Thursday 30 June 2016

Obama's AFRICOM Nominee Will Seek Authority to Assassinate


by Ann Garrison



“The general would he expand the so-called War on Terror in Africa and seek the authority to assassinate without presidential approval.”
Marine Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser
On June 21st, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) questioned Marine Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, President Obama’s nominee to become the next four star general commanding AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. Most of the discussion focused on the ongoing conflict, aka crisis, in Libya, where territory is now controlled by seven different forces: the Council of Deputies and Libyan National Army; the Government of National Accord and Libya Shield Force; the Islamic State; the Shura Councils of Benghazi, Derna and Ajdabiya; the Petroleum Facilities Guard; the Tuareg; and local forces.  
“Control of oil and currency issues were the actual motives behind the U.S. and NATO’s bombing war and the ouster of Gaddafi. 
In 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then UN Ambassador Susan Rice and then National Security Advisor Samantha Power argued that the U.S. was morally obliged to bomb Libya to stop its leader Muammar Gaddafi from committing genocide and mass atrocities as, they claimed, the U.S. had failed to do in Rwanda. E-mail on Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server has since revealed that control of oil and currency issues were the actual motives behind the U.S. and NATO’s bombing war and the ouster of Gaddafi. 
Neither oil nor currency issues were discussed at the SASC hearing, where  Lt. Gen. Waldhauser assured South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham that he would expand the so-called War on Terror in Africa and seek the authority to assassinate without presidential approval: 
Senator Lindsay Graham, R-SC: Libya, do we fly in Libya? 
Marine Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser: The answer is yes, if there is a target that is an imminent threat to the United States. 
LG: OK. Is ISIL an imminent threat to the United States? 
TW: Yes.
LG: Is ISIL in Libya? 
TW: Yes.
LG: How many sorties have we flown in Libya? 
TW: To my knowledge none at this time. 
LG: That makes no sense then, does it? 
TW: It does not. What I can say, Senator, at this time, is there are targets that are being developed, but there have been no flights flown. 
LG: How many people do we have on the ground in Libya? 
TW: I don't have that answer. It's not a large number. 
LG: Do we need people on the ground in Libya?
TW: Yes, we do.
LG: OK. Do you see any change in policy any time in the near future? 
TW: I'm not aware of any of those discussions, Senator. 
LG: Does the buildup of ISIL and other related Al Qaeda type groups present a threat to our European allies?
TW: Eventually they could. Yes. 
LG: OK, thank you. When it comes to Africa, what are the rules of engagement in terms of targeting ISIL in Africa? 
TW: Senator, I believe the rules of engagement have to do with the presidential policy guidance. That's what, when these targets pop up, the three that I mentioned that were hit in Libya this year, they fall under that criteria.  
LG: But you don't have the authority to, without presidential direction, to go and find ISIL members in Africa and kill them? 
TW: Well, Sir, if the question is do we have authority to take out targets, the AFRICOM commander has some authority for various targets in Somalia, for example, with Al-Shabab, but I'm not familiar with the details and if---
LG: Do you have the authority as AFRICOM commander do go after ISIL targets in Africa on your own? 
TW: I do not. 
LG: Do you think that would be wise to have that authority? 
TW: It would be wise. It would certainly contribute to what we're trying to do inside Libya. 
LG: Is the war moving to Africa over time, do you think? 
TW: It could. It's possible. I mean that's why ISIL has taken hold inside Sirte, to be kind of a backup if Iraq and Syria fail.
LG: So the ungoverned spaces in Africa are likely places for ISIL to flee to if we dislodge them from the traditional Mideast?
TW: They're very likely. That's why instability inside Africa is to ISIL's advantage. 
LG: When you come to, say, ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] shortages, how severe is that for your command? 
TW: Senator, if confirmed, I'd have to look into that to be specific. I think in the main, it goes without saying, I think it's common knowledge that AFRICOM's an economy theatre. I think it's common knowledge that AFRICOM could use more ISR, but beyond that, I don't have the specifics.
LG: Is it a fair statement when it comes to radical Islamic threats emanating from Africa, we've got a long way to go in upping our game?
TW: We do. That's an away game. I know that you've mentioned before we are fighting an away game in Africa to contain it on that continent.
Senator Graham concluded that he would gladly support the nomination of Obama's would-be assassin, aka extrajudicial executioner.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist living in Oakland, California.


http://www.blackagendareport.com/africom_assassination_plans

Economic Liberalization Ignores India’s Rural Misery

 


