Rio 2016 and the (Broken) Promises of the Olympic Games

September 23, 2016

The 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro were to catalyse and signify Brazil’s final transition into a modern, developed nation. Yet, many were skeptical of the city and country’s ability to host the event successfully, citing levels of pollution, crime, and a lack of infrastructure. Could hosting in a city like Rio simply exacerbate such issues?

By all accounts, Rio de Janeiro’s successful bid for the 2016 Olympic Games was remarkable. For the first time since 1968, the IOC awarded the Games to a city in a “developing” nation within the global South, and for the first time ever bestowed the Olympics upon a city in South America. Many within Brazil saw this successful bid as affirmation of the country’s newfound standing within the international community, and a catalyst for its final push towards becoming a modern, developed nation. Then President Lula da Silva made clear the significance of the Olympics in this regard, declaring that the Games marked “Brazil’s chance to present itself to the world, [by leaving behind] its status as a second class nation.”¹ Lula’s claims drew on the popular logic of Olympic hosting, namely that holding a sports mega-event provides an opportunity for a host city and country to unlock significant capital towards the reconfiguration of cityscapes, particularly the construction of facilities, transportation, and commercial and tourist areas, as well as an opportunity to broadcast an image of a modern, advanced state to the rest of the world.² Notably, Lula also claimed that the event would provide “an opportunity to improve the living conditions of the people of a country,”³ a particularly significant statement given Rio and Brazil’s legacy of poverty and inequality, as well as the rather dubious track record of the Olympic Games when it comes to leaving a positive, sustained social legacy.

Nonetheless, the promises attached to Rio 2016 were not out of the ordinary. Such potential benefits of hosting an Olympic Games – as well as other sport mega-events like the FIFA World Cup – have become increasingly attractive for emerging nations like Brazil that seek to project an image of “development” to an international audience and to reap the benefits of increased tourism, foreign investment, and international prestige. Thus, the awarding of the 2016 Games to Rio continued the trend of sport mega-events being taken up by non-traditional powers as part of their development strategies, with the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India, the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil all serving as prior examples.

However, while the development potential of Rio 2016 was promoted from the outset, it was quickly accompanied by doubts and fears surrounding the city’s ability to stage such an event successfully, with many citing crime rates, pollution levels, and the lack of infrastructure as barriers to hosting the Games. During the event, such concerns intensified. Coverage of Rio 2016 was replete with tales of incomplete competition venues and accommodations, polluted water for aquatic sports, poor event management, crime, and general civil unrest throughout the city. Such reports fed the notion that the Brazilian Organizing Committee was not prepared to host the event, or worse, that a “developing,” global South nation is unable to host an event of the magnitude of the Olympic Games.

Potential benefits of hosting an Olympic Games have become increasingly attractive for emerging nations like Brazil that seek to project an image of “development” to an international audience and to reap the benefits of increased tourism, foreign investment, and international prestige.

At the same time, such concerns about the practicality of staging the Olympic fortnight in a city like Rio are only the tip of the iceberg. A plethora of critical scholars and social activists cited concerns about the efficacy of hosting the Olympics in Rio during the entire 7-year run-up to the event. In particular, they argued that while the benefits of hosting sports mega-events are attractive to emerging, semi-peripheral or non-traditional states, the stakes are higher for such polities, with fewer resources available and slimmer margins for error as compared to traditional host cities.⁴ From this perspective, a city like Rio was always in a precarious position as host; when unforeseen problems emerged or costs overran (as they inevitably have done in the recent history of the Games), the “winners curse” meant that resources simply had to be found. In turn, the opportunity costs are higher – in Rio and Brazil where poverty and inequality is multi-generational, and basic public services lacking amidst a crippling recession, the fact that so much money was spent on a sports event is increasingly difficult to justify.

These examples might suggest particular struggles or challenges for Rio and Brazil in its attempt to host a successful Olympics. From our perspective, however, such issues are illustrative of the broader politics of hosting sports mega-events. Again, scholars and activists have long argued that hosting events like the Olympics and World Cup does little to overcome social inequality and economic stratification and indeed largely exacerbates such problems through displacement and gentrification. In turn, the intense commercialisation of such events often results in public money being funnelled to private interests and hands. Thus, despite being promoted as a boon to social and economic development (in global North and global South nations alike), the fanfare surrounding sports mega-events tends to obfuscate the neoliberal tendencies underpinning them, forces that result in the private accumulation of wealth, the displacement of marginalised populations, and the privatisation of land and resources to the detriment of the natural environment.

This has been particularly acute in Brazil, where the size and cost of Rio 2016 has intensified social and economic inequalities, and raised questions about matters of human rights and social justice. Jules Boykoff has argued that the Olympic Games often take place in a “state of exception” whereby normal policy priorities are compromised and individual rights sometimes suspended in the name of hosting a world class sport event.⁵ This is perhaps best illustrated in Brazil by the repossession of land from informal housing communities known as favelas through “Police Pacification Units” (UPP), whereby police/military units enter such spaces, remove prominent drug traffickers, and occupy the area. While the state has argued that the UPPs are of benefit to local communities, local activists have shown that these evictions are often conducted at random, through the use of violence, and with the intent of consolidating land and wealth under the pretence of health and safety. Tellingly, such activities have been criticised by both the United Nations Human Rights Council and Amnesty International.⁶

Rio has seen regular street protests against this appropriation of land and displacement of local populations, as well as the lack of investment in impoverished areas, not to mention health care, education, and transportation. Indeed, most of the public funding for the Games has come from Rio’s city government, which in June declared a state of financial emergency requiring the release of federal emergency funds. As a result, Rio state employees and pensioners are owed wages, with many hospitals and police stations adversely affected.⁷ The point here is not that the political contestability of hosting the Olympics is unique to Rio and Brazil; rather, given its precarious position, the stakes of Olympic hosting are higher for Rio, and the negative effects and opportunity costs of hosting have proved more difficult to overcome or ignore compared to other Olympic cities.

The scale of the Olympics is now such that hosting seems increasingly unsustainable, socially, economically, and environmentally; the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, for instance, reportedly cost close to $51 billion (US) .

