zaterdag 5 november 2016

The Secrets of the US Election

The Secrets of the US Election: Julian Assange Talks to John Pilger

Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
This interview was filmed in the Embassy of Ecuador in London – where Julian Assange is a political refugee –  and broadcast on November 5, 2016.
John Pilger:
What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?
Julian Assange:
If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable.  The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us.  But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.  We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State.  They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half.
Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing.  [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.
John Pilger:
The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails.
Julian Assange:
The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything.  Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.
WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.
John Pilger:
The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of  when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.
Julian Assange:
And twelve million dollars from Morocco …
John Pilger:
Twelve million from Morocco yeah.
Julian Assange:
For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].
John Pilger:
In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East.  Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.
Julian Assange:
There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation.  Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and  Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
John Pilger:
The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
Julian Assange:
Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion.  In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.
John Pilger:
Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
Julian Assange:
Yes.
John Pilger:
That’s extraordinary.
Julian Assange:
I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions,  tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states.  The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network?  She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.
She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs.  She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.
John Pilger:
Didn’t Citybank supply a list …. ?
Julian Assange:
Yes.
John Pilger:
… which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.
Julian Assange:
Yes.
John Pilger:
So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States?
Julian Assange: 
If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests.
Julian Assange:
So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia.  The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate.
John Pilger:
Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya?  Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us, told you about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria, the ISIL jihadism and so on, and it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion.  What do the emails tell us about that?
Julian Assange:
Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it?  Hillary Clinton.  That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.
So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.
Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi:  ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened.
John Pilger:
You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing?  Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?’
Julian Assange:
My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that?  Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies… big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.
John Pilger:
There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’
Julian Assange:
We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.
John Pilger:
Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election?  Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?
Julian Assange:
[Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind?  He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] ‘deplorable and irredeemable’.  It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them.  Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense.

John Pilger:
I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London.  Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign.  Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you?
Julian Assange:
Let’s let go back four years.  I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago.  Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side.  So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.
WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.
John Pilger:
Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.
Julian Assange:
I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000.  So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen].
John Pilger:
People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.
Julian Assange:
Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable.  They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalised — this [the embassy] is the world .. it’s visually the world [for me].
John Pilger:
It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it?
Julian Assange:
It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it.
John Pilger:
Yes.
Julian Assange:
So , yes, you adapt.  The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for.
 John Pilger:
Do you worry about them?
Julian Assange:
Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.
John Pilger:
Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’
Julian Assange:
The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K.  Who’s right?  The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse.  It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here?  What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognise his asylum.’
[And here is] Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to [recognise the UN ruling], so leaving open their ability to extradite.
I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative — that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well.  The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.
Julian Assange:
Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum.  Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric?
John Pilger:
Yes, it’s different.
Julian Assange:
The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up.
[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.
To support Julian Assange, go to: https://justice4assange.com/donate.html 

Hillary’s Emails Confirm Oligarchic Control


Assange Points Out Hillary’s Emails Confirm Oligarchic Control

Assange Points Out Hillary’s Emails Confirm Oligarchic Control

Assange: Clinton & ISIS funded by same money, Trump won’t be allowed to win (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE)


In the second excerpt from the John Pilger Special, to be exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Julian Assange accuses Hillary Clinton of misleading Americans about the true scope of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East allies.
In a 2014 email made public by Assange’s WikiLeaks last month, Hillary Clinton, who had served as secretary of state until the year before, urges John Podesta, then an advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia,“which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.”
“I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection,” Assange, whose whistleblowing site released three tranches of Clinton-related emails over the past year, told Pilger in an exclusive interview, courtesy of Dartmouth Films.
“All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”
Assange and Pilger, who sat down for their 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the whistleblower has been a refugee since 2012, then talk about the conflict of interest between Clinton’s official post, which held throughout Obama’s first term, her husband’s nonprofit, and the Middle East officials, whose stated desire to fight terrorism may not have been sincere.
John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the US doubled in dollar value.
JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?
JA: Yes.
Pilger also questioned Assange over increasingly frequent accusations from the Clinton camp, and Western media, that WikiLeaks is looking to swing next week’s US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump – perhaps at Russia’s behest.
But Assange dismissed the prospect of Trump, who is behind in the polls, winning as unlikely – and not necessarily due to his standing with the electorate.
“My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment,” said Assange. “Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.”

READ MORE: ‘Slaughter Donald for Putin bromance’: #Podesta15 emails reveal ISIS strategy diversion for Clinton



Frank Westerman's Provinciale Schrijverij 33


Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
Sir Peter Ustinov. Achtung! Vorurteile. 2003

America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consequently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, sofar, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.
— Arnold J. Toynbee. America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures. 1962.


