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Write an article about: Biden is continuing Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant policies. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

CBP, Donald Trump, ICE, immigration, Joe Biden, podcast, racism

How President Joe Biden is continuing many of Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant policies, giving more funding to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and expanding detention centers while fueling war abroad Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton is joined by journalist Abraham Marquez to discuss how the Joe Biden administration has continued many of Donald Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant policies, giving $284.7 million more to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and expanding detention centers, while turning away refugees of US wars and weaponizing displaced Ukrainians. You can also watch this video at Rokfin or Rumble. You can download the podcast version for free at Substack. Read Abraham Marquez’s article “Biden is expanding the US govt’s brutal anti-immigrant machine”: Since the creation of US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003, each admin has given it more of our tax dollars & has further militarized the US-Mexico border. My report @Multipolarista https://t.co/eEvkzh3tiS — Abraham Marquez (@AbeMarquez3) April 21, 2022 Read Abraham’s other article “Weaponization of immigration policy: Ukrainians welcomed, refugees of US wars abused”: The Ukraine/Russia conflict highlights the hypocrisy of US immigration policy & media coverage. All workers escaping violence & war should be treated w/ dignity & respect, & not be used to push an imperialist agenda further. My latest @Multipolarista https://t.co/FJbsFaX00R — Abraham Marquez (@AbeMarquez3) April 8, 2022

Write an article about: US admits weather pushed Chinese balloon off course, US shot down hobbyists’ $12 balloon in $2M missile attack. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

balloons, China, media

US officials acknowledged the Chinese balloon they shot down on February 4 had likely been blown off course by unexpected weather. The US Air Force later spent $2 million using missiles to blow up what appeared to be a $12 hobbyist balloon. A Chinese balloon that the US military shot down had likely been pushed off course by unexpected weather conditions, according to multiple officials in Washington. This is according to numerous reports in major US media outlets, including the Washington Post and CNN. In response to hysteria surrounding the Chinese rubber object, the US Air Force subsequently spent roughly $2 million to destroy what appears to have been a hobby group’s $12 balloon. On February 1, a large Chinese balloon was first seen over the US state Montana. On February 4, US military fighter jets shot down the rubber object, off the coast of South Carolina. Washington accused Beijing of using the balloon to spy on US territory. China adamantly denied that the rubber object was a surveillance device, instead maintaining that it was used for weather research. There are legitimate reasons to take Beijing at its word. The Washington Post had acknowledged on February 3, “Experts in national security and aerospace said the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitude balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting, telecommunications and scientific research”. The Pentagon itself said that “the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites” and that “the balloon posed no serious physical or intelligence threat”. — Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) February 4, 2023 The newspaper quoted an anonymous US “senior defense official” who “said the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites”, stating, “I wouldn’t characterize it as revolutionary”. Even the bellicose right-wing think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – which is funded by the US government and weapons industry and is notorious for its anti-China bias – called for caution early on, conceding in a February 3 article: “China has not used balloons for spying before, and using a balloon would be a step back. The most likely explanation is that this is an errant weather balloon that went astray—lost weather balloons are the basis of many ‘UFO sightings'”. The neoconservative, US government-funded think tank CSIS is very anti-China, but even it admits: "China has not used balloons for spying before… The most likely explanation is that this is an errant weather balloon that went astray"https://t.co/WN2Wzil3Zs pic.twitter.com/dG99WtDM9y — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 6, 2023 It was clear from the beginning that the Chinese balloon was part of a manufactured crisis, and its significance, like the rubber object itself, was being blown out of control. But the media’s hot air had the effect of ratcheting up tensions with China, creating fear among the US public, and leading Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a diplomatic trip to Beijing. Hawkish US politicians from both the Republican and Democratic Parties, along with neoconservative think tanks, capitalized on the bubble to portray China as a dangerous threat. Slate reported that Republican Congressman James Comer, who chairs the US House Oversight Committee, warned that the balloon could have “bio-weapons” made in Wuhan, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich insisted it “could be trial runs for low-visibility deliver[y] of devastating EMP weapons”. CNBC declared that the balloon “threatens NATO members”, citing the Western military alliance’s bellicose Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who denounced the rubber object as a sign of a dangerous “pattern of Chinese behavior”, insisting, “We need to be aware of the constant risk of Chinese intelligence and step up what we do to protect ourselves”. Spy balloon confirms 'pattern of Chinese behavior' that threatens NATO members, Stoltenberg says https://t.co/zaih1xmjGp — CNBC (@CNBC) February 8, 2023 From February 10 to 12, Air Force fighter jets shot down three objects. At first, US government officials and Western media outlets implied that Washington had targeted more Chinese surveillance devices, but they actually appeared to have been civilian balloons. The website Aviation Week reported that an amateur balloon belonging to a hobbyist group called the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade went missing in the same place at the same time as one of these Air Force bombings. Aviation Week noted: “The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type”. The founder of a company that makes pico balloons for hobbyists told Aviation Week, “I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down”. British newspaper The Guardian followed up on this report, in its own article amusingly titled “Object downed by US missile may have been amateur hobbyists’ $12 balloon“. Researcher Stephen Semler estimated that the Pentagon spent around $2 million in this operation to shoot down the hobbyists’ balloon over Lake Huron. The Air Force used two AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles in the attack, which cost more than $440,000 each and are manufactured by the arms corporation Raytheon. How much did it cost to shoot down what was most likely a balloon over Lake Huron? About $2 million, based on my analysis of procurement and operational data: https://t.co/a4f4jrl0eg pic.twitter.com/zguxExdnuz — Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) February 17, 2023 Immediately after the attacks, the Democratic majority leader of the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, had insisted without evidence that the three objects were spy balloons, declaring, “The Chinese were humiliated – I think the Chinese were caught lying… It’s a real setback for them”. But the US National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, revealed on February 14 that the three objects destroyed by the US military were likely balloons “tied to some commercial or benign purpose”. “We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of [China’s] spying program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts”, Kirby added. President Joe Biden himself admitted on February 16 that the three objects the military blew up were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research”. President Biden said Thursday that three unidentified flying objects shot down over North American airspace were “most likely” balloons tied to private companies or research institutions, not part of China’s surveillance spy balloon operation. https://t.co/mGO8mBTHuu — USA TODAY (@USATODAY) February 17, 2023 Ten days after the Air Force shot down the Chinese balloon, US officials conceded that the rubber object had probably been blown off course by weather. The Washington Post acknowledged in a February 14 report that the Chinese balloon “may have been diverted on an errant path caused by atypical weather conditions”. The newspaper reported that the balloon “took an unexpected northern turn, according to several U.S. officials, who said that analysts are now examining the possibility that China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device”. US “intelligence analysts are unsure whether the apparent deviation was intentional or accidental”, the Post wrote. “This new account suggests that the ensuing international crisis that has ratcheted up tensions between Washington and Beijing may have been at least partly the result of a mistake”, the newspaper said. Exclusive: The U.S. tracked the Chinese spy balloon a week before shooting it down off the coast of South Carolina. The Chinese surveillance device may have been diverted on an errant path caused by unusual weather conditions. https://t.co/ESXLKthHhg — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 14, 2023 CNN also cited numerous anonymous sources and reported, “US intelligence officials are assessing the possibility that the suspected Chinese spy balloon was not deliberately maneuvered into the continental US by the Chinese government and are examining whether it was diverted off course by strong winds“. The major US media outlet stated that the balloon took “a path that US officials are not sure was purposeful, and may have been determined more by strong winds than deliberate, external maneuvering by Beijing”. “Weather modeling done by CNN suggests it is plausible that the wind currents at the time diverted the balloon northward toward Alaska”, the network wrote. CNN added, “US officials have acknowledged that the balloon’s maneuverability was limited”. US officials are looking at the possibility that the spy balloon's path was accidental, determined more by strong winds than a course set by China. https://t.co/Z6iPlTl8dK — CNN International (@cnni) February 16, 2023 In a speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 18, top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi said Washington’s response to the balloon was “absurd and hysterical“. He added, “It does not show the US is strong; on the contrary it shows it is weak”.

Write an article about: IMF admits US dollar hegemony declining, due to rise of Chinese yuan, sanctions on Russia. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

dollar, economics, IMF, International Monetary Fund

The US-dominated International Monetary Fund warns of an “erosion of dollar dominance,” noting use of Chinese yuan in global central bank reserves is increasing, while Western sanctions on Russia could strengthen other currencies. The US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) has acknowledged that the hegemony of the dollar is in noticeable decline. At the same time, the Chinese currency, the yuan or renminbi, is slowly growing in influence, along with other currencies, according to the IMF. In 2000, roughly 70% of global foreign exchange reserves were held in US dollars. As of 2021, that figure had fallen to just under 60%. Meanwhile, the IMF noted that there is a rise in “nontraditional currencies” from smaller countries being held in international reserves. The United States has veto power over IMF decisions, and the institution is notorious for acting as an instrument of US political influence. Economist Michael Hudson has explained that “the IMF was created as an arm of US foreign policy,” and that Washington has historically weaponized the fund “to use debt leverage to force other countries to impose austerity on their populations, and to essentially say we will control what government you have, because if your government does something that the United States officials don’t like, we’re just going to raid your currency, force of austerity on you, and you’ll be voted out of power.” The IMF has helped maintain the US dollar as the de facto global reserve currency since the fund was created in the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. Hudson showed in his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” that Washington has used the power of this global reserve currency status to essentially make other countries pay for its wars. But the dollar’s power is eroding, and even the IMF has begun to publicly acknowledge this fact. The International Monetary Fund published a working paper on March 24 titled “The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance: Active Diversifiers and the Rise of Nontraditional Reserve Currencies.” The report documents “a decline in the dollar share of international reserves since the turn of the century,” with central banks around the world increasingly diversifying their holdings. The study notes that this “decline in the dollar’s share has not been accompanied by an increase in the shares of the pound sterling, yen and euro, other long-standing reserve currencies and units that, along with the dollar, have historically comprised the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.” Instead, “the shift out of dollars has been in two directions: a quarter into the Chinese renminbi, and three quarters into the currencies of smaller countries that have played a more limited role as reserve currencies.” The researchers describe this “evolution of the international reserve system in the last 20 years” as a “gradual movement away from the dollar.” The IMF working paper explained that “the decline in the dollar’s share has been matched by a rise in the share of what we refer to as nontraditional reserve currencies, defined as currencies other than the US dollar, euro, Japanese yen and British pound sterling.” In addition to the Chinese yuan, some of these “nontraditional currencies” that are becoming more prominent include the Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Korean won, Singapore dollar, and Swedish krona. In 2000, more than 98% of international foreign exchange reserves were held in the “big four” hegemonic currencies: the US dollar, euro, Japanese yen, and British pound. Less than 2% of reserves were held in what the IMF calls “nontraditional currencies.” But as of 2021, the share of nontraditional currencies had shot up to 10% – and there is every indication that this figure will only keep growing. The IMF report noted that this “shift is broad based,” identifying 46 central banks that have been diversifying their holdings with nontraditional currencies. The euro is unlikely to challenge US dollar hegemony. The article pointed out that the “euro has gained little ground as a reserve currency since its creation in 1999,” remaining relatively static at around 20% of global reserves. Yet “while the renminbi has gained some ground, it remains leagues behind the dollar as a form of international reserves,” the researchers added, on a cautious note. The working paper was authored by Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, along with IMF economists Chima Simpson-Bell and Serkan Arslanalp. Their study concludes that, while the dominance of the US dollar is far from over, and certainly will not end overnight, its power is waning. A top official at the International Monetary Fund made remarks reflecting this historic shift, in a report by the Financial Times, titled “Russia sanctions threaten to chip away at dominance of US dollar, says IMF.” The mainstream British newspaper interviewed the IMF’s first deputy managing director, Gita Gopinath, and wrote that the crushing Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, “including restrictions on its central bank, could encourage the emergence of small currency blocs based on trade between separate groups of countries.” The senior IMF official conceded that “fragmentation at a smaller level is certainly quite possible,” although she added that the US “dollar would remain the major global currency even in that landscape.” Russia sanctions threaten to chip away at dominance of US dollar, says IMF https://t.co/D0qtv9rlrr — FT Economics (@fteconomics) March 31, 2022 The IMF executive acknowledged that the world “might see some slow-moving trends towards other currencies playing a bigger role [in reserve assets]” held by countries’ central banks. “We are already seeing that with some countries renegotiating the currency in which they get paid for trade,” Gopinath added. Western sanctions on Russia – one of the world’s largest exporters of oil, gas, wheat, and fertilizers – have forced Moscow’s trading partners to seek alternative payment mechanisms. Despite the sanctions, the European Union still gets 40% of its natural gas from Russia. And the Kremlin has demanded that Europe pay for this gas in Russian rubles. Russia’s demand that the European Union pay for its gas exports in rubles could shake up the global economy, undermining Western sanctions and forcing Europe to decide if it truly wants to be independent from the US. Important analysis by @bidetmarxmanhttps://t.co/pIvWWXkXXp — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 25, 2022 China and Russia have also moved toward boosting their bilateral trade in each other’s currencies. Western sanctions pushed Russian financial institutions, including both state-owned and private banks, to encourage clients to open accounts in Chinese yuan. Bangladesh has said it is considering using yuan to evade sanctions and continue trading with Russia. Even India, which has a right-wing, pro-US government, has created an alternative payment mechanism using rupees and rubles, to get around Washington’s sanctions. The IMF has been careful, however, not to overstate the drop in US dollar holdings in international reserves. Gopinath, the IMF official, predicted that “the dollar’s dominance will stay for a while.” While US dollar hegemony is not going to suddenly disappear, it is facing more and more challengers.

Write an article about: The US is already preparing for its next war: on China. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, David Petraeus, Foreign Policy magazine, Japan, NATO, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine

While the US and NATO wage a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, military strategists and pundits in Washington have set their sights on China. (This article was first published at Danny Haiphong’s Substack blog. You can subscribe here.) Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is approaching its first birthday, in February 2023. Top military brass in Russia have long declared that the conflict is not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather Russia and NATO. Simply put, Ukraine is a pawn in another U.S. war. Europe’s economy and military have been sacrificed on the altar of U.S. warmongering toward Russia. Winter is here, and Ukraine’s prospects for getting out of the conflict with anything resembling “victory” have dissipated, if they ever really existed at all. Such has been admitted by two of the foreign-policy establishment’s most criminal members: Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. In an op-ed with the Washington Post, Rice and Gates argue that time is not on Ukraine’s side. The U.S. must act fast or watch Ukraine suffer eventual defeat. Opinion by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former defense secretary Robert M. Gates: Time is not on Ukraine’s side https://t.co/TqoP9sXwsv — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 7, 2023 Of course, for neoconservative hawks like Rice and Gates, a negotiated settlement is simply out of the question. The only option for the U.S. political and military establishment is to fortify Ukraine with the heaviest military equipment such as armored tanks to ensure victory on the battlefield. As geopolitical analyst Brian Berletic has noted, a major problem stands in the way of Rice and Gates’s demand: NATO is running out of weapons. The U.S. produces about 30,000 rounds per year for its 155 mm Howitzer long-range systems, a number that Ukraine uses in just two weeks of fighting Russia on the front lines. Russian missile strikes have made quick work of heavier equipment such as the vaunted HIMARS systems. Only larger NATO states like the U.S. and Germany have anything left to provide. So when Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky came to Congress begging for more weapons, he was likely disappointed in Joe Biden’s remark that the U.S. was not going to make promises to arm Ukraine with anything that could possibly lead to a World War III scenario between NATO and Russia. Russia’s critical victory in the city of Soledar has only intensified concerns among a major faction in the foreign policy establishment that Ukraine is depleting the U.S.’s capacity to wage war elsewhere. In this regard, no other matter of U.S. “national security” is more important than China. The RAND Corporation, a research arm of the Pentagon, has called China a “peer” competitor and the U.S.’s greatest long-term threat. Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has also called China the greatest threat to the U.S.’s “security.” The Biden administration unveiled a new defense strategy, casting China as the greatest danger to American security and calling for an urgent, concerted effort to build the military capabilities to deter Beijing in the decades to come https://t.co/aD8reqtEzT — The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 27, 2022 NATO labeled China a “malicious actor” in the alliance’s latest Strategic Concept document, and pledged to play a larger role in curbing the so-called “threats” presented by its rise. A series published just after the new year in Foreign Policy, however, has blown the lid off of any subtleties to the U.S.’s preparations for a war with China. Titled “Lessons for the Next War,” the series features 12 essays from all corners of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Contributors include former Obama-era CIA director and US army commander David Petraeus, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and former Under Secretary of State and Trump-era NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller. Also included are representatives from a litany of hawkish think tanks, such as the US government-funded Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Accuracy and precision in battlefield sensors and munitions have shaped the war in Ukraine. This offers important implications for the Taiwan Strait, @Mauro_Gilli writes in FP's Winter 2023 issue. https://t.co/F4VffhCtZU pic.twitter.com/jZNhVx22sP — Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) January 17, 2023 Their essays cover 12 areas of economic, cyber, military, diplomatic, and propaganda warfare. An important thread runs through each contribution: Russia has failed in Ukraine (a fabrication mixed with imperial hubris), making the present moment a perfect opportunity to prepare for an upcoming war in Taiwan against China. Foreign Policy’s chief editor Stefan Theil makes the aim of the series quite clear: Drawing the right lessons from the first 10 months of the Russian invasion, then, not only matters for the survival of Ukraine. It is also vital for deterring and preventing a future conflict—and, if necessary, fighting one. The most obvious potential hot spot and one that involves even greater stakes is, of course, Taiwan. Beyond repetitive lip service to “deterrence,” contributors make concrete suggestions on the best means to wage war with China. David Petraeus’s co-authored piece asserts that (all emphasis added): Ukraine points to the imperative for the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies to prioritize the near-term ability to field large numbers of relatively inexpensive, highly mobile anti-ship and anti-air missiles that can be dispersed and maneuvered throughout the first and second island chains against Beijing’s increasingly formidable naval and air forces. Large quantities of unmanned air, sea, and ground systems can amplify these missiles in the U.S. order of battle. In other words, the U.S.’s record $858 billion military budget needs to grow even larger to meet the challenge of China. Petraeus was directly responsible for targeting weddings and civilian areas during his time leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan, giving him first-hand knowledge of the capabilities of the U.S.’s military arsenal. The principles of anti-access/area denial strategy to deter and, if necessary, defeat aggression, used to great effect in Ukraine, are equally applicable in the Western Pacific, David Petraeus and Vance Serchuk write in FP's Winter 2023 issue. https://t.co/qWEwbztmSt pic.twitter.com/3igsK84Apr — Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) January 16, 2023 Former Obama-era NATO Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen backs up Petraeus’s emphasis on pumping weapons into Taiwan, stating: weapons are what counts . . . With the help of its partners [Taiwan] must become a porcupine bristling with armaments to deter any possible attempt to take it by force. China must calculate that the cost of an invasion is simply too high to bear. However, Foreign Policy’s war stenographers clarify that preparing for war with China is about much more than weapons. Maria Shagina, research fellow on sanctions at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a bellicose think tank funded by the weapons industry and State Department, argues that the U.S. and its allies should devise a coherent plan of “economic statecraft” against China as soon as possible. Elisabeth Braw of the Carlyle Group-funded right-wing American Enterprise Institute proposes that the U.S. and its allies secure control over the information airwaves to ensure citizens “know exactly what to look for” from so-called “subversive” state and non-state actors that counter U.S. and NATO talking points. Of course, these so-called “preparations” are already underway. The U.S. spends hundreds of millions in its information war against China, and it recently banned Chinese semiconductor exports to compliment an already wide-ranging economic war on China. Foreign Policy’s “Lessons for the Next War” was part of a flurry indications that the U.S. foreign policy establishment is preparing for war with China. Two days following Foreign Policy’s series, top U.S. General in Japan James Bierman made the stunning admission in the Financial Times that U.S. is “setting the theater of war” by goading China into a Ukraine-style war over Taiwan. US military deepens ties with Japan and Philippines to prepare for China threat https://t.co/5hZaenqwif — Financial Times (@FT) January 8, 2023 The next day, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a war simulation between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Predictably, the U.S. government concluded that Chinese efforts to invade the island would fail at a great cost to the militaries of all parties. In May 2022, The Center for New American Security (CNAS), which is principally funded by military contractors, showcased its own war simulation on NBC’s Meet the Press. Back in February 2022, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force joined the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in conducting joint military exercises, known as Noble Fusion, in the Philippine Sea. The US and Japan in the Noble Fusion military exercise in the Philippine Sea in February 2022 It’s important to note that U.S. war preparations with China have little do with Taiwan specifically. They’re a response to imperial decline and the rise of China and Russia. Beijing and Moscow both present their own specific challenges to Washington’s hegemony. Russia’s growing sovereignty and political independence from the U.S.-led West has undermined the Wolfowitz Doctrine of full-spectrum dominance over all territory of the former Soviet Union. China’s massive socialist-led market economy is set to surpass the U.S.’s stagnant finance capitalist system in GDP terms by 2035. Worse for the U.S. is that Russia and China have grown closer together. In economic terms, the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership has grown by leaps and bounds since the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation was established in 2001. Bilateral trade is expected to increase by 25% and reach a total volume of $200 billion ahead of the 2024 target date. Surging economic ties with China have given Russia further protection from U.S.-E.U. sanctions, with agricultural and energy exports to China increasing by the month. China and Russia have also increased coordination on matters of military coordination, color revolutions, and diplomacy in the face of a common threat: U.S. imperialism. But perhaps the biggest threat to U.S. hegemony resides in China and Russia’s leadership in the global movement for integration and de-dollarization. China and Russia are the principle leaders of multilateral institutions such as BRICS+ mechanism and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These multilateral institutions set out to strengthen investment in all sectors of economic and social development between participating countries, especially in the realm of finance. In response to starvation sanctions imposed by the U.S. and E.U., and predatory loans from Western financial institutions, BRICS+ has united the largest Global South economies, uniting Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in an effort to develop an alternative to the U.S. dollar-dominated neoliberal economic system. The strength of BRICS+ grew immensely in 2022. Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iran, Argentina, and several other countries expressed interest in or applied to join BRICS+. BRICS+ is complimented by China and Russia’s own integration projects which aim to develop the infrastructure necessary to break free from the petrodollar. The “virtual group photo” taken at the 14th BRICS summit in 2022 China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) sports major cooperation agreements with more than 140 countries and consists of at least 2,000 development initiatives, many of which are completed or under construction. Talks of possibly merging the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the BRI are already underway. The same forces preparing for war with China have expressed deep concern about the future of the dollar amid growing Eurasian integration. Foreign Policy admitted in its marathon 12-essay series that U.S. sanctions have led China to pursue alternatives to the dollar with its trading partners. Zoltan Pozsar, an economist and former strategist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, recently sounded the alarm about what he termed “BRICSpansion” and the potential of China, Russia, Iran, and the Global South uniting around a new currency system backed by the wealth of commodities in their possession. Pozsar warns of “commodity encumbrance,” or the growing possibility that resource-rich nations like Russia will use their commodities as collateral to increase reserves of credit and financing. The interest that China and Saudi Arabia have shown in trading oil in Chinese yuan, Russia’s pursuit of an international reserve currency, and the idea of “BRICS coin” are presented as major threats to Western financial dominance. The U.S.’s answer to fading imperial hegemony is war – and more of it. War is an inherent feature of predatory neoliberalism, where corporations seek favorable conditions to exploit and plunder the planet’s laboring classes and resources. War is also a permanent, and very profitable, industry dominated by a tiny few military contractors. The ruling elite has calculated that U.S. imperialism cannot compete with China and Russia, making the rise of both an existential threat to the future of U.S.-led neoliberalism and imperialism. This sentiment has been expressed by NATO’s Atlantic Council think tank, and in the U.S.’s successive national security strategies of “Great Power” and “Strategic” Competition. That U.S. foreign-policy strategists and experts are planning for the next war should come as no surprise. U.S. imperialism does not target singular “enemies”; it targets alternative development models and the nations attempting to build them. As Henry Kissinger said, the United States “has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” The Ukraine proxy war is thus a testing ground for the larger U.S. agenda of imperial expansion. A common condition of peace and prosperity for humanity will depend in large part on undermining of this agenda, particularly within the citadel of imperialism: the United States.

Write an article about: US waging ‘unilateral’ economic and tech war to halt China’s rise, DC insiders say openly. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China, Joe Biden, Jon Bateman, technology

The Biden administration’s aggressive sanctions aim to “kneecap” China’s tech sector. A former Pentagon official acknowledged it is a “disproportionate” and “unilateral” attack, a “form of economic containment.” The US government has imposed aggressive sanctions that aim to “kneecap” China’s tech sector and halt the country’s rise, Washington policymakers and industry analysts have admitted. The Joe Biden administration took the extraordinarily aggressive action this October of blocking China from importing most semiconductors, machines to create chips, and supercomputer parts. A former Pentagon official acknowledged that this was a “disproportionate” and “unilateral” attack, amounting to a “form of economic containment.” He said this in an article in Foreign Policy, the magazine of the DC political class, titled “Biden Is Now All-In on Taking Out China.” Jon Bateman, an ex analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who served in several important policy roles in the Pentagon, wrote that US officials have “imposed disproportionate measures” and “strong-armed others into compliance.” Washington’s “mindset all but guarantees a continued march toward broad-based technological decoupling,” he concluded. Bateman stated that the “increasing boldness of U.S. unilateral actions, and Washington’s open embrace of a quasi-containment strategy” reflect the US government’s new cold war goal: “China’s technological rise will be slowed at any price.” Today, Bateman is a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a powerful DC-based think tank that helps Washington craft policy – with plentiful funding from the US government, its allies, large corporations and banks, and billionaire oligarch family foundations. Bateman is by no means a pro-China advocate. In April, he published a report for Carnegie called “U.S.-China Technological ‘Decoupling’: A Strategy and Policy Framework.” In the lengthy document, Bateman “offered a concrete picture of what centrist decoupling might look like and how implementation could work at the agency level.” Bateman wrote the Foreign Policy article as part of a debate with more hard-line hawks in elite Washington policy-making circles. He warned that their “maximalist” strategy could backfire and hurt the US and its allies, and instead promoted a more cautious, incrementalist approach. “America’s restrictionists—zero-sum thinkers who urgently want to accelerate technological decoupling—have won the strategy debate inside the Biden administration,” he warned. “More cautious voices—technocrats and centrists who advocate incremental curbs on select aspects of China’s tech ties—have lost,” Bateman lamented. He acknowledged that Washington’s new cold war on China has been completely bipartisan, but “Donald Trump’s scattershot regulation and erratic public statements offered little clarity to allies, adversaries, and companies around the world,” whereas “Joe Biden’s actions have been more systematic.” “The United States has waged low-grade economic warfare against China for at least four years now—firing volley after volley of tariffs, export controls, investment blocks, visa limits, and much more,” he wrote. Bateman said the Biden administration’s new sanctions, however, “more so than any earlier U.S. action, reveal a single-minded focus on thwarting Chinese capabilities at a broad and fundamental level.” “Although framed as a national security measure, the primary damage to China will be economic, on a scale well out of proportion to Washington’s cited military and intelligence concerns,” he wrote. He added, “The U.S. government imposed the new rules after limited consultation with partner countries and companies, proving that its quest to hobble China ranks well above concerns about the diplomatic or economic repercussions.” Bateman noted that the United States is trying to pressure allies to join its new cold war on China, leading an international campaign to economically isolate Beijing by building a “Chip 4” alliance with South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan – which control the vast majority of the global semiconductor industry. With the announcement of new export control policies, the Biden administration has made its stance clear: China’s technological rise will be slowed at any price. https://t.co/74dKlNkFUp — Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) October 14, 2022 Bateman’s fears that these aggressive new cold war policies could backfire have already come true. Washington’s rapid attempt to decouple the US economy from China is taking a toll on US universities. At least 1,400 scientists of Chinese descent have left US research institutions and instead gone to China, according to a report published this October by academics at Harvard, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The South China Morning Post reported that the “high number illustrates a ‘chilling effect’ resulting from US government policies deterring research and academic activity by scientists of Chinese descent and suggests American research could suffer.” At least 1,400 US-based ethnic Chinese scientists exited American institutions for mainland: study https://t.co/aZd576RCJV — South China Morning Post (@SCMPNews) October 19, 2022 The tech press has sounded similar alarm bells about Washington’s bellicose attacks on Beijing. Electronics industry website EE Times quoted a corporate analyst who said the US “sanctions put a temporary checkmate on China developing their foundry industry at more advanced nodes.” The website also used cold war rhetoric to refer to the aggressive US policies, writing: The latest U.S. salvo in the chip war against China will set back its domestic chipmakers by generations, while global suppliers of semiconductors and fab tools will incur billions of dollars in lost sales because of a giant dent in demand out of China, analysts told EE Times. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has strengthened Cold War measures from longer than 40 years ago. In its new rivalry, the U.S. aims to freeze China’s advancement on a new front: chip technology that is critical for economic development and military superiority. #NewArticle: Biden Administration’s escalation of the #chipwar with #China is expected to at once hamper China’s foundry industry and cost multinational #chipmakers billions of dollars in lost sales.➡️ Read now: https://t.co/KxRPZ0CXaz — EE Times | Electronic Engineering Times (@eetimes) October 24, 2022 Wired magazine came to the same conclusion, reporting that the US sanctions aimed to “kneecap” China’s tech industry. Wired said Washington’s “sweeping new controls are designed to keep [China’s] AI industry stuck in the dark ages while the US and other Western countries advance.” The tech magazine quoted Gregory Allen, director of the AI governance project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), an influential neoconservative think tank in DC that is bankrolled by the weapons industry, US government, and Washington’s allies. Allen summed it up: “The United States is saying to China, ‘AI technology is the future; we and our allies are going there—and you can’t come.’” The Biden administration’s new export restrictions forbid companies from exporting advanced chips needed to train or run the most powerful AI algorithms to China. https://t.co/KgNbIcMVKn — WIRED (@WIRED) October 12, 2022

Write an article about: Invocando la Doctrina Monroe, diputado de EEUU dice que Argentina es una ‘amenaza’, tras sus acuerdos con China. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Alberto Fernández, Argentina, China, Doctrina Monroe, Matt Gaetz, Rusia, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping

El congresista derechista Matt Gaetz, un aliado de Donald Trump, calificó a Argentina como una “amenaza” para la “seguridad” de EEUU, y se quejó de que su alianza con China desafía la colonialista Doctrina Monroe. (You can read this article in English here.) Un influyente diputado estadounidense invocó la colonialista Doctrina Monroe en el pleno del Congreso y calificó a Argentina de “amenaza” debido a su alianza con China. El congresista republicano Matt Gaetz, un aliado clave del ex presidente Donald Trump, dijo en un discurso en la Cámara de Representantes el 7 de febrero que existe una “amenaza significativa para nuestra nación que se acelera rápidamente cerca de casa”. “Argentina, una nación y economía importante en las Américas, acaba de unirse al Partido Comunista Chino al sumarse a la Iniciativa de la Franja y la Ruta”, declaró Gaetz. Invocando la colonialista Doctrina Monroe, el congresista derechista Matt Gaetz, un aliado de Donald Trump, calificó a Argentina como una “amenaza” para la “seguridad” de EEUU, debido a su alianza con China. Lea más aquí: https://t.co/AWRPXrh6IP pic.twitter.com/2fzI6IhUui — Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 8, 2022 El legislador de la Florida estaba reaccionando a la noticia de que el presidente de Argentina, Alberto Fernández, visitó Moscú y Beijing para reunirse con los mandatarios Vladimir Putin y Xi Jinping el 3 y 6 de febrero, respectivamente. Al explicar sus viajes, Fernández dijo, “Argentina tiene que dejar de tener esa dependencia tan grande que tiene con el FMI y los Estados Unidos, y tiene que abrirse camino hacia otros lados”. Argentina se sumó a la campaña de infraestructura internacional de Beijing, la Iniciativa de la Franja y la Ruta, y China le ofreció a la nación sudamericana $23.700 millones de dólares en inversiones y proyectos de infraestructura. Moscú se comprometió de manera similar a fortalecer los lazos políticos y económicos con lo que llamó “uno de los socios claves de Rusia en América Latina”. Argentina está atrapada con $44 mil millones de deuda odiosa del FMI. Buscando alternativas a la hegemonía de EEUU, el presidente Alberto Fernández viajó a Rusia y China, formando nuevas alianzas y incorporándose a la Iniciativa de la Franja y la Rutahttps://t.co/h7Eg59LRjM — Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 6, 2022 El representante Matt Gaetz describió con enojo los crecientes vínculos de Argentina con China como “un desafío directo a la Doctrina Monroe”. La Doctrina Monroe, que data de 1823, fue un mensaje a los colonialistas europeos de que Estados Unidos considera a América Latina como su propio territorio colonial. Hace dos siglos, el secretario de estado John Quincy Adams creó la doctrina, y el presidente James Monroe la convirtió en política de gobierno, insistiendo en que EEUU no intervendría en las esferas de influencia de las potencias coloniales europeas mientras reconocieran que Centroamérica y Sudamérica eran parte de la esfera de influencia imperial de Washington. Esta actitud de que Latinoamérica es propiedad colonial de EEUU sigue muy viva hoy en día, y es completamente bipartidista en Washington. Varios altos funcionarios de la administración de Donald Trump invocaron la Doctrina Monroe para justificar su intento de golpe en Venezuela, incluido el ex director de la CIA y secretario de estado, Mike Pompeo, más el asesor de seguridad nacional, John Bolton. Este enero, el presidente Joe Biden se hizo eco de la retórica colonial de la Doctrina Monroe al referirse a América Latina como el “patio delantero” de Washington. Si bien Matt Gaetz, al igual que su mentor político Donald Trump, a veces critica de manera oportunista a otras facciones de derecha como los “neoconservadores”, propone una política exterior imperialista igualmente agresiva. Una constante en prácticamente todos los discursos de Gaetz es su demonización obsesiva de China. Aboga firmemente por una nueva guerra fría para contener a la superpotencia asiática. Mientras muchos neoconservadores e intervencionistas liberales quieren una política agresiva contra Rusia, el mensaje de Gaetz es esencialmente que China es la verdadera amenaza para Estados Unidos, no el Kremlin, y que Washington debería buscar la guerra con Beijing en lugar de la guerra con Moscú. En su discurso ante el Congreso, en el que declaró a Argentina como una “amenaza”, Gaetz reiteró este tema y afirmó que “China es una potencia en ascenso. Rusia es una potencia en declive. Concentrémonos, para que no nos unamos a ellos en ese destino eventual”. Gaetz, que representa el Panhandle del noroeste de Florida, se unió a la administración Trump para apoyar firmemente el intento de golpe de estado en Venezuela. El legislador republicano también pide con frecuencia el derrocamiento del gobierno de Cuba, mientras difunde noticias falsas que afirman que “los matones venezolanos, con algunos rusos, ahora son ‘escuadrones de la muerte’ que recorren los hogares. Están masacrando adultos y secuestrando niños”. Gaetz está estrechamente relacionado con la extrema derecha. En 2018, invitó a un notorio bloguero nacionalista blanco, que ha promovido el revisionismo del Holocausto, al discurso del estado de la unión de Trump. Además de su política extremista, Gaetz ha sido investigado por las autoridades estadounidenses por el presunto tráfico sexual de una niña de 17 años.

Write an article about: After Ukraine, US readies ‘transnational kill chain’ for Taiwan proxy war. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, Link 16, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine

Washington approved the dangerous sale of the Link 16 communications system to Taiwan. This is the final link of what the US military calls a “transnational coalition kill chain” against China, and signals a commitment to kinetic war. In many traditions, when you paint or sculpt a Buddha, the eyes are the very last to be painted. It’s only after the eyes have been completed that the sculpture is fully alive and empowered. The United States has approved a $75 million weapons package to Taiwan province, involving the sale of the Link 16 communications system. The acquisition of Link 16 is analogous to “painting the eyes on the Buddha”: a last touch, it makes Taiwan’s military systems and weapons platforms live and far-seeing. It confers deadly powers, or more prosaically, in the words of the US military, it completes Taiwan as the final, lethal link of what the US Naval Institute calls a “transnational coalition kill chain”, for war against China. What exactly is Link 16? It is a key system in the US military communications arsenal. Specifically, it’s the jam-resistant tactical data network for coordinating NATO weapons systems for joint operations in war. If this sale is completed, it signals serious, granular, and single-minded commitment to kinetic war. It would signal that the Biden administration is as serious and unwavering in its desire to provoke and wage large-scale war with China over Taiwan as it was with Russia over Ukraine, which also saw the implementation of this system. More important than any single weapons platform, this system allows the Taiwan/ROC military to integrate and coordinate all its warfighting platforms with US, NATO, Japanese, Korean, Australian militaries in combined arms warfare. Link 16 would be the deadliest piece of technology yet to be transferred, because it allows sea, air, and land forces to be coordinated with others for lethal effect. It permits, for example, strategic nuclear/stealth bombers  (US B-1B Lancers, B-2 Spirits) to coordinate with electronic warfare and surveillance platforms  (EA Growlers, Prowlers, EP-3s), fighters and bombers (F-16,F-22, F-35s) as well as conduct joint arms warfare with US, French, British carrier battle groups, Japanese SDF destroyers, and South Korean Hyun Moo missile destroyers, as well as THAAD and Patriot radars and missile batteries. It also allows coordination with low-earth orbit satellites and other Space Force assets. In other words, Link 16 supplies a brain and nervous system to the various deadly limbs and arms that the Taiwan authorities have been acquiring and preparing on the prompting of the US. It ensures interoperability and US control. It effectively prepares Taiwan to be used as the spear tip and trigger of a multinational war offensive against China. To give a shoe-on-the-other-foot analogy, this would be like China giving separatists in a US territory or state (e.g. Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Texas) not just arms and training – already a belligerent act of war, which the US is currently doing – but connecting insurgent militaries directly to the PLA’s surveillance, reconnaissance, and command/control systems. This coordinates and completes, to borrow the words of the US Naval Institute (USNI), the final link in a “transnational coalition kill chain” for war. The current US doctrine of war against China is based on distributed, dispersed, diffused, network-centric warfare to be conducted along the myriad islands of the archipelagic states encircling China in the Pacific. These are the “island chains” upon which the US has encircled and sown dragon’s teeth: tens of thousands of troops armed with mobile attack platforms and missiles. This is to be coordinated with subsurface warfare, automated/autonomous warfare, and longer-range stand-off weapons and attacks. Powerful think tanks like CSBA, CNAS, CSIS, RAND and the Pentagon have been working out the doctrine, details, logistics, and appropriations for this concept intensively for over a decade while advocating intensely for it. The sale of link 16 to Taiwan realizes and completes a key portion of this, binding the Chinese island as the keystone of this “multinational kill chain”. This doctrine of dispersion is based on a “rock-paper-scissors” concept that networked diffusion “offsets” (Chinese) precision. China’s capacity to defend itself and its littoral perimeter with precision missiles can be undermined with diffuse, distributed attacks from all across the island chains. Note that this diffusion and dispersion of attack platforms across the entire Pacific gives the lie to the claim that this is some inherently deterrent strategy to defend Taiwan island. Diffusion is clearly offensive, designed to overrun and overwhelm defenses: like Ukraine, this is not to deter war, but to enable it. This thus signals that aggressive total war against China is being prepared, in granular, lethal fashion on tactical and operational levels. On the strategic level, currently, at the CFR, CNAS, and other influential think tanks in Washington, the talk is all about “protracted warfare” with China, about pre-positioning systems and munitions for war, about ramping up to an industrial war footing for the inescapable necessity of war with China. This discussion includes preparations for a nuclear first strike on China. The US senses that the clock is running rapidly down on its power. If war is inevitable, then it is anxious to start war sooner rather than later. RAND warned in 2016 that 2025 was the outside window for the US to prevail in war with China. The “Minihan window” also hints at 2025. The “Davidson window” is 2027. The question in Washington regarding war with China is not if, but when–and how. Link 16 makes “how” easier, and brings “when” closer. The current administration has hardline Russophobes who want to continue to bleed Russia out in Ukraine. It wants protracted war with Russia. It firmly believes it can wage ambidextrous, multi-front war. Many US officials also believe that war with Ukraine and war with China are connected. They see Russia and China as a single axis of “revisionist powers” (i.e., official enemies) conspiring against the US to undermine its so-called “rules-based order” (i.e., US hegemony). Furthermore, if the US abandons Ukraine, this could weaken the Taiwan authorities’ resolve and willingness to wage war on behalf of Washington. Earlier in the war, when Russian gains in Ukraine were uncertain, Bi-khim Louise Hsiao (Taiwan’s current vice-president elect) gloated publicly and prominently that Ukraine’s victories were a message to China, as well as proof-of-concept of an effective doctrine for waging and winning war against China. As such, the Taiwan authorities were and are a major supporter of the Ukraine proxy war. But the converse also holds true. Based on the same premise, if the US abandons and loses Ukraine, it sends a clear message to the people on Taiwan island that they will be the next to be used and abandoned; that their US-imposed war and war doctrine (light, distributed, asymmetrical combined arms warfare) for fighting China is a recipe for catastrophic loss. The US plans on using proxies for war against China: Taiwan, Korea, Japan (JAKUS), Philippines, and Australia (AUKUS). Thus it cannot signal too overtly its perfidious, unreliable, and instrumental mindset. Washington has to keep up the pretense. It cannot be seen to overtly lose in or abandon Ukraine. It needs a “decent interval”, or a plausible pretext to cut and run. Still, the US is stretched thin. For example, it is relying on Korean munitions to Ukraine, and South Korea has provided more munitions than all of the EU combined. Moreover, the US is currently at war with itself. The fracturing of its body politic can only be unified with a common war against a common enemy. Russia is not that enemy for the US. China is. The Republicans want war with China now. Eli Ratner and Elbridge Colby have been fretting for years about the need to husband weaponry, arms, and munitions in order to wage war against China. Since the outbreak of Ukraine, Ratner has been working hard to pull India into the US defense industry’s supply chain, and claims to have been successful. South Korea’s considerable military-industrial complex is being pulled into sub-contracting for US war with China. Since many of its major Chaebol corporations got their start as subcontractors for the war in Vietnam (for example, Hyundai was a subcontractor for Halliburton/Brown & Root), the Korean economy is simply reverting back to its corporate-martial roots. South Korea’s economy is currently tanking due to US-forced sanctions on China. Major Korean electronic firms have lost 60 to 80% of their profits due to US-imposed chip sanctions. Under those conditions, military manufacturing and/or subcontracting looks to be the only way forward. In this way, the US is forcing a war economy onto its vassals. Furthermore, US aid to Ukraine benefits its own arms industry. The business of the US is war. Not only do existing US arms companies gain, but also the entire tech industry and supply chain benefits, and is currently re-orienting around this. Much of the US tech industry is seeking to suckle from the government teat, now flowing copiously in preparation for war. On the other hand, the general US economy is not doing well, with massive layoffs, especially in the consumer and business tech sector. The backstop of military Keynesianism, with the integration of think-tank lobbying groups funded by the arms industry with close ties to the administration (such as CNAS, West Exec Advisors, and CSIS) ensure that war is always the closest ready-to-hand resort for tough economic times. The US is simultaneously trying to decouple supply chains, which creates opportunities for US firms (both domestically and subcontracting with US vassals). Automated, AI-enabled warfare will be a key part of this development, as will be dispersed, distributed warfare platforms using proxies such as South Korea and Japan. This fits the existing historical pattern: the history of Western technology shows that technology and machinery have always been developed first for war. Afterwards, they become tools of entertainment and distraction, and later productive tools for general industrial use. This pattern goes back to the earliest machines and inventions of the West: the crane, the pulley, the lever, were all military technologies – machines of war (used in sieges). Later they became machines of illusion and distraction (used as stage machinery in Greek theater). Only much later were they applied for general use – and exploitation – in manufacture and production. This holds true for many other technologies, including: Nuclear power obviously derives from nuclear weapons. AI, too, from its inception, was conceived for automated battle management, especially to enable second strike after human life had been destroyed. An AI war is already in the works, with US sanctions on AI-related chips and computing, along with an algorithmic race to suppress dissent and critique in the information domain. War and business are intricately related in the west, and war is the first lever pulled when the economy stagnates critically or needs a boost. The US needs to abandon its neoconservative fantasies of hegemonic global empire and retreat gently into that good night, for there to be peace. Washington needs to negotiate in good faith with Russia, and begin the process of de-escalating its proxies in Ukraine, as well as in Palestine, and the Pacific. It needs to seek win-win cooperation in a multilateral order based on international law and mutual co-existence, not its own top-down “rules-based order”. It needs to respect the One China principle, end its interference in China’s affairs, and stop preparing and provoking war with China. However, the US ruling class is unwilling to do so. And it has only a few levers left to pull. The military one is the closest and most ready to hand. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. Like a drunk at the bar after the final call – drunk with power – Washington is determined to go out with a fight. That fight could involve a nuclear first strike. Palestine has shown what it will try to get away with: brazen genocide with the whole world watching. The issue is no longer war or peace in Ukraine. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell sees Ukraine as a “unified field” of war with China. He revels in the possibility of a “magnificent symphony of death” in Asia. The coda, of course, will be a deafening fermata of silence across the entire planet. Unless we stop this insane march to war.

