The Firebugs of Foreign Politics

By Haneul Na’avi | 2014.2.26

I have sometimes doubted the levels of foresight of today’s political leadership in the West, and, more and more, people are scrambling to find an accurate gauge to measure the madness of our foreign policy shapers. What used to be a policy of containment has now blossomed into a mature, wholesome, old-fashioned and classical bout of empire-induced madness, which has left the world embittered with unrequited aspirations for a more democratic future.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the existential threat of Communism no longer drove Europe’s finest to battle with Hammer-and-Sickle proletariats, and the leftover private army of defense contractors, Cold-War allies, and a prosperous petrodollar was too profitable to give up. To the oligarchs that have continued this dangerous game of global hegemony, boredom is the single biggest threat to their existence, and unfulfilled, antiquated conquests still run through their veins.

America’s current policy is about driving it home by fully and completely eradicating any world power that opposes its jingoist state agendas, and has installed a grid of economic serfdom and technocratic monitoring as damage control for those back home; a network that would make McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover envious. This conflict is what I would like to call the Cold War—reheated. It is the climactic finale to the battle between superpowers, orchestrated by multinational companies, weapons and armament corporations, private banks, and politicians ready to preserve the status quo or itching to finish family legacies.

Such conflicts have now taken shape in Kiev, as mass protests and rioters have left their country in shambles, armed Tatars have occupied Kiev’s parliament and Ukrainian far-right fascist groups have risen in power[i]. Vladimir Putin has remained busy with authorizing the releases of opponents such as Pussy Riot, Mikhail Kordovkovsky and Yulia Tymoshenko, hosting the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, and fighting terrorism in Volgograd against Chechnyan separatists. These acts of goodwill, unfortunately, have not appeased the Gods enough to keep at bay the vultures of Expansionism, which have begun circling above Georgia, Afghanistan, and doorsteps of the Kremlin.

What began as an outcry against recently ousted President Victor Yakunovich’s agreement with Russia to allow natural gas giant Gasprom to reduce its prices on fossil fuels in favor of pro-Russian concessions, and his refusal to grant Ukraine entry the European Union, has now blossomed into a full-out civil war within weeks and the alchemists of regime change have seen this as a golden opportunity to work their magic—just as they have in the Balkans, Libya, Iraq and Syria. Protesters voicing their disdain for the rejection have now capitulated in the worst way to groups and organizations that have 0% interest in the well-being of Ukrainian democracy. Veznik Kavkaza, political analyst and blogger, comments:

Today the Deputy Secretary of State of the USA, Williams Burns, arrives in Kiev to meet the speaker of the Rada, Alexander Turchinov, the leader of Batkivshchina Party, Arseny Yatsenyuk, and other MPs. Representatives of the Ministry of Finance and the National Economic Council of the USA will arrive together with Mr. Burns, they will work with the EU and the IMF on supporting the new Ukrainian authorities.[ii]

Kavkaza also comments that there have been moves to bypass Ukrainian constitutional law by rushing in elections by May 25^th.

[…] the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs is surprised that “several European politicians quickly supported the declaration of the early presidential elections in Ukraine in May, even though the Agreement on settlement of the situation in Ukraine, which was signed on February 21st, requires that elections should take place only after providing a constitutional reform.

Kavkaza finally notes that Voice of Russia’s Dmitry Babich has openly commented on regime change for Ukraine:

[…] “The average wage in Bosnia is 420 euros today. 44% of the population is unemployed. The philosophy is the same as in Ukraine – let the good ideas win. According to them, there are ineffective countries – remains of the former Soviet Union, where the post-Soviet elite should be replaced. Certain undemocratic things could be done in favor of this. A takeover could be supported.”[iii]

EU and US figureheads have again moved to usher in new leadership, repeating the same pattern of what had been with the Arab League’s Libyan Transitional Council[iv] and the now-defunct Syrian National Council, headed by Bilderberg attendee Bassma Kodmani[v]. To Ukrainians, this is nothing new; the country experienced the unsuccessful Orange Revolution in 2004 and recent events are a continuation of it. These political boondoggles have literally been forgotten overnight for some and burned in the psyche of others who have already become aware of these repeat offenses, which have (literally) set the world on fire.

