Israel’s Strikes on Sudan – Globalizing Politicide

Three times since the start of 2009, including on 17 January and 11 February, Israel has attacked the sovereign state of Sudan. Reports vary, but it seems clear that Israel executed the bombings using American-supplied F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and unmanned drones and killed or injured at least 50 people. These attacks represent obvious violations of international law. Not as obvious, but more importantly, the attacks also represent a renewed globalizing of Israel’s policy of politicide. They are the most recent instances of Israel making global its policy of destroying the national existence of the Palestinians. As such they represent a very real and increasing threat to individual and international peace and security, particularly to the people of the post-colonial south, but also those of the imperial north.

Baruch Kimmerling defines politicide, with specific reference to Israel, as “a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political and economic entity.” Furthermore, “[p]oliticide is a process that covers a wide range of social, political and military activities whose goal is to destroy the political and national existence of a whole community of people [the Palestinians] and thus deny it the possibility of self-determination.”

The bombings of the Sudan are not the first time Israel has extended this process far a field of Palestine. As a colonial movement Zionism has of necessity always pursued political activities in the service of politicide in, among other centers of imperial, reactionary power, London, Washington and Pretoria. Similarly, but more directly violent, in 1988 Israel bombed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Tunis, and in the same place that same year assassinated Abu Jihad. However, for the past 15 years Israel largely restricted politicide to Palestine, with some notable and devastating forays and debacles in Lebanon and Jordan. Israel realizes the process through the structural violence of its illegal military occupation of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip and policies such as land and resource expropriation, house demolitions, settlement and wall construction, curfews and the destruction of educational and social institutions. Properly historicized Israel’s “massacre,” to use the term Finkelstein deploys, of the people of Gaza is the most recent and directly violent articulation of this long and persistent process of politicide in Palestine. If we are to believe media reports, Israel’s bombings in the Sudan targeted convoys intended to provide Palestinians with means to resist being massacred in Gaza. This, in turn, means that Israel again globalized its campaign of politicide against Palestinians. The 2009 bombings of the Sudan represent a renewal of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians on a more global scale.

After the attacks then-Israeli Prime Minister Olmert was explicit on this point: “We operate everywhere we can hit terrorist infrastructure – in nearby places, in places far away.” He also explained that people should “know that there is no place where Israel cannot operate. There is no such place.” These statements are acknowledgement in no uncertain terms that Israel has the capability and willingness to take its destruction of the Palestinian community anywhere in the world. Obviously, they must also be read to mean that Israel will determine unilaterally the “terrorist infrastructure” to be targeted. Anyone who follows Israeli policy knows well that this is very inclusive terminology. All manner of social services including health clinics and charitable organizations have been deemed by Israel to be “terrorist infrastructure,” and now Israel has declared the global applicability of its lexicon.

The renewal of globalized politicide (and, of course, its attendant vocabulary) coupled with increasing global interdependence exposes more people to potential Israeli violence. The most recent violence destroyed the lives of Sudanese, Ethiopians and Eritreans. This, of course, is important in its own right, but it also does not signify the end or extent of the matter. First, just as the Lebanese and Tunisians have been victimized by Israeli violence in the past because Israel was destroying Palestinians and Palestinian communities in their midst, contemporarily, the increased global movement of people and extension of institutional connections vastly expands the geographic scope of potential innocent victims. Politicide knows no territorial bounds, which means that Canadians, Germans and Australians, any societies hosting potential targets of Israeli violence, are again threatened. Second, given Israel’s inclusive reading and global applicability of the “terrorist infrastructure” lexicon, the very real possibility exists that other individuals and institutions, not Palestinian per se, will be exposed to Israel’s none too tender mercies. Looking at Israel’s targeting, either by state agencies or through proxies, of individuals such as Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Rachel Corrie and Tristan Anderson and institutions such as the al-Jazeera network and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), it is no great leap to assume that individuals and institutions, whoever and wherever they may be, refusing to subscribe to and support Israel’s ideas and practices, are again increasingly likely objects of Israeli politicide. For those who might scoff at and easily dismiss this suggestion it is instructive to recall here that the offices of both Alex Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League (ADC) and Edward Said were fire-bombed in 1985, and that no one has ever been convicted of either crime.

