When Scottisch moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith finished his opus, most probably he didn't realize that it would become a landmark examination of political economy. Published in 1776, The Wealth of Nations details the benefits, interconnections and consequences of a free-market economy that paved the way for modern capitalism. Smith believed that there could be no market for anything unless someone, somewhere, was willing to pay for it. He was convinced of the merits of a laissez-faire (let-the market-decide) approach because he believed competition, not intervention, would naturally regulate the market and thus some 'invisible hand' would ensure justice and equality for all.
For example, Smith was of the view that a free market would make monopoly impossible and therefore workers and consumers could not be exploited. If over-demand for a certain product existed, then that demand would naturally encourage others to compete in the same market and prices would fall.
Calum Roberts. The Wealth of Nations. Timeless Concepts for Today. 2011
Er zijn weinig filosofen in de westerse geschiedenis die zich zo vergist hebben als Adam Smith, paradoxaal genoeg de filosoof bij uitstek van het neoliberale kapitalisten. De vrije markt heeft nooit bestaan, het kapitalisme bestaat bij de gratie van staatsinterventies in de vorm van miljarden subsidies en belastingvoordelen waarbij de concurrentie door de monopolies zo snel mogelijk om zeep wordt geholpen, en wat betreft 'de vrije markt' zelf, die is er alleen voor de grote concerns. In die zin heeft het kapitalisme nooit bestaan, net zomin als het communisme ooit in praktijk is gebracht. Zowel in de Sovjet Unie als in de VS is het de staat die via belastinggeld research and development financiert en met zijn strijdkrachten grondstoffen en markten verovert en beschermt. Zoals elke serieuze wetenschapper weet is er sprake van 'socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.' De leider van de kapitalistische wereld heet dan ook de 'Corporate State,' een staat gerund door de economische macht. Dit wordt in de VS mogelijk gemaakt door de wetgeving die volgens het Federale Hooggerechtshof het financieren van de verkiezingscampagnes van de politici niet verbiedt.
Washington (CNN) -- If you're rich and want to give money to a lot of political campaigns, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that you can.
The 5-4 ruling eliminated limits on how much money people can donate in total in one election season.
In een systeem waar alles om geld draait, wordt logischerwijs ook de politiek door geld bepaald, degene met het meeste geld heeft de meeste macht, kan de meeste politici kopen. Het gevolg is dat de VS al geruime tijd geen democratie is, maar een plutocratie, de heerschappij van de rijken.
Een plutocratie is een bestuursvorm waarin de rijksten aan de macht zijn en de wetgeving voor grote groepen binnen een samenleving kunnen bepalen. De naam is een samenstelling van de Griekse woorden πλουτος (rijkdom) en κρατειν (regeren, de macht hebben).
De term wordt ook wel gebruikt voor de heerschappij van het grote kapitaal.
Om goed te begrijpen wat er op dit moment gebeurt dient men allereerst te weten hoe deze ontwikkeling mogelijk is geweest. In het kort:
The United States Isn't a Country
— It's a Corporation!
by Lisa Guliani
'We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.'
— Preamble of the original 'organic' Constitution
— Preamble of the original 'organic' Constitution
'We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'
— Excerpted from the Declaration of Independence of the original thirteen united states of America, July 4, 1776…
— Excerpted from the Declaration of Independence of the original thirteen united states of America, July 4, 1776…
We call ourselves a free people in a land of liberty. Our anthems proudly sing the praises of this nation, and we raise our voices, wave our flags and join in song — but how many Americans realize they are not free? This is a myth perpetuated by the powers-that-be in order to avoid any major civil unrest, and to keep us all living under the thumb of a militaristic corporate Big Brother within the illusions that have been created for us. The truth of the matter is this: what freedom has not been stolen from us, we have surrendered willingly through our silence and ignorance. As Americans, most of us have no idea how our freedoms are maintained — or lost. Apparently, our ancestors didn't have a good grasp of this either. It is sad, but it is also very true…
So, let's roll backward into the past for a moment. It is time we learned what they didn't teach us in school. It is far more interesting than what they DID tell us. I think you'll stay awake for this lesson.
The date is February 21, 1871back-room and the Forty-First Congress is in session. I refer you to the 'Acts of the Forty-First Congress,' Section 34, Session III, chapters 61 and 62. On this date in the history of our nation, Congress passed an Act titled: 'An Act To Provide A Government for the District of Columbia.' This is also known as the 'Act of 1871.' What does this mean? Well, it means that Congress, under no constitutional authority to do so, created a separate form of government for the District of Columbia, which is a ten mile square parcel of land…
How could they do that? Moreover, WHY would they do that? To explain, let's look at the circumstances of those days. The Act of 1871 was passed at a vulnerable time in America. Our nation was essentially bankrupt — weakened and financially depleted in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Civil War itself was nothing more than a calculated 'front' for some pretty fancy footwork by corporate backroom players. It was a strategic maneuver by European interests (the international bankers) who were intent upon gaining a stranglehold on the neck (and the coffers) of America.
