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Biden’s transition team is filled with war profiteers, Beltway chickenhawks, and corporate consultants

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A glance at the Biden-Harris agency review teams should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be “pushed to the left.”

By Kevin Gosztola

Source: The Gray Zone

An eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration. A substantial percentage of them worked in the United States government when Barack Obama was president.

The appointments should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be pressured to move in a progressive direction, especially on foreign policy.

If the agency teams are any indication, Biden will be firmly insulated from any pressure to depart from the neoliberal status quo, which the former vice president has pledged to restore. Instead, he is likely to be pushed in an opposite direction, towards an interventionist foreign policy dictated by elite Beltway interests and consumed by Cold War fever.

Regime change addicts and revolving doors

A prime example of the interventionist-minded establishment-oriented figures filling the Biden-Harris Defense Department agency team is Lisa Sawyer. She served as director for NATO and European strategic affairs for the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, and worked for Wall Street’s JPMorgan Chase as a foreign policy adviser. Sawyer was part of the Center for a New American Security’s “Task Force on the Future of US Coercive Economic Statecraft,” which essentially means she participated in meetings that focused on methods of economic warfare that could be used to destabilize countries that refused to bow to American empire.

Sawyer believes the US government is not doing enough to deter Russian “aggression,” US troop levels in Europe should return to the levels they were at in 2012, and offensive weapons shipments to Ukraine should continue and increase in violation of the Minsk Agreements.

“Instead of saying we will lift sanctions when Russia decides to comply with the next agreement, say that we will raise them until they do. Instead of kowtowing to Russia’s supposed spears of influence, provide Ukraine the lethal assistance it so desperately needs and increase US support to vulnerable nations in the gray zone,” Sawyer declared when testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2017.

US assistant secretary of state for African affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield was appointed leader of the Biden-Harris State Department team. She is a stalwart ally of former US national security adviser Susan Rice, who pushed for war in Libya, supported the invasion of Iraq, and was involved in the decision to remove peacekeepers from the United Nations which enabled Rwanda genocide.

As a developer and manager for US policy toward sub-Saharan Africa, she cheered President George W. Bush’s Millennium Challenge Account, a neocolonialist policy designed to privilege US corporations and facilitate the economic exploitation of so-called emerging African economies.

Thomas-Greenfield has been a part of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global consulting firm chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that lobbies for the defense industry.

Albright Stonebridge’s client list has included the management firm of vulture capitalist GOP mega-donor Paul Singer. When the Beltway insiders teamed up to suck Argentina’s economy dry during the country’s last debt crisis, then-President Cristina Kirchner accused Albright of threatening to fund her opponents unless she ceded to her demands.

The State Department group also includes Dana Stroul, a fellow at the neoconservative Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which was originally founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

As The Grayzone’s Ben Norton reported, Stroul was enlisted by Senate Democrats in 2019 to join the “Syria Study Group” to help map out the next phase of the US dirty war in Syria. The recommendations included maintaining a military occupation of one-third of the country, the “resource rich part of Syria” in order to give the US leverage to “influence a political outcome.”

Stroul urged further economic sanctions against Damascus and the obstruction of reconstruction aid, which has already led to shortages of oil and bread.

Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada noted that Farooq Mitha, a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration, has been appointed to Biden’s Pentagon transition team. Mitha was a board member of Emgage, a Muslim American PAC which has fostered ties to the Israel lobby, provoking angry condemnation from Palestine solidarity advocates. Mitha has reportedly attended AIPAC conferences.

Multiple Biden-Harris appointees back regime change in Venezuela. Paula Garcia Tufro was a member of Obama’s National Security Council and is on the NSC team. She was at the NSC when Obama declared Venezuela a “national security threat” and has consorted with a D.C. group that represents failed coup plotter Juan Guaido.

Kelly Magsamen, the vice president of national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress and a former Pentagon and State Department official, is on the Biden-Harris NSC team. When Representative Ilhan Omar grilled Elliott Abrams, the special envoy to Venezuela, Magsamen rushed to the defense of her former boss, calling Abrams a “fierce advocate for human rights.” (Abrams supported death squads in Central America in the 1980s.)

Former US ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson is a member of the State Department transition team. Marketing herself as an expert on “Latin American business politics,” Jacobson has also worked for the Albright Stonebridge Group consulting firm.

Jacobson helped devise the Obama administration’s designation of Venezuela as a national security threat, setting the stage for the economic blockade imposed under Trump.

“In a rude and petulant manner, Mrs. Jacobson tells us what to do,” Venezuela’s then-Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez complained at the time. “I know her very well because I have seen her personally, her way of walking, chewing. You need manners to deal with people and with countries.”

Derek Chollet and Ellison Laskowski, both senior staffers at the German Marshall Fund (GMF), are also on the Biden-Harris State Department group. GMF has pushed for a more belligerent US and European posture toward Russia while supporting a dubious information war project called Hamilton 68. This website claimed to be able to identify “Russian influence operations” while fueling social media censorship of accounts that promoted anti-imperialist narratives, misidentifying real people as “Russian bots,” and orchestrating smears against Black Lives Matter protests by branding them as instruments of covert Russian influence.

The Biden-Harris intelligence team features Greg Vogle, the former CIA head of station in Afghanistan and a former partner at the McChrystal Group consulting firm founded by former commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Stanley McChrystal. Both JSOC and the CIA, as well as the paramilitary forces they trained, have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

Vogle also found time to work for a US military contractor named DGC International that provides construction, fueling, oxygen, liquid nitrogen, and other logistical support to US military forces, cashing in on wars across the Middle East.

As Sarah Lazare reported for In These Times, “Of the 23 peo­ple who com­prise the Depart­ment of Defense agency review team, eight of them — or just over a third — list their ​“most recent employ­ment” as orga­ni­za­tions, think tanks or com­pa­nies that either direct­ly receive mon­ey from the weapons indus­try, or are part of this indus­try.” Those companies include Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin.

Vogle is joined on the intelligence team by Matt Olsen, the former National Counterterrorism Center director for Obama and briefly, the general counsel for the National Security Agency (NSA).

From 2006-2009, Olsen served as deputy attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division. There, he broke down barriers that prevented prosecutors from being able to use information collected through clandestine operations and warrantless surveillance in criminal cases. He also helped craft the FISA Amendments Act, which granted telecommunications companies immunity for their role in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program established after the 9/11 attacks.

Olsen is a defender of backdoor searches of Americans’ internet communications, having argued that the Fourth Amendment right to privacy is too cumbersome for the FBI to follow. He spent the months after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed mass surveillance programs working to discredit Snowden by accusing the whistleblower of aiding terrorists.

Another Snowden opponent on the Biden-Harris intelligence team is Bob Litt, who was the Office of Director of National Intelligence’s top lawyer. When any media organization ran a story on some new aspect of the US surveillance apparatus, Litt was the national security state’s spokesperson deployed to downplay or dismiss the revelation.

When Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was skewered for lying to Congress about the collection of Americans’ phone metadata, for example, Litt rose to Clapper’s defense, absurdly arguing the director was “surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications.”

In fact, the Biden-Harris agency review teams are packed with figures likely to enshrine lawlessness and disdain for civil liberties if they enter the administration.

Agents of injustice

They include Department of Justice review team member Marty Lederman. A Georgetown Law professor, Lederman was the deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010. He helped draft the “drone memo” that outlined the supposed “legal basis” for executing Anwar al-Awlaki, an Al Qaeda affiliated terrorism suspect without charge or trial, despite the fact that Al-Awlaki was an American citizen.

Joining Lederman is Barbara McQuade, an ex-MSNBC contributor and former US attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan, which has jurisdiction over Dearborn, Detroit, and Flint. During her time as the government’s top prosecutor in Flint, McQuade had the power to bring charges against Michigan officials responsible for contaminating the city’s water and lying to the public about it, but she waited out her tenure without doing anything of substance to hold them accountable.

McQuade’s office was complicit in the racial profiling and intrusive surveillance of Arab, Muslim, and Sikh communities in Dearborn. She pursued the political prosecution of Rasmea Odeh, a prominent Palestinian American civil rights activist in Chicago, resulting in Odeh’s deportation to Jordan.

Odeh was tortured by Israeli forces, the State Department knew she was accused of violence by the Israeli government, yet she was allowed to immigrate to the US in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Odeh was convicted of immigration fraud and deported to Jordan as part of an effort to salvage a larger FBI counterintelligence operation against antiwar and international solidarity activists.

Neil MacBride, the former US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, is on the Biden-Harris Justice Department team too. Although his office did not indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, MacBride oversaw the grand jury that was empaneled to aid the US government in its efforts to destroy the media organization.

MacBride presided over the prosecution of CIA whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling, enabling Obama to claim the dishonorable record of more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than all previous presidential administrations combined. MacBride also fought in federal court for the authority to force New York Times reporter James Risen to divulge his confidential sources in the Sterling case, threatening the correspondent with jail time if he refused.

At an Aspen Security Forum event in July 2013, MacBride was asked by Michael Isikoff, “Have you gone overboard, Neil?” MacBride replied, “No, I don’t believe we have.”

The Biden-Harris team leader for the Labor Department team is Chris Lu, a cheerleader for the Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate free trade deal as Obama’s Deputy Secretary of Labor.

Half dozen or so of the appointees have links to Big Tech companies. Perhaps the most significant figure is Seth Harris, a lobbyist and former Obama Labor Department official who wrote a policy paper for the neoliberal Hamilton Project.

This paper provided the framework for the passage of Proposition 22 in California. Uber, Doordash, and Lyft spent around $200 million to campaign for the passage of this bill, which exempted them and other corporations from paying their employees benefits and blocked Uber and Lyft drivers from organizing a union.

