Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The Knee of the Emperor Bends
There is some very unusual rhetoric out there the last few days. Mihail Saakaasvili and Ehud Ohlmert have both done an about fact in their willingness to compromise on key issues. And their aggressive tones have become the cooing voice of reason itself. Two huge forces have tipped the balance of world power; Russian resurgence and USA economic meltdown. Either one could persuade the West to be more humble - together they may have been quite convincing.
Olmert: Israel must give up almost all West Bank
Interim PM says Israel must give up virtually all occupied West Bank including east Jerusalem as key to achieving peace with Palestinians.
JERUSALEM - Israel's interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel must give up virtually all the occupied West Bank including east Jerusalem, insisting in an interview published on Monday this was key to achieving peace with the Palestinians.
"We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories," said Olmert, who heads an interim government following his September 21 resignation.
"We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace," he told the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper.
"Including in Jerusalem," he said in reference to the predominantly Arab eastern part of the Holy City which Israel occupied and annexed after the 1967 war and which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.
His comments are expected to stir deep controversy. Israel officially considers Jerusalem its "eternal, undivided" capital, a view Olmert -- a former mayor of the city -- said he shared for many years.
"I am not trying to justify retroactively what I did for 35 years. For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at reality in all its depth," said Olmert, who turns 63 on Tuesday.
But he stressed that giving up parts of the city is key to Israel's security, pointing to deadly July attacks by Palestinians from east Jerusalem who ploughed through crowded streets with bulldozers.
"Whoever wants to hold on to all of the city's territory will have to bring 270,000 Arabs inside the fences of sovereign Israel. It won't work," Olmert said.
"A decision has to be made. This decision is difficult, terrible, a decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our innermost desires, our collective memories, the prayers of the Jewish people for 2,000 years.
"I think that we are very close to reaching agreements," he said, even though the peace process with the Palestinians has made little visible progress since it was relaunched at a US-hosted conference in November.
He said that also applied to indirect negotiations with longtime foe Syria which were relaunched in May after a eight-year hiatus, with Turkey acting as a go-between.
He made it clear peace would come at a price for both sides, with Israel having to give up the annexed Golan Heights and demanding Syria end its current ties with Iran and stop backing "the Hamas terrorism, the Al-Qaeda terrorism and the jihad in Iraq."
"In both cases, the decision we have to make is a decision that we have been refusing for 40 years to consider with our eyes open," he said, warning, however that there were no risk-free solutions.
He did not rule out military confrontation in Syria in the coming years or renewed bloodshed in the West Bank.
"We don't know, for example, what will happen in the Palestinian Authority after January 9, 2009," he said.
On the one hand, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose term ends that day, could remain in power "with some manipulation," he said.
"But we believe that there is a very great danger that there will be a bloody clash, which will thwart any possibility of continuing negotiations and perhaps will force us to be involved in the confrontation, with bloodshed, with everything that could happen as a result."
Olmert formally presented his resignation on September 21 amid deep political turmoil over a series graft allegations that caused police to recommend criminal indictments.
He will remain interim prime minister until a new government is formed. The governing Kadima party's newly elected leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is scrambling to put together a government coalition in order to avert snap elections that could put the right-wing Likud party in power.
Read article
Has Ohlmert finally admitted the obvious that Israel can never win the battle they are fighting? Perhaps, since his resignation he is free to speak his mind without political percussions? The reports coming out of Israel vacillate wildly; one week Israel is ready to nuke Iran, the next week it elects a moderate leader. Difficult to find the right clues.
Here is the second article on Saakashvili
West looks to future with Russia relations
By Bridget Kendall
BBC diplomatic correspondent, Sochi
Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili addressing the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2008.
Georgia's leader said there was no alternative to dialogue with Russia Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has said that he does not want his country to drive a wedge between Russia and the rest of the world.
Speaking to the BBC in New York, he said the consequences of the conflict with Russia this summer which led to Georgia's loss of control over the enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been "dire", but that Georgia's focus now was to rebuild its economy and strengthen its democracy, rather than seek further confrontation.
This is an interesting change of tone by the Georgian leader - a tacit admission that Georgia has been the short-term military loser in this conflict, but that it hopes to turn the situation into a long-term gain, by seeking to enhance its international reputation compared to Russia.
President Saakashvili admitted that, in the short term, Russia had made territorial gains and the cost to Georgia of this summer's conflict had been dire.
But the consequences he said had not been deadly and Georgia would recover.
"Remember Russia did not get two of its goals," he said, "to destroy our government or to shut off the pipeline which is the main energy bloodline for Europe."
In a markedly more conciliatory tone than previously, he said Georgia's priority now was to rebuild its economy and strengthen its democracy.
He put the emphasis on improving integration with the EU, rather than pushing for the Nato membership which Russia has objected to so strongly.
He said this remained a long-term goal.
Read Article
The rest of the speech is quite defensive; but a change of heart surely. Where is the self-righteous Georgian madman of two weeks ago? Did Saakashvili start taking medication or has he been put in the corner by his master for soiling his bed? Perhaps he realizes his fairy godmother is in economic meltdown? It is so difficult to think like madmen. And impossible to predict the nasty connivances they create to further their aims. I shall have to keep a close eye on these two..
Olmert: Israel must give up almost all West Bank
Interim PM says Israel must give up virtually all occupied West Bank including east Jerusalem as key to achieving peace with Palestinians.JERUSALEM - Israel's interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel must give up virtually all the occupied West Bank including east Jerusalem, insisting in an interview published on Monday this was key to achieving peace with the Palestinians.
"We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories," said Olmert, who heads an interim government following his September 21 resignation.
"We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace," he told the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper.
"Including in Jerusalem," he said in reference to the predominantly Arab eastern part of the Holy City which Israel occupied and annexed after the 1967 war and which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.
His comments are expected to stir deep controversy. Israel officially considers Jerusalem its "eternal, undivided" capital, a view Olmert -- a former mayor of the city -- said he shared for many years.
"I am not trying to justify retroactively what I did for 35 years. For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at reality in all its depth," said Olmert, who turns 63 on Tuesday.
But he stressed that giving up parts of the city is key to Israel's security, pointing to deadly July attacks by Palestinians from east Jerusalem who ploughed through crowded streets with bulldozers.
"Whoever wants to hold on to all of the city's territory will have to bring 270,000 Arabs inside the fences of sovereign Israel. It won't work," Olmert said.
"A decision has to be made. This decision is difficult, terrible, a decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our innermost desires, our collective memories, the prayers of the Jewish people for 2,000 years.
"I think that we are very close to reaching agreements," he said, even though the peace process with the Palestinians has made little visible progress since it was relaunched at a US-hosted conference in November.
He said that also applied to indirect negotiations with longtime foe Syria which were relaunched in May after a eight-year hiatus, with Turkey acting as a go-between.
He made it clear peace would come at a price for both sides, with Israel having to give up the annexed Golan Heights and demanding Syria end its current ties with Iran and stop backing "the Hamas terrorism, the Al-Qaeda terrorism and the jihad in Iraq."
"In both cases, the decision we have to make is a decision that we have been refusing for 40 years to consider with our eyes open," he said, warning, however that there were no risk-free solutions.
He did not rule out military confrontation in Syria in the coming years or renewed bloodshed in the West Bank.
"We don't know, for example, what will happen in the Palestinian Authority after January 9, 2009," he said.
On the one hand, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose term ends that day, could remain in power "with some manipulation," he said.
"But we believe that there is a very great danger that there will be a bloody clash, which will thwart any possibility of continuing negotiations and perhaps will force us to be involved in the confrontation, with bloodshed, with everything that could happen as a result."
Olmert formally presented his resignation on September 21 amid deep political turmoil over a series graft allegations that caused police to recommend criminal indictments.
He will remain interim prime minister until a new government is formed. The governing Kadima party's newly elected leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is scrambling to put together a government coalition in order to avert snap elections that could put the right-wing Likud party in power.
Read article
Has Ohlmert finally admitted the obvious that Israel can never win the battle they are fighting? Perhaps, since his resignation he is free to speak his mind without political percussions? The reports coming out of Israel vacillate wildly; one week Israel is ready to nuke Iran, the next week it elects a moderate leader. Difficult to find the right clues.
Here is the second article on Saakashvili
West looks to future with Russia relations
By Bridget KendallBBC diplomatic correspondent, Sochi
Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili addressing the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2008.
Georgia's leader said there was no alternative to dialogue with Russia Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has said that he does not want his country to drive a wedge between Russia and the rest of the world.
Speaking to the BBC in New York, he said the consequences of the conflict with Russia this summer which led to Georgia's loss of control over the enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been "dire", but that Georgia's focus now was to rebuild its economy and strengthen its democracy, rather than seek further confrontation.
This is an interesting change of tone by the Georgian leader - a tacit admission that Georgia has been the short-term military loser in this conflict, but that it hopes to turn the situation into a long-term gain, by seeking to enhance its international reputation compared to Russia.
President Saakashvili admitted that, in the short term, Russia had made territorial gains and the cost to Georgia of this summer's conflict had been dire.
But the consequences he said had not been deadly and Georgia would recover.
"Remember Russia did not get two of its goals," he said, "to destroy our government or to shut off the pipeline which is the main energy bloodline for Europe."
In a markedly more conciliatory tone than previously, he said Georgia's priority now was to rebuild its economy and strengthen its democracy.
He put the emphasis on improving integration with the EU, rather than pushing for the Nato membership which Russia has objected to so strongly.
He said this remained a long-term goal.
Read Article
The rest of the speech is quite defensive; but a change of heart surely. Where is the self-righteous Georgian madman of two weeks ago? Did Saakashvili start taking medication or has he been put in the corner by his master for soiling his bed? Perhaps he realizes his fairy godmother is in economic meltdown? It is so difficult to think like madmen. And impossible to predict the nasty connivances they create to further their aims. I shall have to keep a close eye on these two..
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Dismissed employees beat CEO to death
23 Sep 2008, 0124 hrs IST, Lalit Kumar ,TNN
WATCH
GREATER NOIDA: In one of the worst instances of industrial violence in recent times, the MD-cum-CEO of the India unit of Italian MNC, Graziano Trasmissioni, was bludgeoned to death by a 200-strong armed mob of dismissed workers which had barged into the company premises and indulged in largescale violence.
According to Graziano employees, the sacked workers rushed into the premises around 12.20pm when the gates were opened to let in a car. "They smashed each one of the approximately 20 cars inside the compound. Hearing the commotion, our CEO, Lalit Kishore Chaudhary, came out to the building entrance. He was abused while trying to reason with the protesters. And, when he objected, the beat him to death with a hammer," said production supervisor, Udaivir.
Chaudhary, 44, was rushed to Greater Noida's Kailash Hospital, where doctors declared him brought dead. The violence left at least 50 executives and workers of the unit injured. Of the 44 staffers taken to hospital, 34 of them were yet to be discharged until Monday night. Of these, 10 executives of the company remained in the intensive care unit.
The unit also sustained heavy damage in the vandalism that followed. Five Italian technical consultants, who were visiting the unit, barely managed to escape injuries. Some of them had to plead with the raiders to spare them.
The unit, a 100% subsidiary of Graziano Italy, specializes in making gears and transmission systems for vehicles. It was set up in 1998 and commenced commercial production in 2000.
Shockingly, despite several Graziano officials phoning up a number of Noida police officials about the violence, only two police constables arrived at the spot after an hour. And, even at 3.30pm, as the unit's security personnel and some other employees shut themselves up in the unit, only about half a dozen Provincial Armed Constabulary personnel were posted outside.
And, there was no officer with them. Which meant that, in case of an emergency, there was nobody there to order any action. And, this was the state of affairs with the district reserve police lines being located half a kilometre away.
Police officers were not available for comment, until 9.45pm, when area superintendent of police, Babu Ram, claimed, "We had sent force within 15 minutes of getting information. Later, we also arrested 63 persons for murder, rioting and other charges. We had even earlier received a note from the Italian Embassy about trouble at Graziano."
The roots of the unrest can be traced to three months ago, when the company declared a partial lockout. Some 200 employees were affected. Company sources said 15 staffers were given termination letters while the others were to be taken back.
According to a company employee, "Some workers had been locked out selectively. They had arrived today to negotiate the re-employment terms. But, they were not willing to accept some conditions. And, sat on a dharna outside the main gate. There is a court injunction against these workers coming within 300 meters of the unit. But the police did not arrive when about 200 of them were at the gates, even as a precautionary measure."
The bloodstained hammer, which was allegedly used to kill Chaudhary, was found lying in the premises, and had surprisingly not been seized by the police as evidence.
In the company guesthouse, visiting Italian technical consultant, Forettii Gatii, told TOI , "I just locked my room's door from inside. And I prayed they would not break in. See, my hands are trembling even three hours later."
Another consultant said they broke the door of his room and entered, but he just pleaded to them to spare him. For some reason, he was spared. But inside the unit, in spite of there being over 30 security guards, the remaining employees looked scared and worried.
Chaudhary is survived by wife Ratna, a lecturer at DU's Kirori Mal College. His only son, Keshav, studies in Class XII at Modern School, Barakhamba Road. According to family circles, he will be cremated at Delhi's Nigambodh Ghat on Tuesday morning.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Dismissed_employees_beat_CEO_to_death/articleshow/3513395.cms
WATCH
GREATER NOIDA: In one of the worst instances of industrial violence in recent times, the MD-cum-CEO of the India unit of Italian MNC, Graziano Trasmissioni, was bludgeoned to death by a 200-strong armed mob of dismissed workers which had barged into the company premises and indulged in largescale violence.
According to Graziano employees, the sacked workers rushed into the premises around 12.20pm when the gates were opened to let in a car. "They smashed each one of the approximately 20 cars inside the compound. Hearing the commotion, our CEO, Lalit Kishore Chaudhary, came out to the building entrance. He was abused while trying to reason with the protesters. And, when he objected, the beat him to death with a hammer," said production supervisor, Udaivir.
Chaudhary, 44, was rushed to Greater Noida's Kailash Hospital, where doctors declared him brought dead. The violence left at least 50 executives and workers of the unit injured. Of the 44 staffers taken to hospital, 34 of them were yet to be discharged until Monday night. Of these, 10 executives of the company remained in the intensive care unit.
The unit also sustained heavy damage in the vandalism that followed. Five Italian technical consultants, who were visiting the unit, barely managed to escape injuries. Some of them had to plead with the raiders to spare them.
The unit, a 100% subsidiary of Graziano Italy, specializes in making gears and transmission systems for vehicles. It was set up in 1998 and commenced commercial production in 2000.
Shockingly, despite several Graziano officials phoning up a number of Noida police officials about the violence, only two police constables arrived at the spot after an hour. And, even at 3.30pm, as the unit's security personnel and some other employees shut themselves up in the unit, only about half a dozen Provincial Armed Constabulary personnel were posted outside.
And, there was no officer with them. Which meant that, in case of an emergency, there was nobody there to order any action. And, this was the state of affairs with the district reserve police lines being located half a kilometre away.
Police officers were not available for comment, until 9.45pm, when area superintendent of police, Babu Ram, claimed, "We had sent force within 15 minutes of getting information. Later, we also arrested 63 persons for murder, rioting and other charges. We had even earlier received a note from the Italian Embassy about trouble at Graziano."
The roots of the unrest can be traced to three months ago, when the company declared a partial lockout. Some 200 employees were affected. Company sources said 15 staffers were given termination letters while the others were to be taken back.
According to a company employee, "Some workers had been locked out selectively. They had arrived today to negotiate the re-employment terms. But, they were not willing to accept some conditions. And, sat on a dharna outside the main gate. There is a court injunction against these workers coming within 300 meters of the unit. But the police did not arrive when about 200 of them were at the gates, even as a precautionary measure."
The bloodstained hammer, which was allegedly used to kill Chaudhary, was found lying in the premises, and had surprisingly not been seized by the police as evidence.
In the company guesthouse, visiting Italian technical consultant, Forettii Gatii, told TOI , "I just locked my room's door from inside. And I prayed they would not break in. See, my hands are trembling even three hours later."
Another consultant said they broke the door of his room and entered, but he just pleaded to them to spare him. For some reason, he was spared. But inside the unit, in spite of there being over 30 security guards, the remaining employees looked scared and worried.
Chaudhary is survived by wife Ratna, a lecturer at DU's Kirori Mal College. His only son, Keshav, studies in Class XII at Modern School, Barakhamba Road. According to family circles, he will be cremated at Delhi's Nigambodh Ghat on Tuesday morning.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Dismissed_employees_beat_CEO_to_death/articleshow/3513395.cms
And the Peepul said?
Readers Opinions
Dismissed employees beat CEO to death
anil prakash pande, dubai, says: justice delayed is justice denied. today leaders are commenting about SIMI ban to be lifted, ahmed bukhari saying india should face one more division. people given death sentence, still not punished. india is a country that has people having no faith in judiciary. i am sure this kind of wild, voilent and savage behaviour will go unnoticed. just few days media talking about it, then comes aussies series and everything is forgotton.
[23 Sep, 2008 1910hrs IST]
AKN, Bindrabad, says: Arrest the 200 workers, lock them in a big barn, and set the barn on fire.
[23 Sep, 2008 1858hrs IST]
Biswajit Ghosh, Lagos, Nigeria, says: Ashis of Hyderabad and Sree of Bangalore, we collectively as Indians have shamed ourselves enough with this horrific incident. Don't forget you have families too. How would you react if your dad / brother / son meets the same fate ? Please, for God's sake, if you don't feel like sympathasing with the bereaved family, who is no different for yours, at least don't write anything which show you in such poor light !!
[23 Sep, 2008 1830hrs IST]
sunil, delhi, says: Union Labour Minister Oscar Fernandes is supporting workers in their act. I don't think any human can support this. I think these guys are animals or may be worse.
[23 Sep, 2008 1825hrs IST]
SHRIRAM, Pune, says: These type of cruel deeds nearby Capital City shows serious breakdown in the system & handicap situation of the government.What we want to give as massage with these examples? I don't think that,we are on right track of Vision 2020 dreamed by then Honourable President Prof.Abdul Kalam.... Very unfortunate & further jungle raj situation of day to day detoriated Noida area.
[23 Sep, 2008 1820hrs IST]
shamsher kumar, new york, says: pls send the employees in noida to meet ceo of a.i.g , lehmann, fredey mack for few days only
[23 Sep, 2008 1706hrs IST]
Anubhav Jain, Delhi, says: Now we need to add another term in our increasing vocabulary, that is Industrial Violence. What a shame? How can one person kill another? I am sure people who were sacked deserved to be sacked otherwise also since they have an animal in them. These people should be hanged to death like other terroists.
[23 Sep, 2008 1705hrs IST]
Sukesh, Noida, says: This is very shocking news. All ppl who were involved in this murder should get capital punishment. No mercy should be shown to them. My deep condolence to the bereaved family of CEO.
[23 Sep, 2008 1701hrs IST]
dhirendra chheda, mumbai, says: Dear Sir I strongly condem the murder of CEO of Noida as not for it was hear of company but he may have called you for solution but this is not the way to behave
[23 Sep, 2008 1651hrs IST]
Navneet Bhanot, Delhi, says: Lalit K Chaudhary was a role model for many in the auto parts business. God bless his soul God bless India
[23 Sep, 2008 1502hrs IST]
Niko, Australia, says: This is the real truth of this country. The reason China continues to prosper, the police have no idea on what is happening, Delhi area is known for violence on women as well. There is no law and order, Judiciary is only for name sake and sits in a complicated mode. The law enforcers are in a confused state, no training and no funding.
[23 Sep, 2008 1458hrs IST]
Sam Mathur, Navi Mumbai, says: What escapes me is how can some one or any one justify a murder on whatever grounds. He was a human being who was warm and alive when he came to meet the very workers who have now rendered him cold and lifeless. We in India have become too desperate and too impatient, we hit, we harm, we kill for any reason... caste, religion, beliefs, ticket conuter queues, hate, love whatever. The worst is the mob... u do whatever n u get away with it... then we become pacifists and rationalise mob violence. That's what chills my blood, fills me with horror. I live in Kolkata and Mumbai and I've been caught at the centre of mob violence at both places... believe me it still makes me numb in helplessness.
[23 Sep, 2008 1445hrs IST]
Sundari, hyd, says: I would like to know if any action will be taken (against these barbarians) when we write our opinion? Otherwise what is the point?These opinions should not become some statistics. Is the editor capable of voicing these concerns to the right people? What can we educated people of India do? Please ,please I am trully distressed by these events and I would like to do something about it. Can anyone suggest something? Who gave the right to these people to take law in their hands? My prayers are for the family of the deceased. Gosh ! when I saw the son I was shattered.God bless the family.
[23 Sep, 2008 1421hrs IST]
sandeep, canada, says: The bludgeoning of the CEO in Noida by employees adds to the borrible mob violence that is affecting the minds of masses in India. Not only does the government and law officials need to take immediate actions against such crimes, but this mass hysteria should also be analyzed and dealt with on the social levels especially in our educational systems. My appeal to my countrymen in India is let us put an end to this madness before the democracy of our nation turns into anarchy. Let us educate people how to handle grievances against individuals, against communities and against the government in appropriate and mature ways. Remember, we are not animals nor have we descended from them(though some would like to think and behave as such), rather, we are human beings created in the image of God.
[23 Sep, 2008 1400hrs IST]
Andy, Pune, says: Hope IT CEOs take a note of this. So far IT professionals are killing themselves...It will just take a moment to turn the gun around.
[23 Sep, 2008 1353hrs IST]
k venkataraman, new delhi, says: yadha raja, thada praja. no wonder many factories in noida have been closed. now all the ceos and coos must think twice before accepting any job in noida. on top the civil aviation deptt is thinking of building an airport here. they crowd will burn all the planes and bomb the airport.
[23 Sep, 2008 1344hrs IST]
pratikshit singh , noida , says: it,s high time that these ruthless capitalist learn alesson , otherwise they will have to bear the brunt of workers ..
[23 Sep, 2008 1301hrs IST]
Renu, taiwan, says: This news should be made 'international' so that foreign companies will think twice before setting up branches in India. Education or no education, Indian mentality will never change. I'm really ashamed to be an Indian.
[23 Sep, 2008 1232hrs IST]
Bose, Delhi, says: Long live UP Police. These are the signs of time to come.
[23 Sep, 2008 1206hrs IST]
muthu, chennai, says: It is shocking news. We should have more stringent laws to control.People working in an Industry should behave well.killing a person is not a solution to the problem.CEO of the company has brought the company to such a high level because of that all employees are living in a very good standard. For employees, he was god. Those people needs to be punished.
[23 Sep, 2008 0910hrs IST]
Ramanand, Washington, D.C., USA, says: It is surprising to see that people are debating, whether the dismissed employees were at fault or the CEO was on fault, without having all the facts of the situation. However, in any case a murder is a murder and it is a crime; and the criminal should be brought to justice. What did these dismissed employees got from this incidence. If they had any grievance from the lay-off, they could have filed a law suite and had pressured the government and politicians to expedite their case in the court. No body should be allowed to take the law in their own hands irrespective of the government and the location (country). If the government does not have adequate law governing the right and responsibilities of workers and the employing companies, no one other than the government can create one. Yes, people can press on the government to do that. In general, the law and order situation in India is such that people in most of the towns and cities always fear for their lives. The government needs to take some drastic actions to correct the situation.
[23 Sep, 2008 0104hrs IST]
aa, usa, says: You know what the police/justice system should do is that round up the people (100 or 200) please put them on trial and give them sentences. It is just 200 people and from this others will learn a lesson that none can take law in their own hands. Justice needs to be served.
[22 Sep, 2008 2354hrs IST]
sen, malaysia, says: To take a person's life under any circumstances is,inhuman, obnoxious and of course wrong. The culprits are murderers and should be punished as such. I am aghast to see some are supporting the murder! They should also be punished as instigators. Have we, Indians, no morality and humanity left? How these people know what was the problem and who was wrong, company or workers? They are advocating violence, indiscipline and mafia rule. Shame on them.
[22 Sep, 2008 2009hrs IST]
Rohit, USA, says: To Dev from Austin, USA. I have lived in USA for 30 years. US firms give 3-6 months severance pay to employees. Only the CEOs and their cronies get large severance packages. But, the US employee gets unemployment insurance payments for some time whereas no such thing exists in India to the best of my knowledge.
[22 Sep, 2008 2009hrs IST]
JIKUBHAI, MUMBAI, says: Action taken by dismissed employee is sign of frustration to maximum extent as it has been observed that many companies CEO's are dismissing their own employees without any reason and dictating their own terms and conditions like dictator and deserved such treatment.
[22 Sep, 2008 2000hrs IST]
Hindu, India, says: Should wait for postmartum report to understand cause of death . This is unbelieveble
[22 Sep, 2008 1958hrs IST]
Mohsin Iqbal, Jammu, says: respected Sir/Ma'm; I don't suppose that anybody whosoever he or she is should be so brutally killed on any ground basis. Atleast in our country there should be an example of humanity and commemority. If anybody's career is affected they should only harass but not kill. The slain CEO's family might be wailing and who could bear that neither you nor me nor anybody else.
[22 Sep, 2008 1956hrs IST]
Abhijit, Minneapolis, says: It is necessary in India to have a safety net; it may not be suitable to have a US style social security given the large number of un-documented labour - also that US social security system is under duress as more & more people enter their labour market. A proposal of providing unemployment insurance largely donated from employer fund, partly from employee fund & partly from govt. would be a good solution. The insurance should pay the workers that have been laid-off salary they would have otherwise got if employed for a short term duration (like say a year or so) to see them thru' their re-training & re-deployment. And for God's sake, privatize as much as possible, lower taxes, control govt. spending to create more jobs
[22 Sep, 2008 1956hrs IST]
shankar, Los Angles, says: While the death of CEO is tragic or for that matter any death is tragic. We must realise the workers are human too and they have a family to take care off and cannot be fired just to maintain the profit margins. The report does not say if the workers were fired for misconduct or for the dereliction of duties. But this is what one should exect from the heartless corporate world where money is god and greed is a virtue.
[22 Sep, 2008 1939hrs IST]
Sen, USA, says: There are many posters that are trying to find a 'rationale' behind this murder, citing style of CEO, problem of firing etc. What they don't get is that lawlessness is never a solution. Murder is a crime in a civilized society, what ever is the driver behind it.
[22 Sep, 2008 1933hrs IST]
Dismissed employees beat CEO to death
anil prakash pande, dubai, says: justice delayed is justice denied. today leaders are commenting about SIMI ban to be lifted, ahmed bukhari saying india should face one more division. people given death sentence, still not punished. india is a country that has people having no faith in judiciary. i am sure this kind of wild, voilent and savage behaviour will go unnoticed. just few days media talking about it, then comes aussies series and everything is forgotton.
[23 Sep, 2008 1910hrs IST]
AKN, Bindrabad, says: Arrest the 200 workers, lock them in a big barn, and set the barn on fire.
[23 Sep, 2008 1858hrs IST]
Biswajit Ghosh, Lagos, Nigeria, says: Ashis of Hyderabad and Sree of Bangalore, we collectively as Indians have shamed ourselves enough with this horrific incident. Don't forget you have families too. How would you react if your dad / brother / son meets the same fate ? Please, for God's sake, if you don't feel like sympathasing with the bereaved family, who is no different for yours, at least don't write anything which show you in such poor light !!
[23 Sep, 2008 1830hrs IST]
sunil, delhi, says: Union Labour Minister Oscar Fernandes is supporting workers in their act. I don't think any human can support this. I think these guys are animals or may be worse.
[23 Sep, 2008 1825hrs IST]
SHRIRAM, Pune, says: These type of cruel deeds nearby Capital City shows serious breakdown in the system & handicap situation of the government.What we want to give as massage with these examples? I don't think that,we are on right track of Vision 2020 dreamed by then Honourable President Prof.Abdul Kalam.... Very unfortunate & further jungle raj situation of day to day detoriated Noida area.
[23 Sep, 2008 1820hrs IST]
shamsher kumar, new york, says: pls send the employees in noida to meet ceo of a.i.g , lehmann, fredey mack for few days only
[23 Sep, 2008 1706hrs IST]
Anubhav Jain, Delhi, says: Now we need to add another term in our increasing vocabulary, that is Industrial Violence. What a shame? How can one person kill another? I am sure people who were sacked deserved to be sacked otherwise also since they have an animal in them. These people should be hanged to death like other terroists.
[23 Sep, 2008 1705hrs IST]
Sukesh, Noida, says: This is very shocking news. All ppl who were involved in this murder should get capital punishment. No mercy should be shown to them. My deep condolence to the bereaved family of CEO.
