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Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 June 2011 20.18 BST

Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.

Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from “land grabs” that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in the poorest countries in the world.

The new report on land acquisitions in seven African countries suggests that Harvard, Vanderbilt and many other US colleges with large endowment funds have invested heavily in African land in the past few years. Much of the money is said to be channelled through London-based Emergent asset management, which runs one ofAfrica’s largest land acquisition funds, run by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency dealers.

Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent’s clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns.

Emergent said the deals were handled responsibly. “Yes, university endowment funds and pension funds are long-term investors,” a spokesman said. “We are investing in African agriculture and setting up businesses and employing people. We are doing it in a responsible way … The amounts are large. They can be hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not landgrabbing. We want to make the land more valuable. Being big makes an impact, economies of scale can be more productive.”

Chinese and Middle Eastern firms have previously been identified as “grabbing” large tracts of land in developing countries to grow cheap food for home populations, but western funds are behind many of the biggest deals, says the Oakland institute, an advocacy research group.

The company that manages Harvard’s investment funds declined to comment. “It is Harvard management company policy not to discuss investments or investment strategy and therefore I cannot confirm the report,” said a spokesman. Vanderbilt also declined to comment.

Oakland said investors overstated the benefits of the deals for the communities involved. “Companies have been able to create complex layers of companies and subsidiaries to avert the gaze of weak regulatory authorities. Analysis of the contracts reveal that many of the deals will provide few jobs and will force many thousands of people off the land,” said Anuradha Mittal, Oakland’s director.

In Tanzania, the memorandum of understanding between the local government and US-based farm development corporation AgriSol Energy, which is working with Iowa University, stipulates that the two main locations – Katumba and Mishamo – for their project are refugee settlements holding as many as 162,000 people that will have to be closed before the $700m project can start. The refugees have been farming this land for 40 years.

In Ethiopia, a process of “villagisation” by the government is moving tens of thousands of people from traditional lands into new centres while big land deals are being struck with international companies.

The largest land deal in South Sudan, where as much as 9% of the land is said by Norwegian analysts to have been bought in the last few years, was negotiated between a Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development and a local co-operative run by absent chiefs. The 49-year lease of 400,000 hectares of central Equatoria for around $25,000 (£15,000) allows the company to exploit all natural resources including oil and timber. The company, headed by former US Ambassador Howard Eugene Douglas, says it intends to apply for UN-backed carbon credits that could provide it with millions of pounds a year in revenues.

In Mozambique, where up to 7m hectares of land is potentially available for investors, western hedge funds are said in the report to be working with South Africans businesses to buy vast tracts of forest and farmland for investors in Europe and the US. The contracts show the government will waive taxes for up to 25 years, but few jobs will be created.

“No one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans, create jobs or improve food security,” said Obang Metho of Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia. “These agreements – many of which could be in place for 99 years – do not mean progress for local people and will not lead to food in their stomachs. These deals lead only to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors.”

“The scale of the land deals being struck is shocking”, said Mittal. “The conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.

Research by the World Bank and others suggests that nearly 60m hectares – an area the size of France – has been bought or leased by foreign companies in Africa in the past three years.

“Most of these deals are characterised by a lack of transparency, despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms,” says the report.

“We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as squatters, are forcibly removed with no compensation,” said Frederic Mousseau, policy director at Oakland, said: “This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat to global security than terrorism. More than one billion people around the world are living with hunger. The majority of the world’s poor still depend on small farms for their livelihoods, and speculators are taking these away while promising progress that never happens.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

With revolutions sweeping the Arab world and bubbling-up across Europe, aging tyrants or discredited governments are doing their best to cling to power. It’s hard to over-exaggerate the importance of these events: the global political and economic status-quo is in deep crisis. If pro-democracy or anti-austerity movements emerge victorious, they’ll have an immediate problem to solve — how to pay for their vision of a better world. The experiences thus far in Egypt and Greece are proof enough that money matters. The wealthy nations holding the purse strings are still able to influence the unfolding of events from afar, subjecting humiliating conditions on those countries undergoing profound social change.

This strategy is being ruthlessly deployed in the Arab world.   Take for example Egypt, where the U.S. and Europe are quietly supporting the military dictatorship that replaced the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Now Mubarak’s generals rule the country. The people of Egypt, however, still want real change, not a mere shuffling at the top; a strike wave and mass demonstrations are testing the power of the new military dictatorship.

A strike wave implies that Egyptians want better wages and working conditions; and economic opportunity was one of the central demands of the revolutionaries who toppled Mubarak.  But revolutions tend to have a temporarily negative effect on a nation’s economy. This is mainly because those who dominate the economy, the rich, do their best to sabotage any social change.

One defining feature of revolutions is the exodus of the rich, who correctly assume their wealth will be targeted for redistribution. This is often referred to as “capital flight.” Also, rich foreign investors stop investing money in the revolutionary country, not knowing if the company they’re investing in will remain privately owned, or if the government they’re investing in will strategically default and choose not to pay back foreign investors. Lastly, workers demand higher wages in revolutions, and many owners would rather shut down — if they don’t flee — than operate for small profits. All of this hurts the economy overall.

The New York Times reports:

“The 18-day [Egyptian] revolt stopped new foreign investment and decimated the pivotal tourist industry… The revolution has inspired new demands for more jobs and higher wages that are fast colliding with the economy’s diminished capacity…Strikes by workers demanding their share of the revolution’s spoils continue to snarl industry… The main sources of capital in this country have either been arrested, escaped or are too afraid to engage in any business…” (June 10, 2011).

Understanding this dynamic, the rich G8 nations are doing their best to exploit it. Knowing that any governments that emerge from the Arab revolutions will be instantly cash-starved, the G8 is dangling $20 billion with strings attached. The strings in this case are demands that the Arab countries pursue only “open market” policies, i.e., business-friendly reforms, such as privatizations, elimination of food and gas subsidies, and allowing foreign banks and corporations better access to the economy. A separate New York Times article addressed the subject with the misleading title, Aid Pledge by Group of 8 Seeks to Bolster Arab Democracy:

“Democracy, the  [G8] leaders said, could be rooted only in economic reforms that created open markets …The [$20 billion] pledge, an aide to President Obama said, was “not a blank check” but “an envelope that could be achieved in the context of suitable [economic] reform efforts.” (May 28, 2011).

The G8 policy towards the Arab world is thus the same policy the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have pursued against weaker nations that have run into economic problems. The cure is always worse than the disease, since “open market” reforms always lead to the national wealth being siphoned into the hands of fewer and fewer people as public entities are privatized, making the rich even richer, while social services are eliminated, making the poor even poorer. Also, the open door to foreign investors evolves into a speculative bubble that inevitably bursts; the investors flee an economically devastated country. It is no accident that many former IMF “beneficiary” countries have paid off their debts and denounced their benefactors, swearing never to return.

Nations that refuse the conditions imposed by the G8 or IMF are thus cut off from the capital that any country would need to maintain itself and expand amid a time of social change. The rich nations proclaim victory in both instances: either the poorer nation asks for help and becomes economically penetrated by western corporations, or the poor country is economically and politically isolated, punished and used as an example of what becomes of those countries that attempt a non-capitalist route to development.

Many Arab countries are especially appetizing to foreign corporations hungry for new investments, since large state-run industries remain in place to help the working-class populations, a tradition begun under the socialist-inspired Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser that spread across the Arab world. If Egypt falls victim to an Iraq-like privatization frenzy, Egypt’s working people and poor will pay higher prices for food, gas, and other basic necessities. This is one reason, other than oil, that many U.S. corporations would also like to invade Iran.

