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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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How the Taliban surge exposed Pentagon's lies

Western politicians and media colluded in duping their publics into believing Afghanistan was a 'winnable war'

The real explanation for the Taliban's 'surprise' success is that western publics were being duped all along

A month ago, as the US army prepared to end the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan and hand over responsibility to local security forces it had armed and trained, maps showed small, relatively isolated pockets of Taliban control.

At the weekend, the Islamist fighters marched unchallenged into Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, bringing almost the entire country under their thumb. US intelligence assessments that it would take the Taliban up to three months to capture Afghanistan's capital proved wildly inaccurate.

It took a few days.

Foreign nationals were left scrambling to Kabul's airport while American officials were hurriedly evacuated by helicopter, echoing the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US embassy staff were chased out of South Vietnam after years of a similarly failed war.

On Sunday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement that he had fled the country – reportedly in a helicopter stuffed with cash – to "avoid bloodshed". But all the evidence indicates his corrupt security forces were never in a position to offer serious resistance to a Taliban takeover.

Jumping ship

The speed with which the Taliban have re-established their hold on a country that was supposedly being reconstructed as some kind of western-style liberal democracy is astonishing. Or, at least, it is to those who believed that US and British military commanders, western politicians and the mainstream media were being straight all this time.

The real explanation for the Taliban's "surprise" success is that western publics were being duped all along. The United States' longest war was doomed from the start. The corrupt, entirely unrepresentative members of the Kabul elite were always going to jump ship as soon as Washington stopped pumping in troops and treasure.

According to Forbes magazine, as much as $2 trillion was poured into Afghanistan over the past 20 years – or $300m a day. The truth is that western politicians and the media intentionally colluded in a fiction, selling yet another imperial "war" in a far-off land as a humanitarian intervention welcomed by the local population.

As Daniel Davis, a former US army lieutenant colonel and critic of the war, observed at the weekend: "Since early 2002, the war in Afghanistan never had a chance of succeeding."

Nonetheless, many politicians and commentators are still sounding the same, tired tune, castigating the Biden administration for "betraying" Afghanistan, as if the US had any right to be there in the first place – or as if more years of US meddling could turn things around.

Colonial chessboard

No one should have been shocked by the almost-instant collapse of an Afghan government and its security services that had been foisted on the country by the US. But it seems some are still credulous enough – even after the catastrophic lies that justified "interventions" in Iraq, Libya and Syria – to believe western foreign policy is driven by the desire to assist poor countries rather than use them as pawns on a global, colonial chessboard.

Afghans are no different from the rest of us. They don't like outsiders ruling over them. They don't like having political priorities imposed on them. And they don't like dying in someone else's power game.

If the fall of Kabul proves anything, it is that the US never had any allies in Afghanistan outside of a tiny elite that saw the chance to enrich itself, protected by US and British firepower and given an alibi by western liberals who assumed their own simplistic discourse about identity politics was ripe for export.

Yes, the Taliban will be bad news for Afghan women and girls, as well as men, who are concerned chiefly with maintaining personal freedom. But a tough conclusion western audiences may have to draw is that there are competing priorities for many Afghans who have suffered under decades of invasions and colonial interference.

Just as in Iraq, large segments of the population appear to be ready to forgo freedom in return for a guarantee of communal stability and personal safety. That was something a US client regime, looking to divert aid into its own pockets, was never going to guarantee. While the US was in charge, many tens of thousands of Afghans were killed. We will never know the true figure because their lives were considered cheap. Millions more Afghans were forced into exile.

Spoils of war

Nothing about western intervention in Afghanistan has been as it was portrayed. Those deceptions long predate the invasion by the US and UK in 2001, supposedly to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda fighters following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Seen now, the attack on Afghanistan looks more like scene-setting, and a rationalisation, for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq that soon followed. Both served the neoconservative agenda of increasing the US footprint in the Middle East and upping the pressure on Iran.

The West has long pursued geostrategic interests in Afghanistan, given the country's value as a trade route and its role as a buffer against enemies gaining access to the Arabian Gulf. In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires used Afghanistan as the central arena for their manoeuvring in the so-called "Great Game".

Similar intrigues drove US-led efforts to expel the Soviet army after it invaded and occupied Afghanistan through the 1980s. Washington and Britain helped to finance, arm and train Islamist fighters, the mujahideen, that forced out the Red Army in 1989. The mujahideen went on to oust the country's secular, communist government.

After their victory against the Soviet army, the mujahideen leadership split, with some becoming little more than regional warlords. The country was plunged into a bloody civil war in which the mujahideen and warlords looted their way through the areas they conquered, often treating women and girls as the spoils of war.

Despite Washington officials' constant trumpeting of their concern at Taliban violations of women's rights – in what became an additional pretext for continuing the occupation – the US had shown no desire to tackle such abuses when they were committed by its own mujahideen allies.

Rule of the warlords

The Taliban emerged in the 1990s from religious schools in neighbouring Pakistan as civil war raged in Afghanistan. They vowed to end the corruption and insecurity felt by Afghans under the rule of the warlords and mujahideen, and unify the country under Islamic law.

They found support, especially in poor, rural areas that had suffered most from the bloodletting.

The subsequent "liberation" of Afghanistan by US and British forces returned the country, outside a fortified Kabul, to an even more complex havoc. Afghans were variously exposed to violence from warlords, the Taliban, the US military and its local proxies.

To much of the population, Hamid Karzai, a former mujahideen leader who became the first Afghan president installed by the US occupation regime, was just another plundering warlord, the strongest only because he was backed by US guns and warplanes.

It was telling that five weeks ago, asked about the prospects of the Taliban returning to power, Biden stated that "the likelihood there's going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely". Not only was he wrong, but his remarks suggested that Washington ultimately preferred to keep Afghanistan weak and divided between feuding strongmen.

That was precisely the reason most Afghans wanted the US gone.

Washington poured at least $88bn into training and arming a 300,000-strong Afghan army and police force that evaporated in Kabul, the government's supposed stronghold at the first sight of the Taliban. American taxpayers will be right to ask why such phenomenal sums were wasted on pointless military theatre rather than invested back home.

The US military, private security contractors, and arms manufacturers fed at what became a bottomless trough, and in the process were ever more deeply invested in maintaining the fiction of a winnable war. An endless, futile occupation with no clear objective swelled their budgets and ensured the military-industrial complex grew ever richer and more powerful.

Every indication is that the same war-industry juggernaut will simply change course now, playing up threats from China, Iran and Russia, to justify the continuation of budget increases that would otherwise be under threat.

Missing in action

The motive for US officials and corporations to conspire in the grand deception is clear. But what about the mainstream media, the self-declared "fourth estate" and the public's supposed watchdog on abuses of state power? Why were they missing in action all this time?

It is not as though they did not have the information needed to expose the Pentagon's lies in Afghanistan, had they cared to. The clues were there, and even reported occasionally. But the media failed to sustain attention.

As far back as 2009, as the US was preparing a pointless surge of troops to tackle the Taliban, Karl Eikenberry, then ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a cable to secretary of state Hillary Clinton that was leaked to the New York Times. He wrote that additional US forces would only "delay the day when Afghans will take over". A decade later, the Washington Post published secret documents it called the Afghan Papers that highlighted the Pentagon's systematic deceptions and lying. The subtitle was "At war with the truth".

Bob Crowley, an army colonel who had advised US military commanders in Afghanistan, observed: "Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible." The Post concluded that the US government had made every effort to "deliberately mislead the public".

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction appointed by Congress in 2012, had long detailed the waste and corruption in Afghanistan and the dismal state of the Afghan forces. But these reports were ignored or quickly disappeared without trace, leaving the Pentagon free to peddle yet more lies.

Cheerleading, not scrutinising

In the summer, as he issued yet another report, Sopko made scathing comments about claims that lessons would be learnt: "Don't believe what you're told by the generals or the ambassadors or people in the administration saying we're never going to do this again. That's exactly what we said after Vietnam... Lo and behold, we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again."

A good part of the reason the Pentagon can keep recycling its lies is because neither Congress or the media is holding it to account.

The US media have performed no better. In fact, they have had their own incentives to cheerlead rather than scrutinise recent wars. Not least, they benefit from the drama of war, as more viewers tune in, allowing them to hike their advertising rates.

The handful of companies that run the biggest TV channels, newspapers and websites in the US are also part of a network of transnational corporations whose relentless economic growth has been spurred on by the "war on terror" and the channelling of trillions of dollars from the public purse into corporate hands.

The cosy ties between the US media and the military are evident too in the endless parade of former Pentagon officials and retired generals who sit in TV studios commenting as "independent experts" and analysts on US wars. Their failures in Iraq, Libya and Syria have not apparently dented their credibility.

That rotten system was proudly on display again this week as the media uncritically shared the assessments of David Petraeus, the former US commander in Afghanistan. Although Petraeus shares an outsize chunk of responsibility for the past two decades of military failure and Pentagon deception, he called for the "might of the US military" to be restored for a final push against the Taliban.

Were it still possible to hold US officials to account, the Taliban's surge over the past few days would have silenced Petraeus and brought Washington's huge war scam crashing down.

Instead, the war industries will not even need to take a pause and regroup. They will carry on regardless, growing and prospering as though their defeat at the hands of the Taliban signifies nothing at all.

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fapangel · 5 years

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YOUR CUNT PRESIDICK GIVE 3000 TROOPS AND F15S FOR SAUDIS YET CANT LET 50 STAY FOR KURDS

There’s a big fucking difference between some rear-echelon guys sitting in air-conditioned offices and Patriot battery control vans sipping lattes and Special Forces operators stationed as human shields between two armies spoiling for a fight.

I’m actually planning a Big Effortpost about this soon; my first actual writing for this blog in a long, long time - but for now, consider what this guy has to say: https://twitter.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1182718671237664768

This is exactly what the United States has done in countless places - the best example being South Korea. And for decades, the United States has largely dictated the foreign relations of states like that as the price of their patronage. Eventually, we had to compensate that patronage by tolerating unequal trade deals that disadvantaged our own domestic workers, and resulted in resentment towards our supposedly close allies - just ask anyone in my home state, home of the US auto industry, how they feel about Japanese and Korean automobiles destroying their livelihoods. These master-vassal alliance arrangements are the ones Trump is currently dismantling and re-setting on more equitable terms - which, in the long-run, will make for stronger alliances based on mutual interest, instead of arm-twisting ones held together mostly by the pressure of the Soviet Union (which no longer exists.)

Those Cold War thinkers still make up the majority of “The Blob,” the foreign-policy “establishment’ of thinkers that include the think tanks, the government bureaucracy, and the former bureaucrats who then go to work at think-tanks publishing papers that are read by the current bureaucrats. The master-vassal relationship is absolutely what they want to inflict on the Kurds; to turn Kurdistan into a permanent tool of US regional policy.

The establishment of a Greater Kurdistan - one extending from northern Iraq all the way to the east bank of the Euphrates - is Washington’s de-facto policy. We want the Kurds to have that land, because they’ve already got a nation (their shared ethnicity) to bind together their state, and they’re far less of a pain in the ass than pretty much every other government, ethnic group or loose socio-religious polity in the region.

... of course, that’s also supposed to be true of Turkey, as well - despite them invading a contested area (Cyprus) in what was essentially an attack on another NATO ally. And said NATO ally - Greece, the land of my ancestors - embarrassed NATO by falling under the control of a fascist fucking dictatorship for seven years in the late-sixties/early seventies. And the best part is, It was American meddling in favor of authoritarian governments (to combat the Communists) that helped that regime come to power - an American CIA agent was best pals with several of the colonels who’d later stage the coup!

I say to you, as a Greek-American well-educated by my elders in the trials of my bloodline and a fiercely loyal citizen of America: is this what you want for Kurdistan? The America of the Cold War did such things for pressing reasons, even if they weren’t right - in the contest of nukes, whoever loses the game of positioning loses everything (consider the Cuban Missile Crisis.) That era is past, but the elitist leadership class that still infests our government are full of people who would continue the crimes of the past, despite there no longer being any excuse for them. It took us a decade just to put Trump in office. It will take us a generation to remake our government entire.

I want Kurdistan to be truly free - and it will never be so if it doesn’t fight its own battles. You won’t fight like my grandfather’s generation had to; with antique weapons and whatever they could steal from the enemy. The Greeks received European aid to prop them up as a foil against the Turks for a long time, but much of it was privately collected and donated - nothing like the support in cash and arms the Kurds have received. The Kurds are going to bleed Turkey, especially since the President has indicated multiple times that our largess is not coming to an end; that the money and the weapons will continue to flow, even as we punish Turkey for their trouble-making. If the Kurds doubt that the favors of great powers always come with strings attached, they will doubt no more once Turkish F-16s start fading from the skies when America shuts off the deliveries of sundry engines and spare parts - to say nothing of the economic sanctions. America put the Turkish lira into freefall with sanctions in August of last year - all to get back one American held hostage by Ergodan. One American. Wars run on money, and nobody can doubt our power to dry Turkey’s coffers.

We have armed and enriched the Kurds and will soon disarm and beggar their enemies, the Turks - but Kurds must do the bleeding to secure Kurdistan’s future. It is truly incredible that the President of the United States would openly threaten our own treaty ally with possible war on behalf of people who’s state America doesn’t even officially recognize yet. He’s only raising the specter to drive the final point (”call us and mediate a deal before we make you wish you had,”) but even for Trump it is incredible to lift one’s shirt and flash his saber hilt at our own treaty ally. America is far from all-powerful, but it’s as close to a God on Earth as this wretched world is likely to see, and though Americans cannot bend Heaven, we can absolutely move Hell when we see fit.

We have given the Kurds as much opportunity and means as we can. Ergodan’s push against the Kurds is motivated by the demands of his own political survival - any setbacks in their Syrian operations, and the inevitable slow attrition the Kurds will inflict on their “border area” will all tell against Ergodan personally. By fighting their own battles, the Kurds can do what America cannot - humiliate and discredit Turkey’s flamboyant strongman. This is about teaching Turkey a lesson it must learn - that the Kurds can bloody their nose without America holding their hand, and America’s only recompense to Turkey will be laughter. But it’s about something more, too - the possibility of changing Turkey’s political trajectory for the foreseeable future by finishing off Ergodan’s last remaining bastion of credibility.

If America does this, then Kurds will only be seen as obedient pawns of a much bigger, much wealthier power, and Turkish resolve will only harden.

Kurds have won Kurdistan - for all our help, our advisers, our money, our weapons, our airstrikes, it was Kurds who carried bright steel into the smoke and flames of war. Now Kurds must secure Kurdistan. They might resent us, even hate us for what we do now. I don’t give a damn if they do - as long as Kurdistan is truly free.

Americans defend the right to keep and bear arms because they fear their own government. I suggest the Kurds consider that carefully.

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queernuck · 5 years

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What People Do You Hear Sing: American Hegemony and Orientalist Ideology in Leftist Discussions of Hong Kong

the way in which discussions of the MCU in relation to China have often been a means of excusing Marvel and Disney from their own decisions and instead pushing questions of taste, aesthetics, and the role of the blockbuster in American cinema and global cinema more widely as part of the American cultural war machine and global patterns of consumption-production is being brought to a head by comparatively petty bickering between Disney and Sony. and, of course when we discuss consumption of media, the notion of China as a market, as a nation, the way in which China and the US interact with one another is something that comes up. it is an especially pertinent discussion at this moment, when ideation of the Orientalist “other” is on the tips of many politicians’ tongues, the discussion of Trump’s comments on Xi Jinping (and their likening to his remarks on Kim Jong Un) and how discourses about Hong Kong are impacted by this, the way that the trade war with China and apparent fears of a recession are part of a wider array of discussions about how exactly import and export as processes of exchange, ideologies of transferrence and the libidinal flows involved lead to the kind of ideology seen in Western analysis of Hong Kong’s protests

first, a discussion worth mentioning is how attempts at assessing US Hegemony can lead one can enter into a kind of simple (but common) anti-imperialist analysis, offering that in a case of imperialist aggression, one cannot help but root for the defeat of one’s own nation. this proves true in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, entirely without offering support for fundamentalist violence, something that absolutely must not be confused. the way in which this manifests as celebrating events as US defeats rather than celebrating them as victories can then, perhaps, be applied to various supposed anti-imperialist oppositions: China impacting American hegemony through economic actions, Russia weakening American neoliberal hegemony through military action and favoring the Syrian state as a means of opposing ISIS as well as opposing US-backed or US-allied hegemony in nations like Ukraine, a kind of celebration of these as courses of opposition rather than in-themselves is something that is commonly criticized as a remnant or as a “tankie” position, rather than recognized as at least a potential means of celebrating US hegemony as becoming more unsustainable, requiring even more intense flows of libidinal investment, turning against itself as it attempts to transform itself for the many forever-wars it continually finds itself fighting, the transition to recognizing that these are not wars, but are rather colonial occupations, fronts to which young generals and soldiers are sent to be forged in the same tradition as other colonial troops.