The Congress realized our country was in dire financial straits, so they cut a deal with the international bankers — (in those days, the Rothschilds of London were dipping their fingers into everyone's pie) thereby incurring a DEBT to said bankers. If we think about banks, we know they do not just lend us money out of the goodness of their hearts. A bank will not do anything for you unless it is entirely in their best interest to do so. There has to be some sort of collateral or some string attached which puts you and me (the borrower) into a subservient position. This was true back in 1871 as well. The conniving international bankers were not about to lend our floundering nation any money without some serious stipulations. So, they devised a brilliant way of getting their foot in the door of the United States (a prize they had coveted for some time, but had been unable to grasp thanks to our Founding Fathers, who despised them and held them in check), and thus, the Act of 1871 was passed.
In essence, this Act formed the corporation known as THE UNITED STATES. Note the capitalization, because it is important. This corporation, owned by foreign interests, moved right in and shoved the original 'organic' version of the Constitution into a dusty corner. With the 'Act of 1871,' our Constitution was defaced in the sense that the title was block-capitalized and the word 'for' was changed to the word 'of' in the title. The original Constitution drafted by the Founding Fathers, was written in this manner:
'The Constitution for the united states of America.'
The altered version reads: 'THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.' It is the corporate constitution. It is NOT the same document you might think it is. The corporate constitution operates in an economic capacity and has been used to fool the People into thinking it is the same parchment that governs the Republic. It absolutely is not.
Capitalization — an insignificant change? Not when one is referring to the context of a legal document, it isn't. Such minor alterations have had major impacts on each subsequent generation born in this country. What the Congress did with the passage of the Act of 1871 was create an entirely new document, a constitution for the government of the District of Columbia. The kind of government THEY created was a corporation. The new, altered Constitution serves as the constitution of the corporation, and not that of America. Think about that for a moment.
Incidentally, this corporate constitution does not benefit the Republic. It serves only to benefit the corporation. It does nothing good for you or me — and it operates outside of the original Constitution. Instead of absolute rights guaranteed under the 'organic' Constitution, we now have 'relative' rights or privileges. One example of this is the Sovereign's right to travel, which has been transformed under corporate government policy into a 'privilege' which we must be licensed to engage in. This operates outside of the original Constitution.
So, Congress committed TREASON against the People, who were considered Sovereign under the Declaration of Independence and the organic Constitution. When we consider the word 'Sovereign,' we must think about what the word means.
According to Webster's Dictionary, 'sovereign' is defined as: 1. chief or highest; supreme. 2. Supreme in power, superior in position to all others. 3. Independent of, and unlimited by, any other, possessing or entitled to, original and independent authority or jurisdiction.
In other words, our government was created by and for 'sovereigns' — the free citizens who were deemed the highest authority. Only the People can be sovereign — remember that. Government cannot be sovereign. We can also look to the Declaration of Independence, where we read: 'government is subject to the consent of the governed' — that's supposed to be us, the sovereigns. Do you feel like a sovereign nowadays? I don't.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a constitutional historian to figure out that this is not what is happening in our country today. Government in these times is NOT subject to the consent of the governed. Rather, the governed are subject to the whim and greed of the corporation, which has stretched its tentacles beyond the ten-mile-square parcel of land known as the District of Columbia — encroaching into every state of the Republic. Mind you, the corporation has NO jurisdiction outside of the District of Columbia. THEY just want you to think it does.
http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/us_corporation.htm
http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/us_corporation.htm
Een aanzienlijk deel van de Amerikaanse bevolking beseft dat het niet in een 'democratie' leeft, tenminste niet in de strikte zin van het woord, maar dat een uiterst kleine elite van rijke burgers de macht in handen heeft, daarbij gesteund door de massamedia die natuurlijk ook in handen zijn van dezelfde elite. Ondanks of beter nog juist dankzij de vele honderden miljoenen kostende propaganda tijdens landelijke verkiezingscampagnes stemt meer dan 40 procent van de kiesgerechtigde burgers al sinds een halve eeuw niet meer. Dat geldt voor de Congres- en presidentsverkiezingen, het opkomstcijfer bij de staats- en locale verkiezingen zijn nog lager. De meeste Amerikaanse burgers weten dat stemmen nauwelijks of geen zin heeft, ook al beloven de kandidaten gouden bergen. 'Change we can believe in'? Bij de herverkiezing van Obama bleef 42,5 procent thuis, want huidskleur, godsdienst, politieke gezindheid, het maakt allemaal niets uit, de rijken regeren, en elke Amerikaan weet dit als geen ander. Alleen mainstream-opiniemakers als Geert Mak hebben de mond vol over 'het vitale karakter van de Amerikaanse democratie.' Dankzij dit soort leugens worden de Makkianen op televisie uitgenodigd om daar nog eens hoog op te geven van de 'Amerikaanse democratie.' Dat imperium staat aan het hoofd van wat Henk Hofland 'het vredestichtende Westen' betitelt. In werkelijkheid is de VS een expansionistische National Security State, die slechts 21 jaar van zijn hele bestaan geen gewelddadig conflict heeft uitgevochten. Wanneer men zijn ogen dicht genoeg knijpt is de mens in staat blind in de grootst mogelijke nonsens te geloven. Degenen die het diepst gelovig zijn mogen in de commerciële massamedia hun geloof komen belijden, terwijl elke twijfel zaaiende dissident als ketter wordt geweerd. En dus kan chef kunst van de 'kwaliteitskrant' NRC/Handelsblad, Raymond van den Boogaard, publiekelijk verklaren dat de VS 'Irak was binnengevallen om er een democratie te vestigen.' De werkelijkheid is natuurlijk ook hier weer fundamenteel anders, zoals wetenschappelijke onderzoekers en onafhankelijke journalisten gedocumenteerd aantoonden:
Endgame for Iraqi Oil?