Max Moran of The American Prospect contended Proposition 22 was Harris’ audition for Labor Secretary in a Biden administration. Given its smashing success in duping supposedly progressive Californians of all demographics into supporting corporate oppression of workers, Harris has earned himself the job.

And like the interventionists that dominate the foreign policy review teams, Seth Harris embodies Biden’s pledge to big money donors: “Nothing will fundamentally change.”

The Incredible Belief That Corporate Ownership Does Not Influence Media Content

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By Alison Rose Levy

Source: FAIR.org

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (CJR, 8/26/19) has recently noted, corporate ownership of media interferes with the core societal function of the press: reporting and investigating key issues at the intersection of public need and governance. And nowhere is that more critical than when it comes to climate. Due to their corporate conflicts of interest, trusted news authorities have diverted us from our primary responsibility—assuring a viable habitat for our children and grandchildren.

As a journalist who has worked both inside and outside of establishment media, I see influence as embedded in a corporate media culture rather than in isolated cases of CEO dictates. It happens in little ways, such as how an interviewer frames a question, and in big ways, like the decision to exclude a topic, a person or a group of people from the airwaves.

Like most US companies, news organizations are hierarchies, which people who have worked in corporate offices can readily understand. Given that “90% of the United States’ media is controlled by five media conglomerates,” the top executive at many news outfits is likely the CEO of a multinational corporation. The word comes down from the business execs to the company’s division chiefs, as seen in countless movies (like the 1976 classic Network). This was how it was when I worked on primetime national news at CBS in the 1990s.

On the inside, it wasn’t easy to see organizational bias, when job security and team work required overlooking it. The response to the heavily promoted primetime news pairing of two well-known anchors exemplified how news personnel learn to toe the line. The two anchors had zero chemistry, but no one mentioned it, as if an unwritten code had been instantly internalized. This dragged on for two years, pulling down the network’s ratings.

Higher-ups would never offer editorial staff direct input on content. That’s what the executive and middle management were for. Would these managers confide to their staff that the big guns gave them a certain direction? No. Whatever it was, they would present it as their own, and it would be adopted.

Within this culture, controlling the content goes on in whispers, frowns, headshakes and decisions made behind closed doors. If anyone strays into a verboten zone, as I did when I proposed a feature about Native Americans, those in the know privately communicate the ethos that is expected and allowed. “We never put American Indians on air because they talk too slow,” a producer explained.

Despite such experiences, when I left CBS, I respected the many producers with whom I’d worked, many of whom are still employed at the various networks. That work experience honed editorial judgment in ways impossible to measure, for which I am infinitely grateful. It also showed me that organizational agendas and values can trump claims to objectivity.

Reporting from Independent Media

Yet over a decade later, working in progressive online media, I was still astonished that several major stories I covered, were anywhere from underplayed to entirely absent from establishment news.

When I began to cover fracking in New York state in 2009, at first both 60 Minutes (11/14/10) and the New York Times (11/27/09, 10/29/11) covered it as a Hatfield/McCoy feud between upstate rural neighbors, rather than as an invasive industrial activity with a host of health and environmental repercussions.

During the critical years of the major fracking buildout from 2005 to 2016, the  New York Times gave a prominent environmental platform to self-declared “climate champion” Andrew Revkin, whose reporting FAIR (Extra!, 2/10) called “a source of some comfort—and crowing—for the climate change denial crowd.” His pro-industry stance on fracking and naysaying on methane impacts condoned an industrial expansion that has produced far-reaching environmental damage.

The Times’ Ian Urbina (6/25/11)  did invaluable reporting on fracking’s faulty economic model. But in 2013, the paper of record closed its environmental desk, even as   Inside Climate News (1/11/13) was reporting that “worldwide coverage of climate change continued a three-year slide.”

MSNBC show hosts like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes rarely covered fracking, instead letting gas and oil industry ads reassert claims of safety. Nonprofit environmental groups, leading activists, along with a growing body of independent journalists filled the media void, including my own reporting at Huffington Post, AlterNet and EcoWatch.

The TTP

In 2014, I began to report on the Transpacific Partnership (TTP) and other concurrent global trade agreements, which are often characterized as core to President Barack Obama’s “legacy” (e.g., New York Times, 6/14/15; Washington Post, 6/24/15). The agreement’s full provisions were never revealed to the public prior to the June 2015 vote granting absolute trade authority to Obama—authority that would have passed to Trump if the agreement had been ratified in late 2016, as Obama hoped.

In conducting multiple interviews with trade analysts, as well as following the protests in Europe and the resulting leaks of the contents, I learned from  trade analyst William Waren (Connect the Dots,  1/28/15) that even prior to the TPP’s  passage and ratification, plans were underway for the buildout of  fracking, gas and oil, and coal trade and global export freed by its anticipated passage.

Nothing within the unenforceable Paris Agreement would have prevented it. In fact, the Paris Agreement provisions were nonbinding, while the trade agreements that were being secretly negotiated concurrently, including the Trade in Services Agreement(TiSA), were designed to be binding, to “effectively trump whatever commitment is made in Paris,” Waren revealed on Connect the Dots (12/9/15).

Further, the TPP’s planned instatement of an international corporate tribunal with international legal authority over all nations would have mortally injured global democracies. In 2016, Mark Ruffalo summed up what was at stake in the fight: Expanding the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in NAFTA via TPP

would block worldwide environmental and social progress while empowering corporations to undermine existing climate and environmental policies.

As we witness the Trump administration’s deconstruction of US environmental regulatory infrastructure—appointment by appointment, policy by policy—let’s appreciate that in defeating TPP and associated trade deals (thanks to the work of grassroots organizers and independent media), Americans dodged a bullet.

If the US had passed the TPP as planned during the 2016 lame duck session of Congress, both the US and all co-signers (a total of 12 countries) would have been contractually bound to a wholesale takedown of environmental regulations and economic barriers to fossil fuel development—as well as the loss of any right to challenge corporate rule or prevent health and environmental impacts. The climate impacts of the intended gas and oil buildout would likely have been devastating and decisive.

Nevertheless, the forward drive to pass the TPP occurred in a near void of corporate coverage. What had been negotiated behind closed doors with multinational corporations remained their business secrets. Prior to its authorization in June 2015, no mainstream outlet thoroughly investigated and disclosed the TPP’s provisions. Obama’s most memorable pro-TPP television appearance was singing about it with Jimmy Fallon.  FAIR (6/11/16) called the enthused Vox coverage (6/10/16) of Obama’s performance

a borderline parody of everything wrong with corporate-owned “new media”: What we have here is a Comcast-funded website plugging a Comcast-owned TV show to promote a trade deal aggressively lobbied for by Comcast.

Both the New York Times and its liberal economist columnist, Paul Krugman, covered the TPP infrequently. Krugman (10/6/15) professed he was a “lukewarm opponent” of it, and minimized its importance. “We’re not talking about a world-shaking deal here,” he wrote (3/11/15) three months before the Senate granted Obama the authority to sign the final agreement without further consultation or deliberation.

Prior to the vote, a college friend of the MSNBC host Chris Hayes assured me that Hayes, a former environmental reporter for The Nation, would be deeply concerned about these trade deals. I was dubious, but she was insistent. With the contact she provided, I sent all of my TPP research and sources on to Hayes. I received no response.

Rather than cover the TPP, MSNBC went on to fire Ed Schultz, the sole show host who covered trade agreements. (Sadly, the 64-year-old Schultz died in 2018.) In surveying TPP coverage, Media Matters(2/4/15) found that Schultz was the exception in a near-total blackout by all three major networks. Week after week, Hayes and other MSNBC hosts devoted airtime to meticulously dissecting far more minor concerns.

As in any large organization, the firing and hiring of staff speaks volumes to surviving staff members about the owners’ priorities. The unseen casualties among reporters of integrity, and the disservice to journalism, cannot be overestimated. Those working in corporate media get the message without anyone having to tell them, and highly paid show hosts have the most to lose.

The press’ mission is to inform the citizenry and flag abuses to power, not promote special interests. When citizens blind themselves to a news organization’s corporate entanglements, and trust the outlet to be truthful anyway, it is, to put it mildly, extraordinarily naïve.

It’s not about whether or not the public has access to a private conversation or confidential memo sent to editorial with a corporate dictate. The evidence is what’s given airtime and what isn’t over many years.

Was it just happenstance that MSNBC, for example, failed to cover the TPP after firing Ed Schultz? Comcast, the owner of MSNBC, sat at the table behind closed doors during the five-year long negotiations of the TPP’s specific trade provisions.

Have MSNBC or any of its competitors uncovered Comcast’s agenda for the trade agreements? What if concerns over intellectual property rights, for example, made it a corporate mission to pass a deal that also happened to radically hasten the climate tipping point? Should any company have that much power?

No business, no matter how sizeable, should have the right to subvert the actions and political choices necessary to address climate, as well as the activated movement capable of assuring that at long last we do what needs to be done. The only sane response is to support the movement, and the independent media outlets that provide a platform for ideas, facts, studies, polls, policy initiatives and disclosures outside the corporate media frame—and to overhaul the media to address this unfair use of public airwaves for gain and compromise as the world burns.

Russiagate is a Ruling Class Diversion

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By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Trump supporters see themselves as a distinct and independent force in the nation — the saviors of America, in their diseased minds — and they now hate the Democratic Party in a far deeper way than before.”

So this is what we can look forward to in the long twilight of a shrinking U.S. empire: the shrieks of a delirious ruling class, concocting endless diversions from the central reality of late-stage capitalism’s inability to offer the people anything but widening wars and deepening austerity. The Lords of Capital have led us to a dark yet insanely cacophonous realm, a throbbing madhouse din. “Traitor!” scream the minions of corporate communications, calling for the blood of the corporate government’s orange-branded CEO — a no longer exceptional spectacle for the self-proclaimed exceptional nation.

