Archives: Articles

By Dick Platkin and Jeff Warner

“Our alliance with America is transitory.”
Israeli writer Amos Oz in the March 8, 2015, Los Angeles Times

For those who carefully follow the relationship between the governments of the United States and Israel, the dust-up over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s March 3, 2015,anti-Iran speech to a joint session of Congress comes as no surprise. In fact, we think the handwriting has been on the wall since last year, and it was predicted by Jeffrey Goldberg in his October 2014 article in The Atlantic. Despite the content of Netanyahu speech,according to Ha’Aretz the underlying issues have much more to do with the construction of an apartheid Greater Israel than with Iran’s nuclear program.
In an attempt to put Netanyahu’s Congressional speech about Iran into a historical and political context, we describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state. We also analyze several scenariosin which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when, not if, the US government is no longer willing or able to support Israel’s long-term settlement program in the occupied territories. In essence, we try to explain how the decline of US dominance in the Middle East, including reengagement with Iran, means that Israel’s occupation is not sustainable. Our analysisalso offers many new political opportunities to anti-occupation activists in the wake of U.S. decline.

Greater Israel on the Road to Apartheid: Israel today, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, is effectively a single state, referred to as Greater Israel by its architects and supporters. Many analysts, such as Jeff Halper, Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD),have pointed out that this de facto single state is quickly developing a system of apartheid in the territories Israel captured in 1967 during the Six Day War. In contrast, the areas within Israel’s 1948-1967 Green Line boundaries have legal and quasi-legal segregation, but not yet full-blown apartheid. Furthermore, the legal structure of this emerging apartheid state differs between those areas annexed by Israel after the Six Day War (East Jerusalem andGolan Heights) and the territories remaining under direct and indirect military control (West Bank and Gaza Strip). Israeli civil authorities govern all those living in the former, while Palestinians living in the occupied areas are controlled by the Israeli military, unlike adjacent Israeli settlers, who are governed by the same civil authorities running the Israeli state within the Green Line.

To date over 500,000 Israeli Jews have been moved into the neighborhoods of annexed East Jerusalem and into the occupied West Bank. In most cases they are protected by the Israeli military in heavily fortified towns and cities, euphemistically called “settlements” by the press and even most opponents, although more critics are now referring to them as colonial outposts.

An obvious consequence of the rapid construction of Greater Israel is the deliberate geographical and political demise of a viable two state solution, an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. This is because a sovereign Palestinian state is incompatible with an Israeli stateoccupying the same territory and maintaining an authoritarian military regime that implants and protects hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jewish settlers.

There are also parallel political factors that block the emergence of a Palestinian state, as defined by the Oslo Accords, most importantly the recent frankness of Israeli officialswho openly oppose a two state solution, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu during those rare moments when he is not deflecting attention away from settlements and toward Iran. On July 11, 2014, he declared, “There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we [Israel] relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan [meaning the West Bank].”

Other political factors include the rapid growth of extremely right-wing and often religious Israeli political parties and factions, such as the Price Tag group, which engages in systematic violence against Christian and Palestinian property. These movements have not only infiltrated the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)but also violently intimidatedIsraeli moderates still committed to a two-state solution. The most important political factor is, however, the U.S. government’s carte blanche, bi-partisanmaterial and political support for Greater Israel, especially lethal Israeli military attacks designed to weaken Palestinian national aspirations, in particular Cast Lead (2008-9) and Protective Edge (2014).

Despite occasional press statements from the White House and State Department critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu and expanded Israeli civilian outposts and towns in the areas intended for the Palestinian state (by numerous UN resolutions and the Oslo Accords) are unhelpful, the day-to-day construction of Greater Israel’s “facts on the ground” has the full backing of the United States government, including both Republican and Democratic administrations. Israel’s reliance on a great power is not a new phenomenon, as Prof. Avi Shlaim pointed out in his 2001 book The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World, ”This has always been Israel’s modus operandi, as it was for the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.”

In the late 1890s Theodor Herzl focused on building a Jewish state under the auspices of the Ottoman Empire. The first major step towards a Jewish state, however, came in 1917 when Chaim Weizmann successfully obtained the Balfour Declaration from the British government in the midst of World War I, prior to the British victory over the Ottoman Empire. The USSR and its client Czechoslovakia later provided life-saving military support to Israel during the 1948 war. The French subsequently armed Israel for the 1967 war, and the United States has been Israel’s primarybenefactor ever since.

