Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
By Matt Taibbi
August 29, 2012 7:00 AM ET
The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.
The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.
The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move.
And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.
Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid.
"Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party," Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. "He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt."
Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: "It's the debt, stupid." This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who's ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.
Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.
By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.
The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.
Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.
Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.
Labels: CONSERVATIVES
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Mandiwanzira defiant over Zanu PF links
01/09/2012 00:00:00
by Staff Reporters
SUPA Mandiwanzira, who was controversially awarded one of two commercial radio licences, has said it was his democratic right to support a political party of his choice but insisted this would not influence his station’s programming.
Mandiwanzira’s ZiFM and Star FM, owned by the state-run Zimbabwe Newspapers group, were awarded licences to run commercial radio stations by the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) in a decision critics say entrenches Zanu PF’s control of the country’s media landscape.
Media reform activists and other political parties said BAZ’s decision flew in the face of calls for diversity and plurality in the sector since Zanu PF already retains a stranglehold over the Zimpapers group and the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) while Mandiwanzira, a former president of empowerment pressure group AAG, also has strong links with the party.
However, Mandiwanzira told a public meeting in Harare this week that it was his right to support any political party of his choice adding the licence was awarded to a company and not an individual.
“Many people claim I have close links with Zanu PF but those who are saying that have not come to ask me whether I support the party or not,” he said.
“But if they think that I do, I guess the answer is that it is my democratic right as it is with everybody else to support a political party of their choice.
Mandiwanzira angrily denied allegations he had been awarded the licence because of his links with Zanu PF and insisted that his supposed political associations would not influence programming at the station.
“(The allegation) is nonsensical. I do not need to move around saying I am this or that; I am Supa Mandiwanzira and that is my brand; that is my identity and our presenters, on and off air, have their own identities as individuals,” he said.
“I do not have to prove to anyone that I am not Zanu PF or MDC. I have to prove to the public that I am running a successful commercial radio station. I was never given the licence. AB communications won the licence in a bidding process that was very competitive and included some of the heavyweights in the sector.
“The identity of an individual cannot be an identity of the (radio) station. So we make a clear distinction on what Supa Mandiwanzira represents as a brand and what the station represents as ZiFM Stereo. The station is not going to be influenced by an individual or political party or media group. We are going to be independent.”
The two licences were awarded as part of reforms aimed at breaking the monopoly of the ZBC which has dominated the country broadcast industry since independence in 1980.
The process, however, drew fire from media reform activists who dismissed it as a farce with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T party demanding that the licences be revoked.
Still, Mandiwanzira said instead of questioning the supposed political links of individuals associated with the two stations, activists shoud welcome the fact that the country now had two privately owned radio stations and push for more to be allowed to operate.
“This is the first time a privately owned radio stations has been licensed so it is adding to diversity. This time last year you had four radio stations and this year you have six radio stations,” he said.
“So don’t make noise about those who are advancing the growth of the industry but must clamour for the opening of more stations because there is still room for improvement.”
Labels: RADIO, SUPA MANDIWANZIRA
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Challenge global bullies, Mugabe tells NAM
31/08/2012 00:00:00
by NewZiana
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe on Friday slammed the abuse of global institutions by powerful member-states and called on the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) to push for reform of the United Nations and other international institutions to make them more representative.
Mugabe, who was addressing the 16th NAM summit in the Iranian capital, Tehran, said such reforms would curtail selfish abuse not only the UN but also multilateral financial and economic institutions.
The Zimbabwean leader called on NAM member states, which make up two thirds of the United Nations, to use their collective strength to push for changes in global governance.
"As the single largest political group in the General Assembly, we should play a key role in the shaping the framework of global governance for the 21st century. The most fundamental challenge is to reform the United Nations system by bringing it into line with contemporary realities," he said.
"The Security Council has to be more representative, transparent and accountable for the legitimacy of its decisions to be truly acknowledged," Mugabe added.
The current structure of the UN, he said, allowed powerful nations, which he described as "war mongers" to disregard international law in pursuance of selfish strategic interests.
"We have witnessed attempts, at times rather brazen ones, to manipulate people's legitimate demands for democracy, human rights and socio-economic development for purposes of achieving illegal regime change," he said.
After the Libyan crisis, fueled then by western countries leading to the killing of its former leader Muammar Gadaffi, Mugabe said Zimbabwe was gravely concerned with the "unilateralism and military belligerence" by powerful nations.
"With the Libyan experience still fresh in our memories, the signs of military adventurism by the NATO war mongers are all too evident for any of us to ignore," he said, adding that prevailing escalating levels of fighting in Syria, were also due to such interferences by western countries.
[Actually they (Al-Qaeda, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the Free Syrian Army) are funded, armed, directed, trained and supported by the West. - MrK]
Mugabe said the powerful members of the UN must instead be using their influence to push the opposition in Syria to engage the government to find a solution to the crisis.
He said the forthcoming UN session must discuss the continued disregard of international law by powerful countries.
NAM countries in the UN, Mugabe said, must also fight attempts to abuse the General Assembly as well as reject the imposition of foreign values, especially where there was no consensus.
Turning to the situation between Palestine and Israel, Mugabe said it was again a case of abuse of power by western countries which was perpetuating the situation.
"These are the same members of the United Nations Security Council that have shamelessly protected Israel against any censure as it tramples upon the rights of the Palestine people," he said, while calling on NAM to condemn Israel as well as come up with plans to advance the interests of the Palestinian people. Mugabe said NAM should use its collective strength to direct global affairs.
"Our movement should use this collective strength to guide global affairs towards a new world order that is founded on the principles of justice, equity, sovereign equality of states, self determination, mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states and non-aggression and non-interference in the affairs other states," he said.
Labels: NAM, NEOCOLONIALISM, ROBERT MUGABE, UN
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Challenge global bullies, Mugabe tells NAM
31/08/2012 00:00:00
by NewZiana
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe on Friday slammed the abuse of global institutions by powerful member-states and called on the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) to push for reform of the United Nations and other international institutions to make them more representative.
Mugabe, who was addressing the 16th NAM summit in the Iranian capital, Tehran, said such reforms would curtail selfish abuse not only the UN but also multilateral financial and economic institutions.
The Zimbabwean leader called on NAM member states, which make up two thirds of the United Nations, to use their collective strength to push for changes in global governance.
"As the single largest political group in the General Assembly, we should play a key role in the shaping the framework of global governance for the 21st century. The most fundamental challenge is to reform the United Nations system by bringing it into line with contemporary realities," he said.
"The Security Council has to be more representative, transparent and accountable for the legitimacy of its decisions to be truly acknowledged," Mugabe added.
The current structure of the UN, he said, allowed powerful nations, which he described as "war mongers" to disregard international law in pursuance of selfish strategic interests.
"We have witnessed attempts, at times rather brazen ones, to manipulate people's legitimate demands for democracy, human rights and socio-economic development for purposes of achieving illegal regime change," he said.
After the Libyan crisis, fueled then by western countries leading to the killing of its former leader Muammar Gadaffi, Mugabe said Zimbabwe was gravely concerned with the "unilateralism and military belligerence" by powerful nations.
"With the Libyan experience still fresh in our memories, the signs of military adventurism by the NATO war mongers are all too evident for any of us to ignore," he said, adding that prevailing escalating levels of fighting in Syria, were also due to such interferences by western countries.
Mugabe said the powerful members of the UN must instead be using their influence to push the opposition in Syria to engage the government to find a solution to the crisis.
He said the forthcoming UN session must discuss the continued disregard of international law by powerful countries.
NAM countries in the UN, Mugabe said, must also fight attempts to abuse the General Assembly as well as reject the imposition of foreign values, especially where there was no consensus.
Turning to the situation between Palestine and Israel, Mugabe said it was again a case of abuse of power by western countries which was perpetuating the situation.
"These are the same members of the United Nations Security Council that have shamelessly protected Israel against any censure as it tramples upon the rights of the Palestine people," he said, while calling on NAM to condemn Israel as well as come up with plans to advance the interests of the Palestinian people.
Mugabe said NAM should use its collective strength to direct global affairs.
"Our movement should use this collective strength to guide global affairs towards a new world order that is founded on the principles of justice, equity, sovereign equality of states, self determination, mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states and non-aggression and non-interference in the affairs other states," he said.
