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By Franklin Lamb

Yarmouk camp, Damascus: Several credible reports this week from Palestinian refugees in Syria and Europe, the latter among those who by various means managed to escape the Syrian conflict with their lives, illustrate the increasing pressure and dangers Palestinians are facing here just trying to survive. And the chances of survival are not likely to improve anything soon.

Three serious cases over the past few days were reported to the Beirut-Washington DC based Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.org) which since the beginning of this year has been able to modestly assist a number of Palestinians from Syria obtain visas and refuge in Europe. Providing some cash, sometimes intervention with the Kafkaesque problems they face at the Syria-Lebanon Masnaa border crossing and often contacting Lebanese General Security regarding those agencies seemingly ever changing requirements and unannounced restrictions. Problems for arrivals from Syria trying to reach European embassies in Lebanon have recently been compounded as the government imposes yet more strict measures for their entry and forward movement to Europe. SSSP has been able to provide some housing in South Beirut while Palestinians from Syria wait to receive their visas-usually a six day process- and then provides transportation to Beirut airport as the Palestinians seek a new life in Europe, pending return to their own country, Palestine.

What is happening this week to Palestinians at Syrian checkpoints between Damascus and the Turkish border has alarmed the Palestinian community here and their supporters. The reason is that once a Palestinian refugee arrives in Europe, the person can apply for refugee status also for a child, parent or spouse, who, for various reasons were forced to stay behind in Syria. After some months, the European country normally issues visas in favor of the family members so they can travel and the family is reunited. So far so good…but perhaps no longer.

A related case involves minors who sometime arrive to Europe by themselves without a parent. Such as a precious and precocious 15 year old school-girl from Yarmouk camp, ‘Farah’ who last week traveled, on her own, ignoring this observers fatherly advice, and without a visa, made it to Turkey where she boarded an inflatable boat at Ayvalik with 30 other passengers, and since the motor conked out took turns rowing to the Greek island of Lesbos paying $1000 to a ‘holding bank’ in Turkey to be paid to the trafficker once she arrived in Lesbos and submitted a code from the bank ( the normal fare from Ayvalik, Turkey to the Greek island Lesbos, on a regular secure and insured tourist boat is 30 euros).

An addition to “Farah”, record breaking numbers of migrants are arriving on Lesbos these days, overwhelming local authorities who identify, screen and register arrivals and send them on to the Greek mainland, usually Athens. On 7/5/2015, a record 1,600 Syrians and Palestinians, and some others, arrived at Lesbos in a 24 hour period, whereas the previous daily record was around 500 and where monthly arrivals have grown from 737 in January and 1,002 in February, to 3,348 in March. Almost 5,000 arrived in April and over 7,200 in May. As of this week, more than 6000 refugees have arrived at Lesbos and the numbers keep swelling, part of the 110,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria who have fled to Europe.

As we all know, trips such as these are dangerous. Palestinian refugees from Syria are increasingly trying, in the following order of preference, to travel to Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Britain, and France to find safety and dignity. About 40,000 have succeeded to date (270,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Europe so far). Thousands of other Palestinians forced to use ‘death boats’ have died trying. For example, on 11/10/2013, around 200 Palestinian refugees from Syria drowned. On 6/9/2014, a boat carrying 400 refugees, including a large number of Palestinian Syrians, capsized and only 11 survived. In addition, since late 2011 until today, approximately 3000 Palestinians have been killed inside Syria without a ceasefire likely anytime soon.

But “Farah” arrived to Lesbos safely last week and was ecstatic when she called me and reported that the six hour boat ride was “fun on the calm sea.” Her good luck continued as she got off the boat and started to figure out what to do next because some Danish tourists saw her and helped her. Three days later “Farah” arrived in Sweden to a new life and plans to apply in the next few days for her parents in Yarmouk to come as soon as possible and unite the family, as allowed in the case of minors by all European countries but not Lebanon. But this young lady’s dream may not come true.

As noted above new procedures at Syrian checkpoints have potentially shattered “Farahs” and other Palestinians dreams of families being reunited in Europe. The reason is that this week credible reports that Palestinian family members who have received visas to join loved ones in Europe including parents of minors in Europe, are being blocked at Syrian checkpoints and are being jailed or returned to Damascus. There has been no government regulation promulgated on this subject to date and details are still murky. On 7/8/2015 this observer received a Skype call from an eight member Yarmouk family that the SSSP had helped to resettle in the Netherlands. They reported that their parents, while en route to Turkey to fly to the Netherlands were stopped at a checkpoint in Syria north of Homs, arrested and jailed. After a few days friends arranged a bribe and they were freed but they were warned by their jailers that “Palestinians can no longer leave Syria for Europe via Turkey or any other route.” As with two other reported cases this week, the only explanation they were given was “if Palestinians left Syria they would lose the Right to Return to Palestine.”

Of course this outrageous feeble excuse is patent nonsense. Every Palestinian refugee on earth from the Nakba or Naksa and her offspring is invested at birth with the Full Right of Return and this right is inalienable and cannot to ceded, relinquished, bargained away or abolished by political leaders, neither by PA officials negotiating with the Zionist apartheid regime or by anyone else. A Palestinians Full Right of Return is individual and vested in perpetuity–at birth.

But what the new “policy” here does mean is that “Farah” and other families from among the more than 110,000 Palestinians who have fled Syria (270,000 Palestinians are internally displaced inside Syria and most of the rest are under siege) may not be able to be reunited until the conflict ends or this new checkpoint practice is repealed. UNWRA and UNHCR have been informed of this recent devastating development and have pledged they will investigate. So should Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and like-minded humanitarian organizations.

Despite the fact that the Palestinian community in Syria, from the beginning of this conflict, vowed to avoid any involvement and to preserve the symbolism of their cause among the whole population as well as maintain Palestinian relations with the Syrian government that has given them more civil rights than any other Middle East country, it does not appear likely that in near term scenarios for ending this conflict carry positive prospects for the Palestinians in Syria. Myriad efforts to enlist the Palestinians in the Syrian conflict has not done much to alter the balance of power among the main belligerents here, but it has benefited the occupiers of Palestine and resulted in more suffering which today includes the lack of basic family needs such as food and water, fuel, electricity, healthcare and even ability to communicate with loved ones. In addition to Yamouk, the camps of Khan al-Sheikh, al-Narab and Handarat in the governorates of Damascus and Aleppo which this observer has visited, are under siege and are facing death.

As a recent (7/8/2015) analysis by Al-Zaytouna Centre’s Maher Shawish suggests, whether the conflict continues or the Syrian state disintegrates into sectarian and ethnic entities, Palestinian suffering will continue here, and their numbers will decline in Syria.

The deterioration of conditions of Palestinians in Syria could stop if the rival parties, with support from their regional and international sponsors, could arrive at a political settlement that preserves the Syrian state and its unity as well as the central cause of people of good will in this region. The cause of Palestine.

Franklin Lamb’s most recent book, Syria’s Endangered Heritage, An international Responsibility to Protect and Preserve is in production by Orontes River Publishing, Hama, Syrian Arab Republic.

11 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Eric Zuesse

Robert Parry headlined on July 9th, “MH-17 Case Slips into Propaganda Fog,” and he wrote: “Many investigative journalists, including myself, have been rebuffed in repeated efforts to get verifiable proof about the case or even informational briefings.” His phrase “have been rebuffed” was linked to a July 3rd article by nsnbc’s Christof Lehmann, “MH17 — The Methodology of an International Cover-Up,” which included the following:

The Firewall against Transparency

Numerous journalists, the author included, have made considerable efforts to elicit independently verifiable evidence from all of the involved parties. This includes mails and phone calls to relevant ministries in Ukraine, the USA, UK, Russia, Australia, Malaysia, and the Dutch Safety Board in The Netherlands.