Write an article about: Cold war two: US Secretary of State Blinken announces China containment policy. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Antony Blinken, China, Mike Pompeo, Russia, Xi Jinping

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a new policy of containment and siege of China, to “shape the strategic environment around Beijing.” This is similar to the strategy Washington pursued against the Soviet Union in the first cold war. The head of the US State Department has publicly confirmed that Washington is waging a new cold war against China. Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a historic speech in which he essentially announced a policy of containment and siege of Beijing, similar to the strategy that Washington pursued against the Soviet Union in the first cold war. “We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system,” he said. “The scale and the scope of the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China will test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before,” he argued. Blinken even made implicit military threats against China. “President Biden has instructed the Department of Defense to hold China as its pacing challenge, to ensure that our military stays ahead”, he said. In order to wage this new cold war, the US State Department announced the creation of a “China House”, focused specifically on isolating Beijing. Blinken made these remarks in a May 26 talk titled “The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” delivered at George Washington University, a major DC-based college that has a revolving door with the US government. The speech was co-sponsored by the powerful think tank the Asia Society. Blinken praised the organization for “forging closer ties with the countries and people of Asia to try to enhance peace, prosperity, freedom, equality, sustainability.” The Asia Society was founded by billionaire oligarch John D. Rockefeller III, a key political operative with deep ties to US intelligence agencies, who worked closely with the US government and para-state organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations to wage the first cold war on the Soviet Union. Blinken’s speech was very similar to one given in July 2020 by Donald Trump’s former CIA director and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in which he condemned China as “the primary challenge today in the free world” and openly called to “change” the government in Beijing. The central thrust of Blinken’s speech was that, after World War Two, the United States created the global political and economic architecture that governs the world today, and this has allowed Washington to dominate the planet. China, however, now poses a unique challenge to that unipolar US hegemony, he lamented, calling Beijing “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”. “After the Second World War,” Blinken said, “we and our partners [built] the rules-based order.” He described this liberal capitalist “rules-based order” as one in which “people, ideas, goods, and capital move freely.” In the nearly 7,000-word speech, Blinken reiterated this talking point constantly, using the phrase “rules-based international order,” “rules-based order,” or “international order” nine times. “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” he declared. With arrogant American exceptionalist rhetoric, Blinken described the United States as “magical,” and depicted China as a threat to the “magical” US system and its liberal capitalist order. “We have profound differences with the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Government”, he stressed, adding that the US goal is “to outcompete China in key areas.” Blinken’s speech reflected the deep neoliberal ideology of the US government, and showed how its capitalist economic system fundamentally clashes with China’s socialist model. The US secretary of state accused Beijing of supposedly unfairly competing in the “rules-based order” because its government intervenes in the economy and implements socialist policies. “Unlike U.S. companies and other market-oriented firms, Chinese companies don’t need to make a profit – they just get another injection of state-owned bank credit when funds are running low,” he complained. Blinken harshly condemned China’s socialist policies, while calling for more neoliberal policies to be implemented. “We will push back on market-distorting policies and practices, like subsidies and market access barriers, which China’s government has used for years to gain competitive advantage,” he declared. The top US diplomat claimed that state intervention in the economy is unfair, calling instead for “competition” on a “level playing field” – ie, one in which corporations dictate policy, not governments. “We’ll compete with China to defend our interests and build our vision for the future,” Blinken asserted. He put a particular emphasis on the technological sector. Blinken accused China of “unfair technology and economic practices,” by which he largely meant state intervention to foster their growth. The secretary of state complained that US corporations are heavily regulated in China, and that Beijing puts many restrictions on them. “For too long, Chinese companies have enjoyed far greater access to our markets than our companies have in China”, Blinken grumbled. He lamented that “The New York Times and Twitter are prohibited for the Chinese people,” that “American companies operating in China have been subject to systematic forced technology transfer,” and that “Beijing strictly limits the number of foreign movies allowed in the Chinese market.” In his speech, Blinken boasted that the United States is building and strengthening a group of “allies and partners” in order to challenge China. He mentioned the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with Japan, Australia, and India; as well as AUKUS, the US military alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia. Blinken likewise bragged of expanding NATO’s imperial sphere of influence into Asia, stating, “we’re building bridges among our Indo-Pacific and European partners, including by inviting Asian allies to the NATO summit in Madrid next month [in June].” He was specifically referring to Japan and South Korea, which already participated in a meeting in NATO headquarters in April. NATO expanding into Asia-Pacific to militarily encircle China as well as Russia “We are not looking for conflict or a new Cold War”, Blinken claimed in the speech. But at the same time, he contradicted this reassurance with his calls for containing and besieging China. The US secretary of state also targeted Russia. And he warned about the growing alliance between Beijing and Moscow. “President Xi and President Putin declared that the friendship between their countries was – and I quote – ‘without limits,'” he cautioned. Blinken warned that the Eurasian powers are carrying out joint military exercises. “Russian President Vladimir Putin poses a clear and present threat,” he declared. “The foundations of the international order are under serious and sustained challenge” by both China and Russia, Blinken claimed. A significant part of Blinken’s speech was dedicated to accusing China of outlandish misdeeds. Without presenting a shred of evidence, he claimed China is committing “genocide and crimes against humanity” in its Muslim-majority province Xinjiang. This is despite the fact that the State Department’s own lawyers concluded there is insufficient evidence for these hyperbolic allegations. Blinken also implicitly reiterated US support for separatist movements in Tibet and Hong Kong, stating, “We stand together on Tibet, where the authorities continue to wage a brutal campaign against Tibetans and their culture, language, and religious traditions, and in Hong Kong, where the Chinese Communist Party has imposed harsh anti-democratic measures under the guise of national security.” In a deeply hypocritical diatribe, Blinken claimed China had “perfected mass surveillance,” while making no mention of NSA mass spying. Blinken accused Beijing of “harming workers and companies in the United States,” without acknowledging the rampant abuse of workers by Amazon, Uber, Walmart, and other US corporations. The top US diplomat even went so far as to attack China for “standing with governments that brazenly violate” sovereignty and territorial integrity, while completely ignoring US support for Israeli colonialism against Palestinians, the Saudi and Emirati war on Yemen, or the invasion and occupation of Syria by NATO member Turkey, let alone the US wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Somalia. Hinting at the debunked myth of “debt-trap diplomacy,” Blinken fearmongered about economic agreements that countries have made with China, stating, “We’ve heard firsthand about buyer’s remorse that these deals can leave behind”. “Under President Xi, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad,” he claimed. Antony Blinken’s speech had striking similarities with one given by his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in July 2020. Both secretaries of state complained that China threatens US global hegemony, and argued that the China of today is fundamentally different from the China in 1972, when President Nixon took a historic visit to the country to normalize relations. In his speech, titled “Communist China and the Free World’s Future,” Pompeo essentially argued that Nixon’s historic visit was a mistake. Washington thought that, by opening up, it could change China’s political and economic system. But ultimately it was not able to do so, both US secretaries of state lamented. “We can’t treat this incarnation of China as a normal country,” Pompeo insisted. “We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change.” Trump’s secretary of state accused Beijing of challenging the “rules-based order,” the same concept that Blinken has endlessly repeated. “If we don’t act now, ultimately the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build,” Pompeo warned. Blasting “China’s virulent strain of communism,” he declared that “Communists almost always lie.” (This was quite ironic, given Pompeo himself quipped in April 2019, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.) “We have to keep in mind that the CCP regime is a Marxist-Leninist regime,” Pompeo said. “General Secretary Xi Jinping is a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology.” He portrayed China as a monstrous squid, stating, “Every nation will have to come to its own understanding of how to protect its own sovereignty, how to protect its own economic prosperity, and how to protect its ideals from the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party.” Pompeo’s remarks were more combative, but cutting through the rhetoric and looking at the ideas expressed, Blinken’s speech was very similar. Like Blinken, Pompeo’s complaints were ultimately rooted in China’s socialist model. Many Chinese companies “don’t answer to independent boards, and many of them are state-sponsored and so have no need to pursue profits,” he complained. Blaming China for the global Covid-19 pandemic, Pompeo called China “the primary challenge today in the free world.” “Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time,” the top US diplomat insisted. Both speeches serve as confirmation that the United States is waging a new cold war on China, and that this aggressive strategy has bipartisan support in Washington, among both Republicans and Democrats.

Write an article about: UN lies about US military occupation of Syria, reporter calls out Ukraine hypocrisy. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Dana Stroul, Donald Trump, Edward Xu, Farhan Haq, Fox News, Kurds, Mark A Milley, oil, Syria, Tom Bowman, UN, United Nations

US troops have illegally occupied Syria’s oil-rich territory for years, but a top United Nations official, Farhan Haq, falsely claimed “there’s no US armed forces inside of Syria”. Chinese reporter Edward Xu called out the UN’s hypocrisy on Ukraine. US troops have illegally occupied Syria’s oil-rich territory for years, but a top United Nations official falsely claimed “there’s no US armed forces inside of Syria”. In a press briefing on March 24, Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, sparred with Chinese reporter Edward Xu. Xu pressed Haq about a US airstrike on Syria, which killed a dozen people, following an attack on US troops that have been illegally occupying Syrian territory. “Do you think the presence of the US military in Syria is illegal or not?” Xu asked. “That’s not an issue that we’re dealing with at this stage”, Haq replied. Xu countered, “A foreign ministry based presence in another country without invitation, sounds like something else to me”. The UN spokesman then falsely claimed, “There’s no US armed forces inside of Syria… It’s not a parallel situation to some of the others… I believe there’s military activity. But, in terms of a ground presence in Syria, I’m not aware of that”. This statement is simply not true. US troops have illegally occupied Syria's oil-rich territory for years, but a top United Nations official falsely claimed "there's no US armed forces inside of Syria" A reporter called out his lie, exposing the UN's hypocrisy on Ukraine. Full video here: https://t.co/9rOeW53fT8 pic.twitter.com/fp42QG9Fje — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 29, 2023 The New York Times published an article on March 4 revealing that US General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has demanded that troops remain in Syria. “America still has more than 900 troops, and hundreds more contractors, in Syria”, the Times reported. In a March 24 newswire on the US airstrike in Syria, the Associated Press reported that “American troops have been in Syria since 2015“. The news outlet Kurdistan24 has published video footage of US armored vehicles occupying oil wells in Syria. In 2018, the Washington Post printed an article boasting, “In Syria, we ‘took the oil’“. The piece quoted the director of research at the neoconservative, US government-funded think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), who proudly stated, “We have this 30 percent slice of Syria, which is probably where 90 percent of the pre-war oil production took place… This is leverage”. US state media outlet NPR followed up in 2020, stating very clearly: “U.S. forces in northeastern Syria have a relatively new mission: securing oil fields not only from ISIS, but also from Syrian government and Russian forces”. NPR noted that its embedded reporter Tom Bowman “has been travelling with American military forces”. Bowman explained that President Donald Trump “agreed to keep a small number, about 600 or so, to secure these oil fields not only from ISIS but also from Syrian government and Russian forces. Now, they want their Kurdish forces, their allies, to use the proceeds from the oil to pay for their operations”. For his part, Trump was strikingly honest about what Washington was doing in Syria. He told Fox News, “I left troops [in Syria] to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil… We have the oil. Right now, the U.S. has the oil”. Here’s irrefutable video evidence of Trump “fighting the deep state” ? “I left troops [in Syria] to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil… We have the oil. Right now, the U.S. has the oil” pic.twitter.com/IYaep53GP5 — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 31, 2023 A hard-line neoconservative activist Dana Stroul, who oversaw Washington’s Syria Study Group, boasted in 2019 that the US military “owns” one-third of Syria, including its oil-rich “economic powerhouse”. When President Joe Biden came to power in 2021, Stroul was made the top Middle East policy official in the US Department of Defense. The top Pentagon Middle East policy official, neocon Dana Stroul, confirmed Biden is keeping troops to illegally occupy sovereign Syrian territory Stroul once boasted that the US military "owns" 1/3rd of Syria, including its oil-rich "economic powerhouse"pic.twitter.com/NIEJ9elxhs https://t.co/01kZ22dhJ4 — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 15, 2021 An official UN transcript of the March 24, 2023 press briefing follows below: Journalist Edward Xu: A couple of questions on Syria. Yesterday, there’s a drone attack to a US base in north-east Syria which resulted in one death and six injured. After that, US launched an air strike, also killed 11 people in Syria. Any reaction from the Secretary-General on this incident? UN Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq: Oh, well, of course, we continue to be worried about all of the continuing tensions, and we are trying to see what can be done to lower the tensions from different forces in Syria and will continue with those efforts. Edward Xu: Do you not urge everybody to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria? Farhan Haq: Well, of course, that’s a given, and obviously, it’s important that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria is respected. At the same time, you’re aware of the complexity of the situation of foreign forces, but we call for them to exercise restraint. Edward Xu: But, do you think the presence of the US military in Syria is illegal or not? Farhan Haq: That’s not an issue that we’re dealing with at this stage. There’s been a war. Edward Xu: But, is that… because it sounds very familiar this week. We talk a lot about the UN Charter, the international law and relative resolutions. But, it sounds to me, a foreign ministry based presence in another country without invitation, sounds like something else to me. Farhan Haq: I’ll leave your analysis to you. That there’s… At this stage there’s no… Edward Xu: What’s the difference between the situation in Syria and the situation in Ukraine? Farhan Haq: There’s no US armed forces inside of Syria. And so I don’t have a… It’s not a parallel situation to some of the others. Edward Xu: You’re sure there’s no US military personnel in Syria? Farhan Haq: I believe there’s military activity. But, in terms of a ground presence in Syria, I’m not aware of that. Edward Xu: Okay. Five US service members were injured in that attack. If there were no US service members in Syria, how could they got injured? That’s weird, right? Should I ask you about that? And by the way, if you’re talking about the resolution, the international law here is the resolution from Security Council 2254 (2015), I believe, it says in its PA [preambular] paragraph, “reaffirming its strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations”. Farhan Haq: Yes. I’m aware of that. And as you see, that is accepted by the members of the Security Council itself. Edward Xu: Yeah. So, again, back to my question, is that illegal to have presence in Syria for the US base, according to the relevant resolution that I just read out? Farhan Haq: The relevant resolution does call for that and we call on all countries to respect that. I wouldn’t go beyond that at this stage.

Write an article about: How USA makes countries pay for its wars: Economics of American imperialism with Michael Hudson. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

dollar, economics, IMF, imperialism, Michael Hudson, Treasury, treasury bonds, World Bank

Economist Michael Hudson explains how American imperialism has created a global free lunch, where the US makes foreign countries pay for its wars, and even their own military occupation. Economist Michael Hudson explains how American imperialism has created a global free lunch, where the US makes foreign countries pay for its wars, and even their own military occupation.Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the economics of Washington’s empire, the role of the IMF and World Bank, attempts to create alternative financial systems like BRICS, and the new cold war on China and Russia. PART 2 OF 2 (Interview recorded on April 13, 2020) Part 1: “US coronavirus ‘bailout’ is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall St – Economist Michael Hudson explains” (Teaser – 0:03) MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports. So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a secretary of defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism. Its idea is that, we’ll make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are foreign owned. But the primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops.” (Intro – 1:45) BENJAMIN NORTON: Here at Moderate Rebels we talk a lot about imperialism. I mean it’s really the kind of main point of this show. This program explores how US imperialism functions, how it works on the global stage, how neoliberal policies of austerity and privatization are forced at the barrel of a gun through the US military, through invasion and plunder. We talk about it in Venezuela, and Iraq, and Syria, and so many countries. But we often don’t talk about the specific economic dynamics of how it works through banks, and loans, and bonds. Well today we are continuing our discussion with the economist Michael Hudson, who is really one of the best experts in the world when it comes to understanding how US imperialism functions as an economic system, not just through a system of military force. Of course the economics are maintained, are undergirded, by that military force. And we talk about how the military force is expressed through regime-change wars and military interventions. But Michael Hudson also explains how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the US financial system, and banks and Wall Street, they all work together, hand in glove with the military, to maintain that financial chokehold. He spells this all out brilliantly in a book called “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” He originally wrote that book back in 1968, and then recently updated it in 2002, published again in 2003 with the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and kind of updated and showed how, even though the system that he detailed 50 years ago hasn’t really changed, but it has shifted in some ways. So today we’re gonna talk about how that international imperialist system dominated by the US works. Michael Hudson, who in the first part of this talked about the scheme that is the coronavirus bailout — if you want to watch the first part you can go find that at moderaterebels.com; it’s on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, any other platform. Michael Hudson is an economist and he’s also a longtime Wall Street financial analyst. He is also a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and you can find his work at michael-hudson.com, which I will link to in the show notes for this episode. So without further ado, here is the second part of our interview with Michael Hudson. (4:37) MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think it’s a good transition point to talk about another kind of scam you’ve identified. There’s a really hilarious aside in the second preface to your book “Super Imperialism,” where Herman Kahn, who is, I think he was a founder of the Hudson Institute, which you went to work for, he was also the inspiration for the Dr. Strangelove character and Stanley Kubrick’s film. Herman Kahn is, there’s an award that the neocons give out every year named for him; Benjamin Netanyahu is a recent award winner. But he was he was in the audience, or on a panel for one of your talks, where you laid out your theory of “Super Imperialism,” and how the United States actually gets other countries to subsidize its empire, and is able to expand and carry out this massive imperial project without having to impose austerity on its own population, as other countries have to do under IMF control. So Herman Kahn comes up to you after the talk and says, “You actually identified the rip-off perfectly.” And your book starts selling like hotcakes in DC, I guess among people who work for the CIA, and people who work in the military-intelligence apparatus. MICHAEL HUDSON: What he said was, “We’ve pulled off the greatest ripoff in history. We’ve gone way beyond anything that British Empire ever thought of.” He said, “That’s a success story. Most people think imperialism is bad; you’ve shown how it’s the greatest success story — we get a free lunch forever!” MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. So explain the ripoff you identified there, and how it is being perpetuated under the Trump administration in ways that I think are pretty amazing, including through the imposition of unprecedented sanctions on something like one-third of the world’s population. (6:40) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I wrote “Super Imperialism” in 1972, and it was published exactly one month after President Nixon took America off gold in August of 1971. And the reason he took America off gold was the entire balance of payments deficit from the Korean War to the Vietnam War was military in character. And every time, especially in the ’60s, the more money that America would spend in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, all this money had to be spent locally. And the banks were all French banks, because it was French Indochina, all the money would be sent to Paris, to the banks’ head offices, turned over from dollars into francs, and General de Gaulle would end up with all these dollars, and he would, every month, send in the dollars and want payment in gold. And Germany would do the same thing. And so the more America fought militarily, it was depleting its own gold stock, until finally, in August 1971, it said, “We’ve been using gold as the key to our world power ever since World War I, when we put Europe on rations. So we’re going to stop paying gold.” They closed the gold window. And most of the economists were all saying, “Oh my heavens, now it’s going to be a depression. “But what I said was, “Wait a minute, now that other countries can no longer get gold from all this military spending” — and when you talked about the balance of payments deficit, it’s not the trade deficit, it’s not foreign investment; it’s almost entirely military in character. So all these this money that spent abroad, how are we ever going to get it back? Well these dollars we have spent around the world, mainly for the 800 military bases and the other activities we have, these dollars would end up in foreign central banks. And foreign central banks, what are they going to do with them? Well we wouldn’t let foreign central banks buy American industries. We would let them buy stocks, but not a majority owner. My former boss, the man who taught me all about the oil industry, in Standard Oil, who became undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, and when Herman Kahn and I went to the White House, he said, “We’ve told the Saudi Arabians that they can charge whatever they want for their oil, but all the money they get, they have to recycle to the United States. Mostly they can buy Treasury bonds, so that we’ll have the money to keep on spending, but they can also buy stocks, or they can do with the Japanese did and buy junk real estate and lose their shirts.” So basically, when America spends money abroad, central banks really don’t have much — they don’t speculate. They don’t buy companies; they buy Treasury bonds. So we run a monetary deficit; the dollars are spent abroad; the central banks lend them back to the Treasury; and that finances the budget deficit, but it also finances the balance of payments deficit. So we just keep giving paper And I think President Bush, George W. Bush, said, “Well we’re never really going to repay this. They get counters, but we’re not going to repay it.” And then, as a matter of fact, you have Tom Cotton a senator from [Arkansas] saying, “Well you know China holds savings of $2 trillion or so in US Treasury bonds. Why don’t we just not pay them? They gave us the virus; let just grab it and nullify it.” We can nullify Iranian assets, Venezuelan assets — it’s like a bank can just wipe out other deposits you have, if it wants militarily. So the United States doesn’t have any constraint on military spending. Now Herman Kahn and I on another occasion went to the Treasury Department, and we talked about what the world would look like on a gold standard. And I said, “Well gold is a peaceful metal. If you have to pay in gold, no country with a gold standard can afford to go to war anymore. Because a war would be entail a foreign exchange payment, and you’d have to pay this foreign exchange in gold, not IOUs, and you would end up going broke pretty quickly.” Well needless to say, I think someone from the Defense Department said, “That’s why we’re not going to do it.” Here’s an example: Let’s suppose that you went to a grocery store. You decided, ok, you go to the grocery store and you buy — you sign an IOU for everything that you buy. You go to a liquor store, IOU. You buy a car, IOU. You get everything you want just for an IOU, and people try to collect the IOUs, and you say, “Well you know that IOU isn’t for collecting from me. Trade it among yourselves. Trade it among yourselves and you’ll get rich in no time. But treat it as an asset, just as you treat a dollar bill.” Well you’d get a free ride. You’d be allowed to go and write IOUs for everything, and nobody could ever collect. That’s what the United States position is, and that’s what it wants to keep. And that’s why China, Russia, and other countries are trying to de-dollarize, trying to get rid of the dollar, and are buying gold so that they can settle payments deficits among themselves in their own currency, or currencies of friendly countries, but just avoid the dollars altogether. (12:21) BENJAMIN NORTON: Michael, in the first part of this interview, when we were talking about the coronavirus bailout and the $6 trillion that were just basically given to Wall Street, you mentioned that basically it is just — I mean, I also said it — that’s it’s just a con scheme. But you said, really, that a lot of people are surprised, that they don’t think the system can work this way, because it just seems so blatantly stacked against them, so blatantly unfair. In your book — “Super Imperialism” is just so mind-blowing because, in simplistic terms to someone who is definitely a non-expert like me, it just becomes so clear that, as you put it, the US for decades, since the end of World War Two, has been really obtaining “the largest free lunch ever achieved in history,” the way you put it. I’m gonna read just two paragraphs here really quickly from your book, and then maybe ask you to unpack exactly how this works. But right at the beginning — and this is the updated version of your book, and we’ll link to your book in the show notes for this show. So anyone, I would highly recommend anyone listening could go buy “Super Imperialism.” I’m going to be republishing it through my own institute. It’s very hard to get the book; that’s why I’m buying the rights back. Because it’s really not marketed in this country very much. So at any rate it’s on my website, and you don’t have to buy the book; you can go to my website and get many of the chapters. Excellent, well I’m gonna link to your website in the show notes that’s michael-hudson.com. And thank you for putting that up, because I’ve been reading the PDF, and it’s incredible. So you write in the the introduction to the new updated version, which you wrote in 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, you wrote: “The Treasury bonds standard of international finance has enabled the United States to obtain the largest free lunch ever achieved in history. America has turned the international financial system upside down, whereas formerly it rested on gold, central bank reserves are now held in the form of US government IOUs, that can be run up without limit. “In effect America has been buying up Europe, Asia, and other regions with paper credit, US Treasury IOUs that it has informed the world it has little intention of ever paying off. “And there is little Europe or Asia can do about it except to abandon the dollar and create their own financial system.” So this seems to me as an outsider to be totally insane, to be a total con scheme. Can you explain how that scheme works, and especially in light of neoliberal economics? I took, just in college, basic introductory economics classes that were mandatory, especially microeconomics, and in those classes they teach you this neoliberal, libertarian form of economics, and they teach you the famous Winston Churchill quote, “There is no such thing in economics as a free lunch.” But you’re pointing out that actually, on the international stage, this whole thing is just all a giant free lunch for the US empire. (15:53) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the whole financial economy is a free lunch, and if you’re going to get a free lunch, then you protect yourself by saying there is no such thing as a free lunch. Obviously it does not want to make itself visible; it wants to make itself as invisible as possible. Well most of these countries in Asia get the dollars from US military spending. They say, “What are we going to do with the dollars?” They buy US Treasury bonds, that finance the military spending on the military bases that encircle them. So they’re financing their own military encirclement! It’s a circular flow. The United States spends dollars in these countries; the local recipients turn them over for local currency; the local currency recipients, the food sellers and the manufacturers, turn the dollars over to the banks for domestic currency, which is how they operate; and the dollars are sent back to the United States; and it’s a circular flow that is basically military in character. And the gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn’t have gun boats in them, or the crime sector, and probably they didn’t have debt in it either. So if you have economics talking as if the whole economy is workers spending their wages on goods and services; government doesn’t play a role except to interfere, but government is 40 percent of GDP, mainly military in character, then obviously economics doesn’t really talk about what you think of the economy; it doesn’t talk about society. It talks about a very narrow segment that it isolates, as if we’re talking about a small organ in the body, without seeing the body as a whole economic system, a whole interrelated system that is dominated and controlled by the finance and real estate sector, which has gained control of the government. And if the finance, and the insurance, and military sector, military-industrial complex, make themselves invisible and absent from the textbook, then people are just not going to look there to say, “How did that affect our life? How does that affect the economy?” And they’re not going to see that that’s what’s making the economy poor and pushing it into depression. (18:11) MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well I can’t give out IOUs on everything, on my own debts, because when the debt collector comes, I don’t have gunboats; I don’t have machine guns; I don’t have any gun. I mean if I wanted to get a gun I couldn’t get one, because they’re all bought up in Virginia, across the river, because you know everyone’s panicking. And I’m sure they’re defending themselves by like having their guns accidentally go off and shoot their dogs. But that’s kind of what’s missing as well from this theory is that, if people try to collect their debt on the US, the US can do severe damage to them, militarily or otherwise. Let’s game this out. I mean how do you see this playing out in Venezuela, where the Venezuelan government has tried to go around US sanctions, has tried to to work with Russia and China to sell gold; it’s had something like $5 billion of assets stolen by the US through sheer piracy in the past year. And now the US has dispatched I think more naval ships than we’ve seen in Latin America or in South America at any time in the last 30 years. (19:27) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well that’s the other part of the “Super Imperialism” book: debt bondage. Venezuela had a US-installed dictator, a right-winger, some years ago, and changed the law in Venezuela so that Venezuela’s foreign debt, sovereign debt, when it borrows in dollars, is backed by the collateral of its oil reserves. And it has the largest oil reserves in South America. So the United States wants to grab the oil reserves. Just as Vice President Cheney said we’re going into Iraq and Syria to grab the oil, America would like all these oil reserves in Venezuela. How does it get the oil reserves? Well it doesn’t have to technically invade, or at least finance is the new mode of warfare. It tried to grab these reserves by saying, “Let’s block Venezuela from earning the money by exporting the oil and earning the money from its US investments to pay the foreign debt. So we’re just going to grab the investment, and we’re going to select a mini dictator; we’re going to give it to Mr. Guaidó, and say, “This doesn’t belong to Venezuela; we’re arbitrarily taking it away and we’re giving the oil distribution assets in North America to Guaidó.” “We’re going to block Venezuela from paying the debt, and that means it’ll default on a foreign debt, and so the vulture funds and the bondholders can now grab Venezuelan oil, anywhere, under international law, because it is pledged as collateral for its debt, just as if you’d borrowed a mortgage debt and you’d pledged your home and the creditor could take away your home” — like Obama had so many people lose their home. Well now they’re trying to force Venezuela into relinquishing its debt, but Venezuela still is managing to scrape by. And so they may need a military force out to invade Venezuela, like Bush invaded Panama or Grenada. It’s an oil grab. So what finance couldn’t achieve, finally you really do need the military fist. Finance is basically backed by military, and domestically by force, by the sheriff, by the police department. It’s the force that are going to kick you out of the house. So the question is, is the only defense by the indebted people in America, your Virginia defense? Does there have to be an armed revolution here to cancel the debts? Do they have to eat the rich? That’s the whole question for the politics of America. I don’t see it being solved. If it is not solved by the indebted people simply starving to death, committing suicide, getting sick, or emigrating, then there will have to be a revolution. Those are the choices in Americ. And Venezuela said, “We’re not going to starve quietly in the dark.” And so there’s a military buildup pretending that it’s all about drugs, when Venezuela is threatening to interrupt the CIA’s drug trade. I mean that’s the irony of this! It’s the CIA that’s the drug dealer, not the Venezuelan government. So we’re in the Orwellian world that works through the organs or the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, National Public Radio, the real right-wing of America. (23:00) MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I’m so glad you boiled it down like that. Because so much of what we do at The Grayzone is to punch holes in the propaganda constructs that are used to basically provide liberal cover for what is sheer gangsterism. MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s much more black and white than gray. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah well, we should call it The Black and White Zone. We’re seeing it as well in Syria, where we’ve had one kind of human rights propaganda construct after another. And now at the end of the line, as the whole proxy war ends, Trump says, “We have to keep the troops there because of oil. We need them to guard the oil fields.” So it all becomes clear. But it’s unclear to everyone who’s been confused for the past years, following the way that the war has been marketed to them through these corporate media and US government publications that you just named. It’s just, we’re there for the oil. BENJAMIN NORTON: Michael, I mean there are so many ways we could explore this topic further, and hopefully we can have you back more often in the future, because we definitely need more economics coverage. We frequently talk about the political side of a lot of these issues of US imperialism, but of course the economic element is absolutely integral to understand what’s happening. I’m also very interested, you mentioned before we started this interview, that your book “Super Imperialism” is very popular in China, and that even in schools there people are reading it. And the question of China I think is the central question of this century — the rise of China, the so-called “threat” that China poses, in scare quotes, to the US. Of course China doesn’t threaten the American people, but rather the chokehold that the US has on the international financial system. And we have seen under Trump — I mean it’s been happening for years; it really actually began under Obama with the “Pivot to Asia,” and that was really Hillary Clinton’s State Department strategy was to move toward the encirclement of China. But now under Trump it has really become the main foreign policy bogeyman of the Trump White House. And especially now with coronavirus, every single day the corporate media is full of non-stop anti-china propaganda — “China is the evil totalitarian regime that’s going to take over the world, and we have to unite with the Republicans in order to fight against China.” And we now even see figures openly defending the “new cold war,” as they call it. They say we’re in a new Cold War, as the right-wing historian from Harvard Niall Ferguson put it in the New York Times recently. So I’m wondering, your book I think is even more relevant now than it was when you first wrote it, it’s so, so relevant. But what about the question of China? And what about the question of this new cold war? Do you think that could challenge the US-dominated financial system that was created after World War II, using the weapons of the World Bank and the IMF, as you spell out? Are we heading maybe toward the creation of a new international financial system? (26:24) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well what makes China so threatening is that it’s following the exact, identical policies that made America rich in the 19th century. It’s a mixed economy. Its government is providing the basic infrastructure and subsidized prices to lower the cost of living and the cost of doing business, so that its export industry can make money. And it’s subsidizing research and development, just like the United States did in the 19th century and early 20th century. So America basically says to the rest of the world, “Do as we say, not as we do, and not as we’ve done.” So China has a mixed economy that is working very well. You can just see the changes occurring there. And it realizes that the United States is trying to disable it, that that the United States wants to control all the sectors of production that have monopoly pricing — information technology, microchip technology, 5G communications, military spending. And the United States wants to be able to essentially buy goods from the rest of the world with overpriced exports, American movies, anything that has a patent that yields a monopoly price. And China wants to become — it has decided that. America, in the 1950s tried to fight China by sanctioning grain exports to China. You mentioned sanctions earlier, the first sanctions were used against China, to prevent them, trying to starve them with grain. Canada broke that embargo for grain, and China was very friendly to Canada, until Canada turned out to be — the prime minister, now that he has moved into a small basement in the Pentagon, and has agreed to grab Chinese officials. It’s right there in Washington; Canada is right there in Washington in one of the basements. It’s not a country anymore. So China does not feel so friendly towards Canada now that it’s moved. But it realized, we can’t depend on America for anything. It can cut us off with sanctions like it has tried to do with Iran, with Venezuela, with Cuba. So the idea of China, Russia, and the countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has been: “We have to be independent within ourselves, and make a Eurasian trading area, and we will take off because we are successful industrial capitalism, evolving into socialism, into a mixed economy, with the government handling all of the monopoly sectors to prevent monopoly pricing here.” “And we don’t want American banks to come in, create paper dollars, and buy out all of our industries. We’re not going to let America do that.” (29:29) I have gone back to China very often. And I’m a professor at Peking University; I have honorary professorships in Wuhan. I probably lecture mainly in Tianjin. There are a number of articles on my website from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on de-dollarization, essentially how China can avoid the use of the dollar by becoming independent in agriculture, and technology, and other goods. And the threat of China is that it will not be a victim. Victimizers always look at the victims as vicious attackers of themselves. So America says China is a vicious threat because it’s not letting us exploit them and victimize them. So again, it’s an Orwellian rhetoric of the bully. The bully always believes that the person he’s attacking is a threat. Just like in Germany, Goebbels said that their surefire way to mobilize the population behind any attack is to say, “We’re defending ourselves against foreign attack.” So you have the American attack on China pretending to be defense against their wanting to be just as independent as the United States always has been. The United States doesn’t want any other country to have any leverage to use over the United States. The United States insists on veto power in any organization that it’ll join — the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations. And China essentially says, ok, this is the very definition of national independence, to be independent from other countries available to choke us, offering a choke point, whether it’s a grain that we need; or technology; or the bank clearing system, the SWIFT interbank clearing system, to make our financial system operate; or the internet system. So by essentially waging this economic warfare against China to protect America monopolies, America is integrating China and Russia. And probably the leading Chinese nationalist in the world, the leading Russian nationalist, is Donald Trump. He’s saying, “Look boys, I know that you’re influenced by American neoliberals. I’m gonna help you. I believe that you should be independent. I’m gonna help you, Chinese, and Russians, and Iranians, be independent. I’m going to keep pushing the sanctions on agriculture, to make sure that you’re able to feed yourself. I’m gonna be pushing sanctions on technology, to make sure that you can defend yourself.” So he obviously is, I believe he’s a Chinese and Russian agent, just like MSNBC says. (32:09) BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah and Michael, this actually reminds me, I used to follow you regularly at The Real News, and I worked there for a bit, and unfortunately there was kind an internal coup there, and it has moved to the right a bit. But the point is, a few years ago at The Real News, I remember you did an amazing debate between you and the Canadian economist Leo Panitch, and it was about the nature of the BRICS system. This was when this is before the series of coups that that overthrew the left in Brazil and installed the fascist government now of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing extremist. And at the time there was Dilma Rousseff, a progressive from the Workers’ Party. And Brazil and Russia were helping to take the lead in the BRICS system. This is Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. And of course the coups, the series of coups in Brazil, kind of ended that project of South-South regional integration. And also the rise of the right-wing, the far-right, in India with Narendra Modi. But there was a moment there when the BRICS community, these countries were trying to build their own bank. China of course has a series of banks. You mentioned the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. So there have been these international institutions, multilateral institutions, created to kind of challenge the hegemony of the World Bank and the IMF. And I remember in that debate, Leo Panitch was arguing that, “Oh the BRIC system and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all of these institutions are just going to be the new form of neoliberalism, and they’re just going to replace the World Bank and implement many of the same policies.” You disagreed with that. So maybe can you kind of relitigate that debate here a little bit and just kind of articulate your position for our viewers? (34:08) MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports. So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a secretary of defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism. Its idea is that, we’ll make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are foreign owned. But the primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops that can’t be grown in temperate zones like the United States.” So China and Russia, they’re not really agricultural economies. The buttress of America’s trade balance has been agriculture, not industry. Obviously, we de-industrialized. Agriculture, since World War II, has been the foundation of the trade balance. And you need foreign dependency. The purpose of the World Bank is to make other countries’ economies distorted and warped into a degree that they are dependent on the United States for their trade patterns. BENJAMIN NORTON: Well Michal, isn’t it also true though that China has massive agricultural production, and Russia produces a lot of wheat right? (36:14) MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure, but it does it doesn’t have to base its exports on agriculture to African countries. It can afford having African countries growing their own food supply so that they won’t have to buy American food; they can grow their own food. Imagine, if China helps other countries grow their own food and grain, then America’s trade surplus evaporates. Because that’s the only advantage that America has, agribusiness. BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah it’s like that famous quote: If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for one day; if you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life. And then I think Marx, didn’t Marx complicate that? MICHAEL HUDSON: But if you lend them the money to buy a fish, then he ends up bankrupt and you get to grab up all his property. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah I mean we saw this play out clearly in Haiti. MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, that’s the typical — what America has when it has a free a reign, that’s exactly the Haiti story. That’s absolutely terrible. It’s depressing to read. I get cognitive dissonance, because it’s just so unfair. It’s so awful to read; I avert the page. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah I mean just observing all of this is what kind of brought me to the point where I concluded that there had to be another international financial system, when I saw how Haiti was brought to its knees. First with the School of the Americas graduates staging a coup, and Bill Clinton reinstalls Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And so it all it takes place under the guise of goodwill by Washington. But Aristide is forced to sign off, basically sign away Haiti’s domestic agricultural production capacity. And the next thing you know, their rice economy’s wiped out, and they’re importing rice from Louisiana. And the only economy left, the only economic opportunity left, is to work in these free trade zones for US companies. And that’s just the model writ large. It kind of helped lead to the next coup, that removed Aristide, and look where Haiti is today. MICHAEL HUDSON: Right, it means, you must not protect your own economy; only America can protect its own economy. But you must not. That’s free trade. (38:45) MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right, going back to the JFK Seeds of Peace program. It’s big agro subsidies, and then you bomb the Third World with cheap seeds and cheap goods, and then you have a migration crisis. MICHAEL HUDSON: Seeds for Starvation is what the program is known as. Because by giving a low price of foreign aid to these countries, they they prevented domestic agricultural development, because no farmer could compete with free crops that America was giving. The purpose of the Seeds for Starvation program was to prevent countries from feeding themselves, and to make them dependent. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, when I lived in LA I would meet families who had initially come across the border because of the program — they would point the finger directly at Seeds for Starvation. They’d say, “We came from rural Mexico, and our livelihood was wiped out.” So this is a long-standing program. And we’ve seen in the coronavirus bailout five times more money provided to USAID for so-called stabilization programs than for hospital workers. And that’s to do exactly what you just described: USAID is sort of the spearhead of these programs which aim to wipe out land reform programs, and replace them with US aid in the form of these cheap seeds and so on, cheap bananas to Burundi, and everywhere else. So do you see, through your experience in China, that Belt and Road is a genuine alternative to this model? (40:27) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well they’re certainly trying to make it. By the way, what you’ve just described, it’s not a bug; it’s a feature. When you have the same problem occurring after 50 years, it’s either insanity — and we know it’s not — or it’s the intent. You have to assume at a certain point that the results of these aid programs are the intended results. And certainly if you look at the congressional testimony, Congress knows this, but the media don’t pick it up. In China, they’re really trying to create an alternative. They want to break free from the United States. And if Trump’s policies of “America First” continue, and as he said, “We have to win every deal.” That means, any deal we make with the foreign country, that country has to lose. So he’s integrating the whole world, and isolating the United States. And when you isolate the United States, China realizes that what will be isolated is the neoliberal philosophy that is the cover story, the junk economics that justifies all of these destructive policies. BENJAMIN NORTON: Well Michael, this was I think one of our most interesting episodes. We want to more economics coverage, so hopefully we can talk more with you and get some more of your analysis. I guess just concluding here, my final question would be, I mentioned that the term cold war has been thrown around a lot. And of course, the new cold war is going to be different from the old cold war in a lot of different ways. And of course Russia is not the Soviet Union at all. Russia does not have a socialist system. China’s system as you mentioned is mixed, there are still socialist elements, but even China’s economy is not nearly as state controlled as the Soviet Union was at the peak of the cold war. So I’m wondering, it’s pretty clear if you listen to the rhetoric coming from the Pentagon, that “great power competition” as they refer to it is now the the undergirding philosophy of US foreign policy. What is the economics of that? Because the economics of neoliberalism, after the destruction of the Socialist Bloc, and George H. W. Bush’s declaration of a “new world order,” which is of course just neoliberalism and US hegemony — in that period, the clear economic philosophy, the kind of guiding foreign policy, was destruction of independent socialist-oriented states and forcible integration of those countries into the international neoliberal economy. We saw that with Iraq; we saw that with former Yugoslavia; we saw that with Libya — which is really just a failed state. So now I think we’re in a kind of new phase. The Pentagon released two years ago its national defense security strategy saying that the new goal of the Pentagon and US foreign policy is to contain China and Russia. That is the stated, professed goal. What does that look like economically going forward? (43:31) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I think that’s quite right. Of course it’ll contain Russia and China, and there’s nothing that Russia and China want more than to be contained. In other words, that they’re talking about is decoupling from the US economy. And the US will say, “Well we’re not going to let them have access to the US market, and we’re not going to have anything to do with them.” And Russia and China say, “Boy that’s wonderful, ok we’re on the same wavelength there. You can contain us; we will contain you. You go your way; we’ll go our way.” So basically the cold war was an attempt — it’s neoliberalism and privatization. It’s Thatcherism. It’s, “How do we make China and Russia look like Margaret Thatcher’s England, or Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin?” “How do we prevent other countries from protecting their industry and their financial system from the United States financial system and US exports? How do we prevent other countries from doing for themselves what America does for itself? How do we make a double standard in world finance, and world trade, and world politics?” And the result of trying to prevent other countries from doing this is simply to speed the parting guest, to accelerate their understanding that, they have to make a break; they have to be contained. In other words, they have to create their own food supply, not rely on American food exports. They have to create their own 5G system, not let America’s 5G, with its spy portals all built in. And they have to create their own society, and go their own way. Which is what China was like before the 16th century. It was always the “Central Kingdom”; it always looked at itself as being central and independent from the rest of the world. And it’s going back to that. Except it realizes that it needs raw materials from Africa and other countries. And the question is, what is Europe going to do? Is Europe going to just follow the Thatcher right deflationary Eurozone policies and end up looking like Greece? Or is it going to join with Eurasia, with Russia and China, and make a whole Asiatic continent? The cold war really is about what is going to happen to Europe. Because we have already isolated China and Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The question is what will happen to Europe, and what will happen to Africa. (Outro – 46:04) BENJAMIN NORTON: Great, well I think that’s the perfect note to end on. We were speaking with the economist Michael Hudson. He is a Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He’s also the author of many books, and we were talking about “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” He has two versions of that, and we will link to that book in the show notes of this episode. We will also link to his website, where you can find a lot of great interviews with transcripts, his articles — and that’s michael-hudson.com. Michael, thanks a lot. That was a really great, two-part interview. I learned a lot, and I think our viewers will benefit a lot. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah thanks a lot Michael. MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you. I hope we can fill out all the details in subsequent broadcasts. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Absolutely.

Write an article about: US Congress candidate Geoff Young: Abolish CIA, stop arming Nazis, end drug war. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

CIA, Congress, Geoff Young, Kentucky, Nazis, podcast, Ukraine, war on drugs

US Congress candidate Geoff Young, who is running in Kentucky on an anti-war platform, explains why he wants to abolish the CIA, dismantle AFRICOM, end the war on drugs, and stop arming Nazis in Ukraine. Multipolarista host Benjamin Norton interviewed US Congress candidate Geoff Young, who is running in Kentucky’s 6th district on an anti-war platform calling for abolishing the CIA. We discussed Young’s 12-point program, which also seeks to “End the failed ‘War on Drugs,'” prevent nuclear war, establish a Medicare-for-All system of universal healthcare, dismantle the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), increase taxes on billionaires and millionaires, and “Get Big Money out of politics.” Young won Kentucky’s Democratic primary election on May 17. But he explained that the state’s Democratic Party branch has refused to support him against incumbent Republican Congressman Andy Barr. Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, has in fact publicly criticized Young over his opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine. Young said he is “probably the only anti-war Democrat” running for Congress. Preventing nuclear war “is my main concern. That’s been my main concern for 40, 45 years,” he explained. And “it’s most likely to happen, looking at today’s situation, when there is a tense, perhaps a war going on, such as Ukraine. And that’s where the chances of an accidental nuclear war are the highest,” he warned. Young criticized the US government for sending weapons to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Avoz Regiment, which has officially been part of the country’s National Guard since a 2014 Washington-sponsored coup. At the top of his campaign website, young4ky.com, Young has a promise: “Unlike Andy Barr, I will never vote to send weapons to Nazis.” In the interview with Multipolarista, Young stressed that Nazis “are enemies of humanity.” “I thought Americans were against Nazis in general, you know, since World War II,” he added. Young noted that sitting congressmen like Barr “can’t acknowledge the fact that the federal government, both parties, have been sending weapons to Nazis since 2014, in Ukraine.” “One of my objectives during the next five months is to inform every voter in the sixth district, regardless of what party they are registered as, that Andy Barr knew about it since 2014 or 2015, and he never objected, and now he wants President Biden to do it even more,” Young explained. When asked why he wants to abolish the CIA, Young said, “Since it was founded in 1947, right after World War II, the CIA has been the worst, most well-funded, most powerful, most dangerous, most deadly terrorist organization in the world. It still is today.” “We’ve got 16 other intelligence agencies. Let’s get rid of the worst one and save some money,” he added. Young also condemned the US government’s so-called war on drugs, arguing “it has never been effective at fighting addiction. It has always been a bonanza for drug smuggling, you know, organized crime. The CIA has made a whole lot, billions of dollars on the Afghan opium and heroin trade, for example.” “The war on drugs is just wrong-headed from the start,” he continued. “It should be treated as a public health issue, as an addiction treatment issue, and not as a criminal issue, where people get thrown in prison.” Young stressed that the drug war has hurt his state in particular. “The overdose problem in Kentucky has been horrible for years. We’ve been losing thousands of people a year, because they get poisoned by the stuff they buy on the street.” “And the harm reduction approach, the public health approach, would reduce all of that,” he argued.

