Friday, September 18, 2015
A Confused Situation as to Syria and ISIS
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Pitfalls of Economic Globalization
Monday, April 13, 2015
The Normalization of U.S.-Cuba Relations: the Best Accomplishment of President Barack Obama
Friday, February 27, 2015
International Islamist Terrorism: It's More Than a Mere Question of Semantics
Friday, January 2, 2015
2015: A Pivotal Year for Economic and Financial Crises and Wars?
___________________________________________
Friday, September
18, 2015
A Confused Situation as
to Syria and ISIS
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
[There are] “three ways to be influential in American
politics: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and
control media outlets.”
Haim Saban, Pro-Israel billionaire and major political
contributor, and adviser to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, (2009)
[There] “is
a memo [at the Pentagon] that describes
how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq,
and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
General Wesley
Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO (1997-2000),
(March 2, 2007)
“Next the
statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is
attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities,
and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them.”
Mark Twain
(1835-1910), American author and satirist
"The President does not have power
under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a
situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the
nation."
Sen. Barack Obama (D.-Ill.), (in a Dec.
20, 2007 interview with the Boston Globe)
“Our objective is clear, and
that is: degrade and destroy ISIL [ISIS] so that it’s no longer a threat, not
just to Iraq but also to the region and to the United States.”
Pres. Barack H.
Obama, at a news conference on Sept. 3, 2014)
The chaotic situation in
Syria, a country of 22 million, source of some 220,000 Syrian deaths and of between 6 to 8 million refugees fleeing to Europe, is most confusing.
On the one hand,
the Obama administration has been openly violating international law in
actively supporting and arming a rebellious insurrection and a civil war
against the established Assad government. On the other hand, the same
administration seems to consider the Sunni-dominated and foreign-supported
terrorist Islamic
State organization (ISIS) opposed to Assad as illegitimate, and declares to want to “degrade and destroy” it through bombings.
If a foreign government wanted to destroy a country and turn it into
ruins, that is probably what it should do, considering that the same Obama
administration has for years supported protests and fanned
the rebellion in Syria, as part of the color revolutions the
CIA has sponsored in many countries, and it has facilitated the rise of Islamic
extremism directly and indirectly in the hope that it would succeed in toppling
the secular Syrian regime. From the start, this has been a most ambivalent, a
most irresponsible, a most inconsistent, a most incoherent, a most misguided, a most indecent, a most
insane, a most destructive and a most immoral policy, because it has
destabilized both Iraq and Syria, because it has resulted in millions of
victims and because it has contributed in a big way to creating the psychopathic monster that is the
ISIS.
Indeed, the
ongoing provoked chaos in Syria seems to be a repetition of what the
Obama-cum-Hillary Clinton administration did in neighboring
Libya when that country was destabilized and destroyed from top to
bottom through outside intervention, and reduced to a state of anarchy. It also
followed the illegal military incursion by the Bush-Cheney administration in Iraq
in order to engineer illegally a regime change in that country, at the same
time that it left it completely destroyed and dysfunctional. All these
interventions have resulted in unmitigated disasters.
Destroying
countries in violation of international
law and with no empathy for the human suffering of millions of people
seems to have been the official policy of the US government over the last
twenty years, whoever happened to sit in the White House at any given time, be
he a Republican or a Democrat.
There is a
pattern here that even the most ignorant and the most dishonest or obtuse
brains cannot help but notice. We all know that this has been the well-publicized
plan of the pro-Israel neocon
clique that has been advising successive US governments ever since the
George H. Bush administration of 1989-1993.
Their overall objective was to reshape and transform (i.e. destabilize and
destroy) the entire Middle East by provoking the downfall and breakup of
Israel’s neighboring Arab countries (Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc.), and by using American
military power and NATO to
do it.
And now, the
Obama administration is working hard to deliberately and immorally destroy the
country of Syria to please the Israeli government and other allies such as the
totalitarian Wahhabist regime of Saudi Arabia and the increasinglly Islamist
regime in Turkey. Just as there was no al-Qaida organization
in Iraq before the Bush-Cheney administration invaded the country in 2003,
there was no Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria before the US and its allies
supported the insurrection against the Assad regime, beginning in 2011.
Surrounded by his
neocon advisers, who are presumably recommended to their posts by deep pocket
political campaign contributors, President Barack H. Obama gives the sad
spectacle of a politician who has morphed into a repeat of George W. Bush,
using lies and false pretenses to justify an incoherent and destabilizing US
policy in the Middle East. One day he says that his government’s policy is to
contain and destroy the murderous ISIS Califate; the next day he gives a tacit
or explicit go ahead to the demagogue President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to attack
with F-16 fighter jets the only credible force on the ground fighting ISIS,
besides the armed forces of the Iraqi and Syrian governments, the Kurdish militias.
And when the Russian
government brings some assistance to the embattled Syrian government of
Bashar al-Assad—still the legitimate government of that country, ravaged by
outside intervention by the way—President Barrack H. Obama not only denounces
such assistance, but he warns Russia not to do it, curiously asserting that Russia’s
efforts to back the Syrian government against ISIS are “doomed to failure”!
What strategy and what failure? One would like to know.
Indeed, if
President Obama were really serious in wanting to eradicate the medieval terrorist cancer that is ISIS, as he claims he does, one would
think that he would logically welcome any assistance to reach that objective,
whether it comes from Russia or from Iran, or anybody else. But no, Mr. Obama
rather says that such assistance is not at all welcomed, at the same time that
the killers of ISIS consolidate their control over a large part of Syria and of
Iraq, and continue decapitating and persecuting Christian Assyrians, Shiites and other ethnic groups. The result is the
creation of millions of refugees that only Europe seems ready, albeit
reluctantly, to accept, after they have been expelled from Turkey, Lebanon or
Jordan, and while the other richest Arab nations, such as Saudi Arabia and
Qatar, close their doors to them.
This does not
make any sense. When is Mr. Obama sincere? When he says that his NATO
‘coalition’ attacks in Syria are aimed at eradicating ISIS, or when he says
that he has no legal authority for provoking a neocon-inspired regime change in
Syria?
If Pres. Obama does not want to fight al Qaeda—the
group behind the 9/11 attacks, and its close ally the Islamic State (ISIS)—he
should at the very least let those who want to fight them do it. Nowadays, he
seems much more anxious to train
and arm small groups of so called “moderate”
Islamist Syrian rebels, (who have not a chance in hell
to take control of the Syrian government), than to really fight the terrorists of al Qaeda and of the Islamist State (ISIS), who are the ones who would take
over Syria if the Assad government were to fall. On the contrary, for months
now Mr. Obama has done his best to prevent the Kurds, the Iranians and the
Russians, along with the al-Assad government, from fighting the Islamist
terrorists. Why? Could somebody ask him why? And for what purpose?
US-led airstrikes in Iraq and in Syria against the
Islamist terrorists have been judged ineffective from the start, and ISIS has
demonstrated it by pursuing its expansion, presumably because such very
selective bombings were never a priority and were rather a covert and dishonest
show to fool people about the real objective of the US-NATO bombings.