However, as some neoliberal groups rapture that Ukrainian “freedom fighters”[vi] are liberating their homeland, they overlook the familiar alarm echoed from Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Russia, Venezuela, Egypt and Syria: there are foreign-backed interests operating within the country to destroy it. Color revolutions are the linchpin of undemocratic regime change in countries via a program called CANVAS[vii], and its playbook has been outlined in books like From Dictator to Democracy, in which its author, Gene Sharp, is quoted:

The conclusion is a hard one. When one wants to bring down a dictatorship most effectively and with the least cost then one has four immediate tasks:

1. One must strengthen the oppressed population themselves in their determination, self-confidence, and resistance skills;
2. One must strengthen the independent social groups and in-stitutions of the oppressed people;
3. One must create a powerful internal resistance force; and
4. One must develop a wise grand strategic plan for liberation and implement it skillfully[viii].
   

So, Western elites have not wasted time pushing for regime change in yet another government, regardless of calls for referendum or reform. The Assad government in Syria, at the start and apex of the civil war, demanded several times for constitutional reform so that Syrians could voice their grievances and vote on solutions. A Bloomberg journalist wrote that, “Syrian President Bashar al-Assad addressed his nation for the first time since June, offering a plan to end fighting there that was quickly rejected by opposition groups and Western governments.[ix]” Conversely, anti-Assad media campaigns were launched and Western powers rallied instead to finance the Free Syrian (now al-Nursa Front) Army by providing logistics, medical supplies, intel, and munitions[x].

Even after operations like this backfired in Libya with the murder of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Bengazi[xi] (he was smuggling weapons from Libya into Syria), these elites still haven’t learned that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. Democracy is not present in Ukraine, but pro-fascist groups in Ukraine such as Svoboda and EuroMaiden[xii] and pro-Russian forces in Crimea such as the Tatars are. This dialectic, scientific polarization of groups is the classical Machiavellian strategy of “divide and conquer” that has been at the forefront of the Arab Spring movement.

Additionally, Victoria “FU-EU” Nuland previously used this rhetoric against Bashar al-Assad by saying, “It is yet another attempt by the regime to cling to power and does nothing to advance the Syrian people’s goal of a political transition,” […] His [Assad’s] plan “would only allow the regime to further perpetuate its bloody oppression of the Syrian people.[xiii]” Sounds lovely, but the same Assistant Secretary of State later got busted in a hubris-filled conversation with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in which she crassly discussed her evil genius blueprint for control:

[Nuland] “So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the U.N. help glue it and you know … fuck the EU,”

[Pyatt] “Exactly. And I think we’ve got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it.” [xiv]

So, this foreign policy brush fire has become a staunch embarrassment, as the elite favor short-sighted gains over long-term solutions for the people. Consistently, neoliberal oligarchs pushing for regime change quickly follow-up with rampant privatization like what occurred in the Balkans[xv], or a broken government like in Mogadishu, and the original protesters find themselves joining the tragedy of Egypt—still at war with the establishment, divided, abandoned, and incomplete. Will they go from “freedom fighters” to “warlords” like those in Libya, Somalia, or Iraq? More importantly, unlike Libya and Egypt, Ukraine neighbors Russia and Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin gang have already readied a military force of 150,000 Russian troops that plan to hedge any threat coming from outside the country[xvi]. 

Legitimately, people have the right to become angry and frustrated over their nation’s problems. The people demand governments that serve popular interests instead of their own. People cry out for democracy and an end to kleptocratic regimes. That is the true nature of the Arab Spring; however, if the anger remains directionless, social engineers will exploit it. Once we recognize the symptoms, we can work towards creating true change—governments that provide for its citizens, limits its wars to defensive rather than preemptive ones, adheres to its constitutional practices, and protects the rights and liberties of people worldwide through diplomacy rather than barbarism.

This battle is dangerous because it insults the intelligence of global communities, and secondly, will spiral out of control should a nuclear superpower decide to arm itself against an existential threat from Western-backed intelligence agencies. This is a game where, if we join, we will become pawns, and no one wins once it is over.

