Friday, August 23, 2019

Left behind: In search of Empire in the 21st Century America and Britain bombed themselves back to the Stone Age





“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." ~ Edward W. Said, Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003


Lordy, Lordy who would have thought that “not so Great Britain” and America in their quest for Empire in the 21st Century would find themselves left behind in the age of enlightenment, advancement and progress.    Their insatiable lust for money and power through illegal bombing campaigns against any nation standing up to Empire, has left Britain and America deeply in debt, with their infrastructure crumbling and unable to care for their own people. 

W. Bush’s US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to "bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age" if it did not participate in the illegal U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan that kicked off the Iraq War.  Ironic isn’t it, for it is us that have been bombed back to the Stone Age. 

The W. Bush Administration along with the British Empire’s Prime Minister Tony Blair reverted the richest, most powerful nations on earth back to the Stone Age in terms of power, prestige and fortune.  With their vicious, hideous campaign of bombing using banned chemical weapons like depleted uranium, medieval torture programs, and opening up governments to rampant pillaging by Western vulture corporatists, they destroyed not only those unfortunate nations but also “not so Great Britain” and America too.  Today these two nations have become the most reviled, evil nations with no regard for human life, especially in their own countries.  Lordy, Lordy.

The illegal, unelected W. Bush Administration was installed at the helm of America after 8 years of peace and prosperity during the Clinton Administration.  Armed with a 2 billion dollar surplus in the American treasury as well as trillions in more surplus projected into the future, flush with great paying jobs with excellent health and fully funded retirement benefits, the W. Bush Administration demanded the surplus be returned to the people as it was “their money.”

However by “the people” Georgie Bush meant “rich people” who W. Bush called “my base, the haves and the have mores.”  Immediately, Bush passed the biggest tax cut in history for the benefit of the rich with no regard for the damage it would cause to the middle class and the country itself.  From Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair 2007.


Excerpt:

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MR. BUSH
The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy.

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century…

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting…

Remember the Surplus?

The world was a very different place, economically speaking, when George W. Bush took office, in January 2001. During the Roaring 90s, many had believed that the Internet would transform everything. Productivity gains, which had averaged about 1.5 percent a year from the early 1970s through the early 90s, now approached 3 percent. During Bill Clinton’s second term, gains in manufacturing productivity sometimes even surpassed 6 percent…

The Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, spoke of a New Economy marked by continued productivity gains as the Internet buried the old ways of doing business.  Others went so far as to predict an end to the business cycle. Greenspan worried aloud about how he’d ever be able to manage monetary policy once the nation’s debt was fully paid off.

This tremendous confidence took the Dow Jones index higher and higher. The rich did well, but so did the not-so-rich and even the downright poor. The Clinton years were not an economic Nirvana; as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during part of this time, I’m all too aware of mistakes and lost opportunities. The global-trade agreements we pushed through were often unfair to developing countries. We should have invested more in infrastructure, tightened regulation of the securities markets, and taken additional steps to promote energy conservation.

We fell short because of politics and lack of money—and also, frankly, because special interests sometimes shaped the agenda more than they should have. But these boom years were the first time since Jimmy Carter that the deficit was under control. And they were the first time since the 1970s that incomes at the bottom grew faster than those at the top—a benchmark worth celebrating.

By the time George W. Bush was sworn in, parts of this bright picture had begun to dim. The tech boom was over. The Nasdaq fell 15 percent in the single month of April 2000, and no one knew for sure what effect the collapse of the Internet bubble would have on the real economy. It was a moment ripe for Keynesian economics, a time to prime the pump by spending more money on education, technology, and infrastructure—all of which America desperately needed, and still does, but which the Clinton administration had postponed in its relentless drive to eliminate the deficit.

Bill Clinton had left President Bush in an ideal position to pursue such policies. Remember the presidential debates in 2000 between Al Gore and George Bush, and how the two men argued over how to spend America’s anticipated $2.2 trillion budget surplus? The country could well have afforded to ramp up domestic investment in key areas. In fact, doing so would have staved off recession in the short run while spurring growth in the long run.

But the Bush administration had its own ideas. The first major economic initiative pursued by the president was a massive tax cut for the rich, enacted in June of 2001. Those with incomes over a million got a tax cut of $18,000—more than 30 times larger than the cut received by the average American. The inequities were compounded by a second tax cut, in 2003, this one skewed even more heavily toward the rich.

Together these tax cuts, when fully implemented and if made permanent, mean that in 2012 the average reduction for an American in the bottom 20 percent will be a scant $45, while those with incomes of more than $1 million will see their tax bills reduced by an average of $162,000.

The administration crows that the economy grew—by some 16 percent—during its first six years, but the growth helped mainly people who had no need of any help, and failed to help those who need plenty. A rising tide lifted all yachts. Inequality is now widening in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century.