That objective appears not as a priority to destroy
ISIS or push it back, but rather to illegally provoke a regime change in Syria.
This is done by backing different sets of Islamist rebels over time. This is a dangerous
game. And all this is for mainly crass economic
motives, i.e. to facilitate the construction of pipelines from the
Middle East toward Europe, Turkey and Israel.
This Machiavellian policy is not only destabilizing
and destroying the entire Middle East, it is now about to destabilize and
destroy Europe itself with millions of migrants and refugees fleeing the mess
that has resulted ever since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the
US and its allies’ support for the Syrian insurrection since 2011. European
countries have already suspended the Schengen Agreement regarding
freedom of movement within the European Union (EU), and other similar policy
decisions of European disintegration by member states are to be expected in the
coming months if the avalanche of migrants and refugees continues unabated from
the Middle East and northern Africa.
Ever since the neocons
have dominated US foreign policy, American-led interventions in the world have
been a source of great instability and of devastating destruction. They have
resulted in creating disaster upon disaster, with hundreds of thousands people
dead and many millions displaced and impoverished, and forced into exile.
So far, at least
three countries have been completely destroyed, i.e. Iraq, Libya and Syria, and
the carnage goes on in Afghanistan and in Yemen, with the US supporting Saudi
Arabia’s bombing of the latter country. American politicians and the US
government cannot close their eyes and wash their hands of this chaotic mess
because they started it, and because of that, they have a special
responsibility to correct it and contribute to bringing back peace and order in
that part of the world.
If the secular
al-Assad government is ever toppled
and is replaced by one led by fanatical Islamists, and if revenge
killings and massacres of the
Syrian Christians, Alawites, and Druze ensue—a possible
result of the confused imperialistic US-NATO foreign policy—Barack H. Obama and
other American and European politicians will have to place a large part of the
blame on themselves. This is not a trivial matter.
________________________________________
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Pitfalls of Economic Globalization
By Rodrigue Tremblay
‘Nations that
trade with each other make themselves mutually dependent: if one has an
interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are
based on mutual needs.’
Montesquieu, (Charles Louis de Secondat), (1689-1755)
‘An agreement [with the U.S.] to harmonize trade,
security, or defence practices would, in the end, require Canada and Mexico to…
cede to the United States power over foreign trade and investment,
environmental regulation, immigration, and, to a large degree, foreign policy,
and even monetary and fiscal policy.’
Roy McLaren (1934-),
former Canadian liberal trade minister, (1983)
‘The greatest
happiness principle: The greatest happiness of the greatest number of people is
the foundation of morals and legislation.’
Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832)
One
of the most important phenomena of the last quarter century, and without a
doubt the most significant in the economic field, but also in the political
field, has been the rise of economic globalization. This has brought the
increased interdependence of national economies and a rise in competition, not
only between corporations but also between countries.
This
interdependence and competition have increased much more quickly than could
have been envisaged, 25 or 30 years ago, with the result that international
economic integration today greatly exceeds the realm of international trade to
encompass the international mobility of corporations and the integration of
financial and money markets. In some areas dominated by technology, especially
in the field of digital and information technology, we already live in a world
almost without national borders. The consequences of increased globalization
are not only economic; they are also political and social.
But globalization
also means a greater complexity of economic relations and an increased
vulnerability of national economies to shocks from outside. This requires, for
a given country, that the net benefits resulting from globalization must be
greater than the net losses of any nature arising from such greater complexity
and greater vulnerability.
Beside the purely
economic costs of complexity, there are social and political costs that arise
from such enhanced global economic complexity.
Indeed, the
increased complexity of international economic and financial relations has had
the effect of increasing the costs of political transactions and may have
impaired the good functioning of domestic democratic systems by reducing the
possibility for citizens to be adequately informed about issues that concern
them and, if necessary, to be able to raise objections. Socially, it has also
meant that the economy is less embedded in a larger social system; it is rather
the social system that has been compressed and has become embedded in an
increasingly globalized economy.
A primarily
political global project has also been grafted upon economic globalization,
mainly under American
auspices, with the avowed purpose of weakening and
subverting the national consciousness of people in their sovereign nation
states, through the promotion of "multiculturalism" within countries
and through the equally important aim of dismantling the welfare state system
and the social safety net erected after the Second World War in most Western
countries, and replace them with an essentially anti-democratic and oligarchic
globalist system.
In the end, we
shall conclude that the increased complexity of the global economic system over
the last quarter century has had a general consequence: it has resulted in
increasing the power and incomes of the CEOs of large corporations and of mega
banks as never seen before, as well, to the lesser extent, of those of
politicians and bureaucrats, at the expense of the less educated segments of
the population and the less mobile people generally, thus weakening the
democratic spirit and practices in many countries.
I- Main causes of economic globalization
There have been
two revolutions behind the phenomenon of economic globalization.
-The first was
the digital technology revolution, which can be seen as a new industrial
revolution. This appeared with basic innovations that were, among others, the
computer, the Internet as a global computer network, and telecommunications
satellites, the latter enabling communication almost instantly to the four
corners of the planet.
-The second
revolution was the collapse, in 1991, of the Soviet empire and its centralized
communist economic system. It has been said that this politico-economic
revolution heralded the "triumph of (corporate) capitalism" worldwide
and its decentralized and scarcely regulated markets.
Over the last
quarter century, the rush towards economic globalization has accelerated. Its
three main components are:
- Firstly, the
globalization of trade relations;
- Secondly, the
industrial and technological globalization; and
- Thirdly, the
overall financial globalization (financial, banking and monetary).
These three sides
of economic globalization have not had the same effect on all people and on
every country.
It is therefore
necessary to identify the net effects for each of these three components of
overall economic globalization. Indeed, it was expected, at least in theory, that
the move towards economic globalization would strengthen the economic
integration of countries, generate some convergence of national economies by
increasing their productivity levels and their economic growth, reducing global
poverty, and creating, in addition, a better climate for world peace.
In practice, we
can say today that this view was perhaps too optimistic, and we must recognize
that the results of economic globalization in the past quarter century have
been more complex and less inevitable than some would have believed.
That is because
economic globalization and enhanced international competition have resulted in
consequences that have certainly been positive for some people, but they have
also created perverse effects for certain categories of workers, as well as for
governments and their populations, because of the increased international
mobility of corporations and of financial and banking institutions, and not
just for those that are inherently ‘multinational' in nature.
In other words, economic
globalization has created net winners and net losers, and it would be good to
establish a provisional assessment of these results, even if it is only a
partial synopsis of a complex phenomenon.
II- The globalization of trade relations
The establishment
of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 marked an acceleration of the
movement towards multilateral trade liberalization of the previous decades that
had been undertaken under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), the latter having been created in 1947.
Indeed, during
the last quarter century, world exports have grown at an exponential rate of
6.0 percent in volume, a much faster rate than the average annual rate of
growth in world real output, which progressed at the pace of a little less than
4.0 percent between 1990 and 2010. However, we observe that since the financial crisis
of 2008-09, there has been a break in world trade growth, global
exports growing presently at a pace that approximates overall world economic
growth, which ranges from two to four percent annually.
