Category Archives: Geopolitics

Neoliberalism: Serving the Interests of the International Business Elitists

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By Edward S. Herman

Source: Dissident Voice

Mark Weisbrot, a co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has written an enlightening book that pulls together many of the analyses that CEPR has been producing over the past several decades. The book, Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong about the Global Economy, is important and useful because it provides an alternative framework of analysis to the one used by establishment experts, media and policy-makers. What is more, this alternative framework and description of reality is well supported by empirical evidence and is convincing. It is marginalized in the mainstream because it runs counter to the interests of the powerful, who over the past three decades, have successfully pushed for a neoliberal world order that scales back the earlier welfare state advances and pursues trickle-down economics and the well-being of the affluent.

In fact, an important feature of Weisbrot’s analysis is his recognition of the extent to which policy failures have flowed from biased analyses that serve a small elite and punish the majority, and that policy successes have often followed the loss of power by those serving elite interests. His first chapter is entitled “Troubles in Euroland: When the Cures Worsen the Disease,” whose central theme is that the long crisis and malperformance of Europe’s economies, and especially the weaker ones of Greece, Portugal, Spain and to a lesser extent, Italy, were in large measure the result of poor policy choices. The crisis, which dates back to 2008, was not due to high sovereign debt, which was only threateningly high in Greece, but rather the refusal of the policy-making “troika,” the European Central Bank (ECB), European Community and IMF, to carry out expansionary policies that would allow the poor countries to grow out of their deficit position.

The Fed met the U.S. crisis with an easy money program which, when combined with modest fiscal expansion efforts, quickly mitigated this crisis (although the fiscal actions fell short of what was needed for a full recovery). But the ECB refused to carry out a comparable expansion policy, and there was no Europe-wide fiscal program in the EU system. So the poor countries were forced to depend for recovery on an “internal devaluation” of cutbacks in mainly social budgets, given that external devaluations for individual countries were ruled out by the use of a common currency, the euro. This didn’t do the job, so the eurozone remained in a depressed state, even up to the present.

Weisbrot shows that this policy failure was deliberate, with the troika leaders–mainly the ECB–taking advantage of the weaker countries’ vulnerability to force on them structural and policy changes that served the interests of the international business elite. These changes, including cutbacks on public outlays for education, health care, social security, and poverty alleviation, mainly harmed ordinary citizens. So did the enforced pro-cyclical monetary and fiscal policies themselves, which produced a eurozone crisis of unemployment and foregone output that extended for six years and is still ongoing. Weisbrot points out that this policy and process was a notable application of Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine,” according to which elites take advantage of painful developments (here macro-distress) to force policy changes that could not be obtained through a democratic process like a national political vote of approval. Weisbrot shows that the troika leaders were quite conscious of the fact that they were pursuing “reforms” that the public wouldn’t support outside of shock conditions.

This process rested on the undemocratic structure of macro-policy-making in the European community. One of neoliberalism’s instruments is an “independent” central bank, where independent means not subject to democratic control. The ECB meets that standard well, more so than the Fed; and in its statute the ECB is only required to meet a price stability objective, so it is free to ignore unemployment and even deliberately increase it. Neoliberal practice is also encouraged by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which placed ceilings on the size of budget deficits and total public debt (3 and 60 percent respectively). These unnecessary ceilings are often breached, but provide levers to put pressure on weaker countries.

The countries victimized by the ECB’s pressure for painful internal devaluation could in theory exit from the euro and rely on expansion via currency devaluation and newly feasible monetary and fiscal expansion. But the risks in the cutoff of aid and money market access and the turmoil in any transition are severe, and although Syriza was voted into power in Greece on an anti-austerity program and pledge, it did not see fit to exit. In this connection Weisbrot discusses the case of Argentina, which, in the midst of a calamitous recession in 2001-2002 did default on its large external debt, ended its peg of the peso to the dollar, froze bank deposit accounts, and installed controls over capital movements. This caused immediate chaos and a worsened crisis, but as Weisbrot stresses, after only a single quarter of further GDP decline (5 percent), freed of its externally imposed constraints, Argentina began its recovery, taking three and a half years to regain its pre-recession level of output, but with real growth of some 100 percent over the next 11 years. Greece, which had a peak GDP loss of 25 percent, and which is still mired in a badly depressed economy, could hardly have fared worse than Argentina if it had exited years ago. Whether that option should still be taken is debatable, and Weisbrot discusses the pros and cons without coming to a definite conclusion, but that an exit might well have a positive result is suggested by the Argentinian experience.

A major theme of Failed is the negative impact of neoliberalism on the growth of low and middle-income countries and the welfare of their people. A major chapter on “The Latin American Spring” features evidence that the triumph of neoliberalism in the years from 1980 to the end of the 1990s was a dismal economic and welfare failure, Per capita GDP growth fell from 3.3. percent per year, 1960-1980 to 0.4 percent 1980-2000, rising again to 1.8 percent in the years 2000-2014. The earlier period (1960-1980) was one of widespread government intervention in the interest of rapid economic development; the middle years were dominated by the triumph of neoliberalism, with widespread imposition of structural adjustment programs under IMF and World Bank auspices, lowering trade and investment barriers, and ruthlessly cutting back development and welfare state programs. The years 2000-2014 saw a resurgence of economic growth, but not up to the pre-Reagan years.

Weisbrot shows that the new spurt in economic growth was closely associated with the victory of leftist governments in quite a few Latin American states, starting in 1998, He also presents a great deal of evidence showing that the growth spurt resulted in major improvements in a range of human welfare indicators, like reduced infant mortality, poverty reduction, more widepread schooling, enlarged pensions, and greater income equality. Thus, for example, the Brazilian poverty rate, which had remained virtually unchanged in the eight neoliberal years before the victory of the Workers Party, saw a 55 percent drop in that rate during the years 2002-2013. Similar changes in this and other welfare measures took place in Ecuador, Bolivia and other Latin states that escaped the neoliberal trap. Although these changes brought improved lives and prospects to millions, Weisbrot points out that the U.S. mainstream has played dumb, refusing to feature and reflect on the significance of this widespread improvement in human welfare and its strange efflorescence associated with the decline in U.S. and IMF-World Bank influence in Latin America.

Weisbrot stresses the importance of democratization and policy space in these growth and welfare improvements. The ECB narrowed that policy space in the eurozone, making it difficult for national leaders to expand or otherwise help improve social conditions. This reflected the weakening of democracy in the eurozone, with the ECB, EC and IMF able to make decisions that local democratic governments would not be able to make. Similarly, the loss of power over Latin governments by the U.S. and IMF following the left political triumphs from 1998, and their record of anti-people actions and other policy failures, made for policy space. So also did the rise of China as an economic power, providing a market for Latin products and loans without political conditions. Weisbrot notes that the common orthodox position that the democratic West would be more likely to help poorer countries develop democracies as compared with what authoritarian China would likely do is fallacious. China lends widely without intervening politically. The United States has a long record of support of undemocratic regimes that will serve as its political instruments and/or provide a “favorable climate of investment.” (This writer’s The Real Terror Network was a dossier of U.S. support of National Security States in Latin America and of its active involvement in many counter-revolutionary “regime changes.”)