The example of leftists who offered some excitement over the election of Duterte in the Philippines due to his nominal anti-US stance despite his own reactionary ideology, the means by which he openly compares his own anti-drug death squads to those of the Nazis, is a feeling that was shared by Philippine Maoists hoping for at least some loosening of American hegemony in the Philippines, despite firmly and resolutely standing against the government regardless of the head of state, despite abandoning negotiations with Duterte’s government rather soon after said negotiations had begun. The relationship between China, the US, and the Philippines involves a great deal of passing-on of settler-colonial ideologies and neocolonial control, is complex, is one where the reprehensible actions of Duterte can be understood as desired by Maoist rebels not as an end in itself, but rather as a means of improving their ability to maneuver against a wider regime that is overall sympathetic to power, to hegemony, that is more than willing to subject the Filipino People to colonial occupation and how their struggle against colonialism is one that they wage regardless of the actual head of government. A defense of Duterte based on his own policies would be outright justification of genocide, and an understanding of how openly his politics were based around using the drug war as a kind of amplification of the drug war waged by the US, as an open excuse for the creation of death squads rather than a somewhat more subtle one as seen in the US and the policies it has endorsed in the name of the War on Drugs and how many have died, have had their lives ruined, how the police has been militarized in response to the escalation of this war and how colonial occupation has been ongoing in black communities, communities of color, how the way in which crack was only a problem for the government when it could be used to kill in communities of color, how opiates have been used to

The notion that any singular analysis has a monopoly on correct methodologies of analysis in any category is a rejection of the principles behind even the most materialist, scientific implementations of Maoist thought, of Marxist-Leninist discussion, of exactly what the “material” constitutes and how to divide that from the immaterial, the ideological, through a kind of anti-metaphysics of political maneuver. Furthermore, when founded on opposition to an action or policy rather than out of a singular and united action, one finds that a protest transforms into a hyperobject, one wide-ranging in participation and ideological goals, akin to the variance of ideology in assemblies during Occupy Wall Street or found in the protests of the Yellow Vests. Ignoring successes and fetishizing failures, or for that matter creating fantasies out of success and pretending that failure was never found is to condense and ignore the means by which protest occurs in a neoliberal age, the means by which solidarity becomes extended, how messages are received and understood in relation to settler-colonialism and Orientalist understandings of what a protest outside the West constitutes: the way in which Hong Kong now, Euromaidan then, the many ways in which Yankee understandings of leftist movements of numerous tendencies are often based in considering the constituents of such a movement as an unreadable and blank Orientalist “Other”, and how easy it is for reactionary or anticommunist sentiment from liberals to creep into any reading of an action or organization results in a kind of meta-movement within the larger hyperobject of that protest, in the way that the Yellow Vests in Canada constitute a fellow-traveler to numerous fascist movements, how American support for Ukraine has constituted support for the most fascist elements of any movement, and meanwhile as Horvat and Žižek have discussed, the defense of statues of Lenin has been not out of a genuine communist sentiment, but rather out of Lenin as a symbol of Russian identity.

Here, the importance of ideation and ideology in relation to action becomes most clear, in that symbols and actions-as-emblematic lead to certain currents flowing through protests, as the Yellow Vest became a symbol of working class identity and the way in which a diesel tax would disproportionately impact the working class, how the ideological structure of certain actions in Hong Kong designed as attempts to draw international solidarity have become resignified as evidence for reactionary positions (ones which may or more likely may not be held by the protestors themselves, or if so are only being used as a kind of vulgar proxy for other positions) and the way in which aspiration, hope, and attempts at offering a position becomes something just as powerful in reversal and perhaps more vicious. The way in which “Blue Lives Matter” as a direct reversal of the Black Lives Matter movement has become a white supremacist slogan, how support for police has been specifically founded on antiblackness and is most primarily realized as support for antiblack and anti-antifascist actions on the part of police is one example of such a resignification. The way that symbols of supposedly innocuous nature that display a neutral support for agents of state control (control by a justifiable and supportable state, that is) rather than a willingness to at least ignore, and perhaps collaborate directly with, white supremacists is a vital part of understanding exactly how the currency of fascist fantasies adds up.

Effectively, the means by which one encounters the notion of protest, a kind of removed image of protest, and then understands it will be shaped by the neoliberal structure of the apparatuses of capture and distribution, the producing-production space of content within the Virtual, the sublimation of protest and counterprotest into the Virtual. This is why the avoidance of Riot Porn as a serious politics is necessary, why idle fantasizing about Red Armies and Gulags becomes a kind of ghastly exercise in Marxist-Leninist-Reactionist thought, how the way in which the sublimation of identity politics means that there is no longer a singular “voice” as neoliberalism would like one to believe, but rather that discussions and analysis of what must be supported become the primary point of navigation.

The importance of understanding postmodern fields of war, the war machines of neocolonialism and the way in which capitalist development in relation to socialist projects as well as anarchist ones involves a great deal of sublimation, violence, exploitation that is focused against revolutionary critique and toward a new anticommunism means that support and solidarity must be offered as part of genuine engagement with not only an idealized version of a protest but the hyperobject of neoliberal interpretation and re-interpretation, idealization of protest as concept and action makes it such that a unified push toward any goal will invite a great deal of reactionary hangers-on, ones which may be counted among allies in a superficial sense, but will inevitably turn when given the opportunity.

To again address Hong Kong, China, to offer the question of exactly what one can hope that protests in Hong Kong will achieve, an outcome which results in full self-determination for Hong Kong, one which fosters a movement that sees it separated from the PRC, will result in, at best, the formation of a state with enormous income inequality, where the movement in question has been opposed or at least viewed with some disdain by capitalists within Hong Kong, and most of all a state which is likely to collaborate or ally closely with American and British interests, even against the will of the people of Hong Kong. Western support for protests in Hong Kong has at many points come from the right, from American republicans who are unwilling to even begin critiquing the PLA and Chinese politics on a grounds of genuine liberation, but rather care about posturing in order to win a trade war and taking Hong Kong protestors as anti-socialist and moreover “pro-democracy” in a way that meaningfully equates to support for American hegemony. Even if the protests in question are ones against Beijing both in concept and in action, to assume that all protestors are reactionary, are themselves asking that the income inequality, the failure to address the legacy of colonial dominance that was retained when the British handed over Hong Kong and how that has been reflected within Hong Kong as a kind of neocolonial violence, the way that protestors have been developing admirable new technologies and weapons of state resistance, ones which protestors the world over would do well to note regardless of their particular affiliations, and even their adoption of Pepe as a symbol not of fascist libidinal flows but of liberation and the resignification of hegemony can be considered worthwhile victories. However, that there have been protestors who have waved American flags and as a result have been fetishized by Western “supporters” that likely hope for more and more brutal crackdowns, that look to use these protests as a cynical vector of American power and interest (regardless of the presence (or lack) of any Western involvement in directing protests) flows into how Americans look at actions in Venezuela, Cuba, the DPRK, and even internally and look to reinterpret them as pushing a kind of “democratic” hegemony which privileges landlords, the bourgeoisie, interests of maintaining a self-same hegemony.

When Laclau & Mouffe offer the model of Radical Democracy, they emphasize that hegemony as a force is built not from some intractable evil, or capitalist ideology, but is simply a means of describing dominance of power. The potential for radical democratic organizing through post-Marxist means in Hong Kong is certainly great, is certainly an opportunity which should be supported specifically because addressing the incredible disparities of capitalist violence in Hong Kong, highlighting the failures of the PRC (regardless of its merits or lack thereof) and most of all understanding that this lack of understanding is due largely to how discussions are contained within hegemonic, capitalist apparatuses of capture, how most sources will be in one way or another reactionary, how the loudest sources are ones that support Hong Kong out of cynicism and imperialist aspiration such as The Economist, the way in which dominance of a Western and at the end Orientalist critique in both support and detraction pervades other discourses must be acknowledged. The moment of spontaneous collaboration, using an assembled knowledge of a rather famous musical about rebellion and liberation seen in the singing of “Do You Hear The People Sing” by a group of protestors must be acknowledged as a moment in which the aesthetics of protest become interpreted and re-interpreted infinitely by apparatuses of capture that have a definite influence from American cultural hegemony. When companies like Disney create the pop culture of the world, when artists and writers from America or American allies are the dictators of the pop-cultural norms of numerous nations, when American films outgross even the totality of Indian films (despite India producing an order of magnitude more features in a given year) the role of these articulations and rearticulations, the means by which a kind of simulacra of a neat, clean, and singular entity of critique is exchanged within hyperreal spaces of consideration, the role of American hegemony in dictating even how it can be opposed, questioned, and what sorts of opposition are acceptable becomes somewhat clear. Certainly, there is an “external” to this structure, but exactly how much one can look for a true “externality” to the structure from within it, while using platforms dominated by American ideology is questionable.

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hoezier · 5 years

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You know what, I’m gonna do it. I’m just gonna go on a rant about the (second) Gulf War, aka the 2003 Iraq invasion.

The thing that drives me absolutely mad, MAD I tell you, about the way that people talk about this war here in the U.S. is how it has become conflated with the U.S.’s effort in fighting terrorism. It hasn’t even been 20 years since the 9/11, it has barely been 15 years since the Iraq invasion, and the history of it has been misconstrued into one of the string of the U.S.’s effort to fight terrorism.

Setting aside the utter absurdity of the War on Terror that the U.S. launched (that needs its own 50k book), the U.S. did not really invade Iraq to fight terrorism. The U.S. at the time did not present terrorism as a reason for the war. That’s something that was only secondary and added to the narrative after the fact after the country went into a shitstorm following the invasion. What Bush as the time said is that:

They, supposedly, found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Those weapons are there because of a corrupt regime, embodied in Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. needs to help the Iraqi people free themselves from said terrible leader and give them freedom and democracy.

Now, to be clear, Saddam Hussein was an absolute tyrannical piece of shit. I’m talking next level genocides, oppression, driving the country’s economy through the mud, all that good stuff. So it’s not like they weren’t correct in how terrible Saddam Hussein actually was. The real shitstorm is assuming that a population, historically colonized, would be welcoming to a foreign invasion removing a local leader.

And here, we need some context. The problem is that Iraq has been through so much shit over the past 50 years. he 1970′s were a fairly prosperous time for Iraq, following the political turmoil of the 1960′s, the country was beginning to settle. Then Saddam Hussein entered the picture. He went into an eight years long war against Iran in the 1980′s. That war DESTROYED the country. As wars go, half the country’s men were forcibly drafted and subsequently killed, the economic situation was absolutely terrible, and of course, it came to no real win. This is when my mother’s cousin was taken as a War prisoner. He would not return for over ten years after. And what returned of him was nothing but a ghost.

The Iraq-Iran war ended in 1989. People got the smallest bit of a breather then of about a year, during which my parents got engaged. But then, Saddam Hussein got himself in an argument with Kuwait about settling some finances that he should have received from them for his effort against Iran (why exactly Kuwait would support such war against Iran is long and complicated and we will not get into it right now), but then they kinda denied him. So he, like the fucking idiot that he was, went and invaded Kuwait and declared it a part of Iraq.

But that shit ain’t gonna cut it. Now the entirety of the Arab countries, along with the U.S. and its allies (basically everyone and their mom), formed an army against Iraq to defend Kuwait. Things were absolutely terribly for Iraqis, of course, because another war after the eight years long one against Iran, is an utter nightmare in and of itself. But to have to deal with the bombarded effort of all those countries, who were blowing up shit that really did little to hurt the regime but a lot to hurt the people was devastating. My parents got married during this war, because they literally had no idea if they’d survive and they wanted to be married if something were to happen.

Also during this war the U.S.’s effort to get rid of Saddam Hussein started. The U.S. backed Saddam’s rise to power, make no mistake about that. He was someone who could be a good ally to them. Perhaps you would be more inclined to be doubtful about that if it weren’t for our support of Saudi Arabia after everything that the Crown Prince’s been doing. But after his invasion of Kuwait, they saw him as an unpredictable wild card who could go out of control any minute, so he must go. One of the defining moments of the 1990/1991 Gulf War, The First Gulf War, was the destruction of Al-Amriyyah shelter. The U.S. got intelligence that Saddam was in said shelter, so they bombed it. The shelter was undergound, so it required a special kind of incinerating bombs to do the job. We’re also talking about a shelter in which over 300 families stayed at to protect themselves from the terror of the night bombings. All those families were wiped clean. Saddam, whether he was actually there or not before we don’t know for sure, but by the time the bombs hit and burned all those people, he was gone.

Following the war, economic sanctions were placed on Iraq. Dealings and tradings with Iraq were internationally prohibited, it became a no-fly zone, and every once in a while, the U.S. would randomly bomb a few places here and there throughout the 1990′s. It’s important to note here that Bin Ladin stated the bombings on Iraq as one of the reasons behind 9/11, as retaliation. As if the world needed any more bloodthirsty vengeance-seeking monsters. I was born in 1995. And while everyone on here remembers the ‘90′s fondly, my memories of it are a lot of dark nights and loud noise that my father would try to drown out by singing Country Road by John Denver to my siblings and I.

The sanctions, unsurprisingly, did not hurt the regime. It hurt the Iraqi people. It completely destroyed the middle class. And it pretty much ensured that the people themselves would have no chance to get rid of Saddam through a local revolution. And make no mistake people have attempted to overthrow him before, and were brutally squashed every time. But all those attempts were before the economic sanctions. You don’t really have time to revolt when you can’t even afford food. Not to mention the sense of fear from a foreign invasion making patriotism hit in all the wrong places (though do realize that wrong here is only in retrospect and coming from someone who was too young to think of any of this at the time).

The sanctions would not be removed until after the 2003 invasion. But at the time we had a much bigger issue to deal with. A war. Again.

To go back to the original reason of the war and what Bush and the U.S. administration stated, what they said has nothing to do with the actual reason that they invaded Iraq. The simple fact of the matter is that they wanted to get rid of Saddam, yes, but for no reason other than wanting to control the country’s resources, that’s A, and B what they really wanted was to have constant control over an important part of the region.

The talk of terrorism being a reason for it is misleading and maddening. Because this was not the bullshit reason that the administration gave at the time, nor was it the actual reason for it. To say that it was a response to 9/11 is to say that the U.S. miscalculated the benefits of the war for an ultimately “well-intentioned” reason. Iraq had a lot of issues when Saddam was in charge, but terrorism only became an issue AFTER the war. It’s almost as if war... creates a circumstance appropriate for terrorism? But that’s just a crazy theory. Don’t mind me.

Why would I tell you all of this, you might ask. Because the way that we talk about the U.S.’s history with the region is absolutely absurd. It wants you to believe that its relationship with the region before 9/11 was normal and that the attack was what triggered everything. But this is hardly a way of understanding what happened in Iraq, and what continues to happen in the region. The Gulf War was not a disembodied bloody incident in the U.S.’s history with Iraq, it’s pretty much the norm.

#personal #finehs #iraq #history #ya'll can blame dani for triggering this rant #resources: ask me if you want and I'll give them to you #i know this history like the back of my hand because I never want to forget #but i'll give you a source for a specific fact with no trouble #this took so much effort i have to go lie down now #long post for ts

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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On 13 October 1806 a young German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, had an encounter with world history. En route to their annihilation of the Prussian forces 24 hours later, Napoleon and his army were marching through the East German university town of Jena. Hegel couldn’t disguise his terror that in the ensuing chaos the recently completed manuscript of The Phenomenology of Spirit might get lost in the mail. But neither could he resist the drama of the moment. As he wrote to his friend Friedrich Niethammer, ‘I saw the emperor – this world-soul (Weltseele) – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.’