“Make In India” was Narendra Modi’s campaign slogan in 2014. Increasing India’s industrial production drove his agenda.
The service sector had made India relatively buoyant since it began to liberalize its economy in 1991. But the service sector’s growth was unsustainable and unpredictable. It could also not absorb the large numbers of educated Indians who found themselves unable to find decent work.
Foreign investment would provide a burst of growth but such a strategy would do little to reduce India’s vast oceans of poverty.
But the Make In India campaign spluttered. Industrial growth has plateaued and job creation has been weak. Halfway through this government’s term, Modi has decided to loosen rules on investment and attract foreign direct investment as a strategy for growth. This is the hallmark of the type of neoliberal policy that the International Monetary Fund’s research department recently warned tends to increase inequality. Such foreign investment would give a quick short burst of growth — perhaps just in time for the elections in 2019. But a United Nations study found last year that such a strategy would widen the gaps between classes in India and do little to tackle India’s greatest challenge – its vast oceans of poverty.
A 2014 McKinsey study found that 680 million people – more than half the Indian population – live in deprivation. To ameliorate this, McKinsey advocated job creation, sharing productivity gains and increased public spending and efficiency for basic services (health care, water and sanitation). None of this is going to be taken in hand by the policy that Modi has inaugurated.
About 70 percent of India’s population lives in the countryside. Modi’s predecessors, the Congress-Left alliance, understood the predicament and put in place a rural employment guarantee scheme. That reform has been sharply narrowed, as all of Modi’s policies seek to benefit the urban middle class at the expense of the rural poor. Poor management of the agricultural sector has resulted in food inflation – prices of tomatoes and potatoes have doubled since last year. That over 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995 seems to mean little to this government. Policies for those in deprivation are in short supply.
Transnational firms are not on a mission to eradicate poverty. It is the role of the government to do so. Modi’s government has abdicated its responsibility – as enshrined in the Indian Constitution – to ensure social, economic and political justice to the Indian people.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Vijay Prashad’s most recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/30/economic-liberalization-ignores-indias-rural-misery/

Amnesty, HRW want Saudis off UN rights council

United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Two leading human rights groups urged UN member-states to suspend Saudi Arabia from the UN Human Rights Council over the killing of civilians in Yemen and repression at home.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said they would begin lobbying the UN General Assembly to hold a vote on suspending Saudi Arabia from the Geneva-based council, even though they admitted this was a long shot.
"Over the past few months, Saudi Arabia has gone beyond the pale and does not deserve anymore to sit on the Human Rights Council," said HRW deputy director Philippe Bolopion.
Human Rights Watch accused Riyadh of targeting civilians in the war in Yemen, using cluster bombs banned by international conventions and laying siege to ports to prevent basic goods from reaching Yemen.
The joint appeal again put the spotlight on Saudi Arabia, which has been leading an Arab coalition carrying out air strikes against Huthi rebels and their allies who seized much of Yemen.
The coalition is supporting Yemen's President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi in a war that the UN says has killed more than 6,400 people, about half of them civilians since March 2015.
"Saudi Arabia is in a league of its own," Bolopion told a news conference, adding that the kingdom is "getting away with murder in a way that no other country has been able to do."
The rights groups charged that Saudi Arabia had used its position as a council member to block an independent international investigation of war crimes in Yemen.
Riyadh pressured UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to remove the coalition from a blacklist of child rights violators by threatening to withdraw funding to UN aid programs.
Saudi Arabia has denied using pressure tactics and insists the coalition is not deliberately targeting civilians in Yemen.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir dismissed the accusations as "outrageous."
"The coalition is very cautious in selecting targets. We do not harm civilians," the minister told reporters in Paris.
- Repression at home -
Amnesty International said the Saudi government had brutally cracked down on dissent at home and resorts to executions for offenses that under international law are not punishable by the death penalty.
Since 2013, all prominent human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia have been either thrown into prison, threatened into silence or have fled the country, said Richard Bennett, Amnesty's UN director.
Saudi Arabia was elected by the assembly in 2013 to sit on the 47-member council and a two-thirds majority would be needed to remove it from the body, which the rights groups and UN diplomats admitted would be unlikely.
Libya is the only country ever to suspended from the council by a vote held in 2011 to protest Moamer Kadhafi's violent crackdown on protesters.
The rights groups said Saudi Arabia had managed to get away with such violations because of support from the United States and Britain.
HRW's director for the Middle East, Sarah Leah Whitson, said the United States and Britain had "crossed the threshold to be part of this war" in Yemen by supplying weapons and supporting operations.
The rights group is asking the Pentagon to provide information on how it is supporting the coalition with the choice of targets, said Whitson.
This form of military assistance would make the United States complicit in war crimes, she said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/amnesty-hrw-want-saudis-off-un-rights-council-184930634.html?nhp=1

We've stopped believing that elections mean anything, but who can blame us?