In the next few years, the future world order, and America’s place in it, will be determined. In all likelihood, it will fall to the next U.S. president to make the crucial decisions that will define that future. If the United States withdraws to concentrate on ‘nation building at home,’ then the forces fighting against liberal democracy and our way of life will gain ground, and America will be faced with the prospect of stronger foes, weaker friends, and a less secure world,

aldus de strekking van The Will To Lead. America’s Indispensable Role In The Global Fight For Freedom (2016) van de oud secretaris-generaal van de NAVO, de Deen Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Zijn boek wordt geprezen door Madeleine Albright, onder president Clinton minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, die de dood van een half miljoen Iraakse kinderen onder de vijf jaar, volgens eigen zeggen, ‘de prijs waard’ vond om de doeleinden van de Amerikaanse politiek te verwezenlijken. ‘Rasmussen, a true and loyal friend of the United States, makes a compelling case for continued American leadership abroad on the eve of its presidential election. His sure grasp of history and his decades of of experience as a high-level participant in global affairs make the “Will to Lead” a vitally important contribution. I highly recommend it,’ zo formuleert mevrouw Albright haar enthousiasme voor Rasmussen’s steun aan het Amerikaans expansionisme, dat volgens haar gewaarborgd zal blijven door op Hillary Clinton te stemmen, en zeker niet op Bernie Sanders. Tegenover jonge vrouwelijke kiezers gaf ze als doorslaggevend argument de grappig bedoelde opmerking dat ‘there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.’ Het bleef overigens volstrekt onduidelijk welk politiek belang het geslachtsdeel van de toekomstige president van de VS zal hebben. In elk geval zal de buitenlandse politiek er absoluut niet humaner worden, tenminste, wanneer men afgaat op zowel Albright’s als Hillary Clinton’s staat van dienst als ‘War Hawks,’ die ernaar streven de Amerikaanse alleenheerschappij op aarde met geweld af te dwingen, of zoals de goed ingevoerde hoogleraar Filip Kovacevic schreef: 

In the worldview of those who advocate U.S. global hegemony through military domination and the ‘empire of bases,’ NATO is depicted as the ‘savior’ and all its destructive activities are silently passed over. In the mid-to-long term, these activities are ideologically justified, minimized, or even filtered out completely in ‘scientific’ research articles and history books by the geopolitically sympathetic, but corrupt academics.

In this respect, it is particularly revealing to note what Rasmussen writes about Libya, the relatively prosperous state brutally wiped off the map by NATO bombs and turned into a safe haven for head-chopping extremists. Referring to Libya, Rasmussen suddenly become strictly factual. He says that ‘in North Africa, Libya has collapsed and become a breeding ground for terrorists.’ He provides absolutely no analysis as to why and how this happened. He makes it seem like a natural catastrophe. Out of the blue, the state collapsed and terrorists just moved in.

Most of Rasmussen's arguments are as infantile as this one and yet, on October 3, 2016, he was invited to present his book at Harvard University. The championing of the U.S. hegemonic agenda, while, at the same time, seriously eroding the space for its critics, shows the near complete capture of the premier institutions of the U.S. higher education by the military-industrial-intelligence complex. Disrespect for other world's cultures and traditions and the overall ‘dumbing down’ of the American society are the obvious consequences.

From the perspective of the U.S. global hegemonists, even a perfectly rational suggestion by Putin is made to sound like a war crime. Rasmussen tells of a meeting with Putin in 2009 when the latter said to him: ‘After the Cold War, we dissolved the Warsaw Pact. Similarly, you should dissolve NATO. That is a relic of the Cold War.’ Rasmussen almost fell off his chair when he heard this because, for him, NATO is the ‘holy of holies’ that nobody is supposed to come near and criticize, let alone call for its dissolution. And yet, what he and others from his ideological camp consider the ‘holy of holies’ is none other than the dark god of death that every day brings the world closer to a nuclear apocalypse. 

Bekend is dat mevrouw Clinton ‘de ideale kandidaat’ van allereerst de witte elite is in de Verenigde Staten, een elite die door haar financiële steun aan ‘Hillary’ erop toeziet dat geen enkele president de situatie zal veranderen waarbij de ‘top one tenth of one percent of Americans has as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of Americans combined,’ en dat ‘[o]ut of the 540 billionaires in the United States just three are black.’ Het is dit corrupte, ondemocratische bestel dat de ‘meesterverteller’ Geert Mak steunt door onder andere zijn oproep om op Hillary Clinton te stemmen. De kans op een desastreus conflict met de nucleaire grootmacht Rusland neemt de domineeszoon daarbij op de koop toe. De woordvoerders van de neoliberale macht rekenen het namelijk tot hun taak om koste wat kost de ‘orde’ van de schatrijke, witte elite overeind te houden. En dit houdt niet in 'nation building at home,’ maar het handhaven van de status quo in het buitenland. De gezaghebbende Amerikaanse hoogleraar Economie, Michael Hudson, zei eind oktober 2016 naar aanleiding van het feit dat beide presidentskandidaten ‘in bed liggen met Wall Street,’ (mevrouw Clinton wordt door de financiële elite betaald en onroerend goed-magnaat Trump speculeerde zich rijk met geleend geld van de banken): ‘you have the two most unpopular politicians in the United States as a choice,’ en ‘basically the voters in the United States are given a choice between: Yes, Yes Please, Yes thank You.’ Dat de presidentsverkiezing van 2016 door deskundigen wordt gezien als een keuze voor de minst slechte kandidaat, geeft aan hoe diep de Amerikaanse democratie in uitgehold. De vraag is dan ook: wie is eigenlijk ‘the lesser evil’? Professor Hudson: 

Hillary has a full crowd behind her, basically neocons who want to be very confrontational towards Russia and want her to continue what she was doing in Libya and Syria: militarily confrontational. Or you have Donald Trump who doesn’t really know who he can appoint and whether he can get enough people to work with him. So if the direction of America is to try to hold on to a unipolar world, militarily confrontational, you want a president who is the least able to do evil, and there is no question that Trump is the lesser evil, because he is such a narcissist and really sort of a blank slate (onbeschreven blad. svh). 