All of this raises the question of whether the residents of Rio, and the population of Brazil more broadly, will see any benefits from the event. It is perhaps the case that the attention paid to the city and country during the Games will lead to subsequent benefits in tourism, investment and trade. There is also the possibility – often used to justify Olympic spending – that the demonstration of Olympic sport will inspire a new generation of Olympic athletes and a more active population, leading in turn to a healthier, happier and more prosperous nation. However, given that the global media coverage of Rio’s hosting of the Games has been mixed at best, the resulting image of Rio and Brazil may turn out to be less than positive. In turn, given Brazil’s structural inequality, any investment in tourism and trade that may occur as a result of Rio 2016 is not guaranteed to find its way to those who need it most. As for the sporting benefits, investment in elite athletes does not necessarily mean that there are more opportunities or even incentives for average citizens to participate in sport. Indeed, in the aftermath of the pacification and displacement of Rio’s most marginalised citizens, it seems unlikely that they would be motivated to take up sport in the spirit of Olympic legacy.

So what might an alternative and more equitable approach to hosting the Olympic Games look like? The scale of the Olympics is now such that hosting seems increasingly unsustainable, socially, economically, and environmentally; the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, for instance, reportedly cost close to $51 billion (US).⁸ The lack of bid cities for the 2022 Winter Olympics (eventually awarded to Beijing) perhaps signals a sea change, as does current IOC President Thomas Bach’s Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms. Still, no matter where future Games are held, there is currently little reason to believe that they will benefit all or even most residents of host cities, particularly if held in emerging countries. From our perspective, what is required at the very least is a re-configuration of the stakeholder groups involved in any Olympic bid and hosting processes so that priorities of social development are more firmly prioritised. More broadly, the tribulations of Rio 2016 demonstrate the need for an ongoing discussion about how to secure rights and justice for local populations, and particularly marginalised groups, who often live in the shadow of the Olympic spectacle.

In sum, while the Olympic Games are largely produced and consumed outside of discussions of politics and economics in an effort to respect the achievement of the athletes, Rio 2016 reminds us that hosting the Olympics is inherently political. The banishment of Apartheid South Africa at the 1964 Games, the student and civil rights protests at the 1968 Games in Mexico City, and the boycott of the 1980 Games in the Soviet Union are all examples of the Games’ political dimensions, as are more recent protests surrounding environmental damages and economic costs at Vancouver 2010 and London 2012, and human rights abuses at Beijing 2008 and Sochi 2014. For us, now is the time for a more sustained discussion of, or even resistance to, the divisive and detrimental politics and policies that often underpin Olympic hosting.

Featured image courtesy of: Getty Images

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About the Author

Simon C. Darnell is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the relationship between sport and international development and peace building efforts, the development implications of sports mega-events, and the place of social activism in the culture of sport.

Rob Millington is a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on how international organizations like the United Nations and International Olympic Committee implement sport-for-development in policy and practice, in both historical and contemporary contexts.

References

1. O’Conner, A. (2009, April 4). Brazil deserves the 2016 Olympic Games. The Times. Retrieved from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/article6032127.ece
2. Cornelissen, S. (2010). The Geopolitics of global aspiration: Sport mega-events and emerging powers. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 27(16-18), 3008–3025; see also Gaffney, C. (2010). Mega-events and socio-spatial dynamics in Rio de Janeiro 1919-2016. Journal of Latin American Geography, 9(1), 7–29.
3. O’Conner, A. (2009).
4. Black, D. (2008). Dreaming big: The pursuit of ‘second order’ games as a strategic response to globalization. Sport in Society, 11(4), 467-480.
5. Boykoff, J. (2013). Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games. Abingdon: Routledge.
6. Millington, R. & Darnell, S.C. (2014). Constructing and contesting the Olympics online: The internet, Rio 2016 and the politics of Brazilian development. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 49(2), 190-210.
7. BBC News (2016, June 17). Rio state declares ‘public calamity’ over finances. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36565901
8. The Associated Press (2015, February 5). Sochi Olympics leaving costly legacy 1 year alter. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/sports/sochi-olympics-leaving-costly-legacy-1-year-later-1.2946291

Japan’s Impending Monetary Exhaustion

September 23, 2016

By Dan Steinbock

Japan’s monetary gamble and Abenomics are approaching the end of the road. Neither Brussels nor Washington is immune to the adverse consequences of Tokyo’s monetary exhaustion, says Dan Steinbock.

Recently, Japan’s second quarter GDP growth was revised up to 0.7 percent, after four consecutive quarters of stagnation. But don’t set your hopes too high.

More than three years ago, the conservative caution of the Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Masaaki Shirakawa faded into history as his successor Haruhiko Kuroda pledged to do “whatever it takes” to achieve the 2 percent inflation target. Yet, today inflation remains close to zero and Japan’s stock market is down 13 percent.

Irrespective of the outcome of its recent meeting, the BOJ can only postpone the inevitable. Nevertheless, cyclical fluctuations in Japan or elsewhere will in no way mitigate secular challenges.

Failure of Monetary Gamble

Under Kuroda, the BOJ has boosted quantitative and qualitative easing with negative interest rate policy. Base money and the central bank’s holdings of Japanese government bonds (JGBs) each have swollen to almost ￥400 trillion ($3.9 trillion), which is now 80 percent of the country’s GDP, and they continue to expand at a pace of￥80 trillion ($780 billion) annually.

What Kuroda is doing would be comparable to Fed chief Janet Yellen boosting base money and the Fed’s treasuries up to $14.9 trillion, while easing at $3 trillion per year, with no specific limit in sight. In Washington, that would mean an economic kamikaze and political suicide. Until recently, Japan was a different story.

Now divisions are spreading in the BOJ. Kuroda’s fractured majority is sticking with the original plan of large-scale JGBS and negative rates to boost growth and inflation. However, some advocate greater flexibility – ￥70 trillion to ￥90 trillion per year – in purchases, hoping that would make a difference. In contrast, skeptics would like to curb the BOJ’s purchases, even at the risk of perceptions of tightening, rising yen and plunging markets.

Nonetheless, all three seem to believe that Japan’s fortunes can be reversed by monetary policies alone and that these policies are not part of the problem.

