a member of the Axis. In July 1941, Japan moved into southern Indochina in preparation for an attack against both British Malaya, a source for rice, rubber, and tin, and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. This prompted Roosevelt to freeze all Japanese assets in the United States on July 26, 1941, which effectively cut off Japan’s access to US oil.

The economic war had one accomplishment ─ it led to a conventional military war that shifted into a militarized economic war. Faced with eventually having to invade the Japanese mainland and suffer huge casualties, the U.S. adopted a strategy that sacrificed Japanese lives and saved American lives.

After seizing island bases that brought the Japanese mainland within striking distance of long-range bombers, the US, in early 1945, halted a two year lull from the 1942 Doolittle raids and resumed bombings of Japan. The US Strategic Bombing Survey describes the goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan’s major cities in the period between May and August 1945 as “either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country.”

The economic effects of the air attacks against the Japanese mainland appear in the US Strategic Bombing Survey.

…some 40 percent of the built-up area of the 66 cities attacked was destroyed. Approximately 30 percent of the entire urban population of Japan lost their homes and many of their possessions….The railroad system had not yet been subjected to substantial attack and remained in reasonably good operating condition at the time of surrender….Damage to local transport facilities, however, seriously disrupted the movement of supplies within and between cities. Urban incendiary attacks destroyed the electric distribution systems in the burned-out areas simultaneously with the consumer load previously served by them. The hydro-electric generating plants and the transmission networks survived without substantial damage. Twenty-six urban steam-generating plants were damaged as an incident to other attacks, the aggregate loss of capacity being less than one-seventh of Japan’s total generating capacity.

Four hundred and seventy thousand barrels of oil and oil products, 221,000 tons of foodstuffs and 2 billion square yards of textiles were destroyed by air attacks. Ninety-seven percent of Japan’s stocks of guns, shells, explosives, and other military supplies were thoroughly protected in dispersed or underground storage depots, and were not vulnerable to air attack.

Physical damage to plant installations reduced physical productive capacity by roughly the following percentages of pre-attack plant capacity: oil refineries, 83 percent; aircraft engine plants, 75 percent; air-frame plants, 60 percent; electronics and communication equipment plants, 70 percent; army ordnance plants, 30 percent; naval ordnance plants, 28 percent; merchant and naval shipyards, 15 percent; light metals, 35 percent; ingot steel, 15 percent; chemicals, 10 percent.

The bombing campaign may have intended “to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country,” but it did not spare casualties.  The March 9, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo is considered the single-most destructive raid of World War II. Sixteen square miles of city were destroyed and an estimated 80,000 – 130,000 Japanese were killed, more than those who initially died in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Did the militarized economic warfare push the Japanese into surrender; evidence does not support that assumption. If the U.S. command thought that to be probable, the orders to drop the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not have been issued. If the atomic age had not occurred and conventional bombing would have persisted, it is more likely that Japan would have surrendered but not unconditionally. A continued bombing campaign would have caused mounting casualties and impeded further offensive actions by the Imperial Army but would not have prevented a capable defense of the islands. The Japanese could accept the former as long as they had control of the latter. Doubtful that the U.S. would be willing to suffer a massive amount of casualties to achieve unconditional surrender; more likely that President Truman would have ended the war if the Japanese offered a conditional surrender.

The militarized economic warfare did not end the war; it needed more to bring an unconditional surrender. In this case, the more was excessive deaths. The specter of a slaughter of the Japanese by more atomic bombings, which gave the appearance of eventually extinguishing the entire population, prompted the emperor to agree with the surrender terms.

Vietnam
The Vietnam War is easily analyzed. Despite blasting North Vietnam and the Vietcong countryside, the U.S. lost the war. The military economic warfare proved futile and ground forces were incapable of making up for the futility.

Sanctions
Sanctions drive the economic war. After World War II, the United States imposed sanctions against more than 35 countries that Washington accused of intolerable behavior. North Korea, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Burma, Sudan, Iraq, Cuba, Liberia, Soviet Union, Sierra Leone, Syria, Somalia, Russia, and Yugoslavia are some of the many nations that have been whipped by U.S. sanctions. Only Burma and Nicaragua  corrected violations of human rights; both have returned to dictatorial rule. All of these nations have suffered greatly from the sanctions, with Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Iraq enduring the most punishment.

Iran
Already heavily sanctioned, Iran’s entrance into the atomic age provoked a series of new sanctions. The economic warfare affected Iran’s industries and welfare. After decades of different sanctions, annual inflation increased to more than 42 percent, the national currency lost more than half of its value in the years fro 2019-2022, and oil exports fell from roughly 2.5 million barrels per day in 2017 to less than 0.4 million barrels per day in 2020. Gross Domestic Product peaked at $644 billion in 2011 and fell to $185 billion in 2020.

Going into the year 2023 tells a different story. The Iranian government budget predicts 1.4 million barrels of crude oil per day, inflation increased to 55 percent, and Statista predicts the GDP to rise to $368 billion.

Economic warfare has not halted Iran’s nuclear activities, changed any aspects of its behavior, or prevented it from signing contracts with foreign firms to develop energy resources. Exports grew to $71.6 billion in Dec 2021, compared with $46.9 billion in the previous year, with liberated Iraq, war ravished Russia, and independent China filling the gap as trading partners.

Economic warfare has caused Iran’s industry and Iran’s people to suffer. Iranians did not accept defeat, did not succumb, and the economic warfare has not forced its government to capitulate.