Donald Trump is, indeed, a kind of traitor to the Washington Consensus, a hyper-militarized capitalist utopia of corporate dominated global supply chains that doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20th century and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom. The leadership of both corporate parties conspired to force U.S. workers into the global meat-grinder. Democrat Bill Clinton inflicted NAFTA on his party’s wage-earning base and, two decades later, Democrat Barack Obama tried, but failed, to pass the even more devastating Trans Pacific Partnership corporate trade and governance bill. Donald Trump captured the Republican Party by feeding its base the overt racist rhetoric they crave, rather than the more polite “dog whistle” menu cultivated by White Man’s Party politicians since Richard Nixon. With the indispensable assistance of Democrat-oriented corporate media and the Democratic National Committee — both of which saw Trump as the most easily beatable Republican — Trump trounced the entire GOP presidential wanna-be menagerie to seize the reins of half the electoral duopoly, and carried a majority of white voters – including white women — in the general election.

“Global supply chains doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20thcentury and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom.”

It was not Trump’s flaming racism that made him a traitor to his class and to the empire. One of the U.S. duopoly parties has always played the role of White Man’s Party, with white supremacy as its organizing principle. Were it not for endemic, fervent, nationwide white racism, the most reactionary wing of the U.S. ruling class would have no effective electoral base. Trump simply serves up a stronger brew of white supremacist elixir for the good ole boys and girls. His heresy – precipitating the crisis in ruling class politics — was to rhetorically oppose “free trade” and U.S. “regime change” policies, and to call for normalizing relations with Russia. “Free trade” — a euphemism for the unfettered ability of the ruling class to move money and jobs wherever it chooses on the planet – and the “exceptional” right of U.S. imperialism to remove and replace sovereign governments at will, are the pillars of the Washington Consensus. Donald Trump became anathema to the Lords of Capital and their servants in the national security “deep state,” who crowded into Hillary Clinton’s Democratic tent, where Russiagate was invented out of whole cloth.

Again, racism was not Trump’s unpardonable sin, although it plays into the strategies of the (financial and high tech) ruling class sectors at the helm of the Democratic Party, whose own electoral organizing principle is an anemic anti-racism, a phony politics of “inclusion” that welcomes representatives of minority populations to help enforce the race-to-the-bottom and to join in the general capitalist plunder. Trump’s howling racism was what made Democrats believe he was the ideal candidate for a trouncing by Hillary Clinton, who could be counted on to escalate Barack Obama’s general military offensive and to aggressively pursue TPP and other corporate governance arrangements. (Only fools believed Clinton’s late switch, opposing TPP.) When Clinton lost, the ruling class panicked and resolved to bring down the Orange Menace no matter the cost to U.S. institutions and to the appearance of stability in the very bosom of the empire. The rolling coup was begun.

“Trump’s heresy – precipitating the crisis in ruling class politics — was to rhetorically oppose ‘free trade’ and U.S. ‘regime change’ policies, and to call for normalizing relations with Russia.”

Black folks think the crisis is about race. It is – and it isn’t. If the ruling class, including those that fund and run the Democratic Party, were really concerned about Black people’s rights, they would have challenged Trump’s election victory based on blatant Black voter suppression in key Midwest states. As Greg Palast pointed out, the Republican “Crosscheck” scheme fraudulently and illegally purged 449,000 disproportionately Black voters from the rolls in Michigan, alone — about 40 times larger than Trump’s 10,700-vote margin of victory. Yet, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats only reluctantly joined in Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount action, and the first words out of Black Congressman John Lewis’s mouth when the polls closed in November were “Russia…Russia…Russia.” Republicans have been stealing elections through Black voter suppression in broad daylight since 2000, but only one Democratic senator and one congresswoman — California’s Barbara Boxer and Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, in 2004 – have in this century challenged the thefts . Black voter suppression has been part of the gentlemen’s agreement between the two corporate parties. Rich white people do not plunge the system into crisis for the sake of Black voting rights, or any Black rights at all, including the right to life. But the Lords of Capital will roll the dice on the fate of all humanity to preserve and expand their global dominion and the military machine that is their only remaining advantage. Their survival as a class is at stake. Trump must go because he cannot be depended on to preserve the Washington Consensus — the imperial project.

“Republicans have been stealing elections through Black voter suppression in broad daylight since 2000.”

Trump’s racism did factor into the ruling class decision to oust him from the White House, but not in the way that most people believe. Donald Trump proved that his white base is more enthusiastic to support a candidate that affirms white supremacist “values” (yes, that’s what they value most) than they are about maintaining an aggressive military posture everywhere in the world. They did not blink or budge when Trump denigrated NATO, opposed regime change and U.S. efforts at “nation-building” (a euphemism for prolonged military occupation of other peoples), and called for better relations with Russia. These same voters were presumed to be the most militaristic cohort in the nation, dependable fodder to elect fire-breathing war hawks. But clearly, Trump’s base — composed of a majority of whites – cares more about white supremacy in the U.S. than waging endless wars abroad. And, they either hate “free trade,” or don’t care enough about it either way to abandon their White Man’s President.

The national security state, the military industrial complex and the oligarchs whose interests the empire defends were forced to confront the reality, that their presumed prime constituency was not nearly as gung-ho for war as previously assumed. How, then, to continue the “generational” War on Terror (war of imperial conquest)? Answer: Make Russia a clear and present danger, aided and abetted by “useful idiots” (like BAR), domestically.

Trump still retains the support of his white majority. Most importantly, these white supremacists feel affirmed, as “a people,” by his presence, and what they perceive as Trump’s loyalty to them. They are feeling “Great Again.” And they are reveling in their national strength, as a bloc. That’s why they seem unmovable. This re-energized, aggressively white supremacist, intensely self-aware White Man’s Party will assert its permanent, militant and very large presence in the U.S. political spectrum, no matter what happens to Donald Trump. Other politicians, with billions to spend, will appeal to this majority bloc of whites, after Trump leaves the scene. They see themselves as a distinct and independent force in the nation — the saviors of America, in their diseased minds — and they now hate the Democratic Party in a far deeper way than before, when it was perceived as too concerned with Blacks and other “minorities.” Hillary Clinton turned a new chapter when she called Trump voters “deplorables” — a kind of white trash, but connoting moral degeneracy, transcending financial condition. The “witch-hunt” against Trump is perceived as an elite mob out to lynch the “deplorables” — or, at the least, to decertify them as decent Americans.

“This re-energized, aggressively white supremacist, intensely self-aware White Man’s Party will assert its permanent, militant and very large presence in the U.S. political spectrum, no matter what happens to Donald Trump.”

The Democrats can forget about ever getting back most of these self-aware white supremacist voters, but the establishment corporate Republicans that Trump crushed in winning the GOP nomination will not win back his followers’ allegiance unless they become more like Trump, i.e. more blatantly white supremacist. Which is decidedly not the corporate way, in the 21st century. Thus, corporate America, wedded as it is to a “diversity” doctrine that means little to the masses of Black people but is a red flag to the White Man’s Party “deplorables,” will be forced to identify more publicly with the Democrats, or pretend to be apolitical.

The Trump phenomena — and the resultant ruling class hysteria — has stolen the corporations’ option to pose as “non-partisan” actors in U.S. politics. They are forced deeper into the Democratic camp, creating further contradictions for the “inclusive” party, which must ultimately answer to a more clearly defined — and also more self-aware – constituency of the “left,” most broadly speaking, if it is to preserve the duopoly. This other half of the country, slightly bigger than Trump’s white majority base, is composed of a minority of whites, virtually all Blacks, and large majorities of Latinos and other minorities. It is way to the left of the Democratic Party and roiling with economic demands that the Lords of Capital will not, and cannot, fulfill while keeping on the path of a global race-to-the-bottom and deepening austerity, enforced by endless wars.

“Corporate America, wedded as it is to a ‘diversity’ doctrine that means little to the masses of Black people but is a red flag to the White Man’s Party ‘deplorables,’ will be forced to identify more publicly with the Democrats.”

Therefore, there must be Russiagate hysteria — or some other fictitious obsession — primarily to divert the attentions of the “left” half of the electorate, most of which is broadly social democratic (the Black component is the most left-leaning, and peace-oriented). If the duopoly were to collapse, and the various cohorts of the U.S. political spectrum were reorganized along ideological lines, the two biggest parties would be the Trumpist White Man’s party and a social democratic party with a platform to the left of 2016 Bernie Sanders, with the (rightwing) Democrats and establishment Republicans coming together in an avowedly “centrist” party, the smallest of the three. Space would also be created for more radical and libertarian politics.

The ruling class is determined to prevent such a scenario from occurring, and thus needs a permanent, all-consuming diversion. But the Russiagate hysteria — or something else like it — cannot be maintained indefinitely; U.S. political structures cannot withstand such an institutional assault by the ruling class, itself.

The Lords of Capital are caught in the contradiction. To save the corporate state, they are besieging the corporate state, with no vision or timetable for the outcome.

 

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

Millions Around the World Fleeing from Neoliberal Policy

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Source: The Real News Network

Economist Michael Hudson says neoliberal policy will pressure U.S. citizens to emigrate, just as it caused millions to leave Russia, the Baltic States, and now Greece in search of a better life.

A research team from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York estimates 875,000 deaths in the United States in year 2000 could be attributed to social factors related to poverty and income inequality.

According to U.S. government statistics, 2.45 million Americans died in the same year. When compared to the Columbia research team’s finding, social deprivation could account for some 36% of the total deaths in 2000.

“Almost all of the British economists of the late 18th century said when you have poverty, when you have a transfer of wealth to the rich, you’re going to have shorter lifespans, and you’re also going to have emigration,” says Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Many countries, such as Russia, the Baltic States, and now Greece, have seen a massive outflow of their populations due to worsening social conditions after the implementation of neoliberal policy.