[23 Sep, 2008 1701hrs IST]
dhirendra chheda, mumbai, says: Dear Sir I strongly condem the murder of CEO of Noida as not for it was hear of company but he may have called you for solution but this is not the way to behave
[23 Sep, 2008 1651hrs IST]
Navneet Bhanot, Delhi, says: Lalit K Chaudhary was a role model for many in the auto parts business. God bless his soul God bless India
[23 Sep, 2008 1502hrs IST]
Niko, Australia, says: This is the real truth of this country. The reason China continues to prosper, the police have no idea on what is happening, Delhi area is known for violence on women as well. There is no law and order, Judiciary is only for name sake and sits in a complicated mode. The law enforcers are in a confused state, no training and no funding.
[23 Sep, 2008 1458hrs IST]
Sam Mathur, Navi Mumbai, says: What escapes me is how can some one or any one justify a murder on whatever grounds. He was a human being who was warm and alive when he came to meet the very workers who have now rendered him cold and lifeless. We in India have become too desperate and too impatient, we hit, we harm, we kill for any reason... caste, religion, beliefs, ticket conuter queues, hate, love whatever. The worst is the mob... u do whatever n u get away with it... then we become pacifists and rationalise mob violence. That's what chills my blood, fills me with horror. I live in Kolkata and Mumbai and I've been caught at the centre of mob violence at both places... believe me it still makes me numb in helplessness.
[23 Sep, 2008 1445hrs IST]
Sundari, hyd, says: I would like to know if any action will be taken (against these barbarians) when we write our opinion? Otherwise what is the point?These opinions should not become some statistics. Is the editor capable of voicing these concerns to the right people? What can we educated people of India do? Please ,please I am trully distressed by these events and I would like to do something about it. Can anyone suggest something? Who gave the right to these people to take law in their hands? My prayers are for the family of the deceased. Gosh ! when I saw the son I was shattered.God bless the family.
[23 Sep, 2008 1421hrs IST]
sandeep, canada, says: The bludgeoning of the CEO in Noida by employees adds to the borrible mob violence that is affecting the minds of masses in India. Not only does the government and law officials need to take immediate actions against such crimes, but this mass hysteria should also be analyzed and dealt with on the social levels especially in our educational systems. My appeal to my countrymen in India is let us put an end to this madness before the democracy of our nation turns into anarchy. Let us educate people how to handle grievances against individuals, against communities and against the government in appropriate and mature ways. Remember, we are not animals nor have we descended from them(though some would like to think and behave as such), rather, we are human beings created in the image of God.
[23 Sep, 2008 1400hrs IST]
Andy, Pune, says: Hope IT CEOs take a note of this. So far IT professionals are killing themselves...It will just take a moment to turn the gun around.
[23 Sep, 2008 1353hrs IST]
k venkataraman, new delhi, says: yadha raja, thada praja. no wonder many factories in noida have been closed. now all the ceos and coos must think twice before accepting any job in noida. on top the civil aviation deptt is thinking of building an airport here. they crowd will burn all the planes and bomb the airport.
[23 Sep, 2008 1344hrs IST]
pratikshit singh , noida , says: it,s high time that these ruthless capitalist learn alesson , otherwise they will have to bear the brunt of workers ..
[23 Sep, 2008 1301hrs IST]
Renu, taiwan, says: This news should be made 'international' so that foreign companies will think twice before setting up branches in India. Education or no education, Indian mentality will never change. I'm really ashamed to be an Indian.
[23 Sep, 2008 1232hrs IST]
Bose, Delhi, says: Long live UP Police. These are the signs of time to come.
[23 Sep, 2008 1206hrs IST]
muthu, chennai, says: It is shocking news. We should have more stringent laws to control.People working in an Industry should behave well.killing a person is not a solution to the problem.CEO of the company has brought the company to such a high level because of that all employees are living in a very good standard. For employees, he was god. Those people needs to be punished.
[23 Sep, 2008 0910hrs IST]
Ramanand, Washington, D.C., USA, says: It is surprising to see that people are debating, whether the dismissed employees were at fault or the CEO was on fault, without having all the facts of the situation. However, in any case a murder is a murder and it is a crime; and the criminal should be brought to justice. What did these dismissed employees got from this incidence. If they had any grievance from the lay-off, they could have filed a law suite and had pressured the government and politicians to expedite their case in the court. No body should be allowed to take the law in their own hands irrespective of the government and the location (country). If the government does not have adequate law governing the right and responsibilities of workers and the employing companies, no one other than the government can create one. Yes, people can press on the government to do that. In general, the law and order situation in India is such that people in most of the towns and cities always fear for their lives. The government needs to take some drastic actions to correct the situation.
[23 Sep, 2008 0104hrs IST]
aa, usa, says: You know what the police/justice system should do is that round up the people (100 or 200) please put them on trial and give them sentences. It is just 200 people and from this others will learn a lesson that none can take law in their own hands. Justice needs to be served.
[22 Sep, 2008 2354hrs IST]
sen, malaysia, says: To take a person's life under any circumstances is,inhuman, obnoxious and of course wrong. The culprits are murderers and should be punished as such. I am aghast to see some are supporting the murder! They should also be punished as instigators. Have we, Indians, no morality and humanity left? How these people know what was the problem and who was wrong, company or workers? They are advocating violence, indiscipline and mafia rule. Shame on them.
[22 Sep, 2008 2009hrs IST]
Rohit, USA, says: To Dev from Austin, USA. I have lived in USA for 30 years. US firms give 3-6 months severance pay to employees. Only the CEOs and their cronies get large severance packages. But, the US employee gets unemployment insurance payments for some time whereas no such thing exists in India to the best of my knowledge.
[22 Sep, 2008 2009hrs IST]
JIKUBHAI, MUMBAI, says: Action taken by dismissed employee is sign of frustration to maximum extent as it has been observed that many companies CEO's are dismissing their own employees without any reason and dictating their own terms and conditions like dictator and deserved such treatment.
[22 Sep, 2008 2000hrs IST]
Hindu, India, says: Should wait for postmartum report to understand cause of death . This is unbelieveble
[22 Sep, 2008 1958hrs IST]
Mohsin Iqbal, Jammu, says: respected Sir/Ma'm; I don't suppose that anybody whosoever he or she is should be so brutally killed on any ground basis. Atleast in our country there should be an example of humanity and commemority. If anybody's career is affected they should only harass but not kill. The slain CEO's family might be wailing and who could bear that neither you nor me nor anybody else.
[22 Sep, 2008 1956hrs IST]
Abhijit, Minneapolis, says: It is necessary in India to have a safety net; it may not be suitable to have a US style social security given the large number of un-documented labour - also that US social security system is under duress as more & more people enter their labour market. A proposal of providing unemployment insurance largely donated from employer fund, partly from employee fund & partly from govt. would be a good solution. The insurance should pay the workers that have been laid-off salary they would have otherwise got if employed for a short term duration (like say a year or so) to see them thru' their re-training & re-deployment. And for God's sake, privatize as much as possible, lower taxes, control govt. spending to create more jobs
[22 Sep, 2008 1956hrs IST]
shankar, Los Angles, says: While the death of CEO is tragic or for that matter any death is tragic. We must realise the workers are human too and they have a family to take care off and cannot be fired just to maintain the profit margins. The report does not say if the workers were fired for misconduct or for the dereliction of duties. But this is what one should exect from the heartless corporate world where money is god and greed is a virtue.
[22 Sep, 2008 1939hrs IST]
Sen, USA, says: There are many posters that are trying to find a 'rationale' behind this murder, citing style of CEO, problem of firing etc. What they don't get is that lawlessness is never a solution. Murder is a crime in a civilized society, what ever is the driver behind it.
[22 Sep, 2008 1933hrs IST]
China banks told to halt lending to US banks
Wed Sep 24, 2008 9:52pm EDTBEIJING, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Chinese regulators have told domestic banks to stop interbank lending to U.S. financial institutions to prevent possible losses during the financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday. The Hong Kong newspaper cited unidentified industry sources as saying the instruction from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) applied to interbank lending of all currencies to U.S. banks but not to banks from other countries. "The decree appears to be Beijing's first attempt to erect defences against the deepening U.S. financial meltdown after the mainland's major lenders reported billions of U.S. dollars in exposure to the credit crisis," the SCMP said. A spokesman for the CBRC had no immediate comment. (Reporting by Alan Wheatley and Langi Chiang; editing by Ken Wills)
http://www.reuters. com/article/ marketsNews/ idUSPEK166937200 80925
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Asia Needs Deal to Prevent Panic Selling of U.S. Debt, Yu Says
By Kevin Hamlin
Sept. 25 (Bloomberg)
Japan, China and other holders of U.S. government debt must quickly reach an agreement to prevent panic sales leading to a global financial collapse, said Yu Yongding, a former adviser to the Chinese central bank.
``We are in the same boat, we must cooperate,'' Yu said in an interview in Beijing on Sept. 23. ``If there's no selling in a panicked way, then China willingly can continue to provide our financial support by continuing to hold U.S. assets.''
An agreement is needed so that no nation rushes to sell, ``causing a collapse,'' Yu said. Japan is the biggest owner of U.S. Treasury bills, holding $593 billion, and China is second with $519 billion. Asian countries together hold half of the $2.67 trillion total held by foreign nations.
China, Japan, South Korea and others should meet soon to seal a deal, said Yu, a former academic member of the central bank's monetary policy committee. The talks should involve finance ministers, central bank governors and even national leaders, he said.
`Whether some kind of agreement between them to continue to hold Treasury bills is viable, I'm not sure,'' said James McCormack, head of sovereign ratings at Fitch Ratings Ltd in Hong Kong. ``It would be unusual. If it became apparent that sovereigns in Asia were selling Treasuries the market would take that quite badly, it's something to be avoided...''
China's huge holdings of U.S. debt means it must bear a large proportion of the ``burden of sorting things out'' in the U.S. , Yu said. China is not in a hurry to dump its U.S. holdings and communication between the two nations every ``couple of days'' is keeping Chinese leaders informed and helping to avoid a potential panic, he added.
`` China is very worried about the safety of its assets,'' he said. ``If you want China to keep calm, you must ensure China that its assets are safe.''
Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
By Allison Barrie
Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.
Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.
MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security's directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers.
It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious tells invisible to the naked eye — signals terrorists and criminals may display in advance of an attack.
But this is no polygraph test. Subjects do not get hooked up or strapped down for a careful reading; those sensors do all the work without any actual physical contact. It's like an X-ray for bad intentions.
Currently, all the sensors and equipment are packaged inside a mobile screening laboratory about the size of a trailer or large truck bed, and just last week, Homeland Security put it to a field test in Maryland, scanning 144 mostly unwitting human subjects.
While I'd love to give you the full scoop on the unusual experiment, testing is ongoing and full disclosure would compromise future tests.
But what I can tell you is that the test subjects were average Joes living in the D.C. area who thought they were attending something like a technology expo; in order for the experiment to work effectively and to get the testing subjects to buy in, the cover story had to be convincing.
While the 144 test subjects thought they were merely passing through an entrance way, they actually passed through a series of sensors that screened them for bad intentions.
Homeland Security also selected a group of 23 attendees to be civilian "accomplices" in their test. They were each given a "disruptive device" to carry through the portal — and, unlike the other attendees, were conscious that they were on a mission.
In order to conduct these tests on human subjects, DHS had to meet rigorous safety standards to ensure the screening would not cause any physical or emotional harm.
So here's how it works. When the sensors identify that something is off, they transmit warning data to analysts, who decide whether to flag passengers for further questioning. The next step involves micro-facial scanning, which involves measuring minute muscle movements in the face for clues to mood and intention.
Homeland Security has developed a system to recognize, define and measure seven primary emotions and emotional cues that are reflected in contractions of facial muscles. MALINTENT identifies these emotions and relays the information back to a security screener almost in real-time.
This whole security array — the scanners and screeners who make up the mobile lab — is called "Future Attribute Screening Technology" — or FAST — because it is designed to get passengers through security in two to four minutes, and often faster.
If you're rushed or stressed, you may send out signals of anxiety, but FAST isn't fooled. It's already good enough to tell the difference between a harried traveler and a terrorist. Even if you sweat heavily by nature, FAST won't mistake you for a baddie.
"If you focus on looking at the person, you don't have to worry about detecting the device itself," said Bob Burns, MALINTENT's project leader. And while there are devices out there that look at individual cues, a comprehensive screening device like this has never before been put together.
While FAST's batting average is classified, Undersecretary for Science and Technology Adm. Jay Cohen declared the experiment a "home run."As cold and inhuman as the electric eye may be, DHS says scanners are unbiased and nonjudgmental. "It does not predict who you are and make a judgment, it only provides an assessment in situations," said Burns. "It analyzes you against baseline stats when you walk in the door, it measures reactions and variations when you approach and go through the portal."
But the testing — and the device itself — are not without their problems. This invasive scanner, which catalogues your vital signs for non-medical reasons, seems like an uninvited doctor's exam and raises many privacy issues.
But DHS says this is not Big Brother. Once you are through the FAST portal, your scrutiny is over and records aren't kept. "Your data is dumped," said Burns. "The information is not maintained — it doesn't track who you are."
DHS is now planning an even wider array of screening technology, including an eye scanner next year and pheromone-reading technology by 2010.
The team will also be adding equipment that reads body movements, called "illustrative and emblem cues." According to Burns, this is achievable because people "move in reaction to what they are thinking, more or less based on the context of the situation."
FAST may also incorporate biological, radiological and explosive detection, but for now the primary focus is on identifying and isolating potential human threats.
And because FAST is a mobile screening laboratory, it could be set up at entrances to stadiums, malls and in airports, making it ever more difficult for terrorists to live and work among us.
Burns noted his team's goal is to "restore a sense of freedom." Once MALINTENT is rolled out in airports, it could give us a future where we can once again wander onto planes with super-sized cosmetics and all the bottles of water we can carry — and most importantly without that sense of foreboding that has haunted Americans since Sept. 11.
Allison Barrie, a security and terrorism consultant with the Commission for National Security in the 21st Century, is FOX News' security columnist.
EU Privacy Rights to be Taken Away
Most Americans are beginning to understand that they have lost all their rights to Homeland Security. While they were busying shopping with their credit cards and refinance mortgage money, the Congress and the Executive managed to deprive them of all their privacy rights and now even their right to free speech.
Now the EU is on the same track. A number of Draconian limitations of our freedoms are being quietly implemented without a whine or a whistle from EU citizens. A case in point is the subrosa deal being made between Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Bush which allows all electronically stored information on EU citizens to be shared with the Homeland Security Agency in the USA. And there is no system in place to deal with mistakes or abuses of Europeans data. The entire shocking article can be found here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/30/eu.privacy
Horrified after reading this article, I emailed my MEP concerning this issue (and others) complaining that this cozy data sharing deal was most certainly a violation of my privacy rights. After all, why bother with Data Protection Act enforcement if the most dangerous war criminals on the planet have access to all my details held by government and commercial organisations?
I was even more horrified to find out that very few of my fellow Europeans even knew that their privacy rights were about to go bye bye through a deal by an unelected EU bureaucrat, Sarkozy in this case. Thankfully, my MEP is doing her job and I have just received this amendment for the next EP session concerning this issue:
Joint motion for a resolution
PPE-DE, ALDE, UEN
Commission’s Legislative and Work Programme for 2009
Joint motion for a resolution
Paragraph 68 a (new)
Joint motion for a resolution Amendment
68a. Recognises that sharing data and information is a valuable tool in the international fight against terrorism, but also stresses the importance of safeguarding human rights and fundamental freedoms; regrets, in this context, that current negotiations between the EU and the US on concluding a data protection agreement, within the High-Level Contact Group, have taken place in camera without any transparency or democratic oversight and without any involvement of the European Parliament or of national parliaments and thus of European citizens; therefore insists that the Commission bring these negotiations to a natural close and make an appropriate legislative proposal to the Council and Parliament;
In effect, this is a call from the European Parliament for the Privacy Sharing to be brought before the voters and discussed and calls for the agreement in progress to be ended.
It is very important now for the Irish MEP to have support on the issue from other member state MEPs.
If you care about your privacy rights, I urge you to email your MEP TODAY and demand this item be put on the agenda. The time to do this is now: it will only take a few minutes and will keep the people connected to Brussels and protect you and your family's rights for generations to come.
Let's not go the way of the Americans. The url below lists the various MEPs for different member states.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members/public.do?language=EN
Thank you for your support.
Now the EU is on the same track. A number of Draconian limitations of our freedoms are being quietly implemented without a whine or a whistle from EU citizens. A case in point is the subrosa deal being made between Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Bush which allows all electronically stored information on EU citizens to be shared with the Homeland Security Agency in the USA. And there is no system in place to deal with mistakes or abuses of Europeans data. The entire shocking article can be found here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/30/eu.privacy
Horrified after reading this article, I emailed my MEP concerning this issue (and others) complaining that this cozy data sharing deal was most certainly a violation of my privacy rights. After all, why bother with Data Protection Act enforcement if the most dangerous war criminals on the planet have access to all my details held by government and commercial organisations?
I was even more horrified to find out that very few of my fellow Europeans even knew that their privacy rights were about to go bye bye through a deal by an unelected EU bureaucrat, Sarkozy in this case. Thankfully, my MEP is doing her job and I have just received this amendment for the next EP session concerning this issue:
Joint motion for a resolution
PPE-DE, ALDE, UEN
Commission’s Legislative and Work Programme for 2009
Joint motion for a resolution
Paragraph 68 a (new)
Joint motion for a resolution Amendment
68a. Recognises that sharing data and information is a valuable tool in the international fight against terrorism, but also stresses the importance of safeguarding human rights and fundamental freedoms; regrets, in this context, that current negotiations between the EU and the US on concluding a data protection agreement, within the High-Level Contact Group, have taken place in camera without any transparency or democratic oversight and without any involvement of the European Parliament or of national parliaments and thus of European citizens; therefore insists that the Commission bring these negotiations to a natural close and make an appropriate legislative proposal to the Council and Parliament;
In effect, this is a call from the European Parliament for the Privacy Sharing to be brought before the voters and discussed and calls for the agreement in progress to be ended.
It is very important now for the Irish MEP to have support on the issue from other member state MEPs.
If you care about your privacy rights, I urge you to email your MEP TODAY and demand this item be put on the agenda. The time to do this is now: it will only take a few minutes and will keep the people connected to Brussels and protect you and your family's rights for generations to come.
Let's not go the way of the Americans. The url below lists the various MEPs for different member states.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members/public.do?language=EN
Thank you for your support.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
A note of appreciation from the rich
By Author Unknown
21/09/08 "ICH'
Let's be honest: you'll never win the lottery.
On the other hand, the chances are pretty good that you'll slave away at some miserable job the rest of your life. That's because you were in all likelihood born into the wrong social class. Let's face it -- you're a member of the working caste. Sorry!
As a result, you don't have the education, upbringing, connections, manners, appearance, and good taste to ever become one of us. In fact, you'd probably need a book the size of the yellow pages to list all the unfair advantages we have over you. That's why we're so relieved to know that you still continue to believe all those silly fairy tales about "justice" and "equal opportunity" in America.
Of course, in a hierarchical social system like ours, there's never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it's already occupied by us -- and we like it up here so much that we intend to keep it that way. But at least there's usually someone lower in the social hierarchy you can feel superior to and kick in the teeth once in a while. Even a lowly dishwasher can easily find some poor slob further down in the pecking order to sneer and spit at. So be thankful for migrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless street people.
Always remember that if everyone like you were economically secure and socially privileged like us, there would be no one left to fill all those boring, dangerous, low-paid jobs in our economy. And no one to fight our wars for us, or blindly follow orders in our totalitarian corporate institutions. And certainly no one to meekly go to their grave without having lived a full and creative life. So please, keep up the good work!
You also probably don't have the same greedy, compulsive drive to possess wealth, power, and prestige that we have. And even though you may sincerely want to change the way you live, you're also afraid of the very change you desire, thus keeping you and others like you in a nervous state of limbo. So you go through life mechanically playing your assigned social role, terrified what others would think should you ever dare to "break out of the mold."
Naturally, we try to play you off against each other whenever it suits our purposes: high-waged workers against low-waged, unionized against non-unionized, Black against White, male against female, American workers against Japanese against Mexican against.... We continually push your wages down by invoking "foreign competition," "the law of supply and demand," "national security," or "the bloated federal deficit." We throw you on the unemployed scrap heap if you step out of line or jeopardize our profits. And to give you an occasional break from the monotony of our daily economic blackmail, we allow you to participate in our stage-managed electoral shell games, better known to you ordinary folks as "elections." Happily, you haven't a clue as to what's really happening -- instead, you blame "Aliens," "Tree-hugging Environmentalists," "Niggers," "Jews," Welfare Queens," and countless others for your troubled situation.
We're also very pleased that many of you still embrace the "work ethic," even though most jobs in our economy degrade the environment, undermine your physical and emotional health, and basically suck your one and only life right out of you. We obviously don't know much about work, but we're sure glad you do!
Of course, life could be different. Society could be intelligently organized to meet the real needs of the general population. You and others like you could collectively fight to free yourselves from our domination. But you don't know that. In fact, you can't even imagine that another way of life is possible. And that's probably the greatest, most significant achievement of our system -- robbing you of your imagination, your creativity, your ability to think and act for yourself.
So we'd truly like to thank you from the bottom of our heartless hearts. Your loyal sacrifice makes possible our corrupt luxury; your work makes our system work. Thanks so much for "knowing your place" -- without even knowing it!
By Author Unknown
21/09/08 "ICH'
Let's be honest: you'll never win the lottery.On the other hand, the chances are pretty good that you'll slave away at some miserable job the rest of your life. That's because you were in all likelihood born into the wrong social class. Let's face it -- you're a member of the working caste. Sorry!
As a result, you don't have the education, upbringing, connections, manners, appearance, and good taste to ever become one of us. In fact, you'd probably need a book the size of the yellow pages to list all the unfair advantages we have over you. That's why we're so relieved to know that you still continue to believe all those silly fairy tales about "justice" and "equal opportunity" in America.
Of course, in a hierarchical social system like ours, there's never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it's already occupied by us -- and we like it up here so much that we intend to keep it that way. But at least there's usually someone lower in the social hierarchy you can feel superior to and kick in the teeth once in a while. Even a lowly dishwasher can easily find some poor slob further down in the pecking order to sneer and spit at. So be thankful for migrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless street people.
Always remember that if everyone like you were economically secure and socially privileged like us, there would be no one left to fill all those boring, dangerous, low-paid jobs in our economy. And no one to fight our wars for us, or blindly follow orders in our totalitarian corporate institutions. And certainly no one to meekly go to their grave without having lived a full and creative life. So please, keep up the good work!
You also probably don't have the same greedy, compulsive drive to possess wealth, power, and prestige that we have. And even though you may sincerely want to change the way you live, you're also afraid of the very change you desire, thus keeping you and others like you in a nervous state of limbo. So you go through life mechanically playing your assigned social role, terrified what others would think should you ever dare to "break out of the mold."
Naturally, we try to play you off against each other whenever it suits our purposes: high-waged workers against low-waged, unionized against non-unionized, Black against White, male against female, American workers against Japanese against Mexican against.... We continually push your wages down by invoking "foreign competition," "the law of supply and demand," "national security," or "the bloated federal deficit." We throw you on the unemployed scrap heap if you step out of line or jeopardize our profits. And to give you an occasional break from the monotony of our daily economic blackmail, we allow you to participate in our stage-managed electoral shell games, better known to you ordinary folks as "elections." Happily, you haven't a clue as to what's really happening -- instead, you blame "Aliens," "Tree-hugging Environmentalists," "Niggers," "Jews," Welfare Queens," and countless others for your troubled situation.
We're also very pleased that many of you still embrace the "work ethic," even though most jobs in our economy degrade the environment, undermine your physical and emotional health, and basically suck your one and only life right out of you. We obviously don't know much about work, but we're sure glad you do!
Of course, life could be different. Society could be intelligently organized to meet the real needs of the general population. You and others like you could collectively fight to free yourselves from our domination. But you don't know that. In fact, you can't even imagine that another way of life is possible. And that's probably the greatest, most significant achievement of our system -- robbing you of your imagination, your creativity, your ability to think and act for yourself.
So we'd truly like to thank you from the bottom of our heartless hearts. Your loyal sacrifice makes possible our corrupt luxury; your work makes our system work. Thanks so much for "knowing your place" -- without even knowing it!
Shock Doctrine
Surviving Democracy
Reviewing Naomi Klein's
"The Shock Doctrine"
Reviewing Naomi Klein's
"The Shock Doctrine"
By Stephen Lendman 09/20/07 "ICH"
Naomi Klein is an award-winning Canadian journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and activist. She writes a regular column for The Nation magazine and London Guardian that's syndicated internationally by the New York Times Syndicate that gives people worldwide access to her work but not its own readers at home.
In 2004, she and her husband and co-producer Avi Lewis released their first feature documentary - "The Take." It covered the explosion of activism in the wake of Argentina's 2001 economic crisis. People responded with neighborhood assemblies, barter clubs, mass movements of the unemployed and workers taking over bankrupt companies and reopening them under their own management.
Klein is also the author of three books. Her first was "No Logo - Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" (2000) that analyzes the destructive forces of globalization. Next came "Fences and Windows - Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate" (2002) covering the global revolt against corporate power.
Her newest book just out is "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" that explodes the myth of "free market" democracy. It shows how neoliberal Washington Consensus fundamentalism dominates the world with America its lead exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. Wars are waged, social services cut, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or bludgeoned to object. Klein describes a worldwide process of social and economic engineering she calls "disaster capitalism" with torture along for the ride to reinforce the message - no "New World Order" alternatives are tolerated."Free market" triumphalism is everywhere - from Canada to Brazil, China to Bulgaria, Russia to South Africa, Vietnam to Iraq. In all cases, the results are the same. People are sacrificed for profits and Margaret Thatcher's dictum applies - "there is no alternative."
"The Shock Doctrine" is a powerful tour de force, four years of on-the-ground research in the making and well worth the wait. In an age of corporatism partnered with corrupted political elites, it's must reading by an author now firmly established as a major intellectual figure on the left and champion of social justice. Naomi Klein is all that and more. Even for those familiar with her topics, the book is stunning, revealing, unforgetable and essential to know. This review will cover a healthy sample of what's in store for readers in the full equisitely written text. It's in seven parts with a concluding section. Each will be discussed below starting with a brief introduction.
Introduction - Blank Is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World (into Hell)
New Orleans, post-Katrina, is a metaphor for an American-style "New World Order" with unfettered capitalism unleashed in its most savage form. Klein quotes Republican congressman Richard Baker telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it but God did." And New Orleans developer Joseph Canizaro added: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again (and take advantage of) big opportunities." Their scheme is erasing communities and replacing them with upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice city real estate at the expense of the poor mother nature forced out and government won't allow back.
Enter the "grand guru" of free-wheeling capitalism, then age 93 and in failing health. This was conservative/libertarian economist Milton Friedman's moment that he first articulated in his 1962 book "Capitalism and Freedom." His thesis: "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When a crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around....our basic function
(is) to develop alternatives to existing policies (ones Friedman rejects, and have them ready to roll out when the) the impossible becomes politically inevitable." Klein calls crises "democracy-free zones," and Friedman's thesis "the shock doctrine." For New Orleans it means "permanent reforms" like destroying public housing and issuing vouchers for privatized schools in lieu of rebuilding public ones with government reconstruction funds.
For Friedman, government's sole function is "to protect our freedom both from (outside) enemies....and from our fellow-citizens." It's to "preserve law and order (as well as) enforce private contracts, (and) foster competitive markets." In his view, anything else in public hands is socialism that for "free market" fundamentalists like Friedman is blasphemy.
Until 1973, Friedman's radical doctrine stayed in his classroom, but all that changed on an earlier September 11. Following General Augusto Pinochet's bloody ascent to power, he had a real life laboratory as advisor to the new Chilean dictator. His prescription came to be known as the "Chicago School" revolution of rapid-fire economic transformation he called "shock treatment," now known as "shock therapy." It's an economic version of "destroy(ing) the village (and country) to save it" from the Vietnam era and nearly as harsh.
Millions know its lessons, but Friedman's not their hero. It's central tenets are structurally adjusted mass-privatizations, government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with repressive laws, harsh crackdowns and torture along for the ride to reinforce the core tenet Reaganites call "trickle down" and Brits call "Thatcherism."
Its recipients call it hell, and Klein explains why - in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Russia, the Falklands, Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Orleans, Israel, and coming to a neocon-occupied homeland neighborhood near you. It's "disaster capitalism" unleashed, and business is booming. Klein cites insiders saying opportunities are on a par with a thriving "emerging market...."the deals are even better than the dot-com days, and the 'the security bubble' picked up the slack when those earlier bubbles popped."
Reaganomics adherents are today's neoconservatives with the "full force of the US military machine
(serving their unfettered) corporate agenda" of greed writ large. Its holy policy trinity is: "elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending (if any at all)." But instead of lifting all boats as promised, it's mirror opposite. It creates a powerful ruling corporatist class partnered with corrupted political elites - "with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups." Russia got billionaire "oligarchs," China "the princelings," Chile "the piranhas," and America the Bush-Cheney "Pioneers."