A young male in his 30s today has an income, adjusted for inflation, that is 12 percent less than what his father was making 30 years ago. Some 5.3 million more Americans are living in poverty now than were living in poverty when Bush became president. America’s class structure may not have arrived there yet, but it’s heading in the direction of Brazil’s and Mexico’s.

The Bankruptcy Boom

In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous “war of choice” in Iraq.

A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II…

Tax breaks for the president’s friends in the oil-and-gas industry increased by billions and billions of dollars. Yes, in the five years after 9/11, defense expenditures did increase (by some 70 percent), though much of the growth wasn’t helping to fight the War on Terror at all, but was being lost or outsourced in failed missions in Iraq.

Meanwhile, other funds continued to be spent on the usual high-tech gimcrackery—weapons that don’t work, for enemies we don’t have. In a nutshell, money was being spent everyplace except where it was needed. During these past seven years the percentage of G.D.P. spent on research and development outside defense and health has fallen. Little has been done about our decaying infrastructure—be it levees in New Orleans or bridges in Minneapolis. Coping with most of the damage will fall to the next occupant of the White House.

Although it railed against entitlement programs for the needy, the administration enacted the largest increase in entitlements in four decades—the poorly designed Medicare prescription-drug benefit, intended as both an election-season bribe and a sop to the pharmaceutical industry. As internal documents later revealed, the true cost of the measure was hidden from Congress. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies received special favors.

To access the new benefits, elderly patients couldn’t opt to buy cheaper medications from Canada or other countries. The law also prohibited the U.S. government, the largest single buyer of prescription drugs, from negotiating with drug manufacturers to keep costs down. As a result, American consumers pay far more for medications than people elsewhere in the developed world…

You’ll still hear some—and, loudly, the president himself—argue that the administration’s tax cuts were meant to stimulate the economy, but this was never true. The bang for the buck—the amount of stimulus per dollar of deficit—was astonishingly low. Therefore, the job of economic stimulation fell to the Federal Reserve Board, which stepped on the accelerator in a historically unprecedented way, driving interest rates down to 1 percent.

In real terms, taking inflation into account, interest rates actually dropped to negative 2 percent. The predictable result was a consumer spending spree. Looked at another way, Bush’s own fiscal irresponsibility fostered irresponsibility in everyone else. Credit was shoveled out the door, and subprime mortgages were made available to anyone this side of life support. Credit-card debt mounted to a whopping $900 billion by the summer of 2007…

Between March 2006 and March 2007 personal-bankruptcy rates soared more than 60 percent. As families went into bankruptcy, more and more of them came to understand who had won and who had lost as a result of the president’s 2005 bankruptcy bill, which made it harder for individuals to discharge their debts in a reasonable way. The lenders that had pressed for “reform” had been the clear winners, gaining added leverage and protections for themselves; people facing financial distress got the shaft…

Meanwhile, we have become dependent on other nations for the financing of our own debt. Today, China alone holds more than $1 trillion in public and private American I.O.U.’s. Cumulative borrowing from abroad during the six years of the Bush administration amounts to some $5 trillion.

Most likely these creditors will not call in their loans—if they ever did, there would be a global financial crisis. But there is something bizarre and troubling about the richest country in the world not being able to live even remotely within its means. Just as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have eroded America’s moral authority, so the Bush administration’s fiscal housekeeping has eroded our economic authority.

The Way Forward

What is required is in some ways simple to describe: it amounts to ceasing our current behavior and doing exactly the opposite. It means not spending money that we don’t have, increasing taxes on the rich, reducing corporate welfare, strengthening the safety net for the less well off, and making greater investment in education, technology, and infrastructure.

Those proscriptions to put the economy on stable grounds were ignored by the New Democratic Party, which is the same as the Republican Party and under the Obama Administration made those tax cuts permanent.  America is now over $22 trillion in debt and embroiled in even more wars for Empire.

Republican tax cuts for the rich have been catastrophic for America every single time they have been passed.  It never changes, the Republicans are a two-trick pony, tax cuts for the rich and war for Empire.  It took FDR over a decade to undue to catastrophic Republican economics that drove America into the Great Depression.  President Carter was on target to pay off the debt when he had to battle not only Republicans, but Zionist Democrats. 

Senator Ted Kennedy, not at all like his brothers Bobby and JFK, was a corporatist.  He ran against Carter in the 1980 primaries and even though he did not stand a chance, he took his candidacy all the way to the floor at the 1980 convention doing irreparable harm to Carter. 

