If anyone thought that talking of a ‘new cold war’ with China was overstating the case, the recently announced AUKUS military pact must make them think again. Surely timed to deflect notions of US weakness after its defeat in Afghanistan, this major new multifaceted defence agreement between the US, UK and Australia sees the latter firmly jump into the US camp and the former strengthen and renew its Pivot to Asia through unashamedly militaristic means. The UK is coat-tailing the US as usual, hoping to garner some jobs in nuclear reactor production, and trying yet another gambit to boost the ‘global Britain’ profile.

Just six months on from the publication of the government’s big overhaul of foreign and defence policy – the Integrated Review which included a 40% increase in the nuclear arsenal – this is the UK’s second significant provocation towards China, following on from the UK aircraft carrier’s tour to the South China Sea. Australia has the most to lose from this agreement – China is its biggest trading partner and up to recently Australia has avoided getting too sucked into US strategies against China. Earlier attempts during Bush’s presidency to build a ‘Quad’ against China with Australia, Japan and India, foundered when Kevin Rudd withdrew Australian support, but now Australia is back in the fold.

Billed by the signatories as ‘a landmark defence and security partnership’, it’s partly being sold as a values-driven agreement to support a peaceful rules-based international order (US/UK rhetoric for some time now even when the US was unilaterally withdrawing from fundamental pillars of said order); and its key military focus centres on ‘the development of joint capabilities and technology sharing’, deeper integration of security and defence-related science, technology, industrial bases and supply chains.

What this actually means is that the US and UK are going to collaborate with Australia to help provide them with nuclear-powered submarines. Bizarrely the joint governments’ statement suggests that this will ‘promote stability in the Indo-Pacific’; it looks more likely to massively ramp up tension in the region at a time when cooperation with China – in the run up to COP26 to deal with the climate emergency – should be top of the agenda. Not surprisingly, the Chinese authorities haven’t responded well. It’s also dealt a blow to Britain’s relations with France which already had a contract with Australia to provide them with 12 diesel/electric-powered subs to replace their ageing fleet. That contract has now been ripped up but in spite of comments about delays in production and escalating costs, this is not a military-industrial decision, it is a strategic one, fully entering the US orbit – and being granted access to rare nuclear reactor technology.

Nuclear – whether military or civilian – is always controversial and symbolic, and here it means Australian admission to the top level club; only six countries, all nuclear weapon states, have nuclear-powered subs. It is also an indication by the US of the priority it gives to this growing – fortunately still cold – conflict, and its determination to get Australia onside and keep it there. T he nuclear component of the subs lies in the fact they are powered by onboard nuclear reactors. They won’t have nuclear weapons – and the Australian PM Scott Morrison has been quick to insist that Australia will not be pursuing either nuclear weapons or civil nuclear capacity.

Beyond the strategic nightmare created by AUKUS there is much that is not yet clear. Will the Australians build the subs or buy them in? How will the highly enriched uranium necessary to fuel the reactors be provided? There is no doubt that the provision of reactors and the technology they require is the most significant factor here.

Reactor technology is highly prized and top secret, as the uranium used for the reactors is enriched to 95% – weapons grade. The US and UK cooperate on this under the terms of the Mutual Defence Agreement, the world’s most extensive nuclear sharing agreement which first came into force in 1958. Renewed by parliament every decade, the last time in 2014 allowed for greater cooperation on reactor technology. If the Australians were going to build the reactors themselves they would need US technology and expertise and a nuclear-sharing agreement with the US of their own. So the simplest solution would be to buy them in; Boris Johnson’s comments so far about jobs suggest he will try and get reactor orders for the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby. Maybe he will also try for the decommissioning contracts for the spent fuel that eventually needs disposing of. Presumably it will add to the nightmare build up of radioactive waste at the dangerously unsafe Sellafield complex in Cumbria. Highly enriched uranium is stored there but no safe long-term storage facility has yet been found.

Boris Johnson said in Parliament today that the AUKUS agreement did not contravene the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – that this is for nuclear power not nuclear weapons so the restrictions do not apply. But the fact is we are talking about providing weapons grade enriched uranium to a non-nuclear weapons state to power military submarines undertaking provocative action in a very fraught area of the world.

The NPT does not stop the exchange of civil nuclear technology but it stipulates it must be ‘for peaceful purposes’. Sending war-fighting subs to potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific region is hardly that. This is yet another breach of international law by our government, hard on the heels of the nuclear arsenal increase. It’s time to stand up and oppose the government’s reckless and illegal foreign policy.

This article was first published here

Can China do much to fight back against the power wielded by the US in the world economy? At first sight, that looks unlikely. China is big, but world trade is conducted in dollars, and the US has economic, political and military influence across the globe. The usual result of a tally of US might is that its position as hegemon is unassailable. But that would overlook how measures of its strength depend upon the world staying in the form that US power has created since 1945. If it doesn’t, then these will not count for as much. As one might expect, China has been responding to US attacks, and the outcome is likely to foment a split in the world economy.

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Imagine you wanted to travel from one city to another, but the train company wouldn’t sell you a ticket. Neither would the bus company. Then you were not allowed to buy or hire a car. And anyone who sold you or lent you a bicycle would be fined, or would face imprisonment. With due allowance for analogy, that is similar to what has happened to Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea and anyone else that the US does not like.

Woe betide you if you are on the wrong side of the US. Then you will find it very difficult to ‘travel’ in the world economy, that is to have any trade or financial dealings. It is not only the sanctions the US imposes; these are also followed to varying degrees by its allies in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. Could the same thing happen to China? It already has, but so far only to a limited extent.

I begin by discussing important dimensions of US power in the world, with a focus on the economic, commercial and financial aspects. I will not deal with the mountains of US weaponry and its means of intimidation with worldwide military bases, although these are significant. The remainder of the article deals with how the rise of China is reshaping the world economy and acting as an alternative focal point to the US.[1] Many countries are paying attention to this, even if the ‘western’ powers do not like it.

Economy & trade in the US-China balance

In the past few years, the Trump-led US administration has stepped up anti-China moves. Even if Trump does not get re-elected in November, this direction of policy is not likely to be reversed by the Democrats. We have seen higher tariffs on China’s exports, attempts to block its companies from receiving any US-made (or designed) products, particularly in the technology sphere, as well as pressure on US allies to exclude Huawei and other important Chinese companies from their domestic markets on supposed ‘security’ grounds.[2]

China’s importance in the world economy means that these exclusion tactics cannot easily be extended. Although the US administration has trumpeted, so to speak, a new objective to cut China out of the supply chains that its big corporations have profitably been using for decades, even the ‘great again’ America must know that this would take many years to achieve.

The US is the world’s biggest economy. With a population of some 328 million people, its GDP in 2019 was $21,439 billion. China has a much bigger population of around 1.4 billion people, but a smaller GDP, estimated at $14,140 billion. China is nevertheless number two in the world, and would be a little bit closer to the US when Hong Kong’s $373bn is added to the mainland China number. Both countries have huge domestic markets of interest to foreign companies, and each has a relatively small volume of international trade when compared to GDP, giving their domestic economies some insulation from the vagaries of the world market. China and the US are the biggest two global exporters and importers of goods, but China is far ahead on exports and the US leads in imports.

A Bank of England report included an interesting chart of the international trade in goods, showing how China was bigger than the US in trade with Asia and South America, and the US was bigger than China with the rest of North America and with Europe. Unfortunately, Africa was left out of account in this chart, but China’s direct trade with Africa in 2019 was more than three times larger than that of the US.

China’s importance in international goods trade, 2018

The trade pattern shows there are already different relative strengths of the two countries in relation to the rest of the world. Geography goes some way to account for that difference, but one also has to take note of how US companies export from outside the US – including from China – and that many products from China will contain US components. China has a far smaller volume of foreign direct investment and ownership of foreign companies, so its role in world trade is overstated when compared to the US by this simple country-to-country trade picture.

FX power plays

US economic power in the world is shown most easily in the foreign exchange market. This comprises a multitude of transactions, usually across borders, for goods, services and flows of money to buy and sell equities, bonds, commodities, real estate and so forth. Most internationally traded commodities, like oil, copper, wheat and gold, are priced in terms of US dollars, as are many industrial goods like aircraft and chemicals, let alone weapons and illegal drugs. Many countries also have their own currencies directly tied or more loosely linked to the dollar, nearly all central banks hold reserves of US dollar-based securities, and all international companies have dollar bank accounts. As a result, the US dollar is involved in 88% of all exchanges between one currency and another on the international market.[3]

This gives the US government more power than you might think. If a person or a company receives money from selling, or pays money to buy something, then that money has to shift between the bank accounts of the buyer and the seller. When that money happens to be US dollars, the transaction has to go through the US banking system, perhaps indirectly, even if both the buyer and the seller are not located in the US. So, if the US government does not like you, your company, or your country, it can block your ability to use the US banking system.

That would exclude you from the usual channels of world trade and international business transactions. There may be other ways to avoid the dollar entirely and get a transaction done, but these will likely be more costly. And they will also run the risk of the US government using other means of intimidation – for example, when it levies a fine on any bank that processed a deal with you and threatens to stop that bank from operating in the US. This is one way in which the political objectives of the US administration are advanced by its economic power and influence, with no guns needing to be fired.

The centre of gravity

Not only is the US dollar by far the most widely used global currency, the US also has the biggest markets for financial securities, ie for bonds, equities, futures and options contracts.[4] US markets are the centre of gravity for world capitalism. Even though the bulk of transactions in such markets are done within the US itself, the linkages in the global system mean that they filter through quickly into other countries. That is why financial news reports focus most on policy decisions by the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, and the ups and downs of the US stock markets usually have knock on effects elsewhere.

The New York Stock Exchange is the biggest equity market by far, with a capitalisation of nearly $23,000bn at the end of 2019. Nasdaq, also in New York, was the second largest, at nearly $11,000bn capitalisation. Next in line was Japan’s Tokyo Stock Exchange, at a mere $5,700bn, with London at less than $5,000bn.

It is only when China’s three stock exchanges, in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen, are taken together that they come anywhere near the US. At the end of 2019, their total market capitalisations amounted to around $10,500bn. However, the Chinese exchanges do have a slightly higher number of corporations listed, some 5,900 compared to a little over 5,300 in the two US markets.[5]

The reason for considering these things is that they are not narrowly financial. For example, a company’s market capitalisation – the total value of its shares – indicates the potential leverage the company has in the broader market. A higher capitalisation means that it can more easily borrow funds from banks, issue bonds itself to get funds, or use its own shares as a means of payment in its takeovers of other companies. Microsoft and Google stand out here, each having done more than 200 takeovers of actual or potential rivals, or of companies that will help them build up a monopolistic position in the market.

It is mostly US companies that figure at the top of the rankings for market capitalisation. In recent years, it has been the Big Tech corporations like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, each having a number over $1,000bn. China’s Alibaba and Tencent are the only two non-US companies in this top rank, but with valuations of half that of the largest US corporations.

Financial markets magnify US economic power. Not only does the US stock market present its corporations with many billions of market value, that value is also denominated in US dollars, a currency readily acceptable in most of the world. In global terms, it is ‘real money’. Corporations wanting to takeover another will find it easier to do so with US dollars than euros, Japanese yen or sterling, let alone Australian dollars or Norwegian kroner. Apart from its size, liquidity and access to funds, that explains the attraction for companies of listing on the US equity market.

China and the US dollar

The US authorities run access to the dollar, especially the Treasury and the Federal Reserve central bank. So why is it that China, seen by the US as its most dangerous antagonist, has let its economy be dominated by dollars?