It is arguable that an unrecognized benefit of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was their distracting U.S. officials from major efforts to halt the trend toward democratic government in Latin America, although their participation in the attempts at regime change in Venezuela and their successful support of an undemocratic coup in Honduras in 2009 shows that the longstanding anti-democratic policy thrust of the U.S. leadership is not dead. (Mrs. Clinton, of course, fully supported the Honduras coup. So we may see a more energetic pursuit of the traditional U.S. policy of hostility to democracy in Latin America with her election.)

Weisbrot stresses throughout the importance of per capita growth for improving the human condition. A problem with this premise is that the human race may be growing too fast for ecological survival. Weisbrot confronts this issue, arguing that while population growth is a definite negative productivity growth may on balance be a means of coping by increasing food output and lowering the cost of wind turbines, solar panels and other improvements. However, increases in incomes tend to increase the preference for meat, larger houses, and other resource depleters, so that productivity improvements may, on balance, place even more pressure on the environment.

Weisbrot is possibly over-optimistic on this front. But his book is rich in compelling analyses and data that show how the mainstream live in an Alice-In-Wonderland economic world and the important things we may do to escape that Wonderland.

 

Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. Read other articles by Edward.

A Nonviolent Strategy to Liberate Syria

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Editor’s note: While we do not completely agree with the author’s analysis of factors leading to the strife in Syria, we share his desire for greater peace, freedom and stability in the region.

By Robert J. Burrowes

In early 2011, as the Arab Spring was moving across North Africa and the
Middle East, small groups of nonviolent activists in Syria, which has
been under martial law since 1963, started protesting against the brutal
dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and demanding democratic reforms, the
release of political prisoners, an increase in freedoms, abolition of
the emergency law and an end to corruption.

By mid-March these protests, particularly in cities such as Damascus,
Aleppo and Daraa, had escalated and the ‘Day of Rage’ protest on 15
March 2011 is considered by many to mark the start of the nationwide
uprising against the Assad dictatorship. The dictatorship’s reaction to
the protests became violent on 16 March and on 18 March, after Friday
prayers, activists gathered at the al-Omari Mosque in Daraa were
attacked by security forces with water cannons and tear gas, followed by
live fire; four nonviolent activists were killed.

Within months, as the nonviolent protests expanded and spread, the
regime had killed hundreds of activists and arbitrarily arrested
thousands, subjecting many of them to brutal torture in detention. This
pattern has continued unchecked. For the earliest of a succession of
reports that document this regime violence against nonviolent activists,
see the Human Rights Watch report ‘”We’ve Never Seen Such Horror” Crimes
against Humanity by Syrian Security Forces‘.

For the most recent report, see the UN Human Rights Council report ‘Out
of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention in the Syrian Arab Republic‘.

In recent commentaries on the war in Syria, both long-time solidarity
activist Terry Burke – see ‘U.S. Peace Activists Should Start Listening
to Progressive Syrian Voices‘
– and long-term Middle East scholar Professor Stephen Zunes have
encouraged the anti-war movement to listen to Syrian voices in framing
their response, particularly given the tendency within some sections of
it to support ‘the extraordinarily brutal Assad regime – a family
dictatorship rooted in the anti-leftist military wing of the Baath
Party’. See ‘Anti-war movement must listen to voices within Syria’s
civil war’.

One such Syrian voice is that of scholar and nonviolent activist
Professor Mohja Kahf. In her account of the Syrian uprising against the
Assad dictatorship – see ‘Then and Now: The Syrian Revolution to Date. A
young nonviolent resistance and the ensuing armed struggle‘
– Professor Kahf offers the following introductory paragraphs:

‘The Syrian uprising sprang from the country’s grassroots, especially
from youth in their teens, and adults in their twenties and thirties.
They, not seasoned oppositionists, began the uprising, and are its core
population. They share, rather than a particular ideology, a
generational experience of disenfranchisement and brutalization by a
corrupt, repressive, and massively armed ruling elite in Syria.

‘The uprising began nonviolently and the vast majority of its populace
maintained nonviolence as its path to pursue regime change and a
democratic Syria, until an armed flank emerged in August 2011.

‘The Syrian Revolution has morphed. From midsummer to autumn 2011, armed
resistance developed, political bodies formed to represent the
revolution outside Syria, and political Islamists of various sorts
entered the uprising scene. Since then, armed resistance has
overshadowed nonviolent resistance in Syria.

‘…political bodies and support groups for the revolution’s militarized
wing, have become venues for internal power struggles among opposition
factions and individuals, and entry-points for foreign powers attempting
to push their own agendas into a revolution sprung from Syrian
grievances, grown from the spilling of Syrian blood on Syrian soil.

‘Many in the global peace community can no longer discern the Syrian
uprising’s grassroots population through the smoke of armed conflict and
the troubling new actors on the scene. Further, some in the global left
or anti-imperialist camp understand the Syrian revolution only through
the endgame of geopolitics. In such a narrative, the uprising population
is nothing but the proxy of U.S. imperialism.

‘Such critics may acknowledge that the Assad regime is brutal, but
maintain from their armchairs that Syrians must bear this cost, because
this regime has its finger in the dike of U.S. imperialism, Zionism, and
Islamism. Or, perhaps they agree that a revolution against a brutal
dictator is not a bad idea, but wish for a nicer revolution, with better
players. Eyes riveted to their pencils and rulers and idées fixés, such
critics abandon a grassroots population of disenfranchised human beings
demanding basic human freedoms in Syria. This is a stunning and cruel
failure of vision.

‘The voices of the original grassroots revolution of Syria are
nonviolent, nonsectarian, noninterventionist, for the fall of the Assad
regime, and for the rise of a democratic, human rights upholding Syria
that is bound by the rule of law. They are still present in this
revolution. Who will hear them now, after so much dear blood has been
spilled, so much tender flesh crushed under blasted blocks of cement, so
much rightful anger unleashed?’

Other Syrian voices offer a similar account. See, for example, the
recent book by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami titled ‘Burning
Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’
reviewed in ‘Book Review: Burning Country‘.

If Syrians and their solidarity allies are to develop and implement a
successful nonviolent grassroots strategy to end the war in/on Syria and
remove the Assad dictatorship, then we need a sound strategic framework
that guides the comprehensive planning of our strategy. Obviously, there
is no point designing a strategy that is incomplete or cannot be
successful.

A sound strategic framework simply enables us to think and plan
strategically so that once our strategy has been elaborated, it can be
widely shared and clearly understood by everyone involved. It also means
that nonviolent actions can then be implemented because they are known
to have strategic utility and that precise utility is understood in
advance. There is little point taking action at random, especially if
our opponent is powerful and committed (even if that ‘commitment’ is
insane, which is frequently the case).

There is a simple diagram presenting a 12-point strategic framework
illustrated here in the form of the ‘Nonviolent Strategy Wheel‘.

In order to think strategically about nonviolently resolving a violent
conflict, a clearly defined political purpose is needed; that is, a
simple summary statement of ‘what you want’. However, given the
complexity of the multifaceted conflict in the case of Syria, it is
strategically simpler to identify two political purposes. These might be
stated thus: 1. To end the war in/on Syria, and 2. To establish a
democratic form of government in Syria (which, obviously, requires
removal of the dictatorship).