Jeff Halper made a similar point in his 2005 essay entitled “Israel as Extension of American Empire.” He wrote, “Israel’s leading position in this [U.S.] military alliance, has global implications, but is also gives Israel the military strength and political umbrella needed to transform its Occupation into annexation while advancing the Pax Americana over the Middle East.”

In the past 48 yearsthe U.S. government backing for Greater Israel has included extensivefinancial support, grants and transfers of military hardware and technology, intelligence sharing, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, tax-exempt status for private donations to settler organizations, permission for U.S. citizens to join the Israeli military, and mind-numbing repetition of Israeli government talking points. This support is essential for Israel to maintain its post-1967 annexations and occupations, which, cumulatively results in the de facto construction of an apartheid state.

U.S. Decline in the Middle East: There is afly in this ointment, however,and it is the slow and uneven decline of the United State in the Middle East, as expressed by its growing inability to influence events and successfully project power throughout the region. True, the United States has been the dominant power in the Middle East since it supplanted the British, beginning in the1950s. Throughout this entire period the U.S. has built an enormous network of military bases, directly and indirectly waged many wars, and supporteda host of oppressive regimes, includingIsrael, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, mostly characterized by neoliberal economic policies that favor a small elite at the expense of the general public.

Many people believe this Pax Americana is permanent because the U.S.can still unleash massive death and destruction, mostly from the air. But, despite this enormous firepower, the United States has been totally unable to transform Middle East blood baths into political victories, whether through its own wars in Iraq and Libya, or through its historic proxies, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

American decline is evidenced by manymilitary and political failures in this region and elsewhere:

· Its bloated military has not been able to decisively win any war since WW-II, most recently its failed invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush and Obama administrations, and its faltering fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and possibly Libya.

· Its former regional hegemon for the Persian Gulf, Iran, successfully bolted from US domination in 1979 and has been at odds with the United States ever since. Furthermore, the present nuclear negotiations between the U.S and Iran indicate that some foreign policy realists are finally coming to terms with the U.S. government’s declining political influence in the Middle East. In fact, it is this fledgling realignment of U.S. policy in the region, not Iran’s nuclear programs, that so alarms Israeli rightists, such as Netanyahu. They know that Greater Israel demands unwavering support from the U.S. government.

· Its foremost regional ally in the Middle East, Israel, has not unwilling to use its vast arsenal of American military hardware to assist the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, or areas of Sunni Jihadist activity, most notably the Islamic State in Syria. For that matter, Israel has not even succeeded in defeating two small Islamic forces in adjacent areas, Hezbollah and Hamas, despite inflicting enormous death and destruction on Lebanon and Gaza. As “gratitude” for continued U.S supportof these assaults, the Israeli government has openly disparaged the U.S.President, Vice President, and Secretary of State. It even attempted to interfere in American elections, supporting Republican Mitt Romney for President in the 2012. And, most recently Israel bypassed traditionaldiplomatic protocol by wangling an invitation for Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak directly to Congress, without first contacting the White House.

· The United States has employed hundreds of drone attacks against perceived threats in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. So far, this high tech version of Whack-a-Mole has not made the slightest difference in these countries, other than assisting the recruiting drives of Jihadist groups, especially the Islamic State.

· The United States has had few successes in influencing events in the Arab Spring, such as keeping its loyal satrap, Hosni Mubarak, in power in Egypt. Meanwhile, its one direct military intervention related to the Arab Spring, Libya, is an unmitigated disaster, including the murder of the US Ambassador by one of the country’s many warring Islamic militias, which now includes the Islamic State.

· Finally, in Syria, the uprising against the Assad regime is totally beyond the reach of the United States or its regional allies, Israel, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan. Instead, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf Monarchies have supported the Sunni Jihadist opposition to Assad, a tactic that has directly led to the explosive growth and military successes of the Islamic State against the US client state of Iraq.