All requests to provide independently verifiable data have remained unanswered. That includes requests for a certified copy of radar data released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, certified copies of communications between Ukrainian Air Traffic Controllers and the flight crew on board the downed Boeing 777-200, and not least a certified copy of the Comma Separated Variable (CSV) file from the downed Boeing 777-200’s flight data recorder.

To mention but a few examples that demonstrate the significance of the need for full transparency. The DSB [Dutch Safety Board, which is running the entire investigation] published a “transcript” of ATC – Flight Crew communications. Investigative journalists have, in other words, no possibility to see whether the audio has been tampered with or for that matter, if the voices even are consistent with those of the flight crew.

Lehmann then dropped a bombshell, just in passing, a communication from a representative of the investigation-team, which communication had been made individually to Lehmann:

Sara Vernooij from the Dutch Safety Board implicitly provided the key to the puzzling question why non[e] of the involved parties is forthcoming with regards to independently testable and verifiable data end evidence by stating to the author:

“The investigation information is protected by Dutch law (Dutch Kingdom Act). This act determines that only the information issued in the Final Reports is public; sources and files containing investigation information are not publicly accessible. … The Kingdom Act concerning the Dutch Safety Board excludes investigation information from [being covered under] the WOB [Open Government Act]. There is [consequently] no possibility to get any access to investigation information by the Dutch Safety Board if you are not a member of the investigation team.”

… That is – no independently testable and verifiable information will be made available to the public.

This wasn’t the first time that the Dutch Safety Board has made clear that it will prohibit the public from having access to the evidence. The Dutch Safety Board had received its authority over the MH17 investigation by the Dutch Government. The Dutch Government had participated in the planning for the Maidan demonstrations and the overthrow of the prior Ukrainian Government. On 24 August 2014, I had headlined, “MH-17 ‘Investigation’: Secret August 8th Agreement Seeps Out,” and reported that,

Regarding what caused the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH-17 in Ukraine on July 17th, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, reported in a brief Russian-language news story on August 12th, that four days earlier (August 8th) a representative of that nation’s [Ukraine’s] Prosecutor General office, Yuri Boychenko, had said that (as auto-translated by google), “the results [of the investigation] will be announced upon completion of the investigation and with the consent of all the parties who signed the corresponding agreement.” This UNIAN report said that, “As part of the four-party agreement signed on August 8 between Ukraine, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia [all of which nations are allies of the United States and are cooperating with its new Cold War against Russia], information on the investigation into the disaster Malaysian ‘Boeing-777′ will not be disclosed.” In other words: the official ‘investigation’ is being carried out by four nations that, as U.S. allies, are hostile toward Russia. One of those four nations, Ukraine, is … a prime suspect in possibly having shot this airliner down.

Any intelligent person understands that giving a suspect in a crime a veto-power over the ‘findings’ of the official investigation into the crime means that the ‘investigation’ is dishonest; it is corrupt. And yet journaliststs continue to play along with this game as if it weren’t corrupt. Instead of publicizing its corruptness, they pretend that the official ‘investigation’ isn’t corrupt. More is needed than merely to talk about “transparency,” or “propaganda fog.” The appropriate charge here is: “corrupt.” The official ‘investigation’ is corrupt. It is dishonest.

How, then, should investigative journalists deal with this matter?

First of all, they need to publicize that the official ‘investigation’ is corrupt (not only as was just indicated, but in other respects also). Any ‘investigation’ into a crime, where a suspect in the crime possesses veto-power over the ‘findings,’ is corrupt, and cannot be trusted by a journalist who has integrity and basic intelligence. But furthermore, all four national ‘investigators’ were in league with this Ukrainian Government even prior to the downing.

Secondly, it is crucial that journalists identify and point out what constitutes the highest-quality, least-likely-to-have-been-fabricated-or-tampered-with, item of evidence regarding this crime, and that they then build their theory of the case upon that item of evidence, by interpreting every other item of evidence only in ways that are consistent with what is proven to be so on the basis of that one highest-quality item of evidence.

Such a highest-quality item of evidence does, in fact, exist here, and it’s already publicly available; and it is the side-panel of the cockpit right next to where the plane’s pilot was sitting. That side-panel has an enormous gash shot through it, right where the pilot’s belly would have been. This gash is a few feet in diameter, and its ragged edge shows that it was caused not by a huge object like a canonball but instead by a fusillade of much smaller projectiles that had been fired at the pilot and which ripped through the panel to his body, and killed him. This is shocking evidence. It demonstrates that whatever ripped into the pilot’s body was fired sufficiently close-in so as to target him, and not merely target the plane itself, which, of course, is much larger than a pilot’s belly. Here is that side-panel shown positioned onto the plane prior to the downing, so that you can recognize where it had been located on the airliner. And here is a view of this side-panel shown very close up, in high detail.
And here it is shown so that you can see the full side-panel and the enormous gash into it from those projectiles that had been fired at the pilot’s belly.

Now, in order to see an analysis of what is proven by this side-panel, click here. That walks a reader through this and the other reliable evidence, so that you can make your determinations for yourself, rather than relying upon Robert Parry’s statements, or Christof Lehmann’s statements, or my statements — or anyone’s. The case there is presented by me, but it constantly links directly to the actual evidence, and it interprets all of the other evidence in a way that is consistent with this side-panel as you see it in those photographs, all of which were taken within just hours of the shoot-down. This will enable you to make up your own mind about everything, entirely on your own, on a best-evidence basis, and with minimal reliance upon other people’s statements, because your analysis will be entirely upon a best-evidence-based analysis, which is the way that a jury in a court of law in a democratic country is supposed to reach its verdict about a crime.

However, if you are reading this article for the first time, then you might first want to see the case presented in a different way, which points out the reason why the ‘history’ of this event, the cause of that crime, cannot be what the official versions of it say that it is: it cannot be a ground-fired missile that brought down this airliner 33,000 feet above. That ‘explanation’ isn’t only false; it is actually absurd. However, that explanation includes stills from a Russian documentary about the standard ground-based-missile (“Buk”) ‘explanation’ of the shoot-down; and some people in the West have been so indoctrinated to disbelieve everything that comes out of Russia, so that they won’t even want to see that case, which is a preliminary case, demonstrating the U.S.-Ukrainian or Western theory of this event to be absurd on its face. If you want to see that preliminary case (of the absurdity of the U.S.-Ukrainian ‘explanation’), it’s here.

That link, for anyone who isn’t simply closed-minded to Russian sources, is the best single summary presentation of the evidence on the MH17 matter, as I have been able to reconstruct the event.

More recently, I have updated my account in order to deal with the second-most-reliable item of evidence on the case, which is the pilot’s corpse, the autopsy on which is still being hidden, but the cover-up of which is consistent with what one would expect on the basis of my analysis. That update, concerning what would likely be the conclusive proof in the case if it were ever to become public, is here.

And what about the black box and the other items of evidence that are so much the foci of the public’s attention in the West? Well, not only will that evidence never be made public, and so it’s not a rational basis for the public to rely upon in whatever dubious form that might some day become publicly released, but, it’s in the hands of an investigating-team that’s committed to produce a report, if any, that will be acceptable to the Ukrainian Government, which is one of the suspects.

By contrast, the cockpit side-panel was superbly photographed and uploaded to the Internet within only hours of the shoot-down. And no country, and no agent for any country, had had an opportunity to manipulate it before it was made public.

That’s extraordinary. It’s golden. Trusting anything else as constituting the primary item of evidence doesn’t make legal/forensic sense. And, as the last-given link here opens by explaining, wikipedia’s article about the downing of this airliner is deeply untrustworthy, because it altogether ignores the one best item of evidence.