Once the political purpose has been defined, the two strategic aims
(‘how you get what you want’) of the strategy acquire their meaning.
These two strategic aims (which are always the same whatever the
political purpose) are as follows: 1. To increase support for your
campaign by developing a network of groups who can assist you. 2. To
alter the will and undermine the power of those groups who support the
war/dictatorship.

While the two strategic aims are always the same, they are achieved via
a series of intermediate strategic goals which are always specific to
each struggle. To keep this article reasonably straightforward, I have
only identified a set of strategic goals that would be appropriate in
the context of ending the war in/on Syria below. For a basic set of
strategic goals appropriate for ending the dictatorship, see ‘Strategic
Aims‘.

Before listing the strategic goals for ending the war, I wish to
emphasize that I have only briefly discussed two aspects of a
comprehensive strategy to end the war in/on Syria: its political purpose
and its two strategic aims (with its many subsidiary strategic goals).
For the strategy to be effective, all twelve components of the strategic
framework should be planned (and then implemented). See Nonviolent
Defense/Liberation Strategy.
This will require, for example, that tactics that will achieve the
strategic goals must be carefully chosen and implemented bearing in mind
the vital distinction between the political objective and strategic goal
of any such tactic. See ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of
Nonviolent Actions‘.

Strategic goals to end the war in/on Syria

I have outlined a basic list of strategic goals below although, it
should be noted, the list would be considerably longer as individual
organizations should be specified separately.

Many of these strategic goals would usually be tackled by action groups
working in solidarity with Syria campaigning within their own country.
Ideally they would be undertaken by activist groups with existing
expertise in the relevant area (for example, experience in campaigning
against a weapons corporation) but this is not essential.

Of course, individual activist groups would usually accept
responsibility for focusing their work on achieving just one or a few of
the strategic goals (which is why any single campaign within the overall
strategy is readily manageable).

It is the responsibility of the struggle’s strategic leadership to
ensure that each of the strategic goals, which should be identified and
prioritized according to their precise understanding of the
circumstances in Syria, (so, not necessarily precisely as identified
below) is being addressed (or to prioritize if resource limitations
require this).

So here is a set of strategic goals to end the war in/on Syria:

(1) To cause the women in [women’s organizations WO1, WO2, WO…] in Syria
to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your nominated
nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities]. For example, simple nonviolent actions would be to wear a
national symbol (such as a badge of the Syrian revolutionary flag and/or
ribbons in the national colors) and/or to boycott all media outlets
supporting the war. For this item and many items hereafter, see the list
of possible actions that can be taken here: ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action‘.

(2) To cause the workers in [trade unions T1, T2, T…] in Syria to join
the liberation strategy by participating in [your nominated nonviolent
action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities]. For
example, this might include withdrawing their labor from occupations
that support the Syrian military forces.

(3) To cause young people in Syria to resist conscription into the
Syrian military forces.

(4) To cause young people in Syria to refuse recruitment into the Free
Syrian Army, al-Qaeda and its affiliates/allies, the Islamic State
(Daesh) and its allies.

(5) To cause the members of [religious denominations R1, R2, R…] in
Syria to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your
nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities].

(6) To cause the members of [ethnic communities EC1, EC2, EC…] in Syria
to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your nominated
nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities].

(7) To cause the activists, artists, musicians, intellectuals and other
key social groups in [organizations O1, O2, O…] in Syria to join the
liberation strategy by participating in [your nominated nonviolent
action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities].

(8) To cause the students in [student organizations S1, S2, S…] in Syria
to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your nominated
nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities].

(9) To cause the soldiers in [military units M1, M2, M…] to refuse to
obey orders from the dictatorship to arrest, assault, torture and shoot
nonviolent activists and the other citizens of Syria.

(10) To cause the police in [police units P1, P2, P…] to refuse to obey
orders from the dictatorship to arrest, assault, torture and shoot
nonviolent activists and the other citizens of Syria.

(11) To cause young people in [the US, NATO countries, Russia and other
countries fighting in Syria] to refuse recruitment into their respective
military forces.

(12) To cause conscripts into the military forces of [NATO countries,
Russia and other countries fighting in Syria] that still use
conscription to conscientiously refuse to perform military duties.

(13) To cause military personnel in the military forces of [the US, NATO
countries, Russia and other countries fighting in Syria] to refuse
deployment to the war in/on Syria.

(14) To cause young people in [your country] to refuse recruitment into
the Free Syrian Army, al-Qaeda and its affiliates/allies, the Islamic
State (Daesh) and its allies.

(15) To cause former soldiers in [your country] to refuse recruitment as
mercenaries by corporations that supply ‘military contractors’ to fight
in Syria.

(16) To cause the activists in [peace groups P1, P2, P…] in [your
town/city/country] to resist the war on Syria by encouraging their
members to boycott [all/specified nonmilitary products] of [weapons
corporations W1, W2, W…]. For example, this might include boycotting all
commercial flights that use Boeing and Airbus passenger aircraft given
the heavy involvement of these corporations in the production of
military aircraft.

(17) To cause the activists in [environment groups E1, E2, E…] in [your
town/city/country] to resist the war on Syria by encouraging their
members to boycott [all/specified nonmilitary products] of [weapons
corporations W1, W2, W…]. For example, this might including boycotting
all commercial products of General Electric given the heavy involvement
of this corporation in the production of military engines, systems and
services.

(18) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T1,
T2, T….] in [your town/city/country] to resist the war on Syria by
encouraging their members to boycott [all/specified nonmilitary
products] of [weapons corporations W1, W2, W…].

(19) To cause the women in [women’s organizations WO1, WO2, WO…] in
[your town/city/country] to resist the war on Syria by encouraging their
members to boycott [all/specified nonmilitary products] of [weapons
corporations W1, W2, W…].

(20) To cause the members of [religious denominations R1, R2, R…] in
[your town/city/country] to resist the war on Syria by encouraging their
members to boycott [all/specified nonmilitary products] of [weapons
corporations W1, W2, W…].

(21) To cause the members of [ethnic communities EC4, EC5, EC…] in [your
town/city/country] to resist the war on Syria by encouraging their
members to boycott [all/specified nonmilitary products] of [weapons
corporations W1, W2, W…].

(22) To cause the artists, musicians, intellectuals and other key social
groups in [organizations O4, O5, O…] in [your town/city/country] to
resist the war on Syria by encouraging their members to boycott
[all/specified nonmilitary products] of [weapons corporations W1, W2,
W…].

(23) To cause the students in [student organizations S1, S2, S…] in
[your town/city/country] to resist the war on Syria by encouraging their
members to boycott [all/specified nonmilitary products] of [weapons
corporations W1, W2, W…].

(24) To cause the consumers in [your town/city/country] to resist the
war on Syria by boycotting [all/specified nonmilitary products] of
[weapons corporations W1, W2, W…].

(25) To cause more individuals in [your town/city/country] to resist the
war on Syria by conscientiously resisting paying [part/all] of their
taxes for war.