The social turmoil in the Arab world and Europe have fully exposed the domination that wealthy investors and corporations have over the politics of nations. All over Europe “bailouts” are being discussed for poorer nations facing economic crises. The terms of these bailout loans are ruthless and are dictated by nothing more than the desire to maximize profits. In Greece, for example, the profit-motive of the lenders is obvious to everyone, helping to create a social movement that might reach Arab proportions. The New York Times reports:

“The new [Greece bailout] loans, however, will only be forthcoming if more austerity measures are introduced…Along with faster progress on privatization, Europe and the [IMF] fund have been demanding that Greece finally begin cutting public sector jobs and closing down unprofitable entities.”  (June 1, 2011).

This same phenomenon is happening all over Europe, from England to Spain, as working people are told that social programs must be slashed, public jobs eliminated, and state industries privatized. The U.S. is also deeply affected, with daily media threats about the “vigilante bond holders” [rich investors] who will stop buying U.S. debt if Social Security, Medicare, and other social services are not eliminated.

Never before has the global market economy been so damningly exposed as biased and dominated by the super-wealthy. These consciousness-raising experiences cannot be easily siphoned into politicians promising “democracy,” since democracy is precisely the problem: a tiny minority of super-rich individuals have dictatorial power due to their enormous wealth, which they use to threaten governments who don’t cater to their every whim. Money is thus given to subservient governments and taken away from independent ones, while the western media never questions these often sudden shifts in policy, which can instantly transform a longtime U.S. ally into a “dictator” or vice-versa.

The toppling of dictators in the Arab world has immediately raised the question of, “What next”? The economic demands of working people cannot be satisfied while giant corporations dominate the economy, since higher wages mean lower corporate profits, while better social services require that the rich pay higher taxes. These fundamental conflicts lay just beneath the social upheavals all over the world, which came into maturity with the global recession and will continue to dominate social life for years to come. The outcome of this prolonged struggle will determine what type of society emerges from the political tumult, and will meet either the demands of working people or serve the needs of rich investors and giant corporations.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org )  He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

1)   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/world/middleeast/10egypt.html?_r=1&hpw

2)  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/world/europe/28g8.html?

pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=g8%20arab&st=cse&scp=1

3)  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/business/economy/01euro.html?hpw#
20 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org

MOSCOW — When Iraq auctioned rights to rebuild and expand its oil industry two years ago, the Russian company Lukoil won a hefty portion — a field holding about 10 percent of Iraq’s known oil reserves.

It seemed a geopolitical victory for Lukoil. And because only one of the 11 fields that the Iraqis auctioned off  went to an American oil company — Exxon Mobil — it also seemed as if few petroleum benefits would flow to the country that took the lead role in the war, the United States.

The auction’s outcome helped defuse criticism in the Arab world that the United States had invaded Iraq for its oil. “No one, even the United States, can steal the oil,” the Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said at the time.

But American companies can, apparently, drill for the oil.

In fact, American drilling companies stand to make tens of billions of dollars from the new petroleum activity in Iraq long before any of the oil producers start seeing any returns on their investments.

Lukoil and many of the other international oil companies that won fields in the auction are now subcontracting mostly with the four largely American oil services companies that are global leaders in their field: Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International and Schlumberger. Those four have won the largest portion of the subcontracts to drill for oil, build wells and refurbish old equipment.

“Iraq is a huge opportunity for contractors,” Alex Munton, a Middle East analyst for Wood Mackenzie, a research and consulting firm based in Edinburgh, said by telephone.

Mr. Munton estimated that about half of the $150 billion the international majors are expected to invest at Iraqi oil fields over the next decade would go to drilling subcontractors — most of it to the big four operators, which all have ties to the Texas oil industry.

Halliburton and Baker Hughes are based in Houston, as is the drilling unit of Schlumberger, which is based in Paris. Weatherford, though now incorporated in Switzerland, was founded in Texas and still has big operations there.

Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and an authority on oil and conflict, said that American oil services companies were generally dominant both in the Middle East and globally because of their advanced drilling technology. So it is no surprise, he said, they came out on top in Iraq, too — whatever the initial diplomatic appearances.

United States officials have said that American experts who advised the Iraqi oil ministry about ways to restore and increase petroleum production did so without seeking any preferences for American companies.

And immediately after the 2009 auction round won by Lukoil, the United States Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, Philip Frayne, told Reuters that “the results of the bid round should lay to rest the old canard that the U.S. intervened in Iraq to secure Iraqi oil for American companies.”

But Professor Klare said that the American officials who had advised the Iraqi government on its contracting decisions almost certainly expected American oil services companies to win a good portion of the business there, regardless who won the primary contracts.

“There’s no question that they would assume as much,” he said.

The American oil services companies, which have been in Iraq for years on contract with the United States occupation authorities and military, are expanding their presence even as the American military prepares to pull out.

For example, Halliburton, once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney, has 600 employees in Iraq today and said in a statement that it intended to hire several hundred more before the end of the year. “We continue to win significant contracts in Iraq, and are investing heavily in our infrastructure,” Halliburton said.

The 11 contracts Iraq signed with oil majors, including the six for the largest fields, are intended to raise Iraqi output from about 2.5 million barrels of oil a day now to 12 million barrels daily in 2017. Some of the oil services contracts are for repairing currently productive fields, others to tap mostly unused sites.

Most outside experts, including those at the International Energy Agency in Paris, are skeptical of the production targets. The I.E.A. predicts that Iraq will not surpass six million barrels a day until 2030.

But there is little question that production is ramping up. On average in 2002, the year before the United States invasion, Iraq produced only 1.9 million barrels of oil a day.

Lukoil’s experience in Iraq shows how, while geopolitics steered the primary contracts largely away from United States oil companies, the process left the subcontracting wide open for American service providers.

Lukoil was originally granted rights by Saddam Hussein, in 1997, to develop a huge field called West Qurna 2 — rights that Mr. Hussein rescinded just before the war began in 2003.

After the invasion, Lukoil sensed that its best chances lay in working with the Americans. It formed a joint venture with the United States company ConocoPhillips, giving Conoco a small venture in the Russian Arctic and ceding it part of West Qurna 2.

By the time Lukoil was eventually compelled to bid again for the field at the 2009 auction, sentiment in both the United States and Iraqi governments seemed to have shifted to favoring non-American companies in awarding the main contracts. But one of Lukoil’s first steps after securing the West Qurna 2 deal was to subcontract the oil well refurbishment work to Baker Hughes.

While Baker and its American peers are poised to make significant profits from such work in Iraq, wafer-thin margins seem to await Lukoil and the other international oil producers — which include BP of Britain, CNPC of China, ENI of Italy and the Anglo-Dutch company Shell.

Lukoil’s contract, for example, is typical in paying a flat fee of $1.15 for each barrel produced, regardless of oil’s price.

That means even if Lukoil ramps up West Qurna 2 production from almost nothing now to 1.8 million barrels a day by 2017, as specified in the contract, it will require more than a decade of subsequent production just to recoup capital costs of about $13 billion. A good portion of those costs, meanwhile, will have gone to its drilling contractors. Lukoil says it intends to drill more than 500 wells over six years.

Lukoil and other winners of the 2009 auction are now quietly seeking to renegotiate the deals by slowing the upfront investment. On Wednesday, Lukoil executives met with Iraq’s oil minister in Moscow, the company said in a statement. A spokesman declined to provide more details.

Andrei Kuzyaev, the president of Lukoil Overseas, the company’s subsidiary for foreign operations, said in an interview that he was choosing oil services contractors in Iraq through open tenders, as required by the contract. But in fact, Lukoil officials say privately, only American companies have bid.

“The strategic interest of the United States is in new oil supplies arriving on the world market, to lower prices,” Mr. Kuzyaev said.

“It is not important that we did not take part in the coalition,” he said, referring to the military operations in Iraq. “For America, the important thing is open access to reserves. And that is what is happening in Iraq.”