First, if China wanted to operate in the world economy, it had little choice 30-40 years ago but to accept the existing structure of world trade and finance. Asia’s economies in particular were, and still are, bound up with the US dollar, through close ties of their currencies and through flows of trade, investment and loans. China has also for a long time followed a policy of keeping its domestic currency relatively stable versus the dollar, even in the wake of the severe crisis that hit emerging markets in the late 1990s. This, along with capital controls, helped keep its economy growing steadily by curbing one source of potential instability.

Second, one method of limiting the impact of possible capital flight is to build up foreign exchange reserves. If foreign investors have assets in China, whether through direct investment in factories, in buying equities or debt securities, then little could be done about the domestic effect on market prices if they sold those assets. But this would not lead to a serious shortage of funds or a collapse of the currency if China’s central bank could sell dollars it already had to counter these flows.

This was an important rationale behind China boosting its official foreign exchange reserves from just $5bn in 1994 to a massive $3.84 trillion by 2014. Some reserves were shifted into state-sponsored purchases of foreign assets (often done using US dollars), some into covering the bad loans of domestic banks, some into offsetting downward pressure on the value of China’s currency in the FX market.

That has still left what may look like an extravagant volume of reserves, totalling $3.1 trillion by end-June 2020. However, such funds have been required on a ‘safety first’ policy.

Consider that China has received a large volume of foreign investment inflow. By the end of 2018, the cumulative amount was $2.8 trillion of direct investment in China, $0.7 trillion in equities and $0.4 trillion in China’s debt securities. Not all of this near-$4 trillion is at risk from capital flight – a chunk of it will also come from Hong Kong – but how much might be vulnerable is unknown. China also has foreign assets of its own that could be sold if necessary: $1.9 trillion in foreign direct investments, and roughly $0.5 trillion in foreign equity and debt securities. This reckoning puts in perspective what otherwise looks like absurdly big foreign exchange reserves.

If anyone thought that a country’s FX reserves had much to do with its international trade in goods and services, the previous figures should put paid to that. Or contrast what happens when you are not as much at the mercy of a potentially destabilising flow of funds. The US has foreign exchange reserves of just $129bn, less than 10% of China’s.

China’s dollar holdings at risk?

Close to half of China’s foreign exchange reserves is held in terms of US dollars,[6] from bank accounts to US Treasury bills and other interest-bearing securities, to gold.[7] The rest is held in other currency denominations, especially the euro. Not just the central bank, but Chinese state agencies, as well as non-state companies and investors, also hold US securities and dollar bank accounts, as well as having dollar liabilities. Could the US government seize China’s dollar assets, or limit China’s access to them?

If seizure of China’s assets looks implausible, consider what has happened to Venezuela’s gold reserves held in the Bank of England’s vaults, or to payments that have long been overdue to Iran! The US could, in principle, also say that the security certificates owned by China – often held in the big US-based custodian banks like Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, etc – are now invalid pieces of paper, or computer registered items, which belong to an enemy state and now will not be recognised. That would be an extreme measure, also undermining the US ability to attract further funds and investment, so it is unlikely. Such things are usually only done to ‘little’ countries to show them who is boss. But it remains a risk that China’s policy has to manage.

Over recent years, there has been lots of speculation that China could reduce its dollar risk by selling the Treasuries and other US securities that its government and companies own. This would be a foolish thing to do quickly on a large scale, since the prices of the securities could fall in response.[8] Much more importantly, it would also remove the easy access to US dollar funds that China has, and will continue to need, given the dollar-dominated global financial system. What China’s authorities have done instead is to cut back new dollar exposure and quietly offload dollars in the market.

A more comprehensive way of reducing the risk that China faces from US sanctions would be to build another economic, commercial and financial network. Over the past decade, that is exactly what China has been doing.

Your money is no good here

Almost all of the measures used to highlight US economic power depend upon a link to the dollar-based system, for example, the dollar’s domination of the global FX market, the huge capitalisation values of US corporations, and the scale and influence of US financial markets. But what if something shakes the foundations of this power and the global system begins to take on a different form?

Up to now, China’s rise has been evident in production and trade figures. By comparison, its development in the more financial sphere has been limited, but let’s take a look at some of these numbers and what they mean.

The US dollar rules the FX system, with 88% of the $6.6 trillion daily turnover involving the dollar on one side of the transaction. By comparison, even the euro is only at 32%, and China’s currency, the renminbi, is at just 4%.[9] Yet, 38% of the total volume of FX trading is between the dealing banks themselves, and 55% is between banks and other financial institutions, including 9% with hedge funds and other speculators. Only 7% of FX trading is with non-financial firms! What would happen if international financial dealing were less important, especially in US securities? This calls into question the solidity of the dollar’s pre-eminent position in FX markets and in the world at large.

A similar thing applies to the financial power of big US corporations. For example, with a market capitalisation of around $1.6 trillion each in mid-July, it would seem that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft can do pretty much what they like: buy up any budding rival company, run a predatory pricing policy or extend their monopolistic positions further in other ways. But just as a company’s share price can collapse when its prospects no longer look as rosy as before, so can its apparent financial power if it is not able to operate as it wants and finds its markets cut off.

So far these things have not affected the big US corporations very much, although they have faced more constraints than they would like in China’s domestic market. They have not been able to compete well with the domestic champions Alibaba (e-commerce, payments systems, finance), Baidu (a search engine) and Tencent (various operations, from video games to e-commerce, to finance). The boot has instead been on the other foot, as China’s big companies have been edged out of the US and face restrictions in the markets of US allies. Nevertheless, that could change if the US-dominated structure of world markets changes, a development that is well under way.

World in flux

China has prepared itself against US hostility for years. That didn’t take a lot of strategic insight, given the numerous reports to the US Congress complaining about the Chinese ‘threat’ – ie the threat to US hegemony in the world economy, not simply a military calculation. Three international projects have been key: the ‘One Belt One Road’ project launched in 2013, now called the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI); the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), launched by China in 2013-14, and the BRICS Development Bank, now called the New Development Bank (NDB), proposed in 2013-14 and starting up in 2015.

The NDB is headquartered in Shanghai, and initially had enthusiastic support from all its founding members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (hence BRICS). They account for 20% of world GDP and 40% of the world’s population, and the NDB looked like it was going to become a big player in development finance. But little activity seems to have taken place in the last couple of years, although there have been important, separate bilateral deals between China and Russia and between China and Iran.[10]

At least partly, this has been due to renewed tensions between India and China, the latest being over their shared border in the north-west of India and India’s ban on the use of 59 Chinese phone apps, including TikTok. The election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, who has criticised China’s investments in the country, is another factor. More importantly, in recent years both India and Brazil have come more under the influence of the US and more anti-China in their policy stance. Bolsonaro has even tried to emulate Trump in this regard, as he has done in his disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has had a more active time, and it now has more than 100 member countries. Not surprisingly, the US did not join, but several of its close allies did, including the UK and Australia. It is a moot point whether the latter were defying the US, or whether they saw joining as a means of keeping an eye on what China was up to – apart from also not wanting to be on the outside to tender for any new contracts. China accounts for nearly 30% of the AIIB’s capital of $100bn, and for 26% of the voting power. Since 2016, this bank has financed a number of power, energy and road projects in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere.

Belt and Road

The Belt and Road Initiative is a much more serious plan from China. It has involved more than 130 countries in its projects, and some 30 international organisations. The basic idea is to develop ports, shipping lanes, roads and other infrastructure, including high voltage electricity grids, in a vast enterprise spanning the next 30 years.

The plan’s scope can be seen in the following image, where its routes run all around Asia and Europe and extend into East Africa. It could be considered the beginning of a single market area, but it is nowhere near that yet. Although trade, investment and transit arrangements have been made with other countries along the routes, those countries may often have a cautious approach to dealing with China.

Where the Belts and Roads go

Source: Ewa Oziewicz and Joanna Bednarz, ‘Challenges and opportunities of the Maritime Silk Road initiative’, October 2019

Europe, in particular, is wary. Not only because the relevant powers are not used to a ‘developing country’ having so much leverage, but also because they have been within the US sphere of influence. Yet they are growing worried about that, given Trump’s unilateralist ‘America First’ approach that has also targeted their industries for extra import tariffs, and their fear of the role of US Big Tech corporations. While they have joined in some moves to curb Chinese companies, this has been only to a limited extent so far.

As the political leaders of the European Union, Germany and France will have to make up their minds which way to jump. Yet that process will take some time to play out. For the time being, they are working on trying to cohere the EU itself as the UK leaves, and they hope that the EU can play the role of being an independent actor in the world economy.

The UK, ex-EU and ex-much else, is far more tied to the US. It has legions of political figures and economic interests integrated with the Anglosphere global set up, from the UN Security Council, to military cooperation, to the ‘Five Eyes’ spy network, to the rules applied to finance and trade at the BIS, IMF and WTO, to deluded hopes for a special Brexity relationship with the US in the future. These things will weigh on British decision-making, and the resulting disarray in and confusion of an arrogant imperial power should be amusing to observe.

The Belt and Road project is very important for China, and opponents can easily cast it as simply a tool with which China secures safe routes for its exports and imports. It has also had negative media coverage because of signs of unequal deals, projects that have led to large indebtedness for the country concerned, or projects in which a commercial port is claimed to be a cover for a potential Chinese naval base (as in Sri Lanka), or potential Chinese takeover and ownership when the debt cannot be repaid or serviced.

Evidence I have seen points to a more positive assessment. At least some of the problems with projects have been due to local corruption as much as to any Chinese misdemeanour. It is also worth noting that China’s infrastructure development plans often include building schools and hospitals as well as improving energy supply. The BRI should act to integrate more isolated areas into the world economy, greatly speed up logistics, travel and transport, and help these regions grow. It is not in China’s long-term interests that cooperating regions and countries become mere servicing wastelands.

The Xinjian crossing

The BRI’s routes traverse areas in which US imperialism has long sought to gain influence, many of which were formerly inside the USSR – including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Georgia – and also Iran and Russia itself. One area along the route that has been prominent in the news media recently is Xinjiang in north western China.

Xinjiang, or to give it the official title, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is home to around 25 million people, of which 45% are of the Uyghur ethnic group, and many of these are Muslim. It is China’s largest natural gas producing region, and has been the locus for many attacks by Islamic separatists, especially since the 1990s. Plausible reports claim that this was a ‘blowback’ from previous Chinese arming and training of Islamic guerrillas to fight Russia in Afghanistan in the 1980s. China, along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others, cooperated with the US CIA in this period, and trouble brewed for China in this region when the guerrillas came home.

The US, UK and other western powers have a long history of using Islamic militants to do their dirty work of political disruption and destabilisation, even though it often comes back to bite them. Just think of Osama Bin Laden and the support the US also gave his organisation to attack the Russians in Afghanistan. Or the British support for Islamic militants in Egypt against Nasser and in Libya against Gaddafi.[11] It is therefore no surprise that the US has been heavily involved in promoting Uyghur separatists, and that western news media have been full of stories about Chinese ‘concentration camps’ and brainwashing centres for Uyghurs.

BRI & the Xinjiang Region

Source: World Affairs blog, see footnote 12.

It would take too long and be too off topic to cover this in more detail, but my basic view is this. China has not been kind to separatist forces in Xinjiang and may well have clamped down on them harshly. It has also encouraged Han Chinese to move into Xinjiang. But there is no evidence of actual or cultural ‘genocide’ of Uyghurs and the region has even had some autonomy from strict regulations imposed elsewhere in the country, for example, on population and family policy. The western media view of all this is readily available; for an informed alternative view, I give some sources in a footnote.[12] Surely, anyone with any sense would see that there could not possibly be a ‘Save the Muslims’ motive behind the western propaganda about Xinjiang.