Write an article about: US kidnapped and imprisoned Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab for buying food. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Alex Saab, Camilla Fabri Saab, CLAP, Iran, sanctions, Venezuela

Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab was essentially kidnapped by the United States because he was buying food for the government’s CLAP food program, to feed the people of Venezuela. (Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.) “It’s not a crime to fulfill a diplomatic mission. It’s not a crime to evade sanctions that are harming an entire country. It can’t be illegal to help a people.” Camilla Fabri Saab made these impassioned remarks when explaining the situation behind the illegal arrest and extradition – the kidnapping, in essence – of her husband, Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab. Saab is virtually unknown in the United States, where he is currently languishing in a Miami prison, but he has been vital to Venezuela’s ability to survive the brutal economic war being waged by the U.S. He is a political prisoner whose case has parallels to that of Julian Assange. Both have been subjected to extraterritorial reach by U.S. authorities, as neither are U.S. citizens, and their alleged crimes took place outside of the country. Assange is in jail for telling the truth. Saab is in jail for helping feed Venezuelans. Saab faces a charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering for his involvement in Venezuela’s housing program, and was sanctioned by the Trump administration in 2019 for his work with Venezuela’s CLAP, a program that sends food and other necessities to Venezuelan families. Routinely referred to in the media as a Colombian businessman, Saab has dual Venezuela-Colombian citizenship and is a diplomat. He was appointed as a Venezuelan special envoy in April 2018, more than two years before his arrest. Under the Vienna Convention and the U.S. Diplomatic Relations Act, a diplomat cannot be arrested by a foreign power. This includes diplomats who are in transit between the sending and receiving countries, Venezuela and Iran, in Saab’s case. Alex Saab was flying from Venezuela to Iran when his plane stopped to refuel in Cabo Verde, an island country off the western coast of Africa. He was arrested without a warrant and held in Cabo Verde for nearly 500 days, as a protracted battle over his extradition to the U.S. played out in the courts. He was beaten, denied medical care, and held in isolation. Cabo Verde ignored a ruling from a regional court ordering his release, as well as a decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee suspending his extradition. Neither his family nor his lawyers were informed of his extradition until after it occurred. In short, Saab was kidnapped twice: once when his plane was refueling and again when he was spirited to the U.S. The U.S. government argues that the extradition was legal and that any violation of the Vienna Convention was committed by Cabo Verde. David Rivkin, one of Saab’s attorneys, says the fact that “Cabo Verde absolutely violated its legal obligation does not provide any excuse for the United States.” Rivkin describes the case against Saab as “unprecedented,” given the broad and protective view the U.S. has typically held on diplomatic immunity. Saab has an April appearance in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on this very issue. “The U.S. cannot have a world in which third countries can molest U.S. diplomats and if you establish a rule that says third country diplomats can be molested by the United States, it is inevitable that the same would happen to U.S. diplomats. This prosecution is not based on the law and is not in the long-term interests of the United States itself,” Rivkin explains. Beyond the crucial issue of diplomatic immunity, the charges and case against Saab are clearly political. For years, the U.S. has gone after key figures in Venezuela, including putting bounties on President Nicolás Maduro and others, as part of its attempts to overthrow the government. These attempts, which include waging a barbaric and illegal economic war that has decimated Venezuela’s economy, led to increased migration and caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans. Camila Saab rightfully calls U.S. sanctions an “act of war against the entire Venezuelan population.” Her husband played a key role in mitigating the disastrous consequences of the sanctions. He first became involved with Venezuela by winning contracts for the Great Housing Mission, a government social program that has built 3.9 million homes for working-class Venezuelans since 2011, the majority of those with the country under sanctions. Saab later won contracts for Venezuela’s CLAP program, through which 7 million Venezuelan families receive boxes of food and essential goods each month. The sanctions not only make life difficult for Venezuelans; they make it a challenge to do business with Venezuela. Banks refuse to carry out transactions, even when they’re perfectly legal. Insurance companies raise prices or back out altogether. Shipping companies raise rates. Vendors demand cash and won’t operate on credit. Instead of pulling out from Venezuela, as many businesspeople did, Saab decided to stick with the Venezuelan people and went from the private sector into the public one, becoming a diplomat tasked with finding “practical solutions” to the “economic and financial blockade” imposed on Venezuela since 2015, which included brokering trade deals with Iran. The economic relationship with Iran has been critical in helping with the recuperation of Venezuela’s oil industry, and by extension, its economy. Saab played a critical role in trade agreements between Iran and Venezuela for everything from gasoline and spare parts to food and medicine. According to Forbes, Saab was a target of the U.S. because he had “the means and know-how to help discreetly keep an entire economy moving under the eyes of a watching world.” Saab has denied the allegations against him, and points to a Swiss investigation that was dropped after three years due to a lack of evidence. “The merits of the charges are weak on their face. They involve activities that did not take place in the United States and their connection to the U.S. is very tenuous,” says attorney David Rivkin. Saab’s arrest in Cabo Verde, at the behest of the U.S. government, came just months after Trump announced a “maximum pressure” campaign on Venezuela. His extradition to the U.S. derailed the dialogue between the Venezuelan government and opposition. The U.S. now plans to “pressure” Saab “to shed light on Venezuela’s post-sanction economic network,” according to Forbes. After enduring torture in Cabo Verde, the word pressure is an understatement. “Since the day he flew to Iran, they have persecuted all of us. We have been harassed in the media, they have demonized us, they have not let us see him,” Camilla Saab said, describing what her family has been through. A cancer survivor, Alex Saab hasn’t been able to take his daily medicines since his arrest. He has lost 65 pounds. His parents died of Covid-19 while he was imprisoned in Cabo Verde. Saab’s family has been targeted too. His adult children were sanctioned by the Trump administration. His youngest daughter has never met him. Yet in all of his communications, Saab maintains his allegiance to the Venezuelan people. In persecuting him, Camila Saab believes the U.S. is sending a message: “They’re trying to intimidate but the Venezuelan people resist and continue in their fight for sovereignty. The U.S. is not the world’s police force. Free Alex Saab!”

Write an article about: US kills 4th UN call for peace in Gaza, helping Israel violate Hague’s genocide ruling. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Canada, Gaza, Hague, ICJ, International Court of Justice, Israel, Joe Biden, Josep Borrell, Mélanie Joly, Palestine, Rafah, Security Council, UN Security Council, United Nations

The US used its veto power to block a fourth UN Security Council resolution that called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The Biden administration keeps sending weapons to Israel, helping it violate an ICJ ruling that says Netanyahu must respect the Genocide Convention and stop killing Palestinians. The United States has since October voted against four United Nations Security Council resolutions that called for peace in Gaza. Top UN officials have called for a ceasefire, but the US government has stood in their way, facilitating further violence. In January, the highest UN judicial authority, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled that Israel must abide by the Genocide Convention and stop killing Palestinians. But Tel Aviv ignored the Hague’s decision and killed thousands more Palestinian civilians. By vetoing a fourth Gaza-related Security Council resolution on February 20, and by continuing to provide weapons to Israel, the US government has helped Israel violate an ICJ order. The resolution that Washington vetoed on February 20 had been introduced by Algeria, and called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. In the session, 13 of the 15 members of the Security Council voted in support of the resolution. The UK abstained, and the US was the only country that voted against it. #BREAKING US vetoes Algerian-led draft resolution that would have, inter alia, demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire that must be respected by all parties IN FAVOR: 13AGAINST: 1 (US)ABSTAIN: 1 (UK) Live coveragehttps://t.co/fLIqiQv9A4 pic.twitter.com/5lqhlix7RV — UN News (@UN_News_Centre) February 20, 2024 The 13 nations that voted in support of the resolution were permanent members China, France, and Russia, plus Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Switzerland. United States vetoes latest draft resolution on the ongoing crisis in #Gaza The text was put forward by Algeria on behalf of Arab States. It demanded, among other issues, “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire that must be respected by all parties” More: https://t.co/fLIqiQv9A4 pic.twitter.com/Nd1sCDQMEf — UN News (@UN_News_Centre) February 20, 2024 The US designed the United Nations after World War II by concentrating power in the Security Council and giving permanent seats to the war’s five victors: the US, UK, France, Russia (the former Soviet Union), and China. The Security Council’s permanent members have veto power, which Washington has abused to advance its foreign-policy interests. On December 9, the US vetoed another resolution in the Security Council, which had been introduced by the United Arab Emirates and called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. That vote was the same: 13 countries in support, an abstention from the UK, and the US veto. #BREAKING United States vetoes Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, and immediate and unconditional release of all hostages VOTEIn Favour: 13Against: 1 (US)Abstain: 1 (UK) pic.twitter.com/hY0YcJ1JKF — UN News (@UN_News_Centre) December 8, 2023 Back on October 18, the US vetoed a resolution that had been introduced by Brazil, which the UN News Agency noted “would have called for ‘humanitarian pauses’ to deliver lifesaving aid to millions in Gaza”. In this case, 12 countries voted in favor. The US voted against it, and two countries abstained: the UK and Russia. US vetoes Security Council resolution that would have called for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver lifesaving aid to millions in Gaza Favor: 12 (Albania, Brazil, China, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Switzerland,UAE)Against: 1 (US)Abstain: 2 Russia, UK pic.twitter.com/y4tiAbRMUQ — UN News (@UN_News_Centre) October 18, 2023 Why did Russia abstain on this resolution that had been introduced by Brazil? This was because two days before, on October 16, there was a vote on a stronger competing resolution that Russia had introduced, which called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. This had been the first resolution concerning Gaza to be introduced in the Security Council since the war began on October 7. In this first resolution, five countries voted in support of the ceasefire: China, Gabon, Mozambique, Russia, and the UAE. Four countries voted against it – the major imperial powers that had colonized much of the world: France, Japan, the UK, and the US. Six countries abstained: Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Malta and Switzerland. (Brazil only abstained because it had introduced its own competing resolution, which was voted on two days later, and vetoed by the United States.) The Western powers killed a UN Security Council resolution that proposed a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza The resolution was proposed by Russia 5 countries voted for the ceasefire:???????? China???????? Gabon???????? Mozambique???????? Russia???????? UAE 4 voted against:???????? France???????? Japan???????? UK???????? US… pic.twitter.com/6UMfoRRqQH — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 17, 2023 The US veto of the Algerian resolution on February 20 is particularly scandalous, because Washington did it after the top legal authority on Earth, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), located at the Hague, ruled in January that Israel had to stop killing Palestinians. The Hague stated that there is sufficient evidence to investigate Israel on charges of genocide. The ICJ was very clear in its ruling. It ordered (emphasis added): Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of … (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Since this ruling, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and injured tens of thousands more. ICJ’s Israel genocide decision: Historic victory for Palestinians and Global South The United States has also continued to send weapons to Israel, to help it kill Palestinians – and violate the Hague’s ruling. Meanwhile, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) reported on February 5 that roughly 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza had either been killed or wounded by Israel, or were missing – trapped under the rubble of the buildings that Israel had destroyed with US weapons. Furthermore, the WHO estimated that “60% of the 27,019 fatalities reported by the enclave’s health authorities have been women and children… with more than 66,000 now injured and requiring medical care that remains difficult to access”. As of February 21, Israel had killed more than 29,000 Palestinians, according to the health ministry in Gaza. The Gaza health ministry’s data has proven to be consistently accurate. Israeli intelligence agencies have used its casualty figures for their own analysis. Moreover, despite US President Joe Biden’s misleading claims to the contrary, multiple medical experts published peer-reviewed scientific articles in the leading medical journal The Lancet, scrutinizing the data from the Palestinian health ministry and concluding that it is accurate. If anything, the death toll is conservative, and actually understates the number of Palestinians who have been killed by Israel. In fact, the most mainstream of media outlets in the US, the Associated Press, or AP, published a report in January titled “Israel’s military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in recent history, experts say”. It wrote (emphasis added): The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. In just over two months, researchers say the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group. The Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) “bunker-busters” that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the US has sent Israel these 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs during the war. The newspaper noted that, between October 7 and December 1, the US had delivered to Israel 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells. In fact, the Biden administration has repeatedly bypassed Congress, using extraordinary measures to ship more weapons to Israel. While US officials claim that they supposedly want a ceasefire in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported on February 17 that the US plans to continue shipping Israel tens of millions of dollars worth of additional weapons. Even the European Union, which strongly supports Israel, has publicly criticized its atrocities in Gaza. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell admitted in a press conference on February 13 that Israel is carrying out a “slaughter” in Gaza. Borrell highlighted the “illogical” hypocrisy of the US, arguing, “If you believe that too many people are being killed, maybe you should provide less arms in order to prevent so many people being killed”. The top European diplomat stated: I don’t pretend to be in charge of the foreign policy of the US. I have enough with the foreign policy of European Union. But let’s be logical. How many times have you heard the most prominent leaders and foreign ministers around the world saying too many people are being killed? President Biden said this is too much on the top; it is not proportional. Well, if you believe that too many people are being killed, maybe you should provide less arms in order to prevent so many people being killed. It’s not logical. … They [Palestinians] are going to evacuate. Where? To the moon? Where are they [Israel] going to evacuate these people? So if the international community believes that this is a slaughter, that too many people are being killed, maybe they have to think about the provision of arms. And by the way, today [February 13], a court in the Netherlands has said, has ordered the government to stop exporting the spare parts of the F-35 fighters to Israel, in order to be sure that the International Court of Justice ruling is being implemented. So I don’t know; every member state is an owner of its foreign policy. But this is a little bit contradictory to continue saying that there are too many people being killed, too many people being killed; please take care of people; please don’t kill so many. Stop saying please, and do something. The Canadian government has been equally hypocritical. Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly tweeted on February 10, “We are deeply concerned by reports of an Israeli military operation in Rafah. It would have devastating impact, putting the lives of Palestinians and foreign nationals, including [Canadians], seeking refuge in grave danger and making the vital delivery of humanitarian aid dangerous”. However, local news outlet The Maple reported that the Canadian government has approved $28.5 million worth of new permits for military equipment exports to Israel during its brutal war on Gaza.

Write an article about: To celebrate Obama Day, here are Barack’s worst crimes: wars, coups, slavery, sanctions, al-Qaeda, colonialism. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

ATF, Barack Obama, Brazil, deportations, Flint, Gaza, Honduras, immigration, Israel, Libya, Mexico, migrants, Operation Fast and Furious, Palestine, Project Gunrunner, Puerto Rico, Syria, TPP, Venezuela, Yemen

Obama’s had no real scandals, aside from the tan suit, wars on Libya, Syria, and Yemen, coups in Honduras, Ukraine, and Brazil, Wall Street bailouts, and drone assassinations In the United States, June 14 is considered “Barack Obama Day.” On social media, the hashtag #ObamaDayJune14th went viral. To commemorate this day, Multipolarista has compiled a list of the former Democratic president’s many accomplishments. As his supporters are so keen to point out, Obama had no major scandals, except for: Here are some more unforgettable classics from Obama: And be sure not to forget these other timeless hits from Obama: This last act in Flint is especially symbolic, and instructive. Watch video of it below, and you can see how the beloved 44th president cared just as little about his own population as he did the imperial subjects he bombed across the planet. Obama did this repeatedly, just to rub it in. But Obama is not alone; you can’t be commander in chief of the US empire without being willing to commit horrific crimes like these. It is the most important job requirement. Obama certainly isn’t alone when it comes to being a war criminal; every modern US president is. Barry just managed to pull it off with style.

Write an article about: Polls show almost no one trusts US media, after decades of war propaganda and lies. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Bolivia, CIA, corporate media, Jeff Bezos, Libya, media, Nicaragua, propaganda, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, Washington Post

The CIA has long manipulated the media, spreading disinformation to justify US wars. Today just 11% of North Americans trust television news. (Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.) Very few people in the United States trust the mainstream corporate media. This is confirmed by a July survey from the major polling firm Gallup, which found that just 11% of North Americans trust television news, and a mere 16% have confidence in newspapers. It’s quite easy to understand why. The US media apparatus has repeatedly shown itself over decades to be completely unreliable and highly politicized. The corporate media’s treachery has been especially clear in the demonstrably false stories it disseminated to try to justify the US wars on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. This disgraceful legacy continues today, in the proxy war that Washington is waging on Russia via Ukraine. Fake news echoed by the press has served as a powerful form of US information warfare. A co-founding officer of the CIA, Frank Wisner, famously referred to the media as a “mighty wurlitzer,” a type of musical instrument. He boasted that the US spy agency had so many assets in news rooms across the world that Washington could play the press like a musician, in order to manipulate public opinion. Revolutionary Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, who was assassinated in an operation backed by US police agencies, recognized the power of the US media in the 1960s, warning, “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” US media outlets have a kind of symbiotic relationship with the government, and especially with intelligence agencies like the CIA, which act on behalf of Wall Street and powerful corporations. US spies selectively leak stories to journalists, controlling media narratives to serve elite economic interests. Mainstream news publications frequently promote stories based on flimsy accusations made by anonymous US government officials, without any concrete evidence. In this way, the US national security state can spread propaganda and fake news to demonize and destabilize Washington’s adversaries. This is not journalism; it’s information warfare. But large media corporations willingly go along with it, because they profit from it. Many mainstream news outlets have a revolving door with the US government, and are owned by billionaire oligarchs who also have large contracts with US government agencies. Top newspaper the Washington Post, for instance, is the personal property of Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth. Bezos is the founder of mega-corporation Amazon, which has billions of dollars worth of contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, and National Security Agency (NSA). Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, meets with US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at the Pentagon in 2016 The North American public has lost confidence in the media in no small part because of its long history of spreading blatant propaganda and fake news in an attempt to justify US wars of aggression. The media’s history of lying in defense of US wars can be traced back to the very beginning of the country. Newspapers rationalized genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples by European settler-colonialists by claiming the Natives were “barbarians” and “uncivilized.” In the 1898 war between the Spanish empire and the newly emerging US empire, North American media outlets promoted false stories to justify Washington’s colonization of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. This propaganda came to be known as “yellow journalism.” When the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, major media outlets scrambled to defend the crime against humanity. Top newspapers falsely claimed that the atomic bombing was necessary to end the war – despite the fact that the US government’s own Strategic Bombing Survey admitted that this was false, and that the Japanese empire would have surrendered even without the nuclear attack. The New York Times published a patently ridiculous article titled “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.” The respected media outlet obediently echoed a US general who “denied categorically that [the nuclear attack] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” Then, as the US empire sought to justify its scorched-earth wars in Southeast Asia in 1960s, media outlets echoed fake claims by Washington that Vietnamese communists had supposedly attacked US forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was soon proven to be false; it was actually a US act of provocation. In the 1980s, US media outlets absurdly blamed Nicaragua’s Sandinista government for atrocities carried out by the right-wing CIA-sponsored Contra gangs waging war on the Sandinista Front. Former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro later admitted that the Contras were “a proxy army controlled by the U.S. Government,” describing them as a “Central Intelligence Agency puppet” that massacred and tortured civilians in a “premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the Government.” While US media outlets falsely accused the Sandinistas of harming civilians, Edgar Chamorro wrote that the CIA-backed “‘contras’ burn down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas build them.” This US strategy of laundering information warfare through the press continued in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. US media outlets promptly spread fake news claiming that Iraqi soldiers had removed Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them on the ground to die. This was a complete lie, but was used to justify the US war on Iraq in 1990 and 1991. The fabrication originated with the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador, who spread the false claim in testimony before the US Congress, which identified her simply as Nayirah, without disclosing her familial ties. The daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador, referred to simply as Nayirah, spreads lies in the US Congress in 1990 Just over a decade later, Washington waged another war on Iraq. In the lead-up to the illegal US-led invasion in 2003, the media spread fake stories about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein supposedly harboring “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs). This WMD conspiracy theory was also proven to be totally false. But almost no journalists who spread the US government’s fake claims were punished or faced professional consequences. This is because they were obediently serving the interests of Washington’s war machine – and that is the true role of the media. During the NATO war on Libya in 2011, the press once again repeated fake stories, claiming that leader Muammar Gaddafi gave his soldiers Viagra and ordered them to assault women. This was an utter lie. Likewise, in the Western proxy war on Syria that began on 2011, media outlets spread false reports blaming the government in Damascus for atrocities that were actually carried out by CIA-backed Salafi-jihadist extremist insurgents. Some of these falsehoods in the Syria war were exposed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. Yet despite his impressive credentials, Hersh has been basically blacklisted by the corporate media, because he damaged the reputation of the US empire. Mainstream outlets now refuse to publish the renowned and accomplished reporter. More recently, US media outlets were exposed for publishing blatantly fake stories about so-called Havana Syndrome, a vague medical condition allegedly affecting US spies and diplomats. Media networks claimed, without any evidence, that Russia, China, and/or Cuba were attacking US officials with futuristic “directed energy” weapons. The CIA later admitted that this was false. The media spread another ridiculous conspiracy theory during the administration of US President Donald Trump. The press ludicrously claimed for years that Trump was a puppet of Moscow, and that the Kremlin had supposedly helped him win the 2016 presidential election. No concrete evidence was ever presented, because it was false. This scandal came to be known popularly as “Russiagate.” The fake story was endlessly debunked. But it had a massive effect on US politics, and still today many media figures repeat the nonsensical myth that Trump was a Russian asset. Russia is one of the US media’s favorite bogeymen. In 2020, the press targeted Moscow with another fake news campaign. Dozens of major media outlets published false reports, based on unsubstantiated claims by anonymous CIA officials, that Russia was paying Taliban militants to kill the US soldiers who had been occupying their country for two decades. This story was, once again, shown to be a falsehood, but only after it had the intended impact of temporarily blocking the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Today, in the ongoing US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Western media outlets have ramped up their dissemination of fake news to demonize Moscow. Top publications spread the false claim that Russia killed Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island. Many media networks echoed the myth of a virtuosic Ukrainian pilot known as the “Ghost of Kiev,” celebrating him as a hero, when in reality he didn’t exist. Some major outlets even published video game footage and claimed it showed Russia attacking Ukraine. NBC News admits that Ukraine’s “Ghost of Kyiv” myth, which was amplified by the media, was false Any independent journalists in the United States who challenge the lies of the mainstream media are demonized and vilified. The New York Times attacked me personally because I reported on the objective historical fact that the United States sponsored a violent coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014. A leaked recording of a phone call between top State Department official Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, proves they were planning the putsch against Ukraine’s democratically elected government. But despite this undeniable fact, the New York Times smeared me in an irresponsible and defamatory article, claiming I was spreading “conspiracy theories” and implying that I am supposedly collaborating with China and Russia. Whenever the United States carries out a coup d’etat, mainstream media outlets act as Washington’s loyal lapdog, spreading false claims to justify its aggression. When the CIA overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973, the press published fake stories to justify it and falsely portray the putsch as a popular uprising. The media used the same tactics of deception and information warfare to justify the 1953 CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, because he tried to nationalize his country’s oil, challenging the interests of British and US capitalists. Still today, we see the same propaganda and fake news. When the US government and right-wing extremists that it sponsored in Nicaragua tried to violently topple the democratically elected government in 2018, media outlets in both English and Spanish insisted that the violent putsch was actually “peaceful protests.” The press falsely blamed the Nicaraguan government for all deaths during the coup attempt, ignoring the fact that a huge number of the victims were people who supported the Sandinista Front or members of state security services who were killed by the fanatical coup-plotters. In a similar vein, the media played a key role in the US-backed far-right coup in Bolivia in November 2019. The press tried to justify the violent overthrow of democratically elected socialist President Evo Morales by falsely claiming that he rigged the election. This myth originated with the Washington-dominated Organization of American States (OAS), which helped sponsor the anti-democratic Bolivia putsch. The OAS’ false accusations were obediently spread by the media. But these lies were later thoroughly debunked by prominent academics. An academic expert debunks the lies spread by the OAS, US government, and media to try to justify the 2019 coup in Bolivia The reason that mainstream media outlets continue to spread these fake reports, based on evidence-free claims of anonymous US government officials, is precisely because they help to advance Washington’s foreign-policy interests. For US elites, the fact that the stories are false is irrelevant. The professional reputation of corporate journalists is not hurt because they are fulfilling their political role as agents of information warfare, serving the US empire and the billionaire capitalist oligarchs who own the media companies and dictate US government policy. But for the North American public, it has become clearer and clearer by the year that the media is lying to us. The United States claims to be a model of “democracy” and “freedom,” defending a so-called “rules-based order” – in which Washington makes the rules and orders everyone around. But the reality is that many scientific studies prove that that US regime is deeply undemocratic and unpopular. The general mistrust that North Americans have in the media is a symptom of an overall lack of faith in the authoritarian US political system. A June poll by Gallup found staggeringly low levels of confidence in the US government. A mere 2% of North Americans believe their government does what is right “just about always,” and only 19% think it does what’s right “most of the time.” Many of these results fall on partisan lines. Liberals have confidence in the Democratic Party and are skeptical of Republicans, whereas conservatives have faith in the Republican Party and don’t believe Democrats. This extreme partisanism in the United States is partly a result of media conditioning. US news outlets compliantly follow the lines of one of the two corporate parties, the Democrats or Republicans. Although these two parties are nearly identical in their warmongering foreign policy and their neoliberal economic policy, they are at each other’s throats. These ruling corporate parties constantly squabble over cultural issues in order to distract the US public from the more important problems that directly affect their lives. North Americans likewise have very little faith in the other institutions that make up our deeply undemocratic society. Just 7% of North Americans have confidence in Congress, 14% in the justice system, 14% in big business, 23% in the presidency, 25% in the Supreme Court, 26% in large technology companies, and 45% in the police, according to another study by Gallup. One of the only US institutions that remains trusted is ironically the military, which constantly wages illegal wars around the world, with some 800 foreign bases. This widespread lack of confidence in institutions in the United States is a product of its ultra-capitalist model. The USA is a deeply individualistic, consumerist society in which the free market and capitalist profits are valued above everything else. This has led to an atomized culture in which many North Americans feel hopeless, depressed, and lonely. There is very little solidarity and empathy for the many people who suffer from poverty and homelessness. Corruption is rampant and systemic in the United States. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations are legally considered people. This means there is no limit to how much money large companies and billionaire capitalist oligarchs can spend on politics. In other words, bribery is essentially legal in the US political system. And candidates who have more money nearly always win the elections. In the 2016 election cycle, 95.41% of candidates running for the US House of Representatives who spent more money won, while 85.29% of candidates running for Senate with more funding won. According to any consistent definition of the term, this system cannot be considered a democracy. It is the textbook example of an undemocratic oligarchy and a plutocracy – a government ruled by the rich. While the United States portrays itself as the paradigm of democracy and freedom, actual scientific studies by academic experts show that the opposite is true: The USA is an authoritarian oligarchy run by a small handful of rich capitalists, plagued by brutal systematic violence, mass repression, and rampant racism. Yet the US empire seeks to impose its undemocratic model on countries around the world. Washington spends billions of dollars propping up corrupt right-wing dictatorships and bankrolling neoliberal opposition groups that use violence and other extremist tactics to destabilize independent foreign governments – especially socialist or nationalist states that use their natural resources to benefit their populations instead of Western corporations. Washington does this because the US oligarchy, the wealthy capitalists that truly control the government, want to exploit the resources and labor of the Global South to keep their authoritarian system going. These are the same plutocrats who own the press. And they use large media companies to spread propaganda and fake news to deceive the public and advance their economic interests. Polls show that most people in the United States can clearly see through this scam. But because the US system is so undemocratic and repressive, average working people have no real means of changing it.

Write an article about: US gov’t body plots to break up Russia in name of ‘decolonization’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Casey Michel, colonialism, Congress, imperialism, Russia, Steve Cohen, Ukraine

The US government’s Helsinki Commission held a Congressional briefing plotting ways to break up Russia as a country, in the name of supposed “decolonization.” (Se puede leer este informe en español aquí.) A US government body held a Congressional briefing plotting ways to break up Russia as a country, in the name of supposed “decolonization.” The participants urged the United States to give more support to separatist movements inside Russia and in the diaspora. They proposed the independence of numerous republics in the Russian Federation, including Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Dagestan, as well as historic areas that existed centuries ago such as Circassia. This is far from the first time that hawks in Washington have fantasized about carving up foreign countries. During the first cold war, the US sponsored secessionist groups inside the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the US-led NATO military cartel successfully dismantled Yugoslavia. And Washington has long backed separatists in the Chinese regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. After the overthrow of the USSR, neoconservative operative and future Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to slice up Russia into several smaller countries. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski even published an article in elite Foreign Affairs magazine in 1997 proposing to create a “loosely confederated Russia — composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic.” Yet this Congressional hearing was one of the most high-profile and provocative calls for balkanization yet, held in broad daylight. Titled “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative,” the June 23 briefing was organized by the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), known more commonly as the Helsinki Commission. This commission claims to be “independent,” but it is a US government agency created and overseen by Congress. The event was introduced by Congressman Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee who co-chairs the commission. Representative Cohen claimed Russians “have in essence colonized their own country,” and argued that Russia is “not a strict nation, in the sense that we’ve known in the past.” US Congressman Steve Cohen speaks at the “decolonizing Russia” briefing At the virtual hearing, which was livestreamed on YouTube, the congressman was joined by veteran regime-change activists who have worked for an array of US government agencies. The event was moderated by Bakhti Nishanov, a senior policy advisor to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. He excitedly noted, “We have many, many participants. I think this is pretty much a record for a House commission briefing.” Nishanov argued that Western condemnation of Moscow’s war in Ukraine should expand to opposition to “Russia’s interior empire.” He added that the panelists hoped to “come up with ideas that will actually contain Russia.” The most active speaker in the hearing was Casey Michel, a millennial neoconservative activist who has made a career out of advocating for regime change against the US government’s adversaries. Michel got his start professionally working for the US Peace Corps on the Russia-Kazakhstan border, and later capitalized on the new cold war hysteria in Washington. He is an adjunct fellow at the ironically named Kleptocracy Initiative of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing DC think tank that has been handsomely funded by the Koch oligarchs, WalMart’s Walton family, massive corporations like ExxonMobil, and the Pentagon. In May, Michel published an article in Washington’s establishment magazine The Atlantic, titled “Decolonize Russia,” which appears to have been an inspiration for the Congressional briefing. Neoconservative activist Casey Michel “Russia continues to oversee what is in many ways a traditional European empire, only that instead of colonizing nations and peoples overseas, it instead colonized nations and peoples over land,” Michel declared in the hearing. The neoconservative activist lamented that the United States did not use the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to break up Russia itself. He complained that Western support for secessionist movements in Russia did not go far enough. “These are colonized nations that we consider to be part of Russia proper, even though, again, these are non-Russian nations themselves that remain colonized by, as we’ve seen yet again, another dictatorship in the Kremlin,” Michel said. He insisted that the event was not simply about advocating for the “dismemberment and partition” of Russia, but was rather motivated by genuine opposition to colonialism and imperialism. This was deeply ironic, because Michel has spent years viciously smearing the anti-imperialist left in the United States, while frequently caricaturing the term to demonize the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. When it comes to supporting separatist movements inside Russia, however, Michel curiously fashions himself one of the world’s most vocal advocates of a unique form of “anti-imperialism” that just so happens to advance US foreign policy interests. .@cjcmichel: choosing to ignore the kinds of anti-colonial, pro-sovereignty, and anti-imperial movements that will emerge in Russia is a luxury we no longer have. https://t.co/RQA2bR4pd9 — Helsinki Commission (@HelsinkiComm) June 23, 2022 Joining Michel at the Congressional briefing was Erica Marat, a professor at the College of International Security Affairs at the Pentagon’s National Defense University. Marat accused Russia of committing “genocide.” She condemned so-called “imperial collaborators” in Russia, singling out Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. She did not acknowledge the incongruity that she herself works for the US Department of Defense. Marat also complained that the “Global South continues to consider Russia as an anti-Western, anti-colonial power and denies the dignity of non-Russian people and especially people of color from the former Soviet states.” Similar comments were made by fellow panelist Botakoz Kassymbekova, a lecturer at Switzerland’s University of Basel. Kassymbekova lamented that the Soviet Union’s anti-imperialist “narrative was very attractive, especially in the Global South.” She rejected “the Marxian idea, that was popular all around the world, that capitalism produces colonialism,” and the “very successful anti-Western narrative of the Soviet Union that colonialism is a Western problem.” Kassymbekova insisted that the USSR was colonialist, although her argument was contradictory because she simultaneously admitted that, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the former Russian czarist empire “partially underwent decolonization.” Ironically, she also repeatedly mentioned “Stalinism” and the need for thorough “de-Stalinization,” without ever acknowledging that Joseph Stalin was himself Georgian, not Russian. Kassymbekova used the briefing to call for the US government to provide more resources for secessionist movements by “supporting civic initiatives and civil societies of its neighbors and within Russia.” .@BotakozKassymb1: Today Russia attempts to restore the Soviet empire based on the idea of Russian cultural superiority and genocidal suppression of peoples. https://t.co/RQA2bR4pd9 — Helsinki Commission (@HelsinkiComm) June 23, 2022 Another panelist was Fatima Tlis, a Circassian separatist activist from Russia who was given a fellowship by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout used to finance US regime-change operations around the globe. Tlis has worked extensively with US government propaganda outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to her publicly available LinkedIn profile, Tlis has also worked with the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative DC think tank closely linked to the CIA. Tlis claimed in the hearing that her “homeland” Circassia is “occupied” by Russia. She also spoke of “white slavery.” In the Q&A session, a guest asked how the panelists could discuss “decolonization” in Russia while they are in the United States and work for the US government, which was founded on genocide of Indigenous peoples. Tlis dismissively shot back, “As for your question, everybody who has ever dealt with the Russian disinformation and propaganda would immediately recognize it for what it is. It’s called – there’s actually a professional term for this disinformation: whataboutism.” Kassymbekova responded similarly, arguing “this is kind of a very typical way of blaming the West rather than looking inwards.” The final participant in the briefing was Hanna Hopko, a former of member of Ukraine’s parliament, who previously chaired its Foreign Affairs Committee, and a significant figure in the 2014 US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, marketed as Euromaidan. Hopko insisted that Washington must think “how to change not just the regime, but how to change the imperialistic nature of Russian statehood.” But because she was traveling, Hopko’s call signal was very weak, and she was not able to speak much in the briefing. The panelists concluded the hearing condemning Russia’s military intervention in Syria, while making no mention of the billions of dollars the United States, its European allies, Gulf monarchies, Israel, and NATO member Turkey spent arming and training sectarian Islamist rebels in order to wage a proxy war in the country. They likewise failed to acknowledge that Russia only entered Syria at the request of the country’s internationally recognized government. Tlis referred to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as an illegitimate Russian “asset,” and depicted Moscow’s defense of Syria’s territorial integrity against Western attempts at state collapse as a form of aggression. This “Decolonizing Russia” briefing is one of a growing number of examples of the US government co-opting left-wing rhetoric in order to advance its imperial interests. Numerous Biden administration officials have exploited rhetoric about “intersectionality,” the principle that various forms of oppression like racism and sexism intersect. The White House claimed to follow an “intersectional approach.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted the State Department supports “diversity and intersectionality.” The CIA published a recruitment ad featuring a Latina agent who proudly called herself a feminist. The spy agency – which is notorious for organizing right-wing coups d’etat and torturing detainees – has likewise portrayed itself as a supporter of the trans community. The US government funds a podcast co-created and hosted by a CIA veteran that claims to speak on behalf of the “Uyghur diaspora” and employs intersectional feminist rhetoric to demonize China. This strategy of intersectional imperialism shows how Washington has modified its propaganda tactics, employing progressive-sounding talking points to appeal to left-leaning youth. DC’s call to “decolonize” Russia is reminiscent of an award-winning paper by academic Cara Daggett, titled “Drone Disorientations: How ‘Unmanned’ Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War.” This article whitewashed the US assassination program by arguing it is subversive and anti-heteronormative, because “killing with drones produces queer moments of disorientation.”

Write an article about: Ex Guantánamo detainee: Ron DeSantis aided torture, laughed at force-feeding. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

GOP, Guantánamo Bay, Republican Party, Ron DeSantis, torture

Former Guantánamo prison camp detainee Mansoor Adayfi said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a top US presidential helpful, was complicit in torture and laughed when hunger strikers were violently force-fed. A former detainee at the US military’s prison camp at Guantánamo Bay said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was complicit in torture when the Republican politician served there as an Army lawyer. According to the ex prisoner, DeSantis was brought in to break a hunger strike, and he laughed when detainees were violently force-fed by US torturers. He described these horrors in an interview with journalist Mike Prysner, on his podcast Eyes Left. Prysner spoke with Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni man who was held at Gitmo, without charge, from 2002 to 2016. DeSantis is a presidential hopeful who is widely considered a top candidate for the Republican Party in the 2024 election. Today he serves as governor of Florida, the third-most populous US state, and he was previously a member of the House of Representatives. After graduating from elite Yale University, DeSantis briefly taught at an expensive private school, where students recalled he was sympathetic to the white-supremacist Confederacy in the Civil War. DeSantis went on to study at Harvard Law School. As an avid supporter of the US “war on terror,” he also joined the Navy. He served as a lawyer in the military’s judicial arm the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), going on to advise top officers as they committed atrocities in the illegal US occupation of Iraq. But before he went to Iraq, DeSantis was sent to work at Guantánamo Bay in 2006, where he helped oversee the US torture camp there located on occupied Cuban territory. While DeSantis has mentioned his time at Gitmo to gain political capital, he has always been very vague about what he did there, and public records related to his service are largely redacted. There is not much mainstream corporate media coverage of DeSantis’ time in Guantánamo, and the little reporting that exists whitewashes it, claiming he was there to make sure the US military was following the law. Adayfi told Prysner in the podcast interview that DeSantis was stationed in Gitmo specifically to break a hunger strike that started in 2005. Hundreds of prisoners refused to eat to protest the inhumane conditions in the torture camp, in which several detainees died. “They brought in a collection of new ruthless individuals to break the strike,” Adayfi recalled. He said that DeSantis told the detainees he was there to help them, “but it was a trap.” DeSantis monitored the hunger strikers, gathered intelligence, and advised military officials at the torture camp. When US prison guards began to force-feed the detainees, Adayfi reported that DeSantis simply watched the torture and laughed. “We were crying and screaming,” he said. “We were tied to the feeding chair. And that guy was watching. He was laughing.” While DeSantis has tried to market himself in domestic US politics as a right-wing “populist,” he completely follows bipartisan neoconservative orthodoxy on foreign policy. DeSantis is a hawk who praised the US “war on terror” and participated in the illegal military occupation of Iraq. He has since pushed for new wars on both China and Iran. DeSantis strongly supports the illegal US blockades and sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, and he praised US-led coup attempts in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Boasting that “Florida is the most Israel-friendly state in the country,” DeSantis even moved to criminalize protest against the apartheid regime. DeSantis has tried to crush the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates for basic Palestinian human rights.

Write an article about: How Trump and John Bolton attempted a coup in Venezuela. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Donald Trump, John Bolton, Nicolás Maduro, podcast, Venezuela

Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton wrote a book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” detailing the US coup attempt and hybrid war against Venezuela. Donald Trump’s neoconservative US National Security Advisor John Bolton admitted on CNN he “helped plan coups d’etat” in Venezuela and “other places.” Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton analyzes Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” which details the US hybrid war on Venezuela. The following is an excerpt from the Multipolarista report “Trump advisor John Bolton admits planning US coups in Venezuela and beyond“: Trump fired John Bolton in September 2019, partially due to his failure in the Venezuela coup attempts. In 2020, Bolton published a 500-page tell-all memoir, titled “The Room Where It Happened.” He was offered a $2 million advance for the book, and promised millions more in royalties. The memoir turned Bolton into a media celebrity. He cashed in on the opportunity to criticize Trump for supposedly not being enough of a warmonger. “The Room Where It Happened” mentions Venezuela and Venezuelans more than 300 times, and has a 35-page chapter dedicated specifically to detailing his coup attempt, titled “Venezuela Libre” (Free Venezuela). Bolton did not hide his neocolonialist worldview in the book, once again invoking the nearly 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine. Fearmongering about Venezuela’s alliance with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, he declared, “America had opposed external threats in the Western Hemisphere since the Monroe Doctrine, and it was time to resurrect it.” Bolton wrote that Trump shared this colonialist mentality. He claimed the president said that Venezuela is “really part of the United States,” and that “it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela,” according to White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. “Trump still wanted a military option,” Bolton emphasized. This is consistent with what former Defense Secretary Mark Esper described in his book. The neoconservative national security advisor also boasted in the book that the Trump administration’s coup attempt against Venezuela had bipartisan backing from both Republicans and Democrats “on the Hill, where support on both sides of the aisle for our hard line in Venezuela was almost uniform.” “And the press coverage was uniformly favorable,” he added contently. Bolton pointed out the coincidental timing that, “Shortly after I became National Security Advisor, while Maduro was speaking at a military awards ceremony on August 4, he was attacked by two drones.” Maduro said his government has intelligence proving that Bolton had planned the assassination attempt. Showing his sadistic streak, Bolton wrote that the photos of Venezuela soldiers running away from the killer drones was “hilarious.” In a meeting after the drone assassination attempt, Bolton wrote that “Trump said to me emphatically, ‘Get it done,’ meaning get rid of the Maduro regime. ‘This is the fifth time I’ve asked for it,’ he continued.” The national security advisor noted that Trump’s secretary of state, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, was strongly in agreement, stating “‘we should go to the wall’ to get Maduro out.” Bolton added, “Trump insisted he wanted military options for Venezuela and then keep it because ‘it’s really part of the United States.’” Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton in April 2019 Trump had made it clear that he was considering invading Venezuela as far back as August 2017, Bolton pointed out. In a press conference that August, Trump had stated, “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.” In the memoir, Bolton admitted that that illegal unilateral sanctions the United States imposed on Venezuela were aimed at “driving the state-owned oil monopoly’s production as low as possible,” in an attempt “to crash Maduro’s regime.” “Trump stressed that he wanted the ‘strongest possible sanctions’ against Venezuela,” Bolton wrote. Trump also “wanted assurances regarding post-Maduro access to Venezuela’s oil resources, trying to ensure that China and Russia would not continue to benefit from their deals,” he added. Bolton stressed that Trump had great “interest in Venezuela’s oil fields,” and he recalled that the US president insisted “we should take the oil in Venezuela after ousting Maduro.” Similarly, Bolton recalled numerous stories that showed how Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fund manager, was most concerned about the interests of US corporations. He wrote that Mnuchin frequently “talked to oil-company executives.” Mnuchin was concerned about remaining “US oil-and-gas assets in Venezuela,” and “worried that steps in the banking sector would hurt Visa and Mastercard.” Bolton also revealed he pressured the UK government to illegally freeze more than $1 billion of gold reserves that Venezuela held in the Bank of England. He celebrated sanctions as instruments of US financial warfare, declaring that “they’re about using America’s massive economic power to advance our national interests. They are most effective when applied massively, swiftly, and decisively, and enforced with all the power available.” Boasting of the sadistic sanctions he imposed on Venezuela, Bolton gleefully wrote, “we had Maduro by the windpipe and needed to constrict it.” Trump with National Security Advisor John Bolton and CIA Director Gina Haspel in January 2019 In an incredibly hypocritical moment of his book, Bolton accused the Venezuelan government, without any evidence, of supposedly trafficking drugs. But he simultaneously fondly recalled a meeting he had “in my office with Honduran President Juan Hernandez, who was similarly optimistic, in contrast to the situation in Nicaragua, on his border.” Honduras’ right-wing authoritarian leader Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) came to power after a US-backed military coup in 2009. JOH was a key US ally, and joined Washington in recognizing Guaidó. JOH was also a notorious drug dealer. In 2022, JOH was extradited to the United States, and the Justice Department said “Hernandez allegedly partnered with some of the largest cocaine traffickers in the world to transport tons of cocaine.” Bolton concluded the chapter lamenting that the various US-sponsored coup attempts in Venezuela failed. He also complained that Trump was not supportive enough. While Trump had pushed for extremely aggressive policies against Venezuela, he apparently did not much have faith in Guaidó, calling him “weak” and allegedly joking that he was the “Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela.”