Carter was then embroiled in the takeover of the US Embassy in Iran and the Reagan Campaign coerced the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election to ensure Reagan would win the election claiming Carter was weak on foreign affairs.  Reagan immediately passed the largest tax cuts for the rich in history plunging America into debt.  Reagan went on a rampage, busting unions and putting in place a healthcare system that enriched shareholders while devastating the middle class and poor.  Bush senior who followed the Reagan regime realized that the tax cuts had devastated America calling them voodoo economics.  He raised taxes and the Republicans turned on him like vipers.

President Clinton was elected after overcoming a massive campaign attacking his character and immediately faced an investigation into Hillary’s White Water land deal in which the Clinton’s had lost money.  While the investigation was ongoing, Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich launched his “Contract on America”, oops, excuse me “Contract for America” and passed a massive tax cuts for the rich. 

When Clinton vetoed Gingrich’s bill and raised taxes on the rich, Gingrich shut down the government.  Not one of those half assed shutdowns you see today, but a complete and total shutdown, lights out, everyone go home, no government business shut down.  It was during this time that Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky.  Since the Clintons had been exonerated in the White Water scandal, the Republicans along with their Democratic partners expanded the investigation into the Lewinsky affair.

The Clinton investigation that lead to impeachment was more about his vetoing the massive tax cuts for the rich than anything else.  After Clinton raised taxes on the rich, reined in corporate welfare, broke up the Ma Bell monopoly and almost passed universal healthcare, he produced a massive budget surplus threatening to pay off the debt owed to the foreign banks known as the Federal Reserve. 

By September of 2001 the George W. Bush tax cuts had tanked the economy turning workers 401K’s into 201K’s.  Unemployment was rising and it took two jobs to make the amount of money working people made with one job under Clinton.  Bush’s approval had tanked to 39% and plunging.  Bush needed a Pearl Harbor type event to get his war with Iraq.

Once again the Republicans and now with support of likeminded Democrats sought to use the surplus to expand American Empire along with the British Empire to the far reaches of the world.  With the massive tax cuts in place for the rich the time was right for a war with Iraq.  What was needed was an excuse for starting the war.  When the Bush Administration took office they were warned by the outgoing Clinton Administration of the greatest threat to America being terrorism.  The Bush Administration scoffed saying Saddam Hussein was the greatest threat.

Under the Clinton Administration there had been commissions that had been formed to identify the greatest threats posed by terrorists.  One was the Gore Commission headed up by Vice President Al Gore which identified airline safety as a matter of national security.  The recommendations of the Gore Commission were soundly rejected by the GOP.  From John Smith Chicago:


Excerpt:

In the years leading up to 9/11, a proposal was made by the Clinton Administration to require secure cockpit doors on all commercial aircraft. This would have prevented 9/11. The media was more interested in a sex scandal.

The rest is history. On repeat.

“The federal government should consider aviation security as a national security issue. The Commission believes that terrorist attacks on civil aviation are directed at the United States, and that there should be an ongoing federal commitment to reducing the threats that they pose.” The Gore Commission final report, February 12, 1997

In 1997, Vice President Al Gore chaired the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, otherwise known as the Gore Commission, to study and recommend new safeguards to prevent future terrorist attacks.  The Gore Commission recommended all commercial aircraft install secure, un-breachable cockpit doors to stop terrorists from hijacking an aircraft while in flight. The GOP controlled Congress subsequently rejected the Gore Commission proposals as too expensive and too burdensome on the airlines.

Unbeknownst to all, also in 1997 a radical Islamic terrorist named Osama Bin Ladin was plotting an attack on the United States. This plot might have been uncovered sooner if the Republican Congress wasn’t more concerned with impeaching President Bill Clinton over lying about a blowjob…

In 2000, Al Gore ended up losing the presidency to the dumbest man in American politics after the media caricatured Gore as a boring and self aggrandizing technocrat and lauded his opponent George W. Bush as the plain spoken guy you wanted to have a beer with.

Gore narrowly lost to Bush by 500 votes in Florida after Ralph Nader, sensing a moment to make a comeback as an election spoiler, ran a negative Green Party campaign casting the devout environmentalist Gore as a corporate owned shill no different from the oil industry’s official sock puppet, George W. Bush…

Sound familiar?

George Bush also didn’t care for his daily intelligence briefings, including the one he should have received in August 2001 titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike on US Soil”. Bush was on a month long vacation at his Crawford, Texas ranch when this alarming report was issued, warning of threats to hijack commercial aircraft.

On 9/11, terrorists were able to breach the cockpits of multiple commercial aircraft not encumbered by Al Gore’s proposed safety regulations. 3,000 people died horribly that day and two wars were started as a result.

History repeats.