Of the three
components of the phenomenon of economic globalization, trade globalization is
probably the least deserving of criticism. There is even a fairly broad
consensus among economists that, all things considered, its net effects have
been more positive than negative.
Consumers have
benefited greatly, as a result of lowered prices and better quality for a wider
range of imported products and services. The other big winners of the growth in
multilateral trade are owners of capital in general (higher yields) and
officers of large corporations (increased incomes and revenues).
On the negative
side, in many industrialized countries, least skilled workers have faced
personal losses due to unemployment and stagnant or falling real wages. The
same can be said about some industries that have faced increased international
competition and have suffered contractions, relocations and some form of
de-industrialization.
Overall,
empirical studies on these issues have arrived at the conclusion that the gains
reaped by industrialized countries from a better international division of
labor have outweighed the losses, and that this has created a win-win situation
for most countries.
It would appear
that for industrialized countries, the problems arising from enhanced
international trade are primarily a problem of distribution of the net gains in
order to compensate the losers in proportion to their losses.
In other words,
this is a matter of public policy and of social justice. It is thus up to a
government, for example, to make sure that workers displaced by international
competition are compensated and retrained.
If we consider
all countries, the newly industrialized countries of Asia (China, Japan, South
Korea, etc.) have profited greatly from increasing trade globalization, and
they have also been on the receiving end of industrial globalization, as we
will discuss later. Their rates of economic growth and of industrial catching
up have simply been all but phenomenal.
III- Industrial and technological globalization
Alongside the
globalization of trade relations of the last quarter century, the world has
also experienced a similar explosion in foreign direct
investment (direct capital inflows and outflows). Thus, the
share in GDP of all countries of foreign direct investment has increased from
11 percent on average in 1980 to 34 percent on average in 1998. Since the
financial crisis of 2008-09, however, foreign direct investment has also
experienced a sharp downturn. It reached a historical high in 2007 of 2,000
billion$. Six years later, in 2013, foreign direct investment had dropped 30
percent from its 2007 peak.
The international
mobility of corporations, their technologies and their capital, is much more
problematic than trade globalization as such, which is based on the comparative advantages
of trading countries, in a general context of international immobility for
people between countries and of currency fluctuations to equilibrate each
country’s balance of payments.
We cannot put on
the same footing free trade, with rules against dumping and unfair competition
and fluctuating exchange rates, and the free international movement of
corporations, their technologies and their capital when labor is mostly
immobile.
In the first
case, we are dealing with international trade of goods and services based on
comparative advantages in resources, manpower and technology in each country,
which encourages specialization in production and which generates economies of
scale, productivity gains and increases in living standards in all countries,
even if the net gains are not evenly distributed among countries.
On the other
hand, when corporations transfer their capital and their technologies from one
country to another, this has the potential of modifying the economic
comparative advantages of each country. This is a much more problematic
component of economic globalization than simply free trade, because it is not
impossible then that one country ends up a net loser while another is a net
winner of such transfers.
Outsourcing
production from one country to another could become a substitute to
international trade between countries. The exception is when international
trade within a corporation increases both ways.
A process of deindustrialization
can result for the country losing its most productive industries, thus
translating into problems of productivity and of economic growth, while
national governments are unable to face the challenge properly. As I have
alluded to before, this is not inevitable. When industrial globalization
translates into more intra-firm trade and if a country’s total exports
increase, a country can be a net winner of industrial globalization. For
example, if a car manufacturer in a developed country transfers an assembly
activity in a low-wage countries but exports from its national base engines and
other specialized parts, the country can emerge a net winner from such
production outsourcing. This becomes an empirical question. That is why a
national government should monitor the situation closely.
It is a fact,
however, that industrial globalization has made it increasingly difficult for a
national government to pursue its own industrial policy. Indeed, nowadays, most
of so-called 'free trade agreements' are in fact 'agreements for the free
international movement of corporations' and have clauses that prevent national
governments from actively pursuing an industrial policy to boost a country’s
industrial productivity and raise the real wages of its workers. Moreover,
these 'agreements on free movement of companies' are usually negotiated in
secret and are often adopted by blindfolded politicians. It goes without saying
that such an industrial disarmament by nations may erode the benefits expected
from trade globalization and industrial specialization.
We may have here
a reason why popular sentiment, especially in Western countries, is turning
against comprehensive de facto ‘trade
and investment agreements’ because they are wrought in secrecy, because they
gave too much weigh to corporate prerogatives and their gimmicks to avoid
paying taxes to local governments, because they have resulted in wage stagnation,
unemployment, income inequalities and deindustrialization in many advanced
economies, without compensations for the net losers, and because the
governments of some large nations cannot resist dangerously mixing economics
and politics and pushing smaller nations around.
Industrial
globalization can also raise a tax fairness issue and one about income and
wealth inequalities between different categories of taxpayers when corporations
and the most internationally mobile workers insist on tax cuts from national
governments. The latter are thus obliged to increase regressive tax rates on
the incomes of ordinary workers and on their consumer spending.
National
governments may also be called on to compete downward between themselves when
the time comes to formulate some industrial regulations, or implement social
policies or environmental preservation policies.
IV- Financial globalization (financial, banking and
monetary)
If industrial
globalization is problematic in its effects, financial globalization,
(financial, banking and monetary), is even more dubious, considering the high
level of speculation that surrounds the international movements of finance
capital.
International
borrowing and lending have been around for a long time. For instance, in the 19th
century, savers from rich countries made it possible to fund major
infrastructure projects in poorer countries. The inflows and outflows of
portfolio capital (bonds, stocks, etc.) benefit both savers and borrowers and
encourage trade. Indeed, a country that is a net borrower is also a net
importer, and the opposite is true from a lender country’s perspective. Such
international borrowing and lending are factors of economic efficiency and
should be encouraged.
The international
integration of financial markets reflects an objective reality, i.e. the
reality that some countries generate external surpluses and other external
deficits. The international mobility of savings is in itself a good thing from
an economic point of view. What is important is that countries can retain their
power to regulate their financial and money markets, and maintain domestic
control over their banking sector.
In recent
decades, however, mega banks and other financial institutions have exerted
enormous political pressure to be exempted from national regulations. In the
United States, for example, lobbies have succeeded in having the
'Glass-Steagall Act' abolished by the Clinton administration in 1999. That
important law had been put in place in 1933 in order to avoid a repeat of the
financial crisis of 1929. History will record that the abolition of the
Glass-Steagall Act played a major role in paving the way to the financial
crisis of 2008-09, a crisis whose harmful effects continue to be felt around
the world.
When a nation loses
its national sovereignty over financial, banking and monetary regulation, it
largely loses the option to rely on price adjustments to correct imbalances in
its external accounts, and it must instead rely on quantity adjustments through
layoffs, cuts in public spending, tax increases, etc. This is a much more
costly way, in terms of welfare, to improve a balance of payments.
For example, when
a country suffers a drop in the external demand for its products while placed
in the straightjacket of price rigidity, domestic prices and wages cannot move
downward to correct an external deficit (and, conversely, cannot move upward to
correct an external surplus).
