31 May 2015

Hubert Humphrey Fellowships in USA for International Students

Brief description:
The Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program provides a year of professional enrichment in the United States for experienced professionals from designated countries throughout the world.   The Fellowship provides ten months of non-degree academic study* and related professional experiences in the United States.  Fellows are selected based on their potential for leadership and their commitment to public service in either the public or private sector.
*The Humphrey Program is a non-degree program. Participants may complete academic coursework at their host university to update their academic and professional knowledge in their field, but they do not receive an academic degree as a result of their participation in the Program.
Host Institution(s):
Fellows are placed at one of the participating USA universities. Fellows are not able to choose which university they will attend. Rather, they are assigned in diverse groups of 7-15 to the most appropriate host institution based on their area of interest and professional field.
Field of study:
• Agricultural and Rural Development
• Communications/Journalism
• Economic Development
• Educational Administration, Planning and Policy
• Finance and Banking
• Higher Education Administration
• HIV/AIDS Policy and Prevention
• Human Resource Management
• Law and Human Rights
• Natural Resources, Environmental Policy, and Climate Change
• Public Health Policy and Management
•  Public Policy Analysis and Public Administration
•  Substance Abuse Education, Treatment and Prevention
•  Teaching of English as a Foreign Language
•  Technology Policy and Management
•  Trafficking in Persons Policy and Prevention
•  Urban and Regional Planning
Number of Awards:
Approximately 200 Fellowships are awarded annually.
Target group:
Scholarship value/inclusions:
The Fellowship provides for:
•  Payment of tuition and fees at the assigned host university;
•  Pre-academic English language training, if required;
•  A maintenance (living) allowance, including a one-time settling-in allowance;
•  Accident and sickness coverage;
•  A book allowance;
•  A one-time computer subsidy;
•  Air travel (international travel to and from the U.S. for the program and domestic travel to required program events);
•  A Professional Development allowance for professional activities, such as field trips, professional visits and conferences.
Eligibility:
The applicant must have:
•  an undergraduate (first university) degree,
•  a minimum of five years of substantial professional experience,
•  limited or no prior experience in the United States,
•  demonstrated leadership qualities,
•  a record of public service in the community, and
•  English language ability
Please contact the U.S. Embassy, Public Affairs Section or Fulbright Commission in your country of residence to learn about possible specific program requirements (link found below).
Application instructions:
The deadlines for applicants vary by country but falls around May to September each year. Please check with the Embassy or Fulbright Commission in your country to learn about the exact deadline for submitting applications.  Embassies and Commissions must submit their nominations to the Institute of International Education office in Washington, DC by 1 October.
Please contact the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy or Bi-national Fulbright Commission in your country for more information about application procedures.
It is important to read the FAQs and visit the official website (link found below) for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship.
Website:
Official Scholarship Website:  http://humphreyfellowship.org/

Endeavour Vocational Education and Training (VET) Scholarship in Australia

Brief description:
The Endeavour Vocational Education and Training (VET) Scholarship provides financial support for non-Australians to undertake vocational education at a Diploma, Advanced Diploma or Associate Degree level in any field in Australia for up to two and a half years. Vocational education and training provides occupational or work-related knowledge and skills.
Host Institution(s):
The scholarships can be in any field of study. The courses are directly related to a trade, occupation or ‘vocation’ in which the applicant participates. These courses exclude degree and higher level programmes normally delivered by universities.
Number of Awards:
Not specified.
Target group:
Americas: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela.
Asia: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, China (People’s Republic), Hong Kong SAR, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea (Republic of Korea – South), Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Vietnam.
The Caribbean: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago.
Europe: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France (including Reunion), Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).
Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
Pacific: Fiji, French Polynesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated states), Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand* (including Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau), Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna.
Scholarship value/inclusions:
The scholarship includes travel allowance ($AUD 3,000), establishment allowance ($AUD 4,000), monthly stipend ($AUD 3,000; up to maximum programme duration on a pro-rata basis).  Health and travel insurance will also be provided.  It will also include tuition fees up to the maximum study duration (up to $6,500 per semester).
Eligibility:
To be eligible for Endeavour Vocational Education and Training (VET) Scholarship, applicants must:
•  be aged 18 years or over at the commencement of their programme
•  be a citizen and/or permanent resident of a participating country (see above)
•  commence their proposed programme after 1 January 2016 and no later than 30 November 2016. Applicants who have already commenced or will commence their intended programme prior to 2016 are not eligible to apply
•  provide all relevant supporting documentation
• not currently hold or have completed, since 1 January 2014, an Australian Government sponsored scholarship and/or fellowship (directly administered to recipients by the Australian Government)
•  not apply for a category in which they have already completed an Endeavour Scholarship or Fellowship.
Application instructions:
In their scholarship application, Endeavour Vocational Education and Training (VET) Scholarship applicants must provide a formal admission/offer letter for a Diploma, Advanced Diploma or Associate Degree course at an Australian Institution for the 2016 academic year.
Applications must be submitted using the Endeavour Online Application system. The deadline for 2016 Round is 30 June 2015.
It is important to read the 2016 Endeavor Application Guidelines and visit the official website (link found below) for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship.
Website:
Official Scholarship Website: https://internationaleducation.gov.au