Two hundred years later, in rather more sedate circumstances, the Berkeley historian Daniel J. Sargent, addressing the American Historical Association, also evoked the world spirit. But this time it came in the person of Donald Trump and he was riding not on horseback, but on a golf cart. Trump can be compared to Napoleon, according to Sargent, because they are both destroyers of international order. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon wrecked what was left of the legitimate order of Europe. Trump, in turn, has apparently ended the American world order, or, as Sargent prefers to call it, Pax Americana.

Sargent’s is an extraordinary suggestion, even though overenthusiastic historic comparisons have now become commonplace. Early in 2017 I was among those who thought they were seeing the end of the American century. But, even then, in the early days of the Trump administration, it seemed crucial to draw a distinction between American power and American political authority. Two years on, that distinction seems more important than ever.

The idea that Trump is a wrecker of the American-led world order rests on three claims. First, he is manifestly unfit for high office. That such a man can be elected president of the United States reveals a deep degeneration of American political culture and permanently damages the country’s credibility. Second, his capricious and crude pursuit of ‘America first’ has weakened America’s alliances and instigated a departure from globalisation based on free trade. Finally, he has triggered this crisis at a moment when China poses an unprecedented challenge to Western-led globalisation. Each of these claims is hard to deny, but do they in fact add up to a historically significant shift in the foundations of America’s global power?

No question, Trump has done massive damage to the dignity of the American presidency. Even allowing for the personal and political failings of some previous incumbents, he marks a new low. What ought to be of no less concern is that he has received so little open criticism from the supposedly respectable ranks of the Republican leadership. Similarly, American big business leaders, though sceptical of Trump, have profited from his administration’s tax cuts and eagerly assisted in dismantling the apparatus of environmental and financial regulation. He has been applauded by the section of the US media that caters to the right. And a solid minority of the electorate continues to give him its wholehearted support. What is worrying, therefore, isn’t simply Trump himself, but the forces in America that enable him.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first Republican president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture clash has historical roots in America’s domestic struggles over civil rights, the women’s and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide protest movement against America’s brutal war in Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively digging in, consolidating their grip on the white electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition between a free-market, pro-business elite and a xenophobic working and lower-middle-class base. This was always a fragile arrangement, held together by rampant nationalism and a suspicion of big government. It was able to govern in large part owing to the willingness of Democratic Party centrists to help with the heavy lifting. The Nafta free-trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada was initiated by George H.W. Bush, but carried over the line in 1993 by Bill Clinton, against the opposition of the American labour movement. It was Clinton’s administration that righted the fiscal ship after the deficit excesses of the Reagan era, only for the budget to be blown back into deficit by the wars and tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the broad church of the Republican Party began to radicalise. In the 1990s, with Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove setting the tone, the battle lines hardened. With the Iraq War going horribly, and the Democrats taking control of Congress in 2006, the right became ever more dominant within the Republican Party. In 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, the Republicans in Congress abandoned the Bush administration. The financial crisis-fighting of Hank Paulson as Bush’s Treasury secretary and Ben Bernanke at the Fed relied on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of opposition and indulged the populist right in openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012 caused a further, decisive slide to the right, opening the door for Trump. In 2016 no major corporation was willing to sponsor the convention that nominated Trump as the Republican presidential candidate: their brand advisers were too worried that Confederate flags would be waving in the convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing base, energised by funding from a small group of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained by the globalist business elite.

A cynic might say that Trump simply says out loud what many on the right have long thought in private. He is clearly a racist, but the mass incarceration of black men since the 1970s has been a bipartisan policy. His inflammatory remarks about immigration are appalling, but it isn’t as though liberal centrists would advocate a policy of open borders. The question – and it is a real question – is whether his disinhibited rhetoric announces a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even darker. The concern is that he will trigger an illiberal chain reaction both at home and abroad.

At G20, G7 and Nato summits, the mood is tense. The rumour that the US is planning to charge host governments ‘cost plus 50 per cent’ for the military bases it has planted all over the world is the latest instance of a stance that at times seems to reduce American power to a protection racket. But for all the indignation this causes, what matters is the effect Trump’s disruptive political style has on the global power balance and whether it indicates a historic rupture of the American world order. How much difference does the US being rude to European Nato members, refusing to co-operate with the WTO, or playing hardball on car imports really make?

This is not merely a debating point. It is the challenge being advanced by the Trump administration itself in its encounters with its allies and partners. Do America’s alliances – do international institutions – really matter? The administration is even testing the proposition that transnational technological and business linkages must be taken as given. Might it not be better for the US simply to ‘uncouple’? Where Trump’s critics argue that at a time when China’s power is increasing the US should strengthen its alliances abroad, the Trumpists take the opposite view. For them it is precisely in order to face down China that the US must shake up the Western alliance and redefine its terms so that it serves American interests more clearly. What we are witnessing isn’t just a process of dismantling and destruction, but a deliberate strategy of stress testing. It is a strategy Trump personifies, but it goes well beyond him.

In October 2018 the giant Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman unexpectedly pulled out of the Eastern Mediterranean, where its planes had been bombarding IS’s positions in Syria. It sailed into the Atlantic and then suddenly and without warning headed north. Aircraft carriers don’t do this: their itineraries are planned years ahead. This was different. The Truman and its escorts headed full steam to the Arctic, making it the first carrier group to deploy there for 27 years, backing up Nato’s war games in Norway. The consternation this caused delighted the Pentagon. Unpredictable ‘dynamic force employment’ is a key part of its new strategy to wrong-foot America’s challengers.

The Harry S. Truman is a controversial ship. The Pentagon would like to scrap it in favour of more modern vessels. Congress is pushing back. The White House wants more and bigger carrier groups; the navy says it wants 12 of them. The Nimitz-class behemoths commissioned between 1975 and 2009 are to be replaced by a new fleet of even more gigantic and complex Ford-class vessels. All have their priorities, but what everyone in Washington agrees on is the need for a huge military build-up.

The resignation of General James Mattis as defence secretary at the end of 2018 sparked yet another round of speculation about the politicking going on inside the Trump administration. But we would do better to pay more attention to his interim replacement, Patrick Shanahan, and the agenda he is pursuing. Shanahan, who spent thirty years at Boeing, is described by one insider as ‘a living, breathing product of the military-industrial complex’. Under Mattis he was the organisational muscle in a Defence Department with a new focus, not on counterinsurgency, but on future conflicts between great powers. Shanahan’s stock in trade is advanced technology: hypersonics, directed energy, space, cyber, quantum science and autonomous war-fighting by AI. And he has the budget to deliver. The Trump administration has asked for a staggering $750 billion for defence in 2020, more than the spending of the next seven countries in the world put together.

Declinists will point out that the US no longer has a monopoly on high-tech weaponry. But that is grist to the mill of the Trump-era strategists. They recognise the threat that great-power competition poses. Their plan is to compete and to win. In any case, most of the other substantial military spenders are American allies or protectorates, like Saudi Arabia or the European members of Nato. The only real challenges are presented by Russia and China. Russia is troublesome and the breakdown in nuclear arms control poses important and expensive questions for the future. But Russia is the old enemy. Shanahan’s mantra is ‘China, China, China’.

The ‘pivot’ in American strategy to face China was initiated not by Trump but by Obama in 2011, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Even then, despite their far more tactful leadership, it caused some crashing of gears. The problem is that containing China is not what Washington’s system of alliances is designed to do. From the early 1970s, the days of Nixon and Kissinger, China was enrolled as a US partner in keeping the balance of power with the Soviet Union. Given half a chance, Trump would like to essay a reverse-Kissinger and recruit Russia as an ally against China. But Congress and the defence community will have none of that. Instead, the US is doubling down on its Cold War alliances in urging both South Korea and Japan to increase their defence efforts. This has the additional benefit that they will have to buy more American equipment. If the Vietnamese regime too were to veer America’s way, Washington would surely welcome it with open arms.

None of this is to say that Trump’s version of the pivot is coherent. If containment of China is the aim, America’s Asian partners must wonder why the president scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and investment deal within days of taking office. That elaborate package was the foundation of Obama’s China-containment strategy. But for Trump and his cohorts that is muddled thinking. You cannot build American strength on the back of a giant trade deficit. Washington is no longer willing to pay for military co-operation with economic concessions: it wants both greater contributions and more balanced trade.

In Europe the Trump administration is proceeding on the same basis. Trump’s antipathy towards the EU and its political culture is disconcerting. But the problem of burden-sharing has haunted Nato since its inception, and until the 1980s, at least, the Europeans were significant contributors. Until 1989 Germany’s Bundeswehr was a heavily armoured and mechanised force of 500,000 men with a mobilisation strength of 1.5 million. Though its loyalty to the Federal Republic wasn’t in doubt, it was unmistakably a descendant of Germany’s military past. The break following the end of the Cold War was dramatic, not just in Germany but across Europe. Spending collapsed; conscription was abolished; Europe’s contribution to Nato’s effective strength dwindled. There were also deep disagreements between Germany, France and the US over strategic priorities, particularly on Iraq and the war on terror. But differences in threat-perception are no excuse for the dereliction of Europe’s security landscape. If Europe really feels as safe as it claims to, it should have the courage to push for even deeper cuts. Instead, it continues to maintain military establishments which, taken together, make it the world’s second or third largest military spender, depending on how you add up the Chinese budget. But given that it is spread across 28 poorly co-ordinated, undersized forces, Europe’s $270 billion in defence spending isn’t enough to buy an adequate deployable military capacity. Aside from its value as a work-creation measure, the only justification for this huge waste of resources is that it keeps the Americans on board.

The result is a balance of hard power that has for the last thirty years been extraordinarily lopsided. Never before in history has military power been as skewed as it is today. For better or worse, it is America’s preponderance that shapes whatever we call the international order. And given how freely that power has been used, to call it a Pax Americana seems inapposite. A generation of American soldiers has grown used to fighting wars on totally asymmetrical terms. That for them is what the American world order means. And far from abandoning or weakening it, the Trump administration is making urgent efforts to consolidate and reinforce that asymmetry.

How can the US afford its military, the Europeans ask. Is this just another instance of America’s unbalanced constitution? Isn’t there a risk of overstretch? That was certainly the worry at the end of the 1980s, and it recurred in the fears stoked during the Bush era by critics of the Iraq War and budget hawks in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t play much of a role in the current debate about American power, and for good reason. The fact is that for societies at the West’s current level of affluence, military spending is not shockingly disproportionate. The Nato target, which the Europeans huff and puff over, is 2 per cent of GDP; US spending is between 3 and 4 per cent of GDP. And to regard this straightforwardly as a cost is to think in cameralist terms. The overwhelming majority of the Pentagon’s budget is spent in the US or with close allies. The hundreds of billions flow into businesses and communities as profit, wages and tax revenue. What’s more, the Pentagon is responsible for America’s most future-oriented industrial policy. Defence R&D was one of the midwives of Silicon Valley, the greatest legitimating story of modern American capitalism.

If Congress chose, defence spending could easily be funded with taxation. That is what both the Clinton and Obama administrations attempted. The Republicans do things differently. Three of the last four Republican administrations – Reagan, George W. Bush and now Trump – combined enormous tax cuts for the better-off with a huge surge in defence spending. Why? Because they can. As Dick Cheney declared, to the horror of beltway centrists: ‘Reagan showed that deficits don’t matter.’ US Treasuries will be a liability for future American taxpayers, but by the same token they constitute by far the most important pool of safe assets for global investors. Foreign investors hold $6.2 trillion in US public debt, 39 per cent of the debt held by investors other than America’s own government agencies. US taxpayers will be making heavy repayments long into the future. But they will make those payments in a currency that the US itself prints. Foreigners are happy to lend in dollars because the dollar is the pre-eminent global reserve currency.

The hegemony of the dollar-Treasury nexus in global finance remains unchallenged. The dollar’s role in global finance didn’t just survive the crisis of 2008: it was reinforced by it. As the world’s banks gasped for dollar liquidity, the Federal Reserve transformed itself into a global lender of last resort. As part of his election campaign in 2016, Trump undertook an extraordinary vendetta against Janet Yellen, the Fed chair. But he was more restrained after he took office, and his appointment of Jerome Powell as her successor was arguably his most important concession to mainstream policy opinion. Needless to say, Trump is no respecter of the Fed’s ‘independence’. When it began tightening interest rates in 2018 he pushed back aggressively. (As a man who knows a thing or two about debts, he prefers borrowing costs to be low.) His bullying scandalised polite opinion. But rather than undermining the dollar as a global currency, his interventions were music to the ears of hard-pressed borrowers in emerging markets. The same applies to the giant fiscal stimulus that the Republicans launched with their tax cuts: despite rumblings of a trade war, it has kept the American demand for imports – a key element of its global leadership – at record levels.

The world economic order that America oversees was not built through consistent discipline on the part of Washington. Discipline is for crisis cases on the periphery, and dispensing it is the job of agencies like the IMF and the World Bank. Both have been through phases of weakness; in a world in which private funding is cheap and abundant even for some of the poorest countries in the world, the World Bank is struggling to define its role. But the IMF is in fine fettle, largely because the Obama administration pushed the G20 to add $1 trillion to its funding in 2009. So far the Trump administration has shown no interest in sabotaging Christine Lagarde. Over the latest bailout for Argentina, the Americans were notably co-operative. A key issue will be the rollover of the crisis-era emergency funding; from the point of view of international economic governance that may prove to be the most clear-cut test yet of the stance of the Trump presidency.

A stark illustration of the asymmetrical structure of American world order came in recent months in the use of the dollar-based system of invoicing for international trade to threaten sanctions against those tempted to do business with Iran. This outraged global opinion; the Europeans were even roused to talk about the need for ‘economic sovereignty’. What they are upset about isn’t the lack of order, but America’s use of it. To many, Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement is another indication of American unreliability and unilateralism. But why is anyone surprised? It took extraordinary political finesse on the part of the Obama administration to secure backing for the Iran deal in Washington. It was always more than likely that a Republican administration would repudiate it. That may be disagreeable but it can hardly be described as a rupture with the norms of American world order. The system is hierarchical. While others are bound, America retains the sovereign freedom to choose. And that includes the right to revert to the cold war it has been waging against the Iranian Revolution since 1979.

The same harsh logic applies when it comes to the Paris Agreement on climate change. Clearly, it is a disaster that the US has pulled out. But Congress and the George W. Bush administration did the same to the Kyoto Protocol at the beginning of the century. Moves like this should not be interpreted as a rejection of international order tout court, let alone as an abdication of American leadership. The Trump administration has a clear vision of an energy-based system of American leadership and influence. It is based on the transformative technological and business breakthrough of fracking, which has broken the grip of Russia and the Saudis on oil markets and is turning the US into a net exporter of hydrocarbons for the first time since the 1950s. Liquefied natural gas is the fuel of the future. Terminals are being built at full speed on the Texas shoreline. Fracking was originally a wildcat affair but big corporate money is now pouring in. The oil giant ExxonMobil is back (after a weak commercial patch and Rex Tillerson’s humiliating stint at the State Department), investing heavily in huge new discoveries in Latin America. All this will be horrifying to anyone convinced that the future of humanity depends urgently on decarbonisation. But again it is unhelpful, if the aim is to grasp the reality of international order, to conflate it with a specifically liberal interpretation of that idea.

If Republican policy is just Republican policy, American military power is waxing not waning, and the dollar remains at the hub of the global economy, what exactly is it that is broken? The clearest site of rupture is trade, and the associated geopolitical escalation with China. The US is engaged in a sustained and effective boycott of the WTO arbitration system. But the WTO has been ailing for a long time. Since the Doha round of negotiations became deadlocked in the early 2000s it has made little contribution to trade liberalisation. In any case, the idea that legal agreements such as those done at the WTO are what drives globalisation puts the cart before the horse. What really matter are technology and the raw economics of labour costs. The container and the microchip are far more important motors of globalisation than all the GATT rounds and WTO talks put together. If in the last ten years globalisation appears to have stalled, it has more to do with a plateau in the development of global supply chains than with backsliding into protectionism.

