The events of recent years indicate that the world is wising
up to and becoming less intimidated by Washington's overarching
ambition for world dominance. Latin America is increasingly attempting
to escape the empire's clutches. Leaders keenly aware of how US
imperialism works and determined to keep it out of their own country
are in power in Venezuela, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina,
Brazil, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and perhaps the latest
addition, Paraguay.
And now Africa has turned down Washington's offer to be part of the
imperial family. African governments have refused to host Africom, the
US Africa Command. The Washington Post reported that "worry swept the
continent that the United States planned major new military
installations in Africa", and despite the promise of new development
and security partnerships, many Africans concluded that Africom was
primarily an extension of US counterterrorism policy, intended to keep
an eye on Africa's large Muslim population. The United States "equates
terrorism with Islam," said a senior Kenyan diplomat, and few African
governments wanted to be seen as inviting US surveillance on their own
people. [note from your editor: It would be more instructive to equate
anti-American terrorism with American foreign policy, including
building military bases in other people's countries.]
When Bush visited Africa in February, he was told by the Ghanian
president: "You're not going to build any bases in Ghana." US-funded
aid groups protested plans to expand the American military's role in
economic development in Africa, sharply objecting to working alongside
US troops. Said an Africom officer: "[Africom] was seen as a massive
infusion of military might onto a continent that was quite proud of
having removed foreign powers from its soil."[1]
There's also the oil factor. The US imports more oil from African
nations than from Saudi Arabia, and the continent has huge unexplored
areas. This undoubtedly is a major motivation behind Washington's
desire for an expanded military presence in the region. The United
States is not about to take Africa's rejection of Africom as the last
word; indeed, some of the tough rhetoric by African officials may be
for public consumption, for the US already has somewhat of a military
presence on the continent. It will be interesting to observe the
ongoing tug of war between Washington and African
nationalists/anti-imperialists over expansion of the American presence.
Democracy American Style. You gotta problem wit dat?
Here's White House spokeswoman Dana Perino at a recent press briefing:
Reporter: The American people are being asked to die and pay for this,
and you're saying that they have no say in this war?
Perino: I didn't say that ... this President was elected
Reporter: Well, what it amounts to is you saying we have no input at all.
Perino: You had input. The American people have input every four years, and that's the way our system is set up.[2]
In 1941, Edward Dowling, editor and priest, commented: "The two
greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the
widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and
second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."
Can we look forward to Perino's memoir after she leaves the White House
in which, like her predecessor Scott McClellan recently, she confesses
that she was part of a "permanent campaign" mode to deceive the
American public? I'm prepared to welcome her into the fold as I have
McClellan. I have a soft spot in my heart for political late bloomers.
I used to work for the State Department when I was a good, loyal
anti-communist.
Washington's grand and noble new ally in the Free World
Scott McClellan has been criticized for not expressing his reservations
about Bush administration policies while still at the White House. This
would have indeed taken a measure of courage few people have, and
likely meant his job and career committing suicide. I'm reminded of
Carla Del Ponte, the Swiss diplomat who in 1999 became Chief Prosecutor
for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
located in The Hague, Netherlands. In accordance with her official
duties, she looked into possible war crimes of all the participants in
the conflicts of the 1990s surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia and
the NATO (read the United States) 78-day bombing of Serbia and its
province of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians were trying to secede. In
late December 1999, in an interview with The Observer of London, Del
Ponte was asked if she was prepared to press criminal charges against
NATO personnel (and not just against the former Yugoslav republics).
She replied: "If I am not willing to do that, I am not in the right
place. I must give up my mission."
The Tribunal then announced that it had completed a study of possible
NATO crimes, declaring: "It is very important for this tribunal to
assert its authority over any and all authorities to the armed conflict
within the former Yugoslavia."
Was this a sign from heaven that the new millennium (2000 was but a
week away) was going to be one of more equal international justice?
Could this really be?
No, it couldn't. From official quarters, military and civilian, of the
United States and Canada, came disbelief, shock, anger, denials ...
