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May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better |
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Who Rules America > Neoliberalism as a New Form of Corporatism
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| All U.S. schoolchildren should be taught, as part of their basic civics education,
by conscientious elementary, middle school and high school teachers, that they live in an
imperialist country. The term itself ought to be popularized. This
is what politicians like Obama actually refer to, elliptically, when they call the U.S. “exceptional. Gary Leupp, The U.S. Versus ISIS |
Looks like the USA successfully managed to recreate Imperial Rome on a new level, neoliberalism level. See Empires Then and Now - PaulCraig
The idea financial imperialism is simple. Instead of old-fashion military occupation of the country, take over the countries in crisis, if necessary remove their democratically elected governments from power by claiming that election are falsified and/or official are corrupted, and/or the government is authoritarian (unlike the puppets they want to install). They use the installed puppets to mandate austerity, burden the country with debt and facilitate condition under which most of which will be stolen and repatriated to the West.
But neoliberals take this old idea to a new level -- the crisis can be manufactured. The scheme looks like the following (see IMF as the key institution for neoliberal debt enslavement discussion of Greece for more information):
After installation of a puppet government, it is relatively easy to use Fifth column based government to protect foreign financial interests. Now you can recoup the costs and enjoy the profits. Much cheaper and more humane then bombing the country and killing a couple of hundred thousand people to achieve the same goals (Iraq variant) or by arming and training jihadists (using Saudi and Gulf monarchies money) and tribal elements to depose the government (Libya and Syria variants) who kill as much, if nor more.
A classic recent examples were Yeltsin's government in Russia, Yushchenko regime in Ukraine, Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk duo in Ukraine and sequence of neoliberal governments in Greece.
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In other words neoliberalism is inseparable from imperialism and globalization (Neoliberalism A Critical Reader Alfredo Saad-Filho, Deborah Johnston, p. 2)
In the conventional (or mainstream) discourse, imperialism is either absent or, more recently, proudly presented as the ‘AmericanBurden': to civilize the world and bring to all the benediction of the Holy Trinity, the green-faced Lord Dollar and its deputies and occasional rivals. Holy Euro and Saint Yen. New converts win a refurbished international airport, one brand-new branch of McDonald’s, two luxury hotels, 3,000 NGOs and one US military base.
This offer cannot be refused - or else.2 In turn, globalisation is generally presented as an inescapable, inexorable and benevolent process leading to greater competition, welfare improvements and the spread of democracy around the world. In reality, however, the so-called process of globalisation - to the extent that it actually exists (see Saad-Rlho 2003) - is merely the international face of neoliberalism: a world-wide strategy of accumulation and social discipline that doubles up as tin imperialist project, spearheaded by the alliance between the US ruling class and locally dominant capitalist coalitions.
This ambitious power project centered on neoliberalism at home and imperial globalism abroad is implemented by diverse social and economic political alliances in each country, but the interests of local finance and the US ruling class, itself dominated by finance, are normally hegemonic.
...the United States, the United Kingdom and east and south-east Asia respectively, neoliberalism is a particular organisation of capitalism, which has evolved to protect capital(ism) and to reduce the power of labour. This is achieved by means of social, economic and political transformations imposed by internal forces as well as external pressure. The internal forces include the coalition between financial interests, leading industrialists, traders and exporters, media barons, big landowners, local political chieftains, the top echelons of the civil service and the military, and their intellectual and political proxies. These groups are closely connected with ‘global’ ideologies emanating from the centre, and they tend to adapt swiftly to the demands beamed from the metropolis. Their efforts have led to a significant worldwide shift in powerrelations away from the majority. Corporate power has increased, while finance hits acquired unrivalled influence, and the political spectrum has shifted towards the right. Left parties and mass organisations have imploded, while trade unions have been muzzled or disabled by unemployment. Forms of external pressure have included the diffusion of Western culture and ideology, foreign support for state and civil society institutions peddling neolibcral values, the shameless use of foreign aid, debt relief and balance of payments support to promote the neoliberal programme, and diplomatic pressure, political unrest and military intervention when necessary.
...the ruling economic and political forces in the European Union have instrumentalised the process of integration to ensure the hegemony of neoliberalism. This account is complemented by the segmentation of Eastern Europe into countries that are being drawn into a Western European-style neoliberalism and others that are following Russia’s business oligarchy model.
In sum, neoliberalism is everywhere both the outcome and the arena of social conflicts. It sets the political and economic agenda, limits the possible outcomes, biases expectations, and imposes urgent tasks on those challenging its assumptions, methods and consequences.
In the meantime, neoliberal theory has not remained static. In order to deal with the most powerful criticisms leveled against neoliberalism, that it has increased poverty and social dislocation around the world, neoliberal theory has attempted to present the ogre in a more favorable light. In spite of the substantial resources invested in this ideologically inspired make-over, these amendments have remained unconvincing, not least because the heart of the neoliberal project has remained unchanged. This is discussed in Chapter 15 for poverty and distribution, while Chapter 21 unpicks the agenda of the ‘Third Way', viewed by many as ‘neoliberalism with a human face’.
Neoliberalism offered a finance-friendly solution to the problems of capital accumulation at the end of a relatively long cycle of prosperity. Chapters 1. 22 and 30 show that neoliberalism imposed discipline upon a restless working class through contractionary fiscal and monetary policies and wide-ranging initiatives to curtail social rights, under the guise of anti-inflation and productivity-enhancing measures. Neoliberalism also rationalised the transfer of state capacity to allocate resources inter-temporally (the balance between investment and consumption) and inter-sectorally (the distribution of investment, employment and output) towards an increasingly internationally integrated (and US-led) financial sector. In doing so, neoliberalism facilitated a gigantic transfer of resources to the local rich and the United States, as is shown by Chapters 11 and 15.
The “elephant in the room” is peak oil (plato oil to be more correct) and the plato of food production. Without "cheap oil" extraction growing, it is more difficult to sustain both population growth and rising standard of living simultaneously. It became the situation of iether/or.
So the future it does not look pretty. As soon as "cheap oil" escape the current plato, Western financial system gets into trouble: private banks based fractional reserve banking requires economy expansion for survival. Essentially they add positive feedback loop to the economy, greatly increasing the instability. That connection was discovered by Hyman Minsky. Minsky explored a form of instability that is embedded in neoliberal/financialized economies resulting from the use of fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. he argued that such an economy automatically generates bubbles, bursting of which result in periodic deep economic crisis. Which are not an exception, but a feature of neoliberal capitalism (aka "supercapitalism", or "casino capitalism).
When Minsky crisis hits some, less important, banks will implode and strategically important need to be saved by government at a great expense for taxpayers. The western elite is well aware of this possibility and will steal, loot and pillage as fast as they can to prolong the agony... Neoliberal expansion and conversion of other countries into debt slaves thus serves as a substitute for economic growth.
What actually is devalued in austerity programs imposed on indebted nations via currency depreciation is the price of local labor (along with standard of living of the most population). So austerity programs caused a huge drop in the standard of living of population. For example after EuroMaydan color revolution the standard of living in Ukraine dropped to the level of the most poor countries of Africa (less then $2 a day for the majority of population).
This is a pretty instructive example. It qlso cur domestic consumption of fuels and minerals, consumer goods, and food. As wages are sticky and it is difficult to reduced them directly (via high unemployment, leading to falling wages). But the currency depreciation can do the same trick even more effectively. For example since February 22 coup d'état, grivna, the Ukrainian currency depreciated from 8 to 28 grivna to dollar, or approximately 350%.
This is how war of creditors against debtor countries turns into a class war. But to impose such neoliberal reforms, foreign pressure is necessary to bypass domestic, democratically elected Parliaments. Not every country’s voters can be expected to be as passive in acting against their own interests as those of Latvia and Ireland. The financial capital objective is to bypass parliament by demanding a “consensus” (facilitated by a huge foreign debt) to put foreign creditors first, above the national economy. This is the essence of the status of debt slave country. Civil war it a perfect tool to accelerate this process.
Buying natural monopolies in transportation, communications, and the land from the public domain for pennies on the dollar now can be called "rescue package", not the road to debt peonage and a financial neo-feudalism that is a grim reality of "debt slave" countries, where populations are indentured laborers of international capital. Let me state it very simply : "the borrower [debtor] is SERVANT to the lender" ( Wikipedia ):
An indentured servant or indentured laborer is an employee (indenturee) within a system of unfree labor who is bound by a signed or forced contract (indenture) to work for a particular employer for a fixed time. The contract often lets the employer sell the labor of an indenturee to a third party. Indenturees usually enter into an indenture for a specific payment or other benefit, or to meet a legal obligation, such as debt bondage.
The whole point of creating debt is to gain control of and rule over such countries. Prof. Hudson's article Replacing Economic Democracy with Financial Oligarchy (2011) illustrates this point admirably.
At the same time then comes to bailing out bankers who overplayed with derivatives, all rules are ignored – in order to serve the “higher justice” of saving banks and their high-finance counterparties from taking a loss. This is quite a contrast compared to IMF policy toward labor and “taxpayers.” The class war is back in business – with a vengeance, and bankers are the winners this time around.
Classic, textbook example of neocolonialism was rape of Russia in 1991-1999. See Harvard Mafia, Andrei Shleifer and the economic rape of Russia
One of the most interesting analysis of this new phenomena was provided by Henry C K Liu in his series of articles SUPER CAPITALISM, SUPER IMPERIALISM
Robert B Reich, former US Secretary of Labor and resident neo-liberal in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1997, wrote in the September 14, 2007 edition of The Wall Street Journal an opinion piece, "CEOs Deserve Their Pay", as part of an orchestrated campaign to promote his new book: Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Afred A Knopf).
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Reich is a former Harvard professor and the former Maurice B Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He is currently a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California (Berkley) and a regular liberal gadfly in the unabashed supply-side Larry Kudlow TV show that celebrates the merits of capitalism.
Reich's Supercapitalism brings to mind Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972-2003). While Reich, a liberal turned neo-liberal, sees "supercapitalism" as the natural evolution of insatiable shareholder appetite for gain, a polite euphemism for greed, that cannot or should not be reined in by regulation, Hudson, a Marxist heterodox economist, sees "super imperialism" as the structural outcome of post-World War II superpower geopolitics, with state interests overwhelming free market forces, making regulation irrelevant. While Hudson is critical of "super imperialism" and thinks that it should be resisted by the weaker trading partners of the US, Reich gives the impression of being ambivalent about the inevitability, if not the benignity, of "supercapitalism".
The structural link between capitalism and imperialism was first observed by John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940), an English economist, who wrote in 1902 an insightful analysis of the economic basis of imperialism. Hobson provided a humanist critique of neoclassical economics, rejecting exclusively materialistic definitions of value. With Albert Frederick Mummery (1855-1895), the great British mountaineer who was killed in 1895 by an avalanche while reconnoitering Nanga Parbat, an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak, Hobson wrote The Physiology of Industry (1889), which argued that an industrial economy requires government intervention to maintain stability, and developed the theory of over-saving that was given a glowing tribute by John Maynard Keynes three decades later.
The need for governmental intervention to stabilize an expanding national industrial economy was the rationale for political imperialism. On the other side of the coin, protectionism was a governmental counter-intervention on the part of weak trading partners for resisting imperialist expansion of the dominant power. Historically, the processes of globalization have always been the result of active state policy and action, as opposed to the mere passive surrender of state sovereignty to market forces. Market forces cannot operate in a vacuum. They are governed by man-made rules. Globalized markets require the acceptance by local authorities of established rules of the dominant economy. Currency monopoly of course is the most fundamental trade restraint by one single dominant government.
Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776, the year of US independence. By the time the constitution was framed 11 years later, the US founding fathers were deeply influenced by Smith's ideas, which constituted a reasoned abhorrence of trade monopoly and government policy in restricting trade. What Smith abhorred most was a policy known as mercantilism, which was practiced by all the major powers of the time. It is necessary to bear in mind that Smith's notion of the limitation of government action was exclusively related to mercantilist issues of trade restraint. Smith never advocated government tolerance of trade restraint, whether by big business monopolies or by other governments in the name of open markets.
A central aim of mercantilism was to ensure that a nation's exports remained higher in value than its imports, the surplus in that era being paid only in specie money (gold-backed as opposed to fiat money). This trade surplus in gold permitted the surplus country, such as England, to invest in more factories at home to manufacture more for export, thus bringing home more gold. The importing regions, such as the American colonies, not only found the gold reserves backing their currency depleted, causing free-fall devaluation (not unlike that faced today by many emerging-economy currencies), but also wanting in surplus capital for building factories to produce for domestic consumption and export. So despite plentiful iron ore in America, only pig iron was exported to England in return for English finished iron goods. The situation was similar to today's oil producing countries where despite plentiful crude oil, refined petrochemical products such as gasoline and heating oil have to be imported.
In 1795, when the newly independent Americans began finally to wake up to their disadvantaged trade relationship and began to raise European (mostly French and Dutch) capital to start a manufacturing industry, England decreed the Iron Act, forbidding the manufacture of iron goods in its American colonies, which caused great dissatisfaction among the prospering colonials.
Smith favored an opposite government policy toward promoting domestic economic production and free foreign trade for the weaker traders, a policy that came to be known as "laissez faire" (because the English, having nothing to do with such heretical ideas, refuse to give it an English name). Laissez faire, notwithstanding its literal meaning of "leave alone", meant nothing of the sort. It meant an activist government policy to counteract mercantilism. Neo-liberal free-market economists are just bad historians, among their other defective characteristics, when they propagandize "laissez faire" as no government interference in trade affairs.
Friedrich List, in his National System of Political Economy (1841), asserts that political economy as espoused in England, far from being a valid science universally, was merely British national opinion, suited only to English historical conditions. List's institutional school of economics asserts that the doctrine of free trade was devised to keep England rich and powerful at the expense of its trading partners and it must be fought with protective tariffs and other protective devices of economic nationalism by the weaker countries.
Henry Clay's "American system" was a national system of political economy. US neo-imperialism in the post WWII period disingenuously promotes neo-liberal free-trade against governmental protectionism to keep the US rich and powerful at the expense of its trading partners. Before the October Revolution of 1917, many national liberation movements in European colonies and semi-colonies around the world were influenced by List's economic nationalism. The 1911 Nationalist Revolution in China, led by Sun Yat-sen, was heavily influenced by Lincoln's political ideas - government of the people, by the people and for the people - and the economic nationalism of List, until after the October Revolution when Sun realized that the Soviet model was the correct path to national revival.
Hobson's magnum opus, Imperialism, (1902), argues that imperialistic expansion is driven not by state hubris, known in US history as "manifest destiny", but by an innate quest for new markets and investment opportunities overseas for excess capital formed by over-saving at home for the benefit of the home state. Over-saving during the industrial age came from Richardo's theory of the iron law of wages, according to which wages were kept perpetually at subsistence levels as a result of uneven market power between capital and labor. Today, job outsourcing that returns as low-price imports contributes to the iron law of wages in the US domestic economy. (See my article Organization of Labor Exporting Countries [OLEC]).
Hobson's analysis of the phenology (study of life cycles) of capitalism was drawn upon by Lenin to formulate a theory of imperialism as an advanced stage of capitalism:
"Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capitalism is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed." (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1916, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter 7).
Lenin was also influenced by Rosa Luxemberg, who three year earlier had written her major work, The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals: Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialismus), 1913). Luxemberg, together with Karl Liebknecht a founding leader of the Spartacist League (Spartakusbund), a radical Marxist revolutionary movement that later renamed itself the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), was murdered on January 15, 1919 by members of the Freikorps, rightwing militarists who were the forerunners of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) led by Ernst Rohm.
The congenital association between capitalism and imperialism requires practically all truly anti-imperialist movements the world over to be also anti-capitalist. To this day, most nationalist capitalists in emerging economies are unwitting neo-compradors for super imperialism. Neo-liberalism, in its attempts to break down all national boundaries to facilitate global trade denominated in fiat dollars, is the ideology of super imperialism.
Hudson, the American heterodox economist, historian of ancient economies and post-WW II international balance-of-payments specialist, advanced in his 1972 book the notion of 20th century super imperialism. Hudson updated Hobson's idea of 19th century imperialism of state industrial policy seeking new markets to invest home-grown excess capital. To Hudson, super imperialism is a state financial strategy to export debt denominated in the state's fiat currency as capital to the new financial colonies to finance the global expansion of a superpower empire.
No necessity, or even intention, was entertained by the superpower of ever having to pay off these paper debts after the US dollar was taken off gold in 1971.
Super imperialism transformed into monetary imperialism after the 1973 Middle East oil crisis with the creation of the petrodollar and two decades later emerged as dollar hegemony through financial globalization after 1993. As described in my 2002 AToL article, Dollar hegemony has to go, a geopolitical phenomenon emerged after the 1973 oil crisis in which the US dollar, a fiat currency since 1971, continues to serve as the primary reserve currency for international trade because oil continues to be denominated in fiat dollars as a result of superpower geopolitics, leading to dollar hegemony in 1993 with the globalization of deregulated financial markets.
Three causal developments allowed dollar hegemony to emerge over a span of two decades after 1973 and finally take hold in 1993. US fiscal deficits from overseas spending since the 1950s caused a massive drain in US gold holdings, forcing the US in 1971 to abandon the 1945 Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rate based on a gold-backed dollar. Under that international financial architecture, cross-border flow of funds was not considered necessary or desirable for promoting international trade or domestic development. The collapse of the 1945 Bretton Woods regime in 1971 was the initial development toward dollar hegemony.
The second development was the denomination of oil in dollars after the 1973 Middle East oil crisis. The emergence of petrodollars was the price the US, still only one of two contending superpowers in 1973, extracted from defenseless oil-producing nations for allowing them to nationalize the Western-owned oil industry on their soil. As long as oil transactions are denominated in fiat dollars, the US essentially controls all the oil in the world financially regardless of specific ownership, reducing all oil producing nations to the status of commodity agents of dollar hegemony.
The third development was the global deregulation of financial markets after the Cold War, making cross-border flow of funds routine, and a general relaxation of capital and foreign exchange control by most governments involved in international trade. This neo-liberal trade regime brought into existence a foreign exchange market in which free-floating exchange rates made computerized speculative attacks on weak currencies a regular occurrence. These three developments permitted the emergence of dollar hegemony after 1994 and helped the US win the Cold War with financial power derived from fiat money.
Dollar hegemony advanced super imperialism one stage further from the financial to the monetary front. Industrial imperialism sought to achieve a trade surplus by exporting manufactured good to the colonies for gold to fund investment for more productive plants at home. Super imperialism sought to extract real wealth from the colonies by paying for it with fiat dollars to sustain a balance of payments out of an imbalance in the exchange of commodities. Monetary imperialism under dollar hegemony exports debt denominated in fiat dollars through a permissive trade deficit with the new colonies, only to re-import the debt back to the US as capital account surplus to finance the US debt bubble.
The circular recycling of dollar-denominated debt was made operative by the dollar, a fiat currency that only the US can print at will, continuing as the world's prime reserve currency for international trade and finance, backed by US geopolitical superpower. Dollars are accepted universally because oil is denominated in dollars and everyone needs oil and thus needs dollars to buy oil. Any nation that seeks to denominate key commodities, such as oil, in currencies other than the dollar will soon find itself invaded by the sole superpower. Thus the war on Iraq is not about oil, as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan suggested recently. It is about keeping oil denominated in dollars to protect dollar hegemony. The difference is subtle but of essential importance.
Since 1993, central banks of all trading nations around the world, with the exception of the US Federal Reserve, have been forced to hold more dollar reserves than they otherwise need to ward off the potential of sudden speculative attacks on their currencies in unregulated global financial markets. Thus "dollar hegemony" prevents the exporting nations, such as the Asian Tigers, from spending domestically the dollars they earn from the US trade deficit and forces them to fund the US capital account surplus, shipping real wealth to the US in exchange for the privilege of financing further growth of the US debt economy.
Not only do these exporting nations have to compete by keeping their domestic wages down and by prostituting their environment, the dollars that they earn cannot be spent at home without causing a monetary crisis in their own currencies because the dollars they earn have to be exchanged into local currencies before they can be spent domestically, causing an excessive rise in their domestic money supply which in turn causes domestic inflation-pushed bubbles. While the trade-surplus nations are forced to lend their export earnings back to the US, these same nations are starved for capital, as global capital denominated in dollars will only invest in their export sectors to earn more dollars. The domestic sector with local currency earnings remains of little interest to global capital denominated in dollars. As a result, domestic development stagnates for lack of capital.
Dollar hegemony permits the US to transform itself from a competitor in world markets to earn hard money, to a fiat-money-making monopoly with fiat dollars that only it can print at will. Every other trading nation has to exchange low-wage goods for dollars that the US alone can print freely and that can be spent only in the dollar economy without monetary penalty.
Japan is a classic victim of monetary imperialism. In 1990, as a result of Japanese export prowess, the Industrial Bank of Japan was the largest bank in the world, with a market capitalization of $57 billion. The top nine of the 10 largest banks then were all Japanese, trailed by Canadian Alliance in 10th place. No US bank made the top-10 list. By 2001, the effects of dollar hegemony have pushed Citigroup into first place with a market capitalization of $260 billion. Seven of the top 10 largest financial institutions in the world in 2001 were US-based, with descending ranking in market capitalization: Citigroup ($260 billion), AIG ($209 billion), HSBC (British-$110 billion), Berkshire Hathaway ($100 billion), Bank of America ($99 billion), Fanny Mae ($80 billion), Wells Fargo ($74 billion), JP Morgan Chase ($72 billion), RBS (British-$70 billion) and UBS (Swiss-$67 billion). No Japanese bank survived on the list.
China is a neoclassic case of dollar hegemony victimization even though its domestic financial markets are still not open and the yuan is still not freely convertible. With over $1.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves earned at a previously lower fixed exchange rate of 8.2 to a dollar set in 1985, now growing at the rate of $1 billion a day at a narrow-range floating exchange rate of around 7.5 since July 2005, China cannot spend much of it dollar holdings on domestic development without domestic inflation caused by excessive expansion of its yuan money supply. The Chinese economy is overheating because the bulk of its surplus revenue is in dollars from exports that cannot be spent inside China without monetary penalty. Chinese wages are too low to absorb sudden expansion of yuan money supply to develop the domestic economy. And with over $1.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, equal to its annual GDP, China cannot even divest from the dollar without having the market effect of a falling dollar moving against its remaining holdings.
The People's Bank of China announced on July 20, 2005 that effective immediately the yuan exchange rate would go up by 2.1% to 8.11 yuan to the US dollar and that China would drop the dollar peg to its currency. In its place, China would move to a "managed float" of the yuan, pegging the currency's exchange value to an undisclosed basket of currencies linked to its global trade. In an effort to limit the amount of volatility, China would not allow the currency to fluctuate by more than 0.3% in any one trading day. Linking the yuan to a basket of currencies means China's currency is relatively free from market forces acting on the dollar, shifting to market forces acting on a basket of currencies of China's key trading partners. The basket is composed of the euro, yen and other Asian currencies as well as the dollar. Though the precise composition of the basket was not disclosed, it can nevertheless be deduced by China's trade volume with key trading partners and by mathematical calculation from the set-daily exchange rate.
Thus China is trapped in a trade regime operating on an international monetary architecture in which it must continue to export real wealth in the form of underpaid labor and polluted environment in exchange for dollars that it must reinvest in the US. Ironically, the recent rise of anti-trade sentiment in US domestic politics offers China a convenient, opportune escape from dollar hegemony to reduce its dependence on export to concentrate on domestic development. Chinese domestic special interest groups in the export sector would otherwise oppose any policy to slow the growth in export if not for the rise of US protectionism which causes shot-term pain for China but long-term benefit in China's need to restructure its economy toward domestic development. Further trade surplus denominated in dollar is of no advantage to China.
Even as the domestic US economy declined after the onset of globalization in the early 1990s, US dominance in global finance has continued to this day on account of dollar hegemony. It should not be surprising that the nation that can print at will the world's reserve currency for international trade should come up on top in deregulated global financial markets. The so-called emerging markets around the world are the new colonies of monetary imperialism in a global neo-liberal trading regime operating under dollar hegemony geopolitically dominated by the US as the world's sole remaining superpower.
In Supercapitalism, Reich identifies corporate social responsibility as a diversion from economic efficiency and an un-capitalistic illusion. Of course the late Milton Friedman had asserted that the only social responsibility of corporations is to maximize profit, rather than to generate economic well-being and balanced growth through fair profits. There is ample evidence to suggest that a single-minded quest for maximizing global corporate profit can lead to domestic economic decline in even the world's sole remaining superpower. The US public is encouraged to blame such decline on the misbehaving trading partners of the US rather than US trade policy that permits US transnational corporation to exploit workers in all trading nations, including those in the US. It is a policy that devalues work by over-rewarding financial manipulation.
Yet to Reich, the US corporate income tax is regressive and inequitable and should be abolished so that after-tax corporate profit can be even further enhanced. This pro-profit position is at odds with even rising US Republican sentiment against transnational corporations and their global trade strategies. Reich also thinks the concept of corporate criminal liability is based on an "anthropomorphic fallacy" that ends up hurting innocent people. Reich sees as inevitable an evolutionary path towards an allegedly perfect new world of a super-energetic capitalism responding to the dictate of all-powerful consumer preference through market democracy.
Reich argues that corporations cannot be expected to be more "socially responsible" than their shareholders or even their consumers, and he implies that consumer preference and behavior are the proper and effective police forces that supersede the need for market regulation. He sees corporations, while viewed by law as "legal persons", as merely value-neutral institutional respondents of consumer preferences in global markets. Reich claims that corporate policies, strategies and behavior in market capitalism are effectively governed by consumer preferences and need no regulation by government. This is essentially the ideology of neo-liberalism.
Yet US transnational corporations derive profit from global operations serving global consumers to maximize return on global capital. These transnational corporations will seek to shift production to where labor is cheapest and environmental standards are lowest and to market their products where prices are highest and consumer purchasing power the strongest. Often, these corporations find it more profitable to sell products they themselves do not make, controlling only design and marketing, leaving the dirty side of manufacturing to others with underdeveloped market power. This means if the US wants a trade surplus under the current terms of trade, it must lower it wages. The decoupling of consumers from producers weakens the conventional effects of market pressure on corporate social responsibility. Transnational corporations have no home community loyalty. Consumers generally do not care about sweat shop conditions overseas while overseas workers do not care about product safety on goods they produce but cannot afford to buy. Products may be made in China, but they are not made by China, but by US transnational corporations which are responsible for the quality and safety of their products.
Further, it is well recognized that corporations routinely and effectively manipulate consumer preference and market acceptance often through if not false, at least misleading advertising, not for the benefit of consumers, but to maximize return on faceless capital raised from global capital markets. The subliminal emphasis by the corporate culture on addictive acquisition of material things, coupled with a structural deprivation of adequate income to satisfy the manipulated desires, has made consumers less satisfied than in previous times of less material abundance. Corporations have been allowed to imbed consumption-urging messages into every aspect of modern life. The result is a disposable culture with packaged waste, an obesity crisis for all age groups, skyrocketing consumer debt, the privatization of public utilities that demand the same fee for basic services from rich and poor alike, causing a sharp disparity in affordability. It is a phenomenon described by Karl Marx as "Fetishism of Commodities".
Marx wrote in Das Kapital:[1]
The relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. This is the reason why the products of labor become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses … The existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. It is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world, the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of Commodities has its origin … in the peculiar social character of the labor that produces them.Marx asserts that "the mystical character of commodities does not originate in their use-value" (Section 1, p 71). Market value is derived from social relations, not from use-value which is a material phenomenon. Thus Marx critiques the Marginal Utility Theory by pointing out that market value is affected by social relationships. For example, the marginal utility of door locks is a function of the burglary rate in a neighborhood which in turn is a function of the unemployment rate. Unregulated free markets are a regime of uninhibited price gouging by monopolies and cartels.
Thus the nature of money cannot be adequately explained even in terms of the material-technical properties of gold, but only in terms of the factors behind man's desire and need for gold. Similarly, it is not possible to fully understand the price of capital from the technical nature of the means of production, but only from the social institution of private ownership and the terms of exchange imposed by uneven market power. Market capitalism is a social institution based on the fetishism of commodities.
While Reich is on target in warning about the danger to democracy posed by the corporate state, and in claiming that only people can be citizens, and only citizens should participate in democratic decision making, he misses the point that transnational corporations have transcended national boundaries. Yet in each community that these transnational corporations operate, they have the congenital incentive, the financial means and the legal mandate to manipulate the fetishism of commodities even in distant lands.
Moreover, representative democracy as practiced in the US is increasingly manipulated by corporate lobbying funded from high-profit-driven corporate financial resources derived from foreign sources controlled by management. Corporate governance is notoriously abusive of minority shareholder rights on the part of management. Notwithstanding Reich's rationalization of excessive CEO compensation, CEOs as a class are the most vocal proponents of corporate statehood. Modern corporations are securely insulated from any serious threats from consumer revolt. Inter-corporate competition presents only superficial and trivial choices for consumers. Motorists have never been offered any real choice on gasoline by oil companies or alternatives on the gasoline-guzzling internal combustion engine by car-makers.
Reich asserts in his Wall Street Journal piece that modern CEOs in finance capitalism nowadays deserve their high pay because they have to be superstars, unlike their bureaucrat-like predecessors during industrial capitalism. Notwithstanding that one would expect a former labor secretary to argue that workers deserve higher pay, the challenge to corporate leadership in market capitalism has always been and will always remain management's ruthless pursuit of market leadership power, a euphemism for monopoly, by skirting the rule of law and regulations, framing legislative regimes through political lobbying, pushing down wages and worker benefits, increasing productivity by downsizing in an expanding market and manipulating consumer attitude through advertising. At the end of the day, the bottom line for corporate profit is a factor of lowering wage and benefit levels.
Reich seems to have forgotten that the captains of industry of 19th century free-wheeling capitalism were all superstars who evoked public admiration by manipulating the awed public into accepting the Horatio Alger myth of success through hard work, honesty and fairness. The derogatory term "robber barons" was first coined by protest pamphlets circulated by victimized Kansas farmers against ruthless railroad tycoons during the Great Depression.
The manipulation of the public will by moneyed interests is the most problematic vulnerability of US economic and political democracy. In an era when class warfare has taken on new sophistication, the accusation of resorting to class warfare argument is widely used to silence legitimate socio-economic protests. The US media is essentially owned by the moneyed interests. The decline of unionism in the US has been largely the result of anti-labor propaganda campaigns funded by corporations and government policies influenced by corporate lobbyists. The infiltration of organized crime was exploited to fan public anti-union sentiments while widespread corporate white collar crimes were dismissed as mere anomalies. (See Capitalism's bad apples: It's the barrel that's rotten)
As promoted by his permissive opinion piece, a more apt title for Reich's new book would be Superman Capitalism, in praise of the super-heroic qualities of successful corporate CEOs who deserve superstar pay. This view goes beyond even fascist superman ideology. The compensation of corporate CEOs in Nazi Germany never reached such obscene levels as those in US corporate land today.
Reich argues that CEOs deserve their super-high compensation, which has increased 600% in two decades, because corporate profits have also risen 600% in the same period. The former secretary of labor did not point out that wages rose only 30% in the same period. The profit/wage disparity is a growing cancer in the US-dominated global economy, causing over-production resulting from stagnant demand caused by inadequate wages. A true spokesman for labor would point out that enlightened modern management recognizes that the performance of a corporation is the sum total of effective team work between management and labor.
System analysis has long shown that collective effort on the part of the entire work force is indispensable to success in any complex organism. Further, a healthy consumer market depends on a balance between corporate earnings and worker earnings. Reich's point would be valid if US wages had risen by the same multiple as CEO pay and corporate profit, but he apparently thought that it would be poor etiquette to raise embarrassing issues as a guest writer in an innately anti-labor journal of Wall Street. Even then, unless real growth also rose 600% in two decades, the rise in corporate earning may be just an inflation bubble.
To be fair, Reich did address the income gap issue eight months earlier in another article, "An Introduction to Economic Populism" in the Jan-Feb, 2007 issue of The American Prospect, a magazine that bills itself as devoted to "liberal ideas". In that article, Reich relates a "philosophical" discussion he had with fellow neo-liberal cabinet member Robert Rubin, then treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, on two "simple questions".
The first question was: Suppose a proposed policy will increase the incomes of some people without decreasing the incomes of any others. Of course Reich must know that it is a question of welfare economics long ago answered by the "pareto optimum", which asserts that resources are optimally distributed when an individual cannot move into a better position without putting someone else into a worse position. In an unjust society, the pareto optimum will perpetuate injustice in the name of optimum resource allocation. "Should it be implemented? Bob and I agreed it should," writes Reich. Not exactly an earth-shaking liberal position. Rather, it is a classic neo-liberal posture.
And the second question: But suppose the people whose incomes will rise are already wealthier than everyone else. Although no one will lose ground, inequality will widen. Should it still be implemented? "I won't tell you where he and I came out on that second question," writes Reich without explaining why. He allows that "we agreed that people who don't share in such gains feel relatively poorer. Widening inequality also further tips the balance of political power in favor of the wealthy."
Of course, clear thinking would have left the second question mute because it would have invalidated the first question, as the real income of those whose nominal income has not fallen has indeed fallen relative to those whose nominal income has risen. In a macro monetary sense, it is not possible to raise the nominal income of some without lowering the real income of others. All incomes must rise together proportionally or inequality in after-inflation real income will increase.
But for the sake of argument, let's go along with Reich's parable on welfare economics and financial equality. That conversation occurred a decade ago. Reich says in his January 2007 article that "inequality is far more worrisome now", as if it had not been or that the policies he and his colleagues in the Clinton administration, as evidenced by their answer to their own first question, did not cause the now "more worrisome" inequality. "The incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans have increased about 2% in real terms since then, while that of the top 1% has increased over 50%," Reich wrote in the matter of fact tone of an innocent bystander.
It is surprising that a former labor secretary would err even on the record on worker income. The US Internal Revenue Service reports that while incomes have been rising since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, nearly 1% less than in 2000 after adjusting for inflation. Hourly wage costs (including mandatory welfare contributions and benefits) grew more slowly than hourly productivity from 1993 to late 1997, the years of Reich's tenure as labor secretary. Corporate profit rose until 1997 before declining, meaning what should have gone to workers from productivity improvements went instead to corporate profits. And corporate profit declined after 1997 because of the Asian financial crisis, which reduced offshore income for all transnational companies, while domestic purchasing power remained weak because of sub-par worker income growth.
The break in trends in wages occurred when the unemployment rate sank to 5%, below the 6% threshold of NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) as job creation was robust from 1993 onwards. The "reserve army of labor" in the war against inflation disappeared after the 1997 Asian crisis when the Federal Reserve injected liquidity into the US banking system to launch the debt bubble. According to NAIRU, when more than 94% of the labor force is employed, the war on wage-pushed inflation will be on the defensive. Yet while US inflation was held down by low-price imports from low-wage economies, US domestic wages fell behind productivity growth from 1993 onward. US wages could have risen without inflationary effects but did not because of the threat of further outsourcing of US jobs overseas. This caused corporate profit to rise at the expense of labor income during the low-inflation debt bubble years.
Income inequality in the US today has reached extremes not seen since the 1920s, but the trend started three decades earlier. More than $1 trillion a year in relative income is now being shifted annually from roughly 90,000,000 middle and working class families to the wealthiest households and corporations via corporate profits earned from low-wage workers overseas. This is why nearly 60% of Republicans polled support more taxes on the rich.
The policies and practices responsible for today's widening income gap date back to the 1977-1981 period of the Carter administration which is justly known as the administration of deregulation. Carter's deregulation was done in the name of populism but the results were largely anti-populist. Starting with Carter, policies and practices by both corporations and government underwent a fundamental shift to restructure the US economy with an overhaul of job markets. This was achieved through widespread de-unionization, breakup of industry-wide collective bargaining which enabled management to exploit a new international division of labor at the expense of domestic workers.
The frontal assault on worker collective bargaining power was accompanied by a realigning of the progressive federal tax structure to cut taxes on the rich, a brutal neo-liberal global free-trade offensive by transnational corporations and anti-labor government trade policies. The cost shifting of health care and pension plans from corporations to workers was condoned by government policy. A wave of government-assisted compression of wages and overtime pay narrowed the wage gap between the lowest and highest paid workers (which will occur when lower-paid workers receive a relatively larger wage increase than the higher-paid workers with all workers receiving lower pay increases than managers). There was a recurring diversion of inflation-driven social security fund surpluses to the US fiscal budget to offset recurring inflation-adjusted federal deficits. This was accompanied by wholesale anti-trust deregulation and privatization of public sectors; and most egregious of all, financial market deregulation.
Carter deregulated the US oil industry four years after the 1973 oil crisis in the name of national security. His Democratic challenger, Senator Ted Kennedy, advocated outright nationalization. The Carter administration also deregulated the airlines, favoring profitable hub traffic at the expense of traffic to smaller cities. Air fares fell but service fell further. Delays became routine, frequently tripling door-to-door travel time. What consumers save in airfare, they pay dearly in time lost in delay and in in-flight discomfort. The Carter administration also deregulated trucking, which caused the Teamsters Union to support Ronald Reagan in exchange for a promise to delay trucking deregulation.
Railroads were also deregulated by Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 which eased regulations on rates, line abandonment, and mergers to allow the industry to compete with truck and barge transportation that had caused a financial and physical deterioration of the national rail network railroads. Four years later, Congress followed up with the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 which provided the railroads with greater pricing freedom, streamlined merger timetables, expedited the line abandonment process, and allowed confidential contracts with shippers. Although railroads, like other modes of transportation, must purchase and maintain their own rolling stock and locomotives, they must also, unlike competing modes, construct and maintain their own roadbed, tracks, terminals, and related facilities. Highway construction and maintenance are paid for by gasoline taxes. In the regulated environment, recovering these fixed costs hindered profitability for the rail industry.
After deregulation, the railroads sought to enhance their financial situation and improve their operational efficiency with a mix of strategies to reduce cost and maximize profit, rather than providing needed service to passengers around the nation. These strategies included network rationalization by shedding unprofitable capacity, raising equipment and operational efficiencies by new work rules that reduced safety margins and union power, using differential pricing to favor big shippers, and pursuing consolidation, reducing the number of rail companies from 65 to 5 today. The consequence was a significant increase of market power for the merged rail companies, decreasing transportation options for consumers and increasing rates for remote, less dense areas.
In the agricultural sector, rail network rationalization has forced shippers to truck their bulk commodity products greater distances to mainline elevators, resulting in greater pressure on and damage to rural road systems. For inter-modal shippers, profit-based network rationalization has meant reduced access - physically and economically - to Container on Flat Car (COFC) and Trailer on Flat Car (TOFC) facilities and services. Rail deregulation, as is true with most transportation and communication deregulation, produces sector sub-optimization with dubious benefits for the national economy by distorting distributional balance, causing congestion and inefficient use of land, network and lines.
Carter's Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) approach to radio and television regulation began in the mid-1970s as a search for relatively minor "regulatory underbrush" that could be cleared away for more efficient and cost-effective administration of the important rules that would remain. Congress largely went along with this updating trend, and initiated a few deregulatory moves of its own to make regulation more effective and responsive to contemporary conditions.
The Reagan administration under Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Mark Fowler in 1981 shifted deregulation to a fundamental and ideologically-driven reappraisal of regulations away from long-held principles central to national broadcasting policy appropriate for a democratic society. The result was removal of many longstanding rules to permit an overall reduction in FCC oversight of station ownership concentration and network operations. Congress grew increasingly wary of the pace of deregulation, however, and began to slow the pace of FCC deregulation by the late 1980s.
Specific deregulatory moves included (a) extending television licenses to five years from three in 1981; (b) expanding the number of television stations any single entity could own from seven in 1981 to 12 in 1985, with further changes in 1995; (c) abolishing guidelines for minimal amounts of non-entertainment programming in 1985; (d) elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987; (e) dropping, in 1985, FCC license guidelines for how much advertising could be carried; (f) leaving technical standards increasingly in the hands of licensees rather than FCC mandates; and (g) deregulation of television's competition, especially cable which went through several regulatory changes in the decade after 1983.
The 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated the 40-station ownership cap on radio stations. Since then, the radio industry has experienced unprecedented consolidation. In June 2003, the FCC voted to overhaul limits on media ownership. Despite having held only one hearing on the complex issue of media consolidation over a 20-month review period, the FCC, in a party-line vote, voted 3-2 to overhaul limits on media concentration. The rule would (1) increase the aggregate television ownership cap to enable one company to own stations reaching 45% of our nation's homes (from 35%), (2) lift the ban on newspaper-television cross-ownership, and (3) allow a single company to own three television stations in large media markets and two in medium ones. In the largest markets, the rule would allow a single company to own up to three television stations, eight radio stations, the cable television system, cable television stations, and a daily newspaper. A wide range of public-interest groups filed an appeal with the Third Circuit, which stayed the effective date of the new rules.
According to a BIA Financial Network report released in July 2006, a total of 88 television stations had been sold in the first six months of 2006, generating a transaction value of $15.7 billion. In 2005, the same period saw the sale of just 21 stations at a value of $244 million, with total year transactions of $2.86 billion.
Congress passed a law in 2004 that forbids any network to own a group of stations that reaches more than 39% of the national television audience. That is lower than the 45% limit set in 2003, but more than the original cap of 35% set in 1996 under the Clinton administration - leading public interest groups to argue that the proposed limits lead to a stifling of local voices.
Newspaper-television cross-ownership remains a contentious issue. Currently prohibited, it refers to the "common ownership of a full-service broadcast station and a daily newspaper when the broadcast station's area of coverage (or "contour") encompasses the newspaper's city of publication".
Capping of local radio and television ownership is another issue. While the original rule prohibited it, currently a company can own at least one television and one radio station in a market. In larger markets, "a single entity may own additional radio stations depending on the number of other independently owned media outlets in the market".
Most broadcasters and newspaper publishers are lobbying to ease or end restrictions on cross-ownership; they say it has to be the future of the news business. It allows newsgathering costs to be spread across platforms, and delivers multiple revenue streams in turn. Their argument is also tied to a rapidly changing media consumption market, and to the diversity of opinions available to the consumer with the rise of the Internet and other digital platforms.
The arguments against relaxing media ownership regulations are put forth by consumer unions and other interest groups on the ground that consolidation in any form inevitably leads to a lack of diversity of opinion. Cross-ownership limits the choices for consumers, inhibits localism and gives excessive media power to one entity.
Professional and workers' guilds of the communication industry (the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of TV and Radio Artists among others) would like the FCC to keep in mind the independent voice, and want a quarter of all prime-time programming to come from independent producers. The Children's Media Policy Coalition suggested that the FCC limit local broadcasters to a single license per market, so that there is enough original programming for children. Other interest groups like the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters are worried about what impact the rules might have on station ownership by minorities.
Deregulatory proponents see station licensees not as "public trustees" of the public airwaves requiring the provision of a wide variety of services to many different listening groups. Instead, broadcasting has been increasingly seen as just another business operating in a commercial marketplace which did not need its management decisions questioned by government overseers, even though they are granted permission to use public airways. Opponents argue that deregulation violates a key mandate of the Communications Act of 1934 which requires licensees to operate in the public interest. Deregulation allows broadcasters to seek profits with little public service programming.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major overhaul of US telecommunications law in nearly 62 years, amending the Communications Act of 1934, and leading to media consolidation. It was approved by Congress on January 3, 1996 and signed into law on February 8, 1996 by President Clinton, a Democrat whom some have labeled as the best president the Republicans ever had. The act claimed to foster competition, but instead it continued the historic industry consolidation begun by Reagan, whose actions reduced the number of major media companies from around 50 in 1983 to 10 in 1996 and 6 in 2005.
The Carter administration increased the power of the Federal Reserve through the Depository Institutions and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA) of 1980 which was a necessary first step in ending the New Deal restrictions placed upon financial institutions, such as Regulation Q put in place by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and other restrictions on banks and financial institutions. The populist Regulation Q imposed limits and ceilings on bank and savings-and-loan (S&L) interest rates to provide funds for low-risk home mortgages. But with financial market deregulation, Regulation Q created incentives for US banks to do business outside the reach of US law, launching finance globalization. London came to dominate this offshore dollar business.
The populist Regulation Q, which regulated for several decades limits and ceilings on bank and S&L interest to serve the home mortgage sector, was phased out completely in March 1986. Banks were allowed to pay interest on checking account - the NOW accounts - to lure depositors back from the money markets. The traditional interest-rate advantage of the S&Ls was removed, to provide a "level playing field", forcing them to take the same risks as commercial banks to survive. Congress also lifted restrictions on S&Ls' commercial lending, which promptly got the whole industry into trouble that would soon required an unprecedented government bailout of depositors, with tax money. But the developers who made billions from easy credit were allowed to keep their profits. State usury laws were unilaterally suspended by an act of Congress in a flagrant intrusion on state rights. Carter, the well-intentioned populist, left a legacy of anti-populist policies. To this day, Greenspan continues to argue disingenuously that subprime mortgages helped the poor toward home ownership, instead of generating obscene profit for the debt securitization industry.
During the Reagan administration, corporate lobbying and electoral strategies allowed the corporate elite to wrest control of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, from conservative populists. In the late 1980s, supply-side economics was promoted to allow corporate interests to dominate US politics at the expense of labor by arguing that the only way labor can prosper is to let capital achieve high returns, notwithstanding the contradiction that high returns on capital must come from low wages.
New legislation and laws, executive orders, federal government rule-making, federal agency decisions, and think-tank propaganda, etc, subsequently followed the new political landscape, assisting the implementation of new corporate policies and practices emerging from corporate headquarters rather than from the shop floor. Economists and analysts who challenged this voodoo theory were largely shut out of the media. Workers by the million were persuaded to abandon their institutional collective defender to fend for themselves individually in the name of freedom. It was a freedom to see their job security eroded and wages and benefits fall with no recourse.
Note
1. Das Kapital, Volume One, Part I: Commodities and Money, Chapter One: Commodities, Section
I.
Next: PART 2: Global war on labor
Henry C K Liu is chairman of a New York-based private investment group. His website is at http://www.henryckliu.com.
Copyright 2007, Henry C K Liu
Super Imperialism - New Edition: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance [Paperback]
William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)Hudson is a Wall Street economist who used to work at the Chase Manhattan Bank.In Part One, he describes the rise of the American empire.
Part Two describes its institutions: the US-controlled World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, which all benefit the USA. The US has the sole veto power in all three.
Part Three describes what Herman Kahn called `the greatest rip-off ever achieved', the way the US's ruling class levies us all to pay for its aggressive wars, just as the Roman Empire levied tribute to pay for its constant wars. Similarly Britain, Germany and Japan all pay for the US's military bases in their countries.
In 1945, as in 1918, Britain led Europe's capitulation to the USA's debt demands. The British ruling class chose dependency on the US ruling class. The USA insisted that Britain ended the sterling bloc, accepted IMF controls, did not impose exchange controls, and did not devalue. As Hudson writes, "The Anglo-American Loan Agreement spelled the end of Britain as a Great Power."
The 1945-51 Labour government's huge spending on unnecessary imperial, counter-revolutionary wars robbed our industry of investment. This excessive military spending meant that we had constantly to borrow from the IMF, increasing our dependence on the USA. Now Britain is the USA's Trojan horse in Europe, against Britain's interests.
Hudson immodestly claims that his analysis supersedes Lenin. He says that the US national government's interests, not the private interests of the capitalist class, drive the system. He claims that the US government subordinates `the interests of its national bourgeoisie to the autonomous interests of the national government'. But is the US government really independent of the capitalist class? How `autonomous' are these interests?...
Joshua Malle (Seattle, WA USA)
Difficult and rewarding, Hudson is the real deal,
May 24, 2006 See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)This review is from: Super Imperialism - New Edition: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominanc (Paperback)
Super-Imperialism is better viewed as a radical alternative to common undergraduate textbooks such as Joan Edelman Spero's, "The Politics of International Economic Relations" than as an update to the theories of Lenin or Hobson. (His background and prose style are similar to Spero's and his book covers similar ground.)It has three sections, each which could have been a separate book.
- Chapters 1-6 are a history of U.S. international economic relations from World War I through Bretton Woods.
- Chapters 7-10 are a critique of the "The Institutions of the American Empire" (GATT, the World Bank, the IMF and U.S. foreign aid mechanisms). If you have ever wondered what all of the huge protests of the World Bank and IMF were all about these chapters are for you.
- Chapters 11-15 are about the U.S. economic transition in the late 1960s and early 1970s from running consistent balance of payments surpluses to running consistent deficits. (We used to export more than we imported; Now we import more than we export.) At the same time the U.S. stopped backing dollars with gold, which forced other countries to lend the surplus dollars created by our trade deficit back to the U.S. government (i.e. to buy treasury notes), thereby also subsidizing our chronic budget deficits. This is the "super-imperialism" of the book's title. This situation was still new and strange when the first edition was published in 1972, and the book's reputation rests on the light Hudson was able to shed on it.
The 2003 Edition has a new introduction and two new chapters at the end. The rest of the book has occasional new material, but does not appear to have been extensively re-written.
It's a difficult and rewarding book. The difficulty lies partly in the subject matter itself, partly in Hudson's convoluted prose and partly in the numerous typographical errors that mar the 2003 Pluto Press edition.
The book is rewarding because it's honest. Readers educated in the U.S. will initially regard Hudson's account with some skepticism. We can't help it; We've been systematically miseducated by pro-U.S. polemics presented in an "objective" tone.
In contrast Hudson is a strident critic of the U.S. management of the global economy. But so is any reasonably objective person who is apprized of the facts. I much prefer an author who honestly tells you the real story as he understands it to one who conceals the awful truth behind an ostensibly impartial facade. But a "revisionist" has to work twice as hard to make his case, and that is why the book contains the detailed explication of what reviewer Myers calls the "intricacies of events and negotiations that gave rise to the present order."
I think an open-minded reader will be won over by Hudson's thoughtful use of contemporaneous sources (e.g. government publications and articles in the business press) and also biographical sources to illuminate how key decision makers understood the alternatives, and their motives for pursuing the policies that they did when forging the post-war economic order. As he places these choices in context it quickly becomes evident that the motives on the U.S. side have been consistently aggressive and that U.S. policy makers have all along viewed multilateral economic institutions as instruments of national policy--to the world's detriment.