Hudson predicts the United States will undergo the same trend, as greater hardship results from the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, changes to social security, and broader policy shifts due to prospective appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court and the next presidential cabinet.

“Now, the question is, in America, now that you’re having as a result of this polarization shorter lifespans, worse health, worse diets, where are the Americans going to emigrate? Nobody can figure that one out yet,” says Hudson.

Transcript

SHARMINI PERIES, TRNN: It’s the Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.

After decades of sustained attacks on social programs and consistently high unemployment rates, it is no surprise that mortality rates in the country have increased. A research team from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York has estimated that 875,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 could be attributed to clusters of social factors bound up with poverty and income inequality. According to U.S. government statistics, some 2.45 million Americans died in the year 2000, thus the researchers’ estimate means that social deprivation was responsible for some 36 percent of the total deaths that year. A staggering total.

Now joining us to discuss all of this from New York City is Michael Hudson. Michael is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. His latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. Michael, good to have you with us.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back here.

PERIES: So, Michael, what do you make of these recent research and what it’s telling us about the death total in this country?

HUDSON: What it tells is almost identical to what has already been narrated for Russia and Greece. And what’s responsible for the increasing death rates is actually neoliberal economic policy, neoliberal trade policy, and the polarization and impoverishment of a large part of society. After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, death rates soared, lifespans shortened, health standards decreased all throughout the Yeltsin administration, until finally President Putin came in and stabilized matters. Putin said that the destruction caused by neoliberal economic policies had killed more Russians than all of whom died in World War II, the 22 million people. That’s the devastation that polarization caused there.

Same thing in Greece. In the last five years, Greek lifespans have shortened. They’re getting sicker, they’re dying faster, they’re not healthy. Almost all of the British economists of the late 18th century said when you have poverty, when you have a transfer of wealth to the rich, you’re going to have shorter lifespans, and you’re also going to have immigration. The countries that have a hard money policy, a creditor policy, people are going to emigrate. Now, at that time that was why England was gaining immigrants. It was gaining skilled labor. It was gaining people to work in its industry because other countries were still in the post-feudal system and were driving them out. Russia had a huge emigration of skilled labor, largely to Germany and to the United States, especially in information technology. Greece has a heavy outflow of labor. The Baltic states have had almost a 10 percent decline in their population in the last decade as a result of their neoliberal policies. Also, health problems are rising.

Now, the question is, in America, now that you’re having as a result of this polarization shorter lifespans, worse health, worse diets, where are the Americans going to emigrate? Nobody can figure that one out yet. There’s no, seems nowhere for them to go, because they don’t speak a foreign language. The Russians, the Greeks, most Europeans all somehow have to learn English in school. They’’re able to get by in other countries. They’re not sure where on earth can the Americans come from? Nobody can really figure this out.

And the amazing thing, what’s going to make this worse, is the trade, the Trans-Pacific trade agreement, and the counterpart with the Atlantic states. In today’s news there’s news that President Obama plans to make a big push for the Trans-Pacific trade agreement, essentially the giveaway to corporations preventing governments from environmental protection, preventing them from imposing health standards, preventing them from having cigarette warnings or warning about bad food. Obama says he wants to push this in after the election. And the plan is the Republicans also are sort of working with them and saying okay, we’re going to wait and see. Maybe Donald Trump will come in and he’ll really do things. Or maybe we can get Hillary, who will move way further to the right than any Republican could, and bring the Congress.

But let’s say that we don’t know what’s happening after the elections, and the Republicans don’t want a risk. They’re going to do a number of things. They’re going to approve Obama’s Republican nominee to the Supreme Court that he’s already done, figuring, well, maybe Hillary will put in someone worse, or even Trump may put in someone worse. They may go along, at this point, with ratifying a trade agreement that’s going to vastly increase unemployment here, especially in industrial labor, turning much of the American industrial urban complex into a rust belt. And they’’re also talking about an October surprise or an early November surprise. It’s the last chance that Obama has, really, to start a war with Russia.

And there’s Stephen Cohen and a number of other sites have warned that there’s going to be a danger when they put in the atomic weapons in Romania. President Putin has said this is a red line. We’re not going to warn. We don’t have an army. We can only use atomic weapons. So you have danger coming not only from domestic decline in population, you have a real chance of war. And Obama has stepped things up. Hillary has, I think, almost announced that she is going to appoint Victoria Nuland as secretary of state, and Nuland is the person who was pushing the Ukrainian fascists in the [inaud.] assassinations and shootout.

So it looks, this trend looks very bad. If you want to see where America is going demographically, best to look at Greece, Latvia, Russia, and also in England. A Dr. Miller has done studies of health and longevity, and he’s found that the lower the income status of any group in England, the shorter the lifespan. Now, this is very important for the current debate about Social Security. You’’re having people talk about extending the Social Security age because people are living longer. Who’s living longer in America? The rich are living longer. The wealthy are living longer. But if you make under $30,000 a year, or even under $50,000 a year, you’re not living longer.

So the idea is how do we avoid having to pay Social Security for the lower-income people, you know, the middle class and the working class that die quicker, and only pay social security for the wealthier classes that live longer? Nobody’s somehow plugged this discussion of lifespans and longevity into the Social Security debate that Obama and Hillary are trying to raise the retirement age, to ostensibly save Social Security. By save Social Security she means to avoid taxing the higher brackets and paying for Social Security out of the general budget, which of course would entail taxing the higher-income people as well as the lower-income people.

PERIES: All right, Michael. Thank you for your report today, and we look forward to seeing you next week.

HUDSON: Thank you.

PERIES: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.

End

 

Michael Hudson is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and its Discontents. His most recent book is titled Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.

Washington’s Global Economic Wars

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By James Petras

Source: Axis of Logic

Introduction
During most of the past two decades Washington has aggressively launched military and economic wars against at least nine countries, either directly or through its military aid to regional allies and proxies.  US air and ground troops have bombed or invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

More recently Washington has escalated its global economic war against major economic rivals as well as against weaker countries.  The US no longer confines its aggressive impulses to peripheral economic countries in the Middle East, Latin America and Southern Asia:  It has declared trade wars against world powers in Asia, Eastern and Central Europe and the Gulf states.

The targets of the US economic aggression include economic powerhouses like Russia, China, Germany, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba and the Donbas region of Ukraine.

There is an increasingly thinner distinction between military and economic warfare, as the US has frequently moved from one to the other, particularly when economic aggression has not resulted in ‘regime change’ – as in the case of the sanctions campaign against Iraq leading up to the devastating invasion and destruction.

In this essay, we propose to examine the strategies and tactics underlying Washington’s economic warfare, their successes and failures, and the political and economic consequences to target nations and to world stability.

Washington’s Economic Warfare and Global Power
The US has used different tactical weapons as it pursues its economic campaigns against targeted adversaries and even against its long-time allies.

Two supposed allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia, have been attacked by the Obama Administration and US Congress via ‘legal’ manipulations aimed at their financial systems and overseas holdings.  This level of aggression against sovereign powers is remarkable and reckless.  In 2016 the US Justice Department slapped a $14 billion dollar penalty on Germany’s leading international bank, Deutsche Bank, throwing the German stock market into chaos, driving the bank’s shares down 40% and destabilizing  Germany’s financial system.  This unprecedented attack on an ally’s major bank was in direct retaliation for Germany’s support of the European Commission’s $13 billion tax levy against the US-tax evading Apple Corporation for its notorious financial shenanigans in Ireland.  German political and business leaders immediately dismissed Washington’s legalistic rhetoric for what it was: the Obama Administration’s retaliation in order to protect America’s tax evading and money laundering multinationals.

The chairman of the German parliament’s economic committee stated that the gross US attempt to extort Deutsche Bank had  all the elements of an economic war.   He noted that Washington had a “long tradition of using every available opportunity to wage what amounted to a  trade war if it benefits their own economy” and the “extortionate damages claim” against Deutsche Bank were a punitive example.  US economic sanctions against some of Germany’s major trade partners, like Russia, China and Iran, constitute another tactic to undermine Germany’s huge export economy.  Ironically, Germany is still considered “a valued ally” when it comes to the US wars against Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, which have driven millions of refugees to Europe creating havoc with Germany’s political, economic and social system and threatening to overthrow the government of ‘ally’ Angela Merkel.

The US Congress launched an economic-judicial war against its closest ally in the Gulf region when it approved legislation granting US victims of Islamist terrorism, especially related to the attacks on September 11, 2001, the right  to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and seize its overseas assets.  This included the Kingdom’s immense ‘sovereign funds’ and constitutes an arbitrary and blatant violation of Saudi sovereignty.  This opens the Pandora’s Box of economic warfare by allowing victims to sue any government for sponsoring terrorism, including the United States!   Saudi leaders immediately reacted by threatening to withdraw billions of dollars of assets in US Treasuries and investments.

The US economic sanctions against Russia are designed to strengthen its stranglehold on the economies of Europe which rely on trade with Russia.  These have especially weakened German and Polish trade relations with Russia, a major market for German industrial exports and Polish agriculture products.   Originally, the US-imposed economic sanctions against Moscow were supposed to harm Russian consumers, provoke political unrest and lead to ‘regime change’.   In reality, the unrest it provoked has been mainly among European exporters, whose contracts with Russia were shredded and billions of Euros were lost.  Furthermore, the political and diplomatic climate between Europe and Russia has deteriorated while Washington has ‘pivoted’ toward a more militaristic approach.

Results in Asia have been even more questionable:  Washington’s economic campaign against China has moved awkwardly in two directions:  Prejudicial trade deals with Asian-Pacific countries and a growing US military encirclement of China’s maritime trade routes.