"appalling" ... "unjustified". Del Ponte got the message. Her office
quickly issued a statement: "NATO is not under investigation by the
Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO
during the conflict in Kosovo."[3]
Del Ponte remained in her position until the end of 2007, leaving to
become the Swiss ambassador to Argentina; at the same time writing a
book about her time with the Tribunal "The Hunt: Me and War
Criminals", published two months ago but available at the moment only
in Italian. It hasn't been much reported yet what del Ponte has said
about NATO, but the book has already created a scandal in Europe, for
in it she reveals how the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted
hundreds of Serbs in 1999, and took them to Kosovo's fellow Muslims in
Albania where they were killed, their kidneys and other body parts then
removed and sold for transplant in other countries.
The KLA for years has been engaging in other equally charming
activities, such as heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women,
various acts of terrorism, and carrying out ethnic cleansing of Serbs
who have had the bad fortune to be in Kosovo because it's long been
their home. Between 1998 and 2002, the KLA appeared at times on the
State Department terrorism list; at first because of its tactic of
targeting innocent Serb civilians in order to provoke retaliation from
Serbian troops; later because Mujahadeen mercenaries from various
Islamic countries, including some tied to al Qaeda, were fighting
alongside the KLA, as they were in Bosnia with the Bosnian Muslims
during the 1990s Yugoslav civil wars.[4] The KLA remained on the
terrorist list until the US decided to make them an ally, in some
measure due to the existence of a major American military base in
Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel. (It's remarkable, is it not, how these bases
pop up all around the world?) In November 2005, following a visit
there, Alvaro Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of
Europe, described the camp as a "smaller version of Guantanamo",
referring to the detainees there at the time from Washington's various
wars, including the so-called War on Terror.[5]
On February 17 of this year, in a move of highly questionable
international legality, the KLA declared the independence of Kosovo
from Serbia. The next day the United States recognized this new
"nation", thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of
a part of another country's territory. The new country has as its prime
minister a gentleman named Hashim Thaci, described in Del Ponte's book
as the brain behind the abductions of Serbs and the sale of their
organs. The new gangster state of Kosovo is supported by Washington and
other Western powers who can't forgive Serbia-Yugoslavia-Milosevic
"the last communists of Europe" for not wanting to wholeheartedly
embrace the NATO/US/European Union triumvirate, which recognizes no
higher power, United Nations or other. The independent state of Kosovo
is regarded as reliably pro-west, a state that will serve as a
militarized outpost for the triumvirate, which is intent on further
encircling Russia and pushing it out of Europe.
In her book, Del Ponte asserts that there was sufficient evidence for
prosecution of Kosovo Albanians involved in war crimes, but the
investigation "was nipped in the bud", focusing instead on "the crimes
committed by Serbia." She claims that she could do nothing because it
was next to impossible to collect evidence in Kosovo, which was
swarming with criminals, in and out of the government. Witnesses were
intimidated, and even judges in The Hague were afraid of the Kosovo
Albanians.
In April, the Swiss Foreign Department issued a statement that Del
Ponte's book "contains statements which are impermissible for a
representative of the government of Switzerland", ordered her to return
to her ambassadorial post in Argentina, and prohibited any further
appearances promoting her book. The Swiss have officially recognized
the independence of Kosovo and established an embassy in the country.
Kosovo appears likely to remain a highly controversial issue in Europe
and Washington for some time to come.[6]
Reason number 3,468 to yearn for the lifting of the capitalist weight from our souls
My phone company, Verizon, recently raised the monthly charge for my
international call plan by 30 percent. I phoned them to find out the
reason for this and was told that their competitors had raised their
charge for the international plan and so Verizon was doing the same.
"To stay competitive", the earnest young man told me. I thought I must
be misunderstanding him. We've all been raised to believe that one of
the beauties of capitalism is that it provides a competitive
environment which induces businesses to lower their rates so as to lure
away customers from their competitors. In the end, the consumer
benefits from lower prices. And this makes sense, at least within the
capitalist framework. (Although there have of course been numerous
cases of large companies lowering prices to force a small company
which initiated the price cuts out of business, after which the large
companies raise their prices back up.) But now? Now we're told that
competition leads to price
increases. What, pray tell, is there left of the system for us to believe in?