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[i] Batchelor, John. 25 Feb. 2014. Ultranationalist neo-Nazi parties on the march in Ukraine. Al-Jazeera America. Retrieved on 26 Feb. 2014. http://preview.tinyurl.com/p7yjvoy

[ii] Kavkaza, Veznik. 25 Feb. 2014. A Bosnian scenario for Ukraine. Veznik Kavkaza. Retrieved on 26 Feb. 2014. http://vestnikkavkaza.net/articles/politics/51800.html

[iii]Kavkaza

[iv] Power, Dr. Susan. Nov 2012. The Role of the National Transitional Council in the Economic Reconstruction of Libya-Some Legal Challenges. Social Legal Studies Review, Vol. 1. Retrieved on 27 Feb. 2014. http://sociolegalstudiesreview.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Section-8-Article-6.pdf

[v] Skelton, Charlie. 5 June 2012. Bilderberg 2012: Were Mitt Romney and Bill Gates there? The London Guardian. Retrieved on 27 Feb. 2014. http://tinyurl.com/qae5erc

[vi] Lennox, Dennis. 24 Feb. 2014. Ukrainian freedom fighers an inspiration for us all. The Morning Sun. Retrieved on 27 Feb. 2014. http://tinyurl.com/prea2l9

[vii] F. William Engdahl. 7 Jan. 2014. Ukraine Protests Carefully Orchestrated: The Roles of CANVAS, US-Financed “Color Revolution Training Group”. Centre for Research on Globalization. Retrieved on 27 Jan 2014. http://tinyurl.com/odju73c

[viii] Sharp, Gene. From Dictatorship to Democracy-A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. 4^th US Ed. Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Burma, 1993. Retrieved from http://www.cfic.org.uk/media/From%20dictatorship%20to%20democracy.pdf

[ix] Baltaji, Dana El and Mark Drajem. Syria’s Assad Offers Reforms as Government Fights ‘Terrorists’. Bloomberg News. Retrieved on 26 Feb. 2014. http://tinyurl.com/qhg7ktp

[x] Memmot, Mark. 13 Sept. 2013. As Talks Continue, CIA Gets Some Weapons to Syrian Rebels. NPR: The Two-Way. Retrieved on 27 Feb. 2014. http://tinyurl.com/obxx8mb

[xi] Kirkpatrick, David D. 28 Dec. 2013. A Deadly Mix in Benghazi. The New York Times, Retrieved on 26 Feb. 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/benghazi/#/?chapt=0

[xii] Blumenthal, Max. 25 Feb. 2014. Is the US Backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine? Salon. Retrieved on 27 Feb. 2014. http://www.salon.com/2014/02/25/is_the_us_backing_neo_nazis_in_ukraine_partner/

[xiii] Baltaji and Drajem

[xiv] Chiacu, Doina and Arshad Mohammad. Leaked Audio Reveals U.S. Exchange on Ukraine, EU. Reuters. Retrieved on 27 Feb. 2014. http://tinyurl.com/kzrqml6

[xv]Schwartz, Steven. 26 Dec. 2012. “Privatizing” Kosovo: The Madeline Albright Way. Gatestone Institute International Policy Council.  Retrieved on 27 Feb. 2014. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3516/kosovo-privatization.

[xvi] 26 Feb. 2014. Putin orders ‘combat readiness’ tests for western, central Russian troops. Russia Today English. Retrieved on 27 Feb 2014. http://rt.com/news/putin-drill-combat-army-864/

EU immigration: Don’t target the immigrants, blame turbo-capitalism

Published time: February 12, 2014 21:30

Reuters / Luke MacGregor

What’s going on – why has EU immigration become such a big issue? To answer the question, we need to look back at the political and economic changes that have occurred over the past 30 years.

Switzerland has voted narrowly in a referendum to bring back strict quotas for immigration from European Union countries. In Norway, the Progress Party, which serves in the current governing coalition, has called for the country to copy the Swiss and hold its own referendum on immigration from the EU. Meanwhile, in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has said he wants to see “tougher measures” on migration from the EU.

Across the European continent, parties that call for stricter curbs on immigration, such as the UK Independence Party in Britain, have been gaining in strength. It’s not just parties of the right that are taking a tougher line: in Britain, Labour leader Ed Miliband has said that his party “got it wrong” when it allowed uncontrolled immigration from new EU states in 2004.

The large increases in EU migration haven’t just happened out of the blue – it is a feature of modern turbo-capitalism and the shift in economic model from one which put the interests of the majority first, to one that benefits the 1 percent.