(26) To cause more organizations in [your town/city/country] to resist
the war on Syria by conscientiously resisting paying [part/all] of their
taxes for war.

(27) To cause [weapons corporations W4, W5, W…] to convert from the
manufacture of military weapons to [the specified/negotiated
socially/environmentally beneficial products].

(28) To cause [banks B1, B2, B…] to cease financing the weapons
industry.

(29) To cause bank customers to shift their deposits to ethical banks
and credit unions that do not finance (or are otherwise involved in) the
weapons industry.

(30) To cause [religious organizations R4, R5, R…] to divest from the
weapons industry.

(31) To cause [superannuation funds S1, S2, S…] to divest from the
weapons industry.

(32) To cause superannuation fund customers to shift their money to
ethical funds that do not finance (or are otherwise involved in) the
weapons industry.

(33) To cause [insurance companies I1, I2, I…] to divest from the
weapons industry.

(34) To cause insurance customers to shift their policies to ethical
insurance companies that do not finance (or are otherwise involved in)
the weapons industry.

(35) To cause [corporations C1, C2, C…] that provide
[services/components] for [weapons corporations W1, W2, W…] to cease
doing so.

(36) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T4,
T5, T…] to withdraw their labor from [weapons corporations W1, W2, W…]
[partially/wholly], [temporarily/permanently].

(37) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T7,
T8, T…] to withdraw their labor from [corporations C1, C2, C…]
[partially/wholly], [temporarily/permanently].

(38) To cause [corporations C4, C5, C…] that provides
[services/supplies] to [military bases MB1, MB2, MB…] to cease doing so.

(39) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T10,
T11, T…] who work in/supply [military bases MB1, MB2, MB…] to withdraw
their labor [partially/wholly], [temporarily/permanently].

(40) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T13,
T14, T…] to withdraw their labor from [corporations C4, C5, C…]
[partially/wholly], [temporarily/permanently].

(41) To cause [corporations C7, C8, C…] that manufacture and supply spy
satellites for military purposes to cease doing so.

(42) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T16,
T17, T…] to withdraw their labor from [corporations C7, C8, C…]
[partially/wholly], [temporarily/permanently].

(43) To cause [corporations C10, C11, C…] that provide
[services/components] for the militarization of space to cease doing so.

(44) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T19,
T20, T…] to withdraw their labor from [corporations C10, C11, C…]
[partially/wholly], [temporarily/permanently].

(45) To cause [corporations C13, C14, C…] that provide private military
contractors (mercenaries) to fight in wars to cease doing so.

(46) To cause the private military contractors (mercenaries) who fight
in wars to withdraw their labor from [corporations C13, C14, C…].

(47) To cause the soldiers in [military units M1, M2, M…] in [your
town/city/country] to refuse to obey orders to [arrest, assault, torture
and shoot, depending on your local circumstances] nonviolent activists
campaigning against the war.

(48) To cause the police in [police units P1, P2, P…] in [your
town/city/country] to refuse to obey orders to [arrest, assault, torture
and shoot, depending on your local circumstances] nonviolent activists
campaigning against the war.

(49) To cause individual members of the military forces at [Military
Base MB1/Drone Base DB1/Navy Ship NS1/Air Force Base AFB1/Army unit
AU1/Marines unit MU1] in [your town/city/country] to resign.

(50) To cause individual members of those corporations that
employ/supply private military contractors (mercenaries) to resign.

As you can see, the two strategic aims are achieved via a series of
intermediate strategic goals.

Not all of the strategic goals will need to be achieved for the strategy
to be successful but each goal is focused in such a way that its
achievement functionally undermines the power of those conducting the
war.

The difference between success and failure in any struggle is the
soundness of the strategy.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.netand his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Why Okinawa Should Matter

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By Richard Falk

Source: Foreign Policy Journal

Okinawa has been a mostly unhappy host of American military bases, and the issue has been prominent at times on the agenda of the Japanese peace movement.

When President Barack Obama visited Hiroshima in May of 2016, there was an effort to persuade him to put Okinawa on his travel itinerary, but as has happened frequently throughout the long tortured history of Okinawa, the request was ignored, and the people of the island were once more disappointed. In an important sense, Okinawa is the most shameful legacy of Japan’s defeat in World War II, exceeding even the sites of the atomic attacks by its daily reminders of a continued colonialist encroachment on Okinawan national dignity and wellbeing.

Actually, Okinawa is being victimized by overlapping exploitations with that of the United States reinforced and legitimized by mainland Japan. For the United States, Okinawa serves as a hub for its strategic military operations throughout the Pacific, with at least 14 separate military bases occupying about 20% of the island. Kadena Air Base was used for B-29 bombing missions during the Korean War more than a half century ago, and the island was used as a major staging area throughout the Vietnam War. It has also been used as a secret site for the deployment of as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads in defiance of Japanese declared no-nukes policy. Actually, in recent years Okinawa rarely receives global news coverage except when there occurs a sex crime by American servicemen that provokes local outrage and peaceful mass demonstrations followed by the strained apologies of local American military commanders.

Japan’s role in the misfortunes of Okinawa is more than one of a passive acceptance of the enduring side effects of its defeat and humiliation in World War II. After a series of military incursions, Japan finally conquered Okinawa and the Ryukyu island chain of which it is a part in 1879, and then imposed its rule in ways that suppressed the culture, traditions, and even the language of the native populations of the islands. What is virtually unknown in the West is that Okinawa was the scene of the culminating catastrophic land battle between the United States and Japan in the spring of 1945 that resulted in the death of an astounding one-third of the island’s civilian population of then 300,000 and its subsequent harsh military administration by the United States for the next 27 years until the island was finally turned back to Japan in 1972. Despite an estimated 60-80% of Okinawans being opposed to the U.S. bases, confirmed by the recent election of an anti-bases governor of prefecture, the government in Tokyo, currently headed by a dangerous militarist, Shinzo Abe, is comfortable with the status quo, which allows most of the unpopular continuing American military presence to be centered outside of mainland Japan, and hence no longer a serious political irritant within the country.

What the plight of Okinawans exemplifies is the tragic ordeal of a small island society, which because of its small population and size, entrapment within Japan, and geopolitical significance, failed to be included in the decolonizing agenda that was pursued around the world with such success in the last half of the 20th century. This tragic fate that has befallen Okinawa and its people results from being a ‘colony’ in a post-colonial era. Its smallness of current population (1.4 million) combined with its enclosure within Japanese sovereign statehood and its role in pursuing the Asian strategic interests of the United States, as well as joint military operations with Japan make it captive of a militarized world order that refuses to acknowledge the supposedly inalienable right of self-determination, an entitlement of all peoples according to common Article 1 of both human rights covenants. In this respect, Okinawa, from a global perspective, is a forgotten remnant of the colonial past, which means it is subjugated and irrelevant from the perspective of a state-centric world order. In this respect, it bears a kinship with such other forgotten peoples as those living in Kashmir, Chechnya, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Palau, Marianas Islands, among many others.