The plan all along was crashing the economy through tax cuts for the rich, plowing money into the military industrial complex by reviving Reagan’s Star Wars, destroying Social Security through privatization, deregulating the banks and launching unending wars for Empire.  When Bush was unable to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, British Prime Minister Tony Blair provided “sexed up” British intelligence.  The war based on lies was on.  From Prospect.org:

Excerpt;

Bush's Neo-Imperialist War

Our Iraqi occupation not only rejects American foreign policy since Wilson, it's a throwback to the great power imperialism that led to World War I.  In 1882 the British occupied Egypt. Although they claimed they would withdraw their troops, the British remained, they said, at the request of the khedive, the ruler they had installed…

At the outset of the occupation, the British government declared its intention to withdraw its troops as soon as possible... Without the British presence, the khedival government would probably have collapsed.  The British would remain in Egypt for 70 years until Gamel Abdel Nasser's nationalist revolt tossed them out.

They would grant Egypt nominal independence in 1922, but in order to maintain their hold over the Suez Canal, the gateway to British India and Asia, they would retain control over Egypt's finances and foreign policy.

On Sept. 13, 2007, George W. Bush issued his report to the nation on the progress of "the surge" in Iraq. Echoing the British in Egypt, he promised "a reduced American presence" in Iraq, but he added ominously that "Iraqi leaders from all communities … understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency.

These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship -- in a way that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer American troops." (Emphasis mine.) In other words, Iraqi leaders who owe their positions to the U.S. occupation want the Americans to stay indefinitely, and Bush is ready to oblige them, albeit with a smaller force…  Bush, too, has insisted that the United States is not engaged in imperialismAmerica is not "an imperial power," but a "liberating power," he has declared.

But Bush's denial rings as hollow as Gladstone's. What Bush has done in Iraq, rather than what he says he has done, is to revive an imperialist foreign policy, reminiscent of the British and French in the Middle East, and of the kind that the United States practiced briefly under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Bush's foreign policy has been variously described as unilateralist, militarist, and hyper-nationalist. But the term that fits it best is imperialist. That's not because it is the most incendiary term, but because it is the most historically accurate.

Bush's foreign policy was framed as an alternative to the liberal internationalist policies that Woodrow Wilson espoused and that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton tried to put into effect as an alternative to the imperialist strategies that helped cause two world wars and even the Cold War.

Bush's foreign policy represents a return not to the simple unilateralism of 19th-century American foreign policy, but to the imperial strategy that the great powers of Europe -- and, for a brief period, America, too -- followed and that resulted in utter disaster…

Fast forward to today, what have the Bush/Blair imperialist plans wrought on the people of America, Britain and the world.  From Black Agenda Report:

Excerpt:

U.S. imperialism views the One Belt One Road as an existential threat to the domination and monopoly of the dollar.

“China is becoming deeply connected to Asia, Europe, and Africa and this spells doom for U.S. imperial hegemony.”

The U.S. is once again mired in the political circus of the presidential election cycle. Corporate Democrats have aligned themselves firmly against the social democratic aspirations of the Sandernistas…  A crisis off (sic) legitimacy has been set off by the economic condition of the U.S. imperial system where slow growth stagnation, austerity, and endless war reigns supreme.

West of the United States, a new giant is emerging. China possesses a development plan that threatens to undo U.S. hegemony for good and one which has already laid the basis for the most important global struggle of the century.  The development plan is called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI was launched in 2013 under the leadership of president Xi Jinping.

China invested an initial one trillion USD into the BRI with the hopes of connecting China to Europe by both land and sea. In 2013, BRI included 65 countries and an estimated 55 percent of global GDP. This has since increased to tentative agreements with 126 countries after the latest Belt and Road summit.

The value of current trade arrangements from the BRI is nearly eight trillion USD, which accounts for over a quarter of all Chinese trade. In other words, China is becoming deeply connected to Asia, Europe, and Africa and this spells doom for U.S. imperial hegemony…

The Belt and Road Initiative is the starkest example of how U.S. capitalist system and its current stage of imperialism has been eclipsed by China’s market-oriented socialist economy. China’s growth rate has averaged 10 percent since 1978 as compared to the sluggish 2-3 percent that the U.S. has been garnering over the same period. China is becoming the world’s leader in both technological development and poverty reduction.

Since 1978, the People’s Republic of China has accounted for the entire reduction in poverty in the world by lifting 800 million Chinese workers and peasants out of the underdevelopment that Western imperialism imposed on the nation prior to 1949. Old industries have been updated and new industries such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence account for over sixteen percent of China’s GDP.

China’s rapid industrialization and technological growth is important because technological advance under capitalism leads inevitably to a higher rate of exploitation. The capitalist system utilizes technological advances to speed up production and automate labor, which vastly increases the surplus value (profit) accumulated by capitalist enterprises. This widens inequality and raises the number of workers relegated to the reserve army of the unemployed.

