Showing posts with label World Bank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World Bank. Show all posts

August 13, 2008

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin and Haiti and "free trade"

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin and Haiti

(this article first appeared on HaitiAnalysis.com: Link to original article here)

Paul Martin’s History of Haiti and Future Plans for Africa

By: Tracy Glynn - HaitiAnalysis

Rumour spread fast amongst the small activist community in Fredericton months before the official announcement was made that the local chapter of Engineers Without Borders would be hosting a lecture by former Prime Minister Paul Martin on March 23, 2008 at the University of New Brunswick. As Finance Minister, Martin slashed social spending so that more could be given to corporate welfare. Post-secondary education was gutted to the tune of $7 billion from 1993 to 2000, forcing many students into debt before they turned twenty. Plagued by scandals during his reign as Prime Minister, a Ipsos-Reid poll conducted in 2004 found that 61 per cent of Canadians thought his governing Liberal Party was corrupt. After losing the election to Harper, Martin now finds himself speaking at university campuses as an authority on “how business and government can help Africa.”

The corporate media that covered Martin’s lecture failed to mentioned the presence of over a dozen protesters who gathered to counter the onslaught of misinformation and Liberal rhetoric. Flyers were distributed to the crowd on Paul Martin’s track record as Prime Minister including his role in overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.

When Paul Martin began his speech, two UNB students stood up alongside Martin and unfurled a banner that read

“Canada Out of Haiti and Afghanistan”.

A few minutes later, another couple of students unfurled another banner that read

“Neo-Liberalism=Neo-Colonialism”

on the other side of Martin. The two pairs of students with their message stood by Martin during his entire lecture. Martin, like any good Liberal willing to “listen”, was quoted in the local newspaper as saying that he would expect a protest at a university.

Sadly, many of Martin’s remarks received little challenge from what one would expect would be a critical audience on a university campus. Except for the occasional interruption, Martin was able to make several outrageous statements in an apparent attempt to rewrite a history that only transpired in the past decade. The first interruption came when Martin was responding to a question about the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and he said that he could not think of any Canadian business interests in Haiti. A student asked

“What about the sweatshops?”

Surely Martin must know of the presence of Montreal-based Gildan Active Wear in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Gildan has recently closed their remaining North American shops to expand in countries where labour and production is cheaper like in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

How was Gildan connected to the overthrowing of Haiti’s democratically-elected and popular leader? Gildan was the primary subcontractor for Alpha Industries, which was owned by Andy Apaid. Apaid was also the head of Group 184, which was the main opposition force to Aristide’s Lavalas party. Aristide, while enjoying popular support especially amongst the country’s poor, was overthrown from power with the help of Canada, the U.S. and France in 2004. About a year before being removed from power, Aristide increased minimum wage from 36 to 70 gourdes in February 2003, a move most likely opposed by the sweatshop kings.

Martin could also not have possibly forgotten about the presence in Haiti of what is now the world’s largest engineering firm, SNC-Lavalin, also from Montreal. SNC-Lavalin after all built the Canadian Embassy in Haiti’s capital. As one of the largest recipients of Canadian aid dollars, SNC-Lavalin works on CIDA-funded projects around the world, from Haiti to Afghanistan. Martin himself has gone the distance for this company, lobbying on behalf of SNC-Lavalin in arms deals in Libya. St. Genevieve Resources is another Canadian company in Haiti with mineral interests. Yves Engler, co-author of Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, summarizes the close ties between Canadian aid abetting Canadian imperialism:

“the Canadian government may call it foreign aid, but a central aim of the Canadian International Development Agency has always been to help Canadian companies expand abroad both directly and indirectly. The mining sector, for instance, is one of Canadian aid’s greatest success stories and today, Canadian companies hold some 7000 mining concessions around the world… By having a direct hand in liberalizing mining codes in Colombia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Guinea etc., the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has helped the flow of mining profits into Canada. In addition, Canada has channelled billions of “aid” dollars through IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programs that have liberalized mining laws around the world.”

Canada has also funded and had incredible say over Haiti’s troubled judicial and prison systems, police force and elections, but as Engler points out:

“Helping keep the world safe for ever-greater exploitation by the world’s corporate oligarchy has been Canadian aid’s biggest success.”

When interrupted during his version of how Aristide was ousted, Martin said that Aristide had asked for help to be removed safely. It was pointed out that Martin’s government had actually orchestrated the second coup of the democratically-elected Aristide with the support of the Canadian military that secured the airport for his removal. Aristide maintains that he was kidnapped by U.S. forces and forced into exile. Martin conveniently left out an important part of history involving his government hosting a meeting in Ottawa with the Presidents of the U.S. and France in January 2003. The meeting, dubbed the Ottawa Initiative, planned the removal of Aristide.

Canada also contributed to the U.S.-supported destabilization campaign aimed at removing Aristide by cutting off aid to Haiti that was highly dependent on foreign aid. CIDA also funded Haitian and Quebec NGOs that were actively organizing against Aristide.

CIDA also financed and militarized the Haitian police force that arrested the former Haitian Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune, on orders from a Justice Ministry where a CIDA employee, Philip Vixamar, was second in command. The former Haitian Prime Minister remained in jail for over two years under a CIDA-backed court system stacked by the coup government.

Martin ended the discussion on Haiti by saying that the neighbouring Caribbean countries supported the removal of Aristide. Actually, the 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has called for an independent U.N.-led investigation into the details surrounding Aristide’s removal from power.

Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the evening came with Martin’s comment that Canada does not have a colonial past after talking about a way forward for First Nations. Didn’t European settlers colonize the land known today as Canada? Besides a certain colonial past, Canada is currently colonizing lands and resources all over the world via its companies, banks, free trade agreements and publicly funded export credit agencies and pension plans. Royal Bank of Canada recently acquired the largest bank in Trinidad, RBTT while the Bank of Nova Scotia has had a foothold in the Caribbean region for over a century, establishing a branch in Jamaica in 1889. Canada has been extracting the riches of countries in this region ever since at the expense of the environment and traditional livelihoods of the colonized.

Martin also said that poverty drives environmental degradation. Martin seems to be getting greed mixed up with poverty. Martin made reference to the growing deforestation in the Congo basin. He blamed poverty and the looting of the forest by locals for fuel. He failed to mention that Canadian mining companies are deforesting large tracts of land for minerals and profit in the country.

The foreign theft of resources from the Congo rainforest is well documented. But Martin’s twisting of the facts of what is happening today in the Congo allows Canadian mining companies to get richer from Congo’s mineral wealth. About ten Canadian mining companies are active in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) today.

In 2002, eight Canadian companies were implicated in the U.N. Report on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Congo. The report recommended investigations by the Canadian government into their actions but no such action was taken. More recently, Anvil Mining, a Canadian-Australian company, is accused of helping soldiers end an uprising in a village near an Anvil mine that killed more than 80 people including villagers.

According to Le Monde Diplomatique, Canadian mining companies Barrick and Banro had been “funding military operations [in the DRC] in exchange for lucrative contracts.” Barrick and Banro are today trying to silence allegations of abuse in Africa, in the case of Barrick, an alleged massacre of small-scale miners in Tanzania. Écosociété, a Quebec-based publisher, has recently been served with two libel lawsuits, a $5 million SLAPP suit by Banro and a $6 million SLAPP suit by Barrick following the publication of the book Noir Canada.

Over the years advisors and directors for Barrick have included George H.W. Bush, Brian Mulroney, as well as American and Canadian Senators and elite. Connections between Canadian politicians and companies exploiting resources around the globe abound and certainly are not limited to Paul Martin. Joe Clark was both the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party while acting as a special advisor on Africa for the mining company First Quantum Mineral in the mid 1990s.

As more and more Canadians were becoming aware of the extent of abuses faced by communities affected by Canadian mining across the globe, Martin’s government rejected recommendations by an all party Senate Committee to regulate the Canadian extractive sector abroad.

Martin’s prescription for Africa: The Common Market. A common market is essentially a customs union with common policies on product regulation. It is driven by philosophies of the freedom of movement of land, capital and labour for production, and of enterprise. Sounds a lot like “free trade”? Martin never uttered those two words during his entire speech. Maybe he did not want to upset his hosts, the Engineers Without Borders, who were handing out fair trade chocolates during the opening reception.