There are other ways of being forgotten. I have for many years been concerned about the Palestinian ordeal, another geopolitical and historical casualty of Euro-American priorities and the colonialist legacy. Here, too, the indigenous population of Palestine has endured decades of suffering, denials of basic rights, and a dynamic of victimization initiated a century ago when the British Foreign Office issued the Balfour Declaration pledging support to the world Zionist movement for the establishment of a Jewish Homeland in historic Palestine, later placed under the tutorial role of the United Kingdom with the formal blessings of the League of Nations until the end of World War II. Instead of Japan playing the intermediate role as in Okinawa, it is Israel that pursues its own interests and teams with the United States and Europe as a strategic partner to carry forward its shared geopolitical goals throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Of course, there are crucial differences. Japan is constrained as a partner by its postwar peace constitution, which Abe is keen to circumvent and dilute, while Israel has become a military powerhouse in the region, enjoying a special relationship with the United States that includes the incredible assurance by Washington of a military capability capable of defeating any foreseeable combination of Arab adversaries. Also, unlike Okinawa, there are no American military bases in Israel. There is no need for them. Israel acts as an American surrogate, and sometimes even vice versa. Yet the result is the same—force projection unconnected with self-defense, but vital for upholding regional strategic interests that involve maintaining a visible military presence and offering allies in the region credible promises of protection.

When we raise questions about the future of Okinawa, we come face to face with the role and responsibility of global civil society. The Palestinian goals appear to remain more ambitious than those of the Okinawans, although such an impression could be misleading. The Palestinian movement is centered upon realizing the right of self-determination, which means at the very least an end to occupation and a diplomacy that achieves a comprehensive, sustainable, and just peace. For Okinawans, long integrated into the Japanese state, earlier dreams of independence seem to have faded, and the focus of political energy is currently devoted to the anti-bases campaign. Taking moral globalization seriously means conceiving of citizenship as borderless with respect to space and time, an overall identity I have described elsewhere under the label ‘citizen pilgrim,’ someone on a life journey to build a better future by addressing the injustices of the present wherever encountered.

In this respect, acting as citizen pilgrims means giving attention to injustices that the world as a whole treats as invisible except when an awkward incident of lethal abuse occurs. Okinawa has been effectively swept under the dual rugs of statism (Okinawa is part of the sovereign state of Japan) and geopolitics (Okinawa offers the United States indispensable military bases), and even the mainly Japanese peace movement may have grown fatigued and distracted, being currently preoccupied with its opposition to the revival of Japanese militarism under Abe’s leadership. Whether attention to the plight of Okinawa will give rise to false hopes is a concern, but the aspiration is to produce an empowering recognition throughout the world that for some peoples the struggle against colonialism remains a present reality rather than a heroic memory that can be annually celebrated as an independence day holiday. Until we in the United States stand in active solidarity with such victims of colonialist governance we will never know whether more can be done to improve prospects of their emancipation. This awareness and allegiance is the very least that we can do if we are to act in the spirit of a citizen pilgrimage.

 

This article was originally published at RichardFalk.Wordpress.com. An earlier version first appeared in the Japanese publication Ryukyu Shimpo.

 

The real Hunger Games: the Capitalist recipe to maximise profits while ‘having fun’

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By Sky Wanderer

Source: Investment Watch

Introduce a political economy upon the arbitrary axiom that Capitalism is the one and only economic system for mankind, and introduce a narcissistic moral philosophy that you as a Capitalist represent unsurpassable objective moral virtues.

You as a Capitalist hire politicians to implement policy as per your moral and economic philosophy and redefine ‘democracy’ as the political system to sustain Capitalism. Then from such position of self-established authority, abolish unions and all labour-representation, thus force your employees into a race-to-the-bottom contest to compete for jobs by accepting lower and lower wages.

Give decent jobs and benefits to only those who belong to your noble circles. For everyone else reintroduce slavery in the form of “workfare”. The goal is that you pay the lowest wages for jobs done by the fittest slaves, who will survive the contest. If you wish, you can call the contest “real Hunger Games”.

To speed up the process, extend the race-to-the-bottom into global scope so that you will have access to the cheapest and fittest labour everywhere on the planet. Never mind that your slaves will have to live out of a suitcase and every time when you lay them off and labour demand calls them elsewhere, they will have to relocate to yet another continent.

To further accelerate the process, make good use of your 3rd-world colonies, your Mideast colonising wars and your secretly sponsored mercenaries (ISIS). Via your “leftist” assistants, organise a massive refugee crisis to import the cheapest possible workforce via your war-refugees and economic migrants. These migrants are the fittest contestants who – glad just to escape your bombs – will worship you as their saviours and will work for you for literally zero payment. The migrants will not only boost your profits to sky-high levels but will rapidly pull down the overall wages of your domestic employees.

Meanwhile keep increasing the prices so your slaves can’t pay for food, energy, heat and shelter from their next-to-zero incomes. If some of them attempt to survive by taking bank-loans to acquire shelter, education and meet other basic needs, but they can’t repay the loans from their low incomes, you can just evict them from their homes via your banks.

When you made them homeless this way, make sure their ugly presence won’t spoil the beauty of your city. Install pretty anti-homeless spikes, so when they crush onto the pavement they will die, and you can just collect their bodies. To project your capitalist moral virtues into eternity, incorporate the beauty of your anti-homeless spikes into the modern concept of art and beauty.

Introduce private banking to enable yourself to creating new money when you wish. This way you can easily indebt the entire society, soon you can even purchase the whole planet.

Meanwhile dismantle public healthcare, so those of your slaves who are still alive but get sick, will die without treatment. Eliminate (privatise) all affordable public services, destroy the public sphere, abolish all public spaces and welfare benefits. To have a dandy excuse for such policy, make sure to keep the country in ever increasing debt by taking countless £ billions of government loans, and transfer the responsibility of these odious debts onto your slaves. Refer to these debts as the reason for the crisis, then refer to the crisis as the reason for these debts, then refer to the debts and the crisis as the reason for austerity and spending cuts. Then you can increase the public debt again and continue the same loop ad infinitum.

Make sure your very own mainstream media and academia would never reveal the truth that the never-ending crisis and mass-unemployment are due to your private banking and debt- and profit-mongering dysfunctional capitalist system, and keep the real disastrous indicators of the state of economy in secret.

Instead of admitting the truth, use the divide et impera strategy to make your victims blame themselves and one another. To increase the fun, produce reality shows where the still active part of your slaves will blame the disabled and the unemployed, meanwhile make the local poor blame the immigrant poor for the overall misery that you inflicted. Then establish offices where the local poor dressed as fancy clerks will evict the immigrant poor, meanwhile watch how all of them are begging for their lives until they give up and commit suicide.

Enjoy!

How Does Corporate Media Manufacture False Narratives?

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By Nauman Sadiq

Source: RINF

What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the effect of poverty, backwardness and disenfranchisement.

Empirically speaking, if we take all the other aggravating factors out: like poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, social injustice, disenfranchisement, conflict, instability, deliberate training and arming of certain militant groups by the regional and global players, and more importantly grievances against the duplicitous Western foreign policy, I don’t think that Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the likes would get the abundant supply of foot soldiers that they are getting now in the troubled regions of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

Moreover, I do concede that the rallying cry of “Jihad in the way of God” might have been one reason for the abundant supply of foot soldiers to the jihadists’ cause, but on an emotional level it is the self-serving and hypocritical Western interventionist policy in the energy-rich Middle East that adds fuel to the fire. When Muslims all over the Islamic countries see that their brothers-in-faith are dying in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, on an emotional level they feel outraged and seek vengeance and justice.