Hudson also has a keen sense of the painfully narrow horizon of human foresight. The historical sections sometimes read like a conspiracy theory in which the conspirators are not very smart. E.g., Franklin Roosevelt's stubborn insistence that World War I debts be repaid prolonged the Great Depression; When J. M. Keynes was negotiating Bretton Woods for the newly elected Labour government, he got them a terrible deal; The U.S. transition to "super-imperialism" which is the main story of the book (chapters 11 through 14) was originally an unintended consequence of the huge budget and trade deficits caused by the Vietnam War.
If you are interested in "globalization" this book is an important piece of the puzzle, but it really only covers up through 1973, and it spends more time on the relationship between the U.S. and Europe than on "North-South" relations. Having said that, Ch. 8 "The Imperialism of U.S. Foreign Aid" is very good, esp. how foreign aid benefits the U.S. balance of payments and the harmful effects of U.S. agricultural exports. China is hardly mentioned.
If you are an economics student and you sense that they aren't telling you the whole story, or just a thoughtful citizen who wants to sharpen your conceptual tools for understanding and resisting the strategies of U.S. imperialism, this book is for you.
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Salty Saltillo (from the road, USA)
An awkward argument with moments of brilliance,
See all my reviewsNovember 3, 2004 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
Hudson's historical argument in this book is both brilliant and sometimes a bit rough.
Hudson has always had a great talent for interpreting and sketching out for weaker minds like us what the US government's abandonment of the gold-standard really means. When Hudson came forward with his thesis in the mid 1970's, his thesis was outrageous among orthodox economists: to suggest that the US should be worried about the long-term consequences of running balance of payments deficits year after year, decade after decade was crazy leftist nonsense in the 1970s. As long as people continue to need the US markets more than the US needs any other one country's markets (and people still have faith in the good credit of the US government) there is no reason US could not run balance of payment deficits forever, according to the conventional wisdom.
What amazes me is that now, after having done exactly what Hudson warned the US government not to do in the 1970s, many otherwise relatively orthodox economists are beginning to worry about this. Hudson may be on the more "sky-is-falling" end of things, but his analysis was right on the nail in 1972 and is still there today: worst case scenario - massive recession and massive devaluation of the dollar (by massive I mean, unprecedented). Former US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin was quoted in March 16, 2006 WSJ as saying that "The probabilities are extremely high that if we don't address these imbalances, then at some point, and it could be years down the road, we'll pay a very big price." We are in a limbo world where no one really knows how this problem is going to play out, but Hudson should be credited for being one of the first, and longest-running, advocates for addressing this problem. Too bad it has taken so many decades for people to recognize what he has been telling us all along about balance of payments deficits.
The rest of the argument Hudson makes in this book is a bit tough to follow, though. Essentially, Hudson attempts to show how the US has, during this century but especially since WWII, systematically sought to manipulate all of the great economic institution-building opportunities following WWII to advance the interests of the US over other countries. Coming off the gold standard and running up a balance of payments deficit was just one of many ways in which this occurred. The US largely succeeded. The GATT (now WTO), World Bank, IMF, all bear American "fingerprints".
I agree that the mega-institutions of the contemporary world economic and political machine are largely the unilateral creation of the US, imposed on the other great nations at a time when the other nations were particularly vulnerable to US force of will and not particular inclined to be heterodox visionaries. I also agree that the US in general has probably used as much leverage as it could in negotiating all of the defining institutions in which it had any hand in constructing.
And yet, how could it have been any different? National governments pursue their self-interest and the interest of their citizens, often at the expense of other national governments and their citizens. The nation-state system is set up to work that way. But is the problem really one of US bad behavior, as Hudson suggests? Isn't the problem really structural? In the nation-state world, wherein the world is divided up into pseudo-autonomous political monopolies, each individually endowed with particular strengths and weaknesses, and all pitted against each other in a laissez-faire system where the only things that keep nation-states from raping and killing each other to oblivion are, good faith and the fact that the balance of power among the nation-states is enough to keep each monopoly contained in its behavior towards the other monopolies, what sort of behavior could we have expected from the US, a nation-state that, at a series of pivotal moments in 20th century history, found itself with "golden opportunities" to take advantage of other nations' weaknesses and advance its own power? Would the French, or the Brits, or the Japanese, or the Italians, or the Germans, or the Russians have behaved any different if they found themselves holding all the cards in 1945 instead of the US?
My point is, the facts Hudson lays out are correct -- there clearly is a problem in the way in which our current world order has been put together and the US is at the middle of that problem. The conclusions Hudson draws from those facts do not go deep enough in understanding what those facts mean, however.
It isn't that the Americans behave or behaved "bad" by the standard of good behavior implicit in the nation-state system, it is that the nation-state system itself to a certain extent reflects 19th century laissez-faire values of autonomy and individuality that pit nation-states against each other in a world where each is out to improve its lot through trade and, when possible and tolerable, violence.
The system itself breaks down when one player becomes too powerful. To blame the US for the systemic problem of massive power imbalances between nation states is simply pushing any hope for correction in the wrong direction.
FT.com / Columnists / Samuel Brittan - The wrong kind of Third Way: When a book entitled Supercapitalism: the Battle for Democracy in an Age of Big Business (Icon Books) landed on my desk I took it for just another of the many anti-capitalist diatribes so beloved by publishers. Its author was Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labour who parted company from the Clinton administration on the grounds that it was not interventionist enough. But I was glad I persevered. For it turned out to be one of the most interesting books on political economy to appear for a long time.During the postwar decades up to the early 1970s, the Bretton Woods system of semi-fixed exchange rates worked, after a fashion; and countries seemed able to combine full employment with low inflation and historically rapid growth and diminishing income differences. Reich calls them a "not quite golden age". It was "not quite" because of the treatment of women and minorities and the prevailing conformist and authoritarian atmosphere.
It has been succeeded by what Reich calls supercapitalism, in which the cult of the bottom line has replaced the cosy oligopolies of postwar decades, once-dominant companies shrink or disappear, new ones spring up overnight and the financial sector is (or was until recently) in the driving seat. He rightly dismisses many of the popular scapegoats – or heroes – of the process. The changeover began well before Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher could influence anything. Free-market economists have been preaching essentially the same message since the 18th century. It is extremely unlikely that there has been a radical change in the psychology or morality of business operators. His own candidate is the technologies that have empowered consumers and investors to get ever better deals.
Unfortunately, many of these same consumers have lost in their capacity as citizens. He cites the failure of the political process even to attempt to correct the increasing skewness of US income distribution. In later pronouncements he has attributed the subprime loan disaster in part to the failure of supercapitalism to raise the incomes of the mass of wage earners who have been impelled to resort to borrowing as a substitute. Moreover, Congress has performed abysmally in correcting market failures in environmental and other areas. He has a non-partisan explanation: the staggering increase in business lobbying expenditures affecting Democrats as well as Republicans, as a result of which the political process, far from correcting the distortions of unbridled capitalism, has made them worse.
But for me the novel point of the book is his utter dismissal of the prevailing idea of appealing to the "social responsibility" of business to improve matters. This is a notion that particularly appeals to soft centre politicians such as David Cameron's Conservatives in Britain as a new kind of Third Way. Reich argues that it is the job of the democratic political process by laws, taxes and other interventions to harmonise the pursuit of money-making with the public good. "The job of the businessman is to make profits." He is completely unabashed by the charge that he sounds like Milton Friedman and indeed quotes the late Chicago professor approvingly several times. He argues that the so-called stakeholders who insist on being consulted before legislation is drafted are increasingly companies whose interests might be affected. One result is the "corruption of knowledge". We should beware of claims that a company is doing something for the public good. Corporate executives may donate some of their shareholders' money to a genuinely good cause or forbear from polluting the atmosphere to forestall a greater legal or fiscal burden. But in that case such actions are likely to be limited and temporary, "extending only insofar as the conditions that made such voluntary action pay off continue".
Similarly we should beware of a politician who blames a company for doing something that is legal. Such words are all too often a cover "for taking no action to change the rules of the game". Above all, "corporations are not people. They are legal fictions, nothing more than bundles of contractual agreements ... A company cannot know right from wrong ... Only people know right from wrong and only people act." One example of the "anthropomorphic fallacy" is when companies are held criminally liable for the misdeeds of their executives. Not only are the genuinely guilty let off too lightly but many innocent people get hurt. For instance, "the vast majority of Andersen employees had nothing to do with Enron but lost their jobs nonetheless".
I have two reservations. One is that I cannot share Reich's confidence that a revived and effective "democracy" would be a cure-all. You only have to see where democratic pressures are driving US energy policy. Second, there is a danger that the Friedman-Reich position could inadvertently give sustenance to the "I was only doing my job" defence for evil actions. You do not have to hold shares in a company selling arms to Saudi Arabia, or work for it. But do not deceive yourself that such individual gestures can be a substitute for a change in policy.
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The Balance of Capitalism and Democracy,
September 17, 2007 By Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)This review is from: Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Hardcover)
According to Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, there was a time when capitalism and democracy where almost perfectly balanced. This was the period of 1945 to 1975, which he calls the "Not Quite Golden Age." During this period there was a three-way social contract among big business, big labor, and big government. Each made sure that they as well as the other two received a fair share of the pie. Unions recieved their wages and benefits, business their profits, and regulatory agencies had their power. It was also a time when the gap between the rich and the poor was the narrowest in our history. It was not quite the golden age because women and minorities were still second class citizens, but at least there was hope.Fast forward to 2007, capitalism is thriving and democracy is sputtering. Why has capitlism become supercapitalism and democracy become enfeebled? Reich explains that it was a combination of things: deregulation, globe spanning computer networks, better transportation, etc. The changes were mainly a result of technological breakthroughs; unlike many leftists, he is not conspiratorial thinker. The winner of this great transformation was the consumer/investor and the loser was the citizen/wage earner. The consumer has more choices than ever before and at reasonable prices. The investor has unprecedented opportunities to make profits. The citzen, however, is not doing well. The average citizen does not have much voice - other than voting - in the body politic. And on the wage earner has been stagnating for many years. The most salient illustration of this trend is Walmart. Walmart delivers the goods at low prices, but the trade-off is low wages for their employees. We justify this dilemma, as Reich nicely puts it, because "The awkward truth is that most of us are of two minds."
As a left-leaning author, Reich makes some startling pronouncements. One, stop treating corporations as human beings. They are neither moral or immoral, they are merely "bundles of contracts." I couldn't agree more. Stop expecting corporations to be socially responsible, see them for what they are: profit-seeking organizations. Any socially responsible action is a ruse to bolster the bottom line anyway. Don't even encourage them to be socially responsible because it will wrongly lead us to believe that they are solving problems when they are not. Corporations play by the rules that they are given and it is up to citizens and their elected representatives to change the rules.
This is no easy task in the age of supercapitalism. There are currently 38,000 registered lobbyists in Washington DC in a virtual arms race of spending with each other to buy favors from our so-called representatives. The only way citizens can compete with this is not by hiring more lobbyists but advocating through new media outlets such as the internet and cable tv. This, according to Reich, is currently to most effective way to make government more responsive.
The question that remains, after reading this book, is will consumers be willing to sacrifice their low prices to achieve their goals as citizens. If the answer is yes, we can possibly rebalance the equation between democracy and capitalism; if not, we are left to the not so tender mercies of supercapitalism.
Robert Reich makes a compelling argument that supercapitalism has robbed democracy of much of its power. Supercapitalism by the definition presented in the book is simple--the consumer is king and prices ALWAYS go down. What Reich looks at is the cost of low prices to companies, society, the individual and its impact on the workings of democracy. So how is democracy compromised? Reich also points out that the rise of different lobbying groups, the cost of politics and globalization as contributing to this process. This isn't a surprise. It has just become more pronounced with time.
It's not due to some large conspiracy or any hidden political agenda as much as it is driven by consumption. Ultimately Reich argues that it robs the common citizen of any control over democracy. It's not surprising that this is a highly charged issue because the economics of what benefits society (or "the common good" as Reich calls it)often gets tangled up in the web of politics. Reich also points out that the cost of supercompetitiveness, constantly falling prices is a loss to the economic and social health of America. Reich points out that everyone wants to get the lowest price possible but he also suggests that we must balance that with our desire to have decent wages and benefits. He also points out that the move towards regulation was initiated by government and that corporations went along because it kept out competition and guaranteed a top and bottom for prices allowing companies to get a profit without fear of cutting prices so low that it would put them out of business.
I should point out that this is an oversimplification of Reich's points but it does capture some of the concepts. He also makes some suggestions that would help keep the free market afloat without undermining democracy and allowing consumers to still benefit from competitive pricing. Since this is economics we are discussing politics is mixed in and might color whether or not you agree with his points.
Reich's style is breezy for a book that looks at economics, democracy and the erosion of wages, benefits. Reich comes across as fair balanced and thoughtful even as he sells his take on what is undermining American society. Ultimately it's a worthwhile book to read simply because it opens up dialogue on the social cost of constantly lowering prices and how it impacts those who live next door to us
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Every middle class American should read this book. Many observations about income disparities have been written up lately but Reich pulls the important points together in a powerful and accessible way.
Reich's main thesis is that the current transition the US economy is under is misunderstood. Many of the policy elite (Geithner, Volcker) have repeated the familiar claim that Americans are living beyond their means. Personally I don't discount that completely but Reich's insight goes much deeper and rings truer:
"The problem was not that American spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them."
"We cannot have a sustained recovery until we address it. ... Until this transformation is made, our economy will continue to experience phantom recoveries and speculative bubbles, each more distressing than the one before."
Anyone looking at the unemployment data since WWII has to wonder why the unemployment component of the last three recessions is so prolonged. Instead of a sharp trend up, there are long slopes of delayed returns to peak employment. (Google "calculated risk blog" and look at Dec. 2010 articles.) I believe Reich has demonstrated the main culprit this. To be clear, he is not describing the detailed mechanics of what triggered the Great Recession. (Nouriel Roubini has a good book that I would recommend for more on the financial fraud, leverage and credit risks involved - Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance. ) But Reich is taking a long term view and exposes a dysfunctional trait of the US economy that no one can afford to ignore. It is this weakness that will delay the current recovery and continue to create greater risks in the future.
Reich draws the parallels between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, particularly the imbalance of wealth concentrated in fewer hands and middle class workers with less income to convert into consumer demand. One of the fascinating devices he found to do this was the writings of Marriner Eccles (Fed chair between '34 to '48):
"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth - not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced - to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped."
Reich also shares a couple of powerful and disturbing graphs that show how the middle class has been squeezed and also how since the late 70s, hourly wages have not only not kept up with the rise in productivity but have remained essentially flat.
Another driving theme Reich presents is the "basic bargain" and he evokes Henry Ford, the man that took mass production to new heights and paid his workers well:
"[Henry] Ford understood the basic economic bargain that lay at the heart of a modern, highly productive economy. Workers are also consumers. Their earnings are continuously recycled to buy the goods and services other workers produce. But if earnings are inadequate and this basic bargain is broken, an economy produces more goods and services than its people are capable of purchasing."
I was concerned early in the book that Reich would leave out some of the important complexities of the topic but he covered related finances, politics and even consumer/voter psychology in a succinct yet informative way. His summary of changes to the labor market in the last 30+ years was very good.
His ideas for correcting this were interesting if perhaps difficult to implement politically. My take away however was that this is a strong indicator of how bad he thinks the situation really is. Many Americans may be yearning to return to "normal". Reich is the first to thoroughly convince me that it is not going to happen.
This is a very quick read of 144 pages and is well worth the time.
As Michael Hudson aptly noted in Replacing Economic Democracy with Financial Oligarchy (2011)
Finance is a form of warfare. Like military conquest, its aim is to gain control of land, public infrastructure, and to impose tribute. This involves dictating laws to its subjects, and concentrating social as well as economic planning in centralized hands. This is what now is being done by financial means, without the cost to the aggressor of fielding an army. But the economies under attacked may be devastated as deeply by financial stringency as by military attack when it comes to demographic shrinkage, shortened life spans, emigration and capital flight.
This attack is being mounted not by nation states as such, but by a cosmopolitan financial class. Finance always has been cosmopolitan more than nationalistic – and always has sought to impose its priorities and lawmaking power over those of parliamentary democracies.
Like any monopoly or vested interest, the financial strategy seeks to block government power to regulate or tax it. From the financial vantage point, the ideal function of government is to enhance and protect finance capital and "the miracle of compound interest" that keeps fortunes multiplying exponentially, faster than the economy can grow, until they eat into the economic substance and do to the economy what predatory creditors and rentiers did to the Roman Empire.
Simon Johnson, former IMF Chief Economist, is coming out in May's 2009 edition of The Atlantic with a fascinating, highly provocative piece, on the collusion between the US' "financial oligarchy" and the US government and how its persistence will contribute to prolonging the economic crisis. Here is the summary (hat tip to Global Conditions):
One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you (…)
The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don't want to hear.(…)
No, the real concern of the fund's senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis. (…)
Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason-the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit-and, most of the time, genteel-oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders (…)
Many IMF programs "go off track" (a euphemism) precisely because the government can't stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A program "goes back on track" once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern-and thus win or lose-under the IMF-supported plan. (…)
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (…).
(…) elite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better-in a "buck stops somewhere else" sort of way-on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for "safety and soundness" were fast asleep at the wheel.
But these various policies-lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership-had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector's profits-such as Brooksley Born's now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998-were ignored or swept aside.
The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
(…) the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital-a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. (…)
One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup's executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson's predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.
A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true (…).
By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists-at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy's favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused (…)
Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks' hands-indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.
Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand (…)
The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary (…)
In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today.
Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical-since we'll want to sell the banks quickly-they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.
This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the "efficiency costs" of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail-a financial weapon of mass self-destruction-explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.
To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation (…)
Caps on executive compensation, while redolent of populism, might help restore the political balance of power and deter the emergence of a new oligarchy. (…)
(…) Over time, though, the largest part may involve more transparency and competition, which would bring financial-industry fees down. To those who say this would drive financial activities to other countries, we can now safely say: fine".
The nature of financial oligarchy is such that the government's capacity to take control of an entire financial system, and to clean, slice it up and re-privatize it impartially is almost non-existent. Instead we have growing, potentially corrupt, collusion between financial elites and government officials which is hall mark of corporatism in this more modern form on neoliberalism.
In 1998 Mark Curtis wrote The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order, a work whose stated goal was to shed light on various myths of Anglo-American power in the post-Cold War era.
Curtis attempts to demonstrate how the United Kingdom remained a key partner of the United States' effort to enforce their hegemony in the world. He analyzes what he refers to as a special relationship between the two countries and concludes that quite serious consequences exist for both states.
Trade for Life: Making Trade Work for Poor People is a work published in 2001. It is a strong critique of the function of international organizations, especially the World Trade Organization (WTO). Curtis analyzes the decisions taken by the WTO in developing states and concludes that these decisions were seldom without bias against the poor countries; he claims that certain of these decisions, notably certain structural adjustments, caused their intended benefactors more harm than good. Further, Curtis regrets that some rules are lacking when their need is called for, noting the relative lack of regulation checking the growth of power of multinational companies. A partner of Christian Aid in Zimbabwe has said that "the manner in which the WTO functions, is like placing an adult against a child in a boxing ring, like Manchester United against a local Zimbabwean team.
The WTO judges all countries on the same level, while they are not the same. The WTO must help create a situation where countries are more equal." This is a quotation that Mark Curtis recycles throughout his book.
Curtis concludes by saying that market forces can be used in a different, more egalitarian, manner than the one currently employed by the WTO. He believes that it could benefit developing nations if this goal was pursued.
His book was edited by ChristianAid while Mark Curtis was "Policy and Politics" Director and is freely available.
In 2003 Mark Curtis published Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World. This book has been his most successful to date. It offers a new academic approach to the role of the United Kingdom in the post 1945 world until the current the War on Terrorism. It further criticizes the foreign policy of Tony Blair. Curtis, defending the idea that Britain is a rogue state, describes various relations the United Kingdom undertook with repressive regimes and how he thinks these actions made the world less just.
Moreover, the book analyzes various recent actions of the British Army in the world, describing not only what he characterizes as the immorality of the War in Iraq, but also of the War in Afghanistan, and the Kosovo War. Curtis denounces equally strongly Britain's alliances with states he categorizes as repressive, such as Israel, Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Additionally, he details and criticizes the non-intervention of Britain in the Rwandan Genocide.
Curtis draws most of his research from recently declassified documents by the British secret service. He notably claims to demonstrate the role and complicity of the British in the massacre of millions of Indonesians in 1965, the toppling of the governments of Iran and British Guyana, and what he describes as repressive colonial policies in the former colonies of Kenya, Oman, and Malaysia.
In 2004, Mark Curtis published Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses. This book followed a similar line of thought begun in Web of Deceit. Unpeople is based on various declassified documents from the British secret service.
Among the declassified secret service reports, Curtis asserts that the United Kingdom had given aid to Saddam Hussein in 1963 in order that he rised to power in Iraq; he further posits that the Western Powers, notably the UK, performed various arms deals with the Iraqi government while the Iraqi government was involved in the brutal aggression against the Kurdish community. Curtis asserts that these documents further indict the British government in their role played in the Vietnam War, the coup d'État against Idi Amin in 1971, the coup d'État against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and coups in Indonesia and Guyana.
Mark Curtis estimates that approximately ten million deaths throughout the world since 1945 have been caused by the United Kingdom's foreign policy.
From Amazon review of Blowback The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Chalmers Johnson
But Johnson is relying on the idea that "America" is a unitary entity, so that the hollowing out of industry hurts "America", not specific social groups within the country. In reality, US foreign policymakers work to advance the interests not of "America", but of those same business elites that have benefited from turning Asia into the world's sweatshop and undermining the unions that built their strength on American industry. American economic imperialism is not a failed conspiracy against the people of Asia, but an alliance between American elites and their Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Chinese counterparts - against the potential power of the working majority in all those countries.
But it's more complex than that, too, since the US seeks to prevent the emergence of an independent military challenge (especially China, but also Japan) to its Asia hegemony while seeking to expand the power of American commercial interests in the region, even as it tries to keep Asian elites happy enough with the status quo to prevent their rebellion against it.
In other words, the US system in Asia is more complicated than Johnson conveys, and defending America's mythical "national interests" will never address its fundamental injustices.
While Johnson seems to have abundant sympathy for the people of Asia, his nationalist framework prevents his from proposing the only real challenge to American hegemony: a popular anti-imperialist movement that crosses the barriers of nation-states.
Imperialism 101 by Micjael Parenti
Imperialism 101 By Michael Parenti
By Michael Parenti
24 June, 2011
Michaelparenti.orgImperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized, so that empires become "commonwealths," and colonies become "territories" or "dominions" (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, "commonwealths" too). Imperialist military interventions become matters of "national defense," "national security," and maintaining "stability" in one or another region. In this book I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.
Across the Entire Globe
By "imperialism" I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.The earliest victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. Some 800 years ago, Ireland became the first colony of what later became known as the British empire. A part of Ireland still remains under British occupation. Other early Caucasian victims included the Eastern Europeans. The people Charlemagne worked to death in his mines in the early part of the ninth century were Slavs. So frequent and prolonged was the enslavement of Eastern Europeans that "Slav" became synonymous with servitude. Indeed, the word "slave" derives from "Slav." Eastern Europe was an early source of capital accumulation, having become wholly dependent upon Western manufactures by the seventeenth century.
A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II, which gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including the slave labor of concentration camps.
The preponderant thrust of the European, North American, and Japanese imperial powers has been directed against Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the nineteenth century, they saw the Third World as not only a source of raw materials and slaves but a market for manufactured goods. By the twentieth century, the industrial nations were exporting not only goods but capital, in the form of machinery, technology, investments, and loans. To say that we have entered the stage of capital export and investment is not to imply that the plunder of natural resources has ceased. If anything, the despoliation has accelerated.
Of the various notions about imperialism circulating today in the United States, the dominant view is that it does not exist. Imperialism is not recognized as a legitimate concept, certainly not in regard to the United States. One may speak of "Soviet imperialism" or "nineteenth-century British imperialism" but not of U.S. imperialism. A graduate student in political science at most universities in this country would not be granted the opportunity to research U.S. imperialism, on the grounds that such an undertaking would not be scholarly. While many people throughout the world charge the United States with being an imperialist power, in this country persons who talk of U.S. imperialism are usually judged to be mouthing ideological blather.
The Dynamic of Capital Expansion
Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol empires all existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it systematically accumulates capital through the organized exploitation of labor and the penetration of overseas markets. Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, transforming and dominating their economies, cultures, and political life, integrating their financial and productive structures into an international system of capital accumulation.A central imperative of capitalism is expansion. Investors will not put their money into business ventures unless they can extract more than they invest. Increased earnings come only with a growth in the enterprise. The capitalist ceaselessly searches for ways of making more money in order to make still more money. One must always invest to realize profits, gathering as much strength as possible in the face of competing forces and unpredictable markets.
Given its expansionist nature, capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described a bourgeoisie that "chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . . It creates a world after its own image." The expansionists destroy whole societies. Self-sufficient peoples are forcibly transformed into disfranchised wage workers. Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media, consumer societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages by desolate shanty towns, autonomous regions by centralized autocracies.
Consider one of a thousand such instances. A few years ago the Los Angeles Times carried a special report on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific. By their own testimony, the people there lived contented lives. They hunted, fished, and raised food in their jungle orchards and groves. But their entire way of life was ruthlessly wiped out by a few giant companies that destroyed the rainforest in order to harvest the hardwood for quick profits. Their lands were turned into ecological disaster areas and they themselves were transformed into disfranchised shantytown dwellers, forced to work for subsistence wages-when fortunate enough to find employment.
North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximize profits by investing in countries with cheaper labor markets. U.S. corporate foreign investment grew 84 percent from 1985 to 1990, the most dramatic increase being in cheap-labor countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, and Singapore.
Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labor unions, and nonexistent occupational and environmental protections, U.S. corporate profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries. Citibank, one of the largest U.S. firms, earns about 75 percent of its profits from overseas operations. While profit margins at home sometimes have had a sluggish growth, earnings abroad have continued to rise dramatically, fostering the development of what has become known as the multinational or transnational corporation. Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the global free market and are extending their grasp into the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe.
Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars, trucks and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and a dozen other countries. Such "multiple sourcing" enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against each other in order to discourage wage and benefit demands and undermine labor union strategies.
Not Necessary, Just Compelling
Some writers question whether imperialism is a necessary condition for capitalism, pointing out that most Western capital is invested in Western nations, not in the Third World. If corporations lost all their Third World investments, they argue, many of them could still survive on their European and North American markets. In response, one should note that capitalism might be able to survive without imperialism-but it shows no inclination to do so. It manifests no desire to discard its enormously profitable Third World enterprises. Imperialism may not be a necessary condition for investor survival but it seems to be an inherent tendency and a natural outgrowth of advanced capitalism. Imperial relations may not be the only way to pursue profits, but they are the most lucrative way.Whether imperialism is necessary for capitalism is really not the question. Many things that are not absolutely necessary are still highly desirable, therefore strongly preferred and vigorously pursued. Overseas investors find the Third World's cheap labor, vital natural resources, and various other highly profitable conditions to be compellingly attractive. Superprofits may not be necessary for capitalism's survival but survival is not all that capitalists are interested in. Superprofits are strongly preferred to more modest earnings. That there may be no necessity between capitalism and imperialism does not mean there is no compelling linkage.
The same is true of other social dynamics. For instance, wealth does not necessarily have to lead to luxurious living. A higher portion of an owning class's riches could be used for investment rather personal consumption. The very wealthy could survive on more modest sums but that is not how most of them prefer to live. Throughout history, wealthy classes generally have shown a preference for getting the best of everything. After all, the whole purpose of getting rich off other people's labor is to live well, avoiding all forms of thankless toil and drudgery, enjoying superior opportunities for lavish life-styles, medical care, education, travel, recreation, security, leisure, and opportunities for power and prestige. While none of these things are really "necessary," they are fervently clung to by those who possess them-as witnessed by the violent measures endorsed by advantaged classes whenever they feel the threat of an equalizing or leveling democratic force.
Myths of Underdevelopment
The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World," to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct "Second World" of communist states. Third World poverty, called "underdevelopment," is treated by most Western observers as an original historic condition. We are asked to believe that it always existed, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people unproductive. In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor-and it is because of the pillage they have endured.
The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago and continues to this day. First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices, then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory, ebony, and later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium. Not to be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor.
Through the centuries of colonization, many self-serving imperialist theories have been spun. I was taught in school that people in tropical lands are slothful and do not work as hard as we denizens of the temperate zone. In fact, the inhabitants of warm climates have performed remarkably productive feats, building magnificent civilizations well before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. And today they often work long, hard hours for meager sums. Yet the early stereotype of the "lazy native" is still with us. In every capitalist society, the poor-both domestic and overseas-regularly are blamed for their own condition.
We hear that Third World peoples are culturally retarded in their attitudes, customs, and technical abilities. It is a convenient notion embraced by those who want to depict Western investments as a rescue operation designed to help backward peoples help themselves. This myth of "cultural backwardness" goes back to ancient times, when conquerors used it to justify enslaving indigenous peoples. It was used by European colonizers over the last five centuries for the same purpose.
What cultural supremacy could by claimed by the Europeans of yore? From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Europe was "ahead" in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings, murders, and other violent crimes; instances of venereal disease, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, plagues, and other bodily afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); mistreatment of women and children; and frequency of famines, slavery, prostitution, piracy, religious massacres, and inquisitional torture. Those who claim the West has been the most advanced civilization should keep such "achievements" in mind.
More seriously, we might note that Europe enjoyed a telling advantage in navigation and armaments. Muskets and cannon, Gatling guns and gunboats, and today missiles, helicopter gunships, and fighter bombers have been the deciding factors when West meets East and North meets South. Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still maintained by force, though not by force alone.
It was said that colonized peoples were biologically backward and less evolved than their colonizers. Their "savagery" and "lower" level of cultural evolution were emblematic of their inferior genetic evolution. But were they culturally inferior? In many parts of what is now considered the Third World, people developed impressive skills in architecture, horticulture, crafts, hunting, fishing, midwifery, medicine, and other such things. Their social customs were often far more gracious and humane and less autocratic and repressive than anything found in Europe at that time. Of course we must not romanticize these indigenous societies, some of which had a number of cruel and unusual practices of their own. But generally, their peoples enjoyed healthier, happier lives, with more leisure time, than did most of Europe's inhabitants.
Other theories enjoy wide currency. We hear that Third World poverty is due to overpopulation, too many people having too many children to feed. Actually, over the last several centuries, many Third World lands have been less densely populated than certain parts of Europe. India has fewer people per acre-but more poverty-than Holland, Wales, England, Japan, Italy, and a few other industrial countries. Furthermore, it is the industrialized nations of the First World, not the poor ones of the Third, that devour some 80 percent of the world's resources and pose the greatest threat to the planet's ecology.
This is not to deny that overpopulation is a real problem for the planet's ecosphere. Limiting population growth in all nations would help the global environment but it would not solve the problems of the poor-because overpopulation in itself is not the cause of poverty but one of its effects. The poor tend to have large families because children are a source of family labor and income and a support during old age.
Frances Moore Lappe and Rachel Schurman found that of seventy Third World countries, there were six-China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chile, Burma, and Cuba-and the state of Kerala in India that had managed to lower their birth rates by one third. They enjoyed neither dramatic industrial expansion nor high per capita incomes nor extensive family planning programs. The factors they had in common were public education and health care, a reduction of economic inequality, improvements in women's rights, food subsidies, and in some cases land reform. In other words, fertility rates were lowered not by capitalist investments and economic growth as such but by socio-economic betterment, even of a modest scale, accompanied by the emergence of women's rights.
Artificially Converted to Poverty
What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries. With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were actually set back in their development sometimes for centuries. British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India. By 1830, the trade flow was reversed. The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force. Within a matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns. The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories. In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British financiers. By 1850, India's debt had grown to 53 million pounds. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds. The value of the raw materials and commodities the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers. The massive poverty we associate with India was not that country's original historical condition. British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development, then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.
Similar bleeding processes occurred throughout the Third World. The enormous wealth extracted should remind us that there originally were few really poor nations. Countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Bolivia, Zaire, Mexico, Malaysia, and the Philippines were and sometimes still are rich in resources. Some lands have been so thoroughly plundered as to be desolate in all respects. However, most of the Third World is not "underdeveloped" but overexploited. Western colonization and investments have created a lower rather than a higher living standard.
Referring to what the English colonizers did to the Irish, Frederick Engels wrote in 1856: "How often have the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed politically and industrially. By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation." So with most of the Third World. The Mayan Indians in Guatemala had a more nutritious and varied diet and better conditions of health in the early 16th century before the Europeans arrived than they have today. They had more craftspeople, architects, artisans, and horticulturists than today. What is called underdevelopment is not an original historical condition but a product of imperialism's superexploitation. Underdevelopment is itself a development.
Imperialism has created what I have termed "maldevelopment": modern office buildings and luxury hotels in the capital city instead of housing for the poor, cosmetic surgery clinics for the affluent instead of hospitals for workers, cash export crops for agribusiness instead of food for local markets, highways that go from the mines and latifundios to the refineries and ports instead of roads in the back country for those who might hope to see a doctor or a teacher.
Wealth is transferred from Third World peoples to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and more recently Japan) by direct plunder, by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices. The colonized country is denied the freedom of trade and the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, and industrial capacity. Self-sustenance and self-employment gives way to wage labor. From 1970 to 1980, the number of wage workers in the Third World grew from 72 million to 120 million, and the rate is accelerating.
Hundreds of millions of Third World peoples now live in destitution in remote villages and congested urban slums, suffering hunger, disease, and illiteracy, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption. A study of twenty of the poorest countries, compiled from official statistics, found that the number of people living in what is called "absolute poverty" or rockbottom destitution, the poorest of the poor, is rising 70,000 a day and should reach 1.5 billion by the year 2000 (San Francisco Examiner, June 8, 1994).
Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, their mental and physical health severely damaged by endless exploitation. A documentary film on the Discovery Channel (April 24, 1994) reported that in countries like Russia, Thailand, and the Philippines, large numbers of minors are sold into prostitution to help their desperate families survive. In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care.
In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force. Tens of thousands labor in glass factories in temperatures as high as 100 degrees. In one plant, four-year-olds toil from 5 o'clock in the morning until the dead of night, inhaling fumes and contracting emphysema, tuberculosis, and other respiratory diseases. In the Philippines and Malaysia corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment. The pursuit of profit becomes a pursuit of evil.
Development Theory
When we say a country is "underdeveloped," we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve. The negative connotations of "underdeveloped" has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street Journal, and parties of various political persuasion to refer to Third World countries as "developing" nations, a term somewhat less insulting than "underdeveloped" but equally misleading. I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" seems to be just a euphemistic way of saying "underdeveloped but belatedly starting to do something about it." It still implies that poverty was an original historic condition and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.The dominant theory of the last half century, enunciated repeatedly by writers like Barbara Ward and W. W. Rostow and afforded wide currency in the United States and other parts of the Western world, maintains that it is up to the rich nations of the North to help uplift the "backward" nations of the South, bringing them technology and teaching them proper work habits. This is an updated version of "the White man's burden," a favorite imperialist fantasy.
According to the development scenario, with the introduction of Western investments, the backward economic sectors of the poor nations will release their workers, who then will find more productive employment in the modern sector at higher wages. As capital accumulates, business will reinvest its profits, thus creating still more products, jobs, buying power, and markets. Eventually a more prosperous economy evolves.
This "development theory" or "modernization theory," as it is sometimes called, bears little relation to reality. What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitive form of dependent capitalism. Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of transnational corporate investment. The problem is not poor lands or unproductive populations but foreign exploitation and class inequality. Investors go into a country not to uplift it but to enrich themselves.
People in these countries do not need to be taught how to farm. They need the land and the implements to farm. They do not need to be taught how to fish. They need the boats and the nets and access to shore frontage, bays, and oceans. They need industrial plants to cease dumping toxic effusions into the waters. They do not need to be convinced that they should use hygienic standards. They do not need a Peace Corps Volunteer to tell them to boil their water, especially when they cannot afford fuel or have no access to firewood. They need the conditions that will allow them to have clean drinking water and clean clothes and homes. They do not need advice about balanced diets from North Americans. They usually know what foods best serve their nutritional requirements. They need to be given back their land and labor so that they might work for themselves and grow food for their own consumption.
The legacy of imperial domination is not only misery and strife, but an economic structure dominated by a network of international corporations which themselves are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe and Japan. If there is any harmonization or integration, it occurs among the global investor classes, not among the indigenous economies of these countries. Third World economies remain fragmented and unintegrated both between each other and within themselves, both in the flow of capital and goods and in technology and organization. In sum, what we have is a world economy that has little to do with the economic needs of the world's people.
Neoimperialism: Skimming the Cream
Sometimes imperial domination is explained as arising from an innate desire for domination and expansion, a "territorial imperative." In fact, territorial imperialism is no longer the prevailing mode. Compared to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the European powers carved up the world among themselves, today there is almost no colonial dominion left. Colonel Blimp is dead and buried, replaced by men in business suits. Rather than being directly colonized by the imperial power, the weaker countries have been granted the trappings of sovereignty-while Western finance capital retains control of the lion's share of their profitable resources. This relationship has gone under various names: "informal empire," "colonialism without colonies," "neocolonialism," and "neoimperialism. "U.S. political and business leaders were among the earliest practitioners of this new kind of empire, most notably in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century. Having forcibly wrested the island from Spain in the war of 1898, they eventually gave Cuba its formal independence. The Cubans now had their own government, constitution, flag, currency, and security force. But major foreign policy decisions remained in U.S. hands as did the island's wealth, including its sugar, tobacco, and tourist industries, and major imports and exports.
Historically U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without bothering to own and administer the nations themselves. Under neoimperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere - frequently assisted by the sword.
After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a strategy of neoimperialism. Left financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule. They discovered that the removal of a conspicuously intrusive colonial rule made it more difficult for nationalist elements within the previously colonized countries to mobilize anti-imperialist sentiments.
Though the newly established government might be far from completely independent, it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a colonial administration controlled by the imperial power. Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on accumulating capital-which is all they really want to do.
After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere. Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.
The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global capitalist orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and aid. So we witnessed the curious phenomenon of leaders of newly independent Third World nations denouncing imperialism as the source of their countries' ills, while dissidents in these countries denounced these same leaders as collaborators of imperialism.
In many instances a comprador class emerged or was installed as a first condition for independence. A comprador class is one that cooperates in turning its own country into a client state for foreign interests. A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors. In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, few effective labor unions, no minimum wage or child labor or occupational safety laws, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.
In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong economic regulations. The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression. Still, neoimperialism carries risks. The achievement of de jure independence eventually fosters expectations of de facto independence. The forms of self rule incite a desire for the fruits of self rule. Sometimes a national leader emerges who is a patriot and reformer rather than a comprador collaborator. Therefore, the changeover from colonialism to neocolonialism is not without risks for the imperialists and represents a net gain for popular forces in the world.
Chapter 1 of Against Empire by Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad. http://www.michaelparenti.org/
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Jul 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
450.org , Jul 7 2020 2:06 utc | 99
@96
War is no longer about winning. Endless conflict is the name of the game. Military defense contractors are the most influential of all lobbyists and so intertwined in government that it's truly & effectively fascist. Profit is the end, war is the means.
Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 2:28 utc | 102
Wait ... what?Edward , Jul 7 2020 2:56 utc | 106
- Isn't USA effectively at war with Venezuela? Isn't it an act of war to seize billions in State assets - including embassies - and support a coup?
- Isn't USA effectively at war with Syria? If ISIS has been defeated - as Trump has said several times - then USA is illegally occupying Syria oil fields. In addition, USA "recognized" Israel's claim to the Golan Heights - against UN resolutions that deny that claim.
- Isn't USA at war with Yemen? USA supplies Saudi Arabia and UAE with weapons for this war plus targeting.
- Isn't it an act of war to renege on terms to end a war? If so, then one could say that USA has renewed it's war with North Korea.
- Isn't it an act of war to impose a virtual embargo on a country via crippling third-party sanctions? And wasn't the assassination of Solemani an act of war? Then USA is effectively at war with Iran. Putin's reminder that Iran was a Russian ally after the downing of the USA drone may be the reason that we are not in a hot war with Iran.
- USA argued for a "two-state" solution for Palestine for two decades, then (under Trump) switched almost entirely to Israel's side. That sounds like an act of war against the "State" that USA has argued should exist.
- Isn't USA still at war with the Taliban? Or is that just a 20-year "police action" like Vietnam?
- And what about Libya that NATO Turkey is seeking to conquer - after USA played a key (and illegal) role in destroying?
- And then there are tensions with Russia and China, which only seem to grow more intense every week. The Trump Administration seeks to stop NordStream (for security reasons) and punish China for Trump's inept pandemic response and for exercising control of Hong Kong (which is long recognized as Chinese sovereign territory).
<> <> <> <> <>IMO Trump has started wars but the countries and peoples he picks on know that it's best not to respond too forcibly or they invite greater damage.
I'm surprised that moa commenters give any credence to the claims that portray Trump as peaceful/peace-loving. In addition to his belligerence, Empire front-man Trump has initiated a huge military build-up, ended long-standing peace treaties, and militarized space.
!!
Don Bacon , Jul 7 2020 3:13 utc | 108This is the standard Washington rhetoric that accompanies their coup attempts. It is a companion to the "moderate democracy" rhetoric about U.S. satellite governments like Saudi Arabia. The rhetoric tells you that these people have zero interest in democracy, honesty, or avoiding hypocrisy. Some of Bush's neocons are Biden Supporters; what a surprise.
Grieved , Jul 7 2020 4:28 utc | 109@ Jackrabbit 102
re: Isn't USA effectively at war with Venezuela?. . .etc
Obviously you don't know jack about actual war, do you.
Or give us your creds?I dropped back in to see what follows...imagine my deflation to find that people don't know what war is.Don Bacon , Jul 7 2020 4:47 utc | 110@108 Don Bacon
Precisely. No one who has ever experienced the tragedy of war will ever mistake the playground games of make-believe war with the real thing.
~~
That's the problem with the US administration, and its satraps and the many camp followers and court jesters who follow it. They don't know the difference between posturing war and waging war.
The difference is so profound that it calls for not only a new language but a new departure point of reference within one's soul even to begin to speak of such things.
The US will pursue the make-believe war it postures through in order to score points within its small group circle. But real war, should it ever come to touch it - and it will if it pursues its childishness too far - will shock it into total frozen fear the moment that it strikes.
Iran knew this, and had the human strength to test it and to prove it. Everything else, up to this point, was an accommodation by the world's nations to the posturing of the US for its own internal coherence. It was a matter of supporting the US ego rather than of being close to the event when that ego falls apart, with potentially explosive consequences.
But Iran had the strength of character to stand on its principles, and to proclaim its truth. And by the way, that stand is by no means done, despite what the trolls may suggest. Iran has barely begun its action to remove the US from Southwest Asia, and we will only see the footprints of its actions as we realize that the US has departed. And this will happen, regardless of the US narrative and its many parrots.
~~
I don't blame the US or any of its supporters for threatening war when all it really does is act as a nuisance and a spoiler in those few platforms left to it. Those it oppresses have so far mostly chosen to bear the insult rather than to make a fuss. But Iran has shown the way, and one should not expect many more of those oppressed to put up with the abuse from the US many more times.
What is clearly known is that the very last thing the US can do is go to war, in the real meaning of that term. The very last thing the US is capable of, is war. And the generals of all the nations of the world know this because they have seen the proof of it. Anyone who doesn't see the proof of it is behind the curve, and may well have license to comment here and elsewhere, but fortunately does not sit in the security councils of the nations of the world.
~~
If anyone wants to think that the US is "effectively" at war with another nation, then consider that Iran is absolutely "effectively" at war with the US, just as Hezbollah is beyond any doubt at war with Israel. And so what? When positions are "effectively" this or that, then they had better produce "effective" results. And it is only from these effective results that we can count the coup of the engagement. Hezbollah and Iran don't need to be told the difference between real attacks and propaganda attacks.
What they count is the real force.
Everything else is bluster. And I was 16 years old myself once, so in all humility I don't condemn this braggadocio, which I understand all too humanly.
But neither do I take it as real in the real world.
@ Grieved 109Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 5:26 utc | 112
Thanks for helping to deliver us from all that illusory make-believe on war from the deep thinkers who apparently man this place. And yes, Iran has shown the way, which includes its ability to put a serious hurt on US forces if attacked. We're talking about the possibility of lots of US dead bodies, military and dependents, men women and children, also sunken ships, and not just some supporting proxies and aerial bombing with the attendant publicity that suggests to some that genuine war exists, when it doesn't.
People need to get real.
Mao , Jul 7 2020 5:52 utc | 113Trump is really no different than Clinton, GWBush, and Obama. Each a front-man for the Deep State/Empire. Each portrayed as well-meaning, peace-loving men that were FORCED! to war for all the right reasons. In that context, these Jedi mind-tricks fall flat:
- USA can't wage war?
Yet it's bullying other countries and engaging in acts of war.
- Trump's belligerence is all bluster?
Yet USA is preparing for war with a costly arms build-up and massive propaganda campaign (as described well by Caitlin Johnstone).
- No one need fear USA?
Yet power-elites in USA subscribe to supremacist ideologies (neoconservativism, neoliberalism, zionism), advocate a "New World Order", and a 'rules-based' international system that can only be described as "might makes right".
!!Mao , Jul 7 2020 6:23 utc | 114With only four months left to the U.S. presidential elections, and the increasing likelihood of Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel President in history, losing, Israel has been trying to provoke Iran to start a war, so that it can drag the United State into it. This is not anything new. For over a decade Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to force the United States to go to war with Iran, and Israel itself almost attacked Iran three times between 2010 and 2011. But the with events of the last several months darkening the prospects of a second Trump term, Israel feels a new urgency for a war with Iran.
For over two years Israel tried to provoke Iran by attacking Iranian-backed Shiite forces in Syria, but Iran has opted not to retaliate. Since the attacks did not provoke Iran to retaliate, and also failed to dislodge Iran's military advisers and the Shiite forces that it trained, armed, and dispatched to Syria, Israel has seemingly turned to attacking Iran directly within its borders.
The events of past two months in Iran are indicative of Israel's new push for war. These events include large-scale infernos, explosions, and cyberattacks, all believed to have been carried out by Israel and its Iranian proxies, the "fake opposition" which is the part of the opposition that supports economic sanctions and military attacks against Iran, and has even allied itself with small secessionist groups that carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran.
https://original.antiwar.com/sahimi/2020/07/05/israel-is-trying-to-provoke-iran-to-start-a-war/
Richard Steven Hack , Jul 7 2020 6:36 utc | 115In this video, Prof. Wolff talks about the breakdown of the capitalist system and outlines 4 major problems that the US has been faced with without for quite some time with no solution in sight: climate change, capitalism's intrinsic instability, systemic racism inherited from slavery, and lastly the lack of mechanisms to manage viruses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HRWWRFyEc8
In this video, Prof. Wolff compares and contrasts the preparation for and management of COVID-19 with how the US has managed military preparedness and the handling of military confrontations and activities. It has succeeded at one and completely failed at the other. He explains why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAo_QJAsOGg
AskProfWolff: How the Fed Serves Capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reHa7VVnhT8Posted by: Grieved | Jul 7 2020 1:09 utc | 96 Prediction: The US may start a war but the US will not finish that war. Its opponent will end that war, by causing unacceptable losses to the US - something quite easily achieved, and already proved to the world by Iran in this very year of 2020.Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 6:36 utc | 116I agree. The US can not defeat Iran, short of nuking Tehran, which is not in the cards for geopolitical reasons. However, the US can devastate much of Iran's civilian infrastructure, which, like most such infrastructures, can't run and hide. The US can also kill a million or two milllion Iranians, as it proved in Iraq.
All that will do, however, is merely guarantee that Iran will never surrender. Nor would Iran ever surrender in the first place. Which is why I tend to reference the upcoming war as the "New Thirty Years War". The clear example is the near twenty years we've spent in Afghanistan - which is vastly weaker than Iran. Each war - Vietnam, Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq - has lasted longer than the last and with failure as an outcome.
The US can keep attacking Iran from the air and sea for thirty years - but without ever defeating Iran. It will do so because the military-industrial complex will make profits every year from that war - and in the end, that's all that matters to the US (along with the
Only if the US tries a land invasion will the US lose a massive number of troops. But even that will come over time, albeit at a *much* higher rate than the US saw in either Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. US annual casualties would probably be in the low to medium 5 digits per year, as opposed to the low 4 digits in most of those wars. In other words, four or five times the rate in Iraq. That's as compared with a hot war in North Korea which would see 50,000 US casualties in the first ninety days, or any war with China or Russia. See "United States military casualties of war" on Wikipedia. It's possible that casualties could rise to the level of WWI, if the war lasts five or ten years, or even WWII if it lasts twenty - or even higher if it lasts thirty.
Most people think the US will not try a land invasion. I've argued, however, that the *only* way to even attempt to prevent Iran from closing the Straits for the duration of the war will be for the US to put several score thousand Marines and US troops on Iran's shores to attempt to prevent launching of mines and anti-ship missiles. This would be difficult since Iran has a long Persian Gulf shoreline, Iran has fortified that shoreline, there are many places to launch weapons from that shoreline - and any such US troops would be subject to both conventional and guerrilla war by the Iranian military and perhaps a million or more Iranian Basij militia. Nonetheless, the US is likely to be dumb enough to try.
In any event, the US will eventually be forced to withdraw either because the US electorate would eventually tire of the war - although as Afghanistan proves, that could take a *very* long time, mostly depending on the casualty rate, however, as I indicateed - or because another "threat" takes precedence, which would likely mean either Russia or China.
"And the US will strain its mighty Wurlitzer to the utmost to declare victory as it retreats."
Yup. And the sad part is that the US electorate will probably believe that, then forget about the reality and be willing to commit to a new war within another ten years.
Mao @Jul7 5:52 #113Richard Steven Hack , Jul 7 2020 7:00 utc | 119increasing likelihood of Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel President in history, losing
1) The USA establishment are all pro-Israel.
2) Biden has proclaimed himself a Zionist.
3) In 2016 all the polls had Clinton ahead.
Fake populist outsiders (like Trump) have to be shown to defeat the establishment. That helps to sell them as being on the side of the people.