So, the complicity of even the best journalists about this hoax has been that they play along with the pretense that the official authorities on the matter are honest. They make this assumption, even where the authorities persist in hiding evidence from them. Instead, every reader should make up his or her own mind about the downing of this airliner, if a person is interested in the matter at all. Distrust has to be the default assumption for any reader, on this. But what that means in practical terms is: Start only with the least-likely-to-have-been-manipulated item of evidence, and then reason from there, by means of interpreting every other item of evidence on the basis of its consistency with that one, the most-reliable-of-all, item of evidence. And any ‘evidence’ that is inconsistent with it must be presumed to be likely manipulated; it’s legal/forensically inadmissible.

The MH17 shoot-down occurred within the context of U.S. President Barack Obama’s frustration at the EU’s reluctance to increase economic sanctions against Russia, and the downing of this plane was used as the excuse for increasing those sanctions, and it worked — his (and Ukraine’s) ‘explanation’ of the event was accepted right away (though the official ‘investigation’ still has not been completed, if it ever will be). So, this was one of the cardinal historic occurrences in 2014. Anyone seriously interested in the history of our times will need to determine for him or her self how that airliner was shot down. Understanding this event accurately will then open doors to an accurate understanding of our times, and of the world we live in. Not only the victims’ families need to know the truth about this. We all do, actually.

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.

11 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Xekinima (CWI Greece)

July 9th was a black day for the Greek left. SYRIZA’s leading team, around Prime Minister A. Tsipras, subordinated itself completely and absolutely to the demands of the Troika lenders. The Greek working class finds itself in a tragic position. They voted for SYRIZA in order to find solutions to their problems and to escape from the Memoranda (austerity packages). Yet after five months in government the only thing that SYRIZA was able to deliver was another catastrophic Memorandum which finishes off the pro-austerity policies of the previous governments of New Democracy and PASOK.

The working masses do not forget that the same people who are today betraying the ideas and principles of the Left are the same people who had promised to get rid of the Memorandum “within one day and with one law”. It’s the same people who promised the Salonica Programme (SYRIZA’s more radical pre-election promises), which they claimed would be carried out irrespective of the negotiations with the Troika.

The leading group in SYRIZA and Alex Tsipras has been proven tragically incapable of responding to the tasks of the moment and unworthy of the confidence of the working class. They are unworthy of the earth-shaking ‘No’ vote on 5 July which reverberated throughout Europe and the whole world. They betrayed the confidence of workers, pensioners, the unemployed and the poor, who voted by 70%-80% in favor of ‘No’ in the working class neighborhoods and cities. They betrayed the great struggle launched by the Left and the working class, all across Europe, in support of the struggling Greek workers.

And yet, even at this time, the SYIRZA leaders around Tsipras have the gall to ask people to rally today in favor of ‘No’ because, supposedly, this ‘government of the Left’ needs the support of people in the streets! But why should the working class rally and demonstrate to defend those who have stabbed it in the back! Particularly when, only a few days ago, on Friday 3 July, workers and youth came out in their hundreds of thousands into the center of Athens and on 5 July voted by a massive 61.3% No.

The so-called negotiations with the Troika are still, supposedly, continuing and it seems that the only possibility, however remote, of a reversal of the process of the subordination of SYRIZA is if sections of the ruling classes in Europe simply decide to kick Greece out of the Eurozone. This would be the only instance in which Tsipras could come into a head-on clash with the Eurozone. If this happened, it would of course not change even one iota any of the above criticisms of the leadership of SYRIZA.

July 9th represents a historical turning point in the transformation of SYRIZA from a party of the Left into a party in the service of the capitalist system. Tsipras and the ruling team have crossed the Rubicon. And they will continue on this road even if this leads them into the hands of a “national government” along with the enemies of yesterday, even if they have to expel the left wing of SYRIZA and “destroy” the party.

What lies behind this new historical tragedy of the Greek Left is nothing else but the complete lack of understanding by the leadership of the class character of living reality. And a complete lack of understanding of what class struggle means. They went to the EU to “fight for their proposals” with water pistols against machine guns. They tried to “explain” and to “convince” Schauble and the rest of the capitalist gang leading the EU, naively and foolishly, that they were applying wrong policies and should change them. They never had and never showed any confidence to the power of the working class and its ability to take destiny into its own hands. They swallowed the fairy tale perpetuated by the ruling class that their profit system is invincible, that capitalism can never be overthrown and that the exit from the Euro would equal to a social catastrophe.

The defeat in which Tsipras and his government led the Greek working class is historical but it is not final. It not like the defeat suffered by the left and working class in the Civil War in Greece. There is still a lot of potential for resistance.

The immediate task is the coming together of the forces of the Left which understand the need for a regroupment along the lines of revolutionary socialism, to plan the next steps. There are serious forces in the non-parliamentary Left, inside ANTARSYA (Anti-capitalist Left) and SYRIZA etc., which understand that without rupture with the capitalist system and the Eurozone there is no perspective for a better life. These forces must urgently meet and discuss and take all the necessary steps, to lay the basis for a new, mass revolutionary Left. To lead the struggles of tomorrow and to offer the perspective of struggle for a future against the false hopes of Tsipras and his circle.

The Statement

On the evening of 10 July, a planned SYRIZA demonstration taking place in Syntagma, in central Athens, will now probably become a rally mainly of the SYRIZA Left and of ANTARSYA against the Tsipras U-turn. Members of Xekinima (CWI Greece) will distribute the following statement at the protest.

Xekinima (CWI Greece) calls for the Left SYRIZA MPs and MPs from the other Left parties to oppose and to vote against latest proposals of the Tsipras leadership. The Left in Greece must appeal to workers and youth to mobilise against the new Memorandum, including organising mass protests and demonstrations, invoking the powerful No mandate from last week’s referendum to oppose any sell-out of their class interests.(CWI Greece) calls for the Left to break with austerity and to adopt a socialist programme. This includes refusal to pay the debt; controls on capital flows; for the state monopoly of foreign trade; the nationalisation of the banks and the commanding heights of the economy, under democratic workers’ control and management; reversal of austerity; jobs for all, with a living wage, and free, quality health, education and welfare.

Planning the economy for the needs of the people and not the profits of the capitalists – the socialist re-organisation of society – would see an end to economic crises, poverty, joblessness and forced emigration.

To achieve this it is essential to build independent class politics, inside and outside of SYRIZA. Following the enormous No rallies last week across Greece, continue, deepen and expand the active participation of the working class and youth in the struggle against the Troika and for a socialist alternative. This means the creation of popular assemblies and action committees of the rank and file in workplaces and communities.

Appeal to workers and youth across Europe to fight austerity and for a socialist Europe.

11 July, 2015
Socialistalternative.org

By Andre Damon

Despite significant advances in communications, agriculture and bio-technology over the past 15 years, the overwhelming majority of the world population continues to live in economic privation, according to a report on global incomes published this week by the Pew Research Center.

The report, entitled “A Global Middle Class is More Promise than Reality,” classifies 71 percent of the world population as either poor or low-income, subsisting on less than $10 per day. The report concludes that 84 percent lives on less than $20 per day, or $7,300 per year, an income level associated with “deep poverty” in developed countries.

Only seven percent of the world population lives on what the report calls a “high” income level of more than $50 per day, or $18,000 per year. The great majority of these people live in Europe or America.

In the years following the turn of the millennium, and especially before the 2008 financial crash, the supposed emergence of a new “global middle class,” particularly in developing countries, was touted by the political establishment as proof that the capitalist system was capable of bringing economic prosperity to people living in poverty in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

The Pew report pours cold water on such claims. “The global middle class is smaller than we think, it is less well off than we think, and it is more regionally concentrated than we think,” Rakesh Kochhar, the study’s lead author, told the Financial Times .