Cuba
The decades old economic, commercial, and financial embargoes placed on Cuba hampered the Cuban economy. The American Association for World Health and the American Public Health Association ascertained that it also caused significant deterioration in Cuba’s food production and health care:

• Cuba was banned from purchasing nearly 1/2 of new drugs on the market.
• Physicians had access to only 890 medications, down from 1,300 in 1989.
• Deterioration of water supply increased water borne diseases.
• Daily caloric intake dropped by 33% between 1989 and 1993.

The Cuba of 2023, politically, socially and culturally is still the Cuba of 1960. More than 60 years of economic warfare against Cuba has accomplished nothing for the U.S. and has greatly harmed the Cuban people.

North Korea
The proud and impoverished nation of North Korea (DPRK) has been continually subjected to sanctions, threats of economic sanctions, and hastily withdrawn sanctions. The media is peppered with the words: “U.S. Lifts sanctions,” “U.S. recommends sanctions,” “South Korea wary of sanctions.”  After its 2006 claim of conducting a nuclear test, the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic Korea) leaders responded to intended sanctions by labeling them “a declaration of war.”

The DPRK has suffered from economic warfare, which includes restrictions on trade and financial transactions. Export to the DPRK of items that have both military and non-military uses have, at times, been prohibited.  During March 2012, the politics of starvation entered the situation; angered by an intended North Korea missile test, the U.S. suspended food aid to the “hermit kingdom.

Sanctions, intended to collapse the North Korea regime, have not halted its development of nuclear weapons and guided missile delivery systems. They have collapsed the economy and harmed the North Korean people; starvation during droughts have occurred. Although some international assistance has been provided to North Korea, the intensive economic warfare waged against the “hermit kingdom” has exacerbated its problems, without any apparent benefit to its principal antagonist, the United States.

Iraq
Sanctions against Iraq began August 6, 1990, four days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and featured a near-total financial and trade embargo. Resultant suffering has been outlined in a UN Report on the Current Humanitarian Situation in Iraq, submitted to the Security Council, March 1999. Due to the length of the report, only significant features are mentioned.

Pre Gulf War

• Before 1991, Iraq’s social and economic indicators were generally above the regional and developing country averages.
• Up to 1990, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) cited Iraq as having one of the highest per capita food availability indicators in the region.
• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), prior to 1991, health care reached approximately 97% of the urban population and 78% of rural residents. A major reduction of young child mortality took place from 1960 to 1990; with the infant mortality rate at 65 per 1,000 live births in 1989 (1991 Human Development Report average for developing countries was 76 per 1,000 live births). UNICEF indicates that a national welfare system assisted orphans and children with disabilities and supported the poorest families.
• Before 1991, southern and central Iraq had well developed water and sanitation systems, with two hundred water treatment plants for urban areas and 1200 compact hundred water treatment plants  to serve rural areas, as well as an extensive distribution network. WHO estimates that 90% of the population had access to an abundant quantity of safe drinking water.

Sanctions began after the Gulf War, ostensibly as a means to remove Saddam Hussein, and continued until the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

• Economist Intelligence Unit estimates that Iraqi GDP may have fallen by nearly 67% in 1991, and the nation had “experienced a shift from relative affluence to massive poverty” and had infant mortality rates that were “among the highest in the world.”
• The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimated the maternal mortality rate increased from 50/100,000 live births in 1989 to 117/100,000 in 1997. The under-five child mortality rate increased from 30.2/1000 live births to 97.2/1000 during the same period. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) calculates that the infant mortality rate rose from 64/1000 births in 1990 to 129/1000 in 1995 (the Human Development Report set the average infant mortality rate for Least Developed Countries at 109/1000).
• Calorie intake fell from a pre-war 3120 to 1093 calories per capita/per day in 1994-95. The prevalence of malnutrition in Iraqi children under five almost doubled from 1991 to 1996 (from 12% to 23%). Acute malnutrition in Center/South rose from 3% to 11% for the same age bracket.
• The World Food Program (WFP) estimated that access to potable water decreased to 50% of the 1990 level in urban areas and 33% in rural areas.
• School enrollment for all ages (6-23) declined to 53%. According to a field survey conducted in 1993, as quoted by UNESCO, in Central and Southern governorates, 83% of school buildings needed rehabilitation, with 8613 out of 10,334 schools having suffered serious damages.

The U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq accomplished what sanctions failed to accomplish ─ after pushing Iraq into total ruin, the invasion brought total surrender and the removal of Saddam Hussein. A question, “Why go to war, if already had sanctions, or why implement sanctions if ready to go to war?”

CONCLUSION
As shown, economic warfare has rarely, if ever, accomplished its stated purposes. Applied to Russia, with the intent to degrade its ability to wage war and force it to eventually retreat from its wartime gains, economic warfare has little likelihood of achieving victory. The Bear has vast internal resources to use for any emergency, is a member of BRICS — an organization of five leading economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — and a member of the  Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), an intergovernmental military alliance in Eurasia consisting of six post-Soviet states — Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. Many leading nations have refused to isolate Russia for its invasion —India, Israel, Serbia — and business with them remains as usual.

A Ukraine victory can only occur from a ground war that recovers the lost territory and brings the hostilities to the Russian border. For Ukraine to win the ground war, requires escalating the conflict to total war, which includes war on the Russian mainland. The result of this escalation will be vast destruction of Ukraine and millions of casualties. If facing defeat, will Russia use nuclear weapons? If Ukraine faces defeat, will NATO directly intervene?

It has been previously shown that militarized economic warfare by itself has not achieved victory. Circumstances are different in this war.

(1)    If Russia can contain its casualties, it will be patient in achieving its objectives. The U.S. government defied public criticism for 15 years in Vietnam and for 20 years in Afghanistan.

