“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 imperialism. America
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.