On Saturday we vote, and we do so amid the ashes of one of the most seismic political events of the last 35 years. Immediately, as the reality of Brexit urged itself upon us, both of our major parties attempted to riff it into their election pitch: the Coalition urging us to back stability and Labor relying on its record during the Global Financial Crisis to argue it can be trusted to deal with the fallout. But in truth, it points only their declining power: the declining purchase of mainstream parties on our political imaginations. And on Saturday that will be proven when we return the highest non-major party vote since we've had a solid two-party system. That will be our Brexit, if you like: much, much milder but still an unmistakable mark of disillusionment.
It's not temporary, either. In 2010 we witnessed a spike in informal votes and, ultimately, a hung parliament. In 2013, a huge swing away from Labor and the Greens, but only a relatively small one to the Coalition: a big chunk of that swing went instead to minor parties, which is how we got that bizarre Palmer United odyssey. This time, of course, even Palmer's voters are disillusioned with their choice, but they're unlike to flock neatly back to the Coalition. This isn't a moment; it's a movement. We're looking at a trend.
This is an age of anti-establishment dissent. That doesn't mean the establishment will always lose: Hillary Clinton might beat Donald Trump in November, and I expect the Coalition to be returned on Saturday. But it does mean the establishment's authority is rapidly eroding. From the time Kevin Rudd swept to power to the time Tony Abbott did, we'd slowly stopped believing elections meant very much. An Australian National University Study tells the story. Back in 2007, 68 per cent of us thought it mattered which party was in government. By 2014, only 43 per cent did.
That's serious. If election results don't mean much, then democracy doesn't either. We're slowly converging upon a cynical centre: convinced politicians are all roughly the same, and that politics itself is of no interest and limited consequence. Politics' crisis then is one of meaning. No longer does it offer us something fundamental.
That's why I think Brexit matters. It's why I think Donald Trump matters. Whatever you make of these movements, there is something vital about them; something deeply energised and alive – meaningful. If they are confronting, it's because they inspire fervour: that is, they mean something. And what they mean, most crudely, is a sharp, direct rejection of the dominant political idea of the 20th century.
That idea is of a global, liberal order. A world built on the free market, moving inexorably towards a borderless ideal. Here, the market is not an economic arrangement, but a political ideology in its own right. It's "the end of history", the final expression of politics. So final it would be post-politics really, where concepts like, say, efficiency or productivity appear completely non-ideological: like natural laws rather than value judgments in their own right. So, for example, to increase productivity is presumed a good thing, even if it means a tilting of work-life balance, or a reduction in wages. This is not merely economics. It's economics as politics.
Whatever the benefits of that, it's ultimately sterile. This is not a politics thick with meaning, solidarity, or any higher purpose. To be a politician in this context is more or less to be a company chairman; to be a citizen is to be an entrepreneur or a consumer. It works as long as the consumers are happy. But in the aftermath of a financial crisis it poses marked problems. Once the economic narrative falls flat, we're searching immediately for something beyond it.
Hence the resurgence in nationalism. It doesn't exist in isolation. This a reactionary force, defining itself only in opposition. "The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country," boomed Trump this week. "Now it's time for American workers to take back their future…on trade, on immigration, on foreign policy, we're going to put America first again". This stuff works because it offers a mythology of intrinsic greatness that is so much more enchanted, so much more evocative than a free-trade bloc. The American exceptionalism in Trump's case is obvious. But we see something similar in the Brexiters' vision of a Britain in no need of Europe. Here the ghost of the British Empire is invoked: a Britain Great enough to be free from the yoke of interdependence.
Illustration: Simon Letch
Illustration: Simon Letch 
It's an attractive idea. But globalisation is not a reversible process. National governments can simply no longer control their economies, their wealth, their environmental catastrophes, even their security. These are all now global problems demanding global responses any serious nationalism cannot provide. This leaves nationalism nowhere to go except to amplify pride, bluster and aggression. The wave of anti-immigrant violence in Britain this week, the openly racist soundings of Trump, this is all nationalism can now muster. Our societies have become too globalised, too diverse, too irreversibly cosmopolitan to be homogenised. So we can talk the language of "us and them", but there's no longer a simple, coherent "us" to serve. Thus we make do with a "them" to be despised.
It's cheap, sure. But it's an unmistakable search for meaning, and it will do for now because while the big political ideas of the 20th century are collapsing, no one has yet figured out what can replace them. We're watching upheaval because the fault lines of politics are being remade before our eyes, with no obvious blueprint to guide the process.
Australia's not feeling this so keenly yet. Our economy has not yet succumbed. But our disillusionment with politics, our slow steady retreat from the major parties, our repeated pattern of protest votes show that we're far from immune. Chances are we're only a crisis away from wanting to latch onto a mythology of our own.



http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/australia-brexit-and-the-search-for-meaning-20160630-gpv4s5.html

Searching for a ‘Responsible Adult’: Is Brexit Good for Israel?