Everywhere, the scheme is the same: huge public wealth transfers to private hands, exploding public debt most often, "an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism (like George Bush's permanent "war on terrorism" and the world) that justifies bottomless spending on security." "Inside the bubble" is paradise. Outside, however, is hell with "aggressive surveillance, mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties," a declining standard of living, and repression and torture reinforcing the message to non-believers.
Klein calls the harshness "a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic." When applied, it induces a state of "deep disorientation," and shock to force targets "to make concessions against their will." The "shock doctrine" works the same way on a mass scale, and the 9/11 experience proved it. It exploded the "familiar world" and created a period of disorientation and regression the Bush administration jumped on abroad and at home. As Klein put it: "Suddenly we found ourselves living in a kind of Year Zero (with) everything we knew of the world before (now) dismissed as 'pre-9/11' thinking." We became a "blank slate, a clean sheet of paper," and the administration did what was impossible before. It's how the "shock doctrine" works: "the original disaster
(terror attack, war, hurricane, market meltdown) puts the entire population into a state of collective shock" enabling policy manipulators to move in for the kill to remake the world in their image and get it done before the shock wears off.
Part 1 - Two Doctor Shocks - Torture and Chicago School Fundamentalism
Following a crisis shock, another quickly follows. The corporate piranhas exploit disorientation with economic "shock therapy" along with "police, soldiers and prison interrogators" with torture their method of choice "to build a model country (by) erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch."
Klein reviews the history of CIA's interest in torture as a way to control the human mind. It began with the Montreal doctor they funded to perform "bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients (by) keeping them asleep and in isolation for weeks, then administering huge doses of electroshock (plus) experimental (psychedelic LSD and hallucinogen PCP angel dust) drug cocktails."
The experiments were performed at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute by Dr. Ewen Cameron even though they clearly violated all standards of medical ethics using human guinea pigs without their permission with permanent damage their reward. Cameron believed by blasting the human brain with an array of shocks, he could "unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild (on a blank slate) new personalities" cleansed of their previous nature. It was voodoo science, and it failed. His patients were his victims, but CIA gained a wealth of knowledge it now employs with no pangs of conscience or regard for ethics.
Klein traces CIA's interest in mind manipulation to a 1951 trinational meeting of intelligence agencies and academics in Montreal when concern was that Communists could brainwash POWs to control them. That was when the spy agency engaged Canadian researchers to learn how, and one of them was Dr. Donald Hebb, director of psychology at McGill, who was working on the problem. Intelligence agencies were impressed enough with his work to fund classified sensory-deprivation experiments on volunteer McGill students.
They proved intensive isolation interferes with clear thinking enough to make people more receptive to suggestion. They were also "formidable interrogation techniques" amounting to torture that Hebb knew violated medical ethics. He later characterized Cameron's work as "criminally stupid," but CIA got what it wanted - a way to interrogate "resistant sources" in a "new age of precise, refined torture, not the gory, inexact" kind from the Spanish Inquisition or what Nazis and other tyrants often practiced. Cameron's experiments with human guinea pigs built on Hebb's earlier work laying the foundation for CIA's "two-stage psychological torture method" of sensory deprivation followed by sensory overload. University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy in his book, "A Question of Torture" on CIA interrogation, called it "the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries."
Pre-9/11, these techniques were freely used covertly as any form of abuse or torture violates the Geneva, UN and other statutes prohibiting these practices as well as the US Army's own Uniform Code of Military Justice barring "cruelty" and "oppression" of prisoners. No longer, as "On September 11, 2001, that longtime insistence on plausible deniability went out the window" as well as any claim this nation respects the law and rights of free people everywhere. What once was done sub rosa or by proxy is now condoned and authorized at the highest levels of government on the fraudulent claim of national security to hide the real aim of social control.
Klein notes torture is still technically banned in the US, but only when pain is the "equivalent in intensity to (what accompanies) serious physical injury, such as organ failure." Simply put, anything goes, but it's not put that way. In Iraq, it was thought "shock and awe" would be so stunning, Iraqis "would go into a kind of suspended animation." A second makeover Chicago School fundamentalism shock could then be imposed on a blank post-invasion slate, and bingo, mission accomplished. Klein notes "there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people" who were blasted with more shocks when they resisted. Like Cameron and his experiments, "Iraq's shock doctors can destroy, but they can't seem to rebuild," and the same is true wherever these shock doctors show up.
Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Factory
The epicenter of shock ideology is the University of Chicago Economics Department. It came out of the 1950s "in the thrall" (of a) man on a mission to fundamentally revolutionize his profession," and on that score Milton Friedman succeeded mightily. Friedman, now gone, believed, markets work efficiently and best unfettered of rules, regulations, onerous taxes, trade barriers, entrenched interests, and human interference. Whereas Cameron believed electroshocks could restore natural health, Friedman favored economic shock as extreme and destructive to nations as Cameron and CIA's methods are to human minds.
Friedman taught this voodoo science and believed to the end, all contrary evidence aside, it was perfect and worked. Chicago School fundamentalism developed at a post-war time in the 1950s when leftist ideas supporting worker rights were gaining ground. Where they "promised (workers) freedom from bosses, citizens from dictatorship (and) countries from colonialism," Friedman promised "individual freedom" to choose that appealed to owners of capital who embraced him and his thinking.
It stood in stark contrast to what became known as "developmentalism" or "Third World nationalism" in the post-war developing world. Economists in it favored an "inward-oriented industrialization" strategy to break the cycle of poverty and grow. Like Keynesians and social democrats, they showed it worked in Latin America's Southern Cone with leaders like Juan Peron "put(ting) their ideas into practice with a vengeance
(by) pouring public money into infrastructure projects, (providing) local businesses generous subsidies, and keeping out foreign imports with....high tariffs." It brought prosperity to the South and "dark days" for Friedman, his acolytes, and free-wheeling capitalists losing out to social progress.
It sprung corporate America to action by funding a legion of think tank and Chicago School foot soldiers to change the message and fortunes of their businesses. Friedman was their ideological leader preaching public wealth should be in private hands, rules and regulations out the window, accumulation of profits unrestrained, and social welfare programs curtailed or abolished. In short - deregulate, privatize and get government out of the business of everything besides providing security and enforcing contracts. He also believed taxes were onerous and once said he was "in favor of cutting (them) under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible...."
He also said corporations should be exempt from federal taxes claiming what they pay ends up in consumer prices that, in fact, is pure nonsense as every marketing MBA (like this writer) learns straightaway. The fundamental law of pricing is to charge what the market will bear, no more or less. In other words, get all you can but no more than buyers will pay. Soon enough they'd pay plenty in the developing world.
In 1953, the US declared war against "developmentalism" with CIA's first ever coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Another followed the next year in Guatemala, and in both instances democratically elected leaders were ousted because corporate interests opposed them. It was only the beginning, and Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" soon had a real time laboratory to prove their "capitalist utopia" worked.
Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government electoral victory in 1970 was the opportunity. Three years later he was out giving Friedman the chance he wanted. Klein related the results in what she called "the first Chicago School state" with others to follow. They're all the same with "an unstoppable hurricane of mutually reinforcing destruction and reconstruction, erasure and creation" following the crisis. Next is unfettered economic shock therapy with torture and disappearances awaiting resisters and anyone guilty of bad thinking. Friedman's brave new world was beginning to roll. It's devastation is everywhere including at home.
Part 2 - The First Test - The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution
Counterrevolution began 34 years ago in Chile on another September 11 that should have been unimaginable and had to seem surreal. There were tanks in the streets and fighter jets attacking government buildings in a scene all too real and deadly. It played out in Santiago and around Chile and was just the beginning of a long nightmare. It brought General Augusto Pinochet to power (with plenty of CIA help) who called his action "a war," not a coup, and to reinforce his message he made it seem like one. Blood in the streets, the presidential palace in flames, and President Salvador Allende dead ended the most vibrant democracy in the Americas. It was a cakewalk with "the junta's grand battle over by mid-afternoon."
A state of siege was imposed followed by mass arrests, killings and torture in a climate of fear that enveloped the country. Allende supporters were targeted in Chile's "Caravan of Death." Chileans paid dearly, but the Chicago Boys had their moment of triumph, and they were ready. Rolling off the press was their detailed economic manual for the new government called "The Brick." It was a 500 page Chicago School shock therapy wish list. It was "the first Chicago School state," its first "global counterrevolution" victory, and "a genesis of terror" in a brave new world for Chileans.
The economic playbook was right from Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" that's long on free market triumphalism and void on its effects on real people. It was pure Friedman featuring mass privatizations, deregulation and deep social spending cuts flavored generously with corporate-friendly tax cuts, trade unionist crackdowns, savage repression for non-believers, and an end to Chile's social democratic state Friedman condemned.
Pinochet bought it along with a team of Chicago School alumni called "technos." They embarked on a free market binge with disastrous results. In the first year, inflation hit 375%, thousands of Chileans lost jobs, the country was flooded with cheap imports, local businesses closed and hunger grew along with public and small business discontent in this free market "paradise." In desperation, "it was time to call in the big guns" with Milton Friedman coming to Santiago to reinforce his message that for things to improve they first had to get worse. It was classic shock treatment and Chicago School baloney with Friedman preaching patience and promising an "economic miracle" if his prescription was followed.
Pinochet agreed, and slash and burn followed with visions of paradise at the end of the rainbow. It was pure untested fantasy, and the results showed it. After one year of hardened shock therapy, Chile's economy contracted 15%, unemployment rocketed to 20%, and contrary to Friedman's rosy scenario it lasted for years with no social safety net help for desperate Chileans.
Klein notes Chile today is still cited as a model that free market "Friedmanism" works in spite of the clear evidence it doesn't. Growth did resume a decade later, but only after conditions worsened. It forced Pinochet to reinstate Allende policies like renationalizing privatized companies but not his social democratic agenda. Chileans were left with the shambles. When the economy stabilized and rapid growth resumed in the late 80s, poverty was 45%, but the richest 10% saw their incomes rise by 83%. Even today, Klein notes, Chile remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. It's shock therapy miracle shifted "wealth to the top and shock(ed) much of the middle class out of existence."
It's the way it works everywhere and a glimpse of the future: "an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population (excluded); out-of-control corruption and cronyism; (decimated) nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; (mass) transfer of (public) wealth (and resources) to private hands (accompanied by) a huge (shift) of private debts into public hands." Inside the Chilean bubble was paradise. Outside was "The Great Depression." Bubble-benefitters reacted with "junkie logic: Where is the next fix?"
It was first across the border in other Latin American Southern Cone countries where the
"counterrevolution spread (and) people vanish(ed)." Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were targeted with similar results as in Chile under juntas replacing democrats. Chicago School fundamentalism was on a roll, and woe to the non-believers. Nations that were developmentalism models became wastelands with decades of worker gains lost almost overnight. Factories closed, wages fell, unemployment soared, poverty grew severe, dissenters disappeared, and ordinary people suffered to prove what pin-stripped academics knew after Chile went sour. Instead, it was on to the next target.In them all, the slate was cleansed and terror unleashed, unrestrained by national borders. Former Allende economist and diplomat turned activist Marcos Orlando Letelier became a victim in September, 1976. While living in Washington, he condemned Chile's "economic freedom" for the privileged and paid with his life. Pinochet's DINA secret police killed him and his American colleague, Ronni Moffit, by remote-detonating a bomb planted under his driver's seat. An FBI investigation learned the assassins entered the country under false passports with full CIA knowledge and complicity.
The purging included cleansing wrong ideas and thinkers like legendary left wing Chilean folk singer, Victor Jara. He was seized and taken to Chile's notorious National (killing and torture) Stadium to be reeducated. Soldiers broke his hands so he couldn't play the guitar. Then they shot him 44 times "to make sure he couldn't inspire from....the grave." One culture was being erased and replaced by another. As in Nazi Germany, books were burned, newspapers and magazines shuttered, universities occupied and strikes and political meetings banned. Trade unionists were specially targeted as threats to the new economic order. It's leaders were rounded up, movement members viciously attacked, and "battalions" targeted workers in factories. They were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared in a sweeping reign of terror designed to crush opposition and wrong-thinking.
In Argentina, Ford Motor Company's local subsidiary was complicit. It helped soldiers and secret police rid unionists from its factories and supplied vehicles as well. Green Ford Falcon sedans became the feared symbol of terror an Argentine playwright called "death-mobiles." Many thousands kidnapped and disappeared rode off in these cars, never to return.
Farmers involved in land reform struggles also were targeted along with anyone with "a vision of society built on values other than pure profit." It affected community worker activists, many church-connected, who wanted social services like health care, public housing and education the state was erasing through shock therapy and mass repression. Klein noted while "policies attempted to excise collectivism from the culture, inside....prisons (the practice was to) excise it from the mind and spirit." The sickness was democratic socialism, the cure pain and suffering. Wrong-thinkers were taught the hard way, and many paid with their lives. Chicago School fundamentalism is harsh medicine. Its grand guru, Milton Friedman, was unrepentant. He called it "freedom" and took his mathematical model miracle to the grave amidst a hail of undeserved eulogies.
In his memoirs before he died, his "blatant revisionism" on Chile was shameful and disturbing. He falsely claimed Pinochet only asked for help in 1975 when, in fact, the Chicago Boys worked with the military before the 1973 coup, and their policies were implemented on Pinochet's first day in power. Friedman also claimed the junta's repressive years didn't undo Chilean democracy. In his view, it opened up "more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life (offering a greater) chance of a return to a democratic society." It was classic convoluted Chicago School thinking. It made him famous courtesy of corporate triumphalism, generous funding and an utter disdain for human rights and dignity.
Friedman also used his 1976 Nobel lecture to argue economics was as scientifically accurate and objective as other sciences. He failed to mention its dark side - devastating poverty, unemployment, shuttered factories and mass human misery and deaths in the first nation adopting his ideology on its victimized people. Now it's everywhere and savagely enforced in an age of corporate dominance, wars for profit and neglect of human needs to fund them. That's Friedman's real legacy from the barrel of a gun and called "freedom."
Part 3 - Surviving Democracy
Chicago School dogma became known as Thatcherism in Britain, but its prime minister wasn't an early adherent. Margaret Thatcher thought Chilean shock therapy wasn't possible in a
democracy like the UK because voters wouldn't buy it. Three years into her first term, her approval rating was lower than George Bush's. She was in danger of not being reelected and didn't dare risk imposing bitter economic medicine that would sink her chances. That is, until destiny intervened on April 2, 1982 when Argentina invaded the British-held Falkland Islands off its coast that was unimportant to either country except for the political hay to gain from war.Thatcher jumped at the chance to regain her footing and "went into Churchillian battle mode," even though Argentina's president, General Leopoldo Galtieri, wasn't Adolph Hitler. But defending the British empire was almost as good, and it paid off. Thatcher's political future was at stake. She revived it, more than doubled her approval rating and henceforth was known as the "Iron Lady" that for her was high praise, and she made the most of it.
She launched a "corporatist revolution" based on Chicago School economics she thought impossible earlier. She parlayed her new popularity to a victory against striking coal miners in 1984 with tactics like unleashing 8000 "truncheon-wielding" riot police in a single confrontation. Before the strike ended, thousands of workers were injured, but Thatcher stood firm with a clear message to other unionists. Take what you're offered or get the same medicine.
She didn't stop there, and what followed was a radical economic agenda in a wave of state enterprise privatizations including British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Steel and others in what Klein called "the first mass privatization auction in a Western democracy." It proved Chicago School fundamentalism didn't need repressive dictatorships to advance as long as "Iron Ladies" like Thatcher were around to match the best of them, short of all out tanks in the streets shock therapy, that is. Her eleven and a half years in power proved it, and Britain hasn't been the same since with Labor as committed now as the Tories.
Bolivia was soon targeted as well, but in 1985 was part a democratic wave sweeping the world. It was an election year with two familiar figures facing off for the presidency - former dictator Hugo Banzar and former elected president, Victor Paz Estenssoro. It was close and Banzar thought he won so before final returns were in he named 30 year old Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to help develop an anti-inflation economic plan for the country.
Sachs was part Keynsian but larger part Chicago School adherent that made for a bad combination. He bought its orthodoxy in softer form by supporting debt relief and generous aid along with the shock therapy he advised Banzar to adopt as the only solution to hyperinflation.
As it turned out, Banzar lost and Paz won, and while no socialist, he was no Chicago School adherent either, or so voters thought. Four days into his term, he charged his emergency economic team to radically restructure the economy using shock therapy with a twist. It was much harsher than Sachs proposed with the entire state-centered structure Paz erected decades earlier dismantled in the first 100 days before the public could react. In its place, food subsidies were ended, price controls lifted, wages frozen, oil prices hiked 300%, deep government spending cuts imposed, unrestricted imports allowed, and state-owned companies downsized as a first step to privatizing them. It cost hundreds of thousands of full-time jobs, pensions and safety net protections. Friedman continued to roll.
The results were predictable. The minimum wage never regained its value, and two years later real wages were down 40% and average per capita income dropped from $845 in 1985 to $789 in 1987. As in other shock therapy countries, a small elite got richer while the great majority of Bolivians lost out with campesinos faring worst. In 1987, they earned on average $140 a year, or less than one-fifth the nation's declining average income.
Bolivian misery gave Sachs star status for the country's "Miracle." It launched his new career and brought him to Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela and Russia later on plus a best-selling book and three-part PBS "success story" series. The only problem was it wasn't true. President Paz had no mandate for shock therapy, and many workers were predictably furious at his betrayal. They went on strike and Paz's response made Margaret Thatcher's earlier action against striking coal miners seem tame by comparison. Tanks rolled in the streets, and riot police raided union halls, a university and factories. Hundreds of arrests followed, including the top 200 union leaders, and oppositional politics was banned. The siege lasted three months during the decisive shock therapy period with more repression and Chicago School medicine later.
It showed shock therapy needs harsh authoritarian rule backing with Bolivia's pin-stripped politicians, economists and bureaucrats administering it, not uniformed soldiers as in Chile. Paz's democratic victory was illusory like others when leaders renege on promises and sacrifice them on the alter of Chicago School orthodoxy.
Argentina was another "textbook case." In the post-Falklands War period, it was burdened with billions in odious debt Washington insisted be serviced and paid. It was far more onerous after the
(Paul) "Volker Shock" when the US Federal Reserve Chairman hiked interest rates up to 21% in the early-mid 1980s to fight inflation, so he said. It was painful in the US and disastrous for developing countries turning their debt burdens into crises. New loans were needed to pay off old ones, and the debt spiral was born afflicting nations then and still today. That was the whole idea, or at least one of them.
Argentina, Brazil and other countries had another option they didn't take - defaulting on debt so great it was unrepayable. As Klein put it: "Understandably
(new democracies were) unwilling to go to war with Washington (and the international lending agencies it controls so they) had little choice but to play by Washington's rules (and) in the early eighties (they) got a great deal stricter....It was the dawn of the era of 'structural adjustment' - otherwise known as the dictatorship of debt."
In the 1980s, Chicago School economists colonized the IMF and World Bank to advance their corporatist crusade. Economist John Williamson named it "the Washington Consensus" that stuck ever since. It consisted of core economic policies both institutions consider essential for economic health according to their orthodoxy. We know them well: all "state enterprises ....privatized (and) barriers impeding entry of foreign firms....abolished." There was more that together was classic Friedman dogma: privatization, deregulation, unrestricted free trade
(never called fair), and deep cuts in government spending except for security.
Indebted developing countries learned shock doctrine101 the hard way. Getting aid meant accepting Washington Consensus rules - the whole package. So to save their countries, they had to "sell (them) off." Klein calls Argentina the "model student" in the 1990s under leaders like Carlos Menem. Appointing Domingo Cavallo economy minister signaled he bought the corporatist package. But as Klein points out: "Argentina was not unique (and by 1999) Chicago School alumni included more than twenty-five government ministers and more than a dozen central bank presidents from Israel to Costa Rica."
Shock therapy was on a role that in Argentina turned into a textbook case of therapeutically induced disaster. What Time magazine in 1992 called "Menem's Miracle" became Menem's Mirage when the economy collapsed in 2001, and Argentina did the unthinkable with Menem gone and a new president in power. It defaulted on an $805 million debt to the World Bank. It should have ended the neoliberal experiment, but instead it spread. Economic crises fueled it, and when old ones ebbed "even more cataclysmic ones appear(ed): tsunamis, hurricanes, wars and terrorist attacks. Disaster capitalism was taking shape" with shock therapy its tool of choice.
Part 4 - Lost in Transition: Slamming the Door on History
Before the Berlin Wall fell, Lech Walesa became a labor hero in Poland and the West by defying the Moscow-controlled government and getting away with it. Solidarnosc (Solidarity) spread from its Gdansk roots to the country's mines, shipyards and factories and within a year had 10 million members. They won the right to bargain but wanted more. They aspired to take over the state and institute their own alternative economic and political program. It's radical centerpiece was to transform huge state-run companies into worker-run cooperatives so Solidarity members could be empowered in their own "socialized enterprise."
Walesa objected, lost the debate, and he feared what then happened. The Jaruzelski government declared martial law, sent tanks to the streets and rounded up thousands of Solidarity members. By the late 80s, the crackdown subsided, the economy was in free fall, workers again struck and Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist government was in power in Moscow. Solidarity was legalized, a Citizens' Committee Solidarity wing was formed, its members stood in snap elections and won effective control of the government capturing 260 parliamentary seats.
It should have been the best of times, but with the economy in trouble, Poland needed aid including debt relief. With Chicago School alumni running IMF, none was offered except under Washington Consensus rules, take it or leave it. Enter Jeffrey Sach, the shock doc, with an even harsher plan than imposed on Bolivia. It included an immediate end to price controls, slashing subsidies, and privatizing mines, shipyards and factories. It short, it ran directly counter to Solidarity's aim for worker-run industry.
Sachs promised Solidarity Poland could become like France or Germany under his plan. By swallowing shock therapy medicine first, taking the pain, the patient would end up cured and healthy - if he was right. After debate, the verdict was in and the treatment bought with predictable results. Sachs promised "momentary dislocations" but delivered a full-blown depression. Industrial production plummeted 30% after two years of "reforms." Unemployment skyrocketed, and in 1993 hit 25% in some areas. It's still chronic today with recent World Bank figures pegging it at around 20%, the highest in the European Union. For young people, it's even worse with 40% of workers under 24 unemployed.
Most alarming is the number of people in poverty. From a 15% level in 1989, it rose to a startling 59% in
2003. Incredibly, the country, like Chile, is still cited as a free market reform model. It's pure myth, angry Poles know it, but reports in the West ignore them as they do shocked victims everywhere.
They didn't ignore "the shock of Tiananmen Square," but didn't report it accurately either. In the early
1980s, Deng Xiaoping was transforming his country economically while keeping rigid political control including iron-fisted repression when needed. Democracy was nowhere in sight nor is it now. While many of Deng's reforms were successful and popular, others in the late 80s weren't, and it provoked deep anger in the cities by people most affected. Price controls were lifted, corruption and nepotism was rampant, freedom minimal, job security eliminated, unemployment soared, and deep inequalities grew between "winners and losers in the new China."
It came to a head with mass protests in 1989 in Tiananmen Square that Western reports
characterized as a clash between old-guard Communist authoritarians and idealistic students wanting western-style democracy. It was pure propaganda. The protests were massive and threatened the government, but democracy wasn't the issue. It was popular discontent from wrenching economic change raising prices, lowering wages, and causing "a crisis of layoffs and unemployment." Protesters weren't against economic reform. They were against the Chicago School version of it, but their efforts were costly.Deng declared martial law May 20, tanks rolled in the square, indiscriminate shooting took place, and when it ended thousands were dead, many more thousands injured, and still more thousands hunted down, arrested, jailed, some tortured, and hundreds likely executed. Shock therapy rolled in China as in Chile - through the barrel of a gun and raw state terror. Following the crackdown, China opened to foreign investment, joined the WTO, and turned the country into the world's largest low wage sweatshop for Wal-Mart's "Always Low Prices."
For foreign investors and party apparatchiks, it was a win-win arrangement with Klein citing a 2006 study showing 90% of China's billionaires to be Communist Party officials. About 2900 "party scions" (called "the princelings") control $260 billion, and Klein notes the "stark similarity between (China's authoritarian rule) and Chicago School capitalism - a shared willingness to disappear opponents, blank the slate of all resistance and begin anew" using shock and fear to transform countries into free market paradises for the privileged.
The Tragedy of South Africa's "Democracy Born in Chains"
Klein quotes Nelson Mandela in January, 1990 (two weeks before he was freed) in a note to his supporters from prison saying: "The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC
(and changing) our views....is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable." That belief became ANC policy in 1955 in its Freedom Charter. The liberation struggle wasn't just about a political system but an economic one as well. White workers in mines earned 10 times more than blacks, and large industrialists worked with the military to enforce order and disappear dissenters.
Once apartheid ended, a new way was possible, and Mandela seemed poised to lead it. The ANC had "a unique opportunity to reject the free market orthodoxy of the day" and choose a "third path between Communism and capitalism." ANC candidates swept the 1994 elections and Mandela became president at a time South Africa surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world. Negotiations were held with the ruling National Party, and a peaceful handover was achieved but not without "prevent(ing) South Africa's apartheid-era rulers from wreaking havoc on their way out the door."
Negotiations took place on two parallel tracks - political and economic. Mandela and his chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa, "won on almost every count" politically. But along side it, economic negotiations were held with the country's current president, Thabo Mbeki, in charge with the outcome in the end far different. With ANC leaders preoccupied with controlling Parliament, the former white supremacist government and industrialists were determined to safeguard their wealth, and they succeeded by assuring Washington Consensus policies would be instituted when political power changed hands.
ANC economists and lawyers were outfoxed or outgunned by the opposition, IMF, World Bank, GATT and power of big capital against inexperienced politicians and technocrats who ended up losers. Black officials controlled the government, but discovered the real power was elsewhere. As Klein put it: "The bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously captured." The leadership mistakenly thought once firmly in power they could undo earlier made transition compromises.
They couldn't or didn't for the same reasons other developing countries accept free market rules. Adopt them or be punished by the market as Mandela learned when he was freed. The South African stock market collapsed in panic, and the country's currency (the rand) dropped by 10%. He acknowledged the problem later on saying it's "impossible for countries....to decide economic policy without regard to the likely response of these markets." It's too bad he didn't know how Hugo Chavez managed after 1999 (oil aside). He achieved what Mandela reneged on, and Venezuela's economy is booming. Had he and ANC officials stood their ground early on, South Africa (with its mineral riches) might have done the same thing - had a growth economy in a socially democratic state and a model for its neighbors.
They didn't, black South Africans lost out, Mandela's legacy is tainted, and a key factor was current president Thabo Mbeki. He spent spent years studying in exile in England during the apartheid years during which time "he was breathing in the fumes of Thatcherism." He became the ANC's free market tutor, believed in market fundamentalism, and its prescription was "growth and more growth." It meant neoliberal shock therapy with the full Friedman package Mbeki supported. He later professed: "Just call me a Thatcherite," and Mandela told journalist John Pilger the same thing in retirement saying: "....you can call it Thatcherite but, for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy."
After over a decade of that agenda (1994 - 06), Klein highlighted the toll showing conditions today much worse than under apartheid, and ANC's leadership responsible:
-- the number of people living on less than $1 a day doubled from two to four million;
-- the unemployment rate more than doubled to 48% from
1991 - 2002;
-- only 5000 of 35 million black South Africans earn over $60,000 a year;
-- the ANC government build 1.8 million homes while two million South Africans lost theirs;
-- nearly one million South Africans were evicted from farms in the first decade of democracy; as a result, the shack dweller population grew by 50%, and in 2006,
25% of South Africans lived in them with no running water or electricity. And there's more:
-- the HIV/AIDS infection rate is about 20%, and the Mbeki government shamefully denied the severity of the crisis and did little to alleviate it; it's been a major reason why average life expectancy in the country declined by 13 years since 1990;
-- 40% of schools have no electricity;
-- 25% of people have no access to clean water and most who do can't afford the cost; and
-- 60% of people have inadequate sanitation, and 40% no telephones.
"Freedom" for these people and all black South Africans came at a high price, and no efforts are being made to ameliorate it. Political empowerment was traded for economic apartheid under Chicago School fundamentalist rules. Klein observed: "Never before had a government-in-waiting been so seduced by the international community." If China, Vietnam and even Russia saw "the neoliberal light," Mandela was told, how could South Africa resist it. The ANC leadership might have (and Mandela had the credentials to lead them) had they examined the wreckage around the world in Friedman-seduced countries. Instead, they took the easy way out and surrendered.
Russia Chooses "the Pinochet Option"
The man who ignited political and social change in Russia wasn't around long enough to lead it. Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in March, 1985, believing the economy stalled and needed change. His solution became glasnost
(liberalizing opening up) and perestroika
(reconstruction), and Soviet Russia would never be the same again. By the early 1990s the press was freed, the constitutional court was independent, and elections were held for Russia's parliament, local councils, president and vice-president. In addition, Gorbachev favored a Scandinavian-style social democracy combining free market capitalism with strong social safety net protections. He hoped to build "a socialist beacon for all mankind." He never got the chance.
