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By Colin Todhunter

NATO countries are to all intents and purposes at war with Russia. The US knows it and Russia knows it too. Unfortunately, most of those living in NATO countries remain blissfully ignorant of this fact.

The US initiated economic sanctions on Russia, has attacked its currency and has manipulated oil prices to devastate the Russian economy. It was behind the coup in Ukraine and is now escalating tensions by placing troops in Europe and supporting a bunch of neo-fascists that it brought to power. Yet the bought and paid for corporate media in the West keeps the majority of the Western public in ignorance by depicting Russia as the aggressor.

If the current situation continues, the outcome could be a devastating nuclear conflict. Washington poured five billion dollars into Ukraine with the aim of eventually instigating a coup on Russia’s doorstep. Washington and NATO are supporting proxy forces on the ground to kill and drive out those who are demanding autonomy from the US puppet regime in Kiev. Hundreds of thousands having fled across the border into Russia.

Yet it is Washington that accuses Moscow of invading Ukraine, of having had a hand in the downing of a commercial airliner and of ‘invading’ Ukraine based on no evidence at all – trial by media courtesy of Washington’s PR machine. As a result of this Russian ‘aggression’, Washington has slapped sanctions on Moscow.

The ultimate aim is to de-link Europe’s economy from Russia and weaken Russia’s energy dependent economy by denying it export markets. The ultimate aim is to also ensure Europe remains integrated with/dependent on Washington, not least via the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and in the long term via US gas and Middle East oil (sold in dollars, thereby boosting the strength of the currency upon which US global hegemony rests).

The mainstream corporate media in the West parrots the accusations against Moscow as fact, despite Washington having cooked up evidence or invented baseless pretexts. As with Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and other ‘interventions’ that have left a trail of death and devastation in their wake, the Western corporate media’s role is to act as cheerleader for official policies and US-led wars of terror.

The reality is that the US has around 800 military bases in over 100 countries and military personnel in almost 150 countries. US spending on its military dwarfs what the rest of the world spends together. It outspends China by a ratio of 6:1.

What does the corporate media say about this? That the US is a ‘force for good’ and constitutes the ‘world’s policeman’ – not a calculating empire underpinned by militarism.

By the 1980s, Washington’s wars, death squads and covert operations were responsible for six million deaths in the ‘developing’ world. An updated figure suggests that figure is closer to ten million.

Breaking previous agreements made with Russia/the USSR, over the past two decades the US and NATO has moved into Eastern Europe and continues to encircle Russia and install missile systems aimed at it. It has also surrounded Iran with military bases. It is destabilising Pakistan and ‘intervening’ in countries across Africa to weaken Chinese trade and investment links and influence. It intends to eventually militarily ‘pivot’ towards Asia to encircle China.

William Blum has presented a long list of Washington’s crimes across the planet since 1945 in terms of its numerous bombings of countries, assassinations of elected leaders and destabilisations. No other country comes close to matching the scale of such criminality. Under the smokescreen of exporting ‘freedom and democracy’, the US has deemed it necessary to ignore international laws and carry out atrocities to further its geo-political interests across the globe.

Writing on AlterNet.org, Nicolas JS Davies says of William Blum’s book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II: if you’re looking for historical context for what you are reading or watching on TV about the coup in Ukraine, ‘Killing Hope’ will provide it.

Davies argues that the title has never been more apt as we watch the hopes of people from all regions of Ukraine being sacrificed on the same altar as those of people in Iran (1953); Guatemala(1954); Thailand (1957); Laos (1958-60); the Congo (1960); Turkey (1960, 1971 & 1980); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); South Vietnam (1963); Brazil (1964); the Dominican Republic (1963); Argentina (1963); Honduras (1963 & 2009); Iraq (1963 & 2003); Bolivia (1964, 1971 & 1980); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Greece (1967); Panama (1968 & 1989); Cambodia (1970); Chile (1973); Bangladesh (1975); Pakistan (1977); Grenada (1983); Mauritania (1984); Guinea (1984); Burkina Faso (1987); Paraguay (1989); Haiti (1991 & 2004); Russia (1993); Uganda (1996);and Libya (2011).

Davies goes on to say that the list above does not include a roughly equal number of failed coups, nor coups in Africa and elsewhere in which a US role is suspected but unproven.

The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) is a recipe for more of the same. The ultimate goal, based on the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine, is to prevent any rival emerging to challenge Washington’s global hegemony and to secure dominance over the entire planet. Washington’s game plan for Russia is to destroy is as a functioning state or to permanently weaken it so it submits to US hegemony. While the mainstream media in the West set out to revive the Cold War mentality and demonise Russia, Washington believes it can actually win a nuclear conflict with Russia. It no longer regards nuclear weapons as a last resort but part of a convention theatre of war and is willing to use them for pre-emptive strikes.

Washington is accusing Russia of violating Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, while the US has its military, mercenary and intelligence personnel inside Ukraine. It is moreover putting troops in Poland, engaging in ‘war games’ close to Russia and has pushed through a ‘Russian anti-aggression’ act that portrays Russia as an aggressor in order to give Ukraine de facto membership of NATO and thus full military support, advice and assistance.

Washington presses ahead regardless as Russia begins to undermine dollar hegemony by trading oil and gas and goods in rubles and other currencies. History shows that whenever a country threatens the dollar, the US does not idly stand by.

Unfortunately, most members of the Western public believe the lies being fed to them. This results from the corporate media amounting to little more than an extension of Washington’s propaganda arm. The PNAC, under the pretext of some bogus ‘war on terror’, is partly built on gullible, easily led public opinion, which is fanned by emotive outbursts from politicians and the media. We have a Pavlov’s dog public and media, which respond on cue to the moralistic bleating of politicians who rely on the public’s ignorance to facilitate war and conflict.

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst has spoken about the merits of the Kiev coup and the installation of an illegitimate government in Ukraine. Last year, he called the violent removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected government as enhancing democracy. Herbst displayed all of the arrogance associated with the ideology of US ‘exceptionalism’. He also displayed complete contempt for the public by spouting falsehoods and misleading claims about events taking place in Ukraine.

And now in Britain, the public is being subjected to the same kind of propaganda by the likes of Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond with his made-for-media sound bites about Russia being threat toworld peace:

“We are now faced with a Russian leader bent not on joining the international rules-based system which keeps the peace between nations, but on subverting it… We are in familiar territory for anyone over the age of about 50, with Russia’s aggressive behaviour a stark reminder it has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security… Russia’s aggressive behaviour a stark reminder it has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security.”

In a speech that could have come straight from the pen of some war mongering US neocon, the US’s toy monkey Hammond beat on cue the drum that signals Britain’s willingness to fall in line and verbally attack Putin for not acquiescing to US global hegemonic aims.

The anti-Russia propaganda in Britain is gathering pace. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has said that Putin could repeat the tactics used to destabilise Ukraine in the Baltic states. He said that NATO must be ready for Russian aggression in “whatever form it takes.” He added that Russia is a “real and present danger.” Prior to this, PM David Cameron called on Europe to make clear to Russia that it faces economic and financial consequences for “many years to come” if it does not stop destabilising Ukraine.

Members of the current administration are clearly on board with US policy and are towing the line, as did Blair before. And we know that his policy on Iraq was based on a pack of lies too.