Martin has just founded an organization devoted to stopping environmental degradation in the Congo Rainforest Basin. One could be forgiven if they made the presumption that this fund has more to do with creating Canadian business friendly havens than helping the poor people of Africa.


May 05, 2008

Gaza's economic growth has halted, World Bank says

· Israeli blockade strangling territory, report warns
· Olmert spokesman denies expansion of settlements

This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday April 28 2008 on p16 of the International section. It was last updated at 00:00 on April 28 2008.

Gaza's economic growth has ground to a halt and will continue to shrink unless Israel lifts its economic blockade on the beleaguered Palestinian territory, a new World Bank report says. After three years of warning that Palestinian businesses were on the brink of collapse, the World Bank yesterday reported that Gaza's economy had recorded zero growth in 2007.

The report comes 10 months after Israel imposed tough economic sanctions to break Hamas's control of Gaza, after the Islamist militants ousted their political rivals, Fatah, in bloody clashes last year.

It also warns that the West Bank, which is administered by the US-backed Palestinian Authority, will struggle to grow, despite the international community's pledge to inject $7.7bn (£3.9bn), over the next three years to bolster the economy.

Inspired by US-brokered peace talks at Annapolis last year, the international community gave generously, in the belief that Israel would halt further construction in the 149 Jewish settlements and approximately 110 outposts, and ease the barriers, checkpoints, permits and other military decrees that exclude Palestinians from about 1,000 miles of roads and much of the West Bank.

But instead, movement restrictions remain the biggest obstacle to growth in the West Bank, the World Bank says. "Since Annapolis, settlement activity has continued largely unabated and, in the case of the Jerusalem area, has even accelerated. Of the 885 settlement housing units tendered in 2007, 747 were issued in the five weeks after Annapolis," the report says.

The World Bank says Israel has legitimate security concerns, but its control of movement in the West Bank is not solely to protect settlers, but also to help expand settlements. "Some 38% of the West Bank has been confiscated for current or future settlements and outposts and their growth, as well as closed military areas."

Israel claims it is reining in settlement growth. "There's no policy to expand settlements," said Mark Regev, spokesman for the prime minister, Ehud Olmert. "We are building inside existing settlements."

"We understand the importance of movement and access for the Palestinians and support those goals, but we can't ignore serious threats to the security of Israeli citizens. There are hard-core terrorist cells, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and renegade Fatah members, in the West Bank."

The World Bank modelling suggests that the Palestinian economy as a whole could achieve double-digit growth, but that given the stalemate in peace negotiations, is more likely to grow by just 3% in 2008. Even then individual incomes are likely to fall, as population growth is expected to outstrip economic activity.

At the weekend, the prospect of an economic revival in the West Bank continued to wither, with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, saying he had walked away from a meeting with President George Bush "almost empty handed".


March 27, 2008

Is an International Financial Conspiracy Driving World Events?

By Richard C. Cook


Global Research, March 27, 2008

"They make a desolation and call it peace." -Tacitus

Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down?

Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world's financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, "accidentally on purpose"?

And if so, why?

Let's turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world's financial elite.


The lengthy Wikipedia article on Rockefeller provides the following version of a celebrated statement he allegedly made in an opening speech at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, in June 1991:

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries."

This speech was made 17 years ago. It came at the beginning in the U.S. of the Bill Clinton administration. Rockefeller speaks of an "us." This "us," he says, has been having meetings for almost 40 years. If you add the 17 years since he gave the speech it was 57 years ago—two full generations.

Not only has "us" developed a "plan for the world," but the attempt to "develop" the plan has evidently been successful, at least in Rockefeller's mind. The ultimate goal of "us" is to create "the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers." This will lead, he says, toward a "world government which will never again know war."

Just as an intellectual exercise, let's assume that David Rockefeller is as important and powerful a person as he seems to think he is. Let's give the man some credit and assume that he and "us" have in fact succeeded to a degree. This would mean that the major decisions and events since Rockefeller gave the speech in 1991 have probably also been part of the plan or that they have at least represented its features and intent.


Therefore by examining these decisions and events we can determine whether in fact Rockefeller is being truthful in his assessment that the Utopia he has in mind is on its way or has at least come closer to being realized. In no particular order, some of these decisions and events are as follows:

The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations has led to the elimination of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs as well as the destruction of U.S. family farming in favor of global agribusiness.

Similar free trade agreements, including those under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, have led to export of millions of additional manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere.

Average family income in the U.S. has steadily eroded while the share of the nation's wealth held by the richest income brackets has soared. Some Wall Street hedge fund managers are making $1 billion a year while the number of homeless, including war veterans, pushes a million.

The housing bubble has led to a huge inflation of real estate prices in the U.S. Millions of homes are falling into the hands of the bankers through foreclosure. The cost of land and rentals has further decimated family agriculture as well as small business. Rising property taxes based on inflated land assessments have forced millions of lower-and middle-income people and elderly out of their homes.

The fact that bankers now control national monetary systems in their entirety, under laws where money is introduced only through lending at interest, has resulted in a massive debt pyramid that is teetering on collapse. This "monetarist" system was pioneered by Rockefeller-family funded economists at the University of Chicago. The rub is that when the pyramid comes down and everyone goes bankrupt the banks which have been creating money "out of thin air" will then be able to seize valuable assets for pennies on the dollar, as J.P. Morgan Chase is preparing to do with the businesses owned by Carlyle Capital. Meaningful regulation of the financial industry has been abandoned by government, and any politician that stands in the way, such as Eliot Spitzer, is destroyed.

The total tax burden on Americans from federal, state, and local governments now exceeds forty percent of income and is rising. Today, with a recession starting, the Democratic-controlled Congress, while supporting the minuscule "stimulus" rebate, is hypocritically raising taxes further, even for middle-income earners. Back taxes, along with student loans, can no longer be eliminated by bankruptcy protection.

Gasoline prices are soaring even as companies like Exxon-Mobil are recording record profits. Other commodity prices are going up steadily, including food prices, with some countries starting to experience near-famine conditions. 40 million people in America are officially classified as "food insecure."

Corporate control of water and mineral resources has removed much of what is available from the public commons, and the deregulation of energy production has led to huge increases in the costs of electricity in many areas.

The destruction of family farming in the U.S. by NAFTA (along with family farming in Mexico and Canada) has been mirrored by policies toward other nations on the part of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Around the world, due to pressure from the "Washington consensus," local food self-sufficiency has been replaced by raising of crops primarily for export. Migration off the land has fed the population of huge slums around the cities of underdeveloped countries.

Since the 1980s the U.S. has been fighting wars throughout the world either directly or by proxy. The former Yugoslavia was dismembered by NATO. Under cover of 9/11 and by utilizing off-the-shelf plans, the U.S. is now engaged in the military conquest and permanent military occupation of the Middle East. A worldwide encirclement of Russia and China by U.S. and NATO forces is underway, and a new push to militarize space has begun. The Western powers are clearly preparing for at least the possibility of another world war.

The expansion of the U.S. military empire abroad is mirrored by the creation of a totalitarian system of surveillance at home, whereby the activities of private citizens are spied upon and tracked by technology and systems which have been put into place under the heading of the "War on Terror." Human microchip implants for tracking purposes are starting to be used. The military-industrial complex has become the nation's largest and most successful industry with tens of thousands of planners engaged in devising new and better ways, both overt and covert, to destroy both foreign and domestic "enemies."

Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population of any country on earth. Plus everyday life for millions of people is a crushing burden of government, insurance, and financial fees, charges, and paperwork. And the simplest business transactions are burdened by rake-offs for legions of accountants, lawyers, bureaucrats, brokers, speculators, and middlemen.

Finally, the deteriorating conditions of everyday life have given rise to an extraordinary level of stress-related disease, as well as epidemic alcohol and drug addiction. Governments themselves around the world engage in drug trafficking. Instead of working to lower stress levels, public policy is skewed in favor of an enormous prescription drug industry that grows rich off the declining level of health through treatment of symptoms rather than causes. Many of these heavily-advertised medications themselves have devastating side-effects.