In this regard the Trump administration’s aggressive attack on America’s regional trade arrangements is more significant than its boycotting of the WTO. It is in regional integration agreements that the key supply chain networks are framed. The abrupt withdrawal of the US, in the first days of the Trump presidency, from TPP in the Asia-Pacific region and TTIP in the Atlantic, was a genuine shock. But it is far from clear that either arrangement would have been pursued with any energy by a Hillary Clinton administration. She would no doubt have shifted position more gracefully. But the political cost of pushing them through Congress might well have been too high.

In spring 2017 there was real concern that Trump might abruptly and unilaterally cancel Nafta – apparently the hundredth day of his presidency had been set as the occasion. But that threat was contained by a concerted mobilisation of business interests. Once the negotiations with Mexico and Canada started, the tone was rough. In Robert Lighthizer as his trade representative, Trump has found a bully after his own heart. But again, if you look back at the history of Nafta and WTO negotiations, tough talk is par for the course. In the end, a replacement for Nafta emerged, in the form of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA). Apart from minor concessions on dairy exports to Canada and intellectual property protection for American pharmaceuticals, its main provisions concerned the car industry, which dominates North American trade. To escape tariffs, 40 per cent of any vehicle produced in Mexico must have been manufactured by workers earning $16 an hour, well above the US minimum wage and seven times the average manufacturing wage in Mexico. Three-quarters of a vehicle’s value must originate inside the free-trade zone, restricting the use of cheap imported components from Asia. This will likely induce a modification but not a wholesale dismantling of the production networks established under Nafta. Though it was not endorsed by US trade unions, it wasn’t repudiated by them either. As the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations commented, the effect will depend on how it is implemented.

The auto industry was at the heart of the Nafta renegotiation and it is the critical element in simmering US-EU trade tensions too. Let there be no false equivalence, however: the incomprehension and disrespect shown by the White House towards the EU is unprecedented. It isn’t clear that Trump and his entourage actually grasped that America no longer maintains bilateral trade deals with individual members of the EU. Trump’s open advocacy for Brexit and encouragement of further challenges to the coherence of the EU has been extraordinary. The use of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to investigate car imports from Germany as a threat to American national security is absurd. Such things mark a bewildering break with previous experience. That said, Trump’s obsession with the prevalence of German limousines in swanky parts of New York does highlight another painful imbalance in transatlantic relations: the persistent European trade surplus. Of course America contributes to this imbalance with its disinhibited fiscal policy: the better off Americans feel, the more likely they are to buy German cars. But as the Obama administration repeatedly pointed out, Europe’s dogged refusal to stimulate faster growth is as bad for Europe as it is for the world economy. The scale of the Eurozone’s overall current account surplus is highly unusual by historical standards and is both a vulnerability for Europe, leaving its producers hostage to foreign demand, and a potential source of global shocks.

Europe’s freeriding may undermine the global order, but the EU does not mount a direct challenge to US authority. China is different, and that is what truly marks out the foreign relations of our current moment as a break with the decades since the end of the Cold War. No one, including the Chinese, anticipated how rapidly the Trump administration would escalate tensions over trade in 2018 or that this would evolve into a comprehensive challenge to China’s presence in the global tech sector. The US has been putting pressure on its allies to cut the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei out of their plans for 5G, the next generation of internet technology. But here the US – and its allies – are in reactive mode: the original shock was China’s unprecedented growth.

China alone was responsible for a doubling of global steel and aluminimum capacity in the first decade of the 21st century. Its huge investment in R&D transformed it from a ‘third world’ importer of Western technology into a leading global force in 5G. As the likes of Navarro and Lighthizer see it, it was the naivety of enthusiasts for an American-led world order in the 1990s that allowed China’s communist-run state capitalism into the WTO. What the globalists did not understand was the lesson of Tiananmen Square. China would integrate, but on its own terms. That could be ignored in 1989 when China’s economy accounted for only 4 per cent of global GDP: now that figure is close to 20 per cent. As far as the American trade hawks are concerned, competition within an agreed international order is to be welcomed only so long as the competitors agree to play by America’s rules, both economic and geopolitical. This was the lesson Europe was made to learn after the Second World War. It was the lesson that Japan was taught the hard way in the 1980s and early 1990s. If China refuses to learn that lesson, it must be contained.

America retains some huge advantages. But it would be dangerous, the argument goes, simply to count on those. Sometimes American preponderance has to be defended by a ‘war of manoeuvre’. The emerging American strategy is to use threats of trade policy sanctions and aggressive counter-espionage in the tech arena, combined with a ramping up of America’s military effort, to force Beijing to accept not just America’s global preponderance but also its terms for navigation of the South China Sea. In pursuing this course the Trump presidency has a clear precedent: the push against the Soviet Union in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, which deployed economic and political pressure to break what was perceived to be a menacing phase of Soviet expansion in the 1970s. Despite all the risks involved, for American conservatives that episode stands as the benchmark of successful grand strategy.

The reason the attempt to apply this lesson to present-day China is so shocking is that US business is entangled with China to an immeasurably greater degree than it ever was with the Soviet Union. If you are seeking a component of the American world order that is really being tested at the present moment, look no further than Apple’s supply chain in East Asia. Unlike South Korea’s Samsung, the Californian tech giant made a one-way bet on manufacturing integration with China. Almost all its iPhones are assembled there. Apple is an extreme case. But it is not alone. GM currently sells more cars in China than it does in the US. America’s farmers converted their fields wholesale to grow soy beans for export to China, only to find themselves cut out of their biggest market by Brazilian competitors. And it isn’t just American firms that are caught up in the escalation of tension. Important European, South Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese businesses have staked huge wagers on China.

Given these investments, one might have expected more pushback against Trump’s China strategy from US business. So far there has been little. The radical decoupling of the Chinese and American economies may be so horrible a prospect that business leaders simply prefer not to discuss it in public. They may be lying low hoping the row blows over. Or it may be that American business itself buys the increasingly pessimistic diagnosis of the US intelligence and defence community, who argue China’s persistent protectionism and economic nationalism may mean that it presents more of a threat than an opportunity. Even top ‘China hands’ like Steve Schwarzman and Hank Paulson have warned of a chill in the air.

The hardening of attitudes towards China is not confined to America. It was the Anglo-American intelligence consortium known as ‘Five Eyes’ that raised the alarm about Huawei’s capability to build back doors into the West’s most sensitive telecommunications networks. Canada and Australia are deeply concerned about Chinese penetration. The new pessimism about Sinocentric globalisation isn’t confined to security policy hawks, but shared by many mainstream economists and political scientists in US academia, the think-tank world, and journalists and commentators on Chinese affairs. The liberal version of the American world order is deeply influenced by strands of modernisation theory, the up to date version of which is encapsulated in the doctrine of the middle-income trap. Very few large countries have managed to grow beyond China’s current level of income. Those that have done so have kitted themselves out with the full set of liberal institutions and the rule of law. On this reading, China is in a precarious position. Xi’s authoritarian turn is a decisive step in the wrong direction. Further frequently cited signs of Chinese weakness include ethnic tensions and the ageing of the population as a long-term effect of the one-child policy. There is a belief, held well beyond the administration, that the tide may be turning against Beijing and that now is the moment for the West to harden the front.

This would indeed constitute a break with the narrative of globalisation since the 1990s. But it would hardly be a break in the American-led world order. To imagine the American world order as fully global is after all a relatively recent development. After 1945, the postwar order that is generally seen as the non plus ultra of American hegemony was built on the hardened divisions of the Cold War. Where China is concerned, the issue is not so much America’s intention to lead as whether others are willing to follow. Building the Cold War order in Europe and East Asia was comparatively easy. Stalin’s Soviet Union used a lot of stick and very little carrot. The same is not true of modern-day China. Its economy is the thumping heart of a gigantic East Asian industrial complex. In the event of an escalation with China, particularly in East Asia, we may find ourselves facing not so much an end of the American-led order, as an inversion of its terms. Where the US previously offered soft-power inducements to offset the threat of communist military power, backed up by hard power as a last resort, in the next phase the US may become the provider of military security against the blandishments offered by China’s growth machine.

But this is premature. As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.

If America’s president mounted on a golf buggy is a suitably ludicrous emblem of our current moment, the danger is that it suggests far too pastoral a scenario: American power trundling to retirement across manicured lawns. That is not our reality. Imagine instead the president and his buggy careening around the five-acre flight deck of a $13 billion, Ford-class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier engaged in ‘dynamic force deployment’ to the South China Sea. That better captures the surreal revival of great-power politics that hangs over the present. Whether this turns out to be a violent and futile rearguard action, or a new chapter in the age of American world power, remains to be seen.

#hegel #pax americana #imperialism #american century #politics #21st century #book reviews

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floridaprelaw-blog · 4 years

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Abandoning Prosecution Of Michael Flynn: Lawful or Unjust?

By Sneh Amin, University of Miami, Class of 2021

May 22, 2020

The case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, has been dropped. The Justice Department has abandoned his prosecution, claiming that he should never have been charged to begin with.[3]

Michael Flynn was once a distinguished Army lieutenant general, having served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had earned numerous awards and was appointed the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012 by President Barack Obama. Four years later, in 2016, he gave a controversial speech at the Republican National Convention. During his speech, Flynn called for the arrest of Hillary Clinton, stating, “We do not need a reckless president who believes she is above the law… Yes, that’s right, lock her up!” He even went on to say, “If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today.” Shortly after Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he announced his decision to make Flynn his national security advisor. It is around this time that most of Flynn’s issues arose.[6]

During the presidential transition, Flynn participated in a series of conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Prior to these phone calls, Obama had recently announced sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election. This raised many questions about whether the Trump administration was attempting to meddle with the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The calls between Flynn and the ambassador had been intercepted by US surveillance, and although potentially illegal due to the classified information, they were leaked by US officials to the press. When Vice President Mike Pence addressed the nation regarding this issue, he claimed that Flynn had told him that the sanctions were never discussion on the calls. Because the Justice Department had transcripts of the calls due to the interception by US surveillance, there was evidence that during the conversations, Flynn had allegedly told the foreign policy ambassador to not overreact to the Obama administration’s sanctions. [1,6]

Due to this discrepancy, F.B.I. agents went to the White House to interview Flynn, who again maintained that the sanctions were never discussed on the call. Flynn resigned in February 2017, making him the shortest serving national security advisor. After leaving the White House, he continued to be investigated by the F.B.I. During this time, President Trump supposedly encouraged James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. at the time, to drop the investigation on Michael Flynn. Evidently, this raised the question about whether the President of the United States was attempting to obstruct justice.[6]

On December 1, 2017, Flynn pled guilty and admitted lying to the F.B.I. agents.[5] He later became a cooperating witness in the Mueller investigation. At the end of 2018, Flynn was waiting to be sentenced by a federal judge. During this time, it was revealed that Mueller was suggesting to the judge that due to Flynn’s cooperation, he should not be jailed. According to Mueller’s office, “The defendant provided firsthand information about the content and context of interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials.” [6] In 2019, Flynn fired his lawyers, and his legal team decided to take a more combative stance on the matter. The F.B.I. was accused of bias and misconduct.[1]

In May 2020, U.S. Attorney General William Barr asked a separate outside team of federal prosecutors to review the case files, an unusual course of action. These files (pictured below) reveal that there was some sort of internal debate on how to go about questioning Flynn for his interview.[4]Based on these documents, Trump claimed that Flynn was “exonerated” and that the charges should be dropped, despite the fact that Flynn had pleaded guilty. President Trump also said that he was considering pardoning Flynn and bringing him back into his administration.[1]

Barr’s attempt to drop the case is considered to be highly unusual, especially due to the fact that Flynn had already pled guilty. Legal experts have been unable to find a reasonable precedent for the Justice Department to be dropping such a case. Over 2,300 department veterans have signed an open letter accusing Barr of undermining the equity of the justice system. However, the Justice Department has declared that Flynn’s lies did not constitute a crime due to the fact that there was not a legitimate investigation occurring to justify the F.B.I.’s interview of Flynn. In order to support this claim, the department has referred to the fact that prior to the issue regarding Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador, the F.B.I. had decided to close a counterintelligence inquiry into Flynn because of a lack of evidence of his collusion with the Russians.[7] Many law enforcement officials have expressed their disbelief, calling into question the Justice Department’s integrity. Former President Barack Obama stated that “not just institutional norms, but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.” [3]

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is handling Flynn’s case, has appointed retired federal judge John Gleeson to argue against Barr’s decision to abandon prosecution. This week, Gleeson has contributed to an article detailing why dropping all charges would be an unfavorable decision. He has contended that the fourth should not “dismiss a well-founded prosecution for impermissible or corrupt reasons.” He has also been asked by Judge Sullivan to determine whether Flynn has committed perjury, and if he should be held in contempt of court.[7]

It is likely Flynn may have committed perjury. He has stated numerous times under oath that he knowingly lied to the F.B.I. during his interview. However, Flynn later changed his lawyers, and requested to withdraw his guilty plea. In January, he claimed that he did not make false statements to the F.B.I. agents and that he had not remembered the details of his conversations with the Russian ambassador. Flynn also claimed to have pleaded guilty only due to the advice of his former lawyers. He stated that he feared the consequences he would face by maintaining his claim of innocence.[7]

While the president has hinted at rehiring Flynn, many of his advisors do not seem to support his decision.[3] It is possible for President Trump to pardon Flynn at any time. However, at this point it is still unknown what the outcome of Flynn’s case will be.

________________________________________________________________

[1] Cohen, Marshall. “What to Know about Michael Flynn as His Case Hangs in Legal Limbo.” CNN, Cable News Network, 14 May 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/05/13/politics/michael-flynn-trump-russia-explainer/index.html.

[2] Goldman, Adam, and Katie Benner. “U.S. Drops Michael Flynn Case, in Move Backed by Trump.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 7 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/politics/michael-flynn-case-dropped.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article.

[3]Lafraniere, Sharon, and Julian E. Barnes. “For Flynn, Dropped Charges Are the Latest in a Life Full of Reversals.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/politics/michael-flynn.html?searchResultPosition=3.

[4] McAteer, Ksenija Pavlovic. “Read The Latest Unsealed Documents Related To General Flynn Case ::” The Pavlovic Today, 29 Apr. 2020, www.thepavlovictoday.com/read-the-unsealed-documents-related-to-general-flynn-case/.

[5] News, NBC. “Michael Flynn: Timeline of His Rise, Fall and Guilty Plea.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 5 Dec. 2018, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mike-flynn-timeline-his-rise-fall-russia-call-n720671.

[6] “The Saga of Michael Flynn.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/podcasts/the-daily/michael-flynn.html?searchResultPosition=1&showTranscript=1.

[7] Savage, Charlie, and Sharon Lafraniere. “The Justice Dept.'s Attempt to Drop the Michael Flynn Case, Explained.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 15 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/politics/michael-flynn-case-explained.html?searchResultPosition=8.

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tehbaittagoat · 4 years

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‘The Mummy-2017’ review

The Mummy tries a fresh spin on the classic monster with a gender-swapped villain and linking it with the Dark Universe winding up the scale of an action reboot. Tom Cruise’s new creation barely qualifies for a movie. The studio or production running the set, Universal, is planning to copy Marvel by establishing a ‘shared universe’ through interlinking with the blockbusters. But instead of the plot focusing just on the superheroes, the so-called ‘Dark Universe’ movies will be about “The Invisible Man”, “The Wolfman” and the other classic monsters from Universal’s back catalog.

The Mummy had the tendency to make the franchise started This film deserves to be shut inside a pyramid for several millennia. Rather than presenting a self-contained story, it takes a major part of the ShowTime describing its concept and foundations that will help to crop up in future Dark Universe installments. To make the storyline never winding, they used an ordinary line “To Be Continued”. It’s passable if you view it as a trailer, or as the pilot episode of a television series, but as a film in its own right, it deserves to be shut inside a pyramid for several millennia.