Hong Kong less important for China now

As the US anxiety and near-hysteria about China has grown, another opportunity has arisen for mischief – in Hong Kong, especially since early 2019. There have been widespread protests in this ‘special administrative region’ of China against the introduction of laws that would increase mainland China’s authority and potentially suppress dissent and opposition to government policy. Although led principally by students, the protests clearly had support from a large section of the population of Hong Kong.

Beijing was obviously none too pleased with this, and its paranoia alarm bells rang loudly when some demonstrators carried US flags and called for the US to impose sanctions on Hong Kong to force China to drop its proposals. (The US has now done it.) With the CIA-backed National Endowment for Democracy supporting the protests and with Joshua Wong, one of the leading students, cosying up to arch reactionary and regime-change interventionist, US Senator Marco Rubio, the stage was set for a Chinese clampdown.

China’s political system is authoritarian, but one should not fall for the hypocrisy of western powers lamenting the threat to a tradition of democracy in Hong Kong. Prior to UK talks with China in 1984 about the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, there was no sign of democracy, but instead an oligarchic Legislative Council, an advisory body to the British Governor. Full elections to this Council only began in 1995. So ‘democracy’ began to be introduced only just before Britain was going to lose its colony after 99 years.

What will be China’s policy towards Hong Kong now? To answer this question, it is worth noting the role it has played in relation to China.

When it was a British colony, Hong Kong specialised as an entrepot centre in Asia, with a large port operation and a big financial sector. As China grew as a global production base, particularly from the 1980s, Hong Kong also thrived as the ‘western’ gateway into China, with booming cross-border deals. In turn, China used Hong Kong to gain experience of international markets, from how best to run a port to how to manage banking and finance.

Hong Kong is now less important for China than it might seem. Its GDP is less than 3% of mainland China’s, and its 7.5 million people could be seen as barely a rounding error compared to China’s total. It is nevertheless politically inconceivable that China would allow Hong Kong to become fully ‘independent’ or to secede. In the event of continued protests about rule by mainland China, a much more likely policy would be to slowly run down the remaining economic reliance China has on Hong Kong. This is no doubt on the minds of some Hong Kong residents, not all of whom are anti-Beijing.

Hong Kong’s population has significantly higher living standards than the average in mainland China, and US dollar millionaires make up a surprising 7% of the population. Such factors will have influenced the protest movement in Hong Kong, and there have also been many signs of locals resenting mainlanders. Some of the latter have been attacked for supposedly being Beijing loyalists; others have faced opposition from locals who felt their presence was driving up prices and rents. I think that fear of an economic ‘levelling down’ is at least as significant a factor in the protests as any call for democratic rights.

Top 10 World Container Ports, Volume in millions of TEU *

Source: Worldshipping.org. Note *: The data represent total port throughput, including empty containers. A TEU is a ‘Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit’. The dimensions of one TEU are equal to a standard 20-foot shipping container.

One way of judging the ability of China to sideline Hong Kong, if it wants to, is by looking at its importance as a port. A list of the top world container ports – containers are critical in the trade of goods – has mainland China with six in the top 10. Hong Kong’s port is large, but is ranked number seven and is only roughly half the size of Shanghai’s at number one. Shenzhen, at number three and also bigger than Hong Kong, is only around 15 kilometres from Hong Kong (although a bit further to travel by sea!).

Out of control

Rivalries in the world economy can bring unexpected results, especially when a former underdog can now pro-actively resist. The world order is no longer entirely one where, as Bob Dylan put it, ‘You’re dancing with whom they tell you to, or you don’t dance at all’. How far China is able to build stable alliances for an economic area that limits US interference, and whether it too becomes oppressive, remain to be seen. But in the meantime it has offered many countries an alternative to the rich country model of development, one that has left poor countries poor.

Prospects for the Anglosphere powers are not good. Political idiocy born of generations of arrogance now adds to their difficulties in navigating a world that is changing increasingly outside their control. Examples of their recent responses to Chinese technology sum up their problem. China’s Huawei produces very good, and cheaper, 4G and 5G products, including infrastructure and smartphones, and ByteDance also has a popular media app, TikTok. Instead of saying, ‘we have something even better’, the US and others respond by claiming, with no evidence, that they pose a security risk and that Chinese products should be rejected.

By contrast, Germany, the most productivist of the European powers, has shown more enthusiasm for China-led developments than others. The Belt and Road Initiative already has an important outlet in Duisburg, the world’s largest inland port, where it is the first European stop for 80% of Chinese trains:

“Every week, around 30 Chinese trains arrive at a vast terminal in Duisburg’s inland port, their containers either stuffed with clothes, toys and hi-tech electronics from Chongqing, Wuhan or Yiwu, or carrying German cars, Scottish whisky, French wine and textiles from Milan heading the other way.”[13]

Duisberg’s main problem seems to be that ‘for every two full containers arriving in Europe from China, only one heads back the other way, and the port only earns a fifth of the fee from empty containers that have to be sent back to China’.

At the other end of the line, another German company, BMW, has praised China’s technical know how:

“The auto industry is undergoing a major transformation driven by technological development. In the midst of industrial upgrading and transformation, we need to keep an open mind and to collaborate with outstanding Chinese innovation powerhouses.”[14]

To say the least, these things suggest that China’s growing importance in the world economy will be difficult for the US to curb.

Tony Norfield, 14 July 2020

[1] Other articles on this blog have also analysed US-China relationships, including one from May 2011, looking at the growing strategic tensions, one in April 2019 on the economic and technology competition and another in September 2019 on the relative positions of the major powers. I cover the coronavirus pandemic here.

[2] The US makes much of the links, actual or alleged, between top Chinese companies and the Chinese Communist Party, the military, etc. For reasons that only an evil commie would speculate upon, it seems to forget that Amazon, Google and myriads of other US corporations, not just the arms producers, derive a lot of funding and regular contracts from the US government, the CIA and the Pentagon.

[3] See the article FX & Imperialism on this blog, 7 October 2019, for further details of the role of the US dollar compared to other currencies.

[4] Although London is the biggest market for dealing in foreign currency and for interest rate swaps.

[5] Both totals will include some companies listed on more than one exchange. Nearly 20% of companies on the two US exchanges are foreign companies; there is no comparable figure available for China, but it is likely very much lower.

[6] China does not usually disclose the currency composition of its FX reserves, but China’s SAFE has reported that the dollar component of reserves fell from 79% in 1995 to 58% in 2014. It will have fallen further since 2014, and is likely now a little under 50%. The absolute volume of dollars held will have risen up to 2014, given the big rise in total reserves, but will have likely fallen since.

[7] Over the past 10-15 years, China’s central bank has boosted its gold reserves from 600 tonnes to 1,917 tonnes. At $1,700 per troy ounce, this amounts to ‘only’ $106.5bn and a little over 3% of the reserves total at present.

[8] I say prices ‘could’ rather than ‘would’ fall because of the huge size of the US interest-bearing securities market, especially for shorter-term US Treasuries and agencies, which would limit the response to any selling by China.

[9] FX deals involve two currencies, so adding the shares of all currencies traded would give 200%, not 100%.

[10] Going against US sanctions, in July 2020, China and Iran have drafted a deal covering trade, investment and military cooperation. See New York Times, ‘Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership’, 11 July 2020. This Iran-China cooperation has been going on for several years. Notably, most of the payments between China and Iran, if not all, exclude the US dollar.

[11] For the less well known British escapades in this respect, see the book by Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, 2010.

[12] See here, and for the more official Chinese responses, see here and here.

[13] The Guardian, Germany’s ‘China City’, 1 August 2018.

[14] Comment from Jochen Goller, president and CEO of BMW Group Region China, Asia Times, 6 July 2020.

Rampant editorial collective statement

PostedJune 1, 2020

Trump’s post-shooting press conference denunciation of white supremacism was a model of cynical mendacity. He knows full well that white racism is at the core of the mass movement that he is building thorough dozens of rallies nationwide. In the past three weeks Trump launched a vicious racist attack on four Democrat congresswomen of colour and laughed with supporters at a Florida rally who called out that ‘illegal’ immigrants should be shot. In late July a Trump rally in North Carolina broke into chants of ‘send her back’ when he attacked Democrat congresswomen Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia. Trump rallies promote lynch mob politics.

Meanwhile Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has begun mass raids targeting undocumented migrants in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco.

Trump flagged up mental illness as a major cause of shootings, and called for immigration law reform – implying that ‘excessive’ immigration was a cause of the shootings. There is no doubt that mentally unhinged individuals are attracted by the far right. But the causes of mass shootings go deeper than the pro-Trump fascists who follow lunatic far-right web spaces like 8Chan and Gab.com.

Since 9/11 an extreme right-wing ideological mix has developed, promoted and deepened by the Trump regime. As Henry A. Giroux points out, interlocking elements of this include anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism, misogyny, homophobia, militarism, hypermasculinity and gun culture. Rampant homophobia was on display in the Pulse nightclub shooting three years ago in Orlando (53 dead, 49 wounded). Gross misogyny is highlighted by the growing number of US states banning nearly all abortions, and the widespread backlash against feminism.

Add official veneration of the military to gun culture then you get a mass culture of violence. Police in America killed 1,165 people in 2018. Thirty-five per cent of people shot dead by the police were Black, three times the percentage of Black people in the population. Since the beginning of 2018 21 people have been shot dead by the US Border Patrol on the Mexican border.

Donald Trump also blamed violent video games for the shooting, probably something thrown unthinkingly into the mix by one of his speech writers. Ironically, the United States military utilises, and sometimes creates, violent video games and training and recruitment tools. The 2004 game Full Spectrum Warrior was seized upon for training purposes and the army has recently published American Army: Operations, directly and explicitly with an eye to recruiting. In nearly all these games the enemy have beards and wear Afghan or Middle Eastern style clothing (or a stereotypical version thereof).

The veneration of military violence was on full display in Clint Eastwood’s 2014 film, American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper. The movie was based on the story of homicidal maniac Chris Kyle, an American Navy Seal sniper who claimed to have killed 255 Iraqis. Kyle himself was shot dead in a bar by another Iraq war veteran in 2013.

The advertising for the lethal Bushman automatic rifle – ‘Consider your Man-Car Reissued’ – is an explicit reference to the interlinking of hypermasculinity and gun culture.

Lauding mass murder by a military sniper all too easily creates the atmosphere for mass murder by domestic snipers, many of them followers of far-right websites, if not actually members of far-right organisations.

Martin Longman points out that racist shooters are often ‘self-starters’, not member of the organised right, just like many Islamist terrorists:

“We don’t seem to have trouble accepting the linkage when lone wolves commit terrorist attacks and then affiliate themselves with ISIS or al-Qaeda. Sometimes these people claim to actually be members of one of those organizations even if they’ve never actually talked to a recruiter. Between the president’s toxic rhetoric and the influence of websites like 8Chan, there is no doubt about what is inspiring some of these shooters. They’ve become foot soldiers in a fascist movement.”

Mass violence by fascists is not just an American phenomenon. In 2011 Norwegian Nazi Behring Breivik killed 69 young people at a Workers Youth League summer camp in Norway. Australian fascist Brendon Tarrant killed 53 people in the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings in March.