This list should at least give us enough to go on in order to ask a hard question. Assuming again that all these things are parts of the elitist plan which Mr. Rockefeller boasts to have been developing, isn't it a little strange that the means which have been selected to achieve "peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity" involve so much violence, deception, oppression, exploitation, graft, and theft?

In fact it looks to me as though "our plan for the world" is one that is based on genocide, world war, police control of populations, and seizure of the world's resources by the financial elite and their puppet politicians and military forces.

In particular, could there be a better way to accomplish all this than what appears to be a concentrated plan to remove from people everywhere in the world the ability to raise their own food? After all, genocide by starvation may be slow, but it is very effective. Especially when it can be blamed on "market forces."

And can it be that the "us" which is doing all these things, including the great David Rockefeller himself, are just criminals who have somehow taken over the seats of power? If so, they are criminals who have done everything they can to watch their backs and cover their tracks, including a chokehold over the educational system and the monopolistic mainstream media.

One thing is certain: The voters of America have never knowingly agreed to any of this.


Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years." His website is at
www.richardccook.com.



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February 16, 2008

Tanzanian says it better than I can .. what's wrong with the US foreign policy

By Inviting Bush We Are Dishonouring Ourselves

Hamza Mustafa Njozi (2008-02-12)

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men” – Abraham Lincoln

It would seem to me that there are certain moral limits beyond which no one can cross without forfeiting one’s honour and human dignity. Our seemingly voluntary decision to invite and to entertain a hated war criminal for four days in our beautiful land will probably go down in history as marking the darkest moment in our political history so far. I recall, not without pride, that in 2003 as members of the University of Dar es Salaam Academic Assembly [UDASA], we prevented the then U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania from visiting the Mlimani main campus. The university’s long-standing intellectual tradition was too noble to be soiled by a representative of a war criminal who was, and still is, butchering innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is as it should be. Intellectuals should keep the beacon of freedom and justice burning even during the darkest night of unbridled tyranny.

And now, Kwame Nkrumah’s worst fears have come to pass. Tanzania, a former Frontline State, is feverishly preparing itself to participate in a macabre dance with the deadliest twenty-first century harpy, “a monster who entices its victims with sweet music.” Tanzania is apparently following the footsteps of Uganda and Ethiopia. In whose interest? Let us begin by listening to the sweet music as performed by the U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania and sickeningly echoed by some of our leaders.

The Sweet Music of Economic Gain

According to the American Ambassador, Mr. Mark Green, President Bush’s visit to Tanzania will stimulate investment because for four days the world media would focus on Tanzania. Of course, Mr. Green dismissed claims about Bush’s keen interest to station AFRICOM in Tanzania. Instead, Bush’s noble intentions include intensifying the fight against malaria and Aids. To this end, Tanzania will receive $818.4 million to fight Aids. During the visit, Bush would also highlight his country’s commitment to improving health in Africa. In summary, the iron spine of the argument justifying Bush’s trip is economic gain, both, actual and prospective.

Unless if Tanzanians wish to fall prey to racist reasoning, Mr. Green’s story is nothing but an attempt to disguise ignoble motives beneath a glittering façade of altruism. Why should Mr. Bush be so concerned about improving the health condition of Tanzanians and at the same time use the most sophisticated weapons to kill and maim, with zest and ruthlessness, the Iraqis and Afghans and now the Somalis? Why? Is it because we are black and they are Arab? In his recent State of the Union Address, Mr. Bush, amid cheers from his sycophants, vowed to heighten his hawkish policies world wide. And yet, Mr. Bush is so kind and altruistic to Tanzanians. Why? Of course we know from history that even the sordid intentions of tyrants are always dressed up in glowing principles. Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia because he wanted to promote peace and social welfare for all; Mussolini invaded Ethiopia because he wanted to liberate the savages; Japan invaded China to create an earthly paradise; the US and UK invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction; and so on and so forth.

Thomas Jefferson on Profession of Noble Intent

Commenting on the famous claim by the British Imperialists that they were fighting for the liberation of mankind, Thomas Jefferson, wrote, as quoted in Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, "We believe no more in Bonaparte’s fighting merely for the liberties of the seas, than in Great Britain’s fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth, and the resources of other nations."

“A century later,” writes Chomsky, “Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, commented scornfully on ‘how willing the British, French or Italians are to accept a mandate’ from the League of Nations, as long as ‘there are mines, oil fields, rich grain fields or railroads’ that will make it a profitable undertaking.’ These ‘unselfish governments’ declare the mandates must be accepted ‘for the good of mankind’: ‘they will do their proper share by administering the rich regions of Mesopotamia, Syria, & c.’ The proper assessment of these pretensions is ‘so manifest that it is almost an insult to state it’. (p. 48)

To their credit, American leaders saw through such pretensions, and dismissed them for what they were. They knew the real motive was to grab the wealth and resources of other nations. We should apply the same standard in assessing the noble intent of Mr. Bush.

The Transparency of American Motives

Since the Americans know that their real motive is to pillage and loot the wealth and resources of other nations, they have often demonstrated by their behaviour that they must have unhindered access to all resources of the world. To achieve this end, they have stationed military bases all over the world. The goal of their grand strategy is to prevent any challenge to the power, position, and prestige of the United States. Since securing the supplies of oil enables the Americans to have power over her rivals and competitors, successive US governments have bombed, occupied or controlled countries with rich oil deposits. According to a government daily newspaper Habari Leo of 21 July 2007, an American oil company Helvey International and Petronet International of South Africa have signed a $313 million oil exploration contract in Tanzania. In view of how American oil companies have fleeced other oil rich countries like Ecuador, this does not augur us well. No wonder, suddenly, Bush, loves Tanzanians! Why not invite the Chinese who need no military bases, who have invaded no country and who give the best offer? If what has befallen other countries is any barometer, the Americans will need a military base in Tanzania. Military presence is necessary to ensure total control of this vital resource as well as the continued pillage of our gold mines.

Of late USAID has increased its activities in Tanzania. Commenting on the role of USAID in promoting the American Empire, John Pilger notes in Freedom Next Time:

Illuminating how America exported ‘democracy to the world’, the head of USAID, Andrew Natsios, described ‘aid’ as ‘a key foreign policy instrument’. Wishing to leave no doubt about what he meant, he said, ‘Foreign assistance helps developing and transition nations move toward democratic systems and market economies; it helps nations prepare for participation in the global trading system and become better markets for U.S. exports. (p.265)

John Perkins has lent to the same verdict the weight of his considerable weight as a professional Economic Hit Man [EHM]. He says the job of an EHM is:

To encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire – to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs.

Acccording to John Perkins, EHM “funnel money from the World Bank, UASID, and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources” (p. ix).

Bush’s Visit and AFRICOM

The U.S. Ambassador has repeatedly and vehemently dismissed the disquieting reports that one of the objectives of Bush’s visit to Tanzania is to persuade our leaders into accepting to host the hated AFRICOM. Still, the signs and portents are too consistent to brush aside. According to Assistant Secretary of Defence for African Affairs, Theresa Whalen, the mission of AFRICOM will be to promote diplomatic, economic and humanitarian aid for African countries. In recent months, the U.S. Ambassadors, Michael Retzer and Mark Green have conspicuously [ and somewhat undiplomatically] attempted to show the shiny face of the U.S. Army. On 20 July, 2007 the US Ambassador opened a primary school in Chake Chake, Pemba. The school was built with the support of the US military base in Djibouti. The U.S. Navy Captain Wright from the U.S. CJTF-HOA, and the Country Director of USAID attended this important humanitarian function! Mwananchi of 10 November 2006 reported about a Tshs. 3.2 billion U.S assistance to the police laboratory. Habari Leo of 28 November 2007 reported that our police force received 100 hand-cuffs, 50 tape-recorders, 2 laptops, and a camera. Mwananchi of 8 December 2007, reported about the U.S. pledge to increase military assistance to Tanzania to the tune of $70 million under the Acota programme. Mwananchi of 6 December 2007, the U.S. Ambassador addresses students of Kinondoni Secondary school who are under USAID’s Stay Alive programme. Mwananchi of 22 November, 2007 the U.S. Ambassador visits and assists an orphanage in Arusha. Mwananchi of 22 November 2007, the U.S. Army helps a Handeni Hospital with equipments worth Tshs. 6 million. The U.S. Army stationed in Tanga involves itself with helping in the repair and rehabilitation of schools, dispensaries, bore holes and other social activities. Mwananchi of 12 January 2008, an American Army officer distributes toys to school children of Mbagala. Mwananchi of 17 January 2008, USAID officials give academic prizes to outstanding science students. Mtanzania of 10 January 2008, USAID praises the educational achievements of Zanzibar. USAID was handing over text books for Zanzibar secondary schools published by the University of South Carolina. The ceremony was part of the celebrations to mark 44 years of the Zanzibar Revolution. The Zanzibar Minister of Education did not seem to notice the tragic irony of the entire ceremony!