Write an article about: Media regurgitates fake news from US spies, risking World War III with Russia. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

AP, Associated Press, media, Poland, Russia, Ukraine

Top news outlet the Associated Press falsely claimed Russia fired a missile at NATO member Poland, risking World War III. This fake story came from an anonymous US spy. AP’s correspondent insisted, “I can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong on this.” Top Western media outlets published a false report claiming Russia attacked Poland with a missile. This fake news originated with an anonymous US intelligence official, whose unsubstantiated accusations were mindlessly regurgitated by the press. On November 15, two people in Poland were killed in a missile attack that crossed over Ukraine’s western border. NATO and Polish officials later admitted that this missile was likely fired by accident by Ukrainian authorities. But soon after it happened, many Western media outlets blamed Russia. Given that Poland is a member of the US-led NATO military cartel, a Russian attack on its territory could have triggered a direct US military entry into the proxy war in Ukraine, potentially risking World War III between two nuclear superpowers. One of the main culprits in amplifying the false claim that Russia had attacked Poland was leading US news agency the Associated Press (AP). The AP reporter who published the fake news, James LaPorta, had been fed the story by a US spy. The website Semafor obtained internal communications between LaPorta and his colleagues using the chat app Slack. A screenshot of the messages shows that a “senior American intelligence official” had told LaPorta that “Russian missiles crossed into Poland,” killing “at least two people.” The anonymous US spy also claimed that “missiles entered Moldova.” Credit: Semafor LaPorta said the unnamed source in the US intelligence agency had been “vetted by Ron Dixon,” referring to the vice president of news and head of investigations at the Associated Press. AP editor Lisa Leff asked if the website could publish the claim, or if it needed “confirmation from another source and/or Poland.” LaPorta replied, “that call is above my pay grade.” The AP correspondent based in Warsaw, Poland, Vanessa Gera, chimed in, arguing they should publish the fake story, because, “I can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong on this.” Source: Semafor The AP’s deputy news director for Europe, Zeina Karam, ultimately approved the fake story. She wrote, “Yes, should be ok, I see source vetted by @rnixon,” in reference to the vice president. Karam previously served as AP’s news director for Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Lisa Leff, the AP editor, subsequently sent out the news alert, stating that a “senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people.” By publishing the fake news, the AP set off an international scandal that could have triggered a direct US military attack on Russia. To try to save face, the AP fired LaPorta on November 21. But the Associated Press told the Washington Post that it does not plan on punishing Gera, Leff, Karam, or any of the editors who obediently echoed the unsubstantiated claim of an unnamed US spy. This controversy shows how cozy mainstream corporate media outlets are with US intelligence agencies, and how anonymous spies feed them claims that are often false, but that serve Washington’s foreign-policy interests. LaPorta himself previously worked for the US military. The Post noted that he is a “former U.S. Marine who served in Afghanistan, [and] he joined AP in April 2020 after several years as a freelance reporter.” But he was too close to his US government sources, and he got burned.

Write an article about: FBI spied on and harassed Black revolutionary who was killed and set on fire. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Black liberation, Black Lives Matter, Darren Seals, FBI, Ferguson, Michael Brown, police, police brutality, racism

The FBI harassed Black revolutionary Darren Seals and compiled a 900-page report on his organizing against racism and police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, birthplace of Black Lives Matter. He was shot to death in 2016, then set on fire in his car. The FBI harassed Black revolutionary Darren Seals and compiled a 900-page report on his organizing against racism and police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement. Seals was shot to death in 2016, then set on fire in his car in an unsolved murder. Local St. Louis media outlet the Riverfront Times obtained a declassified copy of the more than 900-page FBI report on Seals. The FBI fully redacted approximately 860 of the pages, and partially redacted parts of the remaining roughly 45 pages. In the report, the FBI called Seals “a self-described revolutionary who has espoused somewhat militant rhetoric and has access to weapons.” The Riverfront Times article shows how the FBI used local police to harass Seals. In June 2016, the activist was “investigatively detained” by local police who pulled over Seals in his car on FBI orders. Seals had proudly described himself on his Twitter account as a “Revolutionary, Activist, Unapologetically BLACK, Afrikan in AmeriKKKa.” Although he was one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, Seals was very critical of the nonprofit-industrial complex and the attempt to co-opt the popular movement. A working-class activist who made a modest living as on an assembly line at General Motors, Seals harshly criticized people like DeRay Mckesson, who were handpicked by the corporate media, funded by billionaire-backed corporate foundations, and turned into so-called “leaders” of what had been a grassroots movement. Mckesson used his media celebrity to make large amounts of money, doing ads for corporations. He also joined the Democratic Party, unsuccessfully ran for office, and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Seals condemned them as opportunistic “sellouts.” He ridiculed: “Let me start an organization; give me a couple grants; start me a couple Gofundmes; tweet a little bit; and now they’re big shots; they’re traveling the world.” “They’re in these orgs, getting paid $5000, $10,000 a month, traveling the fucking world, speaking like y’all are fucking helping the community, but you ain’t doing shit for the community.” “We got blood, sweat, and tears in the streets, for nothing,” Seals added. “People risked their lives; people lost their jobs, lost their homes. There are cats in prison right now, doing five, 10 years for Mike Brown shit. This shit was real.” “We could have changed the fucking world. All you wanted was a fucking donation, and a couple Twitter followers” Seals also criticized capitalism and US imperialism. “Money is the root of all evil; being broke is the root of all evil; white supremacy is the root of all evil in this country,” he said. “That’s why the government, they’re going to war every year, taking resources, land, gold, oil.” “I didn’t get in it for no money,” Seals explained. “First of all, I didn’t even know you could make money off that type of shit, like I didn’t know shit about soliciting grant funds.” “I came out there strictly to talk about racism, educate people, let them know how we need to come together,” he said. He emphasized, “We need grassroots organizations from the people in the community, people who genuinely give a fuck, people from the struggle.” “Leadership don’t come from Yale, Princeton; leadership don’t come from Harvard. They ain’t been through this shit.” “They ain’t gonna sacrifice their life for this shit. They ain’t gonna die for y’all or y’all’s kids. They don’t want to lose their motherfucking position.” “I don’t give a fuck about none of this shit. You kill me tomorrow; I ain’t never gonna not speak on this, on the real. And they know that. They knew that when they met me.” “That’s why they made sure my face ain’t get too big.”

Write an article about: US threatened to invade International Criminal Court. Now it loves ICC for targeting Putin. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

África, African Union, Antony Blinken, AU, Burundi, colonialism, Gambia, ICC, ICJ, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, John Bolton, José Bustani, Karim Khan, Mike Pompeo, neocolonialism, racism, Rome Statute, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

The US government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, threatened to arrest judges, and passed a “Hague Invasion Act”. Previously, the ICC only prosecuted Africans. But now that it wants to arrest Russian President Putin, Washington praises the court (while still refusing to join it). (Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.) Many countries in the Global South have denounced the International Criminal Court as a neocolonial institution, biased in favor of the West. Its leadership has been dominated by Europeans, and as of 2016, only Africans had been brought to trial at the court. In a rare point of agreement, the United States has also opposed the International Criminal Court (ICC) since its inception. The US is not a member of the ICC, and Washington has even imposed sanctions on its top officials and threatened to arrest judges and prosecutors. In fact, when the court first opened in the Netherlands in 2002, the United States passed a law known as the “Hague Invasion Act”, according to which Washington threatens to send its soldiers to free anyone being tried at the ICC who is a US citizen or is deemed important to its “national security” interests. But after relentlessly attacking the ICC for its 21-year history, Washington has suddenly done a 180, and now publicly supports the ICC in its attempt to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin. On March 17, the ICC’s Polish president, Piotr Hofmański, issued an arrest warrant for Putin, over alleged atrocities committed in the proxy war in Ukraine between NATO and Russia. The ICC arrest warrant was issued almost exactly 20 years to the day after the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq, which caused more than 1 million deaths, and which even United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said was illegal and violated the UN Charter. Not a single US official was held responsible for the war crimes committed in Iraq. But the ICC now has its sights on Russia. Russia is not party to the ICC. Ukraine is not a full member either. Moscow said the “criminal prosecution is obviously illegal” and is a reflection of the Western-dominated court’s “clear hostility” to Russia. Despite the fact that the United States is not a member of the ICC, President Joe Biden strongly supported the court’s arrest warrant. In collaboration with the European Union, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is pressuring countries that are members of the ICC to comply and arrest Putin. This is quite a reversal for Blinken, because in March 2021, when the court was investigating Israel over war crimes it committed in the occupied Palestinian territories, the top US diplomat published a furious statement denouncing the ICC. Blinken roared: The ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter. Israel is not a party to the ICC and has not consented to the Court’s jurisdiction, and we have serious concerns about the ICC’s attempts to exercise its jurisdiction over Israeli personnel. The Palestinians do not qualify as a sovereign state and therefore, are not qualified to obtain membership as a state in, participate as a state in, or delegate jurisdiction to the ICC. Like Israel and the United States, Russia is not a member of the ICC. But just two years after arguing that the court cannot investigate non-member Israel over its war crimes, Blinken is suddenly insisting that the ICC must take action against non-member Russia on behalf of non-member Ukraine. Blinken’s predecessor went so far as to impose sanctions on top ICC officials. In 2020, when President Donald Trump was in office, the ICC opened an investigation into war crimes committed in Afghanistan by the US, NATO, and Afghan government allies. In response, Trump’s former CIA Director turned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an angry rant denouncing the court. “We oppose any effort by the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over U.S. personnel. We will not tolerate its inappropriate and unjust attempts to investigate or prosecute Americans”, he declared in March. Pompeo blasted the ICC as “an embarrassment” and “a so-called court which is revealing itself to be a nakedly political body”. He asserted that “we are exposing and confronting its abuses”. The top US diplomat even threatened the family members of top ICC officials, vowing, “We want to identify those responsible for this partisan investigation and their family members”. Later that September, the US State Department hit the court’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and her colleagues with sanctions. BREAKING: In shocking attack on #ICC @secpompeo threatens collective punishment against named staff of the court and their FAMILIES for court's ongoing investigation into #Afghanistan crimes that implicate US https://t.co/OsCTrC5YJs — Sarah Leah Whitson (@sarahleah1) March 17, 2020 When the Biden administration entered office in early 2021, it removed these US sanctions on the ICC. But Washington still kept attacking and undermining the court. US state media outlet Voice of America cited Blinken, who stressed that Washington continued “to disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations” and object to ICC “efforts to assert jurisdiction over personnel of non-States Parties such as the United States and Israel”. That is to say, the Biden administration strongly opposed the ICC’s efforts to investigate US and NATO war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Israeli war crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territories. But now that the ICC is going after Putin, the political class in Washington is ecstatic. The military leadership in the Department of Defense, on the other hand, is more cautious. The New York Times reported in early March, just a week before the ICC issued its arrest warrant for Putin: “The Pentagon is blocking the U.S. from sharing evidence on Russian atrocities in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court, officials said. Military leaders fear setting a precedent that might pave the way for it to prosecute Americans”. Breaking News: The Pentagon is blocking the U.S. from sharing evidence on Russian atrocities in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court, officials said. Military leaders fear setting a precedent that might pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. https://t.co/xnHCjkkZnK — The New York Times (@nytimes) March 8, 2023 The International Criminal Court is only 21 years old, but it has clearly demonstrated an extreme bias toward the Global South, and against Africa in particular. The Los Angeles Times published an article in 2016 that clearly illustrated the one-sidedness: “Only Africans have been tried at the court for the worst crimes on Earth”. Only Africans have been tried at the court for the worst crimes on Earth https://t.co/lxy2AEejbX — Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 24, 2016 That same year, Canada’s state media outlet CBC reported: “International Criminal Court facing exodus of African nations over charges of racism”. CBC acknowledged that “nine of the 10 cases currently under investigation by the ICC are based in Africa”. Burundi, Gambia, and South Africa condemned the ICC as a racist institution, vowing to withdraw from the court. Gambia’s information minister said the ICC “is in fact an International Caucasian Court, for the prosecution and humiliation of people of colour, especially Africans”. In 2016, Gambia did withdraw from the court. South Africa left as well – although its high court later revoked the withdrawal. In 2017, the African Union called on its members to leave the ICC. African intellectuals have since continuously denounced the ICC as a neocolonial institution. How colonialism's legacy continues to plague the International Criminal Court https://t.co/wuV2K1tzTG — The Conversation Africa (@TC_Africa) July 16, 2020 Gambian ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda appeared to try to change the court’s reputation by opening the investigations into US and NATO war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. The Trump administration hit back with sanctions and threats. Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by baselessly accusing the ICC of “anti-semitism”. But Bensouda’s efforts – as minimal as they were – were thwarted when her nine-year term ended in 2021. She was replaced with the ICC’s current prosecutor, a Karim Ahmad Khan, a British lawyer. Khan is the brother of right-wing politician Imran Ahmad Khan, a former member of Parliament for the UK Conservative Party (who also happens to be a convicted pedophile). Almost immediately after Karim Khan took over the ICC, he ended the investigations into US and NATO war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. Reuters cited Afghan human rights activist Horia Mosadiq, who called Khan’s decision “an insult to thousands of other victims of crimes by Afghan government forces and U.S. and NATO forces”. This story should be a huge scandal: The new International Criminal Court prosecutor, @KarimKhanQC, quietly dropped the investigation into US war crimes committed in Afghanistan, supposedly "due to lack of resources" More impunity for US war criminalshttps://t.co/KFXR7RUDOv — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 6, 2021 Khan claimed in 2021 that the ICC was struggling with a lack of resources and would instead focus on “the scale and nature of crimes within the jurisdiction of the court”. But the issuing of an arrest warrant for the president of Russia – a non member – over alleged atrocities committed in Ukraine – which is not a full member either – clearly contradicts Khan’s purported commitment to focus on “crimes within the jurisdiction of the court”. The Israeli media revealed that Israel, which is not a member of the ICC, had “worked hard behind the scenes” to pressure countries that are parties to the court to elect Khan as chief prosecutor. It keeps getting better: Now the report says Israel “worked hard behind the scenes” to get #KarimKhan elected to #ICC pic.twitter.com/rdSF3vaK59 — Noa Landau נעה לנדאו (@noa_landau) February 12, 2021 In 2022, the Times of Israel praised Khan, noting that the “new ICC prosecutor has not issued a single public statement nor taken any single public action regarding Israel-Palestine to date”. The Israeli newspaper added excitingly, “Many Israeli officials believe that Bensouda would already have taken actions and maybe even have issued arrest warrants had she continued in office past her nine-year term”. Washington’s opposition to the International Criminal Court goes back to before it was even officially opened in 2002. On the last day of 2000, just three weeks before his term ended, US President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute that laid the foundations for the ICC. But his successor President George W. Bush later “unsigned” the treaty. The Bush administration then waged a political war against the newly created ICC. Arch-neoconservative John Bolton, who helped lead Bush’s State Department, called the US withdrawal from the ICC “the happiest moment of my government service”. (Bolton also threatened the family members of the chief of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, José Bustani, telling him, “We know where your kids live”.) Even the billionaire oligarch-funded lobby group Human Rights Watch, which is notorious for its pro-Western bias, warned in July 2002 that the “principle of universal justice is still under serious threat from Washington”. And that was before the US government passed the notorious “Hague Invasion Act”. Following Bush, Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden have refused to re-sign the Rome Statute, meaning the US is not a member of the ICC. After Trump appointed Bolton as his national security advisor, the neoconservative hawk promised in 2018: “We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us”. Bolton even threatened to arrest ICC judges and prosecutors, proclaiming, “We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States, we will sanction their funds in the US financial system, and we will prosecute them in the US criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans”. US threatens to arrest ICC judges if they pursue Americans for Afghan war crimes https://t.co/ljCNvPgjWV pic.twitter.com/k7Dc0Q4Ldb — FRANCE 24 (@FRANCE24) September 10, 2018 Only 123 countries are members of the ICC. (The United Nations recognizes 193 countries on Earth, meaning less than two-thirds are parties to the ICC, and these nations represent less than half of the global population.) Prominent countries that are not state parties include the US, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Cuba, Vietnam, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Signatories of the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court Despite popular confusion, the ICC is not an organ of the United Nations. The court is independent from the UN’s official judicial arm, the International Court of Justice (ICJ). While the ICC was founded in 2002, the ICJ opened in 1945. Further compounding the confusion is the fact that both are located in the Hague, in the Netherlands. The ICJ litigates state disputes, whereas the ICC focuses on individuals. But the ICJ has been very limited in its capabilities due to a fundamental problem with the structure of the UN: permanent members of the Security Council can use their veto to block the implementation of the court’s decisions. The United States has done precisely this, effectively neutering the ICJ. In 1984, Nicaragua took the US to the Hague over its support for the Contras, far-right death squads that systematically used terrorism against civilians in an attempt to violently overthrow the Central American nation’s revolutionary Sandinista government. In the case Nicaragua v. United States of America, the ICJ found Washington guilty of violating international law, by supporting the Contra terrorists and putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports. The ICJ ordered that the US pay Nicaragua reparations. But Washington refused to do so, and used its veto in the Security Council to prevent any implementation of the ruling.

Write an article about: US now world’s top LNG exporter, as Europe boycotts cheaper Russian gas. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

energy, Europe, gas, LNG, Russia, Ukraine

The USA has rapidly become the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), tied with Qatar. Europe replaced Asia as the top market for US LNG in 2022, boycotting cheaper Russian energy over the proxy war in Ukraine. The United States has rapidly become the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), tied with Qatar. A significant reason for this meteoric increase is because Europe replaced Asia as the top market for US LNG in 2022, as Brussels pledged to boycott Russian energy over the proxy war in Ukraine. Among the principal importers of US LNG are France, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy. Europe is now paying significantly more for expensive US LNG than it had previously for Russian pipeline gas. As of 2022, Europe had the highest energy prices on the planet. This was a key factor in fueling an inflation crisis that spread worldwide, and hit Europe especially hard. Bloomberg reported that the “US tied Qatar as the world’s top exporter of liquefied natural gas” in 2022, calling it “a milestone for the meteoric rise of America as a major supplier of the fuel.” The outlet added that the United States, “which only began exporting LNG from the lower-48 states in 2016 and has seemingly overnight become a dominant force in the industry.” A graph from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) illustrates the monumental shift in US LNG exports in just six years. S&P Global reported in September 2022 that European imports of LNG made up the “lion’s share” of US exports in the first six months of 2022. Global imports of US LNG nearly doubled from $10.8 billion in the first half of 2021 to $21.2 billion in same period in 2022. “Many U.S. LNG export cargoes departed for Europe in the first half of 2022 as the war in Ukraine prompted a scramble for LNG supplies,” S&P Global wrote, adding that “LNG market experts have warned that shipments of LNG cannot quickly replace curtailed pipeline imports from Russia and that the region’s need for significant LNG volumes will remain strong.” The market intelligence unit stressed that Europe has the highest gas prices on Earth. Its benchmark energy price hit a historic high of roughly €320 per megawatt hour in August. S&P Global followed up with another report in November, stating that the “European energy crisis has put US natural gas in high demand and in a position of acute geopolitical relevance.” The financial information firm used the same language, that the “lion’s share headed to Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February” and the escalation of the NATO-Russia proxy war. The industry monitor LNGPrime reported that France, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, and Italy bought nearly half (46.4%) of total US LNG exports in May 2022. Reuters noted in December 2022 that US LNG prices had approximately doubled in the previous year. It added that US LNG exports to Europe increased by a staggering 137% in the first 11 months of 2022, compared to 2021. The news wire added that “the United States will remain the primary supplier of LNG to Europe for at least 2023. This will likely generate even greater revenue for U.S exporters after a record 2022, which totaled $35 billion through September, compared to $8.3 billion over the same period in 2021.” This massive spike in energy prices is causing economic chaos in Europe. Politico published an article in November 2022 titled “Why cheap US gas costs a fortune in Europe.” It pointed out that US LNG is almost four times more expensive in Europe. And it is not just North American corporations that are profiting from this substantial markup, but also European importers and resellers. Even France’s right-wing President Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker, complained to French industrial executes, “In today’s geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices… The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling us at a high price… I don’t think that’s friendly.” Politico added, “Macron’s dig conveniently ignored that the largest European holder of long-term U.S. gas contracts is none other than France’s own TotalEnergies.” In 2018, the CEO of Austrian fossil fuel company OMV estimated that Russian pipeline gas was 50% cheaper than US LNG. The corporate executive, Rainer Seele, said, “I think it is about 50% difference between LNG and Russian gas.”

Write an article about: Intersectional imperialism: US military’s new ideology reflected in Thomas Friedman’s ‘one hard fist’ of diversity. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

military, New York Times, Thomas Friedman

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman boasted that “the real source of” US military power is diversity, and Washington’s “ability to blend” different racial groups “into one hard fist”. Influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in an April 18 article on his visit to NATO-occupied Afghanistan with Joe Biden, provided the clearest example yet of the newly hegemonic ideology of intersectional imperialism. “The real source of our power,” Friedman wrote, is the racial diversity of US society, and especially that of its military. It is the fact that US Special Forces teams — the symbol of Washington’s ubiquitous covert operations and meddling across the globe — are “made up of a collection of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and white Americans. It is our ability to blend those many into one hard fist”, he boasted. This has become the US empire’s modus operandi: Justify imperial exploitation and expansion by claiming that Washington is spreading enlightened views of anti-racism, feminism, and LGBTQ equality. The strategy is not entirely new. The US and NATO exploited women’s rights to rationalize a 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. Israel, too, frequently uses pinkwashing to defend its colonial violence against the Palestinian people. But US hawks are now eagerly proselytizing a kind of inverted “White Man’s Burden” — one that preaches a superficial version of “anti-racism” while still fundamentally reinforcing the centuries-old colonial trope that the empire is helping to “civilize” the barbaric hordes in the rest of the world. The incredible hypocrisy just beneath the surface of this liberal-imperialist philosophy was reflected in the condescending tone of Friedman’s column, which portrayed the Afghan people as knuckle-dragging brutes. In one of such patronizing passages, Friedman lamented the surge in Trumpian racism at home in the United States, writing, “I confess that I wonder if we have become more like the Afghans and not the Afghans more like us”.

Write an article about: CIA’s ‘Havana Syndrome’ conspiracy implodes: Here are media’s worst fake news stories. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, CIA, CNN, Fox News, Havana Syndrome, media, New York Times, Russia, The Guardian, The Independent, Washington Post

The CIA admitted US spies/diplomats aren’t being attacked by foreign adversaries. “Havana Syndrome” is mass hysteria. Here are the top corporate media outlets that spread this bogus conspiracy theory. For five years, major corporate media outlets have cited anonymous US government officials to baselessly accuse Russia, China, and/or Cuba of attacking Washington’s spies and diplomats with “pulsed microwave weapons,” “directed-energy arms,” or other exotic technologies that might as well have been lifted from a B science fiction movie. There was never an iota of evidence for this ridiculous conspiracy theory, which has now totally collapsed, but it spread like wildfire through the mainstream press. As recently as November 2021, the Washington Post — one of the US intelligence community’s most reliable media partners — broadcast an extraordinary threat to the world: “CIA director warns Russian spies of ‘consequences’ if they are behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ incidents.” A year before that, in December 2020, the New York Times promoted a bizarre conspiracy theory: “Report Points to Microwave ‘Attack’ as Likely Source of Mystery Illnesses That Hit Diplomats and Spies.” The US newspaper-of-record quoted an official report, commissioned by the State Department and conducted by the United States’ brightest scientific minds, that concluded that a group of North American spies and diplomats allegedly suffering from “dizziness, fatigue, headaches, and loss of hearing, memory and balance” had been targeted by “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” weapons. This January, however, natsec reporters’ favorite conspiracy theory hit a curb at 90 miles an hour, flipped over, and exploded. “CIA says ‘Havana Syndrome’ not result of sustained campaign by hostile power,” NBC News reported on January 19. In an internal assessment, the spy agency admitted that there was no evidence of foreign attacks, and it ruled out the possibility, saying there were other medical explanations for the symptoms. It is clear that top US intelligence officials approved the leak of this story, because the article was co-authored by Ken Dilanian, a veritable CIA roadie who was once disowned by his former employer the LA Times for doing unethical propaganda on behalf of the spy agency. The CIA officially conceding that Russia, China, and Cuba are not attacking its spooks with scary ray guns should put in the nail in the coffin of an outlandish conspiracy theory that, over five years, has been promoted by basically every major English-language media outlet, including the most respected newspapers in both the United States and Britain. Multipolarista reviewed this onslaught of fake news coverage and found that “Havana Syndrome” conspiracies were eagerly promoted by the following establishment networks: We have assembled a collection of some of their most outrageous fake news stories below. We discussed this scandal with Dr. Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist and leading expert on mass hysteria and social panics, who correctly predicted all of this in his 2020 scholarly book “Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.” A medical expert explains how he knew Russia/China/Cuba weren't attacking US diplomats with microwave guns, and "Havana Syndrome" was mass hysteria. I documented how top media outlets promoted this fake news story: https://t.co/KbajqIUGer Full interview: https://t.co/TEj41yq096 pic.twitter.com/uFUhFj9Vhr — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 23, 2022 “I can summarize the book in one sentence,” he told us: “When you hear the sound of hoof beats in the night, first think horses, not zebras.” “The doctors at the American State Department went for the most exotic, far out, far-fetched explanations early on. They went on a search for unicorns when they should have stuck to mundane explanations,” Bartholomew said. “My first career was as a journalist,” he continued. “And this is a case of bad journalism, bad government, and bad science.” Bartholomew cautioned that the Havana Syndrome scandal is an example of the problem of politics mixing with science. “When you break it down and you start analyzing the studies that were done, it’s like, whoa, it’s actually a really methodologically flawed study, and probably never should have been published in the first place,” he explained. You can watch or listen to our full interview here: It’s quite instructive to review how top media outlets enthusiastically promoted this bogus story. It shows how the most respected newspapers in the United States and United Kingdom are more than willing to publish harebrained conspiracy theories when it does political damage to NATO’s adversaries. All of these scoops were fed to reporters in the corporate media by their handlers in the CIA and Pentagon. These stenographers never exercised a shred of skepticism, mindlessly attributing the outlandish accusations to anonymous officials. Fox News declared in June 2021 that Russia was suspected of targeting US diplomats “in ‘Havana Syndrome’ attacks” not only abroad, but even in Washington, DC. MSNBC followed up with a ludicrous video in August 2021 titled “Sen. Shaheen: Russia ‘at the top of suspect list’ for directed energy attacks on Americans.” Back in August 2017, Time magazine stated unequivocally that “U.S. Diplomats in Cuba Were Injured by a ‘Sonic Weapon.’” This is objectively false. Some reports were careful to add qualifiers that there was no solid proof that Russia, China, or Cuba were behind these so-called “attacks,” but it was always presumed that they were exactly that: attacks. The idea that Havana Syndrome was the result of a foreign power intentionally seeking to harm North Americans was indisputable to the press. It was holy dogma, and simply could not be challenged. The question on the minds of the CIA/Pentagon water boys (and girls) in the corporate media was not whether or not US spies and diplomats are being attacked, but rather by whom? Which villainous US adversary? The mainstream press didn’t stop to question if this was an attack; instead it immediately went to the question: What weapon is responsible? Exotic microwave weapons? Directed energy? Ray guns wielded by fur hat-wearing Russian communist bears wrapped in tin foil? In May 2018, CNN gave credibility to the neo-McCarthyite conspiracy with a report titled “What we know about the possible ‘sonic attacks’ in Cuba and now China.” This massive fake news campaign was then given a stamp of approval from the New York Times, with a September 2018 article titled, “Microwave Weapons Are Prime Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers.” This blockbuster story was on the front page of the Gray Lady, and had the subtitle, “Doctors and scientists say microwave strikes may have caused sonic delusions and very real brain damage among embassy staff and family members.” The article is filed online under the Times’ science vertical. The fact that these outlandish accusations were published in the US newspaper-of-record gave other media outlets the green light to run with the conspiracy theory. And they went wild. In October 2020, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a close ally of the CIA, published a column titled “Russia is an obvious suspect in Havana Syndrome, but the evidence is inconclusive.” Then in December 2020, NBC News published a similar article titled “‘Havana Syndrome’ likely caused by pulsed microwave energy, government study finds.” One of the co-authors of this story was Ken Dilanian, the CIA whisperer who published the article this January suddenly admitting that Havana Syndrome was not caused by attacks. The UK government-backed BBC mindlessly echoed the conspiracy: “‘Havana syndrome’ likely caused by directed microwaves – US report.” This latest episode in widespread mainstream fake news — like the Russiagate hysteria or WMDs conspiracy — shows how Western corporate media outlets don’t require a single shred of evidence to make extraordinary, outlandish accusations against Washington’s Official Enemies. If a US government official intimates something about Beijing, Moscow, or La Habana being involved in some supposed evil-doing, the bellicose stenographers in the press will find 200 reasons why we should instantly believe the politically motivated accusations — and anyone who doubts such baseless claims is branded a “conspiracy theorist” or “Kremlin shill.” In April 2021, CNN went so far as to claim that “Havana Syndrome” attacks were taking place in the heart of Washington. “US investigating possible mysterious directed energy attack near White House,” CNN reported. Then in May, CNN followed up the story with an equally preposterous part two: “US investigates second suspected case of mystery ‘syndrome’ near White House.” A few days later, perhaps the most respected media outlet in the United States, if not the world, the Associated Press, joined in the fake news hysteria. “Growing mystery of suspected energy attacks draws US concern,” the AP reported. Politico took the conspiracy theory even further that same month, pointing the finger at Moscow in a story titled “Russian spy unit suspected of directed-energy attacks on U.S. personnel.” This “exclusive” scoop was attributed exclusively to anonymous US government officials, naturally. Across the pond in June 2021, The Guardian ran a story titled “Microwave weapons that could cause Havana Syndrome exist, experts say.” It was written by the leading UK newspaper’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, a hardline hawk who is also quite friendly with Western intelligence agencies. In September 2021, British newspaper The Independent ran the ridiculous clickbait article “What is the ‘Havana syndrome’? Inside the creepy ‘directed energy’ attacks on US diplomats.” What is really creepy is how hordes of Western reporters will obediently regurgitate the same fake news without a scintilla of skepticism. But the conspiracy theory just wouldn’t die — it was too politically useful. In October 2021, Politico declared, “U.S. investigators increasingly confident directed-energy attacks behind Havana Syndrome.” The liberal magazine Slate pondered, “Are Russians Using Microwaves to Attack Americans?” On the other side of the Atlantic, the UK’s Sunday Times declared, “US diplomats hit by new Havana Syndrome attack.” Then in November 2021, the Washington Post published its risible report, “CIA director warns Russian spies of ‘consequences’ if they are behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ incidents.” This story was echoed by many other media outlets, including Washington’s most respectable pro-Trump website, The Hill, which declared, “CIA director says there will be consequences if Russia is behind ‘Havana Syndrome’ attacks.” And it wasn’t just media outlets; academia joined in as well. In September 2021, respected academic website The Conversation ran a ridiculous story called “Scientists suggest US embassies were hit with high-power microwaves – here’s how the weapons work.” The article was written by Edl Schamiloglu, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate dean for research and innovation at the University of New Mexico’s School of Engineering. The website published a Brobdingnagian disclosure statement: “Edl Schamiloglu receives funding from AFOSR, DARPA, and ONR to perform basic research on the development of high power microwave sources. He also receives support from industry (Verus Research, General Atomics Electromagnetic System Division). He serves as Chair of IEC SC77C which develops civilian standards to protect equipment and infrastructure from IEMI.” In September 2021, The Conversation followed up with another article titled “Directed energy weapons shoot painful but non-lethal beams – are similar weapons behind the Havana syndrome?” It was written by Iain Boyd, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, who disclosed that he “receives funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, Lockheed-Martin Corporation, Northrop-Grumman Corporation, L3-Harris Corporation.” The weapons industry-backed website Defense One re-published the same article with the title “Are Directed-Energy Weapons Behind the Havana Syndrome?” This headline was indirectly answered by the sub-head: “As an aerospace engineer and former Vice Chair of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, I can attest to the effectiveness of such weapons.” With “experts” like these… The list of fake news stories goes on and on. Virtually every major English-language media outlet did its part in helping to spread this conspiracy theory on behalf of the US government — as they did with the Russiagate racket at the exact same time. Now that the CIA has admitted there are no Russian ray guns or Chinese microwave weapons involved, will anything change? Will anyone or any institution be held accountable? Well, if the total impunity for the fervent promoters of the “Putin controls Trump” conspiracy is any indication, it is very unlikely that there will be any consequences. Mindlessly regurgitated the claims of anonymous spooks to feed baseless conspiracy theories that help advance US foreign-policy interests is, in reality, the job description for mainstream “national security” reporters. If we had the glasses from John Carpenter’s classic “They Live,” that’s exactly what New York Times job listings would say.

Write an article about: US sends Ukraine $228 million per day in military aid to wage proxy war on Russia. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Joe Biden, military-industrial complex, Russia, Ukraine

The Joe Biden administration pledged Ukraine $39.87 billion in military aid between February and August 2022, for an average of $228 million per day, fueling a brutal proxy war causing tens of thousands of deaths. The Joe Biden administration pledged Ukraine $39.87 billion in military aid in the six months between February and August 2022, for an average of $228 million per day, fueling what even former US government officials admit is a “brutal proxy war” that is causing tens of thousands of deaths. Researcher Stephen Semler documented the 21 distinct military aid packages that the Joe Biden administration approved for Ukraine in the year between August 2021 and August 2022, at a total of $40.13 billion. Two of those 21 pledges were approved before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Excluding these two presidential drawdowns from August and December 2021, which are worth $260 million combined, the Biden administration passed $39.87 billion for military aid in Ukraine between February 25, 2022 (the day after the Russian invasion) and August 19, 2022. This $39.87 billion in pledged military aid divided by the 175 days between February 25, 2022 and August 19, 2022 comes out to an average of approximately $228 million per day. This spending does not include the billions more that the US government has pledged in economic aid to Ukraine. It likewise excludes the tens of billions of dollars of military aid that European countries have approved for Ukraine. “How much military aid has Biden sent to Ukraine?,” Stephen Semler, Speaking Security “51% of young Americans support tuition-free public college,” CNBC: A survey from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics found that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 support eliminating tuition and fees at public colleges and universities for students from families that make up to $125,000, and making community college tuition-free for all income levels for an estimated cost of $47 billion. “Russia Is Right: The U.S. Is Waging a Proxy War in Ukraine,” Hal Brands, Bloomberg / The Washington Post “Austin’s assertion that US wants to ‘weaken’ Russia underlines Biden strategy shift,” CNN “America’s Hesitation Is Heartbreaking,” Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say,” New York Times CIA and Western special ops commandos are in Ukraine, directing proxy war on Russia

Write an article about: US bombing of Iraq and Syria is illegal aggression – Occupiers have no right to ‘self-defense’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Iraq, Joe Biden, Syria

Militarily occupying Iraq and Syria is a thoroughly bipartisan policy in the United States. And bombing West Asia has become a favorite pastime that unites both Democrat and Republican presidents. (Puedes leer este artículo en español aquí.) The United States believes it has the right to bomb, militarily occupy, and economically strangulate any country, anywhere, without consequence. But the peoples of the world are standing up more and more to the global dictatorship of US hegemony. On June 27, Washington launched airstrikes against forces in both Iraq and Syria, two sovereign countries that are illegally occupied by the US military and that have repeatedly called for American troops to leave. The US attack proved to be a gift to the genocidal extremists in ISIS: it helped provide cover as remnants of the so-called “Islamic State” launched a terror attack on a power grid in northern Iraq. Similarly, the US bombing killed several members of Iraqi government-backed units who had been protecting their nation from ISIS and al-Qaeda. This is far from the first time Washington has clearly been on the same side as far-right Takfiri fanatics. Current US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan admitted in an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 that “AQ is on our side in Syria.” And the US government supported al-Qaeda extremists in its wars on Yemen and Libya. In addition to aiding notorious terrorist groups, these US strikes on Iraq and Syria were glaringly illegal under international law. They constitute a clear act of aggression against the peoples of West Asia, who for decades have struggled for self-determination and control over their own, plentiful natural resources — resources that the US government and its all-powerful corporations seek to control and exploit. The Pentagon tried to justify its attack claiming it was an act of “self-defense.” Absurdly, the US Department of Defense — the world champion in violating international law — even cited international law to try to legitimize the airstrikes. In reality, the US military’s very presence in Iraq and Syria is illegal. And under international law, a military power that is illegally occupying a territory does not have the right to self-defense. That is true just as much for apartheid Israel in its settler-colonial aggression against Palestine as it is for the United States in its imperial wars on the peoples of Iraq and Syria. Iraq’s prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, made that clear. He condemned the US strikes as a “blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security.” In January 2020, in response to Washington’s assassination of top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis — a criminal act of war against both Iraq and Iran — the democratically elected parliament in Baghdad voted 170 to 0 to expel the thousands of US troops occupying Iraq. Washington simply ignored the vote, silencing the voices of the Iraqi people — while threatening more economic sanctions on their government. The Pentagon stressed that the vote was nonbinding, but even the US government-backed RAND Corporation acknowledged that there “is no treaty or status of forces agreement (SOFA) authorizing the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.” Likewise, the United States is illegally occupying one-third of Syrian sovereign territory. The internationally recognized government in Damascus has repeatedly called on the US military occupiers to leave, but they have refused, in a flagrant violation of Syrian sovereignty. “The presence of Americans in Syria is a sign of occupation, and we believe that all nations and governments must stand up to their unlawful presence in the region,” Syrian Prime Minister Imad Khamis declared in 2020, after the US assassinations of the top Iraqi and Iranian military leaders. While former Republican President Donald Trump radiated a kind of neocolonial arrogance, boasting that US troops would illegally remain in Syria because “we want to keep the oil,” the Democratic Joe Biden administration has not acted much differently. President Biden appointed hardline neoconservative operative Dana Stroul as the top Pentagon official for Middle East policy. In 2019, Stroul bragged that Washington “owned” one-third of Syrian territory, including its “economic powerhouse,” which includes the vast majority of the country’s oil and wheat reserves. Stroul’s promotion was an unambiguous sign that the Democrats are endorsing the same sadistic, Trumpian strategy to militarily occupy Syria, steal its natural resources, starve its government of revenue, deny its people gasoline and bread, and prevent reconstruction of what Stroul snidely referred to as the widespread “rubble.” The reality is that militarily occupying Iraq and Syria is a thoroughly bipartisan policy in the United States. And bombing West Asia has become a favorite pastime that unites both Democratic and Republican presidents. Trump launched airstrikes against Syria in April 2018 on totally unsubstantiated accusations that Damascus had carried out “gas attacks,” claims that have since been proven false by multiple whistleblowers from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Then in December 2019, the Trump administration bombed anti-ISIS militias in both Syria and Iraq. Biden carried out a similar, illegal attack on these same fighters in eastern Syria in February 2021. It was yet another example of Washington serving as the de facto air force for the remnants of the so-called “Islamic State.” The December 2019, February 2021, and June 2021 US airstrikes targeted the Iraqi government-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMFs), known in Arabic as the al-Hashd al-Sha’abi. The Pentagon stated unequivocally in its official statement on the June bombing that it was attacking Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, two prominent Iraqi armed groups in the Hashd. The Department of Defense misleadingly referred to these units as “Iran-backed militia groups.” The US government and the corporate media outlets that act as its obedient mouthpiece always describe the Hashd as “Iran-backed” to try to downplay their role as indigenous protectors of Iraqi sovereignty and deceptively portray them as foreign proxies of Washington’s favorite bogeyman. In reality, the PMFs are Iraqi units supported by the elected, internationally recognized government in Baghdad. And the Hashd played a leading role in the fight against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other extremist Takfiri groups in both Iraq and Syria — while the United States, apartheid Israel, and NATO allies spent billions of dollars backing Salafi-jihadist death squads in their genocidal war on the people of Syria. The Hashd do indeed receive assistance from Tehran, and they have every right to. Iran is Iraq’s neighbor, after all, whereas the United States is on the other side of the planet. But Washington, NATO, and their de facto stenographers in the corporate press corps seek to discredit all resistance to criminal US aggression in West Asia by erasing its organic, indigenous roots and lazily depicting it as a vast conspiracy controlled by an omnipresent Iranian puppet-master. The PMFs made it clear that they will not tolerate Washington’s assault on their nation’s sovereignty. “We reserve the legal right to respond to these attacks and hold the perpetrators accountable on Iraqi soil,” the Hashd declared. Unlike the US military occupiers, the people of Iraq and Syria do have a right to exercise self-defense in response to strikes by foreign aggressors. They can legally resist American military occupation and neocolonialism, just as the people of Palestine have the right to resist Israeli military occupation and Zionist settler-colonialism. This is a right enshrined in international law — and an inalienable right that any nation would defend. If Washington wants to stop attacks on its troops, there is an easy way to do that: withdraw them from the region, where they are not wanted. American soldiers will be much safer at home. (This article was written for Al Mayadeen English.)