!!
In addition to the above, the idea that because there's a difference between "war" and "conflicts before war" there is *no chance* of war is absurd.Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 7:03 utc | 120Every war started with this sort of enmity between nations historically. As I've said before, with this level of enmity between the US and Iran, and arguably between the US and Russia, and the US and China, war is inevitable. With the latter two countries, such a war is likely to be nuclear - which is why it hasn't happened yet - that risk is *way* too high (although it can still happen if a miscalculation causes a conventional war, which then escalates into nuclear.)
A war with Iran doesn't have that risk. No nuclear power that I am aware of is going to enter the war on Iran's side and thus risk a nuclear war over Iran. Iran itself will not develop or use nuclear weapons. Israel *might* consider using nuclear weapons against Iran - that would be a*huge* mistake geopolitically and probably result in Israel's destruction by geopolitical means if not by military means. But neither Russia nor China are going to directly engage the US military to defend Iran. That would be stupid and putting their own national survival at risk for the benefit of another nation. As Percival Rose would say, "That ain't gonna happen."
The real problem for some people is cognitive dissonance. They can't emotionally accept the possibility of these wars occurring - so they don't. They are reduced to saying, "well, it hasn't happened...yet."
The "yet" is the operative term. There is no logical extension of that term to mean "never".
Richard Steven Hack @Jul7 6:36 115arby , Jul 7 2020 11:59 utc | 123There are many other mistaken assumptions, such as:
- USA wouldn't start a war it can't win
We've seen that USA is often satisfied with just smashing another country.
- USA would strain to justify a war or continue a war
USA is very adept at propaganda. They can apply pressure that forces a country to "lash out", or intervene to help an abused population or an ally. USA also likes to use proxies. Example: destabilize with "freedom fighters" then intervene when the target country commits "atrocities" as it attempts to defend itself.
- Trump is a negotiator, he doesn't want to fight
Trump is a stooge. The Deep State will decide when they're ready to fight.
- Americans are tired of war
If only that were true. Most Americans just don't care. And are willing to accept what ever lies they're told (at least for the first months).
!!Digital Spartacus , Jul 7 2020 12:59 utc | 125IMO, the word "WAR" means two sides are fighting.
What is plain to see is all of these "wars" are not wars but provocations, aggression from one side and bullying. In every case the other side does not want a war.
Interesting how the US has way upped its aggression on Venezuela without a peep from the people. This started off with some nonsense about an idiot named Guaido and is now full blown nastiness.
arby , Jul 7 2020 15:52 utc | 134@120
Sadly they are not the only stooges. It beggars belief that people everywhere believe that they can elect someone to change the system in the country in which they reside. Political stripes have very little meaning as the differences are incremental at best. The bureaucracies necessary to keep the modern systems of governance afloat are staggeringly monolithic. Electing one individual, or party, or parties and presuming that the system will somehow be improved upon is a laughable fantasy. It leads to a continuous cycle of four years of initiatives to tear down the previous four years initiatives unless you're a second term government. But actual change is still the sole purview of the entrenched bureaucracy or "deep state" or whatever other label you prefer. To Jackrabbit's point, most decisions hinge on whether or not the bureaucracies in charge believe a war, a social change etc. can be implemented and a desired result achieved. It takes a finely developed sense of myopia to think that the only stooges are those of the political class. Says volumes about the people that put them there, and continues to suggest that they are electing "change".
As an aside, the Frank Zappa quote that "government is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" remains potently poignant.PleaseBeleafMe , Jul 7 2020 16:11 utc | 135Calling what the US is doing to these countries "war" is like saying that Floyd was in a fight with the cop's knee.
Yes,there has been some very measured retaliation from some of the victims, but it amounts to Floyd saying he can't breathe.450.org , Jul 7 2020 16:59 utc | 139@450 132
The provocations and responses of the formation of a war with Iran have been very interesting and I think that if Iran hadn't of shot down the Ukrainian airliner after their attack against the American base we may have already or continue to witness that war. As I see it there was a real hard on to go after Iran but word of the shoot down allowed the Don to pull back and let Iran suffer the black mark without escalation.
There are way too many itchy trigger fingers and pretexts for this and that can be easily engineered and sold to the masses. Helps Biden or whomever if he can blame the future cluster fuck on cleaning up donnies mess. I expect something expectedly unexpected in the coming months.Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 17:25 utc | 144@134
War is not a static proposition and its meaning and definition can and should change over time to fit the prevailing military strategies and economic paradigm of the day. We don't live and operate in an unassailable lexicon vacuum. War is not defined tautologically, meaning, war is not war. War is many things and can be fought on many dimensional fronts, meaning not just militarily.
arby @Jul7 17:12 @141
I think war is a state of mind. That's why we talk about "the war on poverty" or a "propaganda war".
You might say that there is a "Cold War" but the number of acts of war is too numerous for that and targeted at multiple countries/peoples. It's more like a 'hybrid war' on everyone that opposes the New World Order that the AZ Empire seeks to impose on the planet.
Importantly, you can't prevent war if you only start thinking of it as 'war' when the shooting starts.
!!
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Jul 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
CitizenX , Jul 6 2020 18:49 utc | 114
..
"Three weeks into the war, Marine Sgt. Ed Chin got the order: Help the Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad's Firdos Square topple the statue of Saddam Hussein."My captain comes over and he's got like this package. He hands it to me and he's like, he tells me there's an American flag in there and when I get up there, you know, he's like, show the boys the colors," said Chin.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-decade-after-saddam-husseins-statue-falls-a-tale-of-two-memories/
I'll speak very slowly and simply just for you.
Are you seriously incapable of making a connection regarding the hypocrisy of the US Govt/US military wrapping an American Flag on the Saddam Statue and destroying it for a media photo op while cheering about it? And the condemnation of the US Govt declaring statues should not be destroyed?
Do you see no insanity regarding the US Regime illegally invading and destroying another Nation and its statues (war crime w/millions dead)? The very same Nation celebrating a "bad" Iraqi statue being destroyed is suddenly disgusted when its own statues are being destroyed by its own people?
My point is obvious if you can step back from your myopic view. The US is a mentally ill Nation ridden with hypocrisy. I personally do not put much merit into statues, cultural idolatry comes to mind, just as foolish as religious idolatry.
So what are your thoughts on the destruction of the Saddam statue sanctioned by the US govt and military?
dh , Jul 6 2020 21:40 utc | 125
@114 I expect V will be along at some point but here are my thoughts on the Saddam statue.....
The US is ridden with hypocrisy as you say ....no surprise there. The statue was actually pulled down by a rentamob of Iraqi Saddam haters while American troops high-fived each other.
They wouldn't see anything wrong with pulling the statue down because Saddam was a 'bad guy' and an American enemy.
Those same troops would probably not feel the same way about Confederate generals.....who just happened to be Americans who kept slaves and picked the losing side. They would be seen as major figures in American history.
That is how a lot of Americans would justify it. Of course it is rank hypocrisy..
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Jul 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
CitizenX , Jul 6 2020 1:56 utc | 76"Iran will have to respond, 4 attacks in less than 2 weeks is really taking the piss and makes them look weak. Quite a reversal from the Iran that was seizing tankers, acting on its threats and dictating the tempo of escalation."
Posted by: Et Tu | Jul 5 2020 23:07 utc | 56...
Iran is playing Chess, the US are still trying to find the checkerboard yelling "King Me".
US military policy has been misguided for decades based on militarism as economic profiteering, not on the life or death principle of a Nation under attack.
Pure Propaganda-
"SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.MR. LAUER: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright." Interview on NBC-TV "The Today Show" with Matt Lauer
Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998
...1997 The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives -Zbigniew Brzezinski.
War profiteering, stealing resources and destroying other nations/economies is not much of a Grand long term Strategy. Iran is preparing, organizing and waiting- the Iranian Red Flag of "Revenge" for Soleimani is flying while Americans burn their own flag.
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Jul 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Mina , Jul 5 2020 16:55 utc | 14
Libya:
Last week Turkey brought two MIM-23 Hawk air defense systems to the al-Watiyah Airbase. Last night they were bombed by either French, UAE, Egyptian or Russian mercenary airplanes. Officially the LNA (Hafter) has taken responsibility for the bombing. Whoever did this had a message to Turkey: Stop trying to break our red lines.
James, "why is turkey even in libya?"
Because they had to get out and quick, upon order of NATO/EU, back in 2011 (+ get a tip for evacuating the other foreigners). They ve lost a lot in this:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-protests-turkey/turkish-businesses-looted-in-libya-turks-evacuated-idUSTRE71K2HJ20110221https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-02-23/turkey-mounts-biggest-evacuation-in-its-history-to-rescue-5-000-from-libya
(I remember reading much more than 25,000 workers, mainly well-paid engineers whose money back home was most welcome)
And there is that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_LibyaEgypt lost just as much or even more, they have ca 2-3 million workers there, mainly not higher scale jobs though
Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 5 2020 17:14 utc | 16
Thanks for the link to the Egypt/Libya article, b. It's a rare insight into the often-hidden complexities behind armed conflict. Thanks too for Caitlin J's opinion of AmeriKKKa's two Right-wing Crank parties. She makes it easier to laugh about their un-funny antics.
Slightly off topic, but I think Caitlin could be onto something worthwhile with her Utopia Prepper meme (whether she invented it or not). The way things are going, Hell could freeze over before sanity emerges in Western Political circles. Prompted by her optimism, I intend to devote an hour every Sunday afternoon to Utopia Prepping and contemplate the many potential delights which a mildly more Utopian world would facilitate. There's way too much negative thinking at present and it's NOT accidental. We'll never get to Utopia if we don't plan what we'll do when we arrive...
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Jul 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Libya:
Last week Turkey brought two MIM-23 Hawk air defense systems to the al-Watiyah Airbase. Last night they were bombed by either French, UAE, Egyptian or Russian mercenary airplanes. Officially the LNA (Hafter) has taken responsibility for the bombing. Whoever did this had a message to Turkey: Stop trying to break our red lines.
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Jul 06, 2020 | apnews.com
When it comes to Russia, the Trump administration just can't seem to make up its mind.
For the past three years, the administration has careered between President Donald Trump's attempts to curry favor and friendship with Vladimir Putin and longstanding deep-seated concerns about Putin's intentions. As Trump has repeatedly and openly cozied up to Putin, his administration has imposed harsh and meaningful sanctions and penalties on Russia.
The dizzying, often contradictory, paths followed by Trump on the one hand and his hawkish but constantly changing cast of national security aides on the other have created confusion in Congress and among allies and enemies alike. To an observer, Russia is at once a mortal enemy and a misunderstood friend in U.S. eyes.
Even before Trump took office questions about Russia abounded. Now, nearing the end of his first term with a difficult reelection ahead , those questions have resurfaced with a vengeance. Intelligence suggesting Russia was encouraging attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan by putting bounties on their heads has thrust the matter into the heart of the 2020 campaign.
The White House says the intelligence wasn't confirmed or brought to Trump's attention, but his vast chorus of critics are skeptical and maintain the president should have been aware.
The reports have alarmed even pro-Trump Republicans who see Russia as a hostile global foe meddling with nefarious intent in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Ukraine and Georgia, a waning former superpower trying to regain its Soviet-era influence by subverting democracy in Europe and the United States with disinformation and election interference .
Trump's overtures to Putin have unsettled longstanding U.S. allies in Europe, including Britain, France and Germany, which have expressed concern about the U.S. commitment to the NATO alliance, which was forged to counter the Soviet threat, and robust democracy on the continent.
But Trump has defended his perspective on Russia, viewing it as a misunderstood potential friend, a valued World War II ally led by a wily, benevolent authoritarian who actually may share American values, like the importance of patriotism, family and religion.
Trump's approach to Russia was at center stage in the impeachment proceedings, when U.S. officials testified that the president demanded political favors from Ukraine in return for military assistance it needed to combat Russian aggression. But the issue ended up as a largely partisan exercise, with House Democrats voting to impeach Trump and Senate Republicans voting to acquit .
Within the Trump administration, the national security establishment appears torn between pursuing an arguably tough approach to Russia and pleasing the president. Insiders who have raised concern about Trump's approach to Russia -- including at least one of his national security advisers, defense secretaries and secretaries of state, but especially lower-level officials who spoke out during impeachment -- have nearly all been ousted from their positions.
Suspicions about Trump and Russia go back to his 2016 campaign. His appeal to Moscow to dig up his opponent's emails , his plaintive suggestions that Russia and the United States should be friends and a series of contacts between his advisers and Russians raised questions of impropriety that led to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation . The investigation ultimately did not allege that anyone associated with the campaign illegally conspired with Russia.
Mueller, along with the U.S. intelligence community, did find that Russia interfered with the election, to sow chaos and also help Trump's campaign. But Trump has cast doubt on those findings, most memorably in a 2018 appearance on stage with Putin in Helsinki .
Yet despite Trump's rhetoric, his administration has plowed ahead with some of the most significant actions against Russia by any recent administration.
Dozens of Russian diplomats have been expelled, diplomatic missions closed, arms control treaties the Russians sought to preserve have been abandoned, weapons have been sold to Ukraine despite the impeachment allegations and the administration is engaged in a furious battle to prevent Russia from constructing a new gas pipeline that U.S. lawmakers from both parties believe will increase Europe's already unhealthy dependence on Russian energy.
At the same time, Trump has compounded the uncertainty by calling for the withdrawal or redeployment of U.S. troops from Germany, angrily deriding NATO allies for not meeting alliance defense spending commitments, and now apparently ignoring dire intelligence warnings that Russia was paying or wanted to pay elements of the Taliban to kill American forces in Afghanistan.
On top of that, even after the intelligence reports on the Afghanistan bounties circulated, he's expressed interest in inviting Putin back into the G-7 group of nations over the objections of the other members.
White House officials and die-hard Trump supporters have shrugged off the obvious inconsistencies, but they have been unable to staunch the swell of criticism and pointed demands for explanations as Russia, which has vexed American leaders for decades, delights in its ability to create chaos.
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Jul 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
The immediate response to a story that U.S. forces were being targeted is to keep fighting a losing conflict.
Barbara Boland reported yesterday on the House Armed Services Committee's vote to impede withdrawal of U.S. from Afghanistan:
The House Armed Services Committee voted Wednesday night to put roadblocks on President Donald Trump's vow to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, apparently in response to bombshell report published by The New York Times Friday that alleges Russia paid dollar bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill U.S troops.
It speaks volumes about Congress' abdication of its responsibilities that one of the few times that most members want to challenge the president over a war is when they think he might bring it to an end. Many of the members that want to block withdrawals from other countries have no problem when the president wants to use U.S. forces illegally and to keep them in other countries without authorization for years at a time. The role of hard-liner Liz Cheney in pushing the measure passed yesterday is a good example of what I mean. The hawkish outrage in Congress is only triggered when the president entertains the possibility of taking troops out of harm's way. When he takes reckless and illegal action that puts them at risk, as he did when he ordered the illegal assassination of Soleimani, the same members that are crying foul today applauded the action. As Boland explains, the amendment passed by the committee yesterday sets so many conditions on withdrawal that it makes it all but impossible to satisfy them:
Crow's amendment adds several layers of policy goals to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which has already stretched on for 19 years and cost over a trillion dollars. As made clear in the Afghanistan Papers, most of these policy goals were never the original intention of the mission in Afghanistan, and were haphazardly added after the defeat of al Qaeda. With no clear vision for what achieving these fuzzy goals would look like, the mission stretches on indefinitely, an unarticulated victory unachievable.
The immediate Congressional response to a story that U.S. forces were being targeted is to make it much more difficult to pull them out of a war that cannot be won. Congressional hawks bemoan "micromanaging" presidential decisions and mock the idea of having "535 commanders-in-chief," but when it comes to prolonging pointless wars they are only too happy to meddle and tie the president's hands. When it comes to defending Congress' proper role in matters of war, these members are typically on the other side of the argument. They are content to let the president get us into as many wars as he might want, but they are horrified at the thought that any of those wars might one day be concluded. Yesterday's vote confirmed that there is an endless war caucus in the House, and it is bipartisan.
The original reporting of the bounty story is questionable for the reasons that Boland has pointed out before, but for the sake of argument let's assume that Russia has been offering bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When the U.S. keeps its troops at war in a country for almost twenty years, it is setting them up as targets for other governments. Just as the U.S. has armed and supported forces hostile to Russia and its clients in Syria, it should not come as a shock when they do to the same elsewhere. If Russia has been doing this, refusing to withdraw U.S. forces ensures that they will continue to have someone that they can target.
The longer that the U.S. stays at war in Afghanistan, the more incentives other states will have to make that continued presence more costly for the U.S. When the knee-jerk reaction in Washington to news of these bounties is to throw up obstacles to withdrawal, that gives other states another incentive to do more of this.
Because the current state of debate about Russia is so toxic and irrational, our political leaders seem incapable of responding carefully to Russian actions. It doesn't seem to occur to the war hawks that Russia might prefer that the U.S. remains preoccupied and tied down in Afghanistan indefinitely.
Prolonging our involvement in the war amounts to playing into Moscow's hands. For all of their posturing about security and strength, hard-liners routinely support destructive and irrational policies that redound to the advantage of other states. This is still happening with the war in Afghanistan, and if these hard-liners get their way it will continue happening for many years to come.
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .
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Fran Macadam • a day agoOne needs to mention the democratic deficit in the US. All the members voting yes are representatives, they represent the people in their constituencies, and presumably vote for what the majority in those constituencies would want, or past promises.
Any poll shows that Americans would rather have the troops brought back home, thank you very much. But this is not what their representatives are voting for. Talk about democracy!
chris chuba • a day agoFor elite war profiteers and the politicians they own, the only war that is lost is one that ends. No lives matter.
kouroi chris chuba • a day agoAnd what's the logic, if you make an accusation against someone you don't like it must be true. Okay well then let's drone strike Putin. If you are going to be Exceptional and consistent, Putin did everything Soleimani did so how can Liz Cotton argue for a different punishment?
1. Killed U.S. troops in a war zone, 2. planning attacks on U.S. troops.The entire Russian military plans for attacks all the time just like ours does but the Neocons have declared that we are the only ones allowed to do that. Verdict, death penalty for Putin.
William Toffan chris chuba • 21 hours agoIf you have watched Oliver Stone's interview with Putin, it comes through that in fact there were at least three or four attempts to Putin's life...
RBH • 15 hours agoDeath penalty for Putin = Death Penalty for continental USA.
Lavinia • 10 hours ago • editedSo you can get into a war without Congressional approval, but you can't get out of one without Congressional approval. Gotcha.
wynn • an hour ago • editedInteresting, well reasoned article as usual from Mr. Larison. However, I have to say that I don't see why Russia would want the US in Afghanistan indefinitely. In primis, they have a strategic partnership with China (even though we've got to see how Russia will behave now when there is the India-China rift), and China has been championing the idea of rebuilding the Silk Road (brilliant idea if you ask me) so in this sense it's more reasonable to assume that they might be aiming to get stability in the region rather than keep it in a state of unrest (as to be strategic partners you need to have some kind of common strategy, or at least not a completely different strategy). In 2018 they (Russia) actually were trying to organise a mediation process which would have the Afghan Gvt. and the Talibans discuss before the US would retire the troops, and it was very significative as they managed to get all the parties sitting around a table for the very first time (even the US participated as an observer).
Secondly, Russia also has pretty decent relations with Iran (at least according to Iranian press, which seems to be realistic as Russia is compliant to the JCPOA, is not aggressive towards them, and they're cooperating in the Astana process for a political solution for Syria, for example), and it wouldn't be so if Russia would pursue a policy which would aim to keep the US in the Middle East indefinitely, as Iran's WHOLE point is that they want the US out of the region, so if Russia would be trying to keep the US in the Middle East indefinitely, that would seriously upset Iran.
Thirdly, Russia is one of the founders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which now includes most of the states in Central Asia, China, India and Pakistan. The association never made overt statements about their stance on the US's presence in the region; yet they've been hinting that they don't approve of it, which is reasonable, as it is very likely that those countries would all have different plans for the region, which might include some consideration for human and economic development rather than constant and never-ending militarisation (of course Pakistan would be problematic here, as the funds for the Afghan warlords get channeled through Pakistan, which receives a lot of US money, so I don't know how they're managing this issue).
Last but not least, I cannot logically believe that the Talibans, who've been coherent in their message since the late 70's ("we will fight to the death until the invaders are defeated and out of our national soil") would now need to be "convinced" by the Russians to defeat and chase out the invader. This is just NOT believable at all. Afghanistan is called the Graveyard of Empires for a reason, I would argue.
In any case I am pleased to see that at TAC you have been starting debunking the Russia-narrative, as it is very problematic - most media just systematically misrepresents Russia in order to justify aggressive military action (Europe, specifically Northern Europe, is doing this literally CONSTANTLY, I'm so over it, really). The misrepresentation of Russia as an aggressive wannabe-empire is a cornerstone of the pro-war narrative, so it is imperative to get some actual realism into that.
Blood Alcohol wynn • an hour agoAs if the Afghan freedom fighters need additional incentive to eliminate the invaders? In case Amerikans don't know, Afghans, except those on the US payroll, intensely despise Amerika and its 'godless' ways. Amerikans forces have been sadistic, bombing Afghan weddings, funerals, etc.
Even if the Russians are providing bounties to the Afghans, to take out the invaders, don't the Amerikans remember the 80s when Washington (rightfully) supported the mujahedin with funds, arms, Stinger missiles, etc.? Again, the US is on shaky ground because of the neocons.
Afghanistan is known through the ages to be the graveyard of empires. They have done it on their own shedding blood, sweat, and tears. Also, the Afghan resistance have been principled about Amerikans getting out before making deals.
Same argument goes for the Iraqi people.
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Jul 05, 2020 | www.unz.com
What is the best way to debunk a conspiracy theory? Call it a conspiracy theory, a label which in and of itself implies disbelief. The only problem with that is there have been many actual conspiracies both historically and currently and many of them are not in the least theoretical in nature. Conspiracies of several kinds brought about American participation in both world wars. And however one feels about President Donald Trump, it must be conceded that he has been the victim of a number of conspiracies, first to deny him the GOP nomination, then to insure that he be defeated in the presidential election, and subsequently to completely delegitimize his presidency.
Prior to Trump there have been numerous conspiracy "theories," many of which have been quite plausible. The "suicide" of Defense Secretary James Forrestal comes to mind, followed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which has been credibly credited to both Cuba and Israel. And then there is 9/11, perhaps the greatest conspiracy theory of all. Israel clearly knew it was coming, witness the Five Dancing Shlomos cavorting and filming themselves in New Jersey as the twin towers went down. Also the Saudis might have played a role in funding and even directing the alleged hijackers. And we have also had the conspiracy by the neocons to fabricate information about Iraq's WMDs and the ongoing conspiracy by the same players to depict Iran as a threat to the United States.
Given the multiple crises currently being experienced in the United States it is perhaps inevitable that speculation about conspiracies is at its highest level ever. To the average American it is incomprehensible how the country has become so screwed up because the political and economic elite is fundamentally incompetent, so the search for a scapegoat must go on.
There are a number of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus currently making the rounds. Those libertarians and contrarians who choose to believe that the virus is actually a flu being exploited to strip them of their liberties are convinced that many in the government and media have conspired to sell what is essentially a fraud. One such snake oil salesman persists in using an analogy, that since more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than by the coronavirus it would be more appropriate to ban cars than to require the wearing of face masks.
Another theory making the rounds accuses Microsoft multi-billionaire Bill Gates of trying to take over the world's healthcare system through the introduction of a vaccine to control the coronavirus, which he presumably created in the first place. The fallacy in many of the virus "conspiracies" that relate to a totalitarian regime or a crazy billionaire using a faux disease to generate fear so as to gain control of the citizenry is that it gives far too much credit to any government's or individual's ability to pull off a fraud of that magnitude. It would require people a whole lot smarter than the tag team of Trump-Pompeo or even Gates to convince the world and thousands of doctors and scientists that they should lock down entire countries over something completely phony.
Other coronavirus theories include that the virus was developed in the U.S., was exported to China by a traitorous American scientist, weaponized in Wuhan and then unleashed on the West as part of a communist plot to destroy capitalism and democracy. That would mean that we are already at war with China, or at least we should be. Then there is the largely accepted theory that the virus was created in Wuhan and escaped from the lab. Since that time Beijing has been engaging in a cover-up, which is the conspiracy. It is a theme favored by the White House, which has not yet decided what to do about it beyond assigning funny "Yellow Peril" names to the disease so everyone in MAGA hats will have something to chuckle about leading up to the November election.
But all kidding aside, there are some conspiracy theories that are more worth considering than others. One would be the role of George Soros and the so-called Open Society Foundations that he controls and funds in the unrest that is sweeping across the United States. The allegations against Soros are admittedly thin on evidence, but conspiracy mongers would point out that that is the mark of a really well-planned conspiracy, similar to what the 89 year-old Hungarian Jewish billionaire has been engaging in for a long time. The current round of claims about Open Society and Soros have generated as many as 500,000 tweets a day as well as nearly 70,000 Facebook posts per month, mostly from political conservatives.
The allegations tend to fall into two broad categories . First, that Soros hires protester/thugs and transports them to demonstrations where they are supplied with bricks and incendiaries to turn the gatherings into riots. Second, that Open Society is funding and otherwise enabling the destabilizing flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.
Soros and his supporters, many of whom are Jewish because they think they see anti-Semitism in the attacks on the Hungarian, claim to support democratization and free trade worldwide. He is, in effect, one of the world's leading globalists. Soros claims to be a "force for good" as the cliché goes, but is it completely credible that his $32 billion foundation does not operate behind the scenes to influence developments in ways that are certainly not democratic?
Indeed, Soros accumulated his vast fortune through vulture capitalism. He made over $1 billion in 1992 by selling short $10 billion in British pounds sterling, leading to the media dubbing him "the man who broke the bank of England." He has been accused of similar currency manipulation in both Europe and Asia. In 1999, New York Times economist Paul Krugman wrote of him that "Nobody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit."
Far from a passive bystander giving helpful advice to democracy groups, Soros was heavily involved with the restructuring of former communist regimes in eastern Europe and had a hand in the so-called Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, both of which were supported by the U.S. government and were intended to threaten Russia's regional security.
Soros particularly hates President Vladimir Putin and Russia. He revealed that he is far from a benevolent figure fighting for justice in his March Financial Times op-ed (behind a pay wall) entitled "Europe Must Stand With Turkey Over Putin's War Crimes in Syria."
The op-ed is full of errors of fact and is basically a call for aggression against a Russia that he describes as engaged in bombing schools and hospitals. It starts with, "Since the beginning of its intervention in Syria in September 2015, Russia has not only sought to keep in place its most faithful Arab ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It has also wanted to regain the regional and global influence that it lost since the fall of the Soviet Union." First of all, Russia did not "intervene" in Syria. It was invited there by the country's legitimate government to provide assistance against various groups, some of which were linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State, that were seeking to overthrow President al-Assad.
And apart from Soros, few actual experts on Russia would claim that it is seeking to recreate the "influence" of the Soviet Union. Moscow does not have the resources to do so and has evinced no desire to pursue the sort of global agenda that was characteristic of the Soviet state.
There then follows a complete flight into hyperbole with: "Vladimir Putin has sought to use the turmoil in the Middle East to erase international norms and advances in international humanitarian law made since the second world war. In fact, creating the humanitarian disaster that has turned almost 6 million Syrians into refugees has not been a byproduct of the Russian president's strategy in Syria. It has been one of his central goals." Note that none of Soros's assertions are supported by fact.
The Soros op-ed also included a bit of reminiscence, describing how, "In 2014, I urged Europe to wake up to the threat that Russia was posing to its strategic interests." The op-ed reveals Soros as neither conciliatory nor "diplomatic," a clear sign that he picks his enemies based on ideological considerations that also drive his choices on how to frame his ventures. Given all of that, why is it unimaginable that George Soros is engaged in a conspiracy, that he is clandestinely behind at least some of the mayhem of Antifa and Black Lives Matter as well as the flood of illegal immigration that have together perhaps fatally destabilized the United States?
Philip Giraldi, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
Carlton Meyer , says: Website July 2, 2020 at 1:37 pm GMT
JasonT , says: July 2, 2020 at 1:42 pm GMTFor those unfamiliar with the Soros/Israeli/CIA coup in the Republic of Georgia, here is a short video:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/qC-xLCgbThM?feature=oembed
A123 , says: July 2, 2020 at 2:50 pm GMT...These, and Soros, are the front men. The real brains are hidden from sight.
Reg Cæsar , says: July 2, 2020 at 3:22 pm GMTOne would be the role of George Soros and the so-called Open Society Foundations that he controls and funds in the unrest that is sweeping across the United States.
Trinity , says: July 2, 2020 at 5:09 pm GMTInstead of fairly distributing the wealth created by globalisation, Soros argued, capitalism's "winners" failed to "compensate the losers", which led to a drastic increase in domestic inequality – and anger.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/06/the-george-soros-philosophy-and-its-fatal-flaw
Sounds like many of the "populists" here.
EliteCommInc. , says: July 2, 2020 at 6:35 pm GMTI know it is just a "conspiracy theory" that people like George Schwartz aka George (((Soros))) are funding these riots, but if this "conspiracy theory" were indeed true, why aren't Soros and his (((cohorts))) at least under investigation for treason and murder charges.
UncommonGround , says: July 2, 2020 at 8:07 pm GMT"Sounds like many of the "populists" here."
I am not a populist. But the contention (s) you are referring to are no really the argument -- not by content.
The argument is that the suppose winners were and continue unfairly leverage the economic system with the help f government to avoid the consequences of their miscalculations, sometimes innocent, often careless and sometimes deliberate machinations.
That is quite a different argument than the winners should share more --
And as much as a capitalist as I am am -- I admit that there are goings on which violate the rules of capitalism as well as common decency.
Meena , says: July 3, 2020 at 11:25 pm GMTI didn't know that Soros could be so explicit about what he thinks about Putin and Syria and involve himself so concretely with such questions, about which he probably doesn't know very much (in the last times there have been very interesting articles about Syria, for instance, see links below).
Even though, I don't think that he has anything to do with BLM and the protests. Riots and revolts have happened other times without the coordination of people from outside. It happened in 1381 in England. A few years ago it happened in the UK and earlier it happened in the US, (I think when there was a blackout). Now it happened spontaneously in Stuttgart in Germany (apparently).
Why shouldn't people complain about the militarisation of the police which uses brutal methods to arrest people, a police which acts as if they had occupaied a country and had to contain a population of enemies?
The most recent conspiracy was the one to oust Corbyn (the text is relatively short):
The killing of Jeremy Corbyn
Peter Oborne and David Hearsthttps://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/killing-jeremy-corbyn
The former Labour leader was the victim of a carefully planned and brutally executed political assassination
About Syria, an important text by an expert, long:
The Salafist Roots of the Syrian Uprising
by William Van Wagenenhttps://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-salafist-roots-of-the-syrian-uprising/
Syria: Old Pretexts, New Sanctions, Still Counterproductive
by Bas SplietGeowhizz , says: July 4, 2020 at 4:12 am GMT" Wall Street Journal reported Friday that following the drone strike on Soleimani last week, Trump told unspecified associates "he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate."
http://www.commindreams.orgFrom any angle ,this will look like a conspiracy . But talking about it to portray the existential crisis of USA politics ,a science of checks and balances, media responsibility and the mechanism in place to make this sort of events to happen will be labeled as conspiracy theory .
What is this.?
1 Impeachable offense
2 who will raise the issue? Media, Congress, Government agencies and activist judges .
They don't why ?
3 Who will investigate ? Dept of Justice.
Why they don't ?4 would it be a conspiracy theory had Trump not shared the quid pro quo? Absolutely .
5 who is keeping quiet on the initiation of war illegal war to gain personal favor by Trump and who is asking war on Iran ? Same gaggle of smiley faces – Bolton to Kristol to Cotton to Lindsey to Pelosi to Biden to Sherman Engle , Schumer , Cheney( the cow ) , sage Bush jr, Hillary and same gallery of rogues like NYT BBC CNN FOX MSNBC .
6 is there a possibility of a war initiated by Trump to make last ditch effort to win election? Yes.
Bolton recently and , Deniis Ross have suggested to Obama to get out of bad poll number before ,
Economist Rubiono has suggested before as was shared by zerohedge sometimes back.7 Why does conspiracy theory keep on returning ? Because the first appearance is never pushed back exposed and vilified by any body .
8 How do one evaluate and understand the fate accompli ? They don't . They shrug and move on as they did after Suleimnai killing and wait for next disavowal of any "conspiracy theory before confidently shrugging off the fait accompli.9 What do you call them? Zombie human slaving away their lives
to harakiri.Thomasina , says: July 4, 2020 at 9:33 am GMTSo Soros broke the pound back in the day. Why did MI6 not kill him?
Anon [413] Disclaimer , says: July 4, 2020 at 9:48 am GMTI've often wondered about Soros. Was he a wealthy man before he "broke the Bank of England"?
I've also wondered how it is possible that someone like Soros would have been allowed to break the Bank of England. Was it just a set-up to provide him with plausible funds in order to make him look legit?
He gets written up as some ideological billionaire who acts in accordance with his conscience, but to me he looks like he's working for the ruling elites and the CIA.
Truly benevolent people (which I'm sure Soros is not) don't go around causing the chaos he does.
UncommonGround , says: July 4, 2020 at 10:19 am GMTThere are many videos about Soros' purported influence on world events but very few books. An interesting one is "Soros rompiendo España" by an internationalist and academic of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid.
It badly needs an editor to make it less boring, but it traces and documents Soros financing and tactics in the case of Cataluña. Basically creating NGOs to mobilize civil society to a pitch, while providing content and tactics. Creating grass roots pressure to change policy and break up one of Europes oldest nation-states. Such a network has the advantage of flexibility, it can ebb and flow as required.
What is different from Europe's 19th Century instability? Well, that one's to ponder. But it seems to me it is:
1) independent of Perfidious Albion or any central government. Unless it's Bilderberg, of course.
2) requires no high level assassinations (king and prime minister of Italy, King and Queen of Serbia, multiple Habsburgs, etc). Orban and Salvini are alive and well. Trump will lose, but continue playing golf.
3) not about the self-determination of oppressed peoples, that is, not about nationhood.There seem to be non-stop programming exercises to achieve and direct mass activism across the West: immigration into Europe and US, Cataluña protests, green St Greta protest, feminist protests, Covid confinement, BLM. These last four, in the past TWO years. The generational divide cemented during Covid is something to watch, I've seen videos in French and Spanish about the "life lessons" of the pandemic that seed this idea.
The next step in this Ordo ab Chaos stumps me.
@Wizard of Oz n't Stop Until They Get Their War With IranReally No Shit , says: July 4, 2020 at 11:08 am GMT– Op-Ed: The neocons: They're back, and on Iran, they're uncompromising as ever
– The Neoconservative Obsession with Iran
– Is Tehran Back in the Crosshairs of the Neocon Crusade?
– Next Stop, Tehran: The Neoconservative Campaign for War in Iran
About the other theme you ask about, I don't believe that it's possible to investigate it properly, but anyway:
– 5 Israelis Detained for Puzzling Behavior' After WTC Tragedy (Yossi Melman, Haaretz)
– Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 .. (the Herald)
Some say that Soros is a Rothschild agent, just as Wilbur Ross is claimed to be by others, and the Bank of England is most likely the Nathan Rothschild agent, therefore, a question arises: how can an operative of an outfit be the buster of that very outfit? It's like saying a pizza parlor owned by the mafia was cleaned out of pies by one of its very own goons.
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Jul 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Mike Pompeo delivered an embarrassing, clownish performance at the U.N. on Tuesday, and his attempt to gain support for an open-ended conventional arms embargo on Iran was rejected the rest of the old P5+1:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Tuesday for an arms embargo on Iran to be extended indefinitely, but his appeal fell flat at the United Nations Security Council, where Russia and China rejected it outright and close allies of the United States were ambivalent.
The Trump administration is more isolated than ever in its Iran obsession. The ridiculous effort to invoke the so-called "snapback" provision of the JCPOA more than two years after reneging on the agreement met with failure, just as most observers predicted months ago when it was first floated as a possibility. As I said at the time, "The administration's latest destructive ploy won't find any support on the Security Council. There is nothing "intricate" about this idea. It is a crude, heavy-handed attempt to employ the JCPOA's own provisions to destroy it." It was never going to work because all of the other parties to the agreement want nothing to do with the administration's punitive approach, and U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA meant that it forfeited any rights it had when it was still part of the deal.
Opposition from Russia and China was a given, but the striking thing about the scene at the U.N. this week was that major U.S. allies joined them in rebuking the administration's obvious bad faith maneuver:
The pointedly critical tone of the debate saw Germany accusing Washington of violating international law by withdrawing from the nuclear pact, while Berlin aligned itself with China's claim that the United States has no right to reimpose U.N. sanctions on Iran.
The Trump administration has abused our major European allies for years in its push to destroy the nuclear deal, and their governments have no patience with any more unilateral U.S. stunts. This is the result of two years of a destructive policy aimed solely at punishing Iran and its people. The administration's open contempt for international law and the interests of its allies has cost the U.S. their cooperation.
Underscoring the absurdity of the Trump administration's arms embargo appeal were Pompeo's alarmist warnings that an end to the arms embargo would allow Iran to purchase advanced fighters that it would use to threaten Europe and India:
If you fail to act, Iran will be free to purchase Russian-made fighter jets that can strike up to a 3,000 kilometer radius, putting cities like Riyadh, New Delhi, Rome, and Warsaw in Iranian crosshairs.
This is a laughably unrealistic scenario. Even if Iran purchased advanced fighters, the last thing it would do is send them off on a suicide mission to bomb Italy or India. This shows how deeply irrational the Iran hawks' fearmongering is. Iran has already demonstrated an ability to launch precise attacks with drones and missiles in its immediate neighborhood, and it developed these capabilities while under the current embargo.
It has no need for expensive fighters, and it is not at all certain that their government would even be interested in acquiring them. Pompeo's presentation was a weak attempt to exaggerate the potential threat from a state that has very limited power projection, and he found no support because his serial fabrications about Iran have rendered everything he says to be worthless.
The same administration that wants to keep an arms embargo on Iran forever has no problem flooding the region with U.S.-made weapons and providing them to some of the worst governments in the world. It is these client states that are doing the most to destabilize other countries in the region right now. If the U.N. should be putting arms embargoes on any country, it should consider imposing them on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to limit their ability to wreak havoc on Yemen and Libya.
The Secretary of State called on the U.N. to reject "extortion diplomacy." The best way to reject extortion diplomacy would be for them to reject the administration's desperate attempt to use America's position at the U.N. to attack international law.
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Jun 29, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com
T he perpetual occupation of Afghanistan has become so normalized that it mostly serves as background noise to most Americans. It's even jokingly referred to as the "Forever War," accepted as just another constant reality. A soldier dies now and again, a couple of dozen civilians get killed in another bombing. It's never enough to stir the population to pressure Washington enough to stop it. And the endless war drags on.
From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, to Donald Trump, every U.S. president has promised to end the war. But their plans to bring the troops home inevitably require first sending more troops to the country. You can't look at all this rhetoric and reality and not conclude that the United States wants to stay in Afghanistan forever. And there is a reason, despite an unresolvable military quagmire, that the Empire won't let go of Afghanistan.
In this latest "Empire Files" documentary, journalist Abby Martin covers reveals the reality of America's Wars in Afghanistan, from the CIA construct of the 1980s through today's senseless stalemate. MintPress brings you documentary in its entirety, published with permission from filmmaker Abby Martin.
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Jul 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Christian J. Chuba , Jul 3 2020 16:13 utc | 162
VK, re: Russia's grip on Europe is gradually tightening from the U.K.'s INDEPENDENT
It's behind a paywall but I read just enough to be curious as to how someone could possibly justify a clickbait title like that.
I suspect that the rest of the article is just going to recap Russia's alleged sins in order to fan hatred but how can someone objectively say that Russia is tightening its grip on Europe?
- FUCKUS banned Russia from the Olympics on a bogus state sponsored steroid scam, no reinstatement on horizon.
- FUCKUS kicked Russia out of the now G7 and imposed a trade embargo that destroyed a large commercial relationship w/Germany.
What is the 'overwhelming' evidence that the Russians poisoned the Skripal's, Novichok can be made by just about anyone.
Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is 'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak.
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Jul 02, 2020 | www.unz.com
William "Bill" Browder has been a figure of some prominence on the world scene for the past decade. A few months back, Der Spiegel published a major exposé on him and the case of Sergei Magnitsky but the mainstream media completely ignored this report and so aside from Germany few people are aware of Browder's background and the Magnitsky issue which resulted in sanctions on Russia.
Browder had gone to Moscow in 1996 to take advantage of the privatization of state companies by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Browder founded Hermitage Capital Management, a Moscow investment firm registered in offshore Guernsey in the Channel Islands. For a time, it was the largest foreign investor in Russian securities. Hermitage Capital Management was rated as extremely successful after earning almost 3,000 percent in its operations between 1996 and December 2007.
During the corrupt Yeltsin years, with his business partner's US $25 million, Browder amassed a fortune . Profiting from the large-scale privatizations in Russia from 1996 to 2006 his Hermitage firm eventually grew to $4.5 billion .
When Browder encountered financial difficulties with Russian authorities he portrayed himself as an anti-corruption activist and became the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, which resulted in economic sanctions aimed at Russian officials. However, an examination of Browder's record in Russia and his testimony in court cases reveals contradictions with his statements to the public and Congress, and raises questions about his motives in attacking corruption in Russia.
Although he has claimed that he was an 'activist shareholder' and campaigned for Russian companies to adopt Western-style governance, it has been reported that he cleverly destabilized companies he was targeting for takeover. Canadian blogger Mark Chapman has revealed that after Browder would buy a minority share in a company he would resort to lawsuits against this company through shell companies he controlled. This would destabilize the company with charges of corruption and insolvency. To prevent its collapse the Russian government would intervene by injecting capital into it, causing its stock market to rise -- with the result that Browder's profits would rise exponentially.
Later, through Browder's Russian-registered subsidiaries, his accountant Magnitsky acquired extra shares in Russian gas companies such as Surgutneftegaz, Rosneft and Gazprom. This procedure enabled Browder's companies to pay the residential tax rate of 5.5% instead of the 35% that foreigners would have to pay.
However, the procedure to bypass the Russian presidential decree that banned foreign companies and citizens from purchasing equities in Gazprom was an illegal act. Because of this and other suspected transgressions, Magnitsky was interrogated in 2006 and later in 2008. Initially he was interviewed as a suspect and then as an accused. He was then arrested and charged by Russian prosecutors with two counts of aggravated tax evasion committed in conspiracy with Bill Browder in respect of Dalnyaya Step and Saturn, two of Browder's shell companies to hold shares that he bought. Unfortunately, in 2009 Magnitsky died in pre-trial detention because of a failure by prison officials to provide prompt medical assistance.
Browder has challenged this account and for years he has maintained that Magnitsky's arrest and death were a targeted act of revenge by Russian authorities against a heroic anti-corruption activist.
It's only recently that Browder's position was challenged by the European Court of Human Rights who in its ruling on August 27, 2019 concluded that Magnitsky's "arrest was not arbitrary, and that it was based on reasonable suspicion of his having committed a criminal offence." And as such "The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion."
"The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings against Mr Magnitskiy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent acts."
Prior to Magnitsky's arrest, because of what Russia considered to be questionable activities, Browder had been refused entry to Russia in 2005. However, he did not take lightly his rebuff by the post-Yeltsin Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As succinctly expressed by Professor Halyna Mokrushyna at the University of Ottawa:
[Browder] began to engage in a worldwide campaign against the Russian authorities, accusing them of corruption and violation of human rights. The death of his accountant and auditor Sergei Magnitsky while in prison became the occasion for Browder to launch an international campaign presenting the death as a ruthless silencing of an anti-corruption whistleblower. But the case of Magnitsky is anything but.
Despite Brower's claims that Magnitsky died as a result of torture and beatings, authentic documents and testimonies show that Magnitsky died because of medical neglect – he was not provided adequate treatment for a gallstone condition. It was negligence typical at that time of prison bureaucracy, not a premeditated killing. Because of the resulting investigation, many high level functionaries in the prison system were fired or demoted.
For the past ten years Browder has maintained that Magnitsky was tortured and murdered by prison guards. Without any verifiable evidence he has asserted that Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight riot guards over 1 hour and 18 minutes. This was never corroborated by anybody, including by autopsy reports. It was even denied by Magnitsky's mother in a video interview.
Nevertheless, on the basis of his questionable beliefs, he has carried on a campaign to discredit and vilify Russia and its government and leaders.
In addition to the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, Browder's basic underlying beliefs and assumptions are being seriously challenged. Very recently, on May 5, 2020, an American investigative journalist, Lucy Komisar, published an article with the heading Forensic photos of Magnitsky show no marks on torso :
On Fault Lines today I revealed that I have obtained never published forensic photos of the body of Sergei Magnitsky, William Browder's accountant, that show not a mark on his torso. Browder claims he was beaten to death by prison guards. Magnitsky died at 9:30pm Nov 16, 2009, and the photos were taken the next day.
Later in her report she states:
I noted on the broadcast that though the photos and documents are solid, several dozen U.S. media – both allegedly progressive and mainstream -- have refused to publish this information. And if that McCarthyite censorship continues, the result of rampant fear-inducing Russophobia, I will publish it and the evidence on this website.
Despite evidence such as this, till this day Browder maintains that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death with rubber batons. It's this narrative that has attracted the attention of the US Congress, members of parliament, diplomats and human rights activists. To further refute his account, a 2011 analysis by the Physicians for Human Rights International Forensics Program of documents provided by Browder found no evidence he was beaten to death.
In his writings, as supposed evidence, Browder provides links to two untranslated Russian documents. They were compiled immediately after Magnitsky died on November 16, 2009. Recent investigative research has revealed that one of these appears to be a forgery. The first document D309 states that shortly before Magnitsky's death: "Handcuffs were used in connection with the threat of committing an act of self-mutilation and suicide, and that the handcuffs were removed after thirty minutes." To further support this, a forensic review states that while in the prison hospital "Magnitsky exhibited behavior diagnosed as "acute psychosis" by Dr. A. V. Gaus at which point the doctor ordered Mr. Magnitsky to be restrained with handcuffs."
The second document D310 is identically worded to D309 except for a change in part of the preceding sentence. The sentence in D309 has the phrase " special means were" is changed in D310 to " a rubber baton was."
As such, while D309 is perfectly coherent, in D310 the reference to a rubber baton makes no sense whatsoever, given the title and text it shares with D309. This and other inconsistences, including signatures on these documents, make it apparent that D310 was copied from D309 and that D310 is a forgery. Furthermore, there is no logical reason for two almost identical reports to have been created, with only a slight difference in one sentence. There is no way of knowing who forged it and when, but this forged document forms a major basis for Browder's claim that Magnitsky was clubbed to death.
The fact that there is no credible evidence to indicate that Magnitsky was subjected to a baton attack, combined with forensic photos of Magnitsky's body shortly after death that show no marks on it, provides evidence that appears to repudiate Browder's decade-long assertions that Magnitsky was viciously murdered while in jail.
With evidence such as this, it repeatedly becomes clear that Browder's narrative contains mistakes and inconsistencies that distort the overall view of the events leading to Magnitsky's death.
Despite Magnitsky's death the case against him continued in Russia and he was found guilty of corruption in a posthumous trial. Actually, the trial's main purpose was to investigate alleged fraud by Bill Browder, but to proceed with this they had to include the accountant Magnitsky as well. The Russian court found both of them guilty of fraud. Afterwards, the case against Magnitsky was closed because of his death.
After Browder was refused entry to Russia in November of 2005, he launched a campaign insisting that his departure from Russia resulted from his anti-corruption activities. However, the real reason for the cancellation of his visa that he never mentions is that in 2003 a Russian provincial court had convicted Browder of evading $40 million in taxes. In addition, his illegal purchases of shares in Gazprom through the use of offshore shell companies were reportedly valued at another $30 million, bringing the total figure of tax evasion to $70 million.
It's after this that the Russian federal government next took up the case and initially went after Magnitsky, the accountant who carried out Browder's schemes.
But back in the USA Browder portrayed himself as the ultimate truth-teller, and embellished his tale by asserting that Sergei Magnitsky was a whistleblowing "tax lawyer," rather than one of Browder's accountants implicated in tax fraud. As his case got more involved, he presented a convoluted explanation that he was not responsible for bogus claims made by his companies. This is indeed an extremely complicated matter and as such only a summary of some of this will be presented.
The essence of the case is that in 2007 three shell companies that had once been owned by Browder were used to claim a $232 million tax refund based on trumped-up financial loses. Browder has stated that the companies were stolen from him, and that in a murky operation organized by a convicted fraudster, they were re-registered in the names of others. There is evidence however that Magnitsky and Browder may have been part of this convoluted scheme.
Browder's main company in Russia was Hermitage Capital Management, and associated with this firm were a large number of shell companies, some in the Russian republic of Kalmykia and some in the British Virgin Islands. A law firm in Moscow, Firestone Duncan, owned by Americans, did the legal work for Browder's Hermitage. Sergei Magnitsky was one of the accountants for Firestone Duncan and was assigned to work for Hermitage.
An accountant colleague of Magnitsky's at Firestone Duncan, Konstantin Ponomarev, was interviewed in 2017 by Lucy Komisar, an investigative journalist, who was doing research on Browder's operations in Russia. In the ensuing report on this , Komisar states:
"According to Ponomarev, the firm – and Magnitsky -- set up an offshore structure that Russian investigators would later say was used for tax evasion and illegal share purchases by Hermitage. . .
the structure helped Browder execute tax-evasion and illegal share purchase schemes.
"He said the holdings were layered to conceal ownership: The companies were "owned" by Cyprus shells Glendora and Kone, which, in turn, were "owned" by an HSBC Private Bank Guernsey Ltd trust. Ponomarev said the real owner was Browder's Hermitage Fund. He said the structure allowed money to move through Cyprus to Guernsey with little or no taxes paid along the way. Profits could get cashed out in Guernsey by investors of the Hermitage Fund and HSBC.
"Ponomarev said that in 1996, the firm developed for Browder 'a strategy of how to buy Gazprom shares in the local market, which was restricted for foreign investors.'"
