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Category: United States

  • Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline

    On June 23, Jamison Cocklin headlined at Natural Gas Intelligence, “Venture Global Set to Become Germany’s Biggest Long-Term LNG Supplier” and reported: “Venture Global LNG Inc. has agreed to supply a state-owned German company with the super-chilled fuel for two decades as European offtakers continue to line up deals to replace Russian natural gas imports.” Upstream Energy simply bannered “Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier”. It’s a very big deal.

    This is the culmination of an agreement that was signed just a year earlier. As Cocklin had bannered on 6 October 2022, “Germany’s EnBW to Buy More Venture Global LNG in Ongoing Shift from Russia”. At that time, he reported that, “Venture Global LNG Inc. said Thursday German utility EnBW AG would expand the amount of LNG it would take under a 20-year sales and purchase agreement (SPA) signed in June.” So: the basic agreement had been signed in June 2022.

    Here is what is now known about the price that will be paid for that “amount of LNG”: Nothing. However, something is known about the history of this deal:

    On 22 June 2023, Venture Global headlined “Venture Global and SEFE Announce 20-year LNG Sales and Purchase Agreement. Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier, with a combined 4.25MTPA of 20-year offtake agreements signed. Approximately half of CP2 20MTPA nameplate capacity has been sold, with 1/3 of the contracted capacity committed to German customers. Construction expected to begin in 2023.”

    As-of yet, no one has indicated what the delivered price of product to Germany will be under this contract, nor what the price to Germany had been of the Russian pipelined gas that it will now be replacing. Of course, only on that basis can the net annual added cost to Germany, that will end up being paid by Germans, under this historic contract, be calculated.

    Whatever it will turn out to be, the June 22 announcement gives good indication that the biggest payoff from blowing up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines from Russia to Germany will end up in American hands.

    Venture Global Partners was founded on 30 July 2008, by Robert Pender and Mike Sabel. In 2010, they established Venture Capital Partners, and then they announced in 2013, that their “development strategy is to be a long-term, low cost producer of LNG Working with a global LNG technology vendor.” They received venture-capital funding of $125M in 2015, then in February 2021 $500M debt-funding from Morgan Stanley, Mizuho Capital, Bank of America, and JP Morgan, and then in January 2023, an additional loan of $1B from an unspecified source.

    The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of Germany — and also of other European countries that had been buying the extra-cheap Russian pipelined gas — who will now be paying Americans a much higher price than previously they had been paying Russians. Not only will Germans and other Europeans now be paying for the super-chilled canned and cross-Atlantic shipped gas that previously was simply pipelined, but Europeans will now have lost what little sovereign independence they had formerly had when the U.S. Government allowed them to buy their gas and oil from Russia.

    Perhaps they will be learning the hard way that it’s no fun to be a vassal nation.

    For example: slide 2 of the 9 November 2017 “US LNG vs Russian pipe gas: impact on prices”, by Dr. Thierry Bros of the Oxford University Institute for Energy Studies, states that Russian gas is the least costly, US LNG can’t compete with it on price, Nord Stream 1 (NS 2 hadn’t yet been approved) is cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine, and Nord Stream 2 (once operational) will be cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine.

    Slide 6 shows that the ”Full cost of US LNG” is more than twice the “Henry Hub” (or “HH”) gas price.

    A CSIS (Pentagon think tank) blog post on 5 July 2019 was headlined “How Much Does U.S. LNG Cost in Europe?” and asked the “familiar question: Can U.S. LNG compete with Russian gas in Europe?” but conspicuously refused to answer it.

    A 25 March 2021 German study concluded that Russia outcompeted America even on LNG supplied in Europe: “LNG exports from Qatar and Russia are relatively competitive in Western Europe,” and even under the best of circumstances, “U.S. LNG only displaces small volumes from other LNG suppliers in Western Europe.”

    Germans will be paying the extra price for this, for at least 20 years.

    If America still is a successful country, then this is the way it will be happening. The wealth will be coming from their colonies. It won’t just be trickle-down (as has been the case domestically in America ever since at least 1980) but also trickle-in (from the colonies). Uncle Sam has been getting hungrier, and is grabbing now from across the Atlantic.

    At least there are some Americans who benefit from what Biden has been doing.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “The arms of the Third Reich were broken but the real winner was Hitler”

    Context: In a recent historical post of mine, a kind subscriber named Elise commented: “If history is written by the victors, it gives one pause to think about who actually won the war to hide all this information.”

    This inspired me to share the post below to expose even more of what is hidden by the “good guys.”

    P.S. Fasten your seatbelts

    It was at a February 1945 conference that State Department Political Advisor Laurence Duggan called for “An Economic Charter of the Americas,” loudly complaining that, “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.”

    From this patently unacceptable premise, the seeds of a 1954 coup were sown, and the U.S.-sponsored results include possibly irreversible environmental devastation and upwards of 200,000 civilians killed or “disappeared.”

    With some 60 percent of the vote, Jacobo Arbenz was freely and fairly elected president of Guatemala in 1951. Prior to this, the country was ruled by Arbenz’s kindred spirit, President Juan Jose Arévalo — who won 86 percent of the vote.

    Arévalo’s term had given his country a ten-year respite from military rule, during which time he provoked U.S. ire by daring to model his government after the Roosevelt New Deal. (More from Arévalo at the end of this post.)

    Wishing to further transform his country, Arbenz’s modest reforms and his legalizing of the Communist Party were frowned upon in American business circles. The Arbenz government became the target of a well-funded U.S. public relations campaign.

    Two years after Arbenz became president, Life magazine featured a piece on his “Red” land reforms, claiming that a nation just “two hours bombing time from the Panama Canal” was “openly and diligently toiling to create a Communist state.”

    It matters little that the USSR didn’t even maintain diplomatic relations with Guatemala. After all, the Cold War was in full effect.

    Ever on the lookout for that invaluable “pretext,” the U.S. business class scored a public relations coup when Arbenz expropriated some unused land controlled by United Fruit Company. His payment offer was predictably deemed inappropriate.

    “If they gave a gold piece for every banana,” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles clarified, “the problem would still be Communist infiltration.”

    For those unfamiliar with John Foster Dulles, he and his brother Allen guided Sullivan and Cromwell, the most powerful Wall Street law firm of the 1930s. The two brothers — who boycotted their own sister’s 1932 wedding because the groom was Jewish — served as the contacts for the company responsible for the gas in the Nazi gas chambers, I.G. Farben. 

    During the pre-war period, the elder John Foster led off cables to his German clients with the salutation “Heil Hitler,” and he blithely dismissed the Nazi threat in 1935 in a piece he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly. In 1939, he told the Economic Club of New York, “We have to welcome and nurture the desire of the New Germany to find for her energies a new outlet.”    

    As for Allen, he was named director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. Dulles lasted in that position until 1961 when he was fired by President John F. Kennedy for his role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. But Dulles managed to re-emerge two years later as part of the [wait for it] Warren Commission. 

    We now return to our regularly scheduled war crimes, courtesy of the Home of the Brave™.

    Led by Allen Dulles, the CIA put Operation Success into action. Here’s how Howard Zinn described what followed: “A legally elected government was overthrown by an invasion force of mercenaries trained by the CIA at military bases in Honduras and Nicaragua and supported by four American fighter planes flown by American pilots.”

    Operation Success ushered in 40 years of repression, more than 200,000 deaths, and what’s been called “indisputably one of the most inhumane chapters of the 20th century.” These chapters, incidentally, could never have been written without permission from the United States and its surrogates — like Israel.

    “The Israelis may be seen as American proxies in Honduras and Guatemala,” stated Israeli journalist, Yoav Karni in Yediot Ahronot. Also, Ha’aretz correspondent Gidon Samet has explained that the most important features of the US-Israeli strategic cooperation in the 1980s were not in the Middle East, but with Central America.

    “The U.S. needs Israel in Africa and Latin America, among other reasons, because of the government’s difficulties in obtaining congressional authorization for its ambitious aid programs and naturally, for military actions,” Samet wrote on November 6, 1983, adding that America has “long been interested in using Israel as a pipeline for military and other aid” to Central America.

    Earlier that same year, Yosef Priel reported in Davar that Latin America “has become the leading market for Israeli arms exports.” One illustrative example is, of course, Guatemala.

    In 1981, shortly after Israel agreed to provide military aid to this oppressive regime, a Guatemalan officer had a feature article published in the army’s Staff College review.

    In that article, the officer praised Adolf Hitler, National Socialism, and the Final Solution — quoting extensively from Mein Kampf and chalking up Hitler’s anti-Semitism to the “discovery” that communism was part of a “Jewish conspiracy.”

    Despite such seemingly incompatible ideology, Israel’s estimated military assistance to Guatemala in 1982 was $90 million.

    What type of policies did the Guatemalan government pursue with the help they received from a nation populated with thousands of Holocaust survivors? This question brings to mind an excerpt from Jennifer Harbury’s book, Bridge of Courage. One member of the Guatemalan resistance Harbury interviewed explained: “Don’t talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn’t have survived a week here.”

    Similar stories can be culled from countries throughout the region, but apparently have had little effect on the foreign policy of the U.S. or Israel. For example, when Israel faced an international arms embargo after the 1967 war, a plan to divert Belgian and Swiss arms to the Holy Land was implemented.

    These weapons were supposedly destined for Bolivia where they would be transported by a company managed by none other than Klaus Barbie… as in “The Butcher of Lyon.”

    Any moral reservations about such an arrangement are dismissed with a vague “national security” excuse that should sound familiar to any American. “The welfare of our people and the state supersedes all other considerations,” pronounced Michael Schur, director of Ta’as, the Israeli state military industry, in the August 23, 1983, Ha’aretz. “If the state has decided in favor of export, my conscience is clear.”

    One Jewish figure that might be expected to find fault with such a policy was Elie Wiesel. An episode from mid-1985, documented by Yoav Karni in Ha’aretz, should put to rest any exalted expectations of the late moralist.

    When Wiesel received a letter from a Nobel Prize laureate documenting Israel’s contributions to the atrocities in Guatemala, suggesting that he use his considerable influence to put a stop to Israel’s practice of arming neo-Nazis, Wiesel “sighed” and admitted that he did not reply to that particular letter.

    “I usually answer at once,” he explained, “but what can I answer to him?”

    One is left to only wonder how Wiesel’s silent sigh might have been received if it was in response to a letter not about Jewish complicity in the murder of Guatemalans but instead about the function of Auschwitz during the 1940s.

    In closing, I ask you to deeply consider some words from the aforementioned former Guatemalan president, Juan Jose Arévalo. As he stepped down in 1951, Arévalo had this to say about the aftermath of a certain world war commonly described as “good”:

    “The arms of the Third Reich were broken and conquered but in the ideological dialogue, the real winner was Hitler.”

    Never forget: This is just some of what we’re still up against today.

    Whenever you opt to trust any proclamation made by the government (or the bankers and corporations that own the government), you are committing self-sabotage by directly playing into their diabolical hands.

    I don’t share this to add to the gloom and doom. It’s not meant to cause anyone to lose hope. Rather, I find it incredibly empowering to gain and raise awareness. The better we each comprehend the tactics of evil, the better equipped we are to resist its lies and manipulation.

    Let’s all start keeping our guard up…

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Congress Ended Pandemic Cash for Parents, but Some States Have Embraced the Idea

    By Dana Goldstein

    See original post here.

    Colorado joins a growing list of states with bipartisan support for child tax credits, which give parents money, no strings attached.

    For a brief period during the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government gave most parents monthly cash — up to $300 per child — with no work requirements or restrictions on how the money could be spent.

    The experiment, through an expanded child tax credit, died last year after 12 months, when Republicans and Senator Joe Manchin III, the moderate West Virginia Democrat, refused to renew it.

    But a growing number of states are moving forward with their own programs, often with Republican support. Last week, Colorado became the ninth state in two years to guarantee some form of cash income to its poorest parents. The law, which passed with bipartisan support, will be the second most generous in the country, providing parents making less than $35,000 per year with up to $1,200 annually for each child under 6.

    Minnesota’s program, which became law last month, is the most generous, guaranteeing families earning $35,000 or less with up to $1,750 in cash annually for each child under 17.

    “Focusing on child welfare and supporting families has been a really big selling point”

    across the aisle, said Halah Ahmad, vice president at the Jain Family Institute, a think tank that supports guaranteed income and worked with Colorado lawmakers to craft the new program.

    State child tax credits are far smaller than the federal benefit was, and are unlikely to drastically remake any household’s budget. At least initially, most will be paid annually rather than monthly, making them potentially less useful in day-to-day spending decisions.

    Still, supporters of the programs say that they will create an important precedent, and test the theory that government can expand cash support to families without discouraging parents from working outside the home — a longtime political and economic concern.

    It was in response to that concern that in 1996, President Bill Clinton remade federal welfare by tying work requirements to cash support for single mothers. But the pandemic, inflation and child care shortages have prompted some lawmakers to reconsider that model.

    In addition to Colorado and Minnesota, New York, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont and New Mexico have also passed guaranteed-income child tax credits over the past two years, with cash payments ranging from $25 to $1,083 annually per child, depending on household income.

    The policies, most popular with Democrats, have won over about a third of Republican state legislators, according to an analysis by the Jain Family Institute. That is in stark contrast to congressional Republicans, who have coalesced around the idea that child tax credits should be attached to work requirements.