The report finds that even countries that “sharply” reduced the worst forms of poverty “experienced little change in the share of middle-income populations.” While the report notes that there has been a reduction in the number of people living on less than $2 per day, it points out that those who have ascended from the lowest depths have for the most party landed in the “low-income” category of $2-10 per day—a level that would classify them as living in extreme poverty by US standards.

The report uses the latest purchasing power parity data to analyze and compare the distribution of incomes throughout the world. It covers 111 countries, which account for 88 percent of the world’s population, and spans the years 2001 through 2011.

Over that period, the share of the world’s population classified as “upper-middle income,” making between $20 and $50 per day, grew from 7 percent to 9 percent. This was significantly less than the growth of the share of the population making between $10 and $20 per day, which increased from 7 percent to 13 percent between 2001 and 2011.

The great majority of the increase in “middle income” people occurred in China and other high-growth countries in the Pacific whose economies have rapidly expanded over this period.

The report notes, “Home to more than 1.3 billion people, or nearly 20 percent of the world’s population, China alone accounted for more than one in two additions to the global middle-income population from 2001 to 2011.”

The story was much different for other “developing” countries, with next to no increase in the number of “middle income” earners in Africa, India, Central America and Southeast Asia.

The report states, “In contrast to China, most other Asian countries had relatively little growth in their middle classes. India is a case in point. Although the poverty rate in India fell from 35 percent in 2001 to 20 percent in 2011, the share of the Indian population that could be considered middle income increased from 1 percent to just 3 percent. Instead of a burgeoning middle class, India’s ranks of low-income earners swelled.”

Africa fared little better. The report notes that on that continent “most of the movement was from poverty to low-income status.” It says: “Ethiopia, for example, experienced a decline of 27 percentage points in the share of people who could be considered poor. This translated into an increase of 26 percentage points in the country’s share of low-income earners and only a 1-point increase in middle-income earners.”

Similarly, “In Nigeria, one of the region’s most dynamic economies, the share of the poor fell 18 percentage points from 2001 to 2011, resulting in a 17 percentage point increase in low-income earners and just a 1-point boost in the share of the population that could be considered middle income.”
Despite the significant social and economic changes that have taken place since 2001, the great majority of high-income people continued to reside in the developed countries in North America and Europe. In 2011, 87 percent of “high-income” people—those subsisting on at least $50 per day, or $18,250 per year—lived in these countries.

Despite modest improvements in living standards in some parts of the world, incomes dropped in the United States. As the report states, “The US economy stumbled through the decade from 2001 to 2011, growing at less than 1 percent annually on average. Even these slight gains did not make their way to American families, whose median income actually decreased from 2001 to 2011.”

Amid falling incomes in the United States and continued mass poverty in the rest of the world, the wealth of the global financial oligarchy has continued to soar. Last year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires hit $7 trillion, having more than doubled in the time covered in the Pew report. The astronomical enrichment of this social layer is inseparable from the impoverishment of the world’s workers.

The statistics presented in the Pew report underscore the basic fact that the capitalist system has proven incapable of providing a decent standard of living for the vast majority of the world’s people.

11 July, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Eric Zuesse

Wikipedia articles are more propaganda than they are historical accounts. And, often, their cited sources are misleading, or even false.

On 15 August 2007, the BBC headlined “Wikipedia Shows CIA Page Edits,” and Jonathan Fildes reported that, “An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organizations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.” I.e.: What the CIA doesn’t like, they can (and do) eliminate or change.

More recently, on 25 June 2015, an anonymous reddit poster, “moose,” listed and linked directly to 18 different news reports, in such media as New York Times, Washington Post, Telegraph, Mirror, Guardian, and Newsweek, reporting about wikipedia edits that were supplied not only by the CIA but by other U.S. Government offices, and by large corporations. That person opened with a news report which implicated Wikipedia itself, “Wikipedia honcho caught in scandal quits, defends paid edits,” in which Wikipedia’s own corruption was discussed. Most of the other news reports there concerned unpaid edits by employees at CIA, congressional and British parliamentary offices, the DCRI (French equivalent of the U.S. CIA), large corporations, self-interested individuals, and others. One article even concerned a report that, “All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) changed a Russian language version of a page listing civil aviation accidents to say that ‘The plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers’.” Basically, wikipedia has been revealed to be a river of ‘information’ that’s polluted by so many self-interested sources as to be no more reliable than, say: “New York Times, Washington Post, Telegraph, Mirror, Guardian, and Newsweek.”

And that’s not reliable at all. For example, everybody knew in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling WMD “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” because they had read it in such ‘news’ sources as that. Consequently, even when wikipedia links to those sorts of articles, it can be propagating lies. After all, The New York Times and Washington Post were stenographically ‘reporting’ the lies from the White House as if those lies were truths (not challenging them at all); so, the fame of a publisher has nothing to do with the honesty (the integrity and carefulness) of its ‘news’ reporting. Stenographic ‘news’ reporting isn’t news-reporting; it is propaganda, no matter how famous and respected the ‘news’ medium happens (unfortunately) to be. Some of the most unreliable ‘news’ media have top prestige.

THE MALAYSIAN AIRLINER OVER UKRAINE

As an example: wikipedia’s English-language article about the 17 July 2014 shoot-down of the MH17 Malaysian airliner is a shameless propaganda-piece by the U.S. Government and its agents. Its (at present) 320 footnote-sources don’t include any of the many reports (virtually all in the foreign press) that present evidence the Ukrainian government shot down this airliner. Among the important issues that aren’t even raised, are: why was the Ukrainian government given veto-power over any final report which will be issued by the official four-nation MH17 investigating team: Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and Ukraine? Why was Ukraine even included in this team to investigate a crime in which one of the two main suspects is the Ukrainian government itself?

Why was the presence of 30mm bullet-holes in the side-panel next to the pilot not mentioned in this lengthy wikipedia article? (If this plane had been brought down by only a missile, such as wikipedia assumes, there wouldn’t be any bullet-holes — much less, hundreds of them, as there are.) Why was the first analysis of that side-panel — which is the best and most reliable piece of evidence that exists about how this disaster actually happened — ignored altogether in the wikipedia article? After all, that analysis of the side-panel has subsequently been further confirmed by other reliable evidence, all of which the article also ignores.

I have edited some wikipedia articles, but I won’t edit the one on MH17: it’s too thoroughly rotten with speculative and other bad sources, so that it would need to be entirely rewritten — and bogus ‘evidence’ removed from it — in order for the article to present an account that’s based upon the best evidence regarding each of its particulars. Wikipedia’s article is thoroughly based on anti-Russian propaganda; it might as well have been written by the CIA (like the case that was presented about “Saddam’s WMD” was).

Here is the wikipedia article, so that you can see what U.S. propaganda says about the downing of MH17.

Here is my latest article about the downing of the MH17.

Here is my most comprehensive article reconstructing, on a best-evidence basis, how and why and who shot down this airliner.

The core of my case there is the same item of evidence to which Haisenko first called the public’s attention: that side-panel. I basically accept his reconstruction of how the plane came down, but I supplement it with additional evidence. Please click onto any link in the article, to see the evidence more fully analyzed, in the given linked-to source, wherever you have further questions that aren’t directly addressed in the article.