Failure of Abenomics

In December 2013, when the Liberal Democratic Party returned to leadership with Abe as its minister, the LDP campaigned on renewed fiscal stimulus, aggressive monetary easing from the BOJ, structural reforms to boost competitiveness and eventual fiscal consolidation. The devaluation of the yen, critical to Japanese exporters, was the tacit denominator of the proposed changes.

In addition to a huge liquidity risk, Tokyo took another risk in timing, as I argued then. It sought to implement the fiscal stimulus in 2013, while fiscal consolidation would follow. Obviously, unease increased in 2014. As Abe went ahead with the sales tax hike that spring, the recovery was too fragile for consolidation. Instead of strong expansion, Japan slid into recession and began its third lost decade.

Ironically, yen continues to rise, thanks to stagnation in the West and the dated perception that yen remains a safe haven currency.

Last summer, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) finally acknowledged Abenomics is not working. “The targets for growth, inflation, and the primary balance remain out of reach under current policies,” it reported. As Tokyo’s policy authorities recognised the risks, they have delayed the proposed consumption tax hike, adopted new structural reforms and a negative interest policy.

Yet, outlook remains weak with real GDP growth less than 1 percent until early 2020s. Meanwhile, time is running out.

Hitting the Ceiling

If the BOJ will continue to purchase JGB debt, it will own almost half of all JGPs outstanding by fall 2017. That would leave another half of the JGBs available for the BOJ to buy. Yet, banks need some JGBs for collateral, while insurers must have their long-term JGBs. So a year ago, even the IMF had to conclude that the BOJ would hit its JGB purchase ceiling “sometime in 2017 or 2018”.

Now there is the additional challenge of the flat yield curve. After the BOJ’s negative rates in January, the JGB curve has flattened drastically. Coupled with low rates, persistently flatter yield curves are likely to weaken financial intermediation and penalise banks, insurers and pension funds, reducing their risk-taking.

Worse, Kuroda’s monetary gamble does not only involve bond markets, but equities as well. Under its stimulus plan, the BOJ buys 3 trillion yen ($29 billion) of exchange-traded funds (ETF) annually. In spring, these purchases made it a top-10 holder in about 90 percent of all Japanese stocks, according to Bloomberg data. In late July the BOJ doubled its ETF buys to 6 trillion yen ($59 billion) per year. It could become the No 1 shareholder in some 40 Nikkei 225 companies by early 2018.

In the next few years, the BOJ could not only own most of the Japanese bond market, but virtually most Japanese stocks; even as Japan’s gross debt will exceed 250 percent of its GDP. It is a disastrous path.

The Selloff Twist

Usually, political opposition can undermine failed economic policies. Yet, Japan’s main opposition Democratic Party has been struggling since it lost to Abe in 2012. In turn, Emperor Akihito has even sought to abdicate the throne in his lifetime to prevent Abe from reviving the pre-war Imperial Japan.

If countervailing forces linger in domestic economy and politics, even internationally, market volatility is a different story.

Japan remains the world’s third-largest economy and the second-largest debt market.

Since the summer, Japan has been suffering from a bond tantrum as its sovereign debt has had its worst rout in a decade. Some expect the BOJ next to pursue a reverse “Operation Twist”. It could sell long-end bonds, while buying the short-end to make the easing more sustainable over time. But as trillions in long-dated JGBs continue to carry negative yields, an abrupt withdrawal from the long-end could roil the market.

Japan remains the world’s third-largest economy and the second-largest debt market. Moreover, correlations among major markets have increased significantly since 2008. A perceived policy reversal could unleash a dramatic selloff in JGBs, while global fixed-income markets would not remain immune.

If that selloff will not ensue in the fall or 2017-18, it will only grow into a more devastating market tsunami over time.

The slightly shorter original version was released by South China Morning Post on September 21, 2016

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About the Author

Dan Steinbock is the founder of the Difference Group and has served as the research director at the India, China, and America Institute (USA) and a visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more information, see http://www.differencegroup.net/

What does the EU Stand for: Globalisation or Universalism?

September 23, 2016

By William Hawes

The EU now stands for globalisation and all its discontents. The dreary, neoliberal perspective of leaders must be replaced for Europe to thrive and maintain global influence. By embracing universalism, the roots of world conflict can be addressed.

What is the purpose of the European Union? This question has been on the minds of everyone following the UK vote in favour of Brexit. Yet in the mad scramble to make sense of the United Kingdom’s rejection of the EU, little lucid commentary has been made. European leaders, the fawning media, and UK citizens alike portrayed the vote as either a refusal of EU austerity, or unhappiness with immigrants and open borders.

So which one was it: a rejection of austerity or immigration? Were UK citizens fed up with austerity measures, and with unreasonable and onerous regulations and taxes paid to the EU bureaucracy? Or were Brexiters caught up in a fever of anti-immigrant nationalism and populist demagoguery, egged on by the odious Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage?

In truth, this is a misleading either/or question: UK citizens were fed up with both lax immigration controls and EU-imposed austerity. By framing the question this way, political commentators miss the larger picture: it is globalisation that is the cause of the disintegration of Western political systems and civil society, and it is globalisation, i.e. predatory capitalism, that is the root cause of the anger and rage felt by voters of Brexit.

This rage was displaced: for white, working class UK citizens facing declining living standards and social mobility, immigrants are easy targets for their fury to be unleashed on. The undemocratic, sclerotic, neoliberal rule emanating from the EU also made for a useful scapegoat. No one can doubt the contempt and disregard EU leaders have for ordinary citizens, and for a genuine people’s democracy. Besides each member nation offering citizens their own referendum to stay or leave, what else can be done?

This brings us full circle, back to the question: what does the EU stand for? Reduced to a single word, there can be no doubt that at the moment, the EU’s leadership unflinchingly promotes globalisation, the tentacle-like network of transnational capitalism, along with all its militarist, industrialist, oligarchic, and kowtowing media trappings.