Trump’s reference to mental illness is a deliberate confusion. Unhinged individuals carrying out racist attacks should not obscure the political origins of these events. For example, the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016, was carried out by Thomas Mair, an obviously disturbed individual. But he was inspired by the National Front and English Defence League, and he collected Nazi memorabilia, as well as press cuttings about Behring Breivik. Mair’s far-right links were systematically downplayed in British media reports.

Trump’s racist mass rallies have the unmistakeable whiff of modern fascism. In the last seven years right-wing mass shootings in the US have targeted synagogues, mosques and a Hindu temple. They are, for the moment, the modern form of pogroms in that country.

Trump will for now condemn white supremacism, but hardly anyone (apart from the BBC) will be fooled. Trump’s politics foreground anti-immigrant racism. It is his go-to political weapon against liberals and the left. It is the way he attracts and fires up the racist mobs at his rallies. And it is coalescing a new face of fascism.

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

For the past three decades, the Democratic Party has been living with a debilitating trauma that’s left it a shell of what it once was. But if Tuesday night’s debate is any indication, the Democrats may finally be moving into the home stretch of a long, painful recovery.

Rather than sticking to the longtime script of Democrats pandering to the center, the two highest polling candidates on the stage—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—articulated a clear-eyed left-wing vision of the direction the party should take. Sanders railed against the “ruling class” while advocating enshrining universal economic rights, as Warren warned that “we’re not going to solve the urgent problems we face with small ideas and spinelessness.” Sanders agreed, claiming: “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.”

Ever since the Clinton years of the 1990s, the party’s officials and apparatchiks have internalized the belief that being too bold or too far left is a ticket to political oblivion. After enjoying a near-unbroken hold on the White House from 1932 to 1968, the following 24 years saw Democratic presidential nominee after nominee go down in landslides against ever more right-wing Republican opponents. Peace candidate George McGovern, who called for pulling troops out of Vietnam within 90 days in 1972, had been too far left to win, went the conventional wisdom. So had Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in 1984 and 1988, respectively, conveniently ignoring the reality that both had campaigned as centrists pledging to cut the deficit and reform welfare.

This set of lessons, combined with Bill Clinton’s two presidential victories, led the party to an increasingly ruinous set of choices. Clinton’s “triangulation”—collaborating with Republicans to deregulate banks, cut social programs and empower large financial institutions—helped hollow out unions and working-class support for the party, while setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. The Democrats’ choice of safe “moderate” candidate John Kerry in 2004 saw a vulnerable George W. Bush return to the White House for another four years. And Barack Obama finished the job Clinton had begun, with his fear of appearing too radical or—heaven forbid—a “socialist,” leading to a less-than-aggressive response to the financial crisis. This crisis, in turn, created a wipeout of black working-class wealth and a sluggish economic recovery that helped President Trump ride a wave of rage and apathy to the White House in 2016.

Paralyzed by caution, and its worst instincts justified through a gradual takeover by corporate interests, the Democratic Party has in many ways been its own worst enemy. Rather than proposing far-reaching redistributive policies, national Democrats have by and large moved to the right while pushing means-tested, tepid proposals meant not to offend corporate backers or scare off mythical “Reagan Democrats.” The result has been a party that’s failed to inspire its core constituency—working-class voters—to show up at the polls. Just look at the Obama years, during which the party lost over 1,000 seats nationwide.

Yet Tuesday night’s battle between, on one side, Sanders and Warren—the two most progressive candidates in the field—and, on the other, the conservative Democrats misleadingly labeled “moderates” by much of the media, suggest things may be finally changing.

The debate saw a conservative onslaught on the ideas of the party’s surging left wing. Sanders and Warren—both tribunes for progressive politics during the Obama years—faced right-wing attacks and skepticism from not just their conservative opponents, but CNN’s panel of moderators as well.

Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney opened the debate by derisively referring to Sanders and Warren’s “bad policies” and “impossible promises” of Medicare for All and “free everything,” questioning why the Democrats were being “the party of taking something away from people,” in this case, private health insurance. Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan suggested that Sanders’ Medicare for All bill would make things worse for union members. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper stressed that incremental reform (“evolution, not revolution”) and giving Americans “choices” promised a better way forward. Moderator Jake Tapper demanded to know if Warren and Sanders planned on raising taxes for the middle class.

The two senators responded combatively, batting away the attacks in an often fiery fashion. “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” an exasperated Warren told Delaney. “You’re wrong,” Sanders said, responding to Delaney’s charge that Medicare for All was “political suicide.”

Warren pointed out to Hickenlooper that incremental reforms had already been tried to no avail, and admonished the other candidates for “using Republican talking points.” Sanders leveled the same accusation at Tapper before charging that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program … with that talking point,” a prediction that came at least partially true: PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm, was one of a number of pharmaceutical entities to air ads during subsequent commercial breaks.

And this was all during just the first half-hour. Healthcare reared its head again later in the debate once the conversation turned to immigration, with the moderators suggesting that Sanders’ plan to allow undocumented immigrants to access care under Medicare for All would encourage a deluge of migrants. A number of other questions implied that Sanders was too radical to beat Trump, or, as one put it, that he was indistinguishable from the far-right president because they both said they wanted to end wars. At one point, the moderators pushed the candidates to affirm they would maintain the United States’ first-use of nuclear weapons, a stance Warren bravely rejected, paralleling UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s own stance on the matter.

Perhaps most significantly, both Sanders and Warren tied signature policies like Medicare for All, a wealth tax, free tertiary education and student debt cancellation to their broader vision of political change, rebuking Democrats’ three-decade-long strategy of scurrying in fear at the sight of their own shadow. Warren thundered that the Democrats need to be the party “of big, structural change.” Sanders argued that “to win this election and to defeat Donald Trump … we need to have a campaign of energy and excitement and of vision. We need to bring millions of young people into the political process in a way that we have never seen.” For his part, Delaney fell back on the Democratic establishment’s classic warning that McGovern’s 1972 loss showed moving to the left was the electoral equivalent of drinking rat poison.

Meanwhile, Warren and Sanders’ criticisms of their conservative challengers were rooted in more than a kernel of truth. Sanders’ charge that Delaney, while opposing Medicare for All, “made money off of healthcare” wasn’t wrong. Besides being a conservative “New Democrat” who, while in the House, supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership and backed Obama’s entitlement-cutting Bowles-Simpson commission, Delaney was one of the richest members of Congress thanks to his career at the head of a company that lent money to the healthcare sector. As Sludge has reported, his latest financial disclosure, filed in 2019, shows Delaney has $3.2 million invested in the healthcare sector and funds with holdings in the industry.

The same goes for Warren’s suggestion that the candidates assailing Medicare for All lacked the “political will” to fight for it, which Hickenlooper emphatically denied. Yet in 2016, as governor of Colorado, he—along with fellow 2020 candidate, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet—opposed Amendment 69, a ballot measure that would have instituted a single-payer system in the state. At the time, Hickenlooper claimed that it was “premature” to reform the healthcare system. Behind closed doors, he told the Colorado Forum, an assembly of business leaders and political operatives that comprised one of Colorado’s most powerful lobbies, that a “couple large healthcare-related companies that are looking at moving their headquarters to Colorado” had “paused” when they learned about the measure.

While post-debate polling is still to come, it’s been clear that the unambitious, conservative approach championed by figures like Delaney and Hickenlooper is no longer welcome among the Democratic grassroots. Both candidates were booed at the California Democratic Convention this year for rebuking single-payer healthcare and socialism. In most polls, both candidates are ranking somewhere between 0 and 1 percent. Hickenlooper, whose campaign began hemorrhaging staff in early July, recently celebrated triumphantly when he hit a mere 2 percent, in one of this election’s most unintentionally hilarious tweets so far: “You did this. This campaign is gaining serious momentum and we’re just getting started.”

The Democratic Party’s recovery from their 30-year trauma isn’t over yet. After all, Joe Biden, one of the original neoliberal Democrats who abandoned the New Deal in the 1980s and is currently running a campaign based on attacking Medicare for All while being lavished with corporate money, is still the frontrunner.

But Warren and Sanders’ performance in Tuesday night’s debate, coupled with the crowd’s raucous cheers for their defiant retorts to the party’s withering conservative wing, hints that the healing process is well underway.

Source: Stylist

Things are bad. Things are really bad.

If you saw the footage of crowds in North Carolina shouting “send her back”, prompted by Donald Trump using the same language when tweeting that four Democratic congresswomen should “go back” to other countries, and it didn’t send chills down your spine, then you should brush up on your history.

This is a world leader using the language of fascism without serious repercussion. It is nothing new for the president and his supporters, who have taken the conventions of white supremacy in their stride. What are we doing about it? Or, rather, what aren’t we doing about it? We have reached this point through complacency, disregard, and laziness. It’s time to stand up and fight back.

Trump and his most vocal supporters have often behaved like the members of an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club. They are rigid in their thinking and narcissistic in their actions. When they screw up, they shrug their shoulders imperially, knowing the old power structures will keep them safe. As well as the immovable, unchangeable rules about who gets to be a member.

Like anything prehistoric, these exclusion policies tend to apply mostly to women and people of colour. You are doubly damned if you happen to be both. Because the objective of these brotherhoods, these groups of white men, was never centred around the bond that comes with inclusion, rather the superiority from selecting who stays on the outside.

Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – otherwise known as The Squad, a joking and affectionate nickname that has stuck – are perhaps our most current and public examples of how it looks to be positioned as the outsider.

The four Democratic congresswomen in question have become frequent easy targets for Trump, as they vocally stand for and personify everything he despises. In a video that went viral in February, Ocasio-Cortez broke down how corrupt finance laws are, which makes it easy for congressional candidates to take advantage. Pressley has been taking on the government and banks to ensure working-class Americans can clear their paychecks faster. On Twitter, the women even share information for migrants who may be subjected to immigration raids.

Trump has a narrative: a story he tells of violent black and Hispanic criminals, of thieving immigrants and uneducated people of colour. The Squad has become the middle finger up to the propaganda.

Above anything else they are young, multiracial, working-class women who epitomise the very progression Trump and conservatives like him are so fearful of. Theirs is not an empty rhetoric of sensationalism, name-calling and antagonism. Instead, they have committed themselves to standing up for the marginalised communities the president has been assaulting, before turning his attention to them.

Each woman, all from humble and challenging backgrounds, has made history. Pressley is the first black congresswoman to represent Massachusetts. Tlaib is the first Palestinian American, and Omar is the first Somali American member of congress. Omar and Tlaib are the first Muslim women in such positions. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected.

Pressley is the first black congresswoman to represent Massachusetts, and Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected. Between them they have lived through wars, poverty and sexual assault, and have come to understand the importance of striving for fairness. They represent the average person for whom they serve. As people who have worked and worried about bills and their communities, they actually have more in common with the majority of Trump’s supporters than the President himself. They are proving that privilege is not the only road to power. Nor is being a man. Or white.

Stuck in the past

Omar is perhaps the most attacked of the four: as a black woman, an immigrant, and a Muslim – a hijabwearing one, no less – she represents many of the categories Trump and his advocates have contempt for. She unwittingly embodies the arguments about American national identity. What she considers it means to be American, and her own definition of belonging, matters very little to those whose criteria relies on birthplace and skintone alone.

Omar is a problem for Trump. Her predicament is that she does not fit his narrative on why refugees, Muslims or immigrants should be dismissed by American society.

Instead, successful, lawabiding and patriotic – to the point that she has made it her life’s work to serve the progress of the US – Omar disproves the lie Trump has told Americans about people like her. Omar is not a terrorist or a terrorist sympathiser. Omar is not useless or lazy. She fails to satisfy the image the president has spent years warning against.