By Jack Miles
TomDispatch.com
Wednesday 24 October 2007
The Sovereignty Showdown in Iraq
The oil game in Iraq may be almost up. On September 29th, like a landlord serving notice, the government of Iraq announced that the next annual renewal of the United Nations Security Council mandate for a multinational force in Iraq - the only legal basis for a continuation of the American occupation - will be the last. That was, it seems, the first shoe to fall. The second may be an announcement terminating the little-noticed, but crucial companion Security Council mandate governing the disposition of Iraq's oil revenues. By December 31, 2008, according to Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, the government of Iraq intends to have replaced the existing mandate for a multinational security force with a conventional bilateral security agreement with the United States, an agreement of the sort that Washington has with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and several other countries in the Middle East. The Security Council has always paired the annual renewal of its mandate for the multinational force with the renewal of a second mandate for the management of Iraqi oil revenues. This happens through the 'Development Fund for Iraq,' a kind of escrow account set up by the occupying powers after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime and recognized in 2003 by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483. The oil game will be up if and when Iraq announces that this mandate, too, will be terminated at a date certain in favor of resource-development agreements that - like the envisioned security agreement - match those of other states in the region.
The game will be up because, as Antonia Juhasz pointed out last March in a New York Times op-ed, 'Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?':
'Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have outlawed foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced.'
By contrast, the oil legislation oil now pending in the Iraqi parliament awards foreign oil companies coveted, long-term, 20-35 year contracts of just the sort that neighboring oil-producers have rejected for decades. It also places the Iraqi oil industry under the control of an appointed body that would include representatives of international oil companies as full voting members. The news that the duly elected government of Iraq is exercising its
limited sovereignty to set a date for termination of the American occupation radically undercuts all discussion in Congress or by American presidential candidates of how soon the U.S. occupation of Iraq may 'safely' end. Yet if, by the same route, Iraq were to resume full and independent control over the world's third-largest proven oil reserves - 200 to 300 million barrels of light crude worth as much as $30 trillion at today's prices - a politically incorrect question might break rudely out of the Internet universe and into the mainstream media world, into, that is, the open: Has the Iraq war been an oil war from the outset? Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan evidently thought so or so he indicated in a single sentence in his recent memoir:
'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'
When asked, Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander who oversaw three and a half years of the American occupation of Iraq, agreed.
'Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that,'
he said during a roundtable discussion at Stanford University. These confessions validated the suspicions of foreign observers too numerous to count. Veteran security analyst Thomas Powers observed in the New York Review of Books recently:
'What it was only feared the Russians might do [by invading Afghanistan in the 1980s] the Americans have actually done - they have planted themselves squarely astride the world's largest pool of oil, in a position potentially to control its movement and to coerce all the governments who depend on that oil. Americans naturally do not suspect their own motives but others do. The reaction of the Russians, the Germans, and the French in the months leading up to the war suggests that none of them wished to give Americans the power which [former National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski had feared was the goal of the Soviets.'
Apologists for the war point out lamely that the United States imports only a small fraction of its oil from Iraq, but what matters, rather obviously, is not Iraq's current exports but its reserves. Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said,
'The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil.'
In the twenty-first century's version of the 'Great Game' of nineteenth century imperialism, the Bush administration made a colossal gamble that Iraq could become a kind of West Germany or South Korea on the Persian Gulf - a federal republic with a robust, oil-exporting economy, a rising standard of living, and a set of U.S. bases that would guarantee lasting American domination of the most resource-strategic region on the planet. The political half of that gamble has already been lost, but the Bush administration has proven adamantly unwilling to accept the loss of the economic half, the oil half, without a desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that the U.S. has been constructing in Iraq for as many as 20,000 troops each, plus the super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has been constructing inside the Green Zone, will suffice to maintain American control over the oil reserves, even in defiance of international law and the officially stated wishes of the Iraqi people - but perhaps not.