    State Senator Janice Rich, a Colorado Republican who represents parts of the rural Western Slope, said co-sponsoring the legislation was an easy call, since it would help families that are struggling with inflation in housing, child care and energy costs.

    “I can’t help what the federal government decides,” she said, referencing Republicans in Congress who opposed making the expanded federal tax credit permanent. “It seemed like the right thing to do for Colorado families.”

    Ms. Rich noted that other early childhood issues, too, had been bipartisan winners in the Colorado legislature, such as efforts to increase access to pre-K and affordable child care.

    Still, there is significant debate around expanding child tax credits, for lawmakers in both parties. In Montana this year, a coalition of Democrats and conservative Republicans killed an effort by Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, to provide $1,200 annually per child for families earning up to $50,000.

    Some lawmakers prefer public dollars to be spent on established child care programs, while others continue to be concerned that cash payments will discourage work.

    “We don’t want to go back to pre-welfare reform,”

    said Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, and a former White House economic adviser under President Donald J. Trump.

    In Washington, he added, “Republicans seem pretty united in the view that you should not get the child tax credit unless you have some amount of earnings. The fact that a state like Colorado has Republicans that are buying into the child allowance is somewhat surprising.”

    The post Congress Ended Pandemic Cash for Parents, but Some States Have Embraced the Idea appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Philippines: Knowing Who Your Friends Are

    On 3 April 2023, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh announced the United States expanding into four new military sites in the Philippines.

    “In addition to the five existing sites, these new locations will strengthen the interoperability of the United States and Philippine armed forces and allow us to respond more seamlessly together to address a range of shared challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, including natural and humanitarian disasters,” said Singh.

    A day later, 4 April, the US embassy in the Philippines announced a joint US-Philippines military exercise, Balikatan-2023, to be held from April 11 to 28. It was billed as the largest military manoeuvres in the history of the Philippines, with more than 5,000 Philippine troops and more than 12,000 US troops taking part.

    To anyone familiar with the world map, it jumps out immediately that the Philippine’s geographical proximity to Taiwan and the South China China is exactly what the US is looking for in its Pivot to Asia (specifically China): a location where the US can try and impose containment on China.

    This realization was clear to China, and China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Yi responded guardedly: “China has sent a signal to the Philippines to not allow third parties to sabotage the friendly relations between the two countries.”

    Helping Those in Need

    More recently, on 16 June, the Philippines news website Inquirer.net ran a piece on a request put out by Philippines president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr to help his country procure affordable fertilizer.

    Did the US step up?

    China stepped up and donated 20,000 metric tons of urea fertilizer to the Philippines.

    “This donation that came from China was a product of our request from all our friends around the world during the crisis when fertilizer — well, what we are still feeling now when fertilizer prices went up and the availability was also because of the supply chain problems that we are experiencing with our usual suppliers and China did not think twice and immediately came up,” said Marcos.

    Relationships Based in Dialogue

    China does not base its relationships with other countries through force of arms.

    Regarding disputed territory in the South China Sea, China seeks to solve this through negotiation. One point of contention is a dispute over fishing in the South China Sea. China says the fishing ban from May to August is to sustain fish stocks and improve the marine ecology. The Philippines is opposed to this imposition.

    Regarding this, Marcos said, “We already have coordination with them (China) when there is a fishing ban so there won’t be a sudden fishing ban. At least we can have a plan. We are making some progress in that regard.”

    A stark Difference between the US and China vis-a-vis Philippines

    Following the Spanish-American War, the US sought to recolonize hitherto Spanish colonies, one of which was the Philippines. The Philippines resisted US imperialism. So the US waged a bloody war against the Philippines from 1899 to 1902. The estimates of Filipino fatalities ranges from 200,000 to 3 million.

    According to one researcher on the US genocide in the Philippines:

    200,000 to 300,000 dead just can not be correct. A People’s History of the United States (1980) [by Howard Zinn, p. 308] cites 300,000 Filipinos killed in Batangas [a province in Luzon, south of Manila] alone, that alone proves the figures wrong, William Pomeroy’s American Neocolonialism (1970) cites 600,000 Filipinos dead in Luzon alone by 1902. This is backed up by General Bell himself, who said “we estimated that we killed one-sixth of the population of the main island of Luzon — some 600,000 people.”

    How Was a Marcos Returned to Malacanang Palace?

    During the period when I lived in the Philippines in 2000, a Filipino colleague who had worked at the US naval base in Subic Bay expressed approval at the US departure, citing the breakdown in cultural morale and rampant prostitution. Now US service personnel are returning to Subic Bay as a result of Marcos’s renewed ties with US militarism.

    Yet, the election of Marcos is puzzling. His father, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr, had been toppled by a People Power Revolution. The kleptocratic family was sent into exile in Hawai’i.

    The current president, however, refuses to apologize for the sins of his father. Fair enough if he had no part in his father’s sins. But he could and should deplore the atrocities of his father’s regime. People of good conscience deplore atrocities regardless of who the perpetrator is. Bongbong doesn’t. Neither has the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family been returned to the Filipino people.

    It is an electoral conundrum that speaks more to the psyche of the masses. When the masses are mired in poverty and hold illusions of better times under martial law, then logic often goes out the window. Sadly, the admonition about people who don’t remember their history bodes ill for the poor masses.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Can the European Leg of the Triad Break Free from the Atlantic Alliance?

    Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria), Envers Endroit Geometrique (‘Geometric Reverse Obverse’), 2016.

    Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria), Envers Endroit Geometrique (‘Geometric Reverse Obverse’), 2016.

    It is difficult to make sense of many events these days. France’s behaviour, for instance, is hard to square. On the one hand, French President Emmanuel Macron changed his mind to support Ukraine’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). On the other hand, he said that France would like to attend the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) summit in South Africa in August. Europe is, of course, not an entirely homogeneous continent, with problems afoot as Hungary and Turkey have refused to ratify Sweden’s desire to enter NATO at its annual summit in Vilnius (Lithuania) in July. Nonetheless, the European bourgeoisie looks westward to Wall Street’s investment firms to park its wealth, yoking its own future to the regency of the United States. Europe is firmly wedded to the Atlantic alliance with little room for an independent European voice.

    At the No Cold War platform, we have been carefully studying these elements of Europe’s foreign policy. Briefing no. 8, which will form the bulk of this newsletter, has been drafted along with European Parliament member Marc Botenga of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, or PTB–PVDA. You will find it below.

    The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a strengthening of the US’s grip and influence on Europe. An important supply of Russian gas was replaced by US shale gas. European Union (EU) programmes originally designed to fortify Europe’s industrial base now serve the acquisition of US-made weapons. Under US pressure, many European countries have contributed to escalating war in Ukraine instead of pushing for a political solution to bring about peace.

    At the same time, the US wants Europe to decouple from China, which would further reduce Europe’s global role and run counter to its own interests. Instead of following the US’s confrontational and damaging New Cold War agenda, it is in the interests of Europe’s people for their countries to establish an independent foreign policy that embraces global cooperation and a diverse set of international relations.

    Europe’s Growing Dependence on the US

    The Ukraine war, and the ensuing spiral of sanctions and counter sanctions, led to a rapid decoupling of EU-Russia trade relations. Losing a trade partner has limited the EU’s options and increased dependence on the US, a reality that is most visible in the EU’s energy policy. As a result of the war in Ukraine, Europe reduced its dependence on Russian gas, only to increase its dependence on more expensive US liquefied natural gas (LNG). The US took advantage of this energy crisis, selling its LNG to Europe at prices well above production cost. In 2022, the US accounted for more than half of the LNG imported into Europe. This gives the US additional power to pressure EU leaders: if US shipments of LNG were diverted elsewhere, Europe would immediately face great economic and social difficulty.

    Reza Derakhshani (Iran), White Hunt, 2019.

    Reza Derakhshani (Iran), White Hunt, 2019.

    Washington has started pushing European companies to relocate to the US, using lower energy prices as an argument. As German Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck said, the US is ‘hoovering up investments from Europe’ – i.e., it is actively promoting the region’s deindustrialisation.

    The US Inflation Reduction Act (2022) and the CHIPS and Science Act (2022) directly serve this purpose, offering $370 billion and $52 billion in subsidies, respectively, to attract clean energy and semiconductor industries to the US. The impact of these measures is already being felt in Europe: Tesla is reportedly discussing relocating its battery construction project from Germany to the US, and Volkswagen paused a planned battery plant in Eastern Europe, instead moving forward with its first North American electric battery plant in Canada, where it is eligible to receive US subsides.

    EU dependence on the US also applies in other areas. A 2013 report by the French Senate asked unambiguously: ‘Is the European Union a colony of the digital world?’. The 2018 US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act and the 1978 US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allow US companies extensive access to EU telecommunications including data and phone calls, giving them access to state secrets. The EU is being spied on continuously.

    Clement Jacques-Vossen (Belgium), Lockdown, 2020.

    Cle?ment Jacques-Vossen (Belgium), Lockdown, 2020.

    Rising Militarisation Is Against the Interests of Europe

    EU discussions on strategic vulnerabilities focus mostly on China and Russia while the influence of the US is all but ignored. The US operates a massive network of over 200 US military bases and 60,000 troops in Europe, and, through NATO, it imposes ‘complementarity’ on European defence actions, meaning that European members of the alliance can act together with the US but not independently of it. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously summarised this as ‘the three Ds’: no ‘de-linking’ European decision-making from NATO, no ‘duplicating’ NATO’s efforts, no ‘discriminating’ against NATO’s non-EU members. Furthermore, in order to guarantee dependence, the US refrains from sharing the most important military technologies with European countries, including much of the data and software connected to the F-35 fighter jets they purchased.

    For many years, the US has been calling for European governments to increase their military spending. In 2022, military spending in Western and Central Europe surged to €316 billion, returning to levels not seen since the end of the first Cold War. In addition, European states and EU institutions sent over €25 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Prior to the war, Germany, Britain, and France were already amongst the top ten highest military spenders in the world. Now, Germany has approved €100 billion for a special military upgrading fund and committed to spend 2% of its GDP on defence. Meanwhile, Britain announced its ambition to increase its military spending from 2.2% to 2.5% of its GDP and France announced that it will increase its military spending to around €60 billion by 2030 – approximately double its 2017 allocation.

    This surge in military spending is taking place while Europe experiences its worst cost of living crisis in decades and the climate crisis deepens. Across Europe, millions of people have taken to the streets in protest. The hundreds of billions of euros being spent on the military should instead be redirected to tackling these urgent problems.

    Decoupling from China Would Be Disastrous

    The EU would suffer from a US-China conflict. A significant part of EU exports to the US contains Chinese inputs, and conversely, EU goods exports to China often contain US inputs. Tighter export controls imposed by the US on exports to China or vice versa will therefore hit EU companies, but the impact will go much further.

    The US has increased pressure on a variety of EU countries, companies, and institutions to scale down or stop cooperation with Chinese projects, in particular lobbying for Europe to join its tech war against China. This pressure has borne fruit, with ten EU states having restricted or banned the Chinese technology company Huawei from their 5G networks as Germany considers a similar measure. Meanwhile, the Netherlands has blocked exports of chip-making machinery to China by the key Dutch semiconductor company ASML.

    In 2020, China overtook the US’s position as the EU’s main trading partner, and in 2022, China was the EU’s largest source for imported goods and its third largest market for exported goods. The US push for European companies to restrict or end relations with China would mean limiting Europe’s trade options, and incidentally increasing its dependence on Washington. This would be detrimental not just to the EU’s autonomy, but also to regional social and economic conditions.

    Georgi Baev (Bulgaria), Name, 1985.

    Georgi Baev (Bulgaria), Name, 1985.

    Europe Should Embrace Global Cooperation, Not Confrontation

    Since the end of the Second World War, no single foreign power has wielded more power over European policy than the US. If Europe allows itself to be locked into a US-led bloc, not only will this reinforce its technological dependence on the US, but the region could become de-industrialised. Moreover, this will put Europe at odds not only with China, but also with other major developing countries, including India, Brazil, and South Africa, that refuse to align themselves with one country or another.

    Rather than follow the US into conflicts around the world, an independent Europe must redirect its security strategy towards territorial defence, collective security for the continent, and building constructive international links by decisively breaking away from paternalistic and exploitative trade relations with developing countries. Instead, fair, respectful, and equal relationships with the Global South can offer Europe the necessary and valuable diversification of political and economic partners that it urgently needs.

    An independent and interconnected Europe is in the interests of the European people. This would allow vast resources to be diverted away from military spending and towards addressing the climate and cost of living crises, such as by building a green industrial base. The European people have every reason to support the development of an independent foreign policy that rejects US dominance and militarisation in favour of embracing international cooperation and a more democratic world order.

    Aida Mahmudova (Azerbaijan), Non-Imagined Perspectives, 2018.

    Aida Mahmudova (Azerbaijan), Non-Imagined Perspectives, 2018.

    The No Cold War briefing above asks an important question: is an independent European foreign policy possible? The general conclusion, given the balance of forces that prevail in Europe today, is no. Not even the far-right government in Italy, which campaigned against NATO, could withstand pressure from Washington. But, as the briefing suggests, the negative impact of the Western policy of preventing peace in Ukraine is being felt daily by the European public. Will the European people stand up for their sovereignty or will they continue to be the frontline for Washington’s ambitions?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • PNG academic says Port Moresby politicians naïve over US defence deals

    By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

    A Papua New Guinean academic says the new security deals with the United States will militarise his country and anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve.