It may be instructive to recall that on 6 November 1933, Hitler responded to his political opponents by saying,
“Your child belongs to us already…What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
Four years later he said
“This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”
Yes, new textbooks were written and new curricula developed.

After 44 years of Independence we are delegating this role to USAID. And USAID has nothing but praise for us!

The Boomerang Effect of the Global Media

The prediction that Tanzania would benefit economically because for four days the world media would focus on Tanzania is nothing but a cruel hoax. If this claim were true, Bush himself would have been the first beneficiary. He enjoys the publicity of the world media throughout the year. Yet, he is probably the most hated leader alive today. He is so hated that he becomes a huge security risk wherever he goes. In their book, America Alone, Harper and Clarke note that America’s militarism has brought about such a rise in world-wide anti-American feeling that:

When the president travels, he must do so in a locked-down security bubble: eight hours here, sixteen hours there, never more than thirty minutes from an airport, no press conferences, no meeting the people, no seeing of the sights. American representative overseas tell us that in many small ways their jobs have become more difficult…(p. 311).

Tanzania under Mwalimu Nyerere received very negative publicity from Newsweek, Time, The Economist, and other leading Western magazines and newspapers. And yet, as a nation we commanded respect throughout the world. The U.S. print and electronic media had nothing but praises for Tony Blair. And yet, unlike the leaders of Germany and France who took a principled stand against America’s unprovoked military aggression in Iraq, Blair’s enduring political image is that of a contemptible poodle of Uncle Sam and his otherwise great country as the 51st State of America!

In 2001 the U.S. Congress passed a bill which directed the government to cut off military aid to all countries which ratified the International Criminal Court treaty, unless they pledged never to surrender American criminals to the International court. Tanzania took a principled stand. It refused to bow to American pressure. Uganda bowed to the U.S. Bush praised Museveni as a shining example of African statesmen. To the rest of the world, Museveni had metamorphosed from a revolutionary African leader to a docile American pupil. In this regard, for some of us, it is a huge embarrassment when the number one war criminal in the world, who should be facing charges in the Hague, showers praises on our leader. No amount of positive media coverage may possibly help Senator Obama win votes in the U.S. if he were for four days to dine and go sight-seeing with Osama bin Laden in the beautiful land of Afghanistan! The situation would certainly be far worse if Osama were to shower praises on him. Likewise, Tanzania will irreparably tarnish her image by allowing the blood-drenching Bush to land in Tanzania, let alone to entertain him for four dark days.

When Fidel Castro or Nelson Mandela visited Tanzania, the country virtually came to a standstill. Thousands upon thousands of Tanzanians braved the rain and the scorching sun to welcome them at the airport. The rest thronged the streets out of respect and admiration. What a contrast with the forthcoming visit of Mr. Bush. For the first time since Independence, a state visit by a foreign head of state is greeted with fierce debates about the wisdom of allowing him to come! His presence is not an asset but a political liability.

Ominous Signs on the Wall

One ominous result of our close association with the American Empire, which may not be intended but inevitable, is the radical shift in our foreign policy. You cannot unequivocally support the rights of the Palestinian people against the Zionist occupation of their land and at the same time win the praise of Mr. Bush as an exemplary statesman. America is backing Israel to the hilt. We used to support the Palestinian people. To this day there is in Sinza area a hospital named after Palestine. The Palestinian people provided us with their doctors in appreciation of our political solidarity with them. We have to make a choice. We either maintain our stance against oppression and foreign occupation and court the displeasure of Mr. Bush or join the oppressors and win the unqualified praise from Mr. Bush and his so-called world media. It seems we value the empty praises of Mr. Bush more. This is a political tragedy.

The clearest example of this shift was observed when in 2006, the Israelis with the open support of the U.S. and UK launched their ill-fated war against Hezbullah in Lebanon. Tanzania was at a loss. The incompatibility of running with the hare and hunting with the hound confronted us. As country after country issued statements to condemn Israel, Tanzania kept quiet. And when we could no longer keep quiet, we issued a feeble and disappointing statement which provoked the anger of most Tanzanians. For the first time, Tanzania spoke with an uncertain voice. We condemned both, the aggressor and the victim! Even that feeble statement was eclipsed in virtually all print and electronic media! The Americans were happy. We were on the side of oppressors. We qualified to send a peace-keeping force to Lebanon! This, again, is a very bad omen indeed.

On the question of Somalia, once again, Tanzania is supporting the war-lords who were recruited and funded by the U.S. The Somali people rejected and defeated them. Peace returned in Somalia. The U.S instructed Ethiopia to intervene militarily. As a result, the biggest humanitarian crisis now is not in Darfur but in Somalia. However, since the principal architect of the crisis in Somalia is America, the suffering of the Somali people is not covered in the so-called world media. Uganda has dutifully sent her army to Mogadishu to give political life support to the American puppets. Tanzania has accepted the role of training the police force of Bush’s henchmen in Mogadishu. We are allowing America to divide us. In whose interest?

In short, as we go closer and closer to the armpit of the U.S. we shall quite inevitably, recede further and further from our former Third world allies. Americans and Europeans are granted visa at the airport here in Dar es Salaam. Egyptians, our long-standing allies and fellow Africans have to apply for visa and await clearance before they can travel to Tanzania. We invite investors from America, and we organize the Sullivan meeting. We discourage investors from the Middle East. America does not like them. The president has made many trips abroad. I do not recall if he has visited Iran, where we do not even have an Embassy. And yet, Iran bailed us out at a very critical moment when the country had no fuel. When our president was in Cuba to attend the NAM conference, he did not pay a courtesy call to Fidel Castro! From Cuba he went to the U.S. These are ominous signs on our political wall.

The Hawk and the Pigeons

In the Fables of Aesop there is a story of the hawk and the pigeons which is worth recalling as we invite Bush in Tanzania:

Some pigeons had long lived in fear of a hawk, but since they had always kept on the alert and stayed near their dovecote, they had consistently managed to escape their enemy’s attacks. Finding his sallies unsuccessful, the hawk now sought to use cunning to trick the pigeons.

“Why,” he once said, “do you prefer this life of constant anxiety when I could keep you safe from any conceivable attack by the kites and falcons? All you have to do is to make me your king, and I won’t bother you anymore.”

Trusting his claims, the pigeons elected him to their throne, but no sooner was he installed than he began exercising his royal prerogative by devouring a pigeon a day.

“It serves us right,” said one poor pigeon whose turn was yet to come.

The moral of the story is that some remedies are worse than the disease itself.

Let me end as I began with a quotation:

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”
--Abraham Lincoln.

*Hamza Mustafa Njozi is a Senior Lecturer in Literature and current Chair in the Department of Literature at the University of Dar es Salaam.


**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org



January 20, 2008

The Post-Washington Consensus: the Unraveling of a Doctrine of Development

[World] Bank researchers have...done extremely visible work on globalization, on aid effectiveness, and on growth and poverty. In many ways, they have been the leaders in these issues. But the panel had substantial criticisms of the way that the research was used to proselytize on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that is favorable to Bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of checks and balances that should have separated advocacy and research. The panel endorses the right of the Bank to strongly defend and advocate its own policies. But when the Bank leadership selectively appeals to relatively new and untested research as hard evidence that these preferred policies work, it lends unwarranted confidence to the Bank's prescriptions. Placing fragile selected new research results on a pedestal invites later recrimination that undermines the credibility and usefulness of all Bank research.