30 May 2015

America Breaks the Middle East

ANDREW LEVINE

In diplomacy, as in war (“diplomacy by other means,” according to Clausewitz), it can be useful to distinguish goals from strategies.
America’s goals in the Middle East are clear: it wants Middle Eastern countries to serve the needs of American capitalists and to advance their interests; and it wants to impose a pax Americana, a stable regional order maintained under American domination.
It has been this way since even before the end of World War II.
Years ago, the United States also wanted to replace Britain and France as the dominant Western power in the region. This was never a major concern, however; in part because, before World War II, making common cause with Britain and France against Germany was a higher priority.
In any case, the issue was moot by the time the Second World War ended. The British and French empires lingered on for a while, but barely. After Suez (1956), neither of America’s erstwhile rivals could any longer even pretend to be forces to be reckoned with. They had become America’s lesser partners.
After World War II, the region also became embroiled in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This did not change America’s fundamental goals, but it did affect how its diplomacy was waged.
Also, after 1948, when the state of Israel was established — and especially after 1967, when Israel crushed the armies of Egypt and other neighboring states, and took control of the entirety of Mandate Palestine – Israel’s interests became America’s too.
Israel became America’s fifty-first state thanks mainly to Cold War exigencies, and because America wanted to keep Arab nationalism in bounds. From early on, pressure from the Israel lobby was a factor as well.
The old geopolitical reasons no longer apply or else are altered beyond recognition. Nevertheless, it is still axiomatic, in foreign policy circles in Washington, that what is good for Israel is good for the United States.
Nowadays, though, it is mainly the power that the Israel lobby wields over Congress that accounts for this otherwise inexplicable situation.
In recent years, that lobby has become increasingly desperate, as world and even American – including Jewish American — opinion turns against the self-described “nation state of the Jewish people.”
From its point of view, the situation can only get worse now that Israel has an openly racist government and a Prime Minister who, unlike the vast majority of American Jews, might as well be a card-carrying member of the GOP.
They shudder too when the see how the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement has taken hold and is on the rise.
But money talks. The American people are coming along, but it will be a while still before the American political class follows suit.
Media propagandists and other practitioners of the dark arts of “public diplomacy” do their best to obscure what would otherwise be obvious, but it is also clear what America’s goals in the Middle East are not.
Spreading democracy and improving the situation of Middle Eastern peoples is plainly not a goal.
Neither, for that matter, is improving the lives of ninety-nine percent or more of the American people, though some of the benefits that come from controlling the world’s oil supply probably do trickle down.
For America’s part, it is not a case of malevolence for malevolence’s sake. The people who determine national interests in capitalist societies are seldom evil. But, in their world, what counts are oil, guns and money, not people – at least not people who are neither economically powerful nor politically connected.
* * *
America’s goals are clear; what is unclear is how to realize them, how to get from here to there.
Our foreign policy establishment has never been good at developing clear and coherent strategies. This is not usually a problem, the way it would be in other countries; the United States can throw its weight around enough to get by on force alone.
However, brawn cannot substitute for brains entirely – or forever. Even a country that strides the world like a colossus sometimes needs a plan.
The United States had a coherent strategy, more or less, while the Cold War was on.   There were fewer complications then for policy makers to wrap their heads around; also, the situations they confronted were less fluid than they have since become.
Even so, those times were, if anything, more dangerous than times are now – thanks to the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship.
But in the Cold War era, Realpolitik principles were dominant in foreign policy circles; and, for the most part, capable people – albeit of the Dr. Strangelove kind — were running the show.
No more. The people running the show in the Bush-Obama War on Terror (or whatever the Obama administration chooses to call it) are inept and in way over their heads.
And so, the United States muddles along – from crisis to crisis. For at least the past decade, there has been no coherence, and very little rhyme or reason, to any of it.
The last more or less coherent strategy America deployed was the neoconservative one that took hold in the first years of the Bush-Cheney administration. It was a disaster.
The idea ostensibly was to abandon Realpolitik entirely, and to replace it with something more suitable to “the light of the world,” the “shining city on a hill” that Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan spoke of.
The neocons conjured up the ghost of Woodrow Wilson too. They wanted “to make the world safe for democracy.”
Or so they said. In fact, their Wilsonian diplomacy came with an odd and fatal twist. Without quite admitting it, “safe for democracy,” for them, meant “safe for Israel to do as it pleases to Palestinians and to its neighbors.”
All the same, they never stopped talking about “democracy” and “American exceptionalism.” Perhaps some of them even believed what they said.
It is not clear, though, what they thought the connection might be between advancing democracy and subordinating American foreign policy to the perceived needs of an ethnocratic settler state half a world away.