In the course of their investigation, on June 2, 2007, Russian tax investigators raided the offices of Hermitage and Firestone Duncan. They seized Hermitage company documents, computers and corporate stamps and seals. They were looking for evidence to support Russian charges of tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares of Gazprom.
In a statement to US senators on July 27, 2017, Browder stated that Russian interior ministry officials "seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of the funds that I advised. I didn't know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old named Sergei Magnitsky. I asked Sergei to investigate the purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials had."
Contrary to what Browder claims, Magnitsky had been his accountant for a decade. He had never acted as a lawyer, nor did he have the qualifications to do so. In fact in 2006 when questioned by Russian investigators, Magnitsky said he was an auditor on contract with Firestone Duncan. In Browder's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 he claimed Magnitsky was his lawyer, but in 2015 in his testimony under oath in the US government's Prevezon case, Browder told a different story, as will now be related.
On Browder's initiative , in December 2012 he presented documents to the New York District Attorney alleging that a Russian company Prevezon had "benefitted from part of the $230 million dollar theft uncovered by Magnitsky and used those funds to buy a number of luxury apartments in Manhattan." In September 2013, the New York District Attorney's office filed money-laundering charges against Prevezon. The company hired high-profile New York-based lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.
As reported by Der Spiegel , Browder would not voluntarily agree to testify in court so Prevezon's lawyers sent process servers to present him with a subpoena, which he refused to accept and was caught on video literally running away. In March 2015, the judge in the Prevezon case ruled that Browder would have to give testimony as part of pre-trial discovery. Later while in court and under oath and confronted with numerous documents, Browder was totally evasive. Lawyer Mark Cymrot spent six hours examining him, beginning with the following exchange:
Cymrot asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?
He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.
And he had a law degree in Russia?
"I'm not aware he did."
Did he go to law school?
"No."
How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?
"I don't know."
Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law degree?
"No."
Critically important, during the court case, the responsible U.S. investigator admitted during questioning that his findings were based exclusively on statements and documents from Browder and his team. Under oath, Browder was unable to explain how he and his people managed to track the flow of money and make the accusation against Prevezon. In his 2012 letter that launched the court case, Browder referred to "corrupt schemes" used by Prevezon, but when questioned under oath he admitted he didn't know of any. In fact, to almost every question put forth by Mark Cymrot, Browder replied that he didn't know or didn't remember.
The case finally ended in May 2017 when the two sides reached a settlement. Denis Katsyv, the company's sole shareholder, on a related matter agreed to pay nearly six million dollars to the US government, but would not have to admit any wrongdoing. Also the settlement contained an explicit mention that neither Katsyv nor his company Prevezon had anything to do with the Magnitsky case. Afterwards, one of Katsyv's, lawyers, Natalia Veselnitskaya, exclaimed: "For the first time, the U.S. recognized that the Russians were in the right!"
A major exposé of the Browder-Russia story is presented in a film that came out in June 2016 The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes by the well-known independent filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov . Reference to this film will be made later but to provide a summary of the Browder tax evasion case some critical information can be obtained from a report by Eric Zuesse , an investigative historian, who managed to get a private viewing of the film by the film's Production Manager.
In the film Nekrasov proceeds to unravel Browder's story, which was designed to conceal his own corporate responsibility for the criminal theft of the money. As Browder's widely accepted story collapses, Magnitsky is revealed not to be a whistleblower but a likely abettor to the fraud who died in prison not from an official assassination but from banal neglect of his medical condition. The film cleverly allows William Browder to self-destruct under the weight of his own lies and the contradictions in his story-telling at various times.
Following the raid by tax officials on the Moscow Hermitage office on June 2, 2007, nothing further on these matters was reported until April 9, 2008 when Ms Rimma Starlova, the figurehead director of the three supposedly stolen Browder shell companies, filed a criminal complaint with the Russian Interior Ministry in Kazan accusing representatives of Browder companies of the theft of state funds, i.e., $232 million in a tax-rebate fraud. Although Hermitage was aware of this report they kept quiet about it because they claimed it as a false accusation against themselves.
On September 23, 2008, there was a news report about a theft of USD 232 million from the Russian state treasury, and the police probe into it. On October 7, 2008, Magnitsky was questioned by tax investigators about the $232 million fraud because he was the accountant for Browder's companies.
The central issue was that during September of 2007 three of Browder's shell companies had changed owners and that afterwards fraud against Russian treasury had been conducted by the new owners of these companies.
According to Magnitsky the way that ownership changed was through powers of attorney. This is a matter that Browder never mentioned. The Nekrasov film shows a document: "Purchase agreement based on this power of attorney, Gasanov represents Glendora Holdings Ltd." Glendora Holdings is another shell company owned by Browder. This shows that Gasanov, the middleman, had the power of attorney connecting the new nominees to the real beneficiaries. However, Gasanov could not be questioned on whose orders he was doing this because shortly afterwards, he mysteriously died. No one proved that it was murder, but if that death was a coincidence, it wasn't the only one.
During September 2007 the three Hermitage shell companies, Rilend, Parfenion and Mahaon, were re-registered by Gasanov to a company called Pluton that was registered in Kazan, and owned by Viktor Markelov, a Russian citizen with a criminal record. Markelov through a series of sham arbitration judgments conducted fake lawsuits that demanded damages for alleged contract violations. Once the damages were paid, in December 2007 the companies filed for tax refunds that came to $232 million. These were taxes that had been paid by these companies in 2006.
On February 5, 2008 the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor's Office opened a criminal case to investigate the fraud committed by Markelov and other individuals.
Markelov had hired a Moscow lawyer, Andrey Pavlov, to conduct these complex operations. Afterwards Pavlov was questioned by Russian authorities and revealed what had happened. Markelov was convicted and sentenced to five years for the scam . At his trial Markelov testified that he was not in possession of the $232 million tax refund and that he did not know the identity of the client who would benefit from the refund scheme. And till this day no one knows! However, Russian tax authorities suspect it is William Browder.
At his trial, Markelov testified that one of the people he worked with to secure the fraudulent tax refund was Sergei Leonidovich. Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. Also when questioned by the police, Markelov named Browder's associates Khairetdinov and Kleiner as people involved in the company's re-registration.
So this provides evidence that Magnitsky and Browder's other officials were involved in the re-registration scheme – which Browder later called theft. In his film Nekrasov states that Browder's team had set things up to look as if outsiders -- not Browder's team -- had transferred the assets.
According to Nekrasov's film documentation, Russian courts have established that it was the representatives of the Hermitage investment fund who had themselves voluntarily re-registered the Makhaon, Parfenion and Rilend companies in the name of other individuals, a fact that Mr Browder is seeking to conceal by shifting the blame, without any foundation, onto the law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation.
Indeed there is cause to be skeptical of the Browder narrative, and that the fraud was in fact concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court has supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December 2013 that Browder had deliberately bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. On the basis of this he was sentenced to nine years prison in absentia.
In the meantime, over all these years, Browder has maintained and convinced the public at large that the $232 million fraud against the Russian treasury had been perpetrated by Magnitsky's interrogators and Russian police. With respect to the "theft" of his three companies (or "vehicles as he refers to them) on September 16, 2008 he stated on his Hermitage website : "The theft of the vehicles was only possible using the vehicles' original corporate documents seized by the Moscow Interior Ministry in its raid on Hermitage's law firm in Moscow on 4 June 2007."
As such, Browder is accusing Russian tax authorities and police for conducting this entire fraudulent operation.
In his film Nekrasov says that the Browder version is: "Yes, the crime took place [$232 million fraud against the public treasury but, according to Browder, actually against Browder's firm], but somebody else did it -- the police did it."
In this convoluted tale, it should be recalled that the fraud against the Russian treasury had first been reported to the police by Rimma Starlova on April 9, 2008. This had been recorded on the Hermitage website. In preparing the material for his film, Nekrasov noted that
"In March 2009, Starlova's report disappeared from Hermitage's website. . . . This is the same time that Magnitsky started to be treated as an analyst . . . who discovered the $232 million fraud. Thus the Magnitsky-the-whistleblower story was born, almost a year after the matter had been reported to the police."
Nekrasov's film also undermines the basis of Browder's case that Magnitsky had been killed by the police because he had accused two police officials, Karpov and Kuznetsov, but this is questionable since documents show Magnitsky had not accused anyone. As Nekrasov states in the film: "The problem is, he [Magnitsky] made no accusations. In that testimony, its record contains no accusations. Mr. Magnitsky did not actually testify against the two officers [Karpov and Kuznetsov]." So this factual evidence should destroy Browder's accusations.
It should be noted Magnitsky's original interview with authorities was as a suspect, not a whistleblower. Also contradicting Browder's claims, Nekrasov notes that Magnitsky does not even mention the names of the police officers in a key statement to authorities.
In his film Nekrasov includes an interview that he had with Browder regarding the issues about Magnitsky. Nekrasov confronts Browder with the core contradictions of his story. Incensed, Browder rises up and threatens the filmmaker:
" Anybody who says that Sergei Magnitsky didn't expose the crime before he was arrested is just trying to whitewash the Russian Government. Are you trying to say that Pavel Karpov is innocent? I'd really be careful about your going out and saying that Magnitsky wasn't a whistleblower. That's not going to do well for your credibility." Browder then walks off in a huff.
Nekrasov claims to be especially struck that the basis of Browder's case -- that Magnitsky had been killed by the police because he had accused two police officials, Karpov and Kuznetsov -- is a lie because there is documentary evidence that Magnitsky had not accused anyone.
Because of Browder's accusations, Nekrasov interviewed Pavel Karpov, the police officer who Browder accused of being involved in Magnitsky's alleged murder, despite the fact that Karpov was not on duty the day Magnitsky died.
Karpov presents Nekrasov with documents that Browder's case was built on. These original documents are actually fundamentally different from the way Browder had described them. This documentary evidence further exposes Browder's story for what it is.
Nekrasov asks Karpov why Browder wants to demonize him. Karpov explains that he had pursued Browder in 2004 for tax evasion, so that seems to be the reason why Browder smears him. And then Karpov says, "Having made billions here, Browder forgot to tell how he did it. So it suits him to pose as a victim. He is wanted here, but Interpol is not looking for him."
Afterwards in 2013, Karpov had tried to sue Browder for libel in a London court, but was not able to on the basis of procedural grounds since he was a resident of Russia and not the UK. However at the conclusion of the case, set out in his Judgment the presiding judge, Justice Simon, made some interesting comments.
"The causal link which one would expect from such a serious charge is wholly lacking; and nothing is said about torture or murder. In my view these are inadequate particulars to justify the charge that the Claimant was a primary or secondary party to Sergei Magnitsky's torture and murder, and that he would continue to commit or 'cause' murder, as pleaded in §60 of the Defence.
The Defendants have not come close to pleading facts which, if proved, would justify the sting of the libel."
In other words – in plain English – in the judge's view, Karpov was not in any sense party to Magnitsky's death, and Browder's claim that he was is not valid.
On the basis of the evidence that has been presented, it is undeniable that Browder's case appears to be a total misrepresentation, not only of Magnitsky's statements, but of just about everything else that's important in the case .
On a separate matter, on April 15, 2015 in a New York court case involving the US government and a Russian company, Previzon Holdings, Bill Browder had been ordered by a judge to give a deposition to Prevezon's lawyers.
Throughout this deposition, Browder (now under oath) contradicted virtually every aspect of his Magnitsky narrative and stated "I don't recall" when pressed about key portions of his narrative that he had previously repeated unabashedly in his testimonies to Congress and interviews with Western media. Browder "remembered nothing" and could not even deny asking Magnitsky to take responsibility for his (Browder's) crimes.
As a further example of Browder's dishonesty, in one of his publications, he shows a photo of an alleged employee of Browder's law firm, Firestone Duncan, named "Victor Poryugin" with vicious facial wounds from allegedly being tortured and beaten by police. However, the person shown was never with Browder's firm. Instead, this is a photo of "an American human rights campaigner beaten up during a street protest in 1961." It was Jim Zwerg, civil-rights demonstrator, during the 1960s, in the American South. Nekrasov was appalled and found it almost unimaginable that Browder would switch photos like that to demonize Russia and its police.
Browder was arrested by the Spanish police in June 2018. Even though Russia has on six occasions requested Browder's arrest through Interpol for tax fraud, the Spanish national police determined that Browder had been detained in error because the international warrant was no longer valid and released him.
A further matter that reflects on his character, William Browder, the American-born co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management is now a British citizen. The US taxes offshore earnings, but the UK does not. Highly likely because of this, in 1998 he gave up his American citizenship and became a British citizen and thereby has avoided paying US taxes on foreign investments. Nevertheless, he still has his family home in Princeton, NJ and also owns a $11 million dollar vacation home in Aspen, Colorado.
To put this in political context, Browder's narrative served a strong geopolitical purpose to demonize Russia at the dawn of the New Cold War. As such, Browder played a major role in this. In fact, the late celebrated American journalist Robert Parry thought that Browder single-handedly deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War.
Browder's campaign was so effective that in December 2012 he exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia, and as a result the US Congress passed a bipartisan bill, the Magnitsky Act, which was then signed by President Obama. U.S. Senators Ben Cardin and John McCain were instrumental in pushing through the Magnitsky Act, based on Browder's presentations.
However, key parts of the argument that passed into law in this act have been shown to be based on fraud and fabrication of 'evidence.' This bill blacklisted Russian officials who were accused of being involved in human-rights abuses.
In her analysis of the Magnitsky Act, Lucy Komisar, an investigative journalist, reveals a little known fact :
"A problem with the Magnitsky Act is that there is no due process. The targets are not told the evidence against them, they cannot challenge accusations or evidence in a court of law in order to get off the list. This "human rights law" violates the rule of law. There is an International Court with judges and lawyers to deal with human rights violators, but the US has not ratified its jurisdiction. Because it does not want to be subject to the rules it applies to others."
In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.
In a move that history will show to be ill-advised, on October 18, 2017 Canada's Parliament and Senate unanimously approved Bill 226, a 'Magnitsky Act.' It mimics the US counterpart and targets Russia for further economic sanctions. Russia immediately denounced Canada's actions as being counter-productive, pointless and reprehensible. Actually an act of this type had been opposed by Stéphane Dion while he was Canada's minister of foreign affairs because he viewed it as a needless provocation against Russia. Dion also stated that adoption of a 'Magnitsky Act' would hurt the interests of Canadian businesses dealing with Russia and would thwart Canada's attempt's to normalize relations with Russia. However, Dion was replaced by Chrystia Freeland who immediately pushed this through. This is not surprising considering her well-documented Nazi family background and who is persona non grata in Russia.
A version of the Magnitsky Act was enacted in the UK and the Baltic republics in 1917.
In early 2020 a proposal to enact a version of the Magnitsky Act was presented to the Australian parliament and it is still under consideration. There has been considerable opposition to it including a detailed report by their Citizens Party, which exposes the full extent of Browder's fraud and chicanery.
The investigation into Browder's business activities in Russia is still an ongoing endeavour. On October 24, 2017 the
Russian Prosecutor General , Yuri Chaika, requested the US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch a probe into alleged tax evasion by Bill Browder, who in 2013 had already been sentenced in absentia to 9 years in prison in Russia for a similar crime.
Browder at that time was still being tried in Russia for suspected large-scale money laundering, also in absentia. Chaika added that Russian law enforcement possesses information that over $1 billion was illegally transferred from the country into structures connected with Bill Browder.
The Prosecutor General also asked Sessions to reconsider the Magnitsky Act. As he put it,
" from our standpoint, the act was adopted for no actual reason, while it was lobbied by people who had committed crimes in Russia. In our view, there are grounds to claim that this law lacks real foundation and that its passing was prompted by criminals' actions."
It's not known if Sessions ever responded to the Russian Prosecutor General. In any event, President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions on November 7, 2018. As such it's evident that Russia's concerns about Browder's dishonest activities are stymied.
Extensive reference has already been made to the film that came out in June 2016 The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes by the independent filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov . When Nekrasov started the film he had fully believed Browder's story but as he delved into what really happened, to his surprise, he discovered that the case documents and other incontrovertible facts revealed Browder to be a fraud and a liar. The ensuing film presents a powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth, but because of Browder's political connections and threats of lawsuits, the film has been blacklisted in the entire "free world." So much for the "free world's" freedom of the press and media. This film is not available on YouTube.
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/oJsWUlkjN6Gf/
The documentary was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016, but at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians cancelled the showing.
There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Despite the frantic attempts by Browder's lawyers to block this documentary film from being shown anywhere, Washington's Newseum, to its credit, had a one-time showing on June 13, 2016, including a question-and-answer session with Andrei Nekrasov, moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. Except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War.
Nekrasov's powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth – and the film's subsequent blacklisting throughout the "free world" – recall other instances in which the West's propaganda lines don't stand up to scrutiny, so censorship and ad hominem attacks become the weapons of choice to defend " perception management ."
Other than the New York Times that had a lukewarm review , the mainstream media condemned the film and its showing. As such, with the exception of that one audience, the public in the USA, Canada and Europe has been shielded from the documentary's discoveries. The censorship of this film has made it a good example of how political and legal pressure can effectively black out what we used to call "the other side of the story."
Andrei Nekrasov is still prepared to go to court to defend the findings of his film, but Bill Browder has refused to do this and simply keeps maligning the film and Mr. Nekrasov.
Recent Developments
Although for almost the past ten years Browder's self-serving story had been accepted almost worldwide and served to help vilify Russia, in the past few months there has been an awakening to the true state of affairs about Browder.
The first such article "The Case of Sergei Magnitsky: Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions" written by Benjamin Bidder, a German journalist, appeared on November 26, 2019 in Der Spiegel. At the outset Bidder states:
"Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him to be. Did the perfidious conspiracy to murder Magnitsky ever really take place? Or is Browder a charlatan whose story the West was too eager to believe? The certainty surrounding the Magnitsky affair becomes muddled in the documents, particularly the clear division between good and evil. The Russian authorities' take is questionable, but so is everyone else's -- including Bill Browder's.
But with the Magnitsky sanctions, it could be that the activist Browder used a noble cause to manipulate Western governments."
In summation, the article raises serious questions about many aspects of Browder's account. It concluded that his narrative was riddled with lies and said Western nations have fallen for a "convenient" story made up by a "fraudster. "
The report provoked Browder's fury, and he swiftly filed a complaint against Der Spiegel with the German Press Council as well as a complaint to the editor of Der Spiegel .
On December 17, 2019 Der Spiegel responded : " Why DER SPIEGEL Stands Behind Its Magnitsky Reporting." In a lengthy detailed response the journal rejects all aspects of Browder's complaint. They point out the inconsistencies in Browder's version of events and demonstrate that he is unable to present sufficient proof for his claims. They state: We believe his complaint has no basis and would like to review why we have considerable doubts about Browder's story and why we felt it necessary to present those doubts publicly."
Their report is highly enlightening and will have long-term consequences. It is one of the best refutations of Browder's falsified accounts that led to the Magnitsky Act. It exposes Browder as a fraud and his Magnitsky story as a fake. Despite all this, this exposé was ignored in the mainstream media so most people are unaware of these revelations. A good review of it is presented by Lucy Komisar in her article The Der Spiegel exposé of Bill Browder, December 6, 2019.
The German Press Council rejected Browder's complaint against Der Spiegel in January 2020 but Browder did not disclose this so it became known only in early May. Lucy Komisar reported this on May 12 and the main points of the Council's rejection are presented in her account. Browder had complained that the article had serious factual errors. The Press Council stated that Browder's position lacks proof and there could be no objection to Der Spiegel's examination of events leading to Magnitsky's death. All other Browder objections were rejected as well. In summation the Council stated: "Overall, we could not find a violation of journalistic principles."
But the action of the press council has not been reported in the Canadian, U.S. or UK media. Nor was the November Der Spiegel report.
The German Press Council ruling follows a December 2019 Danish Press Board ruling against another Browder complaint over an article by a Danish financial news outlet, Finans.dk, on his tax evasion and invented Magnitsky story. Significantly, both the Danish and German cases involve mainstream media, which usually toe the US-UK-NATO strategic line against Russia, which Browder's story serves. And these press complaint rulings follow a September 2019 European Court of Human Rights ruling that there was credible evidence that Magnitsky and Browder were engaged in a conspiracy to commit tax fraud and that Magnitsky was rightfully charged.
In summation, for ten years or more, no one in the West ever seriously challenged Bill Browder's account of what happened to his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky and his stories of corruption and malfeasance in Russia. This is what allowed him to get such influence that the Magnitsky Act was passed, despite Russia's attempts to clarify matters.
But when pressure was exerted on Germany to install a Magnitsky Act, one of their most influential journals Der Spiegel published an investigative bombshell picking apart Browder's story about his auditor Sergei Magnitsky's death. Browder immediately lashed out at Der Spiegel , accusing it of "misrepresenting the facts." However, his outraged objections backfired and resulted in a further even more damaging Der Spiegel article and a rebuke from the German Press Council.
At long last, thanks to Der Spiegel , its investigative reports have effectively rejected and discredited Browder's claim that Magnitsky was a courageous whistleblower who exposed corruption in Russia and was mercilessly killed by authorities out of revenge.
Despite this important and significant course of events, because of its imbedded Russophobia, the mainstream media have completely ignored the Der Spiegel exposé and almost nowhere has this been reported. To some extent this is because Browder has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. Hence aside from people in Germany, this has been a non-event and the Browder hoax still prevails. Given this, it is important for us to publicize this revelation as best we can.
John Ryan, Ph.D. is a Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar, University of Winnipeg The Untouchable Mr. Browder? The Browder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime. Israel Shamir Is Bill Browder the Most Dangerous Man in the World? The darling of the war party needs to answer some questions Philip Giraldi
Vuki , says: Show Comment July 1, 2020 at 10:44 pm GMT
John, great article but we know that what you call "large-scale privatizations in Russia " was a large scale robbery. Even Magnitsky's mother stated that Browder is a fraud. Mr. Nekrasov whose film has been banned in many countries due to Browder's legal challenges has a reputation as a Putin critic -- After interviewing Mr. Browder in 2010 Nekrasov says he set out to make a "Magnitsky the hero" film. But as filming proceeded he "began to have doubts". More accurate would be that he smelled a rat. John, I have read many of your articles you never disappoint with your research and evidence.Neo-Socratic , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 5:26 am GMTOutstanding article sir. I remember when Browder popped up in the news a couple of years ago and made TV appearances on all three big networks in the same day. I was astonished that this lowlife wielded such influence in America.TheTrumanShow , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 5:49 am GMTTotal and absolute corruption just like Weimer.
" smelled a rat "No Friend Of The Devil , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 6:53 am GMTIndeed – and very likely more than one! It should be obvious that the ease with which Browder (a complete nonentity) was able to get away with what he got away with in Russia and remain a virtually untouchable, protected free man to this day, in spite of the very significant evidence against him, would very much seem to indicate that he, much like Paul Bremer later in Iraq, was a tool of higher powers.
Excellent article. There is a misperception that these pathological liars are believed, since their critics are silenced. It has been my experience that that is not the case. The pathological liars are not believed. They just keep lying, sabotaging, fining, legal system stalking, shouting down their oppenents, black listing those who doubt or know that they are lying as conspiracy theorists. I've been witnessing this for far to long. It is obviously not limited to the Magnitsky Act. This country is really nothing more than a sick joke at this point. These individuals do not behave like people. They behave like mercury poisoned monsters. Maybe they are. There is no logical excuse for this insanity. However, if they were mercury poisoned monsters, they would not all always have the same insane delusions. They are extremely corrupt sadistic terrorist criminal psychopaths that have destroyed America and the rest of the world too.Anon [268] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 7:23 am GMTThey are not The Resistance, they are The Persistence! Something has to be done about them. Freedom of the press does not give people the freedom to deliberately lie. You may doubt that, however, slander, libel, and defamation of charcter suits will prove you to be wrong, in addition to providing false information that endangers human life and national security, in the case of a non person like covid that is being used to deprive people of every liberty and rights that exists, including life. They are terrorists. They cannot claim to be news journalists or investigative reporters if they simply say whatever their advertisers or the government tells them to say. If they are unable to get to the bottom of the story, when so many in the alternative media are, then they are either unqualified to do their jobs, or are simply full of shit.
I really believe that the primary intention of covid and the response to it is to get people to voluntarily give up cell phones, particularly since 5-G is so hazardous. That way, the industries will never have to admit any wrong doing about the health hazards related to cell phones and Wi-Fi.That
is what I believe. Also, you can be damn sure that the government and corporations do not like the fact that they can be embarrassed by people that they cannot prevent from embarrassing them without being accused of human rights abuses like vault7 technology."Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?!" – Pink Floyd Fletcher Memorial Home For Incurable Tyants
Knowing them, they probably did!
@Vuki I had at one time a copy of a book titled "The murder of Bill Browder" by an Eastern European journalist which I have, unfortunately, misplaced. As well as being an exposè of the nefarious Mr Browder it also exposes far more serious wrongdoing against him. This book has vanished from the Google search engine (I wonder why?) so if anyone can tell me where to get a copy i would really value itFlintWheel4 , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 7:41 am GMTAn aptly titled must read:GMC , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 8:48 am GMThttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-boys-do-russia/
While most American's were distracted by the emerging World Wide Web, our elite were raping Russia. I'll say it again, America's "elite" raped Russia. In internet time twenty five years past puts you in prehistoric times. This is critical history that most of us missed, or more accurately wasn't available -- to the majority of us.
This was the Clinton era -- with just that you know this story can't be good. With Slick Willie's taste for skanks in a period where there is a story of beautiful impoverished young Russian women (teens likely) forming a line for one of our "elite" who was peeling off Benjamins for blowjobs in a club frequented by their foreign "advisors." Yep, I'm sure this was of no interest to William Jefferson Blythe III.
Harvard University was given a significant role in this "helping" of Russia (pardon the pun), due to the prestige of this institution, long-gone and unbeknownst to Russian elite, but hey they weren't "connected" yet. Geez, sorry about your luck. The Harvard you got was the Harvard we've been getting also, a race privileged hot bed for educating global "rapists" (or was that Brandeis University I'm thinking of?). Six of one
William Browder is a highly educated Jew (not certain about either) who's grandfather was Earl Browder, the former General Secretary of the CPUSA (that's the "Communist Party of the United States of America" for those of you who didn't know we had one). Bill Browder crowed about the irony in his grandfather being an activist for communism here in the U.S., while HE was an activist for capitalism in Russia! No, he was doing to Russia what Jews did to Russia when they hijacked the real Russian's revolution -- fucking them.
Billy Browder's book, "Red Notice," seems at first heartfelt story from a genuine American do-gooder. Oops! I missed the "A true story " tip-off. It's a self engrandizing fairy tale of a rapist's plea of innocence because "she didn't say NO."
There is MUCH more to this most interesting, world impacting historical event, that I believe is the most understated and least understood of the twentieth century, but that said, who fucked up? Certainly Yeltsin with his alcohol addled brain (likely rooted for by Russian Jews, who are the MOST notorious criminals world-wide) in trusting and believing America would help Russia! More significantly I feel America did, big-time, for acting so damn un-American. Unfortunately the America I'm dreaming of is as long-gone as Harvard and now, like Harvard has a Zionist occupied governance (if you didn't know what "ZOG" stood for). Come to think of it, we're acting much like Israel. God save America!
I can tell you one person who did not, Vladimir Ilyich Putin. Yeltsin threw Russia's doors open to the west and Putin slammed them shut. You can quibble about how he got and keeps his office, or how he enriched himself through the process, but he had a job to do and he did it well -- he saved Russia from what the west was going to continue doing to it. You may not agree with his ideology, but he is the most formidable leader the world has. I pray he leaves Russia and Russians in a better place than we're headed.
So, here we are today, where Trump is currently in the position to decide whether Russia should be invited to the next G-whatever summit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/politics/trump-g7-russia.html
I say we're damn lucky it isn't Putin deciding whether to include Trump and the U.S., as some day it very well may be.
P.S. This is a rant of mine burning a long time for a window. Thank you John Ryan. Thank you Billy Browder. Most of all, Thank YOU Mr. Unz!
UNZ has provided a platform for authors, journalists and "knowers" from all over the world. All converging on the same theme -- there is a "they" and there is a plan. This seeming runaway train has awakened plain folks with uncommon sense and giants of intellect alike. Kudos, Ron Unz.
" The western Governments are easily moved or manipulated" and have been Gang Banged – time and time again by the corrupt mafia corporations, Zionists inc., and a dozen other international gangs that are in charge of things – today. Not to mention the corrupt, treasonist nationals that work for the Western Governments. Browder's Hermitage scam just shows how easily the US Gov and others are bought and paid for – that's why the true Magnitsky lie , has to be covered up , from the public. PS – notice all the tax money Browder skimmed off the US – very visible to anyone that can smell a Rat.jsigur , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 9:24 am GMTI became aware of the Browder case when known controlled asset, Brandon Martinez, used his claims as a refutation of Putin which he seemed unbelievably obsessed about.Parsnipitous , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 10:09 am GMT
As I perused you-tube for videos on Browder, I saw that he was welcomed into all approved western media to make his case with the questioners rarely going into the material to dispute his claims. I determined at that time that Browder was part of a deep state campaign to demonize Russia under Putin leadership.
It surprises me not to hear no MSM News organization will print these latest findings since in 2012 I realized the free world and press are anything but free and lie as much or more than the most demonized communist outlets.
Not mentioned in the article that I recall is the fact that Browder's dad was the head of the Communist party in the USA before and during WWII which should be enough by itself for a legitimate news outlet to scrutinize with great vigor any claims made by the man but then we know WWII was really a war against any country willing to exercise goyim rule independent of Jewish advisors and that the US was on the side of Jewish power in that war as much as all the other wars it has engaged in.
(Its interesting that my spell check keeps telling me that there is no such word as "goyem")"But when pressure was exerted on Germany to install a Magnitsky Act, one of their most influential journals "Chet Roman , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 11:40 am GMTDer Spiegel is known as a craven Atlanticist rag. Somebody high up – possibly as a snub to the Trump admin – must have provided ass cover for it to be upheld.
@Anon https://dxczjjuegupb.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/TheKillingOfWilliamBrowder_PrintLayout_6x9-1.pdfSaggy , says: Website Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT@Vuki You can see the film hereannamaria , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 12:52 pm GMT
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/oJsWUlkjN6Gf/
That Browder is a crook is not surprising, the revelation is the extent to which he is supported by the establishment.
Bill Browder has been heavily supported by Ben Cardin, a prominent zionist in the US Congress.vot tak , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 2:39 pm GMTBrowder is a mega thief (he was also involved in several deaths-on-order) who owes everything to Cardin and other zionists from the Mega Group like Lex Wexner and similar criminals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Cardin
https://www.mintpressnews.com/mega-group-maxwells-mossad-spy-story-jeffrey-epstein-scandal/261172/
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bill-browder-escapes-again/5642767It is the same old story of subversion of the state by the moneyed and powerful Israel-firsters.
Useful summary of browder's scam. The man managered to wield a great amount of influence in american/uk media and government, yet is only a minor player by western oligarch standards. For that he must have substantial backing. By whom?AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:18 pm GMTWell he definitely is closely defended by these sources:
British Jewish businessman who challenged Putin is put on Interpol wanted list
Be careful of Putin, he is a true enemy of Jews
https://www.thejc.com/culture/books/be-careful-of-putin-he-is-a-true-enemy-of-jews-1.61745
Who has the power to control media and western governments to such a tight degree?
Bill Browder is a thief, a typical representative of a flock of Western vultures that landed in 1990s Russia to steal state assets. When his thievery was curbed by Putin, he got angry and vengeful, like a scorned lover. He manufactured and spread lies to whip up an anti-Putin campaign in the West. His "narrative" was eagerly supported by the neocons and other scum, as it was in line with their "narrative". Naturally, the first things about Browder any honest investigator or journalist would unearth were lies and fraud. Just as naturally, the scum and scum-controlled Western MSM keep spreading lies supporting their "narrative", and ignoring numerous facts that contradict it.Alfred , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:31 pm GMTThere is an interesting connection between Bill Bowder, Robert Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others. They are all members of "CLUB"Really No Shit , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:55 pm GMTThere are many more revealing articles on Martin Armstrong's blog. Browder is one of the biggest scumbags to ever walk on this earth. He is trying to start a war against Russia – because they took away some of the things he had stolen. An absolute arsehole.
Ghislaine Maxwell Arrested – Clinton's & Epstein's Lover | Armstrong Economics
Ben Cardin must feel like a schmuck given Ben Bidder's exposé in the Der Spiegel but having suborned the late drama queen Johnny McCain in supporting him in his efforts to protect a fellow tribesman, the noodge won't make any effort to rescind the illicit bill now that's the power of corruption!
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Jul 01, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Home / Articles / Realism & Restraint / Madcap Militarism: H.R. McMaster's Dishonest Attack On Restraint REALISM & RESTRAINT Madcap Militarism: H.R. McMaster's Dishonest Attack On Restraint
Anyone looking for new grand strategy won't find it in the retired general's latest 'think piece.' Gen. H.R. McMaster in 2013. By CSIS/Flickr
JUNE 29, 2020
|12:01 AM
ANDREW J. BACEVICHH.R. McMaster looks to be one of those old soldiers with an aversion to following Douglas MacArthur's advice to "just fade away."
The retired army three-star general who served an abbreviated term as national security adviser has a memoir due out in September. Perhaps in anticipation of its publication, he has now contributed a big think-piece to the new issue of Foreign Affairs. The essay is unlikely to help sell the book.
The purpose of McMaster's essay is to discredit "retrenchers" -- that's his term for anyone advocating restraint as an alternative to the madcap militarism that has characterized U.S. policy in recent decades. Substituting retrenchment for restraint is a bit like referring to conservatives as fascists or liberals as pinks : It reveals a preference for labeling rather than serious engagement. In short, it's a not very subtle smear, as indeed is the phrase madcap militarism. But, hey, I'm only playing by his rules.
Yet if not madcap militarism, what term or phrase accurately describes post-9/11 U.S. policy? McMaster never says. It's among the many matters that he passes over in silence. As a result, his essay amounts to little more than a dodge, carefully designed to ignore the void between what assertive "American global leadership" was supposed to accomplish back when we fancied ourselves the sole superpower and what actually ensued.
Here's what McMaster dislikes about restraint: It is based on "emotions" and a "romantic view" of the world rather than reason and analysis. It is synonymous with "disengagement" -- McMaster uses the terms interchangeably. "Retrenchers ignore the fact that the risks and costs of inaction are sometimes higher than those of engagement," which, of course, is not a fact, but an assertion dear to the hearts of interventionists. Retrenchers assume that the "vast oceans" separating the United States "from the rest of the world" will suffice to "keep Americans safe." They also believe that "an overly powerful United States is the principal cause of the world's problems." Perhaps worst of all, "retrenchers are out of step with history and way behind the times."
Forgive me for saying so, but there is a Trumpian quality to this line of argument: broad claims supported by virtually no substantiating evidence. Just as President Trump is adamant in refusing to fess up to mistakes in responding to Covid-19 -- "We've made every decision correctly" -- so too McMaster avoids reckoning with what actually happened when the never-retrench crowd was calling the shots in Washington and set out after 9/11 to transform the Greater Middle East.
What gives the game away is McMaster's apparent aversion to numbers. This is an essay devoid of stats. McMaster acknowledges the "visceral feelings of war weariness" felt by more than a few Americans. Yet he refrains from exploring the source of such feelings. So he does not mention casualties -- the number of Americans killed or wounded in our post-9/11 misadventures. He does not discuss how much those wars have cost , which, of course, spares him from considering how the trillions expended in Afghanistan and Iraq might have been better invested at home. He does not even reflect on the duration of those wars, which by itself suffices to reveal the epic failure of recent U.S. military policy. Instead, McMaster mocks what he calls the "new mantra" of "ending endless wars."
Well, if not endless, our recent wars have certainly dragged on for far longer than the proponents of those wars expected. Given the hundreds of billions funneled to the Pentagon each year -- another data point that McMaster chooses to overlook -- shouldn't Americans expect more positive outcomes? And, of course, we are still looking for the general who will make good on the oft-repeated promise of victory.
What is McMaster's alternative to restraint? Anyone looking for the outlines of a new grand strategy in step with history and keeping up with the times won't find it here. The best McMaster can come up with is to suggest that policymakers embrace "strategic empathy: an understanding of the ideology, emotions, and aspirations that drive and constrain other actors" -- a bit of advice likely to find favor with just about anyone apart from President Trump himself.
But strategic empathy is not a strategy; it's an attitude. By contrast, a policy of principled restraint does provide the basis for an alternative strategy, one that implies neither retrenchment nor disengagement. Indeed, restraint emphasizes engagement, albeit through other than military means.
Unless I missed it, McMaster's essay contains not a single reference to diplomacy, a revealing oversight. Let me amend that: A disregard for diplomacy may not be surprising in someone with decades of schooling in the arts of madcap militarism.
The militarization of American statecraft that followed the end of the Cold War produced results that were bad for the United States and bad for the world. If McMaster can't figure that out, then he's the one who is behind the times. Here's the truth: Those who support the principle of restraint believe in vigorous engagement, emphasizing diplomacy, trade, cultural exchange, and the promotion of global norms, with war as a last resort. Whether such an approach to policy is in or out of step with history, I leave for others to divine.
Andrew Bacevich, TAC's writer-at-large, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
libertarianlwyr kouroi • 2 days agoSurveys show over and over that the Americans overwhelmingly share Dr. Bacevich's views. There was even hope that Trump will reign on the US military adventurism.
The fact that all this continues unabated and that the general is given space in the Foreign Affairs is in our face evidence of the glaring democratic deficit existent in the US, and that in fact democracy is nonexistent being long ago fully replaced by a de facto Oligarchy.
Doesn't matter what Dr. Bachevich writes or says or does. Unless and until the internal political issues in the US are not addressed, the world will suffer.
kouroi libertarianlwyr • 2 days agoonly idiots and fools were under any delusion that Trump would "reign in US military adventurism".
While Hillary was very clear on her drive against Russia, Trump promised the opposite, so many people had hopes for something on that. Nevertheless, he also promised to go against China and JPCOA, which many people forgot or thought not likely. But lo and behold, with Trump we ended up having the worst of both worlds...
and the tragedy is that even if Biden is elected, that direction will not be reversed, or not likely. While I cannot vote, just because of Trump's rhetoric against military adventurism, I would have voted for him. I would have been wrong, so now I am now extremely weary of any promises on this direction, but still hoped for Tulsi...
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Jul 01, 2020 | www.unz.com
Sean , says: June 30, 2020 at 12:58 pm GMT
There is no reason for US elite act as is being suggested, because the cake they get the lion's share of is growing and so even though inequality is growing, the economy is too and the common people are getting slightly better off.
If a country were in the hands of a tiny minority and they were to act in such a way and try steal all the wealth for themselves, then they would be overthrown by domestic enemies like Somoza was.
Chagnon theorized that war, far from being the product of capitalist exploitation and colonization was in fact the true "state of nature." He concluded that 1) "maximizing political and personal security was the overwhelming driving force in human social and cultural evolution," and 2) "warfare has been the most important single force shaping the evolution of political society in our species."
Everything in the last five years is a symptom of the US reacting to being bested by China.
I happen to think states that are even slightly nation-states have emergent qualities, like a nest of social insects that react as though there is central direction though none exists, and no state is closer to being alive than a democracy.
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Jun 25, 2020 | www.defenddemocracy.press
President Bill Clinton's favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.
Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with "war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture." Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being "criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders" and the indictment involved "hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents."
Hashim Thaci's tawdry career illustrates how anti-terrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers. Prior to becoming Kosovo's president, Thaci was the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting to force Serbs out of Kosovo. In 1999, the Clinton administration designated the KLA as "freedom fighters" despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army." The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden.
But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify U.S. killing. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CN) whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler, every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign.
Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo. But to sanctify its bombing campaign, the Clinton administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA's atrocities disappear. British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender."
Read also: From the very beginning: Α conscious plan to destroy Greece!NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals, and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel devices designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute. Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire.
In the final days of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" The Post also reported that according to one Clinton friend "what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO's intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton's own conscience The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose, and he feels 'almost cheated' that 'when it was his turn he didn't have the chance to be part of a moral cause.'" By Clinton's standard, slaughtering Serbs was "close enough for government work" to a "moral cause."
Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: "Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing." In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate. In reality, the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American politicians merely need to publicly recite the word "genocide" to get a license to kill.
Read also: Derrière l'affaire Benalla, la banalisation de la violence policièreAfter the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only "with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold." In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter-million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.
But Thaci remained useful for U.S. policymakers. Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the "George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human organ trafficking. The Guardian noted that the report alleged that Thaci's inner circle "took captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market." The report stated that when "transplant surgeons" were "ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were brought out of the 'safe house' individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic."
Despite the body trafficking charge, Thaci was a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011, 2012, and 2013, where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton. Maybe that was a perk from the $50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci's regime signed with The Podesta Group, co-managed by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as the Daily Caller reported.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.
In 2019, Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, visited Pristina, where they were "treated like rock stars" as they posed for photos with Thaci. Clinton declared, "I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing (by Serbian forces) and for freedom." Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom "for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region." Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era. Actually, the only honorific that Albright deserves is "Butcher of Belgrade."
Clinton's war on Serbia was a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.
Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush's conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top U.S. government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and body trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America's political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?
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Jun 26, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
We've embedded an SEC Risk Alert on private equity abuses at the end of this post. 1 What is remarkable about this document is that it contains a far longer and more detailed list of private abuses than the SEC flagged in its initial round of examinations of private equity firms in 2014 and 2015. Those examinations occurred in parallel with groundbreaking exposes by Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times and Mark Maremont in the Wall Street Journal. At least some of the SEC enforcement actions in that era look to have been triggered by the press effectively getting ahead of the SEC. And the SEC even admitted the misconduct was more common at the most prominent firms.
Yet despite front-page articles on private equity abuses, the SEC engaged in wet noodle lashings. Its pattern was to file only one major enforcement action over a particular abuse. Even then, the SEC went to some lengths to spread the filings out among the biggest firms. That meant it was pointedly engaging in selective enforcement, punishing only "poster child" examples and letting other firms who'd engaged in precisely the same abuses get off scot free.
The very fact of this Risk Alert is an admission of failure by the SEC. It indicates that the misconduct it highlighted five years ago continues and if anything is even more pervasive than in the 2014-2015 era. It also confirms that its oft-stated premise then, that the abuses it found then had somehow been made by firms with integrity that would of course clean up their acts, and that now-better-informed investors would also be more vigilant and would crack down on misconduct, was laughably false.
In particular, the second section of the Risk Alert, on Fees and Expenses (starting on page 4) describes how fund managers are charging inflated or unwarranted fees and expenses. In any other line of work, this would be called theft. Yet all the SEC is willing to do is publish a Risk Alert, rather than impose fines as well as require disgorgements?
The SEC's Abject Failure
In the Risk Alert below, the itemization of various forms of abuses, such as the many ways private equity firms parcel out interests in the businesses they buy among various funds and insiders to their, as opposed to investors' benefit, alone should give pause. And the lengthy discussion of these conflicts does suggest the SEC has learned something over the years. Experts who dealt with the agency in its early years of examining private equity firms found the examiners allergic to considering, much the less pursuing, complex abuses.
Undermining legislative intent of new supervisory authority . The SEC never embraced its new responsibilities to ride herd on private equity and hedge funds.
The SEC has long maintained a division between the retail investors and so-called "accredited investors" who by virtue of having higher net worths and investment portfolios, are treated by the agency as able to afford to lose more money. The justification is that richer means more sophisticated. But as anyone who is a manager for a top sports professional or entertainer, that is often not the case. And as we've seen, that goes double for public pension funds.
Starting with the era of Clinton appointee Arthur Levitt, the agency has taken the view that it is in the business of defending presumed-to-be-hapless retail investors and has left "accredited investor" and most of all, institutional investors, on their own. This was a policy decision by the agency when deregulation was venerated; there was no statutory basis for this change in priorities.
Congress tasked the SEC with supervising the fund management activities of private equity funds with over $150 million in assets under management. All of their investors are accredited investors. In other words, Congress mandated the SEC to make sure these firms complied with relevant laws as well as making adequate disclosures of what they were going to do with the money entrusted to them. Saying one thing in the investor contracts and doing another is a vastly worse breach than misrepresentations in marketing materials, yet the SEC acted as if slap-on-the-wrist-level enforcement was adequate.
We made fun when thirteen prominent public pension fund trustees wrote the SEC asking for them to force greater transparency of private equity fees and costs. The agency's position effectively was "You are grownups. No one is holding a gun to your head to make these investments. If you don't like the terms, walk away." They might have done better if they could have positioned their demand as consistent with the new Dodd Frank oversight requirements.
Actively covering up for bad conduct . In 2014, the SEC started working at giving malfeasance a free pass. Specifically, the SEC told private equity firms that they could continue their abuses if they 'fessed up in their annual disclosure filings, the so-called Form ADV. The term of art is "enhanced disclosure". Since when are contracts like confession, that if you admit to a breach, all is forgiven? Only in the topsy-turvy world of SEC enforcement.
And the coddling of crookedness continued. From a January post :
The agency is operating in such a cozy manner with private equity firms that as one investor described it:
It's like FBI sitting down with the Mafia to tell them each year, "Don't cross these lines because that's what we are focusing on."
Specifically, as we indicated, the SEC was giving advanced warning of the issues it would focus on in its upcoming exams, in order to give investment managers the time to get their stories together and purge files. And rather than view its periodic exams as being designed to make sure private equity firms comply with the law and their representations, the agency views them as "cooperative" exercises! Misconduct is assumed to be the result of misunderstanding and error, and not design.
It's pretty hard to see conduct like this, from the SEC's Risk Alert, as being an accident:
Advisers charged private fund clients for expenses that were not permitted by the relevant fund operating agreements, such as adviser-related expenses like salaries of adviser personnel, compliance, regulatory filings, and office expenses, thereby causing investors to overpay expenses
The staff observed private fund advisers that did not value client assets in accordance with their valuation processes or in accordance with disclosures to clients (such as that the assets would be valued in accordance with GAAP). In some cases, the staff observed that this failure to value a private fund's holdings in accordance with the disclosed valuation process led to overcharging management fees and carried interest because such fees were based on inappropriately overvalued holdings .
Advisers failed to apply or calculate management fee offsets in accordance with disclosures and therefore caused investors to overpay management fees.
We're highlighting this skimming simply because it is easier for laypeople to understand than some of the other types of cheating the SEC described. Even so, industry insiders and investors complained that the description of the misconduct in this Risk Alert was too general to give them enough of a roadmap to look for it at particular funds.
Ignoring how investors continue to be fleeced . The SEC's list includes every abuse it sanctioned or mentioned in the 2014 to 2015 period, including undisclosed termination of monitoring fees, failure to disclose that investors were paying for "senior advisers/operating partners," fraudulent charges, overcharging for services provided by affiliated companies, plus lots of types of bad-faith conduct on fund restructurings and allocations of fees and expenses on transactions allocated across funds.
The SEC assumed institutional investors would insist on better conduct once they were informed that they'd been had. In reality, not only did private equity investors fail to demand better, they accepted new fund agreements that described the sort of objectionable behavior they'd been engaging in. Remember, the big requirement in SEC land is disclosure. So if a fund manager says he might do Bad Things and then proceeds accordingly, the investor can't complain about not having been warned.
Moreover, the SEC's very long list of bad acts says the industry is continuing to misbehave even after it has defined deviancy down via more permissive limited partnership agreements!
Why This Risk Alert Now?
Keep in mind what a Risk Alert is and isn't. The best way to conceptualize it is as a press release from the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations. It does not have any legal or regulatory force. Risk Alerts are not even considered to be SEC official views. They are strictly the product of OCIE staff.
On the first page of this Risk Alert, the OCIE blandly states that:
This Risk Alert is intended to assist private fund advisers in reviewing and enhancing their compliance programs, and also to provide investors with information concerning private fund adviser deficiencies.
Cutely, footnotes point out that not everyone examined got a deficiency letter (!!!), that the SEC has taken enforcement actions on "many" of the abuses described in the Risk Alert, yet "OCIE continues to observe some of these practices during examinations."
Several of our contacts who met in person with the SEC to discuss private equity grifting back in 2014-2015 pressed the agency to issue a Risk Alert as a way of underscoring the seriousness of the issues it was unearthing. The staffers demurred then.
In fairness, the SEC may have regarded a Risk Alert as having the potential to undermine its not-completed enforcement actions. But why not publish one afterwards, particularly since the intent then had clearly been to single out prominent examples of particular types of misconduct, rather than tackle it systematically? 2
So why is the OCIE stepping out a bit now? The most likely reason is as an effort to compensate for the lack of enforcement actions. Recall that all the OCIE can do is refer a case to the Enforcement Division; it's their call as to whether or not to take it up.
The SEC looks to have institutionalized the practice of borrowing lawyers from prominent firms. Mary Jo White of Debevoise brought Andrew Ceresney with her from Debeviose to be her head of enforcement. Both returned to Debevoise.
Current SEC chairman Jay Clayton came from Sullivan & Cromwell, bringing with him Steven Peikin as co-head of enforcement. And the Clayton SEC looks to have accomplished the impressive task of being even weaker on enforcement than Mary Jo White. Clayton made clear his focus was on "mom and pop" investors, meaning he chose to overlook much more consequential abuses by private equity firms and hedgies. The New York Times determined that the average amount of SEC fines against corporate perps fell markedly in 2018 compared to the final 20 months of the Obama Administration. The SEC since then levied $1 billion fine against the Woodbridge Group of Companies and its one-time owner for running a Ponzi scheme that fleeced over 8,400, so that would bring the average penalty up a bit. But it still confirms that Clayton is concerned about small fry, and not deeper but just as pickable pockets.
David Sirota argues that the OCIE was out to embarrass Clayton and sabotage what Sirota depicted as an SEC initiative to let retail investors invest in private equity. Sirota appears to have missed that that horse has left the barn and is in the next county, and the SEC had squat to do with it.
The overwhelming majority of retail funds is not in discretionary accounts but in retirement accounts, overwhelmingly 401(k)s. And it is the Department of Labor, which regulates ERISA plans, and not the SEC, that decides what those go and no go zones are. The DoL has already green-lighted allowing large swathes of 401(k) funds to include private equity holdings. From a post earlier this month :
Until now, regulations have kept private equity out of the retail market by prohibiting managers from accepting capital from individuals who lack significant net worth.