What seems to have gone unnoticed, except for a few astute observers, was the lack of talk about the UK and EU’s role in the wider world. As the venerable Andre Vltchek explains:

“Almost no commentator bothered to notice what was truly shocking about the entire referendum process: an absolute lack of progressive ideology, of internationalism and concern for the world as a whole. Both sides (and were there really two sides there) presented a fireworks of shallow selfishness and of pettiness. The profound moral corruption of the West was clearly exposed…Everybody in Europe now wants more, more and more. Screw austerity! ‘Give us more benefits!’ Provide us with better wages, job security, and shorter working hours!”

The EU’s leadership unflinchingly promotes globalisation, the tentacle-like network of transnational capitalism, along with all its militarist, industrialist, oligarchic, and kowtowing media trappings.

A cautionary tale was revealed last year when former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis explained his dealings with the Eurogroup, which convenes to discuss Euro currency matters. After the Eurogroup issued a communiqué without him, Varoufakis rightly asked for clarification. Here’s the response:

“The meeting was briefly halted. After a handful of calls, a lawyer turned to him and said, ‘Well, the Eurogroup does not exist in law, there is no treaty which has convened this group.’”

Varoufakis elaborates:

“What we have is a non-existent group that has the greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within . . .These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”

This is the new boss, same as the old boss. EU finance leaders are unaccountable to their citizens, just as European and world business leaders are plotting to unravel national and supranational regulatory structures by imposing the TTIP, TISA, and TTP trade deals.

Yet there is another vision of Europe which can supplant the consumerist, neoliberal mould that the EU is turning into, ostensibly in order to compete with the US and China. The idea of a universal world culture, with dignity and egalitarian democracy for all peoples, is what Europeans should strive for. This is hinted at in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which sets the tone for future forms of limited international governance and worldwide social justice initiatives, cultural and environmental rights, and individual liberties.

This sketch of a liveable future world confederation, with nonviolent social relations, has its roots in the great Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace”. Imagine if all EU policy-makers were required to read such a revelatory work, and form legislation based on it.

Of course, the pro-capitalist EU leadership won’t take action without momentum from civil society. For this to happen, what Bassam Tibi calls a Leitkultur (“Leading Culture”) must develop. This means that the postmodern illusions of superficial multiculturalism and cultural relativism must be squashed. For Tibi, Enlightenment values, based on universal rights, secularism, pluralism, and democracy must be protected and expanded for all Europeans, which could re-engage and spark interest among citizens to rework the wider social fabric. Additionally, this may have the effect of dislodging people in the West from their Eurocentric bubbles. With significant progress, widening empathy for others could foster the internationalism needed to provide poorer countries with the resources, technology, and solidarity to vanquish poverty, improve quality of life, and fight against Western-backed tin-pot dictators in the developing nations.

In his essay “The Idea of Europe”, George Steiner explains the need to rise above our corporate, consumer worldview:

“It may be that the future of the ‘idea of Europe’, if it has one, depends less on central banking and agricultural subsidies, on investment in technology or common tariffs, than we are instructed to believe. It may be that the OECD or NATO, the further extension of the Euro or of parliamentary bureaucracies on the model of Luxembourg are not the primary dynamics of the European vision. Or if, indeed, they are, that vision is hardly one to rouse the human soul…Making money and flooding our lives with increasingly trivialised material goods is a profoundly vulgar, emptying passion.”

While Steiner is in favour of European integration, for him, a proviso is necessary: Europe must not give in to the standardisation, to the tyranny of the masses, and the homogeny of Anglo-American culture, or the authoritarianism of the emerging East Asian model. Europeans must embrace their differences, their local traditions, even as they maintain a wider Union to stave off warfare and unbridled economic competition.

For Europe to thrive and maintain global influence, the traditions of great art, literature, and radical humanism should be nurtured, with economic preferences given to small businesses and cooperatives. This is in contrast to the US-UK “merchant model” of the transnational conglomerates, or their Asian counterparts, the Korean Chaebols and Japanese Keiretsus.

We know what the EU stands for now: globalisation and all its discontents. The dreary, neoliberal perspective of leaders like Hollande and Merkel must be replaced: it is the most radical ideas of visionaries like Kant, Tibi, and Steiner that should be upheld. In doing so, the myopia and selfishness of the capitalist worldview becomes all too clear. By embracing universalism, the roots of world conflict can be addressed: material poverty in the developing nations would be history within a few short years, if, for example, the West reallocated their military budgets to such ends. Conversely, the spiritual emptiness of rampant consumerism and sensationalist media could be vanquished in the West, if compassion and solidarity is expanded towards Asia, Africa, Latin America, and indigenous peoples across the globe. Capitalism, and the expanded version of globalisation are Europe’s past: the only possible future is to embrace universalism.

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About the Author

William Hawes is a writer specialising in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, and Dissident Voice. You can find his ebook, Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire, on Amazon.

September – October 2016

September 20, 2016

Philippines
The Duterte Whirlwind: The Reawakening of the Philippines
Dan Steinbock

Duterte curses Barack Obama in a remark about Filipino sovereignty
Tunde Olupitan

US Election
What if Clinton Wins US Presidential Election 2016
Dan Steinbock

Calling Both Clinton and Trump Unpopular and Untrustworthy is Seriously Misleading
Neil Buchanan

Decline of Parties, Rise of Hucksterism (and Trump)
Timothy Braatz

Blinded by Nostalgia
Yuval Levin

Korea
The Strategy for Korea’s Economic Success
Hwy-Chang Moon

International Business
The Business of People: Effective Strategies to Drive Success in Global Business
Sharon Schweitzer

European Union
What does the EU Stand for: Globalisation or Universalism?
Williams Hawes

A Reform Agenda for Post-Brexit Europe
Andrea Montanino, Lilac Peterson, & Álvaro Morales Salto-Weis

Olympics
Rio 2016 and the (Broken) Promises of the Olympic Games
Simon Darnell and Rob Millington

Latin America
Latin America’s Challenge: More and Better Saving for Development
Eduardo Cavallo and Tomas Serebrisky

Africa
Becoming Better Positioned to Lead the Africa Growth Story
Zipho Sikhakhane

Implications of Islamic Finance in Africa’s Socio-Economic Development
Basheer Oshodi

India
The Informal Sector in India: Prosperity or Persistence of Misery?
Saumya Chakrabarti, Daipayan Sarkar and Ankita Biswas

Sharing Economy
Social Wealth Funds: A Key Ingredient of a New Alternative Economic Strategy
Stewart Lansley

Sharing Strikes Back: A New Era of Urban Commoning
Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman

Assad’s Death Warrant

September 19, 2016

By Mike Whitney

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation where the main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2, the United States.