For over 30 years, from the end of the Second World War, European countries, both in the west and the east, operated under economic systems in which full employment was governments’ stated aim. In the 1979 general election in Austria, Socialist Chancellor Bruno Kreisky said that he would rather the government run up a deficit than people lose their jobs.

Reuters / Luke MacGregor

“Hundreds of thousands unemployed matter more than a few billion schillings of debt,” he said. What a contrast to the views of the European elite of today, who put cutting deficits before jobs.

A feature of the European economies in this post-war era was a large state-owned sector. In communist countries, all large-scale enterprises were in public ownership. These state-owned companies were paternalistic and offered workers not just secure employment but other fringe benefits too, such as subsidized canteens, crèches, sports facilities and holidays in company-owned accommodation. In western Europe, too, the public sector was extensive. In Britain, by the late 1970s it included coal, steel and shipbuilding, public transportation, the motor industry, the energy sector, water, cross-channel ferries, hotels and telecommunications. It was a similar story in other western European countries too. 

These state-owned companies were a feature of the pre-neoliberal age.

The nationalized companies’ aim was not profit maximization at the expense of all other considerations – they pursued wider social goals too. They were a key reason why unemployment across Europe was much lower than today.

But starting in 1979 in Britain, all this changed.

If the pre-1979 economic models – communism in eastern Europe, and mixed economies with a high level of state ownership in the west, can be described as majoritarian systems – i.e. ones which put the economic interests of the majority first, the model which followed was minoritarian – in that it was about putting the interests of the 1 percent first. The neo-liberal reforms of the Thatcher government in Britain helped usher in the era of turbo-capitalism. 

Exchange controls were abolished. Financial services were deregulated. And most importantly of all, state-owned enterprises were privatized. These economic policies, when copied elsewhere, led to higher long-term unemployment in western Europe, but the impact was even more disastrous in eastern Europe after the fall of communism in 1989.

Reuters / Paul Hackett

Had communism been replaced by the mixed economy model which operated in western Europe in the post-war period, one in which governments strove to maintain full employment, and maintained a large state-owned sector, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But the western elites – and the international institutions that represent their interests, such as the IMF and World Bank, had already decided to jettison that model and so the countries of the east went straight from communism to neo-liberalism.

Their economies were radically restructured with mass privatization of state-owned enterprises. The impact that this had on employment levels in eastern Europe was catastrophic.

“The unparalleled peacetime contraction of post-communist economies can only be compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s,” Hungarian economist Laszlo Andor wrote in The Guardian in 2004.“Luckier countries like Hungary lost only about 20 percent of their national income in the years after 1989, while the GDP of others fell by 30-40 percent. Poland was first to recover its 1989 output level, in 1997; the rest only managed to do so in 2000 or even later.” Interestingly, Andor is now Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion in the European Commission.

Millions of people in eastern Europe who would have been employed in state-owned companies were laid off as private companies – often from the west – took over and slashed the workforce as a way to maximize profits. Many factories were closed down and the land sold off by asset strippers. In the Hungarian capital, Budapest, the historic building of Magyar Optikai Muvek (Hungarian Optical Works), a world famous company that employed thousands of people, making excellent optical equipment, was demolished to make way for a shopping mall with a Citibank, McDonald’s and Starbucks.

It’s been a similar story across eastern Europe as economies were radically “restructured” to benefit foreign “investors” and multinationals. With greatly reduced employment possibilities at home due to the economic changes, a whole generation of eastern Europeans have had no option but to leave their countries to try and make a living elsewhere.

Shoppers walk in a market in Upton Park, a neighborhood in the British capital’s most culturally diverse borough of Newham, in east London (Reuters/Paul Hacket)

A 2011 census showed that 579,000 Poles were living in Britain, 10 times more than a decade earlier. In Poland, unemployment among the under 25s was a whopping 27.4 percent in December 2013 (and 30 percent for young women). Just imagine how much higher the figure would have been if young Poles had stayed in their country. In Hungary, 24.6 percent of people under 25 are unemployed, while in Bulgaria it’s 29.4 percent (and 33 percent for men under 25).

This mass exodus from the east – brought about by lack of employment opportunities at home – is one of the great non-stories of modern times.