Now, it should not be taken from the preceding, as Israel certainly wants it to be, that Palestinians and the realization of their inalienable rights are a liability for or a threat to other and/or host societies. Palestinians and the realization of their rights are not the “problem.” Palestinians and the realization of their rights are not a threat to individual or international peace and security.On the contrary, it is the denial of Palestinians and the realization of the rights that threatens individual and international peace and security. As the agent of this denial, this negation, Israel is the threat. This was, in fact, borne out by a 2003 European Commission poll which found Israel to be the single greatest threat to world peace. “In all Member States [of the European Union] (with the exception of Italy) the majority of citizens believe that Israel represents a threat to peace in the world.” As Tanya Reinhart notes citing the same poll: “Israel is considered a threat by 59 per cent of those polled. The United States, Iran and North Korea, come only second on this list, each considered a threat by 53 per cent of the EU population.” Despite the best efforts of the collaborationist media, Europeans recognize that neither Iran or North Korea pose the threat to international security that Israel does. Since the poll, and presumably re-enforcing its findings, Iran and North Korea, much less the Palestinians, have not conducted two bombings (Syria in 2007 and Sudan repeatedly in 2009) and one assassination (the killing of Imad Mugniyah in Damascus in 2008) against or in another sovereign state in the past two years. Such an impressive record of belligerence is Israel’s alone.

The surest way to realize international peace and security, and combat “terrorism” for that matter, is to demand the realization of Palestinian rights, notably the right to national self-determination in the form of a viable state. Alternatively, the surest way to ensure that more people, in farther flung regions of the world, get killed in Israel’s realization of politicide is to let its recent renewal of the global nature of this process go unchecked. Encouraging this renewal, as the U.S. and Canada among others, have regrettably and reprehensibly done, augurs more victims of Israeli violence, even possibly, in something that can only be characterized as betrayal of state responsibility, their own citizens and members of their societies.

Ref: counterpunch

Sean McMahon is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at The American University in Cairo. He can be reached at: smcmahon@aucegypt.edu

Notes.

“How Israel Foiled an Arms Convoy Bound for Hamas,” Time, 30 March 2009 (accessed 8 April 2009). Available from http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1888352,00.html. “Report: Isrel used unmanned drones to attack Sudan convoys,” Ha’aretz, 29 March 2009 (accessed 30 March 2009). Available from http://www.haaretz.com. Instructively and in good Orientalist fashion, the Time article does not record the number of people killed in the Israeli attacks.

Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians (London: Verso Books, 2003), pp. 3-4.

Kimmerling, p. 4.

Naji Ali, “It’s Not About Rockets: Israel’s End-Game in Gaza,” Crossing the Line: Life in Occupied Palestine, 20 February 2009 podcast (accessed 21 February 2009). Available from http://ctl.libsyn.com/.

Yossi Melman, Amos Harel and Barak Ravid, “Olmert Hints at Israel’s Suspected Role in Sudan Air Strike,” Forward, 26 March 2009 (accessed 30 March 2009). Available from http://www.forward.com/articles/104317/. “Sudan strike targets weapons believed capable of hitting Tel Aviv, “Ha’aretz, 28 March 2009 (accessed 30 March 2009). Available from http://www.haaretz.com. And Yossi Melman, “Olmert after Sudan report: We will target threats abroad,” Ha’aretz, 27 March 2009 (accessed 30 March 2009). Available from http://www.haaretz.com.

“Sudan says Israel ‘most probably’ behind attack,” Ha’aretz, 27 March 2009 (accessed 30 March 2009). Available from http://www.haaretz.com. My emphasis added.

Ibid.

Directorate General Press and Communication, “Iraq and Peace in the World,” European Commission, November 2003, p. 81.

Tany Reinhart, The Roadmap to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (London, Verso Books, 2006), p. 109.

Palestinian brothers: Israel used us as human shields in Gaza war

Human shield allegations Link to this video

Israel has been accused of using Palestinian human shields during its invasion of Gaza, a breach of the Geneva conventions that prohibit intentionally putting civilian lives at risk.The Guardian has interviewed three Gazan brothers who described how they were taken from their home at gunpoint, made to kneel in front of tanks to deter Hamas fighters from firing and sent by Israeli soldiers into Palestinian houses to clear them.