Even if The Mummy hadn’t had to lay the groundwork for the Dark Universe, it would still be a shambles. A mish-mash of wildly varying tones and plot strands, Alex Kurtzman’s perplexing horror-comedy mixed with sci-fi-espionage or disastrous thriller is stuffed with characters whose beliefs and abilities change with times, and punctuated by murkily lit of action sequences which don’t show how those characters get from one location to the next. Maybe part of the problem is that there are six credited screenwriters behind this creation. That wouldn’t have been much surprised if they wrote particular pages each without ever seeing what others came up with.

To give you some idea of just how weird it is, The Mummy is a film about an Ancient Egyptian sorcerer, and yet its opening scene features a bunch of Crusaders in 12th Century England. However, the time-lapses and they then jump to the present day, when those Crusaders’ catacombs are discovered beneath the streets of London. This discovery is, somehow, the cue for a portly, smirking professor (Russell Crowe) to stride in and narrate the legend of the aforementioned Ancient Egyptian sorceress. Later on, someone else mentions that the legend has been “erased from the history books”, so it’s quite wonderful that he knows it in such detail.

It’s only after the prof has completed his exposition dump that the film hops to a desert in Iraq, and at last, we meet Cruise’s Nick Morton, a US Army sergeant who loots antiquities to sell on the black market. He is, in short, an obnoxious crook, but, like the many other cocky, self-centered rogues Cruise has ever played, he is supposedly forgivable because a) he keeps taking his shirt off, b) he’s good at sprinting, and c) he learns to be a decent person by the end of the film. It’s a shame that, at 53, the actor is a decade or two too old for the role. If someone is still cheating, stealing and bullying as blithely as Morton is in his sixth decade, it’s hard not to feel that he is, fundamentally, a scumbag.

Eventually, he and a blonde archaeologist/love interest (Annabelle Wallis, who is, of course, 20 years younger than her co-star) stumble upon a cavernous but not very spectacular tomb, and accidentally bring a pharaoh’s cursed daughter, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), back to the land of the living. (It’s Morton’s fault, and it results in catastrophic death and destruction, but no one ever blames him.) Wrapped in just enough bandages to remind us that she’s a mummy, but not enough to cover up the doodles tattooed all over her, Ahmanet embarks on some sort of vengeful quest involving a magical dagger.

None of it either makes sense. The film delivers all the chases, explosions, zombies, dimensions, confusion and ghosts you could ask for, and there are a few amusing as well as cheesy lines and creepy moments, but, between the headache-inducing flashbacks and hallucinations, the narrative would be easier than before to follow if all these were written in hieroglyphics. At one point, for instance, a crowd of zombies disintegrates into computer-generated dust, and the film doesn’t bother to explain why or how the hell it happened. No wonder that even the superhumanly confident Cruise appears dazed and confused half the time. When, in the closing minutes, Morton bleats, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” it sounds like a moan for help.

It’s also a matter of great relief when he reaches the professor’s hidden monster-hunting base in London, and The Mummy gets on by spelling out its Dark Universe mythos. This portion literally makes a sense or some purpose. Crowe – who’s trying out not to be the one having two painful English accents – drones are based on the evil creatures stalking the earth, and while his the scenes seems to be lifted straight from “The League of Extraordinary Gentleman”, they’re ludicrous enough to be enjoyable. Maybe Universal’s multi-movie monster creations won’t be that terrible. But don’t get too overwhelmed by now. If the Dark Universe is going to be anywhere near as lucrative as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, its subsequent films will have to be far better than this.

Last, of all, The Mummy is a surface-level popcorn blockbuster that’s biggest strengths lie in a decent action/adventure retelling of the classic monster’s story and the film’s Dark Universe connections. It’s not the best Hollywood offered this summer, nor the most compelling reboot of The Mummy, but will be enjoyable for fans of Cruise’s work and those intrigued by Universal’s new shared universe. And, with the ending of The Mummy leaving the door open for future installments, as well as a possible direction for the Dark Universe, perhaps the movie’s greatest success is as the shared universe’s launchpad.

Not a kid movie tho so that you can sit along and watch as the scenes there are sometimes weird, cringy also the sequence there is quite hard enough to grasp it all but the one who wants a new accence this summer can surely go for it and personal rating will be 5 out of 10.

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alexsmitposts · 5 years

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Criminal Syndicates, Not Politics, Drives Middle East Wars In 2015, I address a security conference in Damascus on the issue of organized crime syndicates and their relationship to the post 9/11 wars and so-called “Arab Spring.” Even in Damascus, efforts were made to stop the presentation forcing me to go directly to Syria’s Minister of Justice, Dr. Najm Hamad al Ahmad, using terse tones. Dr. Najm ordered the conference extended at my request. With regional security officials and media present, US Army Colonel James Hanke (retired) and I addressed the conclave with Dr. Najm at my side. The effect was startling, and there are reasons for this. No one every speaks the truth, not in public. There were repercussions from this, a poisoning attempt, an attempt to plant a kilo of heroin in our hotel room in Lebanon, a plot foiled by Veterans Today financial editor Mike Harris. That story hasn’t ended but, worse still, it is no longer told, even in Syria. Let us review that message and see how it applies today. Syria Currently, Syria is being looted by US backed Kurds who have ethnically cleansed and seized not hundreds but thousands of square miles of oil and gas fields, fertile farmlands, and billions of dollars of industrial and commercial resources. Before that, Syria was looted openly by Turkish organized crime, something I reviewed in detail with the Syrian government, not just endless antiquities sold in London and New York, but entire factories, machine tools, copper pipes from schools, anything that could be uprooted from areas supposedly under the control of ISIS and al Qaeda or the supposed Free Syrian Army, were stolen. Heavy equipment was brought into Syria, lines of trucks, even teams of engineers, across a carefully guarded border, under the watchful eye of Turkish security services full partnered with organized crime cartels we traced to Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and across Europe and into the United States. In addition, thousands of oil trucks were brought into the region, mostly from the United States. Used tanker trucks were being bought wholesale across the US and loaded on transports at the Port of Houston, shipped to Turkey and, from there, transited to Iraq and Syria to steal oil. Previous oil thefts, mostly by the US, had been done using the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, looting Iraq’s Kirkuk oil field, largest in the world, of up to $.5 trillion in oil during and after the US occupation of Iraq, mostly by Exxon and British Petroleum, aided by corrupt US officials. Alex Powers, a Veterans Today bureau chief, served as assistant to Paul Bremer, us appointed “Governor of Iraq” who allegedly oversaw this process. I met with Iraqi officials, while representing the United Nations, over this issue as well, during this period, from my office in Erbil. Everything was known. The reason we mention this is that there would have been no looting of Syrian oil, something moving into high gear at this writing with theft of Syrian oil at the highest levels ever, without the precedent set by the US and Britain in Iraq from 2005 onward. The theft of Syrian oil that began in 2012, hauled mostly by American trucks delivered into Syria and Iraq though Turkey, coincided, of course, with the renewed looting of the Kirkuk oil fields, North and Northeast of Baghdad. Problem is, when this oil was stolen from Iraq, the only road systems that would deliver this to refineries and the world market, and endless stream of thousands of trucks, was through the city of Erbil itself, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government, then into ISIS held Mosul and from there, north past a Turkish held region inside Iraq and right into Turkey herself. What am I saying here? ISIS, powerful Turkish organizations and the government of the KRG in Iraq were fully partnered with their massive theft of resources taking place with the tacit approval of the US and British military. This of course means the entire “coalition” effort against ISIS was fake, fake then and fake now. ISIS was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, openly aided by the Israeli Air Force and facilitated by many governments, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, Jordan, Bahrain and more, many more. Why? Our hypothesis shows the long partnership between multi-generational organized crime and governments, some controlled, some partnered with, that stage terrorism and organize wars as a backdrop for criminal activities. Iraq This isn’t politics, its organized crime, a mafia operating inside the Kurdish region, working in concert with the Turkish mafia, who has long partnered with what is called the “Kosher Nostra,” the “oligarchs” who run much of the world’s organized crime from Trump Towers in New York, from the City of London, where they own banks, from Ukraine and across the world. The government in Baghdad, with US cash flowing into key Sunni politicians, remained divided and helpless. I met with security officials in Baghdad in January 2014 to discuss the threat of ISIS. Several I spoke with assured me ISIS was easy to use and control. Months later, most of those I had spoken with had been beheaded. No one was prepared for the level of oil theft planned under ISIS. Until stopped by Russian aerospace forces, this stream of trucks stealing oil from Syria and Iraq, was so large it would have been visible using only the naked eye from the surface of the moon, and by small telescope from Mars yet the endless fleet of American surveillance drones saw nothing. Why? American lawmakers were receiving their share, paid into their campaign funds though dummy corporations allowed by a highly controversial Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2005) and through accounts in the Cayman Islands under the auspices of a former American presidential candidate. In 2012, a former FBI agent brought me the files on these payoffs and submitted to a video debriefing outlining billions paid to US officials. That video was erased from YouTube but still exists on Vimeo. It was offered to Mueller investigators during an interview at FBI headquarters. They did not accept for reasons unknown. The same “ratline” used to launder funds to pay off congress also launders cash from the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia as well, directly into the US political system and a manages a flow of cash from Afghanistan as well. Afghanistan When the US took over that nation beginning in late 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld presented evidence that al Qaeda had vast underground cities across Afghanistan, housing tens of thousands of terrorists. He presented his evidence on MSNBD to anchor Tim Russert. The video of this farce is here. Of course, the dozens of bases never existed, but America’s transition of Afghanistan from a drug free nation to a nation of addicts, a nation that is the world’s largest producer of processed heroin, that exists to this day. In a 2009 interview with a former Seal Team commander and regional director for not “a” but “the” largest American contractor in the region at the time, I was told the US was using Global Hawk long range drones, like the one Iran shot down in July 2019 over the Straits of Hormuz, to move heroin to Europe and the US. Veterans Today editors Colonel James Hanke and Mike Harris were with me during that exchange. The money trail for this heroin led not only through Mexico and the Cayman Islands to key US officials but through Switzerland as well and paid officials in Afghanistan, former officials in Pakistan, key members of Israel’s Likudist party and funded extremist organizations across Europe. The United States The recent Epstein scandal in the US has had some startling repercussions as well. With the wealth of allegations, yet unproven, supposedly tying large numbers of American officials to a child sex ring run by a foreign intelligence agency, a very real issue of Epstein’s mysterious wealth has revealed useful information. Tracing his key financial backer, we stumbled upon a longtime partnership with the Gambino crime family of New York, and from there, developed inexorable ties to historical figure Meyer Lansky. A fascinating background piece published by MintpressNews outlines the American roots of the organized crime network that highly informed sources say is manifested in ISIS and some of the right wing movements in Europe as well. The article cites how Prohibition, a law enacted in the US in 1919, led to a major Canadian smuggling operation, bringing liquor into the US. The massive funding from this linked the Canadian crime family, the Bronfmans, to “Murder Incorporated’s” Meyer Lansky and allegedly ties them both to FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover and CIA founder Alan Dulles, making both organizations, at some level at least, rooted in the Kosher Nostra and possibly tying them to the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy and certainly tying them to Iran Contra and the massive criminal conspiracy that swept the American government under President Reagan. That trail, from the 1920s, leads to Roy Cohn, former legal council for alleged sex blackmail victim and “red baiter” Senator Joseph McCarthy. By the late 1960s, disgraced Cohn had moved into a powerful New York law firm, aided by former CIA director Alan Dulles. Note that it was Dulles, who John Kennedy fired as CIA director, who headed the Warren Commission which investigated Kennedy’s murder. In 1975, the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially discarded the Warren Commission report citing that John Kennedy was killed by “person or persons unknown,” something now censored from American history. From MintPress: “The Roy Cohn Machine Roy Cohn was only at the beginning of his career when he waded his way into the underground sexual blackmail ring apparently led by Lewis Rosenstiel. Indeed, when Cohn first met Hoover, he was only 23 years old. Over the next three decades or so, before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1986 at the age of 56, Cohn built a well-oiled machine, largely through his close friendships with some of the country’s most influential figures. Among Cohn’s friends were top media personalities like Barbara Walters, former CIA directors, Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, numerous celebrities, prominent lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, top figures in the Catholic Church and leading Jewish organizations like B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress. Many of the same names that surrounded Cohn until death in the late 1980s would later come to surround Jeffrey Epstein, with their names later appearing in Epstein’s now-infamous “little black book”. While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn’s network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard “Dirty Dick” Morris, was Cohn’s cousin and close associate. Morris was also close to Clinton’s former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, these were only Cohn’s connections to respectable members of the establishment. He was also known for his deep connections to the mob and gained prominence largely for his ability to connect key figures in the criminal underworld to respected influential figures acceptable to the public sphere. Ultimately, as New York attorney John Klotz stated, Cohn’s most powerful tool was blackmail, which he used against friend and foe, gangster or public official alike. How much of that blackmail he acquired through his sexual blackmail operation will likely never be known.” Roy Cohn, of course, was Donald Trump’s mentor, constant companion and legal representative until Cohn’s death. Conclusion It is clear that the political processes of the United States, Great Britain and Israel are interlocked under the control of multi-generational organized crime. It is also clear that security agencies of these nations have chosen to seek funding through illegal arms and narcotics sales and that activities of these agencies have become inconsistent with their appointed tasks. You see, if seeking “black funding” is allowed, and it is, without limit, then security agencies, even military commands and, as it follows, governments, become criminal organizations. Their actions, psychological warfare, massive “lie machines,” to cover their activities, endless corruption, complicity in war for profit, false flag terrorism, manipulation of world markets, rigging elections, even rewriting history, must be considered as factual and real. Failure to do so, blinds and cripples any government, any organization, any people who attempt to resist. Then, worse, so much worse, a reexamination of history in this light then questions everything, events, wars, historical figures, is any of it real?

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leftpress · 7 years

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Steve Cohen’s ‘That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic’

charliethechulo | Shiraz Socialist | March 7th 2017

Steve Cohen (ZT”L) died on 8th March 2009. He had been a member of the Jewish Socialists Group, the International Marxist Group, and a leading campaigner for migrants rights. An outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, he was nevertheless concerned about the prevalence of anti-Semitism on parts of the left and pro-Palestinian movement. Steve was a prolific writer (we tried to rope him into Shiraz towards the end of his life), but by far his most important piece was That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic, which can be read in full on the website devoted to Steve and his great pamphlet, which we reproduce here in memory of a fine comrade:

An anti-racist analysis of left anti-semitism by Steve Cohen (ZT”L), edited ...

by Libby Lawson and Erica Bunnan:

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

In 1984 I wrote a booklet against anti-Semitism. For this I was denounced as a Zionist.

In 2005 I wrote a pastiche poem criticising Zionism. For this I was denounced as an anti-Semite by some people on the Engage website. What is happening here?

It seems to me that one of the things that is happening is that whatever the fundamental political distinction between anti Semitism and anti Zionism (a distinction I see as absolute) yet on an emotional and existential level the two have become hopelessly intertwined—and this itself is political. Something else which is happening is the confirmation as far as I’m concerned of a political analysis of anti-Semitism which in my naivety, strikes me as obvious but which I’ve never seen articulated anywhere else. This is that the Jewish Chronicle and Socialist Worker are both correct. And incorrect. Zionism is anti racist. And Zionism is racist. I cannot see how Zionism in its triumphant form (the Israeli state) is anything except essentially racist. It was founded on the dispossession of the Palestinians. And it continues on the super exploitation and humiliation of the Palestinians as the “other”. To deny this strikes me as fundamentally immoral. I also happen to think that two states, one of which by definition has to be exclusively Jewish is similarly immoral. I think majoritarianism (the legitimisation of an entity through numbers) is immoral wherever it presents itself—it leads at the very least to forced population movement and at its most extreme to ethnic cleansing and all that implies. I’ll leave open to discussion and personal judgement the point on this continuum that Israel may already guilty and at which a divided state would become guilty.