If Putin is reacting in a certain way, it is worth wondering what the US response would be if Russia had put its missiles in Canada near the US border, had destabilised Mexico and was talking of putting missiles there too. To top it off, imagine if Russia were applying sanctions on the US for all of this ‘aggression’.

What Russia is really guilty of is calling for a multi-polar world, not of one dominated by the US. It’s a goal that most of humanity is guilty of. It is a world the US will not tolerate.

Herbst and his ilk would do well to contemplate their country’s record of wars and destabilisations, its global surveillance network that illegally spies on individuals and governments alike and its ongoing plundering of resources and countries supported by militarism, ‘free trade’ or the outright manipulation of every major market. Hammond, Fallon and Cameron would do well to remember this too. But like their US masters, their role is to feign amnesia and twist reality.

The media is dutifully playing its part well by keeping the public ignorant and misinformed. A public that is encouraged to regard what is happening in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Libya, etc, as a confusing, disconnected array of events in need of Western intervention based on bogus notions of ‘humanitarianism’ or a ‘war on terror’, rather than the planned machinations of empire which includes a global energy war and the associated preservation and strengthening of the petro-dollar system.

Eric Zuesse has been writing extensively on events in Ukraine for the last year. His articles have been published on various sites like Countercurrents, Global Research and RINF, but despite his attempts to get his numerous informative and well-researched pieces published in the mainstream media, he has by and large hit a brick wall (he describes this here).

This is because the corporate media have a narrative and the truth does not fit into it. If this tells us anything it is that sites like the one you are reading this particular article on are essential for informing the public about the reality of the aggression that could be sleepwalking the world towards humanity’s final war. And while the mainstream media might still be ‘main’, in as much as that is where most people still turn to for information, there is nothing to keep the alternative web-based media from becoming ‘mainstream’.

Whether it involves Eric’s virtually daily pieces or articles by other writers, the strategy must be to tweet, share and repost! Or as Binu Mathew from the India-based Countercurrents website says:

“It is for those who want to nurture these alternative communication channels to spread the word to tell the world about these avenues. ‘Each one reach one, each one teach one’ can be a good way to sum up.”

Colin Todhunter : Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India.

12 March, 2014
Countercurrents.org

By Michael T. Klare

Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere); and the increased value of the dollar relative to other currencies. There is, however, one reason that’s not being discussed, and yet it could be the most important of all: the complete collapse of Big Oil’s production-maximizing business model.

Until last fall, when the price decline gathered momentum, the oil giants were operating at full throttle, pumping out more petroleum every day. They did so, of course, in part to profit from the high prices. For most of the previous six years, Brent crude, the international benchmark for crude oil, had been selling at $100 or higher. But Big Oil was also operating according to a business model that assumed an ever-increasing demand for its products, however costly they might be to produce and refine. This meant that no fossil fuel reserves, no potential source of supply — no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock — was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.

In recent years, this output-maximizing strategy had, in turn, generated historic wealth for the giant oil companies. Exxon, the largest U.S.-based oil firm, earned an eye-popping $32.6 billion in 2013 alone, more than any other American company except for Apple. Chevron, the second biggest oil firm,posted earnings of $21.4 billion that same year. State-owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Rosneft also reaped mammoth profits.

How things have changed in a matter of mere months. With demand stagnant and excess production the story of the moment, the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.

To fully appreciate the nature of the energy industry’s predicament, it’s necessary to go back a decade to 2005, when the production-maximizing strategy was first adopted. At that time, Big Oil faced a critical juncture. On the one hand, many existing oil fields were being depleted at a torrid pace, leading experts to predict an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline; on the other, rapid economic growth in China, India, and other developing nations was pushing demand for fossil fuels into the stratosphere. In those same years, concern over climate change was also beginning to gather momentum, threatening the future of Big Oil and generating pressures to invest in alternative forms of energy.

A “Brave New World” of Tough Oil

No one better captured that moment than David O’Reilly, the chairman and CEO of Chevron. “Our industry is at a strategic inflection point, a unique place in our history,” he told a gathering of oil executives that February. “The most visible element of this new equation,” he explained in what some observers dubbed his “Brave New World” address, “is that relative to demand, oil is no longer in plentiful supply.” Even though China was sucking up oil, coal, and natural gas supplies at a staggering rate, he had a message for that country and the world: “The era of easy access to energy is over.”

To prosper in such an environment, O’Reilly explained, the oil industry would have to adopt a new strategy. It would have to look beyond the easy-to-reach sources that had powered it in the past and make massive investments in the extraction of what the industry calls “unconventional oil” and what I labeled at the time “tough oil”: resources located far offshore, in the threatening environments of the far north, in politically dangerous places like Iraq, or in unyielding rock formations like shale. “Increasingly,” O’Reilly insisted, “future supplies will have to be found in ultradeep water and other remote areas, development projects that will ultimately require new technology and trillions of dollars of investment in new infrastructure.”

For top industry officials like O’Reilly, it seemed evident that Big Oil had no choice in the matter. It would have to invest those needed trillions in tough-oil projects or lose ground to other sources of energy, drying up its stream of profits. True, the cost of extracting unconventional oil would be much greater than from easier-to-reach conventional reserves (not to mention more environmentally hazardous), but that would be the world’s problem, not theirs. “Collectively, we are stepping up to this challenge,” O’Reilly declared. “The industry is making significant investments to build additional capacity for future production.”

On this basis, Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and other major firms indeed invested enormous amounts of money and resources in a growing unconventional oil and gas race, an extraordinary saga I described in my book The Race for What’s Left. Some, including Chevron and Shell, started drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; others, including Exxon, commenced operations in the Arctic and eastern Siberia. Virtually every one of them began exploiting U.S. shale reserves via hydro-fracking.

Only one top executive questioned this drill-baby-drill approach: John Browne, then the chief executive of BP. Claiming that the science of climate change had become too convincing to deny, Browne argued that Big Energy would have to look “beyond petroleum” and put major resources into alternative sources of supply. “Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next,” he had declared as early as 2002. For BP, he indicated, that meant developing wind power, solar power, and biofuels.

Browne, however, was eased out of BP in 2007 just as Big Oil’s output-maximizing business model was taking off, and his successor, Tony Hayward, quickly abandoned the “beyond petroleum” approach. “Some may question whether so much of the [world’s energy] growth needs to come from fossil fuels,” he said in 2009. “But here it is vital that we face up to the harsh reality [of energy availability].” Despite the growing emphasis on renewables, “we still foresee 80% of energy coming from fossil fuels in 2030.”

Under Hayward’s leadership, BP largely discontinued its research into alternative forms of energy and reaffirmed its commitment to the production of oil and gas, the tougher the better. Following in the footsteps of other giant firms, BP hustled into the Arctic, the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadian tar sands, a particularly carbon-dirty and messy-to-produce form of energy. In its drive to become the leading producer in the Gulf, BP rushed the exploration of a deep offshore field it called Macondo, triggeringthe Deepwater Horizon blow-out of April 2010 and the devastating oil spill of monumental proportions that followed.