(2)    Unlike the European war, where all adversaries, except the United States, were subjected to homeland damage, Mother Russia has remained relatively immune from Ukraine attacks.

(3)    The Russians are not asking for unconditional surrender; they are requesting territorial surrender and Ukraine neutrality.

NATO’s economic warfare strategy has no chance of victory. It can only degrade into a land war that could lead to a Third World War. Russia’s militarized economic warfare strategy has been waged for several months, and, despite expecting Ukrainians to freeze, starve, have mental breakdowns, and run for the borders, the Ukrainian public has endured the bombings and remained relatively calm. The Russians are stalled, perplexed, contemplating, and probably feel they need to do more. The more may be similar to the more that American military strategists decided to use in their attempt to persuade Japan to surrender — more havoc and more civilian casualties — a growing more that leads to abundant catastrophes.

Neither side can win this war on the terms that have already been proposed. Ukraine demands complete withdrawal of Russian troops from all territories they have occupied; Russia demands recognition of annexation of territories it has seized and the demilitarization of Ukraine. This war has become a  war without end or ending only if one side is entirely obliterated. The only alternatives are (1) a cease fire, similar to Korea, that freezes the situation and permits each side to claim they have not surrendered. For the next years they can snarl, growl, threaten each other, and go on with their lives, or (2) replacement of one or both governments who will be willing to compromise their positions.

I’ll bet on a combination of the two ─ new governments installed specifically to arrange a cease fire agreement.

Dan Lieberman is a political commentator

2 May 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

A Gazan Ph.D. candidate studying in India, Mohammad Abunahel steadily refines and updates a map on the World BEYOND War website, dedicating a portion of every day to continue researching the extent and impact of USA foreign bases.  What is Mohammad Abunahel learning, and how can we support him?

On the few occasions when a government moves toward converting property or weapon production facilities into something useful for human beings, I can’t restrain a tumbling brainstorm:  what if this signals a trend, what if practical problem-solving begins to trump reckless war preparation? And so, when Spain’s President Sanchez announced on April 26^th that his government will build 20,000 homes for social housing on land owned by the country’s Ministry of Defense, I immediately thought about crowded refugee camps around the world and inhumane treatment of people without homes. Visualize the vast capacity to welcome people into decent housing and promising futures if space, energy, ingenuity and funds were diverted from the Pentagon to meet human needs.

We need glimmers of imagination about the worldwide potential for accomplishing good results by choosing the “works of mercy” over “the works of war.”  Why not brainstorm about how resources devoted to military goals of domination and destruction could be put to use defending people against the greatest threats we all face, – the looming terror of ecological collapse, the ongoing potential for new pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and threats to use them?

But a crucial first step entails fact-based education about the global infrastructure of the USA’s military empire. What is the cost of maintaining each base, how much environmental damage does each base cause (consider depleted uranium poison, water contamination, noise pollution, and risks of nuclear weapon storage). We also need analysis about ways the bases exacerbate the likelihood of war and prolong the vicious spirals of violence attendant on all wars. How does the U.S. military justify the base, and what is the human rights record of the government the U.S. negotiated with to build the base?

Tom Englehardt of Tom Dispatch notes the paucity of discussion about the expanse of U.S. military bases, some of which he calls MIA because the U.S. military manipulates information and neglects to even name various forwarding operating bases. “With very little oversight or discussion,” says Englehardt, “the massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains in place.”

Thanks to the tenacious work of researchers who formed the No Bases campaign, World BEYOND War now presents the many-faced hydra of U.S. militarism, worldwide, in a visual database.

Researchers, scholars, journalists, students and activists can consult this tool for help in exploring vital questions about the cost and impact of the bases.

It’s a unique and challenging resource.

At the helm of daily exploration enabling the mapping project’s growth is Mohammad Abunahel.

On almost any given day in Abunahel’s busy life, he sets aside time, far more than he is compensated for, to work on the mapping project. He and his wife are both Ph.D. students in Mysore, India. They share caring for their infant son, Munir. He takes care of the baby while she studies and then they trade roles. For years, Abunahel has devoted skill and energy to create a map which now draws the most “hits” of any section on the WBW website. He considers the maps as a step in addressing wider problems of militarism. The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one data base which is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying  toll of U.S. militarism and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Abunahel has good reason to resist military dominance and the threats of destroying cities and towns with overwhelming weaponry. He grew up in Gaza. Throughout his young life, before he finally managed to obtain visas and scholarships to study in India, he experienced constant violence and deprivation. As one of ten children in an impoverished family, he readily applied himself in classroom studies, hoping to improve his chances for a normal life, but along with the constant threats of Israeli military violence, Abunahel faced closed doors, dwindling options, and rising anger, his own and that of most other people he knew. He wanted out.  Having lived through successive Israeli Occupation  Force onslaughts, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent people of Gaza, including children, and destroying homes, schools, roadways, electrical infrastructure, fisheries and farms, Abunahel grew certain that no country has a right to destroy another.

He’s also adamant about our collective responsibility to question justifications for the U.S. network of military bases. Abunahel rejects the notion that the bases are necessary to protect U.S. people. He sees clear patterns showing the base network being used to impose U.S. national interests on people in other countries. The threat is clear: if you do not submit yourselves to fulfill U.S. national interests, the United States could eliminate you. And if you don’t believe this, look at other countries that were surrounded by U.S. bases. Consider Iraq, or Afghanistan.