· In desperate efforts to maintain the government the U.S. installed in Iraq, the “coalition” attacks on the Islamic State in Syria have made the U.S. an ally of Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran, while it now totally at odds with its former ally Turkey, which favor the Sunni opposition to Assad. Meanwhile Israel periodically attacks Hezbollah, a military ally of Assad and Iran.

· Finally, as the US coalition against the Islamic State unravels, President Obama is asking Congress to authorize direct U.S. military intervention.

 

The Trajectory of Decline: Like the French and British empires that preceded it in the Middle East, U.S.imperial declinedoes not have a smooth trajectory, butit will profoundly impact countries and non-state actors across the entire region, from Morocco to Pakistan. When the “American Century” finally draws to a close, the unraveling of the existing order will accelerate, and there will be dramatic repercussions in many areas, including Israel-Palestine. The waning of U.S. power means that at some point the U.S. government will either be technically unable or politically unwilling to sustain Greater Israel. Israel’s eventual loss of support from the region’s currenthegemonic power – presaged by the pushback against Netanyahu’s speech to Congress — will become a critical barrier to itslong-term consolidationof an apartheid state.

At present the U.S. government’s backing for the construction of Greater Israel is maintained by the power of the Israel lobby. But, according to Peter Beinert, the lobby’s power is declining as the older leaders of the Jewish component of the Israel Lobby are replaced by younger Jewish-Americans with more liberal, egalitarian, secular, and humanistic political values. This insight was recently repeated by Ha’Aretz columnist Ari Shavit, who wrote:

However, our common values don’t accord with the removal of Arabs from buses in Judea and Samaria, with the undermining and neutralization of the (Israeli) Supreme Court, or with the constant and perplexing settlement drive. An Israel that occupies, settles and discriminates is not an Israel that the United States can continue to back indefinitely.An Israel that insists on behaving like a bull in a china shop will sooner or later lose the support of America’s younger generation. This won’t happen next week or next month, not even next year. But it will happen. If the head-trippers in Israel continue on their path, the collapse will inevitably come.

The coming generation of Jewish American leaderswill not blindly accept Israel’s continued dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, especially as cracks in the U.S. foreign policy establishment regarding Israel and Palestine, including the Israel Lobby itself, become more public, as evidenced by their response to Netanyahu’s scheduled address to Congress. Furthermore, younger Jewish leaders will become increasingly uncomfortable with the rise of Israel’s religious-tinged, xenophobic nationalism, including the harassment of governmental critics, because it reminds them of the racism and political repression they associate with fascism. In their case, pointing a finger at Iran will not succeed in counteracting their distress with Israel.

As the influence of the Israel lobby ebbs,including from Christian Zionists, it will be less able to convince the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon to maintain their unconditional, bi-partisan political, military, intelligence, and financial support for Greater Israel.

In addition to the decline of the Israel Lobby, there are several other factors slowly undermining the U.S. government’s support for Israeli apartheid. Within the foreign policy establishment there is a clear consensus to repair relations with Iran and shift US military forces from the Middle East to China, often called “The Pivot to Asia.” Other secondary factors include growing Palestinian opposition to Greater Israel, as evidenced by the IDF’s inability to defeat Hamas, even with full US support, as well as broad international Palestinian solidaritygroupsundertaking economic and cultural boycotts of Israel. In addition, the divestment movement is finally gaining traction, as indicated by the Presbyterian Church’s recent divestment decision. So far there have been no U.S. Government sanctions against Israel, but the calls for such sanctions can now be heard, such as in Chris Hedge’s column at Truthdig.com at the beginning of Decisive Edge. Later Noam Chomsky made a similar call when he recently spoke at the United Nations.

Without the US government’s full support, it is extremely unlikely that a politically isolated Israel could sustain an increasingly repressive apartheid regime by itself. Israeli apartheid, even more thanits current annexations and occupation, depends on major military, financial, diplomatic, and media support from an outside power. For the foreseeable future Israeli prosperity and technology is simply not powerful enough to fill the void, especially because the country has so much internal economic inequality and political discontent to overcome.

Furthermore, once the role of the United States weakens, there is no other global power on the horizon — not the EU, China, or Russia — that would readily replace theU.S. lifeline to an apartheid Israeli state. While these forces would quickly fill voids throughout the Middle East created by the demise of the United States, their priority would be securing petroleum reserves and shipping routes, not propping up a politically isolated Israeli pariah state.