On the other hand it seems to me equally undeniable that Zionism in its inception was anti-racist. It was a reaction against, a way of dealing with, European anti-Semitism. Maybe as a revolutionary socialist writing in Prestwich in 2005 it would not be my way. However as a Jew of whatever political persuasion in Europe after the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 or the defeat of the revolution in Spain in 1939 I may well have had a different position. And if fascism ever took over here and Jews were barred entry elsewhere then I guess I might take a different position. I empathise with the “bolt hole” theory of Zionism. I appreciate the significance of the remarks by Isaac Deutscher, the Polish Marxist ex-rabbi, who wrote in later life “In this controversy (between socialism and Zionism) Zionism has scored a horrible victory, one of which it could neither wish nor expect; six million Jews had to perish in Hitler’s gas chambers in order that Israel should come to life … If instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jewry to go to Palestine, I might have saved some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers” (Israel’s Spiritual Climate). I take it as axiomatic that any revolutionary of that pre-war period would have fought for the absolute right of Jews to enter Palestine. To have argued otherwise, to have argued for immigration controls, would have meant support for the British Mandate whose army tried to prevent entry. However the tenets of revolutionary socialism (tenets to which I still hold even in these days of Blair, Bush, Sharon and … Bin Laden) would demand that entry into the then Palestine would/should have lead to an attempt to forge an alliance between Jewish workers and Palestinian workers and peasants against the Zionist leadership, the absentee Palestinian landlords and the British soldiery. Of course the task would have been enormous. But the failure of that historic task has lead to what we have today—Israel the perpetual blood bath.

It is because Zionism is both racist and anti-racist that I call myself an anti-Zionist Zionist. It is also because Zionism is racist and anti racist that there is an even more urgent need to rigorously distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. This itself requires a rigorous definition of both—otherwise how is it rationally possible to ever distinguish the two? I do not think there is ever the question of anti-Zionism discourse “becoming” or “sliding into” anti-Semitism. If a position is anti-semitic then it is anti-semitic in its origins—it does not become so. It is nothing whatsoever to do with Zionism. So, fascistic critiques of Israel are not about Zionism. They are about Jews. And this is the point. Anti-Zionism is about solidarity with the Palestinians. Anti-Semitism is about the Jewish conspiracy. Not all critiques of Israel are based on Jewish conspiracy theories. And anti-Semitism is not going to help progress the Palestinian cause. Just as August Bebel famously described the equation of capital with Jew as the socialism of fools then the equation of Zionism with world domination with Jew is the anti-zionism of fools.

It often feels like the wisdom of Solomon is required to know how to deal politically with this grotesque foolishness. One issue is the actual (the “cleansing” of Jews from Jerusalem in 1948, the suicide bombings of today) or threatened (“drive them into the sea”) repression of Israeli Jews which fuels a fortress mentality and to which sections of the left retain an ambivalent or agnostic attitude. Another issue that should be a matter of concern is that anti-semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism drives away those who would otherwise want to give solidarity to the Palestinian cause. For myself, this is what I found unfortunate in the debate over the boycott of some or all Israeli universities. Whatever the motive of those proposing the boycott (and like Engage I’m opposed to exceptionalising Israel) there is still an imperative need to offer real, material, political support to the Palestinians. I think for myself the best way of dealing with any particular proposed boycott is to come to a decision on whether the boycott would help the Palestinians irrespective of its proposers—and organise independently against anti-Semitism. Which perhaps meaning building a movement that simultaneously is dedicated to Palestinian solidarity and opposition to anti-Semitism.

It is apparent from what I’ve said that I also disagree with what I take to be the dominant position within Engage—namely that in our contemporary world anti-Zionism must inevitably equate with anti-Semitism. Paradoxically I also disagree with Engage’s position that in the modern world the form that anti-Semitism takes is through (foolish) anti-Zionism. I think it is worse than that. Obviously this is one form that is taken by the theory of the world Jewish conspiracy. However it seems to me that this is merely concealing more classic forms—Jew as all-powerful (the “Zionist lobby” running the USA), Jew as financial manipulator (the world being supposedly run by trans-national corporations and not imperialist states), Jew as murderer (take your pick—the blitzing of Iraq comes in there somewhere through its constant equation with the repression of the Palestinians). Jew as the subject of the blood libel (ditto but add the surreal accusation that Jews are responsible for September 11th), Jew as the killer of the first born (double ditto), Jew as poisoner of the wells (the anti-urbanisation of much Green politics—with Jews being the urban people par excellence). These images, these world-views, are powerful enough to split off from any anti-zionist base. And they have begun to split off within sections of the anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist movement. It is here that the anti-Zionism of fools emerges with a vengeance but is still subservient to the classic socialism of fools and also to the pre-capitalist feudalism of fools—the real McCoy of jew hatred. This is because anti-capitalism is shared by socialists who aspire to post-capitalist formations and right-wing organisations who hark back to an earlier pre-capitalist age—which is one of many reasons why genuine socialists have to be vigilant against any equation of capital with Jew.

Anti-Semitism on the left has for too long been a taboo subject—probably since the inception of the socialist project itself. I know because in 1984 I was that taboo! I became for a short period a political pariah in sections of the socialist/communist movement (my movement) for daring to raise the subject. Actually when I began writing my book I had no intention of writing anything on anti-Semitism, left or right. I wanted to write and condemn the (latest) Israeli onslaught on Lebanon. I used the left press as source material—and became horrified by what I was reading. And what I was reading was gross stereotyping of the Jew via the stereotyping of Israel as the most powerful force in the universe. All this was redolent of all the old-time European, Christian imagery—just stopping short it seemed of accusations of desecrating the wafer. So I did some research and quickly realised that this left anti-Semitism did not spring from nowhere but unfortunately had a long and dishonourable tradition—going back at least to the successful agitation for immigration controls against Jewish refugees and the 1905 Aliens Act. As it so happened, I was at that time thinking of writing another book just on this agitation—but Pluto Press told me that “Jews don’t sell”. To which I replied that I thought this was what we’ve always been accused of doing too much of. To show Pluto they were not being true Marxists I quoted Marx’s own piece of self-hatred from his On The Jewish Question: “What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling”. And then bizarrely I started to come across references and allusions (illusions) in parts of the left press to the wealth and power of Jews, of Jewry, all in the service of Israel—or maybe Israel was in the service of Jews and Jewry. Who knows? It was all rubbish anyway—but extremely dangerous rubbish.

And without managing (with the support of some comrades in the Jewish Socialist Group—the JSG) to keep fixed in my head the absolute distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, I guess I could have gone schizophrenic. There were two great successive nights when I was evicted from a mosque then a shul. I’m always sorry I never made the hat-trick of our common enemy—a church. The mosque incident involved picketing (along with some Asian youth) some local anti-Jewish ayatollah. The shul incident was wonderful. It was in Liverpool. I went with other members of the JSG to picket a meeting that was being held in support of the invasion (a shul supporting a military invasion? This really was Old Testament stuff). What we didn’t know was that the guest speaker was some Israeli General—we should have recognised him by his ripped jeans and tee shirt. As we were being lifted horizontally, face downwards, out of the shul by the stewards I looked down on a face looking up at me. The face looking up said “Weren’t we at Oxford together?”. To which I replied “I think so—were you at Trinity?” That to me is a classic example of tribalism. Mea culpa. I always regret not screaming out “Let my people go!”.

That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic did create ripples. It managed to split the JSG whose then dominant leadership thought it might offend the Socialist Workers Party. It resulted in some pretty dreadful correspondence over many weeks in journals like Searchlight and Peace News. A pamphlet was written denouncing me as a “criminal”. There was a particular review—in Searchlight—one sentence of which I will never forget. Every Jew on the left will know that terrible syndrome whereby, whatever the context and wherever one is, we will be tested by being given the question “what is your position on Zionism?” Wanna support the miners—what’s your position on Zionism? Against the bomb—what’s your position on Zionism? And want to join our march against the eradication of Baghdad, in particular the eradication of Baghdad—what’s your position on Zionism? And we all know what answer is expected in order to pass the test. It is a very strong form of anti-Semitism based on assumptions of collective responsibility. Denounce Zionism, crawl in the gutter, wear a yellow star and we’ll let you in the club. Which is one reason why I call myself an Anti-Zionist Zionist—at least that should confuse the bastards. Anyhow this particular review, noting that my book actually did attack Zionism, said “It is not enough to trot out platitudes, as he does, about being against Zionism and in support of the Palestinian struggle”. So I’m not allowed into the club even though I fulfil the entry requirements. I’m not allowed in because I recognise and oppose the existence of anti-Semitism on the Left—and this therefore renders all support for Palestinians a “platitude”. Well it ain’t me who’s here confusing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

An accusation greeting the publication of That’s Funny was that even if anti-Semitism existed, it was trivial compared to other forms of oppression—not least that being inflicted on the Palestinians. I find this argument abhorrent. The struggle for communism is not about establishing some equitable scale of oppression and exploitation. It is about smashing all such oppression and exploitation. Switch to Germany 1925—”Comrades why are you harping on about anti-Semitism? It’s trivial. If it ever became significant we will deal with it. Honest”.

But there were positives back in 1984. There were allies out there—for instance the then Manchester and Liverpool branches of the JSG. I discovered that a similar political battle was going on within the feminist magazine Spare Rib and a kind of informal alliance was formed here. I remember that a large debate was organised in the Peace Studies department at Bradford University—where I shared some dope with a member of the PLO. It was Lebanese! And then the three of us who had published the book (we called ourselves The Beyond The Pale Collective) organised a biggish conference in Manchester. And Pluto Press was wrong—we sold a lot of books. We sold enough books to publish another one—on Holocaust Denial by Gill Seidel. This had been accepted by Pluto but then pulped after it had been typeset! I guess this was part of their reality denial.

As far as I’m concerned I’m still prepared to stand behind most of what I wrote those two decades ago. However there is one issue where my position has somewhat changed. And there is a second where I think I missed the plot entirely. First I think the book was, in its critique of assimilation, far too uncritical of the concept of “Jewish culture”. In fact I think it was implicitly far too generous towards Bundism in this respect (though I still support the Bundist championing of political self-organisation). I no longer see Jewish (or any) culture as monolithic. It is fractured and determined by issues of class. I have been in too many situations where the need to fight racism (racist attacks, immigration controls, fascist mobilisations) has been counter-posed by some suggestion about having an “ethnic” evening with “ethnic” clothes and “ethnic” food. It’s got to the stage where, to paraphrase Goebbels, whenever I hear the word multiculture I want to reach for my gun. In particular I am now ruthlessly opposed to denominational schools—be they Jewish, Muslim, Catholic or Church of England. Some of this has been informed by the racist admission practices of the Jewish School in Manchester (no Jewish mother no entry). However the substantive point is that as a militant atheist I am opposed to the state subsidising the garbage of religion—any religion. And anyhow, I’m for the unity of people of all ages not their division. At the same time I’m equally opposed to the (political) drive towards assimilation—I don’t see incorporation into the norms of imperialism as a step forward for humanity. The latest example of this drive towards incorporation is the suggestion by the Home Office Minister, Hazel Blears, following the London underground bombings that ‘minorities should be described as, for example “Asian-British” rather than simply as “Asian”‘. (Times 8 August 2005). The idea of the labelling and re-labelling of human beings as a method of protecting the citizenry of London is as ludicrous as all other justifications used for restricting the free movement of the same human beings. In the past slaves were branded—literally and with fire. Under the modern market economy it is people. This commoditisation of the alien reduces her or him to a piece of capital, to a new form of enslavement – the enslavement of a forced identity within a hostile society ever ready to deport and expel.

Second I come to missing the plot. This is not about what I wrote. It is about what I did not write. In fact it was what I explicitly refrained from writing. So I said “The book says nothing about socialist or liberation movements in the third world, deliberately so, because countries in the third world have not historically been within the grip of Christianity, and thus have no tradition of conspiracy theories. For example within Islam both Jew and Christian were seen as infidels—and certainly there was no constant mythology of universal Jewish domination. If notions about Jewish power entered the third world, then that is a product of imperialistic and Christian penetration”.

Looking back on this from today’s realities it clearly is inadequate. For instance I cannot see any basis for conspiracy theories (i.e. classic anti-Semitism) within Islam historically, however badly Jews (usually alongside Christians) were sometimes mistreated. I guess for this we have to be thankful we never bumped off Mohammed as well as Jesus. However it would be a matter of interesting political investigation to see precisely how conspiracy theories have subsequently entered the Muslim world—to see how they have become the Islam of fools. Moreover whatever the significance today of Left anti-Semitism, its influence and social weight is insignificant compared to that within Muslim communities (an anti-Semitism which is possibly matched by racism within the Jewish community). So the Elders of the Protocols of Zion is a best seller in Arabic speaking countries. So I’ve read how Islamicists blame “world Jewry” for both the New York and London underground bombings. And this junk needs to be challenged. And it needs to be challenged by the Left—and it isn’t. In fact it is encouraged—if only obliquely.

It is encouraged by Israeli exceptionalism—by the constant depiction and caricaturing of Israel as somehow being the pre-eminent world imperialist power. Inasmuch as I might be for some boycott of Israeli universities then I’m equally in support of a boycott of British universities because of their collusion in the institutionalised apartheid of immigration controls—that is either collusion by their silence or by their active co-operation with the Home Office in developing controls (which appears to be the case with University College London). It is encouraged by the emergence on demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq, of the denunciation of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank—as though there was some intrinsic connection between the two which is not shared with other imperialist interventions. It is encouraged by the sycophantic, uncritical relationship that the SWP/Respect has towards the Muslim leadership as organised, for instance, around the mosques—these Muslim machers are as right-wing and often as anti-Semitic as their Jewish macher counterparts organised around the shuls are anti-Islam. In the beginning was the Board of Deputies? Today there is the Muslim Association of Britain. Macherism, the political reliance on a self-appointed leadership (the macherites) is a political disease which needs to be challenged and destroyed—instead sections of the Left are cultivating it at its most dangerous points.

Is there any way out of this mess? Particularly is there any way out of this mess for socialists in this country trapped politically between the existential linkage of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is there a wisdom of Solomon? In all humility I think so. Of course we can all have our own politics on the way forward as regards Israel/Palestine. My own vision is of a federated secular and socialist middle east. This maybe is utopic but so is socialism. So is the revolution. So is all meaningful change. However there is going to be no way forward without a recognition of the fundamental block towards any change whatsoever—namely the world wide antagonism between Jews and Muslims. The international nature of this cleavage is central. Only joint and grassroots solidarity between the players in the game can possibly open up any dialogue. In Israel/Palestine this means between the Jewish and Palestinian masses. For instance let there be a march of a hundred thousand Israeli peaceniks into the occupied territories—and let them stay until the Israeli army and the settlers march out (or co-operate with the Palestinians in the sharing of resources—including the opening up of the new townships to Palestinians). Let Engage encourage this with its co-thinkers in Israel!

In this country it means joint activity between Jews and Muslims (and socialists) with the Jewish and Muslim communities. And what this boils down to is joint activity against fascism and racism. I suggested above the necessity to start to develop a movement simultaneously based on struggle for Palestinian rights and against anti-Semitism. This is presently an abstraction. However another real movement does exist against racism which can draw the two communities together in struggle. This is the disparate movement against immigration controls—for whom the Jews were the first and Muslims the latest victims. Of course controls need to be challenged in their own right—not just as a device for unity. However the challenge can also forge a unity which presently seems a million miles away. What is more the history of the last thirty years of struggle by migrants, immigrants and refugees against controls shows something that SWP/Respect have utterly missed. This is that real, meaningful, progressive political activity within the Muslim community (and all third world communities) comes from the grassroots either by by-passing or defeating the community machers. Let Engage become involved in these struggles both because of their intrinsic political importance and as part of its commitment to challenging left anti-Semitism by building meaningful alliances!