Private equity firms have succeeded in storming that barricade. The Department of Labor published a June 3 information letter that allows private equity funds, or more accurately funds of funds, to be included in certain 401(k) plan offerings, namely, target date funds and balanced funds. This is significant because despite the SEC regularly calling out bad practices with target date funds, they are the strategy used to manage the majority of 401(k) assets .
Moreover, even though Sirota pointed out that Clayton had spoken out in favor of allowing retail investors more access to private equity investments, the proposed regulation on the definition of accredited investors in fact not only does not lower income or net worth requirements (save for allowing spouses to combine their holdings) it in fact solicited comments on the idea of raising the limits. From a K&L Gates write up :
Previously, the Concept Release requested comment on whether the SEC should revise the current individual income ($200,000) and net worth ($1,000,000) thresholds. In the Proposing Release, the SEC further considered these thresholds, noting that the figures have not been adjusted since 1982. The SEC concluded that it does not believe modifications to the thresholds are necessary at this time, but it has requested comments on whether the final should instead make a one-time increase to the thresholds in the account for inflation, or whether the final rule should reflect a figure that is indexed to inflation on a going-forward basis.
It is not clear how many people would be picked up by the proposed change, which was being fleshed out, that of letting some presumed sophisticated but not rich individuals, like junior hedge fund professionals and holders of securities licenses, be treated as accredited investors. In other words, despite Clayton's talk about wanting ordinary investors to have more access to private equity funds, the agency's proposed rule change falls short of that.
Moreover, if the OCIE staff had wanted to undermine even the limited liberalization of the definition of accredited investor so as to stymie more private equity investment, the time to do so would have been immediately before or while the comments period was open. It ended March 16 .
The New York Times reported that Senate Republicans deemed Clayton's odds of confirmation as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York as remote even before the Trump fired Geoffrey Berman to clear a path for Clayton. So the idea that a technical release by the OCIE would derail Clayton's confirmation is a stretch.
So again, why now? One possibility is that the timing is purely a coincidence. For instance, the SEC staffers might have been waiting until Covid-19 news overload died down a bit so their work might get a hearing (and Covid-19 remote work complications may also have delayed its release).
The second possibility is that OCIE is indeed very frustrated with the enforcement chief Peikin's inaction on private equity. The fact that Peikin's boss and protector Clayton has made himself a lame duck meant a salvo against Peikin was now a much lower risk. If any readers have better insight into the internal workings of the SEC these days, please pipe up.
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1 Formally, as you can see, this Risk Alert addresses both private equity and hedge fund misconduct, but on reading the details, the citing of both types of funds reflects the degree to which hedge funds have been engaging in the buying and selling of stakes in private companies. For instance, Chatham Asset Management, which has become notorious through its ownership of American Media, which in turn owns the National Enquirer, calls itself a hedge fund. Moreover, when the SEC started examining both private equity and hedge funds under new authority granted by Dodd Frank, it described the sort of misconduct described in this Risk Alert as coming out of exams of private equity firms, and its limited round of enforcement actions then were against brand name private equity firms like KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, and TPG. Thus for convenience as well as historical reasons, we refer only to private equity firms as perps.
2 Media stories at the time, including some of our posts, provided substantial evidence that particular abuses, such as undisclosed termination of monitoring fees and failure to disclose that "senior advisers" presented as general partner "team members" were in fact consultants being separately billed to fund investments, were common practices. Yet the SEC chose to lodge only marquee enforcement actions against one prominent firm for each abuse, as if token enforcement would serve as an adequate deterrent. The message was the reverse, that the overwhelming majority of the abuses were able to keep their ill-gotten gains and not even face public embarrassment.
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skippy , June 26, 2020 at 4:27 am
Peter Sellers I'll say now – ????
vlade , June 26, 2020 at 4:35 am
TBH, in the view of Calpers ignoring its advisors, I do have a little understanding of the SEC's point "you're grown ups" (the worse problem is that the advisors who leach themselves to the various accredited investors are often not worth the money.
On the same side though, fraud is a criminal offence, and it's SEC's duty to prosecute. And I believe that a lot of what PE engage in would happily fall under fraud, if SEC really wanted.
Susan the other , June 26, 2020 at 11:43 am
Yes, the SEC conveniently claims a conflicted authority – 1. to regulate compliance but without an "enforcement authority", and 2. report egregious behavior to their "enforcement authority". So the SEC is less than a permissive nanny. Sort of like "access" to enforcement authority. Sounds like health care to me.
Yves Smith Post author , June 26, 2020 at 4:06 pm
No, this is false. The SEC has an examination division and an enforcement division. The SEC can and does take enforcement actions that result in fines and disgorgements, see the $1 billion fine mentioned in the post. So the exam division can recommend enforcement to the enforcement division. That does not mean it will get done. Some enforcement actions originate from within the enforcement division, like insider trading cases, and the SEC long has had a tendency to prioritize insider trading cases.
The SEC cannot prosecute. It has to refer cases that it thinks are criminal to the DoJ and try to get them to saddle up.
Maritimer , June 26, 2020 at 5:04 am
Crimogenic: Producing or tending to produce crime or criminality. An additional factor is that, in the main, the criminals do not take their money and leave the gaming tables but pour it back in and the crime metastasizes.
AKA, Kleptocracy.Thus in 2008 and thereafter the criminal damage required 2-3 trillion, now 7-10 trillion.
Any economic expert who does not recognize crime as the number one problem in the criminogenic US economy I disregard. Why read all that analysis when, at the end of the run, it all just boils down to bailing out the criminals and trying to reset the criminogenic system?
(Can I get my economics degree now?)
Adam Eran , June 26, 2020 at 1:33 pm
You might add that the threat of consequences for these crimes makes the criminals extremely motivated to elect officials who will not prosecute them (e.g. Obama). They're not running for office, they're avoiding incarceration.
The Rev Kev , June 26, 2020 at 5:17 am
The SEC has been captured for years now. It was not that long ago that SEC Examination chief Andrew Bowden made a grovelling speech to these players and even asked them to give his son a job which was so wrong-
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/regulatory-capture-captured-on-video-190033/
But there is no point in reforming the SEC as it was the politicians, at the beck and call of these players, that de-fanged the SEC – and it was a bipartisan effort! So it becomes a chicken-or-the-egg problem in the matter of reform. Who do you reform first?
Can't leave this comment without mentioning something about a private equity company. One of the two major internal airlines in Oz went broke due to the virus and a private equity buyer has been found to buy it. A union rep said that they will be good for jobs and that they are a good company. Their name? Bain Capital!
Yves Smith Post author , June 26, 2020 at 5:44 am
We broke the story about Andrew Bowden! Give credit where credit is due!!!! Even though Taibbi points to us in his first line, linking to Rolling Stone says to those who don't bother clicking through that it was their story.
Plus we transcribed his fawning remarks.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/03/secs-andrew-bowden-regulator-sale.html
And he resigned three weeks later.
The Rev Kev , June 26, 2020 at 5:56 am
Of course I remember that story. I was going to mention it but thought to let people see it in virtually the opening line of that story where he gives you credit. More of a jolt of recognition seeing it rather than being told about it first.
Jesper , June 26, 2020 at 6:36 am
Of the three branches of government which ones are not captured by big business? If two out of three were to captured then does it matter what the third does?
Is the executive working for the common good or for the interests of big business?
Is the legislature working for the common good or for the interests of big business?
Is the judiciary working for the common good or for the interests of big business?In my opinion too much power has been centralised, too much of the productivity gains of the past 40 years have been monetised and therefore made possible to hoard and centralise.
SEC should (in my opinion) try to enforce more but without more support then I do not believe (it is my opinion, nothing more and nothing less) that they can accomplish much.
Susan the other , June 26, 2020 at 11:57 am
The SEC is a mysterious agency which (?) must fall under the jurisdiction of the Treasury because it is a monetary regulatory agency in the business of regulating securities and exchanges. But it has no authority to do much of anything. The Treasury itself falls under the executive administration but as we have recently seen, Mnuchin himself managed to get a nice skim for his banking pals from the money Congress legislated. That's because Congress doesn't know how to effectuate a damn thing – they legislate stuff that morphs before our very eyes and goes to the grifters without a hitch. So why don't we demand that consumer protection be made into hard law with no wiggle room; that since investing is complex in this world of embedded funds and glossy prospectuses, we the consumer should not have to wade through all the nonsense to make decisions – that everything be on the table. And if PE can't manage to do that and still steal its billions then PE should be declared to be flat-out illegal.
Yves Smith Post author , June 26, 2020 at 4:08 pm
Please stop spreading disinformation. This is the second time on this post.
The SEC has nada to do with the Treasury. It is an independent regulatory agency.
It however is the only financial regulator that does not keep what it kills (its own fees and fines) but is instead subject to Congressional appropriations. Andrew Levitt, for instance, complained bitterly that Joe Lieberman would regularly threaten to cut the SEC's budget for allegedly being too aggressive about enforcement. Lieberman was the Senator from Hedgistan.
Edward , June 26, 2020 at 7:16 am
More banana republic level grift. What happens when investors figure out they can't believe anything they are told?
RJMc, MD , June 26, 2020 at 8:43 am
It should be noted that out here in the countryside of northern Michigan that embezzlement (a winter sport here while the men are out ice fishing), theft and fraud are still considered punishable felonies. Perhaps that is simply a quaint holdover from a bygone time. Dudley set the tone for the C of C with his Green Book on bank deregulation. One of the subsequent heads of C of C was reported as seeing his position as "being the spiritual resource for banks". If bank regulation is treated in a farcical fashion why should be the SEC be any different?
Susan the other , June 26, 2020 at 12:08 pm
I was shocked to just now learn that ERISA/the Dept of Labor is in regulatory control of allowing pension funds to buy PE fund of funds and "balanced PE funds". What VERBIAGE. Are "PE Fund of Balanced Funds" an actual category? And what distinguishes them from good old straightforward Index Funds? And also too – what is happening before our very glazed-over eyes is that PE is high grading not just the stock market but the US Treasury itself. Ordinary investors should be buying US Treasuries directly and retirement funds should too. It will be a big bite but if it knocks PE out of business it would be worth it. PE is in the business of cooking its books, ravaging struggling corporations, and boldly privatizing the goddamned Treasury. WTF?
Kouros , June 26, 2020 at 12:27 pm
I want to bring this to Yves' attention: the recent SCOTUS decision on Thole v. U.S. Bank that opens the doors wide for corporate America to steal with impunity from the pension plans: https://www.unz.com/estriker/corrupt-supreme-court-gives-green-light-to-corporations-to-steal-from-pensioners/
Glen , June 26, 2020 at 12:51 pm
Can we come up with a better descriptor for "private equity"?
I suggest "billionaire looters".
Olivier , June 26, 2020 at 2:00 pm
What about the wanton destruction of the purchased companies? If this solely about the harm done to the poor investors? If so, that is seriously wrong.
flora , June 26, 2020 at 3:27 pm
If, you know, the neoliberal "because markets" is the ruling paradigm then of course there is no harm done. The questions then become: is "because markets" a sensible paradigm? What is it a sensible paradigm of? Is "because markets" even sensible for the long term?
flora , June 26, 2020 at 3:19 pm
an aside: farewell, Olympus camera. A sad day. Farewell, OM-1 and OM-2. Film photography is really not replicated by digital photography but the larger market has gone to digital. Speed and cost vs quality. Because markets. Now the vulture swoop.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/26/olympus_closes_cameras/
Stan Sexton , June 26, 2020 at 8:17 pm
Where is the SEC when Bain Capital (Romney) wipes out Toys-R-Us and Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Blum wipes out Payless Shoes. They gain control of the companies, pile on massive debt and take the proceeds of the loan, and they know the company cannot service the loan and a BK is around the corner. Thousands lose their jobs. And this is legal? And we also lost Glass-Steagal and legalized stock buy-backs.The Elite are screwing the people. It's Socialism for the Rich, the Politicians and Govt Employees and Feudalism for the rest of us.
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Jun 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Pompeo is suggesting that Iran will spend tens of millions on planes, fly them unopposed through the radar coverage of several countries, to let Iranian Kamikaze pilots crash them into some temple in Nepal.
This does not make any sense. No foreign politician will be impressed by this 'argument'. Pompeo's tweet is for consumption at home.
At the UN the U.S. is trying to get a new arms embargo resolution against Iran:
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump introduced a long-awaited U.N. Security Council (UNSC) draft resolution extending an arms embargo on Iran that is due to expire in October, setting the stage for a great-power clash and likely veto in the U.N.'s principal security body, according to a copy of the draft obtained by Foreign Policy .
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If passed, the resolution would fall under Chapter VII of the U.N. charter, making it legally binding and enforceable. But the U.S. measure, according to several U.N. Security Council diplomats, stands little chance of being adopted by the 15-nation council.
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Some council diplomats and other nonproliferation experts see the U.S. move as a way to score political points at home , not to do anything about Iran's destabilizing activities in the region."The skeptic in me says that the objective of this exercise is to go through the arms embargo resolution, and when it fails, to use that as an excuse to get a snapback of the embargo, and if and when that fails too, to use as a political talking point in the election campaign ," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department nonproliferation official now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Since China and Russia are almost certain to ignore any U.N. arms embargo forced by U.S. maneuvers, the practical impact on Iran's ability to cause mischief will be minimal, he said.
"It's not actually about stopping any arms from China and Russia, it's about winning a political argument ," he said.
We explained that the U.S. does not have a 'snapback' option . Russia and China have also clarified that :
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the Chinese government's top diplomat, Wang Yi, both wrote to the 15-member council and U.N. chief Antonio Guterres as the United States threatens to spark a so-called sanctions snapback under the Iran nuclear deal, even though Washington quit the accord in 2018.Lavrov wrote in the May 27 letter, made public this week, that the United States was being "ridiculous and irresponsible."
"This is absolutely unacceptable and serves only to recall the famous English proverb about having one's cake and eating it," Lavrov wrote.
Washington has threatened to trigger a return of U.N. sanctions on Iran if the Security Council does not extend an arms embargo due to expire in October under Tehran's deal with world powers to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.
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Lavrov cited a 1971 International Court of Justice opinion, which found that a fundamental principle governing international relationships was that "a party which disowns or does not fulfill its own obligations cannot be recognized as retaining the rights which it claims to derive from the relationship."Despite the evident failure to convince others the U.S. continues make stupid arguments :
Russia and China will be isolated at the United Nations if they continue down the "road to dystopia" by blocking a U.S. bid to extend a weapons ban on Iran, U.S. Iran envoy Brian Hook told Reuters ahead of his formal pitch of the embargo to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday.
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"We see a widening gap between Russia and China and the international community," Hook said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday evening.The U.S. has left the JCPoA deal and can not claim a right under that deal to snap back the sanctions that the deal has lifted. It is the U.S. that is isolated. Even its allies do not support the attempt:
"We firmly believe that any unilateral attempt to trigger UN sanctions snapback would have serious adverse consequences in the UNSC," the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Germany said in a statement on June 19. "We would not support such a decision which would be incompatible with our current efforts to preserve the JCPoA."The Trump policy against Iran has failed. He has tried a 'maximum pressure' campaign to blackmail Iran into more concessions. But despite sanctions and economic problems caused by them Iran is not willing to talk with him. Its conditions for talks are clear :
"We have no problem with talks with the U.S., but only if Washington fulfils its obligations under the nuclear deal, apologies and compensates Tehran for its withdrawal from the 2015 deal," Rouhani said in a televised speech.The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including the new sanctions against Syria under the 'Ceasar's Law', have been helping Iran to strengthen its position :
Iran is reaping huge benefits, including more robust allies and resistant strongholds as a result of the US's flawed Middle Eastern policies. Motivated by the threat of the implementation of "Caesar' Law", Iran has prepared a series of steps to sell its oil and finance its allies, bypassing depletion of its foreign currency reserves.Iranian companies found in Syria a paradise for strategic investment and offered the needed alternative to a Syrian economy crippled by sanctions and nine years of war. Iran considers Syria a fertile ground to expand its commerce and business like never before.
With Iran's influence growing and Russia making inroads even with once staunch U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia it seems that real U.S. influence in the Middle East is on a decisive downturn.
Whatever Pompous Pompeo says or tweets will not change that. But there's a sucker born every minute. Some of those may still fall for the stuff he says.
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Twice a year I ask readers of this blog to support my effort. Please consider contributing .Posted by b on June 24, 2020 at 17:10 UTC | Permalink
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Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com
"This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious, and highly organized political movement It is deep and profound and has vast political ambitions. It is insidious, it will grow. It's goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge western civilization itself. This is an ideological movement Even now, many of us pretend this is about police brutality. We think we can fix it by regulating chokeholds or spending more on de-escalation training. We're too literal and good-hearted to understand what's happening. But we have no idea what we are up against. ..These are not protests. This is a totalitarian political movement and someone needs to save the country from it." Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson is right, the protests and riots are not a momentary civil disturbance. They are an attack the Constitutional Republic itself, the heart and soul of American democracy. The Black Lives Matter protests are just the tip of the spear, they are an expression of public outrage that is guaranteed under the first amendment. But don't be deceived, there's more here than meets the eye. BLM is funded by foundations that seek to overthrow our present form of government and install an authoritarian regime guided by technocrats, oligarchs and corporatists all of who believe that Chinese-type despotism is far-more compatible with capitalism than "inefficient" democracy. The chaos in the streets is merely the beginning of an excruciating transition from one system to another. This is an excerpt from an article by F. William Engdahl at Global Research:
"By 2016, Black Lives Matter had established itself as a well-organized network .. That year the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF), "a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition" in which BLM was a central part. By then Soros foundations had already given some $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement .. ..
The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations." ( "America's Own Color Revolution ", Global Research)
$100 million is alot of money. How has that funding helped BLM expand its presence in politics and social media? How many activists and paid employees operate within the network disseminating information, building new chapters, hosting community outreach programs, and fine-tuning an emergency notification system that allows them to put tens of thousands of activists on the streets in cities across the country at a moment's notice? Isn't that what we've seen for the last three weeks, throngs of angry protestors swarming in more than 400 cities across America all at the beck-and-call of a shadowy group whose political intentions are still not clear?
And what about the rioting, looting and arson that broke out in numerous cities following the protests? Was that part of the script too? Why haven't BLM leaders condemned the destruction of private property or offered a public apology for the downtown areas that have been turned into wastelands? In my own hometown of Seattle, the downtown corridor– which once featured Nordstrom, Pottery Barn and other upscale retail shops– is now a checkerboard of broken glass, plywood covers and empty streets all covered in a thick layer of garish spray-paint. The protest leaders said they wanted to draw attention to racial injustice and police brutality. Okay, but how does looting Nordstrom help to achieve that goal?
And what role have the Democrats played in protest movement?
They've been overwhelmingly supportive, that's for sure. In fact, I can't think of even one Democrat who's mentioned the violence, the looting or the toppling of statues. Why is that?
It's because the Democrats think that kowtowing to BLM will give them the winning edge in the November balloting. That's what it's all about. That's why they draped themselves in Kente cloth and knelt for the cameras. They think their black constituents are too stupid to see through their groveling fakery. They think that blacks will forget that Joe Biden pushed through legislation "which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior."
According to the Black Agenda Repor t: "Biden and (South Carolina's Strom) Thurmond joined hands to push 1986 and 1988 drug enforcement legislation that created the nefarious sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine as well as other draconian measures that implicate him as one of the initiators of what became mass incarceration. " Biden also spearheaded "the attacks on Anita Hill when she came forward to testify against the supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas". All told, Biden's record on race is much worse than Trump's despite the media's pathetic attempts to portray Trump as Adolph Hitler. It's just more bunkum from the dissembling media.
Bottom line: The Democrats think they can ride racial division and social unrest all the way to the White House. That's what they are betting on.
So, yes, the Dems are exploiting the protests for political advantage, but it goes much deeper than that. After all, we know from evidence that was uncovered during the Russiagate investigation, that DNC leaders are intimately linked to the Intel agencies, law enforcement (FBI), and the elite media. So it's not too much of a stretch to assume that these deep state agents and assets work together to shape the narrative that they think gives them the best chance of regaining power. Because, that's what this is really all about, power. Just as Russiagate was about power (removing the president using disinformation, spies, surveillance and other skulduggery.), and just as the Covid-19 fiasco was essentially about power (collapsing the economy while imposing medical martial law on the population.), so too, the BLM protest movement is also about power, the power to inflict massive damage on the country's main urban centers with the intention of destabilizing the government, restructuring the economy and paving the way for a Democratic victory in November. It's all about power, real, unalloyed political muscle.
Surprisingly, one of the best critiques of what is currently transpiring was written by Niles Niemuth at the World Socialist Web Site. Here's what he said about the widespread toppling of statues:
"The attacks on the monuments were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it.
It is worth noting that the one institution seemingly immune from this purge is the Democratic Party, which served as the political wing of the Confederacy and, subsequently, the KKK.
This filthy historical legacy is matched only by the Democratic Party's contemporary record in supporting wars that, as a matter of fact, primarily targeted nonwhites. Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and under Obama destroyed Libya and Syria. The New York Times was a leading champion and propagandist for all of these war." ( "Hands off the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant!, WSWS)
What the author is referring to is The 1619 Project, which is a racialized version of American history that was published by the Times on August 19, 2019. The deliberately-distorted version of history was cobbled together in anticipation of increasing social unrest and racial antagonism. The rioting, looting and vast destruction of America's urban core can all be traced back to a document that postulates that the country was founded on racial hatred and exploitation. In other words, The 1619 Project provides the perfect ideological justification for the chaos and violence that has torn the country apart for the last three weeks. This is an excerpt from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:
"The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred -- specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of "black people" by "white people." Hannah-Jones writes in the series' introduction: "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. "
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development . Hannah-Jones's reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes .where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American "white people." Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions .
. No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments." ("The New York Times's 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history", World Socialist Web Site)
Keep in mind, this essay in the WSWS was written a full year before BLM protests broke out across the country. Was Hannah-Jones enlisted to create a document that would provide the dry tinder for the massive and coordinated demonstrations that have left the country stunned and divided?
Probably, after all, (as noted above) the author's theory is that one race is genetically programed to exploit the other. ( "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. ") Well, if we assume that whites are genetically and irreversibly "racist", then we must also assume that the country that these whites founded is racist and evil. Thus, the only logical remedy for this situation, is to crush the white segment of the population, destroy their symbols, icons, and history, and replace the system of government with one that better reflects the values of the emerging non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.
The 1619 Project is a calculated provocation meant to exacerbate racial animosities and pave the way to open conflagration. And it has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. The nation is split into warring camps while Washington has devolved into fratricidal warfare. Was that the objective, to destabilize the country in preparation for the dissolution of the current system followed by a fundamental restructuring of the government consistent with the identity politics lauded by the Democrats?
The Democrats, the Intel agencies and the media are all in bed together fomenting unrest with the intention of decimating the economy, crushing the emerging opposition and imposing their despotic one-party system on all of us. Here's a clip from a piece by Paul Craig Roberts that sums up the role of the New York Times in inciting race-based violence:
"The New York Times editorial board covers up the known indisputable truth with their anti-white "1619 project," an indoctrination program to inculcate hatred of white people in blacks and guilt in white people.
Why does the New York Times lie, brainwash blacks into hatred of whites, and attempt to brainwash whites into guilt for the creation of a New World labor force four centuries ago? Why do Americans tolerate the New York Times fomenting of racial hatred in a multicultural society?
The New York Times is a vile organization. The New York Times attempts to discredit the President of the United States and did all it could to frame him on false charges. The New York Times painted General Flynn, who honorably served the US, as a Russian agent and enabled General Flynn's frame-up on false and now dropped charges. The New York Times spews hatred of white people. And now the New York Times accuses the American military of celebrating white supremacism.
Does America have a worse enemy than the New York Times? The New York Times is clearly and intentionally making a multicultural America impossible . By threatening white people with the prospect of hate-driven racial violence, the New York Times editorial board is fomenting the rise of white supremacy." ( "The New York Times Editorial Board Is a Threat to Multicultural America ", The Unz Review)
The editors of the Times don't hate whites, they are merely attacking the growing number of disillusioned white working people who have left the Democratic party in frustration due to their globalist policies regarding trade, immigration, offshoring, outsourcing and the relentless hollowing out of the nation's industrial core . The Dems have abandoned these people altogether and –now that they realize they will never be able to lure them back into their camp– they've decided to wage a full-blown, scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war on them. They've decided to crush them mercilessly and fill their ranks with multi-ethnic, bi-racial groups that will work for pennies on the dollar. (which will keep the Dems corporate supporters happy.) So, no, the Times does not hate white people. What they hate is the growing populist movement that derailed Hillary Clinton and put anti-globalist Trump in the White House. That's the real target of this operation, the disillusioned throng of working people who have washed their hands of the Democrats for good. Here's more background from Paul Craig Roberts:
"On August 12 Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, met with the Times' employees to refocus the Times' attack on Trump . The Times, Baquet said, is shifting from Trump-Russia to Trump's racism. The Times will spend the run-up to the 2020 presidential election building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative. Of course, if Trump is a racist it means that the people who elected him are also racists. Indeed, in Baquet's view, Americans have always been racist. To establish this narrative, the New York Times has launched the "1619 Project," the purpose of which is "to reframe the country's history."
According to the Washington Examiner, "The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America -- 'Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.'
The premise that America originated as a racist slave state is to be woven into all sections of the Times -- news, business, sports, travel, the entire newspaper. The project intends to take the "reframing" of the United States into the schools where white Americans are to be taught that they are racist descendants of slave holders. A participant in this brainwashing of whites, which will make whites guilty and defenseless, says "this project takes wing when young people are able to read this and understand the way that slavery has shaped their country's history." In other words, the New York Times intends to make slavery the ONLY explanation of America.
At the meeting of the executive editor of the New York Times with the Times' employees to refocus the Times' attack on President Trump, Baquet said: "Race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story." ( "Is White Genocide Possible? ", The Unz Review)
Repeat: "Race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story." Either Baquet has a crystal ball or he had a pretty good idea of the way in which the 1619 Project was going to be used . I suspect it was the latter.
For the last 3 and a half years, Democrats and the media have ridiculed anyone who opposes their globalist policies as racist, fascist, misogynist, homophobic, Bible-thumping, gun-toting, flag-waving, Nascar boosting, white nationalist "deplorables". Now they have decided to intensify the assault on mainly white working people by preemptively destroying the economy, destabilizing the country, and spreading terror far and wide. It's another vicious psy-ops campaign designed to thoroughly demoralize and humiliate the enemy who just happen to be the American people. Here's more form the WSWS:
" It is no coincidence that the promotion of this racial narrative of American history by the Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-middle-class layers it represents, comes amid the growth of class struggle in the US and around the world.
The 1619 Project is one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. The Democrats think it will be beneficial to shift their focus for the time being from the reactionary, militarist anti-Russia campaign to equally reactionary racial politics." (" The New York Times's 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history " WSWS)
Can you see how the protests are being used to promote the political objectives of elites operating behind the mask of "impartial" reporting? The scheming NY Times has replaced the enlightenment principles articulated in our founding documents with a sordid tale of racial hatred and oppression. The editors seek to eliminate everything we believe as Americans so they can brainwash us into believing that we are evil people deserving of humiliation, repudiation and punishment. Here's more from the same article:
"In the months preceding these events, the New York Times, speaking for dominant sections of the Democratic political establishment, launched an effort to discredit both the American Revolution and the Civil War. In the New York Times' 1619 Project, the American Revolution was presented as a war to defend slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was cast as a garden variety racist
The attacks on the monuments to these men were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle . This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it." (" The New York Times's 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history" , WSWS)
Ideas have consequences, and the incendiary version of events disseminated by the Times has added fuel to a fire that's spread from one coast to the other. Given the damage that has been done to cities across the country, it would be nice to know how Dean Baquet knew that "race was going to play a huge part" in upcoming events? It's all very suspicious. Here's more:
" Given the 1619 Project's black nationalist narrative, it may appear surprising that nowhere in the issue do the names Malcolm X or Black Panthers appear. Unlike the black nationalists of the 1960s, Hannah-Jones does not condemn American imperialism. She boasts that "we [i.e. African-Americans] are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military," and celebrates the fact that "we" have fought "in every war this nation has waged." Hannah-Jones does not note this fact in a manner that is at all critical. She does not condemn the creation of a "volunteer" army whose recruiters prey on poverty-stricken minority youth. There is no indication that Hannah-Jones opposes the "War on Terror" and the brutal interventions in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria -- all supported by the Times -- that have killed and made homeless upwards of 20 million people. On this issue, Hannah-Jones is remarkably "color-blind." She is unaware of, or simply indifferent to, the millions of "people of color" butchered and made refugees by the American war machine in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa." (" The New York Times's 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world histor y", WSWS)
So, black nationalists like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers are excluded from the The 1619 Project's narrative, but the author boasts that blacks "are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the US military"?? How does that happen unless Hannah-Jones was coached by Democrat leaders about who should and shouldn't be included in the text? None of this passes the smell test. It all suggests that the storyline was shaped by people who had a specific goal in mind. That isn't history, it's fiction written by people who have an ax to grind. The Times even admitted as much in response to the blistering criticism by five of "the most widely read and respected authorities on US history." The New York Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein rejected the historians' objections saying:
"The project was intended to address the marginalization of African-American history in the telling of our national story and examine the legacy of slavery in contemporary American life. We are not ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is?"
WTF! "We are not ourselves historians"? That's the excuse?? Give me a break!
The truth is that there was never any attempt to provide an accurate account of events. From the very onset, the goal was to create a storyline that fit the politics, the politics of provocation, incitement, racial hatred, social unrest and violence. That's what the Times and their allies wanted, and that's what they got.
The Deep State Axis: CIA, DNC, NYT
The three-way alliance between the CIA, the Elite Media, and the Democratic leadership has clearly strengthened and grown since the failed Russiagate fiasco. All three parties were likely involved in the maniacal hyping of the faux-Covid pandemic which paved the way for Depression era unemployment, tens of thousands of bankrupt businesses and a sizable portion of the US population thrust into destitution. Now, these deep state loyalists are promoting a "falsified" race-based version of history that pits one group against the other while diverting attention from the deliberate destruction of the economy and the further consolidation of wealth in the hands of the 1 percent.
Behind the veil of the protest movement, the war on the American people is gaining pace.
SteveK9 , says: Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:02 am GMT
Stopped reading the Times after the buildup to the Iraq War, when it was clear they were lying. Everyone please stop reading the Times, and in particular stop referring to what they are writing. Act like they don't exist. If enough do, they won't.FB , says: Website Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 4:22 am GMTStopped reading when I got to 'Chinese despotism'Carlton Meyer , says: Website Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 4:22 am GMTWhitney used to have something to say, but his scribblings now go straight to the bottom of the bird cage
The stupidity of the Dems was shown this week when they agreed to three Biden/Trump debates. They should leave him in his basement and hope for the best. They feature political ads where Biden slurs his speech! These are professionals, so it tells me they spent all day and did 40 takes and this was the best he could do. The election will be great comedy, or perhapsvot tak , says: Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 4:30 am GMTThis is all planned. Biden will be forced to drop out and Bloomberg or even Clinton will arise.
"Tucker Carlson is right, the protests and riots are not a momentary civil disturbance. They are an attack the Constitutional Republic itself, the heart and soul of American democracy."schnellandine , says: Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 4:42 am GMTI am reminded of david horowitz and chrissy hitchens
And how they promoted Israeli interests after first pretending to be independent thinkers to gain creed for the switch. Standard zionazi-gay psywar tactic.
@Carlton MeyerThe stupidity of the Dems was shown this week when they agreed to three Biden/Trump debates.
This is all planned. Biden will be forced to drop out and Bloomberg or even Clinton will arise.
Stupid and planned?
Clinton is the best evidence that certain people agree to be blackmailed in exchange for power, as Andrew Anglin wrote this week. Why should DNC care if Trump is 're-elected'? And if they don't care, who not take a stab at installing an intersectional DNC pinnacle fraudster via the griftiest, most insulting, infuriating way possible? They can't lose.
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Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com
Likbez, June 24, 2020 at 4:02 am GMT
Only a complete and utter incompetent (or a rabid Ukrainian nationalist) can call Ukraine an independent state. It is de-facto a colony of the West. A debt slave.
I applaud the US response of supporting Ukraine's aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country and that it continues to support Ukraine's territorial interests over those of Russia's.
This was not about supporting Ukrainian aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country. It is about kicking out Russia from Ukrainian markets and plundering Ukraine all by themselves. Mainly by Germany and the USA -- to major players of Euromaydan color revolution. For Germans this is return to "Drang nach Osten" on a new level, on the level of neoliberal neocolonialism.
They used Western nationalists as their fifth column, but Western Ukrainian suffered from the results no less then people in Eastern Ukraine. Many now try to move to Kiev, Kiev region and further East in order to escape poverty and unemployment. Seasonal labor to Russia (mainly builders) diminished rapidly. Train communication now is blocked, and for Western Ukraine only Poland now represents a chance to earn money for the family to survive the winter.
For the USA this is first of all about selling Ukraine expensive weaponry, wasting precious Ukrainian resources on permanent hostility with Russia (with Donbas conflict as a real win to further the USA geopolitical ambitions -- in line with the "Full spectrum dominance" doctrine) , cornering Ukrainian energy market (uranium supplies for power stations, etc.), destruction, or buy-out of a few competing industries other than extracting industries and maquiladoras, getting better conditions for the EU exports and multinationals operating in Ukraine (and initially with plans for re-export products to Russia tax free) and increasing the country debt to "debt slave" level.
In other words this is a powerful kick in a chin by Obama to Putin. Not a knockdown, but very close.
For Ukraine first of all that means rapid accumulation of a huge external debt -- conditions of economic slavery, out of which there is no escape. Ukrainian people paid a very dear price for their Euromaydan illusions. They became mass slave labor in Poland. Prostitutes in Germany. Seasonal picker of fruits in some other EU countries (GB, France). A new European blacks, so to speak.
The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with fleecing of Libya. The currency dropped 300%, and 80% Ukrainians now live in abysmal poverty, while neoliberal oligarchs allied with the West continue to plunder the country. Gold reserves were moved to the USA.
If I had to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are still colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.
Alfred , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 7:45 am GMT
@likbez If I had to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are still colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.I agree with 90% of what you wrote, but I would like to correct the above.
Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades – gas and oil. In a similar fashion, Russia is doing this with Belarus until the present time. Russia is the only possible consumer of what Ukraine used to manufacture – a market that has disappeared. Gas turbines used to be made in Ukraine. Now, this has moved to Russia. Of course, the skilled Ukrainians went to Russia with their know-how.
To the best of my knowledge the USSR was the only empire that actually subsidized its colonies – Poland, East Germany, Ukraine etc. Russia is far better off without them.
Ukrainian supermarkets are overflowing with French/German/Italian products. European supermarkets are devoid of Ukrainian products.
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Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com
Robjil , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:21 pm GMT
@Druid55 That is the western MSM sugared up version of what happened in Yugoslavia. Western MSM learned their lesson about being truthful about war when US and friends were in Vietnam.Lies and lies only come from western MSM these days so wars and regime change games can go on with anyone noticing or caring.
Western MSM notifies their puppet readers that all the US and friends does is "humanitarian" stuff these days. Most puppet readers lap up this junk.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/natos-rape-of-yugoslavia/5375189
March 24, 1999 will go down in history as a day of infamy. US-led NATO raped Yugoslavia. Doing so was its second major combat operation.
It was lawless aggression. No Security Council resolution authorized it. NATO's Operation Allied Force lasted 78 days.
Washington called it Operation Noble Anvil. Evil best describes it. On June 10, operations ended.
From March 1991 through mid-June 1999, Balkan wars raged. Yugoslavia "balkanized" into seven countries. They include Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.
Enormous human suffering was inflicted. Washington bears most responsibility.
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Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com
onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:21 pm GMT
"So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. "Agent76 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:22 pm GMTThis "just" in: "War is the health of the state" Randolph Bourne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Bourne
Apr 27, 2017 This Is Already Putting an End to the Age of Globalization and Bankrupting the United States (2004)For a major power, prosecution of any war that is not a defense of the homeland usually requires overseas military bases for strategic reasons. After the war is over, it is tempting for the victor to retain such bases and easy to find reasons to do so. February 26, 2015 The Neoconservative Threat To World Order
Scholars from Russia and from around the world, Russian government officials, and the Russian people seek an answer as to why Washington destroyed during the past year the friendly relations between America and Russia that President Reagan and President Gorbachev succeeded in establishing.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/02/26/neoconservative-threat-world-order-paul-craig-roberts/
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Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com
likbez , says: Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 4:02 am GMT
@Mr. Hack Only a complete and utter incompetent (or a rabid Ukrainian nationalist) can call Ukraine an independent state. It is de-facto a colony of the West. A debt slave.I applaud the US response of supporting Ukraine's aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country and that it continues to support Ukraine's territorial interests over those of Russia's.
This was not about supporting Ukrainian aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country. It is about kicking out Russia from Ukrainian markets and plundering Ukraine all by themselves. Mainly by Germany and the USA -- to major players of Euromaydan color revolution. For Germans this is return to "Drang nach Osten" on a new level, on the level of neoliberal neocolonialism.
They used Western nationalists as their fifth column, but Western Ukrainian suffered from the results no less then people in Eastern Ukraine. Many now try to move to Kiev, Kiev region and further East in order to escape poverty and unemployment. Seasonal labor to Russia (mainly builders) diminished rapidly. Train communication now is blocked, and for Western Ukraine only Poland now represents a chance to earn money for the family to survive the winter.
For the USA this is first of all about selling Ukraine expensive weaponry, wasting precious Ukrainian resources on permanent hostility with Russia (with Donbas conflict as a real win to further the USA geopolitical ambitions -- in line with the "Full spectrum dominance" doctrine) , cornering Ukrainian energy market (uranium supplies for power stations, etc.), destruction, or buy-out of a few competing industries other than extracting industries and maquiladoras, getting better conditions for the EU exports and multinationals operating in Ukraine (and initially with plans for re-export products to Russia tax free) and increasing the country debt to "debt slave" level.
In other words this is a powerful kick in a chin by Obama to Putin. Not a knockdown, but very close.
For Ukraine first of all that means rapid accumulation of a huge external debt -- conditions of economic slavery, out of which there is no escape. Ukrainian people paid a very dear price for their Euromaydan illusions. They became mass slave labor in Poland. Prostitutes in Germany. Seasonal picker of fruits in some other EU countries (GB, France). A new European blacks, so to speak.
The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with fleecing of Libya. The currency dropped 300%, and 80% Ukrainians now live in abysmal poverty, while neoliberal oligarchs allied with the West continue to plunder the country. Gold reserves were moved to the USA.
If I had to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are still colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.
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Dec 28, 2019 | crookedtimber.org
likbez 12.27.19 at 10:21 pm
John,I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment. In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new.
You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.
See discussion of this issue by Professor Ganesh Sitaraman in his recent article (based on his excellent book The Great Democracy ) https://newrepublic.com/article/155970/collapse-neoliberalism
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.
When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.
Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for a free and democratic society.
The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.
Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.
Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.
Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups. On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.
Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.
They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.
If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.
Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.
So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the "soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.
The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups, such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals, etc)
That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.
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Jun 23, 2020 | www.unz.com
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/victoria-nuland-alert/ The Unz Review - Mobile The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media User Settings: Version? Social Media? Read Aloud w/ Show Word Counts No Video Autoplay No Infinite Scrolling
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More... Main Features Masthead Announcements Search Books Forum Podcasts Videos Periodicals Most Popular Current Digest Comment Archives College Data ← America's Recessional: Time to Bring ... Blogview Philip Giraldi Archive Blogview Philip Giraldi Archive Victoria Nuland Alert The foreign interventionists really hate Russia Philip Giraldi June 23, 2020 1,900 Words 148 Comments 147 New Reply Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More Listen ॥ ■ ► RSS Email This Page to Someone
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Bookmark Toggle All ToC ▲ ▼ Search Text Case Sensitive Exact Words Include Comments Search Clear CancelIt is difficult to find anything good to say about Donald Trump, but the reality is that he has not started any new wars, though he has come dangerously close in the cases of Venezuela and Iran and there would be considerable incentive in the next four months to begin something to bolster his "strong president" credentials and to serve as a distraction from coronavirus and black lives matter.
Be that as it may, Trump will have to run hard to catch up to the record set by his three predecessors Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush was an out-and-out neoconservative, or at least someone who was easily led, including in his administration Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Gerecht, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams, Dan Senor and Scooter Libby. He also had the misfortune of having to endure Vice President Dick Cheney, who thought he was actually the man in charge. All were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own security, to include invading other countries, which led to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces stationed nearly twenty years later.
Clinton and Obama were so-called liberal interventionists who sought to export something called democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them more like Peoria. Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan as a diversion when the press somehow caught wind of his arrangement with Monica Lewinsky and Obama, aided by Mrs. Clinton, chose to destroy Libya. Obama was also the first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning session to review a list of American citizens who would benefit from being killed by drone.
So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. The America the exceptional mindset is best exemplified currently by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who personifies the belief that the United States is empowered by God to play only by its own rules when dealing with other nations. That would include following the advice that has been attributed to leading neocon Michael Ledeen, " Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business. "
One of the first families within the neocon/liberal interventionist firmament is the Kagans, Robert and Frederick. Frederick is a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War. Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert, is currently the Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. That means that Victoria aligns primarily as a liberal interventionist, as does her husband, who is also at Brookings. She is regarded as a protégé of Hillary Clinton and currently works with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once declared that killing 500,000 Iraqi children using sanctions was "worth it." Nuland also has significant neocon connections through her having been a member of the staff assembled by Dick Cheney.
Nuland, many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-2014. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych's government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.
Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget , but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior.
Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create in Ukraine. For Nuland, the replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with the real enemy, Moscow, over Russia's attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.
And make no mistake about Nuland's broader intention at that time to expand the conflict and directly confront Russia. In Senate testimony she cited how the administration was "providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia." Her use of the word "frontline" is suggestive.
Victoria Nuland was playing with fire. Russia, as the only nation with the military capability to destroy the U.S., was and is not a sideshow like Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Taliban's Afghanistan. Backing Moscow into a corner with no way out by using threats and sanctions is not good policy. Washington has many excellent reasons to maintain a stable relationship with Moscow, including counter-terrorism efforts, and little to gain from moving in the opposite direction. Russia is not about to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and there is no compelling reason to return to a Cold War footing by either arming Ukraine or permitting it to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Victoria Nuland has just written a long article for July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine on the proper way for the United States manage what she sees as the Russian "threat." It is entitled "How a Confident America Should Deal With Russia." Foreign Affairs , it should be observed, is an establishment house organ produced by the Council on Foreign Relations which provides a comfortable perch for both neocons and liberal interventionists.
Nuland's view is that the United States lost confidence in its own "ability to change the game" against Vladimir Putin, who has been able to play "a weak hand well because the United States and its allies have let him, allowing Russia to violate arms control treaties, international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and the integrity of elections in the United States and Europe Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin. It also included incentives for Moscow to cooperate and, at times, direct appeals to the Russian people about the benefits of a better relationship. Yet that approach has fallen into disuse, even as Russia's threat to the liberal world has grown."
What Nuland writes would make perfect sense if one were to share her perception of Russia as a rogue state threatening the "liberal world." She sees Russian rearmament under Putin as a threat even though it was dwarfed by the spending of NATO and the U.S. She shares her fear that Putin might seek " reestablishing a Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe and from vetoing the security arrangements of his neighbors. Here, a chasm soon opened between liberal democracies and the still very Soviet man leading Russia, especially on the subject of NATO enlargement. No matter how hard Washington and its allies tried to persuade Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance that posed no threat to Russia, it continued to serve Putin's agenda to see Europe in zero-sum terms."
Nuland's view of NATO enlargement is so wide of the mark that it borders on being a fantasy. Of course, Russia would consider a military alliance on its doorstep to be a threat, particularly as a U.S. Administration had provided assurances that expansion would not take place. She goes on to suggest utter nonsense, that Putin's great fear over the NATO expansion derives from his having " always understood that a belt of increasingly democratic, prosperous states around Russia would pose a direct challenge to his leadership model and risk re-infecting his own people with democratic aspirations."
Nuland goes on and on in a similar vein, but her central theme is that Russia must be confronted to deter Vladimir Putin, a man that she clearly hates and depicts as if he were a comic book version of evil. Some of her analysis is ridiculous, as "Russian troops regularly test the few U.S. forces left in Syria to try to gain access to the country's oil fields and smuggling routes. If these U.S. troops left, nothing would prevent Moscow and Tehran from financing their operations with Syrian oil or smuggled drugs and weapons."
Like most zealots, Nuland is notably lacking in any sense of self-criticism. She conspired to overthrow a legitimately elected democratic government in Ukraine because it was considered too friendly to Russia. She accuses the Kremlin of having "seized" Crimea, but fails to see the heavy footprint of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a regional enabler of Israeli and Saudi war crimes. One wonders if she is aware that Russia, which she sees as expansionistic, has only one overseas military base while the United States has more than a thousand.
Nuland clearly chooses not to notice the White House's threats against countries that do not toe the American line, most recently Iran and Venezuela, but increasingly also China on top of perennial enemy Russia. None of those nations threaten the United States and all the kinetic activity and warnings are forthcoming from a gentleman named Mike Pompeo, speaking from Washington, not from "undemocratic" leaders in the Kremlin, Tehran, Caracas or Beijing.
Victoria Nuland recommends that "The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia -- one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens." Interestingly, that might be regarded as seeking to interfere in the workings of a foreign government, reminiscent of the phony case made against Russia in 2016. And it is precisely what Nuland did in fact do in Ukraine.
Nuland has a lot more to say in her article and those who are interested in the current state of interventionism in Washington should not ignore her. Confronting Russia as some kind of ideological enemy is a never-ending process that leaves both sides poorer and less free. It is appropriate for Moscow to have an interest in what goes on right on top of its border while the United States five thousand miles away and possessing both a vastly larger economy and armed forces can, one would think, relax a bit and unload the burden of being the world's self-appointed policeman.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org .
Carlton Meyer , says: Website Show Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:18 am GMT
This is a great overview, but Americans cannot understand these truths after hours of constant propaganda in our media. For example, Hillary Clinton and President Obama destroyed and looted Africa's most prosperous nation in 2011 that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths of innocents. This is not in dispute, it is just ignored despite daily stories about the chaos in Libya. Imagine if Black Lives Matters dared protest against this destruction and looting of Africa's wealthiest nation and demanded that Clinton and Obama be arrested for war crimes.Zarathustra , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:45 am GMThttps://www.youtube.com/embed/n5Lh4HUyudk?feature=oembed
Fact is that many leaders in history did solve the inside problems of their country by outside war.anon [437] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:47 am GMT
There is certainly a bit of elevated temperature.Thank you for another great article.Ultrafart the Brave , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:56 am GMTbut
there is one thingYou wrote:
" It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, "
As you yourself have pointed out, more than once, in fact, there actually is a foreign country which, more than, interferes in U.S. domestic policy, some would estimate, effectively controls it, and foreign policy, as well.
While it would a bit of an effort to monetize the full amount spent on this effort, I personally would not be a bit surprised if it were significantly larger than $5 billion, and despite that, one could imagine, quite a bargain in terms of their ROI; it could in fact be considerably less than the overt transfer of sovereign U.S. wealth to that foreign government every year.The past administrations, either every one, or almost every one, going back as far as Truman, certainly , but the trend was already well established during the puppet presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
I'd love to read your rejoinder.
onetribe
being blocked incorrectly from using my usual handle@Carlton MeyerAlfred , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:05 am GMTImagine if Black Lives Matters dared protest against this destruction and looting of Africa's wealthiest nation and demanded that Clinton and Obama be arrested for war crimes.
An admirable sentiment, except that the BLM movement appears to be little more than a vehicle for staged chaos nurtured behind the scenes by more war criminals with a hidden agenda.
And more's the pity, because there are hordes of high-ranking war criminals in the Exceptional Nation that richly deserve burning at the stake. In the Libyan context, Muammar Gaddafi was not only a great leader but also a good man, who was doing great things not only for his own people but also for the community of African nations.
If you're going to have a dictator, make sure you get a good one. Gaddafi was a good one.
Trump not so much, but Clinton was and is horrifically evil.
The war against Russia has been going on for centuries. Nothing upsets these nutters more than the Russians insulating themselves from the mental virus that has proliferated in the West.Anon [233] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:06 am GMTJust read the sour grapes of the usual suspects in this derogatory article. Similar in tone to the nonsense at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. Nothing amuses me more than to watch them vomiting on themselves in frustration.
Moscow, low-key consecration of Victory Cathedral; Catholics denied another church
Nuland's views are, as stated in the article, dangerous fantasy-one could almost accuse her of having psychopathic voices in her head with respect to russia and putin.Biff , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:13 am GMTIt is indeed remarkable in a very bad way that this woman was close to the top level in state under obama but we can surely see her handiwork in the devastation of the ukraine nation.
@Carlton MeyerChris Moore , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:34 am GMTImagine if Black Lives Matters dared protest against this destruction and looting of Africa's wealthiest nation and demanded that Clinton and Obama be arrested for war crimes.
My imagination:
An agitator is planted inside BLM, and is armed and equipped to carry out a terrorist attack on the American people as false flag event – blows up a weight-watchers convention, next to a Wal-mart, and puts a half-a-dozen fat bodies into orbit circling the globe(celestial bodies). After said attack BLM is defunded, and disbanded(but the race war continues).You forgot to mention that virtually all of the neocon/liberal interventionist "intellectuals"on your list identify as Jewish, which means they see themselves as having Hebrew backgrounds, which not only gives them an Israel First/Zionist orientation, but which means their hatred of "anti-Semitic" Russia is pathological and ancestral, which means their hatred of "anti-Semitic" Europeans is pathological and ancestral, which means their hatred of "anti-Semitic" white people is pathological and ancestral, which means their desire for nuclear war between whites is pathological and ancestral, which means they believe they can win a nuclear war (perhaps by sheltering in bunker state Israel) and emerge as the anointed "chosen" intellectual priest class of the worldThreeCranes , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:35 am GMTSo there is a kind of internal logic or rationalism to their insanity, in the same way that any insular, imperious elite suffering from megalomania and delusions of grandeur can develop internal, echo chamber "logic" that is (objectively) insane. The difference is, their insane "logic" is additionally sanctioned by their particular God or their particular History or their version of God/History.