After months of anticipation, the United Kingdom has decided to leave the European Union (EU). Although, the results were fairly close – 51.9% voted to “Leave” vs. 48.1% elected to “Remain” – the consequences of the decision will be far-reaching. Not only will the Brits negotiate their exit from the EU (thus, the term “Brexit”) within the next two years, but the decision is likely to usher in an upheaval unwitnessed before in EU history.
But is it good for Palestine?
In the shadow of the so-called Brexit debate, a whole different discussion has been taking place: “is Brexit good for Israel”, or as an Israeli commentator, Carlo Strengerphrased it in the Israeli daily, Haaretz: “what does (Brexit) mean for the Jews?”
In a last minute pandering for votes, British Prime Minister, David Cameron – who, to his credit, had the dignity to resign after the vote – made a passionate appeal before a Jewish audience on Monday, June 20. He told the Israel supporters in the Charity, “Jewish Care”, that staying in the EU is actually good for Israel.
He presented his country as if it is the safeguard of Israeli interests at the Union. The gist of his message was: Britain has kept a watchful eye on Brussels and has thwarted any discussion that may be seen as hostile towards the Jewish state.
“When Europe is discussing its attitude towards Israel, do you want Britain – Israel’s greatest friend – in there opposing boycotts, opposing the campaign for divestment and sanctions, or do you want us outside the room, powerless to affect the discussion that takes place?” he told the largely Jewish audience.
Predictably, Cameron brought Iran into his reasoning, vowing that, if Britain remained in the EU, his country would be in a stronger position to “stop Iran (from) getting nuclear weapons.”
While the “Leave” campaign was strongly censured for unethically using fear-mongering to dissuade voters, Cameron’s comments before “Jewish Care” – which were an extreme and barefaced example of fear-mongering and manipulation of Israel’s so-called “existentialist threats” – received little coverage in the media.
Indeed, Britain has played that dreadful role for decades, muting any serious discussion on Israel and Palestine, and ensuring  more courageous voices like that of Sweden, for example, are offset with the ardently and unconditionally pro-Israel sentiment constantly radiating from Westminster. Who can forget Cameron’s impassionate defense of Israel’s last war on Gaza on 2014, which killed over 2,200 mostly Palestinian civilians?
Unequivocally, Cameron, along with his Conservative Party, has been a “staunch ally of (Israeli) Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,” as described by Israeli commentator Raphael Ahren, writing in the Times of Israel. His love for Israel can also be more appreciated when compared to, also according to Ahren, “current head of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn – who is a harsh critic of Israel and has called Israel’s arch-foes Hamas and Hezbollah ‘our friends.’”
Since Corbyn was elected to the helm of the Labor Party with a landslide victory in September of last year, an apparently manufactured controversy alleging rampant anti-Semitism within Labor has taken away from the party’s attempt to refocus its energies on challenging the Conservative’s neoliberal policies, and slowing down the momentum of the ultra-right Independence Party of Nigel Farage.
That contrived “crisis” was largely the work of the Israel lobby in the UK, per the assessment of investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley. It was a “witch-hunt” that reached an unprecedented degree of incongruity. “It has reached such an absurd volume that any usage of the word ‘Zionist’ is deemed to be anti-Semitic,” he wrote, “although, tellingly, not when used by self-described Zionists.”
Indeed, many members of Labor were either themselves involved in that “witch-hunt” or succumbed to its pressure, taking outrageous steps to defend against the unwarranted accusations. As a result, the embattled and disorganized Labor, too, urged its supporters to stay in the EU and they, too, lost the vote.
As for Israel, Brexit meant uncertainty and also opportunity.
The EU is Israel’s largest trade partner, and an economically weaker Union is destined to translate to less trade with Israel, thus financial losses. But Israel has also been sharply critical of the EU, with Israeli leaders making all sorts of accusations against supposed European anti-Semitism, and with Netanyahu himself calling for mass emigration of European Jewry to Israel.
Part of the reason why Tel Aviv has been fuming at the EU is the nuclear agreement with Iran, in which the EU is a co-signatory. The other reason is a decision last November by the EU to impose new regulations on products made in Jewish settlements built illegally on Palestinian land. According to the new guidelines, goods produced in these settlements must be labeled “made in settlements”, a decision that further strengthened calls throughout Europe for boycotting Israel altogether.
That decision, and others, increasingly made the EU appear as an untrustworthy ally to Israel; and precisely because of that, David Cameron desperately tried to sell himself at the last minute before the vote as the vanguard against other allegedly unruly EU members who refuse to play by the well-established rules.
Yet, interestingly, one of the loudest, and also fear-mongering groups that campaigned for Britain to exit the EU is “Regavim”, a right-wing NGO that advocates on behalf of the illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Unsurprisingly, “Regavim” used scare tactics by pushing a Palestinian bogeyman into the midst of Britain’s historical debate. Its campaign included a mock video of a masked Palestinian fighter “purportedly from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, urging UK citizens to remain in the European Union because it supports the Palestinians,”reported Al-Monitor.
According to Regavim’s Meir Deutsch, the organization’s aim was to “harm the EU over ‘its intervention in the internal conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.’”
Now that, according to Deutsch’s ruthless logic, the EU is duly “harmed”, Israel is seeking another bulwark in the European Union to defend its interests.
Israeli analyst, Sharon Pardo, while regretting the loss of a “friend” in the Union, asserted that such a loss is not a “catastrophe,” for the likes of Germany and the Czech Republic are even friendlier than Britain.
Israel is particularly concerned about its status within the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council, now that the UK is leaving. “Germany has good chances of taking the lead here and the fact that Germany is a close ally of Israel will clearly have implications,” according to Pardo, who added, “Germany is the responsible adult here.”
While Israel is likely to move fast to ensure its interests, both financial and political, are protected following Brexit, the Palestinian Authority is likely to move much slower and without a decisive, centralized strategy.
The UK’s departure from the EU might not have an immediate impact on the conflict in Palestine, especially during the coming months of projected upheaval, negotiations and transition; however, it could still offer Palestinians an opportunity for the future.
While pressure must continue to be applied on Westminster to end its unconditional backing of Israel, a possibly friendlier EU without the staunchly pro-Israel Britain, may emerge. The UK’s support for Israel in the Union, and the backing of all American steps in the same direction, has seriously hampered the EU’s chances of being anything but a rubber-stamp to US-UK policies not only in Palestine but also throughout the Middle East.
While it is too early to make any significant political forecast following Brexit, one can only hope that the efforts of pro-peace countries such as Ireland and Sweden will be strengthened, and that more such friendly nations will join to rein in Israel for its military occupation and demand justice for Palestine.
Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is a media consultant, an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press).
http://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2016/06/29/searching-responsible-adult-brexit-good-israel/

Scotland Rebuffed, Particularly by Spain, on EU Membership

EU Nations Said to Be Split on Question of Scotland


by Jason Ditz


Yesterday, Scottish officials were talking of a deeply “sympathetic” European Union which seemed open to working with them on some way for Scotland to remain part of the union after Britain’s exit. Today, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon confirmed that her talks with the EU have been much more “mixed.”
Sturgeon has been pushing for Scotland to secede from the United Kingdom as a way of joining the European Union on their own, though Spanish Premier Mariano Rajoy appears to have put the kibosh on that suggesting, insisting that Spain opposes any EU negotiations with Scotland.
Facing an active secessionist movement in Catalonia, Spain has made a policy of seeking to discourage other such movements around the world. Sturgeon said she was unsurprising by the Spanish reaction, though she also mockingly called Rajoy the “acting prime minister,” a reference to Spain’s contested Sunday election.
Even EU officials more open to at least talking to Scotland have insisted no such action could even be formally discussed until Scotland was a recognized, sovereign nation. That puts the Scots in a tough position, having to consider secession as a first step with no guarantee they’ll be able to get into the EU afterward.
http://news.antiwar.com/2016/06/29/scotland-rebuffed-particularly-by-spain-on-eu-membership/