The Collapse of Greater Israel – Some Scenarios: Long before U.S. government support for Greater Israel withers away, Palestinian resistance will likely shift from demands for a sovereign Palestinian mini-state to campaigns for civil, economic, and political rights within Greater Israel. As the Palestinian struggle for equal rights garners support from progressive Israelis sharing a common egalitarian political and economic agenda, and as well as international support, the stage will be set for the rapid and turbulent unraveling of Greater Israel. If we also factor in the long and cyclical history of anti-racist and anti-war movements in the United States, domestic opposition to the US government’s support for Greater Israel could also become a significant factor accelerating the country’s retreat from the Middle East, including the likelihood of a U.S. military conflict with Iran.

When this day of reckoning finally comes, several scenarios are likely. The rights-based Palestinian struggle, combined with the loss of U.S. government support, points to a bumpy transition to several alternative one-state formulas: a single, non-ethnocratic democratic state (like South Africa) or a bi-national state. Ian Lustick explored these one state options in the New York Times, as did John Mearsheimer in his 2012 lecture at the Palestine Center.

The reaction to these one-state proposals and campaigns — mostly Palestinian, but also from alternative Israeli voices– for a liberal unitary state, could unleash several wildly different responses among Israelis. Liberal Zionists like Amos Oz, Peter Beinart, Ari Shavit, and Uri Avnery, hope that once Jewish Israelis fully understand that a single democratic state — regardless of the exact model — would have a non-Jewish majority, they will realize that – like South Africa — this is the moment for serious compromise. Given their determination to maintain a Jewish majority state to protect them from their fears of a future Holocaust — as emphasized by Avi Shavit in his 2013 book My Promised Land, The Triumph and tragedy of Israel — the Israeli government would reluctantly abandon Greater Israel. It would then be forced to finally accept a sovereign Palestinian state alongside an Israeli Jewish state within its 1967 boundaries. If this scenario prevailed, the Israeli government would have finally complied with the Oslo Accords, the U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, renewed in 2007 and 2013.

Furthermore, the two-state solution would be more robust if it emerged as part of a Palestine-Israel economic confederation, as described by Jeff Halper in 2007. If this confederation provided for the free exchange of labor and capital, as the European Union does, citizens of both the Jewish and the Palestinian states would be able to live and work anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean coast. This would, in theory, allow Jews to live in the Biblically significant West Bank, and Palestinians to return to the remnants of their ancestral villages within Israel’s abandoned Green Line.Josef Avesar describes a different confederation model, based on legal factors, in his 2011 book, “Peace, A Case for an Israeli Palestinian Confederation.”

Besides these peaceful outcomes emerging from the collapse of apartheid Greater Israel, there are also grim, violent scenarios.

The downside of Israel finally implementing a two-state solution is that it would mean the forced transfer of about 150,000 to 500,000 settlers into Israel proper, or leaving them in place to become Palestinian citizens. Either option could spark a Jewish civil war, accompanied by many attacks onIsraeli soldiers and atrocities against Palestinians that are certain to trigger equally violent reactions. This scenario is extremely foreboding, and it cannot be dismissed considering the amounts of settler violence against both Palestinians and Israel soldiers in recent years, already carefully documented by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization.

A pariah Israel state may also indulge in a devastating last stand that would lead to wide-scale destruction of everything and everyone within its boundaries. This might be a modern version of the Samson story in which he brought destruction to the Philistines through his own suicide. If Greater Israel’s last stand combined with a regional war in which the United States and its other Middle East proxies, such as Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia joined forces, perhaps against Iran, WW III scenarios must be considered a possible outcome.

Another destructive possibility is the collapse of the Israel state and Palestinian communities through a massive out-migration of modern, secular Israelis and Palestinians. This could produce two failed states: on one side a Jewish population of zealous nationalists and ultra-orthodox Jews, and on the other side extremist Islamic Palestinians.

In order to assure that a non-destructive outcome emerges, it is essential that we fully analyze the peaceful rather than apocalyptic outcomes. While we still can, we need to spell-out these peaceful options in detail, and pursue practical ways to promote them in both the US and in Israel-Palestine.