Over the Cliff

By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach. It made the necessary investments, perfected new technology for extracting tough oil, and did indeed triumph over the decline of existing, “easy oil” deposits. In those years, it managed to ramp up production in remarkable ways, bringing ever more hard-to-reach oil reservoirs online.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production rose from 85.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 92.9 million in 2014, despite the continuing decline of many legacy fields in North America and the Middle East. Claiming that industry investments in new drilling technologies had vanquished the specter of oil scarcity, BP’s latest CEO, Bob Dudley, assured the world only a year ago that Big Oil was going places and the only thing that had “peaked” was “the theory of peak oil.”

That, of course, was just before oil prices took their leap off the cliff, bringing instantly into question the wisdom of continuing to pump out record levels of petroleum. The production-maximizing strategy crafted by O’Reilly and his fellow CEOs rested on three fundamental assumptions: that, year after year, demand would keep climbing; that such rising demand would ensure prices high enough to justify costly investments in unconventional oil; and that concern over climate change would in no significant way alter the equation. Today, none of these assumptions holds true.

Demand will continue to rise — that’s undeniable, given expected growth in world income and population — but not at the pace to which Big Oil has become accustomed. Consider this: in 2005, when many of the major investments in unconventional oil were getting under way, the EIA projected that global oil demand would reach 103.2 million barrels per day in 2015; now, it’s lowered that figure for this year to only 93.1 million barrels. Those 10 million “lost” barrels per day in expected consumption may not seem like a lot, given the total figure, but keep in mind that Big Oil’s multibillion-dollar investments in tough energy were predicated on all that added demand materializing, thereby generating the kind of high prices needed to offset the increasing costs of extraction. With so much anticipated demand vanishing, however, prices were bound to collapse.

Current indications suggest that consumption will continue to fall short of expectations in the years to come. In an assessment of future trends released last month, the EIA reported that, thanks to deteriorating global economic conditions, many countries will experience either a slower rate of growth or an actual reduction in consumption. While still inching up, Chinese consumption, for instance, is expected to grow by only 0.3 million barrels per day this year and next — a far cry from the 0.5 million barrel increase it posted in 2011 and 2012 and its one million barrel increase in 2010. In Europe and Japan, meanwhile, consumption is actually expected to fall over the next two years.

And this slowdown in demand is likely to persist well beyond 2016, suggests the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of rich industrialized nations). While lower gasoline prices may spur increased consumption in the United States and a few other nations, it predicted, most countries will experience no such lift and so “the recent price decline is expected to have only a marginal impact on global demand growth for the remainder of the decade.”

This being the case, the IEA believes that oil prices will only average about $55 per barrel in 2015 and not reach $73 again until 2020. Such figures fall far below what would be needed to justify continued investment in and exploitation of tough-oil options like Canadian tar sands, Arctic oil, and many shale projects. Indeed, the financial press is now full of reports on stalled or cancelled mega-energy projects. Shell, for example, announced in January that it had abandoned plans for a $6.5 billion petrochemical plant in Qatar, citing “the current economic climate prevailing in the energy industry.” At the same time, Chevron shelved its plan to drill in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort Sea, while Norway’s Statoil turned its back on drilling in Greenland.

There is, as well, another factor that threatens the wellbeing of Big Oil: climate change can no longer be discounted in any future energy business model. The pressures to deal with a phenomenon that could quite literally destroy human civilization are growing. Although Big Oil has spent massive amounts of money over the years in a campaign to raise doubts about the science of climate change, more and more people globally are starting toworry about its effects — extreme weather patterns, extreme storms, extreme drought, rising sea levels, and the like — and demanding that governments take action to reduce the magnitude of the threat.

Europe has already adopted plans to lower carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 and to achieve even greater reductions in the following decades. China, while still increasing its reliance on fossil fuels, has at least finally pledged to cap the growth of its carbon emissions by 2030 and to increase renewable energy sources to 20% of total energy use by then. In the United States, increasingly stringent automobile fuel-efficiency standards will require that cars sold in 2025 achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon, reducing U.S. oil demand by 2.2 million barrels per day. (Of course, the Republican-controlled Congress — heavily subsidized by Big Oil — will do everything it can to eradicate curbs on fossil fuel consumption.)

Still, however inadequate the response to the dangers of climate change thus far, the issue is on the energy map and its influence on policy globally can only increase. Whether Big Oil is ready to admit it or not, alternative energy is now on the planetary agenda and there’s no turning back from that. “It is a different world than it was the last time we saw an oil-price plunge,” said IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven in February, referring to the 2008 economic meltdown. “Emerging economies, notably China, have entered less oil-intensive stages of development… On top of this, concerns about climate change are influencing energy policies [and so] renewables are increasingly pervasive.”

The oil industry is, of course, hoping that the current price plunge will soon reverse itself and that its now-crumbling maximizing-output model will make a comeback along with $100-per-barrel price levels. But these hopes for the return of “normality” are likely energy pipe dreams. As van der Hoeven suggests, the world has changed in significant ways, in the process obliterating the very foundations on which Big Oil’s production-maximizing strategy rested. The oil giants will either have to adapt to new circumstances, while scaling back their operations, or face takeover challenges from more nimble and aggressive firms.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation.

12 March, 2015
TomDispatch.com

Copyright 2015 Michael T. Klare

 

 

By Nile Bowie

At the opening of China’s annual parliamentary meeting last week, Premier Li Keqiang laid out Beijing’s policy agenda for the year, speaking frankly about the formidable challenges to growth facing the Chinese economy. Li referred to a myriad of systemic, institutional, and structural problems as ‘tigers in the road,’ responsible for holding up development.

Beijing subsequently unveiled this year’s GDP target at about 7 per cent, the lowest target in over 15 years. After three decades of rapid expansion, Li has referred the current period of slower, sustained economic growth as the ‘new normal’. Though the revised performance target remains robust by global comparison, the Chinese leadership is now taking measures to offset further downward pressure on the economy.

Deflationary Risks

The slowdown in the world’s second largest economy is driven primarily by high debts (estimated at more than 280 per cent of GDP), an unintended consequence of the central government’s massive credit stimulus following the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009. Following the crash, investments in property and infrastructure were financed primarily by credit to compensate for lower consumer demand for Chinese exports.

Declining commodity and oil prices, lower international and domestic demand, and falling industrial production have converged, placing an increasingly heavy debt burden on provincial governments and industrial firms. China is currently experiencing a property downturn and low consumer inflation, while three consecutive years of contracting industrial output has spurred on deflationary risks.

China’s central bank has recently announced the reduction of interest rates for the second time in three months, reducing lending and deposit rates by a quarter percentage point. Beijing has been skeptical of monetary easing policies that would further reckless borrowing and increase the debt burden. The Chinese leadership are now easing borrowing costs, albeit very cautiously and by conservative margins.

Interest rate reductions are being made primarily to manage corporate debt levels, easing financing costs with the ultimate aim of preventing the build up of non-performing loans, which could trigger a hard landing for the Chinese economy that would have severe global reverberations. Lower borrowing costs are also intended to aid exporters and home buyers.

Changing the Business Model

China’s development strategy of export-led growth supported by low-cost manufactured exports, undervalued exchange rates and investment in heavy industry is increasingly viewed as being unsustainable in the face of huge environmental challenges, industrial overcapacity, rising labor costs, and high provincial government debt.