    In May, PNG’s Defence Minister Win Barki Daki and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed the Defence Cooperation Agreement and the Shiprider Agreement.

    Last week they were presented to PNG MPs for ratification and made public.

    The defence cooperation agreement talks of reaffirming a strong defence relationship based on a shared commitment to peace and stability and common approaches to addressing regional defence and security issues.

    Money that Marape ‘wouldn’t turn down’
    University of PNG political scientist Michael Kabuni said there was certainly a need for PNG to improve security at the border to stop, for instance, the country being used as a transit point for drugs such as methamphetamine and cocaine.

    “Papua New Guinea hasn’t had an ability or capacity to manage its borders. So we really don’t know what goes on on the fringes of PNG’s marine borders.”

    But Kabuni, who is completing his doctorate at the Australian National University, said whenever the US signs these sorts of deals with developing countries, the result is inevitably a heavy militarisation.

    “I think the politicians, especially PNG politicians, are either too naïve, or the benefits are too much for them to ignore. So the deal between Papua New Guinea and the United States comes with more than US$400 million support. This is money that [Prime Minister] James Marape wouldn’t turn down,” he said.

    The remote northern island of Manus, most recently the site of Australia’s controversial refugee detention camp, is set to assume far greater prominence in the region with the US eyeing both the naval base and the airport.


    Kabuni said Manus was an important base during World War II and remains key strategic real estate for both China and the United States.

    “So there is talk that, apart from the US and Australia building a naval base on Manus, China is building a commercial one. But when China gets involved in building wharves, though it appears to be a wharf for commercial ships to park, it’s built with the equipment to hold military naval ships,” he said.

    Six military locations
    Papua New Guineans now know the US is set to have military facilities at six locations around the country.

    These are Nadzab Airport in Lae, the seaport in Lae, the Lombrum Naval Base and Momote Airport on Manus Island, as well as Port Moresby’s seaport and Jackson’s International Airport.

    According to the text of the treaty the American military forces and their contractors will have the ability to largely operate in a cocoon, with little interaction with the rest of PNG, not paying taxes on anything they bring in, including personal items.

    Prime Minister James Marape has said the Americans will not be setting up military bases, but this document gives them the option to do this.

    Marape said more specific information on the arrangements would come later.

    Antony Blinken said the defence pact was drafted by both nations as ‘equal and sovereign partners’ and stressed that the US will be transparent.

    Critics of the deal have accused the government of undermining PNG’s sovereignty but Marape told Parliament that “we have allowed our military to be eroded in the last 48 years, [but] sovereignty is defined by the robustness and strength of your military”.

    The Shiprider Agreement has been touted as a solution to PNG’s problems of patrolling its huge exclusive economic zone of nearly 3 million sq km.

    Another feature of the agreements is that US resources could be directed toward overcoming the violence that has plagued PNG elections for many years, with possibly the worst occurrence in last year’s national poll.

    But Michael Kabuni said the solution to these issues will not be through strengthening police or the military but by such things as improving funding and support for organisations like the Electoral Commission to allow for accurate rolls to be completed well ahead of voting.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

  • Life over Lithium

    As guilt mounts over humanity’s inaction in the face of the climate crisis, industrialized capitalists have adapted their tactics to meet the demands of a more environmentally conscious market; by selling the image of sustainability!

    Touted as the green transportation of the future, demand has exploded for electric cars. This has, in turn, increased the demand for lithium and other rare earth metals, with corporations rushing to open as many new mines as possible. Indigenous elders have been at the forefront of resistance to this latest wave of extractive capitalism, particularly in Peehee Mu’huh also known as Thacker Pass, Nevada, where the Ox Sam Indigenous Women’s camp has been resisting the construction of what would be North America’s largest lithium mine.

    Later, subMedia’s nihilist weather droid, UV-400 brings us the latest updates in the climate crisis with a global weather report. Included are record-breaking wildfires in Canada, a heatwave and devastating floods across China and an earthquake in Haiti.

    Finally, in so-called Peru, Indigenous warriors seized oil tankers in yet another flare up of the ongoing tensions with Canadian oil company PetrolTal.

    For more information on the Ox Sam Indigenous Women’s Camp visit OxSam.org.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Readouts Point to a Disjuncture between US and China

    Secretary Antony Blinken on Twitter: "Today, I met with People's Republic of China State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang in Beijing and discussed how we can responsibly manage the relationship between

    During the economic crisis in 2008, the United States sought China’s aid. US treasury secretary Hank Paulson conferred with Chinese officials, and China agreed to increase the value of the RMB and to stop selling US T-bills which it had been doing at that time.

    Paulson said, “It is clear that China accepts its responsibility as a major world economy that will work with the United States and other partners to ensure global economic stability.” But the notion that China was acting in a selfless fashion was also dispelled by Paulson who stated China helps when it is in their own interest.

    Paulson depicted the US position during the crisis as “dealing with Chinese from a position of strength…”

    That same attitude was repeated by the US State Department in March 2021 during the first face-to-face meeting with president Joe Biden’s administration in Anchorage, Alaska: “America’s approach will be undergirded by confidence in our dealing with Beijing — which we are doing from a position of strength — even as we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” [emphasis added]

    Given the baleful US shenanigans against China, Chinese high-ranking officials were ill-disposed to meet with their American counterparts. Chairman Xi Jinping was not interested in meeting with Biden after the US shot down a Chinese weather balloon. The Pentagon sought a meeting between defense secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s minister of national defense Li Shangfu, but the latter reportedly ghosted Austin in Singapore.

    Finally, secretary of state Antony Blinken managed to secure a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing. The official readouts for each country, however, reveal a glaring gap between them.

    The Chinese readout noted that “China-U.S. relations are at their lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic ties…” Other excerpts read:

    China has always maintained continuity and stability in its policies towards the United States, fundamentally adhering to the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation proposed by President Xi Jinping. These principles should also be the shared spirit, bottom line, and goal that both sides uphold together.

    Qin Gang pointed out that the Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests, it is the most significant issue in China-U.S. relations, and it is also the most prominent risk. China urges the U.S. side to adhere to the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. Joint Communiqués, and truly implement its commitment not to support “Taiwan independence”.

    That the US and China were not on the same page was clear from the oft-heard banality in the American readout:

    The Secretary made clear that the United States will always stand up for the interests and values of the American people and work with its allies and partners to advance our vision for a world that is free, open, and upholds the international rules-based order.

    That the US side made no comment on China’s core interest was a glaring brush off. Instead the US side pushed its “international rules-based order,” which is about rules defined by the US for others to follow. In other words, China does not decide what rules apply to its province of Taiwan.

    The readouts made crystal clear that China and the US view the world through different lenses.

    China is about peaceful development and win-win trade relations. The US is about waging war, sanctions, bans on trading, and an immodest belief in its indispensability. Because of this, China and Russia with the Global South are each forging their own way, a way that respects each country’s sovereignty. In future, it will be increasingly difficult for the US to use loans to impoverish other nations and plunder their wealth through the IMF’s financial strictures. Sanctions, freezing assets, and blocking financial transactions through the SWIFT system have pushed countries away and toward de-dollarization, joining BRICS, taking part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and using other financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank based in Beijing. Even companies in countries nominally aligned with the US are pulling back from the harms of adhering to US trading bans. The US pressure tactics have resulted in blowback, and there is sure to be growing apprehension within empire.

    The US is a warmaker. It flattened Iraq, Libya, and would have done the same to Syria had not Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah intervened at the invitation of the Syrian government. Nevertheless, the US still illegally occupies an enormous chunk of Syria and plunders its oil, revealing its true nature to the world.

    China is a peacemaker; for example, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, the Syrian-Arab League reunion, a ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a proposal for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was rejected by the US, and currently China is playing an honest broker to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, something the US has failed miserably at solving (not that it was ever interested in solving this besides, perhaps, a brief interregnum under Jimmy Carter).

    China has stood steadfastly with Russia during its special military operation in Donbass and Ukraine. China knows that if the US-NATO would succeed in their proxy war, the plan is “regime change” and a carve up of Russia to exploit its resource wealth. This would pave the way for further “regime change” in China.

    The Blinken-Qin meeting has been an abysmal failure in diplomacy. Communist China is ascendant, and the capitalist US is in economic decline, but it still believes that it can bully and fight its way to the top by keeping the others down.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Govt urged to act on AUKUS Pillar II roadblocks

    The advanced technologies component of AUKUS remains in danger of being grounded by regulatory barriers, according to the Opposition, which is calling for a more vocal and proactive approach by the Australian government. “While the submarines are big enough to generate their own momentum, I am worried that Pillar II simply won’t get off the…

    The post Govt urged to act on AUKUS Pillar II roadblocks appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • How Does Technology Factor in for US Militarism toward China?


    The United States is about militarism. Its economy is largely based on the military-industrial complex. It has hundreds upon hundreds of military bases in lands around the planet. Yet, despite a bloated military budget, the US fails to care for all its citizens, certainly not the millions of homeless, poor, and those unable to afford medical procedures because they are without medical insurance; however, the US does house and feed its soldiers, marines, and air-force personnel abroad. Yet, when it comes to its veterans there is often a price they must pay. Nonetheless, what must not be forgotten is the far greater price paid by the victims of US aggression.

    The US claims full-spectrum dominance. US politicians make bellicose statements about which country the US will attack next. And when a pretext is required the US will fabricate one. (See AB Abrams’s excellent book Atrocity Fabrications and Its Consequences, 2023. Review)

    I asked Wei Ling Chua, the author of 3 books including Democracy: What the west can learn from China and Tiananmen Square’s “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs Silent Evidence, how aggressive US posturing impacts China.

    Kim Petersen: It is clear that the US is waging an economic war against China. However, based on the bombast of several American military and political figures, the US is also pining for a military confrontation. US Air Force four-star general Mike Minihan said his gut warns of a war with China in 2025.  The Chinese claim to most of the South China Sea has caused the US to assert the right to freedom of navigation by sailing its warships off the Chinese coast. But when has China ever denied any ships the right to freely traverse the South China Sea? And as for the disputed territoriality in the South China Sea, why does the US arrogate to itself a supposed right to meddle in the affairs of other countries even those thousands of kilometers from the US shoreline? The Brookings Institute informs that of potential threats worldwide, “China gets pride of place as security challenge number one — even though China has not employed large-scale military force against an adversary since its 1979 war [what even Wikipedia calls a “brief conflict”] with Vietnam.” Consider that the media organ of British capitalism, The Economist, complains that “People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter jets keep staging recklessly close, high-speed passes to intimidate Western military aircraft in international airspace near China.” The magazine doesn’t blink at the risible scenario it has described: foreign fighter planes near China. Isn’t there sufficient airspace for American military jets in the US? Or sufficient coastline to practice freedom of navigation with its warships in US waters?

    The US is so fixated on the economic rise of China that it even scuppered a multibillion-dollar deal its ally France had to sell submarines to Australia and replace it with nuclear submarines to be supplied by itself and the United Kingdom — AUKUS. The obvious target of the nuclear subs: China. China’s foreign minister Qin Gang has called on the US to put the brakes on to avoid confrontation and conflict. What does all the militaristic hoopla directed at China portend?

    Nonetheless, SCMP.com reported on 24 March 2023 that China has developed a coating for its submarines — an “active” tile based on giant magnetostrictive material (GMM) technology — that “could turn the US active sonar technology against itself.”

    Also, the Chinese navy has many more ships than the US (around 340 Chinese navy ships to the 300 US navy ships) and that gap is widening.

    Given that the rise of China is not just economic, but that China has also developed a staunch defensive capability, what do the military experts say about China’s capability of defending itself against an American attack? Such an attack would also be insane because war between two nuclear-armed foes is a scenario in which there are no winners.

    Wei Ling Chua: The US is the most warmongering country on the planet with every inch of its territory looted from others. Like former US President Jimmy Carter told Trump in a (2019) phone conversation: “US has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history.”  The US is also the only nuclear power ever to use such a weapon of mass destruction, which it did on 2 populated civilian cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). So, any military threat from the US cannot be taken lightly.

    In addition, one should also note that the Chinese military grouped itself into 5 defense regions (Western defense region, Northern defense region, Central defense region, Southern defense region, and Eastern defense region), they are all within China and defensive in nature; whereas, the US military grouped itself into 6 command centers covering the entire world [Africa Command (AFRICOM), Southern Command (covering Latin America), European Command (covering Europe, part of the Middle East and Eurasia), Central Command (covering the Middle East), Indo-Pacific Command (covering the entire Asia Pacific Region, and half the Indian Ocean), and Northern Command (covering the US, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Bahamas)]. The US military is obviously imperialistic in nature.

    However, the good news is that after WW2, the US-led military coalition never won any war in Asia. Their military coalition was badly beaten in the Korean War and Vietnam War (both of which involved China). The latest sudden and messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of brutal occupation demonstrates that the US military is not as powerful as perceived. It appears to be as Mao famously described: “A Paper Tiger.”

    I believe that if the US regime is informed and rational, it will not dare to start a war with China on the Chinese doorstep. The reasons are quite obvious:

    1) After the Korean and Vietnam wars, the US never dared to directly attack any well-armed country such as North Korea, Iran, USSR/Russia, etc. For example, in 2020, Iran fired 22 missiles at 2 US airbases in revenge for the cowardly US assassination of their minister (Qasem Soleimani) while he was on an official diplomatic visit inside Iraq. Despite the Pentagon’s initial playing down of the severity of the Iranian attacks, it was later admitted that 109 US troops had suffered brain injuries. The US did not dare take further military action against Iran.