Labels: NAM, ROBERT MUGABE
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President Sata fires Justice Minister Sebastian Zulu
TIME PUBLISHED - Friday, August 31, 2012, 12:29 pm
President Michael Sata has revoked the appointment of Mr. Sebastian Zulu, SC as Minister of Justice. The Head of State confirmed the revocation of the appointment in his letter to Mr. Zulu dated August, 2012. This is according to a press statement issued by George Chellah, special assistant to the President,press and public relations.
“I wish you God’s blessings in your future endeavours,” read the President’s letter to Mr. Zulu in part. And President Sata has appointed University of Zambia (UNZA) academician Dr Chileshe Leonard Mulenga as the new Southern Province permanent secretary.
Dr Mulenga replaces Mr. Edwin Zumbunu whom the Head of State has retired in national interest.
The President expressed gratitude to Mr. Zulu and Mr. Zumbunu for the services rendered to the country during their tenure of office.
The changes are with immediate effect.
Labels: CABINET, MICHAEL SATA
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Jean Ping accuses SA of undermining his AU bid
By Mwala Kalaluka in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Fri 13 July 2012, 14:00 CAT
THE forthcoming return elections for an African Union Commission chairperson are again marred in controversy after its current head, Dr Jean Ping, accused South Africa of fabricating lies that he intends to withdraw from the contest.
And the Gabonese government has provided Dr Ping with an aircraft to enable him to traverse the continent and meet its leaders in his bid to outdo Dlamini-Zuma, who will be the first woman to head the AU Commission if she emerges victorious.
Dr Ping also said contrary to allegations that he failed to handle the situations in Libya and Ivory Coast, it was actually the South African government that impeded concerted efforts to address the issues.
South Africa's interior minister and President Jacob Zuma's ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, is contesting the position of chairperson of the AU Commission and was able to cause a stalemate in Addis Ababa last January when neither she nor Dr Ping could marshal the required winning threshold.
Dr Ping, a son of a Gabonese mother and Chinese trader, said in a press release on Tuesday that he was annoyed by what he called baseless and malicious lies circulating in the South African media that he intends to withdraw from seeking re-election and seeking a redeployment elsewhere in return.
He said such fabrications as those carried by the Sunday Times of South Africa in its edition of July 8, 2012 were the latest in a series of malicious lies to tarnish his hard-earned reputation and destabilise his campaign.
"I am incensed by such an outright fallacy and fabrication, because nothing could be further from the truth.
I am, and remain a candidate for re-election as chairperson of the African Union Commission, as I have not been withdrawn by my country, Gabon, and my region," Dr Ping said. "I fully intend to stay in the race until the very end and hope to earn the renewed trust of our continent's leaders when they meet at the 19th AU Summit, scheduled to take place in Addis Ababa, on 15 and 16 July 2012."
He said media assertions hinting at his withdrawal from the contest were designed to cast some doubts about his strength of character and to undermine support from a wide range of member states keen to re-elect him.
"It has also been alleged that I have not managed the Commission properly during my tenure, when there is evidence to prove that a lot of reforms in the administrative and financial areas have been carried out during the last four years," he said. "As is evident, I have continued to discharge my duties without let or hindrance, as rigorous as they have been."
Dr Ping said he was first accused of indicating to the South African authorities that he was not interested in seeking re-election but that when this lie was debunked, attention was shifted to his supposed failure to handle the situations in Ivory Coast and Libya.
"…When it is well-known that it is the government of South Africa which impeded ECOWAS' efforts to settle the Cote d'Ivoire crisis…and the same government that voted in favour of resolution 1973 that authorised the bombing of Libya," he said.
"Let me end by affirming that I am the candidate of Gabon and Africa, and have not received any financial or other support from any non-African power. This election is an African Union matter and will be decided only by African member states."
Dr Ping further said at no time had he kowtowed to France's dictates in running the affairs of the AU Commission as alleged.
He said he did not want to lower the moral threshold of the campaign and hoped that all involved in the election would conduct a clean and decent campaign that would bring honour to Africa and set a great example for democratic competition.
And Dr Ping said he was thankful that Gabon's President Ali Bongo Ondimba had provided him with an aircraft to fly around the continent and meet leaders to talk to them about his vision for the African Union.
"The President has also sent envoys to a number of AU member states, to campaign for my re-election," said Dr Ping.
Voting is expected to take place today.
Labels: AU, JEAN PING
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Don't fear to express yourself
Sat 01 Sep. 2012, 10:12 CAT
We all have a duty to speak out when something is wrong. We shouldn't be silent when things are not going well. Our ability and willingness to speak out when things are wrong, when things are not going well, is the lifeblood of our country.
Mankind's ability to speak out, to speak up is the bedrock of civilisation. And on this score, the Gospel according to John is very instructive: "Before the world was created, the Word already existed; he was with God, and he was the same as God. From the very beginning, the Word was with God. Through him, God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. The Word was the source of life, and this life brought light to mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out" (1 John 1-5).
Clearly, everything begins with the word, with our ability to express ourselves, to speak out. Freedom of speech and expression is the lifeblood of any democracy. To debate and vote, to assemble and protest, to worship, to ensure justice for all - these all rely upon the unrestricted flow of speech and information.
Clearly, democracy is communication: people talking to one another about their common problems and forging a common destiny. Before people can govern themselves, they must be free to express themselves.
Citizens of a democracy live with a conviction that through the open exchange of ideas and opinions, truth will eventually win out over falsehood, the values of others will be better understood, areas of compromise more clearly defined, and the path of progress opened. The greater the volume of such exchanges, the better.
Democracy depends upon a literate, knowledgeable citizenry, whose access to the broadest possible range of opinions and information enables them to participate as fully as possible in the public life of their society. Ignorance breeds apathy. Democracy thrives upon the energy of citizens who are sustained by the unimpeded flow of ideas, data, opinions and speculation.
But we also know that not all ideas that are propagated are good, correct and acceptable. Some of them are blatant lies, harmful speculation and propaganda and an abuse of the freedom of speech.
But what should the government do in cases where freedom of speech is abused with information that, in the opinion of the majority, is false, repugnant, irresponsible or simply in bad taste? The answer, by and large, is nothing. It is simply not the business of government to judge such matters. In general, the cure of free speech is more free speech. It may seem a paradox, but in the name of free speech, a democracy must sometimes defend the rights of individuals and groups who themselves advocate such non-democratic policies as repressing free speech.
Citizens in a democratic society defend this right out of the conviction that, in the end, open debate will lead to greater truth and wiser public actions than if speech and dissent are stifled.
Furthermore, the advocates of free speech argue, the suppression of speech that I find offensive today is potentially a threat to my exercise of free speech tomorrow - which perhaps you or someone else might find offensive. One of the classic defences of this view is that all people are harmed when speech is repressed. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth, if wrong, they lose the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
We believe that the strength of a democracy lies in the involvement of people in their own governance. As such, participation is a key component of any democracy.
We also believe that participatory governance generates an environment where matters of abuse of power, corruption and such other social evils could be controlled and even overcome. Through checks and balances, mechanisms that curb any abuses, through the separation of power among political structures, could be put in place. Through this separation of power, political structures are able to restrict each other's political discretion, whereby none of them is overly powerful and uncontrollable.
It is necessary that we all participate in the governance of our country according to our position and role, in promoting the common good.
No one should be afraid to speak out their minds. And as Nelson Mandela advised, "men must follow the dictates of their consciences irrespective of the consequences which might overtake them for it".
And as Fr Gabriel Msipu correctly observes, we all have a special mandate to help each other and to alert those in authority and make them know what is happening in certain places which sometimes they cannot visit at all. For this reason, no one should be afraid to express themselves and become tight-lipped because of fear.
We cannot deny that there is a growing culture of intolerance in our politics. And intolerance is not limited only to those in government. It is something that one sees even in our opposition political parties. You dare to challenge some of the top leaders of our opposition political parties and see what happens to your membership, to your position in the party! Freedom of expression is suppressed in many of our political organisations. It is even suppressed in the church. Dissenting voices are rarely tolerated in our political parties and in our churches. Dissent is equally not tolerated in our traditional institutions. Oppose some of our chiefs and see what happens to you!
But for as long as legitimate bodies of opinion feel stifled, vile minds will take advantage of justifiable grievances to destroy, to kill and to maim.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. And to deny any person their human rights, their freedom of expression is to challenge their very humanity.