“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.”

– Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria, Politico

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

The main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2. (See: Bill Blum here.) We’re talking about the United States of course.

Washington is the hands-down regime change champion, no one else even comes close. That being the case, one might assume that the American people would notice the pattern of intervention, see through the propaganda and assign blame accordingly. But that never seems to happen and it probably won’t happen here either. No matter how compelling the evidence may be, the brainwashed American people always believe their government is doing the right thing.

But the United States is not doing the right thing in Syria. Arming, training and funding Islamic extremists – that have killed half a million people, displaced 7 million more and turned the country into an uninhabitable wastelands – is not the right thing. It is the wrong thing, the immoral thing. And the US is involved in this conflict for all the wrong reasons, the foremost of which is gas. The US wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus so it can secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure that those reserves continue to be denominated in US Dollars that are recycled into US Treasuries and US financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining US dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future.

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on protestors in the spring of 2011. That version of events is obfuscating hogwash. The war began in 2009, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria. As Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains in his excellent article “Syria: Another pipeline War”:

“The $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey… would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey… The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world.

In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally…

Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world…”

Naturally, the Saudis, Qataris, Turks and Americans were furious at Assad, but what could they do? How could they prevent him from choosing his own business partners and using his own sovereign territory to transport gas to market?

What they could do is what any good Mafia Don would do; break a few legs and steal whatever he wanted. In this particular situation, Washington and its scheming allies decided to launch a clandestine proxy-war against Damascus, kill or depose Assad, and make damn sure the western oil giants nabbed the future pipeline contracts and controlled the flow of energy to Europe. That was the plan at least. Here’s more from Kennedy:

Repeat: “the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline”, he signed his own death warrant. That single act was the catalyst for the US aggression that transformed a bustling, five thousand-year old civilisation into a desolate Falluja-like moonscape overflowing with homicidal fanatics that were recruited, groomed and deployed by the various allied intelligence agencies.

But what’s particularly interesting about this story is that the US attempted a nearly-identical plan 60 years earlier during the Eisenhower administration. Here’s another clip from the Kennedy piece:

“During the 1950’s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers… mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism – which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism – particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favouring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism…

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 – barely a year after the agency’s creation… Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. (so)… the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime…

(CIA agent Rocky) Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime…

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government… (Then) Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the US and executed them for treason.” (Politico)

See how history is repeating itself? It’s like the CIA was too lazy to even write a new script, they just dusted off the old one and hired new actors.

Fortunately, Assad – with the help of Iran, Hezbollah and the Russian Airforce – has fended off the effort to oust him and install a US-stooge. This should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of Assad as a leader, but of the principal that global security depends on basic protections of national sovereignty, and that the cornerstone of international law has to be a rejection of unprovoked aggression whether the hostilities are executed by one’s own military or by armed proxies that are used to achieve the same strategic objectives while invoking plausible deniability. The fact is, there is no difference between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Obama’s invasion of Syria. The moral, ethical and legal issues are the same, the only difference is that Obama has been more successful in confusing the American people about what is really going on.

Repeat: “the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline”, he signed his own death warrant.

And what’s going on is regime change: “Assad must go”. That’s been the administration’s mantra from the get go. Obama and Co are trying to overthrow a democratically-elected secular regime that refuses to bow to Washington’s demands to provide access to pipeline corridors that will further strengthen US dominance in the region. That’s what’s really going on behind the ISIS distraction and the “Assad is a brutal dictator” distraction and the “war-weary civilians in Aleppo” distraction. Washington doesn’t care about any of those things. What Washington cares about is oil, power and money. How can anyone be confused about that by now? Kennedy summed it up like this:

“We must recognise the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.”

That says it all, don’t you think?

This article was first published on counterpunch.org on September 15, 2016

Featured image courtesy of: Serkan Senturk | Shutterstock.com

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About the Author

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at [email protected].

Duterte vs Barack Obama In A Remark About Filipino Sovereignty

September 15, 2016

By Tunde Olupitan

Latest news on the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, is of his calling USA President Barack Obama a son of a b***h. We can expect that Duterte’s comment against Obama, is only the opening shot in what promises to be a long running battle between the Philippines and Washington and its imperialist ambitions.

Duterte curses Obama in a remark about Filipino sovereignty telling Obama and the USA – “mind your own business”.

Latest Duterte news sees Duterte calling Obama a son of a b***h. An unstateman-like comment no doubt, but a comment which is a reminder of the frustration and indignation of leaders in emerging nations who often feel that after years of independence, they are accorded limited sovereignty over their own affairs and like vassal states are called upon to account to past colonial masters on matters relating to their internal policies. These are often colonial masters who have not been held to account for past and current misdeeds.

I Answer To No One

A few days ago at a press conference in Manila, President Duterte on his way to the ASEAN Summit in Laos stopped to brief the press and to take questions. A reporter from Reuters asked him about how he would address the issue of extra judicial killings in the Philippines in front of other foreign leaders.

The Philippines, he reiterated, is an independent nation, it is not answerable to any other country except to its people.

“To whom shall I address myself? And who will be asking this question, may I know?”, asked Duterte. The response came back “President Obama”. And this apparently set Duterte off, and here is part of his answer:

“…the Philippines is not a vassal state. We have long ceased to be a colony of the United States. … We look upon Obama and the United States as if we are the lap dogs of that country. I do not respond to anybody but to the people of the Republic of the Philippines…who is he? When as a matter of fact, at the turn of the century, before the Americans left the Philippines in the pacification campaign of the Moro in this island, there were about 6 million population of the Moro. How many died?¹… If you can answer that question and give the apology, I will answer him. I am not beholden to anybody…who is he? I am a president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony. I do not have any master except the Filipino people. Nobody but nobody. You [Obama] must be respectful. Do not just throw away questions and statements. P****g ina,’ I will swear at you in that [ASEAN] forum. …who is he to confront me? As a matter of fact…America has one too many to answer for the misdeeds in this country. … Look at the human rights of America along that line², the way they treat the migrants…”

Duterte’s cursing of Barack Obama was reported widely, the whole world was fixated on the swear words, but the context went unreported and the transcript above shows that Duterte’s anger was triggered by the question that he would be expected to answer to Barack Obama for matters which he considered to be matters entirely within the internal affairs of the Philippines. The Philippines, he reiterated, is an independent nation, it is not answerable to any other country except to its people.