Write an article about: Is a huge war coming? US bombs Yemen, Iraq & Syria. Israel bombs Gaza & Lebanon. Both threaten Iran.. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Ansarallah, Donald Trump, Gaza, Houthis, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Joe Biden, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Yemen

The US military is attacking Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, while Israel bombs Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. Both are threatening Iran. Is a large Middle East (West Asia) war coming? The brutal war that Israel is waging on Gaza is increasingly becoming a regional conflict. Since October, the United States and Israel have bombed not only Gaza, but also Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Now, the U.S. government is even threatening Iran with war. President Joe Biden sent the Iranian government a private message while the U.S. military was bombing Yemen on January 13. He said threateningly, “We’re confident, we’re well prepared”. While this is happening, South Africa has introduced a case in the International Court of Justice, the top United Nations judicial authority, which accuses Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people. South Africa’s case has garnered support from dozens of countries across the Global South. This case has frightened Israel and its sponsors in Washington. They are apparently seeking to expand the conflict into a regional war, to try to win more sympathy and to turn attention away from what South Africa and many countries have referred to as a genocide in Gaza. In fact, top UN experts have been warning precisely this for months: that the Palestinian people face “the risk of genocide in Gaza”, and that there has been a “failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide”. The Financial Times reported in December that, in just two months of Israeli bombing, Gaza had become one of the most heavily bombed areas in human history. Israel's genocidal war has made Gaza one of the most heavily bombed areas in human history.https://t.co/jd4D7e32tM — Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) January 19, 2024 Now that Israel faces formal charges of genocide at the Hague, many officials in Washington are concerned, because the U.S. is directly complicit in the war crimes that Israel is committing. The Joe Biden administration has sent billions of dollars of weapons and military aid to Israel. In fact, the US State Department has bypassed Congress two times, using emergency measures to send weapons to Israel. This is rather strange, because Congress is full of people who strongly support Israel, and would without a doubt have approved these arms shipments. This appears to indicate that the US government does not even want a debate about these arms shipments. Washington is concerned about people focusing their attention on its complicity in arming Israel. So it is simply choosing to do so quietly, without Congress’ approval. And the U.S. is involved in these conflicts in many other ways, not simply by arming Israel. In fact, the U.S. military has 57,000 personnel stationed all across the so-called Middle East, or more accurately, West Asia. These are just the U.S. military personnel that are publicly disclosed. It is likely that the U.S. also has covert special operations forces that are not accounted for among this 57,000. The U.S. has more than 57,000 personnel in the Middle East. Eastern Mediterranean: 12.500Jordan: 3.500Egypt: 500Syria: 900Iraq: 2.000Israel: 100Saudi Arabia: 2.500Kuwait: 10.000Bahrain: 4.500Qatar: 10.000UAE: 5.000Red Sea: 4.500 Source: FT pic.twitter.com/4vpeVx9xzy — Clash Report (@clashreport) January 12, 2024 In just a few months, the U.S. has bombed Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. On January 11, the United States launched airstrikes against dozens of targets in Yemen. The New York Times referred to these as US attacks on the so-called “Houthi militia” in Yemen. But this is very misleading. The “Houthis”, which are officially known as Ansarullah, represent the government for the majority of the Yemeni population. This was acknowledged even by the mainstream Washington, DC-based think tank the Brookings Institution. It published an article in 2023 by a former CIA analyst, Bruce Riedel, who admitted that “the Houthis have created a functioning government”, one that “includes representatives of other groups”. “Some 70 to 80% of Yemenis live under the Houthis’ control”, Riedel wrote. He conceded that Ansarullah had its origins in the grassroots in Yemen, opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Washington’s subsequent wars and interventionist policies across West Asia. At Brookings, the former CIA analyst likewise confessed that the United States had spent six years supporting a scorched-earth “war led by a neighbor most Yemenis hate”, that is to say, Saudi Arabia. He added, “Air strikes, blockades, and intentional mass starvation are the characteristics of a war the United States has supported”. The United Nations estimated that this U.S.-Saudi war killed at least 377,000 Yemenis from 2015 to the end of 2021. So when the United States launched dozens of attacks inside Yemen this January, Washington was continuing a war that it has waged against the de facto Yemeni government for nearly nine years. The so-called “Houthis” are not just a “militia”; they are leading the government. And while it was previously Saudi Arabia that was relentlessly bombing civilian areas in Yemen (using U.S.-made planes and bombs, with intelligence and targeting assistance from the Pentagon), now it is the United States that is cutting out the middle man and attacking Yemen directly. Moreover, the New York Times acknowledged in its report on the Biden administration’s airstrikes that Ansarullah has “greeted the prospect of war with the United States with open delight”. One of Ansarullah’s most important leaders said in a televised speech, “We, the Yemeni people, are not among those who are afraid of America. We are comfortable with a direct confrontation with the Americans”. As if that weren’t enough, after this prominent Yemeni leader said publicly that his country is prepared to fight against the United States, a day later, on January 12, the U.S. again launched airstrikes against Yemen. Reporting on the second US attack, the New York Times commented, “The strikes come amid fears of a wider escalation of the conflict in the Middle East”. This description is quite euphemistic. In reality, the U.S. is creating a wider conflict in the region by expanding the war, and attacking not only Yemen, but also Iraq and Syria. On January 4, the Biden administration carried out an act of war against Iraq. The New York Times reported that the U.S. launched a drone strike in the capital Baghdad. An Iraqi government spokesman referred to this as a “flagrant violation of the sovereignty and security of Iraq”. He characterized the U.S. attack as “no different from a terrorist act”. The U.S. targeted an Iraqi militia known as Harakat al-Nujaba. This organization is part of the Iraqi government, the New York Times conceded, writing that “it remains part of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, a security organization that is in turn part of the government’s broader security forces”. So the U.S. was attacking Iraq’s security forces. However, in 2019, the Donald Trump administration had declared this Iraqi state institution to be a so-called “terrorist” organization. And now the Biden administration is continuing Trump’s policy of attacking the Iraqi government. In response to Washington’s assault on his country, Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, publicly called for the U.S.-led foreign troops in his country to leave. U.S. troops have consistently occupied Iraq since the illegal invasion of 2003. The U.S. war has gone through phases, but it has basically never ended. It should be emphasized that al-Sudani is by no means an anti-U.S. leader. In Iraqi politics, there are many anti-U.S. figures; he is not one of them. But even he is now publicly stating that Washington needs to stop occupying and attacking his country, and that its troops need to leave. Nevertheless, the website Breaking Defense, which is close to the Pentagon, responded to al-Sudani’s comments reporting: “Despite Iraqi PM’s call, US troops won’t likely leave Iraq anytime soon”. It cited U.S. analysts with internal access. So this is essentially acknowledgment that the U.S. maintains a neo-colonial occupation of Iraq. This is not the first time that this has happened. Back in January 2020, Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and the senior Iraqi security official Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis. The latter was a commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces, which are officially part of the Iraqi government, and which were absolutely instrumental in the war against ISIS. These leaders, Soleimani and al-Muhandis, were two of the most important people in the fight to defeat ISIS. Trump assassinated both of them in a blatant act of war, not only against Iran, but also against Iraq. In response to this U.S. act of war, Iraq’s democratically elected parliament (which was ironically created by the United States) voted to expel the U.S. troops occupying the country. Trump say no, refusing to leave. The far-right U.S. president then threatened to impose sanctions on Iraq. Despite the U.S. government’s flagrantly neo-colonial policies, the Western media’s coverage of Iraq essentially portrays the situation as if Iran were secretly in control of the country. When the U.S. carries out acts of war against Iraq, killing Iraqi officials who are part of the Iraqi state’s security apparatus, the Western media misleadingly describes these murdered Iraqi officials as “pro-Iran military commanders”. This propagandistic rhetoric is reminiscent of how the Western media invariably refers to Yemen’s so-called Houthis, Ansarullah, as “Iran- backed”, trying to depict them as Iranian proxies. The same is true for Lebanon’s indigenous resistance group Hezbollah. This is part and parcel of a Western media propaganda narrative that seeks to justify U.S. acts of war and neo-colonial policies against sovereign governments across West Asia. Another clear example of this is recent U.S. attacks in Syria. In November, the U.S. military launched airstrikes in sovereign Syrian territory. The BBC reported on this illegal U.S. act of war writing, “US airstrikes target more Iran-backed bases in Syria”. The double standard is quite clear when one considers how these same Western media outlets would never dare to refer to attacks by Palestinian groups on Israeli military forces as strikes on “pro-U.S. forces” in “U.S.-backed bases”. In fact, as Geopolitical Economy Report has documented, the U.S. is maintaining an illegal military occupation of Syria, and in particular of the nation’s oil-rich territory, where much of its wheat is also produced. The stated policy of U.S. officials is to starve the Syrian government of revenue that it needs to rebuild after a decade of war fueled by the United States devastated the country. In December, there was a resolution introduced in the Senate calling to withdraw the U.S. troops occupying Syria’s oil fields. It failed to pass in a vote of 13 to 84. The US military has illegally occupied Syrian sovereign territory since 2014, preventing Damascus from accessing its own oil and wheat fields. The Senate voted 13-84, rejecting a resolution to withdraw US troops.https://t.co/RC27DFnleC — Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) January 5, 2024 While the U.S. is bombing Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, Israel is also attacking multiple countries in the region. In October, Israel repeatedly bombed airports in Syria, in both Aleppo and Damascus, killing Syrian troops. In January, Israel launched many more attacks on Syria. And once again, the Western media misleadingly portrayed these Israeli acts of war as “strikes on Iran-linked targets in Syria”. The Western media seeks to make everything about Iran, implying that Tehran controls all of these governments, when in reality it is the U.S. and Israel that are at war with many sovereign states in the region. Israel has also been repeatedly assaulting its neighbor, Lebanon. Amnesty International acknowledged that Israel has attacked southern Lebanon with white phosphorus, a horrific weapon that is banned by many countries. Amnesty International emphasized that Israel has been killing Lebanese civilians in illegal, “indiscriminate” attacks. But Israel is not only attacking southern Lebanon; it has also carried out drone strikes inside Beirut, the capital of the country. Lebanon’s resistance group Hezbollah has long defended the country’s sovereignty, expelling Israel in 2000 after the colonial regime carried out an illegal military occupation of Lebanon for 15 years. Hezbollah has said Israel’s attacks in the capital Beirut cross a red line and are risking a wider regional war. While the Western media warns that U.S. and Israeli attacks on countries in the region “raise the specter of a wider regional war”, the reality is that Washington and Tel Aviv are already at war with Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. It is obvious that the main target of U.S. and Israeli neo-colonial wars in West Asia is Iran. This was confirmed by a former top U.S. military general and NATO commander, Wesley Clark, who revealed back in 2007 that, after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Washington made plans to overthrow the governments of seven countries in the region in five years. In an interview with Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, Clark said that the U.S. had plans “to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”. In late 2023 and early 2024, the U.S. government has made this link clearly in public statements. Washington publicly blamed Iran for Ansarullah in Yemen launching attacks on ships in the Red Sea that are traveling to Israel, that are providing support to Tel Aviv as it carries out war crimes and faces charges of genocide at the Hague. A top U.S. official claimed, “Iran is a primary, if not the primary enabler or supporter or sponsor of the Houthis”, and the U.S. government claimed that Iran is “involved in every phase” of what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called “illegal, dangerous and destabilizing attacks against U.S. and international vessels and commercial vessels”. War hawks in Washington are using this as an opportunity to openly call for a U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. John Bolton, the neoconservative extremist who served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser and was an architect of the Iraq War under former President George W Bush, published an article in the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph titled “The West may now have no option but to attack Iran”. Bolton released that call for war on Iran on December 28. He likely coordinated it with Israel’s former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who on the same day published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled “The U.S. and Israel Need to Take Iran on Directly”. In his article, Bennett boasted that when he was prime minister, Israel carried out numerous attacks on Iranian soil. He also admitted that Tel Aviv assassinated Iranian officials. Bennett called to “empower domestic opposition [in Iran], ensure internet continuity during riots against the regime, strengthen its enemies, increase sanctions and economic pressures”. In his last paragraph, Naftali Bennett said in no uncertain terms, “The U.S. and Israel must set the clear goal of bringing down Iran’s evil regime”. Using colonial language, the former Israeli prime minister declared that the so-called “civilized world” must overthrow Iran’s government. This is clearly what all of this is heading toward: Some bellicose officials in the U.S. and Israeli governments want not only a wider regional war, but more specifically a full-out war against Iran. Many of these hard-line imperialists in Washington have salivated for many years at the idea of war with Tehran. Back in 2015, Bolton wrote an article for the New York Times straightforwardly titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”. In fact, Michael Freund, a former spokesman for Israel’s current far-right prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, published an op-ed this January in the Jerusalem Post titled “Iran is already at war with Israel and the US”. In this piece, he insisted that “Israel and America must act now”, calling for war with Tehran. Freund’s bio conspicuously noted that he was previously “deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”. It is quite possible that he coordinated this article with Netanyahu himself. On January 3, there was a terror attack on civilians in the Iranian city of Kerman. More than 90 Iranians were killed, at an event that was commemorating the anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the top Iranian general. Western media outlets claimed that “ISIS” carried out this attack. Iranian intelligence officials said one of the terrorists who planted the bombs that killed at least 94 civilians had Israeli nationality.

Write an article about: Debunked: Media falsely claims China is building spy base in Cuba. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Afghanistan, Bountygate, China, CIA, Cuba, Havana Syndrome, media, Russia

Media outlets claimed China is building a secret station in Cuba to spy on the US, citing anonymous intelligence officials. But the Pentagon admitted this story is false. It is part of an information warfare campaign against Beijing, and could sabotage attempts at diplomacy. Anonymous US intelligence officials used the media this June to spread a rumor claiming that the Chinese government is building a massive spy base in Cuba, 100 miles from Florida. There was however a glaring problem with this story: The US Department of Defense said it is false. Top Pentagon officials came out publicly and clarified that the reports are “not accurate”, that China is in fact not building a spy base in Cuba. This is the latest example of a series of false stories that have been laundered through the mainstream corporate media by US spy agencies, particularly the CIA, which seek to advance US foreign policy interests and demonize adversaries like China, Cuba, and Russia. Recent disinformation campaigns of similar provenance have included Havana Syndrome – the debunked myth that Cuba, China, and/or Russia was supposedly attacking US spies and diplomats with pulsed microwave weapons – or “Bountygate” – the false CIA claim that Russia was paying the Taliban bounties in order to kill US soldiers during the war in Afghanistan. The CIA has perfected the art of using the media to manipulate public opinion, to push people in certain political directions and manufacture consent for war. One of the co-founders of the CIA, Frank Wisner, famously said the spy agency has contacts all across the media and can play the press like a “mighty Wurlitzer” – a kind of old musical instrument. The latest disinformation operation started on June 8, when the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Cuba to Host Secret Chinese Spy Base Focusing on U.S.”. The report relied entirely on the claims of anonymous “U.S. officials familiar with highly classified intelligence”. Just a few hours after this Wall Street Journal exclusive bombshell came out, Reuters quoted the Pentagon denying the claims. A US Defense Department spokesman, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, stated, “I can tell you based on the information that we have, that that is not accurate, that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing a new type of spy station… In terms of that particular report, no, it’s not accurate”. In fact, after the article was published in the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper updated the story with a quote from the spokesman for the US National Security Council, John Kirby. “This report is not accurate”, Kirby reiterated. Kirby previously served as the Pentagon’s press secretary. This shows how it is US spy agencies that are spreading this false story about China, whereas the US military recognizes that there is no evidence, and may be concerned of the political consequences. Despite the fact that the Pentagon publicly denied the story, many other major US media outlets echoed the rumor. The New York Times, CNN, and Politico published their own versions of the debunked story, all citing anonymous US officials. CBS News warned with a paranoid, cold war-style tone, “Prospect of Chinese spy base in Cuba unsettles Washington”. For its part, Cuba forcefully condemned these reports, stating that they are false. Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said the accusation is “untrue and unfounded”, arguing that the articles were “promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization and the aggression against Cuba”. Cuba rejects any “foreign military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the numerous military bases and troops of the US, and especially the military base that illegally occupies a portion of our national territory in the province of Guantánamo”, Fernandez de Cossio emphasized. A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, pointed out, “Spreading rumors and slander is a common tactic of the US”. “The US has illegally occupied the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba for a long time, engaged in ulterior activities, and imposed an embargo on Cuba for more than 60 years”, Wang said. The Chinese official argued that Washington “should reflect on itself, stop interfering in Cuba’s internal affairs under the banner of freedom, democracy and human rights, and immediately cancel its commercial and financial blockade of Cuba”. It is not clear why exactly anonymous US spies would spread gray propaganda that even the Pentagon acknowledges is false. But it may have the effect of sabotaging any attempts at improving diplomatic relations between China and the United States. In fact, just two days before this false story in the Wall Street Journal came out, there were reports that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was planning a visit to China within the upcoming weeks. The paranoid media campaign put pressure on Blinken to cancel the trip. MSNBC strongly implied that the secretary of state should do so, in an interview with the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby. Something very similar happened in February, when the press manufactured a scandal about a Chinese balloon that entered US airspace. US officials later admitted that the floating object was likely a weather balloon that had been blown off course by unexpected weather. However, the US military spent millions of dollars shooting down the object, along with several other balloons – one of which was later reported to belong to a hobbyist club called the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade and which probably cost around $12. The February media scare successfully demonized China among the US public and had the impact of pressuring Secretary of State Blinken to cancel a trip that he had planned to Beijing. US admits weather pushed Chinese balloon off course, US shot down hobbyists’ $12 balloon in $2M missile attack The Pentagon may also be motivated to slightly push back against the information war that US intelligence agencies are waging on China because the Defense Department is concerned that this hybrid war could escalate into a conventional armed conflict. Politico reported this June, “The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China (Because America might lose)”. The article disclosed that the US military has held numerous war games to scope out a potential crisis with Beijing, and Washington has faced disastrous consequences. The former vice chair of the Pentagon’s powerful Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Hyten, confessed that the Chinese military “just ran rings around us”. Politico wrote: Dozens of versions of the above war-game scenario have been enacted over the last few years, most recently in April by the House Select Committee on competition with China. And while the ultimate outcome in these exercises is not always clear — the U.S. does better in some than others — the cost is. In every exercise the U.S. uses up all its long-range air-to-surface missiles in a few days, with a substantial portion of its planes destroyed on the ground. In every exercise the U.S. is not engaged in an abstract push-button war from 30,000 feet up like the ones Americans have come to expect since the end of the Cold War, but a horrifically bloody one. And that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear. “The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” said Becca Wasser, who played the role of the Chinese leadership in the Select Committee’s wargame and is head of the gaming lab at the Center for a New American Security. “The most common thread in these exercises is that the United States needs to take steps now in the Indo-Pacific to ensure the conflict doesn’t happen in the future. We are hugely behind the curve. Ukraine is our wakeup call. This is our watershed moment.” A similar disinformation operation occurred in 2020, when US spy agencies spread a false story known as “Bountygate”. The New York Times took the lead in this information warfare campaign, in a June 2020 report titled “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says“. The newspaper quoted anonymous “American intelligence officials [who] have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing Coalition forces in Afghanistan – including targeting American troops”. This story was lampooned from the beginning, because the US had been militarily occupying Afghanistan for 19 years as of 2020, and it was never explained why the Taliban would need to be bribed in order to attack the foreign soldiers occupying their homeland. But the intention behind the gray propaganda became clear just a few days after this false story was plastered across the media. The US House of Representatives Armed Service Committee cited the dubious rumor in order to justify voting on July 1 to block the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, thereby extending the war. Meanwhile, a mere two weeks after this report came out, the Pentagon publicly stated that it was probably not true. Then US Defense Secretary Mark Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said they had found no evidence to substantiate the claims of “Bountygate”. “All the defense intelligence agencies have been unable to corroborate that report”, Esper said, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. A year later, in 2021, when the scandal had largely been forgotten, the Daily Beast released an article quietly acknowledging, “U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops”. NBC News also reported: “Remember those Russian bounties for dead U.S. troops? Biden admin says the CIA intel is not conclusive”. The media outlet added, “The Biden administration made clear [on April 15] that the CIA has only ‘low to moderate confidence’ in its intel on alleged Russian bounties for U.S. troops”. This story revealed that it was the CIA that had promoted the false “Bountygate” myth in the first place.

Write an article about: Inside Operation Gladio: How NATO supported Nazis and terrorists. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Asa Winstanley, CIA, Europe, fascism, NATO, Nazis, Operation Gladio, podcast, Soviet Union

Journalists Benjamin Norton and Asa Winstanley discuss Operation Gladio, the NATO “stay behind” networks in which the CIA armed former Nazis and fascists to wage war on the left. Multipolarista host Benjamin Norton is joined by journalist Asa Winstanley to discuss Operation Gladio, the NATO “stay behind” networks in which the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies recruited, armed, and trained former Nazis, other fascists, and right-wing terrorists to wage a war on the left. You can also watch the video at Rokfin or Rumble. You can also download the podcast for free at Substack. Follow Asa on Twitter at @AsaWinstanley. Support Asa’s reporting at his Substack. Read Asa’s reports:

Write an article about: CNN and NY Times help US gov’t lie about spying on Americans. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Alejandro Mayorkas, CBP, censorship, CNN, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, Donald Trump, ICE, Joe Biden, media, New York Times, Nina Jankowicz

CNN and the New York Times echoed a blatant lie from the Department of Homeland Security, falsely claiming it does not monitor Americans. DHS has for years spied on US journalists and protesters. CNN and the New York Times let the head of the Department of Homeland Security lie about the institution’s established record of spying on US citizens, echoing his false claims. These top media outlets amplified this falsehood as part of an attempt to defend the US government’s de facto Ministry of Truth, the new “Disinformation Governance Board” that the Department of Homeland (DHS) has created in order to censor supposed “disinformation” that it deems a threat to US national security. DHS, which was created after the September 11, 2001 attacks to oversee the so-called War on Terror, is notorious for its brutal and authoritarian tactics. The fact that DHS has surveilled American journalists, protesters, and even critical politicians is well documented. This is an undeniable matter of public record. But CNN and the New York Times allowed the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, to lie about this objective fact, and did not push back in any way. CNN echoed a blatant lie from the Department of Homeland Security, falsely claiming it does not monitor Americans. The New York Times later amplified this same lie. In reality, DHS has for years spied on US journalists and protesters. Read more here: https://t.co/rtNxGrn3x1 pic.twitter.com/tTurbvgWsI — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 3, 2022 CNN host Dana Bash sat down with Mayorkas on May 1, in an interview titled “Bash presses Mayorkas about ‘1984’ comparisons to disinformation board.” The CNN segment amounted to a defense of DHS’ Disinformation Governance Board, which Mayorkas minimized as a “small working group within the Department of Homeland Security,” supposedly with limited power. “Will American citizens be monitored?” Bash asked, in regard to this disinformation board. “No,” Mayorkas said firmly. “Guarantee that?” Bash responded. “We in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens,” he insisted. This statement is blatantly false. DHS’ monitoring of American citizens is very well documented, by dozens of mainstream media outlets and civil liberties organizations. But instead of pushing back against this clear lie, the CNN host echoed the DHS secretary’s totally false claim. “You don’t,” Bash replied in agreement. “But will this board change that?” she added. “No, no, no,” Mayorkas repeated. This is all completely, categorically false. The Intercept obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request showing how DHS has spied on activists protesting police brutality in the Black Lives Matter movement since at least 2014. NBC 7 obtained DHS documents in 2019 that showed that “the U.S. government created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports.” In 2020, the New York Times itself reported that the “Department of Homeland Security deployed helicopters, airplanes and drones over 15 cities where demonstrators gathered to protest the death of George Floyd.” Homeland Security officials used planes, helicopters and drones to record recent Black Lives Matter protests in 15 American cities. They logged at least 270 hours of surveillance — far more than previously known. https://t.co/lOH0jnYZ8V — The New York Times (@nytimes) June 20, 2020 That same year, the Washington Post revealed that the “Department of Homeland Security has compiled ‘intelligence reports’ about the work of American journalists covering protests.” This led Oregon lawmakers to publicly demand “answers from the Department of Homeland Security, following new reports that the department spied on Portland protesters’ phones.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has exhaustively documented the department’s spying on Americans, noting five branches of DHS have intelligence missions. The ACLU even sued the department for spying on journalists and violating their civil liberties. For nearly 20 years, many of our warnings about DHS have become tragic realities. It's past time to dismantle this rogue agency. https://t.co/bZHD0reU0O — ACLU (@ACLU) November 15, 2020 Some current and former DHS officials have tried to put the blame for these authoritarian policies solely on Donald Trump, but the reality is this surveillance started long before Trump entered office in 2017 and has continued since he left in 2021. Yahoo News obtained documents in 2022 showing that the “controversial unit of Customs and Border Protection that trawled through the travel and financial records of journalists and lawmakers is still monitoring Americans.” Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. CBP unit that spied on journalists and lawmakers is monitoring American protesters: https://t.co/tr9UpgoSsO — Freedom of the Press (@FreedomofPress) January 26, 2022 Instead of acknowledging any of these facts, CNN and its host Dana Bash simply echoed the lies of the DHS secretary. And CNN was not the only major media outlet that spread this US government disinformation. The New York Times amplified the same lies from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The newspaper-of-recored published an article on May 2 titled “Partisan Fight Breaks Out Over New Disinformation Board,” which was really a long-winded defense of Washington’s de facto Ministry of Truth. The Times quoted Mayorkas’ claim, “We in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens.” The top media outlet did not push back against this US government disinformation, or point out that its own reporting had shown this claim to be false. The New York Times echoes the false claim that DHS does not spy on American, without any pushback The Times article was co-written by Steven Lee Myers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Kanno-Youngs had in fact authored the June 2020 New York Times article revealing that the Department of Homeland Security deployed helicopters, airplanes, and drones to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters in 15 cities. Yet less than two years after acknowledging this fact, Kanno-Youngs and his colleagues at the Times had returned to carrying water for DHS and amplifying its false claims. The Times reprinted the comments Mayorkas’ made on CNN insisting that the Disinformation Governance Board is needed to counter supposed “disinformation from Russia, China, Iran.” Mayorkas said the board will censor “disinformation that creates a threat to the security of the homeland.” Both the CNN and New York Times reports gave the false impression that only conservative Republicans are opposed to the Disinformation Governance Board. In fact many journalists and activists on the left are deeply opposed to this de facto Ministry of Truth. But these top media outlets deceptively portrayed the controversy as simply another battle in a US liberal-conservative culture war. There was deep irony in the New York Times publishing blatant US government disinformation in an article warning about the “threat” of disinformation supposedly spread by Russia, China, and Iran. In his interview on CNN, Mayorkas claimed, “The board does not have any operational authority or capability. What it will do is gather together best practices in addressing the threat of disinformation from foreign state adversaries, from the cartels, and disseminate those best practices to the operators that have been executing in addressing this threat for years.” This appeared to be the DHS director’s roundabout way of saying that the board will pressure social media platforms and Big Tech corporations to censor what it calls “disinformation.” DHS can thus claim that it is not directly censoring people, that it is instead private companies censoring them, while failing to mention that they are doing so under US government pressure. Mayorkas also referred to the director of the Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, as “eminently qualified, a renowned expert in the field of disinformation.” In reality, Jankowicz is an avowed cold warrior who smears independent anti-war US media outlets as supposed “Russian disinfo,” and has called WikiLeaks “scum.” The authoritarian Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that oversaw the War on Terror created a “Disinformation Governance Board,” led by information warrior Nina Jankowicz, who smears independent US media as “Russian disinfo” and called @WikiLeaks "scum"https://t.co/V7T9XnIlBI — Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) May 3, 2022 Multipolarista documented how Jankowicz got her start professionally running regime-change operations targeting Russia for CIA front the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a branch of the US government’s infamous National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In its report defending the DHS disinformation board, the New York Times euphemistically claimed the NDI and NED “promote democratic governance abroad.” In reality, these US government bodies exist to fund opposition groups and destabilize foreign countries targeted by Washington for regime change. The NED’s own co-founder admitted that the organization is a CIA cutout. In 2016, Jankowicz described herself as “someone who has made a career in democracy assistance.” She later rebranded as a “disinformation expert” after the election of Donald Trump. Jankowicz has gone out of her way to target independent American journalists who criticize US foreign policy, trying to link them to Russia to justify censoring them. DHS Secretary Mayorkas, for his part, concluded his interview with CNN emphasizing that the Joe Biden administration has continued the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigration. “Our border is not open,” he stressed. When asked what his message was to migrants and refugees, Mayorkas emphasized, “Do not come.”

Write an article about: Despite Biden’s claims, Gaza health ministry death toll is accurate, scientific studies show. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Gaza, Israel, Palestine, The Lancet

US President Biden criticized Gaza’s health ministry, but its statistics on Israel’s killings of Palestinians are accurate, according to peer-reviewed articles in top medical journal The Lancet. The death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza reported by the Palestinian health ministry is accurate, according to two peer-reviewed studies by scientific experts published in top medical journal The Lancet. As of December 18, Israel had killed 19,453 Palestinians in Gaza, the ministry reported. Two-thirds of the deaths were children (7,729) and women (5,153). United Nations bodies, human rights organizations, and major media outlets have often used these statistics, because they have a history of being accurate. “International organizations including the United Nations usually rely on these same figures as they are seen as the best available”, the Washington Post acknowledged. “Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements”, the prominent US newspaper wrote. Israel has claimed, without any evidence, that Gaza’s health ministry is untrustworthy, because it is supposedly run by the political party Hamas. (In reality, the Gaza health ministry is partially funded by and linked to Hamas’ political rival, the Palestinian Authority, based in the Occupied West Bank.) The US government has echoed Israel’s disinformation. President Joe Biden said in an October 25 press conference, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed… I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”. Despite Biden’s criticism, HuffPost revealed that the US State Department uses the Palestinian health ministry figures in its own reports on Gaza. In one of such memos, a US official acknowledged that, if anything, “The numbers are likely much higher, according to the UN and NGOs reporting on the situation”. This was exactly the conclusion reached by scientific experts at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. The peer-reviewed article “No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health”, published in leading medical journal The Lancet on December 6, noted that the Palestinian institution “has historically reported accurate mortality data”. In past conflicts, discrepancies between Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) data and independent United Nations figures were only between 1.5% and 3.8%. Gaza MoH data were also quite similar to figures from Israel’s own Foreign Ministry, with a difference of just around 8%. Scholars Benjamin Q Huynh, Elizabeth T Chin, and Paul B Spiegel wrote that they “found no evidence of inflated rates”. Scientific experts from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine came to a similar conclusion in their own peer-reviewed article in The Lancet, published on November 26. For this previous study, scholars Zeina Jamaluddine, Francesco Checchi, and Oona M R Campbell reviewed death statistics from October 7 to 26, analyzing the list of 7028 deaths compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health. Out of the 7028 names, only one had a duplicated ID number, one had an implausible age, and just 281 lacked an ID number. The experts concluded that the data were reasonable, writing, “We consider it implausible that these patterns would arise from data fabrication”. They also reviewed MoH figures from previous wars in Gaza, and found them to be reliable. “Assessments of Palestinian MoH data validity in the 2014 conflict had shown them to be accurate, and we saw no obvious reason to doubt the validity of the data between Oct 7 and Oct 26, 2023”, the scholars stated. If anything, they concluded that the Gaza MoH figures may be rather conservative. “The death reporting system currently being used by the Palestinian MoH was assessed in 2021, 2 years before the current war, and was found to under-report mortality by 13%”, they wrote, adding that “it is plausible that the current Palestinian MoH source also under-reports mortality because of the direct effect of the war on data capture and reporting, for example by omitting people whose bodies could not be recovered or brought to morgues”.

Write an article about: FBI praises Martin Luther King – after blackmailing and threatening to ‘neutralize’ him. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Black liberation, civil rights, FBI, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, MLK, NYPD, racism

While the FBI now praises Martin Luther King Jr. for PR, it previously plotted to “neutralize” him, blackmailing the civil rights leader, attacking MLK as a “filthy, abnormal animal.” On Marin Luther King Jr. day, this January 17, the FBI tweeted a statement honoring the memory of the late civil rights leader. While the police agency now praises MLK, it previously plotted to “neutralize” him, blackmailing King and calling him a “filthy, abnormal animal.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” This #MLKDay2022 and every day, the #FBI remains dedicated to service and committed to protecting our communities. pic.twitter.com/HDpq9iWXWP — FBI (@FBI) January 17, 2022 There are mountains of evidence from the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) showing the FBI blackmailing and threatening MLK. The FBI even wrote a letter to King revealing that it had spied on the civil right leader and threatened to expose his extra-marital affairs if he did not commit suicide. A jury in a civil suit brought by the family of Martin Luther King Jr. found US “governmental agencies” were part of a conspiracy to murder the civil rights leader, as the New York Times reported in 1999. And it was not just King. A former undercover police officer, named Raymond “Ray” Wood, wrote a letter on his deathbed saying the FBI and NYPD helped to assassinate Black revolutionary Malcolm X. “I participated in actions that in hindsight were deplorable and detrimental to the advancement of my own Black people. My actions on behalf of the New York City Police Department were done under duress and fear,” Wood said.

Write an article about: Terror attacks on Cuba’s embassy fueled by aggressive US policy. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Cuba, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, sanctions, terrorism

Cuba’s embassy in Washington has been attacked two times in three years, and no one has been held accountable. This reflects the long history of US-backed terrorism against Cuba, and six decades of illegal economic warfare. Cuba’s embassy in Washington, DC was attacked with two Molotov cocktails on the night of September 24. This was the second terrorist attack against the embassy in the past three years. The US Secret Service responded at around 8pm, but did not apprehend any perpetrators. The explosives hit the front side of the embassy, which is already scarred with AK-47 bullet holes from a shooting attack in April 2020 — an emblem of the deadly risk it takes to be a Cuban diplomat in the United States, and of the long history of US-backed terrorism against the country. The moment when the terrorist stands in front on the @EmbaCubaUS, lights up the Molotov cocktails & hurls them against the façade of the mission. This footage was handed over to US authorities. Original camera video of the Cuban diplomatic mission in Washington#NoAlTerrorismo pic.twitter.com/c9VWJsQ0xU — Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) September 26, 2023 The Molotov cocktail attack occurred the same day that a Cuban delegation led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel returned to Havana, after participating in the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). It also came soon after Cuba chaired a historic summit of the G77+China. The attack was clearly an act of violent intimidation against Cuban diplomats, and a reaction to the powerful show of solidarity by hundreds of people in the US throughout President Díaz-Canel’s visit to New York. An emotional moment as Cuban President joined our rally to #LetCubaLive “Thank you for your solidarity, thank you for your support, and thank you for being here with us!” —@DiazCanelB CUBA SÍ, BLOQUEÓ NO! pic.twitter.com/ttgWcEY0Bz — The People's Forum (@PeoplesForumNYC) September 22, 2023 Following the second terror attack, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez announced that no embassy staff had been injured and an investigation was underway. Initially, the US government was eerily quiet about the attack on a foreign embassy just blocks from the White House. The night of September 25, a day after the attack – and hours after about 100 DC locals rallied outside the embassy in support of Cuba – US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan finally released a statement condemning the attack and agreeing to an investigation. Speakers at the rally called not only for an investigation into the attacks, but also an end to the illegal, six-decade US blockade – which virtually every country on Earth votes against each year in the United Nations. The UN General Assembly vote against the US blockade of Cuba, on November 3, 2022 Cuba is a victim of US-backed terrorism, yet the Joe Biden administration has continued Donald Trump’s designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” (SSOT), as part of an economic war against 11 million Cuban people. In a statement, Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put blame for this latest attack directly on the US government’s aggressive policy and hateful discourse: Anti-Cuban groups resort to terrorism due to the moral bankruptcy of their hatred against Cuba and the impunity they believe they enjoy. On a regular basis, in the official exchanges between the Embassy and the Department of State, it has been warned that the permissive behavior of United States law enforcement agencies in the face of violent actions can encourage the commission of acts of this nature. It is the second violent attack against the diplomatic headquarters in Washington, since April 2020. On the night of that day, an individual of Cuban origin, standing in the middle of the street in the US capital and using an assault rifle, fired a burst of thirty cartridges against the building. Fortunately, there were no injuries to the personnel inside the building on that occasion, but there were considerable material damages. After three years, the perpetrator still awaits trial and the United States government has refused to classify the incident as a terrorist act. … The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemns this terrorist action and hopes that the United States Government will act in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, in the interest of avoiding the repetition of these events. … It also warns against the double standards used by the US government’s supposed commitment against terrorism. The CIA and FBI have created, financed, and trained hundreds of anti-Cuba terrorist groups since the triumph of the revolution in 1959. At least 3,478 Cubans have been killed and 2,099 have been disabled by US-sponsored terrorism since the revolution. This includes 581 attacks against the country’s diplomatic representations abroad, according to Cuba’s Center for Historical Investigations of State Security (CIHSE). At their peak violence, in 1974, Cuban exiles accounted for 45% of all terrorist bombings on the planet. The most notorious of these terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, bombed a Cuban plane and numerous hotels. They were trained by the CIA and exonerated by the US government for their crimes. They died peacefully in Florida, celebrated as local heroes by the extreme anti-Castro community. As Cuban Foreign Minister Rodriguez wrote after the latest attack, “The anti-Cuban groups resort to terrorism when feeling they enjoy impunity, something that Cuba has repeatedly warned the US authorities about.” The weak response to the April 2020 shooting on the embassy is exactly what enabled an attack to happen again, the Cubans say. The perpetrator of that previous attack, 42-year-old Cuban immigrant Alexander Alazo Baró, has yet to be convicted. “The author of that barbaric act that machine-gunned our diplomatic headquarters … is still awaiting sentencing,” wrote leading Cuban diplomat Johana Tablada, deputy director general of the Foreign Ministry’s US Division. “Cuba is awaiting condemnation from the US government, which did not even call this terrorist act by its name.” Cuban journalist El Necio reported, “The defendant is expected to face a mandatory sentence of no less than 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and up to three years of supervised release … However, the defense seeks to prove a clinical picture of schizophrenia. There is still no sentence for this case, but the attacker is in preventive detention.” (+ detalles) ⤴️ – Se produjeron daños materiales en la fachada y los interiores: paredes, columnas, ventanas, escalera y lámpara interior, el asta de la bandera, la reja y la estatua del Héroe Nacional de Cuba, José Martí, frente a la sede (ver fotos) – El informe policial lo… pic.twitter.com/XIiV23Ih4p — El Necio (@ElNecio_Cuba) September 25, 2023 At 2:05am on April 30, 2020, Alazo Baró parked his truck 16th Street NW, in front of the Cuban embassy. He approached the fence, yelled and desecrated a Cuban flag, then proceeded to fire 32 shots from an AK-47 at the embassy. None of the dozen staff inside were injured, but easily could have been. The outside and interior of the building are completely riddled with bullet holes. Now the embassy has bulletproof doors. Upon his arrest, Alazo Baró claimed he was motivated by his hatred of Cuba and fear of assassination by the Cuban government and alleged criminal groups. At his trial, said he “hated Cubans” and would have shot the ambassador if he saw him, because he was the “enemy.” After weeks of silence from the United States following the 2020 attack, Cuban Foreign Minister Rodríguez publicly denounced Washington’s lack of cooperation in the investigation, accusing the US of failing to “fulfill its obligation to prevent this attack, of which it received sufficient signals.” US media and law enforcement dismissed Alazo Baró as a lone wolf, but he was a vocal Trump supporter linked to extremist anti-Cuba groups in Miami. Alazo Baró had left Cuba in 2003 to settle in Mexico on a religious visa. He then immigrated to the US, crossing the southern border in 2010. He lived first in Florida, then in Texas, and later in Pennsylvania. Like many Cubans permanently residing abroad, he maintained a normal relationship with Cuba, and visited eight times after leaving, last in 2015. He never exhibited any concerning behavior during his returns to Cuba or interactions with Cuban authorities. However, during his time in Miami, Alazo Baró associated with the Doral Jesus Worship Center, a religious center and hot spot of aggression and violence against Cuba. He befriended Pastor Frank López, a vocal extremist who has close relationships with anti-Cuba hawks like Florida Representative Mario Díaz-Balart and Senator Marco Rubio. According to Facebook posts, Alazo Baró also befriended members of the congregation who advocated using drones to kill Raúl Castro and President Miguel Díaz-Canel. In February 2019, a year before the AK-47 terror attack on the embassy, Vice President Mike Pence spoke at the Doral Jesus Worship Center alongside Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Senators Rubio and Rick Scott, and Representative Díaz-Balart. Their remarks showed utter contempt for Cuba and Venezuela, which Díaz-Balart said were suffering from “the same cancer.” President Trump also spoke at the church in July 2020. #US President @realDonaldTrump will speak today at the Doral Jesus Worship Center, involved in instigation to violence and #terrorism against #Cuba, frequented by the attacker who shot against our embassy in Washington with an assault rifle. Will he condemn that action? pic.twitter.com/71EkgG802k — Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) July 10, 2020 In March 2020, a month before the attack, Alazo Baró was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, diagnosed with delusional disorder, and prescribed medication. He already had a license to carry and, after being medically discharged, he acquired the AK-47 rifle. Two weeks before the attack, Alazo Baró visited the embassy to scope out the target. Cuba’s Foreign Affairs Ministry called for the US to investigate these links between the shooter and anti-Cuba leaders. Cuba questions how Alazo Baró was able to purchase an assault rifle with such ease, and then travel around doing reconnaissance at the site of the attack. After the shooting, the embassy repaired the shattered glass and installed bulletproof doors, but Cuban officials decided to leave most of the bullet holes in place, marking them with plaques, so that this act of violence and intimidation can never be forgotten. Meanwhile, the US government and media remain disturbingly quiet about these acts of terrorism in the heart of the capital. Cuba’s Foreign Ministry argued the attacks on the embassy could not be seen as separate, but rather as a direct result “of the permanent instigation of violence by American politicians and anti-Cuban extremist groups that have made this type of attacks their livelihood,” in a hostile political climate which heightened during the Trump administration. Clearly this hostility against Cuba did not end with Trump, but rather continues under Biden, as shown by the second attack. Biden has upheld nearly every one of the hundreds of additional sanctions Trump designed to strangle the Cuban economy, including by renewing the designation of Cuba as a so-called “state sponsor of terrorism.” Despite US-Cuba cooperation on migration, drug-trafficking, and counter-terrorism, and despite Biden’s campaign promises to return to Obama-era rapprochement with Cuba, his administration has carried on Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” and continues to fund $20 million each year to groups that attack and destabilize the Cuban government. Cuba has received messages of support from Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, and other allies. Cuba also saw an outpouring of solidarity from the US people, following a week of actions against the blockade and in support of Cuba during the UNGA. On September 23, the night before the attack, Cuban President Díaz-Canel rallied with 900 people in New York City for the solidarity event “Voices of Dignity: People vs Blockades”. As a leader of Cuban-America solidarity group Puentes de Amor, Carlos Lazo, wrote after the attack, “It is sad and disturbing that while the Cuban president advocated yesterday, in front of hundreds of Americans, for the construction of bridges of love between Cuba and the United States, today, in Washington D.C., a terrorist launched two explosives against the Cuban embassy.” On September 25, local supporters gathered outside the Cuban embassy to show solidarity with the country, calling for the US to investigate these attacks as acts of terrorism, and demanding an end to the US economic war against Cuba. Against the hateful attack of two Molotov cocktails thrown at our Embassy in #Washington, a wall of love, affection and support from loyal friends in solidarity with the Cuban people was erected. Hate will never defeat noble and genuine love. #CubaIsNotAlone pic.twitter.com/tD5wL7t0U6 — Sandra Yisel Ramírez (@carantosan) September 26, 2023 (Editor’s note: This article was updated soon after it was published on September 25 to include the statement from the White House and the newly released video footage of the second attack.)

Write an article about: Puerto Ricans rise up against US-imposed austerity, protest poverty wages. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

austerity, colonialism, neoliberalism, Puerto Rico

Puerto Rican public workers are protesting the neoliberal policies imposed by the US government’s unelected Financial Oversight and Management Board. A professor speaks about their demands for higher wages and better social programs. This February, Puerto Rican public workers have been holding large protests against the neoliberal policies imposed by the US government’s unelected Financial Oversight and Management Board. Multipolarista spoke with Ángel Rodríguez Rivera, president of the Puerto Rican Association of University Professors. He described how teachers are rising up, after the minimum wage has not increased in 13 years. You can watch or listen to the interview below:

Write an article about: UN experts: US sanctions violate Iranians’ human rights. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Alena Douhan, Iran, sanctions, United Nations

Top United Nations experts wrote a letter to the United States government, emphasizing that its illegal unilateral sanctions on Iran violate the human rights of the Iranian people, calling for them to “be eased or lifted completely.” Top United Nations experts have criticized US government sanctions for violating the human rights of Iranians. They made it clear that the unilateral coercive measures that the United States has imposed on Iran violate international law. A group of UN special rapporteurs stressed that these sanctions have a “negative impact” on “the enjoyment of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in the Islamic Republic of Iran and on the right to health and the right to life.” Violating Iranians’ right to life is a roundabout diplomatic way of saying that US sanctions are killing them. The UN experts sent a formal letter to the United States condemning its sanctions and requesting that it investigate and remove them. The special rapporteurs expressed their “serious concerns about the U.S. sanctions as a significant contributing factor in Iran’s environmental degradation, which negatively affects Iranian people’s rights to a healthy and sustainable environment, to health, to life, and to an adequate standard of living.” They added that “U.S. sanctions impede the enjoyment of the right to education” in Iran. Washington constantly accuses Tehran of violating its people’s rights. The US government also publicly claims to support the struggle against climate change and pollution, and on paper it recognizes that people have the right to a clean environment. But Washington’s “sanctions against Iran contradict what seems to be a clear US position on this matter,” the UN experts said. “It is time for sanctions that impede Iran’s ability to improve the environment and reduce the ill effects on health and life, to be eased or lifted completely so that Iranians can access their right to a clean environment, the right to health and to life, and other rights associated with favourable environmental conditions,” they insisted. #US sanctions contribute to environmental harm and prevent all people in #Iran, including migrants and Afghan refugees, from fully enjoying their rights to health and life and a clean environment – UN experts ? https://t.co/OtChnuqRWW pic.twitter.com/WPSsSAdgGv — UN Special Procedures (@UN_SPExperts) December 20, 2022 The UN special rapporteurs noted: Since 1979, the United States of America has imposed a broad and complex network of stringent financial, economic, and trade sanctions against Iran, including a comprehensive trade ban, significant measures to isolate Iran from the international financial and commercial system, as well as secondary sanctions against non-U.S. parties that engage in dealings with Iran. Some (but not all) of these sanctions were removed or eased in 2015, when US President Barack Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement with Iran that was also joined by the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, France, China, and Russia), Germany, and the European Union. In 2018, US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, in violation of a UN Security Council resolution, and subsequently imposed more sanctions on Iran, in clear contravention of international law. The UN experts noted that the Trump administration not only re-imposed “sanctions that had been lifted or eased under the JCPOA”; it also “introduced additional measures. These sanctions targeted Iran’s energy, shipbuilding, shipping and financial sectors, and included the listing of more than 700 individuals, entities, aircraft and vessels.” Unilateral sanctions violate a broad scope of human rights including the right to favorable environment negatively affecting right to health and right to life of all people in the country https://t.co/WJK4toNXZy — Alena Douhan (@AlenaDouhan) December 20, 2022 US threats of secondary sanctions on foreign countries and firms that do business with Iran, as well as overcompliance, make the unilateral coercive measures even more punishing, the UN special rapporteurs wrote: The full impact of the U.S. sanctions in Iran is magnified by considerable overcompliance on a global scale resulting from complex, time-consuming and/or costly compliance procedures; extraterritorial enforcement and fears of penalties for inadvertent breaches; and sanctions-related obstacles to financial transactions for goods and services that the sanctions do not prohibit. The primary author of this letter, the top UN expert on sanctions, Alena Douhan, has previously released reports detailing the catastrophic impact that illegal US sanctions have had on civilians in Venezuela and Syria. She said these “outrageous” US sanctions are “suffocating” millions of civilians and “may amount to crimes against humanity.” The UN's top expert said “outrageous” Western sanctions on Syria are “suffocating” millions of civilians, and “may amount to crimes against humanity.” The US-EU-Israel-Gulf proxy war on Syria made its economy shrink by 90%. 90% of Syrians live in poverty https://t.co/XtHCuCHhYP — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 12, 2022 The letter concerning US sanctions on Iran was signed by the following UN human rights experts:

Write an article about: In COINTELPRO, FBI used anarchism to ‘disrupt left’, attack Vietnam & USSR. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

anarchism, COINTELPRO, FBI, police, Soviet Union, Vietnam, Vietnam War

In COINTELPRO, the FBI created an anarchist underground zine, boasting “the anarchist point of view is the most disruptive element in the New Left” and could be used to attack Vietnam and the USSR US police used anarchist talking points and ideology to “disrupt” the left and demonize Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other targets of imperialism, according to internal FBI documents released through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. “The anarchists point of view is the most disruptive element in the New Left and should be capitalized on in the most confusing ways,” the FBI wrote. In its Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which aimed to destabilize and destroy the socialist, anti-imperialist left in the United States, the FBI realized that anarchism and other ultra-left movements could be an effective weapon. The FBI impersonated anarchists and even created its own underground newspaper or zine. The FBI’s anarchist publication was titled The Workshop. It proposed to base the newspaper in Washington, DC, with correspondents across the United States. In internal documents, the FBI stressed that “the publisher and the writers should be strictly anarchist.” Why? Because the cops recognized that “the anarchist position could take any direction, such as an attack on Vietnam policies as well as an attack on the Soviets in Czechoslovakia.” “The anarchists point of view is the most disruptive element in the New Left and should be capitalized on in the most confusing ways,” the feds added. The FBI recognized that anarchist ideology could be used to de-politicize the leftist struggle, writing that the publication would “reach wider circulation if it were not so political as to be tied to dogma such as the line of MAO or CHE GUEVARA.” In the same vein of de-politicizing the struggle, the FBI also recognized it could weaponize culture against the left. It insisted that the anarchist paper should cover lurid topics, just as VICE magazine made its name. The cops wrote that “the newsletter should also cover vigorously such aspects of the New Left as underground cinema, music, sex, dope, humor and so on,” in order to “increase reader interest.” The FBI also planned to use the anarchist newspaper to attack leftist Black nationalist and pan-Africanist leaders, singling out Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). These internal FBI documents were disclosed by Robert Skvarla. He also credited researcher Dale M. Brumfield. The first proposal, The Workshop, adopted the language of anarchists because their "point of view [was] the most disruptive element in the New Left" and could be used to target anyone. The FBI intended to attack figures like Stokely Carmichael. pic.twitter.com/lKNyIhCA1W — Robert Skvarla (@RobertSkvarla) October 15, 2021 Skvarla showed that the FBI created another underground newspaper in 1968, titled Armageddon News. This was used to attack and destabilize the movement against the US war on Vietnam. “We students are concerned for the need for truth within our antiwar movement,” the feds wrote, before going on to demonize communists. That same year, in 1968, it produced a real fake underground paper: Armageddon News. The paper was ostensibly based out of the University of Indiana Bloomington, allowing the FBI to use it to astroturf attacks on left-wing activists on campus. pic.twitter.com/InEVdJG1OS — Robert Skvarla (@RobertSkvarla) October 15, 2021 The FBI office in San Antonio wrote in a memo to the bureau’s director that “steps can be taken to cause disruption within the ranks of the New Left.” And a third paper, The Longhorn Tale, was distributed by the San Antonio field office at the University of Texas at Austin. The paper essentially doxed SDS activists deemed "disruptive." pic.twitter.com/80bCEV7bD3 — Robert Skvarla (@RobertSkvarla) October 15, 2021 The feds also created a Maoist, staunchly anti-Soviet newspaper called Chevara News. This later turned into a right-wing, Ayn Rand-adoring objectivist publication under the name The Rational Observer. Ah fuck, forgot the funniest one. A Maoist, pro-Che paper initially called Chevara News somehow morphed into an objectivist rag called The Rational Observer. pic.twitter.com/8zrwuAfAvg — Robert Skvarla (@RobertSkvarla) October 15, 2021 This is just one piece of evidence showing how US cops and feds use anarchism and ultra-left ideology to disrupt the socialist movement and disguise imperialist talking points as “left-wing.”