Now, it turns out, none of that mattered anyway. Trump has let us know. An immigrant can do everything their new country demands of them but, in Trump’s America, being “the good immigrant” was never really the golden-ticket to acceptance.

For Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley, as women of colour, even their American birthplaces are of no importance. For Trump’s supporters, “going back” is simply going to a place away from white people.

Back in 1790, the Naturalization Act decreed that citizenship was permitted only to “free white persons of good character”. Native Americans were excluded, as were indentured servants, slaves and free black people. Trump seems to draw inspiration from the distant past: even before he formally entered politics, we watched his relentless harassment of Barack Obama, asking the then-president to defend his own American citizenship.

Trump’s rhetoric has always been about the past. His slogan Make America Great Again thrives among certain audiences because of one word: again.

Again is the time of (not so) long ago. Again is forbidden abortions, it is where gay marriages were not permitted and husbands could rape their wives. Again is when white supremacy reigned without exception. It is no surprise then, that the language that sticks best with the president’s supporters conjures these loathsome times.

People of colour and immigrants have been cautioning of growing public discrimination against them for some time. The response was one of disregard.

We were told not to worry because times had changed. Katie Hopkins, who described migrants as cockroaches (as the Nazis had done), was just a Twitter troll. Attacks on mosques were isolated. UKIP was just a party the drunk guy in the pub supported. Marginalised people were oversensitive snowflakes. We were paranoid and had a victim complex.

It was this very dismissiveness that allowed Boris Johnson – a man who referred to black people as having “watermelon smiles” and being “piccaninnies” – to become prime minister last week. We can only imagine what the future of Britain looks like, when it was Johnson who brought us the highly xenophobic Leave campaign.

The rise of fascism

Of course, “Go back to where you came from” has been the guffaw of simple-minded jingoists everywhere. In Britain – so long as you weren’t the one subjected to it – many believed it had been left behind in the 1970s.

In more recent years we were told it was only said by those on the fringes of society, at poorly attended EDL marches, or by the uncle no one wants to sit next to at family meals.

But this kind of rhetoric is neither dated, offhand or limited to a few. The thoughtless parroting of slogans has always been one of the most effective tools in furthering fascism. Its message is a clear one, as much about fixed ideologies as it is about exclusion. If you don’t like it, tough.

When you are at the receiving end of these words, you understand it to be a threat.

Whether you disappear of your own accord, or theirs, you will go. A week after Trump’s tweet, the now-sacked police officer Charlie Rispoli wrote on Facebook about Ocasio-Cortez: “This vile idiot needs a round.”

Rispoli’s comment is all the more disturbing as the US deals with the unlawful shootings of people of colour by the police. Ocasio-Cortez linked the comment with Trump’s tweet, saying, “This is Trump’s goal when he uses targeted language and threatens elected officials who don’t agree with his political agenda. It’s authoritarian behaviour. The president is sowing violence. He’s creating an environment where people can get hurt and he claims plausible deniability.”

She’s right. These are not throwaway words bundled in healthy patriotism – they are war cries. And history is our evidence. “What’s your ethnicity?” Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Trump, asked a Jewish reporter this month. The answer to that question has always mattered to bigots.

The reply to “What’s your ethnicity?” in 1939 was enough to turn 900 Jewish refugees away from America, where they were returned to die in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. “Send her back!” the crowds chanted about Omar, a refugee who escaped war. So what if you die? Just go back.

“Send them back” was an attitude that weighed heavily in Brexit’s Leave campaign. The now infamous Breaking Point poster portrayed a long line of refugees descending on Britain’s borders, mimicking Nazi propaganda.

Encouraging society to fear people of colour and immigrants has not been born from a place of misunderstanding, nor is it clumsy and thoughtless. Instead, the scaremongering is a considered and precisely implicated strategy with a tried-and-tested template. It is, in fact, a recruiting technique.

For many years in a village in West Yorkshire, Thomas Mair collected Nazi memorabilia, consumed with the belief that the white race was being threatened with extinction.

Just hours after the Breaking Point poster was unveiled, Mair murdered MP Jo Cox – a woman who proudly stood for the rights of migrants. A week later Nigel Farage referred to the EU referendum as victorious “without a single bullet being fired”. The message was clear: even allies of the immigrant, refugee or person of colour would not be considered a part of their society.

The same kind of language was used in America. Activist Heather Heyer was murdered in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, while peacefully protesting against white supremacy. Trump said that there had been “very fine people on both sides”, seeming to suggest there was no moral difference between alt-right marchers with swastikas and semi-automatic rifles, and those who stood against them.

Whatever you may think of Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley and Omar, the attack on them is as much ideological as it is personal. Every chant of “Send her back” is intended for every non-white person across America. It is a poison that will spread. When will the chants be aimed at LGBTQ+ people? At women? At anyone who doesn’t agree with the ideas of those who sit in power?

These are no longer warning signs. We had those long before Brexit and long, long before Trump. History has warned us, repeatedly.

It is not possible to claim to be against prejudice, then remain quiet. Staying quiet is how fascism gains traction. Staying quiet is how fascism has already risen.

Men like Trump and Johnson are not solely responsible; it’s a chicken-and-egg situation: are their supporters learning from them, or are they giving their supporters what they already wanted?

As people of colour and immigrants, many of us have talked loudly for many years that this is where we were headed. It is finally time to listen and react. Now is the time to stand and to stand together to renounce this racist rhetoric. Before it’s too late.

Source: RT

Trump has embarked on a trajectory which unless averted, and soon, will propel him and the United States over a cliff into a hell of his own creation.

Source: The Guardian

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Meanwhile most Americans are working harder, getting nowhere, with less security than ever.

“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21bn saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4bn. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. They’ll make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

Trump is promoting socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else in other ways. GM has got more than $600m in federal contracts, plus $500m in tax breaks. Some of this has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22m in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

When he was in business, Trump perfected the art of using bankruptcy to shield himself from the consequences of bad decisions – socialism for the rich at its worst – while leaving employees twisting in the wind.

Now, all over America, executives who run their companies into the ground are getting gold-plated exit packages while their workers get pink slips.

Sears is doling out $25m to the executives who stripped its remaining assets and drove it into bankruptcy, but has no money for the thousands of workers it laid off.

As Pacific Gas and Electric hurdles toward bankruptcy, the person who was in charge when the deadly infernos roared through Northern California last year (caused in part by PG&E’s faulty equipment) has departed with a cash severance package of $2.5m . The PG&E executive in charge of gas operations when records were allegedly falsified left in 2017 with $6.9m.

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Equifax’s Richard Smith retired in 2017 with an $18m pension in the wake of a security breach that exposed the personal information of 145 million consumers to hackers.

Wells Fargo’s Carrie Tolstedt departed with a $125m exit package after being in charge of the unit that opened more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.

Around 60% of America’s wealth is now inherited. Many of today’s super-rich have never done a day’s work in their lives.

Trump’s response has been to cut the estate tax to apply only to estates valued at over $22m per couple. Mitch McConnell is now proposing that the estate tax be repealed altogether.

What about the capitalist principles that people earn what they’re worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them?

America is on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history. As rich boomers expire over the next three decades, an estimated $30tn will go to their children.

Those children will be able to live off of the income these assets generate, and then leave the bulk of them to their own heirs, tax-free. (Capital gains taxes don’t apply to the soaring values of stocks, bonds, mansions, and other assets of wealthy people who die before they’re sold.)

After a few generations of this, almost all of the nation’s wealth will be in the hands of a few thousand non-working families. To the conservative mind, the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable, and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet that’s exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich.

Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism in which they’re working harder but getting nowhere, and have less security than ever.

They need thicker safety nets and deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie. If you want to call this socialism, fine. I call it fair.

Robert Reich is a former US secretary of labor and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

Source: The Gray Zone

Guaidó was selected by Washington, not to lead Venezuela toward democracy, but to collapse a country that for two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US imperialism.

This is the introduction to an in-depth investigation by Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, which is a must-read that counters the corporate media’s presentation of Juan Guaidó as a beacon of democracy. Available in full here…

But after a single phone call from from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself president of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom-dweller was vaulted onto the international stage as the US-selected leader of the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.

Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times editorial board hailed Guaidó as a “credible rival” to Maduro with a “refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward.” The Bloomberg News editorial board applauded him for seeking “restoration of democracy” and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a new democratic leader.” Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the US government’s elite regime change factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly demonstrated his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power.

“Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance,” Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian sociologist and leading chronicler of Venezuelan politics, told The Grayzone. “It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between laughable and worrying.”

Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the investigative outlet Misión Verdad, agreed: “Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,” Sequera remarked to The Grayzone, “He’s a known character there, is predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.”

While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.

“‘These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,” wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster. According to León, Guaidó’s party remains isolated because the majority of the population “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solution.’”

But this is precisely why Guaidó was selected by Washington: He is not expected to lead Venezuela toward democracy, but to collapse a country that for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US hegemony. His unlikely rise signals the culmination of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust socialist experiment.

The in-depth investigation by Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, “The making of Juan Guaidó: how the US regime change laboratory created Venezuela’s coup leader”, is available in full here…

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: RT

For over 30 years, Washington has engaged in a concerted and unrelenting effort to return the oil-rich country to its ‘rightful’ status as a wholly owned US subsidiary.

The Mexican-American War was a war of plunder and conquest on the part of a US ruling class for whom every country south of the Rio Grande was then, as if by divine right, deemed subservient to Washington. From then to now the US has regarded Latin America as a wholly owned subsidiary, its primary function to serve Washington’s economic interests.

Any Latin American government that dared assert its country’s right to sovereign independence of the US in the years since has found itself subjected to a campaign of subversion and attack, so blatant in gangsterism it would have made Al Capone blush.

It was US Marine General Smedley Butler who famously said after retiring in 1931: “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

This is the context in which Trump’s public recognition of Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaido, as interim president should be weighed.

Starting from the beginning, ever since Hugo Chavez dared liberate Venezuela from the iron grip of a US-controlled local oligarchy in the late 1990s, Washington has engaged in a concerted and unrelenting effort to return the oil-rich country to its ‘rightful’ status as a wholly owned subsidiary.

And what with Venezuela possessing the largest proven oil reserves in the world, for a Trump administration that evinces the characteristics of a New York mafia crime family more than a democratic government, it was always inevitable that this campaign would be ramped up rather than tamped down upon the Orange One’s arrival in the White House in 2016.

Venezuela’s current ‘legally elected’ president, Nicolas Maduro, took over the presidency after his mentor’s death from cancer in 2013, pledging to protect and continue the legacy of radical reforms Chavez inspired and introduced.

And under the aegis of the Bolivarian Constitution, the achievements of those reforms cannot be gainsaid.

The mass literacy known as Mission Robinson was the biggest and most ambitious ever undertaken, its success recognized by UNESCO in 2005 when it declared Venezuela ‘illiteracy-free’. Cuba, crucial to that success, was also involved in the establishment of health clinics, designed to provide free healthcare to the country’s poor.

Additionally, according to the UN, the quality of life of Venezuelans improved at the third highest rate in the world between 2006-11. Poverty was cut from 48.6 percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent by 2011, while at the time of Chavez’s death Venezuela had the lowest rate of income inequality of any country in Latin America.

In order to achieve such outstanding outcomes, the Chavez government moved against the country’s US-backed oligarchy, seizing the assets of over 1,000 companies. It also nationalized oil fields owned by US oil giants Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips.