While still in office at the 1991 G7 meeting in London, his fellow heads of state delivered a free market message Chicago School-style. Later, the IMF, World Bank and other international lending agencies reinforced it - Soviet-era debts must be honored and aid depended on adopting strict shock therapy rules. The Soviet Union soon dissolved, Gorbachev was out, Boris Yeltsin became Russia's president, and Chicago School fundamentalism was adopted as needed "reform." Klein calls what happened next "one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy (in peacetime) in modern history."
Yeltsin assembled a team of Chicago School ideologues to remake the economy. Jeffrey Sachs showed up, too, with other US-funded transition experts to help write privatization decrees, launch a New York-style stock exchange, and craft a total radical economic makeover for a country long used to central planning. Only one thing stood in the way - democracy, and a parliament able to vote down what Yeltsin's team designed. A clash of wills drew closer in the spring of 1993 when parliament's budget diverged from IMF demands for strict austerity. Yeltsin reacted with the "Pinochet option." He issued decree 1400 dissolving parliament and abolishing the constitution. Two days later, parliament voted 636 - 2 to impeach him, and battle lines were drawn.
Yeltsin sent troops to surround parliament and cut off power, heat and phone lines. The army backed him and he pressed on. He then proceeded to dissolve all city and regional councils in the country. Then, on October
4, 1993, he ordered the army to storm the parliament, set it ablaze and "defend Russia's new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy." The assault took about 500 lives, wounded nearly 1000 others with the enthusiastic support from the West in headlines like the Washington Post proclaiming "Victory Seen for Democracy" in Russia. Some democracy.
Yeltsin now had unchecked dictatorial power, the West had its man in Moscow, and shock therapy had an open field to inflict wreckage on Russia's people who didn't know what him them as it unfolded. A corporatist state replaced a communist one, and its apparatchiks were winners along with a handful of western mutual fund managers who made "dizzying returns investing in newly privatized Russian companies." In addition, "a clique of nouveaux billionaires" (17 in all called "the oligarchs") were empowered to strip mine the country of its wealth and ship profits offshore at the rate of $2 billion a month.
As a result, Yeltsin's popularity plunged so he did what all desperate leaders do to hold power with the next election to worry about. He began a war in 1994 in the breakaway Chechen republic killing 100,000 civilians by the late 90s. Elections were held in
1996, and Yeltsin won by overcoming his low approval ratings with huge oligarch-funding and near-total control of television coverage. He then quietly handed power to Vladimir Putin on December 31, 1999 without an election but with the stipulation he was exempt from criminal prosecution. His legacy was devastating with Klein noting "never have so many lost so much in so short a time." When Russia's 1998 financial crisis hit:
-- 80% of Russia's farmers were bankrupt;
-- around 70,000 states factories had closed;
-- an "epidemic" of unemployment raged;
-- before shock therapy in 1989, two million Russians lived in poverty on less than $4 a day; by the mid-90s, the World Bank estimated 74 million were impoverished and by 1996 conditions for 25% (almost 37 million) Russians were "desperate" and the country's underclass remained permanent;
-- Russians drink twice as much now as before; painkilling and hard drug use increased 900%, and HIV/AIDS threatens to become epidemic with a 20-fold jump in infections since 1995; suicides are also rising, and violent crime increased more than fourfold; and
-- Russia's population is declining by 700,000 a year with capitalism having already having killed off 10% of it as one more example of free market-inflicted disaster. That's the brave new world disease spreading everywhere with another scorched-earth stop below. Friedman called it "freedom."
The Looting of Asia
In the summer of 1997, economic crisis hit Asia from no apparent cause beyond rumors the Thai bhat was in trouble, and Thailand didn't have enough dollars to back it. Hot money in became an electronic stampede out with "Asian Contagion" unleashed and heading for Indonesia, South Korea and other so-called Asian Tiger countries that were fast-growth miracles until they crashed together with the plight of one affecting the others. It then got worse and spread to Latin America and Russia with US markets also affected briefly in
1997 and then again with a severe jolt in the summer of 1998.
The 1997 Asian panic was crippling with $600 billion in stock market wealth taking decades to build wiped out in a year. Klein notes "a classic fear cycle" ignited the crisis that might have been contained by the same type "quick, decisive loan" rescue package offered Mexico in 1994 in their so-called Tequila Crisis. It would have been a strong signal to markets the US Treasury and international lending agencies wouldn't let the Asian Tigers fail. No help came, and the message instead was: "Don't help Asia." Why? Because "Asia's catastrophe was an opportunity (for predatory western corporations and vulture investors) in disguise."
Asian Tigers grew by protecting their markets and barring foreign companies from ownership of land or national firms. They also restricted imports from the West and Japan and instead built up their own domestic markets. Western predators wanted unfettered entry to the region with the right to scoop up the best Asian companies but needed a way to do it. Now they had it from an event Klein calls "the fall of a second Berlin Wall," as important to western capital as the first one.
Enter the IMF with crisis-struck Asian countries too sick to resist it. They needed help, and the lending agency had plenty to offer on similar terms as to previous crisis recipients. With economies in trouble and empty treasuries, the Tigers got no choice. First, they had to remove all "trade and investment protectionism and activist state intervention that were the key ingredients of the Asian miracle." IMF also demanded big spending cuts, "flexible" workforces
(meaning mass layoffs and constrained wages and benefits), privatized basic services, and the rest of the package they demand for loans.
The regional toll was devastating with the International Labor Organization estimating 24 million lost jobs along with "what was so remarkable about the region's 'miracle' in the first place: its large and growing middle class." In addition, 20 million people fell into the "planned misery" of poverty, reversing an earlier trend reducing it. Women and children suffered most with families selling daughters to human sex traffickers to survive as child prostitution had a new growth market.
So did Wall Street as IMF structural adjustments put "pretty much everything in Asia....up for sale" in the affected countries. The more markets panicked, the lower asking prices became, and the more pressured hurting companies were to sell out for what they could get or face bankruptcy. It was a bonanza for buyers, and major deals went through in a great fire sale at bargain prices. Asia became hugely transformed with hundreds of local brands replaced by western transnational ones. The New York Times called it "the world's biggest going-out-of-business sale." It also became an early glimpse of post-9/11 disaster capitalism - a way for corporate predators to exploit crises in what's become common practice in the age of "terror" creating opportunities galore and big profits for well-connected firms.
Klein notes the Asian crisis never ended as desparation took root after 24 million people lost jobs in two years. No nation handles that, and the fallout can be unpredictable. It led to a rise in religious extremism in Indonesia and Thailand and "the explosive growth in the child sex trade." Unemployment is still high and layoffs continue with new foreign owners demanding higher profits with jobs disappearing to provide them.
Eventually things settle down but never to where they once were. Throwing people overboard, displacing small farmers and business owners and crushing unions means those affected stay that way. "They end up in slums, now home to one billion people (and rising); they end up in brothels or in cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited (or what) German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (called) 'ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.' " They're the human wreckage left behind by countries swallowing Chicago School economic medicine. Its promised miracle is people-poison but not for vulture investors thriving on it. Disaster capitalism is on a roll, and its growth market potential is unlimited and guaranteed to continue unless mass public outrage stops it as one day it will.
Part 5 - The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex -
Shock Therapy in the USA
Richard Nixon knew before the rest of us that Donald Rumsfeld is "a ruthless little bastard." He also has a knack for making enemies even inside the Pentagon he ran as Defense Secretary. He planned to "reinvent warfare for the twenty-first century (making it) more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable" than ever before. Talk aside, he wanted to revolutionize the military by running it like the corporate world, and that meant using methods like outsourcing and branding. His idea was for fewer full-time troops, more as-needed ones from the Reserves and National Guard, and a lot of backup help from private contractors like Blackwater USA for security and Halliburton for a range of functions unrelated to soldiering. He wanted less staff and more tax dollars diverted to private companies. The Pentagon brass wasn't pleased, but Rumsfeld was boss and Dick Cheney backed him.
Klein calls them both "proto-disaster capitalists" who practice "the central tenet of the Bush regime (that) the job of government is not to govern but to subcontract." The privatization mania was kick-started in the Reagan era, but Bill Clinton bought it as well. Now the feeling is anything government can do, private business can do better so let them. That means fire departments, prisons, public schools, public health, data management, border control and even parts of the military. As Klein explained: "crisis-exploiting methods....honed over the previous three decades would be used to (privatize) the infrastructure of disaster creation and....response. Friedman's crisis theory was going postmodern (to create a) privatized police state" by auctioning it off.
"Then came 9/11, and the idea of hollowing out government seemed opposite of what a frightened public wanted - a strong central government to protect them. Bush promised it in speeches, but "his inner circle had no intention of converting to Keynesianism." September 11 security failures only reinforced their belief that private firms could handle the challenge better than government, and that meant transferring hundreds of billions of public dollars to corporate pockets. The Bush administration exploited shock and fear "to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture."
Mass disorientation post-9/11 provided the opportunity, and the "war on terror" became a "bold evolution of shock therapy....built to be private from the start" to capitalize on it. It came in two stages. First, policing, surveillance, detention and war-making powers of the executive were dramatically increased though nothing in the Constitution permits it. Then, the whole package, including occupation and "reconstruction," was outsourced to well-connected private firms that responded with generous campaign funds to keep the mutually reinforcing daisy chain humming. Using the ploy of fighting "terrorism," the homeland disaster capitalism complex emerged as a full-blown new economy and what Klein calls "a virtual fourth branch of government."
The Bush administration's idea of government, with security as one function, wasn't to provide it but to buy it at cost-plus market prices with lots of latitude for the plus. Just as the internet launched the dot-com bubble, from 9/11 emerged the disaster capitalism one, and it was off to the races "in an ad hoc....chaotic fashion."
Fighting "terrorism" is big business, and one of the first opportunities was the market for surveillance cameras with 30 million of them installed in the US, billions of hours of footage, analytic software to scan it, digital image enhancement to help it, and information management and data mining technology to handle all data government collects on everyone and everything. September 11 unlocked the potential, a huge new growth market was created, and protection from terror became more important than big brother watching. In six short years, an industry that barely existed is now much larger than Hollywood or the music business, and its potential looks limitless.
Klein calls it "an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison" in a frightening brave new world most people barely understand or know exists. It generates enormous wealth that creates a powerful incentive for its winners to sell fear for more of it and partnering with government makes it easy, especially the kind in power now.
Capitalism Becomes Corporatism in a Corporatist State
Proto-disaster capitalism defines the Bush administration as crises, wars and other disasters "conflate with what's good for Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and (Rumsfeld's old company) Gilead" Sciences. Cataclysm is a growth business that in the current climate involved "some of the seediest and most blatant corruption scandals in recent history," war-profiteering in the hundreds of billions, and a "whirling revolving door between government and business" taken to a new level. The limitless homeland security and war-profiteering markets are so alluring, hundreds of administration officials can't wait to cash in like earlier ones did. Klein names some noted ones like Richard Pearle, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, Paul Bremer, George Shultz, John Ashcroft, Tom Ridge, Rudi Giuliani, Richard Clarke, James Woolsey, Joe Allbaugh, and Michael Brown who wrote an infamous memo to a fellow FEMA staffer asking: "Can I quit now?"
That's the whole idea in a get rich quick environment - get an impressive government title, stay in office long enough in a department handing out big contracts, collect insider information with market value, then quit and cash in. Klein calls public service now "little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex." She also quotes Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (a nonprofit watchdog group) saying: "It's impossible to tell where the government ends and Lockeed begins." She also believes that corporatist economic goals and right to limitless profit seeking lie at the heart of the most committed neocons who talk a good game but value great wealth their top priority. They partnered permanent war and homeland security with the disaster capitalism complex to get it, and it's hard indeed telling where one ends and the other begins. But it's centerpiece project is Iraq, and its headquarters is in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.
Part 6 - Iraq, Full Circle - Overshock - Erasing A Country
Perhaps no country provides a greater untapped opportunity for unfettered capitalism than
Iraq. It represents the planet's last remaining low-hanging oil resources fruit with potentially more of it than Saudi Arabia according to some oil analysts. It's also strategically located in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East (with two-thirds of proved reserves) Klein calls the "crusade's....final frontier." Iraq's potential alone is so enormous it made war the way to crack open its market potential because peaceful methods hadn't worked. Its conquest would then serve as "a different model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world" that could become a catalyst to opening the whole region.The potential is a giant free-trade zone, the illusion of newly created democracies, and the freedom for unfettered capitalism "to feed off freshly privatized states." Klein explained this as "the model theory," Iraq as the model, with the idea not being nation-building but nation-creating. But what of the nation already there that's known as the "cradle of civilization." It would have to be erased, and Chicago School fundamentalism would create a new one in its place in its own image with a blank slate to work from.
Bush administration war planners considered the full array of possible shocks and went with them all - blitzkrieg "shock and awe," elaborate PsyOps, use of fear as a weapon, repressive occupation, mass detention and torture, and "the fastest and most sweeping political and economic shock therapy program attempted anywhere....From the start, the invasion was
(Washington's message) to the world....in the language of fireballs, deafening explosions and city-shattering quakes." It said dare challenge US authority, and you're next. Shock and awe planners designed its strategy to deter "the public will of the adversary to resist (to render) the adversary completely impotent" from the effects of sensory deprivation and overload inducing disorientation and regression.
In March, 2003, Baghdad got it on a massive scale. The ministry of communication and four telephone exchanges was blitzed and set ablaze cutting off millions of phones and preventing people from learning if their family and friends were alive. Television and radio transmitters were also destroyed along with the electrical grid plunging the city into "an awful, endless night." Residents were trapped in their homes unable to speak or hear each other or see outside at night. "LIke a prisoner destined for a CIA black site, the entire city was shackled and hooded. Next it was stripped."
Unchecked looting did the most to erase the "country that was....Gone are 80% of the museum's 170,000 priceless objects....the national library is a blackened ruin....the Ministry of Religious Affairs....was left a burned-out shell (and the) national heritage was lost." Paul Bremer's senior economic advisor, Peter McPherson, wasn't bothered. It made his job of radically downsizing the state and selling it off easier. Cleaning the slate and erasing the nation was proceeding fast. It "all unfolded in a matter of weeks." Baghdad was "open for business," and the fire sale for its assets began with US firms having first dibs on everything, except oil, and that would come later as it has now but is stalled.
While he was there, Paul Bremer was Washington's man in Baghdad charged with readying the launch of Iraq, Inc. He saw to it laws were passed smoothing the way for Chicago School shock therapy. Two hundred firms were to be privatized immediately to get "inefficient state enterprises into private (predatory) hands...." New economic laws followed that comprised a "wish list....foreign investors and donor agencies dream of," according to The Economist. The corporate tax was cut from 45% to a flat 15%; another allowed foreign companies to own 100% of Iraqi assets and take all profits out of the country; all restrictions on imports were removed; and investors could sign deals and leases lasting 40 years so no future government could change them.
Iraq became a bold new experiment with invasion, occupation and reconstruction transforming the country into a fully privatized new market "with a huge pot of public money" doing it. Klein called the adventure an "anti-Marshall plan," mirror opposite the post-WW II plan, and guaranteed "to further undermine Iraq's badly weakened industrial sector and send Iraqi unemployment soaring." No funds went to Iraqis or their industries nor was anything done to build a sustainable economy, or rebuild local infrastructure like electrical grids, schools, and hospitals. Iraqis played no role in planning, local firms weren't even given "subsubsubcontracts," jobs were destroyed not created while thousands of serf-type foreign workers were brought in and abused, and critically needed social services were ignored.
Another goal was for a fully outsourced, hollow government with no function so "core" a contractor couldn't handle it for profit. It was pure pillage, but nothing went as planned. "Each miscalculation provoked escalating levels of resistance" with occupying forces responding with counterrepression "sending the country into an inferno of (unending) violence." Everything "tearing Iraq apart today - rampant corruption (and unfettered plundering), ferocious sectarianism, the surge in religious fundamentalism and the tyranny of death squads
(including US 'Salvador option' ones) - escalated in lockstep with....Bush's anti-Marshall Plan." In that environment, the country became "a cutthroat capitalist laboratory" for shameless pillage. Iraq today is a model, a metaphor for everything wrong with Chicago School dogma showing it to be savage, ruthless, heartless and bankrupt.
Its implementation is the core reason for resistance that continues and grows, but it caught war planners off guard when it began. They thought the shock and awe of attack, invasion, occupation and rapid transformation on the ground would be disorienting. Instead, Iraqis demanded a say from the start in how their country would be rebuilt and transformed. "And it was the Bush administration's response to this unexpected turn of events that generated the most blowback of all" that became even worse by crushing democracy and effectively installing a puppet government in the fortified Green Zone masquerading as a real one.
The result was predictable and so was the harsh response - mass detentions, aggressive interrogations, administration-sanctioned gloves off torture, and US unleashed "Salvador option" death squads making it hard to know who's doing the killing and blasting away at selected targets. What is clear are the consequences - "millions of psychologically and physically (traumatized, angry and) shattered people, first by Saddam, (then) by war, (then) by one another
(and the occupation). Bush's in-house disaster capitalists didn't wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up....Countries, like people, don't reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep breaking....Which....requires more blasting - upping the dosage...."
Slowly, it's disappearing, disintegrating, erasing an entire country - women behind veils and doors, children from schools, four million displaced, Iraqi industry collapsed, a new growth industry in kidnapping for ransom, a country so unstable investment is high-risk, and even the heavily fortified Green Zone is too unsafe for George Bush to visit on one of his "surprise trips" to the country. Bremer's charge was to build a "corporate utopia" but instead unleashed a "ghoulish dystopia," and, on an April, 2004 visit to the country, Klein thought she was witnessing a mass contractor exodus with 1500 of them leaving in one week.
Now she's not sure. Big investors like Wal-Mart, HSBC and Procter and Gamble never showed up, and in December, 2006, the Pentagon announced a new project to get state-owned factories operating with plans to buy cement and machinery from them instead of the usual corporate suppliers. Does it signal a change of disaster capitalism tactics? Not at all, and it's likely this amounts to no more than tinkering and tokenism that in the end will do little for the local economy and even less to reduce hardened anger.
The Big Oil drafted Hydrocarbon Law is still a work in progress but already inflamed things further, and well it should. It's an anti-Marshall Plan project at its worst, and in whatever final form is a shameless act of theft on the grandest scale. It's a privatization blueprint for plunder giving Big Oil a bonanza and Iraqis a mere sliver of their own resources. In one draft, Iraq's National Oil Company got exclusive control of just 17 of the country's 80 known oil fields with all yet-to-be-discovered deposits set aside for foreign investors. Even worse, Big Oil is free to expropriate all earnings with no obligation to invest anything in Iraq's economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire local workers, respect union rights, or share new technologies. In addition, foreign investors are guaranteed long-term contracts up to 30 or more years, dispossessing Iraq and its people of their own resources in a naked scheme to steal them and deny them the one source of revenue able to rebuild their shattered country and lives.
The battle for Iraq continues that involves clinging to if not winning the hearts and minds on the home front as well. The country is a wasteland, the nation creation project bankrupt, and the prospect for success bad and worsening. Iraq has been a graveyard for past imperial powers, and it may just be a matter of time until history again repeats. The Brits in the South know it, and after four and a half futile years are tiptoeing out to the dismay of their "coalition" partners. One day, Washington may join them, and for shocked Iraqis it can't come too soon. For now, though, the shock continues, and Iraq more closely resembles hell than "the cradle of civilization."
Part 7 - The Movable Green Zone: Blanking the Beach - "The Second Tsunami"
For coastal Sri Lankans, like those in Arugam Bay, December 26, 2004 felt more like 1945 Hiroshima than life before that fateful day changing everything for them. A devastating tsunami took 250,000 lives and left 2.5 million homeless throughout the region. It affected Arugam Bay, "a fishing and faded resort village" on the island's east coast that government was showcasing in its plans to "build back better." Indeed, but not for the villagers hoteliers, developers and the government wanted removed but weren't sure how until nature did what they couldn't. Everything was gone, and a blank slate remained for what the tourist industry long wanted - "a pristine beach (in a prime area), scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden. It was the same up and down the coast once rubble was cleared....paradise."
"New rules" forbade homes on the beach and a "buffer zone" imposed insured it. Beaches were off-limits, displaced Sri Lankans were shoved into temporary grim barracks camps inland, and "menacing, machine-gun-wielding soldiers" patrolled to keep them there.
Tourist operators were treated differently. They were encouraged to build and expand on prime vacated oceanfront land. It was all in a document called the "Arugam Bay Resource Development Plan" to transform the former fishing village into a "high-end 'boutique tourism destination' (with) five-star resorts, luxury....chalets, (and even a) floatplane pier and helipad." Arugam Bay was to be a model for transforming up to 30 similar "tourism zones" into a "South Asian Riviera." When the plan leaked out, people in Arugam Bay and around the country were outraged.
The grand scheme to remake Sri Lanka was around two years earlier and began when the civil war ended. It was to be the country's reentry into the world economy as one of the last remaining uncolonized places globalization hadn't touched, and a high-end tourism project was seen as the right option. It would be a luxury destination for the "plutonomy set," once a few changes were made. Government's 80% land ownership had to be opened to private buyers, more "flexible" labor laws were needed, and modernized infrastructure had to be developed with World Bank and IMF providing funds on their usual shock therapy terms discussed above. With mass public opposition to the ideas, it wouldn't be easy, and before the tsunami hit, militant strikes and street protests held it back.
Sri Lanka's president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, was elected on an "overtly antiprivatization platform," but the tsunami changed everything and helped her see "the free market light." Four days after the disaster, her government passed a bill "pav(ing) the way for water privatization." It also raised gasoline prices and began crafting legislation to privatize the electricity company in pieces. It was like a second tsunami, and the same scheme followed hurricane Mitch in October, 1998 with Hondurus, Guatemala and Nicaragua hardest hit like New Orleans discussed below.
Klein explained when the tsunami struck in 2004, "Washington was ready to take the Mitch model (now familiar) to the next level - aiming not just at individuals laws but at direct corporate control over the construction." Sri Lanka's president complied and created a new body called the Task Force to Rebuild the Nation fully empowered to proceed. On it were the most powerful business leaders from banking and industry including key players from the beach tourism sector. Absent were villagers, farmers, environmentalists or even a "disaster-reconstruction specialist." Klein called the task force a new type corporate coup d'etat mother nature made possible.
In ten days, then had a complete reconstruction blueprint from "housing to highways" with aid money directed to corporate development and nothing for disaster victims. They were destined to become permanent shantytown dwellers similar to the kinds ringing most Global South cities and populating Global North inner ones. Similar stories of law changes and land grabs came out of other affected Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Thailand, the Maldives and India where around 150 Tamil Nadu displaced women had to sell their kidneys for food.
A year after the tsunami, NGO ActionAid surveyed the aftermath in five Asian countries and found the same pattern everywhere - residents barred from rebuilding, living in militarized temporary camps, hotels "showered with incentives," no restoration of homes lost, and "entire ways of life" destroyed. In July,
2006 in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers ended their cease-fire and war resumed. It's hard knowing if disaster capitalism had a role because peace was always precarious, the government offered little, and continued violence at least promised a chance for something better before and more than ever now given the choice between disaster capitalism and hope.
Disaster Apartheid - A World of Green and Red Zones
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans. The well-off left town, "checked into hotels, and called their insurance companies." For 120,000 others without cars or means of transportation, it was another story. They depended on the state, waited for help and got none. FEMA is supposed to provide it, too, but it was one of the many government functions Bush gutted advancing savage capitalism at the expense of public service.
Katrina was disastrous for those affected, but Milton Friedman saw "an opportunity" in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It was easy for him to say from his luxury San Francisco digs as well as his like-minded ideologues who met 14 days later to plan how to pounce on the tragedy for profit. They produced 32 Chicago School-type schemes packaged as "hurricane relief" that was a wish list for developers and hell for the displaced. They ranged from suspending Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas and making the whole area a flat tax free enterprise zone to erasing public schools by giving parents vouchers for privately-run charter ones. They also wanted environmental regulations suspended on the Gulf Coast and permission to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that showed how far afield they'd go to capitalize on the shock of a local tragedy.
Things moved fast, and within weeks "the Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of
(outsourcing schemes) pioneered in Iraq." The names were familiar with Halliburton first in line along with Bechtel, Blackwater USA and a host of others homing in for the kill. Billions were at stake, and no open bidding was required, just good connections. As Klein put it: "within days of the storm it was as if Baghdad's Green Zone....lifted from....the Tigris and landed on the bayou....As in Iraq, government once again played the role of a cash machine equipped for both withdrawals and deposits." Corporations took one and repaid with the other in sizable campaign contributions in a pattern now familiar.
They also ignored unemployed locals and relied instead on cheap imported undocumented labor easily exploited. The Bush administration showed its type compassion, too, with $40 billion in budget cuts for essentials like Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and more so funds could go to contractors and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, a familiar pattern.
In visiting Iraq, Klein first thought the "Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq." She then discovered it emerges wherever disaster capitalism lands with the same stark divisions between the included and excluded. It was evident in New Orleans with "gated green zones and raging red" ones - not from flood damage but from predatory free market solutions only for the privileged.The Bush administration refused emergency funds for public sector salaries so 3000 city workers were fired. Charity Hospital closed and still isn't open. Public transit was gutted losing half its workers, and most public housing is still boarded up and empty by design. Some sits on prime land close to the French Quarter, developers want it for luxury properties, and New Orleans is being erased for profit just like Iraq. It was all planned with the storm the excuse to do it.
Earlier "creative destruction" opportunities generated "rust belts," neglected neighborhoods, and underfunded inner city public schools. Creative neglect is at work as well as the American Society of Civil Engineers in
2007 said it will cost $1.5 trillion over five years to bring essential public infrastructure back to standard. Instead it continues to deteriorate while the well-off withdraw into gated communities and luxury condos with all their needs met by private providers. Klein calls this trend a "state-within-a-state that is muscular" and as able as the public one is frail. It no longer can function without help from contractors as government is hollowed so business can prosper.
New Orleans is a window on the future in which survival depends on the ability to pay, and those who can't are discarded like trash. It promises a world of protected Green Zones with those outside it neglected, abandoned, ignored and forgotten.
Losing the Peace Incentive - Israel As Warning
Conventional wisdom once thought economic growth and prosperity required peace and stability. No longer. Post-9/11, the terror scare was ignited, wars rage in Iraq and Afghanistan, more war is threatened on Iran, oil prices touched $80 a barrel, the WTO Doha Round trade talks collapsed, and "a golden period of broadly shared growth" prevails (at least until the recent credit crunch). How come?
Conflict and global instability don't just benefit arms related industries. They help the high-tech security sector, heavy construction, private health care companies treating soldiers and oil and gas. The business bonanza in Iraq alone is hugely profitable with all sorts of companies cashing in. The same goes for New Orleans and Gulf Coast overall. Terrorist attacks are good for business. The more destruction, the more to rebuild - a great market for disaster capitalism it pounces on with every incentive to assure the trend continues unchallenged, and why not when government throws public tax dollars at it.
Today, "instability is the new stability," and Israel is its "Exhibit A." In the post-1993 Oslo years, the Jewish state designed its economy to expand in response to escalating violence at home at first and now everywhere. The nation's technology firms pioneered the homeland security industry, and they still dominate it. In addition, its economy overall is the most "tech-dependent in the world," according to Business Week magazine, twice as dependent as the US representing half its exports.
Following the 2000 dot-com crash, Israel's leading tech companies needed a new global niche, and the government encouraged expansion beyond information and communications technologies into security and surveillance. It launched a slew of start-ups "specializing in everything from 'search and nail,' data mining, surveillance cameras, to terrorist profiling." It was perfect timing for a market that exploded post-9/11, and Israel's economy is thriving with one of the fastest growth rates in the world. Klein calls the country "a kind of shopping mall for homeland security technologies," and Forbes magazine says it's "the go-to country for antiterrorism technologies." Today, the country's counterterrorism industry is booming, and its defense-related exports make it the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, larger than the UK.
Klein notes: "With more and more countries turning themselves into fortresses (with walls and high-tech fences part of it), 'security barriers' may prove to be the biggest disaster market of all." In the case of Israel, it's also another "Chicago School frontier marked by rapid stratification of society between rich and poor inside the state." The security boom fueled a wave of privatizations accompanied by social program cuts, "an epidemic of inequality," and the virtual end of Labor Zionism. Klein notes 24.4% of Israelis live in poverty, including 35.2% of children, compared to
8% twenty years earlier (but she doesn't say if these figures include Arab Israeli citizens comprising 20% of the population). She concludes Israeli industry no longer fears war as it thrives on it.