Write an article about: Los bancos de EEUU se enriquecieron durante la pandemia de Covid-19, mientras millones murieron. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

bancos, Covid-19, economía, pandemia, Wall Street

La pandemia de Covid-19 ha matado a más de 854.000 estadounidenses. El gobierno de EEUU abandonó a su gente – pero aseguró que la banca se enriqueció. Los capitalistas ganaron $5 millones de millones. Más de 5,55 millones de personas alrededor del mundo han muerto por el Covid-19. Sólo en Estados Unidos, por lo menos 854.000 habitantes han perdido sus vidas. Y la pandemia ha destruido el sustento de muchos más, llevando a la bancarrota a familias, devastando comunidades. Mientras tanto, los milmillonarios se han enriquecido. Los 10 capitalistas más ricos de la tierra duplicaron su riqueza durante la pandemia, al tiempo que los ingresos del 99% de la humanidad bajaron. Y la prensa financiera prácticamente se está jactando. El medio de comunicación Reuters publicó un informe chocantemente franco que admite que los grandes bancos de EEUU han ganado muchísimo dinero durante esta crisis sanitaria mundial. Con el título “Los bancos de Wall Street ven ‘nuevo normal’ en ingresos del comercio”, el reportaje fue re-publicado en la página oficial de la bolsa Nasdaq. El artículo se jacta de que “una inyección masiva de efectivo en los mercados de capitales por parte de la Reserva Federal [de EEUU] condujo a una liquidez y una actividad comercial sin precedentes durante la pandemia, ya que los inversores buscaban oportunidades para sacar provecho”. Luego, el informe dice alegremente, “Los bancos con grandes mesas de negociación como Goldman Sachs GS.N, JPMorgan JPM.N y Morgan Stanley MS.N han sido los mayores beneficiarios de la volatilidad del mercado, lo que ha permitido a los negociantes disfrutar de su mejor período desde la crisis financiera de 2007-09”. Discutí esta “inyección masiva de efectivo en los mercados de capitales por parte de la Reserva Federal” en una entrevista (en inglés) con el economista Michael Hudson. La Reserva Federal rescató discretamente a los grandes bancos en septiembre de 2019 con $4,5 millones de millones en préstamos de emergencia, que, según Hudson, parecen haber violado la ley. Y esto es además de los millones de millones de dólares más que el Tesoro de EEUU invirtió en el sector financiero. El informe de Reuters continúa, citando al director ejecutivo del banco Goldman Sachs, David M. Solomon, quien dijo a los analistas, “Ninguno de nosotros podría haber anticipado el entorno que hemos vivido durante los últimos dos años y particularmente el entorno de este año, que obviamente fue un viento de cola significativo para nuestro negocio”. Ojo, el director ejecutivo de Goldman Sachs no estaba diciendo que el banco no podría haber anticipado los millones de muertes; más bien, estaba diciendo que Wall Street no podría haber anticipado disfrutar de sus mayores ganancias desde la crisis financiera de hace 14 años. Solomon no es el único. El director financiero de JPMorgan Chase, Jeremy Barnum, señaló que 2020 y 2021, la cima de la pandemia, fueron “años récord”. El artículo de Reuters citó a un analista del banco de inversión JMP Securities, Devin Ryan, quien dijo, “El nivel del 2020 y 2021 es bastante alto”. Las actitudes de estos banqueros lo dejan en claro: el capitalismo es un culto a la muerte. Mientras millones de personas morían en una pandemia global histórica, los oligarcas capitalistas orquestaron una transferencia ascendente de riqueza masiva. “Los diez hombres más ricos del mundo han duplicado con creces su fortuna, que ha pasado de 700 000 millones de dólares a 1,5 billones [millones de millones] de dólares (a un ritmo de 15 000 dólares por segundo, o lo que es lo mismo, 1300 millones de dólares al día) durante los primeros dos años de una pandemia que habría deteriorado los ingresos del 99 % de la humanidad y que ha empujado a la pobreza a más de 160 millones de personas más”, informó Oxfam. Los oligarcas capitalistas ganaron $5 millones de millones de dólares durante la pandemia, el “mayor incremento de la riqueza de los milmillonarios desde que se tienen registros”, dijo Oxfam. La organización humanitaria calculó que la desigualdad contribuye a la muerte de por lo menos 21.000 personas cada día — una persona cada cuatro segundos. La derecha de las Américas ha advertido histéricamente sobre el “autoritarismo del Covid” y un inminente “estado biomédico”, pero la realidad es que Estados Unidos, su gran modelo político, ya es en gran medida la distopía libertaria con la que han soñado los oligarcas capitalistas — han invertido una gran cantidad de dinero para crear este sistema ultra-neoliberal. La ideología dominante de EEUU es cada hombre por si mismo, perro come perro. Esto se refleja claramente en la respuesta del gobierno estadounidense a la mayor crisis sanitaria en un siglo. Esta estrategia de laissez-faire ha sido bipartidista. Tanto con el ex presidente Donald Trump como con el mandatario actual Joe Biden, el gobierno federal de EEUU básicamente no ha hecho nada sustantivo, dejando que cada estado y cada ciudad del país decida su propio destino. La Casa Blanca de Biden dejó esto en claro, diciéndole a la gente que están solos. Y el Departamento de Salud y Servicios Humanos de EEUU les ha dicho a los hospitales que, a partir del 2 de febrero, ya no tienen que informar las muertes diarias del Covid-19 al gobierno federal. Biden afirmó que revertiría la inacción de Trump, pero su administración sólo está mirando, haciendo nada, mientras entre 2000 y 3000 norteamericanos mueren por día por el Covid-19. Sólo en el día del 18 de enero de 2022, 2990 personas en EEUU murieron del virus. Las desastrosas consecuencias de esta estrategia libertaria son obvias para todo el mundo: al menos 854.000 muertes del Covid-19 en Estados Unidos, según estadísticas oficiales. Este es un nivel asombroso de pérdida humana, solo superado por el barbarismo del régimen de extrema derecha de Jair Bolsonaro en Brasil, que ha supervisado 622,000 muertes por Covid-19 en una población de 213 millones. (Si Brasil hubiera implementado las mismas políticas, o sea la falta de ellas, con la población de EEUU, 335 millones, tendría 978.000 muertes por Covid-19.) Mientras tanto, en la República Popular China continental, con una población de 1,400 millones, ha habido menos de 5.000 muertes. En 2021, solo hubo dos muertes por el Covid-19 en China continental. Dos. Si Estados Unidos tuviera la misma población que China, estaríamos hablando de 3,6 millones de muertos por Covid-19. Pero la diferencia es que la banca de China es propiedad del estado, y es el gobierno chino el que controla el sector financiero, no los bancos los que controlan el estado, como lo hacen en Estados Unidos. Por lo tanto, es difícil para las élites en China enriquecerse mientras sus compatriotas mueren, como lo hacen los banqueros en la gran “democracia” estadounidense.

Write an article about: ‘Western dominance has ended’, EU foreign-policy chief admits, warning of ‘West against the Rest’ geopolitics. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

EU, European Union, Gaza, General Assembly, Global South, Josep Borrell, Sahel, Ukraine, United Nations

The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, admitted that the “era of Western dominance has indeed definitively ended”. He warned that the EU must not divide the world into “the West against the Rest”, as “many in the ‘Global South’ accuse us of ‘double standards’”. Europe’s top diplomat has acknowledged that the “era of Western dominance has indeed definitively ended”. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, wrote this in a blog post on the official website of the EU’s diplomatic service on February 25. “If the current global geopolitical tensions continue to evolve in the direction of ‘the West against the Rest’, Europe’s future risks to be bleak”, he warned. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, along with the anti-colonial uprisings in Africa’s Sahel region, have “significantly increased this risk” of Europe becoming geopolitically irrelevant, Borrell said, lamenting that “Russia has managed to take advantage of the situation”. The European foreign-policy chief revealed that “improving our relations with the ‘Global South'” is one of ” the four main tasks on EU’s geopolitical agenda”. “Many in the ‘Global South’ accuse us of ‘double standards'”, he confessed. Borrell is known for sporadically making frank comments, admitting inconvenient truths that most European diplomats leave unsaid. In 2022, the EU foreign-policy chief confessed, “Our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy and market”, with “cheap energy coming from Russia” and “access to the big China market” as the cornerstone of the European economy. However, Borrell’s insistence that Europe must not divide the world into the “West against the Rest” was contradicted by his insistence in the same February 2024 article that the EU must expand its “cooperation with key partners, and in particular the US”. The top European diplomat wrote that “recent months have reminded us how important NATO remains to our collective defence”, calling to strengthen the US-led military bloc. In 2023, the influential think tank the European Council on Foreign Relations published a white paper titled “The art of vassalisation”. It warned of “Europe becoming an American vassal”, noting how the war in Ukraine had “revealed Europeans’ profound dependence on the US”. The EU’s foreign-policy chief does recognize that it would be an error to pit “the West against the Rest”, yet he is simultaneously calling for deepening the trans-Atlantic alliance between the US and Europe, which only exacerbates that geopolitical division. On the global stage, Europe frequently joins the United States in violating the will of the international community. At the United Nations, the US and Europe often vote together, while the vast majority of member states, which are located in the Global South, vote against them. Source: Alastair Iain Johnston, “China in a World of Orders: Rethinking Compliance and Challenge in Beijing’s International Relations”, International Security (2019) The US only voted with the majority of the world at the UN General Assembly 32.7% of the time from 1983 to 2012. In 1988, just 15.4% of overall UNGA votes coincided with the US vote. Europe is the only region of the world that consistently votes with the US. In November 2023, the West voted against the vast majority of the world in UN General Assembly resolutions concerning democracy, human rights, cultural diversity, mercenaries, and unilateral coercive measures (sanctions). In April 2023, the West once again voted as a bloc against the other countries on the UN Human Rights Council, defending unilateral sanctions, which violate international law. In December 2022, the West voted against the rest of the planet in UN General Assembly votes calling for a new international economic order. West votes against democracy, human rights, cultural diversity at UN; promotes mercenaries, sanctions

Write an article about: US invites authoritarian far-right regimes to ‘Summit for Democracy’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Benjamin Netanyahu, China, Hungary, Imran Khan, India, Israel, Italy, Joe Biden, Narendra Modi, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Venezuela

The Joe Biden administration invited numerous authoritarian far-right leaders to the US State Department’s so-called “Summit for Democracy”, including Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Poland’s Andrzej Duda, India’s Narendra Modi, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and Pakistan’s coup regime. The US government organized a conference of its allies which it misleadingly called a “Summit for Democracy”, but which actually featured numerous anti-democratic, far-right regimes. The State Department invited 120 global leaders to participate in the summit on March 29 and 30. They did so virtually, via video calls. Several of the heads of state who spoke represent governments that even Western officials, corporate media outlets, and mainstream human rights organizations have admitted are authoritarian, including Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Andrzej Duda of Poland, and Narendra Modi of India. The Joe Biden administration also invited Pakistan’s unelected coup regime, which came to power following a US-backed regime-change operation against democratically elected Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022. (Islamabad, however, decided not to attend, as it faces mass protests and instability at home.) Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni participated in the summit as well. Meloni is a defender of former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. She started her political career as the leader of the youth wing of a fascist political party founded by war criminals from Mussolini’s regime. Meloni’s far-right political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) still uses the same symbols and colors of Mussolini’s fascist movement. An important leader of her party has a bust of the late dictator in his house, and was investigated for doing Nazi salutes. The Biden administration organized the first so-called “Summit for Democracy” in 2021, in attempt to unify US allies in a bloc to wage a new cold war on China and Russia, which were not invited to either summit. These intentions were made obvious when the US pressured all invitees to sign a joint statement denouncing Russia over the proxy war in Ukraine. The left-wing governments in Brazil and Mexico refused to support Washington’s denunciation of Moscow. For its part, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the summit as an attempt to “draw lines between countries in the world according to US criteria and interfere in their affairs based on US interests”, in a way that “reflects how arrogant, intolerant, selfish and domineering the US has always been, and how it contravenes and tramples on democracy as part of the common values of humanity”. The US government exposed its cynical political designs by inviting Ukraine and Taiwan to participate in the summit, despite the fact that Taiwan island is not a country, but rather a province of the People’s Republic of China. When the US government normalized relations with China in 1972, it signed the first of three communiqués, in which it legally recognized that Taiwan is part of China. Violating its formal diplomatic commitments, the Biden administration publicly illustrated Washington’s support for separatists in China’s Taiwan province by inviting them to both of the so-called “Summits for Democracy”. Ukraine’s leader Volodymy Zelensky spoke at the conference as well, in spite of his brutal attack on democracy at home. Zelensky’s regime has banned all communist and socialist parties, while imposing some of the most aggressive anti-worker legislation in the world, suspending collective bargaining rights and essentially making it illegal to form a union. Even the New York Times reluctantly acknowledged that Ukraine has imposed authoritarian control over the media. While Zelensky’s supporters maintain that this is necessary due to the ongoing war, his draconian crackdown began well before Russia invaded. In 2021, Zelensky’s regime banned critical media outlets deemed to be “pro-Russian”, while arbitrarily persecuting and arresting opposition politicians. Two NATO members were not invited to the so-called “Summit for Democracy”: Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey) and Hungary. This was clearly a politically motivated sign of disapproval by the Biden administration, because the two countries have tried to balance the West against Russia, maintaining good relations with both sides. The democratically elected socialist governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua were not invited either. Instead, Washington invited right-wing US-sponsored opposition activists from both Latin American countries, including Lesther Alemán, who played a major role in a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. Also participating in the summit was the notorious CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Washington has used to meddle in foreign countries all across the planet, organizing regime-change operations and funding “color revolutions”. As a key foreign-policy strategy, the Biden administration has weaponized rhetoric about “democracy” to advance US geopolitical interests. In his first State of the Union address in 2022, Biden claimed that Washington’s new cold war on China and Russia was a “battle between democracy and autocracies”. But European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said otherwise in a speech in October, criticizing the deceptive “democracies vs. authoritarians” framing. Top EU foreign-policy official Josep Borrell admitted the West’s new cold war on China & Russia is NOT a battle of “democracies vs authoritarians” He conceded: “On our side, there are a lot of authoritarian regimes” It's an economic conflict Full video: https://t.co/Ev3qLA5i2S pic.twitter.com/yKbyLBNIVI — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 29, 2022 “On our side, there are a lot of authoritarian regimes”, Borrell admitted. “We cannot say we are the democracies, and the ones which follow us are also democracies. That is not true”, added the top EU diplomat. Israel’s authoritarian far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at the US government’s 2023 “Summit for Democracy” One of the first speakers at Biden’s 2023 Summit for Democracy, as it opened on March 29, was the far-right leader of the Israeli apartheid regime, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has served as prime minister for more than 15 of the 27 years since 1996. Today, his far-right coalition government includes members of literal fascist parties. All major mainstream Western media outlets have acknowledged that Netanyahu’s regime is authoritarian, including the BBC, Washington Post, New York Times, AP, Guardian, and Foreign Affairs. In fact, Netanyahu spoke at Biden’s summit while mass protests were going on in Israel against his authoritarian regime. Israel’s most influential newspaper Haaretz – which is essentially the country’s equivalent of the New York Times, promoting a centrist liberal perspective – published an article warning, “‘Israel’s Government Has neo-Nazi Ministers. It Really Does Recall Germany in 1933′: Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman says he is astounded at how quickly Israel is hurtling toward fascism”. Poland’s authoritarian far-right President Andrzej Duda speaking at the US government’s 2023 “Summit for Democracy” Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” also featured the far-right president of Poland, Andrzej Duda. Many Western mainstream media outlets have admitted that Poland is run by an authoritarian regime. Even former US President Barack Obama stated in an interview on CNN in 2021 that NATO and EU members Poland and Hungary “now essentially have become authoritarian”. However, while Poland’s far-right authoritarian regime was invited to Biden’s “Summit for Democracy”, Hungary was not. The reason why is clear: Poland is virulently anti-Russia, so it was welcomed; whereas Hungary has tried to balance good relations with both the West and Russia, so it was the only EU member that was not invited. Mainstream NGOs that are routinely cited in the Western media to attack NATO’s adversaries have admitted that far-right authoritarianism is growing closer to home. The Civil Liberties Union for Europe – a major civil society organization that is similar to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the United States – warned that Poland and Hungary are increasingly authoritarian. Both are “seizing further control of the justice system, civil society and media, while cutting basic human rights and fuelling divisions by scapegoating migrants and other minority groups”. The Western government-funded International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) has warned that the Polish regime is violently cracking down on protesters and arbitrarily detaining anti-fascist activists, while allowing fascist extremists to use Nazi symbols. Duda’s far-right Law and Justice (PiS) party reportedly tapped the phones of opposition politicians and journalists to illegally spy on them. India’s authoritarian far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking at the US government’s 2023 “Summit for Democracy” Joining Netanyahu on the opening panel of Biden’s 2023 Summit for Democracy was India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi is a longtime member of a fascist paramilitary group, the RSS, whose early leaders were inspired by Nazi Germany, praising Adolf Hitler’s “purging the country of Semitic races” as a “good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by”. Before he became prime minister, Modi governed the state of Gujarat, where high school textbooks honored “Hitler, the Supremo” and the “Internal Achievements of Nazism”. As governor of Gujarat in 2002, Modi oversaw a massive pogrom, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed. (As prime minister, Modi censored a documentary exposing his role in the massacre.) India’s far-right ruling party, BJP, promotes an extreme Hindu-nationalist ideology that sees Muslims and other religious minorities as inferior, second- or third-class citizens, and heavily discriminates against them. Some of Modi’s political allies have openly called for overturning India’s secular constitution and turning the state into a “Hindu rashtra”: a theocratic regime. In fact, just a few days before Modi spoke at the so-called “Summit for Democracy”, his government launched an authoritarian attack on the leader of India’s political opposition, Rahul Gandhi. On March 23, Gandhi was expelled from India’s parliament and sentenced to two years in prison over fraudulent charges of defamation, due to a comment Gandhi made in 2019 in which he referred to Prime Minister Modi and his wealthy oligarch allies as “thieves”. The politically motivated charges seek to bar Gandhi from office, effectively paving the way for BJP and far-right Hindu nationalists to hand themselves victory in the upcoming 2024 election, without significant opposition. Many mainstream media outlets have acknowledged that Modi’s regime is authoritarian, including the New York Times, the BBC, NBC News, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, and The Diplomat. But Modi was eagerly welcomed at Biden’s “Summit for Democracy”, because the United States is desperate to recruit India for its new cold war on China, and hopes to weaken New Delhi’s positive relations with Russia. India is part of the BRICS system, but it is also a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, an anti-China military alliance led by the United States, known commonly as the “Asian NATO”. In fact, India joined BRICS before Modi came to power, under the previous government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, of the Indian National Congress party. Remember BRICS? Well, thanks to @jairbolsonaro and @narendramodi the B and the I both get that the C and the R are threats to their people. pic.twitter.com/JwL8E0uJte — Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 19, 2021 Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed that Washington had tried to use Modi in India and his far-right counterpart Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to disrupt and divide the BRICS system. Former diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar has cautioned that India is the weakest link in the BRICS system, because its government supports Washington’s “so-called ‘rules-based order’, which is a metaphor for the political ideology of the US as the dominant state and ‘lone superpower’ in the 1990s”. BRICS faces a paradox that, while it grows, it also fails internal conflicts, “and the main reason for this is India’s unwillingness to work with China as leaders of economic growth”, Bhadrakumar wrote. Modi’s “India feels uneasy that the centre of gravity in BRICS is poised to shift further to the left of centre”, he said, and, “Being an acolyte of the US-led ‘rules-based order’, India faces the spectre of isolation”. The United States sees these contradictions, and hopes to exploit them to its advantage. That explains why India was invited to the so-called “Summit for Democracy”, despite being overtly anti-democratic. The presence of so many authoritarian, far-right leaders clearly demonstrated the cynical political goals behind Washington’s Summit for Hypocrisy.

Write an article about: Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire with economist Michael Hudson. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, dollar, imperialism, Michael Hudson, Russia