It could begin by supporting the campaign of Samina Altaf and her two children to fight deportation. Samina’s is just one of countless stories—though I guess more immediately poignant. Having fled Pakistan to avoid repeated domestic abuse she was refused asylum here. Like all asylum seekers she is outside of the welfare state and has been forcibly dispersed into Salford by the so-called National Asylum Support Service (NASS—a wing of the Home Office). And now as a failed asylum seeker who is refusing to return “voluntarily” to the country from she fled she is being threatened by NASS with eviction onto the streets. And I forgot to mention this—Samina is disabled with rickets. And her children are crippled with rickets. Get involved with the campaign! Write a letter of support to her constituency MP—Hazel Blears that well known re-labeller of third world identity and warrior against international terrorism (address House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1). Blears happens to be a Home Office MP—so terrorise her with letters of support. And invite a speaker from the campaign to one of your meetings—whilst sending money to the campaign (address Samina Altaf Defence Campaign, c/o Bury Law Centre, 8 Banks St, Bury BL9 ODL).

Finally I think that not one iota of the above can ever be resolved through communalism, through tribalism, through uncritically supporting Jews as Jews or Muslims as Muslims. My religion right or wrong! And all due to an accident of birth. I guess I recoil when I read on the Engage website the reflection on being Jewish—”frankly I can’t get enough of it”. Jewish identity as an addiction is not much of an advert for clarity of political thought. I was shocked by a news report I read a few years ago. It is a story that deserves creative fictionalisation. It concerned a guy who was raised in a highly Zionist family (I guess High Zionism is the Jewish version of High Church). He was raised as a conscious racist towards the Palestinians. Dirty Arabs! Until he discovered he was one of them—He was an adopted son. His biological parents were, I think, Libyan. Overnight (or maybe it took a little longer) he became a vehement anti-Zionist—and Jew hater. Dirty Jews! I was struck by two very powerful televisual images during the recent eviction of the Gaza settlers by the (Orwellian entitled) Israeli Defence Force. One was that of Israeli soldiers crying. The Israeli army in tears? One of the most powerful militaries in the world! Why no tears when the Palestinians were evicted? The second image was just bizarre in its tribalism. This was that of the settlers being evicted and the soldiers evicting them temporarily desisting from their civil war and praying together on shabbos—with the evictions resuming as soon as shabbos ended. Compared to this crazy chauvinism the legendary Christmas Day football match in the trenches of World War One between German and British soldiers was a genuine act of internationalism. However there can be no genuine internationalism, no genuine international solidarity, no meaningful working together of ordinary people wherever tribalism or communalism dominates. And at the moment it is precisely these reactionary formations that dominate both Muslim and Jewish communities—and the tragedy is they are hardening. It would be good if Engage put its energy into helping soften them.

Steve Cohen 2005

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That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic

Obituary for Steve Cohen (ZT”L)

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

Why is this book different from all other books ?

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Socialism of Fools

The Socialism of Fools

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism without Jews

Left Anti-Semitism

Socialism, Anti-Semitism, Thatcherism and Fascism

Chapter 2: The Anti-Semitism of English Socialism”s Formative Years

The Background

Immigration Controls

English and Jewish Opposition to Controls

Rich Jew, Poor Jew: The Conspiracy Theory in Practice

Anti-Alienism or Anti-Semitism

#leftpress #Anti-Racism #anti-semitism #From the archives #good people #Human rights #internationalism #israel #Judaism #left #Middle East #palestine #zionism #news #resistance #politics

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hellofastestnewsfan · 4 years

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The World War III memes are here, bursting onto the shores of TikTok and Twitter after American forces assassinated the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani this week. “Me and the boys on missile duty during #WWIII,” one reads, illustrated by a gif of two soldiers failing running from a misfired mortar. “Me chilling at home after ignoring my draft notice #WWIII,” says another, illustrated with a Spider-Man clip in which the hero’s aunt is interrupted during a prayer by the Green Goblin exploding through her window.

Along with the memes came the counter-memes, chiding people for joking about war, or smarming at them over how little their comfortable lives would be impacted by a new war in Iran.

World War III is not actually upon us, of course, but just hashtag-World War III—a container for content. In that role, these memes fulfill the internet’s ability to fashion endless turtles of content about anything. On TikTok, someone feigns illegally disposing of a draft notice set to Britney Spears’s “Criminal,” which someone else collates in a thread on Twitter, which gets rolled up into Buzzfeed metacontent about World War III memes.

@sarahfaithxx

#wwiii #ThatsWhatILike #turnitup #gymrush #BreakupWithBottled #fyp

♬ original sound - sarahfaithxx

But World War is not just a hashtag, either. It’s also a symbol. And it’s notable that young people are mustering that old emblem to express their unconscious fears about the present. In doing this, they are reviving a received notion of “world war,” one mostly expended by the generations that precede them.

For three decades or more, World War III has been an anxious fantasy. During the Cold War, it became a shorthand for a very specific kind of doom: global nuclear destruction. After the blasts comes the fallout, the depthless smoke of nuclear winter, the ensuing end of the crops that sustain our mortal bodies, and the certain starvation of those too unlucky to have survived the war.

Those who lived through this period can still feel how real the threat was. That has not changed: Global nuclear stockpiles have been cut by 75 percent since their peak between 1965 and 1985, but there are still thousands of nuclear warheads spread all around the globe, each between tens and thousands of times more destructive than the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs detonated over Japan in 1945. Iran is not believed to have nuclear weapons, although its ambitions to develop or acquire them have been at the heart of the American conflict with the country.

Even so, the fantasy of World War III helped hide the reality of what war had become: a tangled mess of statecraft, profiteering, and politicking. In the moment, tidy narratives often made conflicts seem straightforward, but history has unraveled their knotty strands. During the Cold War, hot tensions became hopeless moils, conducted for political benefit as much as (and, over time, more than) moral right. Vietnam braided opposition to communism, itself a tenet of Cold War conflict, with democratic state-building in a decolonizing region. Proxy wars became common, such as the United States’s support of the Afghani mujahideen to destabilize the Soviet Union rather than to support a Muslim revolution. The Gulf War braided up the emerging 24/7 media ecosystem with the oil economy. The Iraq and Afghan wars, it now seems clear, were manufactured for political and commercial gain, and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

And those are just some of the “normal” wars—the military ones entwined with nation-states rather than cartels like Los Zetas in Mexico, militias like the Sudanese Janjawid, and paramilitary groups like ISIS. Then there are the corporations. Mercenary data brokerage by Cambridge Analytica put useful information extracted from Facebook into service for misinformation campaigns. Via social media, organizations like the Russian Internet Research Association weaponized information, on the cheap, to disrupt the operation of the nation-states that might yet wage conventional or nuclear war. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide easy, global reach for all the non-state actors that have proliferated to further destabilize their opponents.

In the face of all this chaos, is it any wonder that young people might see the relatively conventional act of assassinating an Iranian military commander as an oasis of political clarity? The memes help amplify a moment that fits into a straightforward narrative.

The deluge of draft-related memes that flowed from the news of Soleimani’s execution exemplify the mental comfort such clarity brings. The idea of a normal war—an organized military front where national armies face off—became so piquant that it crashed the website for the Selective Service System, the government agency where men over 18 must still register in case of a draft. Even though a U.S. military draft hasn’t taken place since 1973, some of the memes feign comfort in evading conscription, citing hypothetical age, sex, or medical reasons why their authors might be disqualified.

There’s just tons of content about potentially getting drafted pic.twitter.com/4Zwjk57E0L

— Ryan Brooks (@ryanbrooks) January 3, 2020

At Insider, Andria Moore wrote that young people are using the wry humor of memes to cope with uncertainty. And at Buzzfeed News, Otilla Steadman and Ryan C. Brooks portrayed the practice as an expression of fear, carried out on the media formats like Instagram or TikTok that have become native environments for Gen Z.

But the 18-to-24 set might have no idea what they are thinking or feeling when they create or share these posts. “Nobody is aware of what’s going on,” my Gen Z son texted me from his group of friends. (He’s 20 years old.) “It’s not coping because there’s nothing to cope over,” he theorized, adding that his crew wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people posting these memes don’t have the faintest idea about the geopolitical circumstances to which they are supposedly responding.

That’s probably the case for people of all ages, thanks in part to the frenetic pace at which everyone produces and consumes information online. “Buckle up, nerds,” the Arc Digital editor Berny Belvedere began in a hilarious viral tweet. “After discovering the existence of Quasar Sailemun thirty minutes ago, I am now ready to explain how, being three trillion times more significant than Bin Laden, his assassination means we will have to forfeit the Louisiana Purchase.”

Instinct and habit rule online, and online life is just life now. The instincts and habits everyone has developed over the past 20 years of forever war involve reacting first, and thinking later—if at all. The news is so ubiquitous that its coverage—from Soleimani’s assassination to all these memes supposedly comforting people in its aftermath—evades more meaning than it elucidates.

Absent knowledge and intention, the best and most generous way to interpret these World War III memes is to try to understand how they surface the ideology of contemporary life. Memory of the experience of world war is disappearing, as the last of the generation who survived conventional, global warfare pass away. At the same time, conventional war itself became too constant to take notice of; today’s 18 year olds have never taken a breath at a time when the United States wasn’t embroiled in combat in the Middle East.

For GenXers like me, the fear of nuclear annihilation made the end of the world a dark but deviously appealing fantasy. It seemed natural for humankind to dream about witnessing our collective end. No matter your scientific suppositions or religious beliefs about life or afterlife, the glory of human existence became even more bewitching in the event that total annihilation might insure that you would not have missed out on its future, beyond the grasp of your own lifespan.

For many of today’s youths, however, a mortgaged future can already feel likely, if not certain, for much more concrete reasons—from economic inequality to climate-caused extinction. It’s no wonder that their fantasies would look toward the past instead. It is strangely comforting to imagine a conventional war of the 20th-century variety, mated to the risks of nuclear escalation, because it represents a return to a well-worn period of history.

The two World Wars produced horrific atrocities. But they also tipped out into a long period of prosperity and comfort, especially in America. That connects the idea of a world war with other matters: the Greatest Generation, and the idea that military service is noble, thanks to the unvarnished clarity of good and evil; a time when patriotism in general and the war effort in particular was nonpartisan; the social services, tax base, and economic circumstances that produced the middle class and all its benefits, from stable jobs to cheap homeownership.

But that reality is no more. So now what? To fear world war is also to dream of it, and to dream of world war is also to indulge the nostalgia of the mid-century, that great refuge between two gilded ages, when ordinary people thrived.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2sQuZqC

#Blogger

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politicalfilth-blog · 5 years

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Transcript

Alright so in this video we are going to be talking about all things related to u.s. foreign policy specifically Tulsi gabbard Trump State of the Union Syria Iran Venezuela Afghanistan plus most importantly will the u.s. troops come back from Syria and Afghanistan and to discuss that we have partisan girl Mimi who is a researcher has excellent sources on the ground and will provide you important information.

Most likely you won’t get anywhere else know Mimi Donald Trump State of the Union was yesterday and he was discussing a whole bunch of things he boldly came out against cancer child cancer AIDS and the Holocaust but most is seriously what was really fascinating about the state of the union is to see kind of kind of this duplicitous talk that we’ve been seeing from the Trump Administration with him pledging to end the endless Wars in Syria and Afghanistan while at the same time we’re seeing Tapper talk than ever and Donald Trump demonstration looking at Iran and Venezuela.

Those are those are nice countries and it would be a shame if someone would intervene in them so duplicitous talk what’s your take on it mean.

It’s certainly do if you look at the iran-iraq war your Trump has recently also mistake.

Soon as was it yesterday or the day before.

Order to.

Why not I think it’s because those Wars.

Results.

Telephone.

Google.

10 years ago they want to get out because it’s costing a lot.

Surgeons can continue to hide their know whatever you want to call the resistance insurgent.

The military continuously.

She has it in her to pull out.

Olivios Norwood.

Be killed in the street in the masks to the states.

What they have now is an occupation.

The east of the Euphrates which is very unsafe for first of all.

Are the Kurdish.

I’m not popular in the people that live in the area that.

What countries are Muslim.

Difficult.

Not only because the guy that is supporting SDF.

Those people.

Groups that are supporting Vista.

Extreme risk.

Donald Trump even mentioned yesterday during the State of the Union that over 7,000 us Personnel have already died with this kind of war on terror which as he was promising during his campaign speeches when he was running to be president would end so it’s interesting to see him at the same time being like okay let’s get out with MD let’s end this endless Wars but then be like hey you run over there oh yeah we still got to deal with that problem but again a lot of the information that we’re getting about these issues of a or of course I’m not heard I mean even the very fact that just a few days ago the United States bombed a Syrian government position and killed Syrian government troops is nowhere to be found you of course I’ve been reporting on it also the very important fact that actually more US troops are being sent into Syria right now to supposedly prepared for the withdrawal again we have to be skeptical your because this Administration.

Has been saying one thing doing another thing and it’s very unpredictable but we’re going to give you the best analysis we can about this so I want to hear kind of point of view here cuz you’re highlighting also very important details and movements of a lot of these larger Terror groups what are going to be the bigger kind of ramifications if.

Do u.s. soldiers actually get out of there and do you think they will actually get out of Siri.

What is or not about the withdrawal is something we like to question.

Fart.

Contradictory.

It’s possible that’s the reason why they haven’t is the Deep state.

Make in the first place.

Prepare to poop.

This waiver.

I think it was that supports Trump that thinks it’s too risky to stay in Syria US soldiers and turkey or US Army.

Too risky.

Bookcases could be possible.

What is happening on the ground you say that US soldiers were sent in because.

Withdrawing in arms.

Whiskey soda.

U.s. soldiers.

You know what would happen if the US Military.

Basically Tuesdays.

Number one.

Turkish.

The Turkish results.

The Kurdish military.

Turkey.

We didn’t series.

It’s not the fact that turkey is a risk to Syria and courage so by trying to push the negotiated and put you in the war and they only increasing the risk.

It needs to be two-fold not only should also these ministers that has it all these pools host of Syria’s population.

These places are mixed with different ethnicities.

Something unfortunately.

Just making statements.

Might make them feel that they can continue.

Push for federalism. Just going to cause this whole Quest.

How to drag on a potentially cause.

The post Trump Just Can’t Seem To Pull Out In Time appeared first on We Are Change.

from We Are Change https://wearechange.org/trump-just-cant-seem-to-pull-out-in-time/

#We are Change #We Are Change

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avanneman · 5 years

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Go Donald! Go Donald! (Some of the time)

Yes, it has come to this: the American “Establishment” is so blind, benighted, and beggared that it takes the installation of a complete mountebank1 in the White House to save that Establishment, and the United States as well, from that Establishment’s ever-compounding follies. I refer, of course, to Donald Trump’s precipitous withdrawal of a relative handful of American troops from Syria, a country where their presence is completely unauthorized and constitutes in fact a vague and shapeless invasion.

From the shrieks and howls emerging from virtually all points on the political compass—all the “respectable” points, at least—one would think the president had addressed the UN in the nude—said shrieks and howls, of course, being doubled and redoubled with the news that the president is also contemplating significant withdrawals from America’s longest and most fruitless war, in Afghanistan.

The one great, seemingly irreducible advantage of a government based on free elections is that each election allows the opportunity of a new government to pursue new policies unattached to the failures of the past. If you didn’t break it, you don’t have to pay for it. But the elites of both parties were almost equally compromised by the disastrous policy of military intervention in the Middle East first introduced by the supposedly judicious George Bush I, never disavowed by President Clinton, grossly and grandiosely amplified, to the point of disaster and well beyond, by George Bush II, and again never disavowed by his Democratic successor, Barack Obama.

Over and over again, the Establishment sought that elusive “middle ground” that would allow it to eat its cake and have it too—accomplish extravagant goals with minimal effort. The fact that this goal was inherently self-contradictory never seemed to dawn on anyone. Even the great set piece—Bush II’s full-scale invasion of Iraq—was a ludicrous compromise and fraud. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld—and to make him tell the truth as well—we invaded, not with the army we needed, but with the army that it was politically feasible to deploy. Rumsfeld refused to plan for the reconstruction of Iraq, knowing that to examine the task before us would only reveal the impossibility of achieving a successful resolution. Ignorance is bliss, or at least politically necessary!