My articles present far fewer items of ‘evidence’ than does the wikipedia article, because I exclude all but the most-reliable evidence about any given detail. There is so much speculation that’s published, and so much bogus ‘evidence’; my guiding principle is therefore to rely only upon the least-speculative argument that refers to only the most-reliable, assuredly untampered-with, items of evidence. This is what one is supposed to do in a court of law; it’s the reason why judges are authorized to exclude from being presented to jurors any ‘evidence’ that fails to meet modern legal/forensic standards of authenticity and reliability. It’s the only way that an unprejudiced verdict can even become possible. It’s the prerequisite to history, as opposed to mere myth.

That’s the contrast between my articles about the MH17 disaster, and the 320 articles from which the wikipedia article about MH17 is constructed. And it also separates my articles from wikipedia’s article itself about the subject, “Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.”

What’s especially wrong about the wikipedia account is that it doesn’t even refer to the 30mm bullet holes in that side panel — evidence that is inconsistent with the U.S.-Ukrainian account (wikipedia’s account) of how this airliner was shot down. (Wikipedia’s article is instead obsessed with “a Buk missile launcher” — the theory of the case that’s pumped by America’s and Ukraine’s governments, and which is entirely inconsistent with such bullet-holes. You don’t get bullet-holes from 33,000+ feet away.) And the wikipedia article also doesn’t refer to Peter Haisenko, the brilliant former Luftahansa pilot who first pointed out those bullet holes in the side-panel, and who noted that there wouldn’t be any, much less hundreds of, bullet-holes firing directly into the pilot’s body, if the only thing that had brought down this airliner were shrapnel from some missile fired from 33,000 feet below. You simply can’t target the pilot’s belly and pump perhaps a thousand bullets into it from 33,000 feet down. This side-panel decimates the American-Ukrainian theory of the case — and so decimates wikipedia’s propagandistic article.

And why wasn’t the autopsy on the pilot made public? Everyone needs to know what was inside that corpse. But wikipedia and the ‘news’ media show no interest in that crucial question, either.

We don’t live in a democracy. This is a dictatorship. The ‘news’ media cannot be trusted by any intelligent and open-minded person. To find the truth, one (unfortunately) needs to investigate on one’s own and take the attitude that only the most solid evidence and the least speculative argument constitutes authentic history, on anything. All else — any casual trusting of the ‘news’ media — is merely accepting lies and myths, which are designed to manipulate people (like when we invaded Iraq), instead of to inform them. There is more than ample reason to distrust the ‘news’ media. And wikipedia is just as manipulated as the rest.

We live now in a culture where lies and myths drown out truth. In other words: we live in a dictatorship. That’s today’s USA. This is the reality, in which we live. And the Big Lie is: it’s not so. But the evidence sadly proves: it’s so; it clearly is the case.

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.

09 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

 

 

By Eric Zuesse

So that U.S. President Barack Obama can end a roadblock and win the agreement of other nations for his proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, he has decided to remove one of the nations, Malaysia, from the U.S. State Department’s official list of countries that allow slavery. Malaysia, which recently found over a hundred graves of discarded slaves, has been on the U.S. State Department’s “Tier 3” list of slave nations, along with North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria, and Iran, but, unlike those other countries, Obama wants Malaysia to be included in his Trans Pacific Partnership; so, he has decided to remove Malaysia from that official list.
This was first reported by Reuters on July 8th, under the headline “Exclusive: U.S. Upgrades Malaysia in Annual Human Trafficking Report.” Reuters announced: “The United States is upgrading Malaysia from the lowest tier on its list of worst human trafficking centers, U.S. sources said on Wednesday, a move that could smooth the way for an ambitious U.S.-led free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11 other countries.”

Zach Carter at Huffington Post headlined, later on July 8th, “Obama To Upgrade Malaysia On Human Rights Despite Mass Graves,” and he reported that U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) issued a statement saying: “If true, this manipulation of Malaysia’s ranking in the State Department’s 2015 TIP report would be a perversion of the trafficking list and undermine both the integrity of this important report as well as the very difficult task of confronting states about human trafficking.”

However, Senator Menendez, himself, has, behind the scenes, pushed for Obama’s TPP and other mammoth ‘trade’ deals, including TTIP and TISA, even despite these deals allowing participating countries to look the other way and not prosecute when international corporations hire killers to assassinate labor union organizers in a given U.S. trade ‘partner’ country. So, Sen. Menendez is in no position to accuse this President of allowing slavery and even mass-murder of slaves, and he is not making any such accusation. In fact, Menendez was a no-show at the key vote in the Senate on Fast-Tracking — reducing from the Constitutionally required 67 down to the ordinary-law-required 51 Senators, which will be needed in order to approve, as constituting a U.S. law, a treaty — each one of this President’s three gigantic ‘trade’ treaties. Menendez did this even though the Obama Administration has acknowledged that it considers a nation’s murders of labor union organizers to be irrelevant to that country’s suitability to be included in a ‘trade’ treaty as a favored nation and ‘trading’ partner, such as will be in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), or in its Atlantic equivalent, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Allowing murder of trade-union officials, and allowing slavery, are not, in either case, matters of law in any given country, because nowhere are those things technically legal. They are instead matters of not enforcing laws that are technically on the books. When corporations can become more internationally competitive by employing such tactics and paying public officials to look the other way, it’s just a matter of economic competition and of minimizing government regulation of the economy. These are unofficial ways of boosting competitiveness, which — the U.S. President and his “Fast Track” supporters in Congress are now on record as accepting — do not disqualify a given country from being included as one of the treaty “Partners.”

Recently, on May 25th, Britain’s Guardian headlined “Malaysia migrant mass graves: police reveal 139 sites, some with multiple corpses,” and reported that the corpses were probably Bangladeshi but that this had not yet been confirmed. “The revelation is likely to focus new attention on Malaysia’s record in battling a scourge that activists say is carried out by criminal syndicates, likely with the complicity of authorities.” It helps Malaysia stay internationally competitive. And the use of foreigners for this, reduces the likelihood of serious domestic political blowback from this particular means of the nation’s increasing its economic competitiveness. This technique additionally helps to drive down wages within the given nation, and by that indirect means, makes the entire nation even more economically competitive. The Obama Administration is now officially categorizing the entire matter as simply expanding “free trade.”

When the United States provides favored-nation treatment to nations where slaves are used, or where labor-union organizers are murdered, the United States is allowing U.S. international corporations to lower their production-costs by “shipping those jobs overseas” to countries where labor is cheaper (or even free, if the cost of bribes is not included). The beneficiaries of those lower (if any) wages are the owners of these international corporations. U.S. consumers might also benefit, if the lower production-costs get passed along to them; but, sometimes, that doesn’t happen, and all of the benefits from other nations’ union-busting and/or outright slave labor go only to the stockholders of the international corporations.

Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to donate unlimited funds anonymously to U.S. political campaigns, there is no longer any way to prevent international corporations from participating in U.S. electoral politics — it’s now “free speech” (no matter where the corporation is headquartered or incorporated), and any corporation is a “person,” which has unlimited “free speech” regarding political matters. If those corporations (or, actually, their controlling stockholders) decide to do business that way, it’s now only a private decision that they are entirely free to make, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.

An independent economic analysis was done of TPP, and it showed that international corporations will benefit enormously, but that the publics everywhere will become far worse off, if it goes into effect. An independent economic analaysis was also done of TTIP, and it produced the very same findings. However, corporate-backed economic analyses have produced contrary findings, and those are the studies that are officially cited. In current economic theory, the more that things are privatized, the better. Some economists personally object, but most economists who have successful careers do not. Endowed chairs in economics are sparse for dissenters. As the late economist Robert E. Prasch noted:

“Positions at the top twenty research universities are simply closed to scholars working outside the mainstream, and the next twenty on the list have every incentive to become caricatures of the top schools. The reason for this de facto policy of exclusion is not solely ideological. In this era of austerity, research faculties are expected to garner substantial outside funding, and these funds are typically granted to scholars whose work serves the funders ends.”