(An Evaluation of World Bank Research, 1998-2005)

Globalization has failed to provide capital a escape route from its accumulating crises. With its failure, we are now seeing capitalist elites giving up on it and resorting to nationalist strategies of protection and state-backed competition for global markets and global resources, with the US capitalist class leading the way. This is the context that Jeffrey Sachs and other social democrats fail to appreciate when they advance their utopia: an "enlightened global capitalism" that would both promote and "humanize" globalization.

Late capitalism has an irreversible destructive logic. Instead of engaging in the impossible task of humanizing a failed globalist project, the urgent challenge facing us is managing the retreat from globalization so that it does not provoke the proliferation of runaway conflicts and destabilizing developments such as those that marked the end of the first wave of globalization in 1914.




by

Walden Bello*

December 05, 2007

Today's history lesson; CIA, the Arctic, resource list

By going to the link you can read all twelve chapters or at least bookmark them.

I put this one on IN FULL because it dealas with the next imperial phase we are about to see - the thunderclouds in Africa and at the bottom of the world are already apparent - and then there is the Arctic to look at,too, but not covered here.

Here is a way to see some of the REAL forces at play.

If I were doing podcasts and video specials, I would most definitely be zoning on at getting this stuff out where it doesn't have to be read, as such, but can be taken in via pictures and audio.



The Final Empire Chapter 12

COLONIALISM IN THE MODERN WORLD

The Final Empire Chapter 12

COLONIALISM IN THE MODERN WORLD

Zaire: The Congo Atrocity Evolves

Following the end of the rubber boom, the French-Belgian created bloodbath in the Congo basin subsided somewhat but the basic extraction of profits went on. By 1960 the Congo, now called Zaire, was being readied for independence like many African colonies. Independence was to be with a Belgian-chosen leader and with continuing outside ownership and control of the rich resources of oil, cobalt, copper and other minerals. As Independence Day neared, an indigenous leader, Patrice Lumumba arose and began to win elections. By the day of independence he was the acknowledged leader of the new country. Soon a former sergeant in the Congolese army, Mobutu, who had been handpicked by Belgian Intelligence and the U.S. CIA to be the leader, had much of the military behind him and Lumumba murdered. By 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko became the absolute dictator and continues to rule this hapless land to this day under the direction of the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. They oversee security affairs while the industrial elite is represented by such groups as the International Oil Cartel, Union Minie’re, owned at the time of independence by the Belgian Corporation, the Special Board of Katanga and the company well known in South Africa, the Anglo-American company, Oppenheim de Beers.1

Prior to independence the Belgian directed export agriculture had also made the country food self-sufficient (prior to colonialism the area had been food self-sufficient for thousands of years). The money making export crops were sugar, rice, corn, millet, cassava, bananas and other minor crops. As the society disintegrated under the Mobutu dictatorship, food production fell. In 1988 the country imported 60% of its food.

Like other U.S. backed dictators such as Marcos of the Philippines, Somoza of Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran who were super thieves, Mobutu has simply thrown open the country to the trans-nationals who pay a sum to Mobutu for the resources. The Mobutu government occupies itself with robbing the people of what little is left while Mobutu travels to his many palaces, including 26 luxury apartments, villas, chateaux and palaces in Europe. Some place his personal fortune at $8 billion, all of it stolen from the impoverished people of Zaire.

Journalist Steve Askin reports that despite Zaire’s being one of the richest countries in Africa, the country is $5 billion in debt to the international banks. The Zairian people are the ninth poorest on earth yet they must struggle to bear up under a typical International Monetary Fund "austerity plan." "Zaire has fired 40 percent of its government workers, withheld wage increases from those still on the payroll, [and] drastically cut its already meager social service spending. By this economic bloodletting of the population, Zaire is able to pay the international bankers 30 percent of the national budget for debt repayment."2

Three billion dollars of the loan money that incurred this debt went to the Trans-National construction company of Morrison-Knudson to build a power line 1,100 miles long from a dam near Mobutu’s capital of Kinshasha, to Katanga province where the cobalt and copper mines are located. Even though there is hydro-electric potential near the mines, this $3 billion was spent so that Mobutu could "turn off the lights" from Kinshasha, 1,100 miles to the north, in case of any secessionist effort.

Mobutu is used by the U.S. for votes in the UN and the Organization of African Unity. The country is used as a staging area for CIA warfare, projected into other African states and Mobutu’s army is used as a U.S. surrogate for invading other African countries according to the needs of U.S. strategy. Torture, including the CIA’s favorite, the electric shock machine, is widely used against both political and criminal detainees. Total fascism is the form of government under the dictator and total neglect is the social policy. Estimates are that less than 10% of the roads that existed on Independence Day remain and indigenous commerce has all but stopped. After three hundred years of colonial plunder Zaire still has riches to loot, the people continue to starve and the living conditions deteriorate under the "neo-colonialism" of the industrial order.3

Following the ouster of Mobutu the situation has deteriorated even further. Warfare is coursing across much of Africa. Even though major powers each have favorite players that they encourage from the background, the value of the resources that could be gained in such a volatile area do not appear to be enough to bring in heavy military investment from major colonial nations. Also, with the retreat of the Soviet Union it is difficult to convince taxpayers that vast expenditures for military adventures in far flung regions are necessary.

The reason that Zaire was never a matter of household conversation in the U.S. is that the International Corporate Media does not report the situation. The mass information media is essentially controlled by the state in the socialist countries and in the capitalist countries the capitalist class owns it. In the U.S., according to Ben Badgakian, in his study, The Media Monopoly, the whole of television, films, radio, newspapers, magazines and book publishing is essentially owned by less than twenty-five huge conglomerate corporations. This number has been falling steadily for decades. As Michael Parenti explains in his recent book, The Mass Media, the corporate owned media do not so much alter the facts, but frame the facts of each event within the social and ideological framework of the national security state- the militarized juggernaut. Within the context of the National Security State the CIA has significantly infiltrated the ranks of the media as we began to learn in the late 1960’s. In addition to subsidizing the publications of many books, there are working writers on the CIA payroll, or the payrolls of CIA front groups, as well as media workers who are conduits for information that the agency wishes to be presented to the public. Because of the CIA infiltration of journalism, especially in Third World countries, it is possible for them to conduct worldwide disinformation campaigns.

During the initial stages of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States a secret government was formalized within American democracy. For the first time an elaborate system of security clearances and classified documents was created along with a presidentially appointed National Security Council that was not provided for in the U.S. Constitution. This placed a firewall between the electorate and the activities of the higher reaches of government. This is especially true concerning activities of the U.S. government outside its borders. This has enabled the U. S. Government to conduct activities on behalf of the economic elite throughout the world while clothing these activities in the pieties of "aiding democracy" or "free trade."

Antarctica: Empire at the End of the World

Nothing describes the needs and motives of the present industrial empire so well as the final rape-Antarctica. This beautiful and mysterious land is literally the end of the world. It is the south end of the planet and it is the last piece of the planet that has not been plundered by the culture of empire.

Because of the convection currents and because Antarctica is exposed to all oceans, it occupies a pivotal place in the planetary cycles of weather and biology. Barney Brewster in his, Friends of the Earth, book about Antarctica says that:

"Although the Southern Ocean represents only five per cent of the world’s oceans in area, it accounts for 20 per cent of the total marine photosynthesis and plays a major part in deep-ocean water circulation, influencing waters far to the north. Antarctic deep-ocean water carries nutrients which feed economically important fisheries in many parts of the world - Argentine hake, Brazilian tuna, South African pilchard and the remnants of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery."4

Ocean upwellings around the periphery of Antarctica provide the nutrient to charge the food chain. The phytoplankton feed the masses of krill. Krill are a small shrimp-like organism that grow up to three inches long and exist in the Antarctic waters in the amounts of millions of tons. They are the basic energy of the simple food chain of Antarctica. They directly feed the baleen whales, squid and small fish, crabeater seals, adelie penguin, and the sea birds. The next level of the food chain that feeds on the krill eaters are the large fish, weddell and ross seals, killer whale, leopard seal, gull and emperor penguin. The whales in the southern waters were early hunted to near extinction as they migrated in, seasonally, to feed on the krill. Now, "It is estimated that blue whales are less than 5 per cent of their original stock, humpbacks 3 per cent, and fin whales less than 20 per cent."5 The fur seals around South Georgia and the South Shetland islands have been slowly increasing since the devastation for the Yankee trade to China but some authorities believe the small population is now going down again because of the initial krill fishing in the area which is impacting the food chain.6 In the islands north of Antarctica, especially toward Australia, there, historically, have been industries that boiled seals and penguins for the oil in their bodies but so far as is known, no extinctions have been the result of that practice.