We all know that some of this intolerance is the result of fear. And fear arises when we view everyone else with suspicion. And as we all know, the route of all problems is anger, attachment, jealousy, hatred. These are the real enemy. And there is one enemy who is always an enemy, with whom we should never compromise; that is the enemy inside your heart. You cannot change all these bad thoughts in your friend. But you have to confront and control them.
Some people turn very negative when things are not going their way. But negativity is never the solution. Anger, jealousy, impatience and hatred are the real trouble makers; with them, problems can never be solved. Though one may have temporary success, ultimately one's hatred or anger will create further difficulties.
No good ever came of anger. Anger may seem to offer an energetic way of getting things done, but a perception of the world is misguided. The only certainty about anger and hatred is that they are destructive.
And we think that anger can be of two type: hatred with ill-feeling is one while another anger - with compassion as the basis of concern - may be positive.
There is need to keep anger in check. Usually people consider that anger is part of the mind, and that it is better to show it, to let it come out. We think that is a wrong conception. Resentment because of grievances may be let out, because then it is finished. Constant anger - that, we think, it is better to check. Hatred cannot be overcome by hatred. Hatred will only regenerate more problems. If we live our lives continually motivated by anger and hatred, even our physical health deteriorates. If you succeed through violence at the expense of others' rights and welfare, you have not solved the problem, but only created the seeds of another. Tolerance and patience with courage are not signs of failure but signs of victory. Actually, if you are too important, that's a real failure. We shouldn't forget that one's own actions create one's life situation.
And as Mandela aptly put it, "anger is a temporary feeling - you soon forget it, particularly if you are involved in positive activities and attitudes. It is not easy to remain bitter if one is busy with constructive things".
Labels: FREEDOM OF SPEECH, GABRIEL MSIPU, RICHARD LUONDE
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Freedom of expression is fundamental -Fr Luonde
By Ernest Chanda
Sat 01 Sep. 2012, 10:20 CAT
FATHER Richard Luonde says freedom of expression is a fundamental ingredient in any human society which should be utilised in love. Commenting on Chipata Catholic Diocese treasurer general Fr Gabriel Msipu's message that people had a special mandate to speak against injustices in society, the Kitwe Anglican priest said such freedom was good for healthy human interaction.
"In as much as it is there, where your freedom ends, another person's freedom starts. So it means that even those in authority have got such freedoms and should be respected. Nevertheless, no one should stifle another person's freedom of speech because it is a constitutional right that should be respected and upheld whether we agree with what others say or not," he said.
Fr Luonde therefore advised that people should exercise their freedom of speech with love and respect.
"…It does not pay to insult others or call them names in the name of freedom of expression. If we have issues to speak about we should bring them out genuinely and in love. Free speech is fundamental right which all of us should enjoy at all times," said Fr Luonde.
Delivering a sermon during morning mass on Radio Maria on Wednesday, Fr Msipu said it was everyone's right to express themselves on issues of national concern.
"It is the duty of all of us as Christians, as church leaders and as concerned citizens of this country. We all have a special mandate and this is our human right to express that what we feel is not okay and we do not do it out of bad will, but we are there to help each other and to alert those in authority and also to make them know what is happening in certain places which sometimes they cannot visit at all," he said. Fr Msipu said those in authority were sometimes detached from reality because of being misinformed about what was happening in the country.
"When you look at the church and indeed some church leaders, brothers, sisters, priests, pastors and other religious leaders, we are found in most places, sometimes even in remote places which cannot be reached by people in authority, to inform them what is happening among certain people in society," said Fr Msipu.
Labels: FREEDOM OF SPEECH, RICHARD LUONDE
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BoZ expresses inflation fears
By Kabanda Chulu
Sat 01 Sep. 2012, 10:20 CAT
THE Bank of Zambia has warned that the proposed increase in electricity tariffs and rising mealie meal and meat prices are posing serious possible risks to inflation. And the Bank of Zambia (BoZ) has maintained the policy rate at nine per cent for September 2012.
In a communiqué issued by the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank yesterday, it was, however, noted that the possible risks to inflation are likely to be moderated by expected stability in the foreign exchange rates.
"We have noted upside risks to inflation in September 2012 to include the proposed adjustment in electricity tariffs and the rising mealie meal and meat prices," it stated. "These inflation risks are, however, likely to be moderated by the relative stability in the exchange rate as well as stable prices of fuel, fish and vegetables."
It stated that during the policy relevant period, inflation would be broadly in line with the end year target of seven percent.
"The Committee has weighed the inflation risks going forward and it has noted that during the policy relevant period, inflation will be broadly in line with the end-year target of seven per cent. Therefore, the committee decided to maintain the policy rate at nine percent," stated the communiqué.
Labels: BOZ, INFLATION
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Inflation rate records marginal increase
By Henry Sinyangwe
Fri 31 Aug. 2012, 14:20 CAT
ZAMBIA'S inflation rate for August has recorded a marginal increase, up from 6.2 per cent seen in July to 6.4 per cent this month.
During a monthly briefing to announce the country's inflation rate yesterday, Central Statistical Office (CSO) director of census and statistics John Kalumbi attributed the rise in inflation to increases in food prices.
"Between July and August 2012, the annual rate of inflation increased for food and non-alcoholic beverages; furnishings, household equipment and routine house maintenance, health, education, and miscellaneous goods and services, while the annual rate of inflation decreased for alcoholic beverages and tobacco; clothing and footwear; housing, water, electricity, gas, and other fuels; recreation and culture; and restaurant and hotel," he said.
Kalumbi said the annual food inflation rate was recorded at 7.3 percent in August 2012 compared to 6.3 percent in July 2012 while the annual non-food inflation rate was recorded at 5.5 percent in August from 6.0 in July.
"This implies that there was a 1.0 percentage point increase in annual food while that of non food items decreased by 0.5 percentage points over the
previous month," he said. "A comparison of retail prices between July 2012 and August 2012 shows that the national average price of a 25 kilogrammes bag of breakfast mealie meal increased by 2.4 per cent from K42,074 to K43,119. The national average price of a 25 kilogramme bag of roller mealie meal increased by 2.0 per cent from K31,464 to K32,121..."
Meanwhile, Kalumbi said the enumeration phase of the economic census began this month and the CSO staff are currently in the field collecting data from about 12,000 enterprises and establishments for the financial year 2010.
Kalumbi also said Zambia has recorded a trade surplus valued at K383.2 billion in July 2012, the highest since January from K163.0 billion recorded in June 2012.
Labels: CSO, INFLATION
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Govt signs $500m oil deal with Trafigura
By Kabanda Chulu
Sat 01 Sep. 2012, 10:10 CAT
GOVERNMENT has signed a one year US$500 million contract with Netherland's multinational commodity trader, Trafigura, for the supply and delivery of finished petroleum products because Zambian investigative wings have cleared the company.
And energy permanent secretary George Zulu has claimed that the MMD government paid for six shipments of crude oil from Nigeria that have never been delivered.
Responding to questions from journalists after signing the contract for the supply and delivery of 216 million litres of petrol and 21 million litres of diesel yesterday in Lusaka with Trafigura - Puma Energy's parent company, Zulu said the engagement of suppliers for both finished and petroleum products and feedstock had gone through a transparent process.
"We have been accused of engaging in corrupt practices but we have done the best we can in the interest of the people and this is why the PF government brought back the abuse of office clause to deter serving officers from engaging in these vices," he said.
"We have received no such report from people and the security wings, in fact, the companies were cleared and we could not have engaged them if they were not cleared. The police, ZPPA (Zambia Public Procurement Authority) told us to go ahead and negotiate and the Attorney General's office gave advice at each and every stage."
On the Nigerian issue, Zulu could not explain clearly why Zambia sought to import crude oil from Nigeria when Indeni Refinery was built to process specific crude oil feedstock especially from the Arabian regions.
"The agreement to procure oil from Nigeria has been in place for the past few years except that the previous regime treated this matter in a confidential manner such that we are not sure whether the nation benefited from this arrangement," Zulu said.
"I was sent to Nigeria and what I found is shocking because there is a man…who is claiming US$5 million commission since he facilitated the deal but I can't say more and I urge security wings to look into this matter."
When asked about quantities involved, how much was paid and the period the incident occurred, Zulu said Zambia paid for six shipments worth 90,000 metric tonnes each under the MMD government.