Volgens Hudson zal de gedachtegang van een onbekend aantal kiezers zijn dat de keuze voor Trump altijd nog beter is dan de keuze voor ‘someone as Hillary, because you know she will do what her husband did.’ Hij benadrukte tevens dat de

Clintons have corrupted the Democratic Party; that was the issue Bernie Sanders ran on against her, and did very well. But then he did not realize that there really can not be any progress by the labor unions or consumers or the 99 percent, as long as the Democratic Party is totally controlled by Wall Street and by the Robert Rubin-gang, that they brought in, which really is a mafia-gang. 

Ter verduidelijking, Robert Rubin werkte -- voordat hij minister van Financiën werd in de eerste én tweede regering Clinton -- meer dan een kwart eeuw voor de corrupte, internationaal opererende bank 'Goldman Sachs, waar hij uiteindelijk opklom tot lid van de Raad van Bestuur.’ Dankzij zijn benoeming slaagde 

minister Rubin en zijn plaatsvervanger Lawrence Summers in 1999 er in de intrekking van de Glass-Steagall Act (uit 1933) door Congres en Senaat te loodsen. De Glass-Steagall Act schreef voor om investment banking en retail banking van elkaar te scheiden. Deze intrekking van de Glass-Steagall Act stelde de banken in staat om de op hypotheken gebaseerde instrumenten te ontwikkelen en verkopen die acht jaar later de belangrijkste factor zouden worden in de financiële ineenstorting die teweeg werd gebracht door de kredietcrisis.

Zonder Bill Clinton had het speculeren met niet bestaand geld niet zo’n hoge vlucht genomen en zou de daarop volgende wereldwijde kredietcrisis en de nog steeds voortdurende economische depressie daardoor niet zijn veroorzaakt. Hudson stelde dat de financiële wereld, de banken, als criminelen te werk gaan:

Remember,  they paid billions and billions of dollars in fines without a single banker sent to jail, and that is exactly what a criminal wants. When criminals take control of the justice system and take over the police force and bribes the judges, then you have the criminals in control, you have the financial sector criminalized. The business plan of the big banks was fraud, look at all their huge frauds that have been coming out.


Hudson, die als econoom de financiële wereld decennialang bestudeerd heeft, stelt het bankieren gelijk aan het plegen van fraude. Gevraagd naar wat voor soort president Hillary Clinton zal zijn, antwoordde hij kort maar krachtig: 

a vindictive dictator punishing her enemies, appointing neocons as secretary of State and the Defense Department, appointing Wall Street-people in the Treasury and Federal Reserve. A class war will break out very explicitly. As Warren Buffet (Amerikaans miljardair. svh) said: ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ The one percent are winning it, and she will try to use her rhetoric to tell the people: ‘Nothing to see here folks, just keep on moving,’ while the economy is going down and down. She will be cashing in, as she has done all along, getting richer and richer. If she is president there will not be an investigation of the criminal conflict of interest of the Clinton Foundation. You will have a presidency in which corporations that pay the Clintons will be able to set policy. Whoever has the money to buy the politicians will buy control of policy because elections and politics have now been privatized and made part of the market economy in the United States.  It is a political pay-off, and that’s the largest rent-seeking of all, basically for one penny you get a whole dollar of special privileges and rent is really a payment for a privilege. As Honoré de Balzac said: ‘The secret of great fortunes made without apparent (duidelijke. svh) cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly executed.’ It’s a great theft that isn’t considered a great theft anymore, because it is all viewed as part of the market. It is viewed as how the world works. So you will have theft taking place and the Clintons will say: ‘that’s just how the world operates.’ 

Precies dezelfde vanzelfsprekendheid, waarvan Hillary en Bill Clinton en de rest van de westerse politieke elite uitgaan, treft men aan bij Geert Mak wanneer de ‘twee keer tot historicus van het jaar’ uitgeroepen‘meesterverteller’ zijn publiek vertelt dat

de EU een markt [is] van bijna een half miljard mensen met de hoogste gemiddelde levensstandaard ter wereld. Alleen al voor Nederland is de Unie goed voor tweederde van onze totale export, eenvijfde van het nationale product. We hebben nu een open toegang tot die markt,