    My perception from this incident is that the US is too confident — that no one dares to take military action against their military bases across the world.So, they are complacent and failed to invest in underground shelters in those 2 airbases. So, it is reasonable to assume that such weaknesses are likely to be widespread across all the other US military bases across the world.

    2) All the countries the US and NATO attacked after the Korean War and Vietnam War were developing countries. It was only after these countries had been weakened by years of economic sanctions and were without a decent air and sea defense system (e.g., Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc). One should note that the US invasion of Iraq was carried out only after over a decade of UN weapons inspection, disarmament, and economic sanctions. That is after the Iraqi economy and its advanced weaponry were destroyed. As a result, US fighter jets were able to take their own sweet time, flying low, flying slowly to identify targets and bombs. So, the US military weapons have yet to be tested in confrontation with a militarily powerful country, one armed with air and sea defense systems.

    As for the perceived US military might and superior high-tech weaponry, I believe that the following examples will shed some light on whether the US is more militarily powerful or China:

    Firstly, we should thank the United States for its ongoing military actions across the world, and its marketing tactics to promote its image as a superpower, with the intention to sell weapons and to scare the world into submission from its position of strength. Below is a series of US announcements of new weaponry that had frightened the Chinese; as a result, China commissioned her scientists to invent powerful weapons with ideas initiated by the Americans. E.g.,

    Hypersonic Missiles

    • The US is the first country that commissioned a hypersonic bomber program capable of nuking any country worldwide within an hour in the early 2000s. Such an announcement scared the Chinese and Russians. Yet, whereas the US failed miserably and decided to shut down the program in early 2023, we have witnessed that Russia and China successfully developed hypersonic missile technology.  Ironically, given the US failure and China’s success in the technology, the Washington Post published a report titled “American technology boosts China’s hypersonic missile program” to attribute China’s hypersonic missile success to US technology. (When one comes by this type of baseless claim of US technological superiority over China, besides having a good laugh, I am really speechless at the unbelievably shameless nature of the American propaganda machine)

    Laser Guns

    • The US is also the first country which commissioned a laser gun program. In 2014, the US announced that the weapon was installed on USS Ponce for field testing with success. However, in 2023, CBS News reported that the Pentagon spent $1b a year to develop these weapons and stated that  “Whether such weapons are worth the money is an open question, and the answer likely depends on whom you ask. For defense contractors, of course, a new generation of powerful military hardware could provide vast new revenue streams.” The irony is that in 2022, China had already exported its laser guns to Saudi Arabia and that country was reported to have successfully gunned down 13 incoming attack drones.

    One ought to recall what happened to Saudi oil facilities in 2019 when drones attacked. The report at that time was: “US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, the main air defense of Saudi Arabia that was so useless last Saturday, cost $3m apiece.” In addition, there is the recent bad news that the vaunted US Patriot missile system was put out of action by a Russian hypersonic missile in Kiev on the 16th of May 2023. The report’s title was “A Patriot Radar Station and five missile batteries destroyed in Russian hypersonic strikes”. Obviously, the mendacious US military-industrial complex was successfully ripping off a lot of its allies which paid super high prices for their inferior products.

    F-35 “World Most Advanced” stealth fighter

    • The US is a country that loves to boast about its military capability even when the concept is still in an imaginary stage. E.g., introduced in 2006 as the world’s most advanced stealth fighter, the F-35 is also regarded as the US’s most expensive 5th-generation warplane. However, in the past 5 years alone, more than a dozen F-35s crashed across the world despite not operating in a war zone. In 2019, Japan confirmed that an F-35A jet had crashed, causing the remaining F-35s in Japan to be grounded. In 2021, two F-35s were damaged and grounded by a lightning strike in the sky over western Japan. Forbes magazine ran a report titled “Japan is about to waste its F35s shadowing Chinese plane” with this statement: “The stealth fighter is too expensive, too unreliable, and too valuable for other missions to waste it on boring up-and-down flights.” In 2020, The National Interest reported that “The F-35 Stealth Fighter still has hundreds of flaws.” And in 2021, Forbes magazine reported, “The US Air Force just admitted the F35 stealth fighter has failed.” In 2022, the Chinese [People’s Liberation Army] PLA detected an F-35 over the East China Sea and confronted it with their J20 fighter jet, and according to US Airforce General Kenneth Wilbach: “American Lockheed Martin F-35s had had at least one encounter with China’s J-20 stealth fighters recently in the East China Sea and that the US side was ‘impressed’.” These cases demonstrated that the US’s supposedly most advanced “stealth fighter” is visible to Chinese radar technology.

    Space Technology/Rocket Engines

    • Despite the US’s stringent technology bans against China, including even attending international space conferences in the US, China is now the only country to have independently and successfully built its own space station. The International space station (ISS) was created by a number of countries with the Russian contribution being the most crucial part of putting the station and astronauts (with Russian rockets) in space. However, as usual, the American media likes to bullshit to save face. So, in 2020, when the American media reported the news that NASA paid the Russians $90m to send an astronaut to the ISS, the title was: “Despite SpaceX success, NASA will pay Russia $90m to take US astronaut to ISS”. The irony is that in 2022, the US imposed the strictest economic sanctions against Russia including confiscating Russian public and private assets in the West and banning Russia from the SWIFT payment system due to Russia’s military action in Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion. As a counter-US sanction measure, NASA was forced to pay Russia in rubles (2 billion) to take the American astronaut back to Earth. These two incidents should be enough evidence that SpaceX’s space technology is not as advanced as its public relations. The Russians and the Chinese appear more advanced than NASA/Elon Musk’s SpaceX in transporting astronauts to and from a space station.

    Many people may not have noticed that, in 2015, the US ordered 20 rocket engines from Russia. So, in 2022, when Russia counters US-Ukraine war sanctions with a ban on selling their rocket engines to the US, TechCrunch+ reported the situation with an honest title in recognition of the reality: “Russia halts rocket engine sales to US, suggests flying to space on their ‘broomsticks’.”

    GPS Vs Beidou Global Navigation/positioning systems

    • Global positioning technology is a vital part of many advanced weapon systems including land, sea, and air travel: In 1993, the US government falsely accused a Chinese commercial cargo ship with the registered name ‘Yinhe’ of transporting chemical weapon materials to Iran. The US government then cut off Yinhe’s GPS for 24 days to strand them in the Indian Ocean and forced them to allow US officials to board the cargo ship for inspection and nothing was found. Again, in 1996, the PLA conducted a series of missile tests in the Taiwan Strait, and the US again suddenly shut down the GPS used by the PLA. Both incidents led to the Chinese government’s investment in its own Global positioning technology.

    In 2003, the cash-strapped EU invited China to participate in their Galileo navigation satellite project. However, after China transferred €200 million (US$270 million) to the project, in the name of security concerns, China was forced out of major decision-making by the EU in 2007. The irony is that China managed to develop its own Global positioning system (Beidou) faster than the EU’s Galileo project. As a “revenge” perhaps, on a “first-launched, first-served” international wavelength application rule, China successfully registered the use of transmit signals on the wavelength that the EU wanted to use for Galileo’s public regulated service. The New York Times reported the story with a title: ‘Chinese Square off with Europe in Space’.

    One may notice that the US’s aging GPS satellite system has been having a lot of problems in the past years. Just do a web search under GPS breakdown, GPS jamming, GPS outages, GPS error, GPS problems, GPS malfunction, etc., to find out about the reliability of the GPS system.

    Contrariwise, the Chinese Beidou navigation system is a Chinese owned technology with new functions and apparently more precision than the GPS. For example:

    • The Chinese Beidou can be used for text communication between users, while the GPS cannot. So, Huawei became the first company to add satellite texting to their phone device (Mate 50). The significance of such a new communication feature is that, during wartime, the PLA command center or between individual PLA soldiers will be able to communicate with each other with no blind spot. That will enable rapid battlefield intelligence gathering and transmission.
    • In addition, if one ever uses a Beidou navigation device while driving, one should notice that the device’s screen displays the position of the specific car on a specific lane. Should the driver change lanes, the screen will display the changes instantly. That is an indication that Beidou’s navigation system is far more accurate and advanced than the GPS in terms of positioning precision and processing speed. This may imply that the Chinese satellite-guided missiles will be more accurate than the US GPS-guided missiles.
    • A report by Japan Nikkei in 2020 headlined, “Chinese Beidou navigation system has surpassed American GPS in over 165 countries.” That indicates that the Beidou system is a tested, mature navigation technology.
    • A recently published report of a series of computer simulations run by a research team in China revealed that China needs only 24 hypersonic anti-ship missiles to destroy the newest US aircraft carrier and its accompanying warships.

    I consider that China is superior in technology to the US. For example, a recent Australian Strategy Policy Institute report acknowledged, “China leads the world in 37 out of 44 critical technologies.”

    Of course, unless the US regime is crazy enough to start a mutually destructive nuclear war, there is little reason to believe that the US would be able to win a war with non-nuclear weapons on China’s doorstep.

    Winning a war is not just about weaponry: the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Afghanistan War have already demonstrated that a coalition of the most militarily powerful imperialistic nations can be defeated by the people of a lesser-armed nation fighting for their freedom. So, beyond the use of advanced weaponry, the factors that determine who will win a war include:

        • the unity of the citizens,
        • the fighting morale of the soldiers,
        • the logistical support,
        • the military strategies,
        • the ability to manufacture more weapons with speed to sustain a long war;
        • the manufacturing supply chains
        • the energy supply and reserve,
        • the food supply and reserve,
        • the money to sustain a war, and
        • the neighboring countries’ attitude toward the warring parties.

    So, when one goes through the above list, one should easily come to the conclusion that the US is in a  disadvantageous position to travel across the Pacific Ocean to attack China on its doorstep.

    *****
    Upcoming: What does US militarism augur in the context of Taiwan?


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • United States: Rich, corporations win, environment, people lose in ‘debt ceiling’ deal

    The “debt-ceiling crisis” provided the pretext for the rolling back environmental, economic and social policies, while corporations and the rich benefitted the most from the deal struck between the Democrats and Republicans, reports Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • US Calls China “Aggressive”

    This week’s News on China video, presented by Tings Chak.

    • US calls China “aggressive”
    • Suez Canal investments
    • Multinational pharmaceuticals in China
    • History of bicycles in China

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Spends More on Defense [sic] Than the Next 10 Countries Combined

    I could go on for pages about the myriad myths of both U.S. military spending and U.S. military “glory.” In fact, I’ve written two books about it — plus hundreds of articles.

    For the sake of this post, I’ll share just one example of our [sic] beloved and expensive armed forces in action:

    During the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing campaign (read: war crimes) over Yugoslavia in 1999, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen declared: “We severely crippled the Serbian military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50 percent of the artillery and one-third of the armored vehicles.”

    One year later, a U.S. Air Force report revealed a different story:

    Original Claim                                              Actual Number

    120 tanks destroyed                                                   14

    220 armored personnel carriers destroyed           20

    450 artillery pieces destroyed                                  20

    744 confirmed strikes by NATO pilots                    58

     

     

    The report also found that the Serbian military fooled cutting-edge U.S. technology with simple tactics like constructing fake artillery pieces out of black logs and old truck wheels.

    One vital bridge avoided destruction from above when, 300 yards upriver, a phony bridge was erected out of polyethylene sheeting. Vaunted U.S. pilots bombed the fake bridge several times.

    Confronted with this evidence, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon went into spin mode: “We obviously hit enough tanks and other targets to win.”

    Keep in mind that Bacon is talking about an intervention that was a violation of the United Nations Charter and labeled as a war crime by Amnesty International.

    If Putin does something like this, he’s the “next Hitler.”

    When Bill Clinton does it, well… chalk another one up for the Home of the Brave™.

    Reminder to the “right”: The propaganda and deception didn’t start in March 2020.

    Reminder to the “left”: The propaganda and deception didn’t end in March 2020.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Resurrecting the Concept of the Triad

    Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.

    Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.

    At the close of the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima (Japan), the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States and the High Representative of the European Union (EU) released a long and informative statement. In a section titled ‘China’, the eight officials wrote that they ‘recognise the importance of engaging candidly with and expressing our concerns directly to China’ and that they ‘acknowledge the need to work together with China on global challenges as well as areas of common interest, including on climate change, biodiversity, global health security, and gender equality’. The diplomatic tone of the statement stands out in comparison to the heated rhetoric that these countries have adopted in recent years and is much softer than the language used at the G7 meeting itself, where the heads of government bandied about the phrase ‘economic coercion’, indirectly aimed at China.

    A close reading of the speeches at the meeting suggests that there are differences of opinion amongst the leaders of the G7 countries, particularly when it comes to China and their own domestic industrial policies. Certainly, several European states are uneasy about the domestic economic consequences of prolonging the war in Ukraine and of a possible military conflict over Taiwan. It is perhaps this uneasiness that prompted US President Joe Biden to say, ‘We’re not looking to decouple from China, we’re looking to de-risk and diversify our relationship with China’.

    For Europe, the notion of decoupling from China is inconceivable. In 2022, EU figures show that China was the third largest partner for goods exported from the region and the largest partner for good imported to the region, with most of the goods imported by China being high-end, value-added manufactured goods. Europe’s domestic economies have already been grievously injured by the West’s refusal to negotiate a peace agreement in Ukraine; being cut-off from the burgeoning Chinese market would be a fatal blow.