Price controls were introduced in order to ensure the affordability of basic necessities, which along with free education, healthcare and the constitutional right to a home ensured that the Bolivarian Revolution was a beacon of hope to the poor and marginalized not just in Venezuela but throughout the region and across the wider Global South.

On foreign policy, meanwhile, Chavez proved a formidable foe of US hegemony, taking every opportunity to denounce the history of Washington’s role in subverting democracy, human rights and national sovereignty throughout Latin America, educating the Venezuelan people on the history of US imperialism in the process.

He sought and forged closer ties with Cuba, China, Russia and Iran – countries that likewise opposed and challenged US domination – and embarked on numerous initiatives throughout the region to foment closer economic, political and cultural integration.

This fruits of this policy were the establishment of the Latin American trading bloc known as Mercosur, the economic, political and cultural integrationist project knows as ALBA, and the pan-Latin American television and media network, Telesur.

Prior to his death, Chavez also had ambitions to set up a regional development bank in order to end dependence on the IMF and World Bank.

The legacy laid out above is important to grasp if serious about understanding why for Washington the Venezuela shaped and inspired by Hugo Chavez could never be allowed to survive.

Since assuming office in 2013, Maduro has had to contend with a sharp drop in the price of oil, which, combined with a determined campaign conducted by a US-supported opposition, plus US sanctions, has plunged the country into a deepening economic, social and political crisis.

The result has been skyrocketing inflation and a shortage of basic goods on supermarket shelves, blamed by Maduro on an orchestrated policy by the opposition of hoarding food supplies in order to foment social unrest.

Now, with the crisis in the country reaching the point of critical mass, Trump’s coronation of Juan Guaido as interim president marks the next and most blatant attack on a Bolivarian Revolution whose only crime, since inception, has been the crime of a good example.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: Rogue Journalist

Turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper, and it’s nothing but nonstop hagiography and adulation for someone who you know was a serial killer.

If you try to bring up the whole serial killing thing, people react with sputtering outrage that you would dare to speak ill of such a noble and wonderful person.

“Look, I didn’t agree with everything he did, but you can’t just let one not-so-great thing from a man’s life eclipse all the other good things he’s accomplished,” they protest. “For example, did you know he was a baseball captain at Yale?”
“But… what about all those people he murdered?” you reply.

“God, why can’t you just pay respect to a great man in our time of mourning??” they shout in exasperation.

You turn on the TV, and it’s nothing but nonstop hagiography and adulation for this guy who you know was a serial murderer. Pick up a newspaper and it’s the same thing.

On the rare occasions where they do mention his astonishingly high body count, they frame it as a good thing: he got the killing done quickly and efficiently. He helped our country get over its phobia of mass murder. Our streets sure are a lot cleaner without all those unwanted prostitutes and homeless people he butchered.

“What the hell?” you think to yourself. “This guy brutally murdered a whole bunch of men, women and children for no good reason. We all know this. How come that isn’t the single defining thing about this man’s life that we’re all discussing right now? When Timothy McVeigh died people didn’t spend all their time talking about his love of the Constitution or how he never liked broccoli. Nobody cares how much Ted Bundy loved his cat.

Why are they celebrating this mass murderer as though his mass murders are some marginal, irrelevant anomaly in his life and not the single defining feature of it? I mean, that is his legacy!”

How surreal would that be? How weird would it feel to have all that death and destruction go either unmentioned or outright praised in discussing your acquaintance who perpetrated it?

Of course, this will never happen. No random schmuck in your life will ever get caught committing a single murder, let alone many, without being punished and seeing it become the very first thing people think of whenever their name comes up. No, that sort of treatment is a privilege that is reserved only for the elites who rule over us.

If a man kills a lot of people, then his legacy is that of a mass murderer. There is nothing else anyone could possibly accomplish in their lifetime which could eclipse the significance of the act of violently ripping the life out of thousands of human bodies. I don’t care if you started a charity, if you gave a graduation speech, or if you loved your wife very much. If you committed war crimes, knowingly targeted civilian shelters, and deliberately targeted a nation’s civilian infrastructure to gain a strategic advantage after the conclusion of a war based on lies, then you are a mass murderer who may have also done some other far less significant things during the rest of your time on this planet. That is who you are.

Murder is treated as the most serious crime anyone can commit in societies around the world because it is the single most egregious violation of personal sovereignty possible. When you murder someone, you willfully overpower their will for themselves and take everything away from them, without any possibility of their getting any of it back. This doesn’t stop being true if someone happens to be sitting in an office which empowers him to murder people without fear of consequences.

If you murder one person, then what you are for the rest of your life, first and foremost, is a murderer, because murder is such a hugely significant crime. If you murder a large number of people, then what you are is a mass murderer.

George HW Bush was a mass murderer. That is his legacy. That is what he was. Any discussion of the man’s life which does not put this single defining legacy front and center by a very wide margin is being dishonest about the thing that murder is, and is doing so out of fealty to a corrupt power structure which enables consequence-free murder on a mass scale as long as it happens in accordance with the will of that power structure.

Whenever I hold my customary public “good riddance” social media celebration after a war pig dies, I always get people telling me they hope I die for saying such a thing. And of course I am aware that I am courting controversy by saying immediately after someone’s death that the world is better off without them, and hostile reactions necessarily come along with that.

But I also think it says so much about people’s deification of these child-killing elites that simply being glad to see them leave this world, peacefully of old age and in their own homes, is seen as such an unforgivable offense that it deserves nothing short of death. I suppose that’s how high of a pedestal you need to place someone on above the ordinary people in order to see their acts of mass murder as insignificant little foibles instead of horrific atrocities which define their entire personhood.

In the eyes of the thoroughly propagandized public, they are gods, as the nonstop fawning beatification of Poppy Bush makes abundantly clear.

US presidents are not special. They are not made of any different kind of substance than you or I. When they order the extermination of large numbers of human lives for no legitimate reason, they are as guilty as you or I would be if we murdered each and every one of those people ourselves, personally.

And if you or I had done such a thing during our lives, we both know people wouldn’t be spending their time after we die talking about how delightful and charming we were.

George Herbert Walker Bush was a mass murderer, and the only reason that undeniable fact isn’t dominating public discourse today is because of the myopia caused by a deeply unjust power dynamic.

Ken Jarecke’s Death of an Iraqi Soldier, taken on the “Highway of Death” in 1991 has rarely been published in the United States.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Rogue Journalist

No matter who wins, the wars are guaranteed to continue, the oligarchs are guaranteed to keep siphoning more and more money out of the pockets of ordinary Americans.

By this I do not mean that the votes aren’t real or that the outcomes are predetermined, I simply mean that both mainstream parties are controlled by plutocrats who benefit from the status quo and are only interested in their own power and profit.

No matter who wins on Tuesday, the wars are guaranteed to continue, the oligarchs are guaranteed to keep siphoning more and more money out of the pockets of ordinary Americans, opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies are guaranteed to continue expanding intrusive surveillance practices and narrative control psyops in collaboration with powerful Silicon Valley corporations, and we’re guaranteed to keep hurtling toward climate catastrophe on the back of an economic system which requires infinite growth on a finite planet.

The only thing that might change a tiny bit is America maybe temporarily having a government which pretends to care about oppressed minorities sometimes.

But there’s a sharp tension in the air about this performance. Whenever I mention how it’s all an act staged to profit nobody but Vince McMahon, I get a bunch of people yelling and cursing at me, with even those those who kind of know it’s fake saying “Okay, but you still gotta cheer for The Undertaker though, come on!”

That tension is there because on paper the outcome of the 2018 midterms is still uncertain. The slight lead Democrats held in polls has narrowed further today, with some analysts going so far as to predict Republicans retaining control of both houses.

Which is, on its surface, bizarre. It is bizarre not only because a new president almost always takes congressional losses at this point in their administration (the only exceptions being the historically significant years of 1934 and 2002), but also because the Republican Party is under the leadership of the most despised presidential candidate of all time.

If US politics were real, this would not be happening. If the Democratic Party were a real political party, a party which advances popular agendas in order to get its members elected to the government the way kids are taught in school, it would be on the cusp of a massive landslide of victories in both the House and the Senate, instead praying Hail Marys that they at least gain a slight advantage in the House. The last two years would have been spent promoting the virally popular agendas of the Bernie Sanders movement like single payer healthcare and getting money out of politics, after a thorough and radically honest autopsy of everything that went so catastrophically wrong in 2016.

Instead, what did Democrats do? They spent the last two years babbling about Russiagate conspiracy theories, and then in a tacit admission that they’ve never believed a word of that nonsense suddenly went completely silent on the issue before midterms and switched to the “We’re not Trump” platform. Oh yeah, and they’re telling Green Party candidates to drop out.

Democrats have done almost nothing in the last two years to fight the Republicans in any way that will ensure victory. Using his personal Twitter account, conservative media lackeys and an army of sycophants, Trump has completely dominated the narrative that his presidency has been a godsend for the economy. Fighting this narrative should have been Democrats’ first and foremost priority from day one, which would have been extremely easy to do since the narrative is entirely false.

Job growth has continued on the trajectory it’s been on since 2012 and ordinary Americans don’t have any more money in their pockets than before; the wealth has stayed at the top no matter how much the economy has grown. An entirely factual counter-narrative about money being siphoned upward to the dollar-hoarding billionaire class with the help of Republican tax cuts would have been an extremely easy sell, but hardly anybody has attempted to do this.

Or war. It’s simply taken for granted that Democrats aren’t going to campaign against war, but how easy would it be for them to win elections if they did? There is no shortage of footage and statistics which could be used to attack this administration’s unforgivable rate of civilian casualties from airstrikes, its expansion of military presence in Syria, Afghanistan and Africa, its horrifying escalations against a nuclear superpower in Russia, its continued facilitation of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world in Yemen, and its depraved implementation of starvation sanctions against Iran.

Democrats could have been shoving these horrors into the public eye since January 2017 and it would have not only galvanized liberals and leftists against Trump but also crippled his appeal with the anti-interventionist paleocons, libertarians and nationalists on the right. But, of course, they did not, because that would have alienated their war profiteer sponsors.

Instead of advancing popular positions to win the votes of the majority as kids are taught happens in school, all Democrats are doing currently is attacking the Republicans over Trump’s obnoxious tweets and generally successful anti-immigrant fearmongering.

Since both parties support all oligarchic agendas in essentially the same ways, the only wiggle room Democrats have left is on issues the billionaire class doesn’t care about, like racism and other forms of bigotry. Plutocrats don’t care if gay people get married or if the president says racist things, they only care about power and profit, so civil rights and opposition to racism are the only means by which Democrats can significantly distinguish themselves from Republicans in a way that helps them get elected. The fact that both parties support the same oligarchic agendas which hurt disadvantaged groups first and worst goes unmentioned by either side.

It was telling when the Democrats lost to the single most beatable presidential candidate of all time in 2016. It was even more telling that they chose to spend two years spouting gibberish about Russia instead of building an actual platform with actual positions that actual people care about. The fact that there is any doubt whatsoever about the donkey party making gains in 2018 proves conclusively that they have been making zero effort to help advance the interests of Americans.

They do not care. It should be as clear as day to everyone by now. And why don’t they care? Because a pro wrestler gets paid the same whether his character wins the match or loses it.

US politics work nothing remotely like how kids are taught in school. The difference is night and day. If the American education system really wanted kids to learn about the way their electoral system actually functions, teachers would bribe student government candidates with Monopoly money to betray the interests of their classmates, and whichever candidate accepted the most bribes would get advertised on the school PA system as the clear and obvious choice to vote for.