"Nothing has been delivered but Zambia paid for these commodities; I have figures and documents showing that our Ministry of Finance paid but this money never reached the Nigerian Oil Company," said Zulu.Labels: MMD, OIL, TRAFIGURA LTD
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Phosa: ANC leadership is being severely tested
01 Sep 2012 14:25 - Sapa
The ANC's leadership was being tested by socio-economic realities, its treasurer general Mathews Phosa has said.
"Out of the whole Marikana saga we should be asking ourselves a simple question 'why have the workers lost faith in the legitimate authorities?," Phosa said in a speech prepared for delivery on Saturday.
"Let us, as leaders, not seek the glory inherent in accentuating our differences, but rather seek the quiet triumph of building safe bridges over our differences."
Phosa said despite this the party could not ignore that it was celebrating a century of achievement. He was talking at the handing over the African National Congress' centenary torch in Hartswater in the Northern Cape on Saturday.
Phosa said charging the mineworkers when a commission of inquiry was looking into the matter was reckless and absurd.
On August 16, police opened fire on striking workers gathered on a hill near Lonmin's Marikana mine, in North West, killing 34 of them and wounding 78.
A group of 270 miners were arrested and charged with public violence.
On Thursday, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) announced the miners would also face murder and attempted murder charges for the deaths of their colleagues.
The NPA's contentious decision was questioned on Friday. Justice Minister Jeff Radebe said he would seek clarity on the reasons for the move, while legal experts and political parties roundly condemned the decision.
Phosa said the consequences of charging the miners at this time was "too ghastly to contemplate".
"We don't need another Marikana. We need cool heads to prevail," he said.
South Africa urgently needed to move towards civilian control of the police service as envisaged by the Convention for a Democratic SA.
Phosa said the ANC had reached its political destiny.
"We are in control of our present and of our future. We are in a position to shape our environment in such a way that no one can ever say that ours was a flame that burnt in vain," he said.
It was the ANC's job to keep the flame burning for its children and their children who could benefit from the party's efforts, Phosa said.
"To do that we must utilise the power in our hands, the power of government, to change lives, and create hope, wealth and jobs," said Phosa.
It was Phosa's 60th birthday on Saturday. – Sapa
Labels: ANC
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No confirmation of Marikana ultimatum
31 Aug 2012 20:24 - Sapa
The presidency has been unable to confirm whether President Jacob Zuma has received a letter demanding the release of 270 arrested Marikana miners. Jacob Zuma has been asked to release miners by 1pm on Sunday or face an urgent high court application compelling him to release them. (Paul Botes, M&G)
The M&G has been tracking the violence and dissent at platinum mines. Read our coverage on this and the shootings that killed more than 30 at Lonmin. City Press reported on its website that the letter was sent to Zuma on Friday by the miners' lawyers, Maluleke, Msimang and Associates.
Zuma was asked to release the miners by 1pm on Sunday or face an urgent high court application compelling him to release them.
Maluleke, Msimang and Associates reportedly wrote that keeping the miners behind bars was "unlawful".
Justice department spokesperson Mthunzi Mhaga said this would be an "extraordinary" request.
"If they are adopting that stance, it would be an extraordinary route to explore from a legal point of view," he said.
"We would expect them to approach the courts."
Engaging the NPA
He said Justice Minister Jeff Radebe had not seen or received the letter.
"We'll have to wait and see the contents of the letter, because the minister is engaging with the NPA [National Prosecuting Authority] with the view to understand their decisions on the charges."
On August 16, police opened fire on striking workers gathered on a hill near Lonmin's Marikana mine, in North West, killing 34 of them and wounding 78.
Initially, the arrested group was charged with public violence.
On Thursday, the NPA announced they would also face murder and attempted murder charges for the deaths of their colleagues.
The NPA's contentious decision was questioned on Friday.
Radebe said he would seek clarity on the reasons for the move, while legal experts and political parties roundly condemned the decision.
Radebe invoked section 179 (6) of the Constitution, which states that the justice minister "must exercise final responsibility over the prosecuting authority". – Sapa
Labels: MINING, STRIKE
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COMMENT - I didn't know that like John Redwood, Nigel Lawson was also a (non-executive in his case) director of privatisation bank NM Rothschild & Sons.
Chichester protest against Nigel Lawson
Poketov | 05.07.2009 08:50 | South Coast
THE REAL agenda behind Nigel Lawson and his book pooh-poohing climate change was exposed by campaigners on Friday July 10. They gathered outside St John's Chapel, St John's Road, Chichester, where the former Chancellor under Margaret Thatcher was giving a talk as part of the "Chichester Festivities".
Lawson is not a scientist and it is clear that his attack on the environmental movement is politically motivated and stems from his key role in the world of neo-liberal politics. Sussex Police felt the need to provide protection for Lawson, with five uniformed cops plus various security bods outside and a meat wagon touring the area. However, this did not stop the local campaigners from handing out leaflets to virtually every member of the audience as they entered the building.
Here is the text of a leaflet to be handed out:
CLIMATE change is today pretty much universally recognised to be very real and to be very dangerous.
There are still a few organisations that are holding out against this inconvenient truth in different ways. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, is continuing to fund researchers who cast doubt on global warming, despite public promises to cut support for climate-change sceptics, reported The Daily Telegraph on July 2.
The British police also continue to treat demanding action on climate change as a crime, brutally attacking protesters whenever they get the chance, such as at Kingsnorth power station last summer and the City of London in April this year.
Lining up beside these forces is Nigel Lawson, invited by Chichester Festivities to put across the views expressed in his book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming.
So why has a former financial journalist and Chancellor waded into this rather specialist field of debate?
As Graham Steward noted in The Spectator: “Would we take seriously an appraisal of his time as Chancellor of Exchequer written by someone whose only expertise was in oceanography?”
Others found Lawson’s arguments less than convincing.
Robert Watson, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and now chief scientist to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, accused Lawson of selective quotation and not understanding “the current scientific and economic debate”.
He also wrote in a letter to The Telegraph: “Lord Lawson’s perspective that the UK and Europe are over-reacting to the threat of human-induced climate change is substantially wrong and ignores a significant body of scientific, technological and economic evidence.”
Robin McKie in The Guardian wrote of Lawson’s book: “Although it claims to demolish the cause of global warming, it simply piles up scientific howlers... What really grates is Lawson’s conviction that most of the world’s climatologists, meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, Arctic experts, and biologists, as well as several Nobel Prize winners, are all stupid, misguided and wrong in thinking man-made global warming is real...
“It is breathtaking arrogance, to say the least, although Lawson is not alone in displaying it… These Grumpy Old Deniers feel their lifestyles are threatened by greenies and so reject the entire concept of global warming. ‘With the collapse of Marxism, those who dislike capitalism have been obliged to find a new creed,’ says Lawson.’ For many of them, green is the new red.’ In short, global warming is a commie plot.
It is clear that Lawson’s position on climate change is political rather than scientific in origin. His position is that he accepts the IPCC's conclusion that we can expect to see a warming of between 3.2ºF (1.8ºC) and 7.2ºF (4ºC) by the end of this century. But he argues that this would not necessarily be the disaster requiring an immediate cut in carbon emissions - just the message that the Big Business polluters want to hear!
This connection is hardly a surprise coming from Lawson. He was a key proponent of the Thatcher Government's privatization policy. During his tenure at the Department of Energy he set the course for the later privatizations of the gas and electricity industries and on his return to the Treasury he worked closely with the Department of Trade and Industry in privatizing British Airways, British Telecom, and British Gas.
He also has a background in propaganda, having penned a 1972 report on Subversion in British Industry for the right-wing Institute for the Study of Conflict. He has attended Bilderberg conferences alongside leading bankers and other rulers of the capitalist world and is a non-executive director of N M Rothschild & Sons as well as chairman of the Central European Trust which boasts of co-managing “the largest private equity fund in Central Europe” and chairman of Oxford Investment Partners, which proposes a “multi-asset, unconstrained, investment approach.”
Lawson and the world he represents object to any challenge to the power of high finance and the unsustainable greed of global capitalism – his motives in launching his crusade on climate change are dubious to say the least.
This is a man with an agenda and you can be sure that the interests of the environment and humanity do not feature on it.