    Georg Baselitz (Germany), The Brücke Chorus, 1983.

    Georg Baselitz (Germany), The Brücke Chorus, 1983.

    The G7 meeting reveals the gaps between the United States and its allies (Europe and Japan), but these differences of interest and opinion should not be overestimated. As part of our work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been researching and analysing the nature of the cooperation between the United States, Europe, and Japan – the ‘Triad’, as Samir Amin called them; while our research is still ongoing, we present some of the data in this newsletter.

    Following the end of the Second World War, the United States built an international system that was premised on the subordination and integration of Japan and Europe. This process of subordination and integration was evident in the military apparatus constructed by the United States, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) established in 1949 and US-Japan Security Treaty of 1951 being the lynchpins. Establishing a system of US military bases in the defeated powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – allowed Washington to set aside any talk of a sovereign military or diplomatic project for either Europe or Japan (tantrums from France, inspired by Charles De Gaulle’s grand sense of French destiny, led not to a withdrawal from NATO but only to a removal of French forces from the alliance’s military command in 1966).

    There are currently 408 known US military bases in the Five Eyes countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and – because they share intelligence with each other – Israel), in Europe, and in Japan. Stunningly, Japan alone has 120 US military bases, while Germany hosts 119 of them. It is important to understand that these bases are not merely instruments of military power, but also political power. In 1965, Thomas Hughes of the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research authored an important memorandum, ‘The Significance of NATO – Present and Future’. NATO, Hughes wrote, ‘remains essential to the US as a well-established and easily available instrument for exercising American political influence in Europe’ and ultimately ‘it is important for the protection of American interests in Europe’. Such a system had already been put in place in Japan, as detailed in this US military memorandum from 1962. The network of US military bases in Europe and Japan are the symbol of their political subordination to Washington.

    Yinka Shonibare (Nigeria), Scramble for Africa, 2003.

    Yinka Shonibare (Nigeria), Scramble for Africa, 2003.

    With the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida accepted the dominance of the US military over his country but hoped that the Japanese state would be able to focus on economic development. Similar doctrines were articulated in Europe.

    In the post-war era, an economic bloc began to form between the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1966, Raymond Vernon published a significant journal article, ‘International Investment and International Trade in the Product Cycle’, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in which he showed how the large international corporations built a sequential structure: goods would be first produced and sold in the United States, then in Europe, and afterwards in Japan, after which they would finally be sold in other parts of the world. In 1985, Kenichi Ohmae, managing director of the global consulting firm McKinsey’s Tokyo office, shed further light on this arrangement in his book Triad Power: The Coming Shape of Global Competition. Ohmae illustrated how international corporations had to operate simultaneously in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan; increasing capital intensity, high research and development costs, a convergence of consumer taste, and the rise of protectionism made it essential for international corporations to work in these countries, which Ohmae collectively called the Triad, and then seek markets and opportunities elsewhere (where seven-tenths of the world lived).

    André Pierre (Haiti), Ceremony with Issa and Suz, ca. late 1960s/early 1970s.

    André Pierre (Haiti), Ceremony with Issa and Suz, ca. late 1960s/early 1970s.

    Samir Amin used that term – Triad – for a very different purpose. In 1980, he wrote of the ‘gradual consolidation of the central zone of the world capitalist system (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia)’, and soon thereafter began to refer to this ‘central zone’ as the Triad. The elites in Europe and Japan subordinated their own national self-interest to what the US government had begun to call their ‘common interests’. New institutions and terms emerged in the 1970s, giving shape to these ‘common interests’, including the Trilateral Commission (set up by David Rockefeller in 1973 with headquarters in Paris, Tokyo, and Washington) and the concept of ‘trilateral diplomacy’ (which brought together Western Europe, Japan, and the United States under one unified diplomatic worldview).

    Intellectuals in these trilateral circles saw the United States as the central power with its vassal states (Europe and Japan) empowered to maintain control over the tributary states (such as South Korea) in order to keep the rest of the world stable. Much harsher language was used by Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of the Trilateral Commission and National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter. In The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), Brzezinski wrote, ‘To put it in terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together’. You can guess who the barbarians are in Brzezinski’s imagination.

    Dan Mills (USA), Current Wars & Conflicts… (with, by continent, Belligerent and Supporter groups marked with black and red circles respectively, and Asylum Seekers, Internally Displaced, Refugees, and Stateless marked with a letter for every million, and killed marked with a letter for every 250k), 2017.

    Dan Mills (USA), Current Wars & Conflicts… (with, by continent, Belligerent and Supporter groups marked with black and red circles respectively, and Asylum Seekers, Internally Displaced, Refugees, and Stateless marked with a letter for every million, and killed marked with a letter for every 250k), 2017.

    In recent years, the concept of the Triad has largely fallen out of favour. But there is a need to recover this term to better understand the actual world order. The imperialist camp is not solely geographically defined; both the older term, Triad, and the more currently used term, Global North, are geopolitical concepts. The majority of the world – the Global South – now faces a US-led and dominated imperialist system that is rooted in an integrated military structure. This system is composed of three groups: (1) the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Anglo-American white settler states; (2) Europe; and (3) Japan. The Global North is home to a minority of the world’s population (14.2%) but is responsible for a clear majority of global military spending (66.0%). According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, total world military spending reached $2.2 trillion in 2022, with the Triad and its close partners responsible for $1.46 trillion of that amount (China’s military spending is $292 billion, while Russia spends $86 billion). It is this immense military power that allows the Triad to continue to assert itself over the world’s peoples, despite its weakening hold on the world economy.

    In recent years, the United States has encouraged a Japanese rearmament and a German military build-up, both of which were discouraged after the Second World War, so that these ‘vassals’ can strengthen Washington’s parochial New Cold War against Russia and China as well as the newly assertive states of the Global South. Although some elites in Europe and Japan are able to see the domestic crises in their countries that are being accelerated by the US foreign policy agenda, they lack the cultural and political confidence to stand on their own two feet.

    In 2016, the European Union’s High Representative Federica Mogherini laid out the concept of Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ from the United States in the EU Global Strategy. Three years later, France’s Emmanuel Macron said that NATO was suffering ‘brain death’ and that ‘Europe has the capacity to defend itself’. Today, it is clear that neither assertion – Europe’s strategic autonomy nor its capacity to defend itself – holds any water. Modest returns of Gaullism in France do not offer the kind of courage required by European and Japanese leaders to break with the trilateral bargains that were set up seventy-eight years ago. Until that courage arrives, Europe and Japan will remain entrenched in their conditions of vassalage, and the Triad will remain alive and well.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Leaked documents reveal extent of US espionage

    Secret United States government documents leaked onto social media platform Discord reveal how the US and its military is striving to reestablish hegemony — targeting adversaries and pressuring allies, report Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The Phony War on American Culture

    Bereft of an economic program, Republicans turn to social values, beliefs, and prejudices to gain votes and turn the clock back on the change that accompanies society’s development. The GOP can no longer convince a majority of voters to support tax cuts for the rich, eliminating government regulations and cutting programs for the poor. In desperation, they are conducting a war on changing American values.

    Powerful and wealthy interests discovered that rural people fear the social changes that replace the white Christian power structure with more open, inclusionary, equal, and forward-looking values that attempt to fulfill American ideals. A new set of values accepts gays, different ethnicities, business regulations to protect our health and environment, food, education, housing assistance, and the equal distribution of our economic surplus.

    The world changes as America’s great melting pot absorbs immigrants, young people, women, and tries to prevent discrimination based on skin color. They reject being ruled by a closed white, male power infrastructure. People no longer accept being dictated to by the color of their skin, sexual preference, cultural choice, or other incidental characteristics—and demand to share power.

    When GOP billionaires, the Koch network, Fox News, and smaller state and local elites began to lose power, they pandered to traditional religious, business, and rural prejudices to gain support. Politicians like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, and Marjorie Taylor Greene cashed in. They exemplify politics that clings to the past and resist change. They cherry-pick the most radical, out-of-the-mainstream behavior and language for campaigns that promote elite corporate and business interests to amass power and take a larger share of national wealth.

    Their made-up “culture war” focuses on changing values and diverts attention from everyday concerns about medical care, paychecks, and standard of living. Instead of asking why the government doesn’t guarantee education and health care, they conceal how, sometimes in concert with Democrats, they distribute economic surplus into their own pockets. A perfect illustration is the 470 state anti-gay bills the GOP is trying to pass, which diverts attention away from GOP demands to cut aid for education, housing, and environmental protection. They increase military spending and ignore the GOP gift to the rich when they passed Trump’s tax cuts.

    This strategy shifts focus from worker rights, pay increases, housing costs, and medical care to disguise their efforts to keep profits high and shrink government power to allow the wealthy to control the country. They use language such as “woke” to label anything threatening their power and authority. By connecting cultural changes to gay marriage and teaching the American history of institutional racism, they shift emphasis away from issues such as Trump’s rapes and molestation of women, stiffing contractors, lying about his taxes, demonizing minorities, and promoting violence and insurrection. It likewise obscures their continual demands to cut taxes, deregulate, and shrink government.

    Consider how gender is one focus of their culture war campaign. Transgender people hardly affect our personal lives, despite the Republican campaigns to make it a voting issue. In America, only 1.3 million adults and 300,000 children identify as transgender out of a population of 332 million. Only 36 transgender athletes compete in college sports that include over half a million participants. Yet the Republican legislature in Kansas recently banned transgender girls from female high school sports, despite having only three transgender girls out of 41,00 competing in the state. Indeed, they should be respected and accommodated in some way. Yet, GOP legislators are considering a flood of bills to restrict transgender behavior, flooding email boxes with requests for donations, blasting isolated events on Fox News, and making them campaign issues.

    The GOP’s phony culture war is a temper tantrum orchestrated to blame everything on Biden and the Democrats, a simple hate campaign that reminds us of playground rivalries and dictatorships like the USSR and Nazi Germany. At the same time, these attempts are real and divert people’s attention from the everyday issues and reforms that affect our lives. As for culture: It’s changing—religion, ethnicity, immigrants, sexuality, age, and attitudes. The GOP cannot stop change.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Monkerud.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • We Are ‘Just Beginning,’ Tennessee GOP Boasts in Fundraiser After Expelling Democrats



    The Tennessee Republican Party waited less than 24 hours to start fundraising off the expulsion of two progressive lawmakers from the state House—openly bragging Friday about what critics have called a blatantly anti-democratic move that shows the party’s growing authoritarianism.

    State Reps. Justin Jones (D-52) and Justin Pearson (D-86) are two of three Democrats who joined protesters in interrupting a floor session on March 30 to demand gun control in the wake of last week’s deadly school shooting in Nashville. Tennessee House Republicans on Thursday voted to expel both Black men from the chamber while a vote to expel their colleague Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-13), who is white, fell short.

    In a Friday fundraising email, the Tennessee GOP said: “Their adolescence and immature behavior brought dishonor to the Tennessee General Assembly as they admitted to knowingly breaking the rules. Actions have consequences, and we applaud House Republicans for having the conviction to protect the rules, the laws, and the prestige of the State of Tennessee.”

    “Our fight is just beginning,” the email concludes.

    Progressives members of Congress had already denounced Tennessee Republicans for engaging in what U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) called “straight-up fascism in its ugliest, most racist form” before the fundraising email emerged.

    Now, the Tennessee GOP is portraying the state’s first partisan expulsion since the Civil War era as upholding “the rule of law” and is trying to capitalize on it.

    Slate‘s Alexander Sammon warned that Thursday’s vote “is a chilling portent of the future of Republican governance and the state of democracy nationwide.”

    “While Republicans have focused on gerrymandering and voter suppression as the primary prongs of their assault on democracy (as well as the occasional insurrection attempt),” he noted, “the willingness to expel democratically elected Democrats for minor-verging-on-made-up infractions portends a terrifying new development.”

    In a Friday statement, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman condemned Tennessee House Republicans for “summarily ending” the current terms of Jones and Pearson and “depriving their constituents of duly elected representation.”

    “This was a racist and disproportionate act of retaliation against legislators who had joined demonstrators chanting in the chamber, in protest of Republican refusal to adopt commonsense gun control measures in the wake of the March 27 school shooting in Nashville,” said Weissman, who called Tennessee Republicans’ move “flagrantly anti-democratic.”

    “American democracy is in a profound crisis… What just happened in Tennessee is yet another reminder of the perilous state of our country.”

    “In modern American history, expulsion of state legislators is very rare—not just in Tennessee but throughout the United States, and rightfully so. Legislators should expel elected officials only in extreme circumstances, not over policy differences or impingements on decorum,” he continued. “Legislative supermajorities already have enormous power; when they wield that power to strip away even the offices of the minority, they are treading on very dangerous ground.”

    As Weissman pointed out, “Some Tennessee legislators—and a lot of MAGA commentary online—are un-ironically calling the state representatives’ chanting an ‘insurrection.’”

    “Of course, the United States did witness a real insurrection on January 6, 2021,” said Weissman. “Not one member of Congress was expelled for promoting [former President] Donald Trump’s patently false claims that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from him or for supporting the attempted coup carried out at Trump’s behest. Only 10 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives would vote to impeach Trump in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, and only two of them were able to get re-elected.”

    “American democracy is in a profound crisis, riven by lies, right-wing extremism, conspiratorial thinking, and subservience to corporate and special interests, and racism,” Weissman stressed. “What just happened in Tennessee is yet another reminder of the perilous state of our country.”