The landmass of Antarctica has not yet been devastated by human activities. Most of the visitors have been "scientific expeditions" who are there to do science as well as to bolster their respective country’s claim to a piece of the action by their presence- as well as look for industrial valuables. Approximately 700 people winter over at Antarctica and the population rises to 4-5,000 in the summer. This population is scattered at 33 year-round bases and other temporary sites. Two thousand tons of cargo and food come in each year as well as 20 million litres of fuel. Very little is taken out.7 Most of these human settlements are on the rocks or other spots bare of ice. This has created a conflict with the animals and birds who themselves heavily use these scarce sights for nesting and other life activities. Because there are no land animals larger than three centimeters in size (mites), the living population is centered on the ocean and the shorelines, which are essential to them. This is also the location where the human exploiters will congregate as they arrive and set up operations.

Increasing human populations are a threat to the Antarctic environment. Another continuing threat is human stupidity. In 1962 the United States Navy brought in a nuclear power plant in violation of the Antarctic treaty. After ten years of trouble and leaks the reactor was shut down. It was shipped back to the U.S. with 101 large drums of contaminated earth and was followed later by 11,000 cubic meters of radioactive rock. After six years of work, the site was declared sanitized.8

That the industrial predators are preparing to dismember the Antarctic is plain. The most serious threats at the present are krill fishing, whaling, sealing, oil drilling and mining. Krill fishing has been commenced by Japan and the former USSR. Other countries are testing products made with the krill to try to find ways to make money from it. The krill catch was estimated by the FOA at 20,000 to 40,000 tons in the early 1970’s and has been rising steadily. The life habits of the krill are quite complex and little is known about them and little is known about the whole complex of krill and krill eaters. Nonetheless, the industrialists have charged ahead. Harvesting the krill could have serious effects. The nearly extinct whale species need it to revive their numbers and other krill feeders depend on it.

There are pirate whalers who have connections with the Japanese fishing fleets in the area who are still killing the nearly extinct large whales. The large scale whalers of recent years, the Russians and the Japanese, are taking minke whale in the area but have not killed the endangered fin, blue, humpback or southern right whales as far as is known. Because of the expense of operating in Antarctica, exploiting the area is to a great extent dependent upon how desperate countries become for protein, minerals and oil. As ecological catastrophes and exhaustion of resources progress outside Antarctica, the likelihood of industrial exploitation of Antarctic increases.

A very serious possibility is a rush for the "black gold." A number of countries have had oil exploration teams and programs in Antarctica. If oil production begins, Antarctica will be finished. Already there are reports of penguins covered with oil from local spills from ships in the area. The biodegradation rate in the area is far longer than in warmer areas. All garbage, equipment and other debris left since the first humans came there is still there. Oil spills and the locating of human communities that would be needed for the work on Antarctica could finish the life that needs the sea and the strip of land close to it. The krill, the baleen whales that filter seawater to catch the krill, the penguins, seabirds and seals that travel from land to water would all be devastated. In an environment like the Antarctic, clean-up would be almost impossible and if a blow-out occurred it could be under conditions that would make it difficult to stop and if it could not be stopped, (in mid-winter for example) it would simply continue to drain into the sea.

The approach of the industrial countries to Antarctica demonstrates that the essential dynamics of empire culture have not changed since the time of the Sumerians. The motive of immediate gain continues to take precedence over all other values.

Empire in the Modern World:Managed Opinion

The evidence of history suggests that as the public awareness increased in the First World countries, the imperial elites found it necessary to manage domestic opinion and sources of information. The motives and methods of extorting the colonies did not change but the sensibilities of the public in the imperial countries became more acute. The French Revolution, the American Revolution and other changes brought a more sophisticated view of the rights of citizens and the functioning of elites. The motives and strategies of colonialism do not change but the justifications and explanations to the public of the First World have become a smooth integral part of the operation. In the Sixteenth Century no explanation to the European public was necessary but later imperialism became a phenomena of cultural opinion. It became a social ideology. As this change occurred it became necessary for the elites to reflect back to the public the charitable and beneficial effects on the colonies and to conceal the basic motives and methods. In the U.S. it was clothed in "Manifest Destiny," God was often said to have given the New World to the deserving Christians and this encouraged the "missionary fervor" which was encouraged by the elites. All this combined into a jingoistic support for empire. In the present the continuing enterprise to extort valuables from the colonies and to ensure control of them, is clothed in a mythology of "anti-communism," "antiterrorism," and bringing democracy and economic development to the less socially developed masses. The competing elites of the industrialized countries have managed to thoroughly militarize human society. The elites often say that the reason that we must have such tight police control of civilized society is because of "human nature." That is, humans are so violent and savage that there must be outside control of their behavior. On the world scene, the justification for the military control of the planet is said to be the threat of "capitalist imperialism," "the terrorist threat," "communist subversion" or "guerilla insurgency." The reality is, however, that empires expend the effort to have colonies because they are getting something from them - money- markets and resources. Now, with the huge debt of Third World countries, the elites of the capitalist group can literally take over these countries. When the debt cannot be paid and the country is desperate for capital, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank will extend another loan if the country agrees to allow the bankers to send in its own teams to run the economic planning and commerce departments of those countries. The "austerity" or "reform" programs that the bankers subject the country to, are designed to sell off socially owned enterprises to the planetary economic elite and squeeze money out of the masses of the country to pay the debt. The foreign exchange to pay the debt is generated by exporting the country’s resources and impoverishing its citizens. This impoverishes the workers, the country's society, the ecology and tends to centralize the remaining economy in the hands of the domestic and international elite.

Controlling the Colony

In a world of empires, colonies and competing "spheres of influence," there is the threat that some competing empire may steal a colony but there is also the greater threat that the population of the colony may try to stop the extortion and throw out the invaders. This threat of "nationalism" is dealt with by preventing any social development in the colony that is not under the control of the colonial elite. The colonial elite, in turn, ultimately is under the control of its handlers, in the First World industrial elite.

Just after the close of World War II the centers of imperial power began to consolidate their turf. The USSR surrounded itself with dominated colonies, China began to assert its old imperial dominance and the U.S. and European capitalists moved to manage the control of the old colonial structure. This colonial control exercised by the capitalists often took the form of "giving independence" to a colony run by a colonial elite but covertly maintaining control of that former colony’s military and economic infrastructure. One technique of control used in the U.S., "banana republic" colonies is revealed by a Central America study group who say:

"In 1870, US banks began the practice of offering to pay a Central American nation’s entire European debt in a lump payment under the condition that the nation would agree to place itself under a customs receivership in which the US would control the nation’s foreign trade and many aspects of its domestic economy. This economic relationship replaced political colonization with an equally effective method for controlling the trade, resources and labor of another country. Nicaragua was under a US customs receivership until 1949."9

After the close of World War II, first Britain, then the U.S. assisted in fighting a war in Greece against indigenous and left leaning forces that had been the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. These populist Greek forces were defeated and a puppet (and Fascist, in the case of the military dictatorship) colonial elite was installed. The old colonial empires then fought the indigenous guerrillas, the "Huks" of the former U.S. colonial possession of the Philippines,to a standstill in the 1950’s and a peasant revolt in British controlled Malaysia in the same era. This was a historical recreation of the original U.S. takeover from the Spanish. In the earlier era both Cuba and the Philippines had anti-colonialist forces who were nearly to throw out the Spanish. The U.S. saved the day for the empire by frightening off and defeating the Spanish and then wiping out the anti-colonialist resistance. The U.S. in the Kissinger era was able to role back "threatening" nationalism in Indonesia under Sukarno. Kissinger and Nixon backed a military coup and the CIA handed out lists of people marked for elimination. The estimate is, at least one half million people died in this strategy to control empire. Eventually a war was fought in Vietnam in an attempt to regain the French colony that had been taken over by the anti-Japanese resistance under the leadership of Ho Chi Min.