“They would make us go first, so if any fighters shot at them the bullets would hit us, not them,” said 14-year-old Al’a al-Attar.

His brothers, Ali, 15, and Nafiz, 16, described how when the three of them were being led through built-up areas in their home town of ­Attartra, the soldiers would order them to suddenly stop ‑ then fire their rifles over the brothers’ shoulders and between their legs.

The use of “human shields” is prohibited under article 28 of the fourth Geneva convention, which states: “The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.” Israel has ratified the convention and is therefore bound by it.

An Israeli internal army magazine left behind by the troops shows Nafiz at the beginning of his ordeal being led bound and blindfolded in a line of men before he was stripped of his clothes.

Another article in the magazine’s online edition details a separate incident, titled: “For a week and a half they [Israeli soldiers]lived with a family of Palestinians whose home became their stronghold.” In it an officer talks openly of using the house as a base for operations while keeping the family in a downstairs room.

“At the top floor of the house we have established an improvised operational room and soldiers’ bedroom, we have opened firing positions and observation points in the three additional rooms,” the officer was quoted as saying. “In addition, we have established another guarding position on the entrance door of the family home.”

Though the officer claims the family stayed in the house out of choice, using their house as a base while civilians were on the premises could still be a violation of international law.

The Attar brothers’ ordeal began on 5 January when Israeli troops entered the town of Attartra, 1.2 miles (2km) from the border with Israel, and began firing into their house. They were led away blindfolded and at gunpoint in single file as the gunfire carried on around them. At one point the boys were forced to march in front of and alongside Israeli tanks.

They were then forced to kneel in a makeshift Israeli encampment for three days and three nights as tanks fired off shells around them. Human rights groups believe they were held there to deter Palestinian fighters from attacking.

“After being here for a day and a half, they put barbed wire around us, then empty tank shells kept landing on us, a rock or shrapnel came flying toward us. We spent a further three days here, right here,” said Nafiz.

After five days Ali and Al’a were untied, had their blindfolds removed and were released straight into a firefight. They came under attack from Israeli tanks and helicopters as they tried to find their way home through the ruins of their neighbourhood, the boys said.

Nafiz was not so lucky. He was taken to Israel where he was interrogated for three days and says he was beaten. Finally he was taken back into Gaza and released.

The boys’ parents, who are ardent supporters of Fatah ‑ Hamas’ political rivals ‑ cannot understand why they were taken.

The use of human shields was outlawed by Israel’s supreme court in 2005 following several clearly identified incidents, but human rights groups insist the Israeli military continues to use civilians in this way, albeit less often.

In February 2007, Associated Press Television News released footage showing 24-year-old Palestinian Sameh Amira being used as a human shield by a group of Israeli soldiers in Nablus.

The Israeli army declined to be interviewed about the practice but said it gave strict orders to soldiers not to use civilians as human shields during this operation. In a written statement, it said that only Hamas had used human shields by attacking troops from within civilian areas. Hamas denied the claim, saying it would not endanger the lives of other Palestinians, but surveillance footage provided by Israel appears to show this.

Ref: Guardian

Under attack: how medics died trying to help Gaza’s casualties

Clancy Chassay asks why 16 medical workers were killed and more than half of Gaza’s hospitals hit during Israel’s invasion of Gaza

The IMF Rules the World

Not much substantive news was expected to come out of the G-20 meetings that ended on April 2 in London – certainly no good news was even suggested. Europe, China and the United States had too deeply distinct interests. American diplomats wanted to lock foreign countries into further dependency on paper dollars. The rest of the world sought a way to avoid giving up real output and ownership of their resources and enterprises for yet more hot-potato dollars. In such cases one expects a parade of smiling faces and statements of mutual respect for each others’ position – so much respect that they have agreed to set up a “study group” or two to kick the diplomatic ball down the road.