    Nevertheless, he continued, “a hopeful future is also a visible feature of our nation, demonstrated in the courage and principle of the targeted representatives… and the energy and commitment of the protesters—overwhelmingly young people—demanding justice and commonsense gun regulation.”

    “This is a powerful reminder that democracy does not die easily,” Weissman added. “Indeed, the energy in Tennessee will help inspire and power the nationwide movement not just to defend but to expand and deepen our democracy, and we are committed to rising to the occasion, and being part of this movement to make our country a more just and equitable place for all.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Turning tides: The US Congress and Julian Assange

    Democratic Congressperson Rashida Tlaib has urged fellow Congress members to sign a letter to US Attorney-General Merrick Garland urging him to drop the charges against Julian Assange, reports Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Minor League Baseball Players Poised to More Than Double Pay With First Union Contract



    Major League Baseball and recently unionized minor league players working for MLB team affiliates reached a tentative deal Wednesday on a historic first collective bargaining agreement.

    The pending five-year contract is set to more than double the pay of athletes who currently receive poverty wages even though the average MLB team is worth more than $2 billion. It comes just months after the MLB Players Association, the union representing major leaguers, successfully organized highly exploited minor leaguers who are striving to join their ranks into a new collective bargaining unit.

    “Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”

    MLB recognized the union’s minor league unit in September, paving the way for negotiations that wrapped up on the eve of opening day in the majors and two days before opening day in the minors.

    Citing unnamed sources, ESPN‘s Jeff Passan reported Wednesday night:

    After years of disillusionment among future major leaguers about paltry salaries forcing them to work offseason jobs—and coincidentally on the day a judge approved a $185 million settlement the league will pay players who accused it of violating minimum wage laws—the parties agreed on a deal that went out to a vote among the union’s rank and file and that will need to be approved by owners, as well, before it is formalized. The agreement could be announced officially as early as Friday, the first day of games in the minor leagues.

    The deal was confirmed by numerous other reports citing league and union sources.

    Unlike now, minor leaguers are set to be paid “for most of the offseason as well as spring training, including back pay for this season,” according to Passan. He detailed the annual pay increases on social media.

    In addition to pay hikes, players “emphasized better housing and transportation as a matter of import,” Passan reported. “Starting in 2024, those at Triple-A and Double-A will receive their own bedroom, and players with spouses and children will receive special accommodations. In rookie ball, Single-A, and High-A, teams will provide transportation to stadiums, where they’ll eat meals provided under rules negotiated by a joint clubhouse nutrition committee.”

    As More Perfect Union detailed on social media, harsh living conditions on the road between games prompted players to organize for better accommodations and nutrition. Thanks to this effort, MLB began requiring its minor league teams to provide housing to players in 2022. The pending agreement seeks to secure additional improvements.

    While name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights are currently controlled by MLB, the pending agreement grants full NIL rights to the union, which can use them to strengthen group licensing deals. In addition, it expands players’ medical rights, including covering post-injury health expenses for a longer period of time.

    “Among those not included in the deal are players at teams’ complexes in the Dominican Republic,” Passan reported. “The minor league unit of the MLBPA includes only players on teams’ domestic rosters—and players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other foreign countries will still reap the benefits when stateside.”

    In a concession to owners, “the deal includes the reduction of the maximum Domestic Reserve List, which governs the number of players a team can roster outside of its Dominican Republic complexes, from 180 to 165 starting in 2024,” Passan noted. “The union had previously fought MLB’s efforts during the lockout last year to reduce the reserve list, which teams had identified as a priority.”

    Nathan Kalman-Lamb, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, wrote on social media that “Minor League Baseball players were perhaps the single most exploited group of men’s athletes in North America other than college basketball and football players.”

    “Now they have a new (good!) collective agreement,” he added. “No better evidence of why college athletes need unions.”

    “For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns… This is for you.”

    Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league pitcher who spearheaded early organizing efforts, celebrated on Twitter.

    “This is big,” Broshuis wrote. “Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”

    “Is the deal perfect? No, but every negotiation ends in compromise,” he continued. “This will truly better the lives of thousands of players and their families. And that is what this fight has always been about.”

    Broshuis concluded: “For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns. For those who grinded away at two or even three offseason jobs. For those who skipped breakfast or even lunch to pinch pennies. For those who have [given] up the game not for a lack of talent but for a lack of funds. This is for you.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • United States: The new banking crisis

    The United States is hoping to stave off a general collapse of the currency system, writes Barry Sheppard. This threat gives the capitalist class extortion power to insist the government bail out big banks.

  • Biden revives hopes for the monthly child tax credit

    See original post here.

    The last year has been a difficult one financially for 44-year-old Rocky Harper. Inflation, especially, has eaten into his paychecks that support his family of four.

    “I had to switch careers last year to become a truck driver, because my old job could not pay my bills anymore. Now I have to spend all this time away from my family just to pay the bills,” the Arizona resident told Yahoo Finance while on the road in South Dakota. “My wife is at home basically as a single parent with two kids, and I’m out here just making money and living in the truck.”

    Another factor that’s compounded Harper’s money struggles in the last year: No more monthly Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments.

    “The credit helped me start catching up again and then it disappeared and inflation went up,” he said.

    The enhanced credit — which increased the amount of the tax benefit and doled out half the credit in advance in monthly installments in 2021 — expired at the start of 2022 with little political muscle to make the pandemic-era changes permanent. That could change after President Biden included the CTC in his annual budget released this month.

    While the budget itself has little chance of becoming law with the GOP in control of the House of Representatives, the CTC’s inclusion may rekindle debates over its merits, especially as inflation continues to erode more budgets, credit card delinquencies start to rise, and government food aid shrinks.

    “Those expansions were really exciting to see being revived in the president’s budget. All the pieces are critical – monthly payments and giving families more money, also making those credits refundable so that our lowest-income families can access them,” Joanna Ain, associate director of policy at Prosperity Now, told Yahoo Finance. “That would be huge.”

    How the expanded Child Tax Credit worked

    The temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit enacted under the American Rescue Plan in March 2021 broadened the benefit in several key ways that helped many of the economically vulnerable.

    First, the maximum credit amount was raised from $2,000 to $3,000 for each child between 6 and 17 and $3,600 for children under 6. The age limit was also increased to 17 for the first time. Before, the maximum age limit was 16.

    Lawmakers also made the CTC fully refundable, meaning if you didn’t owe taxes, you still qualified for the entire credit. Before, only $1,400 of the $2,000 credit was refundable. The American Rescue Act eliminated the minimum income requirement — which before was $2,500 — allowing those without jobs to qualify for the first time.

    “The other thing that happened is we also delivered half of the credit in advance of filing your tax return,” Elaine Maag, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, previously told Yahoo Finance. “Almost all families with children started getting payments in July, and they received a monthly payment from July to December [2021].”

    Roughly 35 million taxpayers with 60 million children received half of the credit in monthly installments from the Internal Revenue Service in 2021. Meanwhile, families that had opted out of getting the advanced payments could claim the full credit on their 2021 tax return.

    “The monthly CTC was extraordinarily flexible and helped parents and children in ways other government programs couldn’t dream of,” Greg Nasif, director of public affairs at Humanity Forward, told Yahoo Finance. “You can’t subsidize child care in rural Montana towns that don’t have daycare centers. But by reverting the CTC to monthly payments, you can shift resources toward family budgets and let parents figure out what their families need.”

    CTC offered ‘the opportunity to invest in children’

    The expanded Child Tax Credit appeared to have an almost immediate, positive impact.

    By December 2021, the monthly tax credits were keeping 3.7 million children from experiencing poverty, the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University found, up from 3 million when the credits first rolled out. The payments also reduced the monthly child poverty rate by 30%.

    Several studies also showed that the monthly payments helped safeguard family finances during the pandemic. During the fall of 2021, American households consistently reported using the CTC to cover basic needs such as food, rent or mortgage, and utilities, according to the Census Bureau.

    That was the case for Zebulon Newton, a North Carolina resident, who received his last CTC payment of $550 for his daughters, ages 4 and 7, in December 2021.

    “For six months, childhood life got better,” the 40-year old father told Yahoo Finance last year, noting that he used the money for child care and to put healthier food on the table.

    “Maybe the credit amounts weren’t necessarily life-altering for some, but they gave the lowest-income families who historically have been shut out of these programs the opportunity to invest in children,” Christopher Wimer, co-director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, told Yahoo Finance. “For the first time, many were able to just get through the day a little easier.”

    Rising inflation poses new challenges

    Those benefits began to disappear after the last payments went out in December 2021 and as inflation began to rage. Over a year later, inflation has eased some, but prices for food, rent, and utilities still remain high.

    “Lower-income households experienced above-average inflation because of their higher proportional spending on food and housing,” the New York Federal Reserve said in a blog post.

    Since June of last year, around 40% of adults surveyed by the Census Bureau have reported some difficulty with paying regular household expenses. To offset some of the financial blow, a rising share of Americans have been relying on credit cards — with balances hitting a record high in the fourth quarter and missed payments starting to increase.

    The percentage of adults who reported food scarcity has also increased, ticking above 11% in April 2022 and remaining there. When the CTC payments were disbursed, the share had dropped as low as 7.8% in August 2021.

    “We know what it’s like to be hungry,” Harper said. “We didn’t eat for days, but [our children] did. They are eating, but not nearly as nutritious as before.”

    Food insecurity could grow even more now that the pandemic-era Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits also expired at the end of February 2023 for households in 35 states. The other 15 states already ended the extra help earlier.

    On top of that, tax refunds — often a lifeline for those who earn the least — are coming in smaller than last year because so many COVID-19 enhancements including the CTC expired.

    “Tax refunds are going down, the SNAP benefits are expiring and inflation is just punching a hammer, blowing into these families again and again,” Ain said. “That acknowledgement in the budget to have the opportunity to reboot, put these [CTC] expansions back into place is good. We’re going to keep pushing and work with Congress to get them back.”

    New CTC expansion probably won’t look like the 2021 version

    As Congress possibly revisits an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, it’s likely that any new version won’t look like its pandemic predecessor in order to garner bipartisan support. Some Republicans have expressed concerns that the CTC would be inflationary and that one version without work requirements would disincentivize work.

    One potential compromise would be to adopt provisions from the Republican-led Family Security Act 2.0, introduced by Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Steve Daines (R-MT), and Richard Burr (R-NC). The proposal calls to increase the maximum value of the CTC to $4,200 per child under the age of 6 and $3,000 for those between 6 and 17.

    Unlike the enhanced CTC from the American Rescue Act, Romney’s proposal requires families to earn a minimum of $10,000 to receive the full credit. Part of the funding would also come from financial cuts to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the elimination of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, which would impact low- to moderate-income households the most, according to the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities.

    “The proposal has a lot of limitations,” Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, director of the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at Brandeis University, told Yahoo Finance. “If you’re proposing to improve the Child Tax Credit, what you’re trying to do is reduce child poverty. Some of the ideas are in the right direction, but it also does a couple of things that are actually detrimental to children in poverty and would exclude some children.”

    For Harper, he’s still hoping some compromise can happen on Capitol Hill that revives the credit. The sooner, the better.

    “I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining, but I know how everyone’s having a tough time,” he said. “Congress has got to pull their thumb out of their ass and do something about it. We care about paying our electric bills.”

  • ‘Noah’s Wounds Were Not Survivable’: Parents Allow Detailed View of AR-15 Carnage



    On Monday morning, The Washington Post published a series of 3D animations to show “how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart.”

    A few hours later, a 28-year-old shooter armed with two assault rifles and a handgun killed six people at a private Christian school in Nashville.

    In the wake of that massacre—the 129th mass shooting in the United States in 2023—the Post‘s exposé has received sustained attention, with one person calling it “the most powerful article you will read this week” and another characterizing it as “one of the most important pieces of journalism ever produced.”

    Noting that the lethal wounds caused by AR-15s “are rarely seen” by the public, the newspaper demonstrated “the trajectory of two different hypothetical gunshots to the chest—one from an AR-15 and another from a typical handgun—to explain the greater severity of the damage caused by the AR-15.”

    Then, after obtaining permission from the parents of two school shooting victims, a team of visual reporters created 3D models to depict how bullets fired from “many mass killers’ weapon of choice” obliterated their children’s bodies.

    Noah Ponzer was one of the 26 people who were killed by an AR-15-wielding gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. The 6-year-old was shot three times.

    “Noah’s wounds were not survivable,” the Post reported, citing 2019 court testimony from Wayne Carver, who was the state’s chief medical examiner at the time.

    Peter Wang was one of 17 people murdered when an attacker armed with an AR-15 opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018. The 15-year-old was shot 13 times.

    As the Post reported: “The combined energy of those bullets created exit wounds so ‘gaping’ that the autopsy described his head as ‘deformed.’ Blood and brain splatter were found on his upper body and the walls. That degree of destruction, according to medical experts, is possible only with a high-velocity weapon.”

    “This is the trauma witnessed by first responders—but rarely, if ever, seen by the public or the policymakers who write gun laws,” the newspaper noted.

    Instead, many GOP lawmakers glorify assault rifles, including U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), whose congressional district is home to the Nashville school where Monday’s deadly shooting took place.

    Another right-wing member of Tennessee’s congressional delegation—Republican Rep. Tim Burchett—baldly stated that “we’re not gonna fix it” just hours after the shooting.