Blackwater and the Sovereignty Showdown
In any case, a kind of slow-motion showdown may lie not so far ahead; and, during the past weeks, we may have been given a clue as to how it could unfold. Recall that after the gunning down of at least 17 Iraqis in a Baghdad square, Prime Minister al-Maliki demanded that the State Department dismiss and punish the trigger-happy private security firm, Blackwater USA, which was responsible for the safety of American diplomatic personnel
in Iraq. He further demanded that the immunity former occupation head L. Paul Bremer III had granted, in 2004, to all such private security firms be revoked. Startled, the Bush administration briefly grounded its diplomatic operations, then defiantly resumed them - with security still provided by Blackwater. Within days, though, Bush found himself face-to-face in New York with al-Maliki for discussions whose topic National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley revealingly named as 'Iraqi sovereignty.' Who would blink first? We're still waiting to see, but in the wake of an Iraqi investigation ended with a demand for $8 million compensation for each of the 17 murdered Baghdadis, Blackwater is reportedly "on its way out" of security responsibility in Iraq, probably by the six-month deadline that al-Maliki has demanded. Despite its disgrace, the well-connected private security company continues to win lucrative State Department security contracts. Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill told Bill Moyers that losing the Iraq gig would only slightly affect Blackwater's bottom line, but could grievously inconvenience U.S. diplomatic operations in Iraq. In forcing such a crisis on the State Department, the al-Maliki government, whose powerlessness has been an assumption unchallenged from left or right (in or out of Iraq), suddenly looks a good deal stronger. But oil matters more to Washington than Blackwater does. In September, when the effort to enact U.S.-favored oil legislation - a much-announced 'benchmark' of both the White House and Congress - collapsed in Iraq's legislature, the coup de grace seemed to be delivered by a wildcat agreement between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Hunt Oil of Dallas, Texas, headed by Ray L. Hunt, a longtime Bush ally and a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This agreement, undertaken against the stated wishes of the central government, provides for the separate development of Kurdistan's oil resources and puts the Kurds in blatant, preemptive violation of the pending legislation. It makes, in fact, such a mockery of that legislation that the prospect of its passage before the Development Fund mandate expires is now vanishingly small,
aldus Jack Miles, geen radicale anarchist, maar een
senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Relations and professor of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'God: A Biography, among other works.'
Al deze informatie wordt nagenoeg altijd geweerd uit de mainstream media om voor de hand liggende redenen. Het publiek in een neoliberale 'democratie' mag niet weten dat oorlogen worden gevoerd om de westerse economische elite nog rijker te maken, en daarmee nog machtiger. Het totalitaire systeem duldt geen enkele tegenspraak en daarom schrijft de nestor van de polder-pers, H.J.A. Hofland, die tot grootste journalist van de twintigste eeuw werd uitgeroepen, in De Groene Amsterdammer, een weekblad dat voor kritisch doorgaat, dat 'het Westen [vredestichtend]' is. En niemand van zijn zelfbenoemde 'politiek-literaire elite' in de polder die hem tegenspreekt. Zelfs een poging om onafhankelijk te lijken is niet toegestaan. Alleen op internet kan dit soort informatie geanalyseerd en verspreid worden, en natuurlijk in boeken, zoals in They Were Soldiers (2013) van de Amerikaanse onafhankelijke journaliste dr. Ann Jones. Zij laat zien hoe ook de oorlogsvoering zelf, net als alle andere sectoren van de kapitalistische economie, werd gedereguleerd en geprivatiseerd, waardoor talloze taken van het leger konden worden uitbesteed aan huurlingen, waarvan het aantal na 2001 zo snel toenam dat
in our war zones, they outnumbered uniformed soldiers on the ground. In March 2011, the Department of Defense reported that its soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan numbered 145,000, its contractors 155,000, or 52 percent of the 'workforce' of those wars. The percentage shift as deployments change, making for slippery and often deceptive statistics. For example, the report noted that only 45,000 American troops were then left in Iraq, but it somehow neglected to mention that a shadow army of 64,250 private contractors still remained…
When questioned about its use of the shadowy private contractors to conduct its wars, the Pentagon responded that it needed more manpower and that it was more efficient and economical to hire them and then dismiss them when a job was done, without obligation, benefits, or responsibility.
Kortom, vanwege dezelfde redenen dat in het neoliberale Westen bijna al het werk op contractbasis is, en zo goed als niemand een vaste baan krijgt, omdat dan de werkgever verplicht is zich te houden aan allerlei sociale voorzieningen. Ann Jones:
So strong has the Pentagon's preference for this privatized arrangement been that even when a contractor — Blackwater — faced an investigation for war crimes, or — Blackwater renamed Academi LLC — federal criminal charges for violating 'important laws and regulations concerning how we as a country interact with our international allies and adversaries,' or — Halliburton, for one — simply 'lost' untold millions of taxpayer dollars, it was likely to be handed another multimillion or multibillion dollar no bid contract on the grounds of its 'experience.'
In 2008, a BBC investigation of American contractors estimated that 'around $23 billion may have been lost, stolen, or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.' Despite such 'carelessness,' private contractors in Iraq to that date had taken home $138 billion in profits, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, while Halliburton alone snatched $39.5 billion. The wars, it seemed, had become a remarkably efficient engine for transferring the wealth of the nation from the public treasury to the pockets of the already rich. Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, called the contractors' staggering gains possibly 'the largest war profiteering in history.' Could there be any connection between the size of those corporate profits and Washington's patriotic dedication to eternal wartime?