Today, Baghdad, New Orleans and suburban Atlanta Sandy Springs are glimpses of a gated community future run by the disaster capitalism complex. But it's in its most advanced state in Israel - "an entire country (turned into) a fortified gated community, surrounded by locked-out people living in (the) permanently excluded red zones" of Gaza and the West Bank that aren't just left out but are encroached on and under attack. Disaster capitalism thrives in this environment so it yearns to bring it to a neighborhood near you, and that's a prospect to fear.
Hopeful Signs - Shock Wears Off
Klein quotes Canada's National Post editor, Terence Corcoran, wondering if the Chicago School movement Milton Friedman launched could continue as before after his November, 2006 death. The movement's pinnacle was capturing the Congress in 1994 that it lost in 2006 for three reasons - public disenchantment with the Iraq war, political corruption, and a growing class divide unseen since the Gilded Age of the "robber barons" or roaring 20s. Each factor related to core Chicago School economics - privatization, deregulation and cutting government services. In the US, it created a wealth disparity economist Paul Krugman calls unprecedented while poverty is growing and the middle class dying in the richest country in the world that's also the least caring one.
Everywhere Chicago School fundamentalism shows up, the results are the same. A small elite gains hugely while most others don't. But cracks in the ideology are visible as many of its front line adherents got caught up "in an astonishing array of scandals and criminal proceedings (from the) earliest laboratories in Latin America to the most recent one in Iraq."
Before he died, Pinochet was under house arrest. In Argentina, courts stripped former junta leaders of immunity. Bolivia's de Lozada got chased from the country and is now a wanted man. In Russia, many of the oligarch fraudsters were either in exile or jail. In Canada, newspaper magnate Conrad Black was convicted of fraud. In the US, a rogue's gallery of CEOs were charged and convicted as well, and other high level types were caught up in scandals like lobbyist Jack Abramoff's influence-peddling one.
Klein notes another hopeful sign as well - shock effects were beginning to wear off, and in Argentina's
2001 economic crisis forced out five presidents in three weeks. It was spreading and most apparent in Latin America where it began with opponents of Chicago School doctrine winning elections like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but he wasn't alone. It showed a renewed faith in democracy and condemnation of Washington Consensus dogma when people made a choice at the polls in free and open elections. Today's movements aren't replicas of the past, and one of the differences "is an acute awareness of the need for protection from shocks of the past" - coups, foreign shock therapists, torturers, debt and currency shocks.
They've learned from the past and are building "shock absorbers into their organizing models." It's in movements less centralized, Venezuela's grassroots community councils, Brazil's Landless Peoples Movement, and the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico where thousands battled police since a year ago May and still won't quit. In addition, governments are rejecting old trade models and adopting new ones like Venezuela's ALBA bartering system making it less vulnerable to turbulent markets.
They're also rejecting World Bank and IMF debt slavery, and the change is dramatic. In 2005, 80% of IMF's lending portfolio was to Latin America. It dropped to 1% in 2007. And IMF's 2005 $81 billion dollar portfolio shrank to $11.8 billion in three years with nearly all of it in Turkey. The World Bank is also being rejected. Venezuela severed its relationship, and Ecuador's Raphael Correa suspended bank loans and declared its country representative persona non grata in an extraordinary move the equivalent of a well-deserved slap in the face. In addition, the Doha Round trade talks collapsed, and some observers thought it signaled "globalization is dead," or if not, it's at least breathing hard.
Resistance is showing up in Europe, too, with voters in France and the Netherlands rejecting the European Constitution the French call "savage capitalism" and a codification of the corporatist order they reject. The Putin era in Russia is also seen as a backlash against the shock therapy of the 90s that impoverished millions of its people still left out and many desperate. The same is true in South Africa where people in slums abandoned the ANC to protest against their broken Freedom Charter promises. It even surfaced in China where, according to official government sources, 87,000 large protests were held involving over four million workers and peasants. They won major victories for new rural area spending, better health care, and pledges to eliminate education fees.
Millions of Lebanese were in the streets as well that wasn't a show of strength by Hezbollah as the major media characterized it. It was a rejection of the Siniora government's willingness to accept Chicago School reforms in exchange for billions of needed reconstruction loans to recover from Israel's summer,
2006 blitzkrieg attack. Klein called their actions "a poor and working-class people's revolt."
Examples are everywhere but so far just ripples in a pond needing greater numbers for real change. They were in tsunami-struck Thailand where, unlike in Sri Lanka, many settlements were successfully rebuilt in months but not by the government offering no aid. So hundreds of villagers "engaged in what they called land 'reinvasions,' " defied their government with direct-action, and rebuilt their communities making them better than before the destruction.
The same thing happened in New Orleans. In February,
2007, housing project residents "reinvaded" their old homes and reclaimed them in another example of "people rebuilding for themselves" and bypassing government indifferent to their needs and rights. Klein calls this phenomenon "the antithesis of the disaster capitalism complex's ethos." The actions are communal with people helping each other, rebuilding rubble, and aiming to end the erasure "of history, of culture, of memory."
It's a message of collective shock resistance replacing shock, but it's too early to declare victory. The signs are encouraging, and with enough of them who knows what's possible. Hopefully a better world replacing the bankrupt notion that markets work best and government is the problem. That's an idea for the trash bin of history where it belongs and where it one day will be.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net .
Monday, September 22, 2008
Aafia Siddiqui Update
Was neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui raped and tortured at US Bagram prison?
by Ernesto Cienfuegos Sunday Sep 21st, 2008 10:39 PM
It appears that the Bush Administration may have another "Abu Ghraib Prison" type torture scandal in its hands that it is desperately attempting to cover up. The disturbing human rights case involves a Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University educated Pakistani national that mysteriously disappeared, along with her three children, in Afghanistan in 2003. Last month the seriously injured, bleeding, frail, traumatized and confused Dr. Siddiqui re-appeared in a wheel chair in a New York federal court accused of terrorism and to face charges that she attempted to kill FBI and US soldiers in Afghanistan.
No one would have known about what some Pakistanis are calling "one of the most deplorable
crimes against womanhood" if it had not been for human rights organizations speaking out against the rape and torture of "Prisoner 650" that was being held at the US Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a miserable prison that was previously utilized as air base hangers by the Russians during their occupation of Afghanistan. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) just recently picked up the story and the Bush Administration seems to be acting quickly to cover up what many consider to be a war crime.
On Tuesday, they chose their front man, Brian Ross of ABC News, to begin propagandizing against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui in order to justify to the American people the gruesome treatment of the Pakistani neuroscientist at the hands of US authorities in Afghanistan and their lackey Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. Many of you may remember that Brian Ross was also the Neocon front man in the national news concerning the Anthrax Terrorist Attacks in 2001. He was reporting that the anthrax sent to U.S. political and media figures was linked to Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. That was a lie. No tests ever revealed any such thing. Like Colin Powell, he was attempting to create the perception in the public's mind that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks and that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Tortured Dr. Siddique at US courtThe FBI has accused Dr. Siddiqui of being an al-Qaida terrorist. Her father was educated as a doctor in Britain. Her brother is an architect from Houston and her sister is a Harvard University-trained neurologist. Because Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is a Muslim, the FBI started investigating her as far back as 2001when she lived in Boston.
There is no information about what may have occurred to two of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui's three children; one son was returned to Pakistan last week.
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui
http://www.counterpunch.org/mariner09102008.html
Now here is the American media spin on Aafia.
Al-Qaeda Targets Lethal Disease Research Facility on NY Island
Aafia Siddiqui's interest in the Plum Island facility shows terrorists aspire to a frightening form of mass-casualty operation.
September 14, 2008 - by Annie Jacobsen
Americans are just evil.
by Ernesto Cienfuegos Sunday Sep 21st, 2008 10:39 PMIt appears that the Bush Administration may have another "Abu Ghraib Prison" type torture scandal in its hands that it is desperately attempting to cover up. The disturbing human rights case involves a Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University educated Pakistani national that mysteriously disappeared, along with her three children, in Afghanistan in 2003. Last month the seriously injured, bleeding, frail, traumatized and confused Dr. Siddiqui re-appeared in a wheel chair in a New York federal court accused of terrorism and to face charges that she attempted to kill FBI and US soldiers in Afghanistan.
No one would have known about what some Pakistanis are calling "one of the most deplorable
crimes against womanhood" if it had not been for human rights organizations speaking out against the rape and torture of "Prisoner 650" that was being held at the US Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a miserable prison that was previously utilized as air base hangers by the Russians during their occupation of Afghanistan. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) just recently picked up the story and the Bush Administration seems to be acting quickly to cover up what many consider to be a war crime. On Tuesday, they chose their front man, Brian Ross of ABC News, to begin propagandizing against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui in order to justify to the American people the gruesome treatment of the Pakistani neuroscientist at the hands of US authorities in Afghanistan and their lackey Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. Many of you may remember that Brian Ross was also the Neocon front man in the national news concerning the Anthrax Terrorist Attacks in 2001. He was reporting that the anthrax sent to U.S. political and media figures was linked to Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. That was a lie. No tests ever revealed any such thing. Like Colin Powell, he was attempting to create the perception in the public's mind that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks and that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Tortured Dr. Siddique at US courtThe FBI has accused Dr. Siddiqui of being an al-Qaida terrorist. Her father was educated as a doctor in Britain. Her brother is an architect from Houston and her sister is a Harvard University-trained neurologist. Because Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is a Muslim, the FBI started investigating her as far back as 2001when she lived in Boston.
There is no information about what may have occurred to two of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui's three children; one son was returned to Pakistan last week.
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui
http://www.counterpunch.org/mariner09102008.html
Now here is the American media spin on Aafia.
Al-Qaeda Targets Lethal Disease Research Facility on NY Island
Aafia Siddiqui's interest in the Plum Island facility shows terrorists aspire to a frightening form of mass-casualty operation.
September 14, 2008 - by Annie Jacobsen
Americans are just evil.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Let the Experts Decide
by SheilanagigWatching George Bush on television is an experience somewhere between revulsion and hysterical laughter. Yesterday, with a straight face, he told the world that indeed, he is a free market man; but, well, er, um, after consulting with the experts, he decided he better go along with them. The US taxpayer is now on the hook for billions, even trillions, to bail out the experts who created the sub prime crisis in the first place. Of course, not one homeowner facing foreclosure will be saved; but the elites mansions will be safe and sound now, as will be their failed financial empire.
Americans are paralyzed like deer in headlights and continue with their blather on the upcoming election, perhaps hoping that a hero will come along and save them from going down the vortex of the bankruptcy drain. Their faith in the maxim 'what you don't know can't hurt you' has been taken to the height of absurdity even as the 'American Dream' becomes a nightmare from which they cannot awaken.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the EU assure it's unbelieving citizens that the best option for the future is to give more power to the experts in Brussels. The EU president Nicholas Sarkozy plays a game with NATO and Russia, embracing the tainted rhetoric of the American version of the 'Georgian invasion' which could put Europe smack dab in the middle of WW3. If the so-called diplomacy of Sarkozy fails, no doubt the blame will fall on the Irish who refused to give a blank mandate of power to the Brussels elite. Of course, the citizens of three member states have now rejected the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution; but in spite of his over-sized ears, Sarkozy does not seem to be able to hear the people he claims to represent.
How dare people challenge the competency of their political/economic experts!
In South America and Africa, quite a different mood has emerged among the peoples of many countries: they are willing to take their leaders to account, with machetes and rocks if necessary. Westerners look upon the news of some new rebellion in Bolivia or South Africa with horror and pity from their comfortable consumer rapture, shaking their heads and returning to the pleasures of capitalism they have enjoyed up until now, while their own freedoms and control of their lives ebb into the sea of experts in Brussels and Washington DC.
If the political will of people were gold, third world countries would be rich and Western civilization would be bankrupt. The difference between the two is quite obvious and understandable: when people have nothing to lose anymore (and are hungry), they are dangerous (to the elites). In the West, capitalism has given people just enough to make them complacent and willing to surrender their power to the experts for the sake of 'business as usual'.
In the current meltdown of global finance, 'business as usual' may not go on for long, even with all the experts collaborating in a solution to prop up the defective internal structure of capitalism. This crisis did not come about as a result of average people doing anything different then they have always done. It is the elite financiers and gamblers of the stock markets and banks who now are afraid that their profits are in jeopardy. In their expert opinion, common people paying taxes should bail them out and make the world safe again for imperial finance ventures.
This fact is conveniently obscured to Western people as Western media is owned by another group of experts who decide what is good for masses to hear, and what is not. What the experts fear more than anything is people with real political will who demand that government operate for the benefit of people, instead of the reverse.
However, they overlook one critical factor; people do not need the media to tell them whether they are hungry, homeless or jobless and in despair. Such is the case in the third world countries. Imagine a starving family in South Africa reading in the daily rag that it should not worry because experts are now fixing everything. By the time the promised solution arrives, the problem people may be dead. It is after all, a solution of a type.Perhaps scarcity is not such a bad thing in relaying the true character of political experts to the people they supposedly represent. When Western citizens have nothing more to lose, they will not heed the media spin, but will know the truth. Then, the dreaded 'R' (revolution) word may once again create a government for the people and by the people; but not before the soil of earth is soaked with the blood of the previously smug and complacent supporters of the experts. The political will of the West has a long way to catch up with that of the citizens in the third world.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
To see or not to see? Catch 22
by Sheilanagig
Anyone Westerner who is not appalled, horrified and deeply disgusted or angry about the state of the world now is just not paying attention. Perhaps these are the lucky ones; after all, there does not seem to be much we can actually do about the oncoming train wreck of humanity, even if we know about it. The logic is not unsound; if we were to know the end of life as we know it was coming to an end, wouldn't the best choice be to spend the time enjoying our families and friends?
Yet there is something deeply disturbing about a civilization that waltz's off the cliff of disaster, intoxicated with itself and oblivious to other people and the planet. At times, I feel as though I am wandering among delighted zombies finding only a few other people who see what is happening. Meeting another who is following this madness in the world is the only comfort that keeps me going. As they say great minds think alike; or, was it fools seldom differ?
It has become an existential dilemma, a Catch 22 that torments me and if it was not for the Internet, I would have no outlet for the frustration at being seemingly helpless to change the course of events which look evermore likely to sweep our civilization away. Did I mention that were it not for the Internet I would be blissfully ignorant like all the lucky zombies around me?
On the one hand, the only hope the people of earth have is to band together and take back their power from the governments (that is to say leaders). This requires a shared awareness of what the dangers are and a will to stop the insanity. So the logical and ethical course for me is to communicate as much as possible to win enough support with people I meet for hope to be an option. Did I mention this type of subject matter not only makes one look like a flaming nut, but drives all but social lepers out of range of any conversation?
On the other hand, doing nothing and keeping my mouth shut would probably make a happier social and family environment, if in fact, there is a collapse of civilization imminent. It is a rather hopeless and cynical option, but not entirely unattractive. After all, I can't be expected to save the whole world; I'm not even sure I can save myself.
A third option would be welcome. The 50% solution might work: half the time can be spent in enjoyment and bliss, the other half, pursuing the horrible progression of the upcoming maelstrom with an ad hoc strategy, understanding that nothing is impossible, nor is anything for certain. Did I mention that this type of psychological compartmentalisation is rather difficult under the best of circumstances?
One thing is for sure: after the food shortage does its work, the population of earth (about 6
billion) will decline rapidly. About 50% of earth's inhabitants are well aware of their fate and food riots in some 70 countries across the world are becoming a critical destabilising factor in political instability in third world countries. The other 50% hasn't been hit yet; they are still waltzing through their capitalist dream and are not only unaware of the other half; but choose to be unaware. Although that ugliness might ruin the party.What will history say of our strategy? Will those who manage to survive learn something from our failure? Will they see us as fools, complicit idiots in the destruction of our civilization? Perhaps they will see this period as a necessary culling of herd for the survival of all. Maybe cosmic events such as the long predicted meteor will cleanse the planet of the human virus and millenia can proceed with evolution again. The number of outcomes for the present situation is daunting. From global warming, to nuclear annihilation, to another pandemic.
At the end of the day, I prefer to be aware. For one thing, it will make the time I am living now much more valuable and give a sense of appreciation for the mundane pleasures of life. Many who almost die say that the experience had one of the best effects ever on their clarity and enjoyment of life. As for hope in creating an awareness, it is a person's choice to be unaware. Some minds can be nudged and opened, delicately. Other minds would not open with the Jaws of Life. Why waste precious time on them?
But some days I still ask myself, Why, oh why, didn't I take the BLUE pill?
Friday, September 19, 2008
Less is More
Less is More
by Sheilanagig
Alexander Pope was wise in this saying; yet Einstein was equally wise: "Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
It does not take a great mind to create complexity from simple circumstance: but it does take a great insight to reduce complexity to its simplest truth. This is essentially what Einstein did, as well as Stephen Hawkes. They were able to find the common demoninator in a plethora of complex explanations and express them as simple truths.
No method of thinking could be more apropo to today's complex geopolitical/economic situtation than this. Those with vested interests in this or that seek to befuddle issues with rhetorical spin which excite the irrational fears and impulses of the masses. When an issue is made more complex, it creates the need for further analysis, and confusion, such that if issues be infinitely complicated, an analysis to find the essential factors of the issue, may be postponed into the future indefinitely.
I am by no means suggesting that our simplest conclusions based on lack of information are the most valid. However after studying of an issue, when the thinker is bound to a commitment to 'intellectual integrity', gleaning the fundamental currents creating the maelstrom is an act of great courage. This is especially so in a world filled with professional experts bloated by their non-secular vernacular and egos, which exclude any conclusions of common sense. Let all experts examine their egos before analysing their topics.
It is in this spirit that I make the following observation. If you wish to know the nature of a employee's character, do not ask his colleagues or his boss. Instead, ask the janitor. For the true character of an individual is known, not by how he treats those from whom he has something to gain; but, by how he treats those from whom he has nothing to gain. How a self important member of an organisation treats those who have NO power is infinitely more revealing than all the awards, salaries and credentials which his society may award for performance.
This is also true in societies and governments. How political power deals with the most helpless and disagreeable among its' populace is the true measure of its intentions and integrity. The measure of the integrity of power is not in its greatness, but in its humility and compassion to those who have nothing to offer. It is with this yardstick, I choose to analyse the rhetoric of the USA, Russia, the EU, China, Africa and South America.
The essential tell tale clue of core character and true intention, is not how friends are dealt with; but how the insignificant and offensive are treated.
I will close with what I am sure must be one of Einstein's favorite quotes (as well as mine):
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
by Sheilanagig
Alexander Pope was wise in this saying; yet Einstein was equally wise: "Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
It does not take a great mind to create complexity from simple circumstance: but it does take a great insight to reduce complexity to its simplest truth. This is essentially what Einstein did, as well as Stephen Hawkes. They were able to find the common demoninator in a plethora of complex explanations and express them as simple truths.
No method of thinking could be more apropo to today's complex geopolitical/economic situtation than this. Those with vested interests in this or that seek to befuddle issues with rhetorical spin which excite the irrational fears and impulses of the masses. When an issue is made more complex, it creates the need for further analysis, and confusion, such that if issues be infinitely complicated, an analysis to find the essential factors of the issue, may be postponed into the future indefinitely.
I am by no means suggesting that our simplest conclusions based on lack of information are the most valid. However after studying of an issue, when the thinker is bound to a commitment to 'intellectual integrity', gleaning the fundamental currents creating the maelstrom is an act of great courage. This is especially so in a world filled with professional experts bloated by their non-secular vernacular and egos, which exclude any conclusions of common sense. Let all experts examine their egos before analysing their topics.
It is in this spirit that I make the following observation. If you wish to know the nature of a employee's character, do not ask his colleagues or his boss. Instead, ask the janitor. For the true character of an individual is known, not by how he treats those from whom he has something to gain; but, by how he treats those from whom he has nothing to gain. How a self important member of an organisation treats those who have NO power is infinitely more revealing than all the awards, salaries and credentials which his society may award for performance.
This is also true in societies and governments. How political power deals with the most helpless and disagreeable among its' populace is the true measure of its intentions and integrity. The measure of the integrity of power is not in its greatness, but in its humility and compassion to those who have nothing to offer. It is with this yardstick, I choose to analyse the rhetoric of the USA, Russia, the EU, China, Africa and South America.
The essential tell tale clue of core character and true intention, is not how friends are dealt with; but how the insignificant and offensive are treated.
I will close with what I am sure must be one of Einstein's favorite quotes (as well as mine):
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Left is right in USA
Left is right in USA
Preface: Every once in a while I come across a forum post that perfectly describes some more abstract concept with such a simple metaphor that I must save it. This post is from the EU forum and addresses the difference between 'left' in Europe and 'left' in America. It is taken from it's conversational context.
Makedonia is Hellas Location: Thessaloniki,Hellas Mon Sep 15, 2008
To portray what constitutes the "left" in America as "socialist" or "communist" is so completely ridiculous that invoking such an argument exposes your brainwashed mind . . . .the "left" in America is a business friendly entity . . . not unlike their reich wing opponents.
Here's the difference: The Republicans believe ferevently in oligarchy/plutocracy . . .all not
"born to the silver" are coarse, low workers . . . NIGGERS, if you like.Like the Niggers in the old plantation system of the Antebellum South, the new niggers exist only to slave on master's plantation.
The new niggers live only to serve the plantation and enrich master. if one of them niggers come sick, master have overseer toss sick nigger out to die . . . loss of nigger is no concern to master . . . master can always find more niggers to enslave on his plantation. Niggers are good, cheap and if you be harsh enough . . . quiet and docile.
Now Mexicans make GREAT new niggers . . . they haven't grown up with much so they will take more shit and accept even less than American niggers (both white and black!) .
So them Mexican niggers help to keep them other niggers in line by depressing the wages and keepin the "employed" white and black niggers just unsettled enough about their sweet sweet jobs that they don't organize to demand master at least give them enough to live on..
Rich countries in Europe have their niggers too.The difference is that we have unions to help "civilize" master- that's why they bring in the brown people we all hate ..to give us a distraction . . .a scapegoat if you will- to blame all our troubles on when it is really the Pigcorporate Agenda and master uses the brown people here in Europe just like master uses the mexicans in America- to depress wages and keep niggers unsettled enough to be "thankful" master doesn't throw us into the street, but "allows" us to be his niggers!
Now what constitutes the "Left" (Democrats) also likes the plantation system and sees all the
same opportunities to exploit the working folks (they are too political sensitive to call them niggers . . .they call them"labor" or "working families").
They recognize that it is, essentially, cheaper to provide for the niggers a little bit better than the plutocrats.See if you provide healthcare for niggers ,they can show up to work and get more done and you don't have to keep retraining new niggers to do the same work 'cause you wore out the previous nigger ,so you have a more efficient plantation . .
(In case you wonder why I have chosen this topic to reply to you; any topic will do since you've been dribbling all over the place!)
by Makedonia is Hellas on Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:35 am
Preface: Every once in a while I come across a forum post that perfectly describes some more abstract concept with such a simple metaphor that I must save it. This post is from the EU forum and addresses the difference between 'left' in Europe and 'left' in America. It is taken from it's conversational context.
Makedonia is Hellas Location: Thessaloniki,Hellas Mon Sep 15, 2008
To portray what constitutes the "left" in America as "socialist" or "communist" is so completely ridiculous that invoking such an argument exposes your brainwashed mind . . . .the "left" in America is a business friendly entity . . . not unlike their reich wing opponents.
Here's the difference: The Republicans believe ferevently in oligarchy/plutocracy . . .all not
"born to the silver" are coarse, low workers . . . NIGGERS, if you like.Like the Niggers in the old plantation system of the Antebellum South, the new niggers exist only to slave on master's plantation.The new niggers live only to serve the plantation and enrich master. if one of them niggers come sick, master have overseer toss sick nigger out to die . . . loss of nigger is no concern to master . . . master can always find more niggers to enslave on his plantation. Niggers are good, cheap and if you be harsh enough . . . quiet and docile.
Now Mexicans make GREAT new niggers . . . they haven't grown up with much so they will take more shit and accept even less than American niggers (both white and black!) .
So them Mexican niggers help to keep them other niggers in line by depressing the wages and keepin the "employed" white and black niggers just unsettled enough about their sweet sweet jobs that they don't organize to demand master at least give them enough to live on..
Rich countries in Europe have their niggers too.The difference is that we have unions to help "civilize" master- that's why they bring in the brown people we all hate ..to give us a distraction . . .a scapegoat if you will- to blame all our troubles on when it is really the Pigcorporate Agenda and master uses the brown people here in Europe just like master uses the mexicans in America- to depress wages and keep niggers unsettled enough to be "thankful" master doesn't throw us into the street, but "allows" us to be his niggers!
Now what constitutes the "Left" (Democrats) also likes the plantation system and sees all the
same opportunities to exploit the working folks (they are too political sensitive to call them niggers . . .they call them"labor" or "working families").They recognize that it is, essentially, cheaper to provide for the niggers a little bit better than the plutocrats.See if you provide healthcare for niggers ,they can show up to work and get more done and you don't have to keep retraining new niggers to do the same work 'cause you wore out the previous nigger ,so you have a more efficient plantation . .
(In case you wonder why I have chosen this topic to reply to you; any topic will do since you've been dribbling all over the place!)
by Makedonia is Hellas on Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:35 am
Capitalism Implodes
The Crash of Western Capitalist Civilization?
By Richard_C_Cook 15/09/08 "ICH"
“Train-wreck” doesn't even begin to describe what is starting to happen to the U.S. today with the financial crisis, an onrushing depression, and the failure of George W. Bush's war policy as he is faced down by Iran and the Russian bear. But in an even broader sense, the West, as a civilization, after a century of world war and the utter failure of global finance capitalism, may have reached its limits.
Those with a vested interest in the status quo dismiss any suggestion that something is wrong. This includes Donald Luskin, author of an article in the Washington Post on Sunday, September 14, titled: “A Nation of Exaggerators: Quit Doling Out That Bad Economy Line.” Luskin writes, “The relentless drumbeat of pessimism in the media and on the campaign trail” is “a virus.” He continues: “Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too.
None of this, however, is cause for depression -- or exaggerated Depression comparisons.” Continue reading, and you find out who Luskin is: a campaign adviser to John McCain. We know that “where you stand depends on where you sit”—and who pays you for advice. So is a catastrophic meltdown coming? If so, probably a majority of the people in the world are thinking: “Serves them right.”
For the last 500 years, the West has been striding across the globe, armed to the teeth with firearms, warships, bombers, and—more recently—depleted uranium, enforcing the “white man's burden” by enslaving nations and peoples and confiscating everything of value—ranging from art objects to gold to oil—that can be carried away.
The financiers behind it all have also used the diabolically clever practice of creating money “out of thin air” to put the natives everywhere into debt, and, when that has proven insufficient, of doing the same to their own populations. All this is rationalized by various
brands of racism, cultural superiority, social Darwinism, historical determinism, “dominion of the Elect,” “God's chosen people,” etc. Or, simply, “might makes right.” Some call it “The New World Order.” So today, we Americans, denizens of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” victors in two world wars, bearers of “democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq, allies of the brave Israelis who hold high the banner of Judeo-Christian values among the ungrateful Palestinians—well, we Americans owe our own bankers almost $70 trillion at most recent count.
With the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we owe holders of bad housing loans, including the governments of China, Korea, and Japan, another few trillion. The bluster of Kissinger, Brzezinski, the Kristols, the Christian fundamentalists, and their paid-off politicians and media millionaires notwithstanding, America—indeed, the entire West—has been found out, perhaps even checkmated on the world stage.
The Bush/Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have blackened America's name forever. Iran has called our bluff. In Israel the gap between rich and poor is increasing as much as in the U.S. According to an article by Ian S. Lustick, the Palestinians have stood up to the Israelis to the point where more Jews are emigrating from that country than are moving in, and where those who remain are increasingly huddling around Tel Aviv as a safe haven. (Ian S. Lustick, “Abandoning the Iron Wall: ‘Israel and the Middle Eastern Muck',” Middle East Policy , Vo. XV, No. 3, Fall 2008.)
In the 1990s, the European bankers used U.S. and NATO forces to dismember Yugoslavia so George Soros and the Rothschilds could gobble up Balkan resources. But that strategy is failing in the Caucasus, where the Russians fought back against the genocidal attack by Dick Cheney's poodle, Mikheil Saakashvili, the New York-trained attorney the CIA got elected as the president of Georgia. And now the people of Ukraine, the “Little Russians,” realizing what the West has in store for them, are rushing back into the Slavic fold and may be only a year or so away from reuniting with their “Great Russian” cousins across the border.
What is telling is to watch the Western financier press, chiefly the Washington Post and the New York Times , fume about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and his “authoritarian” manner. An example is the article by Times correspondent Ellen Barry on Putin's September 11 press conference in Moscow. She wrote, “In three-and-a-half hours, in tones that were alternatively pugilistic and needy, Vladimir V. Putin tried to explain himself.”
I'm sorry, Ms. Barry. You and your editors may think your writing is cute, but Vladimir Putin is the foremost figure on the world stage today. He will remain so after George W. Bush leaves the White House disgraced.