Beijing’s long-term reform objectives involve restructuring the economy around domestic consumption, tackling overcapacity issues, promoting services, and encouraging technological innovation to move manufacturing up the global value chain. During his parliamentary address, Li highlighted the government’s ambition to “upgrade China from a manufacturer of quantity to one of quality.”

The Chinese government has set job creation as a key objective, aiming to create 10 million new jobs this year, while pursuing measures to further reduce administrative interference to make it easier to start businesses. 7.49 million university graduates are set to enter the workforce this year, as the government has pledged to actively support business start-ups for new industries.

Leaders of China’s largest tech firms – Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Lenovo and Xiaomi – were present at the annual parliamentary session. Beijing laid out plans for promoting e-commerce development and the international expansion of Chinese internet companies and tech firms, pledging greater state investment in the internet sector and emerging technologies.

Domestic tech firms and internet-based start-ups are viewed as one of the future engines of economic growth, capable of creating tens of millions of jobs while Beijing scales back severe pollutant industries, such as coal mining. China boasts over 780 million broadband internet users, more than the populations in the euro-zone and US combined, which makes the internet sector a powerful driver in promoting the kind of consumption-led growth that Chinese leaders have been calling for.

Consumption-Led Growth

China’s economic slowdown presents various obstacles, but also opportunities for the firm implementation of changes that will place emphasis on more equal income distribution to stimulate demand and less damaging forms of development. The main economic challenges ahead consist of maintaining healthy growth targets without resorting to a credit-fuelled surge in borrowing.

Moreover, the gradual appreciation of the renminbi is key to promoting consumption, although the deflationary pressure on the economy has suppressed the currency. Beijing plans to allow more private investment in state-owned enterprises while it liberalizes the financial sector to compensate for decreasing investment and industrial activity.

Shanghai’s 28 square kilometer free-trade zone has been the policy-testing ground for Beijing to experiment with open capital markets in the interest of internationalizing the renminbi, which China has – very cautiously – begun steering toward becoming a globally dominant, fully-convertible currency.

A liberalized capital market is seen by Chinese leaders as a means of accelerating rebalancing reforms, increasing consumption, and forcing low-end domestic exporters to move up the value chain. Integration into global capital markets demands that the renminbi move toward a more freely floating exchange rate as it is utilized as an international trade settlement currency.

In more human terms, the biggest obstacle of consumption taking over as a growth driver is income inequality and the weak position of labor in society. China’s Gini co-efficient figure, which measures the income inequality within an economy, rose to 0.73 last year, representing severe income inequality. Areport by Peking University also found that while poverty has decreased substantially, the poorest quarter of Chinese citizens owned only 1 per cent of the country’s wealth.

Beijing recently unveiled plans to lift government spending to 17.15 trillion yuan ($2.74 trillion) in 2015, a 10.6 percent increase from 2014 levels. The budget deficit for 2015 represents 2.3 per cent of GDP, but there are indications that the real figure may be higher than declared, effectively putting this year’s spending at 2.7 percent of GDP, on par with the 2009 stimulus package.

To drive consumption forward, more resources should be directed toward pensions, healthcare, unemployment and support for a national minimum wage standard. Additionally, tax cuts on low-income earners and small and medium sized enterprises should be implemented to relieve the burden on households and boost spending on consumption.

If the 2015 budget is effectively on par with the post-crisis stimulus budget, the focus this time around should proportionately place emphasis on debt management and spurring demand through consumption, rather than further credit-fuelled investments that would add to the debt burden.

Nile Bowie is an independent journalist and political analyst based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), a Malaysian NGO promoting social justice and anti-hegemony politics.

14 Mrch 2015

By Eric Zuesse

The Obama Administration, which in 2009 provided the crucial assistance that enabled the progressive democratic President of Honduras to be overthrown and a junta of oligarchs to replace him; and which in 2014 perpetrated a bloody coup that replaced the corrupt but democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian equally corrupt Government, and thus sparked Ukraine’s civil war against the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for Yanukovych; is now again trying to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.

Reuters on Monday March 9th headlined “U.S. Declares Venezuela a National Security Threat, Sanctions Top Officials,” and their report gives its closing word to an opposition politician, whom Obama supports and who says: “It’s not a problem with Venezuela or with Venezuelans; it’s a problem for the corrupt ones” (i.e., Maduro and his Government).

In other words, yet again, the idea Obama is pushing is: we’re just trying to replace a ‘corrupt’ elected head-of-state.

The White House explains its Executive Order on March 9th by saying: “President Obama today issued a new Executive Order (E.O.) declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela. … Specifically, the E.O. targets those determined by the Department of the Treasury, in consultation with the Department of State, to be involved in … actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions.”

The Executive Order itself declares that the existing Government of Venezuela limits rights and is corrupt, which “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”

On 14 February 2015, President Maduro had thwarted a coup-attempt against him by the Governments of Canada and the UK. This followed almost exactly a year after he had already thwarted such an attempt by the U.S. Government. In December 2013, the Maduro Government presented detailed evidence that the U.S. was planning a coup against him.

On 15 January 2015, Maduro met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. The Obama Administration is, of course, especially trying to bring down President Putin.

President Obama is also trying to bring down Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. In 2011, he had bombed away the regime of Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi. Both Assad and Gaddafi also are/were allies of Russia, as is Iran. The Obama Administration is now assisting ISIS in its war against Assad, even while bombing ISIS.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

10 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Countercurrents.org

The US has declared Venezuela is a national security threat. US President Barack Obama issued an executive order on March 9, 2015 slapping Venezuela with new sanctions and declaring the Bolivarian nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security”. President Nicolas Maduro a few days ago revealed new evidence on the coup plot against his administration revealing that much of it was planned in the US.

Reports by international news agencies including AFP, AP, Reuters and TeleSUR English said:

Barack Obama issued the executive order, which senior administration officials said did not target Venezuela’s energy sector or broader economy. But the move stokes tensions between the two countries just as US relations with Cuba, a longtime US foe in Latin America and key ally to Venezuela, are set to be normalized.

“Venezuelan officials past and present who violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption will not be welcome here, and we now have the tools to block their assets and their use of US financial systems,” announced White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

A Caracas, March 9, 2015 datelined report by Lucas Koerner said:

The sanctions target seven individuals accused by the White House of alleged human rights violations and “public corruption”, freezing their assets and barring entry into the US.

The figures include Justo Jose Noguera Pietri, President of the state entity, the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG) and Katherine Nayarith Haringhton Padron, a national level prosecutor currently taking the lead in the trials of several Venezuelan political opposition leaders, including Leopoldo Lopez.

The report said:

The executive order is the latest in a series of US sanctions imposed on Venezuela over the past few months. On February 3, the Obama administration expanded the list of Venezuelan officials barred from entering the US, which now includes the Chief Prosecutor Luis Ortega Diaz.

The US has failed thus far to disclose evidence that might bolster its claims of human rights violations, leading Venezuelan and other regional leaders to condemn what they regard as the arbitrary and political character of US sanctions.

While regional bodies such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) have called for dialogue, Washington has so far refused to support negotiations or to recognize the organization’s stance.