Perhaps they believed, as some liberal philosophers do, that democracies don’t wage wars against democracies; and they thought that the regimes they wanted to install throughout the Middle East would identify enough with Israel’s Herrenvolk democracy to assure that all would go well for their favorite country and for the United States.
More likely, whether they realized it or not, their babbling on about democracy was for public relations only.
In any case, it soon became apparent that wherever free and fair elections were held, the results were not what the neocons wanted them to be.
And it became obvious, almost from the moment that George Bush declared “mission accomplished,” that the neocons’ plan to make over the Middle East was a non-starter.
Having a coherent strategy can be overrated.
The one the neocons promoted sputtered out within a year or two after it went into effect. Only the rhetoric survived, as a very different reality from the one that the neocons had imagined asserted itself.
Then, in recent years, a semblance of the worldview that caused America to invade Iraq in 2003 revived — thanks to “humanitarian interveners” in the Obama administration. From a dubious, though arguably admirable, “responsibility to protect” premise, Obama’s liberal imperialists somehow derive nakedly imperialist conclusions.
Those neo-neocons don’t have an overarching vision, the way the original ones did (and still do), and they are not unabashed Israel-firsters, but the effect is much the same. Were Obama not such an inherently cautious soul, the United States would now be making even more of a mess of world affairs than it is.
Unfortunately, though, Obama is not cautious enough. America therefore flounders about, seemingly aimlessly, from one crisis to another.
The only consistent motif is that nearly everything American diplomats and their counterparts in the Pentagon and the intelligence community decide to do ends up making matters worse – not only in some ideal-regarding sense, but in ways that the policy makers themselves, were they honest, would have to acknowledge.
* * *
It would not be so bad had George Bush not broken Iraq a decade ago.
He stirred up the pot in Afghanistan too. Indeed, it would be fair to say that he would have broken Afghanistan as well, had it not been broken already — thanks, in part, to American machinations dating back to the Carter and Reagan eras.
After 9/11, the neocons needed a war to get the juices flowing for the (mis)adventures ahead.
The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were planned and executed by Saudis and others in Al Qaeda, not by Afghanis.   It is true that the Taliban government in Kabul offered Al Qaeda fighters safe haven, and that Taliban militants and Al Qaeda fighters were of a similar cast of mind. But Afghanis were not directly involved.
No matter. Bush and Cheney pounced on the opportunity – counting on servile media in the United States to build a case for war. The idea was to get Americans in a mood to invade Iraq, by lashing out –somewhere, anywhere — in revenge.
Servile media did all that was expected of it, and more.
Revenge is said to be a dish best served cold. Bush and Cheney and their advisors were too uncivilized for that. They liked their revenge hot.
And so they set in motion a process that continues to this day, with no real end in sight. As it unfolds, the miseries afflicted upon the Afghani people continue unabated.
But Iraq was always the target; and it was Bush’s Iraq War, more than his war in Afghanistan, that broke the Middle East.
By now, even thoughtful Republicans agree that invading Iraq was a mistake. How could they not? The world Bush intervened into continues to crumble before their eyes, in ways that genuinely do endanger the United States.
Bush broke the Middle East, but he was never brought to justice for it – or for his many other crimes against the peace, against humanity, and against the Constitution he swore to uphold.
The man ought to be behind bars; instead, he is living the high life in Texas, venturing out only to collect the occasional speaker’s fee that corporations and plutocrats dole out to ex-Presidents or, as in the case of the Clintons, to ex-President’s wives.
The chance, slim as it may be, that brother Jeb will become America’s next Commander-in-Chief is good for keeping those fees coming in.
To do as much harm as he did, Bush had to build – mindlessly, of course – on two centuries worth of British, French and American depredations.
The events of 9/11, the pretext for the Afghanistan War and also for the invasion of Iraq – despite the absence of any link between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government or people – was blowback from what the United States had been doing to the region for decades.
For that, every American President since even before Jimmy Carter is culpable – Bush’s father and Bill Clinton, especially.
But it was Bush the Son who must answer for breaking “the cradle of civilization.”  The consequences are still unfolding.
Obama campaigned on putting what Bush broke back together. In 2008, he was actually considered the peace candidate, and there are still Obama apologists who think of him that way.
Maybe he actually did – and still does – want to correct some of the harm his predecessor did.
But neither he nor the people around him have a clue how to go about it.
It is under their rule, even more than in the final years of Bush and Cheney that the world has had to pay for the fact that, while America has overwhelming military power and a determination to use it to further its goals, it has no strategy to speak of at all.
This became undeniable in 2011 as the Arab Spring erupted.
That year witnessed expressions of popular indignation and people power throughout the Arab world, as well as in Europe and the Americas. Outside the Middle East, it was nothing like 1968, but the world has not seen anything on a similar scale since that time.
In the United States, there were massive demonstrations against the (largely successful) efforts of Republican governors and legislatures to crush public sector unions and to weaken the already feeble labor movement. And there was Occupy Wall Street.
A difference from 1968 was that, by 2011, it had become clear that there was no Left left. There was therefore no organizational vehicle through which outrage could be channeled into constructive change.