Duterte’s Entente with the Communist Party of the Philippines

While no one could condone extra judicial killings (2400 alleged drug dealers/addicts killed in the last 2 months), Duterte’s indignation and irritation is consistent with his anti imperialist stance against the USA. Since coming to power, Duterte has welcomed the Philippine Communist Party to the government, three members of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF) are cabinet members in Duterte’s government. His election was supported and welcomed by the NDF. In an article on their website on 15 May 2016, titled “Prospects under a Duterte Presidency”, NDF noted:

“With Duterte set to become GRP president, for the first time, the Philippine client-state is to be headed by one who is not completely beholden to the US imperialists.”

Duterte has been in peace talks with the Communist Party and has been seeking the return of Jose Maria Sison, founder of the Communist Party of Philippines who has been exiled in the Netherlands since 1987.

Can the Filipino Voters be Trusted to Decide for Themselves?

Not surprisingly, the NDF applauded Duterte for cursing Obama and the US out. On its website it said:

“The National Democratic Front in Southern Mindanao commends GPH Pres. Rodrigo R. Duterte for his unprecedented statements against US imperialist intervention in the Philippines. No other Philippine president has ever publicly censured and taken US imperialism to task for its atrocious crimes against sovereign nations and peoples of the world.”

It will be interesting to see how a newly elected president in Washington deals with the increasing rapprochement between Duterte and The Communist Party of the Philippines given American’s well known obsession with all things communist. Will it intervene? Are these matters too important for the Filipino voters to be left to decide for themselves?*

We can expect that Duterte’s comment against Obama, is only the opening shot in what promises to be a long running battle with Washington, with the Philippines now developing closer ties with China, the stage is set for confrontation between any imperialist ambitions of any p****g ina on the one side and Duterte in the Philippines.

You can watch the video in which Duterte swore at Obama when you go online to this excerpt.

*Kissinger was once quoted as saying:

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

A version of this article was first published on peelfirst.com.

Featured image courtesy of: http://mmc-news.com

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About the Author

Tunde Olupitan is the Managing Editor Europe & Americas for The European Financial Review, The European Business Review and The European Law Review.

References
1. Rodrigo Duterte: “How many died? Six hundred. … Can he explain the 600,000 Moro massacred in this island?” Monday, September 5, 2016. Transcript lifted from http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2016/09/06/duterte-departure-for-asean-summit-speech.html
2. Referring to the Mexico border.

Obama-Duterte Blow Up: What the Corporate Media Doesn’t Get

September 14, 2016

By Wayne Madsen

The western corporate media generalised the Duterte-Obama feud as one between a statesmanlike US president and a Filipino Donald Trump. For Obama to lecture Duterte on human rights was the ultimate in hubris. Duterte is a fiery pragmatist who is on guard against Obama and the neoconservative war hawks.

The explanation by the Western corporate media, which caters to a very basic secondary school level of education, about the reasons behind the recent war of words between US President Barack Obama and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, had little to do with the leader of the Philippines calling Obama a «Putang ina» or «son of a whore» in Tagalog. The breakdown in relations between the Philippines, a former and much-abused American colony, and the United States is based on renewed Philippines nationalism, a disgust by Duterte for the selective human rights agenda of the Obama administration, and the Philippines leader’s antipathy for those schooled in Muslim beliefs in neighbouring Indonesia.

Duterte knows full well that Obama prayed in a mosque and recited from the Koran in his early childhood years at a quasi-Islamic state school in Jakarta. And for Duterte, a former mayor of Davao City in Mindanao, – a southern Philippine island plagued by Saudi-financed Abu Sayyaf Group Wahhabist terrorism nurtured from radicalised mosques across the Sulu Sea in Indonesia – Obama’s upbringing in Southeast Asia is very germane.

Duterte’s reference to Obama’s mother was not uttered in a vacuum of history. Duterte fully understands Stanley Ann Dunham Obama-Soetoro’s role in the aftermath of the 1965 bloody Muslim – and Central Intelligence Agency – backed coup that toppled Indonesia’s secular president, Sukarno. The coup, in which Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Lieutenant Colonel Lolo Soetoro, participated as a brutal thug out to identify and execute as many Communists and ethnic Chinese Indonesians as possible, was staffed out of the US embassy in Jakarta.

In 1967, Obama’s mother took young Barack Obama to join her war criminal husband in Jakarta. After her arrival in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, Obama’s mother worked for the CIA-linked US Agency for International Development (USAID) fanning out across central Javanese villages with orders to collect as many names of Communists as possible.

Duterte fully understands Stanley Ann Dunham Obama-Soetoro’s role in the aftermath of the 1965 bloody Muslim – and Central Intelligence Agency – backed coup that toppled Indonesia’s secular president, Sukarno.

Indonesian intelligence files document Obama’s mother’s involvement in Javanese village-and rural-based Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and Sukarno cadre eradication efforts in the years following the coup, an operation that relied on USAID-financed anthropologists like Ann Dunham-Soetoro and which was code-named Project PROSYM. PROSYM, run by the CIA, had a number of counterparts throughout Southeast Asia.

The program’s counterpart in South Vietnam, which targeted Vietcong and Vietcong sympathizers for eradication, was known as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), also known as the Phoenix Program. In Laos, the eradication programme, which targeted Communist Pathet Lao forces and North Vietnamese troops, was known as the Rascal Program.

Under Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino, Obama had a willing military partner prepared to establish a new version of the defunct Cold War-era South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which would ally Washington with various South East Asian nations to militarily and politically confront China over control over western Pacific. A «SEATO II,» where US warships and fighter planes would, once again, have full base rights in the Philippines for their «WESTPAC» deployments, was the intention of Obama and his generals and admirals in the Pentagon and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After being elected president on a nationalist platform, Duterte began engaging with China and signaled he was prepared to come to an accommodation with Beijing that would allow Filipino trawlers to continue fishing around disputed South China Sea islands, including the contentious Scarborough Shoal, a rocky outcrop in the South China Sea.