zodat 'we' de 'deur' naar die 'markt' natuurlijk niet kunnen ‘dichtgooien.’ Dit advies berust niet op nadenken, maar op een oppermachtig reflex bij mensen die door een gebrekkige verbeeldingskracht zich geen alternatief kunnen voorstellen, hoe desastreus het neoliberale marktdenken ook mag uitwerken voor mens en natuur. In dit geconditioneerde bewustzijn gelden slechts de neoliberale waarheden, zoals die verwoord werden door het neoliberale lijfblad van de westerse elite, The Economist, en — vertaald in het Nederlands — door nrc.next op donderdag 23 januari 2014 verspreid werden. Met een vanzelfsprekendheid, die zelfs de grootste domoor laat zien hoe de kaarten in het ‘democratische’ westen werkelijk geschud zijn, wordt de lezer verteld dat:

de mogelijkheden van mensen ongelijk [zullen] blijven. In een wereld die economisch steeds meer gepolariseerd is, zullen velen hun kansen zien verminderen, terwijl hun salarissen worden afgeknepen. De beste manier om hen te helpen is niet, zoals links vaak denkt, dan maar het minimumloon te verhogen. Dat zou de verschuiving van 'werk laten doen door mensen' naar 'werk laten doen door computers' alleen maar versnellen. Het is beter hun lonen op te hogen met publiek geld, zodat iedereen die werkt een redelijk inkomen heeft…

Veel van de banen die gevaar lopen voor mensen [zijn] onderaan de maatschappelijke ladder, terwijl de vaardigheden die het minst kwetsbaar zijn voor automatisering (creativiteit, management) vaak het terrein zijn van hoger geplaatsten.

De boosheid over de toegenomen ongelijkheid zal groeien, maar politici zullen moeite hebben er iets aan te doen. De vooruitgang mijden zal net zo onzinnig blijken te zijn als protesteren tegen de gemechaniseerde weefgetouwen in 1810. Want elk land dat weigert mee te doen wordt ingehaald door landen die de nieuwe technologie omarmen. En de mogelijkheden om de rijken te straffen met hoge belastingen zullen beperkt zijn, omdat kapitaal en hooggeschoolde arbeidskrachten dan doodleuk naar een ander land verhuizen.

Op welk moment dit alles beslist is, door wie, en op grond waarvan laten The Economist en nrc.next in het midden omdat zij dit domweg irrelevant achtten. 'Innovatie, het wondermiddel dat voor vooruitgang zorgt, heeft altijd banen gekost,' is de enige rechtvaardiging in deze bekendmaking door de ‘vrije pers.’ De Britse geleerde en auteur John Gray schreef over de waanzin:

Modern politics has been driven by the belief that humanity can be delivered from immemorial evils by the power of knowledge.

En dus liet nrc.next onder de kop 'Wie is er beter in jouw werk? Jij of een robot?' weten dat:

In een recent onderzoek van de Oxford Universiteit gesuggereerd wordt dat 47 procent van de huidige banen in de komende twintig jaar zou kunnen worden geautomatiseerd.

Niets kan de koers veranderen van de huidige ‘kenniseconomie,’  waarmee 

wordt bedoeld dat een substantieel deel van de economische groei in de samenleving voortkomt uit (technische) kennis. Het is een maatschappij waarin de productiefactor kennis een steeds belangrijkere plaats in neemt ten opzichte van arbeid, natuur en kapitaal (de drie traditionele productiefactoren). Dit past binnen de algemene verschuiving van arbeid in de landbouw via industrie naar diensten.

Alles op aarde, en zeker de mensheid, is verplicht zich neer te leggen bij de door een zeer kleine sociopathische elite aangestuurde ontwikkelingen, die door — in de letterlijke zin — asociale opiniemakers worden gepropageerd. Het cynisme waarmee burgers enerzijds wordt verteld dat een steeds groter deel van hen overtollig zal worden, en anderzijds dat een Makkiaans 'optimisme' het 'uitgangspunt [moet] blijven,' is zowel weerzinwekkend als levensgevaarlijk, want gevangen in een technocratie waarvan de enige waarden nut en efficiency zijn, zal iedereen die hier niet aan voldoet op den duur als nutteloos worden weggezuiverd. Zonder de bevolking te raadplegen, worden vandaag de dag EU-maatregelen voorbereid, waarvan de consequenties diep zullen ingrijpen in het bestaan van de Europeaan. In dit opzicht heeft Geert Mak gelijk wanneer hij stelt: ‘Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel.’ De politieke, bestuurlijke, en economische elite gaat haar eigen weg, de consumptiecultuur moet koste wat kost gehandhaafd blijven, het totalitair functionerende systeem accepteert geen ongehoorzaamheid. Daartegenover merkte de Franse filosoof Bernard Stiegler in zijn boek For a New Critique of Political Economy (2009) het volgende op:

Whether we must, in order to avoid a major economic catastrophe, and to attenuate the social injustice caused by the crisis, stimulate consumption and the economic machine such as it still is, is a question as urgent as it is legitimate — as long as such a policy does not simply aggregate the situation at the cost of millions and billions of euros or dollars while at the same time masking the true question, which is to produce a vision and a political will capable of progressively moving away from the economic-political complex of investment, which must be a social and political investment or, in other words, an investment in a common desire, that is, in what Aristotle called philia (liefde voor de medemens. svh), and which would then form the basis of a new type of economic investment.