A huge media fuss was made about the so-called “brain drain” from Britain to the US in the 1970s, when the top rate of income tax was 83 percent in Britain, but little said about the much bigger migration flows that brutal neoliberal policies have caused in Europe.

While eastern European immigrants are often scapegoated there is little, if any, analysis of why they are leaving their countries in such large numbers. To do that would mean countering the dominant neoliberal narrative, which says that following the fall of communism eastern European economies have been great success stories. But if the economies in the east really are so successful following “restructuring,” why have millions of eastern Europeans left their homelands?

The question we need to ask is who has benefited most from this massive rise in European migration. The answer quite clearly, is capital.

Reuters / Cathal McNaughton

As Fred Goldstein puts it in his book, “Low Wage Capitalism”: “Sections of the ruling class tolerate, encourage and take advantage of this influx of immigrants, not only for the purpose of filling a labor shortage or to settle territory, but also to artificially increase the reserve army of labor, an army of vulnerable workers who are forced to work at substandard wages. The principal aim of permitting and fostering immigration under imperialism is to greatly increase competition among workers and keep downward pressure on wages.” The same elites in the west who ordered the economic restructuring in the east which triggered the massive exodus of workers from that region, benefit from the immigration for the reasons Goldstein outlines.

If people in western countries feel that the level of immigration is too high, that it is putting too much pressure on services and infrastructure, and that it is leading to a downward push on wages, then they should not be angry with the immigrants. Instead, they should get even with the economic and political elites who changed a system (that worked well for the majority) to one which benefits the 1 percent, for their own selfish interests.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond

Daniel Falcone for Truthout: I wanted to ask you some questions about education in the 21st century.

Chomsky: Not sure the topic exists.

Falcone: Yes, right. Well before I would go into discussing the 21st century, can you comment on this country’s history with education, and what tradition do you think we have grown out of in terms of education?

Chomsky: That’s an interesting question. The US was kind of a pioneer in mass public education. Actually, this here is land-grant university which is part of the big 19th-century expansion of our education through federal grant. And most of them are out in the West, but this is one. And also, just-for-children mass public education, which is a pretty good thing. It wasn’t a major contribution, but it had qualifications. For one thing, it was partly concerned with taking a country of independent farmers, many of them pretty radical. You go back to the late 19th century, the Farmer’s Alliance was coming out of Texas and was the most radical popular Democratic organization anywhere in history, I think. It’s hard to believe if you look at Texas today.

And these were independent farmers. They stick up for their rights – they didn’t want to be slaves. And they had to be driven into factories and turned into tools for someone else.

There’s a lot of resistance to it. So a lot of public education was, in fact, concerned with trying to teach independent people to become workers in an industrial system.

And there was more to it than that. Actually, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on it. He said something like this: he hears a lot of political leaders saying that we have to have mass public education. And the reason is that millions of people are getting the vote, and we have to educate them to keep them from our throats. In other words, we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they’re not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats.

So, it’s kind of a mixture. There’s a lot of good things about it, but there were also, you know, the property class. The people who concentrate wealth don’t do things just out of the goodness of their hearts for the most part, but in order to maintain their position of dominance and then extend their power. And it’s been kind of that battle all the way through.

Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education. A lot of what’s happening is sort of backlash to the 60s; the 60s were a democratizing period. And the society became a lot more civilized and there was a lot of concern about education across the spectrum – liberals, conservatives and bipartisan. It’s kind of interesting to read the liberal literature in the 70s, but there was concern about what they called, at the liberal end, “the failures of the institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young.” That’s the phrase that was used, which expresses the liberal view quite accurately. You got to keep them from our throats. So the indoctrination of the young wasn’t working properly.

That was actually Samuel Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, kind of a liberal stalwart. And he co-authored a book-length report called The Crisis of Democracy. There was something that had to be done to increase indoctrination, to beat back the democratizing wave. The economy was sharply modified and went through a liberal period, with radical inequality, stagnation, financial institutions, all that stuff. Student debt started to skyrocket, which is quite important. But that’s a technique of indoctrination in itself. It’s never been studied. Important things usually never get studied; it’s just putting together the bits of information about it. One can at least be suspicious that skyrocketing student debt is a device of indoctrination. It’s very hard to imagine that there’s any economic reason for it. Other countries’ education is free, like Mexico’s, and that is a poor country.

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