Supply and demand? Like in Burma, following the recent devastating
cyclone? Prices for food and other essentials have risen significantly
since the disaster. As they should, according to the revered and
beloved law of supply and demand, inasmuch as things are obviously in
short supply in Burma and people's needs are plainly much greater than
usual. What could make more sense under circumstances of human
desperation than to raise prices?
Yet, though questioning the law of supply and demand is normally
regarded in the same light as being skeptical of the law of gravity, I
have to do so, and refer to things I've expressed before: The price of
gasoline in the United States has been increasing on a regular basis
for a rather long time now, but there's no shortage of supply. There
are no lines of cars waiting hours at gas stations trying to fill up
before the pumps run dry. And there's been a considerable fall in
demand as less-than-rich drivers cut back on car use. It does not
require total cynicism to wonder whether the law of supply and demand
has been repealed. Or can it be that what is known as "supply and
demand" is not really any kind of immutable "law", but rather (choke,
gasp) "corporate policies"?
The oil companies are currently spending big bucks to convince the
American public that the super-high gasoline prices are not the
companies' fault. "The industry," reported the Washington Post, "is
trying to convince voters who, in turn, will make the case to their
members of Congress that rising energy prices are not the producers'
fault and that government efforts to punish the industry, especially
with higher taxes, would only make pricing problems worse."[7]
Do the oil companies think they're being misunderstood? The next time
you run into a friendly oil company executive ask him this: "If you
lowered prices to what they were two years ago, would consumers stage
protests outside your headquarters? Would the FBI raid your offices?
Would your breathtakingly obscenely high profits drop into the red?
Could you still maintain your decadent millionaire lifestyle? The oil
companies are perfectly free to very significantly lower prices without
anything that you or I would call financial suffering. But they don't
do it. So what's being misunderstood by the public which obliges the
companies to spend millions on advertisements? Money which could go
toward price reductions.
Oil company executives at least produce a useful product compared to
people in the hedge funds business. What are hedge funds, you ask?
They're private, largely unregulated pools of capital whose managers
can buy or sell any kind of assets. The income of the fund's executives
often in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes even
a billion is taxed as capital gains, a much lower tax rate than if it
were taxed as regular earnings. One can say that hedge funds are simply
pure speculation carried to absurdity; typical of the new American
Dream: getting rich through speculation and inheritance instead of
through skill, enterprise, and filling a human social need.
Here is Daniel Strachman, a former hedge fund consultant and author of
"The Fundamentals of Hedge Fund Management." He's skeptical of raising
taxes on hedge fund managers, saying they should be rewarded for taking
huge risks. [So do firefighters, police officers, and bank robbers of
course.] Most managers have their own money in their funds, he
declares, and suffer massive losses when their investments go bad.
"It's clear somebody has to win and somebody has to lose", says
Strachman. "It's not pretty at all because people say, 'Oh my God. Look
how much money these guys are making while people are losing their
homes and are complaining about the cost of eggs and sugar.' But so
what? We don't live in a society that is pretty all the time. That's
why it's capitalism."[8]
NOTES
[1] Washington Post, June 1, 2008, p.18
[2] White House press briefing, March 20, 2008
[3] The Observer (London), December 26, 1999; Washington Times, December 30 and 31, 1999; New York Times, December 30, 1999
[4] There are numerous articles in the world press of the past 20 years
about the KLA's inordinate thuggery; Google "KLA" and one or more of
the key words, such as drugs, prostitution, ethnic cleansing,
transplants, etc.
[5] http://wikipedia.org/, under "Camp Bondsteel"
[6] Del Ponte's book and the turmoil it's produced have been largely
ignored in the US media, but if one does a Google on her name and the
book, one will find many reports from Europe.
[7] Washington Post, May 9, 2008, p.D1
[8] Washington Post, April 17, 2008, p.D1
William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
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