In other words, there is a “free market” in economists, too.

And so, the “free market” will be expanded, no matter what; and there is likely to be considerable public cheering about it, regardless of what slaves, or non-unionized workers, or other possible objectors, might happen to think about it. International corporations might have lots of “free speech,” but the real people who are at the bottom — not nearly as much. And, in Malaysia, perhaps, not at all.

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 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By David Swanson

The National Security Archive has posted several newly available documents, one of them an account by Charles Duelfer of the search he led in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, with a staff of 1,700 and the resources of the U.S. military.

Duelfer was appointed by CIA Director George Tenet to lead a massive search after an earlier massive search led by David Kay had determined that there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq. Duelfer went to work in January 2004, to find nothing for a second time, on behalf of people who had launched a war knowing full well that their own statements about WMDs were not true.

The fact that Duelfer states quite clearly that he found none of the alleged WMD stockpiles cannot be repeated enough, with 42% of Americans (and 51 percent of Republicans) still believing the opposite.

A New York Times story last October about the remnants of a long-abandoned chemical weapons program has been misused and abused to advance misunderstanding. A search of Iraq today would find U.S. cluster bombs that were dropped a decade back, without of course finding evidence of a current operation.

Duelfer is also clear that Saddam Hussein’s government had accurately denied having WMD, contrary to a popular U.S. myth that Hussein had pretended to have what he did not.

The fact that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their team knowingly lied cannot be overemphasized. This group took the testimony of Hussein Kamel regarding weapons he’d said had been destroyed years ago, and used it as if he’d said they currently existed. This team used forged documents to allege a uranium purchase. They used claims about aluminum tubes that had been rejected by all of their own usual experts. They “summarized” a National Intelligence Estimate that said Iraq was unlikely to attack unless attacked to say nearly the opposite in a “white paper” released to the public. Colin Powell took claims to the U.N. that had been rejected by his own staff, and touched them up with fabricated dialogue.

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller concluded that, “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even nonexistent.”

On January 31, 2003, Bush suggested to Blair that they could paint an airplane with U.N. colors, fly it low to get it shot at, and thereby start the war. Then the two of them walked out to a press conference at which they said they would avoid war if at all possible. Troop deployments and bombing missions were already underway.

When Diane Sawyer asked Bush on television why he had made the claims he had about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, he replied: “What’s the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, if he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger.”

Duelfer’s newly released internal report on his hunt, and that of Kay before him, for the figments of propagandists’ imagination refers to “Saddam Hussein’s WMD program,” which Duelfer treats as an on-again, off-again institution, as if the 2003 invasion had just caught it in one of its naturally cyclical low tides of non-existence. Duelfer also describes the nonexistent program as “an international security problem that vexed the world for three decades,” — except perhaps for the part of the world engaged in the largest public demonstrations in history, which rejected the U.S. case for war.

Duelfer openly states that his goal was to rebuild “confidence in intelligence projections of threat.” Of course, having found no WMDs, he can’t alter the inaccuracy of the “projections of threat.” Or can he? What Duelfer did publicly at the time and does again here is to claim, without providing any evidence for it, that “Saddam was directing resources to sustain the capacity to recommence producing WMD once U.N. sanctions and international scrutiny collapsed.”

Duelfer claims that former Saddam yes men, rigorously conditioned to say whatever would most please their questioner, had assured him that Saddam harbored these secret intentions to start rebuilding WMD someday. But, Duelfer admits, “there is no documentation of this objective. And analysts should not expect to find any.”

So, in Duelfer’s rehabilitation of the “intelligence community” that may soon be trying to sell you another “projection of threat” (a phrase that perfectly fits what a Freudian would say they were doing), the U.S. government invaded Iraq, devastated a society, killed upwards of a million people by best estimates, wounded, traumatized, and made homeless millions more, generated hatred for the United States, drained the U.S. economy, stripped away civil liberties back home, and laid the groundwork for the creation of ISIS, as a matter not of “preempting” an “imminent threat” but of preempting a secret plan to possibly begin constructing a future threat should circumstances totally change.

This conception of “preemptive defense” is identical to two other concepts. It’s identical to the justifications we’ve been offered recently for drone strikes. And it’s identical to aggression. Once “defense” has been stretched to include defense against theoretical future threats, it ceases to credibly distinguish itself from aggression. And yet Duelfer seems to believe he succeeded in his assignment.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.

10 July, 2015
TeleSUR

 

By Alex Lantier

Greece’s Syriza-led government agreed to a massive new €13 billion (US$14.34 billion) package of austerity measures yesterday evening, less than a week after Sunday’s landslide “no” vote in a referendum on European Union (EU) austerity.

The proposal would be the deepest package of cuts since the EU austerity drive began in Greece in late 2009. It goes well beyond the proposed €8 to 9 billion in cuts initially demanded by the EU in talks with Syriza.

The 13-page proposal was submitted to the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) before the midnight deadline previously set by the institutions. In exchange for cuts, the Greek government is reportedly asking for a €53.5 billion ($59.2 billion) loan to the Greek state and some form of debt restructuring, allowing it to avoid state bankruptcy and remain in the euro currency area.

The austerity measures reportedly include sharp increases in the regressive VAT sales tax and an increase in the retirement age to 67 by 2022. The elimination of additional payments to the poorest pensioners will take place by the end of 2019, a year earlier than previously scheduled.

Plans for the privatization of state assets, including ports and airports, will go forward. The proposal also includes a reported increase of the corporate tax to 28 percent, rather than 29 percent, a reduction requested by the IMF.

In proposing the new austerity package, Syriza has with extraordinary rapidity repudiated the vote in Sunday’s referendum, which Syriza itself had called and presented as a model of democratic accountability. More than 61 percent of the population rejected precisely the measures that the government has now adopted.

Even as Syriza officially called for a “no” vote, Tsipras had no intention of fighting EU austerity. The prime minister expected to lose the vote and, in response, abandon office and leave it to another government to impose the cuts. (See also: Tsipras petitions EU for new austerity deal)

Following the vote, the Syriza-led government has moved as quickly as possible to reach an accommodation with the pro-austerity parties within Greece and approve a deal that would be acceptable to the European banks.

The measures were finalized in discussions between Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Deputy Prime Minister Yiannis Dragasakis, Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos and Economy Minister Giorgios Stathakis—all from the ruling Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) party—and adopted by the Greek cabinet on Thursday.

The government is planning to seek a vote in the Greek parliament today, relying on support from the openly pro-austerity New Democracy and PASOK parties. On Saturday, eurozone finance ministers are scheduled to meet to review the proposal, followed by a meeting Sunday of the EU leaders.

The new austerity proposal was rushed through amidst threats from European officials to entirely cut off funding for Greece and force the country out of the eurozone. In response to these threats, Syriza continually refused to take any measures that would threaten capitalist property relations and rejected any appeal to workers throughout Europe for a common struggle against austerity.

It is uncertain whether an agreement will be approved by the EU, even on the surrender terms being offered by Syriza. Sections of the European ruling class are discussing forcing Greece to default on its debts, expelling it from the euro zone, and pushing it through a drastic economic crisis by forcing it to restore a devalued national currency.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said yesterday that any significant restructuring of Greece’s debt was unlikely, as this would violate EU rules.

Other European officials have indicated a desire to reach agreement with the Greek government. Syriza members told the Guardian that French finance ministry officials had worked with Greek Finance Minister Tsakalotos to rewrite the austerity package Athens was proposing, in order to make it acceptable to the EU.