In China, the opposite has occurred. China has become a technological powerhouse while decreasing unemployment and raising the standard of living for all. While inequality between the rich and the poor has widened through the implementation of market reforms, colonial underdevelopment has become a thing of the past in China…

One of the central objectives of socialism is the rapid development of the productive forces of society. Only the rapid growth of the productive forces within nations ravaged by colonial plunder and underdevelopment can ensure that the basic needs of the masses are met and that the revolution can move toward communism, or a classless society…

In a hostile global environment characterized by U.S. imperialist destruction and provocation, China has been able to bridge the gap between the city and countryside by eradicating the backwardness left by semi-colonialism and imperialism. It is China’s success in this area which led late Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro to remark that “China has become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. . .”

The Belt and Road Initiative represents the duality of China’s economic miracle. China has not required its partners to adopt a socialist command economy. Rather it has lent its technical and economic prowess to build massive railway projects in both neocolonial states, such as Indonesian and Malaysia; and socialist countries like Vietnam and the DPRK, as part of a “win-win” arrangement…

Whatever contradictions exist within the Belt and Road Initiative are to be resolved by the people of China and the nations that participate in the project. It is worth noting that critics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative have almost entirely come from the U.S. and Western imperialist orbit. Corporate outlets have described the Belt and Road as a “scheme” designed to impose debt traps on participating nations and expand Chinese “imperial” influence across the world.

Such criticisms are laughable when one takes stock of the enormous debts that the I.M.F. and the World Bank, two wholly U.S.-led institutions, have placed upon the throats of the former colonial world. U.S. and Western imperial states have left the planet in utter catastrophe and only have austerity and war to offer its inhabitants. 

That the U.S. and its Western allies opposing the Belt and Road Initiative are primarily responsible for the fact that five individuals own more wealth than half the world’s population tells us all we need to know about the legitimacy of U.S. and Western critiques of the BRI. U.S. opposition to China’s Belt and Road is evidence of a global struggle between the decline of U.S. imperialism and China’s market socialist economy.

The Trump Administration has continued Obama’s “pivot to Asia” by labeling China (and its partner Russia) the gravest threat to U.S. “national security.” Trump’s regime has engaged in a “trade war,” purged Chinese scientists in the U.S. mainland, and illegally placed the CFO of Huawei Corporation under house arrest.

Most recently, the U.S. has increased its military aid to Taiwan in a blatant violation of the One China policy. These provocations are a signal to China that its very existence as a global power is unacceptable to the U.S. imperialist albatross.  “U.S. opposition to China’s Belt and Road is evidence of a global struggle between the decline of U.S. imperialism and China’s market socialist economy.”

The One Belt One Road Initiative represents the biggest threat to U.S. imperial hegemony in this epoch. China offers the world’s nations access to what U.S. and European imperialism has historically prevented in order to extract the wealth and labor of Third World at the cheapest price: technical expertise and infrastructure development.

U.S. imperialism views the One Belt One Road’s objective of enhancing the productive forces of the poorest nations as an existential threat to the domination and monopoly of the dollar. The equation is simple. The more that China dominates trade and investment worldwide, the less likely that these nations will continue to use the U.S. dollar to conduct its economic affairs.

U.S. imperialism offers only austerity and war and is thus unable to compete with China’s Belt and Road initiative. To be more precise, U.S. imperialism is incapable of doing anything to the contrary given the current stage of the system. China doesn’t operate from the basis of unfettered capitalism where the “market” (a euphemism for private capitalists) dictates all affairs with private profit, and profit alone, in mind.

Capitalism has reached its most advanced stage of imperialist development. Monopolies and finance capitalists call the shots. True competition and investment in the form of a different economic mode of development is nothing but an impediment to the maximization of profit. And because finance capital refuses to hedge its bets on anything that doesn’t bring a maximum return on investment for its shareholders, the U.S. military has been deployed to threaten China into submission…

China’s planned economy is here to stay. Military threats and trade wars have not weakened China. On the contrary, they have brought China closer to key allies such as Russia. The question is, what can people in the U.S. learn from the One Belt One Road process? First, the BRI teaches us that the U.S., as it is currently constructed, offers no hope for humanity.

China’s plan offers more than hope; it offers an opportunity in the here and now to further erode the legitimacy of the U.S.-led austerity regime…  The One Belt One Road Initiative also urges us to defend China from U.S. imperialism. Some on the “left” in the U.S. have repeated corporate media and State Department talking points about China’s “imperialism” and other iterations of Yellow Peril critiques of China’s policies.

Yet while these “left” forces condemn China’s infrastructure projects on the African continent as exploitative, they rarely if ever mention the U.S.’ neo-colonial military presence on the continent which has contributed to chaos and carnage in nations such as Libya. They also fail to mention that the U.S. military state has as its main priority the “containment” and ultimate destruction of China’s planned economy—a mission that can only end in nuclear war…

A left that finds itself aligned with the militarist and imperialist U.S. state on the question of China is no left at all. Radicalism that searches for a “pure” socialism amid the incessant attacks from U.S. imperialism should not be labeled as such. The responsibility of an insurgent and organized left in the United States is to oppose war and develop cooperative relationships with nations around the world.