David Swanson, the Executive Director of World BEYOND War, reviewing David Vine’s book, The United States of War, notes that “since the 1950s, a U.S. military presence has correlated with the U.S. military starting conflicts. Vine modifies a line from Field of Dreams to refer not to a baseball field but to bases: ‘If you build them, wars will come.’ Vine also chronicles countless examples of wars begetting bases begetting wars begetting bases that not only beget yet more wars but also serve to justify the expense of more weapons and troops to fill the bases, while simultaneously producing blowback — all of which factors build momentum toward more wars.”

Illustrating the extent of the USA’s network of military outposts deserves support. Calling attention to the WBW website and using it to help resist all wars are vital ways to expand the potential for expanding and organizing resistance to U.S. militarism. WBW will also welcome financial contributions to assist Mohammad Abunahel and his wife who are, by the way, excitedly awaiting the birth of their second child. WBW would like to increase the small income he earns. It will be a way to support his growing family as he raises our awareness of warmaking and our resolve to build a world BEYOND war.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@worldbeyondwar.org), Board President of World BEYOND War, co-coordinates the November 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal

2 May 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

Viewpoint by Kalinga Seneviratne

SYDNEY, 3 May 2023 (IDN) — At a time when the West has weaponised human rights, the United Nations body that promotes freedom of expression need to rethink what it means.

Every year UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation) mark World Press Freedom Day (WPFD) on May 3 with a particular theme and this year is its 30th edition.

UNESCO has mainly provided a platform through their WPFD to civil society (NGO) groups that are funded by western agencies to shape the free speech agenda. With many countries in the Global South seeing these groups involved in so-called “colour revolutions” as a security threat, it is time, as an inter-governmental organisation, UNESCO paid some attention to the views of its member states who are not of the western alliance.

This year’s theme is ‘Shaping of Future Rights: Freedom of Expression as a Driver of all other human rights’.

UNESCO has given four special briefs in their website for campaign action on the day. First of which is the “misuse” of the judicial system to attack freedom of expression. It focuses on the use of criminal defamation to silence journalists, but no mention at all about how the UK and US judicial systems are being used to silence Julian Assange of Wikileaks.

Yonden  Lhatoo, the Chief News Editor of the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post in a recent videolog made a powerful indictment regarding the Assange case.

“There is no limit to the insufferable hypocrisy of these gangsters in glass houses,” he said referring to the US, UK and Australian government action against Assange. “They defecate all over on human rights and press freedom in the name of national security, when it suits them, calling it ‘justice’, when a country they don’t like do something of that sort, its ‘repression’—how convenient”.

Safety of foreign journalists and those covering protests are two other issues, while the fourth UNESCO brief is about journalism and whistleblowing.

The 16-page UNESCO brief on whistleblowing talks about the new electronic means of leaks to media and publishing of such information. It mentions “Pub/Leaks” and “Latamleaks” in Latin America but no mention of Wikileaks. It also argues that whistleblowers and publishers must have guarantees of protection and that their actions do not lead to negative consequences, such as financial sanctions, job dismissals, undermining their family members or circles of friends, or threats of arbitrary arrest. But, no mention whatsoever about the Assange’s case including western financial institutions blocking donations to Wikileaks[1].

The document seems to distance itself completely from this case because the US considers Assange a computer hacker not not a journalist. The brief talks about the benefits to society from whistleblowers that “allow people to get information and evidence of acts of corruption, human rights violations, or other matters of unquestionable public interest“ but no direct reference to war crimes, that Wikileaks exposed through whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Unfortunately, today, it is okay to talk about war crimes if the Russians are doing it but not when the Americans, NATO or Australians are involved.

In June 2019, the Australian Federal Police raided the newsroom of Australia’s national broadcaster ABC after they have exposed Australian forces’ war crimes in Afghanistan. They took away the laptops of some journalists in an attempt to trace the whistleblowers describing the action as a “national security” operation.

Today human rights arguments have lost credibility because of these double standards. Thus, it is interesting to note how China is now pushing a new human rights agenda via the United Nations.

In July 2021, China succeeded in getting a resolution adopted at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council on development rights[2]. It affirmed that the eventual eradication of extreme poverty must remain a high priority for the international community and that international cooperation for sustainable development has an essential role in shaping our shared future.

The resolution was adopted by 31 votes to 14 against. Interestingly those voting against were 12 European countries plus Japan and South Korea. While joining China in voting for it were Russia, India, Pakistan, Cuba, Indonesia, Philippines and Fiji, plus a number of African and Latin American countries.

The vote itself gives a good indication of the new trends in the human rights agenda promoted by the Global South.

This brings us to the question of where freedom of speech stands in this human rights agenda.

Human rights according to this agenda are what is prescribed in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).  Providing clean water and sanitation to the people, a good education, developing and nurturing sustainable systems of agriculture to provide food security to people, protecting the environment and protecting communities from the impacts of climatic change, empowering women, providing proper housing and healthcare to people, and so forth and so on.

Governments should be held accountable to providing these rights to people, but that cannot be achieved by the media always accusing governments of corruption, or people coming out to the streets shouting slogans or blocking roads or occupying government buildings.

Reporters need to go out to the communities talk to the people and find out how they live, what is lacking and how they think these services could be provided by governments. Journalist could even become a facilitator of a dialogue between the people and the government.

Human rights is a marvellous concept on paper, but its practice is today immersed in double standards and hypocrisy. Media has been a party to this.

In 2016-17, I was part of a team at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok to develop curriculum to train Asian journalists in what we call “mindful communication for sustainable development”. It was funded by UNESCO, and we used Asian philosophical concepts in designing the curriculum, to encourage journalists to have a compassionate mindset in reporting grassroots development issues from the peoples’ perspective.