Instead, the
country must then resort to implementing so-called ‘austerity policies’ (cuts
in public spending, increases in taxes, etc.), the latter having the negative
consequences of slowing down domestic demand on top of the drop in
international demand. As a result, the economy suffers two blows instead of
one. Such an adjustment process to outside economic shocks creates an economic
downturn that could translate into an economic recession (a drop in production
and employment), hurting more severely some segments of the population than
others.
This is a major
structural problem within badly structured monetary unions, as it is currently
the case in Europe within the euro zone, which encompasses economies with very
high productivity levels, such is the case with the German economy, and other
less productive economies, such as those of Greece or Portugal.
When no
institutional mechanisms have been designed to transfer purchasing power
between surplus countries and deficit countries, the rigidities of the single
currency, (whatever its microeconomic benefits to businesses and consumers),
can result in major macroeconomic problems. For instance, the common currency
may be simultaneously undervalued for surplus economies and overvalued for
deficit economies. Deficit economies must then rely on austerity measures to
lower imports and increase exports, while surplus economies are more or less
left outside the adjustment process.
Another severe
drawback to financial integration (financial, banking and monetary) is the
greater vulnerability of countries to external economic shocks and the
transmission of economic and financial crises from one country to another.
The 2008-09
financial crisis is a good example of this phenomenon wherein a financial or a
banking crisis originating in one country spreads quickly through financial and
money markets from one country to another and affects the entire global
economy. Financial crises are often the result of risky banking practices and
of poorly regulated international financial and money markets.
Indeed, one of
the consequences of increased financial integration has been the increased
vulnerability of fragile economies to negative outside influences and a certain
globalization of economic and financial crises, in a context where domestic
governments are losing many of their instruments of intervention.
V- General conclusions
Is the world a
better place today than it was twenty-five years ago? In certain aspects, the
answer is yes; in some other aspects, the answer is no.
We can say that
the overall economic globalization of the past quarter century has certainly
had positive economic effects for several countries and their people, but that
such globalization has perhaps gone too far, too fast, in some countries,
especially since the global financial crisis of 2008-09.
Indeed, on one
hand, trade globalization has resulted globally in economic benefits for
consumers, for large corporations, their CEOs and for the most skilled workers.
Some newly industrialized economies, such as the Chinese one, have also derived
substantial benefits from economic globalization.
On the other
hand, industrial globalization has set into motion a process of
deindustrialization in many developed countries—especially in Europe—which has
hurt small and medium businesses.
It has also
concentrated the benefits of economic globalization on the most mobile factors
of production (capital, corporations, new technologies) to the detriment of
more immobile factors of production (labor, labor organizations and especially
less-skilled workers).
Similarly,
financial globalization has reduced the national sovereignty of most countries
and lowered their governments’ capability to react to economic and social
crises. The weakening of nation states and the disarmament of national
governments in the face of international corporations and globalized mega banks
are also important features or pitfalls of the overall movement towards
economic globalization during the last quarter century.
How can we weigh
the various elements of economic globalization? Have they benefited primarily
an economic elite and left behind a trail of net losers, or have they benefited
everybody to various degrees? It depends if we look at things from the
viewpoint of a particular country or if we consider the entire world economy,
and whether or not there are institutional mechanisms for the net winners of
economic globalization to compensate the net losers.
For the global
economy as a whole, the move towards economic globalization of the last quarter
century has encouraged the spread of economic activity geographically, and it
has resulted in a certain convergence of living standards, especially as the
newly industrialized countries of Asia are concerned. On the other hand, this
was made possible at the cost of a certain deindustrialization in many
industrialized countries and of a rise in income and wealth inequalities in
many countries. At the level of the particular country, the net economic
results of economic globalization are an empirical question.
However, one
thing stands out: globalization has profoundly changed the structure of social
and political power within each country by strengthening corporate power and
their leaders’ influence, and by decreasing the power of workers in general and
of labor organizations in particular. There are indications that it has hurt
the functioning of democracy in several countries.
One general conclusion in terms of economic policy: in the context of
economic globalization, it would appear essential that national governments
retain control over their financial and banking sectors, as well as over their
monetary policies, if they want to avoid, in times of crisis, that their
economies behave like a ship without a captain, without direction on a rough
sea.
More generally speaking, because of so many hazards, I am afraid that
the all-out economic globalization that is currently being imposed on nations
and people alike risks imploding, sooner or later. This is a model that has too
many economic and political pitfalls to persist without profound reforms. That
is because it de facto transfers the
real power in our societies from legitimate elected officials to officers of
large corporations and of mega banks, and to owners of capital in general who,
in turn, can use it to corrupt the political system to their advantage. —There
exists a basic economic and democratic deficit to economic globalization that
will not be easily corrected.
__________________________________________________
* Drawn from a conference by the author at the
Humanist Symposium on Human Nature, held in Montreal, Saturday June
Monday, April 13, 2015
The Normalization of U.S.-Cuba Relations:
the Best Accomplishment of President Barack Obama
by Rodrigue Tremblay
“At the beginning
of 1959, United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar
lands—almost all the cattle ranches—90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions—80
percent of the utilities—practically all the oil industry—and supplied
two-thirds of Cuba's imports.”
Senator John F. Kennedy (1917-1963),
(speech at a Democratic Dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 6, 1960,
during the 1960 Presidential campaign)
“I believe that there is no country in
the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where
economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in
part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime.
—I approved the
proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably
called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will
even go further: to some extent it is as though [Dictator] Batista was the incarnation of a number of
sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins.
—In the matter of
the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries.
That is perfectly clear.”
President John F.
Kennedy, October 24, 1963, (interview with journalist Jean
Daniel, The New Republic, published on December 14 1963, pp. 15-20)
“It is clear that
counter-terror became the strategy of the Batista government. It has been
estimated by some that as many as 20,000 civilians were killed.”
A Report to the
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence Volume 2, U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1969, p. 582.
In December 2014,
U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President
Raul Castro announced that they would begin normalizing
diplomatic relations between the two
nations, an agreement brokered by Catholic Pope Francis. Last
Saturday, April 11, U.S. President
Obama and Cuban President Castro met in
Panama to finalize the new reality and to “turn the page and develop a new
relationship between our two countries," in Mr. Obama’s words.
This
development is about to put an end to more than a half-century scandalous boycotting of the small island of
Cuba by American politicians, as this small Caribbean island became a pawn in
the Cold War
between the U.S.
and the USSR. In the U.S., this was done also mainly for purely domestic
electoral motives, i.e. to obtain the Miami exiled Cubans’ votes and money, and
against basic human morality.
This is a sad
chapter in 20th Century American foreign policy history, especially
considering that the U.S. government has established full diplomatic relations
with countries such as China and Vietnam, and also considering that Canada has
recognized and has traded with Cuba since 1960.
Indeed, a few
years after the 1959 Cuban
revolution that overthrew the corrupt government
of dictator Fulgencio Batista (1952-1959),
a government under the direct influence of elements of the American
mafia who controlled the drug, gambling,
prostitution, racetrack and casino businesses in Cuba, successive U.S.
governments imposed on the inhabitants of Cuba a blanket of severe economic and
political sanctions that crushed the small Cuban economy and lowered its
people’s standard of living.