Hence, with this cult, we not only get insular, echo-chamber imperialism, but we additionally get quasi-religious, messianic fanaticism that will view any nuclear war as pre-ordained fate in service of delivering the Chosen Ones to the world.
And half of America thinks Trump is nuts? It should look at the "intellectual Jews" it's so desperate to consign its fate to.
Posturing. What else can this be, coming from the lips of a Jewish woman? It all just sounds so ridiculous. What authority does she have? Only the threat of force, reckless force dispensed with abandon. That's not authority. It's insanity.Mr. Hack , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:35 am GMTAnother critique of US foreign policy regarding Russia, all referenced under the famous "cookies and milk" response of Ms. Nuland in Kyiv. Lucky for Russia that she wasn't doling out scoops of ice cream instead?Mustapha Mond , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:41 am GMTFor Nuland, the replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with the real enemy, Moscow, over Russia's attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.
I applaud the US response of supporting Ukraine's aspirations for a freer more Western oriented country and that it continues to support Ukraine's territorial interests over those of Russia's. It's time for the Giraldis and Cohens of the world to shed their Russian fig leaf covering and be exposed as the gutless appeasers that they really are.
Victoria Nuland (her family name formerly Nudelman) and her blood-thirsty, thieving zionist neocon buddies would love nothing more than to tear Russia apart and finish the rape and plunder of that country first begun under Russia's 'reformer' president, the idiot Yeltsin, wherein mostly jewish Russian and American oligarchs systematically stole what amounts to about $330 billion dollars of Russia's wealth.Mr. Hack , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:47 am GMTThat these zionist neocon murderers and thieves would put the world at risk to achieve their goals is no surprise, as one need only look at the 3,000+ innocent American lives, including many Jews, that were snuffed out on 9/11, all to set the stage for the US and allies' "War of Terror" against mainly the enemies of Israel, and to line the pockets of the ever-growing Military-Information-Security Complex. Innocent lives mean absolutely nothing to these monsters.
The campaign against Russia is simply another necessary link in the chain that binds the world to the PNAC vision of using the US and the West to establish and maintain what is essentially a Jewish supremacist movement that barely conceals itself and its nefarious agenda from the useful idiot goyim so necessary to carry forward the PNAC's plan for world domination. And the chubby little Ms Nudelman is just another tireless zionist mouthpiece for this ugly, obnoxious and risky agenda
Giraldi would have us believe that it was all a US sponsored provocation, not the natural outcry of the Ukrainiain people seeking change from a thoroughly corrupt and authoritarian regime. Ms.Nuland's cookies must have tasted really good to get the massive outpouring of support in Kiev that demanded systemic change.chris , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:11 am GMThttps://www.youtube.com/embed/-nNFrvGOb9o?feature=oembed
A major indicator of how long-term foreign policy goals are actually set by the US was revealed when Obama declared Venezuela a threat to national security in 2015!roonaldo , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:13 am GMT
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/obama-declares-venezuela-national-security-threat-imposes-sanctionsVenezuela? A threat to US national security?? Sounds completely absurd.
But if you consider your 'national security' being threatened whenever any scarce natural resources in the world are not in your or in your client states' posession, then anthing which interferes with that is a "threat!" Iran (before 2003), Iraq, and Russia certainly fit the bill of being enemies.
This explanation, for me, is much more realistic than to think the neocons are solely driven by cold war mentalities.
The neocons are particularly peeved at Russia because through their oligarchs, they had the crown jewels in their hand before Putin wrested it out. It was always clear from the beginning that the overthrow of the Ukraine government was always just a stepping stone to the overthrow of Putin in Russia.
Russia is truly the mother load, with control over its natural resources, you control China, undermine the Middle Eastern Arab states and if necessary control Europe financially. Besides the direct political control you then exercise, on an economic level, the productive people of the world Germany and China then work for you.
Nuland and her ilk will be spewing their dangerous nonsense and banging the drums of war like homicidal energizer bunnies until hell freezes over. Meanwhile, "from Atlantic to Pacific, the insanity is terrific," as the nation devolves in an engineered mass hysteria. As things go down the tubes, the Empire will get ever more desperate, rather than easing back a bit on the throttle. With Donald Boy and Sec. of State "Plump-piehole" egging on Israeli expansionist dreams and drone-executing whomever they please–what could possibly go wrong? I'm waiting for one, just one, European power to call bullshit on the U.S. and put a stop to this madness. Fat chance of that.Rahan , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:41 am GMTI think we are in the Empire's desperation phase. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report that called for and got another Pearl Harbor also spoke affectionately of creating bioweapons to target any upstart nation encroaching on U.S. hegemony. If the bastards could get away with 9/11, a most obvious inside job, what's not to like about the disruption and confusion of bioweapons? The ruthless evil we are up against is truly staggering.
It would be super funny, if Russian, Chinese, Serbian, Sudanese, Afghani, and Iranian diplomats now went out en mass to give out cookies to the US rioters.Lot , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:55 am GMTTaking PR pictures with the poor oppressed black looters and antifa trannies, lecturing Washington on human rights, and pledging support to the "moderate terrorists" i.e. the democrat mayors and governors who decide to not interfere with the looting and autonomous zones.
I think this would be the most epic troll ever. Especially if Venezuela then paraded some nervous spook and declared him the "legitimate president of the United States".
Or maybe, kek, just appoint Bernie the real president. "For two elections the corrupt system has denied this true hero his rightful position. Enough! We support the people's choice!" etc. Bernie would be all: "I don't know who these people are, honest," and they'd be: "stay strong, comrade, we shall help you in your fight to become a true people's president!"
America's most pro-Israel President, the one who moved the embassy to Jerusalem and appointed a West Bank settler dude as ambassador, has both refrained from starting wars and is gradually bringing the troops home from Afghanistan, Germany, etc.Marshall Lentini , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:35 am GMTSo much for the Jihadi/leftist smear that Israel's friends promote wars.
Trump: peace through strength and loyalty to America's true friends.
restless94110 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:04 am GMTConfronting Russia as some kind of ideological enemy is a never-ending process that leaves both sides poorer and less free.
Well said.
It's also really strange to portray Russia in this demonic fashion. When you see it up close, there are things you don't like or question, things that are bizarre, absurdly inefficient, and outright abhorrent, but it's far from the big threatening geopolitical beast they make it out to be. It's more of a joke which even Russians understand.
There's a phrase from the USSR that someone taught me – аналогов нет, "no analogues" or nothing comparable, referring to the quality of their military armaments, specifically rockets. Obvious nonsense pushed by the USSR to bolster faith in the populace, it lives on today in Kremlin propaganda, but is widely regarded as the bullshit it is, which is why videos containing the phrase itself are banned on YouTube Russia.
In short Russia, as a meme, is a "paper tiger" propped up largely by Washingtonian psychodrama and will-to-power. Washington doesn't want Russia out of Crimea because they love the Ukrainians; they want them out because Ukraine is a major destination for American corporate venality. Absent interference from Washington, the Kremlin might undertake some foreign adventures in neighboring countries, but for the most part would continue on its obvious path of "peacefully" melding with the Chinese economy, like everyone else.
There is no white nation free of the forces of decline set in motion by white success and the overall technological arc of history. "Russia" is nothing more than a scarecrow for the Washington establishment – which it could just as well drop, as they no longer need justifications or approval from the people – and signifies only a livid hunger for the last major market they've yet to absorb directly.
Proud_Srbin , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:07 am GMTIt is difficult to find anything good to say about Donald Trump, but the reality is that he has not started any new wars, though
It is difficult to read past an opening sentence such as this one.
I have seen it constantly. I call it the "Back-handed Trump hating fool" approach. The many writers who employ this method in their articles appear to believe that they literally have to make it clear to their readers that of course they (the writers) think Trump is a moron/cad/crook/criminal/mentally ill, BUT!!!
Then they proceed with the rest of their article.
But don't you (the reader) dare think that they think anything good about Trump!
This is childish bullshit and am I the only one who is completely sick of it?
Hey, Phil, how about you leave out the stupid back-handed Trump hating nonsense? You don't need to write it, but if you do? Have your editors cut it from your writing. It just makes you look stupid, and many won't even continue reading your article. As they should. No one deserves to be read who would write such facile, petty nonsense.
ANY country, real or satelite which allows ""diplomats from 5-headed beast or anglo-terrorist and marauding alliance deserve extinction.Bill Jones , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:30 am GMT
God Bless DPRK!Petty typoJWalters , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:39 am GMT
"Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, ""is" sb was (thank god)
I too find it appalling that these people move among us.
If we "follow the money", Hillary's campaign was financed by the Israelis. An honest post mortem on her loss would have focused attention on the huge influence of Israeli money on American elections. The faked focus on Russian "meddling" could have been to divert any talk of election "meddling" away from Israel's truly vast "meddling". (The Israelis routinely distract by accusing others of their own crimes.) The Israelis control both the DNC and the corporate media, so "Russiagate" could roll on virtually evidence-free. Fox was allowed to criticize the "Russiagate" attack on Trump, but only to keep the kabuki conflict boiling. Neither side ever mentioned Israel's "meddling", or in any way criticized Israel. To the contrary, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity even agreed that Netanyahu would be a great American president. So why did Israeli asset John Bolton just attack Trump, after Trump has given Israel so much, including assassinating Soleimani? Maybe it's Trump's refusal to launch Israel's next war? Maybe they don't really trust Trump? Maybe because on 9/11 Trump said he didn't believe planes could have brought down the twin towers, and that explosives must have been involved? Could Trump be in a deadly dance with the Israelis, riding a tiger?Anonymous [661] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:08 am GMTNuland wrote that Russia did "violate arms control treaties, international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and the integrity of elections in the United States " But wait a minute, doesn't she really mean Israel, not Russia?Larchmonter420 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:15 am GMTAnd in retrospect, America's penchant for throwing little countries against the wall has never worked all that well. I'm thinking Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia.
Good article, Mr. Giraldi.
WHAT , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:21 am GMTNuland, many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-2014. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election.
Nuland might hate Russia, but Obama gave back Crimea to Russia the rightful owner on a Silver Platter. Russia has now easy access to Mediterranean Sea. Obama then invited Russia back to Syria, as the USSR was kicked out of Middle East by the Evil Kissinger after the Yom Kippur War ..
The rest is history. 20/20 is hindsight.
@Mr. Hack Exactly, it was a US financed provocation with a whole lot of extremely dumb stooges. Six years that have passed since prove it again and again, every day.Robert Pinkerton , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:24 am GMTWhatever; "Ukraine" is not a state, "ukrainians" are not a people, "ukraininan" is just bastardized Russian/Polish mix, so to hell with this joke of a cuntry. Let Russia, Poland and Hungary partition it.
A sub-set of our Jewish fellow Earth-walkers hates Russia, rodina and narod as ancestral heritage.Philip Giraldi , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:24 am GMTNATO should have been disbanded shortly after the Soviet Union fell, its bureaucrath given Certificates of Service and sent home.
@Bill Jones Thanks – corrected!BL , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:57 am GMT@anonThreeCranes , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:05 am GMT" It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, "
We could chalk this up to a lack of imagination on the part of our intrepid former CIA scribbler, but anyone paying even cursory attention couldn't help but conclude that the Obama administration didn't just tolerate, it choreographed, a plot against Trump in league with foreign intelligence services.
U.K., Ukraine, Italy, Australia, Russia, and, yes, Israel.
I'm confident that neither a lack of imagination or garden-variety ignorance explains Giraldi's narrative weaving. However open or obscured, staying on the remove Trump by any means necessary team remains the smart, if treasonous, play.
You'll note that Russia is included in this no doubt incomplete list. It really is a fool's errand to try to surmise for any of these foreign participants what of their actions were opportunism as opposed to resigned self-protectiveness,
But, make no mistake, every single one, foreign powers, whether allies or adversaries, and individuals and purportedly non-state entities, was promised goodies at the expense of the American national interest.
That's anyone's guess at this point. We know surveillance state bottom-feeder Glenn Simpson got at least $6M, and Stefan "Guttman" Halper about $1M. What do you think was promised to foreign powers for playing ball? In the case of Russia, unless I miss my mark, Nord Stream II was merely the down payment.
Maybe some day Giraldi will ask Brennan the contours of the deal he made Russia assistance in throwing the election to Hillary in March, 2016:
@chrisFred777 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:10 am GMT" Russia is truly the mother load, with control over its natural resources, you control China, undermine the Middle Eastern Arab states and if necessary control Europe financially. Besides the direct political control you then exercise, on an economic level, the productive people of the world Germany and China then work for you."
Hear, hear!
Hold fast Russia, the globalists have nothing good in store for you.Hapalong Cassidy , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:11 am GMTGiven all that has happened this year, I can unequivocally say that any white person who joins the US military needs to have their head examined. And a US military bereft of white people would be pretty much useless.red rider , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:18 am GMTClinton actually bombed Yugoslavia/Sebia as a diversion when the press somehow caught wind of his arrangement with Monica Lewinsky.Z-man , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:23 am GMTPhilip said:JoaoAlfaiate , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:48 am GMTBush was an out-and-out neoconservative, or at least someone who was easily led,
Ok but the main reason 'Dubbya' went into Eye-Raq is because he wanted to 'get' Saddam for having gone after 'Big Daddy' Bush I. The Neochoens provided the cover.
Bill Jones said:
I too find it appalling that these people move among us.
Yes but Nudelman is also a laughable character now who's shelf life has expired, I hope.
Hoping for Peoria but getting Minneapolis and Seattle.rienzi , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:02 pm GMTIgnoring all arguments about who is on the side of the angels here.anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:03 pm GMTThere are a lot of countries that could hurt us badly in a shooting war, but we would survive, and at the end of the day, they would not. However, there is one country, and only one, that could completely erase us in a few hours, and that is Russia.
Seems insanely suicidal to run around poking the bear with a stick at every possible opportunity.
For the gullible fans of Mr. Trump, who want so fervently to believe that he's trying to change anything but the rhetoric:Robjil , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:07 pm GMTWhen I searched to confirm the name of that "diplomat" standing next to Ms. Nuland, I learned from an official website that he remains employed as such, now the face of Uncle Sam in Greece.
Geoffrey R. Pyatt, a career member of the Foreign Service, class of Career Minister, was sworn in as the U.S. Ambassador to the Hellenic Republic in September 2016.
He served as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 2013-2016, receiving the State Department's Robert Frasure Memorial Award in recognition of his commitment to peace and alleviation of human suffering in eastern Ukraine.
What should we expect of a President that would brag about luring an Iranian leader into a gangland hit with an invitation to discuss peace?
If you can't handle the truth, just hit the Troll or Disagree button.
@Mr. Hack It is called fool's gold.geokat62 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:13 pm GMTThey were promised the EU or riches from the EU.
Yet, the leader of the coup Nuland said these immortal words to start her coup:
"F–k the EU"
Nuland knew the real deal.
She was creating a Zion colony in Ukraine and nothing more than that.
Realist , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:15 pm GMTAll were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own security , to include invading other countries, which led to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces stationed nearly twenty years later.
Great article, Phil. May I recommend one minor edit:
All were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance the Jewish State's security, to include invading other countries, which led to Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. still has forces stationed nearly twenty years later.
Realist , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:17 pm GMTThe foreign interventionists really hate Russia
Ya think??? Is this supposed to be newsy?
@Hapalong CassidyJake , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:18 pm GMTGiven all that has happened this year, I can unequivocally say that any white person who joins the US military needs to have their head examined.
That has been the case for decades.
Why do our 'foreign interventionists,' our 'permanent war for globalist perpetual peace' crusaders, our Neocons, hate Russia so thoroughly and so centrally to their very beings?BL , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:22 pm GMTFirst, our imperialists are the direct descendants intellectually, spiritually, and morally of the first WASP Empire, the first Anglo-Zionist Empire: the British Empire. And they have used their high IQs that are focused on grasping the One Ring to Rule Them All to locate where the Brit WASP Empire failed to achieve its goals, which allowed the collapse starting with World War 1. They are obsessed with that because they believe that if they can achieve what the Brit WASPs failed to achieve, then they can make the Anglo-Zionist Empire 2.0 as permanent as the Roman Empire – a Thousand Year Reich.
And that is spiritually what all WASP imperialism, all Anglo-Zionist imperialism back to at least the Anglo-Saxon Puritans, is about: replacing the Roman Empire, which means replacing that which culturally led to, and was absolutely indispensable to, Christendom.
What they wish to redo and achieve that the Brit WASPs failed in is winning The Great Game: becoming total master of Eur-Asia. And that requires taking out Russia and China. In the 19th century, China was sicker than even the Ottoman Turkish Empire. To play the long game to destroy Russia, the Brit WASPs allied with the Turks to prevent Russia acting to push the Ottomans out of Europe. Brit WASP secret service in eastern Europe was focused on reducing Russia significantly right through the Bolshevik Revolution, even with Russia naively, stupidly allied with the British Empire in World War 1.
Our 'foreign interventionists' have seen Russia under Putin rise from the ashes, and they intend to destroy Russia once and for all, so they then can reduce China and win The Great Game. And thus make Anglo-Zionist Empire greater than Roman Empire.
Second, our Neocons are the spiritual and intellectual descendants not just of Trotskyites, but of all Russia-hating Jews with ties to Central and/or Eastern Europe. For them, Russia always is the evil that must be destroyed for the good of Jews.
Everything at its bedrock is about theology, is about the choice between Christ and Christendom or the Chaos of anti-Christendom.
@BL By the way, I will give you the commanding heights Sad Story in absurdly abridged form.geokat62 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:34 pm GMTChina won the post-Cold War period hands down. From Tiananmen Square to Ising power on the cusp of global hegemony in a quarter century. With the US paying the bill.
While there were clear indications to any honest observer years before, Snowden's coming out signaled the public next phase of a years long operation in which the USG built a global surveillance apparatus, including not the least of Americans, and then lost the whole shebang to Russia, China and God Knows Who Else.
My view then -- and I have seen nothing to even suggest my informed speculation was wrong -- was that the sky was the limit in terms of what the powers that be would gift in terms of the national interest to protect themselves from exposure and a reckoning.
I would like anyone who disagrees to otherwise explain how USG policy became one of driving China and Russia into a strategic alliance. To say nothing of putting obviously compromised individuals, foreign assets, like Brennan at the apex of power.
Obama was also the first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning session to review a list of American citizens who would benefit from being killed by drone.
Uh huh. Read the NYT article -- Obama is no angel, but Giraldi should explain why President Obama would set up, much less publicly reveal, weekly sessions in which both he and the office of the president are grossly debased by the Director of the CIA?
Jake , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:52 pm GMTZionism is the Deep State – Rick Wiles
-- TruNews™ (@TruNews) June 22, 2020
In this article, this is the most important sentence in terms of showing how doomed America is: Obama was also the first president to set up a regular Tuesday morning session to review a list of American citizens who would benefit from being killed by drone.anon [319] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:00 pm GMTThe DOOM is that no Liberal can ever acknowledge that as something a liberal, a sacred black liberal at that, would do without being forced to do so by white conservatives.
That insanity lies at the heart of America and has since at least the Emancipation Proclamation. It means that it is totally impossible to have a halfway meaningful 'liberal' opposition to imperialism, because imperialism is always easily cast as doing good for the downtrodden blacks and/or browns and/or yellows and/or Jews and/or Moslems.
Too late, too fat, & too ugly! Nuland already lost the beauty contest for Biden's ventriloquist to Avril Haines, She-wolf of the DO. The rectal feedings will continue till morale improves!Really No Shit , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:13 pm GMTThe "foreign interventionists" want two things: Russia's mineral riches and its good gene pool (how do you think Middle Eastern Semites became blonde hair- blue eyed people who can easily blend into the West to undermine it from within in the first place to begin with?)Mr. Hack , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:36 pm GMTAnd they won't stop until they get what they want, by hook or crook!
@Robjil Nuland was about as interested in creating a "Zion colony" of Ukraine as Ron Unz (another Jew) is in creating one at this website!Anonymous [112] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:41 pm GMTClinton and Obama were so-called liberal interventionists who sought to export something called democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them more like Peoria . . .BuelahMan , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:43 pm GMTMore like the Castro District or Seattle, in fact.
Vicky is a Dirty Woman:A123 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:43 pm GMThttps://www.youtube.com/embed/q67l4qPKbJ4?feature=oembed
Desert Fox , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:50 pm GMTSo the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration.
Trump fired John Bolton. Pompeo is at most a shadow of Bolton. That is rather the opposite of resurgence. If the author could let go of his #NeverTrump bias he would be able to see that Trump has run the NeoCons out of the GOP.
Trump tried to remove troops from Syria and Afghanistan and ran into Deep State obstructionism.
The Globalists tried to trick Trump into a Syria expansion by creating a Turkey/Syria battle through areas controlled by U.S. Troops. Trump refused to be manipulated and pulled U.S. Troops out of the kill sack. Does anyone still believe that myth about 'protecting Syrian oil'? Only the mentally dim accepted that ludicrous cover story. It was flimsy excuse to relocate out of the Deep State trap.
Prior U.S. administrations created huge problems in the ME by toppling Saddam and emboldening Iran's theocracy. "Cut and Run" would guarantee a nuclear arms race in the region. Trump's containment of Iranian colonial expansionism is working, albeit slowly. The Rial continues to slide (now at ~200,000 to the USD). At some point, the Iranian people will choose to get rid of their failed leaders and rejoin civilized society. Until then Trump's containment is better than a Biden invasion.
_____Trump has fundamentally reshaped the alignment of U.S. Politics. There is only one foreign interventionist party. The SJW Globalist DNC now owns both the NeoConDemocrats and the R2P crowd. The choice this November is clear:
-- Trump -- No New Foreign Wars
-- Biden -- Invasion of Ukraine, Iran, Libya, etc.PEACE
Nuland is just the tip of the iceberg in the ZUS government, which is infested with zionists and has been in every administation since Wilson, they are the cause of every war since WWI right down to the middle east and in the case of the middle east wars, the zionists and Israel used their attack on the WTC to push America into the slaughter house for the greater Israel project.chris , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:53 pm GMTRead The Protocols of Zion and the book The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed, there is laid out the zionist one world zionist government.
@Rahan HAHAHA, I'm still laughing !!! That's friggin hilarious, Rahan!!!Bill Jones , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:00 pm GMT
Bernie the cowardly comrade@Larchmonter420 It is little noticed that those Countries consumed by the evil Soviet Union have fared much better in conserving their culture and sense of self, after they were upchucked in the early '90s, than the Champions of Democracy of the West have done under the freedom and tutelage bestowed by the US.chris , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:09 pm GMT
Funny dat.@Hapalong Cassidy yeah, white or straight; the worst is if you're bothAnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:19 pm GMTYes, Nudelman and her ilk are rabidly anti-Russian. But what they did in Ukraine revealed a very different thing: globohomo elites are mentally degenerate, they cannot foresee even immediate consequences of their moves. There was a joke in Russia that for the coup in 2014 in Kiev Obama deserves a medal "For the liberation of Crimea" (there was a medal of this name in WWII). There was another joke, that Ukraine without Crimea is like a purebred stallion without balls.Bill Jones , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:20 pm GMTNeocons planned to make Ukraine a battering rum against Russia. They did not understand that a log rotten through and through cannot serve as a battering ram. Now they are stuck with that wreck ("you break it – you own it" rule) and don't know what to do with it. Previous US administration and DNC big shots (Biden, Pelosi, Schiff, and Co) used it mostly as a rout of stealing US taxpayers' money. Current administration does not seem to have even this use for it. The US keeps proving the age-old wisdom that when you see your enemy committing suicide, do not interfere. Putin appears to have a huge stock of popcorn.
@BL Bezos has done extremely well for acting as China's proxy in destroying the US economy.onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:21 pm GMT
Give the man a medal:
"So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. "Agent76 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:22 pm GMTThis "just" in: "War is the health of the state" Randolph Bourne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Bourne
Meaning, if you have governments in the first place, sooner or later, you will have war, either on the people inside a country [eg the war on drugs], or on citizens of another country, or both at the same time [i.e. what we have now].
Outside of complete dissolution of all states [ preferable in my opinion, but unlikely given the general mindset of the brainwashed masses worldwide], and given the systemic need of all states everywhere for evermore wars on their own, and on others populations, the only [ imperfect, and perhaps temporary], solution I see is to 95% downsize the federal government and restore the constitution and bill of rights and to thereby restrict the federal government to its original limits, and to even design new, more effective ways to prevent the federal governments further expansion beyond those original limits/chains.
"..the very idea of the State itself is poisonous, evil, and intrinsically destructive. But, like so many bad ideas, people have come to assume it's part of the cosmic firmament, when it's really just a monstrous scam.
It's a fraud, like your belief that you have a right to free speech because of the First Amendment, or a right to be armed because of the Second Amendment. No, you don't. The U.S. Constitution is just an arbitrary piece of paper entirely apart from the fact the whole thing is now just a dead letter. You have a right to free speech and to be armed because they're necessary parts of being a free person, not because of what a political document says.Even though the essence of the State is coercion, people have been taught to love and respect it. Most people think of the State in the quaint light of a grade school civics book. They think it has something to do with "We the People" electing a Jimmy Stewart character to represent them.
That ideal has always been a pernicious fiction, because it idealizes, sanitizes, and legitimizes an intrinsically evil and destructive institution, which is based on force. As Mao once said, political power comes out of the barrel of a gun." Doug Casey
https://www.caseyresearch.com/daily-dispatch/doug-casey-the-deep-state-is-responsible-for-all-economic-turmoil/Regards, onebornfree
Apr 27, 2017 This Is Already Putting an End to the Age of Globalization and Bankrupting the United States (2004)AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:25 pm GMTFor a major power, prosecution of any war that is not a defense of the homeland usually requires overseas military bases for strategic reasons. After the war is over, it is tempting for the victor to retain such bases and easy to find reasons to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/orBEdPe63v0?feature=oembed
February 26, 2015 The Neoconservative Threat To World Order
Scholars from Russia and from around the world, Russian government officials, and the Russian people seek an answer as to why Washington destroyed during the past year the friendly relations between America and Russia that President Reagan and President Gorbachev succeeded in establishing.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/02/26/neoconservative-threat-world-order-paul-craig-roberts/
@Bill Jones There is even funnier thing now with covid: the countries that do not toe the imperial line, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, are doing a lot better than imperial sidekicks like Brazil, Colombia, or Peru. Rephrasing old Russian saying, "tell me who is your friend, and I tell you how stupid you are".chris , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:25 pm GMT@Rahan To make the troll work even better, Venezuela could then send 20 guys in zodiacs to motor into DC and NY harbor to try to take over Dulles and LaGuardia airports, and when they got captured, they could just trade them for those 2 knuckleheads we sent down there. They could also claim that they're here to capture Trump; that might just get him handed over.Wizard of Oz , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:45 pm GMTRahan, you have to send your brilliant joke to CJ Hopkins and to Caitline Johnstone to get if more exposure.
@anonymous You appear to be saying that a career diplomat who served in Ukraine when the US did or supported bad things there should not have been appointed as Ambassador to Greece. Is that a correct understanding of what you mean to convey? If so, how does this reflect on Trump when the appointment was made two months before he was elected?JoaoAlfaiate , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:48 pm GMTBefore confronting the Russians, it might be a good idea to regain control of Minneapolis and Seattle ..anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:52 pm GMTAnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:53 pm GMTSo the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance.
That's pretty much it, they just use different rhetoric to appeal to their constituencies. Might makes right; there is no other law beside bandit law. The Russians have been a barrier to the US being able to spread itself over the entire globe and rob everyone weaker than itself. The US was behind all these atrocious jihadi mercenaries even as it's pretended to be against them. The Russians stopped the US project of terror and overthrow in Syria and that's outraged the Americans who thought they could act as they pleased. Libya was destroyed by the wonderful, hip Obama who many stupid Americans still think was a nice person. But with Russia, they can huff and puff but can't blow their walls down. They have a military that can deter the Americans unlike all the other smaller victim states.
@onebornfreeWizard of Oz , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMTMeaning, if you have governments in the first place, sooner or later, you will have war,
Funny, you sound like notorious Russian politician Zhirinovsky. He said: "there is no such thing as lasting peace, there is only prolonged armistice".
@AnonFromTN The second joke should be withdrawn from active service. It is that of the naughty schoolboy who will say anything for a cheap laugh – in this case "balls. A well bred gelding will win races, be just as well fed and housed as the entire stallion and much more contentedly placid.GMC , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:59 pm GMTRight after those two Israeli puppets were dancing and talking on their open lined cell phones outside on Shitskyia St. in Kyiv, Ukraine, in front of the US Embassy, Ambassador Py Rat ended up going to the US Embassy in Greece, in order screw the Greek people some more, and Cookies Nuland ended up -- F n what's left of the island of Cyprus. US Embassies are nothin more than CIA offices and only idiots would leave them in their country.Biff , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:20 pm GMT@AnonFromTN Another Russian joke about Ukraine – that I will probably wreck but here goes:EliteCommInc. , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:33 pm GMTHow come you want to attack Donbass?
Because the Russians are there.
How come you don't actually attack Donbass?
Because the Russians are really there!
"She accuses the Kremlin of having "seized" Crimea, but fails to see the heavy footprint of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a regional enabler of Israeli and Saudi war crimes. One wonders if she is aware that Russia, which she sees as expansionistic, has only one overseas military base while the United States has more than a thousand."Herald , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:34 pm GMTI think this is a mistake. I think Miss Nuland knows exactly how large and intense the US ft print is and belies it should be larger and more intense. There are sincere people who believe that the US must as duty make the work safe for democracy even the means of getting there is any and everything bt democratic because in the long run -- the benefits will outweigh.
and as proof of er sincerity -- it's not just Russia (Though I understand why Dr. Giraldi would like to tackle one territorial issue at a time makes sense)
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/21/china-adapting-and-improving-on-tactics-deployed-b/
@Chris MooreAnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:44 pm GMTAnd half of America thinks Trump is nuts? It should look at the "intellectual Jews" it's so desperate to consign its fate to.
Of course, it should look at them, that's what Trump seems to be doing.
@Biff I've heard another version of this.Rahan , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:48 pm GMT
Ukrainians are asked:
– If you believe that Crimea belongs to you, why don't you fight for it?
– We are not stupid, Russian troops are there.
– But you say that there are Russian troops in Donbass, yet you fight.
– That's what we say, but in Crimea there really are Russian troops.@chrispeter mcloughlin , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:51 pm GMT
Thank you for the kind words, Chris,
You're very welcome to share the gist of the joke anywhere you like, and add to it whatever you think works:)I agree that "backing Moscow into a corner with no way out" is a dangerous strategy. This is not the Cold War: in the Cold War the United States and USSR were able to keep peace, a balance of power, an equilibrium where neither side's vital interests were threatened. Russia had a buffer zone: not today. America was at the height of its global economic power: today it is being overtaken by China. In the Cold War the big powers avoided nuclear Armageddon – though at times appeared to come close – because they were able to. The misguided thinking today is: "we got through the Cold War we can get this". This is not a re-run of 1945-1991: it is the lead-in to the holocaust that period skillfully avoided.GMC , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:54 pm GMT
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/@Mr. Hack I was in Ukraine and was a resident in 2008 even. Yanuk was a thief, but this was SOP in Kyiv – how do you think they all get rich ? Sure the people were protesting about corruption, but anyone who was really there know how easy it was to spread the riot when the western neo nazis are bussed in, the " cookies" end up being money paid to certain groups and out of work peasants. Yanuk was trying to short sell Ukraine's farmland etc. to many corporations and countries. He was taking money from Monsanto, Carghill, Dupont, John Deere/ Iowa Univ. and even China started to build a deep water port in Crimea , in order to grow on the 200,000 hectares they wanted to lease. Russia always gave the Ukies a decent loan or gaz price { esp. for Princess Jewish Tymoshenko who up the price for her takings }, not to mention the million or so that worked in Ru. A Perfect storm , for as far back as when , in 2005, Senator B Obama , brought 40 million in cash to Donetsk, in order to de- arm the Ukrainian military. This Maidan and Ukrainian plan was well planned – decade or two earlier – Pravda !Herald , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 3:56 pm GMT@Bill Jones China's proxy?Shaman911 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:00 pm GMTFor one thing. PRESIDENTS of any country "DO NOT START WARS" It's always Jewish Bankers.Alfa158 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:13 pm GMT
Nuland is Jewish so what else is there to talk about?Mr. Giraldi ; do you think Vicky is angling for the Secretary of State position in the upcoming Biden administration?Really No Shit , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:15 pm GMT
Have you given any thought to who Biden will be told to select for the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Advisor slots where they will be leading the charge for war?
I think it is possible that Bolton may have been angling for one of those spots with his current book tour, but that has obviously blown up in his face.@BuelahMan Dirty Vicky wanted to do statuesque Julia you know where!Curmudgeon , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:41 pm GMT@Anonymous I thought that bit was comic relief.anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:42 pm GMT@Wizard of Oz OK, as you give off more than a whiff of effete hack yourself, I'll bite.*AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:44 pm GMTYes, that's what I mean to convey. It reflects on President Trump -- and, more particularly, his sham campaign rhetoric -- that the likes of Mr. Pyatt remain in place with another Exceptional! plaque on his lavish office.
Do you mean to convey that the President can't replace ambassadors at will, or that they have tenure?
-- --
*Before interacting with this "Wizard of Oz" character, be aware that he/she/they often draw other commenters in with questions and requests that are seldom resolved to his/her/their satisfaction, or with cryptic insinuations that distract discussion.
The same person also fuzzes up threads by pretending to be more than one commenter, the technique known as "sock puppetry." See under Mr. Derbyshire's February 15, 2019, article comment ## 28, 42, 43, 44, 68, 122, where he/she/they got sloppy also posting as "Anon[436]."
Among this website's oddest, sophisticatedly trollish commenters.
@GMC Let's give credit where credit is due. Yes, the Empire wanted to buy Ukraine, preferably on the cheap (considering that the goods were not of the first quality). But for the sale to proceed you need two sides. You need a fraudster and a sucker. You cannot consider morons who sold their would-be country for beads blameless. Not to mention that many local thugs got a cut. Smarter thieves took their loot and ran away, like Yats. Dumber and/or greedier ones, like Porky and Kolomoisky, remained and kept trying to steal more. The suckers (the rest of the population) are left holding the bag. Stupidity is always punished in the end, but not always so severely.Mr. Hack , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:51 pm GMT@GMC Although one has to be careful in dealing with the large multinationals, the only way to obtain large contracts is through cooperation with them. Opening things up and building ports would have resulted in large employment opportunities for the masses, adding some stability to the Ukrainian economy.Chris Moore , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 4:56 pm GMTI'm not aware of Senator Obama's dealings in Donetsk to "de-arm the Ukrainian military". Please do tell me more.
@JakeCurmudgeon , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:00 pm GMTOur 'foreign interventionists' have seen Russia under Putin rise from the ashes, and they intend to destroy Russia once and for all, so they then can reduce China and win The Great Game. And thus make Anglo-Zionist Empire greater than Roman Empire. Second, our Neocons are the spiritual and intellectual descendants not just of Trotskyites, but of all Russia-hating Jews with ties to Central and/or Eastern Europe. For them, Russia always is the evil that must be destroyed for the good of Jews.
So basically, they're Jewish parasites with delusions of grandeur who attached themselves to the British Empire and American Empire (destroying the US Constitution along the way), and are using its decaying WASP blood and treasure to set up an Anglo-Zionist Empire, which will then morph into a Zionist Empire, which will then move its headquarters to Israel, which will then fulfill "chosen" Zionist Jewish supremacist prophecy and theology of ruling the world.
In other words, they're not only parasites, but they're insane parasites. Really, could there be any other kind? The insanity is baked into the parasite.
@anonymousColin Wright , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:01 pm GMTWhat should we expect of a President that would brag about luring an Iranian leader into a gangland hit with an invitation to discuss peace?
I am confident that, in my lifetime, the truth about how that unfolded will never be known. The intel for the hit came from the Israelis through the same people that have been undermining him from Day 1. Did Trump actually know Soleimani was there on a peace mission? Did Trump know that an Iraqi leader would be with Solmeimani? Why would de-escalation of tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia be bad for Trump who has been avoiding staring wars? Was Mattis in on that game?
Once the hit was done, the rest is creating a narrative for diversion. It was a shit show, to be sure, but I suspect there is a lot more to this than what we are being fed.
' Michael Ledeen, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." 'Colin Wright , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:06 pm GMTNow, if that 'small, crappy little country' could be Israel, me 'n Mike could have a real meeting of minds.
but I suppose that's not what Mike meant.
' Backing Moscow into a corner with no way out by using threats and sanctions is not good policy 'FLgeezer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:10 pm GMTThat might well be, but maybe there is a way out.
Think maybe if Russia abandoned its support for a state in Syria and let Israel have her little way with the place that she might suddenly be left in peace?
Nahhh couldn't possibly be a connection. How could that influence our policy?
@anonymous >Among this website's oddest, sophisticatedly trollish commenters.Colin Wright , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:16 pm GMTAgreed. I suggest he/she/it be referred to henceforth as the Wizard of Odds.
' Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War 'Kouros , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:34 pm GMTThis always happens with winners -- be they World War One generals or Cold Warriors.
If, due to other factors entirely, they happen to finally triumph, it all becomes attributed to their incredible genius.
The oddity is that the Soviet Union lasted as long as it did. It was a massively unattractive system with no natural constituency beyond its own bureaucrats. Yes, it had to be kept at bay, and we did do that -- but we basically merely watched while it collapsed under the weight of its own internal flaws.
American Oligarchy really wants to take over the Russian economy and assets (as well as China's and Iran's)Pat Kittle , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:38 pm GMTHegar , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:44 pm GMTthe advice that has been attributed to leading neocon Michael Ledeen, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Hmm Israel comes first to mind.
Giraldi's first paragraph is spot on. But after corona dealing the economy a heavy blow, I don't think Trump will start a war before the election. I don't think he would have done that otherwise either, though there was some risk. Trump has caved numerous times, he is an idioht when it comes to hiring his enemies hoping to appease them, but there is no question that he opposes mass immigration and invasions.Pat Kittle , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:48 pm GMTI suppose most people here know this, but let's look at how many of the pro-war names mentioned belong to the 2.5 % "Chosen":
George Bush
Donald Rumsfeld
Hillary Clinton
Michael Ledeen (White, but studied history under *George Mosse, immigrated from Germany)
Reuel Gerecht
Dan Senor*Richard Perle
*Paul Wolfowitz (The architect of the Afghan-Iraq invasions, who gathered support for them in Congress and organized the pro-war communication)
*Douglas Feith (would have been the Sec. of Defense if people hadn't objected too much, as he was infamous after the Iran-Contra affair)
*Eliot Abrams
*Lewish "Scooter" Libby of the dead eyes
*Robert Kagan
*Frederick Kagan
*Victoria Nuland
*Madeleine Albright (Half a million dead Iraqi children from starvation sanctions and bombing the infrastructure for twelve years was "worth it")That's six Whites and nine Tribe.
If those nine hadn't existed millions would have been alive today, there would have been no flood of Somalis, Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians to Europe, and the U.S. and the Middle East would have been far better off.
@Colin Wright I just posted a similar comment, before I saw yours.Alfred , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:53 pm GMTPlagiarism unintended!
@Mr. Hack I applaud the US response of supporting Ukraine's aspirations for a freer more Western oriented countryRurik , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 5:57 pm GMTYou are joking surely? The country is run by Jews from top to bottom – although Jews are 1% of the population. Since the Maidan putsch, there has only been a string of Jewish presidents and prime minsters. The guy responsible for investigating corruption was recently sacked and replaced by a Jew.
Post Maidan, 3 TV stations were shut in Kharkov alone. Everything is controlled and is lies. Journalists and politicians who don't do as they are told are shot. No one is arrested. The latest victim was an opposition politician who was executed by a shot in the head in his parliamentary office a few weeks ago. No Jew ever suffers such a fate.
He was not "found dead". He was killed by a bullet to the head.
It was not in "central Kyiv". It was in the parliament building.Colin Wright , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:33 pm GMTVice President Dick Cheney, who thought he was actually the man in charge.
he was
contrast the chimp sitting in that classroom for 20 something minutes, as our nation was under attack
with what Cheney was doing at the time..
https://www.youtube.com/embed/qjR0gGXV-04?feature=oembed
All were hawks who believed that the United States had the right to do whatever it considered necessary to enhance its own security,
I see Geo has already pointed out the obvious absurdity that any of these criminal were in the least bit worried bout US security. If anything, they were overtly sacrificing US security on behalf of an enemy state. Not sure why you write stuff like that Mr. G, unless you just expect people to ignore it as perfunctory tripe, but there are some, no doubt, who read those words and assume you are actually saying they care about the US. When you and I both know they don't.
Clinton and Obama were so-called liberal interventionists who sought to export something called democracy to other countries in an attempt to make them more like Peoria.
Nope.
They were and are both amoral, opportunistic zio-whores, whose only ideology is what's good for Clinton and Obama, respectively. Clinton didn't bomb Serbia out of some humanitarian love of freedom and democracy, and Obama didn't destroy Libya and Syria except to serve his zio-masters. Duh.
So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good,
I was telling my gal the other day, that Trump could be The One to End the Fed, by allowing Goldman Sachs and the rest of them to feast at the Treasury to their heart's content.
I reminded her of Jackson's quote about hurting ten thousand families, in order to save fifty thousand. And in a similar vein, Trump could be setting up the collapse of the ZUS economy, which will hurt hundreds of millions, but if he could collapse the dollar, he very well might save billions of people's lives.
"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out."
– Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role
I beg to differ, Mr. G.
I would posit that her most famous utterings were when she imperiously demanded that "Yats is our guy". IOW, the way she was promoting "democracy" in Ukraine, was by corrupting the system with 5 billions of tax payer lucre- to the point where she, *personally* could decide who- (Jewish banker) would be president in a nation thousands of miles away. That's how the ZUS promotes "democracy" in foreign lands. (and, I suspect that it was the way that call was leaked, that is the fount of all the rage at Russia, for "Russian hacking', breaking long-standing diplomatic protocols against exposing other nation's treachery and corruption to the 'little people').
Nuland's view . Russia to violate arms control treaties, international law, the sovereignty of its neighbors, and the integrity of elections in the United States and Europe
for Nuland to talk about 'International law and the 'integrity of European elections'.. is like Jerry Sandusky lecturing people on child welfare.
That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level,
OK, so not only Nuland but also John Bolton is screeching that Trump is the disaster of our times.
Not since John McCain has a mad dog Zionist insider been so full of hate for Trump. Hmm..
as Russia's threat to the liberal world has grown."
the more she talks, the more I like Putin.
And it is precisely what Nuland did in fact do in Ukraine
.
they think chutzpah, (arr0gent contempt for decency and in-your-face hypocrisy), is a virtue.All Americans and Europeans and everyone else, should see that Putin is the world's remaining statesman. We should all do everything we can to support Putin's earnest efforts to rein in the murderous, zio-glob menacing the planet today.
Thank you Mr. G. for exposing Nuland's treachery, hypocrisy and J-supremacist agenda.
@Pat Kittle ' Plagiarism unintended!'Jake , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:33 pm GMTWouldn't it be more of a matter of great minds thinking alike?
@Chris Moore Archetypal WASP Oliver Cromwell made alliance with Jewish bankers, then congregated in the Netherlands. The deal, which financially was necessary to him securing Puritan rule and to then wage more war against non-WASP natives of the British Isles, included Jews being allowed legally live in and own property in England, including to build a synagogue, with Jews exempted from all requirements that the Puritan government made on al natives of the British Isles.Agent76 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:34 pm GMTJews are not parasites on WASP culture. WASP culture is born of a Judaizing heresy, and Jews therefore have always been partners in WASP culture.
You need to spend a large amount of time learning the rise of Jews with the growth of the British Empire. Then put that with the rise of Jews as part of the American empire.
And then unless you are brain dead, you will see that WASP culture and Jews go together. Jews are not parasites on WASP culture. Jews and WASPs are symbiotic, at the expense of 90-95% of non-WASP whites.
Jun 23, 2020 Online Event: U.S. Grand Strategy in the Middle EastColin Wright , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:35 pm GMTWhile prominent voices in Washington have argued that U.S. interests in the Middle East are dwindling and will require the United States to "do less" there, Jake Sullivan argued in a recent Foreign Affairs article that the United States should be more ambitious using U.S. leverage and diplomacy to promote regional stability.
@Lot 'So much for the Jihadi/leftist smear that Israel's friends promote wars.'anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:38 pm GMTUh huh. Just look at how Trump has reached out to Iran.
and I notice that our troops are still in Syria.
not that any of this could conceivably lead to yet another war on behalf of Israel.
@Curmudgeon Did you not hear the recording of President Trump's disgusting speech weeks later at a fundraiser, recounting the hit to his rapt backers? I'm pretty sure that it was posted in a comment to one of Dr. Giraldi's columns.Mefobills , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:51 pm GMTYou might also want to review Linh Dinh's June 12, 2016 "Orlando Shooting Means Trump For President."
Voting for any of these Red/Blue characters merely moves the boot around on your face.
Democracies don't reflect the will of the people:Bill Jones , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 6:53 pm GMTVictoria Nuland recommends that "The challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world in crafting a more effective approach to Russia -- one that builds on their strengths and puts stress on Putin where he is vulnerable, including among his own citizens." Interestingly, that might be regarded as seeking to interfere in the workings of a foreign government, reminiscent of the phony case made against Russia in 2016. And it is precisely what Nuland did in fact do in Ukraine
We live in the dark, convinced by our public media and our insincere leaders that we are heroes and freedom fighters. In reality the opposite is true: we are the plunderers, the ravagers, deceiving ourselves to do the dirty work of the manipulators who have twisted our minds with trinkets and false accounts of the people we kill and the countries we ruin in order to steal their treasures.
And the saddest part -- the punchline that proves how stupid we are -- is that we never profit from the invasions we are cynically ordered to conduct. The bounty always goes to the swindlers pulling the strings, and we, as the agents of banditry, time and again, are always left to suffer the same fate of the people we have robbed when we are robbed ourselves, of not only our treasures, but of our dignity, shortly before we are robbed of our lives.
It is the way history has always gone. The ignorant masses are persuaded to commit the crimes of the rich and as the unwitting perpetrators, we ultimately suffer the same fate as the victims, while the rich snicker in their palaces and plot their next swindle.
@Herald How much of Amazon's offering is Chinese sourced?Colin Wright , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 7:02 pm GMTWho sells more Chinese goods than Bezos?
@Agent76 'While prominent voices in Washington have argued that U.S. interests in the Middle East are dwindling and will require the United States to "do less" there, Jake Sullivan argued in a recent Foreign Affairs article that the United States should be more ambitious using U.S. leverage and diplomacy to promote regional stability.'geokat62 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 7:32 pm GMTI'm confused. Iraq is more stable for our intervention?
If we 'did less' in the Middle East, it could only promote regional stability.
Most of our actions there are pretty clearly calculated to promote instability, not stability. Promoting anarchy in Syria, baiting Iran into a war, acquiescing in a coup in Egypt, sanctioning Israel's continual bombing raids
Anyone ever heard of Father Mordechi Martin? Neither did I, until I came across this explosive videoanonymous [237] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 7:32 pm GMTBANNED: How the Jews infiltrated the Vatican & changed the Catholic Church
https://www.goyimtv.com/view?v=2074240941
The late Michael Collins Piper hosts a call in program and his guest is Jim Condit Jr. The topic of conversation is Father Mordechi Martin, a Zionist spy who infiltrated and subverted the Catholic Church.
Unfortunately, it indeed seems that Jewish Supremacists have achieved full spectrum dominance.
The first thing a confident America has got to do is top up that DO covert-ops slush fund:slorter , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:07 pm GMThttps://www.madcowprod.com/2020/06/17/politics-contraband-gangster-planet/
Cuz, Oops. Big CIA profit center needs some business interruption insurance, huh?
Gee, I wonder who ratted them out?
Good article !Druid55 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:14 pm GMT@Mustapha Mond Only a few israelis died on 911. They didn't get the text that american jews got to stay away that day. This is admited!The Alarmist , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:17 pm GMTJake , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:20 pm GMTThe challenge for the United States in 2021 will be to lead the democracies of the world .
The challenge will be to find any actual democracies of any import in the world, as the lamps go out across the whole planet.
@Mr. Hack US control of the Ukraine will mean that Jews will own almost all of it and the land will be flooded with blacks and Mohammedans, with gays made another sacred group.chris , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:30 pm GMTAnglo-Zionist Empire does what Anglo-Zionist Empire does.
@Rahan I laughed my ass off ! I'm still laughingWikiBlabs , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:50 pm GMTI passed your comment on to CJ Hopkins with link to the source. Maybe he can use it in his column. It needs a much greater audience than in the comment section here.
Yours is a fantastic troll, but there are others who've commented on the ironies in this context. This article for example: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/490539-looting-is-the-price-of-freedom-cynical/ There's enough trolling material in all these events to last us a lifetime.
@Chris Moore The public does not understand that the system is actually "two party tyranny". This system is designed to divide and conquer, and it works. Compound this with the fact that many people get their information from simply "googling" terms and phrases as opposed to actually digging deep and reading books and other sources for information. Combine this with the sad state of affairs in our public education system – where students are not taught to think or ask questions but to behave, conform, and memorize information. With regard to the methods being used in our foreign policy and now, subsequently, being used here to foment chaos, check out the following resource. You will see that what is going on is simply UCW – Unconventional Warfare, and we have perfected the technique abroad.geokat62 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 8:51 pm GMTUNIDENTIFIED NEMESIS
Breaking newsAnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:02 pm GMTNEW: Alan Dershowitz's attorney confirms that his client has access to Virginia Giuffre's sealed depositions. Those depositions reveal that she was directed by Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak & Victoria's Secret's Les Wexner.