Nogmaals, op zinnige kritiek rust in de mainstream-media een banvloek. Daar kunnen alleen de bekende suïcidale dogma’s worden herhaald, en krijgen voornamelijk profeten als Geert Mak de ruimte om hun neoliberaal globalisme te propageren. De daaraan ten grondslag liggende veel bredere verbanden kennen ze niet, en ze zijn er ook niet echt in geïnteresseerd. Dat het beter zou zijn dat de VS zich zou richten op ‘nation building at home,’ is voor hen een te onzinnig voorstel om überhaupt in overweging te nemen. Het gevolg is dan ook dat de mainstream-opiniemakers de volgende feiten uit maart 2016 verzwijgen:

Over the past decade, things have steadily gotten worse for American families no matter what our politicians have tried. Poverty and government dependence continue to rise.  The cost of living continues to go up and incomes continue to go down.  It is truly frightening to think about what this country is going to look like if current trends continue.

The following are 37 facts that show how cruel this economy has been to millions of desperate American families:

1. One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.
2. A different recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.
3. In the United States today, there are close to 10 million households that do not have a single bank account.  That number has increased by about a million since 2009.
4. Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.
5. The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by about 6 million over the past four years.
6. Median household income has fallen for four years in a row.  Overall, it has declined by more than $4000 over the past four years.
7. 62 percent of middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.
8. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of middle class Americans say that it is more difficult to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.
9. In the United States today, 77 percent of all Americans are living to paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time.
10. In the United States today, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans are not working.
11. Since January 2009, the ‘labor force’ in the United States has increased by 827,000, but ‘those not in the labor force’ has increased by 8,208,000.  This is how they have gotten the unemployment numbers to ‘come down.’
12. Sadly, 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
13. Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.
14. Right now, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
15. At this point, less than 25 percent of all jobs in the United States are ‘good jobs,’ and that number continues to shrink.
16. There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing.  That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.
17. According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.
18. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
19. In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance.  Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.
20. Health insurance premiums rose faster than the overall rate of inflation in 2011 and that is happening once again in 2012.  In fact, it has been happening for a very long time.
21. According to one recent survey, approximately 10 percent of all employers in the United States plan to drop health coverage when key provisions of the new health care law kick in less than two years from now.
22. Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all income earners had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned.  By 2007, that figure had soared to $1.48.
23. Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.
24. Total consumer debt in the United States has risen by 1700 percent since 1971.
25. Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.
26. According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.
27. Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living at home with their parents.
28. The percentage of Americans that find that they are able to retire when they reach retirement age continues to decline. According to one new survey, 70 percent of middle class Americans plan to work during retirement and 30 percent plan to work until they are at least 80 years old.
29. The U.S. economy lost more than 220,000 small businesses during the recent recession.
30. In 2010, the number of jobs created at new businesses in the United States was less than half of what it was back in the year 2000.
31. Back in 2007, 19.2 percent of all American families had a net worth of zero or less than zero.  By 2010, that figure had soared to 32.5 percent.
32. Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either ‘low income’ or impoverished.
33. In the United States today, somewhere around 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or ‘near poor.’
34. In October 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, 46.7 million Americans are on food stamps.
35. Approximately one-fourth of all children in the United States are enrolled in the food stamp program.
36. Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.  And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare.
37. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government.  Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.

What makes all of this even more frightening is that many homeless shelters and food banks around the nation are so overloaded at this point that they are already over capacity…


America’s Greatest Shame: Child Poverty Rises and Food Stamps Cut While Billionaires Boom

Juni 2016 werd bekend dat Chelsea Clintons 'former Manhattan apartment has entered into contract just about two weeks after hitting the market. The three-bedroom unit on the 10th floor at the Grand Madison condominium was last listed at $5.995 million,

hetgeen nog eens onderstreept hoe groot de kloof is tussen de kinderen van rijke volksvertegenwoordigers en die van de doorsnee Amerikaanse kiezer. Al deze feiten vormden voor Geert Mak geen aanleiding af te zien van zijn televisie-oproep om op Hillary Clinton te stemmen. Mijn oude vriend steunt in zowel zijn boeken als tijdens publieke optredens het neoliberale bestel met zijn ‘waarden’ en ‘belangen.’  Over ‘Our Execeptional “Values” and “Interests”’ schreef de Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournaliste Diana Johnstone in haar zo geprezen boek Queen of Chaos. The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (2016):

Our political leaders never cease assuring us that our foreign policy is determined by ‘our values’ and ‘our interests.’ Whose interests exactly? ‘Our interests’ remain unclear. As for ‘our values,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘human rights’ are concepts that raise more questions than they answer, if you stop to think about it. But thinking is precisely what such abstractions are intended to prevent. 

Hillary Clinton regularly repeats these standard, meaningless words  as  if ‘our interests’  and ‘our values’ were divine commandments, guiding us like icebreakers through a recalcitrant world. Get out of our way... Here we come with our values and interests! 