In the post-World War II era, a system of conflict and competition evolved wherein secret government agencies were used as the spearhead of covert war. This system exists and evolved because of this same motive- to conceal these foreign activities both from the "enemies" and the First World domestic populations. The home populations would not approve of them, or the policies they serve, if they were known. That is the functional reason for the shroud of secrecy of the "National Security State." Honorable government actions are not kept secret from the people. Secret covert action agencies like the U.S., CIA and Russian, KGB exist now in many governments of the earth. After World War II, the imperial governments used their secret war agencies to set up secret police and covert action agencies in their colonies. The KGB assisted the creation of secret police in Eastern Europe and the CIA helped create secret police and intelligence agencies like the hated Savak in the Shah’s Iran, the CIA counterpart in West Germany under General Rheinhard Gehlen and the KCIA in Korea. These agencies carry out domestic and foreign activities. The foreign activities are usually acts and atrocities that the elite would not want to be associated with publicly.

At times the clothing of "anti-Communist" rhetoric was not used but some other negative image such as "nationalist," as in the CIA overthrow of Mohammed Mossedeq of Iran to get the oil fields. Generally, such as in the overthrow of Arbenz, the nationalist leader of Guatemala in 1954, with CIA assistance, all of the drumbeaters and "anti-Communist" cheerleaders in the corporate controlled mass media were called out to manipulate the mental images of the populace of the empire. By the time of the CIA’s war in Vietnam, the control of empire was being called "counter-insurgency warfare." Not only the control of the colonial elites was necessary but also it became necessary to control the infrastructure of society itself. In Vietnam, the CIA discovered that they were fighting the very society itself, in a war of colonial domination. The response to this was the perceived need to destroy indigenous social leadership. Operation Phoenix and the strategic hamlet concepts came out of this. Operation Phoenix was a program to murder or imprison persons who occupied positions of social leadership not controlled by the empire. Strategic hamlets were created usually by forced relocation of peasant populations and imprisonment in guarded "villages" that were under military control.

These strategies have developed into the present such that colonial militaries and police forces that are trained in the First World, maintain "death squads" who’s task it is to eliminate any indigenous leadership that may compete with the controlled cadres of the empire. Farm cooperative leaders, labor leaders, church leaders who advocate compassion for the poor, doctors, teachers who may teach self-help or assist the dispossessed are all seen as creating the possibilities of social power outside of imperial control and so are kidnapped, tortured and murdered. These assassination team members have often been trained at the U.S. base in Panama or at the torture schools at U.S. bases in Texas and Louisiana maintained by the CIA. "Low-intensity warfare," the new name for imperial control, is not always intended to have dramatic winners, often it is used simply to "soften-up" a country for some policy strategy. This amounts to simply bashing the target country with terrorism, divisiveness and sabotage until the country is shredded and its people suffering and easily controlled. What is called low-intensity warfare is not really warfare but simply the covert management techniques of the empires. This does not necessarily have anything to do with violence but involves such things as manipulating the local media through journalists, militarists and politicians who are on the foreign intelligence agency’s payroll.

There is usually foreign participation in elections above ground, such as through the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO and CIA linked American Institute for Free Labor Development, and the CIA-U.S. Chamber of Commerce linked Center for International Private Enterprise. There are also underground conduits of cash, supplies and experts offered to selected candidates and parties. Books are published clandestinely and widely circulated, serving covert strategies. Particular social groups and institutions are organized and financed within the target country, which serve particular strategies. In effect only the imagination limits these covert action agencies who have huge budgets hidden within their own home government’s accounting.

There is the motive to protect the investments and profits in the colony and there is also the motive to prevent the example of independence of a colony, its escape from a "sphere of influence."

Creation of the "Internationalist" Empire

Although we now have the imperial centers of the U.S., Europe, and China, the coordination of the capitalist powers has integrated into a powerful elite under the auspices of the Rockefeller/Kissinger created Tri-Lateral Commission with what appears to be the executive function in the annual Bilderburg Conference. These groups include some of the richest people in the world, leading military figures (not always in uniform), the major international bankers, some representatives of wealthy royal families and high government officials especially from the U.S., West Germany and Japan. Membership in the Tri-Lateral Commission is centered on corporate entities that do business in from several to many countries. This "Commission" has developed along with a homogenized elite that owns and controls the international class of Trans-National corporations.

In a country such as the U.S., being 6% of the world’s population and consuming more than half the entire planet’s resources each year, most coming from outside its borders, the need to control the resources and markets is obvious on the face of it. As with the old slaving days and the opium days, the masses in the First World countries must be convinced that the activities of their governments are absolutely altruistic. "Helping," "economic development," "anti-terrorism," "assisting democracy," "winning hearts and minds," and of course the "communist menace" are images used to camouflage what is really happening, which is the control and operation of an industrial empire who’s vast flow system needs massive amounts of raw materials and equally massive markets for the products. Much of the control, planning and execution of these policies is out of view of the electorate and often are performed by clandestine groups such as CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the KGB and the covert action groups of the other industrial states. The structure of power that has developed from the earlier colonial empires is one of complete militarization of the world through alliances such as NATO, ASEAN, Warsaw Pact, and other military aid and currency loan connections. This has spawned the largest arms race the world has ever seen. Countries that cannot feed their people can always get loans for armaments from First World states.

The struggle for planetary supremacy is conducted with secret strategies and it is conducted in the minds of the people through the mass media. The control of sources of information is an important factor in domination of each empire’s "sphere of influence."

(A full bibliography is included for those interested in the covert management of the contemporary empire.) 10

Although industrial investment in the colonies generally returns large profits (25% per year being the standard), super-profits since World War II have come from guns and drugs. The U.S. has been the largest armaments producer, with other countries now catching up rapidly. Alliances and militarization have been encouraged all over the world and this has seen the militaries take power (overt or covert) in most societies. The petroleum industry is the largest planetary industry but it is closely followed by the armaments industry in size and production. The armaments industry mushrooms as all forms of colonial exploitation grow. A modern example is the [1989] Iran-Iraq war, where 42 arms-exporting countries sold weapons to the combatants and 36 sold to both sides.

Some now estimate the planetary drug market to be $500 billion per year. The sources of opium are Turkey (where the plant originated), Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Laos and Mexico. A few peasants in remote areas do not control the huge volumes of this valuable substance. Peasants are not seen transporting the trainloads of cash involved in this trade. It is not difficult to see that commerce of this importance requires people of equal importance to conduct it. This super-profit trade is controlled by some of the more powerful people in the world. Governments of origin get cuts, international transporters get cuts and controllers of distribution in the rich countries get cuts. The opium poppy growing regions are (with the possible exception of portions of the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia) substantially under the control of the U.S. In many regions such as with the Meo tribesmen of Laos, the tribals of Afghanistan/Pakistan, and the colonial elites of the cocaine producing countries of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, there are strong historical contacts with the U.S. CIA.

The economic trade relations of empire are simple. The price of manufactured goods produced in the industrial countries rises faster than the price of raw resources sold by the Third World countries. This is the basic economic relationship. This has historically been the case. In the field of economics, the studies that developed this information are called the Prebisch Thesis, named after Raul Prebisch. Prebisch worked at the United Nations in the 1960’s when he developed these statistical studies. Because of this export/import disparity and because of the energy price rise of the 1970’s, the Third World has gone heavily into debt with the international bankers. This gives the bankers the opportunity to manage the economies of the Third World. In return for new loans the country must accept an economic plan that effectively bleeds the country and destroys remaining healthy ecology in the name of "resource extraction." In 1990, the net flow of money from the developing world to the developed nations was over $100 billion (U.S.) per year. This is a net figure, meaning the excess over the flow from the developed to the developing nations.11

The possibility of Third World countries taking over their own countries for their own benefit is slight. The overwhelming destructive power of secretly maneuvering covert action groups, an economic blockade by First World governments, a "capital strike" (the withdrawing of funds from the colony), strangulation by the international banks and a cutoff of funds by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank is almost certain to smother any indigenous movement. Just as workers can withhold their labor in a labor strike, so can capital withhold investment. Though the remaining and remote forager/hunters of the earth can still survive nicely without the industrial empire, everyone in the money economy, who’s survival systems are dependent on industry, are subject to those who control the money, guns and industrial production.