The least irrelevant news was not good at all: The attendees agreed to quadruple IMF funding to $1 trillion. Anything that bolsters IMF authority cannot be good for countries forced to submit to its austerity plans. They are designed to squeeze out more money to pay the world’s most predatory creditors. So in practice this G-20 agreement means that the world’s leading governments are responding to today’s financial crisis with “planned shrinkage” for debtors – a 10 per cent cut in wage payments in hapless Latvia, Hungary put on rations, and permanent debt peonage for Iceland for starters. This is quite a contrast with the United States, which is responding to the downturn with a giant Keynesian deficit spending program, despite its glaringly unpayable $4 trillion debt to foreign central banks.

So the international financial system’s double standard remains alive and kicking – at least, kicking countries that are down or are falling. Debtor countries must borrow a trillion from the IMF not to revive their own faltering economies, not to pursue counter-cyclical policies to restore market demand (that is only for creditor nations), but to pass on the IMF “aid” to the poisonous banks that have made the irresponsible toxic loans. (If these are toxic, who put in the toxin? To claim that it was all the “natural” workings of the marketplace is to say that free markets curdle and sicken. Is this what is happening?)

In Ukraine, a physical fight broke out in Parliament when the Party of Regions blocked an agreement with the IMF calling for government budget cutbacks. And rightly so! The IMF’s operating philosophy is the destructive (indeed, toxic) belief that imposing a deeper depression with more unemployment will reduce wage levels and living standards by enough to pay debts already at unsustainable levels, thanks to the kleptocracy’s tax “avoidance” and capital flight. The IMF trillion-dollar bailout is actually for these large international banks, so that they will be able to take their money and run. The problem is all being blamed on labor. That is the neo-Malthusian spirit of today’s neoliberalism.

The main beneficiaries of IMF lending to Latvia, for example, have been the Swedish banks that have spent the last decade funding that country’s real estate bubble while doing nothing to help develop an industrial potential. Latvia has paid for its imports by exporting its male labor of prime working age, acting as a vehicle for Russian capital flight – and borrowing mortgage purchase-money in foreign currency. To pay these debts rather than default, Latvia will have to lower wages in its public sector by 10 per cent — and this with an economy already depressed and that the government expects to shrink by 12 percent this year!

To save the banks from losing on their toxic mortgages, the IMF is bailing them out, and directing the Latvian government to squeeze labor all the more – and to charge for education rather than providing it freely. The idea is for families to take a lifetime of debt not only to live inside rather than on the sidewalk, but to get an education. Alcoholism rates are rising, as they did in Russia under similar circumstances in Yeltsin’s “Harvard Boys” kleptocracy after 1996.

The insolvency problem of the post-Soviet economies is not entirely the IMF’s fault, to be sure. The European Community deserves a great deal of blame. Instead of viewing the post-Soviet economies as wards to be brought up to speed with Western Europe, the last thing the EU wanted was to develop potential rivals. It wanted customers – not only for its exports, but most of all for its loans. The Baltic States passed into the Scandinavian sphere, while Austrian banks carved out financial spheres of influence in Hungary (and lost their shirt on real estate loans, much as the Habsburgs and Rothschilds did in times past). Iceland was neoliberalized, largely in ripoffs organized by German banks and British financial sharpies.

In fact, Iceland ( where I’m writing these lines) looks like a controlled experiment – a very cruel one – as to how deeply an economy can be “financialized” and how long its population will submit voluntarily to predatory financial behavior. If the attack were military, it would spur a more alert response. The trick is to keep the population from understanding the financial dynamics at work and the underlying fraudulent character of the debts with which it has been saddled – with the complicit aid of its own local oligarchy.

In today’s world, the easiest way to obtain wealth by old-fashioned “primitive accumulation” is by financial manipulation. This is the essence of the Washington Consensus that the G-20 support, using the IMF in its usual role as enforcer. The G-20’s announcement continues the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve bank bailout over the past half-year. In a nutshell, the solution to a debt crisis is to be yet more debt. If debtors can’t pay out of what they are able to earn, lend them enough to keep current on their carrying charges. Collateralize this with their property, their public domain, their political autonomy – their democracy itself. The aim is to keep the debt overhead in place. This can be done only by keeping the volume of debts growing exponentially as they accrue interest, which is added onto the loan. This is the “magic of compound interest.” It is what turns entire economies into Ponzi schemes (or Madoff schemes as they are now called).