Two generations
of Cubans were the victims of this cruel policy. That President Obama agreed to restore diplomatic ties with the Cuban government,
ties that were unilaterally broken off by Washington in 1961, is all to his
credit. Kudos also to Pope Francis, an Argentine, who pressed for ending such
an insane policy that saw a powerful country crush a small neighbor,
irresponsive to the human suffering that resulted.
As the two quotes
above from President John F. Kennedy show, there were American politicians who
felt that Cubans were in their right to overthrow the mafia and their corrupt
local collaborators who controlled most of everything in Cuba under Dictator
Batista. How could a nation that threw off the yoke of British king George III
not understand that?
An obvious
question begs to be asked: To what extent President Kennedy’s statements and
intentions played a role in his assassination one month later, on October 23?
Three groups had
special reasons to be adamantly opposed to President Kennedy’s support of the
Cuban revolution and to his avowed intention to establish political and
economic relations with Cuba.
First, the
elements of the American mafia who had been kicked out of Cuba and had to
abandon their lucrative trades in that Caribbean island country.
Second, the Cuban
supporters of dictator Batista who left Cuba for an exile in Florida, leaving
behind properties and other possessions, with no hope of returning to their
country if the U.S. government was to have normal relations with the
Cuban-Castro government.
A third group is
composed of some elements of the United States
government's Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), under
then CIA Director Allen
Dulles
(1953-1961),
who had sponsored the failed Bay of
Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, and whose objective was the
overthrow of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
Such a plan had been drafted under the previous
Eisenhower administration (1953-1961). (Keep in mind that CIA Director
Allen Dulles was the brother John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's
Secretary of State.)
After
his election, President John F. Kennedy had been informed of the CIA’s invasion
plan and had initially approved it, but when it unfolded, he refused to commit
U.S. armed forces to the operation. The CIA thus had ample reasons to blame
President Kennedy for the glaring failure of the Bay of Pigs para-military
invasion of Cuba, considering that
a similar invasion
of Guatemala in 1954 had required the assistance of U.S. troops
to succeed. Later, President Kennedy discharged CIA
Director Allen Dulles and replaced him with John McCone (1961-1965).
Cui Bono? (Who
profits?) All three of these groups had special motives for blaming President
John F. Kennedy for their misfortunes in Cuba. And all three of them had
reasons to be violently opposed to President Kennedy’s intentions to normalize
political and economic relations with Cuba.
The 1964
controversial Warren Commission
Report on John F. Kennedy’s assassination did not establish any
link between these groups who had reasons to hate the President, and his
assassination, concluding instead that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the
November 1963 shooting of the President. And this, even after it had been
established that the murderer had been monitored by the FBI under Director J.
Edgar Hoover and by the CIA under Director Allen Dulles in the months before
the assassination.
It is true that
not all the evidence surrounding the Kennedy Assassination has been released to
the public, some of which has been classified and kept secret. However, these
documents are scheduled for release two years from now, in 2017. It is
anybody’s guest if they might reveal new information about the circumstances
that led to President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
_________________________________________________
Friday, February
27, 2015
International Islamist Terrorism:
It's More than a Mere Question of Semantics
by Rodrigue Tremblay
“Since
the Bible also contains verses calling for war and the destruction of the
other, then what difference is there with the Koran?
None, if not for the attitude of the religious leaders
themselves.
-If they consider, as is the case with the majority of
Christians and Jews, that these verses are related to bygone historic times,
they therefore cannot be inspired by them to justify violence and murder.
-On the other hand, if these verses are considered the
“divine word” and bearers of the only truth, everything is to be feared.”
François Garai (1945- )
Rabbi in
Geneva, Switzerland, and head of the GIL (Liberal Jewish Group) and member of
the World Union of Progressive Judaism.
“The mosques [in
Western countries] will be our barracks,
the domes our helmets, the minarets will be our swords, and the faithful will
be our army.”
Recep Tayyip
Erdogan (1954- )
President of Turkey, [in December 1997 when he was
mayor of Istanbul, citing in his speech the nationalist poet Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924)].
“We
could have just said no [to Saudi financing of a mosque in
Norway], in principle the ministry
doesn't approve such things. But when we were first asked, we used the
opportunity to add that an approval would be paradoxical as long as it's a
crime to establish a Christian community in Saudi Arabia.”
Jonas
Gahr Støre (1960- ), Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs,
(Oct. 2010).
“We must speak
clearly: Yes, France is at war against terrorism, jihadism and radical
Islamism.”
Manuel Valls
(1962-), French Prime Minister (speech to the National Assembly on 13 January
2015).
“Moreover, the
sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view
the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam. Violent extremists have
exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The
attacks of September 11, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to
engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam
as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to
human rights...
The truth [is] that
America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.
Instead, they overlap, and share common principles -- principles of justice and
progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings...
I consider it part of my
responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative
stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear...
So let there be no doubt:
Islam is a part of America.”
Barack Obama (1961-
), Speech at Cairo University: A New
Beginning, June 4, 2009, in which the words “terror” or
“terrorism” were not mentioned at all.
“Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy,
ISIL [ISIS] through
a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.”
Barack Obama (1961-
), Statement by the President on ISIL, September 10, 2014.
[The ISIS terrorist networks] “are not an existential
threat to the United States or to the world order.“
Barack Obama (1961-
), CNN interview of February 1, 2015.
Early
last January, it was widely reported that President Barack Obama’s staff had
said that for him or his Vice President not joining other heads of state in the
largest rally in the history of Paris to protest the carnage done by Islamist
terrorists in their attacks against journalists and against French Jews, had
been a “mistake”, made by an “unnamed senior White House staff.”
I personally did
not buy that line of thought for an instant, even though nearly all American
media swallowed the story “hook, line and sinker”! Anybody who knows how a
government functions also knows that such an explanation is absolutely
impossible, because that kind of decision is widely discussed at the White
House, but also at the State Department and elsewhere within the government.
The final decision not to have the U.S. President or his Vice President present
at the anti-Islamist terror rally in Paris had to be made, in the last
analysis, by President Obama himself. The real motive: President Obama did not
want to be personally associated, nor his administration, to a high profile
rally against international Islamist
terrorism.
In 2008, I wrote
an article about then U.S. presidential candidate Barack
Obama, following the publication in the U.S. of my book ‘The New
American Empire’, a few years before. I
had arrived at the conclusion that even though Obama was probably “the least worst” candidate, he was also
showing a dangerous propensity to double-talk. The last two quotes above could
be an example of such a tendency.
This brings me to
the observation that over the last few weeks and months, some politicians in
Western countries have also adopted a somewhat distinctive
and curious linguistic approach to describe the current phenomenon of
international Islamist terrorism and its Islamist
jihadist ideology. This is
basically a form of escapism, denial, willful delusions and dodges.