Putin is heir to an epochal movement of patriots who began in the 1970s to take back Russia from within. It started with a base of operations within the KGB and the Orthodox Church, led to Gorbachev's glasnost in the 1980s, and culminated in the Second Russian Revolution of 1991. At that point, the Western financiers gleefully rushed in to support an assault from the Russian “oligarchs” who were looting Russia of everything it owned. The oligarchs were the shock troops of a financier assault that had already begun to overlap in the West with the Russian Mafia.
Cheered on by the Washington Post and aided by academic advisors from places like Harvard, this international syndicate nearly destroyed Russia during the 1990s. But when Putin was appointed interim president by Boris Yelstin in 1999, and after winning the presidential election of 2000 in his own right, he began to fight back. From the mid-1970s to today, thousands of Russian gangsters, along with many hard-line Bolsheviks/Stalinists, were allowed to emigrate.
Many settled in the U.S. and are here today, and many more settled in Israel. In fact, one
reason the price of condos in New York, Miami, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere has inflated so much reportedly is the flood of cash from racketeering. The crooks have allied themselves with the Colombian drug cartels and have heavily infiltrated the world's financial systems, even setting up their own banks for laundering money and speculating in the commodities markets. Today, Putin is cleaning out the remaining gangster class. His efforts reached a milestone in January with the arrest in Moscow of Semion Mogilevich, called “the world's most dangerous man.”
Putin has declared that the world will not be governed in a “unipolar” manner; i.e. by the U.S. military as the police force for the global financiers. This does not mean Russia has to be our enemy. In fact the world would be much better off, and much safer, if we joined with Russia as allies in keeping the peace. But to do that our system would have to change, because finance capitalism is far too unstable to coexist with other nations as equals. It must either grow or die, because it always needs new victims to pay the interest on its usury practices and to finance its speculative balloons.
As a last resort, it needs the kind of financial institution bailouts being engineered by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, where the only remaining stopgap is borrowing from public funds and adding to the national debt. Once economic growth stops, as has now happened, and all the bubbles to restart it have blown up, as has also happened, the end really is nigh. Especially if the host—the U.S.—is bankrupt.
What is coming at us today isn't just another downturn. If people like McCain adviser Donald Luskin doubt it, maybe, instead of writing campaign propaganda, they should ask the fired CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stockholders of Lehman Brothers, whose shares have dropped ninety percent in less than a year, and the millions who are losing their homes. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are calling for “change.” Well, if I were standing on a beach with a 100-foot tsunami roaring in my direction, I would call for change too. Except I would not be standing around arguing about the meaning of the words “lipstick on a pig.”
By Richard C. Cook http:// www.richardccook.com Copyright 2008 by Richard C. Cook
Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age , called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years . ” His Challenger website is at www.richardccook.com . A new economics website at www.RealSustainableLiving.com is upcoming with partner/author Susan Boskey. To get on his mailing list, for questions and comments, or to pre-purchase copies of his new book, please write EconomicSanity@gmail.com .
By Richard_C_Cook 15/09/08 "ICH"
“Train-wreck” doesn't even begin to describe what is starting to happen to the U.S. today with the financial crisis, an onrushing depression, and the failure of George W. Bush's war policy as he is faced down by Iran and the Russian bear. But in an even broader sense, the West, as a civilization, after a century of world war and the utter failure of global finance capitalism, may have reached its limits. Those with a vested interest in the status quo dismiss any suggestion that something is wrong. This includes Donald Luskin, author of an article in the Washington Post on Sunday, September 14, titled: “A Nation of Exaggerators: Quit Doling Out That Bad Economy Line.” Luskin writes, “The relentless drumbeat of pessimism in the media and on the campaign trail” is “a virus.” He continues: “Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too.
None of this, however, is cause for depression -- or exaggerated Depression comparisons.” Continue reading, and you find out who Luskin is: a campaign adviser to John McCain. We know that “where you stand depends on where you sit”—and who pays you for advice. So is a catastrophic meltdown coming? If so, probably a majority of the people in the world are thinking: “Serves them right.”
For the last 500 years, the West has been striding across the globe, armed to the teeth with firearms, warships, bombers, and—more recently—depleted uranium, enforcing the “white man's burden” by enslaving nations and peoples and confiscating everything of value—ranging from art objects to gold to oil—that can be carried away.
The financiers behind it all have also used the diabolically clever practice of creating money “out of thin air” to put the natives everywhere into debt, and, when that has proven insufficient, of doing the same to their own populations. All this is rationalized by various
brands of racism, cultural superiority, social Darwinism, historical determinism, “dominion of the Elect,” “God's chosen people,” etc. Or, simply, “might makes right.” Some call it “The New World Order.” So today, we Americans, denizens of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” victors in two world wars, bearers of “democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq, allies of the brave Israelis who hold high the banner of Judeo-Christian values among the ungrateful Palestinians—well, we Americans owe our own bankers almost $70 trillion at most recent count.With the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we owe holders of bad housing loans, including the governments of China, Korea, and Japan, another few trillion. The bluster of Kissinger, Brzezinski, the Kristols, the Christian fundamentalists, and their paid-off politicians and media millionaires notwithstanding, America—indeed, the entire West—has been found out, perhaps even checkmated on the world stage.
The Bush/Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have blackened America's name forever. Iran has called our bluff. In Israel the gap between rich and poor is increasing as much as in the U.S. According to an article by Ian S. Lustick, the Palestinians have stood up to the Israelis to the point where more Jews are emigrating from that country than are moving in, and where those who remain are increasingly huddling around Tel Aviv as a safe haven. (Ian S. Lustick, “Abandoning the Iron Wall: ‘Israel and the Middle Eastern Muck',” Middle East Policy , Vo. XV, No. 3, Fall 2008.)
In the 1990s, the European bankers used U.S. and NATO forces to dismember Yugoslavia so George Soros and the Rothschilds could gobble up Balkan resources. But that strategy is failing in the Caucasus, where the Russians fought back against the genocidal attack by Dick Cheney's poodle, Mikheil Saakashvili, the New York-trained attorney the CIA got elected as the president of Georgia. And now the people of Ukraine, the “Little Russians,” realizing what the West has in store for them, are rushing back into the Slavic fold and may be only a year or so away from reuniting with their “Great Russian” cousins across the border.
What is telling is to watch the Western financier press, chiefly the Washington Post and the New York Times , fume about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and his “authoritarian” manner. An example is the article by Times correspondent Ellen Barry on Putin's September 11 press conference in Moscow. She wrote, “In three-and-a-half hours, in tones that were alternatively pugilistic and needy, Vladimir V. Putin tried to explain himself.”
I'm sorry, Ms. Barry. You and your editors may think your writing is cute, but Vladimir Putin is the foremost figure on the world stage today. He will remain so after George W. Bush leaves the White House disgraced.
Putin is heir to an epochal movement of patriots who began in the 1970s to take back Russia from within. It started with a base of operations within the KGB and the Orthodox Church, led to Gorbachev's glasnost in the 1980s, and culminated in the Second Russian Revolution of 1991. At that point, the Western financiers gleefully rushed in to support an assault from the Russian “oligarchs” who were looting Russia of everything it owned. The oligarchs were the shock troops of a financier assault that had already begun to overlap in the West with the Russian Mafia.
Cheered on by the Washington Post and aided by academic advisors from places like Harvard, this international syndicate nearly destroyed Russia during the 1990s. But when Putin was appointed interim president by Boris Yelstin in 1999, and after winning the presidential election of 2000 in his own right, he began to fight back. From the mid-1970s to today, thousands of Russian gangsters, along with many hard-line Bolsheviks/Stalinists, were allowed to emigrate.
Many settled in the U.S. and are here today, and many more settled in Israel. In fact, one
reason the price of condos in New York, Miami, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere has inflated so much reportedly is the flood of cash from racketeering. The crooks have allied themselves with the Colombian drug cartels and have heavily infiltrated the world's financial systems, even setting up their own banks for laundering money and speculating in the commodities markets. Today, Putin is cleaning out the remaining gangster class. His efforts reached a milestone in January with the arrest in Moscow of Semion Mogilevich, called “the world's most dangerous man.” Putin has declared that the world will not be governed in a “unipolar” manner; i.e. by the U.S. military as the police force for the global financiers. This does not mean Russia has to be our enemy. In fact the world would be much better off, and much safer, if we joined with Russia as allies in keeping the peace. But to do that our system would have to change, because finance capitalism is far too unstable to coexist with other nations as equals. It must either grow or die, because it always needs new victims to pay the interest on its usury practices and to finance its speculative balloons.
As a last resort, it needs the kind of financial institution bailouts being engineered by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, where the only remaining stopgap is borrowing from public funds and adding to the national debt. Once economic growth stops, as has now happened, and all the bubbles to restart it have blown up, as has also happened, the end really is nigh. Especially if the host—the U.S.—is bankrupt.
What is coming at us today isn't just another downturn. If people like McCain adviser Donald Luskin doubt it, maybe, instead of writing campaign propaganda, they should ask the fired CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stockholders of Lehman Brothers, whose shares have dropped ninety percent in less than a year, and the millions who are losing their homes. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are calling for “change.” Well, if I were standing on a beach with a 100-foot tsunami roaring in my direction, I would call for change too. Except I would not be standing around arguing about the meaning of the words “lipstick on a pig.”
By Richard C. Cook http:// www.richardccook.com Copyright 2008 by Richard C. Cook
Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age , called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years . ” His Challenger website is at www.richardccook.com . A new economics website at www.RealSustainableLiving.com is upcoming with partner/author Susan Boskey. To get on his mailing list, for questions and comments, or to pre-purchase copies of his new book, please write EconomicSanity@gmail.com .
Friday, September 12, 2008
EU and China must choose
All the bluster and saber rattling between Iran and Israel, and Russia and the USA has just taken a lethal turn. Russia, Syria and Iran have entered a military alliance and will open a Russian military base on the the Mediterranean at Tartus.
Bluffs are about to be called.
The two actors in this grim drama who have the ability to end this threat of war are China and the EU. Both have declined, in essence, to support either the West or Russia, and in doing so have abandoned their responsibility to guide the planet toward peaceful coexistence rather than nuclear war.
If the USA is left unchecked, the planet will surely suffer another catastrophic war which may transport earthlings back ten thousand years. Afterall, the USA has little to lose at this point and is fighting for its survival in a trap it engineered itself. It's currency is doomed; it's hegemonic ambitions thwarted by Russia, its citizens at the brink of insurrection and bankruptcy and its international credibility scarred beyond recognition. A cornered animal is a dangerous one, albeit, the neocon leadership is entirely responsible for the situation in which America finds itself.
Yet, the consequences of uncontrolled military aggression will fall on the citizens of Europe. This is where the war will be waged and no regulation by the EU will be able to restore prosperity to Europe for decades to come. When European countries created the EU, giving up a bit of sovereignity to empower it, the hope was for prosperity through cooperation in peace. But now, those dreams are shot to hell in endorsing USA led NATO installations, by the EU leadership.
Time for the EU to grow up and get some cajones for the benefit of its union and all its citizens. Time for the EU to make a stand against warmongers and truly espouse the goals of prosperity through peace. Time for the EU leadership to throw American warmongers out of Europe. No other stance will protect European people from the ravages of war that the USA/Israel interests have planned for it. Time to give NATO a decent burial and redefine the interests of Europe as separate from those of the USA.
Putin is right: a unipolar world is no longer viable, especially ruled by insane hegemons. Cheney and his Machiavellian cohorts have proved themselves unworthy, unethical megalomaniacs. Nothing will depose them except world condemnation.
China and the EU must come out against this atrocious posturing of the USA/Israel toward nuclear war. If they do not, what will history say about them? Who will China and the EU trade with after the bombs have fallen? Let us remember Burke: All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for enough good men to do nothing.
If the EU and China will not step up to the plate, then citizens must pressure them to do so. For it is the people of both places who will suffer the consequences of the insanity of war. There will be no corporate profits for shareholders to divide because there will be few left to buy goods. How will their neutrality serve the prosperity they desire for their citizens?
Enough is enough. Let those who weild power now use it for the good of all. The USA must be stopped for the world to even begin to be at peace. A word to the wise is sufficient. Time for long term strategy for peace to replace short term hunger for profits.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
WW3 - Media preamble
Probably many are wondering, like me, how exactly is the USA going to start this war in Europe aimed at securing an energy corridor for Caspian oil to western markets. Well, the logical first step is to isolate your 'enemy' which in this case for the USA, is Russia. This plan has the multiple advantages: 1) securing USA hegemony geopolitically 2) accessing oil reserves to boost the ailing American economy 3) increasing military-industrial trade for a country that has nothing to export but war and 4) keeping its citizens out of the line of domestic military events (so they can more easily identify the 'villians' the media will drip feed for them), 5) rebrand the USA as 'reasonable' defenders of the innocent globally 6) boost the election campaign of John McCain.
Yes, the 'good guy, bad guy' metaphor is the one they the USA media spin masters will use now against Russia. Mostly this sort of rhetorical tripe bores me to tears; however, seeing there is a possible world war in the making, it might be useful to interpret the American rhetoric for those toward whom it is aimed. This new war will first be fought in the arena of the public opinion.
I would like to paraphase the article below, through my own bias of course, to make it more understandable for the mentally handicapped amoung us, for which the article is surely intended.
U.S. rules out unilateral steps against Russia
By Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers
Published: September 9, 2008
WASHINGTON: The Bush administration, after considerable internal debate, has decided not to take direct punitive action against Russia for its conflict with Georgia, concluding that it has little leverage if it acts unilaterally and that it would be better off pressing for a chorus of international criticism to be led by Europe.
We have learned an important lesson from 'going it alone' from the Iraq debacle. This time we will do as we please, but only after getting everyone on our side. We hate to be perceived as the 'bad guys'.
In recent interviews, senior administration officials said the White House had concluded that American punishments like economic sanctions or blocking Russia from world trade groups would only backfire, deepening Russia's intransigence and allowing the Kremlin to narrow the regional and global implications of its invasion of Georgia to an old-fashioned Washington-Moscow dispute.
We can't get sanctions passed against Russia, so let's just say we decided against them because we are soo wise.
Even as they vowed to work with allies, administration officials conceded that they wished the European Union had been willing to take firmer action than issuing tepid statements criticizing Russia's conduct. But the officials said the benefits of remaining part of a united front made it prudent for the United States to accept the softer approach advocated by Italy and Germany, among other allies.
Dam Eurotrash! How dare they defy us! We will play their little game until the oil corridors are secured by American military, then they will dance to our tune happily.
Some within the administration have argued for a more hawkish response, saying that Moscow probably intends to impose its will among independent states along its borders. They say the Kremlin is signaling to Ukraine, the Baltic nations and Poland that it is back in the game of regional hegemony, and they say it must be deterred.
Russia played its part well and did a great job of scaring the shite out of all the other Caucasas countries: Regional hegemons will not be tolerated as long as the USA is the BIG DOG, unless we say so.
In the first days of the conflict, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney reflected the view of administration hard-liners who saw Russia's offensive as justifying their skepticism and a policy that the Kremlin's actions would "not go unanswered." In his more recent comments, Cheney has stuck with the administration's emerging position of a more calibrated response.
We knew they were no goodniks; but we wanted to be fair and support Russians in the hopes of civilizing their sorry asses, BECAUSE WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. But now we understand, some nations do not understand kindness and cannot be civilized. Alas and alack for Russia.
In an interview, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described the administration as having come to a unified position that calls for "a long-term strategic approach — not one where we react tactically in a way that has negative strategic consequences."
Short term bullying hasn't worked too well; we will try long term bullying.
The United States essentially would be asserting a home truth: that Georgia's invader so disqualified itself - hey, Putin insists Tehran's program is peaceful, not military - it can no longer to be allowed to act as both as Iran's provider of nuclear wherewithal and arms, and derail serious sanctions in its gatekeeper capacity at the United Nations Security Council.
Russia, though they have been exceedingly cooperative in restricting sales of military weapons to America's enemies, is now just like Iran: nuclear maniacs who wish to destroy the good democratic people of the world. Iran is evil; Russia is Iran's friend: therefore, Russia is evil. Guilt by association.
To do this, the Bush administration would have to open direct U.S.-Iran talks. It wouldn't only be a Bush administration gift to McCain, who's stuck with a rigid "no" on negotiations with Iran while Obama backs direct ones.
We won't talk to Iran; we won't talk to Russia; we don't talk to evil nations. We blow them away.
Much more, the move lifts the United States from paralysis, undercuts Russia and serves as the best available demonstration of America's will and capacity to act.
AHA! A way out of our drowning economy, our civil unrest, a way to show the world we are truly destined to be 'masters of the universe'.
This approach offers an escape from the just-woofin' on Georgia routine that turns Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder into posthumous visionaries concerning America's diminished world leverage.
Glad that old Eurotrash Chirac & Shroeder are gone; the new breed of French and German leaders are right where we want them; under our economic multi-national jackboot (Good dog, good dog).
Whatever the many other measures the United States and Europe need to take to protect Georgia and chasten Russia, it would provide a path and a perspective until Jan. 20, 2009, on the most pressing world problem.
That problem being: how can USA be Earth's hegemon if Russia keeps deliberately upsetting our plans?
Indeed, Georgia's tragedy is in part the child of Russia's reading of America's passivity on Iran.
We were just minding our own business in Iraq, when the Russia's became vicious in attacking our peacekeeping missile shields in the Czech Republic and Poland via Georgia.
Coupled now with U.S. insistence that all its options are open through any talks with the mullahs, breaking this mold that magnifies Moscow's importance would be Washington sending Russia an unmistakable and constructive message: enough.
Russia better get the message: USA dominates the globe. Don't dare think of resisting the USA; we control everything and will make you pay if you defy us.
Gates, a career Kremlinologist and former director of central intelligence, said: "We are all agreed that we need to stay very much in close collaboration with the Europeans and others.
We have to whup Eurotrash into alignment with the 'vision' we have. We will threaten them with every means possible, including consequences which hit them in the cajones: decreasing corporate profits.
I think there is a sense that we do have the time to calibrate reactions carefully. And I think there is agreement not to take any precipitous actions. But there is also agreement on the importance of continued support for Georgia's territorial integrity."
Oh lord, when will the EU understand WE ARE the masters? We decide who is a country and who is not. We must be patient with the EU until they willingly accept their servility to American global domination.
"We are all agreed that we need to stay very much in close collaboration with the Europeans and others." He cautioned that "if we act too precipitously, we could be the ones who are isolated."
Dam those European media who criticized us in Iraq. This time, our war will be waged by pressuring all our commercial allies to support us ideologically, OR ELSE!
As part of the new strategy, President George W. Bush notified Congress on Monday that, "in view of recent actions" by Russia, he was withdrawing from consideration an agreement for civilian nuclear cooperation that he and Vladimir Putin, then Russia's president and now the prime minister, negotiated in April after years of effort. While the step was the most meaningful show of displeasure the United States has made over Russia's military action in Georgia, it also reflected a more cautious response.
The deal was all but certain to die in Congress anyway, and the agreement could be revived by the administration should Russia's behavior improve, officials said.
Well, we have no military potency left....so we will use what we have to paint the Russians out of the picture....even if it is a crock of shite.
The issue of how to manage Russia is also playing into presidential politics. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, has long called for excluding Russia from the Group of 8 industrialized powers and has urged a firmer response. Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, has criticized the Kremlin's decision to go into Georgia but has made it clear that he favors more engagement.
Doesn't matter who is elected: warmonger 1 or warmonger 2. Either way, look out Europe and Central Asia. The AMERICANS are coming!
While the United States has been cautious in moving to punish Russia, it has thrown significant support behind Georgia, including a $1 billion economic assistance package that Bush proposed last week. The aid, officials said, was to shore up Georgia's economy and to help the political standing of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the republic's battered leader.
WE punish because WE are the judges of the world. Those countries who wish to be in our good graces for military aid (the only export we have) had better toe the mark, or will be 'isolated' also.
Overall, the administration's strategy reflects a desire to defend Georgia's territorial sovereignty and its symbolic role as an emerging democracy, while not precluding cooperation with Russia on a number of important long-term national security interests, including counterterrorism, nonproliferation and efforts to halt narcotics traffic.
We want our cake and to eat it too. Bar the intervention of Allah, we shall have it.
While the United States and Russia continue to share a number of national security interests, Gates said, "We would still like to see Russia headed toward a more constructively collaborative role in dealing with international problems — rather than throwing their food on the floor."
The ungrateful Russians must learn to kiss the hand of their masters. If not, the world will think of them as an ungrateful child.
In other interviews, a range of senior administration officials argued that Russia is already paying a price for its actions, as foreign investors appeared to be removing or withholding assets, prompting a decline in the ruble since the Kremlin's forces crossed into Georgia. The Russian stock market has also plummeted.
The price of defying USA hegemony is total national ruin. Read and learn those of you who wish to survive.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/08/europe/politicus.php?page=2
How refreshing that Russia does not involve itself in this dialogue of the American megalomaniacs. I shudder to think of the mentality of those readers who take the USA rhetoric as truth.
Yes, the 'good guy, bad guy' metaphor is the one they the USA media spin masters will use now against Russia. Mostly this sort of rhetorical tripe bores me to tears; however, seeing there is a possible world war in the making, it might be useful to interpret the American rhetoric for those toward whom it is aimed. This new war will first be fought in the arena of the public opinion.
I would like to paraphase the article below, through my own bias of course, to make it more understandable for the mentally handicapped amoung us, for which the article is surely intended.
U.S. rules out unilateral steps against Russia
By Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers
Published: September 9, 2008
WASHINGTON: The Bush administration, after considerable internal debate, has decided not to take direct punitive action against Russia for its conflict with Georgia, concluding that it has little leverage if it acts unilaterally and that it would be better off pressing for a chorus of international criticism to be led by Europe.
We have learned an important lesson from 'going it alone' from the Iraq debacle. This time we will do as we please, but only after getting everyone on our side. We hate to be perceived as the 'bad guys'.
In recent interviews, senior administration officials said the White House had concluded that American punishments like economic sanctions or blocking Russia from world trade groups would only backfire, deepening Russia's intransigence and allowing the Kremlin to narrow the regional and global implications of its invasion of Georgia to an old-fashioned Washington-Moscow dispute.
We can't get sanctions passed against Russia, so let's just say we decided against them because we are soo wise.
Even as they vowed to work with allies, administration officials conceded that they wished the European Union had been willing to take firmer action than issuing tepid statements criticizing Russia's conduct. But the officials said the benefits of remaining part of a united front made it prudent for the United States to accept the softer approach advocated by Italy and Germany, among other allies.
Dam Eurotrash! How dare they defy us! We will play their little game until the oil corridors are secured by American military, then they will dance to our tune happily.
Some within the administration have argued for a more hawkish response, saying that Moscow probably intends to impose its will among independent states along its borders. They say the Kremlin is signaling to Ukraine, the Baltic nations and Poland that it is back in the game of regional hegemony, and they say it must be deterred.
Russia played its part well and did a great job of scaring the shite out of all the other Caucasas countries: Regional hegemons will not be tolerated as long as the USA is the BIG DOG, unless we say so.
In the first days of the conflict, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney reflected the view of administration hard-liners who saw Russia's offensive as justifying their skepticism and a policy that the Kremlin's actions would "not go unanswered." In his more recent comments, Cheney has stuck with the administration's emerging position of a more calibrated response.
We knew they were no goodniks; but we wanted to be fair and support Russians in the hopes of civilizing their sorry asses, BECAUSE WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. But now we understand, some nations do not understand kindness and cannot be civilized. Alas and alack for Russia.
In an interview, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described the administration as having come to a unified position that calls for "a long-term strategic approach — not one where we react tactically in a way that has negative strategic consequences."
Short term bullying hasn't worked too well; we will try long term bullying.
The United States essentially would be asserting a home truth: that Georgia's invader so disqualified itself - hey, Putin insists Tehran's program is peaceful, not military - it can no longer to be allowed to act as both as Iran's provider of nuclear wherewithal and arms, and derail serious sanctions in its gatekeeper capacity at the United Nations Security Council.
Russia, though they have been exceedingly cooperative in restricting sales of military weapons to America's enemies, is now just like Iran: nuclear maniacs who wish to destroy the good democratic people of the world. Iran is evil; Russia is Iran's friend: therefore, Russia is evil. Guilt by association.
To do this, the Bush administration would have to open direct U.S.-Iran talks. It wouldn't only be a Bush administration gift to McCain, who's stuck with a rigid "no" on negotiations with Iran while Obama backs direct ones.
We won't talk to Iran; we won't talk to Russia; we don't talk to evil nations. We blow them away.
Much more, the move lifts the United States from paralysis, undercuts Russia and serves as the best available demonstration of America's will and capacity to act.
AHA! A way out of our drowning economy, our civil unrest, a way to show the world we are truly destined to be 'masters of the universe'.
This approach offers an escape from the just-woofin' on Georgia routine that turns Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder into posthumous visionaries concerning America's diminished world leverage.
Glad that old Eurotrash Chirac & Shroeder are gone; the new breed of French and German leaders are right where we want them; under our economic multi-national jackboot (Good dog, good dog).
Whatever the many other measures the United States and Europe need to take to protect Georgia and chasten Russia, it would provide a path and a perspective until Jan. 20, 2009, on the most pressing world problem.
That problem being: how can USA be Earth's hegemon if Russia keeps deliberately upsetting our plans?
Indeed, Georgia's tragedy is in part the child of Russia's reading of America's passivity on Iran.
We were just minding our own business in Iraq, when the Russia's became vicious in attacking our peacekeeping missile shields in the Czech Republic and Poland via Georgia.
Coupled now with U.S. insistence that all its options are open through any talks with the mullahs, breaking this mold that magnifies Moscow's importance would be Washington sending Russia an unmistakable and constructive message: enough.
Russia better get the message: USA dominates the globe. Don't dare think of resisting the USA; we control everything and will make you pay if you defy us.
Gates, a career Kremlinologist and former director of central intelligence, said: "We are all agreed that we need to stay very much in close collaboration with the Europeans and others.
We have to whup Eurotrash into alignment with the 'vision' we have. We will threaten them with every means possible, including consequences which hit them in the cajones: decreasing corporate profits.
I think there is a sense that we do have the time to calibrate reactions carefully. And I think there is agreement not to take any precipitous actions. But there is also agreement on the importance of continued support for Georgia's territorial integrity."
Oh lord, when will the EU understand WE ARE the masters? We decide who is a country and who is not. We must be patient with the EU until they willingly accept their servility to American global domination.
"We are all agreed that we need to stay very much in close collaboration with the Europeans and others." He cautioned that "if we act too precipitously, we could be the ones who are isolated."
Dam those European media who criticized us in Iraq. This time, our war will be waged by pressuring all our commercial allies to support us ideologically, OR ELSE!
As part of the new strategy, President George W. Bush notified Congress on Monday that, "in view of recent actions" by Russia, he was withdrawing from consideration an agreement for civilian nuclear cooperation that he and Vladimir Putin, then Russia's president and now the prime minister, negotiated in April after years of effort. While the step was the most meaningful show of displeasure the United States has made over Russia's military action in Georgia, it also reflected a more cautious response.
The deal was all but certain to die in Congress anyway, and the agreement could be revived by the administration should Russia's behavior improve, officials said.
Well, we have no military potency left....so we will use what we have to paint the Russians out of the picture....even if it is a crock of shite.
The issue of how to manage Russia is also playing into presidential politics. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, has long called for excluding Russia from the Group of 8 industrialized powers and has urged a firmer response. Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, has criticized the Kremlin's decision to go into Georgia but has made it clear that he favors more engagement.
Doesn't matter who is elected: warmonger 1 or warmonger 2. Either way, look out Europe and Central Asia. The AMERICANS are coming!
While the United States has been cautious in moving to punish Russia, it has thrown significant support behind Georgia, including a $1 billion economic assistance package that Bush proposed last week. The aid, officials said, was to shore up Georgia's economy and to help the political standing of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the republic's battered leader.
WE punish because WE are the judges of the world. Those countries who wish to be in our good graces for military aid (the only export we have) had better toe the mark, or will be 'isolated' also.
Overall, the administration's strategy reflects a desire to defend Georgia's territorial sovereignty and its symbolic role as an emerging democracy, while not precluding cooperation with Russia on a number of important long-term national security interests, including counterterrorism, nonproliferation and efforts to halt narcotics traffic.
We want our cake and to eat it too. Bar the intervention of Allah, we shall have it.
While the United States and Russia continue to share a number of national security interests, Gates said, "We would still like to see Russia headed toward a more constructively collaborative role in dealing with international problems — rather than throwing their food on the floor."
The ungrateful Russians must learn to kiss the hand of their masters. If not, the world will think of them as an ungrateful child.
In other interviews, a range of senior administration officials argued that Russia is already paying a price for its actions, as foreign investors appeared to be removing or withholding assets, prompting a decline in the ruble since the Kremlin's forces crossed into Georgia. The Russian stock market has also plummeted.