Rome : It’s an accumulative kind of thing, the demise of capitalism worldwide: at first the waning and the dwindling, now the rapid corkscrew-like downwards spiraling, of greedy, vicious, cannibalistic capitalism busily devouring itself. Today, one can only conclude the imminence of its just demise.

Just as one once said in Italy during the agony of the death of the Italian Communist Party, just as one once spoke of the loss of the propulsive force of the French Revolution, current events show that also capitalism, the capitalist system itself, has lost its self-proclaimed propulsive force. Today, for a growing number of capitalists it is a case of si salvi chi puo , every man for himself. No one can logically claim that capitalism as an economic-social-political idea propels forward world society.

In the face of the current disaster of the capitalist system, one can ldetermine that capitalism’s ideology, its promises for societal well-being, were false from the start. One can no longer defend capitalism in good faith. Marx was right, over a century and a half ago: capitalism has hung itself in its excess, in its greed for more and more and more.

Underlying what I prefer to call the Mediterranean Spring rather than the European Spring are a host of symptoms of a highly infectious pandemic of rejection of the capitalist system. The movement of the movements infecting Spanish youth camping on the plazas of their nation today is transversal. Its common denominator is anti-system, which, though they might not yet realize it, I believe translates into anti-capitalism.

Rejection of what is and what has been in Europe . The fever has spread across all of southern Europe , from Portugal to Greece . The Spanish-Portuguese mood is almost identical in Greece , where working people, especially youth, refuse to pay for the greed of capitalism. Also some similarities are visible in the overturn of systems in Tunisia and Egypt . Now today also in Italy , the grass roots—youth and workers. the unemployed and the underpaid underemployed—demand the same rights claimed by protesters in Spain and Portugal and Greece .

It has become contagious. A fever. The Mediterranean world is burning: the demand is economic democracy, political justice and peace. In Spain , Real democracia ya ! Real democracy now. The time of indifference seems over and past. Society has awakened. Spain ‘s indignados , modern Don Quixotes, have occupied sixty plazas across the Spain . The Indignant Ones movement in Portugal is the same. The movement is hailed and imitated by Greeks and Italians. In France , they occupied for a brief time the Bastille. Capitalism should tremble. For when indifference ends, social activism takes over. Revolution is in fact already underway.

It is clear that capitalism cannot change its very nature. Reform has become an obscene word since it today means change so that nothing changes. Reform has come to mean shifting gears so that the strain of economic crisis shifts ever more onto the backs of the socially weak and undefended.

Who then are the weak and undefended? As always in social history of the over one hundred years of rampant, unbridled, excessive capitalism, they are the working class. As an irony of history that class today is bigger than it has ever been. It now includes also a great part of the former middle class. Simultaneously however, the ruling capitalist class has shrunken in numbers to that infamous one per cent who hold and use the social wealth to crush and humiliate the weakened classes.

In Italy , the symptoms of the socio-political revolution underway have suddenly, overnight, exploded onto the scene. Everything has been commented on in Italy : the lowest salaries, the highest prices, the lowest pensions, the hardest workers, the greatest insecurity, the highest real unemployment, the highest number of precarious workers, the highest emigration from Italy of qualified university graduates in search of better lives elsewhere.

Wherever you look in southern Europe you hear the same cries of indignation. While financial collapse threatens Mediterranean Europe, the cries of the indignant ones are rising in intensity. What at first seemed like just another protest movement similar to 1968 has changed gears and entered a slow-motion period of still non-violent but constant, unrelenting dissidence which is also becoming an accelerated socio-political catastrophe. In Spain and Portugal , in Italy and Greece , while the political elite struggles with economic recovery from the disaster it created, everyday life is worsening: economically, politically, and socially. Today’s non-violent protest seems on the verge of violence.

Debt defaults, impossible state bond sales, hopeless bailouts and failed debt restructuring threaten. In this eschatological atmosphere, suddenly appeared the indignados. As if from nowhere, university-educated, networked youth, especially in Italy and Spain, many still living with their parents, are all acutely aware that their post-bubble nations have little or nothing to offer them as unemployment soars, precarious part-time employment becomes the norm and health benefits are reduced,

Until now their demands have been restrained: they have aimed at making the political elite accountable, called for new electoral laws geared to end the fake two-party system in Spain and the stale political systems in Italy and Greece . Electoral reform is a modest demand for what in south Europe is widely labeled a lost generation.

On the other hand, in Eurolandia, as in the USA , politicians and bankers are joined at the hip in their response to the economic crisis.

Therefore, one is surprised by protester statements such as: “We are not against the system, but we want a change in the system. We want change— not in the future; we want a change in the present. We demand a change, and we want it now.” But not even that voice of the people is heard.

In this atmosphere of socio-economic hopelessness, reform seems enough in the immediate future. Still, I believe the still unconscious demand reaches much more deeply into society and that the ante is rising with each passing day. We know that as a rule people don’t rebel easily. People do everything possible to avoid real social convulsion and upheaval, even compromising with a Fascist police state.

On the other side of the fence, today’s government is aware that a spirit of mutiny is brewing. That is why it has armed itself with a set of illegal and anti-constitutional laws to crush it. But the evident reality is that at this point the alternative to ousting today’s corrupt system is a permanent police state, which if it becomes any more fixed than it is now just might last a thousand years.

Acceptance of the legitimacy of Power, indifference to Power’s deviations and passivity in the face of Power’s threats against external enemies at least seem to have peaked. It commonly accepted that Power gone mad has to be put aside. The eventual end of acceptance and passivity could result in a kind of explosion the world has never seen. Clash between people and corrupt systems appears logically inevitable.

At the same time, and on another front, more and more people are losing faith in nonviolence, even though capitalism itself is extremely violent. If you’re not nice and polite, some people consider that violence. But most violence is in business as usual and capitalism grinding on, killing workers, forests and oceans. We’re surrounded by normalized violence and don’t recognize it for what it is. Confronting this normalized violence in a direct way is not violent; it is necessary.

Yet, many people still argue that you have to work within the system, that is, within the capitalist system. But it is a truism that you can’t have it all. You can’t have your air conditioning and not use up limited energy. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that endless economic growth is unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, so drastic change in the field will come about whether we like it or not.

The romantic word Revolution is terrifying to most people. There is just reason to mistrust it. Since the heroic times of the American and French revolutions and the Great Russian Revolution the word has degenerated. The student revolution of the 1960s, though leaving behind many lasting effects, petered out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine comes to mind as an example of a political class abusing the word Revolution.

If we discard the idea of armed revolution, at the same time let’s don’t confuse revolution with mere reform on the one hand or with armed insurrection on the other. Insurrection is a local, usually spontaneous and one-issue matter. Reform is simply adjustment made by the rulers in order to maintain power as happened time and time again in Tsarist Russia. As a rule, reforms are too little and too late, and besides are offset by negative developments in other sectors.

Resistence against oppression causes a rupture between rulers and the ruled. That is the beginning of revolution. The thing about revolution is that it is gradual and elusive. You don’t even realize it is revolution when in fact you are already in it.

Resistence and rebellion against unjust power remains a leitmotiv in the history of mankind. With that tradition in mind the present rulers of Europe must wonder what form the next explosion will take and when it will arrive. For when the gap between rulers and people becomes unbridgeable and the scared people re-learn the sense of social solidarity and widespread Resistance sets in, the revolutionary step is inevitable. In an adult and mature people the passage from one step to the next in the dialectical chain appears historically ineluctable. Once underway, such a process doesn’t just stop.

The masses of the oppressed of America and Europe have thus far appeared surprisingly nonchalant about their lost freedoms. Most snicker at suggestions of rebellion. Of any kind of rebellion. Many still see America and Europe as the cradle of democracy and freedom. But what if, for example, in the United States of America—shaky super power today, in decline and tottering on the brink of disaster—what if the next step by the people was mutiny against the long, gradual counter-revolution in America, as of yet little charted by historians? What if real revolution broke out in Greece and then spread westwards? Is it science fiction, the image of people taking to the streets? Is the idea of revolution really far-fetched?