Vaststaat dat de economisch macht miljarden verdient aan oorlogsvoering, en dat het de meest lucratieve business is in de VS, de onbetwiste leider van wat Henk Hofland 'de Vrije Wereld' met hoofdletters noemt. Laat duidelijk zijn dat de propaganda van de mainstream-opiniemakers almaar gevaarlijker en daarmee misdadiger wordt. De spanning die de westerse commerciële massamedia creëren naar aanleiding van de binnenlandse onrust in Oekraïne is alleen maar gunstig voor het militair-industrieel complex, en levensbedreigend voor allereerst de burgerbevolking in Europa, inclusief Rusland, en de VS. En toch blijft de mainstream intelligentsia de spreekbuis van de economische macht. Ian Sinclair, auteur van The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003 schreef 26 april 2014:
Een dag eerder wees de Amerikaanse auteur Sheldon Richman op het volgende:
Sheldon Richman is vice president of The Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of FFF's monthly journal, Future of Freedom. For 15 years he was editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38333.htm
Maar in Nederland klinkt alleen de stem van malloten. Zaterdag 12 april 2014 betoogde hoogleraar Europese Studies, en vroegere medewerker van De Groene Amsterdammer, de uiterst ijdele Paul Scheffer in Het Parool:
In his essential book on UK foreign policy, Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, historian Mark Curtis notes 'the ideological system promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence.' Criticism of foreign policies is possible 'but within narrow limits which show ''exceptions'' to, or "mistakes" in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence.' I would only add one caveat to Curtis's enduring maxim - the ideological system in the UK also promotes the basic benevolence of the United States, our closest ally. And arguably it is the UK's liberal media who are the biggest cheerleaders and apologists of the US as an active and aggressive world power.
Writing about President Obama's State of the Union address in January Simon Tisdall, the Guardian's foreign affairs commentator, explained the speech 'was evidence of unabashed retreat from attachment to the imperious might, the responsibilities and the ideals that once made America an unrivalled and deserving superpower.' Writing two months later, the BBC's North America Editor Mark Mardell argued this retreat was so significant the White House now 'thinks military power is a relic from a past age.' Mardell seems to be unaware the Obama Administration has launched drone attacks on seven nations since coming to office.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38338.htmEen dag eerder wees de Amerikaanse auteur Sheldon Richman op het volgende:
The U.S. government’s and news media’s demonization of Putin (who’s no saint) should not be allowed to overshadow the fact that America’s rulers have needlessly provoked the Russians, the coup in Kiev being just the latest example. In 1998, the architect of the postwar containment policy, George Kennan, warned that humiliating Russia by expanding NATO 'is a tragic mistake.'
Must we learn this the hard way?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38333.htm
Maar in Nederland klinkt alleen de stem van malloten. Zaterdag 12 april 2014 betoogde hoogleraar Europese Studies, en vroegere medewerker van De Groene Amsterdammer, de uiterst ijdele Paul Scheffer in Het Parool:
Wat in Oekraïne gebeurt, is een wake-up-call. Het is bijna onontkoombaar dat Europa zich moet verplichten meer te doen. We worden nu wel heel hard geconfronteerd met de terugkeer van de geopolitiek. Je kunt je afvragen of er een buitenlands beleid moet komen waarin over alles met meerderheid van stemmen wordt besloten en iedereen aan bijvoorbeeld een militaire missie meedoet. Maar het is nogal een beperkt idee om te denken dat we het allemaal op eigen houtje kunnen oplossen. De roep om 'minder Europa' komt voort uit het gevoel van bedreigde veiligheid. Als Europa buitengrenzen beter bewaakt, kan dat het gevoel van veiligheid juist bevorderen.
De interviewer verzuimde te vragen wie de 'we' zijn, waarop Scheffer zich beroept. In elk geval niet de burgers, want die kunnen alleen de dupe worden van een gewapend conflict met Rusland over Oekraïne. Niet voor niets constateerde Trouw-columnist Ephimenco op 11 maart 2014:
De elite hult Poetin in de lompen van het monster maar de vox populi volgt niet. Mensen weten dat de Krim Russisch was tot het, na een met alcoholica besprenkeld maal, door het Kremlin aan Oekraïne werd geschonken. Het morele oordeel van EU-leiders over Poetin komt op een slecht moment. West-Europeanen zijn uiterst negatief over hun EU-bestuurders en zullen hen binnenkort electoraal afstraffen. Vele Nederlanders kijken met een mengeling van fascinatie en bewondering naar de slimme schaker Poetin.
http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/6849/Sylvain-Ephimenco/article/detail/3610962/2014/03/11/Positief-over-Poetin.dhtml
Ik denk zelfs dat de meeste burgers in de EU niet voor de toetreding van Oekraïne zijn, nu op hen al jarenlang zwaar wordt bezuinigd. Daarom zijn de 'we' bij Scheffer niet de burgers, maar de economische en politieke elite, gesteund door de 'politiek-literaire elite' in de polder die de belangen van de gevestigde orde beschermt en daarvoor beloond wordt met bijvoorbeeld een professoraat. Intussen werken deze intellectuele lichtgewichten mee aan het opvoeren van de spanning. Zaterdag 26 april 2014 luidde de welhaast juichende kop op de voorpagina van het dagblad Trouw:
De kou is terug in de Situation Room. President Obama kan putten uit oude doctrine voor zijn omgang met het Rusland van Poetin.
