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Obama Deifies American Hegemony
Obama Deifies American Hegemony
Today is the 70th anniversary of the UN. It is not clear how much good the UN has done. Some UN Blue Hemet peacekeeping operations had limited success. But mainly Washington has used the UN for war, such as the Korean War and Washington’s Cold War against the Soviet Union. In our time Washington had UN tanks sent in against Bosnian Serbs during the period that Washington was dismantling Yugoslavia and Serbia and accusing Serbian leaders, who tried to defend the integrity of their country against Washington’s aggression, of “war crimes.”
The UN supported Washington’s sanctions against Iraq that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. When asked about it, Clinton’s Secretary of State said, with typical American heartlessness, that the deaths of the children were worth it. In 2006 the UN voted sanctions against Iran for exercising its right as a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty to develop atomic energy. Washington claimed without any evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon in violation of the non-proliferation treaty, and this lie was accepted by the UN. Washington’s false claim was repudiated by all 16 US intelligence agencies and by the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground in Iran, but in the face of the factual evidence the US government and its presstitute media pressed the claim to the point that Russia had to intervene and take the matter out of Washington’s warmonger hands. Russia’s intervention to prevent US military attacks on Iran and Syria resulted in the demonization of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. “Facts?!, Washington don’t need no stinkin’ facts! We got power!” Today at the UN Obama asserted America’s over-riding power many times: the strongest military in the world, the strongest economy in the world.
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Washington’s Fifth Columns Inside Russia and China
Washington’s Fifth Columns Inside Russia and China
It took two decades for Russia and China to understand that “pro-democracy” and “human rights” organizations operating within their countries were subversive organizations funded by the US Department of State and a collection of private American foundations organized by Washington. The real purpose of these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is to advance Washington’s hegemony by destabilizing the two countries capable of resisting US hegemony.
Washington’s Fifth Columns pulled off “color revolutions” in former Russian provinces, such as Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin and Ukraine, a Russian province for centuries.
When Putin was last elected, Washington was able to use its Fifth Columns to pour thousands of protesters into the streets of Russia claiming that Putin had “stolen the election.” This American propaganda had no effect on Russia, where the citizen back their president by 89%. The other 11% consists almost entirely of Russians who believe Putin is too soft toward the West’s aggression. This minority supports Putin as well. They only want him to be tougher. The actual percentage of the population that Washington has been able to turn into treasonous agents is only 2-3 percent of the population. These traitors are the “Westerners,” the “Atlantic integrationists,” who are willing for their country to be an American vassal state in exchange for money. Paid to them, of course.
But Washington’s ability to put its Fifth Columns into the streets of Moscow had an effect on insouciant Americans and Europeans. Many Westerners today believe that Putin stole his election and is intent on using his office to rebuild the Soviet Empire and to crush the West. Not that crushing the West would be a difficult thing to do. The West has pretty much already crushed itself.
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Iran Deal is About Staving Off the Coming Oil Shock
Iran Deal is About Staving Off the Coming Oil Shock
The US wants to use Iran to sustain its regional influence in the face of the next global economic recession
The Iran nuclear deal signals a major shift in the geopolitics of the Middle East. Integral to the equation is oil, economics, terror – and US hegemony.
The Bush administration had initiated a long-term covert strategy to undermine Iranian influence in the Middle East and Central Asia, combined with overt pressure through diplomatic initiatives and economic sanctions.
Under Obama, this strategy accelerated, largely in concert with other Gulf powers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, who have long sought to roll-back Iranian influence.
Yet even as the strategy accelerated, unlike its predecessors which openly declared their warmongering hostility to Iran, the Obama administration had used the pressure to forge an unprecedented deal with the country.
Averting regional war
The reasons for the shift are, of course, pragmatic. For years, US intelligence agencies have told the White House that there is simply no evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.
And the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly certified that uranium is not being enriched to levels necessary for weaponisation, nor is it being diverted to a secret weapons programme.
Meanwhile, senior US military officials have long warned that the sort of US-Iran military confrontation which frothing neoconservatives have been pining for would likely fail and destabilise the entire region.
What about an Israel-Iran confrontation? A classified Pentagon war simulation held in 2012 found that an Israeli attack on Iran would also lead to a wider regional war.
Unlike the neocons, for the military pragmatists in successive US administrations, war with Iran could never be a preferred option.
The added bonus is that Iran might notch down its involvement in Iraq and Syria.
– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/iran-deal-about-staving-coming-oil-shock-1366649799#sthash.fMD7hQbp.dpuf
The Last Days Of ‘Normal Life’ In America
The Last Days Of ‘Normal Life’ In America
If you have got family and friends that you would like to visit before things start getting really crazy, you should do so within the next couple of months, because these are the last days of “normal life” in America. The website where I have posted this article is called “End of the American Dream“, but perhaps I should have entitled it “The End of America” because that is essentially what we are heading for. The debt-fueled prosperity that so many of us take for granted is about to come to a screeching halt, and we are about to enter the hardest times that any of us have ever known. And I am not just talking about economics either. Based on all of the intel and information that I have gathered, we are about to enter a “perfect storm” that is going to shake this country in just about every possible way that it can be shaken. So I hope that you will truly savor this summer – days like this will not come around again any time soon.
Have you ever known someone that lived a seemingly charmed life even though that individual made foolish decision after foolish decision?
In the end, reality almost always catches up with people like that.
And in so many ways, we have been living a charmed life as a nation even though we have been making incredibly foolish decisions for decades. We have cursed ourselves over and over again, and just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is exploding all around us. As a nation, we now stand for just about everything that is foul, disgusting and wicked, and the rest of the world is absolutely horrified by what has happened to us.
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Pentagon Concludes America Not Safe Unless It Conquers The World
Pentagon Concludes America Not Safe Unless It Conquers The World
The Pentagon has released its “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015,” June 2015. http://news.usni.org/2015/07/02/document-2015-u-s-national-military-strategy
The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are independent. In other words, the norm is dependence on Washington.
Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.” In other words, their independence is out of step with the neoconservative Uni-power doctrine that declares independence to be the right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes any other country being independent in its actions.
The Pentagon’s report defines the foremost “revisionist states” as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The focus is primarily on Russia.Washington hopes to co-op China, despite the “tension to the Asia-Pacific region” that China’s defense of its sphere of influence, a defense “inconsistent with international law” (this from Washington, the great violator of international law), by turning over what remains of the American consumer market to China. It is not yet certain that Iran has escaped the fate that Washington imposed on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine, and by complicity Palestine.
The Pentagon report is sufficiently audacious in its hypocrisy, as all statements from Washington are, to declare that Washington and its vassals “support the established institutions and processes dedicated to preventing conflict, respecting sovereignty, and furthering human rights.” This from the military of a government that has invaded, bombed, and overthrown 11 governments since the Clinton regime and is currently working to overthrow governments in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina.
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Russia, Ukraine and U.S. Hegemony
Russia, Ukraine and U.S. Hegemony
The following is an edited version of a talk by the author as part of a panel at a public forum in Toronto on June 12, 2015. The forum was sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice and Socialist Project. You can view the talk here on ‘Left Streamed’.
The Ukraine/Russia conflict is particularly ominous because tensions with the United States could escalate into a nuclear war. For this reason, it is necessary to understand NATO’s role, patterns of U.S. domination and the nuclear arms race. The political world is dangerously in flux, with entangled military and economic alliances and a robust weapons trade. This is similar to the prelude to World War I when it took one trigger to unleash cascading inter-state violence.
The demonization of Russia and Putin leaves out the role of the United States and NATO. Seumas Milne, writes in The Guardian, March 4, 2015, “A quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, the ‘Russian threat’ is unmistakably back. Vladimir Putin, Britain’s defence secretary Michael Fallon declares, is as great a danger to Europe as ‘Islamic State’…
“Putin’s authoritarian conservatism may offer little for Russia’s future, but this anti-Russian incitement is dangerous folly. There certainly has been military expansionism. But it has overwhelmingly come from NATO, not Moscow.”
James Bissett is a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. He wrote in the Ottawa Citizen last year, “The current crisis in Ukraine threatens global security and at worst has the potential for nuclear catastrophe. At best, it signals a continuation of the Cold War. Sadly, the crisis is completely unnecessary and the responsibility lies entirely in the hands of the United States-led NATO powers. The almost virulent propaganda onslaught blaming Russia for the instability and violence in Ukraine simply ignores reality and the facts.”
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Paul Craig Roberts’ Address to the International Conference on the European/Russian Crisis Created by Washington
Paul Craig Roberts’ Address to the International Conference on the European/Russian Crisis Created by Washington
Paul Craig Roberts’ address to the Conference on the European/Russian Crisis, Delphi, Greece, June 20-21, 2015
Paul Craig Roberts, formerly Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy, Associate Editor, Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow, Stanford University, William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
The United States has pursued empire since early in its history, but it was the Soviet collapse in 1991 that enabled Washington to see the entire world as its oyster.