    There are more guns than people in the United States. Due to National Rifle Association-bankrolled Republicans’ opposition to meaningful gun safety laws—bolstered by a 2022 ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary majority—it is relatively easy for people to purchase firearms in many states.

    Two years ago, Tennessee became one of several states that allow most adults to carry handguns without a permit.

    There have been thousands of mass shootings since Noah and more than two dozen other individuals suffered gruesome deaths at Sandy Hook, including last year’s slaughter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, among hundreds of others. Research shows that U.S. states with weaker gun control laws and higher rates of gun ownership have higher rates of mass shootings.

    Research also shows that gun regulations with high levels of public support, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, help reduce the number and severity of fatal mass shootings.

    Guns recently became the leading cause of death among children and teens in the United States. A study published last year found that roughly 26,000 kids could still be alive today if the U.S. had the same gun mortality rate as Canada.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Why We Must Stop a New Cold War Before It’s Too Late



    Relations between the United States and China are spiraling dangerously downward, and neither side seems able to reverse the trend. Yet it is imperative that the world’s two biggest economies find a modus vivendi if the peace of the planet is to be preserved.

    Consider the recent contretemps between the U.S. and China over a Chinese balloon that drifted over the United States. The rift caused acrimonious accusations by both sides and a cancellation of the Secretary of State’s visit to China, which had been designed to tamp down tensions.

    China’s first reaction was a public regret, only later to be followed by more belligerent language. Wouldn’t it have been better if President Biden had taken China’s expression of regret and ignored the later, harsher responses? Wouldn’t it have been better if the secretary of state’s visits had gone forward?

    That’s what President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades ago when the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev sent an emotional message suggesting that, rather than “doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war…let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let’s take measures to untie the knot.” The very next day, Russia upped the ante with a much harsher message demanding that American missiles in Turkey be removed.

    Kennedy ignored the second message and replied to the first. In due course, the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba and the American missiles from Turkey, although the latter was not officially part of the deal.

    How much better it would have been if the Secretary of State Blinken had gone ahead with his mission, met with his counterpart in China, and made an effort to reduce the tensions between China and the United States instead of accelerating them.

    When I looked up the purpose of the new House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, I found the following:

    The Select Committee “is committed to working on a bipartisan basis to build a consensus on the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and develop a plan of action to defend the American people, our economy and our values.”

    No one is denying that there is serious competition between the United States and China, but does it justify such a defensive crouch? Wouldn’t it have been better to form a committee that would also develop a plan of action so that the two major competing powers can avoid conflict?

    Although the growing antagonism between the United States and China has not grown to the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis, nevertheless it presents the greatest danger to the world today. Much has been written about the “Thucydides Trap,” Graham Allison’s warning that all too often in history the tension between a rising power and an established power results in war, as it did between Sparta and Athens in 431 BC, and German and Great Britain in the early 21th Century.

    It is imperative that cooler heads in China and the United States work to defuse tensions. The prospect of nuclear war that so terrified the world in the fifties and sixties has lost some of its emotional punch. The historian Christopher Clark writes that Europe’s leaders in 1914 knew that a general European war would be massively destructive, but did they really feel it? He posits that in the 1950s and 60s decision makers and the general public not only understood the dangers of nuclear war, but viscerally felt it. Today that visceral fear has fallen away among younger generations.

    China is not without blame for the growing confrontation between the United States and China. Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has reasserted its dominant role over the economy and returned China to a more Maoist centralized state with aggressive and at times bullying diplomacy and military actions in the South China Sea and in the Himalayas. But that said, a drumbeat of anti-Chinese rhetoric from the Western powers only enables China’s hardliners and handicaps those in China who would seek a less belligerent accommodation with the West.

    After all, China does not seek to overthrow our system of government. The Chinese Communist Party does not seek to export revolution as did the old Soviet Union. It is hard to imagine Cambridge University students becoming traitors as did Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean in the 1930s for the sake of the Chinese Communist Party.

    As Singapore’s Bilahari Kausikan has pointed out: “Competition within a system cannot by definition be existential because the survival of the system is not at stake. China is the principal beneficiary of the existing system and has no strong incentive to kick over the table and change it in any fundamental way because its own economy rests on the foundation of that system.”

    Americans have always suffered under the delusion that China should become more like the United States. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American missionaries fanned out across China in an effort to convert the Chinese to Christianity. President Woodrow Wilson was delighted when he discovered that Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, had become a Christian. More recently, when Deng Xiaoping abandoned Maoism for a market economy, Americans concluded that a political liberalization was sure to follow, that China would become more like the United States. It didn’t happen, but is China responsible for this miscalculation and disappointment, or are we?

    It is one thing to deny China technology that could be used militarily, but the bipartisan inflammatory language emanating from the United States is counter- productive to America’s interests and the preservation of peace. China and the United States are drifting, like sleepwalkers, toward confrontation much as Europe did in 1914 which of course resulted in a devastating war nobody wanted.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • China Denounces US TikTok Ban Threat as “xenophobic witch hunt,” Firmly Opposes Possible Forced Sale

    WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was a rare opportunity for lawmakers to question the leader of the short-form social media video app about the company’s relationship with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and how they handle users’ sensitive personal data. Some local, state and federal government agencies have been banning use of TikTok by employees, citing concerns about national security (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

    The US’ TikTok hearing is politically manipulated to cover its real purpose of robbing the profitable firm from China, which reflects the US’ mounting hegemony and bullying against firms with Chinese background, experts said on Friday, noting the US witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’ technological innovation is going downhill and the political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility.

    The US House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on Thursday (US time) titled, “TikTok: How Congress can safeguard American data privacy and protect children from online harms.”

    While US lawmakers acted like they are pursuing a solution on how to ensure data security, the hearing turned out to be a political show that was designed to smear an international firm that has Chinese background and cover up its real purpose of stealing the firm from its Chinese parent, experts said.

    Whether it ends up “killing” TikTok or forcibly taking the child out of its parent ByteDance’s arms, it is one of the ugliest scenes of the 21st century in high-tech competition, they said. “Your platform should be banned,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said as she started the hearing, claiming that the app has ties with Chinese government.

    During the roughly five-hour  hearing, CEO Shou Zi Chew’s attempts to illustrate TikTok’s business operations were frequently interrupted. His requests to elaborate on concerns of members of US Congress were also blocked.

    Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning denounced the US’ move on Friday, saying the US is adopting the presumption of guilt and engaging in an unreasonable crackdown against TikTok without any proof.

    “We noted that some US lawmaker has said that to seek a TikTok ban is a ‘xenophobic witch hunt’,” she said, urging the US to respect the market economy and fair competition rules, stop the unreasonable crackdown on foreign firms and provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for other countries’ firms in the US.

    The Chinese government places high importance on protecting data privacy and security according to laws. China has never and will never ask firms or individuals to violate local laws to collect or provide data and information stored within other countries’ borders, Mao stressed.

    The latest hearing followed reports that the Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok if its China-based parent company ByteDance doesn’t divest its stakes in the popular video app.

    It is another dark scene in Washington’s struggle for US supremacy, the US’ barbaric act only underscores that US values of fair competition, freedom of speech and inclusiveness are gradually disappearing and instead xenophobia is rising, experts said, noting that the US government lacks confidence in competing with China.

    Even more ironic is that rather than finding a solution to problems brought about by the negative impact of US social problems on children such as suicide, self-harm and drug abuse, US lawmakers are instead faulting the company, Li Yong, deputy chairman of the Expert Committee of the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Friday.

    “The hearing was hegemonic and bullying against a private firm,” Li said, noting that it’s common for American politicians to put unwarranted labels on entities with Chinese background by fabricating excuses.

    “While the US has always paraded itself as a rules-based market economy, they don’t really have any objective rules. All the rules are selected and serve American political elites’ interests and US hegemony,” Li said.

    The US’ forced sale of TikTok is shameless robbery of a profitable firm from China, he said, noting that the US is increasingly politicizing an innovative app that has enriched the digital life of American people and benefited a lot of micro businesses in the US.

    “TikTok itself is not available in the Chinese mainland, we’re headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we have 7,000 employees in the US today,” Chew said in his opening remarks.

    Dismissing Chew’s testimony, US officials have stepped up their fight against TikTok. Speaking at a separate House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday TikTok should be “ended one way or another,” adding that he did not know if it would be sufficient for TikTok to be divested from its Chinese parent company, CNN reported.

    The high-profile hearing also attracted wide attention from netizens who called US Congress members arrogant, ridiculous and ignorant.

    “Not a single one of them has made an argument that makes a lick of sense,” an American net user posted on Twitter. “By his logic every other social media app should be banned,” posted another netizen.

    The topic “TikTok CEO attending US hearing” became trending on China’s Twitter-like social media Sina Weibo, generating nearly 5 million views.

    “I feel sorry for what Chew endured at the hearing. American politicians weren’t so arrogant and aggressive at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hearing. It seems all the lawmakers are bullying Chew,” a Chinese netizen posted on Sina Weibo.

    While Chew was grilled in Washington, Apple CEO Tim Cook was met with cheers and applause at an Apple store in Beijing on Friday, prompting Chinese netizens to compare the “so-called free market” in the US and “real free market” in China.

    The Biden administration’s so-called “national security” narrative has also caused widespread speculation among TikTok users, scholars and researchers.

    A TikTok sale would be “completely irrelevant to any of the alleged ‘national security’ threats” and go against “every free market principle and norm” of the state department’s internet freedom principles, the Guardian reported, citing Karim Farhat, a researcher with the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech.

    NBC News reported on Thursday that a 19-year-old Harvard freshman named Aidan Kohn-Murphy, who used TikTok to rally support for Biden in 2020, is now trying to use the app to stop Biden from killing the platform.

    “If they went ahead with banning TikTok, it would feel like a slap in the face to a lot of young Americans,” he said. “Democrats don’t understand the political consequences this would have.”

    Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    Sinister move doomed

    By forcing the sale of TikTok, the Biden administration is aiming to repeat its takeover of French power company Alstom and its torment on Japanese chip firm Toshiba, but the US’ sinister move is doomed to meet challenges, given similar roadblocks faced by Trump three years ago, experts said.

    “The Biden administration will find it hard to completely ban TikTok, as the app has a large user base of more than 150 million in the US,” Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times.

    It’s an even more complicated issue for the US to take over TikTok, as a possible deal should also be in compliance with Chinese laws, he said. Experts said the Chinese government may step in to block the sale of TikTok.

    “The Chinese side is firmly opposed to the forced sale or divestiture of TikTok,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson Shu Jueting said on Thursday.

    Exports of Chinese technology must be subject to administrative licensing procedures in accordance with Chinese laws, and the Chinese government is legally bound to make a decision, she reiterated.

    In August 2020, China’s Ministry of Commerce revised its restrictions on technology exports, including personalized content recommendations based on data analysis and a number of other technologies such as AI algorithms, which is widely considered as China’s countermeasures against US’ forced sale of TikTok then.

    Back in 2020, then president Donald Trump and his administration sought to remove TikTok from app stores and force ByteDance to sell off its US assets. US courts blocked the order, concluding that banning the app would likely restrict the “personal communications” and sharing of “informational materials” by TikTok users.

    In addition, the Washington Post reportedly worked with a privacy researcher to look under the hood at TikTok in 2020, concluding that the app does not appear to collect any more data than typical mainstream social network platforms in the US.

    “From the US’ groundless crackdown on Huawei to targeting TikTok citing the so-called ‘national security,’ American politicians have not had a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ for their moves, it’s all politically motivated,” Xiang said, referring to reports saying Biden is seeking a second presidential term.

    On Thursday, the US put an additional 14 Chinese companies to a red flag list, forcing US exporters to conduct greater due diligence before shipping goods to them, mainly technology and solar firms.

    Xiang said the US’ unabated crackdowns on international firms including those from China violate international rules, disrupt global industrial and supply chains and harm both sides’ interests and the global economy as a whole.

    Ghost of McCarthyism haunts TikTok Hearing. Cartoon: Carlos Latuff

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Worse Than Trump: The Invasion of Iraq Twenty Years On

    “The hypocrisy in … the Bush administration’s overall national security strategy – is monumental. If having weapons of mass destruction and a history of using them is a criteria, then surely the United States must pose the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed … While the U.S. is massively expanding its biological weapons research capabilities – for example by upgrading its bioresearch facilities at the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons labs to aerosolize live anthrax and genetically modify bio-organisms – it is blocking a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow international inspectors into U.S. facilities.” 

    — Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation

    “There are well over 90 UN Security Council resolutions that are currently being violated by countries other than Iraq. The vast majority of these resolutions are being violated by allies of the United States that receive U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support. Indeed, the U.S. has effectively blocked the UN Security Council from enforcing these resolutions against its allies.” 

    — Stephen Zunes, Associate Professor of Politics, University of San Francisco

    “In his [President Bush’s] speech to the nation on Oct. 7, he said ‘America is a friend of the people of Iraq.’ Try telling that to a friend of mine in Baghdad who walked out of his house following a U.S. bomb attack to find his neighbor’s head rolling down the street; or to a taxi driver I met whose four-year-old child shook uncontrollably for three days following Clinton’s 1998 ‘Monicagate’ bombing diversion. Try telling it to the mother of Omran ibn Jwair, whom I met in the village of Toq al-Ghazzalat after a U.S. missile killed her 13-year-old son while he was tending sheep in the field. Try telling it to the hundreds of mothers I have seen crying over their dying babies in Iraqi hospitals, and to the hundreds of thousands of parents who have actually lost their infant children due to the cruel U.S. blockade, euphemistically called ‘sanctions.’”