The order goes on to call for the release of all “political prisoners” allegedly held by the Venezuelan government, including “dozens of students”.

The Venezuelan government, for its part, maintains that all of those arrested are in the process of facing trial for criminal offences linked to violent destabilization efforts spearheaded by the opposition.

Former Caracas Metropolitan Mayor Antonio Ledezma was arrested last month on charges of conspiracy and sedition related to the February 12 thwarted “Blue Coup” attempt. A Venezuelan judge found sufficient evidence linking the opposition figure to air force officials involved in the coup as well as to rightwing terrorist leaders such as Lorent Saleh, who was extradited by Colombian authorities to face charges last year.

The other high profile Venezuelan opposition leader currently facing trial is Leopoldo López, who was indicted for his role in leading several months of violent opposition protests last year with the aim of effecting the “exit”, or ouster, of the constitutional government. Known as the “guarimbas”, these violent protests and street barricades caused the death of 43 people, the majority of whom were security personnel or Chavistas.

Ledezma and López, together with far right leader Maria Corina Machado, were active in the 2002 coup against then president Hugo Chávez, which succeeded in temporarily ousting the Venezuelan leader until he was restored by a popular uprising.

All three opposition leaders also signed a “National Transition Agreement” released on the day prior to February’s “Blue Coup” attempt, describing the government of Nicolas Maduro as in its “terminal phase” and declaring the need to “name new authorities” without mentioning elections or other constitutional mechanisms. Many political commentators interpreted the document as an open call for a coup against the president.

The report added:

The Venezuelan government has charged the US government with hypocrisy on the issue of human rights, and in particular the mass repression and incarceration of Afrodescendent communities in the US.

On February 28, President Maduro announced new measures imposing a reciprocal travel visa requirements on U.S. citizens seeking to enter Venezuela as well as mandating a reduction in U.S. embassy staff to levels that match the number of Venezuelan personnel in Washington.

Maduro also announced the creation of an “anti-terrorist list” of individuals barred from entering Venezuela, which will include former US officials such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who have reportedly “committed human rights violations.”

The Reuters report said:

Declaring any country a threat to national security is the first step in starting a US sanctions program. The same process has been followed with countries such as Iran and Syria, U.S. officials said.

The two countries have not had full diplomatic representation since 2008, when late socialist leader Hugo Chavez expelled then-US Ambassador Patrick Duddy. Washington at the time responded by expelling Venezuelan envoy Bernardo Alvarez.

The report said:

Commercial ties between Venezuela and the United States have largely been unaffected by diplomatic flare-ups, which were common during the 14-year-rule of Chavez.

The US is Venezuela’s top trading partner, and the OPEC member in 2014 remained the fourth-largest supplier of crude to the United States at an average of 733,000 barrels per day – despite a decade-long effort by Caracas to diversify its oil shipments to China and India.

A Caracas datelined report said:

President Maduro lashed out at the US for imposing sanctions on top Venezuelan officials accused of human rights violations, saying he would ask his country’s Congress to grant him additional powers to “fight imperialism.”

In a fiery speech broadcast on state television on March 9, 2015, the socialist leader appeared alongside the sanctioned officials, promoting one and congratulating each for the “imperial honor” bestowed by Washington.

“President Barack Obama, in the name of the US imperialist elite, has decided to personally take on the task of defeating my government, intervening in Venezuela, and controlling it from the US,” Maduro said. “Obama today took the most aggressive, unjust and poisonous step that the U.S. has ever taken against Venezuela.”

One of targeted individuals, Major Gen. Gustavo Gonzalez, director general of Venezuela’s intelligence service, was promoted to Interior Minister, a key post responsible for keeping the peace.

Maduro also announced that he would ask the ruling-party controlled Congress to grant him new powers so that he could defend the country against all aggressions and threats to its sovereignty. But he didn’t specify the powers or how he’d apply them.

The TeleSUR English report said:

During his weekly televised show last week, Maduro played the audio of a conversation held between Carlos Manuel Osuna Saraco, a former Venezuelan politician living in New York, and a soldier, in which Osuna dictates the statement that the rebel soldiers should read out during the coup.

The Venezuelan leader informed viewers that he would soon call upon the United States to extradite the suspect Osuna for trial in his home country.

Maduro also noted that in addition to the call from Osuna’s base in New York, there was a second phone call from Miami.

Ledezma was in constant coordination with Osuna in New York via telephone.

“There is a lot of hatred in certain minorities [in Venezuela],” Maduro said. “Minorities with economic power that are being encouraged from the US.”

“This plot has a tag which reads ‘made in the USA,’” he asserted, adding that a member of the United States Embassy in Venezuela also met with opposition leaders, giving them documents to help in the preparation stage.

He urged Barack Obama to abandon his government’s attempts to oust him.

“You, Mr. Obama, must decide … if you want to go down in history as George W. Bush, who failed in attempting to oust President Chavez,” said Maduro.

According to information the government had previously released, the coup plotters had a four-stage plan to oust the president, which would begin with economic warfare and finish with a violent military uprising.

Maduro said preliminary information given by detained officers – not yet confirmed – points at CNN and Televen as two of the media outlets through which the coup plotters’ message would be aired.

Maduro also showed a copy of a new “100-day Plan for Transition”, designed by the coup plotters and the opposition, which stipulated a series of measures which would be implemented by the planned governing junta.

The plan would take effect immediately after the coup, calling for early elections and the privatization of all public services.

The transitional government would request all of the current Venezuelan officials to turn themselves into the police within a period of 180 days. It also requested every Cuban worker within the government to turn themselves in unarmed to their local police station.

The plan also contemplated a role for the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to intervene in the Venezuelan economy.

Maduro announced further revelations will be made in the following weeks, and said he will bring that evidence to present at the Summit of the Americas, to be held in April in Panama.

“We have only revealed less than one percent of all of the information which the detained generals have given us,” said Maduro.

The Venezuelan president ended the broadcast by urging opposition leaders to stay away from an armed struggle and to respect the Constitution.

 

10 March 2015

Countercurrents.org

 

By Sandy English

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reportedly used heavy equipment to demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Reports describe ISIS militiamen trucking away statues and tablets from the site and the demolition of the area since last Thursday. The fundamentalist group considers pre-Islamic artifacts to be idolatrous and worthy of destruction.

Nimrud, built over 3,000 years ago, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 883 BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose rulers spoke a language distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria, from about 900 BC to 600 BC.

The site along the Tigris River contained monumental statues, frescos, temples, private dwellings and a ziggurat, the stepped pyramid characteristic of Mesopotamian civilizations. Nimrud boasted some of the most extensive carvings in ivory of any site in the world, most of which had been removed and placed in museums in Iraq and Britain.

A week earlier, the Islamic State released video showing men smashing statues with sledgehammers in the Nineveh Museum, about 20 miles from the site of Nimrud. Nineveh was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 705 BC.

In recent weeks, ISIS has also set off incendiary devices around Mosul Central Library. Estimates of the books and manuscripts destroyed range from 8,000 to 10,000. Bookshops on the central Al-Nujaifi Street have been burned, and ancient Christian monasteries have been vandalized.

Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported that residents near Hatra, 68 miles southwest of Mosul, saw ISIS fighters removing artifacts form the 2,000-year-old city. Hatra was built during the Seleucid Empire in the second or third century BC and changed hands over the next several hundred years, belonging in turn to the Parthians, the Romans and Araba, one of the first pre-Islamic Arab kingdoms.

Next to the tremendous loss of life, the destruction of the past is one of the most grievous products of the conflict that was initiated by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A whole people is being cut off from its historical roots and the study of the Mesopotamian past by historians has suffered a serious blow.
The plunder of Iraq began on April 10, 2003, when American occupation forces in Baghdad, in spite of warnings by archaeologists, allowed the National Museum to be looted of tens of thousands of historical artifacts of great artistic and scientific value. Only about half the artifacts have been recovered. The American military, in violation of cultural heritage regulations, fired on the museum.

In that first month of the occupation, dozens of other museums and libraries were burned or looted, including the Mosul Museum, where the 2,000-year-old statue of Parthian King Saqnatroq II was stolen.

In 2003-2004, American troops occupied the site of ancient Babylon, where they dug ditches across excavated areas, filling sandbags with ancient bricks labeled with cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamian civilization. The occupation forces built a heliport, and vibrations from American aircraft caused the bases of temples to collapse.

“The damage to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable,” Columbia University archeologist Zainab Bahrani said in 2007. “The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history, well beyond the museums and libraries that were looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have [like Babylon] been used by US and coalition forces since 2003, one of them being in the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006.”

The destruction and looting of Iraqi archaeological sites has been going on nonstop ever since. Iraq’s archeological sites and tells—unexcavated mounds of earth that cover formerly inhabited areas—have been dug up with earth-moving equipment and the spoils have been sold on the antiquities market for private gain.

In 2010, the New York Times noted the collusion of the police with antiquities thieves in southern Iraq, areas controlled by Shia sectarian militias. One of the great cultural crimes brought on by the American occupation of Iraq was the bombing of al-Mutinabbi Street, Baghdad’s historic street of booksellers, on March 5, 2007.

Both Nimrud and Nineveh were plundered several times during the American occupation. Before ISIS’s destruction last week, the advanced state of decay of the Nimrud site was causing archaeologists great concern.

The American and European media have expressed “shock” and “outrage” over ISIS’s cultural destruction. Irina Bokova, director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESO) said, “We cannot remain silent. The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime.”

The Iraqi government, somewhat more forthrightly, has used the ISIS vandalism to call for stepped-up intervention by the American and coalition air forces in Iraq.

But the corporate-controlled media, UNESCO, and the miserable servants of the US in the Iraq government conceal the essential causes and nature of this barbarism, and omit even naming the force that is chiefly responsible for the destruction of the past: American imperialism.

This exercise in unbridled hypocrisy assumes that the people of the world have forgotten the destruction of Iraqi, and now Syrian, heritage sites, museums and libraries as the result of 12 years of almost continuous imperialist military intervention in the region.

Over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the American invasion and occupation, and the sectarian fighting stoked up by US imperialism. Tens of millions remain internally displaced and mired in poverty. The utilities infrastructure and the Iraqi health care system have been destroyed and have yet to recover. The World Socialist Web Site has accurately defined this process as “sociocide,” “the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.”

The same is true for the devastation wrought by right-wing political movements such as ISIS, and the destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage. Just as there was no presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq before the American invasion, there was no plunder of the country’s archaeology or cultural institutions.

Those above all responsible for the destruction of Nimrud, Nineveh and Hatra bear the names of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell. One must add to this list Barack Obama, who continued the occupation for nearly three years and has now launched a new war in Iraq and Syria that can only lead to the further destruction of the region’s historical and cultural legacy, in addition to more civilian deaths and an increase in the number of refugees.

In a more direct sense, the vandalism of ISIS is an American production. In its eagerness to implement regime-change in Syria, the CIA, working with American allies among the Gulf monarchies, as well as Turkey and Jordan, armed the Islamists fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The American-stoked civil war in Syria led to the widespread destruction of antiquities.

Last year, the UN found that 24 archaeological sites have been completely destroyed, 189 severely or moderately damaged, and a further 77 possibly damaged. All six of Syria’s World Heritage sites have been damaged.

09 March, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

Today is International Women’s Day . The mainstream media misses the point intentionally. They highlight certain women (some who make the lives of women everywhere difficult people like Hilary Clinton, Condoleeza Rice, Angela Markel etc) and they fail to give credit to those who change things or to even explain to us the origin of this day. Having an anual dedicated day for women (action) was proposed by Clara Zetkin of Germany to attendees at the International Conference of Working Women in 1910. Inspired by women socialist movements for fair working conditions in the USA in 1908 and 1909, movements grew of women demanding their rights (until then they did not even have a right to vote). The first women’s day on 8 March 1911 launched demonstration and marches for women workers’ rights (right to vote, right to fair work condition, right to live free from oppression, right to life, against wars etc). After a long struggle and many lives lost along the way, the UN finally recognized 8 March as an “International” (I prefer global) women’s day in 1977, 66 years after it was launched by brave socialist women. Thus women’s day is about actions against injustice not about Hilary Clinton!

The First Arab Women’s Congress of Palestine gathered about 200 women and was held on 26 October 1929 in Jerusalem. The demands were rights of women and against the Balfour Declaration, against the racist idea of Zionism, for self-determination, and for full equality (gender, religion etc). They elected a 14 member Executive Committee headed by Matiel E. T. Mogannam. Mogannam wrote a book titled “The Arab Women and the Palestinian Problem” published 1937. Moghannam explained how Palestinian women in the 1920s were innovative in many ways: lobbying the colonial power, writing in newspapers, and holding the first demonstration in human history that used automobiles with 120 cars in 1928 (gathered from all over Palestine to drive in the streets of Jerusalem). See my book on “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of hope and empowerment”
(http://qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/) The struggle of women here continues unabated. Many people like me believe sincerely that had women been in charge here, we would have had a free Palestine by now. My mother who is 82 years old showed us by example what giving and self-sacrifice and love of people and land means. My wife and three sisters are likewise examples of what we all should aspire to do: kind, dedicated, and hard-working human beings. Like millions before them and millions contemporary with them, these women make life livable while many men (and a few women) engage in hurting others and pushing for conflicts and war. Words are too mediocre and inadequate to express our feelings but I simply want to say to all the women working for peace and justice: thank you and to pledge that we will work with you for more progressive change in our societies.

Donate to the Palestine Museum of Natural History and our institute of biodiversity and sustainability. New campaign launched through Indiegogo
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/palestine-museum-of-natural-history/x/10068075
More at http://palestinenature.org

Palestine Remix http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/PalestineRemix

Thank 60 members of Congress for skipping the Netanyahu speech
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/641/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=17304

Mazin Butros Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist and author and the director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History.
9 March 2015

By Ali Abunimah

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his much trailed and politically divisive speech to the US Congress today, forcefully denouncing a possible international agreement that would place Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program under strict supervision.

Immediately afterwards, I spoke to The Real News Network’s Paul Jay to analyze the speech, including Netanyahu’s appeal to Biblical myths and Islamophobia in his attempt to derail US diplomacy.

Netanyahu’s speech came as US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, were in Switzerland to close the deal at high stakes negotiations backed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.