By all means go ahead and vote on Tuesday, my American readers, in whatever way you feel might make some difference. But please also remember that you are ultimately participating in a game rigged for your oppressors, and that you deserve a much better system than this.

That’s where the real fight is.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

One of the all-time greatest actors speaking the provocative and profound words of one of the all-time greatest playwrights and political agitators.

Sir Mark Rylance is recognized as one of today’s finest actors, both in theatre and film. In 2016 he won the Oscar for best supporting actor in the film Bridge of Spies.

Harold Pinter was also a fine actor, but is best known as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, not least for his hugely influential plays.

The performance was part of a season of Pinter plays, which runs to February 2019, in celebration of Pinter’s literary legacy and to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his passing.  Artistic Director for the season,  Jamie Lloyd, said: “This is sure to be a powerful evening; one of the all-time greatest actors speaking the provocative and profound words of one of the all-time greatest playwrights and political agitators. The Nobel Lecture concerns the quest for truth in art and the scarcity of truth in politics. These performances couldn’t be more timely.”

And how right he was.

As well as in their professional lives, Mark Rylance and Harold Pinter were linked by their political activism, particularly in their opposition to injustice and war. Unsurprisingly, this led both to a close involvement with the Stop the War movement (STW), which was founded nearly two decades ago in response to the war in Afghanistan, and is one of the most significant mass movements in British history.

Pinter was a regular contributor to Stop the War events, speaking on demonstrations at which he often read a poem he had written especially for the occasion.

Mark Rylance says the STW demonstration on 15 February 2003, when two million came onto London’s streets in protest against the Iraq war, was “one of the most profound moments of my life”. Rylance is today a STW patron, regularly appearing at its events. His two performaces of Pinter’s Nobel lecture were also fundraising events for Stop the War.

Harold Pinter was seriously ill in 2005 with advanced cancer and other health issues, so was unable to travel to Norway to make his acceptance speech in person, delivering it instead on film from his wheelchair. It was – despite Pinter’s obvious physical discomfort and his seriously weakened voice – an electric performance, in which his anger at the injustices of the world were given powerful expression, in a speech which stands in its importance as one of the great radical speeches since the end of World War Two.

Mark Rylance’s performance brilliantly caught the rhythms and intonation of Pinter’s own voice, and the intensity of his outrage over the momentous crimes against humanity that went unrestrained and unpunished – particularly those committed in the name of US foreign policy.

He moved purposefully round the stage, savouring every sentence of Pinter’s text, the theme of which centred on truth, and how it is portrayed both in literature and in the world generally. Pinter opened his speech with this statement:

In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth is forever elusive in drama, says Pinter. But truth is also elusive in political language, due to how it is filtered through the media, and because

… the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

Behind this “vast tapestry of lies”, says Pinter, lies a reality in which “the United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War”, from Nicaragua to Greece, from Indonesia to Chile.

This is in addition to US wars in Korea and Vietnam and – in Pinter’s final years – Afghanistan and Iraq, which, he says, “was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law”. Pointing his finger at George W Bush and Tony Blair, Pinter asks, “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought.”

And since Pinter’s death, we have had the invasion of Libya, the catastrophic subversion by the US and its allies in Syria and countless other interventions.

Was all this mass slaughter and destruction attributable to American foreign policy? asks Pinter. “The answer is yes,” he says. “But you wouldn’t know it”. Adding in a now much quoted passage:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

This was a theme taken up by the audience in the Q&A which followed the performance, in which Mark Rylance was joined by two founder members of Stop the War, Lindsey German and Chris Nineham.

One of the first quesions raised from the audience was whether the root cause of endless war we experience today was the result of human nature, rather than a consequence of US foreign policy, as Pinter argues. To which Chris Nineham replied that people are not ‘naturally’ predisposed to be aggressive and uncaring; look at people’s daily lives and we see that it is collaboration and unselfishness which are the main characteristics. Lindsey German added that how people act depends on the social context in which they live: there are many examples of societies in which war and conflict are not the predominant values, as they are today, particularly in the world as dominated by US imperialism.

The musician Dave Randall asked about Jeremy Corbyn, who has inspired a movement for justice and peace which grew directly out of the anti-war movement. Corbyn was for many years the chair of Stop the War before his leadership transformed the Labour Party into the biggest political party in Europe. How could he be supported?

Mark Rylance replied that it is in collective action that we can best support a politician like Corbyn. But Harold Pinter had also given an answer to this question in his summing up at the end of his Nobel speech:

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.  

The final question from the audience asked the panel why we are so powerless when there are so many of us, and why is it that those in power, who are so few in number, are not scared of the vast majority.

To which another audience member replied: But they are scared, which is why they do everything they can to vilify and smear someone like Jeremy Corbyn, who has inspired a mass movement committed to the causes of peace and social justice, and looks like he is on the brink of forming a government based on those values.

It is a reply that Harold Pinter would have welcomed.

This was a very special evening to be long treasured by all who were there, and it is hard to imagine another actor who could have captured both the spirit and meaning of Pinter’s words with the clarity and emotional force that Mark Rylance gave to them.

Mark Rylance interviewed on BBC Andrew Marr programme

While Trump denies that climate change is a reality, the United States is becoming one of the main victims of extreme climate events.

In the United States, Donald Trump has promised all necessary aid to the affected states – North and South Carolina and Virginia in particular. But the recent hurricane history of the United States is one of neglect and indifference towards poor and non-white populations – often the same people – not least by the Trump administration towards the people of Puerto Rico.

In the United States we see the same set of factors recurring: 1) Poor populations are disproportionately victims because their housing is substandard, because flood defences have been neglected and because they tend to live in the most vulnerable areas 2) Poor populations have a higher proportion of victims because they don’t have the means to escape from the onrush of storm water 3) Survivors from Black and Latino populations suffer disproportionately in post-hurricane situations because they often lack the means to rebuild their homes, renew their possessions (including vital documents) or find missing relatives and 4) Local officials are often keen to aid property developers in stealing the land of the poor where their homes and businesses are not rebuilt. As a consequence of these factors communities and families are dispersed, which compounds the grieving and social distress of victims.

A major factor in all the US events discussed here is that a huge proportion of the poorest victims of hurricanes and floods cannot afford household insurance. Lack of insurance, or inadequate insurance, is a major source of theft from America’s poorest.

Last year’s hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and because of the slow and weak emergency response, between 3000 and 5000 people dying unnecessarily. Two independent academic studies found that there were between 3000 and 5000 unnecessary deaths as a result of post-hurricane neglect. Trump responded on 11 September by typically denying the facts – tweeting that the reported death tolls from the storm were fabricated by Democrats “to make me look as bad as possible”

Hurricane Maria was preceded by the equally appalling response to Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans in 2005, Hurricane Sandy which smashed into New Jersey and parts of New York in 2012, and Hurricane Harvey which inundated Houston in 2017.

In all four of these disasters the pattern has been similar – hundreds of people dying unnecessarily as a consequence of insufficient aid, poor people losing everything (especially their homes) with little or no recompense from the state, and devastated working class areas becoming a business opportunity as they are rebuilt and gentrified.

There is a huge irony in all this of course. While the Trump administration denies that climate change is a reality, the United States is becoming one of the main victims of extreme climate events. As the hurricane season becomes more intense year by year, tropical storms and hurricanes are routinely making landfall in mainland United States with devastating consequences. And because of soaring temperatures, wildfires in the United States, while in long term trends fewer in number, are affecting a much larger area. A double whammy.

Katrina – Death, Destruction, Social Cleansing

According to Michael Parenti: “On Day One of the disaster … it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost in New Orleans. Many people had ‘refused’ to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain ‘stubborn. It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.” (1)

The rescue operation was a disaster. Parenti reports: “The federal government was nowhere in sight…The authorities seemed more concerned with the [stopping]looting than with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free marketeers always want.”

A consequence of the lack of state rescue efforts was that bodies were still being recovered in outlying areas weeks, and sometimes months, later.

More than one million people fled the city and its surrounding areas as a result of the storm. Hundreds of thousands of them never returned, lacking the resources to rebuild their homes. The experience of the evacuees was shocking. Laura Lein reported:

“While Gulf Coast residents from all walks of life came to Austin in the aftermath of the storm, those who occupied the poorest, and most heavily African-American, wards in New Orleans arrived with the fewest resources. Evacuees from these areas, which suffered the worst flooding and storm damage, often arrived with very little. Many lacked basic identification, a change of clothing, or necessary prescription drugs. They were often separated from family members”. (2)

New Orleans city officials decreed that people who had not started to rebuild their homes after a year would have their property taken from them. Hundreds of properties were confiscated, resulting in a change in the class and ethnic composition of previously poor Black areas, and a sharp decline in their overall population. In other worlds, Black communities have been broken up and much of their population moved out. Nearly 1 in 3 Black residents have not returned to the city after the storm. (3)

Land and property theft in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane now faces the people of Barbuda, Caribbean twin of neighbouring Antigua. In November 2017 Hurricane Irma devastated the island. In the wake of the near total destruction, the Antiguan and Barbadian Senate passed a law abolishing communal ownership of the land. With local people lacking resources to rebuild their homes, property developers are eager to move in and buy up land for a pittance. A consortium led by Hollywood actor Robert de Niro plans to build a large luxury resort called Paradise Found (sic!).

Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Harvey

Storm Sandy, dubbed ‘Frankenstorm’ had a dramatic impact in New York and New Jersey. An amazing 518,000 households asked for federal aid after the storm. But once again the impact was much more dramatic in poor areas.  Forty three percent of those 518,000 households had incomes of less than $30,000 a year – dirt poor given US prices. Many of those were low income renters, and a high proportion of them were Black or Latino.

Working class areas were hit hardest because of their locations nearer shorelines and the flimsier construction of their homes. Chris Sellers reports of Mastic Beach: “Mastic Beach had long offered a cheaper version of shoreline property, in part because the land on which it lies was so uniformly close to sea level, near the water table. So when a Sandy surge washed in, 1,000 of its homes were flooded, many of them by both seawater and cesspool wastes. Next door, the original Westhampton Beach, hillier as well as more affluent, experienced far less damage from the storm.” (4)

Seventy-two people died as a direct result of the storm and another 87 died in the days after, mostly older people who froze to death in homes and apartment blocks which were without heat.

A similar story of climate disaster hitting the poorest is what happened during and after Hurricane Harvey which devastated Houston in September 2017.  One hundred and seven people died and 300,000 buildings damaged. According to the New York Times, despite a much higher level of aid than that given to Puerto Rico (see below), one year alter 27% of Hispanics said their houses were still unfit to live in, compared with 20% of Black residents and 11% of whites. Fifty percent of non-white residents said they were not getting the help they needed to put their lives back together.

Puerto Rico: imperial contempt

Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico immediately after Hurricane Maria. He claimed that something between 18 and 64 people had died, and the territory’s governor told him that the rescue effort was a ‘a great job’. While his figures probably wildly underestimate the numbers killed immediately by the storm, they are mainly beside the point. Two academic studies, one by Harvard researchers and the other by academics at George Washington University, estimated between 3000 and 5000 extra deaths within six months of the storm’s impact. Those deaths, often of older or sick people, were caused by lack of food, shelter, medical care and heating.

Among Trump’s nonsense claims were that aid to Puerto Rico was difficult “because it is an island”. Massive US government resources being sent to a Caribbean island were not in short supply on 25 October 1983, when the United States invaded Grenada and toppled the left-wing government there. Seven thousand three hundred US troops were landed within a day, and dozens of ship and planes went into action in the same time period. Those forces could be mobilised for a single island (many more could have been) because for the United States it was important. Rescuing the people of Puerto Rico was not.