Globalization has accelerated the crises of traditional, national political systems, reorganizing and transforming the nature of power, relocating it to international political bodies. The institutions of the European Union—the European Commission, the European Council, The European Central Bank—are not democratic representatives requested by popular majorities. Instead they represent the bureaucratic and technocratic structures instituted to permit capitalism to continue to expand its hegemony on a continental and global scale. Within the revolutionary process underway in the world, Europe is attempting to cut its own vital space pointed toward monopolizing planetary resources. The size of this space will be determined by the European Union’s capacity to develop a new regime of accumulation, integrating territories, capital and consumers/workers. In fact, the real revolution of the unification of world markets is not the vaunted liberal revolution, but instead a financial revolution, affecting all the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea .

Protesters worldwide do not yet realize that the factor that has accelerated the transformation of markets and the degradation of the situation of workers in recent years has been the savage deregulation of the mechanisms governing financial transactions. This deregulation paved the way for the change from an economy based on productivity of industrial systems to a drugged economy based on incomes for the top 1% of the population derived from monetary and financial transactions.

Gaither Stewart is a veteran journalist, his dispatches on politics, literature, and culture, have been published (and translated) on many leading online and print venues.

20 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org

22 June, 2011

WSWS.org

Monday night’s air strike on a compound west of Tripoli that killed 19, including women and children, puts an end to any pretence that NATO is not deliberately targeting civilians in its ongoing bombardment of Libya.

NATO was unapologetic, describing the attack on the estate of Khweildy al-Hamidy, a close ally of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi, as a “precision strike on a legitimate military target―a command-and-control node which was directly involved in coordinating systematic attacks on the Libyan people”.

It said it had carried out “a rigorous analysis” of the target “over a prolonged period of time”.

This was a deliberate act of murder. The estate was hit by eight rockets and the main building “pulverised”. Reporters were taken to a hospital where all the beds in one ward had been filled with the dead. They could not be identified. But subsequent reports stated that Hamidy’s two small grandchildren and his pregnant daughter-in-law were among 19 victims that included eight children.

A Libyan government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, said of NATO’s response to the atrocity, “This is very twisted logic, so you kill children, you kill mothers, you kill fathers, aunts and uncles, and then you try to explain it by twisted political military logic”.

The previous day, a NATO missile had struck a two-storey block of flats in the Al-Arada residential area of Tripoli, killing nine, including a woman, a nine-month-old baby and two toddlers. There is no military facility anywhere near the working class neighbourhood. NATO admitted having caused civilian casualties, but cynically blamed a “weapons failure” during a strike targeting a “missile site”.

Libyan officials have stated that NATO forces have killed more than 700 civilians. The stepped-up NATO bombardment of Tripoli will inevitably produce a growing number of civilian deaths.

By exposing the lying claims of the United States, Britain, France and other powers to be waging a war to “protect civilians”, the civilian deaths are creating mounting difficulties for the NATO alliance. The latest incidents prompted Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, at a European Union meeting in Luxembourg, to warn that NATO’s credibility was in danger.

“You can’t run the risk of killing civilians, this is something that is absolutely unacceptable”, he said. “We cannot continue our shortcomings in the way we communicate with the public, which doesn’t keep up with the daily propaganda of Gaddafi”.

Initially a member of the Italian Socialist Party before joining Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government in 2001, Frattini is an inveterate careerist―aware that public sentiment in Europe and internationally is hardening against the war in Libya. His concerns were endorsed by US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, who said, “It’s always an issue in any NATO mission to maintain popular support, to maintain public understanding for why we are there”.

The real “issue” for the US is to maintain the smokescreen used to conceal the reality of a predatory and illegal war of conquest to bring about regime change in Libya, secure control of Libyan oil and set up a military bulwark against a popular uprising of the Arab masses.

The BBC’s Jonathan Marcus noted that, “[T]here has long been some unease in certain quarters within NATO about the Libya mission. This has consistently been papered over, with all nations agreeing to extend the mission for a further three months from the end of June. But is this fragile consensus going to be undermined if incidents of civilian casualties increase?”

More nervous than Washington and Rome are the various Arab and African regimes, whether or not they have backed the war.

The Arab League, which endorsed United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 legitimising war in the name of protecting civilians, has been exposed as a rotten vehicle for imperialist intrigues in the Middle East. Deputy Secretary-General Ahmed Ben Helli complained pathetically to his political masters in Washington, “When the Arab League agreed on the idea of having a no-fly zone over Libya, it was to protect civilians. But when civilians get killed this has to be condemned with the harshest of statements”.

Interviewed by the Guardian in Brussels yesterday, the outgoing head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, called for a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement with Gaddafi. “When I see children being killed, I must have misgivings”, he said.

Asked whether that meant a halt to NATO air strikes, he said, “A ceasefire is a ceasefire”.

Moussa feels politically exposed by his support for NATO, at a time when he is seeking to become president of Egypt after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. But he is not alone. A senior European official told the Guardian, “The Arab League is telling us that we’re losing the support of the Arab world”.

Other African states are in an equally precarious position. Many were closer allies of Gaddafi than the Arab powers. They see in his transformation from a valued Western ally, courted for his oil riches and support of the so-called “war on terror”, into a target for assassination, their own possible fate at some future point.

On June 13, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned a meeting of the African Union to back the war in Libya or risk facing overthrow like Gaddafi, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine Abidine Ben Ali. In April, the African Union tried to organise a ceasefire that was rejected out-of-hand by NATO and the Benghazi opposition, which insisted that nothing short of regime change would do.

However, at a June 15 meeting between the UN Security Council and the African Union High Level Ad hoc Committee on Libya, Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda, Uganda’s permanent representative to the United Nations, issued a statement insisting, “An attack on Libya or any other member of the African Union without express agreement by the AU is a dangerous provocation that should be avoided”.

Calling for dialogue without precondition, he added that “sovereignty has been a tool of emancipation of the peoples of Africa…after centuries of predation by the slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism…. Ignoring the AU for three months and going on with the bombings of the sacred land of Africa has been high-handed, arrogant and provocative”.

US dictates have nevertheless had the desired effect on some states.

President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal has visited Benghazi, where he called upon Gaddafi to step down, “The sooner the better”.

The president of the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, also made a visit to the Tunisian capital of Tunis Saturday, invited for talks with Prime Minister Beji Caid Sebsi’s government. When asked whether Tunisia had recognised the TNC, he replied, “We’ve gone past that stage. The fact that we are received here is implicit recognition”.

Tunisia’s position comes as no surprise. Sebsi’s government was formed with the backing of Washington, with the specific aim of curtailing the mass movement that led to the downfall of President Zine Abedine Ben Ali.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen took a hard-line against those questioning the viability of its Libyan offensive. “We have seriously degraded the military capacity of the Gaddafi regime, and the combination of this military pressure and the reinforced political pressure will eventually lead to the collapse of the Gaddafi regime”, he said. “It’s not a question of if, but when”.

However, the next day, Rasmussen received an embarrassing rebuke from the Benghazi opposition, which complained of a failure of the NATO powers to supply any of the one billion dollars promised. Claiming to need more than $3 billion to cover “salaries and other needs” for the next six months, the TNC’s Finance Minister Ali Tarhouni told Reuters, “We are running out of everything. It’s a complete failure. Either they (Western nations) don’t understand or they don’t care. Nothing has materialized yet. And I really mean nothing”.