The End of the Atlantic Project: Slamming the Brakes on the Neoliberal Order

 


Britain isn’t leaving the EU any time soon as confusion grips parliament. Angela Merkel will see to that. Make no mistake though, Britain voting to ‘leave’ on a high 72% turnout in the Brexit referendum is a devastating blow to the current international order, the entire structure of which will have to change. The British public has Molotov cocktailed the Westminster and Washington élites.
***
As Britain enters the unknown, it is in a seriously bad financial condition. This is déjà vu for lame-duck Prime Minister David Cameron as Sterling experiences the largest one-day fall since Nixon dumped Bretton Woods in 1971.
These are echoes of ‘Black Wednesday’, when Cameron was there as Norman Lamont’s aide, on the fateful day in 1992 that Sterling crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The ERM was the system of unification of European exchanges which preceded the launch of the Euro. Then as now he was stalked by a ghoulish Soros.
Cameron didn’t announce the Brexit referendum out of any concern for the British public’s increasing unease at the globalizing effects of EU neoliberal policies. The massive flow of cheap East European labour to Britain might have led to the rapid rise of a whole new political party (UK Independence Party=UKIP). But he was only concerned about internal party politics, because his right-wingers risked his 2015 parliamentary majority. They wanted to leave the EU and so were promised a referendum in the last election campaign as the price of cooperation.
Britain’s anti-democracy
Liberal leader Nick Clegg had a chance to bring democracy to Britain in 2010, when changes in Scottish politics meant that neither of the two main parties achieved an absolute parliamentary majority. As a coalition sweetener Gordon Brown offered Clegg the Liberal party’s historic policy objective on a plate: a national referendum on a proportional representation voting system (PR). Instead, Clegg went into coalition with Cameron, who was dead set against PR. Whilst in coalition Clegg also broke all other pledges to his supporters, thus completing the total destruction of his party. We will never hear from them again.
As it was, in 2015, the ‘first-past-the-post’ system gave Cameron 330 seats in Parliament on 36% of the vote, and UKIP just 1 seat on nearly 13% of the vote. So really Cameron was right not to care about any populist challenges. But when Cameron, and organiser of the Brexit campaign George Osborne, granted this latest referendum to their right-wingers, they were essentially giving the British Public a straight PR one man/woman, one vote: a strange act, given that they have never won, and could never win, anything that way.
But they had a plan to make it work: Project Fear. This had worked in scuttling prospects for Scottish Independence in 2014. Obama, David Petraeus, Jens Stoltenberg the NATO Chief were all wheeled out to warn of the dire consequences of an exit from the EU. Meanwhile a whole raft of military generals threatened the British public with Putin, as the IMF, IBRD, OECD, EU, ECB filled the airwaves with dark forebodings if Britain ever left the EU. Treasury cranked out numbers from its economic model to show that every single British household would lose £4387.25 p.a. (or something like that) if it happened.
As things became tight, ex-PM Gordon Brown was wheeled out. Blair is no longer of any use. The smell of death rises from his political corpse as the date for the publication of the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq War approaches. Current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, in the ‘Remain’ camp for tactical reasons, wasn’t prepared to put himself out.
But then we had David and Victoria Beckham, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jude Law, J.K. Rowling (who was an integral part of the previous Scottish Project Fear, not to mention the anti-DBS campaign), etc…, Arsene Wenger, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell, ex-Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, etc…, Elton John, Bob Geldof, Florence Welch, not forgetting Paloma Faith, all singing the praises of the EU. Just to cover all bases, Cameron finally threatened the British public with WWIII if they voted ‘leave’.
There was no plan in the case of a vote to ‘leave’, not from Cameron, or indeed from the ‘leave’ campaigners themselves, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Cameron’s buddy, Osborne, did have a plan though, which was announced as polls began to move the wrong way: swingeing tax rises in the event of ‘leave’.
As we now know, none of this impressed the British public in the least, and the rest is history.
Neoliberalism and the economic consequences of Mrs Thatcher
It is a mistake to think that merely having an independent sovereign currency puts Britain in a league above all those European states currently being crucified on the cross of the EURO. The country has to be productive for this to mean anything.
The collapse of Sterling on the news of Brexit is not a mere hissy fit on the part of the bankers. It is based on the fact that Britain now has a crushing balance of payments deficit well over 5.2% of GDP. Funding this has required massive cumulative foreign borrowing in recent years.
With Thatcher, the country developed a perpetual trade deficit: “The government of Mrs Thatcher will go down in history as the first British administration to preside over the transformation of Britain’s net trade balance on manufactured goods. For the first time since the Tudors ruled England we find ourselves in deficit on that account” (Kaldor 1983: Foreword by Shore). Thatcher closed whole industries down specifically in order to destroy the trade unions, and instituted the monetarist policies that took Sterling to levels that annihilated much of the country’s remaining export potential.
Most of post-war de-industrialization process took place in the early part of the Thatcher era (Rowthorn, Coutts 2013: 16).
Thatcher looked to banking and the commercial services sector to make sure the looming trade deficit didn’t translate into a payments deficit. In 1986, Bankers were granted the regulatory soft touch in London well before Bill Clinton helped the US Congress ditch Glass-Steagall in 1999, encouraging City of London earnings and capital inflows as Wall Street downstreamed its illegal business to the British capital. Fortuitously, North Sea oil and gas had just begun pumping and helping the trade side of things along, so there would be some real growth to assure the funding of interest payments on the occasional borrowings needed.