U.S. President Barack Obama, for example, has gone
out of his way in not using in his speeches the perfectly appropriate words of
“Islamist terrorism”, but has preferred to use instead the more general and the
more vague and vacuous words of “violent
extremism” to describe the repetitive killings of innocent people by
Islamist terrorists in many countries. He has even gone so far as to imply that
criticism
of the failings of Islam, as a prerogative of free speech in any
democracy, could be a major cause of the rise of violent jihadists, rather than
the bombing of populations in the Middle East by Western powers.
Added to that is
Mr. Obama's proclivity to make his own the twisted logic of the National Rifle
Association (NRA) when the latter asserts that freely and widely available “guns do not kill people; only people kill
people”! Now Mr. Obama says, with perhaps even less justification, that "no religion is responsible for
terrorism —people are responsible for violence and terrorism," as if
most Islamist terrorists were not motivated by a backward Islamist ideology
that has its roots in the
Dark Ages. —This is not to deny that in many cases, it may be
difficult to separate the political motives from the religious ones behind the
bloody and gory crimes committed by delusional psychopaths.
Other Western
politicians, in Europe and in Canada, (luckily they are a minority!) have also
tried to downplay the true character of international Islamist terrorism by
playing a trivial and potentially self-delusional game of
semantics to gloss over and obscure reality. In their view, when
well-financed and well-identified Islamist terrorists kill journalists or
innocent Jewish by-standers by the dozens in Paris and in Copenhagen, or when
the medieval butchers of the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) decapitate two dozen Egyptian Christian
workers in Libya just because of their religious affiliation, or again when the
same madmen are bent on establishing
a caliphate and carry out mass-executions of ethnic or religious
minorities in Iraq and in Syria, these should be considered, according to some
politicians, to be some “random” criminal acts committed by some freelance
extremists, not related whatsoever to the Islamist
jihadist ideology! Egads!
With such a
misappropriate and somewhat dishonest play with words to describe
the criminal murders by international Islamist terrorists, it would seem that what these politicians wish to do
is to confuse people's mind and conceal the anti-freedom of the press ideology,
the anti-freedom of religion ideology and the anti-Jewish ideology of the
killers. Their purpose, it would seem, is to separate international Islamist
terrorism from its religious Islamic source, even when the killers themselves
do their misdeeds while yelling "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is the greatest!) while shooting and
beheading innocent people.
The intention of that type of cowardly politicians is
to inculcate in the minds of people the idea that these cruel terrorist acts
are the result of random ordinary violence by individuals unconnected to a
particular religious ideology, and therefore, that they are not that important.
Such a play with words and with the truth could also be an attempt to justify a
politician's inaction and his concealed position of irenicism
and of defeatism.
This is most disingenuous, because from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization
and the 9/11 mass killers in the USA to the butchers of ISIS in Iraq, Syria and
Libya, or to the Islamist terrorists in Chechnya or Yemen or in Nigeria, and
not forgetting the Islamist killers of
the Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris in January 2015, and those
killed in Copenhagen and in Ottawa, it can be said unequivocally that even
though it is true that “not all Muslims
are terrorists”, far from it, it should nevertheless be ascertained
nowadays that “most high profile
international terrorists are Muslims,” no matter how hard some complacent
characters do their best to hide this obvious fact.
Mr. Obama and some other politicians might think that
this is not a “holy war” that Western civilization faces, but the jihadists do.
Therefore, can we ask if this semantic game to limit
the freedom of thought is only a demonstration of misplaced political
correctness as a form
of George Orwell's Newspeak, or if it is
a cowardly attempt by some politicians to willfully mislead the people
regarding the real threat of Islamist terrorism, not only in the Middle East,
but increasingly also in Western countries?
The reality is made of daily
instances of horrors and of extreme
brutality as thousands of people, in many countries, are being
slaughtered, crucified,
decapitated, stoned to death, raped, forced into marriage, burnt alive,
tortured, enslaved, expatriated, etc., all in the name of the Islamist jihadist
ideology. This is a much too serious and dark reality for the international
community to feign to ignore or to camouflage through semantic tricks.
In such a chaotic situation,
it would seem obvious that the United Nations must be more pro-active in
implementing the principles of the U.N. Charter and
of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Above all, and at this
important juncture of human history, the current Secretary-General
of the United Nations Mr. Ban Ki-moon holds a special responsibility.
A lack of fortitude and of
foresight on his part could bring catastrophic, even apocalyptic, consequences
for the world order, for fundamental human rights and for the fate of hundreds
of millions of innocent people, men, women and children. At the very least, the
U.N. General Assembly should declare the murderous ISIS organization illegal,
and to be rejected by the international community, with the proviso that any
member country supporting it directly or indirectly could be severely blamed.
Indeed, this savagery of
another age has to stop. Islamist terrorism is a political cancer that should
not be allowed to metastasize.
Now is not the time to
discuss the sex of angels but to lead and to fight this rising threat to our
civilization and to basic humanitarian and civilized principles, ideologically,
politically and militarily. There is no way out. This is the challenge of our
times and the world must rise to the challenge. As one woman told me after a
meeting: “Maybe the world would be better
off with no religions at all!”
Think about it.
However, to fully
understand why and how the monstrosity that is ISIS came into existence, one
has to understand its source in the ill-conceived
policy pursued by some American administrations and by some European
governments to willfully destabilize Middle Eastern countries.
This was done according
to a neocon plan
designed long ago to systematically sponsor insurgencies and civil wars
in that part of the world and to overthrow their secular governments.
To avoid more
man-made disasters, such a destructive strategy should be denounced and stopped,
possibly reversed, and be replaced with a more coherent policy to help the
populations over there rather to draw them into a daily hell.
The semantic game
referred to above and carried on by some politicians may be a way to conceal
the over all catastrophe that has resulted from the U.S.-led policy of
destabilization of the entire Middle East for more than a decade. The ISIS
crisis has arisen as a consequence of these past failed policies. Many parts of
the world are now in a mess, and some sitting politicians and previous ones
have to share responsibility for the situation, —and they know it.
Conclusion
Nevertheless, if for any reason, some of these sitting
failed politicians, especially in our democracies, do not have in their
character or in their belly to change course and do what is right, they should
have the decency to step aside and let men or women of the quality of Winston
Churchill in the U.K., Charles De Gaulle in France and Franklin D. Roosevelt in
the USA take command in each of our countries.
_________________________________________________
Friday, January
2, 2015
2015: A Pivotal Year for Economic and
Financial Crises and Wars?
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”,
and
"The dangerous patriot: The one who drifts into
chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. He is a defender
of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. Chauvinism is a proud and
bellicose form of patriotism, …which identifies numerous enemies who can only
be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with
military victory." - James A. Donovan (1916-1970), American
lawyer and Commander in the United States Navy Reserve
"Where you
have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the
mentality of gangsters get control." - Lord
Acton (1834-1902) (John E. Dalberg), English Catholic
historian, politician, and writer
"If you want
war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men
ever are subject... " - William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), American academic
"The great rule of conduct for us in
regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have
with them as little political connection as possible. … It is our true [foreign] policy to steer clear of permanent alliances
with any portion of the foreign world." - George Washington (1732-1799),
First President of the United States, (1789-1797), Farewell
Address, 1796
These
days, militaristic Neoconservatives, or Neocons,
have near
complete control of the American government under the façade of whoever is
president at the time. They direct U.S. policies at the State Department, at
the Pentagon, at the U.S. Treasury and at the Fed central bank. They are thus
in position to influence and frame American foreign policy, military policy, economic
and financial policies and monetary policy.