Accommodating Beijing is the last thing on Obama’s mind. Therefore, Obama was prepared to issue a demarche in person to Duterte at the ASEAN summit in Laos over his human rights record and his policy on the extrajudicial execution of drug dealers in the Philippines. After US ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg publicly rebuked Duterte for his crackdown on drug dealers, the Philippine president called him a «gay son-of-a-bitch.» Goldberg has a background of undermining countries to which he has been assigned. He was expelled by Bolivian President Evo Morales for meeting with right-wing Bolivian opposition members in order to foment an Obama-sanctioned coup in Bolivia.

Duterte, of course, as aware of the ties that Obama and Goldberg have to the CIA. The Philippine president, who Obama referred to as «colorful,» is not, as claimed by the Western corporate media, a «Filipino Donald Trump.»

Instead, Duterte is a fiery pragmatist who is on guard against Obama and the neoconservative war hawks and Wahhabi and Salafist accommodators who dominate America’s CIA and State Department. Duterte and his supporters know fully well that the bloody CIA purge of PKI members and sympathizers, along with ethnic Chinese, in Indonesia would not have been possible without the support of Indonesia’s Sunni Muslim hierarchy – a group in which Obama’s mother and stepfather were in total lockstep.

Before and after the 1965 CIA coup in Indonesia, the Muslim political party, the Crescent Star Party, received financial assistance from the CIA in their declared jihad against the PKI, Indonesian Chinese, and Indonesian Christians. The Crescent Star Party, which is still active in Indonesia, favors the adoption of Islamic sharia law in what has been a largely secular country since the end of World War II.

Duterte is a fiery pragmatist who is on guard against Obama and the neoconservative war hawks and Wahhabi and Salafist accommodators who dominate America’s CIA and State Department.

The Indonesian Muslim political movement was particularly strong in Java, where Obama’s mother and her Muslim husband, Lolo Soetoro, had extensive contacts down to the town, village, and hamlet levels. The problem for counter-insurgency forces in the Philippines is that the Indonesian Muslims were also active in Kalimantan (Borneo) and across the border in British North Borneo (now Sabah), areas uncomfortably close to Muslim Moro separatists active in a rebellion in Mindanao, Duterte’s home island. The Philippines also has a longstanding claim to the state of Sabah in northern Borneo.

Cross border Muslim terrorism continues to plague Mindanao, Sabah, and Indonesian Kalimantan. More vexing to the Philippine government is that Obama’s stepfather was in cahoots with a Filipino Jesuit priest named Father Jose Blanco, a CIA agent who formed KAMI, an anti-Chinese and Muslim-oriented Indonesian student organization that fomented street protests in 1965 against Sukarno in Jakarta and across the Indonesian archipelago. The CIA’s Indonesian proxies also began stirring up anti-Chinese sentiment in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.

All of these CIA operations were conducted under the imprimatur of SEATO, an organization that Obama and Hillary Clinton would like to see resurrected in a new form in order to plunge Southeast Asia into a new Cold War. Duterte is displaying the same sort of nationalism and populism that is spreading across the planet against the twin evils of globalism and multilateralism.

The western corporate media, which knows about as much about the history of Indonesia, the Philippines, and the surrounding region as a 7-year old child, generalized the Duterte-Obama feud as one between a statesmanlike US president and a «Filipino Donald Trump.»

Duterte is the first Mindanaoan to be elected president of the Philippines. As a Mindanaoan, who knows more about the history across the Sulu Sea than many of his countrymen, Duterte has little time for an American president whose Indonesian clan has the blood of innocent Southeast Asians on its hands. For Obama to lecture Duterte on human rights was the ultimate in hubris. Duterte, who survived political office in violence-prone and Islamist guerrilla-rife Mindanao, let Obama know exactly what he thought of the American upstart.

This article was first published on Strategic Culture on September 9, 2016.

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About the Author

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club

The Rise of Uber and the Sharing Economy

September 13, 2016

By Jared Meyer

The sharing economy clearly benefits workers and consumers. So why does opposition to innovative business models persist? The answer: entrenched interests continue to use government to suppress competition.

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TTIP: The Suicide of Nations

September 12, 2016

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

The TransAtlantic and TransPacific Trade and Investment Partnerships (TTIP and TTP) are trade agreements between the US and the EU conducted behind closed doors, shrouded in mystery. In this article, the author discusses what this means for us as citizens, and why we should be scared when armed with the necessary information to truly understand exactly why these “partnerships” exist.

The TransAtlantic and TransPacific “partnerships” are the economic and financial counterpart to Washington’s military and foreign policy push for world hegemony. TTIP and TPP are neither partnerships nor trade agreements. They are instruments of financial imperialism that, if they come into effect, subordinate the sovereignty of countries to the profits of global corporations.

The reason the “partnerships” are negotiated in secrecy without public discussions and the participation of the national legislatures is that the so-called agreements cannot stand the light of day. The reason is simple. The agreements make global corporations immune to laws and regulations that can be said to adversely impact their profits. It makes no difference whether the laws protect the environment, the safety of food and workers or are part of the social fabric. If the laws impose costs that reduce profits, corporations can sue the governments in “corporate tribunals” in which the corporations themselves serve as judge and jury.

This is no joke. Public Citizen reports that the agreements would greatly expand the privileges given to foreign corporations by the North American Free Trade Agreement under which $350 million has been paid out by governments to corporations because of costs of complying with toxic waste and logging rules, with $13 billion in claims pending.
(http://www.citizen.org/documents/Leaked-TPP-Investment-Analysis.pdf)

Economist Michael Hudson cites a British study that public provision of health care, such as the UK’s National Health Service, is a TTIP target on the grounds that not only health care regulations but also public provision of health care harms the commercial interests of corporations. (http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/11/the-dangers-of-free-trade-agreements-ttips-threat-to-europes-elderly/)

TTIP and TPP are tools for disenfranchising electorates and overturning democratic outcomes and for looting taxpayers via damage suits against governments for the costs of complying with health, safety, environmental, and social laws and regulations. The agreements place corporations above the laws of countries. The agreements have the potential of producing a worldwide sweatshop with starvation wages devoid of environmental and safety legislation.