In response, the June 20 meeting of the EU foreign ministers agreed to examine the possibility of making frozen Libyan funds available to Benghazi, “in compliance with the provisions of the relevant” United Nations Security Council Resolutions. There are no resolutions that can, in fact, be employed to legitimise funding one side in a civil war. Hence the EU statement added the caveat that “measures in this respect will respect the rule of law”.

The US government, for its part, issued a press release announcing that it had “delivered a second shipment of non-lethal aid to Benghazi”.

Funding the war is a bone of contention between the US and Europe, but fighting it is a source of far greater acrimony. It is, moreover, placing great strains on Washington’s closest ally, Britain.

Yesterday, Royal Air Force head Sir Simon Bryant warned that mounting the NATO air war against Libya was endangering the RAF’s ability to deal with future emergencies. Bryant said morale among airmen was “fragile”, and fighting spirit was being threatened by being overworked in simultaneous operations in Libya and Afghanistan. Last week, the First Sea Lord, Sir Mark Stanhope, made a similar warning that continuing operations in Libya beyond September would mean taking ships away from other tasks.

Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander yesterday said that the UK operation in Libya may cost “hundreds of millions” of pounds, rather than the tens of millions initially claimed.

Press Release

The many hundreds of world citizens sailing on Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza at the end of June deserve our support and admiration, and I hope the International Community will demand that the Israeli Government do not carry out their threats to use violence against these ‘unarmed’ heroes but give them their right to safe passage to Gaza.

The ‘brave hearts’ on board some 10 boats, not only represent the 40 countries

of which they are citizens,  but they are the conscience of the world.   They are sailing to Gaza to let the people of Gaza know, they are not forgotten, and that the world abhors the actions of Apartheid Israel as it carries out, for almost 4 years, the immoral and illegal ‘siege’ of Gaza.

In Gaza children are suffering lack of medicine, shortage of food, and are totally traumatized by War.   Fishermen are shot and often killed by Israeli Navy, off the shores of Gaza for simply trying to get fish for their families. Gaza farmers have been shot by Israeli soldiers whilst trying to grow food for their families.  The Gaza port has been cut off from the World for over 40 years, the airport bombed and crossings closed, all in an attempt by Israeli Government to destroy the spirit of the Palestinian people.   Israeli Apartheid policies of siege, occupation, break every law in the book, but above all they try to break the spirit and bodies of men, women, and children of Palestine, and to divide and dominate the Palestinian people.  But Israeli policies  are not succeeding as the courage and magnificent spirit of the Palestinian people has moved millions of people around the world to identify with their stories of persecution at the hands of the Israeli Government.

Tragically, the USA, EU, and other world Governments, do not act to insist Israel

end this immoral siege  and so the civil community is obliged to act on our behalf.   Those who sail on the boats have great hearts and great courage and we applaud them.  They face long boat journey (maybe up to 18 hours) and as most have never sailed in their lives, many will be sea-sick.  Many will be  apprehensive as they know they may well be attacked by the Israeli Navy, they might even be killed or injured (as happened last year on the Mavi Marmara boat when Israeli seals killed 9 unarmed passengers). Their boats may well be confiscated and they will be forcefully taken at gunpoint against their will to Israel.   They will be finger-printed, detained and deported from Israel for ten years.  They will be listed as ‘criminal’ and their only crime will be that of caring about the suffering of the people of Gaza, wanting to bring Humanitarian aid to Gaza and to break the immoral, illegal siege by Israeli.

The International Community (including the UN who can inspect the Cargo) can help protect these brave hearts on the Freedom Flotilla II by breaking its silence and  insisting Israel allow the boats to enter the Gaza Port.   Even more importantly the International Community and its Political and Spiritual Leaders can begin to show the same kind of  moral courage as these passengers of peace on the Flotilla II, and call for the lifting of the Siege of Gaza, and end the collective punishment of the people of

Gaza.

We owe it to the children of Gaza, and we owe it to the Palestinian people to insist that Israel does the right thing, and acts morally.

Israeli security is not threatened by unarmed civilians and  boats carrying medicines and toys.   Israeli security is threatened only by its own intransigence and lack of political will to choose peace and not land, and to behave morally and uphold International Law and give to Palestinians what most of  the rest of the world take for granted – human dignity and human rights.

The Palestinian people can take hope from the fact that the tide is indeed turning and the world is awakening at long last, to the plight of the Palestinian people and adding their voices to their call for freedom and justice now.

The Palestinian people, by their nonviolent insistence on civil and political rights, have inspired millions of people to act and it is hoped that the sailing of the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza, will bring hope to all that justice and peace is possible in the Middle East and in the World.

Nobel Peace Laureate

22^nd June, 20ll

www.peacepeople.com

23 June, 2011

Yes! Magazine

If we’d stop tearing each other apart, we might see an opportunity to win back our democracy from the rich and powerful.

This is the twenty-fifth of a series of blogs based on excerpts adapted from the 2nd edition of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. I wrote Agenda to spur a national conversation on economic policy issues and options that are otherwise largely ignored. This blog series is intended to contribute to that conversation. —DK

From the beginning of history, Empire’s rulers have maintained their power by sowing fear, mutual suspicion, and division to prevent those who bear the burdens of their rule from uniting against them. Currently, on the political right, anger is directed against government. On the political left, it is directed against Wall Street corporations.

Each blames the other for America’s decline and the economic distress of working families, thus diverting attention from the deeper truth. Corporate money, perks, and the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms have corrupted the political process. As a consequence, Wall Street and Washington are both running out of control and united in the pursuit of agendas that grow the power and privilege of the few at the expense of the many.

Whether the blame lies more with Wall Street or with Washington is largely beside the point. The bottom line is a Wall Street–Washington axis that has stolen our money and country, denies us our rights, undermines national security, and threatens the future of all our children, irrespective of political orientation.

Two events following the 2008 financial meltdown so focused attention on the power and dysfunction of the Wall Street-Washington axis that the establishment propaganda machine that keeps us divided came near losing control. They demonstrate the potential for a broad popular transpartisan political alliance.

One was the government bailout of Wall Street. Virtually no one outside of Wall Street was happy about government taking money from struggling taxpayers in order to give it to Wall Street bankers so they could reward themselves bonuses for crashing the economy.

The other was the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission that gave corporations carte blanche to buy elections. Follow-up polls reported that the Supreme Court’s decision was opposed by 80 percent of Americans, including 76, 81, and 85 percent of Republicans, Independents and Democrats, respectively—a truly extraordinary consensus in this time of political division.

I come from deeply conservative roots and distrust any concentration of unaccountable power. As the author of When Corporations Rule the World, my view of the unconscionable abuse of corporate power is on public record. I also recognize the profound truth of Paul Hawken’s observation in The Ecology of Commerce that it is big business that creates the need for big government to constrain the excesses and clean up the messes. What we now have, however, is big government aligned with big business to facilitate the excesses and reward those who create the messes. It is a disastrous arrangement against which the vast majority of conservatives and liberals should be united.

Conservatives are correct on a key point liberals tend to overlook: the federal government is too big and intrusive. The Patriot Act, which passed with a large bipartisan majority, is an abomination against democracy and foundational American ideals. We do have a public spending problem. The public debt owed to foreign nations and Wall Street bankers is unsustainable and a threat to national security.

Taxing the poor to pay for subsidies to powerful corporations and squandering our national treasure on unwinnable wars that have no point other than to fuel corporate profits is unconscionable. Health insurance programs designed to benefit insurance and pharmaceutical companies need to be restructured to reduce costs and improve services.

We spend too much on safety net programs that would not be necessary if we rolled back ill-conceived trade agreements that facilitate outsourcing and the global bidding down of wages and benefits and required corporations to pay employees a living wage with basic benefits. It is absurd to tolerate the Federal Reserve giving Wall Street banks virtually free money to loan back to U.S. taxpayers at a market interest rate.