    — James Jennings, President, Conscience International 

    “…the establishment of the ‘no-fly zones’ violated Iraq’s sovereignty, something explicitly guaranteed by every Security Council resolution on Iraq. The infiltration of spies into Unscom … was a further violation of the inspections process – and among the information they collected was anything that could help target Saddam Hussein for assassination, in violation of both international law and domestic executive order …. the U.S. used (weapons) inspections explicitly to provoke crises …”

    — Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism

    “… a unilateral attack by the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq without further authorization from the Security Council would still remain illegal and therefore constitute aggression. In recognition of this fact, British government officials are already reportedly fearful of prosecution by the International Criminal Court. And the Bush Jr. administration is doing everything humanly possible to sabotage the ICC in order to avoid any prospect of ICC prosecution of high-level U.S. government officials over a war against Iraq. Lawyers call this ‘consciousness of guilt.’”

    — Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois, College of Law

    “Claims of a threat posed by Iraq to international peace and security are entirely untenable. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet refuted Bush’s claims in a letter to the Senate, where he said clearly the threat of an Iraqi WMD attack was virtually nonexistent, except possibly in the eventuality of a U.S. war for ‘regime change.’ Nobody claims Iraq has nuclear weapons, nobody has produced any evidence that Iraq is capable of weaponizing biological agents, and it’s quite clear that Iraq can have no more than a nominal chemical weapons capability.”

    — Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism

    “… the U.S. government has repeatedly stated that it would continue the economic sanctions even if Iraq were to fully comply with the weapons inspectors. This means the U.S. policy over the last decade gave a disincentive for Iraqi compliance with the weapons inspectors and ensured an indefinite continuation of the devastating economic sanctions with no legitimate cause.”

    — -Sam Husseini, Communications Director, Institute For Public Accuracy

    “Although it’s true that Iraq has repeatedly restricted access, its degree of compliance is very high – far higher than the compliance of most nations with regard to binding decisions like Security Council resolutions or judgments of the International Court of Justice. Israel, for example, is in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions with no attempt at progress toward compliance. The United States vetoes Security Council resolutions directed against it, as it did with a resolution against its invasion of Panama, and it completely ignored a ruling by the International Court of Justice to cease its terrorist operations against Nicaragua and to pay $17 billion in restitution.”

    — Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism

    “Language finding Iraq already in ‘material breach’ and being given ‘a final opportunity’ to come clean is a rather ominous way of predetermining the outcome …”

    — James Jennings, President, Conscience International

    “We must not forget what this [UN Security Council Resolution 1441] does not do. It does not authorize the United States to go to war against Iraq. Despite claims to the contrary by the United States, that can only happen by means of a second resolution. The UN Charter requires specific and unambiguous authorization for the use of force; it is for the Security Council and not the United States to decide the consequences of any failure to implement resolutions.”

    — Michael Ratner, President, Center For Constitutional Rights

    “Since Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in twenty years. It has scuppered the biological weapons convention while experimenting, illegally, with biological weapons of its own. It has refused to grant chemical weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories, and has destroyed attempts to launch chemical inspections in Iraq. It has ripped up the antiballistic missile treaty, and appears to be ready to violate the nuclear test ban treaty. It has permitted CIA hit squads, to recommence covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. It has sabotaged the small arms treaty, undermined the international criminal court, refused to sign the climate change protocol and, last month, sought to immobilize the UN convention against torture.”

    — George Monbiot, The Guardian

    “All he [UN weapons inspector Hans Blix] can know is the results (sic) of his own investigations. And that does not prove Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction.”

    — Richard Perle, Chairman, Defense Policy Board

    “What it would prove would be that the inspection process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis.”

    — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on what a lack of evidence of Iraqi WMDs would prove

    “If they [the Iraqis] turn on their radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace …. We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.”

    — U.S. Brigadier General William Looney, 1996 

    “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”

    — President George Bush to Condoleezza Rice

    *****

    Sources:

    General Looney quote: William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000) p. 159

    Zunes quotes from Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, (Common Courage, 2003)

    GW Bush quote: Time magazine, May 13, 2002, “We’re Taking Him Out”

    Remaining quotes from Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq: What the News Media Don’t Tell You, (Context Books, 2003) p. 5, 51, 54, 71, 97-8, 142-86 passim.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Huge Difference Between America’s and Russia’s Governments

    In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the newly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.

    The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).

    Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.

    By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.

    If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.

    Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.

    The post A Huge Difference Between America’s and Russia’s Governments first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Huge Difference Between America’s and Russia’s Governments

    In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.

    The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).

    Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.

    By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.

    If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.

    Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.

  • Commemorations of the Attack on Iraq March 20 and Libya March 19 Reaffirms that the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination Remains the Greatest Threat to International Peace on our Planet

    The International Criminal Court should uphold an objective and impartial stance, respect the jurisdictional immunity enjoyed by the head of state in accordance with international law, exercise its functions and powers prudently by the law, interpret and apply international law in good faith, and avoid politicization and double standards.

    — Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin

    This commentary really should be part two from the piece I wrote last week in the run-up to the anti-war mobilization that took place March 18 which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In that article I made a similar argument about why the U.S. should be seen as the greatest threat to the survival of collective humanity on our planet.

    That point, however, needs to be reinforced because in typical arrogance, on the eve of that mobilization and the official March 20th date of the U.S. invasion, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Russia President Vladimir Putin while Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Barack Obama, responsible for horrific crimes against humanity and literally millions of deaths combined in Serbia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria, walk around as free individuals.

    It would be comical if it was not so deadly serious and absurd. Just a couple of years ago when the ICC signaled under the leadership of the Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that it wanted to conduct an investigation into possible crimes in Afghanistan by the U.S. state, the Trump Administration told the court in no uncertain terms that the Court would be subjected to the full wrath of the U.S. government and the Court quietly demurred in favor of a national probe that everyone knew was a sham.

    This is just part of the infuriating double standards that Chinese spokesperson Wang Wenbin refers to. For many in the global South, the “neutral” international mechanisms and structures created to uphold international law have lost significant credibility.

    The politicization of the ICC on the Ukrainian war and the unprincipled participation of the United Nations that provided political cover for the invasion and occupation of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010 are just two examples of how international structures ostensibly committed to upholding international law and the UN Charter are now seen as corrupt instruments of a dying U.S. and Western colonial empire.

    How did we get here?

    It is not a mere historical coincidence that the world became a much more dangerous place with the escalation of conflicts that threatened international peace in the 1990s. Without the countervailing force of the Soviet Union, the delusional white supremacists making U.S. policy believed that the next century was going to be a century of unrestrained U.S. domination.

    And who would be dominated? Largely the nations of the global South but also Europe with an accelerated integration plan in 1993 that the U.S. supported because it was seen as a more efficient mechanism for deploying U.S. capital and further solidifying trade relations with the huge and lucrative European Market.

    Central to the assertion of U.S. global power, however, was the judicious use of military force. “Full Spectrum Dominance” was the strategic objective that would ensure the realization of the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC). There was just one challenge that had to be overcome. The U.S. population still suffered from the affliction labeled the “Vietnam syndrome.” Traumatized by the defeat in Vietnam the population was still reticent about giving its full support to foreign engagements that could develop into possible military confrontations.

    How was this challenge overcome? Human rights.

    “Humanitarian interventionism,” with its corollary the “responsibility to protect” would emerge in the late 90s as one of the most innovative propaganda tools ever created. Produced by Western human rights community and championed by psychopaths like Samantha Power, the humanitarianism of the benevolent empire became the ideological instrument that allowed the U.S. to fully commit itself to military options to advance the interests of U.S. corporate and financial interests globally while being fully supported by the U.S. population.

    With this new ideological tool, the Clinton Administration bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 without any legal basis but with the moral imperative of the “responsibility to protect.” By the early 2000s it was obvious that the U.S. was not going to be bound by international law. Operating through NATO and with the formulation of a “rules-based order” in which the U.S. and its Western European allies would make the rules and enforce the order, the world has been plunged into unending wars, illegal sanctions, political subversion and the corruption of international structures that were supposed to instrumentalize the legal, liberal international order.

    But white supremacist colonial hubris resulted in the empire overextending itself.

    Twenty years after the illegal and immoral attack on Iraq where it is estimated that over a million people perished and twelve years after the racist attack on Libya where NATO dropped over 26,000 bombs and murdered up to 50,000 people, the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination is in irreversible decline but the U.S. hegemon, like a wounded wild beast is still dangerous and is proving to be even more reckless then just a few years ago. 

    The disastrous decision to provoke what the U.S. thought would be a limited proxy war with Russia that would allow it to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation will be recorded in history, along with the invasion of Iraq, as the two pivotal decisions that greatly precipitated the decline of the U.S. empire.

    However, with over eight hundred U.S. bases globally, a military budget close to a trillion dollars and a doctrine that prioritizes a “military-first strategy,” the coming defeat in Ukraine might translate into even more irresponsible and counterproductive moves against the Chinese over Taiwan in the Pacific and more aggressive actions to maintain U.S. hegemony in the Americas through SOUTHCOM and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

    Global polls of international opinion continue to reflect that the peoples’ of our planet see the U.S. as the greatest threat to international peace. They are correct.

    The commemoration of the attacks on the peoples of Iraq and Libya is an act of solidarity not only with the peoples of those nations, but with the peoples and nations suffering from the malign policies of this dying empire today. It is a time of rededication to peace and to justice, two elements that are inextricable. In the Black Alliance for Peace, we say that peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

    This understanding is the foundation for why we are launching with our partners, an effort to revive the call to make the Americas a Zone of Peace on April the 4th, the day the state murdered Dr. King and the date that the Black Alliance for Peace was launched in 2017.

    For Africans and other colonized peoples, the task is clear. The U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination embodies the anti-life structures of colonial/capitalist oppression and must be seen as the primary contradiction facing global humanity. We recognize that other contradictions exist. We are not naive. But for the exploited and colonized peoples of this planet, until there is a shift in the international balance of forces away from the maniacs in the “collective West,” the future of our planet and collective humanity remains imperiled.

    The post Commemorations of the Attack on Iraq March 20 and Libya March 19 Reaffirms that the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination Remains the Greatest Threat to International Peace on our Planet first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • United States: Thousands rally for peace and against US imperialism

    Rohima Miah reports from Washington DC that on the 20th anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq, thousands of peace and antiwar activists rallied in the nation’s capital under the banner Fund People’s Needs, Not the War Machine!

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • What Red State vs. Blue State Looks Like to an Ant

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    Just watching the two major parties ruthlessly claw at and attempt to malign and delegitimize each other, then seeing people now excitedly lining up on one side or the other like opposing Ninja turtle teams is both amusing and frightening.  We can count on the talking heads and modern media to regurgitate a story line familiar to devotees of Saturday morning cartoon shows to give substance to our political competitions and aspirations.  Unfortunately, the narrative is insultingly simple-minded and mostly a distraction.

    With the nation divided into red and blue states, the news robots now have the solemn and putatively critical duty to keep us up to date on any shifting of allegiances and rebalancing of the color scheme, milking any incremental addition of a splotch of blue or dash of red for whatever drama they can generate, before cutting to a commercial break.

    What has this got to do with the mounting crises we find ourselves in?

    Here is a short list of profound challenges confronting the world:

    • Potential for nuclear war and the annihilation of the planet.
    • Climate change.
    • Resource depletion.
    • Desertification of shrinking tracts of farm land.
    • Diminishing fresh water supplies.
    • Acidification of the oceans and overfishing.
    • Antibiotic-resistant diseases.
    • Accelerating species extinction.
    • Human trafficking and enslavement.

    Here is a short list of critical challenges just to our nation:

    • Destruction of democracy and rule by an oligarchy.
    • Historical levels of wealth inequality.
    • Loss of privacy and basic constitutional rights to the surveillance state.
    • Corporate tyranny and plutocratic control of the economy.
    • Almost 40% of Americans living in or close to poverty.
    • As many as 30,000,000 still without health insurance.
    • Rampant social and systemic racism.
    • Crumbling of infrastructure and crippling of our social institutions.
    • Militarization of society and seizure of power by the military-industrial complex.
    • Police brutality and murder of innocent citizens.

    Pundits and politicos in service to their oligarchic masters can generate all the wonderful spin they can.  But America’s economy has been hollowed out from the inside, and due to a fanatic allegiance to a defective and extremely destructive ideology, the vital needs of everyday citizens have been ignored.  Anger and frustration mount.  Signs of decline and decay are all around us, behind the glitter and the glitz.  Worst of all, the U.S. as a world power is losing the mantle of leadership.  Its policies have inflicted so much chaos, destruction and death on the rest of the planet, the U.S. is losing its legitimacy and is successfully being challenged by Russia, China, and the non-aligned countries of the South.  Of course, with the myopia and desperation that characterizes a dying empire, what’s America’s answer?  More chaos, destruction and death.  We are involved in a very serious war right now and the specter of World War III looms frighteningly on the horizon.

    Everything comes back to what we as a people do to reverse this disastrous course.

    Isn’t it time to put away the gang colors and actually begin to solve some problems?

    Is it possible?  I don’t know.

    I do know it’s absolutely necessary.

    Our survival as a country and even as a species depends on it.

    The post What Red State vs. Blue State Looks Like to an Ant first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.