The price of defying USA hegemony is total national ruin. Read and learn those of you who wish to survive.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/08/europe/politicus.php?page=2
How refreshing that Russia does not involve itself in this dialogue of the American megalomaniacs. I shudder to think of the mentality of those readers who take the USA rhetoric as truth.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Aafia Siddiqui
I sometimes find stories on the internet that are so deeply moving, such profound mirrors of my own inadequacies, that I am silent, humbled in my own shame of lacking the courage I see others demonstrating.
One such story it that of Aafia Siddiqui. Pakistani born, Aafia was American educated, eventually becoming a doctor of neuroscience with a degree from MIT, and an impressive array of published papers through 1999. She became the focus of 'terrorist witchhunters' in 2001 and in 2003, she and her 3 children disappeared into the torturous labrinth of renditions; she has been deposited, sans children, in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan for more than five years.
Pursuant to legal requests for her whereabouts (recall the Pakistan Judges were castrated by Musharraf in 2007), Aafia was finally located and brought to New York to be charged for shooting an FBI agent. However, after five years in isolation and enduring various interrogation methods by her captors, she was unable to appear in court; and the presiding judge so ordered her to receive medical treatment before her next appearance (she appeared incoherent, in a wheelchair).
The details of the alleged shooting are contradict0ry in the extreme; one can only imagine how a lone woman overpowered American and Afghani men, armed to the hilt, stole one of their guns and shot an agent. The FBI then of course shot her. She must have been a very clever woman to overpower all those military men, fully armed; especially since she had just come out of 5 years in isolation (with no knowledge of her children), had her teeth pulled, liver removed and most likely have severe bowel problems after having been repeated raped.
I can see why the USA would find her dangerous alright.
It is even painful to try and imagine the physical and psychological pain Aafia has endured, year after year; yet she had the courage to keep living, perhaps for her children. There is no moral or legal justification for what has been done to her, in any civilized society anywhere. There should be a trial alright; but it is her Pakistani/USA torturers who should be in the spotlight.
Now you know about her. I have provided a link below, but perhaps you prefer your own research. I can do nothing to help her. But I can tell you, and ask you to sign the petition.
Scales tilt by adding grains of sand to one side or the other. Please add your grain to her side..
http://www.petitiononline.com/af258633/petition.html
You can find updated reports at http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/1162264. I recommend an image search of 'Aafia Siddiqui' for the very best articles giving all sides to the situation. Video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMcJr0NbzNA
One such story it that of Aafia Siddiqui. Pakistani born, Aafia was American educated, eventually becoming a doctor of neuroscience with a degree from MIT, and an impressive array of published papers through 1999. She became the focus of 'terrorist witchhunters' in 2001 and in 2003, she and her 3 children disappeared into the torturous labrinth of renditions; she has been deposited, sans children, in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan for more than five years.Pursuant to legal requests for her whereabouts (recall the Pakistan Judges were castrated by Musharraf in 2007), Aafia was finally located and brought to New York to be charged for shooting an FBI agent. However, after five years in isolation and enduring various interrogation methods by her captors, she was unable to appear in court; and the presiding judge so ordered her to receive medical treatment before her next appearance (she appeared incoherent, in a wheelchair).
The details of the alleged shooting are contradict0ry in the extreme; one can only imagine how a lone woman overpowered American and Afghani men, armed to the hilt, stole one of their guns and shot an agent. The FBI then of course shot her. She must have been a very clever woman to overpower all those military men, fully armed; especially since she had just come out of 5 years in isolation (with no knowledge of her children), had her teeth pulled, liver removed and most likely have severe bowel problems after having been repeated raped.
I can see why the USA would find her dangerous alright.
It is even painful to try and imagine the physical and psychological pain Aafia has endured, year after year; yet she had the courage to keep living, perhaps for her children. There is no moral or legal justification for what has been done to her, in any civilized society anywhere. There should be a trial alright; but it is her Pakistani/USA torturers who should be in the spotlight.
Now you know about her. I have provided a link below, but perhaps you prefer your own research. I can do nothing to help her. But I can tell you, and ask you to sign the petition.
Scales tilt by adding grains of sand to one side or the other. Please add your grain to her side..
http://www.petitiononline.com/af258633/petition.html
You can find updated reports at http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/1162264. I recommend an image search of 'Aafia Siddiqui' for the very best articles giving all sides to the situation. Video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMcJr0NbzNA
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Caucasian Oil Corridor - Lucid comments
What in tarnation is the EU doing?
Preface: Try as I may, I have not been able to understand why the EU elites are acting as if they do not know that this entire mess in Georgia is USA/Israel backed. They know this is all about oil pipelines: and we know they know. Merkel are Sarkozy are doing the best imitation of Texas parlour house whores since Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven'. Figuring out what is going on in their frenzied capitalist brains is difficult though.
I came across a very refreshing blog that explains the oil/pipeline dynamics of Russia and Europe and how a Federation might benefit all. It is rather lucid and so I thought I might share it here.
Zagiel
Location: Slovakia, Bratislava
PostPosted: Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:15 pm
Well, OK then. I respect anybody's opinion, if it's an opinion of a majority.
But history proves that any gathering that's not firm enough can, and 99% will, be broken down by destroying the weakest link in the chain by enemy's bribery.
But me myself, I'll always remain federalist. We had formed a federation with our Czech brothers with no fear, and had not a single problem with them, it's just that our ways parted at last. I see no reason for any nation entering EU to be afraid of too much integration, 'cause if it goes wrong, any MS can just leave any time it wants.
Why to form a federation when the things go as well according to the current rules? Well, they don't go that well in the field of energy policy, which seems to be the most important one during this decade.
EU is the weakest energy player in the world. The fact, that we're no major oil exporter, cannot be helped and need not be cried about, if we exert sufficient political force our a part of the world that has the oil. US conquered half of the Middle East (besides the fact that it still has many gigabarels of oil untouched in its own soil - quite a mercantilistic approach for a biggest freed-trade speaker, aren't you a bit schizophrenic, yanks?).
Russia has a lot of supplies.
And China silently conquered half of the strategic energy enterprises in Africa during last 5-8 years. Maybe you've missed it, because it never was on front-pages of newspaper - media moguls simply could not write about China fighting for oil, 'cause it'd cast a different light on these super-duper-righteous wars "for democracy" the yanks were commiting. But if google up a list of oil-rich African states and google the particular nations with the word 'China', you'll get many records of african bank, refinery & infrastructures acquisitions and loans by China, all since the yanks invaded first ME country.
EU has 4 options.
A: Middle-East. Al-Maliki is eager to let us in, so are his neighbours. Iran wants to switch from petro-dollar to petro-euro for a long time, but knows too well it's too dangerous and EU is too afraid to land a hand. Anyway Nabucco pipeline must go through Turkey. Which gives Turkey certain power over EU. To avoid this, they needed to by bound. The only available way to bind them was to have them submit to EU laws. But the Turks know their position very well, so they are willing to cooperate only if they get a voice. And that can be too dangerous and was rejected. So Nabucco is lost.
B: The remntants of Africa, specifically Qaddafi. This still can prove fruitful, as the majority of the world already changed its rethorics towards Qaddafi during last year (as he's got something that everybody wants), but Qaddafi keeps rejecting agreements outside of his proposed African Union (what a shame for quarelling europeans, who still aren't able to do such a thing).
C: Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan. A bit unstable, because it's too close to Russia and a bit inconvenient, if the EU decided to go more independent of US, because it's it practically in US hands.
D: Russia. European dependency on Russia is alarming, and gas dependency is supposed to double in a decade. Parts of the eastern Europe, like mine, are 100% dependent. Russia knows this and will use this to its advatage. It already did, in Ukraine & Czech republic, pausing its supply. And for several last years, it keeps building a pipeline to China, which is desperate to get it done, and promises to give anything for it. Once the last section of that pipeline is done, Russians can stop the european supply with almost no fear of financial loss.
Now this is the point why I mentioned the need of some federational approach in energy policy. Nowadays Russia rules the Europe through bilateral energy agreements: Germany has its undersea pipeline project, Sarky cares only about dealing with his closest neighbours (hence Mediterranean union), you folks around North sea can get something there (although not much) and us easterers can become short-sighted and form bilateral agreement with Russia anytime soon too.
As far as Russia has many bilateral agreements instead of a common one on european level, obligatory for each MS, it can exert its power - charging unfriendly nation more and a friendly one less. But as soon as federative approach arises, we can better bent Russians to sign an agreement which will try to avoid the possibility to blackmail us.
But this must be done before China is connected.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Refreshing Analysis on Russia-USA
The Medvedev Doctrine and American Strategy
Preface: Reading the media reports on the Georgia/Russia conflict is frought with bias traps from all perspectives. Parsing the bias to a minimum and analysing the strategic options of all players remains the best chance to understand the geopolitical context in which we find ourselves. I have posted this article as it delineates clearly the critical aspects which must be addressed by all parties in the future. Enjoy.
September 2, 2008
By George Friedman
The United States has been fighting a war in the Islamic world since 2001. Its main theaters of operation are in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its politico-military focus spreads throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. The situation on Aug. 7, 2008, was as follows:
1. The war in Iraq was moving toward an acceptable but not optimal solution. The government in Baghdad was not pro-American, but neither was it an Iranian puppet, and that was the best that could be hoped for. The United States anticipated pulling out troops, but not in a disorderly fashion.
2. The war in Afghanistan was deteriorating for the United States and NATO forces. The Taliban was increasingly effective, and large areas of the country were falling to its control. Force in Afghanistan was insufficient, and any troops withdrawn from Iraq would have to be deployed to Afghanistan to stabilize the situation. Political conditions in neighboring Pakistan were deteriorating, and that deterioration inevitably affected Afghanistan.
3. The United States had been locked in a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program, demanding that Tehran halt enrichment of uranium or face U.S. action. The United States had assembled a group of six countries (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) that agreed with the U.S. goal, was engaged in negotiations with Iran, and had agreed at some point to impose sanctions on Iran if Tehran failed to comply. The United States was also leaking stories about impending air attacks on Iran by Israel or the United States if Tehran didn’t abandon its enrichment program. The United States had the implicit agreement of the group of six not to sell arms to Tehran, creating a real sense of isolation in Iran.
* The Russian Resurgence
In short, the United States remained heavily committed to a region stretching from Iraq to Pakistan, with main force committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possibility of commitments to Pakistan (and above all to Iran) on the table. U.S. ground forces were stretched to the limit, and U.S. airpower, naval and land-based forces had to stand by for the possibility of an air campaign in Iran — regardless of whether the U.S. planned an attack, since the credibility of a bluff depended on the availability of force.
The situation in this region actually was improving, but the United States had to remain committed there. It was therefore no accident that the Russians invaded Georgia on Aug. 8 following a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. Forgetting the details of who did what to whom, the United States had created a massive window of opportunity for the Russians: For the foreseeable future, the United States had no significant forces to spare to deploy elsewhere in the world, nor the ability to sustain them in extended combat. Moreover, the United States was relying on Russian cooperation both against Iran and potentially in Afghanistan, where Moscow’s influence with some factions remains substantial. The United States needed the Russians and couldn’t block the Russians. Therefore, the Russians inevitably chose this moment to strike.
On Sunday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in effect ran up the Jolly Roger. Whatever the United States thought it was dealing with in Russia, Medvedev made the Russian position very clear. He stated Russian foreign policy in five succinct points, which we can think of as the Medvedev Doctrine (and which we see fit to quote here):
* First, Russia recognizes the primacy of the fundamental principles of international law, which define the relations between civilized peoples. We will build our relations with other countries within the framework of these principles and this concept of international law.
* Second, the world should be multipolar. A single-pole world is unacceptable. Domination is
something we cannot allow. We cannot accept a world order in which one country makes all the decisions, even as serious and influential a country as the United States of America. Such a world is unstable and threatened by conflict.
* Third, Russia does not want confrontation with any other country. Russia has no intention of isolating itself. We will develop friendly relations with Europe, the United States, and other countries, as much as is possible.
* Fourth, protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be, is an unquestionable priority for our country. Our foreign policy decisions will be based on this need. We will also protect the interests of our business community abroad. It should be clear to all that we will respond to any aggressive acts committed against us.
* Finally, fifth, as is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbors. We will pay particular attention to our work in these regions and build friendly ties with these countries, our close neighbors.
Medvedev concluded, “These are the principles I will follow in carrying out our foreign policy. As for the future, it depends not only on us but also on our friends and partners in the international community. They have a choice.”
The second point in this doctrine states that Russia does not accept the primacy of the United States in the international system. According to the third point, while Russia wants good relations with the United States and Europe, this depends on their behavior toward Russia and not just on Russia’s behavior. The fourth point states that Russia will protect the interests of Russians wherever they are — even if they live in the Baltic states or in Georgia, for example. This provides a doctrinal basis for intervention in such countries if Russia finds it necessary.
The fifth point is the critical one: “As is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests.” In other words, the Russians have special interests in the former Soviet Union and in friendly relations with these states. Intrusions by others into these regions that undermine pro-Russian regimes will be regarded as a threat to Russia’s “special interests.”
Thus, the Georgian conflict was not an isolated event — rather, Medvedev is saying that Russia is engaged in a general redefinition of the regional and global system. Locally, it would not be correct to say that Russia is trying to resurrect the Soviet Union or the Russian empire. It would be correct to say that Russia is creating a new structure of relations in the geography of its predecessors, with a new institutional structure with Moscow at its center. Globally, the Russians want to use this new regional power — and substantial Russian nuclear assets — to be part of a global system in which the United States loses its primacy.
These are ambitious goals, to say the least. But the Russians believe that the United States is off balance in the Islamic world and that there is an opportunity here, if they move quickly, to create a new reality before the United States is ready to respond. Europe has neither the military weight nor the will to actively resist Russia. Moreover, the Europeans are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas supplies over the coming years, and Russia can survive without selling it to them far better than the Europeans can survive without buying it. The Europeans are not a substantial factor in the equation, nor are they likely to become substantial.
This leaves the United States in an extremely difficult strategic position. The United States opposed the Soviet Union after 1945 not only for ideological reasons but also for geopolitical ones. If the Soviet Union had broken out of its encirclement and dominated all of Europe, the total economic power at its disposal, coupled with its population, would have allowed the Soviets to construct a navy that could challenge U.S. maritime hegemony and put the continental United States in jeopardy. It was U.S. policy during World Wars I and II and the Cold War to act militarily to prevent any power from dominating the Eurasian landmass. For the United States, this was the most important task throughout the 20th century.
The U.S.-jihadist war was waged in a strategic framework that assumed that the question of hegemony over Eurasia was closed. Germany’s defeat in World War II and the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War meant that there was no claimant to Eurasia, and the United States was free to focus on what appeared to be the current priority — the defeat of radical Islamism. It appeared that the main threat to this strategy was the patience of the American public, not an attempt to resurrect a major Eurasian power.
The United States now faces a massive strategic dilemma, and it has limited military options against the Russians. It could choose a naval option, in which it would block the four Russian maritime outlets, the Sea of Japan and the Black, Baltic and Barents seas. The United States has ample military force with which to do this and could potentially do so without allied cooperation, which it would lack. It is extremely unlikely that the NATO council would unanimously support a blockade of Russia, which would be an act of war.
But while a blockade like this would certainly hurt the Russians, Russia is ultimately a land power. It is also capable of shipping and importing through third parties, meaning it could potentially acquire and ship key goods through European or Turkish ports (or Iranian ports, for that matter). The blockade option is thus more attractive on first glance than on deeper analysis.
More important, any overt U.S. action against Russia would result in counteractions. During the Cold War, the Soviets attacked American global interest not by sending Soviet troops, but by supporting regimes and factions with weapons and economic aid. Vietnam was the classic example: The Russians tied down 500,000 U.S. troops without placing major Russian forces at risk. Throughout the world, the Soviets implemented programs of subversion and aid to friendly regimes, forcing the United States either to accept pro-Soviet regimes, as with Cuba, or fight them at disproportionate cost.
In the present situation, the Russian response would strike at the heart of American strategy in the Islamic world. In the long run, the Russians have little interest in strengthening the Islamic world — but for the moment, they have substantial interest in maintaining American imbalance and sapping U.S. forces. The Russians have a long history of supporting Middle Eastern regimes
with weapons shipments, and it is no accident that the first world leader they met with after invading Georgia was Syrian President Bashar al Assad. This was a clear signal that if the U.S. responded aggressively to Russia’s actions in Georgia, Moscow would ship a range of weapons to Syria — and far worse, to Iran. Indeed, Russia could conceivably send weapons to factions in Iraq that do not support the current regime, as well as to groups like Hezbollah. Moscow also could encourage the Iranians to withdraw their support for the Iraqi government and plunge Iraq back into conflict. Finally, Russia could ship weapons to the Taliban and work to further destabilize Pakistan.
At the moment, the United States faces the strategic problem that the Russians have options while the United States does not. Not only does the U.S. commitment of ground forces in the Islamic world leave the United States without strategic reserve, but the political arrangements under which these troops operate make them highly vulnerable to Russian manipulation — with few satisfactory U.S. counters.
The U.S. government is trying to think through how it can maintain its commitment in the Islamic world and resist the Russian reassertion of hegemony in the former Soviet Union. If the United States could very rapidly win its wars in the region, this would be possible. But the Russians are in a position to prolong these wars, and even without such agitation, the American ability to close off the conflicts is severely limited. The United States could massively increase the size of its army and make deployments into the Baltics, Ukraine and Central Asia to thwart Russian plans, but it would take years to build up these forces and the active cooperation of Europe to deploy them. Logistically, European support would be essential — but the Europeans in general, and the Germans in particular, have no appetite for this war. Expanding the U.S. Army is necessary, but it does not affect the current strategic reality.
This logistical issue might be manageable, but the real heart of this problem is not merely the deployment of U.S. forces in the Islamic world — it is the Russians’ ability to use weapons sales and covert means to deteriorate conditions dramatically. With active Russian hostility added to the current reality, the strategic situation in the Islamic world could rapidly spin out of control.
The United States is therefore trapped by its commitment to the Islamic world. It does not have sufficient forces to block Russian hegemony in the former Soviet Union, and if it tries to block the Russians with naval or air forces, it faces a dangerous riposte from the Russians in the Islamic world. If it does nothing, it creates a strategic threat that potentially towers over the threat in the Islamic world.
The United States now has to make a fundamental strategic decision. If it remains committed
to its current strategy, it cannot respond to the Russians. If it does not respond to the Russians for five or 10 years, the world will look very much like it did from 1945 to 1992. There will be another Cold War at the very least, with a peer power much poorer than the United States but prepared to devote huge amounts of money to national defense.
There are four broad U.S. options:
1. Attempt to make a settlement with Iran that would guarantee the neutral stability of Iraq and permit the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces there. Iran is the key here. The Iranians might also mistrust a re-emergent Russia, and while Tehran might be tempted to work with the Russians against the Americans, Iran might consider an arrangement with the United States — particularly if the United States refocuses its attentions elsewhere. On the upside, this would free the U.S. from Iraq. On the downside, the Iranians might not want —or honor — such a deal.
2. Enter into negotiations with the Russians, granting them the sphere of influence they want in the former Soviet Union in return for guarantees not to project Russian power into Europe proper. The Russians will be busy consolidating their position for years, giving the U.S. time to re-energize NATO. On the upside, this would free the United States to continue its war in the Islamic world. On the downside, it would create a framework for the re-emergence of a powerful Russian empire that would be as difficult to contain as the Soviet Union.
3. Refuse to engage the Russians and leave the problem to the Europeans. On the upside, this would allow the United States to continue war in the Islamic world and force the Europeans to act. On the downside, the Europeans are too divided, dependent on Russia and dispirited to resist the Russians. This strategy could speed up Russia’s re-emergence.
4. Rapidly disengage from Iraq, leaving a residual force there and in Afghanistan. The upside is that this creates a reserve force to reinforce the Baltics and Ukraine that might restrain Russia in the former Soviet Union. The downside is that it would create chaos in the Islamic world, threatening regimes that have sided with the United States and potentially reviving effective intercontinental terrorism. The trade-off is between a hegemonic threat from Eurasia and instability and a terror threat from the Islamic world.
We are pointing to very stark strategic choices. Continuing the war in the Islamic world has a much higher cost now than it did when it began, and Russia potentially poses a far greater threat to the United States than the Islamic world does. What might have been a rational policy in 2001 or 2003 has now turned into a very dangerous enterprise, because a hostile major power now has the option of making the U.S. position in the Middle East enormously more difficult.
If a U.S. settlement with Iran is impossible, and a diplomatic solution with the Russians that would keep them from taking a hegemonic position in the former Soviet Union cannot be reached, then the United States must consider rapidly abandoning its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and redeploying its forces to block Russian expansion. The threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was far graver than the threat posed now by the fragmented Islamic world. In the end, the nations there will cancel each other out, and militant organizations will be something the United States simply has to deal with. This is not an ideal solution by any means, but the clock appears to have run out on the American war in the Islamic world.
We do not expect the United States to take this option. It is difficult to abandon a conflict that has gone on this long when it is not yet crystal clear that the Russians will actually be a threat later. (It is far easier for an analyst to make such suggestions than it is for a president to act on them.) Instead, the United States will attempt to bridge the Russian situation with gestures and half measures.
Nevertheless, American national strategy is in crisis. The United States has insufficient power to cope with two threats and must choose between the two. Continuing the current strategy means choosing to deal with the Islamic threat rather than the Russian one, and that is reasonable only if the Islamic threat represents a greater danger to American interests than the Russian threat does. It is difficult to see how the chaos of the Islamic world will cohere to form a global threat. But it is not difficult to imagine a Russia guided by the Medvedev Doctrine rapidly becoming a global threat and a direct danger to American interests.
We expect no immediate change in American strategic deployments — and we expect this to be regretted later. However, given U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s trip to the Caucasus region, now would be the time to see some movement in U.S. foreign policy. If Cheney isn’t going to be talking to the Russians, he needs to be talking to the Iranians. Otherwise, he will be writing checks in the region that the U.S. is in no position to cash.
www.stratfor.com
Preface: Reading the media reports on the Georgia/Russia conflict is frought with bias traps from all perspectives. Parsing the bias to a minimum and analysing the strategic options of all players remains the best chance to understand the geopolitical context in which we find ourselves. I have posted this article as it delineates clearly the critical aspects which must be addressed by all parties in the future. Enjoy.
September 2, 2008By George Friedman
The United States has been fighting a war in the Islamic world since 2001. Its main theaters of operation are in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its politico-military focus spreads throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. The situation on Aug. 7, 2008, was as follows:
1. The war in Iraq was moving toward an acceptable but not optimal solution. The government in Baghdad was not pro-American, but neither was it an Iranian puppet, and that was the best that could be hoped for. The United States anticipated pulling out troops, but not in a disorderly fashion.
2. The war in Afghanistan was deteriorating for the United States and NATO forces. The Taliban was increasingly effective, and large areas of the country were falling to its control. Force in Afghanistan was insufficient, and any troops withdrawn from Iraq would have to be deployed to Afghanistan to stabilize the situation. Political conditions in neighboring Pakistan were deteriorating, and that deterioration inevitably affected Afghanistan.
3. The United States had been locked in a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program, demanding that Tehran halt enrichment of uranium or face U.S. action. The United States had assembled a group of six countries (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) that agreed with the U.S. goal, was engaged in negotiations with Iran, and had agreed at some point to impose sanctions on Iran if Tehran failed to comply. The United States was also leaking stories about impending air attacks on Iran by Israel or the United States if Tehran didn’t abandon its enrichment program. The United States had the implicit agreement of the group of six not to sell arms to Tehran, creating a real sense of isolation in Iran.
* The Russian Resurgence
In short, the United States remained heavily committed to a region stretching from Iraq to Pakistan, with main force committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possibility of commitments to Pakistan (and above all to Iran) on the table. U.S. ground forces were stretched to the limit, and U.S. airpower, naval and land-based forces had to stand by for the possibility of an air campaign in Iran — regardless of whether the U.S. planned an attack, since the credibility of a bluff depended on the availability of force.
The situation in this region actually was improving, but the United States had to remain committed there. It was therefore no accident that the Russians invaded Georgia on Aug. 8 following a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. Forgetting the details of who did what to whom, the United States had created a massive window of opportunity for the Russians: For the foreseeable future, the United States had no significant forces to spare to deploy elsewhere in the world, nor the ability to sustain them in extended combat. Moreover, the United States was relying on Russian cooperation both against Iran and potentially in Afghanistan, where Moscow’s influence with some factions remains substantial. The United States needed the Russians and couldn’t block the Russians. Therefore, the Russians inevitably chose this moment to strike.
On Sunday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in effect ran up the Jolly Roger. Whatever the United States thought it was dealing with in Russia, Medvedev made the Russian position very clear. He stated Russian foreign policy in five succinct points, which we can think of as the Medvedev Doctrine (and which we see fit to quote here):
* First, Russia recognizes the primacy of the fundamental principles of international law, which define the relations between civilized peoples. We will build our relations with other countries within the framework of these principles and this concept of international law.
* Second, the world should be multipolar. A single-pole world is unacceptable. Domination is
something we cannot allow. We cannot accept a world order in which one country makes all the decisions, even as serious and influential a country as the United States of America. Such a world is unstable and threatened by conflict.* Third, Russia does not want confrontation with any other country. Russia has no intention of isolating itself. We will develop friendly relations with Europe, the United States, and other countries, as much as is possible.
* Fourth, protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be, is an unquestionable priority for our country. Our foreign policy decisions will be based on this need. We will also protect the interests of our business community abroad. It should be clear to all that we will respond to any aggressive acts committed against us.
* Finally, fifth, as is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbors. We will pay particular attention to our work in these regions and build friendly ties with these countries, our close neighbors.
Medvedev concluded, “These are the principles I will follow in carrying out our foreign policy. As for the future, it depends not only on us but also on our friends and partners in the international community. They have a choice.”
The second point in this doctrine states that Russia does not accept the primacy of the United States in the international system. According to the third point, while Russia wants good relations with the United States and Europe, this depends on their behavior toward Russia and not just on Russia’s behavior. The fourth point states that Russia will protect the interests of Russians wherever they are — even if they live in the Baltic states or in Georgia, for example. This provides a doctrinal basis for intervention in such countries if Russia finds it necessary.
The fifth point is the critical one: “As is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests.” In other words, the Russians have special interests in the former Soviet Union and in friendly relations with these states. Intrusions by others into these regions that undermine pro-Russian regimes will be regarded as a threat to Russia’s “special interests.”
Thus, the Georgian conflict was not an isolated event — rather, Medvedev is saying that Russia is engaged in a general redefinition of the regional and global system. Locally, it would not be correct to say that Russia is trying to resurrect the Soviet Union or the Russian empire. It would be correct to say that Russia is creating a new structure of relations in the geography of its predecessors, with a new institutional structure with Moscow at its center. Globally, the Russians want to use this new regional power — and substantial Russian nuclear assets — to be part of a global system in which the United States loses its primacy.
These are ambitious goals, to say the least. But the Russians believe that the United States is off balance in the Islamic world and that there is an opportunity here, if they move quickly, to create a new reality before the United States is ready to respond. Europe has neither the military weight nor the will to actively resist Russia. Moreover, the Europeans are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas supplies over the coming years, and Russia can survive without selling it to them far better than the Europeans can survive without buying it. The Europeans are not a substantial factor in the equation, nor are they likely to become substantial.
This leaves the United States in an extremely difficult strategic position. The United States opposed the Soviet Union after 1945 not only for ideological reasons but also for geopolitical ones. If the Soviet Union had broken out of its encirclement and dominated all of Europe, the total economic power at its disposal, coupled with its population, would have allowed the Soviets to construct a navy that could challenge U.S. maritime hegemony and put the continental United States in jeopardy. It was U.S. policy during World Wars I and II and the Cold War to act militarily to prevent any power from dominating the Eurasian landmass. For the United States, this was the most important task throughout the 20th century.
The U.S.-jihadist war was waged in a strategic framework that assumed that the question of hegemony over Eurasia was closed. Germany’s defeat in World War II and the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War meant that there was no claimant to Eurasia, and the United States was free to focus on what appeared to be the current priority — the defeat of radical Islamism. It appeared that the main threat to this strategy was the patience of the American public, not an attempt to resurrect a major Eurasian power.
The United States now faces a massive strategic dilemma, and it has limited military options against the Russians. It could choose a naval option, in which it would block the four Russian maritime outlets, the Sea of Japan and the Black, Baltic and Barents seas. The United States has ample military force with which to do this and could potentially do so without allied cooperation, which it would lack. It is extremely unlikely that the NATO council would unanimously support a blockade of Russia, which would be an act of war.
But while a blockade like this would certainly hurt the Russians, Russia is ultimately a land power. It is also capable of shipping and importing through third parties, meaning it could potentially acquire and ship key goods through European or Turkish ports (or Iranian ports, for that matter). The blockade option is thus more attractive on first glance than on deeper analysis.