The Obama regime dispatched Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to promote the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) among a dozen regional governments, which would blatantly exclude China, Asia’s largest economic power.   In a slap to the outgoing Obama Administration, the US Congress rejected his showpiece economic weapon against China, the TPP.

Meanwhile, Obama ‘encouraged’ his erstwhile ‘allies’ in the Philippines and Vietnam to sue China for maritime violations over the disputed ‘Spratly Islands’ before the Permanent Court of Arbitration.   Japan and Australia signed military pacts and base agreements with the Pentagon aimed at disrupting China’s trade routes.  Obama’s so-called ‘Pivot to Asia’ is a transparent campaign to block China from its markets and trading partners in Southeast Asia and Pacific countries of Latin American.  Washington’s flagrant economic warfare resulted in slapping harsh import tariffs on Chinese industrial exports, especially steel and tires.  The US also sent a ‘beefed up’ air and sea armada for ‘joint exercises’ along China’s regional trade routes and its access to critical Persian Gulf oil, setting off a ‘war of tension’.

In response to Washington’s ham-fisted aggression, the Chinese government deftly rolled out the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with over fifty countries eagerly signing on for lucrative trade and investment deals with Beijing.  The AIIB’s startling success does not bode well for Obama’s ‘Pivot to Pacific Hegemony’.

The so-called US-EU-Iran accord did not end Washington’s trade war against Teheran.  Despite Iran’s agreement to dismantle its peaceful uranium enrichment and nuclear research programs, Washington has blocked  investors and tried to undermine trade relations, while still holding billions of dollars of Iranian state assets, frozen since the overthrow of the Shah in  1979.  Nevertheless, a German trade mission signed on a three billion trade agreement with Iran in early October 2016 and called on the US to fulfill its side of the agreement with Teheran – so far to no avail.

The US stands alone in sending its nuclear naval armada to the Persian Gulf and threatens commercial relations. Even the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the longstanding enemy of the Iranian Islamic Republic, has agreed to a cooperative oil production arrangement at a recent OPEC meeting.

Washington’s declaration of economic warfare against two of its most strategic powerful allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia and three rising competitor world powers, has eroded US economic competitiveness, undermined its access to lucrative markets and increased its reliance on aggressive military strategies over diplomacy.

What is striking and perplexing about Washington’s style of economic warfare is how costly this has been for the US economy and for US allies, with so little concrete benefit.

US oil companies have lost billions in joint exploitation deals with Russia because of Obama’s sanctions.  US bankers, agro-exporters, high-tech companies are missing out on lucrative sales just to ‘punish’ Russia over the incredibly corrupt and bankrupt US coup regime in Ukraine.

US multi-national corporations, especially those involved in Pacific Coast transport and shipyards, Silicon Valley high tech industry and Washington State’s agro-export producers are threatened by the US trade agreements that exclude China.

Iran’s billion dollar market is looking for everything from commercial airplanes to mining machinery.  Huge trade deals have has been lost to US companies because Obama continues to impose de facto sanctions.  Meanwhile, European and Asian competitors are signing contracts.

Despite Washington’s dependence on German technical knowhow and Saudi petro-dollar investments as key to its global ambitions, Obama’s irrational policies continue to undermine US trade.

Washington has engaged in economic warfare against ‘lesser economic powers’ that nevertheless play significant political roles in their regions.  The US retains the economic boycott of Cuba; it wages economic aggression against Venezuela and imposes economic sanctions against Syria, Yemen and the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.  While these countries are not costly in terms of economic loss to US business interests, they exercise significant political and ideological influence in their regions, which undermine US ambitions.

Conclusion
Washington’s resort to economic warfare complements its military fueled empire building.

But economic and military warfare are losing propositions.  While the US may extract a few billion dollars from Deutsch Bank, it will have lost much more in long-term, large-scale relations with German industrialists, politicians and financiers.  This is critical because Germany plays the key role in shaping economic policy in the European Union.  The practice of US multi-national corporations seeking off-shore tax havens in the EU may come to a grinding halt when the European Commission finishes its current investigations.  The Germans may not be too sympathetic to their American competitors.

Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has not only collapse, it has compelled China to open new avenues for trade and cooperation with Asian-Pacific nations – exactly the opposite of its original goal of isolating Beijing.  China’s Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) has attracted 4 time more participants than Washington’s TPP and massive infrastructure projects are being financed to further bind ASEAN countries to China.  China’s economic growth at 6.7% more than three times that of the US at 2%.  Worse, for the Obama Administration, Washington has alienated its historically most reliable allies, as China, deepens economic ties and cooperation agreements with Thailand, Philippines, Pakistan, Cambodia and Laos.

Iran, despite US sanctions, is gaining markets and trade with Germany, Russia, China and the EU.

The Saudi-US conflict has yet to play-out but any escalation of law suits against the kingdom will result in the flight of hundreds of billions of investment dollars from the US.

In effect, Obama’s campaign of economic warfare may lead to the infinitely more costly military warfare and the massive loss of jobs and profits for the US economy.   Washington is increasingly isolated. The only allies supporting its campaign of economic sanctions are second and third rate powers, like Poland and current corrupt parasites in Ukraine.  As long as the Poles and Ukrainians can ‘mooch’ off of the IMF and grab EU and US ‘loans’, they will cheerlead Obama’s charge against Russia.  Israel, as long as it can gobble up an additional $38 billion dollars in ‘aid’ from Washington, remains  the biggest advocate for war against Iran.

Washington spends billions of US tax-payer dollars on its military bases in Japan, Philippines and Australia to maintain its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region.   Its allies, though, are salivating at the prospect for greater trade and infrastructure investment  deals with China.

Economic warfare doesn’t work for the Washington because the US economy cannot compete, especially when it attacks its own allies and traditional partners.  Its regional allies are keen to join the ‘forbidden’ markets and share in major investment projects funded by China.  Asian leaders increasingly view Washington, with its ‘pivot to militarism’ as politically unreliable, unstable and dangerous.  After the Philippine government economic mission to China, expect more to ‘jump ship’.

Economic warfare against declared adversaries can only succeed if the US is committed to free trade with its allies, ends punitive sanctions and stops pushing for exclusive trade treaties that undermine its allies’ economies.   Furthermore, Washington should stop catering to the whims of special domestic interests.  Absent these changes, its losing campaign of economic warfare can only turn into military warfare – a prospect devastating to the US economy and to world peace.

 

Please note James Petras’s new collection of essays with Clarity Press:
THE END OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE DELUSION OF EMPIRE

ISBN: 978-0-9972870-5-9
$24.95 / 252 pp. / 2016

The Secret Global Court – Why Corporate Criminals and Corrupt Politicians Desperately Want the TPP

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Obama needs to ensure he gets well compensated after leaving office for a job well done protecting, defending and further enriching the global oligarch class. This is precisely why he’s so adamant about passing the TPP during the upcoming lame duck session of Congress, when he knows “representatives” who no longer face reelection can be coerced or bribed into voting for this monumental public betrayal.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ins’t really a free trade deal, it’s a way for global oligarchs to consolidate, grow and protect their enormous wealth. The investor-state dispute settlement system (ISDS) is perhaps the most nefarious and objectionable aspect of the deal, with this shadowy court system being used to accomplish the following for the super rich and powerful:

1) Eliminate sovereign risk from their investments.

2) Earn money by scouring the world for potential ISDS “opportunities” and then speculating on them.

3) Escape prosecution from criminality on a global basis.

The whole thing is absolutely disgusting and epitomizes all that is wrong and unethical about the world today. As such, stopping the TPP from passage is probably the most important near-term challenge ahead for all of us who want to make the world a better place (or at least prevent it from getting much, much worse).

Before getting into today’s article, I want to commend Chris Hamby and BuzzFeed for publishing this extremely timely and important work. We can only hope that it will inform millions of Americans sufficiently to create the needed pushback to prevent the TPP from ever becoming law.

So without further ado, let’s get on with it. What follows are excerpts from Part 1 of a four part investigative series. My snippets don’t do this work the justice it deserves; as such, I strongly encourage you to read the entire piece and share it with everyone you know.

Now, from the blockbuster piece, The Court That Rules the World:

Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.

This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

The BuzzFeed News investigation explores four different aspects of ISDS. In coming days, it will show how the mere threat of an ISDS case can intimidate a nation into gutting its own laws, how some financial firms have transformed what was intended to be a system of justice into an engine of profit, and how America is surprisingly vulnerable to suits from foreign companies.

The series starts today with perhaps the least known and most jarring revelation: Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:

  • A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars — but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.
  • In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village — including dozens of children — with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners’ lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.
  • Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.

When the US Congress votes on whether to give final approval to the sprawling Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Barack Obama staunchly supports, it will be deciding on a massive expansion of ISDS. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton oppose the overall treaty, but they have focused mainly on what they say would be the loss of American jobs. Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, has voiced concern about ISDS in particular, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren has lambasted it. Last year, members of both houses of Congress tried to keep it out of the Pacific trade deal. They failed.

I wonder why they failed. Perhaps the following will provide some insight: New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy 

ISDS is basically binding arbitration on a global scale, designed to settle disputes between countries and foreign companies that do business within their borders. Different treaties can mandate slightly different rules, but the system is broadly the same. When companies sue, their cases are usually heard in front of a tribunal of three arbitrators, often private attorneys. The business appoints one arbitrator and the country another, then both sides usually decide on the third together.

“It works,” said Charles Brower, a longtime ISDS arbitrator. “Like any system of law, there will be disappointments; you’re dealing with human systems. But this system fundamentally produces as good justice as the federal courts of the United States.”

I mean, it takes some nerve to make a statement like that.

But over the last two decades, ISDS has morphed from a rarely used last resort, designed for egregious cases of state theft or blatant discrimination, into a powerful tool that corporations brandish ever more frequently, often against broad public policies that they claim crimp profits.