This is “equilibrium”, neoliberal style. In addition to paying an exorbitant basic interest rate, homeowners must pay a special 18 per cent indexation charge on their debts to reflect the inflation rate (the consumer price index) so that creditors will not lose the purchasing power over consumer goods. Labor’s wages are not indexed, so defaults are spreading and the country is being torn apart with bankruptcy, causing the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. The IMF approves, announcing that it can find no reason why homeowners cannot bear this burden!

Meanwhile, democracy is being torn apart by a financial oligarchy, whose interests have become increasingly cosmopolitan, looking at the economy as prey to be looted. A new term is emerging: “codfish republic” (known further south as banana republics). Many of Iceland’s billionaires these days are choosing to join their Russian counterparts living in London – and the Russian gangsters are reciprocating by visiting Iceland even in the dead of winter, ostensibly merely to enjoy its warm volcanic Blue Lagoon, or so the press is told.

The alternative is for debtor countries to suffer the same kind of economic sanctions as Iran, Cuba and pre-invasion Iraq. Perhaps soon there will be enough such economies to establish a common trading area among themselves, possibly along with Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil. But as far as the G-20 is concerned, aid to Iceland and “doing the right thing” is simply a bargaining chip in the international diplomatic game. Russia offered $4 billion aid to Iceland, but retracted it – presumably when Britain gave it a plum as a tradeoff.

The IMF’s $1 trillion won’t help the post-Soviet and Third World debtor countries pay their foreign debts, especially their real estate mortgages denominated in foreign currency. This practice has violated the First Law of national fiscal prudence: Only permit debts to be taken on that are in the same currency as the income that is expected to be earned to pay them off. If central bankers really sought to protect currency stability, they would insist on this rule. Instead, they act as shills for the international banks, as disloyal to the actual economic welfare of their countries as expatriate oligarchs.

If you are going to recommend more of this consensus, then the only way to sell it is to do what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown did at the meetings: announce that “The Washington Consensus is dead.” (He might have saved matters by saying “deadly,” but used the adjective instead of the adverb.) But the G-20’s IMF bailout belies this claim. As Turkey was closing out its loan last year, the IMF faced a world with no customers. Nobody wanted to submit to its destructive “conditionalities,” anti-labor policies designed to shrink the domestic market in the false assumption that this “frees” more output for export rather than being consumed at home. In reality, the effect of austerity is to discourage domestic investment, and hence employment. Economies submitting to the IMF’s “Washington Consensus” become more and more dependent on their foreign creditors and suppliers.

The United States and Britain would never follow such conditionalities. That is why the United States has not permitted an IMF advisory team to write up its prescription for U.S. “stability.” The Washington Consensus is only for export. (“Do as we say, not as we do.”) Mr. Obama’s stimulus program is Keynesian, not an austerity plan, despite the fact that the United States is the world’s largest debtor.

Here’s why the situation is unsustainable. What has enabled the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries to cover the foreign-exchange costs of their trade dependency and capital flight has been their real estate bubble. The neoliberal idea of financial “equilibrium” has been to watch “market forces” shorten lifespans, demolish what industrial potential they had, increase emigration and disease, and run up an enormous foreign debt with no visible way of earning the money to pay it off. This real estate bubble credit was extractive and parasitic, not productive. Yet the World Bank applauds the Baltics as a success story, ranking them near the top of nations in terms of “ease of doing business.”

One practical fact trumps all the junk economics at work from the IMF and G-20: Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations that no government in history had ever repaid its national debt. Today, the same may be said of the public sector as well. This poses a problem of just how these debtor countries are not going to pay their foreign and domestic debts. How will they frame and politicize their non-payment?