Useful links:
www.transitionchichester.org
www.climatecamp.org.uk
www.earthfirst.org.uk
www.greenpeace.org.uk
www.greenpartywestsussex.co.uk
www.schnews.org.uk
www.indymedia.org.uk
www.resurgence.org
www.eco-action.org/porkbolter
Labels: CONSERVATIVES
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Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, August 30, 2012
Asia-Pacific Journal
The most urgent political challenge to the world today is how to prevent the so-called “pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like the 19th-century so-called “pax Britannica” before it, into major global warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” in its final stages, became less and less peaceful, less and less orderly, more and more a naked imposition of belligerent competitive power based on inequality.
To define this prevention of war as an achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are above all achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic reassessment and progressive scaling back of two discredited policies that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive.
I am referring above all to America’s so-called War on Terror. American politics, both foreign and domestic, are being increasingly deformed by a war on terrorism that is counter-productive, producing more terrorists every year than eliminates. It is also profoundly dishonest, in that Washington’s policies actually contribute to the funding and arming of the jihadists that it nominally opposes.
Above all the War on Terror is a self-generating war, because, as many experts have warned, it produces more terrorists than it eliminates. And it has become inextricably combined with America’s earlier self-generating and hopelessly unwinnable war, the so-called War on Drugs.
The two self-generating wars have in effect become one. By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico, America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last six years).1 By launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin and most of the world’s hashish.2
Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily – Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.)3 And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.4
Both of America’s self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance.5 At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world.
Thus, by a paradoxical dialectic, America’s New World Order degenerates progressively into a New World Disorder. And at home the seemingly indomitable national security state, beset by the problems of poverty, income disparity, and drugs, becomes, progressively, a national insecurity state and one gripped by political gridlock.
The purpose of this paper is to argue, using the analogy of British errors in the late 19th century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just international order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them incremental. Using the decline of Britain as an example, I hope to demonstrate that the solution cannot be expected from the current party political system, but must come from people outside that system.
The Follies of the Late 19th Century Pax Britannica
The final errors of British imperial leaders are particularly instructive for our predicament today. In both cases power in excess of defense needs led to more and more unjust, and frequently counter-productive, expansions of influence. My account in the following paragraphs is one-sidedly negative, ignoring positive achievements abroad in the areas of health and education. But the consolidation of British power led to the impoverishment abroad of previously wealthy countries like India, and also of British workers at home.6
A main reason for the latter was, as Kevin Phillips has demonstrated, the increasing outward flight of British investment capital and productive capacity:
Thus did Britain slip into circumstances akin to those of the United States in the 1980s and most of the 1990s – slumping nonsupervisory wage levels and declining basic industries on one hand, and at the other end of the scale a heyday for banks, financial services, and securities, a sharp rise in the portion of income coming from investment, and a stunning percentage of income and assets going to the top 1 percent.7
The dangers of increasing income and wealth disparity in Britain were easily recognized at the time, including by the young politician Winston Churchill.8 But only a few noticed the penetrating analysis by John A. Hobson in his book Imperialism (1902), that an untrammeled search for profit that directed capital abroad created a demand for an oversized defense establishment to protect it, leading in turn to wider and wilder use abroad of Britain’s armies. Hobson defined the imperialism of his time, which he dated from about 1870, as “a debasement … of genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and inassimilable peoples.”9
The earlier British empire could be said by a British historian in 1883 to have been “acquired in a fit of absence of mind," but this could not be said of Cecil Rhodes’s advances in Africa. Maldistribution of wealth was an initial cause of British expansion, and also an inevitable consequence of it. Much of Hobson’s book attacked western exploitation of the Third World, especially in Africa and Asia.10 He thus echoed Thucydides description of how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies in Vietnam and Iraq [and Britain’s in Afghanistan and the Transvaal]. Thucydides attributed the rise of this folly to the rapid change in Athens after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of a rapacious oligarchy.11
Both the apogee of the British empire and the start of its decline can be dated to the 1850s. In that decade London instituted direct control over India, displacing the nakedly exploitative East India Company.
The British empire during the Victorian Era
But in the same decade Britain sided with France’s nakedly expansionist Napoleon III (and the decadent Ottoman empire) in his ambitions against Russia’s status in the Holy Land. Although Britain was victorious in that war, historians have since judged that victory to be a chief cause of the breakdown in the balance of power that had prevailed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Thus the legacy of the war for Britain was a more modernized and efficient army, together with a more insecure and unstable world. (Historians may in future come to judge that NATO’s Libyan venture of 2011 played a similar role in ending the era of U.S.-Russian détente.)
The Crimean War also saw the emergence of perhaps the world’s first significant antiwar movement in Britain, even though that movement is often remembered chiefly for its role in ending the active political roles of its main leaders, John Cobden and John Bright.12 In the short run, Britain’s governments and leaders moved to the right, leading (for example) to Gladstone’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 to recover the debts owed by the Egyptians to private British investors.
Reading Hobson’s economic analysis in the light of Thucydides, we can focus on the moral factor of emergent hubristic greed (pleonexia) fostered by unrestrained British power. In 1886 the discovery of colossal gold deposits in the nominally independent Boer Republic of the Transvaal attracted the attention of Cecil Rhodes, already wealthy from South African diamonds and mining concessions he had acquired by deceit in Matabeleland. Rhodes now saw an opportunity to acquire goldfields in the Transvaal as well, by overthrowing the Boer government with the support of the uitlanders or foreigners who had flocked to the Transvaal.
French caricature of Rhodes, showing him trapped in Kimberley during the Boer War, seen emerging from tower clutching papers with champagne bottle behind his collar.
In 1895, after direct plotting with the uitlanders failed, Rhodes, in his capacity as Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony, sponsored an invasion of Transvaal with the so-called Jameson Raid, a mixed band of Mounted Police and mercenary volunteers. The raid was not only a failure, but a scandal: Rhodes was forced to resign as Prime Minister and his brother went to jail. The details of the Jameson raid and resulting Boer War are too complex to be recounted here; but the end result was that after the Boer War the goldfields fell largely into the hands of Rhodes.
The next step in Rhodes’ well-funded expansiveness was his vision of a Cape-to-Cairo railway through colonies all controlled by Britain. As we shall see in a moment, this vision provoked a competing French vision of an east-east railway, leading to the first of a series of crises from imperial competition that progressively escalated towards World War I.
According to Carroll Quigley, Rhodes also founded a secret society for the further expansion of the British empire, an offshoot of which was the Round Table which in turn generated the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In 1917 some members of the American Round Table also helped found the RIIA’s sister organization, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).13
Some have found Quigley’s argument overstated. But whether one agrees with him or not, one can see a continuity between the expansionist acquisitiveness of Rhodes in Africa in the 1890s and the post-war acquisitiveness of UK and American oil corporations in the CFR-backed coups in Iran (1953), Indonesia (1965), and Cambodia (1970).14 In all these cases private acquisitive greed (albeit of corporations rather than an individual) led to state violence and/or war as a matter of public policy. And the outcomes enriched and strengthened private corporations in what I have called the American war machine, thus rendering less weak those institutions representing the public interest.
My main point is that the progressive build-up of the British navy and armies provoked, predictably, a responsive build-up from other powers, particularly France and Germany; and this ultimately made World War I (and its sequel, World War II) all but inevitable. In retrospect it is easy to see that the arms build-up contributed, disastrously, not to security but to more and more perilous insecurity, dangerous not just to the imperial powers themselves but to the world. Because American global dominance surpasses what Britain’s ever was, we have not hitherto seen a similar backlash in competitiveness from other states; but we are beginning to see a backlash build-up (or what the media call terrorism) from increasingly oppressed peoples.