Because the system is so secretive, it is not possible to know the total number of ISDS cases, but lawyers in the field say it is skyrocketing. Indeed, of the almost 700 publicly known cases across the last half century, more than a tenth were filed just last year.

Bull market in oligarch thievery continues unabated:

Driving this expansion are the lawyers themselves. They have devised new and creative ways to deploy ISDS, and in the process bill millions to both the businesses and the governments they represent. At posh locales around the globe, members of The Club meet to swap strategies and drum up potential clients, some of which are household names, such as ExxonMobil or Eli Lilly, but many more of which are much lower profile. In specialty publications, the lawyers suggest novel ways to use ISDS as leverage against governments. It’s a sort of sophisticated, international version of the plaintiff’s attorney TV ad or billboard: Has your business been harmed by an increase in mining royalties in Mali? Our experienced team of lawyers may be able to help.

In a little-noticed 2014 dissent, US Chief Justice John Roberts warned that ISDS arbitration panels hold the alarming power to review a nation’s laws and “effectively annul the authoritative acts of its legislature, executive, and judiciary.” ISDS arbitrators, he continued, “can meet literally anywhere in the world” and “sit in judgment” on a nation’s “sovereign acts.”

Some entrepreneurial lawyers scout for ways to make money from ISDS. Selvyn Seidel, an attorney who represented clients in ISDS suits, now runs a specialty firm, one that finds investors willing to fund promising suits for a cut of the eventual award. Some lawyers, he said, monitor governments around the world in search of proposed laws and regulations that might spark objections from foreign companies. “You know it’s coming down the road,” he said, “so, in that year before it’s actually changed, you can line up the right claimants and the right law firms to bring a number of cases.”

Can you believe this? Outside of technology, pretty much all the big money being made these days is from purely parasitic, extractive activities.

Opposition to ISDS is spreading across the political spectrum, with groups on the left and right attacking the system. Around the world, a growing number of countries are pushing for reforms or pulling out entirely. But most of the alarm has been focused on the potential use of ISDS by corporations to roll back public-interest laws, such as those banning the use of hazardous chemicals or raising the minimum wage. The system’s usefulness as a shield for the criminal and the corrupt has remained virtually unknown.

This is why Obama will try to pass it when the fewest members of government can be held accountable.

Most of the 35-plus cases are still ongoing. But in at least eight of the cases, bringing an ISDS claim got results for the accused wrongdoers, including a multimillion-dollar award, a dropped criminal investigation, and dropped criminal charges. In another, the tribunal has directed the government to halt a criminal case while the arbitration is pending.

One lawyer who regularly represents governments said he’s seen evidence of corporate criminality that he “couldn’t believe.” Speaking on the condition that he not be named because he’s currently handling ISDS cases, he said, “You have a lot of scuzzy sort-of thieves for whom this is a way to hit the jackpot.

Now here’s an example of ISDS abuse from Egypt.

But, though Mubarak was gone, he had left behind a gift for investors like Sajwani: one of the world’s largest networks of investment treaties — twice the size of the United States’ — that allowed foreign businesses to file ISDS claims against Egypt. Within a week of Sajwani’s conviction over the Red Sea deal, Damac invoked one of these treaties and sued Egypt before the international arbitration arm of the World Bank.

This argument — that the government at the time gave its blessing, so the sweetheart deal couldn’t be criminal — became the template for other businesses facing similar accusations.

By filing an ISDS claim, Sajwani took his case out of the Egyptian court system and placed it in the hands of three private lawyers convening in Paris. For the arbitrator he was entitled to choose, Sajwani appointed a prominent American lawyer who had often represented businesses in ISDS cases. And to press his case, Sajwani hired some of the world’s best ISDS attorneys.

For Egypt, the potential losses were big and would come as the country struggled to revive its floundering economy.

It decided to settle.

But the key benefit for Sajwani, according to all three: In exchange for dropping his ISDS case, Egypt would wipe away his five-year prison sentence and close out the probes of the other deals. The man who had been convicted of collaborating on a deal that would bilk the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars was now free and clear.

“Damac, followed by multiple other cases filed, made them say, ‘You know what, no; there should be another way,’” said Girgis Abd el-Shahid, a lawyer who represents corporate clients and assisted with Sajwani’s arbitration claim. “I believe that, after Damac, Egypt learned its lesson.”

Virtually across the board, the government began trying to settle.

In one case, an Egyptian court had declared a foreign company’s purchase of a factory corrupt and nullified the deal, court records show. But after the company filed an ISDS claim, the government agreed to pay $54 million in a settlement — roughly twice the price the company had paid for the factory just a few years earlier, according to news reports and documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News. A lawyer for the company said that his client had not been found guilty of a crime and that the company had made “significant investments” in the factory after acquiring it.

In another case, a second Dubai developer was under investigation — until he threatened an ISDS claim, according to the Cairo lawyer Hani Sarie-Eldin, who has represented the company. Instead of a criminal trial, the government opted for a settlement, and the mogul’s company went forward with its project, Sarie-Eldin said.

Meanwhile, the government has changed its laws, stripping public-interest lawyers and average citizens of the right to file court challenges to dubious public contracts, such as the sale of public land to a developer like Sajwani.

Heba Khalil, a researcher at an Egyptian human rights organization, recently recalled the chaotic but hopeful days after the fall of Mubarak. “No one knew what Egypt would be like,” she said. “International investors were kind of scared that the kind of deals that they did with the Mubarak regime wouldn’t be possible anymore.”

Then came the ISDS claims. “I think the impact of international arbitration,” Khalil said, was that Egyptians “started knowing that, ‘Oops, if we try to expose corruption, then those investors will take us to court internationally, and we will lose the case. Which means we had better just shut up and let the wrongs of Mubarak continue the way they are.’”

Here’s an example from El Salvador.

Not long after the battery factory set up shop on the edge of Sitio del Niño in 1998, people began noticing clouds of ash floating over from their new neighbor, descending on fields where children played soccer and seeping into their homes at night. It burned people’s throats and sent them into coughing fits.

Eventually, people started connecting the ash with the persistent headaches, dizziness, extreme fatigue, and constant bone and joint pain that children in particular were suffering. In 2004, a committee of local citizens began petitioning leaders for help, writing the town’s mayor, national government ministries, and eventually even other nations’ embassies and international aid organizations. For years, their efforts came to naught.

Then lead started showing up at potentially dangerous levels in the blood of the town’s children. Testing in 2006 and 2007 found that dozens of children, some as young as 3, had been contaminated.

In the midst of the trial, the prosecution agreed to settle. Prosecutors declined to comment on the role ISDS played, but the settlement document lays out the terms. The company agreed to pay for a limited cleanup of only the factory site, far short of the much more expansive cleanup the government has said is needed, and to establish a medical clinic in the village, albeit one that would provide only basic care and be funded for only three years. The company would also pay for some of the costs associated with the prosecution and make small donations to the community. And it agreed to drop its threat and not pursue an ISDS case.

Ultimately, the court concluded that the factory had contaminated the village. But that same court acquitted the three lower-level managers, so, it reasoned, it had no choice but to exonerate the company, too.

A force that helped persuade the judges, said Girón, the company’s lawyer, was the ISDS threat and its potential to slam the government with huge compensatory damages.

The failure to hold the factory accountable is an open wound for the impoverished residents of Sitio del Niño — a village whose very name, “Place of the Child,” is now a cruel joke. For six years, their community has been designated an “environmental emergency” by the government, which has warned them not to eat anything grown in the town’s contaminated soil. But many of them have no other option.

When NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, took effect in 1994, some lawyers at top firms took notice of ISDS for the first time. One heralded “a new territory” where some pioneering attorneys had ventured and “prepared maps showing a vast continent beyond.” What they saw was the opportunity to expand and reshape ISDS to their benefit, and the previously dormant system changed forever.

“A whole industry grew up,” said Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah, an international lawyer and ISDS arbitrator who argued that the system is now being misused. Large law firms, he said, see ISDS “as a lucrative area of practice, so what happens is they think up new ways of bringing cases before the arbitration tribunals.”

A key service offered by the ISDS legal industry goes by various euphemisms: “corporate structuring,” “re-domiciling,” “nationality planning.” Critics have a different term: “treaty shopping.” It amounts to helping businesses figure out which countries’ treaties afford the most leeway for bringing ISDS claims, then setting up a holding company there — sometimes little more than some space in an office building — from which to launch attacks.

ISDS lawyers also grow the market for their services by advocating for new treaties, and some of the most outspoken are beneficiaries of the revolving door between the US government and top law firms.

Now meet a particularly nefarious cretin, Daniel Price.

Daniel M. Price negotiated the section of NAFTA containing ISDS when he was a lawyer at the Office of the US Trade Representative. He later served as a top international trade official in the George W. Bush White House.

In between these government stints, he worked as a private lawyer helping clients in ISDS cases. Twice he used the treaty he himself had helped negotiate to help US-based businesses pursue claims against Mexico.

He founded and chaired the unit handling ISDS claims at Sidley Austin, a leading global law firm. Today, he promotes his services as an arbitrator and, along with a powerhouse team that includes other former government lawyers, sells international expertise on ISDS and related matters.

Price, who at first agreed to an interview but later stopped responding to messages, is only one of a number of private lawyers who have exerted outsize influence on American policy on ISDS.

Yes, America. This is your government.

Finally, companies can gain advantages by bringing an ISDS suit, even if they don’t expect to win the case. Krzysztof Pelc, an associate professor at McGill University, found that there has been a proliferation of frivolous cases primarily intended not to win compensation but rather to bully the government — and other nations that want to avoid a similar suit — into dropping public-interest regulations. These new cases, Pelc found, represent a fundamental transformation of ISDS: The system was designed to deal primarily with theft by autocrats, but, in the majority of cases today, businesses are suing democracies for enacting regulations.