We want to develop a new generation of communicators, who would not demand rights and create conflicts, but work with all stakeholders, including governments, to help achieve the SDGs in a cooperative manner rather than confrontation.

It is time that UNESCO listen to the Global South and rethink about why we need to have freedom of speech and for what purpose.

* Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is the deputy global editor of IDN-In Depth News and is also currently a consultant to the Journalism Program at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.

3 May 2023

Source: www.indepthnews.net

By Karsten Riise

The ambitions of the US foreign policy élite to beat both Russia and China is creating an internal war among the US Neocons.

The ambitions of the US foreign policy élite to beat both Russia and China is already creating an internal war among the US Neocons.

The Ukraine war is sucking the US dry of weapons, and the US is getting little to nowhere in its frail attempts to restock supplies sent to Ukraine. See this.

This already pushes some Neocons to panic for a ceasefire to close down the Ukraine engagement – just in order to save remaining arms supplies for conflict with China?

Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the defense industry are looking at the next major national security challenge: deterring, and if necessary, fighting, China in the Indo-Pacific region. See this.

That panic in parts of the Neocon community is already surfacing in the Council of Foreign Relations of the USA. On 13 April 2023, none less than Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations together with Charles Kupchan were overtly anxious to argue for a Ukrainian ceasefire.

[…]

The article, Neocons Starting to Panic About Ukraine, can be read on globalresearch.ca.

1 May 2023

By Ellen Brown

According to an article in American Banker titled “SEC’s Gensler Directly Links Crypto and Bank Failures,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler has asked for more financial resources to police the crypto market. Gensler testified at an April 18 House Financial Services Committee hearing: 

[Crypto companies] have chosen to be noncompliant and not provide investors with confidence and protections, and it undermines the $100 trillion capital markets …

Silvergate and Signature [banks] were engaged in the crypto business — I mean some would say that they were crypto-​backed …

Silicon Valley Bank, actually when it failed, saw the country’s — the world’s — second-leading stable coin had $3 billion involved there, depegged, so it’s interesting just how this was all part of this crypto narrative as well.

Cryptocurrency experts Caitlin Long and Nic Carter take the opposite view. They acknowledge the link between crypto and the recent wave of bank failures and the runs and threatened runs they triggered, but Carter and Long make a compelling case that it was the FDIC, the SEC and the Federal Reserve that brought the banks down, by a coordinated, extrajudicial “war on crypto” that blocked that otherwise-legal industry from acquiring the banking services it needs.

The public banking movement has run up against similar roadblocks. Both cryptocurrencies and publicly-owned banks compete with the Wall Street-dominated private banking cartel, but more on that after a look at the suspicious events behind the recent bank runs.

The War on Crypto

In a February 2023 article on Pirate Wires titled “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” Carter laid out the case that the federal government was quietly attempting to ban crypto. In a 7,000-word March 23 follow-up titled “Did the Government Start a Financial Crisis in an Attempt to Destroy Crypto?”, he writes:

The two most crypto-​focused banks, Silvergate and Signature, were forced into liquidation and receivership, respectively. The established narrative is that they made “bad bets” and lost, or that they couldn’t handle flighty depositors in the form of tech and crypto startups.

But there’s an alternative version of events being pieced together that is far more sinister …

The preponderance of public evidence suggests that Silvergate and Signature didn’t commit suicide — they were executed.

In January 2023, … [s]ome in the crypto space noticed highly coordinated activity between the White House, financial regulators, and the Fed, aimed at dissuading banks from dealing with crypto clients, making it far more difficult for the industry to operate. This is problematic because it represented an attempted seizure of power far beyond what is normally reserved for the executive branch.

He observes that banking crypto firms wasn’t prohibited. It was just made very expensive and reputationally risky, by burying the bank in paperwork and unpleasant interrogations from regulators. The Fed also made it clear that new crypto-focused bank charters would be denied. Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and Signature were put out of business:

Now, depositors are fleeing to the largest banking institutions, money market funds, or simply holding Treasuries directly. Whether intentional or not, these policies will cause smaller banks to die off, making credit more scarce, reducing competitiveness in the bank sector, and making it easier to set policy by marshaling a few large banks for political ends.

Carter observes that the distress in the banking sector was caused by the Fed’s attempt to reverse the inflationary effects of excess government spending, particularly for COVID-19 relief, by rapidly raising interest rates. As a result, government bond portfolios, “the foundational collateral asset of the financial system,” radically depreciated, causing $620 billion in unrealized losses collectively to U.S. banks. “But,” he writes, “there’s also a political subtext here. Most banks are now sitting on mark-​to-​market losses in their bond portfolios, but they’re not facing runs from their clients. … Silvergate met its end because — well after the crypto credit crisis of ‘22 had concluded — its remaining depositors were cajoled and bullied into withdrawing their funds.”

The most visible smoking gun, says Carter, was the decision to seize Signature Bank:

On Sunday the 12th of March, Signature (SBNY) was abruptly sent into FDIC receivership by the NYDFS [New York State Department of Financial Services]. This was not a two-bit crypto bank. They had $110B in deposits as of YE 2022, of which around 20 percent came from crypto-focused companies. …

Almost immediately, we knew something was wrong. Signature was not a “crypto bank” like Silvergate, where the majority of deposits were derived from crypto firms. It was a pretty venerable NY bank that primarily serviced real estate. It was not in as bleak a financial position as Silvergate or SVB, or other beleaguered regional banks. They weren’t closed on a Friday afternoon after market close, as is typical in receivership situations, but snuck in on a Sunday night, practically a footnote to the SVB shutdown. The FDIC was reportedly surprised on Sunday when SBNY was delivered into their hands. The NYDFS has maintained a well known long-running animus against crypto. The bank crisis was the perfect cover to take down the last remaining bank, which was unapologetic about servicing crypto firms (and ran important fiat settlement infrastructure).