NOTES

1 My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria. Andre’e Blouin. Praeger Scientific pub. New York. 1983. p. 267.

2 National Catholic Reporter. July, 29, 1988. vol. 24, no. 36. "Rule by Kleptocracy in Zaire wins Mobutu U.S. backing," Steve Askin. p. 9.

3 ibid. pp. 7-11,14.

4 Antarctica: Wilderness At Risk. Barney Brewster. Friends of the Earth. San Francisco. 1982. p. 97

5 Let’s Save Antarctica!. James N. Barnes. Greenhouse Publications. Victoria, Australia. 1982. p. 18.

6 ibid. p. 19.

7 Brewster. Antarctica. op. cit. p. 49.

8 ibid. p. 56,57.

9 EPOCA UPDATE. Summer 1990. Earth Island Institute. San Francisco, CA. p. 2,3.

10 Sources of information on the conduct of covert strategies of the modern empire.

RELEVANT PERIODICALS:

Intelligence/Parapolitics. monthly, $20/yr. P.O.Box 50441, Washington, D.C. 20004 or 16 rue des Ecoles, 75005 Paris, France.

The National Reporter. quarterly, $13/yr. P.O.Box 21279, Washington, D.C. 20009.

Covert Action Quarterly. quarterly, $15/yr. P.O.Box 50272, Washington, D.C. 20004.

Lobster: Intelligence-Parapolitics-State Research. published occasionally, $14/yr. 17c Pearson Ave., Hull; HU5 2SX; United Kingdom.

RELEVANT BOOKS:

The World War II Era.

The War Lords of Washington: The Inside Story of Big BusinessVersus The People in World War II. Bruce Catton. Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1948.

The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy. Rodney Campbell. McGraw-Hill Book Co. 1977.

Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power 1919-1933. James Pool and Suzanne Pool. Dial Press. 1978.

Trading With The Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. Charles Higham. Delacorte Press. 1983.

Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance. Michael R. Beschloss. W.W. Norton & Co. 1980.

The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano. Marin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer. Little, Brown & Co. 1974

The Post-World War II Era.

Klaus Barbie: The Shocking Story of How the U.S. Used this Nazi War Criminal as an Intelligence Agent. Erhard Dabringhaus. Acropolis Books Inc. 1984.

Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich. Ladislas Farago. Simon & Schuster. 1974.

The Bormann Brotherhood: A New Investigation of the Escape and Survival of Nazi War Criminals. William Stevenson. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1973.

The Belarus Secret. John Loftus. Alfred A. Knopf. 1982.

(When John Loftus was an Assistant Attorney General working for the Justice Department he was assigned to investigate the existence of numerous Nazi war criminals living comfortably in the U. S. When little action was taken, he wrote this account of the case.)

The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection. Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton and Neal Ascherson. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1984.

The General was a Spy: The Truth about General Reinhard Gehlen.. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc. 1971. (How part of Hitler’s intelligence apparatus was merged with the CIA.)

The Super-States, The Korean War and the Present Era.

The Hidden History of the Korean War. I.F. Stone. Monthly Review Press. 1952.

Global Rift: The Third World Comes Of Age. L.S. Stavrianos. William Morrow & Co. 1981.

The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. Frank J. Donner. Alfred A. Knopf. 1980.

The CIA: A Forgotten History/ US Global Interventions Since World War 2. William Blum. Zed Books. 1986.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights. Vol. I Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. South End Press. 1979.

After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and The Reconsideration of Imperial Ideology. Vol. II. Chomsky & Herman. South End Press. 1979.

The Geography of Empire. Keith Buchanan. Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation pub. 1972.

The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to The Second Indochina War. Peter Dale Scott. Bobbs-Merrill Co. 1972.

Torture In The Eighties. Amnesty International Report. 1984.

War Without End: American Planning For The Next Vietnams. Michael T. Klare. Alfred A. Knopf. 1970.

Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA. Ralph W. McGehee. Sheridan Square Pub. 1983.

In Search Of Enemies: A CIA Story. John Stockwell. W.W. Norton & Co.1978.

Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World: How America’s Worldwide Interventions Destroy Democracy And Free Enterprise And Defeat Our Own Best Interests. Jonathan Kwitny. Congdon & Weed, Inc. 1984.

The Secret Team: The CIA And Its Allies In Control Of The United States And The World. L. Fletcher Prouty, Col., U.S. Airforce (Ret.) Prentice-Hall. 1973. (Excellent introductory volume by an official who served many years at the highest levels of the U.S. government/military.)

None of Your Business: Government Secrecy in America. Norman Dorsen and Stephen Gillers, Editors. Viking Press. 1974.

State Secrets: Police Surveillance in America. Paul Cowan, Nick Egleson and Nat Hentoff. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1974.

Agent’s Of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against The Black Panther Party and The American Indian Movement. Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall. South End Press. 1988.

Inside The Shadow Government: Declaration of Plaintiffs’ Counsel Filed by the Christic Institute, U.S. District Court, Miami, Florida, March 31, 1988. Edith Holleman, et. al. Christic Institute Pub. 1324 North Capitol St. N.W., Wash. D.C. 20002.

On The Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy. Jim Garrison. Sheridan Square Press. 1988.

High Treason:The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: What Really Happened. Robert Groden. Conservatory Press. 1989.

The Yankee and Cowboy War. Carl Oglesby.

Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Jim Marrs. Carrol & Graf Pub.1989.

The Assassinations: Dallas And Beyond: a guide to cover-ups and investigations. First edition. Peter Dale Scott. Random House. 1976.

Works Concerning the Corporate Sector of the Same Era.

In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican. Penny Lernoux. Anchor Press/Doubleday. 1984.

Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning For World Management. Holly Sklar, ed. South End Press. 1980.

The Bohemian Grove And Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-class Cohesiveness. G. William Dumhoff. Harper Torchbooks. 1975.

Inside Job: The Looting Of America’s Savings and Loans. Stephen Pizzo.McGraw Hill. 1989.

Drugs and the International Elite

The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams And Covert Operations In The Reagan Era. Johnathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter. South End Press. 1987.

Out Of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration’s Secret War In Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipelines, and the Contra Drug Connection. Leslie Cockburn. Atlantic Monthly Press. 1987.

The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism. Henrik Kruger. South End Press. 1980.

The Politics Of Heroin In Southeast Asia. Alfred McCoy. Harper & Row. 1972.

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Alfred McCoy. Lawrence Hill/Chicago Review Press. Chicago. 1991.

Of Grass and Snow. Hank Messick. Prentice-Hall. 1990.

The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Facism. Trans. from Danish. Henrick Kruger. Black Rose Books. Canada. 1990.

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America. Peter Dale Scott, et. al. U of Calif. Press. March, 1991.

Deep Cover: The Inside Story Of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence And Subterfuge Lost Us The Biggest Battle Of The Drug War. Micheal Levine. Delacorte Press. N.Y. 1990.

Elite Control of the Mass Media.

A Dangerous Game: CIA and the Mass Media. Vitaly Petrusenko, Interpress, Prague, Czechoslovakia. 1977.

Even The Gods Can’t Change History: The Facts Speak for Themselves. ,George Seldes. Lyle Stuart pub. 1976.

The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. Senator J. William Fulbright.Vintage Books. 1970.

Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media. Michael Parenti. St. Martin’s Press. 1986.

The CIA And The Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered it Up. Carl Bernstein. Rolling Stone (magazine). 20 Oct. 1877.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Pantheon. 1989.

EPOCA UPDATE. Summer 1990. "Are Debt-for-Nature Swaps the Answer?" Earth Island Institute. San Francisco, CA. p. 3.

End of Chapter 12 and Volume

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