In fact, in a recent article Noam Chomsky came to these same conclusions and argued that the primary political focus of Americans concerned about Israel and Palestine must be the US government. In his words, “There is every reason to expect it [Greater Israel] to persist as long the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support. For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can no higher priority than working to change US policies.”

Historian Chalmers Johnson addressed the American side of the declining American empire and how anti-war activists can effectively oppose the descent of a globally declining US empire into horrific military spasms. He wrote, “The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of its missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner, rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overreach, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.” Johnson then went on to outline a 10 step political program, including many grass roots initiatives, to finally tame U.S. militarism, including support for proxies, such as Israel.

Next Steps: Civic efforts, as described by Chalmers Johnson, can affect how the United States government reacts to its decline in the Middle East, and how that decline affects Israel-Palestine. His goal is to assure that the United States will retreat in an orderly way, modeled after the decline of the Soviet Union in 1999, and not resort to a violent last gasps of desperate military adventures to maintain its failing hegemony. These efforts, as outlined below, should also work to assure that Israel-Palestine transforms into an egalitarian one-state or two-state solution, avoiding mayhem in the process.

· Emphasize BDS sanctions by calling for the U.S. to halt arms sales to the entire region, including Israel, but also countries like Saudi Arabia.

· Follow the lead of Josh Ruebner (national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation),as well as the October 2012 Christian Clergy letter to lobby Congress, tocall for the United States to enforce the U.S. Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act.

· Fuse Israel-Palestine rallies, marches, and vigils with general anti-war and anti-police violence actions, such as Muslim and Black Lives Matter. These issues should be treated in a unified, not isolated manner.

· Clarify that sensible U.S. policies toward Israel-Palestine are just one element of sensible policies toward the entire Middle East, such as sanctions on shipments of U.S. military hardware to states that violate United Nations resolutions or use the equipment againsttheir civilian populations

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Los Angeles-based Levantine Cultural Center and the nationalconference of the U.S Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation in San Diego.Please send any comments and questions to info@lajewsforpeace.org.

Richard (Dick) Platkin is a founding member of LA Jews for Peace and also serves on the U.S. board of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD-USA). His writing on Middle East topics includes a critical review of Jeremy Ben Ami’s A New Voice for Israel for the Levantine Review. Platkin is also a city planner and sociologist, with three decades of professional experience in urban planning, applied social research, and college teaching.

Jeff Warner, Ph.D., is a Jewish peace activist in Los Angeles, active in the Cousin Club of Orange Country and LA Jews for Peace, where many of his articles are posted.
13 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

Washington has begun delivering military hardware to Ukraine as part of NATO’s ongoing anti-Russian military build-up in eastern Europe, escalating the risk of all-out war between the NATO alliance and Russia, a nuclear-armed power.

The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it would transfer 30 armored Humvees and 200 unarmored Humvees, as well as $75 million in equipment, including reconnaissance drones, radios and military ambulances. The US Congress has also prepared legislation to arm the Kiev regime with $3 billion in lethal weaponry.

Washington is at the same time deploying 3,000 heavily armed troops to the Baltic republics, near the Russian metropolis of St. Petersburg. Their 750 Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley armored personnel carriers, and other vehicles are slated to remain behind after the US troops leave. This handover is aimed at “showing our determination to stand together” against Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Major General John O’Connor said in the Latvian capital, Riga.

Washington is pressing ahead despite stark warnings from Moscow that it views massive weapons deliveries by NATO to hostile states on its borders as an intolerable threat to Russian national security.

“Without a doubt, if such a decision is reached, it will cause colossal damage to US-Russian relations, especially if residents of the Donbass [east Ukraine] start to be killed by American weapons,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said last month. He called NATO’s plans “very worrying,” adding: “This is about creating additional operational capabilities that would allow the alliance to react near Russia’s borders… Such decisions will naturally be taken into account in our military planning.”

The decision is also sharpening tensions between Washington and Berlin, which backs the current policy of sanctions and financial strangulation of Russia, but opposes moves that threaten all-out war with Russia.

Visiting Washington yesterday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged a continuation of the strategy of “economic and political pressure” on Russia. Arming Ukraine, could “catapult (the conflict) into a new phase,” he warned at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.