None of these elements remain in the picture any longer. The trade deficit has widened as oil and gas reserves have dwindled, while the anti-labour vision has assured the dominance of labour-saving over labour-enhancing technology over time, so hitting productivity and therefore competitiveness. All of the earnings that used to cover the country’s trade deficits have collapsed.
This has been due to privatisation mania and the massive sale of London property to foreigners, contributing to a staggering £615bn drop in the UK’s earning assets between 2000 and 2010. Public utilities and infrastructure are owned by amongst others, French, German, Spanish and Australian conglomerates which repatriate earnings back home, leaving virtually nothing in the public domain – not even (more recently) the Post Office. Earnings have also dropped because quantitative easing since 2008 has pushed financial sector investment yields to almost nothing.
Most especially, however, the widening payments deficit has been made worse by Britain’s increasing EU contribution, because of the way it is calculated as a percentage of non-EU imports. This poison-pill was concocted by Georges Pompidou in the early 1970s, when he saw that import-addicted Britain’s membership could no longer be resisted.
Sterling like the EURO is at the mercy of the bankers
In other words, all of Britain’s accounts are in deficit, and its earnings capacity shot to pieces. Meanwhile neoliberal economics makes anymention of a balance of payments ‘deficit’ unfashionable. It becomes a non-problem in the context of the neoliberal creed that the banks will create whatever new money is necessary to cover the tab. So how is any of this different from the vast debt-generating imbalances of the EURO?
The original conception of the EURO in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty made monetary policy a joint policy of the EU states through the European Central Bank (ECB), while fiscal or budgetary policy remained the individual responsibility of each member state (Bell and Nell 2003: 159-69). No event was conceived in the document that would trigger a breakdown in the payments system. So the Treaty did not give the ECB a position of lender of last resort. Furthermore, thebankers on the Delors Committee who drafted the Treaty, did not provide a framework for regulating and supervising Europe’s financial institutions. In this way, by preventing the central banks of the individual member states in the EURO from monetising their debts, the bankers assured their profitability and control of the system (Ingham 2004: 190).
It is not difficult to see how a policy of prioritising sound money and tight budgets appealed to Germany’s monetary experts. It is harder to see why Jacques Delors and behind him, François Mitterrand, proposed the EURO to the Germans in the first place, given customary French profligacy. The French were not about to abide by German parameters. In fact, they were intent on the EURO precisely in order to force a looser monetary policy on Europe. The deception was accepted by the Germans at the time, because Chancellor Helmut Kohl was under the influence of a coalition of politicians who saw the EURO as a political rather than economic project (Dyson and Featherstone 1999: 280).
This deception is the root of Europe’s current chaotic state as the ECB under Mario Draghi breaks all previous rules to save the bankers’ hides.
Britain would have been part of the EURO if Prime Minister John Major, Norman Lamont and their advisers at the Bank of England hadn’t overvalued Sterling with respect to the Deutschmark, for it to crash out of the ERM on ‘Black Wednesday’. However, that is small comfort given the parlous state of Britain’s dwindling finances today, with a City of London to depend on which resorts to systemic fraudand money laundering to survive, acquiring for the country the indictment of ‘most corrupt country on earth’ from Mafia experts.
European producers need Britain: bankers need Britain’s rising debt like a hole in the head
The reason Britain has a large trade deficit in the first place is because of exports from the EU nations. Italy and Spain stand to be destroyed if they can’t send their agricultural produce to Britain, especially since the new international order is barring them from sending the stuff over to Russia because of sanctions. Their banks are teetering on the edge.
But it isn’t just Southern Europe that will suffer. Mark Kerber, representing German business, impatient with the posturing of token EU democrats and vacuous apparatchiks, says there must be animmediate free trade deal with Britain, immediately upon Brexit.
Confident of a ‘remain’ vote, Cameron didn’t actually specify any legal trigger in the referendum document in the case of a ‘leave’ vote. Merkel wants to keep it that way for the time being.
Haunted by what Kerber’s demands might mean in terms of all the resurgent nationalisms across Europe, Merkel also hears Nicola Sturgeon promising a new referendum on Scottish independence, which by extension promises a Catalonian torpedo into Spain’s already very leaky hull. With the FED and the ECB having to finance Mark Carney’s latest monetary tsunami at the Bank of England, it is inconceivable that a Brexit project will be financed that risks Spain’s own debt sliding into the Atlantic like La Palma’s mountainsides. Bye bye Wall Street?
Obama is bound to be on the phone, for this and other reasons. His support for the ‘remain’ camp wasn’t an idle favour for an embattled Cameron. Britain is formally the US fifth column in Europe, which is why Charles de Gaulle kept Britain out of the EEC for so long. British Labour minister Ernest Bevin proposed NATO in 1949 as a way of keeping Europe within the US sphere of influence. When the idea was first floated that Britain should join the EEC, however, JFK saw the benefits saying that: “London could offset the eccentricities of policy in Paris and Bonn” (Schlesinger 2002: 845).
More recently, Britain was at the forefront of the operation to absorb Eastern Europe into the EU, after the American invasion and thedismemberment of Yugoslavia, together with the push to include Turkey, in the drive to encircle Russia.