And so we jumped blindly into the abyss, and, having done so, lacked the courage to admit our own folly, to admit that we are more incompetent than indispensable. It is “amusing” to read “moderate” hawks like Slate’s Fred Kaplan as they reveal the incoherence and inherent infeasibility of our policies even as they seek to defend them:

One complicating factor is that the United States government has never figured out what its interests in Syria are. The Obama administration pursued a few interests, some of them contradictory: Defeat ISIS, contain Iran, bolster Iraq, maintain the alliance with Turkey, protect the Kurds, and help negotiate a political settlement that involves the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Accomplishing one of two of those goals was extremely difficult; tackling them all, probably impossible.

Well, yes, that’s probably true, particularly since actual American involvement fell short of even the “very limited, very targeted, short-term effort” originally described—rather vaguely, to be sure—by then Secretary of State John Kerry. “That is exactly what we are talking about doing, unbelievably small, limited kind of effort,” the secretary explained, the incoherence of his speech reproducing with remarkable accuracy the incoherence of his thought, and, later, the incoherence of our policy.

For more than two full administrations the United States has been in a state of crisis because no one would say that the emperor has no clothes. And it has taken Donald Trump, Mr. Nudity himself, to do it.

Afterwords At the same time, of course, the “real” Donald Trump is shutting down, and half wrecking, the federal government because he can’t admit that he was lying when he said he was going to build a big, beautiful wall, the one that will solve all our problems. And so the beat goes on.

Fairly long, fairly coherent diatribe on the lack of a meaningful foreign policy debate by me here, and more here. Over at the American Conservative, Jon Basil Utley reminisces about "How the Gulf War Gave Us the Antiwar Right", linking to a number of articles exposing the lies George I told to get us into Iraq the first time around, particularly this one.

“Mountebank” being a polite term meaning “complete and unrelenting asshole”. ↩︎

#foreign policy #Syria #Donald Trump

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gocasualrunawaycollection-blog · 6 years

Text

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A coworker once told me that once you're labeled as a homeowner, your car insurance rates go up b/c you can be sued for your house. Is there any truth to this? If it matters, I live in NY.""

Looking for Auto Insurance in Canada...?

I need some company names please. Searching for a reputable and affordable insurance company. If you're happy with yours, send their name along.... Thanks for your answers!""

Insurance rates on sporty cars ?

Would insurance be absolutly insane for a 16 yr old in a 91 toyota mr2 turbo or a 95 mitsubishi eclipse gst or a 95 mustang gt or a 91 toyota mr2 non turbo? Does anybody know about the difference in rates for these cars ir cars like acura integras. Thanks

Car insurance and Traffic accident in Germany?

Is it necessary to have car insurance? Who do you report accidents to after they happen? Do you need to register your cars? Do you take a test to get your license? What is the legal limit for driving while intoxicated? How do they measure blood alcohol? Breathalyzer? Blood? Can you refuse to take the test? Do lawyers get involved in accident cases? What are penalties for driving without a liscence or being insured? Do you have judges, juries or both?""

Quick question about RENTERS INSURANCE?

My fiance and i are renting out a house starting Feb. 1st. After a year we have an option to buy the house. Anyways, when we were looking at the house she said her dad wants us to get renters insurance before we move in. I'm guessing because of the fireplace, attic, etc. Do i need to get any info from her before i sign up for insurance? Where do i go to get this? ANY sort of info would be great. We're new to renters insurance. We live in an apartment complex right now with NO insurance.""

How much would it cost to insure a new Mazda3?

I want to buy a new ('08 or '09) Mazda 3. It would go on my parents insurance, and they both have a clean record. How much would it cost to insure? I live in Nassau County, NY (Long Island).""

Motorcycle insurance cost?

I was in an aciident a year ago it was my fault. I was driving a truck. Now that I'm 21 I want a cruiser such as the boulevard or vulcan, maybe even a shadow. I would like to know will my insurance be high? I don't have a license to drive one yet. I will be taking a class so I can learn the basice then buy a beater to learn to ride better before I get what I want. It will most likely just to get to work and school.""

Best life insurance company?

Can't find affordable Health Insurance for my wie?

I have been talking to Medicare Medicaid Market Place and can't find health insurance that I can afford for my Wife. She is 65 and a US citizen. I can find Health Insurance for her if I pay over $700 month and who can afford than, help pls""

Car accident with no insurance in FL?

I was in a car accident where the other driver admitted it was her fault, and i had a witness - as well as the officer saying it was my right away. However, I did not have insurance.. I assumed I was still under my parents name but my dad took me off their insurance a couple months ago. My car is totaled, and im in some pain ( nothing minor, just very sore )Where can I go from here? is my only option to call a lawyer or can i directly go to her insurance? all i want is a rental for the time being and to get money to buy a new car ( so w.e money my totaled car was worth) i want to make this as easy and fast as possible which is why i dont want a laywer involved. is that basically my only choice though? Thanks""

Can my insurance company deny my claim...?

Lots of info, sorry! My car was parked on the street and hit during the night. I drove the car to the repair place the following morning and the airbag deployed on the way there. (Stupid, I know, I wasn't thinking). My insurance company, GEICO is insisting that the damage is not consistent with a hit and run accident. They have taken recorded statements from me and my boyfriend. They have contracted an independent accident reconstructionist to read the airbag deployment. The reconstructionist originally told me that he was unable to retrieve the data, but the insurance company is now telling me that he was able to get a partial reading. And that it shows that the airbag deployed as a result of impact. The airbag did not actually fully deploy. There is no powder or injury to me to justify a complete deployment. Does anybody know if they have the right to deny my claim based on suspicion? They keep trying to make me say that my boyfriend was driving the car, which he wasn't. We were in the house together all night. Also: car was in previous fire; severe damage to front of car, all repaired. accident happened in CA, full coverage policy written in GA I know its a lot of info. Thanks for reading and I appreciate any helpful answers. Thanks!""

How can 18 year old male afford an car insurance?

Im 18 year old male, i have full driving license i was searching for car insurances on my Vauxhall Corsa 2002 the prices is like 400+ a month! this is crazy! i can afford like 50-70 a month, any advice? Thanks.""

New York New York Cheap car insurance quotes zip 10272

Young Car Insurance?!?

Hi! I currently have a Peugeot 306 1.4 Meridian I'm 18 years of age, and my test is in a few days! I've been filling out forms on the internet, and phoning various different companies for quotes! The cheapest i have recieved so far is 4,800 for a thirdparty fire and theft cover! How, as a student am i supposed to get my hands on that type of money?! Its pathetic how we're expected to pay so much! Is there anybody out there, who can help me get a cheaper quote! I wouldn't mind if it was 2000 even, which is still a pathetic price for me to drive to college and back! Thanks in advance. Jamie""

Wondering whether to pay my car insurance monthly or annually?

I have taken a loan out at 5.9% to pay for my new car, and will have a bit left over. Now I'm trying to decide whether it makes more sense to use whats left to pay for the insurance in one payment, or to just pay it monthly, and have a little of bit of spending money put aside. i know insurers charge interest on paying monthly, but im not sure how much it is. If it's over 5.9%, I may as well use the loan, if its less, I'll prolly just keep the cash aside for myself. Any advice?""

What color cars are cheaper to insure?

its bugging me lol. i would like to know what colors are considered aggressive like red,black ect. and what colors they wont rape you over. so a list of aggressive colors and a list of calm colors. thank you for your help!""

Confused about insurance...?

forgive me, its my first time..but im confused. My new apartment says i need liability insurance to move in...i already have renter's insurance.......are they basically the same thing?""

I changed my car and the insurance is so expensive?

Hello Everyone, Ive changed my car and I've bought Mazda RX8, the thing is my insurance does not insure these type of car, and they said send us the certificate and we will send you a 3 NCB. I've checked many sites such us moneysupermarket, confused.com etc. and they cheapest quote was 2200 per year. anyone knows how can i get a cheaper insurance for this car ? Thanks""

How much will my car insurance be as a new driver?

I'm learning to drive as a necessity for a new job, but I am struggling to get a reliable estimate of the insurance premium I should expect once I have a car. I know that nobody will be able to give me a precise figure as it depends on so many variables, but I wondered if anyone would know what to put into a quote generator to get something accurate? I'm female, in the UK, 27 years old and will need a cheap and cheerful 5 door hatchback. Unfortunately I don't know enough about engine sizes and that sort of thing to know if I'm answering the questions on the form realistically. I tried compare the market and got a cheapest quote of 3,700 per annum - does this sound right? I know it will be expensive but even so that seems very high for a 1999 Vauxhall Corsa! (the car I used to get the quote). I do realise this is a very subjective question but any advice is greatly appreciated - at the moment it is looking like I won't be able to take up a dream job offer as all I will be doing is working to pay for a car that I oly got in order to take the job :(""

How much on average does your insurance go up after a speeding fine?

How much does the average American pay for Healthcare?

Spending on health care to reach $5,170 per Canadian in 2008 http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_13nov2008_e I'm looking for this in American.""

Is GEICO auto insurance tougher (more expensive) than Progressive if you have an at fault accident?

I have one at fault accident on my record. It was a rear-end collision and it is a 2 pt. accident in California. I was shopping for new insurance. I made this statement about the at fault accident when filling out the forms for a quote online. At first GEICO the GEICO rates were looking way better than Progressive or other insurance companies so I thought I'd go with them. But when I went to go pay online, they did one last DMV record check, and came back with a higher rate. Even though I had stated the accident in the form previously. They waited to verify this at the very end and not earlier which I found annoying--they had my driver's licence earlier in the application process, so why wait till the very end! When filling out the Progressive quote forms, I also stated the info about my accident where asked. At the end, the form still considered me a Good Driver and the quote was much cheaper than Progressive. I went to pay and it did not recalculate my quote after a DMV check like GEICO did. I paid and am wondering if I am going to hear back from them saying I need to pay more. But I gave them all the info and I do now have a policy. So it appears that GEICO is tougher when it comes to having an accident, and Progressive doesn't let one at fault accident ruin a good driver discount? Does anyone have experience with this?""

What is the typical cost of condo insurance in florida?

I'm trying to understand what homeowners insurance woul cost in florida for a 2 bedroom condo. I'm not ready to call an insurance company. I'm looking in Ft.Myers. Just want to know is it thousands of dollars and out of my range or a few hundrend per year. Say for a 75k condo.

How much is car insurance for a 17 year old girl?

I am nearly 17 and am really excited about learning to drive. I would really like to be driving my own car by the end of the year, however I'd really like to know how much car insurance is going to be for me, so that I can save up a little. Every time I go onto any car insurance website, it asks for my car registration and when I passed my test, which obviously I haven't done yet, so it seems really pointless, and there's no way of avoiding or trying to 'trick' it. Does anyone have any ideas of how much roughly it costs, for a 17 year old girl if your living in England?""

Which company does the cheapest car insurance?

I have moved house and when I changed my address the Insurance company wanted an additional premium of 298. As you can imagine I cancelled the policy. I am now looking for a cheap insurer I have golf GTI (150) and my new post code is classed as higher risk. any ideas ?

Best car for a broke teen driver?

I'm 14, so I wont be getting the car for another year or so. I'd be paying for it myself, so I'd like it cheap, with good mileage and cheap insurance. I'd also like it ...show more""

Possible to have such cheap car insurance at 20 years old?

Hello all, i'm looking for car insurance on gocompare.com site and if i'm taking the insurance on my own name, the price comes up at 1,200 for a 1995 Ford Fiesta LX 1.2. I am 20 years old, male and held the licence for 1 year (1 year and 6 months to be exact) and have 0 NCB. Now, here is where the 'cheap' part comes in. The 1,200 was ON me as a prosper and owner of the car. If i put my step dad as first driver (main) and me as an additional driver (second) it comes up as 1,500 for insurance. How is that possible? He has 6 years no claims and held the licence for over 20 years. Never made a claim or had accident. Now if i put my self as FIRST driver and him as SECOND driver, meaning that everything goes on me and i would be getting no claims bonus every year, i get the price at :- 750! Now basically my question is - Is that possible? The companies that are at 750 are Diamond, Elephant, and Admiral. Then the prices goes up to 1,500+""

Where can I find Insurance for labor provider business?

California...where can I find Insurance for Labor provider business?

Car Insurance help for new driver?

I just passed my test yesterday. I have a Vauxhall Corsa active 16V 1.2 2004(3 Door). I asked my friends who have recently passed how much they got on their insurance. One of my friends got 1100 on a 9month deal (Direct Line) on their 2009 VW Golf. And another one of my friends also on direct line got 1300 on their Ford Fiesta (X reg). When I come to get my quote they range from 1900-3000!! I've added near enough the same details. Mother main driver, fully comp all that. So I want to know is what is it that's allows them to get cheaper car insurance? Or is there something I'm doing wrong? Perhaps suggest another insurance company (I've looked at most). But any advice would be most appreciated. Young driver wanting to have his freedom.""

Who's car insurance pays for accident?

A young guy hit into the rear of my vehicle the other day. When I asked for insurance information he said he is driving his grandmothers car and he can't show me any. I don't know if he is telling the truth that it is not his car or not. He just gave me his name and phone number. At first I felt the marks were not bad but decided they should be fixed. He is hoping I don't pursue any damage claim. If this is his grandmothers car will her insurance pay for the accident or will his insurance?

How much money do auto insurance brokers make?

How do they get paid? and how much?

Where have you been able to obtain the cheapest car insurance from?

Is it better to go through an independent agent or is it better to just go directly to some of the larger companies?

Insurance for a 350z on Parents plan?

Hey there so when i turn 18, im buying a 2003 nissan 350z with my own money. Right now im 17 and have been driving an old civic for almost the past 2 years and have never gotten in an accident or ticket (not that that lowers the insurance at all) and have the good student discount. so i followed the rule of thumb to buying a car thats okay to beat up when you first start driving. anyways, ive been looking for a lot of answers to my question, but all of the people asking it seem to be paying for theyre own insurance. Im on my parents plan, and when i buy the car its going to be put under my dads name (he is 52 and is a teacher btw if that matters). Both my parents are extremely responsible drivers, so im assuming their insurance rate wont be as high as if the car was in my name. the one issue with this car is how much insurance is going to be exactly. I looked for a quote on progressive, and im almost positive it cant be right. when i typed in the insurance cost for my 2003 civic with me paying it myself, it was only like $10 cheaper per month than a 350z, which like i said seems somewhat off. anyways, does anyone that went through buying a sports car when they were 18 with kinda the same thing have any answers for me? or even if you just know insurance well i just want to know. My parents would be okay with insurance going up some, but not astronomically high (like people were saying a couple thousand a year). ive asked them if they can talk to our agent (we are insured with PEMCO), but they keep saying theyll do it later. anyways, sorry for the long question. but any answers would help! Thanks!""

""Im 17 how much would insurance be for an an Infinity QX56 2013? Its fully loaded and costs $80,470.?

I want one so bad!

Why at 22 years old is a first time drivers insurance so dam high?

Yeah so the title says it all. Has anyone got any tips on how to lower insurance down a bit I'm looking at prices from 2k-2.4k at the moment and that's only on a 1.3 ford fiesta. Hopefully someone has a few tips on how to get the cheaper insurance ;p

WHY WHY WHY!!!! Is so-called affordable health insurance so ridiculously expensive???

Here in WI they consider $479/month for a married couple affordable! That is with a $2500 deductible!! It just doesn't make any sense to me. Can anyone tell me why the rates are so very UN-AFFORDABLE? One simply can't afford to get sick or maintain one's health...

""How much will it cost per month to pay for gas fees, and auto insurance in Toronto?""

How much will it cost per month to pay for gas fees, and auto insurance in Toronto?""

Is there some sort of reason that Car Insurance costs so much more in Nevada than it does in California?

Im looking into moving, and I cannot help but notice that the quotes I am getting are, well, DOUBLE what I pay in California. Granted, I am a 23 year old male and have a decent driving record, it is kind of shocking to see liability only coverage quoted at $250/month for my two 8 and 12 year old cars, when Im paying $125/mo. as of now in California for the same 100/300 coverage. Can someone explain this? I have some friends that have moved to Las vegas, with the same shocking increase in premiums... (And yes, I need the 100/300 since I own a home)""

New York New York Cheap car insurance quotes zip 10272

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/kansas-city-missouri-cheap-car-insurance-quotes-zip-64110-metzler/"

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