Donald Tusk, the chair of the EU summit, urged European officials to take certain measures to allow Greece to pay back its debt. “The realistic proposal from Greece will have to be matched by an equally realistic proposal on debt sustainability from the creditors,” Tusk said.

Germany has also come under pressure from the Obama administration to ensure that Greece is not pushed out of the eurozone. On Wednesday, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew publicly intervened to push for an agreement on austerity between Greece and the EU and call for some form of “debt restructuring.”

Criticizing those who “create more of these kind of life-and-death deadlines,” Lew said they were creating far greater economic and political risks, including a broader financial panic across southern Europe and the possible splitting of Europe. The US wants to ensure that Greece remains within NATO and continues to support the campaign of military and economic aggression against Russia.

With Greece’s banks still closed and depositors limited to €60 in daily cash withdrawals amid the crisis, the Greek economy is rapidly grinding to a halt.

The National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce released a report Wednesday that found that consumption had fallen 70 percent since the closure of Greece’s banks, costing €1.2 billion to the economy. Greeks are reportedly stocking up on key medicines as well as non-perishable foods, such as rice and pasta, fearing a possible collapse of supplies of imported food and medicine.

10 July, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

I doubt that there will be a Greek exit.

The Greek referendum, in which the Greek government’s position easily prevailed, tells the troika (EU Commission, European Central Bank, IMF, with of course Washington as the puppet master) that the Greek people support their government’s position that the years of austerity to which Greece has been subjected have seriously worsened the debt problem. The Greek government has been trying to turn the austerity approach into reforms that would lessen the debt burden via a rise in employment, GDP, and tax revenues.

The first response of most EU politicians to the Greek referendum outcome was to bluster about Greece exiting Europe. Washington is not prepared for this to happen and has told its vassals to give the Greeks a deal that they can accept that will keep them within the EU.

Washington has a higher interest than the interests of the US financial interests who purchased discounted sovereign debt with a view toward profiting from a deal that pays 100 cents on the dollar. Washington also has higher interest than the interests of the European One Percent intent on using Greece’s indebtedness to loot the country of its national assets. Washington’s higher interest is the protection of the unity of the EU and, thereby, NATO, Washington’s mechanism for bringing conflict to Russia.

If the inflexible Germans were to have Greece booted from the EU, Greece’s turn to Russia and financial rescue would put the same idea in the heads of Italy and Spain and perhaps ultimately France. NATO would unravel as Southern Europe became members of Russia’s Eurasian trade bloc, and American power would unravel with NATO.

This is simply unacceptable to Washington.

If reports are correct, Victoria Nuland has already paid a visit to the Greek prime minister and explained to him that he is neither to leave the EU or cozy up to the Russians or there will be consequences, polite language for overthrow or assassination. Indeed, the Greek prime minister probably knows this without need of a visit.

I conclude that the “Greek debt crisis” is now contained. The IMF has already adopted the Greek government’s position with the release of the IMF report that it was a mistake from the beginning to impose austerity on Greece. Pressured by this report and by Washington, the EU Commission and European Central Bank will now work with the Greek government to come up with a plan acceptable to Greece.

This means that Italy, Spain, and Portugal can also expect more lenient treatment.

The losers are the looters who intended to use austerity measures to force these countries to transfer national assets into private hands. I am not implying that they are completely deterred, only that the extent of the plunder has been reduced.

As I have previously written, the Greek “debt crisis” was an orchestration from the beginning. The European Central Bank is printing 60 billion euros per month, and at any time during the “crisis” the ECB could have guaranteed the solvency of any remaining creditor banks by purchasing their holdings of Greek debt, just as the Federal Reserve purchased the troubled mortgage backed “securities” held by the “banks too big to fail.” This easy solution was not taken.

The orchestration was a benefit to Western financial interests in general by enabling enormous speculations on the euro and gambling with derivative bets on sovereign debt and everything connected to it. Each successive “crisis,” such as Sunday’s No vote, became cover for an attack on oil or other commodities. The rigging and manipulation of markets can be hidden by pointing fingers at the latest “crisis.”

John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, describes the process by which Western financial interests intentionally over-lend to weaker countries and then use the pressure of the debt to force the transfer of the countries’ wealth, and often sovereignty, to the West. The IMF and its austerity programs have long played a role in the looting.

In exchange for reducing euro debt on Greece’s books, Greece was to turn over to private interests its water companies, ports, and protected islands. Unless the One Percent can purchase the current Greek government as it purchased previous governments (for example, with payoffs to borrow money with which to purchase submarines), the referendum has frustrated the looters.

In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, I explained that the Greek “debt crisis” had two other purposes. One was to get rid of the practice of restructuring a country’s debt by writing it down to a level the country could afford and to establish in its place the new principle that people of a country are responsible for the mistakes of creditors who over-lend. The write-down is no longer to occur on the balance sheet of the creditors’ but instead becomes a write-down of pensions, social services, and employment. This, too, is a process of looting.

The other purpose, as Jean-Claude Trichet, the previous head of the European Central Bank, made explicitly clear, was to further reduce the sovereignty of member states of the EU by transferring authority over fiscal policy (tax and spend decisions) from national governments to the EU in Brussels.

Washington favors this centralization of political power in Europe, and Washington favors the One Percent over the people. However, above all Washington favors its own power and has acted to prevent a Greek exit, which could begin the unraveling of NATO.

Russia and China have missed an opportunity to begin the unraveling of NATO by assisting Greece’s departure from the EU. Whatever the cost, it would be tiny in comparison to the military buildup that Washington is forcing on both countries. Russia and China might have decided that Washington could no more accept Greece’s alignment with Russia than Russia can accept Ukraine becoming a member of NATO.

If the Greek situation and the waiting Italian and Spanish situations are now resolved along the lines that this article suggests, it means that the NATO mechanism for Washington’s pressure on Russia remains intact and that the conflict that Washington has created will continue. This is the bad news and the downside of Greece’s victory over the looters.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.
08 July, 2015
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Nile Bowie

Often touted as the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s re-engagement with Asia, a close vote in the US Senate has brought the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) a major step closer to becoming law. Facing significant opposition within his own party, the US president has secured fast-track negotiating authority, limiting Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate the contents of the trade accord.

Though the US Congress and American public will have an opportunity to review the deal before it is voted on, fast-track passage procedure reduces time for debate and prohibits amendments to the proposed legislation, limiting Congress to passing an up-or-down vote on the deal. Negotiated behind closed doors and drafted under tremendous secrecy for nearly a decade, elected representatives have thus far had limited access to the draft text.

The negotiations, intended to eventually create a multilateral trade and foreign investment agreement, involve Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Comprising some 40 percent of the world’s economy, the trade pact represents Washington’s response to the rising influence of China, which is not a participant, despite being the region’s largest economy and the largest trading partner of Asia-Pacific economies.

Bringing together a diverse grouping of culturally and economically disparate countries, the pact aims to enforce a common regulatory framework that governs rules for tariffs and trade disputes, patents and intellectual property, banking, foreign investment and more. The deal is widely seen as being representative of Washington’s long-term commitment to the Asia-Pacific region.

Rebranding the Asia Pivot

Described as a “comprehensive trade pact that could help cement our dominance over China in Asia” by a prominent American columnist, Senator Charles E. Schumer claimed the deal’s stated goal is to “lure” other countries “away from China”. If the underlying geopolitics of the deal weren’t clear enough, President Obama himself claimed, “If we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules,” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Needless to say, the TPP is no ordinary trade agreement.

Substantial differences have emerged between Democrats and Republicans over trade policy, though the bulk of American policy makers view the deal in terms of its strategic benefits: consolidating a new regional economic architecture in the Asia-Pacific on American terms. Mainstream economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have argued that the deal would in fact yield marginal economic benefits for the US, even for the corporate and financial interests that stand to gain most from regulatory liberalizations.