As a journalist and witness of the achievements of the Belt and Road Initiative, Andre Vltchek notes , “BRI is the exact contrast to the Western colonialism and imperialism.” Condemning China without investigation reinforces Western imperialism and failing to engage with the Belt and Road Initiative only renders the people of the U.S. irrelevant in the most significant global struggle of the 21stcentury: that between the U.S. and China.

The carnage caused by British and American imperialism goes on today.  From Africa to Asia, from the Middle East through Eastern Europe and from Central America to South America no one is safe from the British and American Empires.  From Covert Geopolitics:

Excerpt:

Britain Has As Much Blood on its Hands as the Worst Dictatorships

All Western media networks, broadcast and online, are now focusing on the China-Hong Kong oppression narrative, and purposely silent about the massive protests against the Deep State’s plan to privatize healthcare and school systems in Honduras.

Western media are now speculating that China is readying a Tienanmen Square type of operation that shamed China for decades, to deal with Hong Kong protests that really has the CIA flavor for violent occupation of vital economic infrastructures.

The US, on the other hand, is ready to use all means to remove the unwanted socialist governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba from power in order to achieve full control over Latin America, the Russian GRU chief Igor Kostyukov has warned.

All of these aggressive efforts rest on controlling the narrative as one of the main pillars of Western power grab, and Western regimes have as much blood on their hands as the worst genocidal dictators that have ever lived.   An Indian politician has put Winston Churchill in the same category as some of “the worst genocidal dictators” of the 20th century because of his complicity in the Bengal Famine…

In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.  During an appearance at the Melbourne writers’ festival broadcast by ABC, the Indian MP noted Churchill’s orders related to Australian ships carrying wheat at Indian docks.

“This is a man the British would have us hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy, when he has as much blood on his hands as some of the worst genocidal dictators of the 20th century,” he said to applause.  He added: “People started dying and Churchill said well it’s all their fault anyway for breeding like rabbits. He said ‘I hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’.”

Dr Tharoor, a former Under-Secretary of the UN, also gave an extensive description of British colonial exploitation and annihilation of traditional Indian industries such as textiles which reduced it to “a poster child of third world poverty” by the time the British left in 1947.  He said the “excuse that apologists [of British empire] like to make is, it’s not our fault, you just missed the bus for the industrial revolution. Well, we missed the bus because you threw us under its wheels…”

“This [Churchill] is the man who the British insist on hailing as some apostle of freedom and democracy,” the author told UK Asian at a launch for his book. “When to my mind he is really one of the more evil rulers of the 20th century only fit to stand in the company of the likes of Hitler, Mao and Stalin”. He added:

“Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does. Particularly the decisions that he personally signed off during the Bengal Famine when 4.3 million people died because of the decisions he took or endorsed.”  Between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation while it was under the control of the British Empire, as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India…

“Not only did the British pursue its own policy of not helping the victims of this famine which was created by their policies. Churchill persisted in exporting grain to Europe, not to feed actual ‘Sturdy Tommies’, to use his phrase, but add to the buffer stocks that were being piled up in the event of a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia”.

“Ships laden with wheat were coming in from Australia docking in Calcutta and were instructed by Churchill not to disembark their cargo but sail on to Europe,” he added. “And when conscience-stricken British officials wrote to the Prime Minister in London pointing out that his policies were causing needless loss of life all he could do was write peevishly in the margin of the report, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?'”

What Churchill did to the people of India while under control of the British Empire Trump’s B-Team is doing to the people of South America resisting the rule of American Empire.

Venezuela:  From LaRouche.Pub

Excerpt:

Bolton Behind Embargo of Venezuela, Russia and China Tension

In an action bearing National Security Adviser John Bolton’s and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s fingerprints, President Donald Trump late last night issued an Executive Order establishing a total economic blockade of Venezuela. This will block all property of the Venezuelan government in “the jurisdiction of the United States,” and target for secondary sanctions any nation or individual “who provide material support to ... or enable the illegitimate Maduro regime and undermine the National Assembly of Venezuela and interim President Juan Guaidó.”

Aside from killing more Venezuelans, the White House action also ratchets up the geopolitical conflict with Russia and China, governments that have opposed the U.S. war party’s regime change policy for Venezuela and backed a negotiated settlement. Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry called the U.S. action “economic terrorism.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry called it illegal.