It is different now – at least in Greece and Spain and elsewhere where austerity has stung the hardest. But, at the time, there was nothing.
The ruling classes took advantage of the organizational vacuum, fielding compliant “center-left” politicians to lead the way.
Thus the Obama administration let the Occupy movement exhaust itself, surreptitiously imposing only moderate levels of repression – until the bitter end.
Before long, the constructive energy the Occupy forces expended was either dissipated or channeled into the 2012 electoral circus – where, ironically, the goal was to reelect Barack Obama.
In the long run, the Obama administration’s malign neglect of workers’ struggles earlier in the year was at least as debilitating.
It was self-defeating too.
The Democrats’ corporate paymasters want unions weak, but the Democratic Party needs those unions to supply the foot soldiers it needs at election time, and to give Democratic candidates money.
Evidently, Obama and the leaders of the national party decided that it would be better for them if the wishes of their corporate paymasters prevailed. They were wrong. The “shellacking” they sustained in the 2014 midterms, much like their shellacking four years earlier, was one of the more immediate consequences.
Wisconsin, along with several other heavily unionized Midwestern states, was Ground Zero for this latest Republican-led, plutocrat-funded assault on organized labor.
Wisconsin’s Governor, Scott Walker, one of the more outrageous buffoons in Republican ranks, became a national figure on the strength of his union-busting shenanigans.   Had state Democrats gotten a little more help from Obama and the national party, he would surely have been sent packing in the recall election that came a year later, or in the regular election in 2014.
Instead, he is presently contending for the Republican nomination for the presidency.  With the Koch brothers and other billionaires behind him, his chances are as good as any of his rival’s.
No doubt, Team Obama and the people in charge of the Democratic Party decided, as they always do, that the unions had nowhere else to go and that reelecting Obama in 2012 took priority over everything else.
They were wrong; but being wrong, in their circles, is par for the course.
There is no more telling example than the way the Clinton State Department mishandled the Arab Spring.
Because the buck stops where it does, their fumbling was enough to put Barack Obama in the same league as George Bush.
Obama and his Secretary of State destabilized what Bush had not yet gotten to, and they broke what Bush’s adventurism had not yet destroyed.
Libya was the first casualty. Bush and Cheney cannot be blamed for that, any more than Bush the Father or Bill Clinton can be blamed for Bush the Son’s Iraq War.
The consequences continue to accrue.   The raid on the American consulate – and CIA outpost – in Benghazi is the least of it, notwithstanding the efforts of disingenuous Republicans to use the incident against Hillary Clinton.
The refugees and asylum seekers trying desperately to flee from Libya to European detention centers (concentration camps, essentially) provide more telling evidence of Clinton’s – and America’s — ineptitude.
Clinton — and therefore Obama — botched Egypt too. Now, as a result, the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has imposed an even more brutally repressive regime upon the Egyptian people than the one they overthrew in the glory days of the Arab Spring.
In the absence of a coherent strategy, the American military is effectively running U.S.-Egypt relations. The connections between the two militaries have run deep at least since the end of the seventies, when, under Jimmy Carter’s aegis at Camp David, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat signed peace accords that effectively removed the prospect of future wars between Israel and Egypt.
The price that Egypt exacted for this was integration — along with Israel, though to a lesser degree — into the Pentagon’s ambit, and therefore into the welcoming arms of the American “defense industry,” in whose hangars and storerooms Egyptian generals buy weapons like spoiled kids in a toy shop.
This serves America’s purposes – not by design (for there is no design), but by default. In much the way that American policies towards Latin American dictatorships were governed by the exigencies of military to military relations and the needs of the armaments industry in the United States, so has it been, since Camp David, with the Egyptian military.
Stability is achieved, for a while, under the army’s boot, but the underlying problems that cause instability remain unresolved. The day of reckoning is postponed.   It will surely come eventually. As the slogan goes, “no justice, no peace.”
The situation elsewhere in the Middle East is hardly better.
Indeed, it is in Iraq and Syria that America’s mindless bungling has so far had the most disastrous effects.
War-mongering Republicans, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, blame Obama for the rise of the Islamic State.   They have a point.
For them, though, the problem is not enough American military involvement; they think combat troops ought never to have been removed from Iraq, and they think they should be brought back now.
It hardly bears saying that the opposite is true.
In Iraq, at various times as the war raged on, displays of brute force on America’s part sometimes, briefly, kept acute instability at bay.   But it might as well be a law of nature: that the U.S. is bound to get it wrong, and, in the end, to make matters worse.
Matters already are worse – because, instead of correcting Bush and Cheney’s mistakes, Obama built upon them. And, by groping along from day to day without anything like coherent strategy, he broke much of what he inherited that was somehow still intact.
If, as seems likely, Hillary Clinton succeeds him, count on the situation in the Middle East – and nearly everywhere else — becoming even worse. Count on the Middle East getting broken in ways that can now be only dimly imagined.
Should it fall to her, as it probably will, to lead future phases of the war on terror – by now, in effect, a war on the historically Muslim world – her slogan might as well be: “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Revolution and American Empire