This was not the
case before the Ronald Reagan administration (1981-1989) when the latter
adopted a neocon-inspired "muscular foreign policy"
based on military intervention abroad, perpetual war, arbitrary regime changes,
and imperial
worldwide governance in any matters deemed to be in American interests and of that of its
close allies. Even though they fared less well under the George H.
Bush administration (1989-1993), when
they were considered the "crazies in the basement", they resumed
their ascendance within the American government under the Bill Clinton
administration (1993-2001) with the U.S.-led Kosovo war and with the
irresponsible dismantling of the
Glass-Steagall Act,
thus paving the way for the 2008 worldwide financial crisis.
The Neocons’ greatest success, however, came with the George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney administration (2001-2009) when they persuaded the latter to launch
the (illegal) 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a war still with us and expanding
today, twelve years later. They also drafted the so-called "Bush Doctrine" of (illegal) preemptive wars and of forced
political regime changes in other countries.
This was an ideology that the Neocons had long advanced, both when Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of
Defense for policy in the George H.
Bush administration (1989-1993), even though the latter publicly repudiated it,
and in various essays published by a neocon think-tank dubbed "The Project
for the New American Century (PNAC)" and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan.
After the fall of
the Soviet empire in 1991, the warmongering Neocons argued that there should
not be any "Peace dividend" for American taxpayers but rather that the
United States should seize the opportunity to become the sole world military superpower
and should therefore increase and not decrease its military spending. The intention was to establish a military New American Empire
for the 21st
Century, along the lines of the British Empire in
the 19th Century.
Indeed, after the
events of 9/11 and the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House in 2001, Paul Wolfowitz, as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld, was in a
better position to push for increased U.S. military spending and for the
adoption of a new
aggressive U.S. foreign policy. What was most troubling is the fact that the PNAC produced a paper in
2000, titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses", (of which Paul Wolfowitz was a signatory), which
enigmatically noted that only a "new Pearl Harbor"
would make Americans accept the military and defense policy transformations
that the neocon group was proposing. Then, in September 2001, the “new Pearl
Harbor” coincidentally and conveniently morphed into the 9/11 attacks.
The war
against Afghanistan, where
the 9/11 terrorists had trained (and who came from Saudi Arabia and a few other countries), and the war against Iraq, a country not even remotely connected with the
events of 9/11, followed.
At the beginning
of 2015, Neocons occupy key positions within the Barack Obama administration
and it should be no surprise that U.S. foreign policy is hardly any different
than it was under the George W. Bush administration. They are constantly
pushing for provocations, confrontations, conflicts and wars. In fact, the year
2015 could be the year when many of the fires they have lit could turn into
conflagrations.
Let us look at a
few of them.
1- The
danger of another major financial and economic crisis
On July 21, 2010,
President Obama signed an already watered down version of the Dodd–Frank
Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to reign in financial corruption that brought about the 2008 financial
crisis. The new law was supposed to re-establish part of the provisions of the
1933 Glass-Steagall Act gutted out by the Clinton administration in 1999, in
order to prevent megabanks and insurance companies from using government-insured
deposits to build for themselves a pyramid of risky bets on the derivatives
market (credit default swaps, commodity swaps, collateralized-debt obligations
and other risky derivative financial products, etc.).
But guess what! Only four years later, on December 16, 2014, lobbyists
and lawyers working full time for the megabanks persuaded President Obama to
sign a massive
$1.1 trillion omnibus bill disguised as a Budget Bill and which contains a provision to remove a
rule known as the ‘swaps push-out’ rule, the latter
requiring insured banks to establish uninsured subsidiaries
to conduct their speculative derivatives trading
activities.
As a consequence, American megabanks are
now back in business speculating with government-insured deposits. When the
entire financial house of cards will blow out again is unknown, but you can be
sure that it will, especially if a serious political or economic shock hits the
economy.
I would call that ‘financial
brinkmanship’ and I would call Obama’s caving in to the megabanks ‘political
cowardice’. And who do you think will pay in various ways for the economic mess
when it occurs? Certainly not the megabanks that transformed their insolvent asset-backed
securities into newly printed cold cash
after the 2008 financial crisis, but ordinary people.
The U.S. economy and many other economies are still
reeling from the 2008 financial crisis brought about by corrupted politicians
and bankers with their lax or nonexistent regulations and excessive speculation
schemes. Such economies are vulnerable and sensitive to unforeseen financial shocks because debt-to-income ratios are still high in many
countries, including in the U.S. where the indebtedness ratio reached a peak of 177
percent just before the 2008-09 economic recession and still now stands at a
lofty 152 percent. (Historically, the debt-to-income ratio has remained well below 90
percent.) A
sudden rise in interest rates could therefore wreak havoc with many economies.
For one, the European
Union
(EU), the largest world economy, is teetering on the brink of recession,
suffering from various government-imposed austerity programs, from an
overvalued euro currency (for those countries in the euro zone) and from the
economic blowback of its conflicts with Russia over including Ukraine into
NATO. Europe is indeed in the midst of a lost decade
of high unemployment, low economic growth and deteriorating social conditions.
And, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
China’s
economy, the third largest world economy, is also slowing down
fast, with excess manufacturing capacity while its exports are suffering from a
25 percent appreciation of
the Chinese renminbi since 2004 and from weak world demand. Moreover, its financial sector is also vulnerable to
the fact that China’s debt level is now at a lofty 176
percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Chinese economy is also going
through structural changes as the Chinese government pursues
policies to reduce the country's reliance on foreign markets and to shift from
an export-oriented model to more domestic sources of growth.
As for the U.S.
economy, it is still
weak and unable to generate enough new jobs, despite a rebound during the last
few months, while the labor force participation rate has declined
from 66.5 percent before the 2008-09 recession to 62.7 percent today. The fact
that millions of Americans have part-time jobs and would like to
have full-time jobs, and that real wages of those who work
are stagnant or falling are also indicators that things have not come back to
normal.
Since there is no fiscal policy and no industrial
policy originating from the U.S. government, the Fed central bank has been
obliged to step in with the most aggressive monetary policy in its history.
Indeed, the Fed has quadrupled its bank lending to $4.5
trillion since 2008 and it has pursued a policy of risky zero-rate and
low-rate policies.
As a consequence, the Fed has created a gigantic financial
asset bubble. The unwinding of such monetary prodigiousness won’t be an easy task.
What’s more, the U.S. government will be paralyzed by a political gridlock over
the coming two years, a republican-controlled Congress being pitted against a
lame-duck Democratic president, thus making it difficult for the U.S. government
to respond adequately to a new financial crisis.
Another ominous sign is the collapse
of the velocity
of money in
the U.S., just as during the late 1920s, right before the start of the Great
Depression, and it is now at a nearly 20 year low.
That both the American political and financial sectors are unhealthy should be
worrisome for the coming years.