This conclusion likely explains why US stock markets barely reacted to the House’s initial rejection of fast-track, which could have potentially torpedoed the deal. For the United States, the Pacific trade pact is a symbol representing the reversal of declining US dominance and the rebranding of America as a leading market power in eyes of Asia-Pacific nations who have begun casting doubt on Washington’s staying-power.

The terms through which supporters have defended the deal revolve almost exclusively around standing up to China and the reputational damage caused to American prestige if the accord fails to materialize. Truthfully speaking, the notion that a foreign government could shape the global economy through alternative multilateral institutions and displace the US as the world’s dominant economic actor stirs passions in the American psyche, one that is utterly convinced of its own indispensability and exceptionalism.

Far from being an ordinary trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a by-product of 21st century bloc-politics. Of all the countries participating in the negotiations, Southeast Asian nations – Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam – are the most strategically significant. These small states seek to balance their relations with Washington and Beijing through economic integration without antagonizing either power.

The View from ASEAN

The four participating Southeast Asian nations are opposed to choosing sides and they may potentially have a restraining influence over provocative military activity in the region. If the Pacific deal is perceived as yielding beneficial results in these states, the United States will have greater leverage in bringing second-round entrants onboard, expanding the trade area to incorporate other regional players, which will have repercussions for the Chinese economy.

The deal would give Southeast Asian nations preferential access to US markets, which will initially reduce China’s export competitiveness. Vietnam, for example, seeks to the join the TPP to offset its ballooning trade deficit with China. Its textile and garment industries rely on Chinese inputs, but in order to gain tariff-free access to the US apparel market, the materials used must originate within the TPP area, which would force Vietnamese exporters to restructure supply chains to seek alternatives to Chinese products. It should be recognized that these measures impose costs on developing economies and can undermine their capacity to compete.

For American multinationals, the deal opens doors to low-cost offshoring alternatives that would ease dependence on China. Malaysian manufacturers would be in the same position vis-à-vis the deal’s rules of origin, though its multinationals would stand to gain from greater access to new export markets for its natural resources. The pact’s developing economies see widened foreign direct investments as a major incentive, although greater competition between SMEs and multinationals will put downward pressure on wages.

Small states with extensive investment capital and limited domestic markets such as Brunei and Singapore stand to gain most from the TPP, as evidenced by the latter’s aggressive lobbying in favor of the deal. Singapore’s multinational-friendly tax structure and staunch adherence to regulating intellectual property make it a magnet for investment, spurring domestic job growth as its own companies become better positioned to do business with TPP partners to the benefit of the city-state’s financial, shipbuilding and petrochemical sectors.

The View from Beijing

Facing declining commodity and oil prices, lower international and domestic demand, falling industrial production, and the slowest pace of growth in over two decades, China’s leadership has raised concerns that the TPP will undermine its export competitiveness. Though the country has taken steps to move towards a consumption-led growth model, manufacturing and trade is still the engine of the Chinese economy.

Beijing’s latest manufacturing plan specifically mentions the US-led trade deal, claiming it would “further impair China’s price advantage in the exports of industrial products and affect Chinese companies’ expansion”. China is the top trading partner of over 120 countries. If the TPP exacerbates the slowdown of China’s economy, export markets worldwide would be adversely affected.

China’s Industrial output has contracted for three consecutive years, while declining performance in the productive economy and mounting property sector debts have begun triggering signs of speculative bubbles. The most favorable outcome of these developments for the United States would be a reduction in the operational scope of the internationalization of the renminbi and China-sponsored multilateral institutions, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which the US and Japan have shunned.

The question of whether China would eventually join the TPP as a second-round entrant implies that it would have to accept the reorientation of its economy around the agreed upon result of the TPP negotiations that it did not participate in. The deal’s trade rules would demand of China a significant departure from its traditionally incremental approach to liberalizing reforms and strong state-led organization of the economy.

Given prevailing Chinese attitudes toward the deal, which is largely viewed as representing a policy of containment, and the ongoing antagonisms between China and the US over land reclamation issues in the South China Sea, it would be genuinely surprising if Chinese leaders sought TPP membership. Beijing’s primary focus will continue to be developing a parallel regional economic architecture and alternatives to the existing international financial institutions such as the Western-dominated IMF and World Bank and Japan-led Asian Development Bank.

China & the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

Throughout the Asia-Pacific, the most significant obstacles to regional trade result from inadequate networks of infrastructure rather than high tariffs and other protectionist barriers. A study conducted by the World Economic Forum in 2013 concluded that world GDP would rise over six times the current level by reducing supply chain barriers rather than removing all import tariffs. It is in this context that China’s AIIB initiative offers an approach to regional integration through which the TPP provides no equivalence.

China’s AIIB is set to become operational in 2016 with US$100 billion initial capital, drawing investments from a long list of countries that have opted to become AIIB co-founders. Despite pressure from the United States, some of its closest allies – Australia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom – have joined Beijing’s new multilateral development bank, which seeks to reduce the vast gaps in economic infrastructure worldwide.

Beijing has garnered one of the world’s most impressive track records in infrastructure development over the last two decades. Building on this experience, the AIIB will play a key role in China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which aims to modernize two ancient trade routes – the Silk Road Economic Belt linking China with Europe via Central Asia, and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road connecting China with Southeast Asia – that would serve as two prongs in an evolving global trading regime under Beijing’s auspices.

The success of these initiatives would make China, with its whooping US$4 trillion in foreign currency reserves, the central player in the global development landscape. In the prevailing circumstances, where the powers of the region are competing to achieve their own strategic outcomes, it must be asked whether there is any parity between the United States and its path to regional integration through the Trans-Pacific Partnership in comparison to the vision put forward by the Chinese leadership.

Assessing the Trans-Pacific Partnership

A paper published by the East West Center estimated that the projected gains from the TPP for the countries involved would only result in a 0.5 per cent increase of income. The deal’s focus is on dismantling “nontariff barriers” to business, such as regulatory measures to protect labor, consumers and the environment. Countries involved would be required to adopt new regulatory practices built to cater to the needs of multinational business interests, of which American firms – which stand to gain most from radically enhanced protection for patents and copyrights – will be most advantaged.

American manufacturers, large Silicon Valley firms, Hollywood studios and the pharmaceutical industry have been the most vocal proponents of the sweeping intellectual property provisions in the TPP, which would negatively impact developing countries. A study conducted by the Australian National University found that enhanced protections for pharmaceutical corporations would limit access to antiretroviral drugs for an estimated 45,000 Vietnamese HIV patients who would no longer be able to afford their medication.

A panel of UN experts have recently objected to the potentially adverse impact of the TPP, arguing that the deal’s provisions cater disproportionately to the business interests of pharmaceutical monopolies. The most egregious aspect of the trade deal is the Investor-State-Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which would allow corporations to seek restitution against states in an international arbitration court for the alleged diminution of their potential future profits as a result of government regulations.

This provision was used by tobacco giant Phillip Morris to sue the South American nation of Uruguay for US$25 million when it enacted health warnings on its cigarettes and laws designed to discourage children and pregnant women from smoking. The ISDS subjects the participating developing countries to expensive arbitration suits that hinder their ability to adopt regulations that protect labor, the environment and public health.

There is no mandate to speak of for ushering in policies that so demonstrably neglect public interest. Granting multinationals new powers that allow national laws and regulations to be challenged in international tribunals represents a step toward a new interpretation of sovereignty: one that shifts away from national governments toward that of an international-corporate sovereignty. The proponents and beneficiaries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership must ask themselves whether this deal truly serves the people of the region.

1 July 2015