The only problem: based on what we know, it appears that Signature wasn’t actually insolvent when they were nationalized and $4.3B of shareholder value was vaporized.

Carter writes that the crypto industry found an unlikely ally in Barney Frank, former chair of the House Financial Services Committee, the Frank in Dodd-​Frank, and a Signature board member. He alleged that the bank could have opened on Monday, and that leadership was shocked when they were put into receivership. In an interview with New York Magazine, Frank left “absolutely no doubt that the closure was a political hit job, primarily motivated by a desire to send a message to the crypto industry.” Carter observes:

As more data emerged, even the taciturn WSJ became convinced that Signature was a political execution.

In particular, the disparate treatment given to Signature versus their peers PacWest or First Republic is extremely telling. Both banks were in similar or worse financial positions, yet both were given time to save themselves, whereas Signature was seized on a Sunday night, right after SVB’s collapse. …

Most worryingly, the takedowns of Silvergate and Signature represent a rank lawlessness associated with authoritarian regimes. In a lawful society, solvent banks are not seized by the government simply because their clientele is politically disfavored. Shareholders in Signature had $4.3B in equity ($22B at peak) wiped out with no recourse. … Shareholders who saw their equity wrongly vaporized should sue under New York law.

He says that the upshot will be to drive crypto innovators abroad. In fact that move is happening already.

Killing Custodia: A States’ Rights Issue

A second smoking gun was the denial of FDIC insurance to Custodia Bank, which had a 100%-reserve business model that would have cost the FDIC nothing and posed no risk to the public. Custodia’s goal was just to provide a secure onramp from dollars to cryptocurrencies and an offramp back again. In fact, Custodia didn’t need to ensure its deposits, because it would not have been making loans from them. It would have kept them in reserve for the depositors. The bank needed FDIC insurance only because without it, the Fed refused to give Custodia a master account, necessary to participate in the national payment system.

Caitlin Long, the Wall Street veteran who founded Custodia, argues that this newly-imposed rule constitutes an unconstitutional violation of the long-standing right of states to charter their own banks. In an April 17 article titled “Why Defending the Right of States to Charter Banks Without Federal Permission Is Critical,” she writes:

Until a decade ago, it was unheard of that a bank would stop serving entire groups of customers or the people in lawful — if controversial — industries. It was also unheard of that banks would be blocked from accessing either of the two federal utilities in the banking industry: (i) deposit insurance and (ii) the U.S. dollar payment system (which the FDIC and Fed operate, respectively). Indeed, legislative history shows that Congress took great pains to keep the operation of these two utilities standalone and fully separated from the power to charter banks. As a check and balance, Congress wanted all chartering work done exclusively by the states or the lone federal agency that can charter banks, the OCC. Access to the two utilities was automatic for eligible banks, albeit with bank-​specific insurance premiums and overdraft restrictions.

The dual banking system – federal and state – goes back to the days of Abraham Lincoln, when the National Bank Act was passed. Before that, state-chartered banks were issuing their own currencies as paper promissory notes with their own names on them, an unstable system. The National Bank Act unified the country under a single paper currency, the U.S. dollar, by imposing a 10% tax on other bank-issued promissory notes. With the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the U.S. dollar became the Federal Reserve Note. The national currency was federally issued but states retained the right to charter banks. As Long observes:

Historically, states have acted as a check against federal overreach in banking. There is a key reason why: the mission statements of state banking agencies usually require them to support both safety and soundness AND economic development, while federal bank regulators do not have economic development within their wheelhouse. This creates a healthy tension and explains why innovation in banking often originates within the states. The Fed and FDIC have no veto power over state chartering decisions.

… Congress again respected the delicate balance in 1980 when it further clarified the utility nature of the Fed’s role as payment system operator by requiring the Fed to provide services to all eligible banks on a non-​discriminatory basis. … In denying payment system access to Custodia, the Fed cited Custodia’s lack of FDIC insurance and lack of a federal regulator among its reasons for denial and, in doing so, the Fed improperly created for itself the unilateral power to require all state banks to be both insured and federally regulated.

Custodia sued the Fed, and the Attorney General of Wyoming, the state chartering the bank, joined the lawsuit. The Attorney General noted in the filing that the Fed had created a “Kafkaesque situation” where a Wyoming-​chartered bank is denied access to the U.S. dollar payment system “because it is not federally regulated, even while it is also denied federal regulation.”

Five states have enacted bank charters that don’t require deposit insurance or federal regulation –  Connecticut, Maine, Nebraska, Vermont and Wyoming. Such uninsured banks are prohibited from lending; they must hold 100% cash to back customer deposits, plus up to 8% of deposits as an additional capital requirement. Long concludes:

Congress tasked the Fed and FDIC with running utilities; it did not give the Fed and FDIC veto power over U.S. states – and, in turn, power to block the responsible innovations that state banking authorities create as they fulfill their economic development mandates.

Public Banks and the FDIC Conundrum

The public banking movement is particularly geared toward local economic development. The stellar and only model in the U.S. is the Bank of North Dakota, formed in 1919 when local farmers were losing their farms to foreclosure by big out-of-state banks. With assets in 2021 of $10.3 billion and a return on investment of 15%, the BND is owned by the state, which self-insures it. There is no fear of bank runs, because the state’s revenues compose the vast majority of its deposits, and they must be deposited in the BND by law.