Economist Michael Hudson discusses his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” and the financial motivations behind the US new cold war on China and Russia. Economist Michael Hudson discusses the update of his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” and the financial motivations behind the US new cold war on China and Russia. Hudson has published a new, third edition of his book Super Imperialism that updates his analysis for the 21st century, discussing the new cold war on China and Russia and the ongoing transition from a US dollar-dominated financialized system to a “multipolar de-dollarized economy.” Hudson explains how the strategy of US economic hegemony has evolved since World War One. BENJAMIN NORTON: Hello, everyone, this is Moderate Rebels live. I’m Ben Norton. As always, I’m joined by my co-host, Max Blumenthal. And today we have back one of our most popular guests, one of our favorite guests, Professor Michael Hudson. People probably know who he is. He is a prominent economist, a very unique thinker. He has written several books not only on economics, but also on history and human society. He’s an expert on balance of payments, and debt, and a lot of topics. And today we’re going to talk about a new edition of his book that was just published. We actually had Professor Hudson on over a year ago to talk about his legendary book Super Imperialism. He actually just published a new edition of it. You can see here, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. And he just published the third edition. It just came out. So we wanted to have him on to talk about why Professor Hudson updated this book that he published back in the 1970s. This is now the third edition. The second edition was published in 2002 or 2003, at the beginning of the so-called War on Terror. And I think it’s pretty appropriate, Professor Hudson, we can begin with this – I think it’s pretty appropriate that your first edition of Super Imperialism was published after Richard Nixon took the dollar off of gold in the early 1970s. And then the second edition was published after 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, which represents a kind of new phase of imperialism. And then finally, your third edition here was just published, and your new edition encompasses the new cold war. The final chapter talks about the increasing economic competition between the US on one side and China and Russia on the other side. And you talk about the move toward a “de-dollarized multi-polar economy.” So can you talk about the differences in the editions and how they reflect the changes in US super imperialism, the system that you described back in the 1970s? MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the first edition was published in September of 1972, 13 months after President Nixon took the dollar off gold. And everybody was worried that, oh, without gold, how are we going to control the world? How are we going to control Europe? Because we’re losing all the gold. Because the entire balance-of-payments deficit in the 1950s and the ’60s and early 70s came from military spending. And they thought that if you had to lose your gold stock, which was the source of world power, as a result of military spending, how can you control the world? Well, what I wrote was that there was a new means of controlling the world and going off gold had actually locked in America’s control, because now that it had forced other central banks not to buy gold, what were they going to do? All they could do was recycle the dollar surpluses they were getting into U.S. Treasury bonds. Because that’s what central banks bought; they would buy Treasury bonds. So then what I said was that all this deficit coming from the military spending abroad is going to be recycled to the United States by central banks who have to recycle their money into dollars, otherwise their currencies are going to go way up, and that will price their exports out of the market, and it’ll make their economies basically overvalued. So to keep down the value, they buy U.S. dollar securities, and America would not let some by big companies; it wouldn’t let them buy anything important, only U.S. Treasury bonds. So the irony is that the larger the balance-of-payments deficit became, the more money was recycled into financing the U.S. budget deficit, which also was largely military. Well, I thought that this was going to be a warning to other countries. And indeed, there was a very quick Spanish translation and Japanese translation. But the main purchases, as we’ve talked about a year ago, were the CIA and the Defense Department. Immediately Herman Kahn hired me to the Hudson Institute and gave a very large grant for me to explain to the government how imperialism was working. And the U.S. government used this as a how-to-do-it book. Well, it went out of print, and Pluto Press offered to make a new addition, but it had hundreds and hundreds of typographical errors, and I didn’t like the reset. And I was going to live with that until I began to work in China, 10 or 15 years ago, and the Chinese government wanted me to do a new version to upgrade it as a key to how they can de-dollarize. And from their point of view, they want to see how they can decouple not only from the United States, but from the West. They don’t look at there as being any competition between China and the United States, certainly not industrial competition. The United States decided it was going to de-industrialize, because its corporations could essentially hire cheaper labor abroad than they could hire in the United States. The United States has got so debt-oriented and so privatized. Since the Reagan Revolution, the American economy was Thatcher-ized, and that made it a high-cost economy. The cost of housing has gone way up. The cost of medical insurance has gone way up. The debt burden has gone way up. And America has now priced itself out of the market. So China and Russia look at America as an object lesson, as how do we avoid here having the dynamic that occurred in the United States. It doesn’t have anything to do with capitalism versus socialism or other isms. It has to do with the basic dynamics of debt. And China realizes that, ok, we’re going to do make our economy productive in the way that the United States and Germany did in the 19th century. It’s a mixed economy. And as a mixed economy, we’re going to have the government provide the basic utilities at a subsidized rate, instead of letting them be privatized, so that we can have a low-priced economy. And the most important public utility to China, as it was to Russia, is to keep money creation, banking, and credit in the public domain. So right now, you’ve seen the problems and the news about the Chinese company [Evergrande] getting into trouble. And in America, if the largest real estate corporation like BlackRock were to go under, that would bring down the banks; it would bring down everything. It doesn’t doesn’t have a ripple in China, because the the debts are owed to the government, and the government can simply write down the debt. It can decide what to do, to protect the home buyers who put money into buying apartments low. It can tax away the land rent to prevent the housing from being essentially financialized. So China is trying to de-financialize its real estate, de-financialize its industry. It’s not a rivalry with the United States; it’s a rejection of the whole neoliberal structure that the United States has put in place. And what I discuss and Super Imperialism is how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created as a means of imposing a neoliberal, anti-government structure on the world to prevent other countries from regulating their industry or from regulating their agriculture. The function of the World Bank basically was to make Third World countries, the Global South, dependent on the United States for their food supply, by only funding export agriculture, export plantation crops, not growing their own food. The function of the IMF was to use debt leverage to force other countries to impose austerity on their populations, and to essentially say we will control what government you have, because if your government does something that the United States officials don’t like, we’re just going to raid your currency, force of austerity on you, and you’ll be voted out of power. So essentially, the United States, what it calls the international organizations, as if this is a world organization, is actually a very nationalistic tool of the United States to distort the agriculture and industry and commercial development of other countries, to serve U.S. interests and specifically U.S. financial interests. And the mode of control, obviously, is not military anymore; it’s financial. And Super Imperialism is about how America is different from European colonialism by controlling the world financially and covertly, politically, not by military force. And yet all of this requires an enormous subsidy of foreign countries that are now decoupling from the dollar and no longer giving America the free ride that it has been getting since 1971, when all governments could do with their balance-of-payments surpluses were to buy Treasury bonds. Now they’re buying gold. They’re buying each other’s currencies. They’re doing everything except holding dollars. And that’s the big change in the world. So when the Chinese ask me to rewrite this book for their audience – and I spend a lot of time with China – I thought, well, I’m going to fix up Super Imperialism; I’m going to re-edit it; I’m going to include some episodes that I didn’t include before; and I’m going to show how the framework of international relations has been transformed in a way that isn’t being discussed in the press. BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, you said something there that, not necessarily to push back, but to complement your analysis, you said that it’s no longer about military domination, but financial. I would say it’s both, and that they are kind of two sides of the same coin that reinforce each other. One of the points that you make throughout the book is that the U.S. military occupies many parts of the world, including it has occupied Japan since 1945, Korea since the 1950s, the early 1950s; there are troops in Germany and many other countries. So the US military presence clearly in Afghanistan and Syria right now and Iraq, it’s still a huge part of it, but complementing that, you point out in your book, is that those U.S. military occupations are essentially paid for by the country that is being occupied by the U.S. military. Can you explain how that works? And how that that scheme – you keep calling it in your book, again and again, a free lunch, that the U.S. has a free lunch; it has accomplished an economic scheme that no other country was able to accomplish. Can you explain how that still operates today? MICHAEL HUDSON: Well it’s not that the country that is hosting the troops is paying; it’s the payment-surplus countries in general. It’s Saudi Arabia; it’s Germany; it’s the prosperous countries that are paying. Here’s what happens. And here’s what happened during the Vietnam War. And here’s what was not in the Vietnam Papers that McNamara asked for. When the United States spent money in Vietnam, or when it spends it now in the Near East or the 800 military bases it has, these dollars go into the domestic economy. And when you’re in Japan and Korea, what do you do? You turn these dollars, you make an export, you get the spending – you turn it in for domestic currency to your central bank. The central bank now ends up with these dollars that are thrown off by American military spending. And what is the central bank going to do with the dollars? Well, central banks – America told Japan already in the 1970s, when Japan was basically funding, 22 percent of the entire U.S. budget deficit was funded by Japan in 1986. And America said, look, we’re not going to let you buy any major company. We’re going to let other, former whisky sellers, the Seagram people buy DuPont, but we won’t let you buy DuPont, because you’re Japanese. We’re not going to let you buy a company. You can buy Rockefeller Center, and lose a billion dollars on it. You can buy a Pebble Beach golf course. But really, you’re going to have to take the money that you’re getting in Japan for the US exports, and you’re going to have to invest it in Treasury bills. Otherwise, we’re going to impose punitive tariffs against you and we’re going to do something you don’t like. Because remember, you Japanese, you’re the yakuza, you’re the crooks that we put in power to fight the socialists to make sure Japan didn’t go socialist. You’re the gangs. You’re going to do what we say. And Japan did exactly what the United States told them to do, recycled its auto export earnings and electronic exports to help finance the US balance-of-payments deficit and the US budget deficit simultaneously. So it was Japan, Germany, France, other countries that ended up with all these dollars that are spent abroad. For instance, the money America spent in Vietnam, because that was French Indo-China earlier, the money was all sent to French banks. And General de Gaulle would turn in the dollars being thrown off by the army in Vietnam to buy gold every month, much to their embarrassment. Germany did the same thing with this dollars. So basically, America wants the ability to say we have one power, we can wreck your economy. If you don’t do it, we say, we can make you look like Libya, we can make you look like Iraq, and we can tear you up. We can make you like Afghanistan. We have one power. We don’t have economic power. We don’t have productivity. We don’t have competitive power. But we can destroy you, and we’re willing to destroy you, because otherwise we’re going under. And we’re not going to feel safe unless we have the power to destroy you and prevent you from having the power to fight back and protect yourself. So it can only do this if it can control the financial system that recycles all of this military spending abroad in the United States, otherwise America would have to either print the money or tax its corporations and people, which would make it even more high cost. So America essentially has painted itself into a corner as a result of its military spending. It has lost its industrial advantage. It has lost its international competitiveness. And the only thing that it has left to do is the power to destroy, if other countries don’t essentially surrender their economies to control by the US, pretending to be objective and non-nationalistic by saying, we’re not controlling you, the the World Bank is controlling you, the IMF is controlling you, the international organizations are controlling you. But it’s a double standard. And my book shows how this double standard has perverted these seemingly international organizations into nationalistic arms, basically, of the Defense Department and State Department. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Professor Hudson, you write in Super Imperialism about how the United States, coming out of World War Two, was facing a balance-of-payments problem. It had a surplus and it managed to resolve this problem through a cold war, in which it moved into deficit spending in order to promote foreign export markets and world currency stability. I wonder if you can expound on that and maybe take us into the new cold war and the economic rationale for a very different United States, arguably a declining empire that has agitated a new cold war. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, in 1944 and 1945, it was apparent that the war was going to be over, and the United States had gained power since World War One, essentially by staying out of war and by building up its own industry. So the United States essentially structured the post-war world so that it would increase its economic power. And indeed, from 1945 to 1951, the United States increased its balance, its gold supply, to three-quarters of the world’s gold, monetary gold, all in the United States. Well, this was a problem for the US, because Europe and other countries said, well, wait a minute, we’ve been on the gold standard now for a century, but we’re not going to be impoverished if you can have all the gold, but we’re going to go in a different standard. This is what the discussion between John Maynard Keynes and the American Treasury was all about at the end of World War Two. Europe said if you’re going to have all the gold and control the money, we’re not going to operate without money, we’re just going to go off gold. That’s how we de-dollarize, by going off gold, and the dollar was as good as gold. So the United States then decided to go to war in Korea, and the Korean War, from 1950 to 1951 onwards, every single year, the balance-of-payments deficit got worse and worse, and the entire balance-of-payments deficit was military. So American military spending was actually welcomed by other countries because they said, oh, now we don’t have to create a new monetary system and go it alone. Now we can still earn enough dollars that we can finance our own economic growth. And they were amenable to staying in the American economic orbit. BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, sorry to cut you off really quickly, but I just want to underscore a point that you make in your book that I think is crucial to understand this transition you’re talking about. You say in the book that, before World War Two, and immediately after World War Two, around that time period, from the 1920s into the 1940s, the U.S. was a global creditor. But then the point you make is that after the Korean War, when the Cold War began getting hot, and the U.S. began waging these these proxy wars against the Soviet Union and China and other socialist and communist forces, in Korea and Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia, your argument is that from the ’50s on, the U.S. went from being the global creditor to the global debtor, so a major shift. MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. The difference is that the American debt to foreign countries is a debt that it never expects to pay, because how is it going to pay? The debt is owed by the U.S. government to other governments. BENJAMIN NORTON: In the form of treasuries, Treasury bonds. MICHAEL HUDSON: Treasury bonds. Yeah, exactly. And this debt is basically created by military spending. So America has been able to control other countries by issuing its money. The debt that America has is the money of other countries. The central bank reserves that they hold in dollars in Treasury bonds is counted as their monetary reserves for their own economy. So just like the American dollars you have in your pocket are technically a debt of the U.S. Treasury, these dollar bills or five dollar bills or 50 dollar bills, nobody expects them to be repaid, because if they were repaid, they wouldn’t be any more money. BENJAMIN NORTON: And no one can force the U.S. to repay them because of the U.S. military. So at the end of the day, the reason that the U.S. can have this global debtor status is because no one can invade it. MICHAEL HUDSON: That was the case until recently. Well, you know, it’s true that the United States cannot repay its debt because it doesn’t have enough gold to repay. And it’s not going to repay in the way that Latin America or other countries repay, by selling its industry. It’s not going to pay its foreign debt by saying, ok, why don’t you take that Amazon? Why don’t you take General Motors? Why don’t you take Boeing? You know, we’ll pay by giving you the industry just like we’ve made you countries give us your industry when you’re in debt. America simply isn’t going to do that. But other countries don’t have to ask to get repaid for their dollars. They can say, ok, we’re not going to hold dollars. So China has decided we want to just minimize our holdings of dollars, except for what we need for trading on the foreign-exchange markets to keep the exchange rate stable. Russia is avoiding dollars. Iran is the avoiding values. Obviously, Venezuela is avoiding dollars, because anything that Venezuela holds, the U.S. can simply grab their accounts. So other countries are afraid to have their gold in the United States. Even Germany has said send us back the gold that we have on deposit at the Federal Reserve. We don’t trust you anymore. Give us our gold. Everybody is dumping the dollar, and nobody wants to be repaid. The dollar now is like a hot potato, and nobody wants to hold it except pliant satellite economies of the United States that don’t want to upset the United States because of the power, bribery power if nothing else, that the United States has over European politicians, Asian politicians, all the overt support that the United States can wield. But other economies are just dumping the dollar. And so all these dollars are being turned in to hard currency, each other’s currencies, gold, each other’s industry, real economic means of production. And so now we’re winding down the whole free-lunch system of issuing dollars that will not be repaid. It’s as if you’re going to the grocery store and you give them an IOU and then they ask, well, you know, you ran up a bill last month and you owe us 50 dollars. We have your IOU. And you say, well, you give this IOU to your dairy suppliers, or your vegetable suppliers, just use it as money, we’ll pay someday. And somehow your IOU that you got something for just gets used as other people’s money. Well, that’s what the United States does on a global scale. BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, another point that that you addressed recently, a few minutes ago, also in your book you call food imperialism, is the role of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, and the World Bank in trying to make other countries dependent on U.S. food exports. In the new chapter, in your updated Super Imperialism book, you refer to this as “U.S. food imperialism versus a new international economic order.” So can you explain your argument? MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the World Bank ideally was supposed to make loans for other countries to earn dollars. In other words, so they could buy American exports of things. But the most central element of American diplomacy for the last 80 years has been to promote U.S. farm exports. So the World Bank did not make any loans to Chile or Venezuela or Latin America to increase their own food supply. You have to buy your grain and your basic food from the United States. We want to develop your agriculture, but we will only develop export crops because you are a tropical country that can be exported, that we can’t grow in the United States, palm oil or whatever, coffee, bananas. We’re going to promote plantation crops, not food supply, so that countries have become more and more dependent on the U.S. for food. And that means that the United States can do to other countries what it tried to do to China after Mao’s revolution. It can say, well, you had a revolution, we don’t like. We’re going to put sanctions on you and we’re not going to export any more food to you. Now, you can starve if you don’t reject Mao’s revolution and thank Chiang Kai-shek. Well, Canada broke that. Canada said, well, if America won’t sell you the grain, we’re going to sell you the grain. So that that broke it. Other countries are now realizing in order to be independent and prevent the U.S. from “Your money, or your life” threat, they’re all growing their own food. They’re all being independent. The United States two years ago, more than two years ago, thought that it was going to really hurt Russia by putting sanctions on agricultural exports to Russia, and said, boy, now you’re going to suffer. So all of a sudden, the Baltic countries couldn’t export cheese or other things to Russia. What Russia did was say this is the most wonderful thing that has happened. Now we can develop our own agriculture. Russia is now producing its own cheese, that it used to get from Lithuania. Russia is now the largest agricultural exporter in the world, and displaced the United States. So the result of the United States trying to hurt Russia and make it a dependent has actually forced Russia to become independent in food and immune from the U.S. food threat. It still has the food threat over Latin America. And that’s why when Hillary went down to Honduras and the Honduran president [Manuel Zelaya] wanted to develop Honduran agriculture, immediately Hillary had a coup d’etat, had the army take over in a coup d’etat and establish a dictatorship that promised the United States not to grow its own food, but to remain dependent on the United States. So the United States could feel secure, secure that it could starve Honduras to death if Honduras didn’t do what it wanted, and was dependent on the U.S. for food. That’s the kind of food strangulation that the United States has sought through every country. And it has used the World Bank and the IMF and the international banking system to impose sanctions, and to only make loans for industries and agriculture and sectors that do not compete with the United States, but actually end up serving the U.S. economy as inputs. So other countries are turned into economic and trade satellites of the United States. That’s the aim of the U.S. control of the World Bank, the IMF. And that’s why the United States will not join any organization in which it does not have veto power. It insists on being able to veto any policy of other countries acting in their own interests independently of the United States, or in ways that do not actually enable the United States to be the main beneficiaries of foreign countries’ growth. MAX BLUMENTHAL: That’s what we call the “rules-based order.” MICHAEL HUDSON: Right. That’s exactly right. MAX BLUMENTHAL: We make up the rules, and order everyone around. Mafia rule. And ironically, after Hillary’s sort of instrumentalized coup in Honduras, her husband – or right before Hillary entered the State Department, her husband had apologized for destroying Haiti’s indigenous food economy, basically its ability to produce rice, so that they would import rice from his home state of Arkansas. So yeah there’s a certain irony there. We also saw, in WikiLeaks cables, Hillary go down to Haiti and demand that they cancel a massive pay hike of sweatshop workers from something like 37 cents an hour to 45 cents an hour, which is consistent. We’ve also seen the release of Meng Wanzhou, I guess she is the CFO or COO of Huawei, a Chinese tech firm. And I think this is relevant to the conversation here. A key facet of the U.S. great power competition with China revolves around tech. And you write how, you describe how in the post-war period, the U.S. sought to foster dependency not only with food, but also with military wares and specifically technology. And now you have a situation where the U.S. is being outpaced by China in 5G and demanding that the U.K. ban 5G. So what is happening here? How will the U.S. fare in a world where it can no longer foster dependency on its own technology? And what will it do to remedy the situation? MICHAEL HUDSON: Well when you say technology, what you really mean economically is economic rent, monopoly rent. And America cannot compete on the basis of cost for industry. It can’t compete in a profit-making industry because there aren’t profits. You can’t make a profit if your labor costs, and your economy, and your transport costs, and your health costs are so high. But you can make a monopoly rents. And the function of technology for the United States is to make other countries obliged to pay anything that the the large information technology and high tech companies can charge. So the technology sector is really a monopoly sector, and it wants to keep it monopolized. The problem is that no country for the last 5000 years has been able to keep a monopoly. You remember that maybe 3000 years, 2000 years ago, China had a monopoly in silk. And then Marco Polo and Catholic priests brought back silkworms to Italy and began the Italian silk. I guess that was 1000 years ago. So you can try to get a temporary monopoly on technology, like from Google or from Apple, but ultimately, you can’t really prevent other countries from doing it. So the United States essentially has not been doing much innovation. Let’s take IBM as an example. IBM was really the first high-tech company that was made a monopoly, but it wasn’t very imaginative. It had to be told by insurance companies to go and begin making computers in the late ’30s and to develop it. By the 1960s, IBM was using about $10 million a year to buy back its own shares. And Google and Amazon are spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year now to buy back their own shares, not to invest in new technology, in research and development, in developing new technology and 5G technology, and the other technology that China is developing. But when China is a mixed economy, the public and private sector together, when it is trying to develop the technology sectors that are the mirror image of Google and other things, like TikTok replacing Facebook, they’re doing it much better because they’re not trying to make capital gains in stocks. The purpose of technology, to China, isn’t to increase the price of the stock in the companies that make it. They’re trying to lower the cost of production and develop new technologies to develop their technology better. So obviously, China is getting a lead. The United States has made a policy decision: We don’t need a lead; all we need to do is establish a monopoly rent. And let China get way ahead of us. Let it be more efficient. Let it be more lower cost. Let it be more modern. As long as we have enough satellites in Europe and Latin America, and in Asia, to promise only to buy U.S. goods, they’ll buy high-cost, less efficient, American 3G or 4G technology, and let China and its Belt and Road Initiative countries develop 5G. So we’re really having a technological divergence in the world. America, living in the short term, wants to have high-priced, hit-and-run, very quick profits for Facebook and Google and the others, while China’s trying to look at the long run and develop an actual technological economy that will create a new non-dollar trading and currency area, that will be independent of U.S. Threats. And America in 10 years can tell China, well, we are not going to let you use Facebook or Google anymore. China can say that’s fine. We have our own systems. They work much better. We’ll go our own way. BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, there’s another really interesting part of your book Super Imperialism, well you talk about this throughout, but specifically one of the arguments you make is that one of the primary U.S. economic competitors after World War One, well, during and after World War One, and then leading to World War Two, leading to the end of the British Empire, was England, was Britain, the British economy. Can you talk about how essentially the U.S. helped to collapse the Sterling Area? And for people who don’t know, explain what the Sterling Area is, how the U.S. helped to collapse that. And then also, the point you make in the book in the last chapter, is how the U.S. did something similar to another so-called ally, to Japan, how in the 1980s, the U.S. basically waged a kind of economic war against the Japanese economy, which permanently crippled it. Japan had had been one of the largest economies in the world, and it has never really, truly recovered from that. So can you talk about how the U.S. has waged economic war not only against its adversaries, but even so-called allies like Britain and Japan? MICHAEL HUDSON: The number one U.S. enemy has always been its closest friend, its closest rival. It fought against England, and then France. And they were getting a free lunch through the Sterling Area and the Franc Area in the following way: England’s colonies had to do their banking in England. They had to keep the savings in England. The government had to keep all of its revenues in England. So when World War One broke out, England simply told the government, give us a gift of all of your money. Mass famine in India, mass starvation, because England just grabbed the money that India had in sterling. Well, during World War Two, there wasn’t much international trade, and so raw materials producers – India, Argentina, and other countries – had maintained close connections with England. And there weren’t many consumer goods to buy. Countries had to be self-sufficient. But India, Argentina, and the Sterling Area countries had to keep all of their money in sterling. The United States insisted that, number one, that sterling balances that were held by India and other countries be allowed to be spent outside of sterling. You couldn’t tie the sterling balances to say they have to be spent in England. And that was what the sterling balances were before. England says, ok, you’ve got a lot of savings here in England in sterling; you have to spend that money on British goods and British companies. You have to keep within the English economy. Not only did the Americans say, first of all, no country can limit its spending to say you have to keep the money in your former colonial power. But it insisted as a condition to lending England the British Loan – in 1944, England was desperate by the last year of the war. It needed food. It needed supplies. It needed industry. And America said, we’re going to make you a loan, called the British Loan, but as a result, you’re going to have to keep your own pound sterling at five dollars a sterling. You’re going to have to keep it at a high price. You’re not going to be able to devalue it in order to compete with us. And England, as a result, from 1945 to about 1950, had to take this huge overvalued sterling, so that there was no way that English companies could compete with American companies. And America was able to undersell England and grab the Indian market, the Argentine market, the market for almost all the countries that had been within the Sterling Area, and undersell it. So America had essentially gained control of Britain’s domestic financial policy by insisting that this policy be set in Washington, not in London. So it asked England to commit economic suicide, and England said, well, we don’t have a choice, otherwise we’re going to starve. And it threw its lot in with the United States, hoping the United States would protect it. And in the new edition of Super Imperialism, I quote the debates that occurred in the House of Lords, when the House of Lords saw exactly what was going to happen. They said, wait a minute, the United States is treating us as if we’re Germany; it treated us as if we’re the defeated party in World War Two. Are we really going to go along with this? And they saw just what was happening, and they said, well, we really don’t have a choice. We surrender; we’re going to let our policy be run by the United States. The same thing in Japan. In 1985, when there was the famous Plaza Accord, you had Reagonomics going full blast. And Secretary of State James Baker said, what is Reaganomics? It means we want low interest rates; we want to cut taxes on the rich, and even though we’re going to cut taxes, we’re going to have a huge budget deficit. Somebody is going to have to fund this. And in the past, countries running a budget deficit, which Reagan and Bush quadrupled America’s foreign debt from 1981 to 1992 – who is going to buy this debt? Because if we make Americans buy this debt, we’re going to have to pay high interest. So it told Japan, we want you to agree to buy a big chunk of our foreign debt. England and Europe said, ok, we’re going to go along and we’re going to buy a big chunk of it too. So essentially, America forced Japan not only to buy the debt, but to revalue its currency. And its currency went from 240 yen per dollar to 200 yen, meaning a dollar would only buy 200 yen. And then finally, America would only buy 100 yen. And all of a sudden, car prices, electronic prices in Japan, export prices doubled; it lost the market. And essentially went broke. And that was what was called the bubble economy. The Reagan economy was a bubble economy in America, but the bubble was felt or absorbed by Japan, by England, and by Europe. That was the the genius of Reaganomics, to make other countries bear the costs of the American tax cuts. BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, this is an article I have up here in The Wall Street Journal in 2018, titled “The Old U.S. Trade War with Japan Looms Over Today’s Dispute with China.” Do you think there are parallels? I mean, clearly Japan has been a key U.S. ally since World War Two, whereas China has become a serious adversary. So the political relationship between the U.S. and Japan and the U.S. and China is very different. But do you see parallels between the U.S. policy, economically, toward Japan in the ’80s and now with China? MICHAEL HUDSON: There was a lot of discussion recently in China about the Plaza Accord and the Louvre Accord. There’s no parallel at all. They’re looking at this as an object lesson. They say, we saw what the United States did to Japan. We’re not going to let the United States do it to us. We’re not going to inflate our economy and create a bubble here just so that we are as inflated as the US economy is. We’re going to lower our prices. We’re not going to make a financial boom and a real estate boom. We’re going to do just the opposite. Instead of letting banks getting rich on real estate loans, like to Evergrande, we’re going to let Evergrande go under. We’re going to let the bondholders of Evergrande go under. We’re going to let the stockholders of Evergrande go under. And we’re going to create a basic tax system and public support system to minimize the cost of housing. So that, while the American middle class and political parties think that they’re getting rich, as their housing prices are going up, the Chinese people think they’re going to get rich as housing prices go down, and they can afford more and more housing at a lower and lower price, while their wages go up. So there is no rivalry at all there. They’re looking at the United States and deciding we want to go in a different direction. We’re looking at what’s happening with Japan, and we’re never going to be like it. And there are Japanese too – every company in Japan, as I was told when I visited Nippon Steel years ago, the heads of the companies are all very pro-U.S. And they have to work with the United States importers and corporations in order to succeed. But the number two person or someone else is going to be an option number two, and option number two is we can make a step function, all of a sudden we can switch. Do we want to reorient our economy toward China instead of the United States? This is the nightmare of the United States. What if Japan and Korea and other countries decide to throw in their lot with with China instead of with the United States? And now that America is putting the squeeze on Japan and other Asian countries to support its military spending and its trade deficit even more, these countries are saying, what do we get out of the U.S. relationship? Wouldn’t we be better if we can make a deal with China to say, ok, about the South China Sea, we’re going to make a map that all of us get to share in the South China Sea oil and gas reserves? We’re going to have peace, and that includes Taiwan. Most of the Taiwanese officials, including central bank officials that I used to meet with, all say, you know, ultimately we want to, we plan on rejoining China. We’re going to try to take as much of a business position in mainland China as we can. But ultimately, the economy is going to re-merge. It’s just a question of when we can get a better deal from China than we get in the United States. And as the United States is in a state of rapid shrinkage of its economy right now, all of a sudden other countries are saying that very quickly, well, let’s rethink our position and maybe we’re going to do better off not following the neoliberal plan of the United States. Let’s have a mixed economy where the government and industry and labor work together to develop the economy instead of a polarized, financialized, Reagan- and Thatcherized economy that you’re having in the United States and England. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, maybe you can address the U.S. economy right now, which is in a state of catastrophe, but which might actually be kind of a controlled demolition, if you consider the discussions that began prior to the pandemic, in late 2019. BlackRock was calling for just massive printing of money from the Fed. And they’ve just been doping the economy ever since, to stave off inflation. But now Biden’s worst problem, the greatest problem Biden faces now, is inflation, high food prices; gas prices are going up. The U.K. is seeing record gas prices, too. And global supply chains are what we would call verkakte. And I don’t know if you want to address that, but the U.S. economy is just seeing massive, massive amounts of workers being financially disempowered, a downwardly mobile middle class, endless printing of money, and more wealth for this very – I mean, it’s not even the 1 percent; it’s like the 0.1 percent percent – and it’s beginning to plague Biden through inflation. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well that is happening, but not in the way you described. The Federal Reserve has hardly spent any money into the economy at all. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well in the banking sector. MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s printing trillions and trillions of dollars, more money, more essential credit than ever before, but all of this credit has gone into the stock market and the bond market and the packaged loan market. It’s all gone for assets that the 1 percent of the economy hold. It has financed asset price inflation, not domestic inflation. The domestic inflation is something that comes not from an increase in the money supply, but from supply shortages. And this is a result of the neoliberal management philosophy that corporations have. In order to increase their reported profits, they have cut costs wherever they could. And one way they found of cutting costs is to minimize inventories. 80 years ago, every company would have enough inventory on hand so that if there was an interruption in its imports, in its raw materials, in the supplies that it needs, it has enough to get by. But the corporate managers said let’s have something called just-in-time inventory. That is, if we need a part, we’re not trying to order it six months in advance and hold it in a warehouse; we’ll just pay for it that day and order it. And all of the companies together in the United States thought, the economy is going to shrink, we don’t need any inventories, because everybody is going to be poor. They thought they were going to be poor, because they were making the economy poor, by predatory practices that they were following. They were getting rich by impoverishing the economy. They thought the economy couldn’t buy what they produce, so they didn’t need any inventories. Well, all of a sudden, they ran out; they depleted all of the inventories. And there were huge, huge orders, in China, in Asia, in Japan, in Korea, for electronics exports, for chips, for everything else. And now you see, the price of shipping has multiplied tenfold. It costs 10 times as much to ship a container from China to New York today than it did a year ago. So what is happening is a shortage from just the neoliberal, really socially incompetent management of American corporations. Other companies throughout the rest of the world have tried to, they keep inventories; they’re not having this problem. This is unique only the United States is not. It’s not people are richer and have so much more money; it’s that there’s a shortage. In the case of housing, which has gone up – it’s the most rapid increase, over 10 percent in the last year, that’s essentially because BlackRock has said, the era of rising into the middle class by getting home ownership is over. Our ideal here at BlackRock is the 19th-century ideal; really, it’s the 14th-century ideal. It’s the landlords. We want to turn the American economy away from a home ownership economy into a renter’s economy. And if we had BlackRock and our fellow landlords can monopolize the control of housing, and bid it all the way, we all of a sudden will have a monopoly in housing costs. We can raise it 10 percent this year, 10 percent next year. And the banks are going to lend to us to buy out all of this real estate at 1 percent or 2 percent, and they’ll charge 3 or 4 or 5 percent to other people. All of a sudden you’re going to have a concentration of home ownership in the hands of large corporations. And the middle-class ideal of home ownership is going to be squeezed out. The other major growth is in pharmaceuticals and medical care. It’s way up, medical insurance, 10 or 15 percent. The one thing that corporations in America are willing to fight to the death for is to prevent socialized medicine, to prevent public health. Because they realize if we can prevent public health in America, then workers, the American population is going to have only one way of getting health care and avoiding the threat of bankruptcy if they get sick. They’ll have to go to work for an employer. Because the health is going to, insurance is going to come from the employer. And if they don’t go to work for the employer, they won’t get health care, and they can go broke very easily. And if they go on strike, they lose their health insurance, and then they’ll go broke. If they complain about the job, they’ll get fired, they’ll lose the health insurance. The new way of controlling labor, the class war in the United States, is to privatize pharmaceuticals and health care and prevent people from having access to health care and pharmaceuticals, unless it’s through their employer. And that’s why wages have not gone up. Because this is what Alan Greenspan called the traumatized worker syndrome. They’re powerless. They’re afraid to complain against the job. They’re completely dependent on the employer for everything they have. And in some cases, it may be like a Soviet Russia, they’ll even become dependent on their employer for housing, as it was in Russia, because they can’t afford houses of their own, which are now all corporately owned. BENJAMIN NORTON: Well the difference, of course, was that in the Soviet Union, it was public housing and it was provided to everyone as part of the government, whereas now we’re talking about feudalism, neo-feudalism, where your landlord is your boss and you’re treated like a serf. But you made an important point, Professor Hudson, about short-term versus long-term thinking. And this actually, I think, is related to the energy crisis we have seen in Europe. And it really reflects this idea you’re talking about of this neoliberal mentality that, we can just get everything we want right here in the market in the short term. And that’s this crisis now where the European Commission canceled all of these long-term contracts that it had with Russia for importing gas and also oil from Russia. So the EU had access to all of this Russian energy. And then as a political protest against Russia, as part of the new cold war, they canceled all of these long-term contracts, and instead, they were just buying Russian gas and oil on the spot market, in the short term. And then the price of gas and also oil just skyrocketed recently. And now there’s a huge demand in Asia, and largely because countries in East Asia have for the most part recovered from the coronavirus pandemic. So now Europe has a huge shortage of gas and oil, and they’re of course blaming Russia, and they’re doing all the typical things that they do. But the irony is that it’s the same kind of short-term neoliberal philosophy that you’re talking about, where the bankers who run the European Commission said, we don’t need contracts; we don’t need long-term deals; we can just buy everything short term every single day by day or week, week by week in the spot market. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think you’re talking also about the Nord Stream Two pipeline that the Germans and the Europeans were blocking. So when a European politician said we would rather all starve in the dark than have to buy from the Russians, what they mean is, we would rather take the bribes that we’re getting into our bank accounts from the Americans. We would rarely get the high prices and all of the support from the Americans, and let our 99 percent of the population starve, so that we can get rich off what the Americans are paying us to starve the Europeans of energy and freeze in the dark, just so that Russia won’t get get the payment for this. So obviously, Russia is thinking, well, it can now sell all the gas that it wants to China. At some point, it’ll decide, if Europe doesn’t want to buy our gas, if it’s not going to open the Nord Stream Two pipeline. The pipeline is all there. All they have to do is open the pipeline, and the price of gas will come down. And the Europeans are – what Putin recognized, and [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov have been saying is, the European Commission does not represent Europe; Brussels works for Washington. Brussels is an arm of the U.S. State Department. It has nothing to do with the European population. Europe is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy. But it’s also a militarized oligarchy controlled by the United States. And so Europe is acting, is willing to have its houses freeze, its pipes freeze over, floods in houses, just in order to please the Americans. How long can this go on without there being a revolution? The amazing thing is that protest is coming from the right, not from the left. You have the Alternative für Deutschland party on the right, and Die Linke, the Left Party, has fallen. The socialists have not taken an anti-American stand because America has gained such has control, has made the European socialist parties, just like it has made the British Labor Party under Tony Blair. The socialist parties and left-wing parties of Europe are all pro-American. And they’re not talking about economics. They’re not talking about welfare. I can’t even summarize what they’re saying, because it’s a mush. But the irony is that it’s the right wing that is becoming the nationalistic power in Europe to break away from the United States, not the left. And I don’t see Europe ending up as much more than a dead zone. And I think President Biden feels the same way. He is obviously pivoting towards Asia and has left Europe, and England, and Ukraine, and the Baltics just to go their own way. And no matter how bad things look in the United States, I think things look worse for Europe right now. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, you see the same dynamic at play with the protests in Italy and France against the green pass, and the construction of what, in my opinion, is a kind of digital authoritarianism, just exploiting the emergency atmosphere of the pandemic. The right is gaining power. A nationalist right is gaining power. And there are workers and unionists involved in these protests. Trieste, the Italian port city, is seeing dock dockworkers rise up. But the left is, I mean, it seems to be largely absent. And the same in the US, with the protests against government mandates. Whatever you think about them, we need to make this objective observation and determine what it means for left-right dynamics when workers are being intimidated. This all is being guided, this policy, is being guided in many ways through the World Economic Forum. And there is a vocabulary out there about a Great Reset, which is something that Klaus Schwab, the president of the World Economic Forum, has openly proposed in his latest book about the pandemic. But it has been denounced as a conspiracy theory by Naomi Klein in The Intercept. And I think a lot of what we have been talking about is kind of consistent with how people understand the Great Reset, you know, pivoting towards a kind of feudalistic and authoritarian capitalism that is highly digitized, in order in order to manage an impoverished middle class. What are your thoughts on the Great Reset? Is it a conspiracy theory? Is it something real? And if so, what does it mean to you? MICHAEL HUDSON: It would love to be a conspiracy, but not all conspiracies are successful. They’re hoping that they can bamboozle the world into believing rhetoric instead of reality. And they’re hoping that people will think that the future is something that has never been in the world before. And what they’re calling democracy is a country without government. There are only two kinds of governments possible in the world. One is the usual kind that you have had ever since Sumer in Babylonia: a mixed economy, with the government providing basic services, and the public private sector doing the trade and the innovation. The other is something that you had briefly in Rome before it collapsed, and you’re now idealizing in the United States: it’s an economy with no government at all. You get rid of all government power to regulate or tax business. You want all of the planning – you want a centrally planned economy, much more centrally planned than you have in China and even in Russia. But the central planner is going to be Wall Street, and the city of London, and the Paris Bourse. You’re going to have financial planners take over the planning, and they’re going to do it with the corporations as a means basically of subduing, of squeezing out more and more of a surplus out of the people who produce it, labor, basically, and other countries that produce raw materials. And that is the dream. Can they convince, can Klaus [Schwab] and the attendees who go to these [World Economic Forum] meetings really convince people that you can get along without government and let the neoliberals do to the world economy what Margaret Thatcher did for England, and somehow think that you’re getting richer? Because the cost of your housing is going up, and your salary is going up, but even more than it goes up, you have to pay it for medical care, for housing, for your debt service, and for just the cost of living. How do we convince the world that they’re getting better and better when actually they’re getting poorer and poorer, and we’re concentrating more and more of the wealth in our own hands? Now you can call that a conspiracy. I think it’s sort of a pipe dream if they think they can get the rest of the world to go along with it. And I guess it’s the Abraham Lincoln statement, you can fool some of the people some of the time, some of them all, but you can’t fool China and Russia, and Iran, and India, and North Korea, and South Korea all the time. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, it could be a conspiracy, but that’s in many ways how history is dictated. I’d refer to Michael Parenti’s lecture on capitalism and conspiracy and class power from 1993, where he makes the case that history is really not an accident. And now more than ever, it’s being decided in Davos. So I think that on that point – well I guess I’ll just pitch to Ben here. I know Ben as a question. BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, this is this is a good question from [a viewer]. This is for Professor Hudson. What do you think of Richard Werner and Henry George, and about Jeff Snider’s assertion that demand for U.S. debt is due to its value as collateral in the eurodollar system as opposed to the petrodollar? MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard Werner has been a friend of mine and a colleague for many years. I think what he’s writing on money creation is wonderful. We’re good colleagues. We’ve had some of the same students. I thoroughly applaud and support him. I loathe Henry George, because he essentially was an anti-socialist and a right-winger of the late-19th century, and he spent his life fighting against socialism. He wanted to basically get rid of government. And his followers, essentially, George spent his time going, and George’s followers, for 20 years before World War One, going around the country debating with socialists over, is the future of the economy going to be socialist, or is it going to be the Ayn Rand-type economy that Henry George wondered. Well once the Russian Revolution occurred, the Georgists turned into anti-Bolsheviks. And the followers of George in the United States basically became an anti-Semitic group, very friendly to the Nazis, to the Nazi Party. And in Germany, the Georgists were among the first to join the Nazi Party. So I’m all for land taxation. That is a socialist policy. That’s the policy of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, the whole 19th-century political economy aimed at getting rid of the landlord class and getting rid of economic rent as unearned income. Henry George did not have a theory of value and price, and without that you don’t have a concept of economic rent. So the Georgists today around the right wing of the political spectrum. I had some contact with them at one point, and I was just appalled that they were the feeders, one of the feeder organizations into the Ayn Rand movement. So I can’t think of anyone more opposite from Richard Werner than the Henry George people. BENJAMIN NORTON: And the other part of his question was about the eurodollar system as opposed to the petrodollar. MICHAEL HUDSON: Oh, they’re both the same system, the petrodollars, the deal was – and this was what was done in the aftermath of my publication of Super Imperialism. I went down to the White House and met with the Treasury officials and the State Department officials, and they said, we have told Saudi Arabia – this is when the price of grain was quadrupled, and Saudi Arabia quadrupled the price of oil in response. So the Treasury told Saudi Arabia, you can keep charging whatever you want for the oil, but all the export proceeds you have, you have to invest back in the United States. You can invest it in the stock market. You can’t buy American companies. You can buy stocks and bonds, and especially government treasury bonds to finance things. So petrodollars were a means of recycling oil export proceeds into the American banking system and into the U.S. government budget. The eurodollars were the same thing, but slightly different. Russia really created the eurodollar market, because it was afraid to hold dollars in the United States in the 1950s, because the United States could simply grab the money, like it did with Venezuela. And so it held them in England. And so what happened was Citibank and Chase Manhattan Bank found that they could then borrow these dollars from their London branches. And Chase’s largest depositor, when I was working for it, as their balance-of-payments economist in the 1960s, was the eurodollars from the London branch. So all of these dollars that other countries would accumulate and be afraid to invest in the United States were put into British banks, that sent this money to the head offices back in the United States to essentially liquefy the American economy. And there were no reserve requirements on eurodollars. So if Chase or Citibank would get a regular deposit from somebody, and make a loan against it, they’d have to keep reserves against it. But you didn’t have to have any reserve requirements for the eurodollar deposit. So the eurodollar system was a free lunch for the commercial banking system in the United States in the 1950s and ’60s. MAX BLUMENTHAL: I wanted to go back to some comments you made earlier about the U.S. and Japan and how the U.S.’s best allies are often it often get treated as its worst enemies. This kind of reminded me of the AUKUS deal and France. The former French ambassador to Washington, I think his name is Gerard Araud, commented that after this deal, where France was basically stabbed in the back – it had what, like I don’t know the dollar sum, BENJAMIN NORTON: Over $60 billion. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Over $60 billion in diesel subs to Australia. And the deal was canceled after it was inked, apparently because the U.S. just stepped in with more advanced nuclear subs. And Araud said we need to return to a de Gaullist policy; we need a neo-de Gaullist policy. I wanted you, professor, to weigh in. Just give us your thoughts on AUKUS, on the deal, what it signals for the new cold war, but also for U.S.-French relations and the U.S. treatment of Europe. And maybe you could remind us what happened when de Gaulle tried to collect on what he was owed. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the English language is an enormous language, and it’s always expanding the words. And one of the new terms that is come into the English language about two years ago, a year or two ago, was a translation from the Russian: non-agreement capable. In other words, just like a Trump wrote the bestseller The Art of Breaking the Deal, that’s become the American policy: we can break any deal we want, because we can make our own reality. That’s what the neocons said: We make the deal, but we can make our own reality. So the United States, and Australia – U.S. satellites would have a deal with France to say we’re going to buy a submarine. But the Americans could say, wait a minute, buy our submarines, because we need our companies would rather make profits in dollars than have you order something from France that will make profits for French companies. So without telling France at all, it told Australia, just break the deal. And Australia essentially – it is not well known, but the prime minister actually lives in a basement of the Pentagon in Washington. MAX BLUMENTHAL: I thought they just kept his brain there in a jar. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well it is in a jar. MAX BLUMENTHAL: What exists of it, anyway. MICHAEL HUDSON: At any rate, Australia has never been known to do anything that America or London didn’t want. Well, once Australia actually elected a socialist prime minister, and all of a sudden the British representatives said, no, you’re not allowed to elect anyone the queen of England doesn’t recognize; you have to cancel the election. And they did. They didn’t say we want to be free of England. They said, oh, ok, who should we elect? And America told England to tell Australia to elect. So Australia is hopeless. But at any rate, this led France to say, we have been double crossed again. We want to look at, just like Germany, we want to look at making better deals with Russia. We can see that one part of the world is growing: China, Russia, the mixed economies, not the oligarchy, the financialized economies. So they’re shifting. And when you say what happened to de Gaulle – well, in May, I guess, was it [1968] – de Gaulle had been cashing in the dollars he was getting from America’s spending in Southeast Asia, he was cashing them in for gold. So America, the CIA, bragged that it had organized the big May riots in Paris. And the riots led to de Gaulle being replaced by a more left-wing party that was thoroughly under the control of the United States. So obviously, the French are worrying, ok, if we try to follow a policy of turning east, of turning towards Russia, China, and the mixed economies, with active governments instead of banks, America is going to try to do to us what it did not only to de Gaulle, but it did to Italy after World War Two, getting rid of the communists; Greece after World War Two, assassinating the communist leadership; essentially just coming and in every country, trying to interfere and meddle in elections. So they’re trying to prevent the United States from using the Green Party in Germany’s turn, following the U.S., with a very nationalistic anti-Russian, pro-American position. So Europe is realizing, breaking away from dependence on the United States, breaking away from letting the United States have all of the European surplus, and telling us to freeze in the dark and to impoverish ourselves, just so that U.S. neocons can create a world – breaking away is not going to be a pretty sight. They’re going to do to us what Hillary did the Honduras, and what and what Obama did to Libya. And we have got to be prepared for that. But at a certain point, we we just get tired of surrendering. At a certain point, we just can’t live this way anymore. And that’s the point at which Europe is maybe five years away from realizing. BENJAMIN NORTON: Well, that’s a good image, and I think it’s important to stress that point, that these policies that Washington carry out abroad always come back home, they always come back home. And just wrapping up here in the last few minutes. But that this actually reminded me, Professor Hudson, have you heard of this book by this French executive, Frederic Pierucci, who wrote this interesting book called The American Trap: My Battle to Expose America’s Secret Economic War Against the Rest of the World? It’s a very interesting book. This guy Frederic Pierucci, he was previously was an executive at the French transport company Alstom. And the U.S. government accused him of so-called corruption. And he was kind of the first case of like a Meng Wanzhou, before Meng Wanzhou, a few years before her. He was arrested actually in the United States, and he was held as what he claimed to be an “economic hostage.” And this is the beginning of this campaign we now see against Alex Saab from Venezuela, Meng Wanzhou from China, and also there’s a North Korean businessman whom the U.S. is trying to imprison. And what’s interesting is the Washington Post did a story about this book. Here’s the Washington Post article; it’s titled “An unlikely winner in the U.S. trade war: A French businessman’s book about his battle with the DOJ.” And here’s the translation of The American Trap. So I haven’t read this book; I want to get a copy of it. But essentially, from the summaries that I’ve read about this book, The American Trap, he argues that the U.S. has been carrying out a kind of economic war against French companies, in the same way it carried out those policies you explained against Japanese companies in the 1980s. MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s probably true. I have not heard of the book; nobody sent me a copy. I don’t know about it. But it seems that that’s the American modus operandi. It tries to prevent any real competition. People talk about the Thucydides problem as if there’s a competition. The United States wants to prevent any competition. And the real competition isn’t among countries; it’s economic systems. And the economic system, as I said, is one of finance-centered oligarchy, as opposed to a government promoting rising living standards and technology, and increasing our productivity. And I think America has joined the wrong side of history. And it’s a result of the combination of neoliberalism and the neocon military plan that somehow thinks that military force can force other countries to submit to what you called neo- feudalism, which indeed it is. And the question is – that has never worked over time. It’s very short term. But then these people think, well, they’re probably in their 50s or 60s now; they only have 20 years to live. All they care about is getting rich for the next 20 years. They don’t care if they leave a bankrupt America in their place. That’s their business plan. The business plan is to load the country down with debt, shrink the economy – but they’ll take their money and run. And the question is, where are they going to run to? If the rest of the world is going its own way, that they’re driving the world to grow its own way. That’s the dynamic that is at work. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Ben, maybe we can put Professor Hudson’s book on screen now and tell everyone where they can find it, the new edition. MICHAEL HUDSON: I guess it’s easier to buy books on Amazon now than it is in the bookstores. So it’s up there now. BENJAMIN NORTON: And do you know if there’s going to be an e-book version? Because I’ve only seen physical copies. MICHAEL HUDSON: I don’t know how to make e-books. I just don’t know if there will. The paperback will be out on, I think, [October 18 or 19]. BENJAMIN NORTON: Oh, great, there’s going to be a paperback out? MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, but I don’t know about e-books. BENJAMIN NORTON: Excellent, well, I would highly recommend checking out this book. Fortunately, he sent Max and me a copy. It’s incredible reading. As someone, I’m certainly not an economics expert, this book for me is just really eye-opening. I had a copy of the second edition that I would go back to regularly. I use it kind of like a textbook, because there’s just so much good information in there. There’s a lot of history. In fact, something that Professor Hudson talks about in his book is that one of the main differences, well, one of the several differences – there are many differences between the way he teaches economics and other mainstream economists – is that he actually talks about economic history. And in your book, Professor Hudson, you say that very few economists these days teach economic history because – at least in U.S. economics departments – because if you actually studied economic history, you would see how different it is from all of the neoliberal textbooks. MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. There’s been a rewriting. America got rich by being a mixed economy, where the government took an active role in subsidizing basic infrastructure. And all this changed in the 1980s. And the neoliberalism has sort of pretended that Adam Smith was an advocate of basically the neoliberalism of Ayn Rand, instead of being anti-landlord, anti-monopoly, and not really thinking very much of the ethics of businessmen. BENJAMIN NORTON: And then there’s one final question here, Professor Hudson: Are you thinking of doing an audiobook version? MICHAEL HUDSON: No, I don’t know anybody who does audio books. BENJAMIN NORTON: Well, maybe we can talk about it. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Who should we get to read it? Is James Earl Jones still around? I always have actors read my books, and I don’t know who they are. And I always ask the publisher, can I please just, once, read the book? And they won’t let me in. Then they bring these D-list actors in. And it’s just so bizarre to listen to it. They read it so concisely. And I hate it. So don’t. Sometimes you want to avoid an audio book. Don’t wish for it, because you just might get it. MICHAEL HUDSON: You’ve got to read, Because sometimes you want to look at the previous page. I’m really old fashioned. MAX BLUMENTHAL: No really, with this book, you really do want to read it. It’s the kind of book you want to read several times. As Ben said, it’s sort of like a textbook that has a rich narrative arc that courses through every page. And then you might want to check the citations as well. I mean, every historical episode could demand its own book. So I’m really benefiting from it. I have benefited a lot from, I guess this is our third conversation, so I really hope he can make these kind of a running series. I’m actually at the tail end of three hours of livestreaming because I just did my own live stream. So I’m sort of hallucinating. I really have nothing else to say. BENJAMIN NORTON: And yeah, well, we’ll end on that. Do you have anything to add, Professor Hudson, before we leave? MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah. It is a textbook in China. And as I said, they asked me to update it. So if you want to see what China’s strategy is vis-a-vis the United States, this explains what is on their mind. BENJAMIN NORTON: Great, well, on that note, I would say anyone who wants to check out Professor Hudson’s work, they can go to Michael-Hudson.com. He has a lot of good resources. I read his columns regularly, because I’m not an economics expert, so his columns are very digestible. And he talks about current affairs and the new cold war. So it’s always a pleasure to have you, Professor Hudson, thanks for joining us again. MICHAEL HUDSON: Thanks a lot for the discussion.

Write an article about: US makes up c 40% of global military spending, 10x Russia, 3x China. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, military-industrial complex, Pentagon, Russia

The United States spent $877 billion on its military in 2022, nearly 40% of the global total, 10 times more than Russia ($86.4 billion), and three times more than China ($292 billion). The US military budget is larger than the next 10 biggest spenders combined. (Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.) The United States was responsible for nearly 40% of global military spending in 2022. The US military spent $877 billion, 10 times more than Russia ($86.4 billion), and three times more than China ($292 billion). US military expenditure in 2022 was bigger than the next 10 largest spenders combined. This means the Pentagon spent more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine combined. US military spending was higher than the next 10 countries combined in 2022. Five years ago, it was higher than only the next nine. How much safer do y’all feelhttps://t.co/VIq8pwChRI pic.twitter.com/FX47O8Uego — Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) April 29, 2023 This is according to data published this April by the Sweden-based Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). SIPRI calculated that the planet’s total military expenditure was $2.24 trillion in 2022. The United States, at $877 billion, thus made up 39.2% of total global military spending. The US-led NATO alliance spent a total of $1.23 trillion, meaning it was responsible for just over half (55%) of global military spending. SIPRI reported that real military spending in Europe, adjusted for inflation, is at the highest levels since 1989, toward the end of the first cold war. Europe is the region with the fastest growing military spending, the study found. Business Insider noted that the US federal government only dedicated $76.4 billion in discretionary spending for education in 2022, meaning it spent over 10 times as much on the military. The Joe Biden administration has requested a mere $90 billion for education in 2024, compared to $842 billion for the military, Business Insider pointed out. Moreover, all of these figures could be very conservative, given the US Department of Defense is notoriously opaque in its accounting. Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon made $35 trillion in “accounting adjustments” in 2019, as well as $30.7 trillion in adjustments in 2018. These irregularities in the Pentagon’s accounting are larger than the entire US economy. The US Department of Defense has failed every audit it has ever tried.

Write an article about: Putin debunks Tucker Carlson’s warmongering anti-China propaganda, mocks his CIA ties. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, Donald Trump, Fox News, Marine Le Pen, Russia, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin condemned the “boogeyman” anti-China propaganda that Trump ally Tucker Carlson spewed in his interview in Moscow, while mocking the ex Fox News host for applying to join the CIA. The US TV host Tucker Carlson set off a political scandal by traveling to Moscow this February to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. This provoked a debate in the media, which – as is so often the case in partisan US politics – completely missed the forest for the trees. Liberal war hawks like Hillary Clinton portrayed Tucker Carlson as a traitor and “useful idiot” of Putin. Democrats have been blinded by their obsessive hatred of Russia, and are utterly incapable of seeing what is happening geopolitically. In reality, Carlson and other Donald Trump allies in the Republican Party have tried for years to drive a wedge in between Russia and China, while maniacally pushing for war on Beijing. Trump’s former top advisor Steve Bannon, who ran the far-right leader’s 2016 presidential campaign, stated openly in 2018: “We’re at war with China”. Bannon called to “unite the West against the rise of a totalitarian China”. And he considers Russia to be part of the “West”. This strategy was also adopted by France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who stated in 2022 that she wanted to improve relations with Russia in order to prevent it from allying with China. The Trumpist Republicans and their far-right counterparts in Europe see Russia as white, European, Christian, and capitalist, and a potential ally against China, which they demonize as a non-white, Asiatic, atheistic, and communist threat to so-called “Judeo-Christian Western civilization”. Carlson has played a key role in this warmongering campaign against China. When he had his prime-time show on Fox News, Carlson declared, “Russia is not America’s main enemy. Obviously, no sane person thinks it is. Our main enemy, of course, is China. And the United States ought to be in a relationship with Russia, aligned against China”. Anyone claiming Tucker Carlson is "anti-war" is a useful idiot. He's just a neocon 2.0 The only reason he criticizes NATO's war on Russia is because he wants war on China instead Tucker lamented, "If Russia ever joined forces with China, American global hegemony would end" pic.twitter.com/P42zHVIS3A — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 24, 2023 The narrative that Carlson is “anti-war” is totally false. The reason that he opposes the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is simply because he wants all resources focused on war with China. Carlson insisted on his Fox program, “The biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin; that’s ludicrous. The biggest threat, obviously, is China”. The far-right TV host is afraid that a China-Russia alliance would end US hegemony over the planet, which the close Trump ally wants to preserve. “If Russia ever joins forces with China, American global hegemony, its power, would end instantly”, Carlson lamented. “If Russia and China ever got together, it would be a brand new world, and the United States would be greatly diminished. Most Americans agree that would be bad”. Another clip of warmonger Tucker Carlson: "The biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin; that's ludicrous. The biggest threat obviously is China" He fearmongers about Chinese spying and its "growing military", blames it for fentanyl deaths, brings on a neocon guest pic.twitter.com/B7XpqpdymY — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 26, 2023 Since he was fired from Fox News in 2023, Carlson has continued pushing this same warmongering narrative: that the US should ally with Russia against China. In his February interview with Putin, however, the Russian leader could clearly see that Carlson is a political operative acting on behalf of the Republican Party and Trump, and that they hope to encourage division between Moscow and its most important ally. Putin pushed back against Carlson’s hysterical anti-China narratives, which he referred to as mere “boogeyman stories”. The Russian president emphasized that China wants peaceful cooperation, and that “China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive”. The following is a transcript of the February 6 exchange: TUCKER CARLSON: The question is what comes next? And maybe you trade one colonial power for another, much less sentimental and forgiving colonial power. I mean, is the BRICS, for example, in danger of being completely dominated by the Chinese, the Chinese economy, in a way that’s not good for their sovereignty? Do you worry about that? VLADIMIR PUTIN: We have heard those boogeyman stories before. It is a boogeyman story. We’re neighbors with China. You cannot choose neighbors, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of a thousand kilometers with them. This is number one. Second, we have a centuries long history of coexistence. We’re used to it. Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive. Its idea is to always look for a compromise. And we can see that. The next point is as follows. We’re always told the same boogeyman story, and here it goes again, through a euphemistic form, but it is still the same boogeyman story. The cooperation with China keeps increasing. The pace at which China’s cooperation with Europe is growing. It’s higher and greater than that of the growth of Chinese-Russian cooperation. Ask Europeans. Are they afraid? They might be. I don’t know. But they are still trying to access China’s market at all costs. Especially now that they are facing economic problems. Chinese businesses are also exploring the European market. Do Chinese businesses have small presence in the United States? Yes. The political decisions are such that they are trying to limit the cooperation with China. It is to your own detriment, Mr. Tucker, that you are limiting cooperation with China. You are hurting yourself. As Putin made clear, the Republicans have failed to isolate China from Russia and divide BRICS. The irony is that the Democratic Party’s hysteria over the Russiagate conspiracy, combined with the war in Ukraine, prevented the Trumpist elements from realizing this strategy. (Washington’s failure to divide Russia from China has only further incentivized the United States to focus heavily on allying with India’s far-right government, seeking to provoke conflict between New Delhi and Beijing. Both Trump and Joe Biden have sought to woo India.) Carlson’s bellicose anti-China rhetoric was not mere red meat for his typical Fox News conservative audience. Since he was fired, Carlson has continued churning out this cartoonish propaganda as an independent broadcaster. On February 2, just four days before he interviewed Putin, Carlson published a video claiming that China is “fueling the invasion of America”. The implication was that war would on Beijing would be justified in response to a supposed Chinese communist-backed “invasion”. In November 2023, Carlson released an interview with Trump, in which both fearmongered about Beijing. “Why is China allowed to conduct imperialism in our hemisphere?” Carlson asked. Trump replied, “Yeah, and it’s far beyond Cuba; it’s all over South America”. The former US president then claimed, without a shred of evidence, that “China is building military installations in Cuba”. Carlson is a personal friend of Trump, and acts as a propagandist for the former president and his faction of the Republican Party. But their relationship goes deeper than friendship. In fact, Trump has publicly said that he has considered Carlson to run with him to be vice president of the United States. This is especially relevant considering that Trump may very well win this year’s presidential election. Most polls show that he is leading over Biden, including in critical swing states. As he campaigns for president, Trump has pledged to implement extremely aggressive anti-China policies. The Washington Post reported, citing his advisors, that “Trump is preparing for a massive new trade war with China”, and wants to impose 60% tariffs on all imports of Chinese goods into the US. When asked about this on Fox News, Trump floated tariffs even higher than 60%, stating, “I would say maybe it’s going to be more than that”. Historically, economic wars of this magnitude often lead to military conflict. So Trump’s hawkish anti-China policies could escalate into a conventional war. In addition to being a close ally of Trump, Carlson has used his large post-Fox personal media platform to promote the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Together, they demonized China and fearmongered about war over Taiwan. Ramaswamy has campaigned on a Trumpist and Carlsonian foreign policy platform, arguing that the US should ally with Russia in order to try to isolate China. Ironically, this strategy advocated by Trump, Bannon, Ramaswamy, and Carlson was also previously promoted by Henry Kissinger. Back in the Richard Nixon administration in the 1970s, Kissinger used “triangular diplomacy” to play China against the Soviet Union. Washington’s alliance then with Beijing was a significant factor that led to the destabilization and eventually overthrow of the USSR. In 2018, Kissinger called for returning to this triangular diplomacy, but in the opposite direction. The Daily Beast reported, “Henry Kissinger suggested to President Donald Trump that the United States should work with Russia to contain a rising China”. With the rise of Donald Trump and his far-right movement, Tucker Carlson tried to rebrand himself as a so-called populist. But Carlson was always blue-blooded media royalty. His middle name is Swanson, and his stepmother was the heiress of the eponymous food corporation. The scion of a powerful, wealthy, politically connected family, Carlson started his media career as a neoconservative hawk, churning out diehard pro-war articles for the notorious neocon bible the Weekly Standard. Carlson was soon kicked upstairs, in the 2000s, to host shows at CNN and MSNBC, before later moving to Fox News. In the Trump era, Carlson has marketed himself as a paleoconservative, condemning neoconservatives to try to score points with “populists”. But back during the George W. Bush administration, Carlson was a card-carrying neocon. Carlson eagerly supported the illegal US invasion of Iraq, using crude, neocolonial, racist talking points. As The Daily Beast wrote (emphasis added): Tucker Carlson described Iraqis as “semiliterate primitive monkeys” in past comments made on the Bubba The Love Sponge radio show, according to new audio recordings uncovered by Media Matters. The Fox News host also claimed Iraqis don’t “behave like human beings” and said he had “zero sympathy” for Iraqis or their culture during a May 2006 discussion of the Iraq War on the popular radio show. “A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks,” Carlson said—adding that Iraqis should “ just shut the fuck up and obey” the U.S. because “they can’t govern themselves.” In a Sept. 2009 episode, Carlson also proclaimed that Afghanistan would never be a “civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.” In fact, Carlson was such a dedicated Reaganite and cold warrior that, back when he was in college, he applied to join the CIA. Journalist Alan Macleod showed how, in the 1980s, Carlson traveled to Nicaragua to support the CIA’s far-right death squads, the Contras, in their terror war against the revolutionary Sandinista government. Tucker’s father, Richard “Dick” Carlson, was the director of Voice of America, a US government propaganda outlet that is closely linked to the CIA and other spy agencies. Russian intelligence clearly knew about Carlson’s CIA ties. So when he interviewed Putin in February, the Russian leader mocked Carlson for having applied to join the notorious US spy agency, which Putin emphasized had organized many coups d’etat and meddled in the internal affairs of countless foreign countries. The following is a transcript of the exchange: TUCKER CARLSON: With the backing of whom? VLADIMIR PUTIN: With the backing of CIA, of course. The organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand. We should thank God they didn’t let you in. Although it is a serious organization, I understand. My former vis-à-vis, in the sense that I served in the first main directorate, the Soviet Union’s intelligence service. They have always been our opponents. A job is a job. Although he criticizes neocons today, Carlson’s foreign policy regarding Latin America is decidedly neoconservative, and neocolonial. Carlson routinely treats Latin America as the US “backyard”, and frequently complains that China is supposedly trying to “take over” and even colonize “our hemisphere”. In 2022, when he was still at Fox News, Carlson traveled to Brazil to produce a propaganda documentary for far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, who was staunchly pro-US and anti-China. In effect, Carlson was meddling in Brazil’s election, seeking to prevent the return to power of leftist Lula da Silva (who went on to win the 2022 vote). In the promotional video that Carlson made for Bolsonaro, he invoked the 200-year-old, explicitly colonial Monroe Doctrine, in order to fearmonger about China’s bilateral, consensual relations with Latin American nations – and to justify increasingly aggressive US interventionism in the region. The Fox News host declared (emphasis added): In 1823, President James Monroe announced a policy that has been the center of American foreign policy for the last 200 years. Called the Monroe Doctrine, it has a very simple thesis: Great powers would not be allowed to control nations in the Western hemisphere. That would be a direct threat to the interests of the United States. And for 200 years, we haven’t allowed it. Under the Biden administration, the Monroe Doctrine is no longer enforced. Constrained by its ideological concerns, consumed with petty political grievances and above all, distracted by a faraway war in Eastern Europe [ie, against Russia in Ukraine], the Biden administration has abdicated its responsibility. And into the void left by the United States moves a new superpower. We’ve come to Brazil to see for ourselves the rise of China, and how the government of China is replacing the United States as the dominant power in our hemisphere. This anti-China, pro-colonial diatribe was a stark reminder that Carlson is in fact an ardent advocate for US imperialism. Carlson is not opposed to war on principle. He only criticizes the US proxy war against Russia because he wants to focus the entire attention of the US empire for war on China. Carlson is co-opting many well-intentioned people who don’t want war on Russia, and brainwashing them to want war on China. However, US liberals’ hysteria over the Russiagate conspiracy has blinded them to this reality. Of course, in Washington there is bipartisan opposition to China. But the Democrats are more fixated on Russia now, in the short time, while referring to China as a “long-term threat”. Republicans, led by Trump and Carlson, want to put aside differences with Russia and dedicate all of the US empire’s resources into containing, weakening, and ultimately overthrowing the Communist Party of China. Both dominant US political parties are thoroughly imperialist. Their fight is not about whether the US should be an empire; rather, their debate is about what is the best strategy to preserve the US empire. Carlson and Trump share much in common politically with neocons and liberal-interventionist hawks, whom they sometimes criticize for “populist” credit. What unites them all is their desire to strengthen the US empire and maintain Washington’s unipolar hegemony over the planet. This is precisely why Tucker Carlson warned with terror, back on his Fox News show, “If Russia ever joins forces with China, American global hegemony, its power, would end instantly”.