America is an exceptionally ideological country — and that is a clue to the ‘exceptional’ nature of the United States. No society lives without an ideology, but the ideology of America's current political leaders and opinion-makers thrives in an utter fog of self-justification. For decades, so-called American Exceptionalism has been successfully exported both by Hollywood and by an extensive official propaganda machine funding ‘non-governmental’ organizations in countless countries (NGOs). The idea that America is the ‘best country on earth’ and the proper model for all others, has succeeded in creating cultural inferiority complexes in youth around the world. Since World War II, Western European leaders have accepted this notion to the point of having surrendered their national sovereignty to the ‘governance’ of the European Union, a false and essentiallv unworkable imitation of the United States. This is an unstable situation, but it helps to confirm Washington's illusion of world domination. 

We are always very good at seeing through the mass illusions of other times and other places, and especially those of the last century. Our own illusions remain as invisible as the air we breathe. Hitler is considered insane for having believed that the Germans were ‘the master race.’ This judgment has not yet been pronounced on current leaders who proclaim that America is ‘the indispensable nation’ and an ‘exception’ to all the rules that apply to the rest of the world. 

In de Engelse vertaling van zijn Reizen zonder John, getiteld In America. Travels With John Steinbeck (2014), benadrukt Geert Mak dat ook hij trouw is aan het geloofsartikel dat de 

United States is still the 'world’s indispensable nation,' as Madeleine Albright once put it, the 'anchor,' the 'default power,’ 

waaraan de ‘chroniqueur’ van ‘Amerika’ en ‘Europa’ — die er diep van is doordrongen dat de ‘toekomst altijd totaal onvoorstelbaar’ blijft — speciaal voor het Amerikaanse lezerspubliek geruststellend toevoegt dat ‘However the world may change, that is a role neither Russia nor Europe, nor even China, are going to fill in the near future.’ En vandaar dat hij Hillary Clinton en haar neoconservatieve buitenlandse politiek steunt, en niet Trump, die geen conflict met Rusland wil. In 2014 meende Mak nog dat een gewapend conflict met Rusland niet kon uitblijven, want 'Russia is on the move again. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire it wants to start making history once more, and how! […] In this new situation, Europe is vulnerable.’ Nu ‘Western values and Western ways of thinking, are no longer paramount’ voor de Russen zijnen het ‘continent is divided and susceptible to blackmail because a number of European countries have become highly dependent on Russian gas,’ is er een levensgevaarlijke situatie ontstaan, ook nog eens verergerd door het feit dat de Europese ‘Defense has been neglected since the end of the Cold War; NATO has expanded its territory without strengthening its own armed forces; most European countries have implemented severe cutbacks and a common European defense policy remains a distant prospect.’ Het spreekt voor zich dat de paniek zaaiende neoconservatieve retoriek van deze ‘voormalige pacifist’ en ‘populairste geschiedenisleraar van het land,’ door militairen en rechtse politici als bevestiging wordt gebruikt voor de noodzaak van nog meer wapens en nog meer militaire bases die de Russische Federatie moeten isoleren. Opiniemaker Geert Mak is zijn gewicht in goud waard voor het militair-industrieel complex. Zijn op niets reëels gebaseerde stellige bewering dat ‘After decades of peace, Americas traditional allies represent a serious security problem,’ legitimeert de agressieve en uitzichtsloze NAVO-politiek, onder aanvoering van de VS. Daarentegen schrijft een insider als Diana Johnstone over haar ‘indispensable nation’:

Because it is shared by men and women in charge of the greatest power of destruction that ever existed on earth, this ideology is the number one threat to humanity, to all forms of life on our planet. It risks unleashing the total devastation of nuclear war. None of our ‘interests' can do that; interests are inherently not suicidal. It is our ‘values’ that are dangerous. It is the belief in our overwhelming superiority, the superiority of ‘our values,’ which leads us toward the destruction of ourselves and of others. 

Hillary   Clinton   personifies   the   hubris   of   American Exceptionalism. She seems incapable of doubting that America is ‘the last hope of mankind.’ Above all, she certainly believes that the American people also believe in American Exceptionalism and want to hear it confirmed and celebrated. As long as that is what the American people want to hear, Hillary Clinton is not the only problem. She is not even the most basic problem. A more basic problem is our ideological fog. 

If Americans were staying at home and minding their own business, belief in the country's ‘exceptionalism' would be nothing but a quaint ethnic trait. But the present context is globalization, and for Americans believing in the exceptional nature of the United States, globalization means Americanization of the entire world. Our interests and values must prevail everywhere. 

In short, globalization means a world tied together by the universal penetration of financial markets in every sector of each national economy, thus allowing international capital to shape production, trade, and services via their own investment choices. This has radical political implications. In their efforts to attract mobile capital, nation-states are expected to lower dissuasive (af te raden. svh) taxes and provide widened investment possibilities by privatization even of the most vital national activities, such as education and basic utilities. This leaves the national government without resources to ensure public welfare, to develop industry and farming, to redistribute wealth through public services. The gap between rich and poor widens radically. The powers of national governments tend to be reduced to maintaining public order. Even those may be privatized.