The drive towards Russia: Turkey will accede to the EU ‘in the year 3000’
While the ‘leave’ campaign won by a margin of 52-48 overall, Boston (Lincolnshire) residents voted ‘leave’ by a margin of 75-25. The Borough of Boston is home to one of the largest concentrations of Polish people in Britain at some 5% of the population, without counting the five other East European nationalities that live there (for which I can’t find data). This may not seem strange in an American context, but these are new and distinct cultures suddenly arriving en masse into the sleepy British countryside.
The thing is about Cameron’s spectacular own-goal on his immigration pledges is that EU expansion eastwards towards Russia, and the policy of free movement of East European peoples was actually a British policy more than it was a policy of the other EU states, even Germany. Britain is in partnership with the US on this: it was all part of the move eastwards towards Ukraine and Russia.
So no one paid attention to Cameron’s embarrassed heat of the moment disavowals of his previous aggressive support of Turkish entry into the EU.
The rise and rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since 1994 was accompanied by the assiduous attention of British and American diplomats, who visited him even during his spells as a political prisoner. The mainstay of Turkish politics since 2002 – that which allowed Erdoğan to topple the fearsome military régime installed by Kemal Atatürk at the inception of the new Turkish Republic in 1923 – was the country’s application to join the EEC/EU. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) was able to piggy-back all of its revolutionary legislation onto the terms of EU accession (Pérouse 2016: 179).
Accession became remarkably more difficult, however, when Cyprus, aggrieved by Turkey’s 1974 invasion of its northern section, acceded to the EU in 2004, along with a host of East European nations with a more distant Ottoman, but nevertheless troubled, past. When German politics swung to the right with the CDU and Merkel gaining power in November 2005, things ground to a complete halt. It would be Britain in Cameron’s first ministry, which then led the charge in the EU to move things along on behalf of Turkey.
The end of Atlanticism and the regional free trade agreements
Like Britain, Turkey is a historic member of the immediate post-war US ‘Atlanticist’ security architecture. Turkey was the founding plank, along with Greece, of Britain’s formal handing over of imperial responsibility for the fight against communism to the US on February 24 1947, which historical event Dean Acheson dramatically called ‘The Creation’ (Chace 2008: 166). It is also a founding member of NATO, and possesses its largest army after the US.
The Turkish nation remains an east-west lightning rod to this day. But the quadrupling of Turkey’s GDP under Erdoğan’s ministries, as a result of its neoliberal opening, has created a new independent Turkey chafing at the bit. Cracks on this eastern rim of the Atlanticist project began to appear as Turkey-Israel relations soured over the Palestinian issue.
The situation with the Turkish economy is not all that different to what happened with China. After Nixon’s opening, Bill Clinton pushed for China’s entry into the multilateral World Trade Organisation (WTO) as part of corporate America’s outsourcing drive for greater profits. China’s meteoric rise wasn’t part of the plan though, so regional free trade agreements like TTP/TTIP/CETA were devised more recently outside of the WTO context, especially under Obama, not so much to contain, but more to try to leapfrog Chinese growth (Tellis, in Baru and Dogra 2015, 107-114).
Turkey, like Britain, is a supporter of TTIP in Europe. Its customs arrangement with EU, from which it has benefitted enormously, now begins to pall. In 1975, Turkish foreign trade was 9% of GDP; by 2012 this had risen to 50%. As the EU signs new agreements with countries such as Canada, India, Japan and Vietnam, the terms of the customs arrangement don’t allow Turkey to do the same. Fortress Europe has become protectionist, and just like Britain, Turkey sees the benefit of a TTIP agreement for Europe in which it must be included (Kirişci 2013: 37)
Britain in the EU was crucial for Obama’s TTIP negotiations. France was playing tough on agriculture and GMOs. Germany was playing tough on legal issues. German judges had ruled ISDS unconstitutional; ISDS being the crucial TTIP clause which allows business to bypass national court systems and sue governments for past and/or future profits lost. With Brexit, TTIP is dead in the water for the next administration.
Not only did the secrecy of EU negotiations over the TTIP contribute to the British public’s growing distrust of its élites, but those same élites indicated their impatience with the prospects for TTIP negotiations by joining the Chinese Investment Bank, angering Obama in the process.
Like Britain, Turkey looks east, but the Turks can see the Chinese Silk Road project extending from their backyard across the Turkic heartlands of Central Asia, whose people see Istanbul and not Moscow as their spiritual capital. The only problem for the future is how the wheeler-dealer Turkish business community adapts to the bureaucratic and autocratic environments of the Russo-Chinese business environment. Adapt it inevitably will, though.
Russia outflanks America: the Middle East fulcrum once again
Irresponsible and murderous US and British military adventures in the Middle-east led to a refugee crisis of Gothic proportions, threatening a new fall of Rome. Turkey absorbed close to 3 million refugees from Syria – well over half the global figure. Unlike those that have fled to various Arab countries, a majority of these refugees have received training and jobs in Turkey, and a considerable number of their children are being formally educated.
Turkey’s importance in stabilising the Middle-east region finally saw Merkel reengaging with Erdoğan this year, and reenergising the accession process, although at great cost to her domestic popularity. She lost some ground to the neo-fascist right, but also to a European left not at all enamoured of the divisive political style which has won Erdoğan seven different popular elections over 22 years.