-- julie k. brown (@jkbjournalist) June 23, 2020
@The Alarmist How can the US "lead democracies" not being one of them? It's as ridiculous as me leading the elephants of the world.potemkin villiage bank , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:12 pm GMT@Fred777 The globalists should be castigatedDruid55 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:31 pm GMTthen downtrodden and opressed
hanging is too good for them
@red rider Serbia deserved it. They were conducting ethic cleansing with concentration camps, rape camps, etcVojkan , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:40 pm GMT@Hegar That's three goyim and twelve "chosen". Ledeen (founder and former member of board of advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs – doesn't look goy to me), Gerecht (Israelis say he's one of them) and Senor are Jewish.Pat Kittle , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:41 pm GMT@Colin Wright Well, at least we haven't been stampeded into mob psychosis.Rurik , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 9:55 pm GMT@AnonFromTNmark tapley , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:00 pm GMTHow can the US "lead democracies" not being one of them?
didn't Vicky Nuland lead the Ukrainian democracy?
it isn't ridiculous, all it takes is shekels, as always, and an understanding of semantics. Words like 'democracy' are like 'liberated', or 'terrorists'.
The ZUS "liberated" Iraq from the "terrorists" who were ruling it, and imposed "democracy". Just like we "liberated" Germany, and "liberated" Libya, and so many other places, where the ZUS leads 'democracies'.
You see how easy it is, once you understand how to interpret the words they use?
America is helping to liberate Palestine from terrorists, so that the Palestinians can enjoy democracy.
Today the Crimea is suffering under a regime that seized her by aggression and force, and so America would like to liberate the people of Crimea, and lead them to democracy.
Jewmerica is controlled by Zionists and their operatives like Jew Nuland. Add Trump and Pence to the list too. The Presidency has been controlled by the Zionist Jews since Woodrow Wilson. Almost all of Congress is in the pocket of aIPAC and other Jew organizations. The Zionist Jews drive all the wars and conflicts, foment the false flags like the fake Floyd, Sandy Hook, Los Vegas etc. The Global Jew Bankers made immune from prosecution by our shabbos goy Congress have stolen trillions of the the country's wealth. First after 911 (also a false flag for Greater Israel) then with the bailouts for the super rich in 08 and now the monumental 6 trillion theft for their Wall St. buddies under cover of the fake Corona virus.Haxo Angmark , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:08 pm GMTThe goyim must be propagandized and the target demonized before the Israeli Foreign Legian (U.S. military) is sent in to force another extortion for the Jews. this is what they did twice to Germany and to Japan. Same thing in Iraq and Libya. The Zionists have so far failed in Syria and Iran. Even after getting Israel's best friend ever in the White House who abrogated our treaty with the Iranians and has lied constantly about both countries, launched rockets against the Syrians and accused Assad of gassing his own people.
The Zionsits cannot make progress without war, conflict and hatred. Once the goyim are whipped up with enough war sentiment against the Russians and Chinese and the two countries have built up sufficient military capability they will most likely join forces with a nuclear attack against Jewmerica. this will probably result in a stalemate that can then be used as a precursor to the global totalitarian NWO.
@Shaman911 just for the record, it's VictoriaRurik , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:09 pm GMT(((Nudelman))).
@Druid55Currahee , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:10 pm GMTSerbia deserved it. They were conducting ethic cleansing with concentration camps, rape camps, etc
idiocy
they were fighting some of the worst scum on the planet; KLA human and narco-traffickers attempting to murder enough Serbs so they could steal the ancient Serbian land of Kosovo. Zio-style – by terrorizing the legitimate inhabitants into fleeing for their lives- to they could simply steal the land for themselves.
The trial against Milosevic was a sham and a fraud. And Milosevic was humiliating the ICC in open court, so they poisoned/assassinated him in his cell.
But, I suppose the case could be made that if the Serbs deserved it, it was because they allowed the Albanians to immigrate into Kosovo in transformative numbers in the first place, and just as the Zi0s know, demographics = destiny.
The whites of South Africa made the same mistake. The whites of Europe are very busy also making the exact same mistake, just as they are in North America and Oceana.
One day they'll wake up, and discover that now they and they're children are now on the block, with their school girls being gang-raped wholesale and their lands taken from them, and like the Serbs, they'll say, 'golly, who'd have ever thunk that inviting in stone age invaders is of questionable prudence.
So yea, in that context, they did deserve it.
@Anon "Victoria Nuland was born in Jewish family in 1961 to Sherwin B. Nuland, a distinguished surgeon, and Rhona McKhann." -WickipediaRobjil , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:21 pm GMTEVERY, SINGLE, TIME!
@Druid55 That is the western MSM sugared up version of what happened in Yugoslavia. Western MSM learned their lesson about being truthful about war when US and friends were in Vietnam.mark tapley , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:23 pm GMTLies and lies only come from western MSM these days so wars and regime change games can go on with anyone noticing or caring.
Western MSM notifies their puppet readers that all the US and friends does is "humanitarian" stuff these days. Most puppet readers lap up this junk.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/natos-rape-of-yugoslavia/5375189
March 24, 1999 will go down in history as a day of infamy. US-led NATO raped Yugoslavia. Doing so was its second major combat operation.
It was lawless aggression. No Security Council resolution authorized it. NATO's Operation Allied Force lasted 78 days.
Washington called it Operation Noble Anvil. Evil best describes it. On June 10, operations ended.
From March 1991 through mid-June 1999, Balkan wars raged. Yugoslavia "balkanized" into seven countries. They include Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.
Enormous human suffering was inflicted. Washington bears most responsibility.
@Druid55 More MSM Jew propaganda. The Zionists wanted this area to remain fractured and weak (Balkanized) so that the unified Yugoslavia could not oppose their plans. The Zionists intend to control pipelines running from Middle East into Europe. This would compete against Russia that now supplies most of the gas. All wars are about money, power and territory, this war was no exception. The Zionists need to control all energy sources and transportation routes in order to achieve hegemony.AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:28 pm GMT@Rurik Good explanation. Orwell called this "newspeak". That's now the language of libtards.vot tak , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:53 pm GMT"It is difficult to find anything good to say about Donald Trump, but the reality is that he has not started any new wars"Rurik , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:53 pm GMTAgree with the first part, disagree with the second. The reasons israel's trump colonials have not started new militsry invasions are mainly two. The trump reime is in the middle of a military modernization. The american zionazi colony fell behind militarily as they ran proxy terrorists and drug mafia support/colonial policing ops. Fighting wars againat those who can actually hurt them back became obsolete, or so the "end of history" neocons figured. Now they are outclassed and they can't pick on someone capable of shooting back effectively.
As for the second part, the likud colonial trump regime is doing its best to attack zionazia"s rivals any way they can mimus actually sending in troops. Times have changed, the oligarchs do war by other means than troop invasion now. The economic, biological and psywar aspects are being used full tilt by israeloamerica. What they lack the means to do on the field of battle, israel's war criminals and quislings are more than making up for it by other means.
The trump quislings have vastly increased international strife across the board and are decidedly more war mongering than israel's previous american colonial governors.
@mark tapleymcohen , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:04 pm GMTThe Zionists wanted this area to remain fractured and weak (Balkanized)
I agree with all your posts.
I'd just add to this one, that by bombing Serbia, (on behalf of Muslim invaders), they were accomplishing several things.. They were ending the post WWII International Laws against unilateral military might by strong nations against weaker ones in Europe. With that act, they declared with bombs that the ZUS is now The Unilateral Power, and that the International Laws against Aggressive War was now moot.
By bombing a White Christian nation on behalf of Islam, they were also tossing a bone to Islam, as a trade off for the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Who in our times is going to complain about bombing white people? And Muslims would cheer it.
Also, as ((Gen. Wesley Clark)) explained about his bombing campaign on Serbia:
"There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That's a 19th-century idea and we are trying to transition it into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states."
– NATO's Supreme Commander, Gen. Wesley Clarkso there were myriad reasons for why ((they)) bombed Serbia into handing over its ancient and sacred lands.
Passing out cookies.vot tak , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:08 pm GMT
Daisy cutters
So more with claymore"So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance."Rurik , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:19 pm GMTIt's neocons and neolibs, the "liberal interventionists" are as liberal as the neocons are conservative. Agree about the style and substance, though, think of the disgusting things as different/somewhat rivals management teams working for the same employer. Like the likud and labor political blocks in israel. Goals are the same, some differences in how to achieve them.
One sees this same phony duo-political scam across the capitalist "west" where right wing political parties dominate wholesale.
@AnonFromTNWizard of Oz , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:23 pm GMTOrwell called this "newspeak". That's now the language of libtards.
thanks
and not just shitlibs, but across the entire length and breadth of our culture and society this Ministry of Truth-imposed doublethink masquerades as language intended to inform and explain, when it does the opposite.
George Will and Sean Hannity use newspeak with the same alacrity as Lawrence O'Donnell or Rachel Maddow. Israel has to defend itself. Putin's aggression and Russian meddling in our democracy.
'Quantitative easing' as a doubleplusgood expression for human history's most colossal case of mass-swindling the world has ever known.
it's everywhere, and the more it isn't noticed, the more sinister and diabolical it is.
It's like that Twilight Zone episode of the aliens that only wanted to 'serve man'.
'We're here to serve you'.
The writers of that episode certainly must have been thinking of a certain tribe of 'philanthropists' and owners of 'human rights' organizations.
celebrate diversity!
it's our greatest strength!
@anonymous Thank you for clarifying that though you do not give any evidence beyond reason for suspicion about his role in Ukraine as to why this career diplomat should be sacked from his Ambassadorship to Greece.vot tak , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 11:26 pm GMTAs for israel's nuland neanderthal*, this is a critter about as zionazi low as one can get. What she posits come directly from israel and its international domination freakshow. The critter is about as far right/neocon psychopathy as that subhuman element gets.anonymous [245] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 12:24 am GMTThe use of these freaks by both american dem and rep colonial governorships shows how these are simply psywar front outfits pursuing the same goals for the zionazi master.
@Wizard of Oz My comment (#35) that you're typically and oh-so-diplomatically trying to obscure concerned the naïveté of those who think that Mr. Trump ever intended to (or could) effect any change in Uncle Sam's treatment of other countries.Agent76 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 12:27 am GMTBut as to your concern for this "career diplomat," do you think he's too good to "be sacked" and have to work at an honest job?
@Colin Wright If a politicians lips are moving they are lying. This comes from the war parties think tank and everything they say is the total opposite every time. This group gives me great insight into thier plans and why I even bothered to share this here today. Thanks Wright!mark tapley , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 12:31 am GMT@AnonFromTN Democracy is a subversive term used by the Zionists, MSM and many politicians as well as lots of other people that should know better. Democracy results in mob rule that will always lead to tyranny.Wizard of Oz , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 12:59 am GMTThe word democracy does not occur in either the Declaration of Independence or it's companion document the Constitution. That is because the founders believed it to be the worst form of government. James Madison stated that democracies "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
It is no mistake that the word democracy is widely used. Democracies work in the Elites favor because they can steer the chaos then put their system in place when the democracy falls apart.
The founders established a system of sovereign states in a limited Republic of laws. That was the foundation of our success, not democracy.
@anonymous For an apprentice pedant you are not doing well. You seem to have overlooked Trump's very big changes in the treatment of one major foreign country, namely China.mark tapley , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:01 am GMTAnd I am disappointed that you don't realise how much the US needs the institutional memory and the skills of career diplomats when so many ambassadorships are given to completely unqualified and unsuitable donors to the president's election campaign.
@Druid55 Hardly anyone died. No planes used and all accounted for. Social Security Death Register about the same as usual for that day in N.Y. Bodies "jumping" out were dummies. Another false flag for the Zionist agenda of wars for Israel.Pat Kittle , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:11 am GMTJew supremacists like Nuland & her fellow (((treasonous war criminals))) care ultimately about expanding the domain of "Greater Israel."Pat Kittle , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:15 am GMTFomenting hostility (if not outright war) between the world's largest primarily White countries has always been what (((they))) do.
On the home front, Black Lives Matter terrorism would go nowhere without Jew supremacist organizing, funding, censoring, & intimidating. Not that the (((shysters))) actually give a damn about Blacks!
NAME the JEW!!
@vot tak Please don't conflate Nazis with these Jews.niteranger , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:25 am GMTIt's unfair to Nazis.
@Anon Nuland is a Jew. Nothing to see here. She is a nutbag who wants eternal war. Whatever Israel wants .Israel gets. Whether it's Obama destroying Libya or constant friction with Russia it's the Jewish control of everything.Ryan2 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:36 am GMTWhat does Victoria Nuland have to gain from all this?showmethereal , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:51 am GMT
Money? Really? Is she a true believer? Does she consider all this to be Patriotic?@Jake "Christ" said His kingdom was not of this world . So going back to Emperor Constantine – the western church has gotten it wrong.mark tapley , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:53 am GMT@Jake Do you think the Catholics were any less likely to sell out? The Catholic Church was infiltrated by the cripto Jew Medicis with the placement of Leo X in 1513. The Founders of the Jesuit order were also cripto Jews.vot tak , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 1:55 am GMTThe Jews have infiltrated all the governments of any consequence. Jewmerica has been so well infiltrated it would be more accurate to just term the situation an out in the open takeover. The Jews could have never made much headway without the shabbos goys helping them. The government of Jewmerica is full of traitors serving the Zionist Jew agenda.
@Pat Kittle Bum bandits are bum bandits.mark tapley , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:14 am GMT@Ryan2 She is a hard core Zionist Jew. She is in the clique with the most powerful criminal syndicate in existence. And they are winning. Some of them may actually believe that they are still the Chosen. Trump's Chabad Lubavich son-in-law and the Shiksa Princess are said to be disciples of Rabbi Schneerson who taught that we Gentiles were just here to "hew wood and fetch water" for the Jews. Judging from the words and deeds of the shabbos goy puppet actors like Trump, Pence, Pelosi and almost the entire congress along with most governors, an observer would think this is definitely true.Pat Kittle , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:27 am GMT@vot tak It's not that simple.Hibernian , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:31 am GMTAs you know, winners write history.
Jew supremacists won; Germany (& everyone else) lost.
If that wasn't the case, the world would know the Holocau$t mythology is an extortion racket, and we wouldn't be fighting the Jews' criminal wars for them to this day.
@red rider The face that launched a thousand bombers.Hibernian , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:33 am GMT@geokat62 Malachi, not Mordechi.Guest0206 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:37 am GMT@AnonFromTN "Grabbing the Breadbasket of Europe The East-West competition over Ukraine involves the control of natural resources, including uranium and other minerals, as well as geopolitical issues such as Ukraine's membership in NATO. The stakes around Ukraine's vast agricultural sector, the world's third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat,constitute a critical factor that has been often overlooked." Whereas Ukraine does not allow the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture,Article 404 of the EU agreement, which relates to agriculture, includes a clause that has generally gone unnoticed: it indicates, among other things, that both parties will cooperate to extend the use of biotechnologies. There is no doubt that this provision meets the expectations of the agribusiness industry. As observed by Michael Cox, research director at the investment bank Piper Jaffray, "Ukraine and, to a wider extent, Eastern Europe, are among the "most promising growth markets for farm-equipment giant Deere, as well as seed producers Monsanto and DuPont."" https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/OurBiz_Brief_Ukraine.pdfRegulo , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:40 am GMT@Anon "Russia" is, for US intelligence ALSO code for "French". The propaganda against Russia during the cold war and beyond, also applies to "the French" [IMO].They both had a revolution , with world wide consequences , both have the same color flag[ the US propaganda says that Russia modeled their flag from the Netherland flag, but I suspect it is modeled from the French flag. The Americans cant be too blatant about it , but that is what is going on; anti Russia animus and propaganda is also anti French animus and propaganda. [ during the cold war, my French relative who had been a communist , went to Russia to see what it was like. She was disappointed .When she subsequently tried to visit my family here in the US, she was stopped art the airport and told she could not enter the US because she had been to Russia. This was the 1960's.Apparently this two countries and people were not polarized as the US and the soviets were. A kind of mutual respect or even admiration existed perhaps. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but that has been my sense for decades. Nuland's anti European/ anti russian animus is not surprising; its rather ubiquitous in the US and when they say EU they have primarily in mind the French!Guest0206 , says: Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 2:45 am GMT@Druid55 Do not repeat the NATO propaganda.Current Commenter
See Michael Parenti's
"To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia"
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Jun 23, 2020 | nationalinterest.org
The drama eventually ended with President Donald Trump pulling U.S. peacekeepers out of Syria -- and then sending them back in . One hundred thousand Syrian civilians were displaced by an advancing Turkish army, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces turned to Russia for help. But U.S. forces never fully withdrew -- they are still stuck in Syria defending oil wells .
Bolton's account sheds light on how it happened: hawks in the administration, including Bolton himself, wanted U.S. forces in Syria fighting Russia and Iran. They saw the U.S.-Kurdish alliance against ISIS as a distraction -- and let the Turkish-Kurdish conflict fester until it spiralled out of control.
Pompeo issued a statement on Thursday night denouncing Bolton's entire book as "a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods."
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Jun 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Christian J. Chuba , Jun 21 2020 14:18 utc | 78
Re: the Nuremberg trials , I became fascinated by the writings of Paul R. Pillar who pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace' . This is when one country sets up an environment for war against another country. I'll grant you that this is vague but if this is applicable at all how is this not an accurate description of what we are doing against Iran and Venezuela?In both cases, we are imposing a full trade embargo (not sanctions) on basic civilian necessities and infrastructures and threatening the use of military force. As for Iran, the sustained and unfair demonization of Iranians is preparing the U.S. public to accept a ruthless bombing campaign against them as long overdue. We are already attacking the civilian population of their allies in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.
How Ironic that the country that boasts that it won WW2 is now guilty of the very crimes that it condemned publicly in court.
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Jun 20, 2020 | www.unz.com
"The centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." -- W. B. Yeats, 1919
Truth is the first victim in politics. Factions and passions rule. Random facts are picked as weapons, no one thinks things through.
We need to understand the facts surrounding the death of George Floyd.
Many key facts are being ignored:
Minneapolis police officers have been charged with Floyd's murder. Yet all the evidence points to the fact that Floyd had taken a drug overdose so strong that his imminent death could hardly have been prevented. In all likelihood, the police were neither an intentional nor accidental cause of his death. These crucial facts have been completely ignored in the uproar.
It is widely believed that George Floyd died from a police officer's knee on his neck, whether due to asphyxiation or neck injury. That may be how it looks, to a naïve viewer. In reality, the county autopsy report says he died of a heart attack, [1] https://lawandcrime.com/george-floyd-death/authoriti...-here/ The full autopsy report was published here https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents...yd.pdf Diagnoses are summarized on pp. 1 and 2: I. The "blunt force injuries" are basically minor cuts and bruises: "cutaneous" injuries and contusions from handcuffing. II. Chronic conditions: Heart disease, hypertension and enlarged heart. These all tend to accelerate death from a drug overdose. They can also develop from long-term drug abuse. III. No injuries to the front of the neck or throat were found. This full 76-page report does not contain the word "homicide." and states that there were "no life-threatening injuries." Then how could they conclude it was homicide?
When scientists review scientific papers, they look primarily at the evidence, and give less weight to the conclusions, which are only the other fellow's opinions. To blindly follow "expert opinions" is the Authoritarian View of Knowledge. This is no real knowledge at all, because to assess whether an expert is always right, we would need infinite knowledge, and doubly so when experts disagree. Not thinking for oneself is not really thinking.
So let us stick to the evidence. The county's ambivalent autopsy also included the following hard facts: "Toxicology Findings: Blood samples collected at 9:00 p.m. on May 25th, before Floyd died, tested positive for the following: Fentanyl 11 ng/mL, Norfentanyl 5.6 ng/mL , Methamphetamine 19 ng/mL 86 ng/mL of morphine," but draws no conclusions therefrom, noting only that "Quantities are given for those who are medically inclined."
Shouldn't we be so inclined? This fentanyl concentration, including its norfentanyl metabolite at its molecular weight, was 20.6 ng/mL That is over three times the lethal overdose, following earlier reports where the highest dose survived was 4.6 ng/mL. [2] https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/02/fentanyl-overdo...-10822 "The patients who were dead on arrival had gone into cardiac arrest due to blood concentrations of fentanyl that were much higher than what is administered therapeutically. " Patients who died in hospital had concentrations of 9.5 ng/mL to 13 ng/mL. See also note 13. In other studies of death from heroin and morphine, there were deaths from only 100 ng/ml of morphine and "all cases with a blood concentration of 200 ng/ml and more of free morphine displayed a fatal outcome." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11040428_Fa...rivers (Heroin quickly metabolizes into morphine.) Fentanyl is considered 100 times more potent than morphine. By this comparison, Floyd's blood fentanyl concentration could have been 10 times the fatal level. In addition his morphine concentration of 86 ng/mL would usually be fatal by itself.
Concentration levels are relative to the volume of blood, so are independent of body size.
If ever there was a leap before a look, we are in it now. Masses of people have become extremists, based on conclusions that are as false as they are hasty.
Regarding suffocation, the county medical examiner's report found "no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation." [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/0...85002/ A report commissioned by the Floyd family stated that asphyxiation from sustained pressure was consistent with the evidence, but the author Michael Baden didn't have access to all the evidence, and chose not to endorse his opinion with the "expert opinion" label. Pressure applied to the side of the neck, as in this case, and not to the throat, has little or no effect on breathing. One can easily verify this oneself. [4] The knee on the neck is a body hold, not a chokehold or carotid restraint, which involves putting pressure precisely on both carotid arteries, located on either side of the throat. A carotid restraint is usually applied by an elbow, and causes the subject to pass out in as little as 15 seconds. Blocking the arteries does not stop the breathing or heartbeat (pulmonary or cardiac arrest), which Floyd suffered after being restrained for many minutes. Once pressure on the arteries is released, the subject normally regains consciousness quickly.
One difficulty is that there are public statements to the effect that the coroner ruled it a homicide, and the title of the autopsy report includes the term "neck compression." But the words "homicide," "restraint," "stress" or "compression" do not appear in the 20-page body of the report. References to the neck are few -- a couple minor abrasions, a contusion on the shoulder, and "The cervical spinal column is palpably stable and free of hemorrhage." It is as if the title was chosen in regard to what was expected or proposed, but which was never found, and the title was never updated. There seems to be no support at all in the report body for the report title, which reads, "Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression."
The term "cause of death" does not appear. The words "death" and "fatal" only appear in this comment in the lab report: "Signs associated with fentanyl toxicity include severe respiratory depression, seizures, hypotension, coma and death . In fatalities from fentanyl, blood concentrations are variable and have been reported as low as 3 ng/mL." Floyd's fentanyl level was seven times higher.
If first impressions via the media fooled the coroner's office, until they examined the body, we too can be fooled at first, but change our opinion according to the evidence.
Excited Delirium Syndrome
An additional hypothesis involves Excited Delirium Syndrome (EXD), a symptom of drug overdose which sometimes appears in the final minutes preceding death. EXD typically results from fatal drug abuse, in past years from cocaine or crack, more recently from fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin. Especially dangerous are street drugs like meth, heroin or cocaine laced with fentanyl.
According to an article in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (WJEM), 2011: [5] https://westjem.com/articles/excited-delirium.html "Excited delirium (EXD) is characterized by agitation, aggression, acute distress and sudden death, often in the pre-hospital care setting. It is typically associated with the use of drugs. Subjects typically die from cardiopulmonary arrest all accounts describe almost the exact same sequence of events: delirium with agitation (fear, panic, shouting, violence and hyperactivity), sudden cessation of struggle, respiratory arrest and death ."
It appears that an EXD episode began when the officers tried to get Floyd into the squad car. He resisted, citing "claustrophobia" -- the onset of the fear and panic phase, and "I can't breathe" -- difficulty breathing due to fentanyl locking into the breathing receptors in the brain. (Classic symptoms of EXD are highlighted in bold.) He then exhibited unexpected strength from the adrenaline spike in successfully resisting the efforts of four officers to get him into the car. We may never know whether Floyd's agitation was caused purely from the EXD adrenaline spike, or if it was aggravated by police attempts to subdue him -- but a subject defying the efforts of multiple officers to subdue him is a very common theme.
When Chauvin pulled him out of the car he fell to the ground, perhaps due to disorientation and reduced coordination. Presumably this was when he injured his mouth and his nose started to bleed, and the police made the first call for paramedics.
While restrained on the ground, Floyd exhibited agitation ( shouting and hyperactivity, trying to move back and forth) for several minutes. There is one brief video at this point. One hears Floyd shouting very loudly, as in the agitated delirium phase -- it sounds like, "My face is stoned ah hah, ah haaa, ah please people, please, please let me stand, please, ah hah, ah haaa!" [6] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-video-appea...17476/ . In a few minutes this was followed by " sudden cessation of struggle, respiratory arrest and death, " shown in a later video, where he becomes exhausted, and had stopped breathing when the ambulance arrived. [7] https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/vi...61280/
It appears that disorientation had already set in when the store employees went to Floyd's car and asked him to return the cigarettes he had bought for a fake $20 bill. He refused, and they reported the incident to the police, saying that he appeared to be very intoxicated. He certainly must have been, or he would have either returned the cigarettes or left quickly to avoid arrest. Loss of judgment is a symptom of the syndrome; this includes futile efforts to resist arrest.
Police Intervention and Intentions
The EXD diagnosis is controversial and in some quarters is viewed as an alibi for police brutality. The WJEM authors note, "Since the victims frequently die while being restrained or in the custody of law enforcement, there has been speculation over the years of police brutality being the underlying cause. However, it is important to note that the vast majority of deaths occur suddenly prior to capture, in the emergency department (ED), or unwitnessed at home."
Regarding restraint, they note, "people experiencing EXD are highly agitated, violent, and show signs of unexpected strength, so it is not surprising that most require physical restraint. The prone maximal restraint position (PMRP, also known as "hobble" or "hogtie"), where the person's ankles and wrists are bound together behind their back, has been used extensively by field personnel. In far fewer cases, persons have been tied to a hospital gurney or manually held prone with knee pressure on the back or neck."
This latter position is what the accused officer Chauvin was applying, although at one point the team did consider using a hobble. Physical restraint of the subject has always been the classical procedure, to prevent the subject harming themselves or others. It has been proposed that restraint helps to forestall injury and death by conserving the subject's energy, but most experts believe that by leading to an intense struggle, it increases the likelihood of a fatal outcome.
Since knowingly using counterfeit currency is a fairly serious offense, the Minneapolis officers were required to arrest Floyd and try to bring him in. When he violently resisted, the optimal choice could have been to let him sit against a wall and guard him while calling an ambulance. To be able to quickly switch from law enforcement mode to emergency care mode requires training in recognizing the symptoms.
The charge sheet against Chauvin included this exchange between the two white officers on the squad: [8] https://www.startribune.com/protests-build-anew-afte...869672 ""I am worried about excited delirium or whatever," Lane said. "That's why we have him on his stomach," Chauvin said."
According to this dialogue, Chauvin was apparently was trying to follow the protocol recommended by WJEM. Since Floyd was on his stomach, Chauvin's knee pinned him at the side of his neck, and did not impede breathing. Commentators are referring to Chauvin "kneeling" on Floyd's neck, or resting his weight on it. From videos it is hard to gauge how much weight he applied, but the correct procedure is just enough to restrain movement, not to crush the person.
Chauvin and his team might not have done everything perfectly, but it is easy to underestimate the difficulty of police work, particularly in cases of resisting arrest, whether willfully or due to intoxication. If they had been clairvoyant clinicians, they would have called an ambulance the moment they saw him. Better training is needed. Was the police department then responsible? Might the department have given the needed training if the AMA had acknowledged the existence of the syndrome? This brings up a paradox: could police critics who deny the syndrome then bear part of the responsibility for the deaths they decry? The syndrome is being recognized by law enforcement after the fact. It needs to be recognized as it is happening.
The American College of Emergency Physicians' White Paper Report on Excited Delirium Syndrome (ACEP, 2009) [9] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/a...09.pdf See also the decision by the Ninth Circuit Court, "[t]he problems posed by, and thus the tactics to be employed against, an unarmed, emotionally distraught individual who is creating a disturbance or resisting arrest are ordinarily different from those involved in law enforcement efforts to subdue an armed and dangerous criminal who has recently committed a serious offense." in "Explaining the Unexplainable: Excited Delirium Syndrome and Its Impact on the Objective Reasonableness Standard for Allegations of Excessive Force," https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...ext=lj The first few pages relate a narrative similar to the Floyd case, involving multiple police subduing a violent EXD victim, who suddenly dies from exhaustion. A media uproar then arises against alleged police brutality. notes that "a law enforcement officer (LEO) is often present with a person suffering from ExDS because the situation at hand has degenerated to such a degree that someone has deemed it necessary to contact a person of authority to deal with it. LEOs are in the difficult and sometimes impossible position of having to recognize this as a medical emergency, attempting to control an irrational and physically resistive person, This already challenging situation has the potential for intense public scrutiny coupled with the expectation of a perfect outcome. Anything less creates a situation of potential public outrage. Unfortunately, this dangerous medical situation makes perfect outcomes difficult." In other words, officers need to be policemen, paramedics and public relations experts all at once.
With a fatal overdose there is no good outcome possible, but there is no way for police to foresee that. Sometimes EXD can last longer, and it is not always fatal. Perhaps the ACEP Task Force on EXD will update their report and provide guidelines to help police identify and deal with EXD while avoiding accusations of police brutality.
In one video [10] https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/vi...61280/ Chauvin continued to apply the neck restraint although bystanders repeatedly objected, and even after Floyd stopped moving. As Floyd became exhausted, it could have been reasonable to relax the restraint to see if it was really necessary. Chauvin didn't seem to respond to the bystanders to give a medical reason for the restraint. His actions were consistent with a belief that police should restrain the subject until medevacs arrive. Videos show the police focused on restraint, never beating or striking Floyd. The restraint and verbal exchanges with Floyd are also consistent with a belief that he was resisting arrest, by refusing to get in the squad car. When he said "I can't breathe," they responded "You're talking fine." When they said "Get in the car," he didn't agree to.
Subjects suffering from EXD usually resist arrest violently, which requires police to restrain them, but when police see signs of EXD, they also need to call an ambulance. It appears the police may have called for paramedics first when Floyd developed a nosebleed, then for an ambulance, which arrived after Floyd had stopped breathing. [11] From the incident report of the fire truck that was called to the scene, it appears that both police and bystanders called 911 for emergency medical services (EMS). The first call was Code 2, apparently for Floyd's nosebleed, which summoned a fire truck, followed by a more urgent code 3, which was said to bring an ambulance within six minutes. It appears the police called the ambulance when Floyd's breathing and heartbeat stopped. https://www.startribune.com/first-responders-worked-...06682/ "Floyd goes limp and appears to lose consciousness. Hennepin EMS then arrive six minutes after the distress call." The article refers to the incident report by the fire truck, http://www.minneapolismn.gov/www/groups/public/@mpd...80.pdf which has a note implying the first call to EMS was from police and another call came from bystanders: "No clear info on pt [patient] or location was given by either initial pd [police department] officers or bystanders." We need an incident report from the ambulance. .
Videos of EXD incidents generally show subjects violently resisting arrest, and requiring multiple officers to subdue them. There is one news clip about a police department that was trained to regard EXD as a medical and not a criminal issue, and avoid physical restraint as far as possible; the results are much better. [12] TV news clips showing police restraining subjects who are exhibiting EXD symptoms and violently resisting arrest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qCqjuqEWEc A TV news report and cellphone video on a more humane method of managing an EXD case, thanks to police training, putting safety of the subject and of bystanders first, rather than restraints. However, no details are given about the outcome or the drug dose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qCqjuqEWEc
EXD seems to be the most likely reason why Floyd suddenly refused to get into the squad car, and began to shout and writhe on the ground. With or without EXD or police intervention, he was going to die quickly from fentanyl, short of immediate intensive care. A common treatment for EXD is sedation with drugs like ketamine. The usual antidote for fentanyl is naloxone. Higher levels of fentanyl may require intravenous naloxone for 24 hours or more.
Fentanyl is so deadly because it acts so fast and binds so tightly to dopamine receptors in the brain -- even those that control breathing, unlike other narcotics. [13] https://columnhealth.com/blog_posts/why-is-fentanyl-...erous/ . Deaths from fentanyl have skyrocketed in the last seven years. In one incident in California, superlethal fentanyl doses of 53 ng/mL were successfully reversed with intravenous naloxone. However, some patients were dead on arrival. https://www.drugs.com/illicit/fentanyl.html When Floyd complained "I can't breathe," although he was breathing, [14] Wikipedia has a detailed narrative of the incident here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd . Certain notes there support the thesis of fentanyl intoxication, and resisting arrest as part of an EXD syndrome. Floyd struggled with Lane before leaving his own vehicle, and again when Kueng, then all four officers, tried to get him into the squad car. Floyd already complained he couldn't breathe before they tried to get him into the police car, without any neck restraint, indicating the onset of respiratory depression from fentanyl. https://abcnews.go.com/US/george-floyd-protest-updat...038665 "They all tried to force Floyd into the backseat, during which time Floyd said he could not breathe, according to the complaint."
He also fell down twice, which could be seen either as a sign of intoxication or resisting arrest. The officers knew it was a drug overdose, as Thao told bystanders, "This is why you don't do drugs, kids." By the way, this Wikipedia article should be named "Death of George Floyd," as an accused is innocent until proven guilty. and then completely stopped breathing, this was the onset of respiratory arrest, which is how a fentanyl overdose kills.
While police work is needed to trace the source of these dangerous drugs, the problems of drug addiction and crime have deep causes and can only be contained, not solved, by the police. Whatever our society has been doing about these problems is not working.
Right now, our civilization risks being torn apart by the passions of extremism, due to a misunderstanding. Please share this analysis, as an appeal to return to reason.
Reviewer comment: "My first thought is why it has been left to you to figure this out, when we pay professional journalists to investigate these things, and why aren't the police and politicians telling us about this."
A good question which gives a clue to something I've been wondering about. When other commentators publish within hours, why does it take me a week or two to finish an article like this? Journalists are usually under a deadline to produce stories quickly, whereas it takes a lot of research and reflection to develop an original thesis into a fair and coherent explanation of events.
Everyone tends to have an agenda, and to look for facts to support it. Police brutality or looters running amok may be more newsworthy than a chronic problem like drug abuse. The best agenda now is to take a break to focus on facts, or else an "Excited Delirium" could become a contagion that engulfs our nation.
Part II. The Death of Tony Timpa
A highly pertinent question: Has there ever been a confirmed death from a knee hold before? Not finding any data by searching the Net, I posted the question on Quora. [15] https://www.quora.com/Has-there-ever-been-any-previo...ics-or One answer soon came.
A young white man died in Dallas a few years ago, after being restrained by the police with the knee on his back. My respondent believed he suffocated, but the actual autopsy said cardiac arrest due to cocaine, overdose EXD, and stress from restraint by police officers.
Tony Timpa had not only taken an overdose of cocaine, plus he was off his anti-schizophrenia medicine. Mental illness can also be a trigger for EXD, and according to the autopsy report, he displayed all the classic symptoms. The first phase, fear and panic, was fear of the onset of delirium itself -- he himself called 911 for help. By the time the police arrived, security guards had already handcuffed him to restrain him. He was incoherent, out of control, found lying on the ground, the typical EXD position. The police pinned him down with a knee on his back for 13 minutes, saying he was at risk of rolling into the roadway, and suddenly he was dead.
Tony Timpa died in 2016. The family got the run-around, [16] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/...timpa/ and an autopsy was not released until 2019. The body cam footage was released, which showed the police behaving callously towards the subject. The officers were originally charged with homicide, but it was found they were not at fault, charges were dropped and they were reinstated. Timpa's case is very similar to Floyd case in many ways, and there are also many differences -- the starkest of course being the intensity of the public reaction.
Here is the text of the Timpa autopsy. [17] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6226349-SWIF...515249
Case: ME Page 7 of8
Timpa, Anthony Alan
Based on the case history and autopsy findings, it is my opinion that Anthony Alan Timpa, a 32-year-old white male, died as a result of sudden cardiac death due to the toxic effects of cocaine and physiologic stress associated with physical restraint.
Cardiac hypertrophy and bipolar disorder contributed to his death.
The mechanism of death in cases such as this is sometimes referred to as "excited delirium." Classically, people affected by EDS are witnessed to exhibit erratic or aggressive behavior, and will often "throw off" attempts at restraint, requiring multiple people to subdue them. The person will appear to calm down and will suddenly become unresponsive. Most cases are associated with drug intoxication and/or illness.
In this case, several factors likely contributed to the death. The surveillance and body cam footage and witness reports fit the classic scenario of excited delirium and cocaine use and illness (bipolar disorder) are common predisposing risk factors for EDS. Cocaine leads to increased heart rate and increased blood pressure, making a cardiac arrhythmia more likely. Due to his prone position and physical restraint by an officer, an element of mechanical or positional asphyxia cannot be ruled out (although he was seen to be yelling and fighting for the majority ofthe restraint). His enlarged heart size also put him at risk for sudden cardiac death.
Although the decedent only had superficial injuries, the manner of death will be ruled a homicide, as the stress of being restrained and extreme physical exertion contributed to his demise.
MANNER OF DEATH: Homicide
[Signatures and seals of medical examiners]
(Note that homicide is not the same as murder, it also includes unintentional or accidental actions contributing to death.)
Anthony Timpa autopsy p. 5, blood tests -- Cocaine and metabolites
Cocaine, 0.647 mg/L
Ecgonine Methyl Ester, 0.378 mg/L
Benzoylecgonine, 0.843 mg/L
The lethal dose of cocaine ranges from around 0.1 mg/L to 0.6 mg/L, according to different sources [18] http://www.forensicmed.co.uk/science/toxicology/cocaine/ , https://academic.oup.com/jat/article/38/1/46/831276
If we add the three numbers above for cocaine and metabolytes together it comes to about 18 mg/L. This is anywhere from 3 to 18 times the lethal dose. With such an overdose, plus being without his schizophrenia medication, Timpa had little if any chance of surviving.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on Timpa, part of a series on the Dallas police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Police_Department#Killing_of_Tony_Timpa
"Killing of Tony Timpa [edit]
On August 10, 2016, Dallas Police killed Tony Timpa, a 32-year-old resident who had not taken his medication. Timpa was already handcuffed while a group of officers pressed his body into the ground while he squirmed. It took over three years for footage of the incident to be released. The footage contradicted claims by Dallas Police that Timpa was aggressive Criminal charges against three officers were dropped in March 2019 and officers returned to active duty."
Wikipedia doesn't even mention cocaine, although that was the main cause of death. Likewise, the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd makes no mention of a drug overdose or excited delirium. By entitling the articles "Killing" rather than "Death," Wikipedians appoint themselves as a court of law.
It must be observed that the Minneapolis officers acted with far more consideration towards Floyd than the treatment Timpa received in Dallas. The way the officers made fun of Timpa was a scandal. [19] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/tony-timpa-dal...m.html Then they were surprised when he suddenly died.
It is strange that George Floyd's case is taken as proof of systemic racism, when Tony Timpa got much worse treatment -- even though Timpa hadn't committed any crime, had no police record, and even called 911 himself.
Isn't it odd, when we have a problem in the United States of many shootings by -- and of -- the police, that such an uproar has arisen, over a case where the police actually had little or nothing to do with the man's demise?
The stress of restraint is most likely incidental. As reported by the WJEM, "Victims who do not immediately come to police attention are often found dead in the bathroom surrounded by wet towels and/or clothing and empty ice trays, apparently succumbing during failed attempts to rapidly cool down." Hyperthermia or high body temperature is a classic symptom of EXD. Enormous energy is released by an uncontrolled adrenaline spike. The heat also feeds delirium, which is a familiar symptom of high fever.
Normally, it's assumed that stress factors contribute to a heart attack, as medical examiners wrote in both the Floyd and Timpa cases. Yet the WJEM notes that "one important study found that only 18 of 214 individuals identified as having EXD died while being restrained or taken into custody." All victims died of cardiopulmonary arrest. Drug overdose and EXD are sufficient causes for this outcome.
Both Floyd and Timpa had taken overdoses at triple the lethal level. Enough drugs to kill them three times over. Yet you can only die once so how could the stress of restraint contribute more to their deaths? You can't contribute to a glass that's already full three times over. That is a little like saying that someone died because their parachute didn't open, and the weight of their backpack also contributed to the fall. But they die from the fall once they hit the ground, whether it's at 120 mph or 122 mph.
It's true, that in this analogy, the extra weight makes the jumper hit the ground a little sooner. Forcibly restraining the victim can cause them to struggle and consume energy more quickly, accelerating the burnout. Giving the subject a little space and empathy could help calm them. In this case, restraint might reduce energy loss. If that delays cardiac arrest until an ambulance arrives, the patient might be saved. Victims are less likely to struggle when strapped to a gurney than when held down by police. [20] "Probably negligible involvement of position in contribution of death in cases of excited delirium, although allowing patients to breathe effectively is obviously important." https://emergencymedicinecases.com/episode-3-excited...irium/
We can compare Excited Delirium to an explosion or a wildfire, that rapidly consumes all the energy in the body. The police try to contain the explosion by restraining it, but can one blame the firefighter for the fire? The explosion continues until all the fuel is gone. Then life's flame flickers out, and the drug-intoxicated body can not be resuscitated. [21] "According to Dr. Assaad Sayah, Chief of Emergency Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, Excited Delirium Syndrome can be best explained as a 'physical response to an actual psychological [or drug] problem resulting in their autonomic systems producing too much adrenaline.' Dr. Sayah analogizes it to 'having too much nitrous in a car; eventually the engine will blow up.' In most cases, the cause of death is either 'a heart attack or, less frequently, respiratory failure.' Dr. Vincent Di Maio estimated that Excited Delirium Syndrome kills 800 people every year in police altercations because the victims "are just overexciting [their] heart from the drugs and from the struggle.'" Op. cit. https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...ext=lj Presumably, the blood must be circulating in order for the antidote to neutralize the fentanyl.
In conclusion, excited delirium should be treated as a medical condition, at high risk of ending quickly in sudden death. An ambulance should be called immediately. Only the minimum necessary restraint should be applied. Police and paramedics should be trained in the symptoms and handling protocols.
It would be helpful if the AMA would recognize EXD as a real condition, rather than dismissing it as a cover story for police brutality. Ignorance of the symptoms can lead to unintentional cruelty by police, when they assume they are confronted by a typical case of a criminal violently resisting arrest, rather than a patient with a life-threatening intoxication.
Notes
[1] https://lawandcrime.com/george-floyd-death/authorities-just-released-george-floyds-complete-autopsy-report-read-it-here/ The full autopsy report was published here https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf Diagnoses are summarized on pp. 1 and 2: I. The "blunt force injuries" are basically minor cuts and bruises: "cutaneous" injuries and contusions from handcuffing. II. Chronic conditions: Heart disease, hypertension and enlarged heart. These all tend to accelerate death from a drug overdose. They can also develop from long-term drug abuse. III. No injuries to the front of the neck or throat were found. This full 76-page report does not contain the word "homicide."
[2]
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/02/02/fentanyl-overdose-dont-count-naloxone-save-you-10822
"The patients who were dead on arrival had gone into cardiac arrest due to blood concentrations
of fentanyl that were much higher than what is administered therapeutically. " Patients who died
in hospital had concentrations of 9.5 ng/mL to 13 ng/mL. See also note 13. In other studies of
death from heroin and morphine, there were deaths from only 100 ng/ml of morphine and "all cases
with a blood concentration of 200 ng/ml and more of free morphine displayed a fatal outcome."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11040428_Fatal_versus_non-fatal_heroin_overdose_Blood_morphine_concentrations_with_fatal_outcome_in_comparison_to_those_of_intoxicated_drivers
(Heroin quickly metabolizes into morphine.) Fentanyl is considered 100 times more potent than
morphine. By this comparison, Floyd's blood fentanyl concentration could have been 10 times the
fatal level. In addition his morphine concentration of 86 ng/mL would usually be fatal by
itself.
Concentration levels are relative to the volume of blood, so are independent of body size.
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/01/george-floyd-independent-autopsy-findings-released-monday/5307185002/ A report commissioned by the Floyd family stated that asphyxiation from sustained pressure was consistent with the evidence, but the author Michael Baden didn't have access to all the evidence, and chose not to endorse his opinion with the "expert opinion" label.
[4] The knee on the neck is a body hold, not a chokehold or carotid restraint, which involves putting pressure precisely on both carotid arteries, located on either side of the throat. A carotid restraint is usually applied by an elbow, and causes the subject to pass out in as little as 15 seconds. Blocking the arteries does not stop the breathing or heartbeat (pulmonary or cardiac arrest), which Floyd suffered after being restrained for many minutes. Once pressure on the arteries is released, the subject normally regains consciousness quickly.
[5] https://westjem.com/articles/excited-delirium.html
[7] https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/videos/1425398217661280/
[8] https://www.startribune.com/protests-build-anew-after-fired-officer-charged-jailed/570869672
[9] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/acep_report_on_excited_delirium_syndrome_sept_2009.pdf See also the decision by the Ninth Circuit Court, "[t]he problems posed by, and thus the tactics to be employed against, an unarmed, emotionally distraught individual who is creating a disturbance or resisting arrest are ordinarily different from those involved in law enforcement efforts to subdue an armed and dangerous criminal who has recently committed a serious offense." in "Explaining the Unexplainable: Excited Delirium Syndrome and Its Impact on the Objective Reasonableness Standard for Allegations of Excessive Force," https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=lj The first few pages relate a narrative similar to the Floyd case, involving multiple police subduing a violent EXD victim, who suddenly dies from exhaustion. A media uproar then arises against alleged police brutality.
[10] https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/videos/1425398217661280/
[11] From the incident report of the fire truck that was called to the scene, it appears that both police and bystanders called 911 for emergency medical services (EMS). The first call was Code 2, apparently for Floyd's nosebleed, which summoned a fire truck, followed by a more urgent code 3, which was said to bring an ambulance within six minutes. It appears the police called the ambulance when Floyd's breathing and heartbeat stopped. https://www.startribune.com/first-responders-worked-nearly-an-hour-to-save-floyd-before-he-was-pronounced-dead/570806682/ "Floyd goes limp and appears to lose consciousness. Hennepin EMS then arrive six minutes after the distress call." The article refers to the incident report by the fire truck, http://www.minneapolismn.gov/www/groups/public/@mpd/documents/webcontent/wcmsp-224680.pdf which has a note implying the first call to EMS was from police and another call came from bystanders: "No clear info on pt [patient] or location was given by either initial pd [police department] officers or bystanders." We need an incident report from the ambulance.
[12] TV news clips showing police restraining subjects who are exhibiting EXD symptoms and violently resisting arrest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qCqjuqEWEc A TV news report and cellphone video on a more humane method of managing an EXD case, thanks to police training, putting safety of the subject and of bystanders first, rather than restraints. However, no details are given about the outcome or the drug dose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qCqjuqEWEc
[13] https://columnhealth.com/blog_posts/why-is-fentanyl-so-dangerous/ . Deaths from fentanyl have skyrocketed in the last seven years. In one incident in California, superlethal fentanyl doses of 53 ng/mL were successfully reversed with intravenous naloxone. However, some patients were dead on arrival. https://www.drugs.com/illicit/fentanyl.html
[14] Wikipedia has a detailed narrative of the incident here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd . Certain notes there support the thesis of fentanyl intoxication, and resisting arrest as part of an EXD syndrome. Floyd struggled with Lane before leaving his own vehicle, and again when Kueng, then all four officers, tried to get him into the squad car. Floyd already complained he couldn't breathe before they tried to get him into the police car, without any neck restraint, indicating the onset of respiratory depression from fentanyl. https://abcnews.go.com/US/george-floyd-protest-updates-arrests-america-approaching-10000/story?id=71038665 "They all tried to force Floyd into the backseat, during which time Floyd said he could not breathe, according to the complaint."
He also fell down twice, which could be seen either as a sign of intoxication or resisting arrest. The officers knew it was a drug overdose, as Thao told bystanders, "This is why you don't do drugs, kids." By the way, this Wikipedia article should be named "Death of George Floyd," as an accused is innocent until proven guilty.
[18] http://www.forensicmed.co.uk/science/toxicology/cocaine/ , https://academic.oup.com/jat/article/38/1/46/831276
[19] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/tony-timpa-dallas-police-body-cam.html
[20] "Probably negligible involvement of position in contribution of death in cases of excited delirium, although allowing patients to breathe effectively is obviously important." https://emergencymedicinecases.com/episode-3-excited-delirium/
[21] "According to Dr. Assaad Sayah, Chief of Emergency Medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, Excited Delirium Syndrome can be best explained as a 'physical response to an actual psychological [or drug] problem resulting in their autonomic systems producing too much adrenaline.' Dr. Sayah analogizes it to 'having too much nitrous in a car; eventually the engine will blow up.' In most cases, the cause of death is either 'a heart attack or, less frequently, respiratory failure.' Dr. Vincent Di Maio estimated that Excited Delirium Syndrome kills 800 people every year in police altercations because the victims "are just overexciting [their] heart from the drugs and from the struggle.'" Op. cit. https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=lj
Anon [223] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 4:11 am GMT
I think more likely he died of a Covid-19 induced heart attack. Heart disease is the #1 comorbidity of Covid19. Doctors have talked about patients of Covid19 dying of sudden heart attacks at a high rate. Floyd was Covid19 positive, and he also had heart disease and hypertension, the top two comorbidity of Covid19.R.C. , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 4:12 am GMT
That is over three times the lethal overdose, following earlier reports where the highest dose survived was 4.6 ng/mL.SOL , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 4:38 am GMT
Good points. And before this, all we ever heard about was how deadly fentanyl is. It killed Tom Petty and is so potent, it killed him via skin absorption! Now, however, the Back Flow Media (BFM) ;-), has agendas to push and truth ain't one of them.
Unfortunately, those who need to learn these facts have no interest in truth. Logic, reason, common sense, and all such things are thrown out; instead, the mob controls based upon who yells the loudest, not who makes the most fact-based sense.