Kortom, de politiek die de Nederlandse burger sinds de eerste helft van de jaren tachtig via de no-nonsens kabinetten van CDA en VVD over zich heen heeft gekregen, en die in 1989 ideologisch werd gerechtvaardigd met Wim Kok's historische woorden: 

Er is geen alternatief voor de maatschappelijke constellatie die we nu hebben en dus heeft het geen enkele zin daar naar te streven.


Zes jaar later beweerde dezelfde inmiddels neoliberale Wim Kok als PVDA-voorman met evenveel stelligheid dat het hoog tijd was om ‘afscheid van het socialisme’ te nemen, zodat de sociaal-democratie zich kon onderdompelen in 'de bevrijdende werking van het afschudden van de ideologische veren.’ Zo konden de deregulering en privatisering zich, onbelemmerd door socialistische ‘stokpaardjes,’ optimaal ontplooien. Dit alles met steun van PVDA-bewindslieden die nadien rijkelijk beloond werden door banken en grote concerns. Toen in 2008, bij gebrek aan overheidsmaatregelen om de zelfverrijking enigszins aan banden te leggen, deze ‘bevrijdende’ ideologie logischerwijs uitliep op het uitbreken van de financiële en daarmee economische crisis, leidde dit bij PVDA-minister van Financiën Wouter Bos niet tot het inzicht dat het neoliberalisme een failliet systeem was, maar tot het besluit om het koste wat kost overeind te houden met miljardensteun van de Nederlandse belastingbetalers. Ook oud-minister Bos werd, nadat hij de dagelijkse politiek had verlaten, rijkelijk beloond door degenen die het meest profiteerden van zijn politieke beleid, of beter gesteld, juist het ontbreken ervan. Ironisch genoeg werkt ook de sociaal-democratie van Lodewijk Asscher, telg van een familie van diamantairs, anno 2016 nog steeds enthousiast mee aan de doctrine van het socialisme voor de rijken. De ideologie van de terughoudende staat die met miljarden subsidies de ‘vrije markt’ het werk liet doen, is, zoals zelfs de voorstanders ervan nu toegeven, geëindigd in een grote chaos. In werkelijkheid zijn het alleen de rijken die wereldwijd profiteerden van de ‘bevrijdende werking’ van het afschaffen van overheidstoezicht, waardoor vandaag de dag 64 miljardairs even rijk zijn als de helft van de hele mensheid tezamen, die van één tot twee dollar per dag moeten zien te overleven. In The Revenge of History. The Battle for the 21st Century (2012) constateerde de Britse publicist Seumas Milne met betrekking tot het neoliberale beleid van de Europese Unie van ‘Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel’ dat:

in the European Union, where neoliberal ideology, corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded ever more deeply into each treaty revision, the result was ruinous. The combination of a liberalized banking system with an undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics… had always warned risked breaking apart without large-scale tax-and-spend transfers was an economic disaster waiting to happen. The crash of 2008 then provided the trigger for what would become the pulverising economic and social crisis for the eurozone.

The meltdown at the heart of the global system, described by the Bank of England governor Mervyn King as the worst financial crisis in capitalism’s history, turned a powerful case against the neoliberal order into an unanswerable one. It was after all the deregulation of financial markets, the financialization of every part of the economy, the pumping up of credit to fill the gap left by stagnating wages and the loss of state leverage from mass privatization that triggered the crash and turned it into a prolonged crisis — and all these flowed from the heart of the neoliberal system and its ever more dysfunctional operation.

The governing elites who had championed it, including King, had been shown to be disastrously wrong: not only about the economic and social impact of the ‘free market,’ but about how it actually functioned in reality.

Veelzeggend in dit verband is dat in op 11 juli 2009 NRC Handelsblad onder de kop ‘Bos betreurt geringe greep op banken’ berichtte dat:

Het kabinet wil dat banken zich verantwoordelijker gedragen. Maar minister Bos (Financiën) erkent dat hij de middelen niet heeft om dat af te dwingen.

De ‘kwaliteitskrant’ van de mainstream-pers verzuimde de vraag te sgtellen waarom een minister van Financieën in een parlementaire democratie '[niet] de middelen  heeft om dat af te dwingen,’ terwijl de neoliberale staat wel degelijk de mogelijkheid bezit om miljoenen werknemers van alles 'af te dwingen,' met voorop de jarenlange miljardenbezuinigingen. En waarom kunnen banksters ongecontroleerd opereren? Het antwoord is simpel: één van de belangrijkste redenen is dat de financiële macht dienstbare oud-politici met lucratieve banen beloont. Het is dan ook niet verbazingwekkend dat de voorganger van minister Bos, ING-commissaris Wim Kok al snel liet weten ‘dat de beloning van de top van ING geen voorbeeld is van exhibitionistische zelfverrijking,’ waarmee hij voor eens en altijd publiekelijk aantoonde hoe ‘bevrijdend’ de ‘werking van het afschudden van de ideologische veren,’ was geweest. De zwakste schouder dragen nu de zwaarste lasten, precies het tegenovergestelde van wat de PVDA-premier Den Uyl in de jaren zeventig had beoogd, en dankzij wat Diana Johnstone ‘our ideological fog’ betitelt, waarbij de globalisering tevens 

an ideological construct [is]. It is now widely accepted as an inevitable stage of human history, as the product of communications and transport technologies that turn the world into a ‘global village.’ This notion, which ignores the enormous subjective and material gaps which still divide humanity, underlies the American assumption that ‘we’ are justified in prying (gluren. svh) into everybody's business. 