This emotional outrage, in my opinion, is a far more potent factor than the sterile rational argument of God’s supposed command to fight holy wars against the infidels. If we take all the other contributing factors, that I have mentioned in the second paragraph out of the equation, I don’t think that Muslims are some “exceptional” variety of human beings who are hell-bent on killing the heretics all over the world.

Notwithstanding, it’s very easy to distinguish between the victims of structural injustices and the beneficiaries of the existing neocolonial economic order all over the world. But instead of using words that can be interpreted subjectively I’ll let the figures do the talking. Pakistan’s total GDP is only $270 billion and with a population of 200 million it amounts to a per capita income of only $1400. While the US’ GDP is $18 trillion and per capita income is in excess of $50,000. Similarly the per capita income of most countries in the Western Europe is also around $40,000. That’s a difference of 40 to 50 TIMES between the incomes of Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, i.e. the Western powers.

Only the defense budget of the Pentagon is $600 billion, which is three times the size of Pakistan’s total GDP. A single multi-national corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world owns assets in excess of $200 billion which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such business conglomerates are: Investment banks – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC, BNP Paribas; Oil majors – Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, RDS, Total, Vitol; Manufacturers – Apple, Microsoft and Google.

On top of that, semi-legit wealth from all over the world flows into the Western commercial and investment banks: last year there was a report that the Russian oligarchs have deposited $800 billion in the Western banks, while the Chinese entrepreneurs have deposited $1.5 trillion in the Western financial institutions.

Moreover, in April this year the Saudi finance minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets if Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. And $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add up Saudi investment in Western Europe, and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in the US and Western Europe.

The first and foremost priority of the Western powers is to save their Corporate Empire, and especially their financial institutions, from collapsing; everything else like eliminating terrorism, promoting democracy and “responsibility to protect” are merely arranged side shows to justify their interventionist foreign policy, especially in the energy-rich Middle East.

Additionally, the irony is that the neoliberal dupes of the mainstream media justify and validate the unfair practices of the neocolonial powers and hold the victims of structural injustices responsible for their misfortunes. If a Third World’s laborer has been forced to live on less than $5 a day and a corporate executive sits in the Wall Street on top of $18 trillion business empire, neoliberals are okay with this travesty.

However, we need to understand that how does a neoliberal mindset is structured? As we know that mass education programs and mass media engender mass ideologies. We like to believe that we are free to think, but we aren’t. Our narratives aren’t really “our” narratives. These narratives of injustice and inequality have been constructed for the public consumption by the corporate media, which is nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments and the business interests.

Media is our eyes and ears through which we get all the inputs and it is also our brain through which we interpret raw data. If media keeps mum over some vital structural injustices and blows out of proportion some isolated incidents of injustice and violence, we are likely to forget all about the former and focus all of our energies on the tangential issues which the media portrays as the “real” ones.

Monopoly capitalism and the global neocolonial economic order are the real issues while Islamic radicalism and terrorism are the secondary issues and itself an adverse reaction to the former. That’s how the mainstream media constructs artificial narratives and dupes its audience into believing the absurd: during the Cold War it created the “Red Scare” and told us that communism is an existential threat to the free world and the Western way of life. We bought this narrative.

Then the West and its Saudi and Pakistani collaborators financed, trained and armed the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” and used them as their proxies against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they declared the former “freedom fighters” to be terrorists and another existential threat to the “free world” and the Western way of life. We again bought this narrative.

And finally, during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars the former terrorists once again became freedom fighters – albeit in a more nuanced manner, this time around the corporate media sells them as “moderate rebels.” And the lobotomized neoliberal audience of the mainstream media is once again willing to buy this narrative, how ironic?

 

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and MENA regions, neocolonialism and Petroimperialism.

The Age of Disintegration

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Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World

By Patrick Cockburn

Source: TomDispatch.com

We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover. Cities like Aleppo in Syria, Ramadi in Iraq, Taiz in Yemen, and Benghazi in Libya have been partly or entirely reduced to ruins. There are also at least three other serious insurgencies: in southeast Turkey, where Kurdish guerrillas are fighting the Turkish army, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where a little-reported but ferocious guerrilla conflict is underway, and in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries where Boko Haram continues to launch murderous attacks.

All of these have a number of things in common: they are endless and seem never to produce definitive winners or losers. (Afghanistan has effectively been at war since 1979, Somalia since 1991.) They involve the destruction or dismemberment of unified nations, their de facto partition amid mass population movements and upheavals — well publicized in the case of Syria and Iraq, less so in places like South Sudan where more than 2.4 million people have been displaced in recent years.

Add in one more similarity, no less crucial for being obvious: in most of these countries, where Islam is the dominant religion, extreme Salafi-Jihadi movements, including the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are essentially the only available vehicles for protest and rebellion. By now, they have completely replaced the socialist and nationalist movements that predominated in the twentieth century; these years have, that is, seen a remarkable reversion to religious, ethnic, and tribal identity, to movements that seek to establish their own exclusive territory by the persecution and expulsion of minorities.

In the process and under the pressure of outside military intervention, a vast region of the planet seems to be cracking open. Yet there is very little understanding of these processes in Washington. This was recently well illustrated by the protest of 51 State Department diplomats against President Obama’s Syrian policy and their suggestion that air strikes be launched targeting Syrian regime forces in the belief that President Bashar al-Assad would then abide by a ceasefire. The diplomats’ approach remains typically simpleminded in this most complex of conflicts, assuming as it does that the Syrian government’s barrel-bombing of civilians and other grim acts are the “root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region.”

It is as if the minds of these diplomats were still in the Cold War era, as if they were still fighting the Soviet Union and its allies. Against all the evidence of the last five years, there is an assumption that a barely extant moderate Syrian opposition would benefit from the fall of Assad, and a lack of understanding that the armed opposition in Syria is entirely dominated by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda clones.

Though the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is now widely admitted to have been a mistake (even by those who supported it at the time), no real lessons have been learned about why direct or indirect military interventions by the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East over the last quarter century have all only exacerbated violence and accelerated state failure.

A Mass Extinction of Independent States

The Islamic State, just celebrating its second anniversary, is the grotesque outcome of this era of chaos and conflict. That such a monstrous cult exists at all is a symptom of the deep dislocation societies throughout that region, ruled by corrupt and discredited elites, have suffered. Its rise — and that of various Taliban and al-Qaeda-style clones — is a measure of the weakness of its opponents.

The Iraqi army and security forces, for example, had 350,000 soldiers and 660,000 police on the books in June 2014 when a few thousand Islamic State fighters captured Mosul, the country’s second largest city, which they still hold. Today the Iraqi army, security services, and about 20,000 Shia paramilitaries backed by the massive firepower of the United States and allied air forces have fought their way into the city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, against the resistance of IS fighters who may have numbered as few as 900. In Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban, supposedly decisively defeated in 2001, came about less because of the popularity of that movement than the contempt with which Afghans came to regard their corrupt government in Kabul.