The question jumps out: How could any country’s trade representative agree to give foreign corporations control over his country’s laws? The answer is money. The reason a person wants appointment as trade representative is to be made rich by serving the interests of corporations. “Fast track” makes this easy. There are no legislators or reporters looking over the trade representative’s shoulder as he sells out his country for his price. The corporations stand to gain so much that they will pay large sums.

The question jumps out: How could any country’s trade representative agree to give foreign corporations control over his country’s laws? The answer is money.

When the agreements are completed without anyone’s participation except the corporations, the national legislatures are only permitted to vote the agreement up or down. The legislators are told that years of hard work went into reaching the agreement and that it would be irresponsible not to support all the hard work that benefits everyone. Environmental and other public interest groups can expose the corrupt agreement, but they cannot match the corporations’ political campaign contributions or bribes. Like the trade representatives, the legislators go with the money.

We can see this already. When the TTIP negotiations began, the European Commission put a 30-year ban on public access to the proceedings. When Greenpeace secured and leaked secret TTIP documents, Ignacio Garcia Bercero, the EU’s chief negotiator, rushed to the defence of TTIP, claiming that no health, safety, or environmental standards would be harmed. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilla Malmstroem also defended TTIP against itself, as did the Independent’s Sean O’Grady in a public debate with me, despite the fact that his own newspaper published the Greenpeace leak in an article that said that the TTIP “documents show that US corporations will be granted unprecedented powers over any new public health or safety regulations to be introduced in future. If any European government does dare to bring in laws to raise social or environmental standards, TTIP will grant US investors the right to sue for loss of profits.”

It is not only the giant global US corporations who are lobbying strongly for TTIP. So are large European corporations as they also benefit. What TTIP and TTP do is to create corporate governance over nations. The New World Order will be run by corporations that sit above the laws of nations and extract money from those countries that try to protect the environment and the health and safety of citizens.

TTIP is not merely the biggest power grab in world history. It is the biggest power grab imaginable.

If accurate records were kept and released—perhaps NSA has it all—I would not be surprised if the records revealed that the main thing negotiated was the price paid to each trade representative for agreeing to sign his country up to be looted by global corporations.

Western capitalism is no longer productive and no longer serves any valid social purpose. In the US the two largest sectors, the military/security complex and the mega-banks, exist on public subsidies. The US manufacturing corporations no longer manufacture. They outsource the work and offshore the jobs. Apple Computer, for example, does not even own the Chinese factories that produce the products that Apple markets.

So many American manufacturing and middle class jobs have been offshored that the real median family income has been declining for decades. Without growth in real consumer incomes, consumer demand was maintained by the expansion of consumer debt. However, debt growth is limited by the absence of income growth and both have come to an end. Consequently, family formation is floundering. More Americans age 18-34 live at home with parents than with spouses or partners. The jobs simply do not exist to provide the income necessary for independent existence.

Western capitalism is kept going by privatisations in which public assets, such as the British postal system, are sold to favoured friends of the government for pence on the pound. Privatisation has become the rage because it is a way of producing capitalist profits by looting public assets.

In the US the laws are written by powerful private interest groups. In Europe, EU membership destroys the sovereignty of member countries whose parliaments are subordinated to the EU.

Capitalism has also been kept alive by Western banking systems indebting other countries and then looting them through IMF-imposed austerity programs that require the sell-off of public assets, always at bargain prices, to Western corporations. John Perkins in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, explains how this operates. Currently, Greece and Portugal are the poster-children for how capitalism loots countries.

With the coup against the elected government of Brazil, that country is being set up for renewed looting by Wall Street which has succeeded in having its agents appointed to Brazil’s key monetary and financial positions. http://www.globalresearch.ca/wall-street-behind-brazil-coup-d-etat/5526715

Michael Hudson explains in his recent books the rise of “financialisation.” Financialisation capitalises largely untaxed “economic rents,” such as monopoly profits and land values, into debt instruments that pay interest and fees to banks. These income-flows into banks deprive the consumer economy of purchasing power and result in the decline of productive activity.

Having little left to loot, the purpose of TTIP and TPP is to set up governments for looting. This, of course, means the looting of the hard-pressed taxpayers of the countries whose “trade representative” got his price and signed his country up for looting.

TTIP and TPP also extend the payoff mechanism to legislators. Those who have vocal doubts can expect payments in exchange for being quiet. The obvious result of TPIP and TPP is to destroy any integrity that might still exist in government.

Some economists now advocate that not only should government functions, such as the postal service and health care, be privatised, but also that governance itself should be privatised. However, it already is. In the US the laws are written by powerful private interest groups. In Europe, EU membership destroys the sovereignty of member countries whose parliaments are subordinated to the EU. With few exceptions formerly sovereign countries are deprived of the ability to finance themselves as only the European Central Bank can create euros.

Thus, most EU members are dependent on private banks, usually foreign, for their financing. Lacking financial sovereignty, EU members are reduced to the status of ordinary debtors of private creditors and are treated as such, as the looting of Greece and Portugal testifies.

TTIP takes privatisation to a higher level outside of politics itself and places power in the hands of corporate tribunals that are accountable only to global corporations.

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About the Author
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts attended four of the finest universities, studied under two Nobel Prize-winners in economics, authored 20 peer-reviewed articles in journals of scholarship, and published four academic press peer-reviewed books, including Harvard and Oxford Universities, and seven commercially published books. His most recent book is The Neoconservative Threat to World Order: Washington’s Perilous War for Hegemony.

Is the Russian Economy Finally Tilting East?

September 2, 2016

By Vladimir Popov

It may well be that in the next decades, with the benefit of hindsight, it will be only too obvious how Russia had sidestepped its Asian opportunities until 2014. Russia is lucky to border China – an emerging world economic leader – but it has not benefitted from this proximity as its primary policy goals have been Western-oriented, at least until the Ukraine conflict.

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