President Barack Obama dismissed Netanyahu’s speech as offering nothing new and said the Israeli leader offered no alternatives to his efforts to reach a diplomatic agreement.

Approximately fifty Democratic members of Congress skipped Netanyahu’s speech, some after intense lobbying efforts by Palestinian rights advocates.

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

04 March, 2014
Electronicintifada.net

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was brilliantly deceitful because it played to the fantasies that Israeli propaganda and right wing militarists in the US have been popularizing for the past thirty years.

* The biggest fantasy: that we can coerce others through power over them to do what we consider in the best interests of the U.S. or Israel. This is what I call “The Strategy of Domination.” A more effective path is “The Strategy of Generosity”–showing others that we care about them and recognize their needs as being equally legitimate to our own. This second approach is the view that made trade between tribes, and eventually between nations possible in the past, and it remains the view that makes it possible for most countries of the world to live in peace with their neighbors. They hate to do business with those who think that they can get their way through power-tripping and manipulations and threats.

This struggle between two world views is the core of the debate today in the U.S. and the reason that the militarists have the upper hand is because the Obama Administration, fearing that it might be ridiculed as believing in “kumbaya politics,” used its first six years to pursue policies that better fit the Strategy of Domination than the Strategy of Generosity. Predictably, now it finds itself without a popular base for turning toward a more rational path in regard to Iran, having to frame its policies in terms of his policies’ toughness rather than in terms of their humanity and reflection of higher ethical values.

I know so many people who shake their heads in despair at the growth of the right-wing consciousness in the US in every sphere except identity politics, but really what other discourse are they ever exposed to? Obama should embrace the Biblical call for “love the stranger/the other” and challenge Americans to take that call seriously. Instead, he tries to measure up against the criteria set by the militarists. Guess what? In that coercion-oriented arena liberals and progressives will always fail, because you have to be unscrupulous to win there.

Netanyahu is a master of manipulating the fantasies that the right-wing discourse advances. For example, the view of the world that sees “our side” (whether that ‘our’ be the U.S. or Israel) as always innocent and good, and “the other” as intrinsically evil.

* So consider his claim that it is Iran that has been making war against countries in the Middle East. No…actually it is the U.S. that has been making war against those countries in the past 12 years. You will have to look very hard to find any Iranian troops in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, or Egypt in the past 12 years. But you will find tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past twelve years. Similarly, it is Israel that has been decimating Gaza, not Iran decimating a neighboring city or province or country. From a global perspective, and based on the behavior of these countries in the past two decades ever since the peace-oriented prime minister of Israely Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by a right wing religious Zionist, the world has more to fear from the US and Israel and our indomitable sense of self-righteousness than it does from Iran.

*Iran is the biggest violator of human rights in the region. Not so fast. Iran has some stiff competition with America’s ally Saudi Arabia, not to mention the U.S. torture operations in Abu Ghraib. In fact, the US still won’t release the full U.S. Senate report on its torture operations around the world because they would be too shocking to the US population. And the CIA chief recently appointed by President Obama insists that the CIA was not involved in torture, and the Obama Administration refuses to bring charges against any CIA agents who were engaged in torture, thus giving a signal to future torturers that they will be exempt from any punishments. We will deplore their behavior, but then let them continue it.

Undermining negotiations with Iran by continuing sanctions and offering no serious benefits for Iran to agree to anything would lead to Iran accelerating its nuclear program out of fear that it might soon be facing a war with Israel and the U.S. and perceiving itself as vulnerable unless it quickly develops nukes for itself. So following Netanyahu’s path would actually create the very situation he claims to fear–a renewed commitment on the part of Iran to develop nuclear weapon capability.

* Israel is a beacon of democracy. Well…not so fast. Palestinians living within the West Bank and Gaza are living under the effective control of Israel on most matters of life, pay taxes to the Israeli government, must get permission from Israel to lave those areas, yet have no vote in the elections (though Jews living in the West Bank do have the right to vote). It’s certainly better than what faces people in many other middle eastern countries, but it’s a stretch to call Israel a democracy as long as the Occupation continues.

* Iran with nuclear weapons would be a danger to everyone. Well, that’s partially true and partially false. It’s true to the extent that any country having nuclear weapons is a danger to everyone on the planet (though the US is the only country in the world to have ever actually used nuclear weapons in a war). But it’s not true that Iran would use those weapons. While I detest the current regime in Iran and hope for its nonviolent overthrow by the people of Iran, I see nothing in their behavior that leads me to believe that they are suicidal. On the contrary, they have a strong desire to make their Islamic republic the model for all future Islamic societies.

Iranian leaders know full well that Israel has the capacity, should Iran strike at Israel, to use its 200 nuclear bombs to wipe Iran off the face of the planet, if the US didn’t do that first in the event of an Iranian use of nuclear weapons against Israel. So Netanyahu’s paranoid fantasy only seems plausible if you think that Iran is the equivalent of the Nazi regime. And that is precisely where political analysis has to yield to psychological investigation. In my book Embracing Israel/Palestine (check it out at www.tikkun.org/eip) based in part on research I did while living in Israel and doing research at Tel Aviv U. and Hebrew U in Jerusalem, I describe the devastating consequences of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on the capacity of those who have suffered extreme stress or oppression to make rational decisions for themselves. The PTSD is most acute in both the Israeli and Palestinian population, but far less so among Iranians who have never suffered in the past 70 years the way Jews and Palestinians have. So if we have any worries about possession of nuclear weapons, that concern should direct us to seeking nuclear disarmament from Israel. But for the impact of PTSD, having those 200 nukes should have yielded Israel a payoff in feeling secure. Instead, Israel continues to live under the cloud of the 70 year old trauma of the Holocaust, and the Prime Minister of Israel comes to the U.S. to shout “Never Again.” But that slogan was originally meant to be a slogan concerning all peoples–so that no one should ever suffer what Jews suffered. The path to a war with Iran would make a mockery of that slogan. So it was tragic to see Elie Wiesel allowing himself to become a political pawn in Netnayahu’s fantasy trip.

All this plays well for the US militarists and their cheerleaders among Christian Zionists and the rightwing of the Jewish Zionist movement. They raise the same fears and solutions they raised 55 years ago when they hoped to push the US into a war with the Soviet Union when it developed nuclear weapons. That war would have cost millions of lives, and saner voices prevailed. President Eisenhower warned about the dangers of the military/industrial complex and its ability to push the US toward wars. But Democrats, fearful of being called weak, brought us the War in Vietnam, and refused to cut off funds when the Republicans led us into the trillion-dollar debacle of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now those same moral idiots who led us into the Iraq war want to let Netanyahu’s brilliant manipulation of our quite justified desire to see Israel remain safe and strong lead us into a war with Iran. We should resist such a folly. We could have used that trillion dollars to end global and domestic homelessness, hunger, poverty, inadequate health care, inadequate education, and to repair the destruction advanced indsutrial societies both capitalist and socialist have done to the global environment. Such a Global Marshall Plan might be dismissed as “unrealistic,” just as the movements to end apartheid and segregation, provide equal rights for women, end legal discrimination against gays and lesbians, were also dismissed at first as unrealistic, naive, utopian or even “dangerous.”