The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the rise of the neoconservatives to power and influence in the US government. The neoconservatives have interpreted the Soviet collapse as History’s choice of “American democratic capitalism” as the New World Order.
Chosen by History as the exceptional and indispensable country, Washington claims the right and the responsibility to impose its hegemony on the world. Neoconservatives regard their agenda to be too important to be constrained by domestic and international law or by the interests of other countries. Indeed, as the Unipower, Washington is required by the neoconservative doctrine to prevent the rise of other countries that could constrain American power.
Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative, penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine shortly after the Soviet collapse. This doctrine is the basis of US foreign and military policy.
The doctrine states:
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”
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Is The Credibility Bubble Bursting?
Is The Credibility Bubble Bursting?
In a fiat currency system, perception is, by definition, everything. Paper money has no intrinsic value. So the people saving it and accepting it in exchange aren’t expressing faith in the money itself but in the competence and honesty — and power — of the institutions managing it. Let that faith erode and those slips of colored paper and ephemeral computer bits revert to their intrinsic value.
And on the credibility front, the trends aren’t encouraging. Consider the coverage of this weekend’s Washington DC meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, two global financial institutions that the US dominates. From the New York Times:
At global economic gathering, concerns that US is ceding its leadership role
This article is available only to subscribers, but a similar one from India’s Business Standard makes many of the same points:
US primacy seen ebbing at global meet
As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.
The spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J Lew. But they have also highlighted what some in Washington and around the world see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.
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US Hegemony, Dollar Dominance Are Officially Dead As China Scores Overwhelming Victory In Bank Battle
US Hegemony, Dollar Dominance Are Officially Dead As China Scores Overwhelming Victory In Bank Battle
It’s official: everyone has caught onto the fact that the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank story is extremely important. We’ve covered this exhaustively over the past month, but to summarize, the China-led development bank essentially marks an epochal shift away from traditionally US-dominated multinational institutions like the IMF and the ADB. Meanwhile, it also represents an implicit attempt by the Chinese to usher in a kind of sino-Monroe Doctrine and solidify their regional — and, to a certain extent their international — ambitions. In a desperate attempt to undermine the effort and preserve what’s left of US hegemony, Washington aggressively lobbied its allies last year to refrain from supporting the effort. Then the UK decided to join calling the bank an “unrivaled opportunity.” That effectively opened the floodgates and in short order, a bevy of Western nations and close US allies suddenly reversed course and indicated they were likely to support the new institution. Here’s more:
- US Attacks “Closest Ally” UK For “Constant Accommodation” With China
- De-Dollarization Accelerates As More Of Washington’s “Allies” Defect To China-Led Bank
- US “Isolated” As Key Ally Japan Considers Joining China-Led Bank
- US Upset At West’s Lack Of War Preparedness
- Treasury Secretary Lew Admits US “International Credibility & Influence Is Being Threatened”
With the deadline for applications fast approaching, news coverage has picked up markedly of late. Here’s Bloomberg for instance:
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Washington Blinks: Will Seek Partnership With China-Led Development Bank
Washington Blinks: Will Seek Partnership With China-Led Development Bank
Don’t look now, but Washington just blinked. As we’ve documented exhaustively over the past week, pressure has been building steadily for the US to strike some manner of conciliatory tone towards China with regard to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a China-led institution aimed at rivaling the US/Japan-backed ADB. Britain’s decision to join China in its new endeavor has prompted a number of Western nations to throw their support behind the bank ahead of the March 31 deadline for membership application. Because the AIIB effectively represents the beginning of the end for US hegemony, the White House has demeaned the effort from its inception questioning the ability of non-G-7 nations to create an institution that can be trusted to operation in accordance with the proper “standards.” Now, with 35 nations set to join as founders, it appears Washington may be set to concede defeat. Here’s more, via WSJ:
The Obama administration, facing defiance by allies that have signed up to support a new Chinese-led infrastructure fund, is proposing the bank work in a partnership with Washington-backed development institutions such as the World Bank.The collaborative approach is designed to steer the new bank toward economic aims of the world’s leading economies and away from becoming an instrument of Beijing’s foreign policy. The bank’s potential to promote new alliances and sidestep existing institutions has been one of the Obama administration’s chief concerns as key allies including the U.K., Germany and France lined up in recent days to become founding members of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
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