The state’s local banks are also protected by the BND, which is forbidden to compete with them. Instead, it partners with them, helping with liquidity and capitalization. The BND has been called a “mini-Fed” for the state and its banks. That helps explain why North Dakota has more local banks per capita than any other state, at a time when other states have been losing banks to big bank mergers, causing the number of U.S. banks to shrink radically.

UK Prof. Richard Werner recently published a briefing memo supporting the case for a public bank. It was prepared for the state of Tennessee, which is considering a sovereign state bank on the North Dakota model, but the arguments apply to all states. Benefits discussed include dividends, higher state-level tax revenues, greater job creation, greater local autonomy and resilience to shocks, more options for funding public sector borrowing and state pension funds, and protection of financial transaction freedom and privacy.

The FDIC has not formally rejected insurance coverage for state-chartered publicly-owned banks, but regulators have intimated that it is not interested in covering them; and as noted by Julie Andersen Hill in an Iowa Law Review article, the Fed is “especially hesitant” to process payments without that coverage. Federal usurpation of state banking regulation not only drives cryptocurrency innovation abroad but kills innovation in local economic funding of the sort pioneered in North Dakota. Andersen Hill writes, “The language and structure of the Federal Reserve Act require that the Federal Reserve provide payment services to all eligible banks.… If the Fed wants to exclude banks, it should ask Congress to change the law.”

*

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.

1 May 2023

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By John Pilger

In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.

Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.

The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power’.

Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’

Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear.  Let me give you one example:

On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.

No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry.

‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.

There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.

The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.

‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’

The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?

Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.

The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.

In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Inside A White Supremacist Militia in Ukraine

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligensia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.

The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life’.

No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice’, wrote Eagleton.

Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as ‘the movement’, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.

On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’

At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and  recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling’ of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes.  And in one sense it was.

Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.

As for ‘the movement’, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In the years since, America has gone to war with the world.

According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.’

‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population.

The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’

He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’

I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein‘s ‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’, spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.

Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.

‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target’.

A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’

In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people.

‘We knew…,’ he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’

This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.

Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.

When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’

Click here to watch the clip.

On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.

• The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.

Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission’, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged’.

In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China’, in the words of his Defence Secretary.

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose’.

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.

Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.

I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.

All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’.

Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.

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John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London.

1 May 2023

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

The Four Horses of the Economic Apocalypse: Agribusiness, Oil, Arms and Big Pharma

By Colin Todhunter

The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.  

In 2022, it was estimated that a quarter of a billion people across the world would be pushed into absolute  poverty in that year alone.

In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, as millions go without heat and skip meals. Due to the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, 10.5 million are experiencing financial difficulty. An additional 13.7 million people would be at risk of financial difficulty with further increases in costs.

Living standards in the UK are plummeting. For instance, 28 per cent (up from 9 per cent pre-COVID) of UK adults said that they could not afford to eat balanced meals. Absolute poverty is set to rise from 17.2 per cent in 2021-22 to 18.3 per cent in 2023-24, pushing an additional 800,000 people into poverty.

In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.

In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US.

Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate. Private bankruptcy filings in 2023 have exceeded the highest point recorded during the early stages of COVID by a considerable amount. The four-week moving average for private filings in late February 2023 was 73 per cent higher than in June 2020.

Meanwhile, nearly 100 of the biggest US publicly traded companies recorded 2021 profit margins that were at least 50 per cent higher than their 2019 levels.

The Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock. In 2022, he said that a “very entitled” generation of people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.

Crisis – what crisis?  

Of course, Kapito is no doubt referring to ordinary US citizens and not himself. Kapito, as the president of BlackRock, made $26,750,780 in total compensation in 2021.

Nor is he referring to the high-net-worth individuals who benefit from hunger by investing in BlackRock, a firm that continues to profit from a globalised food system which – by design – leaves around a billion people experiencing malnutrition. BlackRock is one of the rich ‘barbarians at the barn’ who continue to make huge financial killings from an exploitative food regime.

Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to their ‘new normal’ while business as usual prevails elsewhere, not least in one of the world’s most financially lucrative sectors – arms manufacturing. The war in Ukraine has been a ‘gold rush’ for Western arms makers as wealthy US neocons like Victoria Nuland continue to try to bring about ‘regime change’ in Russia by fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian.

When Huw Pill tells ordinary people to get used to being poorer, he is not referring to the  individuals and firms who have made hundreds of millions of pounds (courtesy of the taxpayer) from corrupt COVID equipment contracts thanks to the UK government prioritising politically connected suppliers at the start of COVID.

And this cannot be brushed aside as a ‘one-off’. These revelations are merely the tip of a massive corruption iceberg.

For example, Byline Times reports a cross-party parliamentary watchdog raised concerns that decisions on how to award money from the £3.6 billion towns fund, designed to boost economic growth in struggling towns, were politically motivated. It also notes that 40 potential breaches of the Ministerial Code were not investigated in the past five years.

Little wonder that in January 2023 the UK plunged to its lowest-ever position in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.

Consider that the UN estimates that just $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. Then consider that 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the financial years 2020 and 2021.

According to Global Witness, ‘excess profits’ are sudden and significant increases in a company’s financial returns that are due not to their own actions but to external events. The EU says profits count as ‘excess’ when they are more than 20% above the average return of the previous four years.