Finally, here’s the third example of how ISDS allows powerful people convicted of crimes to escape justice.

The British financial guru Rafat Ali Rizvi had a big problem: In Indonesia, where he’d plied his trade, he and a business partner had been convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from one of the country’s banks. The government there had to bail out the bank — sparking enraged protests that police tried to quell with tear gas and water cannons — and Indonesian authorities were pursuing him and the money they said he’d stashed in accounts around the world.

Ensconced overseas, Rizvi was beyond the reach of the Indonesian authorities. But the conviction came with an Interpol “red notice,” meaning he risked extradition if he traveled abroad. Some of his bank accounts were frozen. And with this stain on his record, he was largely cut off from the world of global finance he’d played in for years.

Rizvi’s topflight criminal lawyer had threatened to sue Interpol if the agency didn’t delete the alert, but so far it hadn’t worked. What Rizvi needed was an entirely different type of lawyer. Someone like George Burn.

Burn had spent years representing businesses in corporate disputes, but, like many of his colleagues, he was drawn to ISDS as the system began to flourish in the 1990s. Now, he said, ISDS cases make up the majority of his work as a London-based partner at the U.S. firm Vinson & Elkins.

The strategy he crafted for Rizvi epitomizes the ingenuity of elite ISDS lawyers and the willingness of arbitrators — many of whom are also attorneys who argue ISDS cases — to expand their own authority. It is a stark example of how canny and audacious lawyers can work the system, crafting a win even when they technically lose. The only real losers: a nation of taxpayers.

As usual.

First, Burn needed to find a treaty that would apply to this case. His team discovered an obscure agreement among predominantly Islamic nations, including Indonesia, where the case was unfolding, and Saudi Arabia, where al-Warraq was a citizen. There was no record of anyone using that pact to file an ISDS claim before, but Burn audaciously forged ahead.

In fact, an official present at the creation of that treaty 30 years earlier told the tribunal that the agreement was not supposed to allow ISDS cases at all. The arbitrators waved off this objection as “irrelevant.”

The key argument that Burn planned to make was that the criminal trial in Jakarta had violated al-Warraq’s right to fair treatment as a foreign investor. This protection is now commonplace in investment treaties and trade deals, and it has become one of the most controversial aspects of ISDS.

Guaranteeing foreign businesses “fair and equitable treatment” sounds like common sense. But many treaties don’t say what exactly that means, so arbitrators have found that governments have acted unfairly even when they regulated the price of water or merely complied with European Union law. Critics argue that such judgments have transformed a system that was supposed to uphold the rule of law into one that places foreign businesses above the law, able to get out of obeying almost any statute or regulation, no matter how worthwhile, that cuts into profits.

Many scholars and activists say the “fair and equitable treatment” provision, which is included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership now being considered by Congress, is the most widely abused element of treaties containing ISDS. Numbers from the UN’s trade and development body show that arbitrators find violations of this controversial provision far more than any other.

As it happened, though, the treaty Burn had invoked didn’t include that clause. But the agreement did have another common and often controversial clause, which requires a government to treat foreign businesses covered under one treaty at least as well as businesses covered under any of its other treaties.

So Burn plucked the fair-treatment provision from another agreement and applied it to the Islamic nations pact. In effect, he constructed his own super-treaty.

And the ISDS arbitrators allowed it, giving themselves the authority to rule on the actual merits of the case.

Martha took that crucial finding and presented it to his former employer. He argued that, unless Interpol dropped its red alerts against Rizvi and al-Warraq, the international cops themselves would be violating international law. Interpol obliged, deleting the red notices.

“Unprecedented Concessions by Interpol,” trumpeted a press release put out on behalf of Martha’s firm. The international cops also had agreed to delete information about the two convicts from its files and to send letters to certain risk profiling and due diligence agencies, as well as the roughly 190 Interpol member countries, according to the release.

“As a result, Mr. Rizvi and Mr. Al-Warraq will be able to travel and conduct business without restriction,” the release boasted. “Such results have never been obtained before from INTERPOL.” Reached by BuzzFeed News, Martha at first agreed to an interview but didn’t respond to subsequent messages.

So gross.

Now the legal team is trying to use the ISDS decision to block Indonesia from seizing the men’s foreign bank accounts. Initially, Indonesian authorities had won a small victory when a Hong Kong court granted them access to a $4 million account. But that’s been put in doubt…

If all of this enraged you as much as it did me, please share this post as widely as possible and consider sending a message to Chris (chris.hamby@buzzfeed.com) thanking him for his work. Also, do whatever you possibly can to push back against Obama’s plan to pass this monstrosity after the election.

Finally, if all that wasn’t enough for you, I suggest reading the following article written by David Dayen a few days ago titled: The Big Problem With The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Super Court That We’re Not Talking About.

Related Article: The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History by Chris Hedges

 

Lament for Humanity: A 50 Year Reflection

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Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

By Robert J. Burrowes

Source: RINF

Deeply affected by the death of my two uncles in World War II, on 1 July 1966, the 24th anniversary of the USS Sturgeon sinking of the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship Montevideo Maru which killed the man after whom I am named, I decided that I would devote my life to working out why human beings are violent and then developing a strategy to end it.

The good news about this commitment was that it was made when I was nearly 14 so, it seemed, anything was possible. Now I am not so sure.

Here is my report on 50 years of concerted effort to understand and end human violence.

In 1966 one of my immediate preoccupations was war. The US genocidal war on Vietnam was raging and, as a sycophantic ally of the United States, Australia had been drawn into it some years previously. Trying to understand what this war was really about was challenging, particularly given the limited (mainstream) sources of information available to me at the time.

But I was deeply troubled by another problem too. I had seen a photo of a starving African child in the newspaper when I was ten and I found this most disturbing. Why did adults let children starve? I wondered. And trying to make sense of this by reading newspaper reports or asking those around me was utterly unenlightening.

By the early 1970s the environmental crisis was starting to impact on my awareness too, including through environmental campaigns I heard about and the ‘limits to growth’ literature published by the Club of Rome, which I read at University.

So where are we today?

Well, the most casual perusal of the state of our world reveals the ongoing (and recently heightened) threat of nuclear war and obliteration (on top of the ongoing and rapidly spreading radioactive contamination generated by Fukushima and the use of Depleted Uranium weapons), ongoing phenomenal levels of military spending and the endless push from corporate and other elite interests for more wars. Hence, we are witness to and, through our taxes, active supporters of an endless sequence of wars, military invasions, occupations and coups, virtually all of them instigated by the US elite and its allies, as well as a sequence of ‘local’ wars, also instigated by western elites and supplied with weapons by western corporations.

The global economy teeters on the brink of collapse and, of course, from the viewpoint of those 100,000 people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who starve to death each day or those one billion people who live in a state of semi-starvation and abject poverty in many parts of the world, it has already ‘collapsed’. This all happens at the instigation of insane elites who continue to accumulate and hoard their wealth, much of it in illegal offshore tax havens. Given the enormous psychological damage that individual members of the elite have suffered, millions or even billions can never be enough.

And the environmental crisis has only become vastly worse with the synergistic impact of our combined assaults on the environment causing human extinction-threatening strain on the biosphere. These devastating assaults include those inflicted by military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), the emission of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and spreading radioactive contamination.

We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet and inducing the collapse of hydrological systems. Human activity drives 200 species of life (birds, animals, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone.

Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings, now or in the future.

In addition, you might have noticed the ongoing attacks on everything from our civil liberties and right to privacy to our right to eat healthy food that has not been poisoned and/or genetically mutilated.

So why does all of this happen? Well, 50 years of research and decades of nonviolent activism have had some rewards and particularly the research that Anita McKone and I conducted during our 14 years in seclusion (1996-2010) which fully explained why human beings are violent. In essence, it is an outcome of the visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by adults on children. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Moreover, this research also gave us enormous insight into the insanity of the global elite and those who serve them in order to maintain this worldwide system of violence and exploitation that is killing us all while destroying the biosphere. Whether it be the politicians who implement elite policies, the academics who ‘justify’ or remain silent about this violence and exploitation, the business people who manage it, the judges, magistrates, lawyers and prosecutors who defend and ultimately enforce it, the teachers and media personnel who teach and promote (or distract us from) it, or the soldiers, private military contractors, police and prison officers who inflict its most direct violence, the global elite is served by a ready stream of witting or unwitting people, many of whom are paid by your taxes to do its bidding. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’.

And just to ensure that you are endlessly frightened into accepting this worldwide system of violence and exploitation, and to support its further encroachment into your life, the global elite conducts an ongoing terrorist campaign against you. See ‘Terrorism: Ultimate Weapon of the Global Elite’ and ‘Why Elites Love Drones’.

But there is another huge problem too: Lack of solidarity.

Elites know that they can divide us and that enables them to conquer us. Despite our efforts to build solidarity over recent decades, elites keep finding new ways to emphasize our ‘differences’. We need to start thinking of our selves as ‘We are all each other’. Does it matter if the ‘big’ difference between us is our gender, our race, our class, our religion, our nationality or something else (or even all of these)?

While elites can easily manipulate us, especially via education systems and the corporate media, into projecting our fear and self-hatred onto others who are ‘different’ and then inflicting violence on, or even killing, each other because, in effect, ‘I am an adult and you are a child’, ‘I am a man and you are a woman’, ‘I am non-indigenous and you are indigenous’, ‘I am a Christian/Jew/Hindu/Buddhist and you are a Muslim’, ‘I am working class and you are middle class’, ‘I am white and you are not’, ‘I am straight and you are LGBTQIA’, ‘I am one nationality and you are another’, ‘I am a feminist and you are a socialist’, or even ‘I am human and you are a bird/animal/fish/insect/reptile/amphibian/plant’ then we haven’t even begun to realize that the real issue is that we are all living beings and this insane elite is willing to do anything they can to exploit and, if necessary, kill us all.