The mood in broad sections of the American ruling elite has turned increasingly hysterical, however, after the Kiev regime’s defeat prior to last month’s ceasefire in Ukraine negotiated by German, French, Russian, and Ukrainian officials in Minsk.

In a comment denounced by the Russian Foreign Ministry, retired Major General and TV pundit Robert Scales declared, “It’s game, set, and match in Ukraine. The only way the United States can have any effect in the region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians.”

This week, Pentagon and Congressional officials called for Washington to arm Kiev, pressing for faster action from the White House. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey are pressing for large-scale weapons deliveries to Kiev, as are leading members of Congress from both big-business parties.

“I applaud President Obama for sending a strong signal both to the people of Ukraine as well as to the Kremlin,” said Democratic Senator Dick Durbin. “But more can and must be done for Ukraine, including defensive weapons as soon as possible.”

“The fact that it appears that the president may have made a commitment to [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel while she was here, or the German ambassador, not to do that certainly has created a lot of concern on both sides of the aisle,” said Republican Senator Bob Corker.

“I don’t buy this argument that, you know, us supplying the Ukrainian army with defensive weapons is going to provoke Putin,” said Democratic Senator Chris Murphy.

With a toxic combination of maniacal aggression and thoughtlessness, the NATO alliance is lurching towards a war with Russia that could destroy the entire planet. Warnings about US policy from Berlin, which itself has led the European imperialist powers in supporting the February 2014 putsch in Kiev and backing the Kiev regime’s bloody war in east Ukraine, have at most a tactical character. The only force that opposes war is the working class, in America and Europe and internationally.

Despite Berlin’s misgivings as to US policy, the NATO alliance is pursuing its escalation against Russia. At a press conference Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and NATO Supreme Commander of European forces General Philip Breedlove laid out the ongoing military build-up across eastern Europe. They spoke at the Supreme command Headquarters of Allied Personnel in Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, which oversees NATO operations in Europe.

Stoltenberg declared that due to the Ukraine crisis, NATO has to “expand its collective defense, as it has never done since the end of the Cold War… We will double the rapid response force from 13,000 soldiers to 30,000. We will equip the rapid response force with a spearhead of 5,000 men, which will be ready to deploy within 48 hours. And we will establish six command centers in the Baltic states and three other eastern European countries.”

Referring to NATO member states’ pledge to massively increase defense spending at the recent Wales summit, Stoltenberg pledged to “keep up the momentum.” Besides the escalation in the Baltics, naval exercises are taking place in the Black Sea, and NATO is preparing for the largest exercises for many years, with 25,000 men, in southeastern Europe.

Breedlove said he had never seen greater “unity, readiness and determination within NATO to tackle the challenges of the future together.” He was sure that this would continue.

In reality, tensions between Washington and its European allies, above all Germany, have increased in recent weeks. In its latest edition, Der Spiegel reports that Berlin is angry that “Washington’s hardliners are inciting the conflict with Moscow, first and foremost the supreme commander of NATO in Europe.”

The German Chancellor’s office criticized Breedlove for “dangerous propaganda” and making “imprecise, contradictory and even untruthful” statements.

“I wish that in political matters, Breedlove would express himself more cleverly and reluctantly,” commented a foreign-policy specialist of the Social-Democratic Party, Niels Annen. Instead, NATO has “repeatedly spoken out against a Russian offensive in the Ukraine conflict precisely at the point when in our view, the time was right for careful optimism.”

According to Der Spiegel, the US-German dispute is “fundamentally because the transatlantic partners [have] different objectives… While the German-French initiative [a reference to the Minsk peace agreement] aimed to stabilize the situation in Ukraine, for the hawks in the American administration it is about Russia. They want to push back Russia’s influence in the region and destabilize Putin’s rule. Their dream goal is regime change in Russia.”

German imperialism backed the coup in Ukraine, using the crisis to create political conditions for it to rearm within the framework of NATO and pursue its economic and geostrategic interests in eastern Europe militarily. It fears an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, however, as it could expand into all-out war between NATO and Russia, for which the German army is not yet ready.

13 March, 2015
WSWS.org

 

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