There is good reason for outrage against both big business and big government. We must respond, however, from a place of love, national unity, and sense of possibility rather than a place of fear, anger, and division. When consumed with anger, our reptilian brain takes control. Our capacity for nuanced critical thought is diminished and we easily succumb to manipulation by propagandists and advertisers. Note the ease with which Wall Street billionaires feed and manipulate the anger of Tea Party members to mobilize them in support of campaigns that support Wall Street interests at the expense of their own.

If those on each side of America’s deep political divide could see the merit in the arguments of those on the other, we might come together as a powerful citizen alliance. We could break up concentrations of corporate power, get money out of politics, end senseless wars, achieve an equitable distribution of wealth, downsize government, and hold politicians accountable to an authentic popular will. That is an agenda that principled conservatives and liberals should all be able to get behind.

David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group.

Interested?

Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance to Build a New Economy

Wall Street is bankrupt. Instead of trying to save it, we can build a new economy that puts money and business in the service of people and the planet—not the other way around.

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It’s time we the people declare our independence from the money-favoring Wall Street economy.

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23 June, 2011

TomDispatch.com

Now that Washington has at least six wars cooking (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and more generally, the global war on terror), Americans find themselves in a new world of war. If, however, you haven’t joined the all-volunteer military, any of our 17 intelligence outfits, the Pentagon, the weapons companies and hire-a-gun corporations associated with it, or some other part of the National Security Complex, America’s distant wars go on largely without you (at least until the bills come due).

War has a way of turning almost anything upside down, including language. But with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, crumbling infrastructure, and weird weather, who even notices? This undoubtedly means that you’re using a set of antediluvian war words or definitions from your father’s day. It’s time to catch up.

So here’s the latest word in war words: what’s in, what’s out, what’s inside out. What follows are nine common terms associated with our present wars that probably don’t mean what you think they mean. Since you live in a twenty-first-century war state, you might consider making them your own.

Victory: Like defeat, it’s a “loaded” word and rather than define it, Americans should simply avoid it.

In his last press conference before retirement, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was asked whether the U.S. was “winning in Afghanistan.” He replied, “I have learned a few things in four and a half years, and one of them is to try and stay away from loaded words like ‘winning’ and ‘losing.’ What I will say is that I believe we are being successful in implementing the president’s strategy, and I believe that our military operations are being successful in denying the Taliban control of populated areas, degrading their capabilities, and improving the capabilities of the Afghan national security forces.”

In 2005, George W. Bush, whom Gates also served, used the word “victory” 15 times in a single speech (“National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”). Keep in mind, though, that our previous president learned about war in the movie theaters of his childhood where the Marines always advanced and Americans actually won. Think of his victory obsession as the equivalent of a mid-twentieth-century hangover.

In 2011, despite the complaints of a few leftover neocons dreaming of past glory, you can search Washington high and low for “victory.” You won’t find it. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Yeti. Being “successful in implementing the president’s strategy,” what more could you ask? Keeping the enemy on his “back foot”: hey, at $10 billion a month, if that isn’t “success,” tell me what is?

Admittedly, the assassination of Osama bin Laden was treated as if it were VJ Day ending World War II, but actually win a war? Don’t make Secretary of Defense Gates laugh!

Maybe, if everything comes up roses, in some year soon we’ll be celebrating DE (Degrade the Enemy) Day.

Enemy: Any super-evil pipsqueak on whose back you can raise at least $1.2 trillion a year for the National Security Complex.

“I actually consider al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with Al-Awlaki as a leader within that organization probably the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland.” So said Michael Leiter, presidential adviser and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, last February, months before Osama bin Laden was killed (and Leiter himself resigned). Since bin Laden’s death, Leiter’s assessment has been heartily seconded in word and deed in Washington. For example, New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti recently wrote: “Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is believed by the C.I.A. to pose the greatest immediate threat to the United States, more so than even Qaeda’s senior leadership believed to be hiding in Pakistan.”

Now, here’s the odd thing. Once upon a time, statements like these might have been tantamount to announcements of victory: That’s all they’ve got left?

Of course, once upon a time, if you asked an American who was the most dangerous man on the planet, you might have been told Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong. These days, don’t think enemy at all; think comic-book-style arch-villain Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom — anyone, in fact, capable of standing in for globe-encompassing Evil.

Right now, post-bin-Laden, America’s super-villain of choice is Anwar al-Awlaki, an enemy with seemingly near superhuman powers to disturb Washington, but no army, no state, and no significant finances. The U.S.-born “radical cleric” lives as a semi-fugitive in Yemen, a poverty-stricken land of which, until recently, few Americans had heard. Al-Awlaki is considered at least partially responsible for two high-profile plots against the U.S.: the underwear bomber and package bombs sent by plane to Chicago synagogues. Both failed dismally, even though neither Superman nor the Fantastic Four rushed to the rescue.

As an Evil One, al-Awlaki is a voodoo enemy, a YouTube warrior (“the bin Laden of the Internet”) with little but his wits and whatever superpowers he can muster to help him. He was reputedly responsible for helping to poison the mind of Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan before he blew away 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. There’s no question of one thing: he’s gotten inside Washington’s war-on-terror head in a big way. As a result, the Obama administration is significantly intensifying its war against him and the ragtag crew of tribesmen he hangs out with who go by the name of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Covert War: It used to mean secret war, a war “in the shadows” and so beyond the public’s gaze. Now, it means a conflict in the full glare of publicity that everybody knows about, but no one can do anything about. Think: in the news, but off the books.

Go figure: today, our “covert” wars are front-page news. The top-secret operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden garnered an unprecedented 69% of the U.S. media “newshole” the week after it happened, and 90% of cable TV coverage. And America’s most secretive covert warriors, elite SEAL Team 6, caused “SEAL-mania” to break out nationwide.

Moreover, no minor drone strike in the “covert” CIA-run air war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands goes unreported. In fact, as with Yemen today, future plans for the launching or intensification of Pakistani-style covert wars are now openly discussed, debated, and praised in Washington, as well as widely reported on. At one point, CIA Director Leon Panetta even bragged that, when it came to al-Qaeda, the Agency’s covert air war in Pakistan was “the only game in town.”

Think of covert war today as the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at that mainstream media newshole. The “shadows” that once covered whole operations now only cover accountability for them.

Permanent bases: In the American way of war, military bases built on foreign soil are the equivalent of heroin. The Pentagon can’t help building them and can’t live without them, but “permanent bases” don’t exist, not for Americans. Never.

That’s simple enough, but let me be absolutely clear anyway: Americans may have at least 865 bases around the world (not including those in war zones), but we have no desire to occupy other countries. And wherever we garrison (and where aren’t we garrisoning?), we don’t want to stay, not permanently anyway.

In the grand scheme of things, for a planet more than four billion years old, our 90 bases in Japan, a mere 60-odd years in existence, or our 227 bases in Germany, some also around for 60-odd years, or those in Korea, 50-odd years, count as little. Moreover, we have it on good word that permanent bases are un-American. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said as much in 2003 when the first of the Pentagon’s planned Iraqi mega-bases were already on the drawing boards. Hillary Clinton said so again just the other day, about Afghanistan, and an anonymous American official added for clarification: “There are U.S. troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently.” Korea anyone? So get it straight, Americans don’t want permanent bases. Period.

And that’s amazing when you think about it, since globally Americans are constantly building and upgrading military bases. The Pentagon is hooked. In Afghanistan, it’s gone totally wild — more than 400 of them and still building! Not only that, Washington is now deep into negotiations with the Afghan government to transform some of them into “joint bases” and stay on them if not until hell freezes over, then at least until Afghan soldiers can be whipped into an American-style army. Latest best guesstimate for that? 2017 without even getting close.

Fortunately, we plan to turn those many bases we built to the tune of billions of dollars, including the gigantic establishments at Bagram and Kandahar, over to the Afghans and just hang around, possibly “for decades,” as — and the word couldn’t be more delicate or thoughtful — “tenants.”