Inclusief de MAD-doctrine, waarbij de twee kern grootmachten elkaar bedreigen met de totale vernietiging en daarmee de vernietiging van de mensheid. Op zijn beurt opent De Telegraaf op de voorpagina
Tijdbom onder vrede Europa
Russische agressie dreigt over te slaan
Het gevaar dat kruitvat Oekraïne ontploft en de vlam overslaat richting Baltische NAVO-lidstyatren waardoor oorlog in heel Europa dreigt, groeit met het uur.
Of de EU-bevolking van 'Geen Jorwerd zonder Brussel' nu wel of geen oorlog wil, en in het uiterste geval uitgeroeid wenst te worden, speelt geen rol van betekenis, de beslissing valt in Washington en op Wall Street, terwijl mainstream-opiniemakers als Paul Scheffer, Geert Mak, Henk Hofland en al die anderen van de polderpers zullen dit proces blijven legitimeren.
De kou is terug in de Situation Room. President Obama kan putten uit oude doctrine voor zijn omgang met het Rusland van Poetin.
Inclusief de MAD-doctrine, waarbij de twee kern grootmachten elkaar bedreigen met de totale vernietiging en daarmee de vernietiging van de mensheid. Op zijn beurt opent De Telegraaf op de voorpagina
Tijdbom onder vrede Europa
Russische agressie dreigt over te slaan
Het gevaar dat kruitvat Oekraïne ontploft en de vlam overslaat richting Baltische NAVO-lidstyatren waardoor oorlog in heel Europa dreigt, groeit met het uur.
Of de EU-bevolking van 'Geen Jorwerd zonder Brussel' nu wel of geen oorlog wil, en in het uiterste geval uitgeroeid wenst te worden, speelt geen rol van betekenis, de beslissing valt in Washington en op Wall Street, terwijl mainstream-opiniemakers als Paul Scheffer, Geert Mak, Henk Hofland en al die anderen van de polderpers zullen dit proces blijven legitimeren.
Professor Paul Scheffer, die precies zijn plaats weet in het bestel, net als die arme sloeber hieronder.
John Kerry’s Sad Circle to Deceit
U.S. NEWS
04.26.14
Green Politics Has to Get More Radical, Because Anything Less Is Impractical
It’s natural to see US inaction on climate change as another symptom of ourbroken politics. The United Nations’ climate change panel has announced the world needs major US emissions controls on greenhouse gases to avoid global catastrophe. It didn’t happen when the Democrats controlled Congress, and it isn’t any more likely in this Congress, which is well stocked with climate-change deniers.
That isn’t the whole story, though. The whole story is worse. Doing something about it will be much harder than even “fixing Washington.” Mainstream environmental politics, which took shape around an old generation of problems and has had the radicalism bred out of it in favor of pragmatism, is not doing to be much help. Ironically, recovering a more radical strand of environmental politics may be the practical way to get a grip on the new challenges of climate change.
The latter is happening amid a perfect storm of problems that all have the same basic logic: a system that was supposed to be self-correcting turns out not to be. In economic life, market signals ignore greenhouse gases, so the carbon economy keeps accumulating wealth. The market is systematically failing in a time when there seem to be no alternatives to capitalism.
Politically, Washington’s dysfunction is echoed in Brussels, Delhi, and Beijing; there are global doubts about governance, just when it is most needed. And now we’ve learned from Thomas Piketty that capitalism may tend to produce Gilded Ages rather than middle-class societies.
Put together a world set up to enrich the carbon economy with a political system that rewards wealth, and you get, not just an oligarchy, but a carbon oligarchy. Political dysfunction and economic dysfunction reinforce each other to drive ecological dysfunction.
Our economic and political systems work on the theory that if people pursue their self-interest, the overall result will be roughly good for everyone. This has always been questionable, but now it looks plain self-undermining. We know what we need to do—a global transition away from carbon—and we know why we won’t do it: because in a system in which everyone acts selfishly, from individuals to corporations to party leaders, no one takes on the costly decisions that could make the system itself sustainable.
It isn’t surprising that traditional environmentalism has not been very effective at changing this bleak picture. It was born in the 1960s and 1970s, with tremendous but somewhat short-lived success, to address very different problems.
“Environmental politics has worked best when people find both something to fear and something to love, a possible world they want to inhabit.”
Although the Earth flag first appeared then, the problems were national, not global. When the Clean Air Act passed the Senate unanimously in 1970, squeaking through the House 375-1, cross-border pollution was hardly in anyone’s mind.
Because greenhouse gases disperse evenly through the atmosphere and stay there for centuries, there are huge barriers to global cooperation. From the point of view of the US, with 5 percent of global population, 95 percent of the benefits of any emissions reduction go to foreigners, most of whom haven’t even been born yet.
The pollution that 1970s environmentalism targeted was also more concrete. Poison comes out of a smokestack and, downwind, birds fall from the sky. Factories pipe their waste into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River until one day it catches fire. But greenhouse gases aren’t poisons, and they aren’t unnatural. They belong in the atmosphere; it’s just that their rising levels throw off our familiar climate balance.