Creditors know that these debts can’t be paid. (I say this as former balance-of-payments analyst of Third World debt for nearly fifty years, from Chase Manhattan in the 1960s through the United Nations Institute for Training and Research [UNITAR] in the 1970s, to Scudder Stevens & Clark in 1990, where I started the first Third World sovereign debt fund.) From the creditor’s vantage point, knowing that the Great Neoliberal Bubble is over, the trick is to deter debtor countries from acting to resolve its collapse in a way that benefits themselves. The aim is to take as much as possible – and to get the IMF and central banks to bail out the poisonous banks that have loaded these countries down with toxic debt. Grab what you can while the grabbing is good. And demand that debtors do what Latin American and other third World countries have been doing since the 1980s: sell off their public domain and public enterprises at distress prices. That way, the international banks not only will get paid, they will get new business lending to the buyers of the assets being privatized – on the usual highly debt-leveraged terms!

The preferred tactic do deter debtor countries from acting in their self-interest is to pound on the old morality, “A debt is a debt, and must be paid.” That is what Herbert Hoover said of the Inter-Ally debts owed by Britain, France and other allies of the United States in World War I. These debts led to the Great Depression. “We loaned them the money, didn’t we?” he said curtly.

Let’s look more closely at the moral argument. Living in New York, I find an excellent model in that state’s Law of Fraudulent Conveyance. Enacted when the state was still a colony, it was enacted in response British speculators making loans to upstate farmers, and demanding payment just before the harvest was in, when the debtors could not pay. The sharpies then foreclosed, getting the land on the cheap. So New York’s Fraudulent Conveyance law responded by establishing the legal principle that if a creditor makes a loan without having a clear and reasonable understanding of how the debtor can repay the money in the normal course of doing business, the loan is deemed to be predatory and therefore null and void.

Just like the post-Soviet economies, Iceland was sold a neoliberal bill of goods: a self-destructive Junk Economics. Just how moral a responsibility – and perhaps even more important, how large a legal liability –should fall on the IMF and World Bank, the U.S. Treasury and Bank of England whose economies and banks benefited from this toxic Washington Consensus junk economics?

For me, the moral principle is that no country should be subjected to debt peonage. That is the opposite of democratic self-determination, after all – and of Enlightenment moral philosophy that economic policies should encourage economic growth, not shrinkage. They should promote greater economic equality, not polarization between wealthy creditors and impoverished debtors.

At issue is just what a “free market” is. It’s supposed to be one of choice. Indebted countries lose discretionary choice over their economic future. Their economic surplus is pledged abroad as financial tribute. Without the overhead costs of a military occupation, they are relinquishing their policy making from democratically elected political representatives to bureaucratic financial managers, often foreign – the new Central Planners in today’s neoliberal world. The best they can do, knowing the game is over, is to hope that the other side doesn’t realize it – and to do everything you can to confuse debtor countries while extracting as much as they can as fast as they can.

Will the trick work? Maybe not. While the G-20 meetings were taking place, Korea was refusing to let itself be victimized by the junk derivatives contracts that foreign banks sold. Korea is claiming that bankers have a fiduciary responsibility to their customers to recommend loans that help them, not strip them of money. There is a tacit understanding (one that the financial sector spends millions of dollars in public relations efforts to undermine) that banking is a public utility. It is supposed to be a handmaiden to growth – industrial and agricultural growth and self-sufficiency – not predatory, extractive and hence anti-social. So Korean victims of junk derivatives are suing the banks. As New York Times commentator Floyd Norris described last week, the legal situation doesn’t look good for the international banks. The home court always has an advantage, and every nation is sovereign, able to pass whatever laws it wants. (And as America’s case abundantly illustrates, judges need not be unbiased.)

The post-Soviet economies as well as Latin America must be watching attentively the path that Korea is clearing through international courts. The nightmare of international bankers is that these countries may bring the equivalent of a class action suit against the international diplomatic coercion mounted against these countries to lead them down the path of financial and economic suicide. “The Seoul Central District Court justified its decision [to admit the lawsuit] on the kind of logic that would apply in the United States to a lawsuit involving an unsophisticated individual investor and a fast-taking broker. The court pointed to questions of whether the contract was a suitable investment for the company, and to whether the risks were fully disclosed. The judgment also referred to the legal concept of “changed circumstances,” concluding that the parties had expected the exchange rate to remain stable, that the change in circumstances was unforeseeable and that the losses would be too great for the company to bear.”