In retrospect one can see also that the progressive impoverishment of India and other colonies guaranteed that the empire would become progressively more unstable, and doomed in its last days to be shut down. This was not obvious at the time; and comparatively few Britons in the 19th century, other than Hobson, challenged the political decisions that led from the Long Depression of the 1870s to the European “Scramble for Africa,” and the related arms race.15 Yet when we look back today on these decisions, and the absurd but ominous crises they led to in distant corners of Africa like Fashoda (1898) and Agadir (1911), we have to marvel at the short-sighted and narrow stupidity of the so-called statesmen of that era.16
We also note how international crises could be initially provoked by very small, uncontrolled, bureaucratic cabals. The Fashoda incident in South Sudan involved a small troupe of 132 French officers and soldiers who had trekked for 14 months, in vain hopes of establishing a west-to-east French presence across Africa (thus breaching Rhodes’ vision of a north-to-south British presence.17 The 1911 provocative arrival (in the so-called “Panther leap” or Panzersprung) of the German gunboat Panzer at Agadir in Morocco was the foolish brainchild of a Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs; its chief result was the cementing of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, thus contributing to Germany’s defeat in World War I.18
The Pax Americana in the Light of the Pax Britannica
The world is not condemned to repeat this tragedy under the Pax Americana. Global interdependence and above all communications have greatly improved. We possess the knowledge, the abilities, and the incentives to understand historical processes more skillfully than before. Above all it is increasingly evident to a global minority that American hypermilitarism, in the name of security, is becoming – much like British hypermilitarism in the 19th century -- a threat to everyone’s security, including America’s, by inducing and increasingly seeking wider and wider wars.
There is one consolation for Americans in this increasing global disequilibrium. As the causes for global insecurity become more and more located in our own country, so also do the remedies. More than their British predecessors, Americans have an opportunity that other peoples do not, to diminish global tensions and move towards a more equitable global regimen. Of course one cannot predict that such a restoration can be achieved. But the disastrous end of the Pax Britannica, and the increasingly heavy burdens borne by Americans, suggest that it is necessary. For American unilateral expansionism, like Britain’s before it, is now contributing to a breakdown of the understandings and international legal arrangements (notably those of the UN Charter) that for some decades contributed to relative stability.
It needs to be stated clearly that the American arms build-up today is the leading cause in the world of a global arms build-up – one that is ominously reminiscent of the arms race, fuelled by the British armaments industry, that led to the 1911 Agadir incident and soon after to World War I. But today’s arms build-up cannot be called an arms race: it is so dominated by America (and its NATO allies, required by NATO policy to have compatible armaments) that the responsive arms sales of Russia and China are small by comparison:
In 2010 …the United States maintained its dominating position in the global arms bazaar, signing $21.3 billion in worldwide arms sales, or 52.7 percent of all weapons deals, ….
Russia was second with $7.8 billion in arms sales in 2010, or 19.3 percent of the market, compared with $12.8 billion in 2009. Following the United States and Russia in sales were France, Britain, China, Germany and Italy.19
A year later America’s total dominance of overseas arms sales had more than doubled, to represent 79 percent of global arms sales:
Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.20
And what is NATO’s primary activity today requiring arms? Not defense against Russia, but support for America in its self-generating War on Terror, in Afghanistan as once in Iraq. The War on Terror should be seen for what it really is: a pretext for maintaining a dangerously oversized U.S. military, in an increasingly unstable exercise of unjust power.
In other words America is by far the chief country flooding the world with armaments today. It is imperative that Americans force a reassessment of this incentive to global poverty and insecurity. We need to recall Eisenhower’s famous warning in 1953 that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, is in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”21
It is worth recalling that President Kennedy, in his American University speech of June 10, 1963, called for a vision of peace that would explicitly not be “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”22 His vision was wise, if short-lived. After sixty years of the American security system – the so-called “Pax Americana” – America itself is ever more caught up in an increasingly paranoid condition of psychological insecurity. Traditional features of American culture – such as respect for habeas corpus and international law – are being jettisoned at home and abroad because of a so-called terrorist threat that is largely of America’s own making.
The Covert US-Saudi Alliance and the War on Terror
Of the $66.3 billion in U.S. overseas arms sales in 2011, over half, or $33.4 billion, consisted of sales to Saudi Arabia. This included dozens of Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, weapons described by the New York Times, as needed for defense against Iran, but more suitable for Saudi Arabia’s increasing involvement in aggressive asymmetric wars (e.g. in Syria).23
These Saudi arms sales are not incidental; they reflect an agreement between the two countries to offset the flow of US dollars to pay for Saudi oil. During the oil price hikes of 1971 and 1973 Nixon and Kissinger negotiated a deal with both Saudi Arabia and Iran to pay significantly higher prices for crude, on the understanding that the two countries would then recycle the petrodollars by various means, prominently arms deals.24
The wealth of the two nations, America and Saudi Arabia, has become ever more interdependent. This is ironic. In the words of a leaked US cable, “Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.”25 The Rabita or Muslim World League, launched and largely funded by the Saudi royal family, has provided an international meeting place for international Salafists including some al Qaeda leaders.26
Obama with Saudi King Abdullah, 2010
In short, the wealth generated by the Saudi-American relationship is funding both the al Qaeda-type jihadists of the world today and America’s self-generating war against them. The result is an incremental militarization of the world abroad and America at home, as new warfronts in the so-called War on Terror emerge, predictably, in previously peaceful areas like Mali.
The media tend to present the “War on Terror” as a conflict between lawful governments and fanatical peace-hating Islamist fundamentalists. In fact in most countries, America and Britain not excepted, there is a long history of occasional collaboration with the very forces which at other times they oppose.
Today America’s foreign policies and above all covert operations are increasingly chaotic. In some countries, notably Afghanistan, the US is fighting jihadists that the CIA supported in the 1980s, and that are still supported today by our nominal allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In some countries, notably Libya, we have provided protection and indirect support to the same kind of jihadis. In some countries, notably Kosovo, we have helped bring these jihadis to power.27
One country where American authorities conceded its clients were supporting jihadis is Yemen. As Christopher Boucek reported some years ago to the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace,
Islamist extremism in Yemen is the result of a long and complicated set of developments. A large number of Yemeni nationals participated in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s. After the Soviet occupation ended, the Yemeni government encouraged its citizens to return and also permitted foreign veterans to settle in Yemen. Many of these Arab Afghans were co-opted by the regime and integrated into the state’s various security apparatuses. Such co-optation was also used with individuals detained by the Yemeni government after the September 11 terrorist attacks. As early as 1993, the U.S. State Department noted in a now-declassified intelligence report that Yemen was becoming an important stop for many fighters leaving Afghanistan. The report also maintained that the Yemeni government was either unwilling or unable to curb their activities. Islamism and Islamist activists were used by the regime throughout the 1980s and 1990s to suppress domestic opponents, and during the 1994 civil war Islamists fought against southern forces.28
In March 2011 the same scholar, Christopher Boucek, observed that America’s war on terror had resulted in the propping up of an unpopular government, thus helping it avoid needed reforms:
Well, I think for -- our policy on Yemen has been terrorism -- has been terrorism and security and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I think, despite what -- what people in the administration say, we have been focused on terrorism. We have not been focused on the systemic challenges that Yemen faces: unemployment, governance abuses, corruption. I think these are the things that will bring down the state. It's not AQAP….. everyone in Yemen sees that we're supporting the regimes, at the expense of the Yemeni people.29
Stated more bluntly: One major reason why Yemen (like other countries) remains backward and a fertile ground for jihadi terrorism is America’s war on terror itself.
America’s is not the only foreign security policy contributing to the crisis in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has had a stake in reinforcing the jihadi influence in republican Yemen, ever since the Saudi royal family in the 1960s used conservative hill tribes in northern Yemen to repel an attack on southern Saudi Arabia by the Nasser-backed republican Yemeni government.30
These machinations of governments and their intelligence agencies can create conditions of impenetrable obscurity. For example, as Sen. John Kerry has reported, one of the top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) “is a Saudi citizen who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo in November 2007 and returned to militancy [in Yemen] after completing a rehabilitation course in Saudi Arabia.”31
Like other nations, America is no stranger to the habit of making deals with al Qaeda jihadis, to aid them to fight abroad in areas of mutual interest -- such as Bosnia – in exchange for not acting as terrorists at home. This practice clearly contributed to the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, when at least two of the bombers had been protected from arrest because of their participation in a Brooklyn-based program preparing Islamists for Bosnia. In 1994 the FBI secured the release in Canada of a U.S.-Al Qaeda double agent at the Brooklyn center, Ali Mohamed, who promptly went on to Kenya where (according to the 9/11 Commission Report) he “led” the organizers of the 1998 attack on the U.S. Embassy.32
Saudi Arabian Support for Terrorists
Perhaps the foremost practitioner of this game is Saudi Arabia, which has not only exported jihadis to all parts of the globe but (as previously noted) has financed them, sometimes in alliance with the United States. A New York Times article in 2010 about leaked diplomatic cables quoted from one of the diplomatic dispatches: “Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.”33
Back in 2007 the London Sunday Times also reported that:
wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror networks. 'If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,' said Stuart Levey, the US Treasury official in charge of tracking terror financing.34
Similar reports of Saudi funding have come from authorities in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, according to Rachel Ehrenfeld:
Pakistani police reported in 2009 that Saudi Arabia's charities continue to fund al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. The report said the Saudis gave $15 million to jihadists, including those responsible for suicide attacks in Pakistan and the death of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
In May 2010, Buratha News Agency, an independent news source in Iraq, reported on a leaked Saudi intelligence document showing continued Saudi governmental support for al Qaeda in Iraq in the form of cash and weapons…. An article in the May 31, 2010, edition of The Sunday Times in London revealed that the Afghan financial intelligence unit, FinTRACA, reported that since 2006, at least $1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia was smuggled into Afghanistan, headed most probably to the Taliban."35
However the Saudi backing of al Qaeda was not, according to the Times, limited to funds:
In recent months, Saudi religious scholars have caused consternation in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for the destruction of the great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, some of which have already been bombed. And while prominent members of the ruling al-Saud dynasty regularly express their abhorrence of terrorism, leading figures within the kingdom who advocate extremism are tolerated.
Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, the chief justice, who oversees terrorist trials, was recorded on tape in a mosque in 2004, encouraging young men to fight in Iraq. “Entering Iraq has become risky now,” he cautioned. “It requires avoiding those evil satellites and those drone aircraft, which own every corner of the skies over Iraq. If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free to do so.”36
The Example of Mali
Something similar is happening today in Africa, where Saudi Wahhabist fundamentalism “has grown in recent years in Mali with young imams returning from studying on the Arab peninsula.”37 The world press, including Al Jazeera, has reported on the destruction of historic tombs by local jihadis:
Fighters from the al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar Dine, controlling northern Mali, have destroyed two tombs at the ancient Djingareyber mud mosque in Timbuktu, an endangered World Heritage site, witnesses say…. The new destruction comes after attacks last week on other historic and religious landmarks in Timbuktu that UNESCO called "wanton destruction". Ansar Dine has declared the ancient Muslim shrines "haram", or forbidden in Islam. The Djingareyber mosque is one of the most important in Timbuktu and was one of the fabled city's main attractions before the region became a no-go area for tourists. Ansar Dine has vowed to continue destroying all the shrines "without exception" amid an outpouring of grief and outrage both at home and abroad.38
Djingareyber
But most of these stories (including al Jazeera’s) have failed to point out that the destruction of tombs has long been a Wahhabi practice not only endorsed but carried out by the Saudi government:
In 1801 and 1802, the Saudi Wahhabis under Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad ibn Saud attacked and captured the holy Muslim cities of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq, massacred parts of the Muslim population and destroyed the tombs of Husayn ibn Ali who is the grandson of Muhammad, and son of Ali (Ali bin Abu Talib), the son-in-law of Muhammad). In 1803 and 1804 the Saudis captured Makkah and Medina and destroyed historical monuments and various holy Muslim sites and shrines, such as the shrine built over the tomb of Fatimah, the daughter of Muhammad, and even intended to destroy the grave of Muhammad himself as idolatrous. In 1998 the Saudis bulldozed and poured gasoline over the grave of Aminah bint Wahb, the mother of Muhammad, causing resentment throughout the Muslim World.39
The Chance of Peace and Insecurity, the Chief Impediment to It
Today one must distinguish between the Saudi Arabian Kingdom and the Wahhabism promoted by senior Saudi clerics and some members of the Saudi Royal Family. King Abdullah in particular has reached out to other religions, visiting the Vatican in 2007 and encouraging an interfaith conference with Christian and Jewish leaders, which took place in 2008.
In 2002 Abdullah, as Crown Prince, also submitted a proposal for Arab-Israeli peace to a summit of Arab League nations. The plan, which has been endorsed by Arab League governments on many occasions, called for normalizing relations between the entire Arab region and Israel, in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem) and a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee crisis based on UN Resolution 194. It was spurned in 2002 by Israel’s Sharon and also by Bush and Cheney, who at the time were determined to go to war in Iraq. But as David Ottaway of the Woodrow Wilson Center has noted,
Abdullah's 2002 peace plan remains an intriguing possible basis for U.S.-Saudi cooperation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Abdullah's proposal was endorsed by the entire Arab League at its 2002 summit; Israeli President Shimon Peres and Olmert both referred to it favorably; and Barack Obama, who chose the Saudi-owned al Arabiya television station for his first interview after taking office, praised Abdullah for his "great courage" in making the peace proposal. However, the presumed new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has strongly opposed the Saudi plan, particularly the idea that East Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state.40
The plan has no traction in 2012, with Israel hinting at action against Iran and America paralyzed by an election year. However Israeli President Shimon Peres welcomed the initiative in 2009; and George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, announced in the same year that the Obama administration intended to "incorporate" the initiative into its Middle East policy.41
These voices of support indicate that a peace agreement in the Middle East is theoretically possible, but by no means do they make it likely. Any peace settlement would require trust, and trust is difficult when all parties are beset by a sense of insecurity about their nations’ futures. Pro-Zionist commentators like Charles Krauthammer recall that for thirty years before Camp David, the destruction of Israel was “the unanimous goal of the Arab League.”42 Many Palestinians, and most of Hamas, fear that a peace settlement would leave unsatisfied, and indeed extinguish, their demands for a just settlement of grievances.
Insecurity is particularly widespread in the Middle East because of the widespread resentment there against injustice, which insecurity both grows from and propagates. Much of the global status quo has its origins in injustice; but the injustice in the Middle East, on all sides, is extreme, recent, and ongoing. I say this only to offer this advice to Americans: to keep in mind that the issues of security and justice cannot be separated.
Above all, one thing called for is compassion. We as Americans must understand that both Israelis and Palestinians live in conditions not remote from a state of war; yet both have reason to fear that a peace settlement might leave them even worse off than in their present uncomfortable situation. Too many innocent civilians have been killed in the Middle East. American actions should not increase that number.
This sense of insecurity, the major impediment to peace, is not confined to the Middle East. Since 9/11 Americans have experienced the anguish of insecurity, and this is the major reason why there is so little American resistance to the manifest follies of the Bush-Cheney-Obama War on Terror.
The War on Terror promises to make America more secure, yet in fact continues to guarantee the proliferation of America’s terrorist enemies. It also continues to disseminate the War into new battlefields, notably Pakistan and Yemen. By thus creating its own enemies, the War on Terror, now solidly entrenched in bureaucratic inertia, seems likely to continue unabated. In this it is much like the equally ill-considered War on Drugs, dedicated to maintaining the high costs and profits that attract new traffickers.
Above all this contributes to Islamic insecurity as well, causing more and more Muslims to deal with the fear that civilians, not just jihadi terrorists, will be the victims of drone attacks. Insecurity in the Middle East is the major obstacle to peace there. Palestinians live in daily fear of oppression by West Bank settlers and retaliation by the Israeli state. The Israelis live in constant fear of hostile neighbors. So does the Saudi royal family. Insecurity and instability have increased together since 9/11 and the War on Terror.
Middle Eastern insecurity replicates itself on a wider and wider scale. Israeli fear of Iran and Hizbollah is matched by Iranian fear of Israeli threats of massive attacks on its nuclear installations. And recently former U.S. hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski have warned that an Israeli attack on Iran could lead to a longer war that spreads elsewhere.43
Above all, in my opinion, Americans should fear the insecurity spread by drone attacks. If not soon stopped, America’s drone attacks threaten to do what America’s atomic attacks did in 1945: lead to a world in which many powers, not just one, possess this weapon and may possibly use it. In this case the most likely new target by far would be the United States.
How long will it be, I wonder, before a prevailable force of Americans will recognize the predictable course of this self-generating war, and mobilize against it?
What Is to Be Done?
This paper has argued, using the analogy of British errors in the late 19th century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just international order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them incremental:
1) a progressive reduction of America’s bloated military and intelligence budgets, over and above that already contemplated for financial reasons.