Everywhere nation states are enfeebled or collapsing, as authoritarian leaders battle for survival in the face of mounting external and internal pressures. This is hardly the way the region was expected to develop. Countries that had escaped from colonial rule in the second half of the twentieth century were supposed to become more, not less, unified as time passed.

Between 1950 and 1975, nationalist leaders came to power in much of the previously colonized world. They promised to achieve national self-determination by creating powerful independent states through the concentration of whatever political, military, and economic resources were at hand. Instead, over the decades, many of these regimes transmuted into police states controlled by small numbers of staggeringly wealthy families and a coterie of businessmen dependent on their connections to such leaders as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

In recent years, such countries were also opened up to the economic whirlwind of neoliberalism, which destroyed any crude social contract that existed between rulers and ruled. Take Syria. There, rural towns and villages that had once supported the Baathist regime of the al-Assad family because it provided jobs and kept the prices of necessities low were, after 2000, abandoned to market forces skewed in favor of those in power. These places would become the backbone of the post-2011 uprising. At the same time, institutions like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that had done so much to enhance the wealth and power of regional oil producers in the 1970s have lost their capacity for united action.

The question for our moment: Why is a “mass extinction” of independent states taking place in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond? Western politicians and media often refer to such countries as “failed states.” The implication embedded in that term is that the process is a self-destructive one. But several of the states now labeled “failed” like Libya only became so after Western-backed opposition movements seized power with the support and military intervention of Washington and NATO, and proved too weak to impose their own central governments and so a monopoly of violence within the national territory.

In many ways, this process began with the intervention of a U.S.-led coalition in Iraq in 2003 leading to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the shutting down of his Baathist Party, and the disbanding of his military. Whatever their faults, Saddam and Libya’s autocratic ruler Muammar Gaddafi were clearly demonized and blamed for all ethnic, sectarian, and regional differences in the countries they ruled, forces that were, in fact, set loose in grim ways upon their deaths.

A question remains, however: Why did the opposition to autocracy and to Western intervention take on an Islamic form and why were the Islamic movements that came to dominate the armed resistance in Iraq and Syria in particular so violent, regressive, and sectarian? Put another way, how could such groups find so many people willing to die for their causes, while their opponents found so few? When IS battle groups were sweeping through northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, soldiers who had thrown aside their uniforms and weapons and deserted that country’s northern cities would justify their flight by saying derisively: “Die for [then-Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki? Never!”

A common explanation for the rise of Islamic resistance movements is that the socialist, secularist, and nationalist opposition had been crushed by the old regimes’ security forces, while the Islamists were not. In countries like Libya and Syria, however, Islamists were savagely persecuted, too, and they still came to dominate the opposition. And yet, while these religious movements were strong enough to oppose governments, they generally have not proven strong enough to replace them.

Too Weak to Win, But Too Strong to Lose

Though there are clearly many reasons for the present disintegration of states and they differ somewhat from place to place, one thing is beyond question: the phenomenon itself is becoming the norm across vast reaches of the planet.

If you’re looking for the causes of state failure in our time, the place to start is undoubtedly with the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago. Once it was over, neither the U.S. nor the new Russia that emerged from the Soviet Union’s implosion had a significant interest in continuing to prop up “failed states,” as each had for so long, fearing that the rival superpower and its local proxies would otherwise take over. Previously, national leaders in places like the Greater Middle East had been able to maintain a degree of independence for their countries by balancing between Moscow and Washington. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, this was no longer feasible.

In addition, the triumph of neoliberal free-market economics in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse added a critical element to the mix. It would prove far more destabilizing than it looked at the time.

Again, consider Syria. The expansion of the free market in a country where there was neither democratic accountability nor the rule of law meant one thing above all: plutocrats linked to the nation’s ruling family took anything that seemed potentially profitable. In the process, they grew staggeringly wealthy, while the denizens of Syria’s impoverished villages, country towns, and city slums, who had once looked to the state for jobs and cheap food, suffered. It should have surprised no one that those places became the strongholds of the Syrian uprising after 2011. In the capital, Damascus, as the reign of neoliberalism spread, even the lesser members of the mukhabarat, or secret police, found themselves living on only $200 to $300 a month, while the state became a machine for thievery.

This sort of thievery and the auctioning off of the nation’s patrimony spread across the region in these years. The new Egyptian ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, merciless toward any sign of domestic dissent, was typical. In a country that once had been a standard bearer for nationalist regimes the world over, he didn’t hesitate this April to try to hand over two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia on whose funding and aid his regime is dependent. (To the surprise of everyone, an Egyptian court recently overruled Sisi’s decision.)

That gesture, deeply unpopular among increasingly impoverished Egyptians, was symbolic of a larger change in the balance of power in the Middle East: once the most powerful states in the region — Egypt, Syria, and Iraq — had been secular nationalists and a genuine counterbalance to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies. As those secular autocracies weakened, however, the power and influence of the Sunni fundamentalist monarchies only increased. If 2011 saw rebellion and revolution spread across the Greater Middle East as the Arab Spring briefly blossomed, it also saw counterrevolution spread, funded by those oil-rich absolute Gulf monarchies, which were never going to tolerate democratic secular regime change in Syria or Libya.

Add in one more process at work making such states ever more fragile: the production and sale of natural resources — oil, gas, and minerals — and the kleptomania that goes with it. Such countries often suffer from what has become known as “the resources curse”: states increasingly dependent for revenues on the sale of their natural resources — enough to theoretically provide the whole population with a reasonably decent standard of living — turn instead into grotesquely corrupt dictatorships. In them, the yachts of local billionaires with crucial connections to the regime of the moment bob in harbors surrounded by slums running with raw sewage. In such nations, politics tends to focus on elites battling and maneuvering to steal state revenues and transfer them as rapidly as possible out of the country.

This has been the pattern of economic and political life in much of sub-Saharan Africa from Angola to Nigeria. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, a somewhat different system exists, one usually misunderstood by the outside world. There is similarly great inequality in Iraq or Saudi Arabia with similarly kleptocratic elites. They have, however, ruled over patronage states in which a significant part of the population is offered jobs in the public sector in return for political passivity or support for the kleptocrats.

In Iraq with a population of 33 million people, for instance, no less than seven million of them are on the government payroll, thanks to salaries or pensions that cost the government $4 billion a month. This crude way of distributing oil revenues to the people has often been denounced by Western commentators and economists as corruption. They, in turn, generally recommend cutting the number of these jobs, but this would mean that all, rather than just part, of the state’s resource revenues would be stolen by the elite. This, in fact, is increasingly the case in such lands as oil prices bottom out and even the Saudi royals begin to cut back on state support for the populace.

Neoliberalism was once believed to be the path to secular democracy and free-market economies. In practice, it has been anything but. Instead, in conjunction with the resource curse, as well as repeated military interventions by Washington and its allies, free-market economics has profoundly destabilized the Greater Middle East. Encouraged by Washington and Brussels, twenty-first-century neoliberalism has made unequal societies ever more unequal and helped transform already corrupt regimes into looting machines. This is also, of course, a formula for the success of the Islamic State or any other radical alternative to the status quo. Such movements are bound to find support in impoverished or neglected regions like eastern Syria or eastern Libya.