But the only way we can succeed in stopping the Republicans and AIPAC Democrats from following like lemmings the Netanyahu path is to present and powerfully advocate for an alternative–the Strategy of Generosity and a Global Marshall Plan modeled on the one we at Tikkun and our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives have developed (d0wnload the full version of our Global Marshall Plan at www.tikkun.org/gmp).

Please join us in developing this path rather than in the futuile path of domination that will only confirm the fears of the most paranoid elements of all sides.

You dont have to believe in God or be part of a spiritual or religious tradition or practice to be a “spiritual progressive.” You are a spiritual progressives by our definition if you want institutions, social practices, government policies, corporations, our educational system, our legal system to be judged “efficient, rational or productive” to the extent that they maximize our capacities to be loving, caring for each other and the earth, supporting generosity instead of domination, and responding to the universe not solely as “a resource” for human purposes but with a sense of awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and preciousness of life itself and the universe in which it has evolved!

Please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org (when you join you will get a one year free sub to Tikkun magazine).

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, co-chair with Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, holds a ph.d. in philosophy and a second ph.d. in psychology and was principal investigator of research on stress for the NIMH.

04 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Bill Van Auken

The speech delivered Tuesday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to an extraordinary joint session of the US Congress consisted of a hysterical anti-Iran tirade and an implicit denunciation of the Obama administration for what was portrayed as an outright betrayal of the security interests of both Israel and the US.

Netanyahu’s appearance, organized behind the back of the White House, marked an unprecedented—and constitutionally dubious—bid by an American political party to bring a foreign head of state before Congress in order to condemn and undermine the policies of a sitting president.

For Netanyahu, who described his trip to Washington as a “historic, even fateful mission,” the political motives were transparent. With Israeli elections just two weeks away and polls showing his support fading, the speech provided Netanyahu with a means of shifting attention from deteriorating economic and social conditions in Israel to the supposed “existential threat” posed by Iran’s nuclear program.

It also gave him the opportunity to be televised accepting multiple standing ovations from the US Congress. Democrats and Republicans proved equally obsequious to the Zionist lobby, rising to their feet at least 15 times during the 39-minute diatribe.

While roughly 55 of the 232 Democrats in both houses of Congress stayed away from the address—not out of disagreement with Israeli policy, but out of loyalty to Obama—the party’s congressional leadership showed up.

The speech was delivered simultaneously with a third session of talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in the Swiss town of Montreux. The negotiations between Iran and the P5+1—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—are proceeding under the pressure of a March 31 deadline to reach a tentative agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu’s clear aim was to derail any deal with Tehran. US officials had feared he would use the speech to disclose classified information on the negotiations in order to achieve this aim. Instead, the Israeli prime minister relied on crude scaremongering and Islamophobia in what was clearly an attempt to convince Congress to intervene and disrupt the talks.

He portrayed Iran as both a terrorist state and an expanding empire that would resort to nuclear war to achieve its aims.

“We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror,” he said, adding that “the greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons.”

The deal being negotiated by the Obama administration, he charged, would “inexorably lead to a nuclear-armed Iran whose unbridled aggression will inevitably lead to war.”

No one in either major party or in the corporate media pointed out the hypocrisy that saturated Netanyahu’s speech. The head of the Israeli government, which possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, charges Iran, a signatory to the pact, with nuclear malfeasance. The Israeli government, which has waged repeated wars of aggression against the Palestinian people and all of its Arab neighbors, while recognizing no restrictions on its borders, accuses Iran, which has invaded no one, of “aggression.”

To promote these lies, Netanyahu equated Iran not only to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but even to Nazi Germany.

At one point, he turned the attention of Congress to the presence in the gallery of Elie Wiesel, who has made a lucrative career as Washington’s semi-official Holocaust spokesman, and repeated the refrain “Never again.” Wiesel was seated with Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, who finds herself at the center of multiple corruption scandals within Israel itself.

This cheap invocation of the Holocaust to justify a policy of aggressive war against an oppressed country is as fraudulent as it is morally obscene.

President Barack Obama responded to the speech by stating that there was “nothing new” in Netanyahu’s remarks and that he had failed to “offer any viable alternative.”

An unnamed “senior US official” who spoke to the Washington Post was more blunt, declaring, “The logic of the prime minister’s speech is regime-change, not a nuclear speech.” The official added, “Simply demanding that Iran capitulate is not a plan.”

This is the essence of Netanyahu’s policy. His demand that Iran accept the complete dismantling of all of its nuclear facilities—to which it is entitled under international law—cannot be achieved by negotiations, but only through a war to subjugate the country.

Washington has itself repeatedly engaged in saber rattling against Iran, with US representatives insisting even this week that should Tehran fail to accept or subsequently violate a nuclear agreement, the military option remained “on the table.”

Since the end of 2013, however, after it was compelled to back down from its threat to launch an air war against the Iranian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration has shifted its policy toward reaching an accommodation with Iran.

It is this policy, not the danger of nuclear attack, that Tel Aviv sees as an existential threat. The Zionist regime requires a continuous state of war and confrontation to sustain its rule. A deal with Iran would undermine its central claim to legitimacy.

Before the 1979 Iranian revolution, US imperialism relied on the dictatorial regime of the Shah as a pillar of stability and counterrevolution in the Middle East. Elements within the US ruling establishment no doubt harbor the hope that such a relation can be revived. As Netanyahu’s appearance demonstrated, there are sharp divisions within the US ruling elite over how to pursue such a strategy.

In its latest military intervention in Iraq and Syria, Washington has coordinated its actions with those of Iran, which has supplied the Shia-dominated Iraqi regime with substantial military aid. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that in a newly launched operation to retake the Iraqi city of Tikrit, Iran was “throwing drones, heavy weaponry and ground forces into the battle, while the US remained on the sidelines.”

Israel, which has provided logistical support to the Islamist “rebels” in Syria and has tried to forge a de facto anti-Iranian alliance with the reactionary Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, perceives any thaw in US-Iranian relations as a threat to its hegemonic aims in the region, as well as to Washington’s unconditional support for the aggressive policies with which it pursues these aims.

Tel Aviv opposes Iran in large measure because its aid to the Syrian government, to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to Hamas in Gaza, while posing no existential threat to Israel, limits Israel’s ability to militarily impose its dictates on the peoples of the region.

Washington, on the other hand, is pursuing far broader objectives. Its negotiations with Tehran are directed not merely at curbing its nuclear program, but at creating conditions in the region that will facilitate US imperialism’s “pivot” toward escalating military confrontation with both Russia and China.

Speaking in Geneva, Kerry pointed toward this shift, declaring, “Israel’s security is absolutely at the forefront of our minds, but frankly, so is the security of all the other countries in the region, so is our security in the United States.”

Netanyahu’s provocation in the US Capitol has been accompanied by statements from both Democrats and Republicans reaffirming support for Israel, which translates into over $3 billion a year in mostly military aid. In an interview with Reuters Monday, Obama said Netanyahu’s actions would not prove “permanently destructive.”

Such reassurances notwithstanding, Netanyahu’s speech is not the cause of the tensions between Washington and Tel Aviv, but rather a symptom of an increasing divergence of strategic interests between US imperialism and its Israeli client state.

04 March, 2015
WSWS.org