Speaking this morning in Peru at the Lima Group-sponsored “International Conference on Democracy in Venezuela,” Bolton declared that it is the “moral imperative” of the U.S. to defend Western Hemisphere “neighbors against any threat, internal or external.” He harkened back to past London-supported U.S. regime-change offensives in Ibero-America to warn that Washington won’t hesitate to repeat them. “Not since an asset freeze against the [Manuel] Noriega government in Panama in 1988, a trade embargo on Nicaragua in 1985, or the comprehensive asset freeze and trade embargo on Cuba in 1962 have we taken this action,” he boasted, the Miami Herald reported.

“In each of these instances, we used robust economic tools against dictatorships.... It worked in Panama, it worked in Nicaragua once, and it will work there again, and it will work in Venezuela and Cuba,” Bolton threatened. He went on that, outside of Cuba, “the U.S. has used similar economic sanctions on the governments of Iran, North Korea and Syria. Now, Venezuela is part of this very exclusive club of rogue states.”

As for Russia and China, Bolton warned them that “your support to the Maduro regime is intolerable, particularly to the democratic regime that will replace Maduro.”

Ah, yes the American Empire’s mission isn’t take over the largest oil reserves in the world and open their resource rich country to plunder and control by American capitalists, but its mission is to educate and liberate."  Like they have liberated and educated Honduras. 

Honduras:  From Jacobin.com

Excerpt:

The Student Movement Standing up to the Honduran Regime

It’s been ten years since a US-backed coup installed a repressive neoliberal regime in Honduras. Now, a student movement has emerged to challenge the government’s agenda of privatization and militarization.

Ten years have passed since the democratically elected center-right president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a military coup. On the same day of a referendum to create a National Constituent Assembly that sought to rewrite the military dictatorship’s 1982 Constitution, Zelaya was whisked away to Costa Rica still in his pajamas.

Observers across Latin America, watching nervously to see how President Obama would respond to his first real foreign policy test in the region, quickly had their hopes for a shift in US policy crushed. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were quick to legitimize the coup and call for new elections that in Clinton’s words would “render the question of Zelaya moot.”

Clinton has defended the US role in the coup by arguing that to declare it a “coup” would have forced the United States to cut off all aid to the country, ultimately hurting the Honduran people. Yet since then, Washington has found no shortage of alternative ways to hurt the Honduran people, who have watched their country turn into one of the most violent and dangerous in the world.

The current status quo in Honduras is reminiscent of the days of US-backed death squads during the 1970s and ’80s Central American civil wars. Since the coup, a right-wing dictatorship — maintained through an alliance between the military, landowning elites, and the media — has increased ties with the United States while drastically militarizing the country. In July 2013, the regime created the Intelligence Troop and Special Security Group.

The next month in August, with a quick amendment to the Constitution to avoid the prohibition on military participation in policing, the Military Police was created. Even the DEA has entered the scene, through its Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST) which is now conducting operations in the country.

After the brief scare that Zelaya’s self-declared “center-right” government might bring socialism to the country — one of the coup’s central justifications — Honduras has returned to a program of neoliberalization. But popular resistance to this agenda has been strong.

The fraudulent reelection of President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) in 2017 was an important moment proving the criminality and violence of the regime: Hernández brutally cracked down on protesters, killing seventeen. Since only April of this year, state security forces have killed at least eight people protesting privatization attempts to health and education…

The key battleground has been the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) in the capital, Tegucigalpa. With a student population of over 93,000, since the coup UNAH has become both a symbol of government encroachment into Honduran society as well as popular resistance against the regime.

Bitter fights have broken out over everything from administrative changes, to attempts to criminalize student protest, to an increase of the passing grade from 60 percent to 70 percent, which would have effectively kicked 13,000 students out of the university…

The student movement is diverse, accommodating a range of ideologies and tactics. This year it has intensified as wider movements against Hernández’s attempts to privatize the health and education sectors have grown. Massive street protests have been led by La Plataforma para la Defensa de la Salud y Educación (Platform for the Defense of Health and Education), made up of various unions with more than seventy thousand combined members.

Despite attacks by the staunchly pro-regime media, La Plataforma achieved a huge victory in June when Hernández backed down and repealed the law. It was a watershed moment of popular power against a regime that needed to deploy the military, when the police alone could not repress the movement… 

A flashpoint was reached on June 24, when the military police invaded the UNAH campus and fired live ammunition at students. Remarkably, no students lost their lives, despite a number of serious injuries. Still, the protests are refusing to stand down…

In Honduras, to oppose the government has become dangerous. The state apparatus has made it clear that any calls of “Fuera JOH!” (“Out JOH!”) will not be tolerated. The regime is protected by a national media that discredits any form of anti-government resistance and an international media whose only coverage of the country is to demonize its most vulnerable people who flee extreme violence and poverty. Under this imperial shield, Hernández is employing state violence and repression without fear of consequence.