As a second cause of action, Korea is claiming that the banks provided creditor for other financial institutions to bet against the very contracts the banks were selling Korea to “protect” its interests. So the banks knew that what they were selling was a time bomb, and therefore seem guilty of conflict of interest. Banks claim that they merely were selling goods with no warranty to “informed individuals.” But the Korean parties in question were no more informed than were Iceland’s debtors. If a bank seeks to mislead and does not provide full disclosure, its victim cannot be said to be “informed.” The proper English word is misinformed (viz. disinformation).
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Speaking of disinformation, an important issue concerns the extent to which the big international banks may have conspired with domestic bankers and corporate managers to loot their companies. This is what corporate raiders have done for their junk-bond holders since the high tide of Drexel Burnham and Michael Milken in the 1980s. This would make the banks partners in crime. There needs to be an investigation of the lending pattern that these banks engaged in – including their aid in organizing offshore money laundering and tax evasion to their customers. No wonder the IMF and British bankers are demanding that Iceland make up its mind in a hurry, and commit itself to pay astronomical debts without taking the time to ask just how they are to pay – and investigating the creditor banks’ overall lending pattern!

Bearing the above in mind, I suppose I can tell Icelandic politicians that I have good news regarding the fate of their country’s foreign and domestic debt: No nation ever has paid its debts. As I noted above, this means that the real question is not whether or not they will be paid, but how not to pay these debts. How will the game play out – in the political sphere, in popular ideology, and in the courts at home and abroad?

The question is whether Iceland will let bankruptcy tear apart its economy slowly, transferring property from debtors to creditors, from Icelandic citizens to foreigners, and from the public domain and national taxing power to the international financial class. Or, will Iceland see where the inherent mathematics of debt are leading, and draw the line? At what point will it say “We won’t pay. These debts are immoral, uneconomic and anti-democratic.” Do they want to continue the fight by Enlightenment and Progressive Era social democracy, or the alternative – a lapse back into neofeudal debt peonage?

This is the choice must be made. And it is largely a question of timing. That’s what the financial sector plays for – time enough to transfer as much property as it can into the hands of the banks and other investors. That’s what the IMF advises debtor countries to do – except of course for the United States as largest debtor of all. This is the underlying lawless character of today’s post-bubble debts.

Ref: counterpunch

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com

The Ideology of Barack Obama + The Obama Deception (video)

In the past two months:

US Vice President Joe Biden was asked by reporters at a summit in Chile if Washington plans to put an end to the near-50-year-old economic embargo against Cuba. He replied “No.”

Israeli authorities broke up a series of Palestinian cultural events in Jerusalem, disrupting a children’s march and bursting balloons at a schoolyard celebration.11 There has not been, nor will there be, any embargo of any kind by the United States against Israel. Nor will President Obama make any comment about what he really feels about invading a children’s party and bursting their balloons.

The White House and the Pentagon appear to be having a competition over who can announce the most troops being sent to Afghanistan. Is anyone keeping a body count?

US drones continue to drop bombs on people’s homes and wedding parties in Pakistan. No one in Washington publicly admits to this or comments in any way about the legality or morality of it all.

Bolivia and Ecuador have expelled American diplomats for what their hosts saw as conspiring to undermine the government.

Any number of other examples can be given of how alike the foreign policies of the Bush and Obama administrations are, how little, if any, change has occurred; certainly nothing of any significance. Yet, my saying such a thing is precisely what most often bothers Obama supporters who read or hear my comments. They’re in love with the man with the toothpaste-advertisement smile, who’s “smart” (whatever that means), who plays basketball, and is not George W. Bush, and his wife who puts her arm around the queen of England.

Obama’s popularity around the world is enhanced, to an important extent, by the fact that he has endeavored to conceal or obscure his real ideology. As an example, in early March, in an interview with the New York Times, he was asked: “Is there a one word name for your philosophy? If you’re not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?”

“No, I’m not going to engage in that,” replied the president.

The next day he called the Times reporter, telling him: “It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question”. Obama then gave the reporter several examples of why his policies show that he isn’t a socialist.