Puerto Ric has an anomalous constitutional status as an ‘unincorporated territory’ of the United States, which reflects its real status as a virtual colony. The United States has sovereignty and the people of the island are US citizens, but they cannot vote in US elections. The hurricane and its aftermath have been a salutary lesson in their subordinate status.

Hurricane Maria also hit Cuba with devastating force. A BBC report pointed out the contest between the response in the two islands: “In Cuba, brigades of emergency services, hordes of police and firemen, as well as thousands of state employees, were in the streets of Havana from the moment it was safe to be out. Despite the lack of adequate materials, teams with chainsaws arrived to remove the worst of the felled trees and clear much of the debris” (5)

Typhoon Mangkhut: Climate Change disaster in Asia

What damage Typhoon Mangkhut will do to the Philippines at the time of writing cannot be known. But we can make an obvious prediction: it will be a lot worse than Hurricane Florence in the United States, because the storm is much more intense and because locals people lack the resources of people in the US, however inadequate those might be for the poorest Americans. Climate change disasters in Asia are on an altogether more frightening scale than the United States. Millions are housed in flimsy self-built shacks, easily washed away. Millions live on hillsides subject to mudslides, especially in areas where logging has caused deforestation. Most national and local states are either unprepared to help civilian populations, or corrupt, or both. But most of all the scale off the typhoons and flooding has been much greater than storms and flooding in other parts of the planet, because the annual monsoon is the biggest rain event on the planet.

A recent scientific survey says that there is a distinct and obvious link between increasingly intense typhoons and rising temperatures. It says: “Even though no increase in the frequency of tropical cyclones and extreme typhoons in the Philippines is discernible, evidence exists that the nature of these hazards is changing, both in warmer temperatures and heavier rainfall.” (6)  Five of the 10 deadliest typhoons to hit the Philippines have come since 2006. The deadliest was 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Typhoon Yolanda, which was responsible for more than 6,300 lost lives, over four million people displaced citizens, and $2 billion in damage.

Civil defence and rescue services in the Philippines, mainly in the hands of the military, are skewed by intense inequality and corruption. But even without that, dealing with such events would tax and country where the majority of people are poor. According to the Climate Reality Project: “Evacuation plans, early-warning systems, and shelters are critical to dealing with extreme weather events. Warning and relocating thousands or millions of citizens when a storm is approaching would be a massive hurdle for any country – and in the case of a developing nation like the Philippines with nearly 100 million citizens spread out across thousands of islands, the hurdle becomes bigger still.” (7)

But we know from the Cuban experience, albeit on a small island, that a society based on social solidarity, where the whole resources of the state and local community organisations are mobilised to deal with social disasters, can prepare to minimise the damage of hurricanes and similar events. Medical journalist Gail Reed says: “Hurricanes give you several days warning and the Cuban government gives seven days warning during which time local communities are given ample opportunity to prepare for the worst.” (8)

Hurricanes Caused by Global Warming?

Climate change deniers always say that no particular climate incident can be put down to global warming. The same argument will be repeated with Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut. This is a false argument because it deliberately misses the point, which is of course that the long-term trend of global warming is perfectly matches by the long-term trend towards warmer temperatures, especially warmer daytime temperatures, worldwide. With hurricanes the connection is direct. Florence started off as a group of thunderstorms off the coast of Africa, which merged and as a gigantic hurricane moved across the Atlantic.

And according to a new study (9) the destructive power of the typhoons that wreak havoc across China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines has intensified by 50% in the past 40 years due to warming seas.

Hurricanes, typhoons and flooding are just part of the climate catastrophe increasingly hitting the world’s poorest people. Intolerably high temperatures and their corresponding wildfire destruction are the other side of the coin. We can no longer simply try to fight to prevent global warming, that warming and its dire consequences is upon us. Today we face a fight for climate justice, so that the poor and the oppressed worldwide can win the resources to survive and manage the potential disasters that threaten them.

1. http://www.marxsite.com/orleans.htm
2. https://theconversation.com/still-waiting-for-help-the-lessons-of-hurricane-katrina-on-poverty-46666
3. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2015/08/27/concentrated-poverty-in-new-orleans-10-years-after-katrina/
4. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/why-superstorm-sandy-still-wreaking-havoc-poor-communities
5. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41371793
6. https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2792
7. https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-climate-change-affecting-philippines
8. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/A-Lesson-for-the-US-Cubas-Response-to-Hurricanes-20170828-0025.html
9. https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2792

Source: Medium

The race for the White House in 2016 was a race between two representatives of a psychopathic ruling class for the keys to a kingdom of despair.

“Mickey and Mallory Knox are without a doubt the most twisted depraved pair of shitfucks it has ever been my displeasure to lay my god damn eyes on. I tell you these two motherfuckers are a walking reminder of just how fucked up this system really is.”

From Oliver Stone’s controversial 1995 black comedy, Natural Born Killers, the above unforgettable lines, when rewritten with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s names substituted for those of Mickey and Mallory Knox, serve the most salutary purpose of disabusing us of the myths of US liberal exceptionalism, while at the same time bringing us face to face with its grim reality.

It’s a grim reality that has never been more important to confront at a time when Barack Obama has decided to make a return to mainstream politics in the run-up to the US midterm elections in early November. This he does as the liberal saviour America has been desperate to see appear on the horizon of the dystopia fashioned by the current impostor in the White House, ‘the orange one’, bearing his trusty shield of hope in one hand and steady lance of decency in the other.

The only problem with this particular movie is that the distortion of reality at its heart is so outlandish it makes the suspension of disbelief impossible.

Obama’s record, in truth and in fact, is such that it elevates his successor to the level of moral giant by comparison. Yes, this may well change. In Trump, after all, we have us a man and president for whom caprice is a virtue. But nonetheless, at the time of this writing, there is no escaping the fact that of the two it is Obama whose worldview presents the greatest danger to a world left battered and bruised by too many years of US exceptionalism and the litany of crimes committed in its name.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m overstating things? Well, for those who continues to harbour hope in a man who peddles hope like a drug dealer peddles crack, I implore you to survey the kind of evidence that should rightly be presented at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It comes in the form of journalist Neil Clark’s heartrending piece on the devastation visited on Libya in 2011 by the West — this under the rubric of yet another NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ — which only succeeded in turning the North African country from a functioning state able to boast, per the United Nations Development Program, the highest human development index of any African state, into a living hell.

Obama and his then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton (Mallory to his Mickey) were prime movers in unleashing this catastrophic military intervention, one that was tantamount to NATO flying sorties for al-Qaeda. And who will ever forget the sight of Clinton, upon learning of Gaddafi’s brutal slaughter at the hands of a baying mob of sectarian butchers we’d been told were the heroic harbingers of Libya’s democratic future, clapping her hands in undisguised glee while proclaiming, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Held up by their supporters as representative of everything that’s good about America — freedom, liberty, opportunity, and all that jazz — Clinton and Obama are in truth exemplars of the ocean of bodies that has been left behind in the swirl of their tireless paens to the ‘promise of America’ in the name not of democracy and freedom but exceptionalism and hegemony.

Clinton’s record, staying with her for a moment, is a veritable monument to mendacity. She and her husband come as a package of liberal opportunism who’ve made a virtue of speaking left and acting right. The fruits of this malady are mass incarceration, the entrenchment of Wall Street as the golden temple of the US economy, and perpetual regime change wars and military intervention overseas. Their Clinton Foundation is the acme of moral turpitude, where corruption comes dressed in the top hat and tails of liberal cant. On this, Christopher Hitchens was never more right than when he opined, “She [Hillary Clinton] and her husband haven’t met a foreign political donor they don’t like and haven’t taken from.”

And yet it’s Trump who we are being told is the nutcase, the half lunatic and crackpot against whom members of his staff are working to ‘protect America and the world’ day and night. Such a rendering only makes sense when you ask yourself who in their right mind could possibly conceive of making peace with North Korea and Russia when you can have war?

When it comes to the state of the nation at home, anyone who believes America is a classless society need only spend half an hour walking around Hollywood, acknowledged epicentre of the American Dream, to realise how wrong they are. For not only will they be assured that there is no society more defined by class than US society, they will be left in little doubt that every minute of a every day a fierce class war is raging with up to now only one side taking all the punches and doing all the bleeding.

Not only in Hollywood but all across America the abandonment of the poor, downtrodden and sick to their fate has and continues to be so brutal that its human consequences given new meaning to the words ‘wretched of the earth’. And this wretched constituency of millions — lacking healthcare, decent housing, jobs, and hope — hardly saw their fortunes improve under Obama, despite the soaring rhetoric about hope and change, etc.

Try Cornel West for size: “The reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump — but it did contribute to it. And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility.”

And there’s more: “Obama’s lack of courage to confront Wall Street criminals and his lapse of character in ordering drone strikes unintentionally led to rightwing populist revolts at home and ugly Islamic fascist rebellions in the Middle East. And as deporter-in-chief — nearly 2.5 million immigrants were deported under his watch — Obama policies prefigure Trump’s barbaric plans.”

The real hope when it comes to the ills of America, those it dispenses at home and those overseas, lies not with Trump’s overt white supremacy nor with Obama and Clinton’s liberal exceptionalism. The real hope lies in the resistance to both that runs like an unbroken thread through the country’s history. Indeed, the names of its most courageous proponents shine like glittering stars in a coal black firmament: Sitting Bull, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, the San Patricios, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, MLK, Malcolm X, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, anti-Vietnam War movement, Cesar Chavez, the list goes on.

Each of the aformentioned were sustained by moral outrage at the injustice they experienced and witnessed being inflicted on their own and other peoples in the name of progress and might is right. Many, of course, experience this sense of moral outrage. The difference lies between those who learn to make their peace with it and those who refuse to make their peace with it — who instead choose to grapple with this monster in what they know before they start will be a losing fight.

This is the human condition at its most inspiring, the willingness to fight even while knowing you are destined to lose. But, then, such a reductive and one dimensional interpretation of victory has no place when we understand history as a river that flows without end, rather than a monument separating it into neat and tidy chapters, as in a book. Fighting is winning and winning is fighting in a struggle that will continue so long as injustice and oppression obtains.

The race for the White House in 2016 was a race between two representatives of a psychopathic ruling class for the keys to a kingdom of despair. But lest this ruling elite allows itself to to remain too complacent in its privilege and ostentation, let the words of legendary Native American Chief Crazy Horse, spoken days before he died while resisting imprisonment, resound as a portent of the reckoning to come:

“The Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world; a world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations; a world longing for light again.”

Amen.

Published in HowardZinn.org

Who actually gained from that victory over England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what?

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?

How many people died in the Revolutionary War?

Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.

You might consider that worth it, or you might not.

Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?

In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.

Who actually gained from that victory over England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it’s very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That’s one thing we’re not accustomed to in this country because we don’t think in class terms. We think, “Oh, we all have the same interests.” For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.

Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line—in the Proclamation of 1763—that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.

So when you look at the American Revolution, there’s a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians—no, they didn’t benefit.

Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?

Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.

What about class divisions?

Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really.

It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.

There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?

We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not.

And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class.

Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.

The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.

We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No.

We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

Source: Counterpunch

Source: The Guardian

In one of his last acts as president, Barak Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s  sentence of 35 years imprisonment for the public duty he served in leaking documents which revealed the lies and deceit that governments use in secret to keep their populations ignorant of their machinations. The leak also helped bring to an end the Iraq war. Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers that all previous presidents, but he is to be commended that on 17 May 2017, rather than in 2045, Chelsea Manning will be set free