Isn’t it time we started to see what makes us the same – victims of violence and exploitation – rather than focusing on what, after all, are the rather less significant differences in our bodily characteristics, in our beliefs or even the causes of our exploitation (which is not meant to diminish the significance of the outcomes of direct and structural violence which undoubtedly have variable impact)? Fear divides us.

One interesting personal outcome of this lifetime of effort, apart from the many arrests, terms of imprisonment (including once in a psychiatric ward where I was forcibly injected with ‘antipsychotic’ drugs), bankruptcy and seizure of my passport that have been direct results of my nonviolent activism, is that Anita and I have been homeless since 1999: conscience has its costs. Moreover, a worldwide search has failed to identify more than a handful of individuals (but pre-eminently my parents, James and Beryl, both veterans of World War II and now 93) or an organization of any kind that is willing to fund our research or our work to end human violence. Of course, there is a psychological explanation for this as well. See ‘Why Don’t We Try to Understand and End Human Violence?’

So what of human prospects? Not good. With an insane elite controlling the US (and other) military/nuclear arsenals and the highly exploitative global economy (with the secret corporate governance deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, designed to further consolidate corporate control of our world), as well as the dominant discourse via the education systems and corporate media, very few people have the emotional and intellectual capacities to critique this world order and then strategically and nonviolently resist the rush to extinction in which we now find ourselves. In short, most human beings are utterly (unconsciously) terrified and remain politically inert despite time and opportunities slipping rapidly away.

And those who do courageously resist this violent world order face a phalanx of violent institutions, ranging from psychiatry – see ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – and the pharmaceutical – see ‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients’ – and agribusiness – see ‘Monsanto, America’s Monster’ – industries to the corporate media – see ‘Propaganda & Engineering Consent for Empire’ – and the police, legal and prison systems – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – designed to neutralize or stop us, one way or another.

So what do I suggest? Well, with the scientific evidence now indicating that near term human extinction is the most likely outcome – see ‘Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?’ – it is increasingly clear that if we are to end human violence in all of its many and complex manifestations, and prevent human extinction, then we need an integrated and comprehensive strategy for doing so that also provides many meaningful avenues for involvement by individuals and organizations who wish to respond powerfully: token gestures have no value. Over many years I have endeavoured to create this overarching strategy and I invite you to participate in it by doing one or more of the following.

If you are an adult, you might consider dramatically modifying your treatment of children in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. You might also find this article useful in better understanding how to do so: ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If these suggestions seem beyond you, then perhaps your own emotional healing should be your priority. Despite its title, this article explains what you need to do: ‘An Open Letter to Soldiers with “Mental Health” Issues’. And remember this: if you don’t believe that you are ‘important’ enough to spend time learning to know yourself more deeply, I disagree. You are important.

Separately from the above, you might like to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

And if you would like to learn how to make your nonviolent action campaign for a peace, environmental or social justice outcome more strategically effective, you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Campaign Strategy’. To nonviolently defend against coups and invasions, remove a dictatorship or conduct a liberation struggle, check out ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’.

I am not going to get another 50 years to try to create the world of peace, justice and sustainability for which many of us strive but I am going to use every single moment of the time I have left.

Why? Because I love the Earth and everything on it. And you?

 

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.net and his website is here.

 

Hillary and Tim Kaine: a Match Made on Wall Street

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Hillary-Clinton-likely-to-pick-Virginia-Sen-Tim-Kaine-for-VP

By Eric Draitser

Source: CounterPunch

Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders warned that Hillary Clinton’s eventual vice presidential pick must not be someone from the milieu of Wall Street and Corporate America. And while Sanders is still fighting to win the Democratic Party nomination in what many have argued is a rigged system with a foregone conclusion, it appears that Sanders is also intent on influencing the course of the Clinton campaign and the party itself.

In a thinly veiled demand that Clinton embrace the core principles of the Sanders campaign in order to secure the support of Sanders’s political base, the insurgent Democratic candidate hoped aloud “that the vice-presidential candidate will not be from Wall Street, will be somebody who has a history of standing up and fighting for working families, taking on the drug companies…taking on Wall Street, taking on corporate America, and fighting for a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”

And while that description may sound positive for its sheer idealism, it does not seem to account for the fact that banks and corporations effectively own both major parties, and that nearly every top Democrat is in various ways connected to the very same entities. In any event, it is useful still to examine a few of the potential Clinton running mates in order to assess just what sort of forces are going to be put in motion to help deliver a Clinton presidency.

The Actors on the Playbill

Beltway pundits are fond of remarking that Tim Kaine, the underwhelming centrist Democrat senator (and former Governor) from Virginia, is at the top of the list for Clinton. He’s safe. He’s experienced. He’s safe. He’s a Democratic Party loyalist with experience fundraising. Oh, and did I mention that he’s safe? Such is the general tenor of the conversation around Kaine, a politician with a long track record and a mostly forgettable personality known more to DC insiders than to the general voting public.

What could be better for Hillary Clinton, perhaps the least liked Democratic (presumptive) nominee in decades, than to have a party establishment insider who represents the status quo as her running mate in an election year that will undoubtedly be remembered for the ostensibly anti-establishment candidates and rhetoric on display throughout?

To be fair, Kaine does represent Virginia, a swing state that is crucial for Donald Trump, and which could spell victory for Clinton should she carry it.  And of course, Kaine can also posture as “tough on Wall Street” from his days as DNC Chairman and party mouthpiece during the passage of the so-called “Wall Street reform” bill.  Despite nothing substantive coming out of the bill, Kaine is still able to cash in the political currency derived from that bill, and perhaps meekly shield Clinton from continued attacks vis-à-vis her connections to Wall Street.

Of course Kaine also comes with his own baggage, including his anti-abortion stance which earned him the ire of many pro-choice activists in Virginia when he was Governor.  Considering the shameless droning from Clinton and her backers about being “the first woman president,” it would certainly raise serious questions – and open up an obvious angle of attack for Trump – were she to sport her feminism and focus on women’s reproductive rights by selecting a man with an anti-abortion record.

A look down the list of other potential choices reveals that Clinton truly has very little to choose from.  Both Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro, as well as Labor Secretary Tom Perez, have both had their names bandied around as Clinton seeks to solidify the Latino vote in an election where the Republican candidate has worked tirelessly to alienate that all-important demographic as much as possible.  But of course, the obvious question to be asked in response to either of these potential selections would be “Who?” Neither Castro nor Perez is well known nationally, nor have either of them won major elections or really done anything of note in their tenure in Obama’s cabinet.  Despite being Latinos, they are utterly forgettable, and unlikely to bring significant returns to Clinton.

While other names such as New Jersey junior senator Cory Booker, as well as Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, have been discussed, both men hail from states with Republican governors, meaning that were they to accept a VP slot, their senate vacancies would be likely filled by Republicans, a scenario that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has already said “Hell no!” to, vowing to “yell and scream to stop that.”

Who Else Is “Ready for Hillary”?

So that then leaves the two most interesting potential running mates: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders himself. Warren, who conspicuously refused to endorse Clinton over Sanders, has tremendous upside for Clinton as she has been perhaps the Democratic Party’s most vehement opponent of Wall Street, having led many high profile attacks on the major banks in her tenure in the Senate.  From a public relations branding perspective, she is essentially the female Bernie Sanders, a progressive Democrat who presents herself as an ally of working people and an enemy of bankers. For Clinton, Warren would also round out the “First Woman…” card, allowing the Clinton campaign to quite literally become a campaign about breaking the glass ceiling in US politics. The stump speeches almost write themselves.

Finally, there’s Mr. #FeelTheBern himself. His latest comments (mentioned above) certainly do have a subtext that implies his willingness to accept a running mate slot.  Having fashioned himself as the champion of the middle class and threat to the Washington establishment, Bernie would provide much in the way of credibility to a lackluster Clinton campaign which has failed to excite even many ardent Democrats.  Sanders would also guarantee a unified Democratic Party ticket, and provide much needed defense of Clinton’s left flank.  In short, Sanders, like Warren, would give anti-Clinton progressives the pretext many of them need to justify their voting for the much-hated Clinton.

Never mind the fact that neither Sanders nor Warren would actually do anything to combat Wall Street finance capital as Vice President.  Never mind the fact that no one on Wall Street is particularly scared of either politician being given the ceremonial power that comes with the Vice Presidency.  These are just the kind of uncomfortable, but inescapable, facts that progressives must choose to ignore.

The difficulty for either Sanders or Warren is the marketing of their decision to left progressives, some of whom would see collaboration with Clinton and the Clinton political machine as a betrayal and a complete sell-out.  However, aside from driving a some relatively small number of progressives to vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party (or stay home entirely), it is unlikely that the negative impact in the progressive base would amount to anything more than some hurt feelings followed by the usual acquiescence to the Democratic Party line.

If such an analysis sounds cynical and jaded, that’s because it is. Perhaps a better descriptor would be disdainful.  Indeed, as someone who watched with bemused melancholy as progressives lined up to support Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, my position on support for ANY Democrat is the same as Harry Reid’s position on swing state senator VP picks: Hell no!

Indeed, the very notion of collaboration with a war criminal and Wall Street puppet such as Clinton is anathema to everything the left and “progressives” are supposed to stand for.

Of course, there is also the elephant (and donkey) in the room: both major parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of finance capital and the corporations that rule over us. This is the realization that millions of Americans have already made, and which millions more are making.  This is the realization that keeps Democratic and Republican apparatchiks up at night.  And this critical revelation is what Bernie, Liz, & Co. are there to suppress.

Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.