Global Witness finds that the 2022 annual profits of the five largest integrated private sector oil and gas companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies – were $195 billion. Up by almost 120% on 2021 and the highest level in the industry’s history.

This means that these companies made $134 billion in excess profits, which could cover nearly 20% of the money all European governments together have allocated to shielding vulnerable households and businesses from the current energy crisis.

Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, reports record profits for 2022. Operating profits of £3.3bn were recorded, up from £948m in 2021. This surpassed its previous highest ever yearly profit of £2.7bn in 2012.

In May 2021, it was reported that COVID vaccines had created at least nine new billionaires. According to research by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, the new billionaires included Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech, which has produced a vaccine with Pfizer. Both CEOs were then worth around $4 billion. Senior executives from China’s CanSino Biologics and early investors in Moderna have also become billionaires.

Although the nine new billionaires were at that time worth a combined $19.3 billion, the vaccines were largely funded by public money. For instance, according to a May 2021 report by CNN, BioNTech received €325 million from the German government for the development of the vaccine. The company made a net profit of €1.1 billion in the first three months of the year, thanks to its share of sales from the COVID vaccine, compared with a loss of €53.4 million for the same period last year.

Moderna was expected to make $13.2 billion in COVID vaccine revenue in 2021. The company received billions of dollars in funding from the US government for development of its vaccine.

This article has briefly touched on four horses of the economic apocalypse – agribusiness, oil, arms and big pharma. But let’s finish by mentioning the fifth and the most powerful – finance. The sector which sparked the devastation that we now see.

By late 2019, a financial crisis was looming. It was multiple times worse than the 2008 one.

Investigative journalist Michael Byrant says that €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019:

“All talk about big finance bankrupting the nation by looting public funds, politicians destroying public services at the behest of large investors and the depredations of the casino economy were washed away with COVID. Predators who saw their financial empires coming apart resolved to shut down society. To solve the problems they created, they needed a cover story. It magically appeared in the form of a ‘novel virus’.”

The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

What happened in Europe was part of a strategy to avert the wider systemic collapse of the hegemonic financial system. And what we now see is an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history under cover of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’.

As millions of workers take strike action in the UK, Huw Pill implies that they should accept their plight as inevitable. But they have no reason to.

The wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth then stood at $11.95tn, a 50 per cent increase in just 9.5 months. Between April and July 2020, during the initial lockdowns, the wealth held by these billionaires grew from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion.

The only thing inevitable about the current crisis was the collapse of a debt-fuelled, unsustainable neoliberalism set up to facilitate outright plunder by the super-rich who have offshored more than $50 trillion in hidden accounts.

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture.

27 April 2023

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović

The long-term crisis in the relations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine entered its final – war phase on February 24^th, 2022. The official reactions to the latest dramatic events in East Europe, which come from the Westerners, including the most important overseas Western political address, are usually dominated by two phrases: “flagrant violation of international public law” and “violation of the territorial integrity of an internationally recognized state“. The perpetrator of the acts is, of course, Russia, and, as it is claimed, the innocent victim is neighboring Ukraine. However, the same Westerners do not want to see either flagrant violations by the Kiev regime of human rights in the Donbass Region since 2014 onward or flagrant violations of international public law and territorial integrity of the internationally recognized state in the case of the Balkans (Yugoslavia) in the 1990s.

From the author

The ignorant attitude towards the provisions of international public law relevant to the Balkan case resulted, therefore, in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the long wars in its two former federal units (Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) that took about 150,000 lives, produced more than two million displaced people and left behind a region to this day, almost three decades later, it has not politically stabilized and consolidated.

The West demonstrated an identical attitude towards the branch of law that it is ardently calling for these days concerning Ukraine, several years after the end of those wars, when it decided to actively engage in “protecting the endangered human rights of Kosovo Albanians” and “stopping the humanitarian catastrophe to which they were exposed”, as the official Western narrative was, explaining 78 days of the barbaric campaign of bombing Serbia and Montenegro in the spring of 1999. As we know, it ended with the complete physical destruction of the country and the de facto exclusion of Kosovo from its constitutional and legal framework of the Republic of Serbia.

The self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo in February 2008 was, as well as the aggression against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 contrary to all relevant customs of international public law. However, Western countries that today are leading in condemning similar Russian acts in Ukraine, were among the first to recognize the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo.

From the author

The policy of “double standards” in international relations and global politics used by great powers is not unknown and unrecorded in history. However, after the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989) up today, the absence of any Western standards in the practice of generally accepted and binding rules of the international “game”, however, is one of the focal dimensions of the international relations in the world politics. The well-known dictum that sums up that insight – “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they have to” – came from the pen of the famous ancient Greek historian and military leader from Athens – Thucydides (c. 460−c. 400 BC). Thus, almost two and a half millennia ago, the great historian taught that justice and rights, as its codified forms, exist in international relations and can only be among equals (inter pares). Major disagreements in this regard, which are the basis of what is happening today in Ukraine with potentially catastrophic consequences, occur when this “equal”, in this case, the great and powerful Russia, is not recognized as such and is not as such respected. Today, the Western policymakers made a crucial mistake with Russia as thinking this is the same state as it was in the 1990s during the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Unfortunately for them, today’s Russian Federation is not a Western puppet state from the Yeltzin’s period – it is today at least equal with the Western great powers including NATO as well. Those Western actors in global politics who would continue to overlook this “hard” fact concerning Russia and her role in the politics of the contemporary world, would lead the world to the dangerous edge of the abyss and push the world into it very quickly with their indolence and old policy of gangsterism in international relations.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

27 April 2023

Source: www.globalresearch.ca