Although presented as an inexorable (onverbiddelijk. svh) destiny, real ‘globalization’ is the product of a particular relationship of forces. Promoted as 'free trade,’ the slogan does not at all mean what the words suggest: freedom to buy and sell goods and services. In practice, it means a complex system of international agreements that facilitate the movement of investment capital in or out of countries at the expense of national regulations. In hammering out these agreements, the United States benefits from superior bargaining power thanks to its control of the dollar as world currency, the influence of its ideology, and not least by its military presence around the world. The United States has between 662 and over a thousand military bases or installations (depending on what one defines as such) spread across some 148 foreign countries, effectively controlling the armed forces of many of these nations through ‘aid’ and ‘joint training programs.’ The United States not only succeeds in using its influence to obtain trade deals to the advantage of its own corporations and financial institutions, it also feels free to violate the spirit and letter of free trade whenever it chooses to ‘punish’ some country or other with economic sanctions. 

U.S.-led globalization is a process. It is a process intended to absorb more and more of the world into the sphere of ‘free market democracy.’ 

This is indeed a new form of world conquest. It is not a matter of conquering territory by military force and creating colonies, as in past empires. It is not a matter of taking over responsibility for governing conquered territories. It is a process of creating conditions for the gradual absorption of one region after another into a single system in which free enterprise, or private capital, commands both the economy and the political process, based on the model of the present-day United States. Note that ‘free elections,’ U.S.-style, can be freely influenced by financial contributions. Our modern so-called ‘bourgeois’ democracy began with voting rights limited to men of property. Gradually, property requirements were lowered and for a short time in the twentieth century, voting rights were equal in the United States (and still are in some other countries). But by allowing unlimited campaign contributions, the United States has reverted, not to ‘bourgeois’ democracy, but to billionaire democracy. The advantage of this revised democracy is that if you have the money, you can buy it.

Such ‘democracy,’ if exported, looks like the easy non-violent way for our friendly financial interests to take over foreign states. A ‘free market democracy’ can be influenced politically and economically by international finance capital. The United States government is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support ‘democracy’ - usually through grants to NGOs in foreign countries by way of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Such grants select leaders and build careers. These efforts are supported by numerous associations and private foundations, more or less government-linked, of which the most notorious is George Soros' Open Society Foundation. 

The European Union is the vanguard example of this expansion process. Under strong influence from the United States, which effectively occupied Western Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany, six countries — France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg — began the integration process with the 1957 Treaty of Rome. It has been expanding ever since. This expansion is closely related to, although not quite identical with, the expansion of NATO. The paradox is that the more it expands, the less democratic it becomes, as key decision-making is transferred to a central bureaucracy. ‘Free market democracy’ is becoming an oxymoron. (Een oxymoron is een speciaal geval van de paradox. Een paradox bevat een schijnbare tegenspraak die bij nadere beschouwing blijkt te kloppen; bij een oxymoron blijft de spanning van het betekenisverschil echter in stand. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron_(stijlfiguur))

Soon to be cemented by the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA), the European Union, the United States and NATO will form the core of this projected ‘World Community of Democracies.’ This ‘international community’ is designed to claim superior legitimacy on the world stage due to two factors: the supposed moral superiority of ‘democracy’ and the armed force of NATO. Specifically, the armed ‘democracies,’ under U.S. leadership, will — as they are already doing in regard to Ukraine — take it upon themselves to intervene in any area of the world, citing human rights, R2P (the right or responsibility to protect), or some other moral pretext. 



Het neoliberale geopolitieke model dat de achtergrond vormt van de huidige ontwikkelingen wordt aan het publiek verkocht middels de criminalisering van ‘meneer Poetin,’ die volgens Geert Mak de EU van ‘Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel’ op dit moment ‘dwingt’ om ‘meer aan defensie uit te geven.’ Tegelijkertijd wordt het academische wereldje in de polder bewerkt door docenten als dr. Ruud van Dijk van de Universiteit van Amsterdam met zijn bewering dat ‘Een van de belangrijkste doelstellingen van het Europese en Nederlandse beleid moet zijn te voorkomen dat Amerika niet langer verantwoordelijk wil zijn voor het functioneren van het internationale systeem,’ aangezien in zijn ideologische visie ‘de Verenigde Staten de onmisbare ordeningsmogendheid in het internationale systeem [blijven].’ Het is slechts een kwestie van tijd voordat deze, op een overleefde superioriteitsgedachte gebaseerde, ‘veiligheids’-doctrine in een wereldwijde catastrofe zal eindigen. Vergeet daarbij niet: 'Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.' Volgende keer meer.