Emboldened by Washington’s unequivocal support of the 2009 coup and the fraudulent 2017 election, as well as the 2015 constitutional change to allow presidential reelection, Hernández knows he is safe to apply a whatever-means-necessary approach to the mass protests that are now beginning to radicalize and call for his resignation.

With the recent revelation that the president has been involved in drug trafficking with his brother — who is currently under arrest in the United States — “to maintain and enhance their power,” Honduras is on the precipice of becoming a narco-state. This makes it harder for the United States to publicly support Hernández. But when push comes to shove, he remains Washington’s man.

Now more than ever, the Honduran people are in need of international solidarity. The crisis they are suffering epitomizes the very worst of imperialism and neoliberalism. Hernández, with his known links to drug trafficking and criminal gangs, employs the state apparatus against his own people while corrupting democratic institutions to further entrench himself and the oligarchy that supports him in power.

All this while unleashing a torrent of privatization attempts against the most vulnerable people. In response, students and workers are valiantly leading the fight. All who believe in anti-imperialism and power from below must show their solidarity with the Honduran people in this critical time.

Sheesh you mean Venezuela doesn’t want Imperial Washington’s nirvana that has been smashed down upon the people on Honduras.  Another South American country benefiting from American Empire’s quest to “educate and liberate” is Brazil.  Let’s check in how Brazil is doing under the Empire installed Dictator.

Brazil:  From Intrepid Report

Excerpt:

Brazil’s massive crime against humanity

The corrupt Brazilian government installed by Washington has decided to destroy the Amazon Rain Forest.  This will adversely affect the Earth’s climate by eliminating a massive carbon sink.

The beneficiaries of the destruction of the rain forest are the timber loggers who are buddies with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, environmental minister Ricardo Salles, and farming lobbyist Tereza Cristina Dias.

One might have thought that the build-up of CO2 and the impact of carbon emissions in raising the temperature of Earth would result in more careful and responsible policies than one that destroys a unique ecological habitat that stabilizes the Earth’s climate. For no other reason than to maximize profits for timber loggers, the Amazon Rain Forest is to be destroyed. This is unregulated international gangster capitalism at work.  Destroy the planet for everyone else so that a handful of gangsters can acquire fortunes.

We cannot expect any intelligence in a government where Dias dismisses global warming as “an international Marxist plot.” Dias sounds like a parrot for the anti-global warming think tanks sponsored by the carbon energy lobby.  Anything that would constrain short-run profits regardless of their long-run costs is dismissed as a hoax or a communist plot.

President Lula de Silva and his successor Dilma Rousseff attempted to run Brazil in the interests of a broader segment of the population than the robber-baron capitalists. In its unbridled form, capitalism is an exploitative mechanism that permits a few people to grab large profits in the near term by imposing massive external costs on the broader society and the environment. 

The more responsible policies of Lula and Rousseff enraged the Brazilian robber barons and their backers in Washington.  Using the capitalist controlled press, Brazil’s gangster capitalists demonized Lula and Rousseff. They were accused of money laundering and “passive corruption.”  The most corrupt elements on the political scene framed them up on false charges. Lula was imprisoned and Rousseff was impeached and removed from office, thus turning the country back over to Washington and the corrupt Brazilian capitalists. The idiot Brazilian population accepted this.  The fools believed their enemies.

Currently, the rain forest is being destroyed at the rate of 3 football fields per minute.  The rain forest has already lost 17 percent of its tree cover.  Scientists report that when deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent the rain forest converts to savanna and loses its ability to absorb carbon.  But the concerns expressed at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research are not as important to Bolsonaro and his cronies as the profits temporarily gained by destroying the rain forest along with the many species dependent on the habitat of the rain forest.

The policies for which a small handful of Brazilian capitalist gangsters, backed by Washington, are responsible will have massive effects and impose massive costs on the rest of mankind.  More melting of ice and release of methane, rising and more acidic oceans, drought, water stress, more intense storms all of which affect food production...

What is happening right now in Brazil is a massive crime against humanity.  It is such a massive crime that the countries on Earth should unite and give the corrupt gangster Brazilian government an ultimatum:  Stop the deforestation of the Amazon Rain Forest or be invaded and put on trial for crimes against humanity. There is no greater crime than to make the Earth uninhabitable. There is no better case for war than to protect the global climate and life on earth.

Lordy, Lordy who would have thought that “not so Great Britain” and America in their quest for Empire in the 21st Century would find themselves left behind in the age of enlightenment, advancement and progress.    As they devastate other countries leaving millions dead, maimed and starving, their own countries lie in devastation.  Both countries care not for humanity, they revile their own populous leaving them sick, homeless and ignorant.  What hath the quest done to their own countries?  It has left them rivaling third world countries in their devastation.  America and Britain have bombed themselves back to the Stone Age.



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