And by the way, accompanying the recent reports that the CIA is preparing to lend the U.S. military a major covert hand, drone-style, in its Yemen campaign, was news that the Agency is building a base of its own on a rushed schedule in an unnamed Persian Gulf country. Just one base. But don’t expect that to be the end of it. After all, that’s like eating one potato chip.

Withdrawal: We’re going, we’re going… Just not quite yet and stop pushing!

If our bases are shots of heroin, then for the U.S. military leaving anyplace represents a form of “withdrawal,” which means the shakes. Like drugs, it’s just so darn easy to go in that Washington keeps doing it again and again. Getting out’s the bear. Who can blame them, if they don’t want to leave?

In Iraq, for instance, Washington has been in the grips of withdrawal fever since 2008 when the Bush administration agreed that all U.S. troops would leave by the end of this year. You can still hear those combat boots dragging in the sand. At this point, top administration and military officials are almost begging the Iraqis to let us remain on a few of our monster bases, like the ill-named Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, which in its heyday had air traffic that reputedly rivaled Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. But here’s the thing: even if the U.S. military officially departs, lock, stock, and (gun) barrel, Washington’s still not really planning on leaving.

In recent years, the U.S. has built near-billion-dollar “embassies” that are actually citadels-cum-regional-command-posts in the Greater Middle East. Just last week, four former U.S. ambassadors to Iraq made a plea to Congress to pony up the $5.2 billion requested by the Obama administration so that that the State Department can turn its Baghdad embassy into a massive militarized mission with 5,100 hire-a-guns and a small mercenary air force.

In sum, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” is not a song that Washington likes to sing.

Drone War (see also Covert War): A permanent air campaign using missile-armed pilotless planes that banishes both withdrawal and victory to the slagheap of history.

Is it even a “war” if only one side ever appears in person and only one side ever suffers damage? America’s drones are often flown from thousands of miles away by “pilots” who, on leaving their U.S. bases after a work shift “in” a war zone, see signs warning them to drive carefully because this may be “the most dangerous part of your day.” This is something new in the history of warfare.

Drones are the covert weaponry of choice in our covert wars, which means, of course, that the military just can’t wait to usher chosen reporters into its secret labs and experimental testing grounds to reveal dazzling visions of future destruction.

To make sense of drones, we probably have to stop thinking about “war” and start envisaging other models — for example, that of the executioner who carries out a death sentence on another human being at no danger to himself. If a pilotless drone is actually an executioner’s weapon, a modern airborne version of the guillotine, the hangman’s noose, or the electric chair, the death sentence it carries with it is not decreed by a judge and certainly not by a jury of peers.

It’s assembled by intelligence agents based on fragmentary (and often self-interested) evidence, organized by targeteers, and given the thumbs-up sign by military or CIA lawyers. All of them are scores, hundreds, thousands of miles away from their victims, people they don’t know, and may not faintly understand or share a culture with. In addition, the capital offenses are often not established, still to be carried out, never to be carried out, or nonexistent. The fact that drones, despite their “precision” weaponry, regularly take out innocent civilians as well as prospective or actual terrorists reminds us that, if this is our model, Washington is a drunken executioner.

In a sense, Bush’s global war on terror called drones up from the depths of its unconscious to fulfill its most basic urges: to be endless and to reach anywhere on Earth with an Old Testament-style sense of vengeance. The drone makes mincemeat of victory (which involves an endpoint), withdrawal (for which you have to be there in the first place), and national sovereignty (see below).

Corruption: Something inherent in the nature of war-torn Iraqis and Afghans from which only Americans, in and out of uniform, can save them.

Don’t be distracted by the $6.6 billion that, in the form of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, the Bush administration loaded onto C-130 transport planes, flew to liberated Iraq in 2003 for “reconstruction” purposes, and somehow mislaid. The U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction did recently suggest that it might prove to be “the largest theft of funds in national history”; on the other hand, maybe it was just misplaced… forever.

Iraq’s parliamentary speaker now claims that up to $18.7 billion in Iraqi oil funds have gone missing-in-action, but Iraqis, as you know, are corrupt and unreliable. So pay no attention. Anyway, not to worry, it wasn’t our money. All those crisp Benjamins came from Iraqi oil revenues that just happened to be held in U.S. banks. And in war zones, what can you do? Sometimes bad things happen to good $100 bills!

In any case, corruption is endemic to the societies of the Greater Middle East, which lack the institutional foundations of democratic societies. Not surprisingly then, in impoverished, narcotized Afghanistan, it’s run wild. Fortunately, Washington has fought nobly against its ravages for years. Time and again, top American officials have cajoled, threatened, even browbeat Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his compatriots to get them to crack down on corrupt practices and hold honest elections to build support for the American-backed government in Kabul.

Here’s the funny thing though: a report on Afghan reconstruction recently released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff suggests that the military and foreign “developmental” funds that have poured into the country, and which account for 97% of its gross domestic product, have played a major role in encouraging corruption. To find a peacetime equivalent, imagine firemen rushing to a blaze only to pour gasoline on it and then lash out at the building’s dwellers as arsonists.

National Sovereignty: 1. Something Americans cherish and wouldn’t let any other country violate; 2. Something foreigners irrationally cling to, a sign of unreliability or mental instability.

Here’s the twenty-first-century credo of the American war state. Please memorize it: The world is our oyster. We shall not weep. We may missile [bomb, assassinate, night raid, invade] whom we please, when we please, where we please. This is to be called “American safety.”

Those elsewhere, with a misplaced reverence for their own safety or security, or an overblown sense of pride and self-worth, who put themselves in harm’s way — watch out. After all, in a phrase: Sovereignty ‘R’ Us.

Note: As we still live on a one-way imperial planet, don’t try reversing any of the above, not even as a thought experiment. Don’t imagine Iranian drones hunting terrorists over Southern California or Pakistani special operations forces launching night raids on small midwestern towns. Not if you know what’s good for you.

War: A totally malleable concept that is purely in the eye of the beholder.

Which is undoubtedly why the Obama administration recently decided not to return to Congress for approval of its Libyan intervention as required by the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The administration instead issued a report essentially declaring Libya not to be a “war” at all, and so not to fall under the provisions of that resolution. As that report explained: “U.S. operations [in Libya] do not involve [1] sustained fighting or [2] active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve [3] the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties, or a serious threat thereof, or [4] any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”

This, of course, opens up the possibility of quite a new and sunny American future on planet Earth, one in which it will no longer be wildly utopian to imagine war becoming extinct. After all, the Obama administration is already moving to intensify and expand its [fill in the blank] in Yemen, which will meet all of the above criteria, as its [fill in the blank] in the Pakistani tribal borderlands already does. Someday, Washington could be making America safe all over the globe in what would, miraculously, be a thoroughly war-less world.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

22 June, 2011

Tomdispatch.com

If Americans don’t get hurt, war is no longer war

The Obama administration has come up with a remarkable justification for going to war against Libya without the congressional approval required by the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

American planes are taking off, they are entering Libyan air space, they are locating targets, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war. Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is a war.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not a war. Why? Because, according to “United States Activities in Libya,” a 32-page report that the administration released last week, “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”

In other words, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favor of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die. When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name. When they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not.

This cannot be classified as anything but strange thinking and it depends, in turn, on a strange fact: that, in our day, it is indeed possible for some countries (or maybe only our own), for the first time in history, to wage war without receiving a scratch in return. This was nearly accomplished in the bombing of Serbia in 1999, in which only one American plane was shot down (and the pilot rescued).

The epitome of this new warfare is the predator drone, which has become an emblem of the Obama administration. Its human operators can sit at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada or in Langley, Virginia, while the drone floats above Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Libya, pouring destruction down from the skies. War waged in this way is without casualties for the wager because none of its soldiers are near the scene of battle — if that is even the right word for what is going on.