Write an article about: Colin Powell: ‘Human rights’ NGOs are ‘force multipliers’ for US military, part of ‘combat team’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Colin Powell, George W Bush, human rights industry, Iraq, Iraq War, NGOs, non-governmental organizations, nonprofit-industrial complex, State Department

Iraq War architect Colin Powell said human rights NGOS are a “force multiplier” for the US military, and “an important part of our combat team” So-called “human rights” groups and “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) frequently claim to be independent, while in reality serving as instruments of US foreign policy. But rarely is their status as an arm of Washington’s soft power openly acknowledged. That is what makes the following remarks from one of modern history’s most notorious war criminals so explosive. On October 26, 2001, top US military general Colin Powell, who was then serving as secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, gave a speech at the “National Foreign Policy Conference for Leaders of Nongovernmental Organizations,” held in the State Department. This was well over a month after the 9/11 attacks, and the United States was already several weeks into its war on Afghanistan. The Bush administration was also setting the stage for its subsequent invasion of Iraq. Powell gathered leaders of prominent NGOs in Washington to butter them up and emphasize the crucial supplementary role that they would be playing in the US government’s war efforts. Powell heaped praise on NGOs that “shed light on human rights.” He noted that they were a key part of US military efforts, a “force multiplier” in Washington’s wars, and “such an important part of our combat team.” The secretary of state dispelled any pretense that American NGOs do work around the world in the interest of vague notions like “human rights.” Rather, Powell gloated, these NGOs serve the United States’ imperial interests, and it is in fact the illusion of their ostensible “independence” from the US government that is precisely what “makes [them] so valuable.” The following is the full quote from Powell (emphasis added), taken directly from the official transcript published at the US State Department website: If we at the State Department and in other branches of government and other departments of government are truly serious about outreach and about cooperation, outreach and cooperation and working with you has to happen every day at every single level in all of our bureaus and all of the pieces and parts of our Department here, and at our embassies overseas. And I want you to know that I have made it clear to my staff here and to all of our ambassadors around the world that I am serious about making sure we have the best relationship with the NGOs who are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team. I have also made it clear to the members of the diplomatic community who work for American interests around the world that they will not be doing their jobs — they will not be doing their jobs for the American people if they do not keep abreast of the work and the ideas that NGOs operating in their areas of responsibility in the countries to which they are accredited. And I have made a point of instructing all of our ambassadors, especially the new ones going to posts for the first time, I have instructed them to make every effort to work with NGOs, international and especially indigenous, and to factor the contributions that NGOs make into their planning and into their programs. Needless to say, cooperation between governments and NGOs is not the same as co-opting you. Always, we must respect your independence. After all, it is the very fact of your being independent and not an arm of government that makes you so valuable, that permits you to do your essential work, and that gives you the flexibility that you need to do it. Admissions like this help clarify why billionaire-funded NGOs like Human Rights Watch, which have a revolving door with the US government, also just so happen to vigorously lobby for murderous American and European sanctions on socialist governments in Latin America. Powell is not just some Joe Schmoe; he sits at the heights of US military royalty. Powell served as national security advisor for Ronald Reagan, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff (the highest-ranking US military position) for George H. W. Bush, and secretary of state for George W. Bush. Although he might be most well remembered for his infamous speech lying to the United Nations Security Council about non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq, Powell presided over even more atrocities: When Powell says purported “human rights” groups and other NGOs serve as “force multipliers” and “an important part of our combat team,” he means they help the US empire more effectively carry out blood-curdling war crimes like these. All of this is only further confirmation that NGOs’ supposed support for “human rights” is just an imperial fig leaf to cover for Uncle Sam’s subjugation and exploitation of the planet. Credit to scholar Philip Cunliffe, who cites this Powell quote in his book “Cosmopolitan dystopia: International intervention and the failure of the West”

Write an article about: Biden says Latin America is US ‘front yard,’ Trump says ‘backyard’ – Pick your flavor of neocolonialism. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Alex Saab, colonialism, Donald Trump, Iran, Iraq, Joe Biden, Latin America, Monroe Doctrine, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen

What is the difference between Republicans and Democrats? Trump says backyard and Biden says front yard. Otherwise they share 95% of the same warmongering, capitalist, imperialist policies. (Puedes leer este artículo en español aquí.) People in Latin America often ask me what is the difference between Republicans and Democrats. For those outside of the United States, the two hegemonic parties seem so similar that they’re difficult to tell apart. The reality, of course, is that the Republican and Democratic Parties are indeed nearly identical. When we look past all of the superficial Culture War battles they wage to distract the US public, we can clearly see that the two ruling-class parties share 95% of the same policies — and are funded by the same billionaire capitalist oligarchs and exploitative mega-corporations to obediently serve their economic interests. The Joe Biden administration has made this undeniable. The Democratic president campaigned on promises to reverse Trump’s disastrous policies, only to continue the vast majority of them. At a press conference on January 19, the current president accidentally revealed what the real difference between him and former head-of-state is: Trump thinks that Latin America is the US empire’s backyard, while Biden insists it is Washington’s “front yard.” You can see Biden’s comments in the official transcript published at the White House: “We used to talk about, when I was a kid in college, about ‘America’s backyard,’” he said in the presser. “It’s not America’s backyard. Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” U.S. maintains its Monroe Doctrine as Biden assures that Latin America is "America's front yard" pic.twitter.com/VhNxIVdV4Z — Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) January 20, 2022 So now, when people in Latin America ask me to describe the differences between Republicans and Democrats, I have the perfect answer: Republicans think you are their backyard, whereas Democrats think you are their front yard. Pick your favorite flavor of neocolonialism. Biden has been in power for exactly one year as of today, January 20. And he has failed to accomplish anything significant. (His long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan does deserve an honorable mention, but it is greatly overshadowed by Biden’s hawkish policies against the rest of the world — not to mention the devastating sanctions his administration has imposed on Afghanistan, which are starving millions of civilians.) Far from breaking with Trump, Biden has doubled down on the far-right former president’s worst policies: Meanwhile, inside the United States, Biden’s own party has blocked all attempts at passing significant legislation. The US government is so thoroughly undemocratic, so entirely beholden to capital, it has become a dysfunctional basket case. Its “democratic” window dressing has melted away, and all that is left is a stone-cold authoritarian regime controlled by billionaire oligarchs, a textbook dictatorship of the capitalist class. The only thing the US empire can do anymore is do what is has always done: escalate its imperial aggression abroad, endlessly pour money into the gaping maw of the Military-Industrial Complex, try to tame the voracious appetite of the death cult of capitalism — use war abroad to distract from the mass death, skyrocketing inequality, growing poverty, dire homelessness, police brutality, and mass incarceration at home.

Write an article about: US threatens war on China over Taiwan – with nuclear implications. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, Nancy Pelosi, nuclear weapons, Taiwan

The US government has prepared for years for war with China over Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi’s trip was only the latest provocation, including Pentagon war plans, CIA threats, tens of billions in weapons sales, and US military forces on the ground. The US government has been preparing for war with China over Taiwan. The extremely provocative trip by top official Nancy Pelosi was only the latest US escalation. The Pentagon has made plans for war with China, top CIA officials openly call for fighting Beijing, and US troops are on the ground in Taipei. Washington has sold Taiwan tens of billions of dollars worth of military equipment, and influential DC think tanks are even calling to send it nuclear weapons. Our visit reiterates that America stands with Taiwan: a robust, vibrant democracy and our important partner in the Indo-Pacific. pic.twitter.com/2sSRJXN6ST — Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) August 2, 2022 “U.S. Navy deploys four warships east of Taiwan as Pelosi heads to Taipei,” Reuters, August 2, 2022 “Navy transits Taiwan Strait as Esper in Taipei calls for end to ‘One China’ policy,” Stars and Stripes, July 20, 2022 “US military considered using nuclear weapons against China in 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis, leaked documents show,” CNN, May 24, 2021 “Would a nuclear-armed Taiwan deter China?,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), December 24, 2020 “Yes, Taiwan Needs Nuclear Weapons to Deter China,” American Enterprise Institute (AEI), November 5, 2021 “To avoid Ukraine’s fate, Taiwan needs nuclear missiles — now,” Boston Globe, March 2, 2022 US Army Veterans Network: United States Taiwan Defense Command (USTDC) “Reestablish the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group-Taiwan,” War on the Rocks, January 7, 2022 “US Nearly Doubled Military Personnel Stationed in Taiwan This Year,” Voice of America (VOA), December 2, 2021 “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable,” RAND Corporation, 2016 “America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan,” The Hill, November 24, 2021 “Timeline: U.S. arms sales to Taiwan in 2020 total $5 billion amid China tensions,” Reuters, December 7, 2020 “U.S. Set to Sell Taiwan $7 Billion in Arms,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2020 “US makes 3rd arms sale to Taiwan under Biden admin,” Anadolu Agency, April 6, 2022 You won't see this in the Western media: People in Taiwan are protesting the dangerous provocation by Nancy Pelosi and the US government Condemning local politicians as US "puppets and traitors" Chanting "We don't need America to treat us as a pawn!" pic.twitter.com/PrawgxZVts — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 2, 2022

Write an article about: US President Bush praised dictator Fujimori as ‘Peru’s hope for the future’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Alberto Fujimori, CIA, genocide, George H W Bush, Indigenous peoples, Keiko Fujimori, Peru, racism, USAID, Vladimiro Montesinos

US President George H. W. Bush welcomed far-right Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori to the White House in 1991, heroizing him as “Peru’s hope for the future” and praising his neoliberal economic policies. (Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.) US President George H. W. Bush welcomed far-right Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori to the White House in September 1991, heroizing him as “Peru’s hope for the future”. With US backing, Fujimori committed genocide, sterilizing roughly 300,000 Indigenous people while killing, terrorizing, and torturing thousands of leftist dissidents. The former Peruvian dictator was later sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of crimes against humanity, murder, kidnapping, and corruption. He was convicted of ordering a military death squad to massacre poor people in rural areas. But back in 1991, former CIA Director turned US President Bush praised Fujimori for the neoliberal economic reforms he imposed in Peru. US President George H. W. Bush welcomed far-right Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori to the White House in 1991. Bush heroized Fujimori as “Peru’s hope for the future”, and praised his neoliberal economic policies. More information here: https://t.co/ikikPheeE0 pic.twitter.com/HrddVHeVmK — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 24, 2023 Bush told Fujimori at the White House with pride, “Mr. President, since taking office, you have cut government spending, eliminated price controls, knocked down barriers to trade and investment – and those reforms have begun paying off; they’ve begun paying dividends”. “We want to be a full partner in your efforts to restore Peru’s economy”, Bush declared. “We have spoken openly, discussing the tough challenges Peru faces, from economic hardship to renegade insurgencies, from the war against drugs to the battle to preserve human rights. And much has been done on all these fronts. But much more waits to be achieved”, the US president added. “My administration wants to send $94 million in economic and military assistance”, Bush noted. But “unfortunately the Congress has placed a hold on disbursement of these funds, chiefly because of stated human rights concerns. We share these concerns and so do you, Mr. President”. “But you have made progress on human rights, and let’s also then see progress on releasing these funds”, he continued. Just a few months after this meeting, in April 1992, Fujimori carried out a “self-coup” or “auto-coup”, destroying Peru’s democratic state institutions and establishing a brutal dictatorship. The Bush administration later superficially criticized Fujimori in public, but continued to support him. US assistance continued when President Bill Clinton took power in 1993. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) provided funding for Fujimori’s “family planning” program, which he used as cover to commit genocide against Peru’s Indigenous nations, sterilizing nearly 300,000 people between 1996 and 2000. Peru's far-right US-backed dictator Alberto Fujimori carried out genocide against Indigenous communities, sterilizing nearly 300,000 people. His sterilization of Indigenous women received funding from the US Agency for International Development @USAID.https://t.co/63yXrqNBGg pic.twitter.com/NpQRkVZbt4 — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 24, 2022 As the New Republic put it in 2018: “Under former President Fujimori, over 200,000 women were violated—one of the largest such projects since Nazi Germany. His party is still in power”. USAID boasted in a report (emphasis added): After the [United Nations] International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994 and with political support from the president, the Peruvian Ministry of Health instituted a policy in 1995 mandating free contraceptives for all Peruvians through government facilities. As a result of this policy change, modern contraceptive use increased, particularly among rural and poor inhabitants. USAID and other donors provided 100 percent of the contraceptives to the government while also providing technical assistance for training, supervision, education, information, and communication. Annual investments in family planning doubled from $12.9 million in 1994 to $28 million in 1998. Fujimori committed many of his crimes with the help of his far-right intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who was also imprisoned on dozens of charges, such as murder, drug trafficking, and bribery. Montesinos was a longtime CIA asset who started his career by spying on Peru’s left-wing government and giving the United States confidential intelligence about Lima’s relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Today, the far-right followers of the former dictator, known as Fujimoristas, still have significant influence in Peru’s political system. Fujimori’s daughter Keiko was the right wing’s leading presidential candidate in 2021, running against leftist Pedro Castillo. Castillo won the election, but was subsequently overthrown in a US-backed parliamentary coup in December 2022. A 2021 debate between Peru’s presidential candidates Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Castillo

Write an article about: Doctor explains CIA’s ‘Havana Syndrome’ conspiracy is mass hysteria – not Russian ray gun attacks. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, CIA, Cuba, Havana Syndrome, hysteria, Robert Bartholomew, Russia

Medical expert Robert Bartholomew explains how he knew CIA claims of “Havana Syndrome” was actually mass hysteria, not attacks with Russian, Chinese, or Cuban microwave weapons For years corporate media outlets accused Cuba, China, Russia, and other US adversaries of attacking spies and diplomats with hi-tech “pulsed microwave weapons” or “directed-energy weapons.” But now the CIA has admitted that “Havana Syndrome” is not caused by attacks by a foreign hostile power, but rather stress or natural causes. Doctor Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist and leading expert on mass hysteria and social panics, explains how he predicted this in his 2020 book “Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.”

Write an article about: Western media goes white nationalist, calls Ukraine more ‘civilized’ than Iraq, whitewashes US wars. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

corporate media, Israel, media, Russia, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen

Media outlets are calling Ukraine “civilized,” emphasizing that its people are white European Christians, while ignoring or whitewashing the US military occupations of Syria and Iraq, Western-backed Saudi bombing of Yemen, and constant Israeli attacks on Syrians and Palestinians. Western corporate media outlets that published demonstrable lies to try to justify the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have done a 180 and suddenly become staunch anti-war voices condemning Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, which began on February 24. Mainstream North American and Western European journalists have adopted what is essentially a white-nationalist narrative that has been widely denounced as racist, depicting Ukraine as a “civilized” European Christian country that is more worthy of sympathy than formerly colonized countries in the Global South, where the United States and its allies are killing civilians every day. The US has roughly 800 foreign bases around the planet, with a military presence in the majority of the countries on Earth. The US is illegally militarily occupying both Iraq and Syria’s oil-rich territory, while helping Saudi Arabia bomb civilian areas in Yemen, in a nearly seven-year Western-backed war that has killed at least 377,000 Yemenis. In fact, within hours of the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States bombed Somalia, Western-sponsored Saudi forces bombed Yemen, and Israel bombed Syria, just after Israeli occupation soldiers killed a teenage Palestinian. The Times of Israel newspaper, without a hint of irony, even published an article on February 25 titled “Ukraine fighting reportedly not expected to keep Israel from bombing Syria.” Meanwhile, Western media networks have bent over backward to portray Ukrainians as more “worthy victims,” emphasizing their whiteness, European culture, and Christianity, while these same outlets dehumanize or simply ignore dark-skinned people and Muslims in the Global South who are “unworthy victims” of Western wars. This double standard was made blindingly obvious in comments by CBS News foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata. In a broadcast on February 25, titled “Russia closes in on Kyiv with more explosions reported across Ukraine overnight,” D’Agata insisted that the war in Ukraine is unique because the country is “civilized,” unlike nations invaded by the United States. “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen,” the CBS News foreign correspondent declared. Western corporate media coverage of Ukraine has gone full-on white nationalist, calling Ukrainians “civilized” white European Christians while whitewashing the US war on Iraq, bombing of Yemen, and Israeli attacks on Syrians & Palestinians Read more here: https://t.co/YZCBzv4wXy pic.twitter.com/f4HZPOcaLz — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 28, 2022 The US war on Iraq killed more than 1 million people, and its two-decade war on Afghanistan killed hundreds of thousands more. But the “unworthy victims” of US wars are dehumanized as “uncivilized,” whereas the “worthy victims” of Washington’s adversary Russia are portrayed as “civilized” white Christians. D’Agata later apologized for his remarks, but he was by no means alone. NBC News correspondent Kelly Cobiella stated openly, “Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria. These are refugees from neighboring Ukraine. I mean, that, quite frankly, is part of it. These are Christians. They’re whites. They’re very similar to people who live in Poland.” "Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria. These are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine. I mean, that, quite frankly, is part of it. These are Christians. They're Whites. They're very similar to people who live in Poland."pic.twitter.com/T90tA101H9 — Zeeshan Khan (@IbnKhayyam) February 27, 2022 In the same vein, Ukraine’s deputy chief prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, emphasized in an interview on the BBC that Ukrainians are unique victims because many have blond hair and blue eyes. “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed, children being killed every day, with Putin’s missiles, and his helicopters, and his rockets,” Sakvarelidze said. Western media outlets deny that Ukraine has a massive Nazi problem (it does), while they spread Nazi-esque propaganda: "It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed with Putin's missiles" ? https://t.co/gCbnsm5EB4 — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 27, 2022 Sakvarelidze was formerly a member of parliament in Georgia, from the right-wing, pro-Western party of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, one of Washington’s most loyal allies in the region. Yet Sakvarelidze was given Ukrainian citizenship and appointed deputy general prosecutor in 2015, soon after the US-sponsored 2014 coup overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected president and installed a pro-Western puppet regime. Sakvarelidze’s Eurocentric rhetoric was echoed on Britain’s ITV News, by its correspondent Lucy Watson. Recalling seeing Ukrainian children in strollers (or “buggies,” in British English), Watson said in exasperation, “Every single one of those buggies is a young child who was at nursery school, who was being looked after by their parents. Their parents were going to work, eating, drinking in cafes, doing the things that you and I were doing two, three days ago.” “Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing, third world nation; this is Europe,” she added. 'Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, third world nation, this is Europe.' pic.twitter.com/BFYvql7iie — black lives matter (@jrc1921) February 27, 2022 British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan exemplified the imperial hypocrisy in an article in the right-wing Telegraph newspaper on February 26, titled “Vladimir Putin’s monstrous invasion is an attack on civilisation itself.” “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers,” Hannan wrote. “War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.” Ironically, many people in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other countries attacked by the United States do indeed have Instagram accounts, and Netflix is available in some of these nations as well. But the obvious implication of this media narrative is that Global South countries invaded, bombed, and militarily occupied by the United States and its Western allies are not civilized, and therefore that Washington’s and Brussels’ wars are justified. This flagrant differentiation in treatment is a textbook example of the concept of “unworthy victims,” articulated by scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their classic 1988 book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.” “Worthy victims” are those who are killed or abused by the US government’s Official Enemies – such as Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela. “Unworthy victims” are the people killed and abused by the US government and its allies – in Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Nicaragua, Somalia, Panama, Congo, and beyond. Herman and Chomsky wrote: Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage. Western media coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes this imperial hypocrisy as clear as day.

Write an article about: US covid ‘bailout’ is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall Street: Economist Michael Hudson explains. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

CARES Act, Covid-19, Donald Trump, economics, Michael Hudson, Steven Mnuchin, Treasury

Economist Michael Hudson says the US Congress’ CARES Act is not a Covid-19 pandemic bailout for the people, but a $6 trillion giveaway to Wall Street, banks, and stockholders. Facing the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Congress rammed through the CARES Act — which economist Michael Hudson explains is not a “bailout” but a massive, $6 trillion giveaway to Wall Street, banks, large corporations, and stockholders. Hudson discusses the enormous financial scam, and reveals how the economy actually works, with the Federal Reserve printing money so rich elites don’t lose their investments. (Interview recorded on April 13, 2020) Part 2: “How USA makes countries pay for its wars: Economics of American imperialism with Michael Hudson” (Teaser – 0:03) MICHAEL HUDSON: Just think of when, in the debates with Bernie, Sanders during the spring, you had Biden, and Klobuchar keep saying, ‘What we’re paying for Medicare-for-All will be $1 trillion over 10 years.’ Well here the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks. Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy! The idea that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent. People hesitate to think that. They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 50, 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show. And that’s why you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about, you know, just words, and they use euphemisms, and it’s the kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world that they’re talking about. (Intro – 1:58) BENJAMIN NORTON: The world is suffering right now from one of the worst economic crises in modern history. Definitely the worst crisis since the 2008 financial crash. And many economics experts are saying that we’re living through the worst recession actually since the Great Depression of 1929. Well joining us to discuss this today, we have one of the best contemporary economists, who is really well prepared to explain what has been going on in this global recession during the coronavirus pandemic. And specifically today we’re gonna talk about the $6 trillion bailout package that the US Congress has passed. The Trump administration is basically taking Obama’s corporate bailout on steroids, and injecting trillions of dollars into the corporate sector. And today to discuss what exactly the coronavirus bailout means, we are joined by the economist Michael Hudson. He is the author of many books. And in the second part of this episode we’re gonna talk about his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” So that’ll be much more in the vein of kind of traditional Moderate Rebels episodes, where we talk about imperialism, US foreign policy, and all of that. Michael Hudson is also a former Wall Street financial analyst, so he’s very well prepared to talk about just the financial thievery that goes on on Wall Street. And he is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. So Michael, let’s just get started here. Can you respond to this global depression that we’re living through right now amid the Covid-19 pandemic? And what do you think about this new bailout that was passed? (3:50) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the word bailout, as you just pointed out, really was used by Obama, and the bailout only applies to the banks. The word coronavirus is just put in as an advertising slogan. Banks and corporations, airlines, have a whole sort of wish list that they have their lawyers and lobbyists prepare for just such an opportunity. And when the opportunity comes up — whether it’s 9/11, with the Patriot Act, or whether it’s today’s coronavirus — they just passed a coronavirus onto an act which is shouldn’t be called giveaway to the big bank banking sectors. Let’s talk about who’s not bailed out. Who’s not bailed out are the small business owners, the restaurants, the companies that you walk down the street in New York or other cities, and they’re all shuttered with closed signs. Their rent is accumulating, month after month. Restaurants, and gyms, and stores are small markup businesses and small margin businesses, where, once you have no sales for maybe three months, and rent accruing for three months, they’re not going to have enough money to earn the profits to pay the rents that have mounted up for the last three months. The other people that are not being bailed out are the people, the workers — especially the people they call the prime necessary workers, which is their euphemism for minimum-wage workers, without any job security. There have been huge layoffs of minimum-wage labor, manual labor, all sorts of labor. They’re not getting income, but their rents are accruing. And their utility bills are accruing. Their student loans are accruing. And their credit card debts are mounting up at interest and penalty rates, which are even larger than the interest rates. So all of these debts are accruing. And the real explosion is going to come in three months, when all of a sudden, this money falls due. The governor of New York has said, “Well we have a moratorium on actually evicting people for three months.” So there are restaurants and other people, individuals, wage-earners, who are going to be able to live in their apartments and not be evicted. But at the end of three months, that’s when the eviction notices are going to come. And people are going to decide, is it worth it? Well especially restaurants are going to decide. And they’re going to say, well there is no way that we can make the money to pay, because we haven’t had the income to pay. And they’re just going to go out of business. They’re not going to be helped. The similar type of giveaway occurred after 9/11. I had a house for 20 years in Tribeca, one block from the World Trade Center. And the money was given by the government to the landlords but not to the small businesses that rented there — the Xerox shops and the other things. The landlords took all of the ostensible rent loss for themselves, and still tried to charge rent out to the xerox shops, and the food shops, and ended up collecting twice, and driving them out. So you’re having the pretense of a bailout, but the bailout really is an Obama-style bailout. It goes to the banks; it goes to those companies that have drawn up wish lists by their lobbyists, such as the airlines, Boeing, the large banks. The banks and the real estate interests are going to be the biggest gainers. They have changed the real estate law so that the real estate owners, for a generation, will be income tax free. They are allowed to charge depreciation, and have other fast write-offs, to pretend that their real estate is losing value, regardless of whether it’s going up and up in value. Donald Trump says that he loves that depreciation, because he pretends that he’s losing money, and gets it is a tax write-off, even while his property prices go up. So there’s a lot of small prints. And the devil is all in the small print of the giveaway. And then President Trump has his own half-a-trillion-dollar slush fund that he says he doesn’t have to inform a Congress or be subject to any Freedom of Information Law, that he gets to go to his backers in the Republican States. And even for the money that is going out to states and municipalities, they’re left broke. Imagine New York City and other states. Most states in the United States, and cities, have balanced budget constitutional restrictions. That means they’re not allowed to run a deficit. Now if these states and cities have to pay unemployment insurance, have to pay carrying charges on the schools and public services, and are not getting the sales taxes, not getting the income taxes, from the restaurants and all the businesses that are closed, or from the workers that are laid off, they’re going to be left with a huge deficit. Nothing is done about that. There has been no attempt to save them. So three months from now, you’re going to have broke states, broke municipalities, labor that cannot, whose savings was wiped out. As I’m sure you’ve reported on your show, the Federal Reserve says that half of Americans do not have $400 for emergency saving. Well now they’re going to be running up thousands of dollars of rent and monthly bills. So the disaster is about to hit. They will not be bailed out. But no investment, investor, really will lose. And you’ve seen last week, the stock market made the largest jump since the depression — the largest jump in in 90 years. And that’s because Trump says, “The economy is the stock market, and the stock market is the 1 percent.” So from the very beginning, his point of reference for the market and for the economy is the 1 percent. The 99 percent are simply overhead. Industry is an overhead. Agriculture is an overhead. And labor is an overhead, to what really is a financialized economy that is writing the whole bailout. It’s not a bailout — it’s a huge giveaway that makes them richer than they ever were before. (10:48) BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah and Michael, related to that — you mentioned that fine print is important. But I also have a kind of bigger question. And I don’t really know where exactly these numbers come from. Officially the bailout is $2 trillion. Many media outlets reported it as effectively $4 trillion. But actually, according to Larry Kudlow — who is the director of the US National Economic Council, he’s the Trump administration’s kind of chief economist — Larry Kudlow is now saying that it’s actually $6 trillion in total, which is a quarter of all of US GDP. And that includes $4 trillion in lending power for the Federal Reserve, as well as $2 trillion in the aid package. So there is discussion of this aid package, but actually the aid package of $2 trillion is actually half the size of the $4 trillion that is given to the Federal Reserve. What exactly is that $4 trillion that the Federal Reserve has? Is this some kind of slush fund, or how does it work? (11:52) MICHAEL HUDSON: No, the Federal Reserve was given special powers to create 10 times as many loans or swaps as others. So the Federal Reserve says we’re in — the Federal Reserve represents the commercial banks and the commercial investors. Now here’s the problem: a lot of companies were issuing junk bonds. They were going way down in price, especially junk bonds for the fracking industry. The Federal Reserve says, “We’re going to be backed up by the Treasury. We can just create — as you know, Modern Monetary Theory — we can just create money on a computer, and swap. So we will, say, ‘Give us your poor.’ It’s like the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give us your poor, your oppressed,’ or Aladdin’s old lamps for new: Give us all your junk bonds, and we will give you a bona fide Federal Reserve deposit.” So the Federal Reserve has been pumping trillions and trillions of dollars into the stock market. That’s what’s been pushing up the stock market, the Federal Reserve. The bailout has gone to the stock market. As if the stock market got coronavirus! Stocks don’t get coronavirus! They don’t get sick on the virus! And yet it’s the stock market that’s going up through the Federal Reserve. There’s also another $2 trillion dollars, $2 to $4 trillion that the US government has, over and above the $2 trillion that’s going to the people. So most of the calculations that have been published cite it as a $10 trillion bailout. Of which the newspapers, to avoid embarrassing Mr. Trump, only refer to the money given to the the wage earners. And they’re sort of embarrassed that the vast majority are given to the financial sector that doesn’t need a bailout, but that doesn’t want to lose a single penny from the virus. So when you see the stock market recovered almost to what it was before the virus, while the economy is going down, you realize, wait a minute they’re saving the 1 percent, or the 10 percent of the population that own 85 percent of the stocks and bonds. They’re saving the banks. They’re not saving the people, and they’re not saving the economy; they’re not saving industry; and they’re not saving small businesses. So it’s an amazing hypocrisy that the mainstream press is not discussing, which is why your show is so important. (14:29) MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah and here in Washington, DC, we got I think $500 million from the, I guess what you accurately describe as the stock market bailout. And that’s a lot less than a number of red states that are less populous than Washington, DC got. So there’s a massive shafting here. And then the city has only been able to provide for certain parts of the economy. Undocumented immigrants, who do a lot of work here, got nothing from the city. Vendors, which are a big part of the informal economy in DC, even though they have to be regulated, got nothing. And then you mention all of these sectors of the economy — young people, college-educated young people who are deep in debt, and therefore less inclined to spend — are getting shafted here. So you have called for a solution — well I guess, knowing so many of those people, they contribute so little to the economy because they can’t; they’re just putting all their money into debt. So you have called for a debt jubilee. You say that debts that can’t be paid won’t be, and this is the best way out. Maybe you can explain to our viewers and listeners what that is and why it would be the best remedy? (15:42) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well here’s what happens if you don’t write down the debts that are just going to accrue in the next three months: If you don’t say, “The rents will not have to be paid, and workers will not have to pay the debts that mount up,” if you leave those debts on the books, and you make the workers liable to keep paying the student debts, and the other debts, and the mortgage debts, and the rents, then they’re not going to have any money left to buy goods and services. When it’s all over, they’re going to get their paychecks, and off the top is going to be the wage withholding, and the tax withholding, and the Medicare, and if they don’t want to get kicked out of their houses, they’re going to have to pay all of this money that’s accrued while they’re not making an income. So you’re going to have a shrinkage of the economy, a vast shrinkage. How can they afford to buy anything but the most basic necessities, the cheapest food, the necessary transport? Obviously they’re not going to buy the kinds of goods and services that are supposed to be part of the circular flow. The whole of economics textbook say employers pay the workers so the workers can have enough money to buy what they produce. But the workers don’t spend their income only on what they produce. They spend most of their income on rent, on debt service, on taxes, on finance, insurance, and real estate. And this is the only part of the economy that is being enabled to survive. So how can you have the superstructure of rents and debts, of insurance charges, on an economy that doesn’t have the income to buy goods and services? And if they can’t buy goods and services, you’re going to have the stores closing down, because people can’t afford to buy what the stores are selling. You’re going to have a whole wave of closures. And you’re going to go down the streets, and certainly in cities like New York, or where I live in Queens, just outside of Manhattan, where block after block, they’re going to be “For rent” signs. It’s going to be empty. And the only way to avoid that is for a debt write-down. Now you’ve had this occurring for 5,000 years. I’ll give you an example that may be easy to understand. In Babylonia, we have the Laws of Hammurabi, in 1800 BC. One of the laws says that, if — in Babylonia you only had, when you would buy beer or other things, they would write it on a tab in the bar, in the ale house, and all the debts were owed when the harvest was in. You’d pay the debt seasonally. Well Hammurabi said, if there’s a drought, or if there’s a flood, then you don’t have to pay the debts. Most debts were owed to the palace, and others. And he said, “The reason we’re doing this is, if we don’t do that, then you’re going to have these debtors become debt servants, bond servants to the creditors; they’re going to owe their labor to the creditors; they’re going to lose their land to the creditors; and they won’t be able to work on public infrastructure projects; they won’t work for Babylonia; they won’t serve in the army, and we can be invaded; and they won’t be able to use their crops as taxes, because they’ll owe the crops as debts. So we’re going to write it down.” So the whole idea for thousands of years, of every Near Eastern ruler starting his reign by writing down the debts, was to begin everything in balance. Because they realized, just mathematically, debts grow at compound interest. You’ve seen the coronavirus increase at an exponential rate. That’s how debts accumulate interest, at an exponential rate. But the economy grows in an s-curve, and then it tapers off. The American economy, the GDP since the Obama bailouts of 2008, the entire growth of the GDP has only accrued to 5 percent of the population. 95 percent of the GDP, the population for 95 percent, the industry, agriculture, that’s actually gone down. So we’re already in a 12-year depression, the Obama depression, that they like to call a recession, because most of the media are Democratic Party people. But you’re going to have this recession turn into a genuine depression, and it will continue until the public debt, that is state local debts, written down; the mortgage debts written down; and the personal debts written down, starting with the student loans, the most obviously unpayable debt. And the choices, do you want to depression, or do you want the banks to be able to collect all the economic surplus for themselves? Well Donald Trump, supported unanimously by the Democratic Congress, says, “We want to protect the banks, not the population, not the economy. Let the economy shrink, as long as our constituents, the donor class, are able to avoid making a loss. Let’s make the loss borne by the 99 percent, not our donor class.” (21:17) BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, and Michael, you mentioned something, getting back to the Federal Reserve and understanding how this whole system works. I mean frankly it seems to me to kind of be a house of cards. But you mentioned this idea of Modern Monetary Theory and just kind of creating money out of nothing. Can you talk more about that? You know this is a term that’s become more prominent, especially on the left: MMT, modern monetary theory. There are socialists who argue in support of MMT and then there are others who are kind of skeptical of the whole notion that you can just print all this money to fund these social programs that you want to create, and that it won’t create inflation. But at the same time, you and other people point out that that’s exactly how the economy already works. Where for instance, you want to fund a war, there’s never — you know frequently when someone on the left asks for universal health care or free public education, members not only of the Republican Party but many neoliberal Democrats often say, “Well yeah, where are you gonna get the money from?” And the response of some of the MMT supporters is, “Well we just fund the program, and we just create the money because we control the creation of the dollar.” And we see that same attitude used actually by the Federal Reserve right now, but to bail out Wall Street. “Yeah we’re just gonna print” — they printed $1.5 trillion, and then just gave it, they just injected it right into Wall Street. So does that not create inflation, or what exactly is happening economically there? I mean to me, it seems like a scam; it seems like totally a scam. (22:59) MICHAEL HUDSON: Since 2008, you have had the greatest inflation of money in history. And you have also had the greatest inflation in history, but it’s entirely asset price inflation. You’re absolutely right: the money has gone into the stock market and the bond market, to hold down bond prices, meaning you’ve had the biggest bond boom in history. You’ve had a huge stock market boom. But consumer prices have gone down. So here you have an enormous amount of money creation, and consumer prices and real wages have been drifting down. So they are really two economies. The question is, are you going to create money for public purposes by spending it into the economy, on industry, agriculture, and the goods and service production and consumption economy, or are you going to put it into the financial economy? Well if you put a bank loan — the whole way of our banking system is that banks create credit. If you go into a bank and you take out a loan, you say, I’m gonna borrow $5,000 for something. The banker doesn’t go and say, let me see if we have any money to loan you; he says, okay I will write a loan on my computer. I will credit your deposit with $5,000, and you will sign this IOU, and we have an asset. And the asset is $5000, on which we’re going to charge interest on what we pay you. So it’s just done by computer, on a balance sheet. And as long as money is created on a computer, the only cost is the electricity used to make that debt record. Now the banks, when they make a loan, they very rarely make loans just against — here’s just free money. They say, okay if we’re going to make a loan, well 80 percent of their loans are against real estate. So they say, in case you can’t pay, you’re pledging your real estate, the home you’re buying, or the commercial building you’re buying as collateral. So we’ll lend you up to 80 percent, maybe 100 percent, of the value of what you’re buying, and that’s the collateral we have. So we lend against collateral. Well if you lend the money against collateral to buy a building, or to buy stocks and bonds, which are the other collateral, then obviously this money you’re creating to buy houses, or commercial real estate, or stocks and bonds are going to bid the price up. Banks don’t give loans for people who say, I want to go shopping and buy more goods because I need the money. That may be a little bit, that’s what credit cards are for, but that’s a small portion of the overall money supply. So banks don’t make loans to buy goods and services; they make loans to buy assets that obviously inflate the price of assets. And the more money that you pay for houses that are rising in price, or medical insurance, or stocks and bonds, to make a retirement income for your pension fund; the more money you pay for houses that are inflating in price because of bank credit, the less money you have to buy goods and services. So actually the more money they create, the more consumer prices for goods and services fall. It’s the exact opposite of the usual theory. I have on my website I have many articles about that, and I have something today in Counterpunch on that, it’s on sort of how the economy works the opposite of the way the textbook says. Now unfortunately the left-wing doesn’t really study finance and money much. The whole discussion of finance and money has been monopolized by the right-wing, so left-wingers think, they don’t realize that they’re picking up a kind of junk theory of monetary relations and debt relations that’s all picked up from the right-wing of the political spectrum. It’s a kind of parallel universe. That’s not how the economy really works, but in a way that sort of is easy to understand. And it’s very easy to make an erroneous, oversimplified view of the world easy to understand. And when it’s repeated again and again and again, in the media, the New York Times and MSNBC, people really think that, well, maybe that’s how the world works — more money is going to push up prices, so we better not push for it, we better go along with trickle-down theory. And most of the left believes in trickle-down theory. The Democratic Party leadership is absolutely convinced, if you just give enough money to the top 1 percent, or 5 percent, or Wall Street, it’ll all trickle down. (27:49) BENJAMIN NORTON: Well of course the Democratic Party is not the left. MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right, but it pretends to be. And it has crowded out the left. It has — you can see in the recent election primaries that its job is to protect the Republican Party from any critique by the left, interjecting itself in between the Republican Party and any possible reform movement. BENJAMIN NORTON: Exactly. (28:20) MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well they stood up really strongly against the bailout — I mean what was it, 96 to nothing? And in the voice vote, I was listening to the voice vote last night in the House; I didn’t hear AOC’s voice against it. MICHAEL HUDSON: They did a voice so that nobody — everybody could say, “Oh it wasn’t me!” MAX BLUMENTHAL: No, no! So you mentioned that foreclosure king Steve Mnnuchin gets like a $500 billion slush fund. I haven’t heard much discussion about that. What will he do with this sort of opaque slush fund, and how will this — I mean it’s a leading question, but how will this kind of reinforce or consolidate inequality for the next generation? (29:10) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well gee, I hope he gives some of it to Kamala Harris, who was the attorney general who let him do all of this, and who thoroughly backed him and led the foreclosure, was the iron fist behind his foreclosure program. So I’m sure he’ll press for Kamala to be the vice president on the ticket. The Democrats have a problem. How can they guarantee that they have their candidate win? Their candidate is Donald Trump. How can they make sure that they have such a weak candidate that he’s sure to lose to Donald Trump? And the choice is, we’ll get a vice president that’s so unpopular that they’re sure to lose. Now it’s a race between Kamala Harris and the Minnesota lady. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Klobuchar? The one who throws staplers at her staff. She seems very charming. MICHAEL HUDSON: Uh, I don’t know about that. But my wife can’t even look at her on television. But I think that the pretense is that she’ll help get Minnesota, as if Minnesotans, where I’m from, are so dumb just to vote for somebody from there. But by getting Minnesota, they’ll lose the whole rest of the country. So I think she’ll be the vice president, because that guarantees a Trump victory. And that will enable the Democrats to say, here — they’ll have the president they want, that is for their donor class, but they can say, “That’s not us; that’s the Republicans.” So that’s the Democratic strategy. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right, then they can raise loads of money for the “Resistance,” and all of the outside think tanks. And that was the old Republican, William F. Buckley strategy, is we’re better throwing rocks out side the building and raising a ton of money for the National Review than actually having to govern. And that seems like the Democratic strategy. But I guess I was asking about how you see the economy transforming, because the Obama bailout sort of transformed it or consolidated the gig economy, where everyone has to work three to five jobs, and what was supposed to be a highly educated middle class is deeply in debt. Where do you see it after this next tranche of stock market bailouts? (31:29) MICHAEL HUDSON: Ok, let’s look at three months from now. Smaller companies are going to be squeezed, because all of their expenses are going to go up. Small companies have had to run up debts, and they have all sorts of other problems, and their earnings, their prospective profits, are not going to look that good. Because there’s not going to be a market for the things that they sell, because of the debt deflation that I talked about. So what’s going to happen? You’re going to have a bonanza for private equity capital. The liquid, the 1 percent that have access to bank credit, and I have their own equity capital, are going to come in and pick up a lot of real estate that’s going to be defaulted on — just like they did after Obama evicted his constituency, the mob with pitchforks, and evicted them. They’re going to pick up, Blackstone will pick up more real estate. Big companies are going to pick up small companies. So you’re going to emerge with a highly monopolized economy, much more centralized. The important thing to realize about free-market economics and libertarianism, is libertarians advocate central planning; the Chicago School of monetarists advocate central planning; the free marketers want central planning. The banks are the planners, not the government. They want to exclude the government from planning, except to the extent that they can take over the government, as Trump has done, and plan all of the income to be transferred to themselves from the rest of the economy. So we’re going to have a much more centrally planned by a coalition of monopolies and the government. In the 1930s, that was called fascism. MAX BLUMENTHAL: It’s what we call a “public-private partnership” or something. MICHAEL HUDSON: Right. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Just really quickly, and maybe we can kind of transition after this, but you mentioned Blackstone. I think this is one of the key components of the bailout. They own so much stake in so many of the companies getting bailed out. Can you just describe their role and what they are? (33:38) MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s appropriate that they were put in charge of bailout. So if they’re the largest company buying up defaulted real estate and buying, picking up the weak — it’s called moving assets from the weak hands to the strong — then they might as well be put in charge, because they’re going to be the company doing all the grabbing. So of course they’re in charge of it. It’s called grabitization. That was their word for privatization in the 1990s. So grabitization is I think a better word than public-private partnership. It’s not really a partner; it’s sort of a one-way partnership; there’s one subsidiary partner. It’s really financialization and grabitization. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right, just the looting of state assets. BENJAMIN NORTON: Going back one step here, Michael, you were talking about the way that people should think about how the economy actually works. And I mentioned MMT. Can you kind of just walk through that again? Because you were talking about how actually, when the Fed creates — I mean really to me, as someone, I’m definitely not an economics expert, I just don’t understand really how this whole process works, because to me it just seems simply like, they’re literally just creating money and just giving it to banks, and corporate elites, and rich people. I mean maybe that’s what it is. But I don’t understand, this is like the biggest scheme I can imagine, where the Federal Reserve is creating all of this money, printing — they’re physically printing money is my understanding. And then they’re just giving it to these banks, to bondholders. And then, but you said that what does is, instead of actually creating inflation, all that does is, if I understood correctly, it boosts the value of assets like real estate, while at the same time deflating wages and commodity prices. So if that’s the case, then how should people who are advocating for socialized programs like Medicare for All, free public education, and maternity leave, and childcare, and all of these programs that the Bernie Sanders campaign and movement have been advocating for, how should we talk about the way to pay for all of those programs, if the reality of the economy is that the Fed is printing trillions of dollars, and then just giving that cash to banks? (36:11) MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I think the reason you’re having trouble understanding MMT is because what you described is what’s happening, but you think, “But that’s unfair!” And there’s a tendency to think, if it’s unfair — MAX BLUMENTHAL: It’s not just unfair. It’s the biggest scheme I can imagine. There’s no other word other than just a con scheme. MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, and the brain recoils from thinking, “Can the government really be doing that to us?” Well, yes it can. And just think of when, in the debates with Bernie, Sanders during the spring, you had Biden, and Klobuchar keep saying, ‘What we’re paying for Medicare-for-All will be $1 trillion over 10 years.’ Well here the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks. Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy! The idea that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent. People hesitate to think that. They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 50, 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show. And that’s why you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about, you know, just words, and they use euphemisms, and it’s the kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world that they’re talking about. They will buy stock; they’ll say we’re going to buy a million shares of Boeing; they’ll just write a check, and the check will be Federal Reserve, and people will get the money, and the Federal Reserve — you can create a deposit, just like a banker will write you a loan when you go in and borrow, and there will be a computer, the Fed can do the same thing. Stephanie Kelton, my department chairman for many years at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, describes this. The University of Missouri’s website, New Economic Perspectives has a description of it. So if people want to google either her, UMKC, or what I’ve written, or Randall Wray at the Levy Institute, you’ll get, it’ll walk you through. And it’s something that you have to — if you’re not already thinking in terms of balance sheets, which most people don’t, you have to sort of just do it again, read it again and again and again, and then all of a sudden, “Ah, now I get. It’s a ripoff! It’s created out of nothing. Now I get it.” BENJAMIN NORTON: It’s just a house of cards. To me it proves the kind — there used to be this kind of very blunt orthodox Marxist view that the economy strictly follows politics, and it seems to me this is a case where the economy is just created by politics. MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s true, and that’s not an un-Marxist position. Marx did distinguish between oligarchies and democracies, and finance capitalist economies and industrial capitalist economies. MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. And the $17 billion for “urgent national security measures” was straight into the pockets of Boeing, which had its 737 maxes falling out of the sky, and had been clamoring for this bailout for a long time. I mean you saw 3M, the maker of these masks which are suddenly unavailable, gained a total exemption from lawsuits, if the masks that it mass-produced now somehow failed. So all of these things stuffed into the bailout were what industry and finance had been clamoring for for years. And they finally had the opportunity to do it. (Outro – 40:38) BENJAMIN NORTON: All right, we’re gonna take a pause there. That was the end of part one of our interview here with the economist Michael Hudson. He is a Wall Street financial analyst, a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, and of course the author of many books on economics. You can find some of his work at michael-hudson.com. We will link to that in the show notes. He has interviews with transcripts and articles. You can also find some of his economics work and the work of some of his like-minded colleagues at the economics department at the University of Missouri Kansas City website. I will link to that as well in the show notes. You can find the show notes at moderaterebels.com. In part two of this episode, we’re going to continue our discussion of the house of cards that is the international financial system, the economic system. And in the second part we’re going to talk about his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” This is an incredible book. You know here at Moderate Rebels, Max and I frequently talk about the political and military side of imperialism. Michael Hudson just spells out, in easy-to-understand terms, how imperialism works at an economic level, how the US government and the Treasury, through the backing of military force, force countries around the world to buy US bonds, Treasury bonds, and how there’s basically just a con scheme where countries pay for their own US military occupation through buying US Treasury bonds. Michael Hudson explains that all in really simple terms. And we also talk about the rise of China, and how China does pose a so-called threat, in scare quotes, to not the American people but rather to the hegemony of the US financial system — and the main financial instruments, the weapons that the US uses to maintain that hegemony, the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, and the World Bank. And Hudson describes how, in his terms, the IMF, and the World Bank, specifically, are some of the most evil institutions that are really maintaining the American dictatorial, authoritarian chokehold on the global financial system. If you want to support this program, Moderate Rebels, and the kind of independent interviews we do like this, giving a platform to some of these voices who you’re never going to hear in mainstream corporate media, you can go to Patreon.com. Please consider supporting us. And definitely join us in part. See you soon.