The harms of climate change are remote and ambiguous, so it’s easy to deny responsibility for them. We know exactly which leaking tank polluted drinking water in southern West Virginia earlier this year. It’s impossible, though, to trace a super-storm to any power plant, or any country’s emissions, or even the global emissions of any one decade. No one in particular causes any of the harms of climate change. According to our standard instincts about responsibility, either we are all innocent or we are all guilty. So far, we seem to be enjoying the presumption of innocence. We live like climate change deniers even if we say, and mean, that we believe in it.
So the environmentalism that once worked so well is stymied by climate change. Environmental politics looks set to be drowned in the general dysfunction. But the barriers to addressing climate change don’t show that it is impossible, only that the stakes are very high. If we succeed, we will become different people in the process. Environmental politics has reinvented itself before while grappling with new challenges, and it has contributed to changing people. That could happen again.
The environmentalism of the early 1970s was not just a pragmatic response to a technical problem. It wrote new laws for a new worldview. In the mid-twentieth century, with help from scientist-writers such as Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, Americans learned to see the natural world in a new way: deeply interconnected, intrinsically valuable, resilient but also fragile. Americans learned to look at a smokestack and see dying trees and fish downwind. They learned that a burning Cuyahoga was not just a light show—it had burned several times in the twentieth century, without inspiring calls for change—but a symptom of a poisoned ecosystem. An eye that sees ecologically takes in a different world. It was a new, ecological eye that saw new kinds of harms and legislated to cure them.
That wasn’t the first transformation in vision to shape environmental politics. For centuries, colonists and early Americans hated and feared “wilderness.” Then outdoor movements like the early Sierra Club and images like the grand landscape paintings of the Hudson River School taught them to find inspiration in wild lands. Pioneers waged wars of extermination against wolves and other predators. Now the Endangered Species Act (which passed the House 355-4 in 1973) enshrines a national commitment to biodiversity.
Part the challenge of climate change is to learn to see the connection between our everyday lives and the global atmosphere. The task is to see the harm in what now seems harmless. Not so long ago, dams and smokestacks were symbols of progress. Maybe we can learn to see our power sources, too, as choking the natural world.
We shouldn’t just feel bad about the harm we do. Environmental politics has worked best when people find both something to fear—pollution, resource exhaustion, climate catastrophe—and something to love, a possible world they want to inhabit. The Clean Water Act (1972, 247-23 in the House, overriding a Nixon veto) set out a new way of valuing waterways: not just as industrial channels, but as the bloodstreams of the natural world. Maybe somewhere in satellite images of the planet and the science of atmospheric chemistry is a new sense of beauty, a way of appreciating the planet’s systems as passionately as some of us do Yosemite or our own home landscapes.
Maybe the most important thing to remember about earlier environmentalism is not a limit but a strength. Before environmental politics became technocratic in the 1990s, it raised basic questions. Should we be aiming for something better than eternal economic growth (which is ecologically impossible anyway)? Should we instead want an economy with less resource use, less desperate competition, and more intrinsic satisfaction in both the natural world and one another—more contemplation and collaboration and play? Should we doubt whether individual self-interest serve us as well in the hyper-complex, ecologically fragile, infinitely interdependent twenty-first century as it (arguably) did in the eighteenth and nineteenth?
In short, both markets and democracy have reached a point where they are producing problems they can’t solve. We have to reinvent them in order to save them. We need a politics that crosses national borders and the borders between generations. Already young climate activists are saying about Bangladeshis and the people of the twenty-third century, “They are us.” Such solidarity turns a fragmenting problem into a potentially common thing. From patriotism to religious ties to humanitarianism, learning to see ourselves as bound by a shared condition is a key resource for cooperation.
We also need to cross the boundary between environmental and non-environmental issues. Climate change is ecological but also economic, social, and political. Twentieth-century activists invented “the environment” to save it, welding together a set of pollution and public-health problems with an older American politics about public lands and Romantic landscapes to include, more or less, the issues that motivate the modern Sierra Club. Now the world has to invent a new politics for a truly planetary problem, in equal parts about the shape of the economy and the shape of the natural world.
The most basic challenge may be to cross the boundary between self-interest and our common interest in the systems that have to work if people are to survive and even thrive. Solving collective-action problems like climate change takes pragmatic effort, but also imagination.
The United States began as a collective-action problem: After Independence, thirteen semi-autonomous states split over taxation, trade, and foreign affairs. Each one had good reason to spin off and protect its own interests, even though cooperation would be better for everyone—just like with climate change. Early Americans had to invent America to become it. Now everyone has to invent a world that is worth becoming.
AFP/Getty
effWORLD NEWS
04.25.14
The Big Weapons that the U.S. May Be Secretly Supplying to the Syrian Rebels
After years of grinding civil war, the Syrian battlefield has seen a wide array of weapons employed by the rebel factions fighting Assad. From antiquated World War II rifles to homemade mortars, the rebels have used everything at their disposal, but recently the appearance of American anti-tank weapons in the northern town of Heesh has many wondering if the United States is finally about to supply the rebels with the heavy weapons, including shoulder-fired MANPADs, needed to counter Assad’s mechanized and airborne forces.