Ironically, the one minority supportive of Erdoğan’s AKP – the Kurds – poses the greatest challenge. Their support in his electoral successes was repaid early on in the announcement of Interior Minister Beşir Atalay of the ‘Kurdish democratic opening’ in 2009 (Pérouse 2016: 221). It would prove difficult to acclimatise Turkish nationalists to this process, in particular since the Turkish deep state has traditionally been symbiotic with the ‘Kurdish problem’ and its associated emergency laws (Söyler 2015: 199).
In the new modern Turkey, however, the shoe is on the other foot. The fact that the resolution of the ‘Kurdish problem’ is a key chapter’ in the EU accession process, has handed the militant group PKK a weakness in the Turkish position to exploit, to ensure its own survival as an ongoing militant organisation. Turning the Kurdish cause over to civil society in the wider Turkish democratic arena, would inevitably eclipse its own role.
The asymmetric treatment of the PKK and its Syrian sister organisation the PYD, neither of whom are sanctioned for their violent acts in Turkey by Western nations, comes from their exploitation by all the powers in the Middle-eastern geopolitical game. The PKK is on the DEA’s terrorist list as drug traffickers, but since the Western security services are themselves drug traffickers, this doesn’t seem to matter.
Russia has upped the ante by backing the PYD in its new Syria strategy to encircle Turkey. Now dominating the skies both in Syria and the Caucasus, Russia is in a position to influence the region’s energy politics in its favour. But that is not the only reason for Russia’s presence. The geopolitical standoff may makes itself in Eastern Europe, but it is Syria that will crucial in the future.
As the ideologues of war desert Trump’s Republicans for Hillary Clinton’s Democrats, with the likes of neocon Victoria Nuland pushing for war with Russia, it is clear that Russia is now well-placed to change the dynamics of conventional and guerrilla conflict in the Middle-east at will, potentially to Israel’s considerable disadvantage. Putin’s first strike threats during the recent NATO wargames are in effect mere reminders that Russia has nuclear subs in the Atlantic with the capacity to end life as we know it, just in case Americans didn’t realise.
The Russians will never need to do anything like that as long as they hold the neocons where it hurts. Israel is already recognising Russia’s effective suzerainty over the region in its need for access to Turkey. The real threat is for a continuation of terrorism.
Although relations between Russia and Turkey became strained over the downing of the Russian fighter jet, the event was stage managed by Russia, in order to justify moving its S-400 antiaircraft system to the Latakia airbase. Bad relations with Turkey, which represents Russia’s chief supply line for military materiel to Syria and for its energy sales to Europe, wasn’t expected to last. They are now formally on the mend, and Turkey looks east again.
But fortress Europe turns in on itself, tied-up in the contradictions of its delusional monetary creation, irretrievably wounded politically by Brexit, and sinking into an Islamophobic stupor as Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico declares that ‘Islam has no place in Slovakia’, only shortly before his country takes over the EU presidency.
‘Western values’ have crashed big time in the court of world public opinion, especially in relation to Europe’s tyrannical theme park.Amnesty International charges the EU with complicity in the enforced disappearances, torture and arbitrary arrests on a mass scale perpetrated by the Egyptian military on the Egyptian people. 
In 2014 alone, 290 licences were authorised for military equipment to Egypt, totalling more than €6 billion (US$6.77bn), from EU states Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and the UK. They of course take their lead from the US ‘Camp David’ programme that funds the Egyptian coup.
Obama’s legacy described in Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, ends in sour grapes recriminations over Erdoğan’s ‘lack of commitment’. But the question poses itself: commitment to which part of Obama’s confused doctrine? As Erdoğan said, he couldn’t figure out what Obama was up to, so he had to start talking to Biden. Now he is the only NATO member talking actively to Putin. Turkey has no choice but to go east.
Fire in the Houses of Parliament
The Molotov cocktails have set all of the political parties in turmoil. The Blairites have staged a potentially self-immolating coup against Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party, ahead of their spiritual leader potentially being savaged in the Chilcot Report into the conduct of the War in Iraq. It turns out apparently that Bush might not have gone to war without Blair egging him on.
Cameron and Osborne are history. The conservatives face a leadership election, but it is unlikely that the bankers who are funding the British government’s fast expanding £1.5 trillion debt will countenance a leader who voted ‘leave’.
Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond want to take Scotland out of the UK. But with oil prices on the floor and the EU in recession, the 5m Scots cannot make ends meet without the £40bn p.a. they get from the 55m English. The quick reflex demand for independence by Sturgeon in the context of the current parliamentary turmoil, and ahead of any resolution of the Brexit question, is undoubtedly a political move to push Labour into coalition talks ahead of a general election.
Merkel knows this and will slow everything down in Europe to a snail’s pace. The bankers have realised by now that their money will be worthless if there isn’t a British government that can carry a sceptical public away from their protest vote, which is legally non-binding on parliament. It would nevertheless be unwise for any government to run roughshod over the historic Brexit outcome, although ultimately Britain will eventually have to stay put in some kind of restructured Europe.
Ultimately, the prize for the populist effort might be a swing to social democracy. In any event Atlanticist project is dead.
Omar Kassem can be reached through his website at http://different-traditions.com/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/28/the-end-of-the-atlantic-project-slamming-the-brakes-on-the-neoliberal-order/