2) a progressive phase-out of the violent aspects of the so-called war on terror, while retaining traditional law enforcement means for dealing with terrorists
3) Much of the recent intensification of American militarism can be traced to the “state of emergency” proclaimed on September 14, 2001, and renewed annually by American presidents ever since. We need an immediate termination of this state of emergency, and a reassessment of all the so-called “continuity of government” (COG) measures associated with it – warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention, and the militarization of domestic American security.44
4) a return to strategies for dealing with the problem of terrorists that rely primarily on civilian policing and intelligence.
Forty years ago I would have appealed to Congress to take these steps to defuse the state of paranoia we are living under. Today I have come to see that Congress itself is dominated by the powers that profit from what I have called America’s global war machine. The so-called “statesmen” of America are as dedicated to the preservation of American dominance as were their British predecessors.
But to say this is not to despair of America’s ability to change direction. We should keep in mind that four decades ago domestic political protest played a critical role in helping to end an unjustified war in Vietnam. It is true that in 2003 similar protests – involving one million Americans – failed to impede America’s entry into an unjustified war in Iraq. Nevertheless, the large number of protesters, assembled under relatively short notice, was impressive. The question is whether protesters can adapt their tactics to new realities and mount a sustained and effective campaign.
Under the guise of COG planning, the American war machine has been preparing for forty years to neutralize street antiwar protests. Taking cognizance of this, and using the folly of British hypermilitarism as an example, today’s antiwar movement must learn how to apply coordinated pressure within American institutions – not just by “occupying” the streets with the aid of the homeless. It is not enough simply to denounce, as did Churchill in 1908, the increasing disparity of wealth between rich and poor. One must go beyond this to see the origins of this disparity in dysfunctional institutional arrangements that are corrigible. And one of the chief of these is the so-called War on Terror.
No one can predict the success of such a movement. But I believe that global developments will persuade more and more Americans that it is necessary. It should appeal to a broad spectrum of the American electorate, from the viewers of Democracy Now on the left to the libertarian followers of Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, and Lew Rockwell on the right.
And I believe also that a well-coordinated nonviolent antiwar minority – of from two to five million, acting with the resources of truth and common sense on their side – can win. America’s core political institutions at present are both dysfunctional and unpopular: Congress in particular has an approval rating of about ten percent. A more serious problem is the determined resistance of corporate and personal wealth to reasonable reforms; but the more nakedly wealth shows its undemocratic influence, the more evident will become the need to curb its abuses. Currently wealth has targeted for removal Congress members who have been guilty of compromise to solve government problems. Surely there is an American majority out there to be mobilized for a return to common sense.
Clearly new strategies and techniques of protest will be needed. It is not the purpose here to define them, but future protests – or cyberprotests – will predictably make more skillful use of the Internet.
I repeat that one cannot be confident of victory in the struggle for sanity against special interests and ignorant ideologues. But with the increasing danger of a calamitous international conflict, the need to mobilize for sanity is increasingly clear. The study of history is one of the most effective ways to avoid repeating it.
Are these hopes for protest mere wishful thinking? Very possibly. But, wishful or not, I consider them to be necessary.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 36, No. 2, September 3, 2012.
Notes
1 Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle, Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda, Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy (London: Zed Books, 2012); Mark Karlin, “How the Militarized War on Drugs in Latin America Benefits Transnational Corporations and Undermines Democracy,” Truthout, August 5, 2012.
2 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 217-37.
3 Patrick Cockburn, “Opium: Iraq's deadly new export,” Independent (London), May 23, 2007.
4 Scott, American War Machine, 134-40.
5 See Mark Karlin, “How the Militarized War on Drugs in Latin America Benefits Transnational Corporations and Undermines Democracy,” Truthout, August 5, 2012.
6 Sekhara Bandyopadhyaya, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004), 231.
7 Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 185.
8 “The seed of imperial ruin and national decay – the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor…. the swift increase of vulgar, jobless luxury – are the enemies of Britain” (Winston Churchill, quoted in Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 171).
9 John A. Hobson, Imperialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1902; reprint, 1948), 6. The book’s chief impact in Britain at the time was to permanently stunt Hobson’s career as an economist.
10 Hobson, Imperialism, 12. Cf. Arthur M. Eckstein, "Is There a 'Hobson–Lenin Thesis' on Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial Expansion?" Economic History Review, May 1991, 297–318, especially 298-300.
11 Peter Dale Scott, "The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, January 21, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3476.
12 See Ralph Raico, “Introduction,” Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2010), http://mises.org/daily/5088/Neither-the-Wars-Nor-the-Leaders-Were-Great.
13 Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (G,S,G, & Associates, 1975); Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (GSG Associates publishers, 1981), http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/Anglo_American_Estab.html. Discussion in Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 12-14; Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader , 332.
14 For the little-noticed interest of oil companies in Cambodian offshore oilfields, see Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 216-37.
15 Thomas Pakenham, Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876-1912 (New York: Random House, 1991).
16 See the various books by Barbara Tuchman, notably The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1984).
17 Pakenham, Scramble for Africa.
18 E. Oncken, Panzersprung nach Agadir. Die deutsche Politik wtihrend der zweiten Marokkokrise 1911 (Dilsseldorf, 1981). Panzersprung in German has come to be a metaphor for any gratuitous exhibition of gunboat diplomacy.
19 Thom Shanker, “Global Arms Sales Dropped Sharply in 2010, Study Finds,” New York Times, September 23, 2011.
20 Thom Shanker, "U.S. Arms Sales Make Up Most of Global Market,” New York Times, August 27, 2012.
21 Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 325,
22 Robert Dallek, An unfinished life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2003.). 50.
23 Shanker, "U.S. Arms Sales Make Up Most of Global Market,” New York Times, August 27, 2012.
24 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 33-37.
25 Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, Hovember 29, 2010. Cf. Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter, “Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror: The desert kingdom supplies the cash and the killers,” Times (London), 2007, http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/11/saudi-arabia-is-hub-of-world-terror-the-desert-kingdom-supplies-the-cash-and-the-killers.html.
26 The United Nations has listed the branch offices in Indonesia and the Philippines of the Rabita’s affiliate, the International Islamic Relief Organization, as belonging to or associated with al-Qaeda.
27 See Peter Dale Scott, "Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's On-Going Collusion with Terrorists," Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011; also William Blum, “The United States and Its Comrade-in-Arms, Al Qaeda,” Counterpunch, August 13, 2012, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/13/tales-of-an-empire-gone-mad/.
28 Christopher Boucek, “Yemen: Avoiding a Downward Spiral,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 12.
29 “In Yemen, 'Too Many Guns and Too Many Grievances' as President Clings to Power,” PBS Newshour, March 21, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/jan-june11/yemen_03-21.html.
30 Robert Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa’ud (New York: Avon, 1981), 346-47, 361.
31 John Kerry, Al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia: A Ticking Time Bomb: a Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 2010), 10.
32 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 152-56.
33 Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, November 29, 2010.
34 Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter, “Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror,” Sunday Times (London), November 4, 2007: “Extremist clerics provide a stream of recruits to some of the world's nastiest trouble spots. An analysis by NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 55% of foreign fighters in Iraq. They are also among the most uncompromising and militant.”
35 Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Al-Qaeda's Source of Funding from Drugs and Extortion Little Affected by bin Laden's Death,” Cutting Edge, May 9, 2011, http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=51969&pageid=20&pagename=Security.
36 Sunday Times (London), November 4, 2007.
37 BBC, July 17, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18870130.
38 Al Jazeera, July 19, 2012, http://m.aljazeera.com/SE/201271012301347496.
39 The Weekly Standard, May 30, 2005, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/642eforh.asp. Cf. Newsweek, May 30, 2005. Adapted from Hilmi Isik Advice for the Muslim, (Istanbul: Hakikat Kitabevi).
40 David Ottaway, “The King and Us: U.S.-Saudi Relations in the Wake of 9/11, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2009.
41 Barak Ravid, “U.S. Envoy: Arab Peace Initiative Will Be Part of Obama Policy,” Haaretz, April 5, 2009. David Ottaway, “The King and Us Subtitle: U.S.-Saudi Relations in the Wake of 9/11, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2009.
42 Charles Krauthammer, “At Last, Zion: Israel and the Fate of the Jews,” Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998.
43 “We have no idea how such a wald r wouend,” [Brzezinski] said. “Iran has military capabilities, it could retaliate by destabilizing Iraq” (Salon, March 14, 2012).
44 See Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 183-242; Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 28, 2010,
http:/1/japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448
Peter Dale Scott is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Peter Dale Scott
Labels: COLONIALISM, SYRIA
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