Excellent work. Unfortunately, the revolutionaries exploiting his death don't care about the truth.obwandiyag , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 4:55 am GMT
People don't riot over the specific police murder that sets it off. They riot because they are sick and tired of the ways cops treat them–one of the ways being to murder them. If you don't like the Floyd murder, I got a couple thousand other cop murders for ya, and I would like to see you write such a stirring defense of cop-killed bodies riddled with hundreds of rounds of automatic weapons fire. Including all the dead white people.Anonymous [456] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 5:11 am GMT
No denying that Floyd was a thug. Neither would any amount of denying alter the fact that he died at the hand – rather the knee – of a racist cop. Get over it, supremacists.Cranberries , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 5:16 am GMT
anonymous1963 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 5:29 am GMTThis fentanyl concentration, including its norfentanyl metabolite at its molecular weight, was 20.6 ng/mL
Might help for someone to explain this calculation, since simply summing the fentanyl and norfentanyl concentrations gives 16.6, not 20.6.
It really does not matter. The Jewish mainstream media has tried and convicted the officers. They will never get a fair trial and are screwed. Saint George will have to be avenged or there will be more riots, arson and looting which the same degenerate media will call "protests".Franz , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 5:30 am GMT
So they could have left him alone and he would have died anyway, another statistic.Hang All Text Drivers , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 5:45 am GMTIt does imply intrusive policing invites unintended consequences. For the counterfeit $20, a summons would have been sufficient. Then George could have crawled off, go home to Jesus, and we could have been spared the phoniest and most overblown freak show since the Fall of Babylon.
Let them patrol their own 'hoods and be done with all this.
@R.C. """"the mob controls based upon who yells the loudest, not who makes the most fact-based sense."""Wuok , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 5:54 am GMTWrong – Yelling loud does not matter. If you are anti-white the press is on your side no matter how softly you speak.
But why he didn't die before the police placed his knee on his neck?Thulean Friend , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 5:54 am GMT
Fentanyl Floyd was a drug peddler and a petty criminal who got caught in the act of selling drugs by patrolling police. Panicking, he swallowed his own stash and overdosed as a result. Now he is being retconned into a saint.Robert Dolan , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 6:05 am GMT
I suspect the F killed the man, but you will never convince the negroes, and the Jmedia will never reveal the truth anyway.Gleimhart Mantooso , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 6:06 am GMT
At this point I think the universe is just trolling us for the fun of it.Sean , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 6:10 am GMT
I think Floyd was being passive aggressive rather than resisting as such. What was done to him by Chaving was punishment out of frustration, but the duration was well outside normal practice.Ficino , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 6:35 am GMTFloyd already began to complain "I can't breathe" a few minutes before the neck restraint was applied,
That will be a dangerous argument for Chauvin's defence counsel to make to the court, because it will be opening the door to a telling counter argument: Floyd's breathing was restricted after he reported respiratory distress.
If it was a Fentanyl overdose they ought to have given him Narcan antidote, not put weight on his ribcage while he was face down and his hands cuffed behind him; a contributory cause according to the autopsy, which found wrist bruises.
@Anon There's no such thing as a heart attack induced by covid-19.Sparkylyle92 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 6:45 am GMT
People who have been hospitalized for heart disease, and subsequently test positive for covid-19, don't usually die from the virus they die from their underlying heart disease condition.
I saw the video. Looked like just another hoax to me. Weight on his other knee, looking right at the camera while "killing" someone, yada yada. Officer Chauvin, fer Chrissake. Officer Racist would be too much even for stupid goyim. 8 minutes my ass. Aces and eights anyone? The point of this fentenyl dohicky is to pretend it really happened. Just another deep state psyop I say. But go ahead and argue about it. Makes it easier to steal 10 trillion from the US taxpayer.Biff , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 7:01 am GMT
This guy is channeling Johnny Cochran. Yes, we know O.J. didn't do it either, because Nicole Brown was high on lethal amounts of cocaine, and Ron Goldman was mainlining deadly amounts of horse(heads almost fall off when this happens)ICANREAD , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 7:23 am GMTYou see, the amount of imaginary fantasy is endless which feeds the inter-civilian war of people-against-people while the State remains blissfully secure knowing that those who control the media(narrative) will always win
Otherwise, yea, we get it, the police are always honest, justice is blind, your vote counts, your money is secure, god loves you, the vaccine is harmless, and your children are doing a great service by telling the government instructor(school teacher) that you smoke pot, so the state can seize everything you own.
Your underlying analysis is incorrect. People overdose at much higher levels and live through it. Maybe the cops should have been more interested in why he was presenting in an altered state and called an EMT, than carting him off to jail for a possible forged $20 bill.goldgettin , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 8:18 am GMTSee http://uthscsa.edu/ARTT/AddictionJC/2020-02-11-Sutter.pdf
The mean serum concentrations of fentanyl in their patients was (52.9 ng/mL) with a range of 7.9-162.3 ng/ml.
One of the 18 patients died in hospital. Five patients underwent cardiopulmonary resuscitation, one required extracorporeal life support, three required intubation, and two received bag-valve-mask ventilation. One patient had recurrence of toxicity after 8 hours after naloxone discontinuation. Seventeen of 18 patients required boluses of naloxone, and four required prolonged naloxone infusions (26–39 hours). All 18 patients tested positive for fentanyl in the serum. Quantitative assays conducted in 13 of the sera revealed fentanyl concentrations of 7.9 to 162 ng/mL (mean = 52.9 ng/mL).
The author starts one paragraph with "in conclusion", LOL again LOLRouterAl , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 8:29 am GMT
Once again missing the point,intentionally,misdirecting. It's a FALSE FLAGStreet theater duh, set up Fromthestart. Plandemic.Seriously,it creates jobs.
Liars oops I mean lawyers,oops I mean poly ticks,locally,nationally,
all the way to the jewdicial branch and congress and beyond.GET REAL.It's far worse than that.An elder told me they don't believe in IQ.
The facts and investigations and evidence don't do nuffin after the incurred LOSS
of SO much time,money,energy,community,productivity,confidence,SANITY etc.
THIS is COUP and" it's no where near in conclusion." that's my comment,thanks
peace,love, life
Excellent article which should be on the front page of every major paper in the USA. The part on the Excited Delirium Syndrome is new to me but it's interesting .It illustrates nicely this civil disorder has nothing to do with Mr Floyd. I just hope officer Chauvins defence team makes good use of this information.Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 8:38 am GMT
As a retired pharmacist I'm surprised by the use of fentanyl as a drug of abuse. The therapeutic dose banding is very small, its very potent , it is a very short acting drug and it's a drug that only an anaesthetist should consider using or abusing. Its a very potent respiratory depressant that has a nasty habit of producing a delayed action hours after the affect has apparently worn off. Fentanyl also causes heart slowing and any anaesthetist would give other drugs to counter that effect to keep the patient under control.Now lets look at the photo of other officers using the correct Israeli defence force pin down
Notice that the knee and leg not doing the pinning is not on the ground therefore all the weight of the body is brought to bear on the victims neck and the major blood vessels under the knee. Now look at officer Caulvin his right boot toe is on the ground along with his right knee. Try it yourselves on a pillow, you cannot bring any force to bear , at best you are holding someone with that pose. He also looks under no stress from Mr Floyd with his hold. At 5′ 8" I would be using the IDF method if I had to restrain Mr Floyd, but lets be honest I would avoid him full stop. There is also the fun part of trying to hit and subdue someone who thanks the the Fentanyl in his system would feel little pain.
This whole thing looks very suspicious to me , and the speed with which the thing went global even more suspicious. The speed that people appeared with expensive t-shirts and hoodies all bearing
"I cannot breath" printed on the front in many locations simultaneously along with the piles of bricks and attacks on statues has a pre-planned Soros and Antifa agenda all over it.
I'm sure that the author of this article, who I assume isn't a drug addict, will be totally fine if a racist white thug in uniform with a history of murdering people knelt on his neck for nine minutes with its hands in its pockets. Yes, it was the drugs all along!anon [161] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 8:41 am GMT
vot tak , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 8:55 am GMTHis ability to resist four officers trying to get him into the squad car is typical of EXD cases.
When did this happen, exactly? The security cam video show that two [2] officers succeeded to get Floyd into the back seat of the cruiser. Then, one officer pulled him out on the other side.
I've read plenty about ExD, and believe that Chauvin will make a successful defense. Your '4 men failed' spared me reading this long slog.
Gotta protect those israeli occupation troops at all costs and keep their colonial police state (that's the usa, neanderthals) a colonial police state. Should those dumb goy animals unite and force our quislings out, who knows what might befall our "sacred homeland".animalogic , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 9:24 am GMT
Did drugs kill George Floyd ? Does it matter ?Anonymous [178] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 9:26 am GMT
This affair is one of public perception.
The perception IS that Chauvin used excessive force. The guy died after that "force" whether excessive or not. People, rightly or wrongly see cause & effect.
As for your points about overdose ? Fairly weak. Every minute that passes the likelihood of overdose decreases. Overdoses don't hide in your system for 20 minutes (excluding digestion or assimilation) & then jump out & shut down your heart.
Floyd may have appeared intoxicated, but he also appeared functional for a "normal" unstressful setting.
He sat down, handcuffed, against a wall for some minutes without "losing it".
Also interesting -- they had him in the police car -- then dragged him out for lack of compliance. Why ? Let him sit in the locked, secure police back seat, So he screams & makes a fuss ? Arrestees are known to do that. But no, they drag him out (still handcuffed) & THREE of them get on top of him: one on legs, one on the torso, & one on his neck. And stay that way for nearly 9 minutes. And its not like they don't know he's physically problematic -- they call the EMS early on.
Now lets imagine that you have a problem with your heart or breathing (he tells them numerous times about his breathing, not necessarily entirely from physical airway blockage, but from panic -- psychology rendering the act of breathing difficult )– would being pinned to the road by 3 burly men, one of them exerting some pressure on your neck not cause some degree of panic ? Could some people be near to literally shitting themselves from panic ? Would such fear & panic not be contraindicated in a man for whom you have already called the EMS ?
Funny thing, was I a police man I would have asked Floyd to sit in his car (yes, take his keys & guard him) while I had a look at this so-called counterfeit bill. I mean, that's the point isn't it ? this whole abortion rests on passing a dodgy $ 20. (Knowingly passing: I wonder how many shonky US bills there are out there millions ?).
So Floyd is probably a scumbag -- so ? The whole affair looks appalling. And that really IS the point here.
"Systemic racism" is simply POC and non-European descended Whites saying that they cannot live in Western (or, indeed, industrial) society,gotmituns , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 9:34 am GMT
The POC are correct in this. Who, after all, is qualified to tell them that they are wrong? George Floyd was destroyed by "systemic racism" in the above sense. Even East Asians and South Asians with high enough IQ and sufficient emotional control to live in Western (industrial) society strongly condemn the lack of organization in such societies, and the absence of the protective social organizations (caste, a directive government/social organization) that are characteristic of their homelands. Middle Eastern Whites condemn the absence of the tribal / honor / religious system that characterizes their countries of origin.
POC and non-European descended Whites want Western ( industrial) society changed or destroyed for their benefit.
This is a serious and irresolvable conflict of interest, for the European descended Whites are just as unable to live in the home societies of various POC and non-European descended White groups as these groups are unable to live in Western (industrial) society.Note that the above irresolvable conflict of interest is not ever discussed directly. This is characteristic of major irresolvable conflicts of interest. WW II is a good example of this (see the American Pravda articles, unz.com , for support of this assertion). All of the participants (except possibly Hitler, who apparently wanted a European Empire allied to the British Empire) thought it was "them or us" (hence the "unconditional surrender" demands from the Allies), and thus had strong reasons for fighting. These reasons were not used in propaganda by any side. Propaganda based on self interest of the "only one Empire will survive" type makes poor propaganda. So does propaganda based on what amounts to a multi-sided volkwandering ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswanderung ), which is what we seem to be entering into.
Good propaganda is smoke -- mythic appeals, but to a non-applicable myth, with irrelevant "proof". George Floyd is an example of how this is supposed to work.
The interesting thing about this situation is that it is the OC and non-European descended Whites are the ones insisting that they cannot live in the West / industrial civilization. Granted that the Left wing of the Democratic Party is the proximate cause of the current offensive, attempted Antifa leadership of the offensive has been largely repudiated or simply ignored by the various POC. Understanding the basics of this situation requires that the objections of the POC and non-European descended Whites be taken seriously and understood, as I have tried to do above.
Doesn't matter what theniggerdied of. They're going to get the White guy no matter what.Jud Jackson , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 9:49 am GMT
Fantastic Article!! I just hope the cop is acquitted.Emily , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:03 am GMT
@Sean If it was a Fentanyl overdose they ought to have given him Narcan antidote,Moi , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:08 am GMTAre you serious?
These cops meant to make an instant medical diagnosis.
Decide the problem and drug involved.
Produce an antidote.
And administer it.
What planet are you on?
And had they administered the wrong drug .?
They would be crucified as well.
Its hard to believe you can really believe that comment yourself.
Its sheer prejudice and blah for BLM.
And a grossly unfair accusation.
@anonymous1963 Three points:Anon4578 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:08 am GMT*Since the MSM and many of our leaders are in sync with BLM, we should just turn the country over to them since they've done a great job within their own "neighborhoods."
*It's pretty useless to say the MSM loves BLM. The MSM does what the folks who control/own it tell it to do.
*Per BLM's demand, cops should stop patrolling black neighborhoods and instead boost patrolling non-black neighborhoods to reduce crime there.
Police were not arresting him for the counterfeit bill. If you pass a counterfeit bill you are interviewed by police so they can attempt to trace its origin.onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:15 am GMTWhere did you get cash?
Where do you cash your checks?
Did you get this as change for a larger bill? Where?
He was detained because when they came up to him in the car he was obviously intoxicated and behind the wheel. Also rewatch the security tape and see the cop talks to him for 2 minutes and at one point is so worried by whatever Floyd was doing he unholstered his gun but didn't point it. Floyd also had no ID on him.
So it's a cascade of events that lead to his arrest. Police can't ID an intoxicated person behind the wheel of a car. Try to get him out of the car and he immediately starts resisting.
@Sparkylyle92 " I saw the video. Looked like just another hoax to me"steve K. , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:15 am GMTHere's an excellent analysis of 3 of the alleged live, completely contradictory videos on this alleged event, which quite clearly show it to be hoax perpetrated via crisis actors, fake police and EMT's. :
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/OItT0WD55x0w/
Regards, onebornfree
@Anonymous And what evidence do you have that Chauvin was racist? Is it because all white people are racist?padre , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:33 am GMT
What's the difference, does it mean that police should continue with their practice, till they choke a healthy person?Rich , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:45 am GMT
@Anonymous I'm curious about this "racist cop" trope that's become pretty common. Is it common for "racists" to be married to someone of another race as Chauvin is? I'd think a "racist" would favor a spouse of their own race, no? Seems to me, to you crazies on the left, Pale skin makes a person a "racist ". It's become a truth in America that the only definition of "racist" is White. The word is, therefore, meaningless. Floyd died because of his drug use and criminal activity. Not a knee on the back of his neck.Moi , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:45 am GMT
@SOL I second that. Problem is there is no satisfying the BLM folks. They are suffering from PTSD because of our history of slavery. This is sort of like vets who have PTSD, but the key difference being vets actually participated in a war whereas no black living was a part of our history of slavery.journey80 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:57 am GMTThe solution is for the BLM and lgbtqi folks to join forces and put forth a black tranny candidate to solve all our problems.
Why should we believe the "report"? why not believe our lying eyes? Who released this "report"? Where is an independent verification? I'll wait, thanks, for a report that has been released by an independent source that is confirmed by the family.anon [392] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 10:58 am GMT
The ADL is the rabid hate group and a threat to society.Contraviews , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:19 am GMT
If this is the case, if it is true the officers should have a very strong defence in court.Emslander , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:25 am GMT
anon [392] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:31 am GMTI'm sure that the author of this article, who I assume isn't a drug addict, will be totally fine if a racist white thug in uniform with a history of murdering people knelt on his neck for nine minutes with its hands in its pockets. Yes, it was the drugs all along!
When I see a comment like this on an article as closely reasoned and supported as this one, I wonder whether public schools teach the ability to read.
You can check my previous posts and see that these are precisely the points I made from a very casual glance at the autopsy report and a little knowledge of police motivations. That was right after the incident occurred. Videos and photos are very poor evidence because they only raise emotional response.
Thank you, Ron Unz, for being brave enough to publish this article.
@onebornfree ..hall of fame vs their sandy hoaxEliteCommInc. , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:40 am GMT
laughing.Fred777 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:44 am GMTI guess the defense is entitled to a defense. I guess that is the benefit of having two coroner's reports. The skill and advocacy of the police unions to manufacture alternative theories and creates smoke as defense is light years ahead of antifa, BLM or the KKKK.
Te problem with the the current system is not dug induced males sitting on their cars o falling asleep in drive thrus or jogging in around empty construction sites or waiting for tow trucks, or selling cigarettes, or avoiding creepy guys stalking the in apartment complexes, or sleeping in their beds or or walking with some white women --
It's the loss of credibility. The police unions can have the officers walk out as they ave routinely done as a means of black mail holding cities hostage, but at the end of the day, what technology is doing is unavailing a side of Wyatt Earp the public would rather not see even if they know what's up. It's the system in a manner of exposure unlike it's even been used to. It's the collapse of the arguments for invading countries that are not a threat. It's the collapse of the internal dialogues among the agencies in multiple arenas of government force. It's Ruby Ridge, It's Waco, It's Baltimore, It's Fergusaon. It's Oakland. It's Baton Rouge. It's New Jersey. It's . . . It's balloting were the 1 per-center is suddenly number one,. Utter nonsense such as written in the Fergason Report. It's nonsense such as the Ferguson Effect.It's a news system, that is serious doubt. It's bail out for WS, repeatedly and then throwing the payees f bail out out of works. It is stagnant wages. It's hiring and executive to make a serious shift ad the best he could do hire ore part time citizens and embrace more immigrants.
It's the system saying it's not the system. It;s loosening up credit for businesses and the rules for consumers tighter. It's watching something on film as it happens and then being told what you saw is not what happened.
It's the unmasking of tactics used by the system to shield itself from accountability. And perhaps worst of all, we believing what the system tells us because believing reality is just to tough a road to to travel. It is the system saying . . . it's not the system.
-- -- --
uhh No. I didn't believe there was a reason to invade Ira or Afghanistan or any of the subsequent intentions by the former Vietnam protester "we lost Vietnam" crowd as I am that Mr. Floyd died from a drug overdoese.
And none of the smoke and mirrors: that Pres Hussein was a bad person, that the Taliban were in on 9/11, that the family occupying Ruby Ridge were Nazis, Mr. Koresh was a demon, there's a Fergason Effect, that blacks are just bad innately and whites are angelic beings along with browns and yellows worthy of pass, or that IQ is destined by some unique, unknown and unseen genetic code, that the Russians sabotaged US elections, . . . or US lost Vietnam (no it did not). If I start buying onto the nonsense spouted as truth to escape accountability before you know it, I will start advocating that slaves were just immigrants coming the continent for better jobs and life.
And cows rally do jump over the moon.
@Moi BLM having PTSD over slavery would be like an Air Force veteran who served in the 1990s having PTSD over hitting Omaha Beach in the first wave.Wizard of Oz , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:46 am GMT
@Sean Apart from Emily's point I note that you state that Chauvin constricted Floyd's breathing without evidence despite it not being accepted by the author of the article.Z-man , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:47 am GMT
This proves, the sainthood of a very simian looking convicted criminal doped up coon, that you can fool some of the people all of the time. The Jooz are laughing all the way to the ban total control of the World.Jim Bob Lassiter , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:47 am GMT
@obwandiyag Well let's have 'em (couple of thousand cop murders) . And don't forget to include Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas.Sick of Orcs , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:48 am GMT
Segregation worked. Hard to believe it's just sitting on the shelf, unused.Jim Bob Lassiter , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:51 am GMTAccess to Whites is not a right.
@Anon4578 A passer of counterfeit bills is typically given an opportunity by the cheated merchant to make him whole before the cops are called. Saint George, for whatever reasons, didn't avail himself of the opportunity extended to him to do just that.Jim Bob Lassiter , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:54 am GMT
@Wuok He prolly would have had they just left him alone. Then they'd be in jail for failure to render first aid. The rioting would have still happened. Heads or tails, you lose with niggers.gotmituns , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 11:59 am GMT
@Rich Chauvin was probably a screaming liberal until he got involved with the chink. The thing about chinks is they're known to hate everyone equally who isn't a chink.Steve in Greensboro , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:12 pm GMT
@Anonymous Did you read the article? Seems pretty convincing to me.Felix Krull , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:21 pm GMT
It is strange that George Floyd's case is taken as proof of systemic racism, when Tony Timpa got much worse treatment -- even though Timpa hadn't committed any crime, had no police record, and even called 911 himself.Redman , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:26 pm GMTThat is not strange. The reason BLM choose cases where the policeman only did their job is because otherwise, they'll risk seeing the policeman go to jail, and then there'd be no systemic racism to rail against. Only when you are sure the policeman will be exonerated in a court of law, can you rile the animals without risking the party coming to an end before the music even starts.
@Anonymous And proof of that racism would be what exactly?DanFromCT , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:28 pm GMT
@RouterAl For the time being, an educated comment like yours gets a hearing, in contrast to the unreasoned moral posturing of so many others here. For so long as they can hide behind "good intentions," they can run from inconvenient facts. UR recently featured an article and comments on Dietrich Doerner's Logic of Failure , which says it best about these disgusting phonies who'd never dream of reexamining their positions based on the horrors they cause.Redman , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:28 pm GMT"In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good intentions. But the nurturing of good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise, while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far from clear whether "good intentions plus stupidity" or "evil intentions plus intelligence" have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions. The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means.
Excerpt From
The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations
Dietrich Dorner
This material may be protected by copyright.
@Thulean Friend What exactly did happen to the white substance that clearly fell out of his left pocket while against the wall? Odd nobody mentions that.wlindsaywheeler , says: Website Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:31 pm GMT
George killed himself. He took a lethal overdose of Fentanyl. The meth and the fentanyl combined cause delirium and heart problems. These two drugs caused what is called "Excited Delirium Syndrome" which is usually fatal.annamaria , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:44 pm GMThttps://medium.com/@gavrilodavid/why-derek-chauvin-may-get-off-his-murder-charge-2e2ad8d0911
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2263095/
http://www.progressivepress.com/blog-entry/death-rides-fast-horse-black-life-shattered-dope
When the officers pulled him out of the Mercedes–he was already foaming at the mouth. These four officers need to be released and given their jobs back. Their arrests are just a lynch mob by the liberal establishment. George killed George. He gambled with his life, put himself in that position with allegedly passing counterfeit money. Furthermore, George was DWI; he was sitting in the drivers seat. Even though you are not driving, sitting in the driver's seat is DWI, Driving while impaired. Who needs to be arrested is the Drug Dealer that sold him the Fentanyl.
Moreover, Excited Delirium syndrome causes "Wooden Chest". That is what George was experiencing, His drug cocktail killed him.
@R.C. Reality check for the "revolutionaries:"annamaria , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:49 pm GMT
https://www.hannenabintuherland.com/europa/whites-were-slaves-in-north-africa-before-blacks-were-slaves-new-world1 million to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th, by slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli alone (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast)
"From bases on the Barbary coast, North Africa, the Barbary pirates raided ships traveling through the Mediterranean and along the northern and western coasts of Africa, plundering their cargo and enslaving the people they captured."
From at least 1500, the pirates also conducted raids along seaside towns of Italy, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and children.
On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore, Ireland were abandoned following the raid, only being resettled many years later. Between 1609 and 1616, England alone had 466 merchant ships lost to Barbary pirates.
@Anonymous Are you sure that you are not a racist or a progeny of racists?VinnyVette , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 12:49 pm GMTAs Confederate statues are torn down in the USA, one wonders: Are we going to ask Egypt to change its name, tear down its pyramids which were built by slaves too? And destroy mummies of pharaohs that had slaves?
Are the black tribes of Africa, the ones who sold the slaves they took from other tribes when at war and sold to the Arab slave traders, are we going to change the names of those African tribes too? And tear down the names of their leaders?
No comments? Here is more:
Regarding white slaves in Africa and black slaves in the New World, it is often overlooked that slaves were enslaved before they were bought and sold by Jews, Arabs, and Gentiles. The unasked question is: Who enslaved them?
Things that used to be true before political correctness set in: More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States.
All this obsessing over what pretty boy George died of is irrelevant. Cops putting their knee on the neck, the most vulnerable part of the human body is wrong period! No sympathy for the thug, he was a menace to society. What should be obsessed over is police culture has not been to "protect and serve" since at least the 70's. They see themselves as "at war" with the whole of society, from the suburban soccer mom to the ghetto thug.JQ , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:00 pm GMT
It's widely known cops will take a routine traffic stop, and poke and prod at the driver to try to rile them up and get the person to react and give the cop an attitude to escalate the interaction into an altercation. In the suburbs, quiet rural areas it matters not. Race matters not. They'll pull this shit in the most docile neighborhoods, with the most docile of people, regardless of color.
I'm neither pro cop or anti cop, I see them as a necessary evil. They'd be a hell of alot less evil if reforms were made in their attitude toward the public at large, and if they were held accountable for all their various abuses of power. They also need their privileged status as some sort of exalted special class "above the public" obliterated! Cops on the whole are some of the most corrupt, anti social, sadistic people in society. I know many of them personally, both city and suburban.
As much as I dislike the rioting, looting, arson and chaos, I'm enjoying the karmic retribution the boys in blue in receiving.
@obwandiyag It could also be that a certain race is a bit more prone to get into drugs, crime, prostitution,Biff , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:06 pm GMT
and so on. And truth to be told hard work is not in their DNA. As long as you keep
denying FACTS this will never end.Canada has to bring thousands of Mexicans and Guatemalans to work on the farm fields,
while half of this people are on welfare, and when they do work they only want easy jobs,
bus drivers, taxi drivers, or for the governments where most of the time they just don't perform
as well. In the mean time people like me are being taxed close to 60% to pay for all these social programs which only benefits the laziest
@Rich171 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMTIs it common for "racists" to be married to someone of another race as Chauvin is?
Yes.
File that one under "dumb question" ..
Since when gross injustice against a once subdued person legitimate anti-humanity? That is how, to a naive person consumes daily propaganda by the usa government and their presstitute which reflect an appearance of "good america" while genuinely reflecting a clandestine disdain for what is right or such unjustified violence cloaked under the line of duty against the general population would not be so common in the touted "land of the free." The magnet (of the peaceful protesters from australia, to europe and latin america) is not to a "good free land of jewmerica" but to the missing and lack of legitimate Justice parroted along with the moral compass touted by the usa government and their law enforcement while the true reality of irrectitude makes itself apparent in videos such as the one of George floyd's unjustified assassination/murder, where unjustified violence is evident. Thus, with these uncensored videos by the peaceful population or general public of the usa, the truth did not remain hidden by manipulated narratives of the jew-owned presstitute and media in favor of the cia/usa government flavor of their wicked ideology preference while cloaked in sheep's clothing.ploni almoni , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMTIn conclusion, When an individual poses a serious threat to an officer or another individual, according to the National Institute of Justice, the "peace-officer" (as they are glorifyingly touted) is generally authorized by law to use lethal weapons (i.e., firearms) to protect himself or herself or others by stopping the individual's actions. You don't want to realize that there is IRREFUTABLY no serious threat nor danger to life once a person (of any color in handcuffs as the estate of George Floyd was and many others) is subdued. And, those marching (or rather peacefully protesting to show solidarity) in many other foreign nation states display how morally magnetic is the actual legitimate axiom of the interest of justice because that no democracy can exist unless each of its citizens is as capable of outrage at injustice to another as he is of outrage at unjustice to himself.
Calling all trolls: discuss this as if it were a real event to demoralize and confuse the public and prevent them from acting.follyofwar , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:25 pm GMT
@Jud Jackson Could the authorities risk an acquittal? Or might Chauvin suffer the same fate as Epstein?Truth3 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:32 pm GMT
Truth no longer matters toTazer 2.0 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:34 pm GMTNegroes.
Faggots.
Trannies.
Women.
Democrats.
It never mattered to Jews. Falsehood and Sophistry is their weapon of choice.
I don't care so much for the cops since they would put you in a cage with these animals for thought crimes like posing the JQ and denying the Holycaust without any hesitation at all. They are paid mercs and sometimes they get burned. Similarly the light property damage incurred by corporate storefronts and reduction in quality of life for liberal urban dwellers is not at all a concern for me, and I honestly hope this goes on in perpetuity until the statistical reality of black crime is literally beaten into their skulls. As for George Floyd he will no longer be producing any more of his ilk. He was set to marry a lower class white woman and open an establishment eponymously named the Konvict Kitchen, all in defiance of the principles of nuptiality and common decency. The former enhances black criminality by combining pathological white genes from the classes which in Europe would have their breeding restricted by cultural and economic constraints but are allowed to flourish here generating trailer parks and white trash that with miscegenation and negrification are as much of a danger to society as the the African type they complement.anon [427] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:41 pm GMTIn any case having seen the footage from these events it strikes me that these cops are themselves very unintelligent. In the case of the Atlanta negro aptly named Rayshard they were inclined to play junior detective and gameshow host for upwards of 30 minutes when it was obvious that they should have immediately incapacitated the feral groid and dragged him away from a motor vehicle capable of causing far more damage than the plastic dart guns they ended up wrestling over. Instead they allowed the monkey to shuck and jive for what seemed like an hour repeating the same inane phrases over and over again. I would have been inclined to dump a mag in the baboon at the 2 minute mark. These two men were themselves products of negrification and no doubt they likened the ill-fated negro to their favorite afleets and sports stars they worship on TV, giving him chance after chance to behave like a human being with around a standard deviation more aptitude than they should have given him credit for. If they had a choice between the ineffective Taser device and a firearm they ended up using it would have gone better.
I think this country is screwed in the long run and I just hope it ends in fireworks. The long and inexorable drag into stupidity is maddening.
I doubt anyone cares what he died from, they can just go "change" their signs to some guy in Georgia. They all look like hoaxes but they needed something for "change" to happen. Back to online petitions and countless fake hoaxes and more toppling anything whuhhh, and more historical revision to erase whuhhhh, can't even spell it anymore.JimDandy , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:41 pm GMT
Who called the police on the martyrs? Why would a black person call the police on a black man asleep in the line at Wendy's in Georgia, when they could have just drove around him. Why have the white police bother him? It all just looks like more lefty "change" helped out by the good folks at Netflix or something.
@obwandiyag Yet they always seem to pick a loser. Funny, eh?backup , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:43 pm GMTAnd how dare you bring WHITE victims into this?!!! This is about BLACK victims and WHITE oppressors. GOT IT?!
He also had sickle cell anemia. The coronary report mention a lot of "sickled" cells, but only postmortem. It is knows that sufferers of SCD show that kind of pattern: Death induces it. However, George Floyd was also COVID19 positive, and there are signs that COVID19 decreases Hemoglobin levels:Anonymous [208] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:43 pm GMTPrimate models of Covid-19 (Munster 2020) and human Covid-19 patients have subnormal haemoglobin levels (Chen 2020). Clinical evaluationof almost 100 Wuhan patients reveals haemoglobin levels below the normal range in most patients as well as increased total bilirubin and elevated serum ferritin (Chen 2020). Hyperbilirubinemia is observed in acute porphyria (Sassa 2006) and would be consistent with ineffective erythropoiesis (Sulovska 2016) and rapid haemoglobin turnover.
https://osf.io/4wkfy/download/?format=pdf&usg=AOvVaw2aUKMUoT-E7lUm0WvwqQaj
People with SCD can suffer from other viruses causing anemia, without showing sickled cells:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease#Aplastic_crisis
@ICANREAD They did call the EMTs. That's what they were waiting for. Maybe you shouldn't try to analyze the situation until after you learn what the situation involved?JimDandy , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:48 pm GMT
@Wuok He was dying before he even left the car. He collapsed when they pulled him out of it. He collapsed after they helped him walk to the wall. He was complaining that he couldn't breathe before he had a knee on his neck. My sense was that when he saw the cops were coming for him, he swallowed his drugs. Pretty common.Anon [375] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:52 pm GMT
@obwandiyag I basically agree.JimDandy , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 1:59 pm GMTThis was also about the McMichael shooting. And the entire Trump presidency.
@EliteCommInc. And criminals who break into pregnant women's houses and jam guns into their pregnant guts really do get their just deserts when they hastily swallow all the drugs they were dealing to avoid going back to the joint.EliteCommInc. , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:00 pm GMT
"It is strange that George Floyd's case is taken as proof of systemic racism, when Tony Timpa got much worse treatment -- even though Timpa hadn't committed any crime, had no police record, and even called 911 himself."Anon [375] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:01 pm GMTIt would b strange if what you said was accurate.
enforcement, It is not singular artifact.I is not any singular death, not even a group of deaths that are rare at the hands of police. It's the ten million plus arrests misdemeanors primarily that end with violence against unarmed citizens that are disproportionately used with respect to african americans it's the related history. It is the sentencing. It is the pea bargain system . . .
It's the crack vs regular cacaine narratives nonsense, it is the rhetorical dialogue -- it is not one single thing, but a compendium of constructs across the country over time.
@Anon It seems more likely that the heart attack came because the heart was overworked due to low blood-oxygen levels due to the sedated breathing from the opioid.Sokrates , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:01 pm GMT
@animalogic Are you member of BLM?chuckywiz , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:05 pm GMT
Go tell these crap to a decent jury
Such analysis is diversion from the main discussion. It does not matter if Floyd was on drugs or a criminal. Why was he treated brutally by the police. Too much power given to the law enforcement. And the bad apples always take advantage of it. Observe the way they walk. No sign of humility or being a servant of society or a protector.Zarathustra , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:13 pm GMT
Race riots yes. but so many whites and no African Americans are rioting, too. It is economic disparity and hopelessness, stupid, and that is what the pundits are avoiding purposely.
Brilliant presentation.tradecraft46 , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:18 pm GMT
I was arrested one time and was put into car. Interestingly enough I had difficulty breathing and I did not have any drugs in me.
I did ask officer to open window in the car but he did not. He did not care.
Who cares, nits make lice .Juckett , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:24 pm GMT
@SOL Exactly. They would not even spend the time to read this excellent example of actual journalism.Emily , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:25 pm GMT
Their hatred blinds them to all facts.
Talking time is over. Balkanize the failed multi-cultural experiment. Ethnostate is NEEDED.
Separate from Hate.
Anyone else getting rather peed off by the huge donations to BLM, apparently about to flow in – as reparations for the proceeds from slavery by Briitish firms.fnn , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:33 pm GMT
Seems to me these companies should be starting at home.
What about the proceeds from mills and factories here in England where the labour was little more than slavery.
Forced on the poor for pathetic and utterly meagre wages – amounting to slavery – as the option to the 'poor house'.
Children of seven working 12 hours a day for pennies.
Many dying and crippled by the machinery under which they had to scrabble.
I am sure there are millions – not least up north – who would very much like some recognition for the quite awful exploitation of their forebears.
Oops – sorry – they all have white faces and are not prepared to commit mayhem, arson and criminal damage to support any claim.
Time, maybe to start, it works.
Maybe we less than aristocratic English people should start a few demands in payment for the terrible conditions of the industrial 'revolution', for the Victorian slums, more appalling than black Americans ever endured.
You don't see the black Americans sporting rickets, TB, suffering starvation, diptheria and smallpox to mention a few.
Or kids forced up chimneys.
I wonder how Dickens would be feeling today – at Lloyds etc.
Disgusted and sick, I imagine.
Don't get me started on those 'pressed' into the navy .
@gotmituns I've read that's she's a Hmong. As dumb as the press is, I don't know how they could confuse Hmong and Chinese.Emily , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:39 pm GMT
@chuckywiz Why was he treated brutally by the police.Sean , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:44 pm GMTWas he?
The autopsy doesn't appear to record 'brutal physical injury' of the kind you appear to claim .
Could you detail the evidence that demonstrates such 'brutality'
Restraint surely does not come into that category and there is no or very little indication on his neck or throat.
Clarify the facts, Chucky, so we can all see the cuts, bruises, abrasions
Perhaps you will also give us some information as to how you would have handled a very large such individual full of fentanyl and other substances .
@Wizard of Oz The author of the article talks about the knee on Floyd's neck only. But while he may be correct, that knee was not the only thing going on. I am talking about the other things including Chauvin's other knee. Officer Lane seems to have diagnosed Floyd's medical status as one unlikely to stand up to the tender mercies being administered by Chauvin. Lane, the first cop to talk to Floyd, had immediately observed he had been foaming at the mouth. Later, once Chauvin got on top of Floyd, Lane suggested turning him face up, and said he was worried about EXD. Lane's partner complained and said 'don't do that' to Chauvin in relation to him kneeling on Floyd.JimDandy , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:49 pm GMTIf a 300lb wrestler was to apply a tight bodylock (bear hug) and keep it on tight, breathing would halt and the one being bear hugged would quite likely die within 10 minutes. Floyd's breathing was constricted by his bulk and being put face down with cuffs pulling his arms against the side of his ribcage. The weight and duration of Chauvin's knee on Floyd's back surely is what tipped the balance and killed him. There is an ex cop and prison guard who admits he used to deliberately break the fingers of resisting convicts who points to the sun glasses perched on Chauvin's head and the casual placement of his hands while kneeling on Flyod as clear indications there was no meaningful resistance from him, see here .
It is not mere opinion that Floyd was not actively resisting arrest during the several minutes he had Chauvin on top of him, because officer Chauvin was recorded explaining the reason Floyd was being pinned down was he had not cooperated earlier , when they had tried to put him in the police car. Hence Chavin virtually admitted it was a was a physical punishment for previous non-cooperation, but in law Chavin is not permitted to use the restraint technique as a punitive measure, which he knew very well. Hence Chauvin was commiting a felony, wham, in the course of which someone died, bam. Wham bam: felony murder.
@chuckywiz Actually, this article touches on what you consider the "main discussion" when it assesses whether or not the cop was following procedure. Is the man being vilified as the worst person on earth just a guy who was doing the job he was taught to do? If you think the rules are wrong, you're free to work to change them. This cop will face an American court, not some post-revolutionary tribunal. The question is whether or not his trial will look more like the latter than the former.Trinity , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:51 pm GMT
Hispanic cop in Georgia shoots and kills white guy who grabs Hispanic cop's taser = NO coverage by national media. Hell, I live in Georgia and I didn't even hear about this one.RobbieSmith , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:52 pm GMTWhite cop in Georgia shoots and kills black guy who grabs White cop's taser = NONSTOP 24/7 coverage by national media.
SHOULD THE MEDIA BE LABELED AS A HATE GROUP BY THE $PLC?
@Anonymous Yep. The more Blacks in a society, the less safe and prosperous it is.RobbieSmith , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMTThis is not complicated; it's an IQ issue.
Google: National IQs
Notice a pattern?
[MORE]
• 108 Singapore
• 106 South Korea
• 105 Japan
• 105 China
• 102 Italy
• 101 Iceland
• 101 Mongolia
• 101 Switzerland
• 100 Austria
• 100 Luxembourg
• 100 Netherlands
• 100 Norway
• 100 United Kingdom
• 99 Belgium
• 99 Canada
• 99 Estonia
• 99 Finland
• 99 Germany
• 99 New Zealand[snip]
• 70 Botswana
• 70 Rwanda
• 69 Burundi
• 69 Cote d'Ivoire
• 69 Ethiopia
• 69 Malawi
• 69 Niger
• 68 Angola
• 68 Chad
• 68 Djibouti
• 68 Somalia
• 68 Swaziland
• 67 Dominica
• 67 Guinea
• 67 Haiti
• 67 Liberia
• 66 Gambia
• 65 Congo
• 64 Cameroon
• 64 Gabon
• 64 Sierra Leone
• 64 Mozambique
• 59 Equatorial GuineaBlacks can only achieve because they have White admixture or because they reside in White societies. Too few of them are smart enough to even build sufficient infrastructure in Africa to allow the Black intellectual elite to achieve.
Sub-Saharan Africans have never made a contribution to the world. If allowed to become too numerous they destroy previously-thriving and safe White cities.
This is why Blacks seethe with jealousy and hatred of Whites yet can't seem to stay away because they want what we create and maintain, no matter if they deserve it or not. They want our peaceful and clean neighborhoods, our law and order, our technology and science, our school systems, our inventions, the jobs we create, the food we grow, the transportation we invent, the entertainment we provide Blacks hate us but can't live without us. That's why they demand that we take care of them and give them special rights and privileges that we don't grant ourselves, just to compensate for their inability at living in a modern and technologically-advanced civilization.
Some groups succeed all the time, everywhere. Some have never succeeded anywhere.
Blacks are the oldest race, so they should be the most advanced race; but they never developed at all and had to be domesticated by Whites.
National IQs calculated and validated for 108 nations:
https://www.academia.edu/18754731/National_IQs_calculated_and_validated_for_108_nations
https://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/IQandNationalProductivity.pdf
@Sick of Orcs "Access to Whites is not a right."RobbieSmith , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMTJust week we had a White sub-Saharan African (Elon Musk) launch a spacecraft while Black sub-Saharan Africans destroyed several cities.
Name a civilization (or even a written language) ever created by Blacks.
Name a single contribution from sub-Saharan Africans to the world.
The simple fact is, everything Blacks have was given to them by Whites.
Blacks are the only race never to have civilized. They were removed from the jungle just 250 years ago.
Blacks can only achieve because they have White admixture or because they reside in White societies. Too few of them are smart enough to even build sufficient infrastructure in Africa to allow the Black intellectual elite to achieve.
@annamaria "whites-were-slaves-in-north-africa-before-blacks-were-slaves-new-world"anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 2:58 pm GMTSlavery was the best thing to happen to Blacks, it was essentially a rescue mission by a free cruise. Being a slave was actually a good career move for a Black African -- as it still would be today. An enslaved Black in any non-Black country has a higher standard of living than a free Black living among his own kind.
After defeating George Foreman for the heavyweight boxing title in Zaire (now Congo), Muhammad Ali returned to the United States where he was asked by a reporter, "Champ, what did you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat."
Blacks are incapable of creating a civilization of their own. Blacks can only achieve because they have White admixture or because they reside in White societies. Everything Blacks have was given to them by Whites.
Criminally insane Floyd killed himself. His chosen lifestyle could only lead to a bad end sooner or later. He shouldn't even have been out on the street after his armed home invasion conviction. It was the misfortune of the police to have had to deal with this drugged-up thug at the point he was going to expire due to drugs and eroded health due to years long drug use. He was a large, tough looking criminal that one had to be careful in dealing with. This is the 'hero' of the moment, one of the scummiest people one could ever meet.Herald , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:00 pm GMT
@Anon Get a big copper to put his weighted knee on your neck for 8 minutes or so and then report back and tell us how it was for you.fnn , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:07 pm GMT
@chuckywiz The Jewish MSM always ignores non-black victims of police misconduct. They made a collective decision to do that following the mild uproar over Ruby Ridge and the Waco massacre of the Branch Davidians. Today the Narrative is all about white oppressors and black victims.EoinW , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:17 pm GMTIt is economic disparity and hopelessness, stupid, and that is what the pundits are avoiding purposely.
We can't read minds, so you could possibly be right. But in the visible world toppling statues of white men and various displays of guilt-mongering seem to be taking precedence over any racially neutral economic demands.
Muddy the water. Now we know why they hate us. Now we know why posters at this site and Zero Hedge are considered white trash. Science is unacceptable when lefties use it to promote global warming or the Nazis use it to lock down our society, but when it can be manipulated to try and prove dirty cops innocent then it's okay. What's to conclude? Giant Echo Chamber! The Left has it to keep their ignorant followers in line. The Right has it as well. Everyone preaching to their audience and no one really worried too much about truth.Rurik , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:29 pm GMTThis is an excellent site. It's a shame that it feels a need to blame EVERYTHING on Jews or Socialists or whatever the rednecks have been brainwashed to fear. The site simply hurts its credibility doing this. Not much better than Left wing groups and that's one serious Freak Show!
@obwandiyagKo , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:29 pm GMTThey riot because they are sick and tired of the ways cops treat them–
no, they're rioting because blacks and browns don't have academic and economic parity with whites, and the ((universities)) have instructed their charges that there's no such thing as racial differences, and so that means all the academic and economic discrepancies between white and black, and the over-representation of blacks in the criminal justice system, are all a direct consequence of lingering, "systemic" white racism in America.
That's why they're rioting. The Floyd death was simply the perfect metaphor for America's 'racism', crystalized down to nine minutes of video.
The video was simply the catalyst, for a mindset that's been foisted by the ((universities)) and ((media)) for many decades now.
We're seeing what they've wanted all along. White people transformed into Palestinians, treated as second class citizens. Affirmative action, and now free health care ONLY for blacks in Kentucky.
White people will pay the taxes, but not get the benefits, because they're racists and anti-Semites, and like the Palestinians (terrorists) they don't deserve any rights.
That's what this is all about. The 21st century is to be like the 20th, a Jewish supremacist orgy of racial hatred unleashed.
From what I understand, Fentanyl acts quickly and if he had 3x lethal dose in him, he would have died earlier.Trinity , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:37 pm GMTI feel bad for the cops, trained by Israelis who routinely kill Palestinians and use the knee of the head move. Look here at pics:
https://insidearabia.com/israel-exports-its-brutal-police-training-to-the-us-and-it-shows/
I don't understand why they held him down so long. It seems as if they wanted to wait until the criminal stopped tensing himself, which could be an indicator of continued resistance. Maybe they felt if they eased up, he'd jump up and fight them as the guy in Atlanta did.
The Atlanta cops are going to get lynched. That's not justice.
@RobbieSmith Ali spoke a lot of truth and the only reason the counterculture adopted him is because of his stance against "Whitey" or what they thought was his stance against "Whitey." I do not blame Ali for not wanting to fight for America in the Vietnam War. When Ali grew up, Blacks were indeed second class citizens, far from it now, they have their asses kissed 24/7. Ali was about Blacks pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, and was a hardcore SEPARATIST. Ali actually had more than a touch of Irish blood in him. I wish more Blacks did indeed belong to the NOI like Ali, I think we would have less crime and they would stay to themselves.Anonymous [363] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:37 pm GMT
George Floyd was an unhealthy man. He wasn't an angel. He wasn't even a decent citizen. He was a piece of shit.Zarathustra , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:38 pm GMTBut he didn't die of an overdose.
He died from a cop burying his knee on his neck for almost 10 minutes. Already in horrible shape with breathing problems, his body wasn't able to handle it.
Floyd was pleading for him to get off his neck. He was asking for his mother. C'mon people. Chauvin was heartless and ignorant. All he had to do was get off Floyd's neck. He wasn't a threat.
Chauvin had a serious lapse in judgement. So did Floyd. He wouldn't have been in that position in the first place. We can always argue that Floyd was a piece of shit. Maybe he was, but he didn't have to die like that. Who in this comment section is so perfect to judge?
Chauvin has his own issues. He isn't a murderer either. Ignorant and callous, yes. Deserving of jail time. I don't think so. Therapy and retirement form the police force? Absolutely.
3 problems in USRurik , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:38 pm GMT1 Blacks can newer be civilized.
2 Blacks will never trust white people.
3 Whatever whites will do. Blacks will never be satisfied until they will have all and permanent administrative power.
@EoinWDweezil the Weasel , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMTNazis use it to lock down our society
what a lying POS you are
It was the liberal Democratic governors who were the worst 'lock-down' "Nazis", but to a dishonest, agenda-driven liar like you, the truth is only something to bastardize to your own hatred-consumed agenda.
EVERYTHING on Jews or Socialists or whatever the rednecks have been brainwashed to fear.
Yea, it's not like thousands of those rednecks haven't given their lives in the last two decades fighting the Eternal Wars for Israel, now is it? But that's a price we should all pay for what was done on (((9/11))), huh?
The entire debate is moot at this point. Floyd is dead. The puppeteers have their "Crisis". The mob is still out there. Thought crime is the new passion. Negroes can do nothing wrong. When they do, it is my fault because I am white. Up is down, down is up, etc. The big question is what lies ahead.Priss Factor , says: Website Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 4:05 pm GMT
This was all manufactured to cover the real truth about a collapsing economic system which will devastate nations and economies all over the world. When it hits(my bet is before 2021), nothing else will matter. Here in Amerika, the Sheeple, Normies, and Cucks will go bat-s ** t crazy. It will be Bosnia times Rwanda times Venezuela, times The Stand. Plan accordingly. Bleib ubrig. Proverbs 27:12.
All this hysteria over one dead black thug and utter silence about far more tragic/innocent victims(often at the hands of black thugs) suggest that the 'systemic racism' is in favor of blacks.Trinity , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 4:11 pm GMTIt's like US's favoritism for Zionists over Palestinians, Iranians, and Arabs.
We hear endless yammering about 'antisemitism' and 'white supremacism', but US is pathologically philosemitic and serving Jewish Supremacism 24/7.
BTW. it will be funny when a black guy wearing a Floyd t-shirt ends up dead at the hands of another black.
@Anonymous IF this whole incident is REAL, and believe me, nowadays I have a hard time believing anything we see in the media or read is REAL, I have to say the cop was wrong and does deserve to do time. Whatever the guy died from, people in the crowd told Chauvin over and over that Floyd wasn't moving. The other cops should have pulled Chauvin off as well. The case in Atlanta is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, however. IMO, Chauvin is guilty of manslaughter and quite possibly second degree murder, but that one would be hard to prove. BUT the question must be ASKED ONCE AGAIN, how or why did it come to this, WHY didn't George Floyd COMPLY with officer's orders? Floyd would still be alive IF he had JUST COMPLIED with the cops. What is it about complying with an officer's orders do Blacks not understand? A couple months ago a man was killed right up the street from me because he attacked an officer with a knife. The officer responded to a domestic dispute and the man STUPIDLY charged an armed cop with a knife and was shot dead. White cop, and white perp so that was the end of story.ruralguy , says: Show Comment June 19, 2020 at 4:11 pm GMT
@Ficino Covid-19 attacks cells with ACE-2 enzyme receptors. They are present in the lungs, heart, intestine, blood vessels, and kidneys. Many people infected with Covid-19 suffer more damage in these organs than in the lungs. People think they will recover quickly from this virus like another cold (two of the cold strains are actually coronoviruses) or flu viruses, but it's damage to the organs is more severe. It leaves them vulnerable to next year's covid-20, where they will now have "preexisting health conditions."