Note, however, that this process of destabilization is by no means confined to the Greater Middle East and North Africa. We are indeed in the age of destabilization, a phenomenon that is on the rise globally and at present spreading into the Balkans and Eastern Europe (with the European Union ever less able to influence events there). People no longer speak of European integration, but of how to prevent the complete break-up of the European Union in the wake of the British vote to leave.

The reasons why a narrow majority of Britons voted for Brexit have parallels with the Middle East: the free-market economic policies pursued by governments since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister have widened the gap between rich and poor and between wealthy cities and much of the rest of the country. Britain might be doing well, but millions of Britons did not share in the prosperity. The referendum about continued membership in the European Union, the option almost universally advocated by the British establishment, became the catalyst for protest against the status quo. The anger of the “Leave” voters has much in common with that of Donald Trump supporters in the United States.

The U.S. remains a superpower, but is no longer as powerful as it once was. It, too, is feeling the strains of this global moment, in which it and its local allies are powerful enough to imagine they can get rid of regimes they do not like, but either they do not quite succeed, as in Syria, or succeed but cannot replace what they have destroyed, as in Libya. An Iraqi politician once said that the problem in his country was that parties and movements were “too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of instability that has already begun.

 

Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London and the author of five books on the Middle East, the latest of which isChaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East(OR Books).

The Odor of Desperation

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

It must be obvious even to nine-year-old casual observers of the scene that the US national election is hacking itself. It doesn’t require hacking assistance from any other entity. The two major parties could not have found worse candidates for president, and the struggle between them has turned into the most sordid public spectacle in US electoral history.

Of course, the Russian hacking blame-game story emanates from the security apparatus controlled by a Democratic Party executive establishment desperate to preserve its perks and privileges . (I write as a still-registered-but-disaffected Democrat). The reams of released emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and other figures in HRC’s employ, depict a record of tactical mendacity, a gleeful eagerness to lie to the public, and a disregard for the world’s opinion that are plenty bad enough on their own. And Trump’s own fantastic gift for blunder could hardly be improved on by a meddling foreign power. The US political system is blowing itself to pieces.

I say this with the understanding that political systems are emergent phenomena with the primary goal of maintaining their control on the agencies of power at all costs. That is, it’s natural for a polity to fight for its own survival. But the fact that the US polity now so desperately has to fight for survival shows how frail its legitimacy is. It wouldn’t take much to shove it off a precipice into a new kind of civil war much more confusing and irresolvable than the one we went through in the 1860s.

Events and circumstances are driving the US insane literally. We can’t construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us and therefore we can’t form a set of coherent plans for doing anything about it. The main event is that our debt has far exceeded our ability to produce enough new wealth to service the debt, and our attempts to work around it with Federal Reserve accounting fraud only makes the problem worse day by day and hour by hour. All of it tends to undermine both national morale and living standards, while it shoves us into the crisis I call the long emergency.

It’s hard to see how Russia benefits from America becoming the Mad Bull of a floundering global economy. Rather, the Evil Russia meme seems a projection of our country’s own insecurities and contradictions. For instance, we seem to think that keeping Syria viciously destabilized is preferable to allowing its legitimate government to restore some kind of order there. Russia has been on the scene attempting to prop up the Assad government while we are on the scene there doing everything possible to keep a variety of contestants in a state of incessant war. US policy in Syria has been both incoherent and tragically damaging to the Syrians.

The Russians stood aside while the US smashed up Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We demonstrated adequately that shoving sovereign nations into civic failure is not the best way to resolve geopolitical tensions. Why would it be such a bad thing for the US to stand aside in Syria and see if the Russians can rescue that country from failure? Because they might keep a naval base there on the Mediterranean? We have scores of military bases around the region.

It’s actually pretty easy to understand why the Russians might be paranoid about America’s intentions. We use NATO to run threatening military maneuvers near Russia’s borders. We provoked Ukraine — formerly a province of the Soviet state — to become a nearly failed state, and then we complained foolishly about the Russian annexation of Crimea — also a former territory of the Soviet state and of imperial Russia going back centuries. We slapped sanctions on Russia, making it difficult for them to participate in international banking and commerce.

What’s really comical is the idea that Russia is using the Internet to mess with our affairs — as if the USA has no cyber-warfare ambitions or ongoing operations against them (and others, such as hacking Angela Merkel’s personal phone). News flash: every country with access to the Internet is in full hacking mode around the clock against every other country so engaged. Everybody’s doing it. It is perhaps a projection of America’s ongoing rape hysteria that we think we’re special victims of this universal activity.

 

Related Article:

Update from Craig Murray: “I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is not any Russian state actor or proxy that gave the Democratic National Committee and Podesta material to WikiLeaks.”

Obama Fears Backlash from Saudi 9/11 Bill — So What?

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By Klaus Marre

Source: Who.What.Why.

Only an idiot would sign an order triggering a process that ends up with them in court. President Barack Obama is not an idiot and that is why he vetoed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).

The legislation, which allows victims of terror attacks on US soil to sue foreign governments, was very popular in Congress where lawmakers did not want to seem unpatriotic ahead of the election. That is why, to Obama’s great disappointment and consternation, Congress overrode the veto — and immediately showed buyer’s remorse.

Specifically, its purpose is as follows:

The purpose of this Act is to provide civil litigants with the broadest possible basis, consistent with the Constitution of the United States, to seek relief against persons, entities, and foreign countries, wherever acting and wherever they may be found, that have provided material support, directly or indirectly, to foreign organizations or persons that engage in terrorist activities against the United States.

What the legislators had apparently not considered, even though it was Obama’s main argument for not supporting the bill, were the unintended consequences of JASTA. Sure, allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia sounded like a great idea to lawmakers running for reelection.

Yet the law will also open up the United States, its military and intelligence services to the same kind of action abroad. That is something Obama wanted to avoid at all costs — and why the White House called the veto override the “single most embarrassing thing” the Senate has done in decades.

But why? Shouldn’t the United States conduct itself in a way that would prevent it from getting sued abroad? The president, who has access to more intelligence than anybody else, clearly didn’t think so.

If JASTA allows Saudi Arabia to be sued for whatever level of complicity in the 9/11 attacks a US court finds sufficient evidence of, just imagine what the United States government can be taken to court for.

There is already talk of Vietnam War veterans being particularly vulnerable to lawsuits. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Could Pakistanis whose wedding got blown up by a drone take Obama to court? Can one of the many torture victims sue to get the names of their guards, torturers, etc. and then seek compensation from them? Or what about GITMO prisoners who were released without ever being charged? Finally, what about any citizen of a country that was plunged into turmoil as a result of CIA actions?

Maybe an easier challenge would be to figure out who couldn’t sue the United States once this precedent has been established.

But we ask again: Would that really be such a bad thing, especially going forward? It could serve as a deterrent and maybe the United States, as well as the other big players on the world stage, would think twice about intervening in the affairs of other countries if the threat of personal accountability would hang over their heads.