Some strange conclusions follow from this strange thinking and these strange facts. In the old scheme of things, an attack on a country was an act of war, no matter who launched it or what happened next. Now, the Obama administration claims that if the adversary cannot fight back, there is no war.

It follows that adversaries of the United States have a new motive for, if not equaling us, then at least doing us some damage. Only then will they be accorded the legal protections (such as they are) of authorized war. Without that, they are at the mercy of the whim of the president.

The War Powers Resolution permits the president to initiate military operations only when the nation is directly attacked, when there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” The Obama administration, however, justifies its actions in the Libyan intervention precisely on the grounds that there is no threat to the invading forces, much less the territories of the United States.

There is a parallel here with the administration of George W. Bush on the issue of torture (though not, needless to say, a parallel between the Libyan war itself, which I oppose but whose merits can be reasonably debated, and torture, which was wholly reprehensible). President Bush wanted the torture he was ordering not to be considered torture, so he arranged to get lawyers in the Justice department to write legal-sounding opinions excluding certain forms of torture, such as waterboarding, from the definition of the word. Those practices were thenceforward called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Now, Obama wants his Libyan war not to be a war and so has arranged to define a certain kind of war — the American-casualty-free kind — as not war (though without even the full support of his own lawyers). Along with Libya, a good English word — war — is under attack.

In these semantic operations of power upon language, a word is separated from its commonly accepted meaning. The meanings of words are one of the few common grounds that communities naturally share. When agreed meanings are challenged, no one can use the words in question without stirring up spurious “debates,” as happened with the word torture. For instance, mainstream news organizations, submissive to George Bush’s decisions on the meanings of words, stopped calling waterboarding torture and started calling it other things, including “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but also “harsh treatment,” “abusive practices,” and so on.

Will the news media now stop calling the war against Libya a war? No euphemism for war has yet caught on, though soon after launching its Libyan attacks, an administration official proposed the phrase “kinetic military action” and more recently, in that 32-page report, the term of choice was “limited military operations.” No doubt someone will come up with something catchier soon.

How did the administration twist itself into this pretzel? An interview that Charlie Savage and Mark Landler of the New York Times held with State Department legal advisor Harold Koh sheds at least some light on the matter. Many administrations and legislators have taken issue with the War Powers Resolution, claiming it challenges powers inherent in the presidency. Others, such as Bush administration Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, have argued that the Constitution’s plain declaration that Congress “shall declare war” does not mean what most readers think it means, and so leaves the president free to initiate all kinds of wars.

Koh has long opposed these interpretations — and in a way, even now, he remains consistent. Speaking for the administration, he still upholds Congress’s power to declare war and the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. “We are not saying the president can take the country into war on his own,” he told the Times. “We are not saying the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional or should be scrapped or that we can refuse to consult Congress. We are saying the limited nature of this particular mission is not the kind of ‘hostilities’ envisioned by the War Powers Resolution.”

In a curious way, then, a desire to avoid challenge to existing law has forced assault on the dictionary. For the Obama administration to go ahead with a war lacking any form of Congressional authorization, it had to challenge either law or the common meaning of words. Either the law or language had to give.

It chose language.

Jonathan Schell is the Doris M. Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a Senior Lecturer at Yale University. He is the author of several books, including The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Schell discusses war and the imperial presidency, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 Jonathan Schell

22 June, 2011  Countercurrents.org

Early morning June 18, lung cancer claimed 62 year old UK anti-war activist Haw after a long battle, a man London Independent contributor Mark Wallinger called “the conscience of the nation grown quiescent.”

His family left a message, saying: “He left us in his sleep and in no pain, after a long, hard fight,” ending three months of treatment in Germany. His long vigil, in fact, contributed to his poor heath. It also led to a divorce and largely separated him from his seven children.

After others stopped protesting America’s Afghan and Iraq wars, Brian was steadfast against his own government’s complicity. In fact, from June 2001, months before 9/11, he camped out in London’s Parliament Square against the UN’s appalling economic sanctions. They got former UN representative for Iraq’s Oil and Food program Denis Halliday to resign for being asked to commit the equivalent of genocide, killing 5,000 children monthly.

Haw, in fact, documented horrific Gulf War depleted uranium birth defects, repeated lies and evasions of US and UK leaders, and imperial lawlessness waging unconscionable wars. Resolutely he remained tenacious against injustice, championing peace and love.

On his own, his decade-long presence pressured his government relentlessly. In return, authorities hounded, arrested, and assaulted him. In 2002, the Westminster City Council petitioned Britain’s High Court for an injunction to remove him, claiming he blocked the pavement. The Court, however, declined, ruling his presence wasn’t unreasonable.

In 2003, the House of Commons Procedure Committee recommended a law change, prohibiting unlicensed protests on security grounds. He never left.

In 2005, after Tony Blair called him a nuisance to get rid of, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) passed, legislation enacted against him, making it illegal to protest within a one km radius of Parliament without police permission.

Nonetheless, he successfully argued that his vigil predated parliamentary terrorism, winning the right to continue protesting against Britain’s lawless participation in Washington’s imperial wars.

Preaching “Love….peace….justice….for all,” he camped out night and day every day, in good and bad weather, in spite of everything authorities tried to harass, deter, and banish him.

Using a megaphone, banners, placards, homemade signs, peace flags, photos, and slogans, his message resonated in Westminster and worldwide, a testimony to his heroic spirit, dogged presence against war, and refusal to quit until illness forced him.

Wallinger called him “a unique and remarkable man,” citing his “tenacity, integrity and dignity,” then asking: “What are we going to do now there is no (Brian) there?”

A lead Independent article called him a “Rebel with a cause….(a) one-man peace camp….a mighty irritant slap in front of the seat of national government,” challenging the illegal war-making of three prime ministers.

He survived numerous arrests, dozens of eviction attempts, and the mayor of London’s failed effort to clear his pavement space for Britain’s royal wedding. His resilience made him a hero for many.

In 2007, Channel 4’s Political Awards voted him the Most Politically Inspiring Figure of the Year. By then, in fact, he was internationally recognized. In Britain, tour guides included him on their itineraries, and documentaries and docudramas on Britain’s involvement in America’s wars featured him.

On June 19, a message from supporters on his web site said:

“Brian showed great determination and courage during the many long hard years he led his peace campaign. (He) showed the same courage and determination is his battle with cancer. He was keenly aware of and deeply concerned that so many civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine did not have access to the same treatments that were made available to him.”

On June 2, 2001, police asked him how long he’d be there. He replied, “As long as it takes.” He kept his word until his deteriorating health demanded treatment in Germany.

He’s survived by his wife former Kay, seven children, and legions of global admirers, perhaps inspired enough by his courage to pursue peace in his absence.

A Final Comment

On June 20, anti-war activist former UK MP Tony Benn headlined a London Guardian op-ed, “Brian Haw gave his life for peace,” saying:

He stood for principle against lawless wars. “Every MP on the way to work would pass Brian and know he was always there and underst(ood) what he was saying.”

His activism “frightened the establishment” enough to try stopping him legislatively, mindless of his dogged determination to resist.

“The remarkable thing about Brian was not only his principle, but his determination, alone, to be effective as indeed he was; for millions of people must have seen him there or on television, and came to know of his campaign.”

Some called him “the man of peace in Westminster,” a different message from warmongering MPs, Benn never one of them.

“Brian did not stop the Iraq war” or others, “but he will be remembered as a man who stood” for peace and gave his life championing it.

“He will be sadly missed and his death marks the end of a historic enterprise by a man who gave everything to support his beliefs” – honorable ones against Washington and UK war criminals, reigning terror and destruction he valiantly tried to stop.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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