In early April, YouTube videos showed American made BGM-71 TOW anti-tank rocket systems in the hands of Harakat Hazm, a group of moderate Syrian rebels. It’s not confirmed who provided the weapons but they could have come directly from the United States, which has been vague about the exact nature of its support for the rebels. Another possibility is that they reached Syria indirectly and were provided by a country like Saudi Arabia that supports anti-Assad forces in Syria and has its own stock of the weapons that it purchased from the U.S. in the past.
Powerful new weapons suddenly appearing this late in the conflict has generated discussion on whether or not the United States is preparing to send or sponsor the shipment of more advanced weapons into the hands of Syrian rebels. With diplomatic efforts stalled and Assad’s military continuing to use devastating weapons like homemade barrel bombs and, according to some reports, employing improvised chemical weapons, the introduction of advanced U.S. weapons could shift the dynamic in the war and give the rebels better odds.
Wednesday, NPR reported that the CIA plans to send more arms and training to Syrian rebels and that 50 TOW missile systems had been sent to Harakat Hazam as a part of a “test” or pilot program. Yet, when asked specifically about the deal, National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan kept her response vague. “As we have consistently said, we are not going to detail every single type of our assistance,” Meehan said.
While the TOW missile system is effective against ground targets it won’t help the rebels stop air attacks by Assad’s forces. Those advocating more direct assistance to the rebels have long called for arming the rebels with weapons that could be used against the Assad regime’s aircraft but the U.S. has been hesitant to send those systems. The biggest obstacle to arming the rebels with Man portable surface-to-air missile systems, or MANPADs as the anti-air missiles are known, is the fear that they could be used outside of Syria’s war in a terrorist attack against commercial aircraft. MANPADs have been around for decades, and became a household name after the CIA supplied millions of dollars’ worth to Afghan Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s.
It’s the memory of supplying anti-air Stinger missiles to the Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan that haunts many of the people who oppose sending similar weapons to the Syrian rebels. In Afghanistan, many of the Stingers given to Mujahedeen were lost in the din of the conflict and wound up in the hands of terrorist organizations after a CIA buyback program failed to regain them at the end of the war.
“That’s a pretty dangerous weapon to have running around out there, you can easily take down an airliner with an operational system.”
“That’s a pretty dangerous weapon to have running around out there, you can easily take down an airliner with an operational system,” said David Maxwell, the associate director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “You’re basically locking on to a heat source, and once it does that it, you fire and it tracks that heat source.”
For now though, the TOW is the heaviest American-made weapon seen on the Syrian battlefield.
“It’s a relatively expensive weapon for infantry,” Maxwell said. “It’s not some fire-and-forget weapon.”
According to Jane’s, a publication specializing in information about global weapons, the TOW missile system was originally fielded by the United States in 1970 and has gone through multiple variations since. The acronym TOW stands for Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire command link-guided missile. But the current TOW fielded by the U.S. military no longer has a wire command-linked warhead, instead using an infrared aiming system. Syrian rebels, however, appear to be operating an older version of the system, as screen grabs indicate that the warhead is still wire-guided. These days the TOW is used by more than 30 countries and has been cloned by Iran and is known as the Toophan.
While large, the TOW is surprisingly easy to employ and maintain. Jane’s U.S. Army statistics indicate that the system has a success rate of 93 percent in more that 12,000 test fires.
“Someone who has no training but knows how to use a sight and trigger can be fairly accurate with [the TOW],” said Sean Feely a TOW gunner with 1st Battalion 3rd Marines, who fought in the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. “As long as you keep the target in your crosshairs, you’re fine.”
Feely also indicated that the TOW was reliable, citing he had never seen a misfire during his four-year enlistment. “Not much the user has to do to keep it functioning besides keep it dust-free and the [sight] lens clean,” Feely said.
Yet, for all the noise generated over the appearance of the TOW in Syria, U.S.-supplied weapons still haven’t made a proven impact in the course of the war.
One of the primary ways the rebels have been able to re-arm and refit over the past three years without significant foreign aid has been through “battlefield pickups,” i.e. taking equipment left over from skirmishes with the Syrian Army.
Thursday, a video showed Syrian rebels purportedly doing just that in the Darwaa province near the Jordanian border. Rebels pick through what looks to be a Syrian Army artillery position and are seen recovering what appears to be a working Russian T-55 medium tank, at least three Russian 122mm D-30 howitzer artillery guns, a ZPU-4 23mm towed anti-aircraft gun, and two SA-7 Grail MANPADs.
As munitions constantly change hands and Americans appear to be entering the fray in a more public fashion, Maxwell believes that it will take a lot more than American arms to stop the violence in Syria.
“I don’t think the rebels in their current state, even with the TOWs and MANPADs, that they would be able to build up a force to defeat the Syrian Army,” Maxwell said. “Are TOWs and MANPADs on such a small scale a game changer? Probably not.”