More important, any overt U.S. action against Russia would result in counteractions. During the Cold War, the Soviets attacked American global interest not by sending Soviet troops, but by supporting regimes and factions with weapons and economic aid. Vietnam was the classic example: The Russians tied down 500,000 U.S. troops without placing major Russian forces at risk. Throughout the world, the Soviets implemented programs of subversion and aid to friendly regimes, forcing the United States either to accept pro-Soviet regimes, as with Cuba, or fight them at disproportionate cost.
In the present situation, the Russian response would strike at the heart of American strategy in the Islamic world. In the long run, the Russians have little interest in strengthening the Islamic world — but for the moment, they have substantial interest in maintaining American imbalance and sapping U.S. forces. The Russians have a long history of supporting Middle Eastern regimes
with weapons shipments, and it is no accident that the first world leader they met with after invading Georgia was Syrian President Bashar al Assad. This was a clear signal that if the U.S. responded aggressively to Russia’s actions in Georgia, Moscow would ship a range of weapons to Syria — and far worse, to Iran. Indeed, Russia could conceivably send weapons to factions in Iraq that do not support the current regime, as well as to groups like Hezbollah. Moscow also could encourage the Iranians to withdraw their support for the Iraqi government and plunge Iraq back into conflict. Finally, Russia could ship weapons to the Taliban and work to further destabilize Pakistan.At the moment, the United States faces the strategic problem that the Russians have options while the United States does not. Not only does the U.S. commitment of ground forces in the Islamic world leave the United States without strategic reserve, but the political arrangements under which these troops operate make them highly vulnerable to Russian manipulation — with few satisfactory U.S. counters.
The U.S. government is trying to think through how it can maintain its commitment in the Islamic world and resist the Russian reassertion of hegemony in the former Soviet Union. If the United States could very rapidly win its wars in the region, this would be possible. But the Russians are in a position to prolong these wars, and even without such agitation, the American ability to close off the conflicts is severely limited. The United States could massively increase the size of its army and make deployments into the Baltics, Ukraine and Central Asia to thwart Russian plans, but it would take years to build up these forces and the active cooperation of Europe to deploy them. Logistically, European support would be essential — but the Europeans in general, and the Germans in particular, have no appetite for this war. Expanding the U.S. Army is necessary, but it does not affect the current strategic reality.
This logistical issue might be manageable, but the real heart of this problem is not merely the deployment of U.S. forces in the Islamic world — it is the Russians’ ability to use weapons sales and covert means to deteriorate conditions dramatically. With active Russian hostility added to the current reality, the strategic situation in the Islamic world could rapidly spin out of control.
The United States is therefore trapped by its commitment to the Islamic world. It does not have sufficient forces to block Russian hegemony in the former Soviet Union, and if it tries to block the Russians with naval or air forces, it faces a dangerous riposte from the Russians in the Islamic world. If it does nothing, it creates a strategic threat that potentially towers over the threat in the Islamic world.
The United States now has to make a fundamental strategic decision. If it remains committed
to its current strategy, it cannot respond to the Russians. If it does not respond to the Russians for five or 10 years, the world will look very much like it did from 1945 to 1992. There will be another Cold War at the very least, with a peer power much poorer than the United States but prepared to devote huge amounts of money to national defense.There are four broad U.S. options:
1. Attempt to make a settlement with Iran that would guarantee the neutral stability of Iraq and permit the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces there. Iran is the key here. The Iranians might also mistrust a re-emergent Russia, and while Tehran might be tempted to work with the Russians against the Americans, Iran might consider an arrangement with the United States — particularly if the United States refocuses its attentions elsewhere. On the upside, this would free the U.S. from Iraq. On the downside, the Iranians might not want —or honor — such a deal.
2. Enter into negotiations with the Russians, granting them the sphere of influence they want in the former Soviet Union in return for guarantees not to project Russian power into Europe proper. The Russians will be busy consolidating their position for years, giving the U.S. time to re-energize NATO. On the upside, this would free the United States to continue its war in the Islamic world. On the downside, it would create a framework for the re-emergence of a powerful Russian empire that would be as difficult to contain as the Soviet Union.
3. Refuse to engage the Russians and leave the problem to the Europeans. On the upside, this would allow the United States to continue war in the Islamic world and force the Europeans to act. On the downside, the Europeans are too divided, dependent on Russia and dispirited to resist the Russians. This strategy could speed up Russia’s re-emergence.
4. Rapidly disengage from Iraq, leaving a residual force there and in Afghanistan. The upside is that this creates a reserve force to reinforce the Baltics and Ukraine that might restrain Russia in the former Soviet Union. The downside is that it would create chaos in the Islamic world, threatening regimes that have sided with the United States and potentially reviving effective intercontinental terrorism. The trade-off is between a hegemonic threat from Eurasia and instability and a terror threat from the Islamic world.
We are pointing to very stark strategic choices. Continuing the war in the Islamic world has a much higher cost now than it did when it began, and Russia potentially poses a far greater threat to the United States than the Islamic world does. What might have been a rational policy in 2001 or 2003 has now turned into a very dangerous enterprise, because a hostile major power now has the option of making the U.S. position in the Middle East enormously more difficult.
If a U.S. settlement with Iran is impossible, and a diplomatic solution with the Russians that would keep them from taking a hegemonic position in the former Soviet Union cannot be reached, then the United States must consider rapidly abandoning its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and redeploying its forces to block Russian expansion. The threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was far graver than the threat posed now by the fragmented Islamic world. In the end, the nations there will cancel each other out, and militant organizations will be something the United States simply has to deal with. This is not an ideal solution by any means, but the clock appears to have run out on the American war in the Islamic world.
We do not expect the United States to take this option. It is difficult to abandon a conflict that has gone on this long when it is not yet crystal clear that the Russians will actually be a threat later. (It is far easier for an analyst to make such suggestions than it is for a president to act on them.) Instead, the United States will attempt to bridge the Russian situation with gestures and half measures.
Nevertheless, American national strategy is in crisis. The United States has insufficient power to cope with two threats and must choose between the two. Continuing the current strategy means choosing to deal with the Islamic threat rather than the Russian one, and that is reasonable only if the Islamic threat represents a greater danger to American interests than the Russian threat does. It is difficult to see how the chaos of the Islamic world will cohere to form a global threat. But it is not difficult to imagine a Russia guided by the Medvedev Doctrine rapidly becoming a global threat and a direct danger to American interests.
We expect no immediate change in American strategic deployments — and we expect this to be regretted later. However, given U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s trip to the Caucasus region, now would be the time to see some movement in U.S. foreign policy. If Cheney isn’t going to be talking to the Russians, he needs to be talking to the Iranians. Otherwise, he will be writing checks in the region that the U.S. is in no position to cash.
www.stratfor.com
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Georgia and Kosovo
Georgia and Kosovo: A Single Intertwined Crisis
August 25, 2008
By George Friedman
The Russo-Georgian war was rooted in broad geopolitical processes. In large part it was simply the result of the cyclical reassertion of Russian power. The Russian empire — czarist and Soviet — expanded to its borders in the 17th and 19th centuries. It collapsed in 1992. The Western powers wanted to make the disintegration permanent. It was inevitable that Russia would, in due course, want to reassert its claims. That it happened in Georgia was simply the result of circumstance.
There is, however, another context within which to view this, the context of Russian perceptions of U.S. and European intentions and of U.S. and European perceptions of Russian capabilities. This context shaped the policies that led to the Russo-Georgian war. And those attitudes can only be understood if we trace the question of Kosovo, because the Russo-Georgian war was forged over the last decade over the Kosovo question.
Yugoslavia broke up into its component republics in the early 1990s. The borders of the republics did not cohere to the distribution of nationalities. Many — Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and so on — found themselves citizens of republics where the majorities were not of their ethnicities and disliked the minorities intensely for historical reasons. Wars were fought between Croatia and Serbia (still calling itself Yugoslavia because Montenegro was part of it), Bosnia and Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia. Other countries in the region became involved as well.
One conflict became particularly brutal. Bosnia had a large area dominated by Serbs. This
region wanted to secede from Bosnia and rejoin Serbia. The Bosnians objected and an internal war in Bosnia took place, with the Serbian government involved. This war involved the single greatest bloodletting of the bloody Balkan wars, the mass murder by Serbs of Bosnians.
Here we must pause and define some terms that are very casually thrown around. Genocide is the crime of trying to annihilate an entire people. War crimes are actions that violate the rules of war. If a soldier shoots a prisoner, he has committed a war crime. Then there is a class called “crimes against humanity.” It is intended to denote those crimes that are too vast to be included in normal charges of murder or rape. They may not involve genocide, in that the annihilation of a race or nation is not at stake, but they may also go well beyond war crimes, which are much lesser offenses. The events in Bosnia were reasonably deemed crimes against humanity. They did not constitute genocide and they were more than war crimes.
At the time, the Americans and Europeans did nothing about these crimes, which became an internal political issue as the magnitude of the Serbian crimes became clear. In this context, the Clinton administration helped negotiate the Dayton Accords, which were intended to end the Balkan wars and indeed managed to go quite far in achieving this. The Dayton Accords were built around the principle that there could be no adjustment in the borders of the former Yugoslav republics. Ethnic Serbs would live under Bosnian rule. The principle that existing borders were sacrosanct was embedded in the Dayton Accords.
In the late 1990s, a crisis began to develop in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Over the years, Albanians had moved into the province in a broad migration. By 1997, the province was overwhelmingly Albanian, although it had not only been historically part of Serbia but also its historical foundation. Nevertheless, the Albanians showed significant intentions of moving toward either a separate state or unification with Albania. Serbia moved to resist this, increasing its military forces and indicating an intention to crush the Albanian resistance.
There were many claims that the Serbians were repeating the crimes against humanity that were committed in Bosnia. The Americans and Europeans, burned by Bosnia, were eager to demonstrate their will. Arguing that something between crimes against humanity and genocide was under way — and citing reports that between 10,000 and 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing or had been killed — NATO launched a campaign designed to stop the killings. In fact, while some killings had taken place, the claims by NATO of the number already killed were false. NATO might have prevented mass murder in Kosovo. That is not provable. They did not, however, find that mass murder on the order of the numbers claimed had taken place. The war could be defended as a preventive measure, but the atmosphere under which the war was carried out overstated what had happened.
The campaign was carried out without U.N. sanction because of Russian and Chinese opposition. The Russians were particularly opposed, arguing that major crimes were not being committed and that Serbia was an ally of Russia and that the air assault was not warranted by the evidence. The United States and other European powers disregarded the Russian position. Far more important, they established the precedent that U.N. sanction was not needed to launch a war (a precedent used by George W. Bush in Iraq). Rather — and this is the vital point — they argued that NATO support legitimized the war.
This transformed NATO from a military alliance into a quasi-United Nations. What happened in Kosovo was that NATO took on the role of peacemaker, empowered to determine if intervention was necessary, allowed to make the military intervention, and empowered to determine the outcome. Conceptually, NATO was transformed from a military force into a regional multinational grouping with responsibility for maintenance of regional order, even within the borders of states that are not members. If the United Nations wouldn’t support the action, the NATO Council was sufficient.
Since Russia was not a member of NATO, and since Russia denied the urgency of war, and since Russia was overruled, the bombing campaign against Kosovo created a crisis in relations with Russia. The Russians saw the attack as a unilateral attack by an anti-Russian alliance on a Russian ally, without sound justification. Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin was not prepared to make this into a major confrontation, nor was he in a position to. The Russians did not so much acquiesce as concede they had no options.
The war did not go as well as history records. The bombing campaign did not force capitulation and NATO was not prepared to invade Kosovo. The air campaign continued inconclusively as the West turned to the Russians to negotiate an end. The Russians sent an envoy who negotiated an agreement consisting of three parts. First, the West would halt the bombing campaign. Second, Serbian army forces would withdraw and be replaced by a multinational force including Russian troops. Third, implicit in the agreement, the Russian troops would be there to guarantee Serbian interests and sovereignty.
As soon as the agreement was signed, the Russians rushed troops to the Pristina airport to take up their duties in the multinational force — as they had in the Bosnian peacekeeping force. In part because of deliberate maneuvers and in part because no one took the Russians seriously, the Russians never played the role they believed had been negotiated. They were never seen as part of the peacekeeping operation or as part of the decision-making system over Kosovo. The Russians felt doubly betrayed, first by the war itself, then by the peace arrangements.
The Kosovo war directly effected the fall of Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin. The faction around Putin saw Yeltsin as an incompetent bungler who allowed Russia to be doubly betrayed. The Russian perception of the war directly led to the massive reversal in Russian policy we see today. The installation of Putin and Russian nationalists from the former KGB had a number of roots. But fundamentally it was rooted in the events in Kosovo. Most of all it was driven by the perception that NATO had now shifted from being a military alliance to seeing itself as a substitute for the United Nations, arbitrating regional politics. Russia had no vote or say in NATO decisions, so NATO’s new role was seen as a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Thus, the ongoing expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union and the promise to include Ukraine and Georgia into NATO were seen in terms of the Kosovo war. From the Russian point of view, NATO expansion meant a further exclusion of Russia from decision-making, and implied that NATO reserved the right to repeat Kosovo if it felt that human rights or political issues required it. The United Nations was no longer the prime multinational peacekeeping entity. NATO assumed that role in the region and now it was going to expand all around Russia.
Then came Kosovo’s independence. Yugoslavia broke apart into its constituent entities, but the borders of its nations didn’t change. Then, for the first time since World War II, the decision was made to change Serbia’s borders, in opposition to Serbian and Russian wishes, with the authorizing body, in effect, being NATO. It was a decision avidly supported by the Americans.
The initial attempt to resolve Kosovo’s status was the round of negotiations led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari that officially began in February 2006 but had been in the works since 2005. This round of negotiations was actually started under U.S. urging and closely supervised from Washington. In charge of keeping Ahtisaari’s negotiations running smoothly was Frank G. Wisner, a diplomat during the Clinton administration. Also very important to the U.S. effort was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried, another leftover from the Clinton administration and a specialist in Soviet and Polish affairs.
In the summer of 2007, when it was obvious that the negotiations were going nowhere, the Bush administration decided the talks were over and that it was time for independence. On June 10, 2007, Bush said that the end result of negotiations must be “certain independence.” In July 2007, Daniel Fried said that independence was “inevitable” even if the talks failed. Finally, in September 2007, Condoleezza Rice put it succinctly: “There’s going to be an independent Kosovo. We’re dedicated to that.” Europeans took cues from this line.
How and when independence was brought about was really a European problem. The Americans set the debate and the Europeans implemented it. Among Europeans, the most enthusiastic about Kosovo independence were the British and the French. The British followed the American line while the French were led by their foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had also served as the U.N. Kosovo administrator. The Germans were more cautiously supportive.
On Feb. 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence and was recognized rapidly by a small number of European states and countries allied with the United States. Even before the declaration, the Europeans had created an administrative body to administer Kosovo. The Europeans, through the European Union, micromanaged the date of the declaration.
On May 15, during a conference in Ekaterinburg, the foreign ministers of India, Russia and China made a joint statement regarding Kosovo. It was read by the Russian host minister, Sergei Lavrov, and it said: “In our statement, we recorded our fundamental position that the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo contradicts Resolution 1244. Russia, India and China encourage Belgrade and Pristina to resume talks within the framework of international law and hope they reach an agreement on all problems of that Serbian territory.”
The Europeans and Americans rejected this request as they had rejected all Russian arguments on Kosovo. The argument here was that the Kosovo situation was one of a kind because of atrocities that had been committed. The Russians argued that the level of atrocity was unclear and that, in any case, the government that committed them was long gone from Belgrade. More to the point, the Russians let it be clearly known that they would not accept the idea that Kosovo independence was a one-of-a-kind situation and that they would regard it, instead, as a new precedent for all to follow.
The problem was not that the Europeans and the Americans didn’t hear the Russians. The
problem was that they simply didn’t believe them — they didn’t take the Russians seriously. They had heard the Russians say things for many years. They did not understand three things. First, that the Russians had reached the end of their rope. Second, that Russian military capability was not what it had been in 1999. Third, and most important, NATO, the Americans and the Europeans did not recognize that they were making political decisions that they could not support militarily.
For the Russians, the transformation of NATO from a military alliance into a regional United Nations was the problem. The West argued that NATO was no longer just a military alliance but a political arbitrator for the region. If NATO does not like Serbian policies in Kosovo, it can — at its option and in opposition to U.N. rulings — intervene. It could intervene in Serbia and it intended to expand deep into the former Soviet Union. NATO thought that because it was now a political arbiter encouraging regimes to reform and not just a war-fighting system, Russian fears would actually be assuaged. To the contrary, it was Russia’s worst nightmare. Compensating for all this was the fact that NATO had neglected its own military power. Now, Russia could do something about it.
At the beginning of this discourse, we explained that the underlying issues behind the Russo-Georgian war went deep into geopolitics and that it could not be understood without understanding Kosovo. It wasn’t everything, but it was the single most significant event behind all of this. The war of 1999 was the framework that created the war of 2008.
The problem for NATO was that it was expanding its political reach and claims while contracting its military muscle. The Russians were expanding their military capability (after 1999 they had no place to go but up) and the West didn’t notice. In 1999, the Americans and Europeans made political decisions backed by military force. In 2008, in Kosovo, they made political decisions without sufficient military force to stop a Russian response. Either they underestimated their adversary or — even more amazingly — they did not see the Russians as adversaries despite absolutely clear statements the Russians had made. No matter what warning the Russians gave, or what the history of the situation was, the West couldn’t take the Russians seriously.
It began in 1999 with war in Kosovo and it ended in 2008 with the independence of Kosovo. When we study the history of the coming period, the war in Kosovo will stand out as a turning point. Whatever the humanitarian justification and the apparent ease of victory, it set the stage for the rise of Putin and the current and future crises.
www.stratfor.com
August 25, 2008By George Friedman
The Russo-Georgian war was rooted in broad geopolitical processes. In large part it was simply the result of the cyclical reassertion of Russian power. The Russian empire — czarist and Soviet — expanded to its borders in the 17th and 19th centuries. It collapsed in 1992. The Western powers wanted to make the disintegration permanent. It was inevitable that Russia would, in due course, want to reassert its claims. That it happened in Georgia was simply the result of circumstance.
There is, however, another context within which to view this, the context of Russian perceptions of U.S. and European intentions and of U.S. and European perceptions of Russian capabilities. This context shaped the policies that led to the Russo-Georgian war. And those attitudes can only be understood if we trace the question of Kosovo, because the Russo-Georgian war was forged over the last decade over the Kosovo question.
Yugoslavia broke up into its component republics in the early 1990s. The borders of the republics did not cohere to the distribution of nationalities. Many — Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and so on — found themselves citizens of republics where the majorities were not of their ethnicities and disliked the minorities intensely for historical reasons. Wars were fought between Croatia and Serbia (still calling itself Yugoslavia because Montenegro was part of it), Bosnia and Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia. Other countries in the region became involved as well.
One conflict became particularly brutal. Bosnia had a large area dominated by Serbs. This
region wanted to secede from Bosnia and rejoin Serbia. The Bosnians objected and an internal war in Bosnia took place, with the Serbian government involved. This war involved the single greatest bloodletting of the bloody Balkan wars, the mass murder by Serbs of Bosnians.Here we must pause and define some terms that are very casually thrown around. Genocide is the crime of trying to annihilate an entire people. War crimes are actions that violate the rules of war. If a soldier shoots a prisoner, he has committed a war crime. Then there is a class called “crimes against humanity.” It is intended to denote those crimes that are too vast to be included in normal charges of murder or rape. They may not involve genocide, in that the annihilation of a race or nation is not at stake, but they may also go well beyond war crimes, which are much lesser offenses. The events in Bosnia were reasonably deemed crimes against humanity. They did not constitute genocide and they were more than war crimes.
At the time, the Americans and Europeans did nothing about these crimes, which became an internal political issue as the magnitude of the Serbian crimes became clear. In this context, the Clinton administration helped negotiate the Dayton Accords, which were intended to end the Balkan wars and indeed managed to go quite far in achieving this. The Dayton Accords were built around the principle that there could be no adjustment in the borders of the former Yugoslav republics. Ethnic Serbs would live under Bosnian rule. The principle that existing borders were sacrosanct was embedded in the Dayton Accords.
In the late 1990s, a crisis began to develop in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Over the years, Albanians had moved into the province in a broad migration. By 1997, the province was overwhelmingly Albanian, although it had not only been historically part of Serbia but also its historical foundation. Nevertheless, the Albanians showed significant intentions of moving toward either a separate state or unification with Albania. Serbia moved to resist this, increasing its military forces and indicating an intention to crush the Albanian resistance.
There were many claims that the Serbians were repeating the crimes against humanity that were committed in Bosnia. The Americans and Europeans, burned by Bosnia, were eager to demonstrate their will. Arguing that something between crimes against humanity and genocide was under way — and citing reports that between 10,000 and 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing or had been killed — NATO launched a campaign designed to stop the killings. In fact, while some killings had taken place, the claims by NATO of the number already killed were false. NATO might have prevented mass murder in Kosovo. That is not provable. They did not, however, find that mass murder on the order of the numbers claimed had taken place. The war could be defended as a preventive measure, but the atmosphere under which the war was carried out overstated what had happened.
The campaign was carried out without U.N. sanction because of Russian and Chinese opposition. The Russians were particularly opposed, arguing that major crimes were not being committed and that Serbia was an ally of Russia and that the air assault was not warranted by the evidence. The United States and other European powers disregarded the Russian position. Far more important, they established the precedent that U.N. sanction was not needed to launch a war (a precedent used by George W. Bush in Iraq). Rather — and this is the vital point — they argued that NATO support legitimized the war.
This transformed NATO from a military alliance into a quasi-United Nations. What happened in Kosovo was that NATO took on the role of peacemaker, empowered to determine if intervention was necessary, allowed to make the military intervention, and empowered to determine the outcome. Conceptually, NATO was transformed from a military force into a regional multinational grouping with responsibility for maintenance of regional order, even within the borders of states that are not members. If the United Nations wouldn’t support the action, the NATO Council was sufficient.
Since Russia was not a member of NATO, and since Russia denied the urgency of war, and since Russia was overruled, the bombing campaign against Kosovo created a crisis in relations with Russia. The Russians saw the attack as a unilateral attack by an anti-Russian alliance on a Russian ally, without sound justification. Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin was not prepared to make this into a major confrontation, nor was he in a position to. The Russians did not so much acquiesce as concede they had no options.
The war did not go as well as history records. The bombing campaign did not force capitulation and NATO was not prepared to invade Kosovo. The air campaign continued inconclusively as the West turned to the Russians to negotiate an end. The Russians sent an envoy who negotiated an agreement consisting of three parts. First, the West would halt the bombing campaign. Second, Serbian army forces would withdraw and be replaced by a multinational force including Russian troops. Third, implicit in the agreement, the Russian troops would be there to guarantee Serbian interests and sovereignty.As soon as the agreement was signed, the Russians rushed troops to the Pristina airport to take up their duties in the multinational force — as they had in the Bosnian peacekeeping force. In part because of deliberate maneuvers and in part because no one took the Russians seriously, the Russians never played the role they believed had been negotiated. They were never seen as part of the peacekeeping operation or as part of the decision-making system over Kosovo. The Russians felt doubly betrayed, first by the war itself, then by the peace arrangements.
The Kosovo war directly effected the fall of Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin. The faction around Putin saw Yeltsin as an incompetent bungler who allowed Russia to be doubly betrayed. The Russian perception of the war directly led to the massive reversal in Russian policy we see today. The installation of Putin and Russian nationalists from the former KGB had a number of roots. But fundamentally it was rooted in the events in Kosovo. Most of all it was driven by the perception that NATO had now shifted from being a military alliance to seeing itself as a substitute for the United Nations, arbitrating regional politics. Russia had no vote or say in NATO decisions, so NATO’s new role was seen as a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Thus, the ongoing expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union and the promise to include Ukraine and Georgia into NATO were seen in terms of the Kosovo war. From the Russian point of view, NATO expansion meant a further exclusion of Russia from decision-making, and implied that NATO reserved the right to repeat Kosovo if it felt that human rights or political issues required it. The United Nations was no longer the prime multinational peacekeeping entity. NATO assumed that role in the region and now it was going to expand all around Russia.
Then came Kosovo’s independence. Yugoslavia broke apart into its constituent entities, but the borders of its nations didn’t change. Then, for the first time since World War II, the decision was made to change Serbia’s borders, in opposition to Serbian and Russian wishes, with the authorizing body, in effect, being NATO. It was a decision avidly supported by the Americans.
The initial attempt to resolve Kosovo’s status was the round of negotiations led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari that officially began in February 2006 but had been in the works since 2005. This round of negotiations was actually started under U.S. urging and closely supervised from Washington. In charge of keeping Ahtisaari’s negotiations running smoothly was Frank G. Wisner, a diplomat during the Clinton administration. Also very important to the U.S. effort was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried, another leftover from the Clinton administration and a specialist in Soviet and Polish affairs.
In the summer of 2007, when it was obvious that the negotiations were going nowhere, the Bush administration decided the talks were over and that it was time for independence. On June 10, 2007, Bush said that the end result of negotiations must be “certain independence.” In July 2007, Daniel Fried said that independence was “inevitable” even if the talks failed. Finally, in September 2007, Condoleezza Rice put it succinctly: “There’s going to be an independent Kosovo. We’re dedicated to that.” Europeans took cues from this line.
How and when independence was brought about was really a European problem. The Americans set the debate and the Europeans implemented it. Among Europeans, the most enthusiastic about Kosovo independence were the British and the French. The British followed the American line while the French were led by their foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had also served as the U.N. Kosovo administrator. The Germans were more cautiously supportive.
On Feb. 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence and was recognized rapidly by a small number of European states and countries allied with the United States. Even before the declaration, the Europeans had created an administrative body to administer Kosovo. The Europeans, through the European Union, micromanaged the date of the declaration.
On May 15, during a conference in Ekaterinburg, the foreign ministers of India, Russia and China made a joint statement regarding Kosovo. It was read by the Russian host minister, Sergei Lavrov, and it said: “In our statement, we recorded our fundamental position that the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo contradicts Resolution 1244. Russia, India and China encourage Belgrade and Pristina to resume talks within the framework of international law and hope they reach an agreement on all problems of that Serbian territory.”
The Europeans and Americans rejected this request as they had rejected all Russian arguments on Kosovo. The argument here was that the Kosovo situation was one of a kind because of atrocities that had been committed. The Russians argued that the level of atrocity was unclear and that, in any case, the government that committed them was long gone from Belgrade. More to the point, the Russians let it be clearly known that they would not accept the idea that Kosovo independence was a one-of-a-kind situation and that they would regard it, instead, as a new precedent for all to follow.
The problem was not that the Europeans and the Americans didn’t hear the Russians. The
problem was that they simply didn’t believe them — they didn’t take the Russians seriously. They had heard the Russians say things for many years. They did not understand three things. First, that the Russians had reached the end of their rope. Second, that Russian military capability was not what it had been in 1999. Third, and most important, NATO, the Americans and the Europeans did not recognize that they were making political decisions that they could not support militarily.For the Russians, the transformation of NATO from a military alliance into a regional United Nations was the problem. The West argued that NATO was no longer just a military alliance but a political arbitrator for the region. If NATO does not like Serbian policies in Kosovo, it can — at its option and in opposition to U.N. rulings — intervene. It could intervene in Serbia and it intended to expand deep into the former Soviet Union. NATO thought that because it was now a political arbiter encouraging regimes to reform and not just a war-fighting system, Russian fears would actually be assuaged. To the contrary, it was Russia’s worst nightmare. Compensating for all this was the fact that NATO had neglected its own military power. Now, Russia could do something about it.
At the beginning of this discourse, we explained that the underlying issues behind the Russo-Georgian war went deep into geopolitics and that it could not be understood without understanding Kosovo. It wasn’t everything, but it was the single most significant event behind all of this. The war of 1999 was the framework that created the war of 2008.
The problem for NATO was that it was expanding its political reach and claims while contracting its military muscle. The Russians were expanding their military capability (after 1999 they had no place to go but up) and the West didn’t notice. In 1999, the Americans and Europeans made political decisions backed by military force. In 2008, in Kosovo, they made political decisions without sufficient military force to stop a Russian response. Either they underestimated their adversary or — even more amazingly — they did not see the Russians as adversaries despite absolutely clear statements the Russians had made. No matter what warning the Russians gave, or what the history of the situation was, the West couldn’t take the Russians seriously.
It began in 1999 with war in Kosovo and it ended in 2008 with the independence of Kosovo. When we study the history of the coming period, the war in Kosovo will stand out as a turning point. Whatever the humanitarian justification and the apparent ease of victory, it set the stage for the rise of Putin and the current and future crises.
www.stratfor.com
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