He didn’t have to convince me. Obama’s centrist bent is clear to anyone who bothers to look. But after the Times incident — which apparently bothered him — he may have felt the need to be more clear about his ideological leanings to avoid any further silly “socialist” episodes. The next day, meeting at the White House with members of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist Democratic members of the House, Obama said at one point: “I am a New Democrat.”

Most conservatives will probably continue to see him as a dangerous leftist. They should be happy that Obama is the president and not any kind of real progressive or socialist or even a genuine liberal, but the right wing is greedy.

Ref: counterpunch
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

The Obama Deception HQ Full length version

Cuba Will Continue to Resist – Not a Word About the Blockade

The U.S. administration announced through CNN that Obama would be visiting Mexico this week, in the first part of a trip that will take him to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where he will be within four days taking part in the Summit of the Americas. He has announced the relief of some hateful restrictions imposed by Bush to Cubans living in the United States regarding their visits to relatives in Cuba. When questions were raised on whether such prerogatives extended to other American citizens the response was that the latter were not authorized.

But not a word was said about the harshest of measures: the blockade. This is the way a truly genocidal measure is piously called, one whose damage cannot be calculated only on the basis of its economic effects, for it constantly takes human lives and brings painful suffering to our people.

Numerous diagnostic equipment and crucial medicines –made in Europe, Japan or any other country– are not available to our patients if they carry U.S. components or software.

The U.S. companies producing goods or offering services anywhere in the world should apply these restrictions to Cuba, since they are extraterritorial measures.

An influential Republican Senator, Richard Lugar, and some others from his same party in Congress, as well as a significant number of his Democratic peers, favor the removal of the blockade. The conditions exist for Obama to use his talents in a constructive policy that could put an end to the one that has failed for almost half a century.

On the other hand, our country, which has resisted and is willing to resist whatever it takes, neither blames Obama for the atrocities of other U.S. administrations nor doubts his sincerity and his wishes to change the United States policy and image. We understand that he waged a very difficult battle to be elected, despite centuries-old prejudices.

Taking note of this reality, the President of the State Council of Cuba has expressed his willingness to have a dialogue with Obama and to normalize relations with the United States, on the basis of the strictest respect for the sovereignty of our country.

At 2:30 p.m., the head of the Interests Section of Cuba in Washington, Jorge Bolaños, was summoned to the State Department by Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Shannon. He did not say anything different from what had been indicated by the CNN.

At 3:15 p.m. a lengthy press conference started. The substance of what was said there is reflected in the words of Dan Restrepo, Presidential Adviser for Latin America.

He said that today President Obama had instructed to take certain measures, certain steps, to reach out to the Cuban people in support of their wishes to live with respect for human rights and to determine their own destiny and that of the country.

He added that the president had instructed the secretaries of State, Commerce and Treasury to undertake the necessary actions to remove all restrictions preventing persons to visit their relatives in the Island and sending remittances. He also said that the president had issued instructions for steps to be taken allowing the free flow of information in Cuba, and between those living in Cuba and the rest of the world, and to facilitate delivering humanitarian resources directly to the Cuban people.

He also said that with these measures, aimed at closing the gap between divided Cuban families and promoting the free flow of information and humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people, President Obama was making an effort to fulfill the objectives he set out during his campaign and after taking on his position.

Finally, he indicated that all those who believe in the basic democratic values hope for a Cuba where the human, political, economic and basic rights of the entire people are respected. And he added that President Obama feels that these measures will help to make this objective a reality. The president, he said, encourages everyone who shares these wishes to continue to decidedly support the Cuban people.

At the end of the press conference, the adviser candidly confessed that ?all of this is for Cuba?s freedom.?

Cuba does not applaud the ill-named Summits of the Americas, where our nations do not debate on equal footing. If they were of any use, it would be to make critical analyses of policies that divide our peoples, plunder our resources and hinder our development.

Now, the only thing left is for Obama to try to persuade all of the Latin American presidents attending the conference that the blockade is harmless.

Cuba has resisted and it will continue to resist; it will never beg for alms. It will go on forward holding its head up high and cooperating with the fraternal peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean; with or without Summits of the Americas; whether or not the president of the United States is Obama, a man or a woman, a black or a white citizen.

Ref: counterpunch

Also read The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States