2- The
real danger of a nuclear war with the rekindling of the old Cold War with
Russia
Brinkmanship in financial
matters is one thing; brinkmanship with nuclear war is another. Sadly, the neocon-inspired
U.S. government is today involved in both.
Indeed, for many
years now, the U.S. government has been engaged in an aggressive geopolitical
warfare against Russia, first in pursuing a policy of geopolitical and
military encirclement of Russia by expanding NATO to its borders with the integration of Ukraine, and second, by implementing a policy of economic
warfare against Russia in order to undermine its economy and, eventually, to
provoke a regime change in that country. It’s a
game of “dare you?”
Some of the more
lunatic Neocons openly call for a new World War III, presumably with Russia a country against which they
seem to have personal animosities. These are some of the lunatics President
Barack Obama listens to.
Oil as a geopolitical
tool
The 50 percent
drop of oil price in 2014 may be part of a wider U.S.-led economic
warfare plan to
destabilize the Russian economy and provoke an Oil Slump, knowing full well that 50 percent
of Russian state revenue comes from its export sales of oil and gas. Above all,
policy-makers in Washington D.C. want to break the Gazprom-E.U. supply
dependency to weaken Russia and keep control over the E.U. via American allies
such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Such an artificial drop in oil price appears to be a
complement to the already known decisions to saddle Russia with stiff American-led economic and financial sanctions designed by
the U.S.
Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, (an outfit created in 2004 after intensive lobbying by AIPAC) and other
attempts by the U.S. government to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian oil and
gas.
Since September, Saudi Arabia, a country
with excess oil capacity and low-cost production, (and in a position to
manipulate the international price for oil), has suddenly and dramatically
decided to sell crude oil at deeply discounted prices and to
maintain its oil production at high levels in face of a declining world oil
demand.
This is a reversal of what Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries did in
the fall of 1973 when they suddenly quadrupled the price for oil and provoked a
global economic recession.
This is, however, a strategy similar to what Saudi
Arabia adopted in 1986 when it flooded the world with cheap Saudi oil, thus collapsing
the international price of oil to below $10 a barrel, after an agreement with
the U.S. government. The objective then was to undermine the economies of the
Soviet Union and its then Iraq ally, even though other economies such as the
Canadian economy suffered greatly from such a gambit.
This time, there seems to be a convergence of
interests between the U.S. government and the Saudi kingdom. From a U.S.
government’s point of view, the main objective is to hurt the Russian and Iranian energy sectors and
damage the finances of President Vladimir Putin’s
Russian government, while securing Saudi Arabia’s assistance in fighting the Islamist State
(IS) in Iraq and in Syria.
From a Saudi point of view, a world oil price war
meets its regional and global objectives in three ways. First, it is well known
that the Saudi government wants to dominate oil and gas production
in the entire Middle East region and is in opposition to
Iran and Syria for securing the rich European market. Second, the Saudi
government would also like to pressure Russia to end its support for the Syrian
al-Assad government. Third, Saudi Arabia also wishes to regain market shares
that it lost to more costly oil from shale oil and oil sands. By lowering oil
prices, Saudi Arabia hopes to reduce or even put such competing oil production
out of business by making their production less profitable.
However, such a
move is bound to severely damage oil production from oil shale in North Dakota
in the USA and oil-producing states like Texas may fall into recession, even
though the overall U.S. economy will benefit from cheaper oil. Oil production
from tar sands in Alberta, Canada will also badly suffer and this means a drop
in the Canadian dollar, and possibly a Canadian recession. The shale and tar
sands oil industries will be the main innocent victims of the overall
geopolitical policy pursued by the U.S. government and its Middle East allies.
Indeed, since the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an
American client state, it is most unlikely that such a move to flood oil
markets and precipitate a stiff drop in oil price was decided without a tacit,
if not an overt, approval by the U.S. government. In fact, there is wide
speculation that when U.S. secretary of state John
Kerry met with King Abdullah in September 2014, they allegedly struck an overall
deal to that effect.
Ukraine
as a geopolitical pawn
As to the
destabilization of Russia’s neighboring Ukraine, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has pretty much confirmed
that the U.S. government was deeply involved in overthrowing the legitimate
elected Ukrainian government last February, with the avowed objective of installing a
U.S. puppet
government in that country. This makes a mockery of democracy and only demonstrates how deeply the
U.S. government is involved abroad in power politics and in aggressive interference
in the domestic affairs of other countries.
Neoconservative
Victoria Nuland, appointed Assistant Secretary of
State by President Barack Obama, has publicly confirmed that the U.S.
government has “invested” $5 billion to destabilize Ukraine and create a
conflict between the latter country and Russia. It is hard not to conclude that
the Ukrainian crisis is a made-in-Washington crisis. Her famous and insulting remark about Europe
[“f*** the E.U.”] is another clear indication that the U.S. government wished
to provoke a crisis with Russian not to help Europeans but to serve its own
narrow imperial objectives, whatever the costs to the Russian people and to
Europeans.
What is most disturbing is the irresponsibility with
which the U.S. House of Representatives passed Resolution
758, on December
4, 2014, that is
tantamount for all practical purposes to a declaration of war against Russia,
based on false premises, distorted facts and false
accusations. With that kind
of irresponsible leadership, the world is presently in very bad hands.
The truth is that
if Soviet
missiles in Cuba, 90
miles from U.S. territory, were
unacceptable to the U.S. government in 1962, American missiles in Ukraine, on
the Russian borders, are unacceptable to the Russian government in 2015. What’s
good for the goose is good for the gander. For whoever knows history, that
should not be too difficult to understand.
Conclusion
If world affairs take a turn for the worse in
2015, the world should know where to point the finger at the culprits. Some
people think that world events occur by pure chance and there is no planning
behind them. They are wrong. Dead wrong. Bad government policies, misdeeds,
false flag operations or simple miscalculations are often at the heart of many geopolitical
crises, be they financial, economic or military. Sometimes, it just happens
that the "crazies in the
basement" are in charge.
It is becoming clearer and
clearer, even for the uninformed and the misinformed among us, that the
resurgence of the Cold
War confrontation with Russia has been engineered in Washington D.C. and that
Russia has not been the aggressor, (as the official propaganda wants us to
believe), but has rather reacted to a whole series of U.S.-led provocations.
Why have there been so many
destabilizing interventions by the U.S. government around the world
and who profit the most from this man-made instability? This is a good question
that ordinary Americans should ask themselves.
Domestically, should the U.S. economy continue to be
run by bankers? Internationally, should the U.S. government pursue its policy
of deliberately attempting to drive the Russian government into a corner and
takes measures to destroy the Russian economy? These are acts of war. Are
ordinary Americans in agreement with such policies? Who will profit the most
and who will loose the most if there were to be a nuclear war with Russia?
Since Europeans would be at the forefront of such a conflict, this is a
question that has also to be answered in Europe.
What the world desperately needs now is a law-governed
international environment, not a jingoistic and chauvinistic world empire that looks only after its narrow
self-interests.
More
fundamentally maybe, we should reject the false ideology of clash between
nations. It is a grave and dangerous fallacy that can only lead the world to
disaster.
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