Rob Urie

The American preference for ideological, or ideologically based, explanations of world events frames them as both self-generated and inexplicable— self-generated because causal relations recover history and thereby clutter ideology and inexplicable in that ideology didn’t exist until it did, again recovering history. Through an ideological frame the American Revolution was driven by the desire for ‘freedom’ and the Russian and Cuban Revolutions were driven by Marxist ideology, the desire for socialist or communist political economy. When history is recovered the Russian and Cuban Revolutions were rejections of intolerable— factually unlivable, circumstances whereas the American Revolution was a plutocratic rebellion intended to formally install unlivable circumstances— slavery and genocide against indigenous populations, into local rule against distant colonial (British) economic extraction.
While three centuries of racist chatter leave some ambiguity around when kidnapped Africans (local societies, Africa is a continent, not a people) forced into slavery were considered human beings by White settlers, the political question was answered in 1787 with three-fifths a ‘political’ person assigned to slaves to accrue to the political representation of slaveholders. The indigenous population was excluded from Constitutional political representation entirely. This brief and greatly simplified history is presented for three reasons: 1) American ‘freedom’ as political privilege is the opposite of its generalized form as freedom from it; 2) its political meaning is tied through history to Western imperialism—U.S. history is of overthrowing democratic regimes to support U.S. economic interests and 3), ‘globalization’ presented in the present as historically unique is tied through this history to Western imperialism.
urierev1
America. The American individualist conception of freedom finds both the largest number of incarcerated persons and the largest percentage of the population incarcerated in the world. Here a teenager is shackled as he is held in solitary confinement for an indeterminate period of time in an adult prison. In contrast to Western economic theory, individuals realizing themselves individually, as in by themselves, don’t do very well. Solitary confinement is 1) widely used throughout the U.S. penal system, 2) considered torture by most of the ‘developed’ world and 3) known to cause psychosis and other severe mental health problems. Original image source: nbcnews.com
Western history ties politics, the freedom to dominate other people, to economics through the reasons for domination. Slavery was / is the politics of economic extraction— it is ‘personal’ imperialism, the taking of personal economic production through its social realization in socially engineered circumstance. Genocide against indigenous populations applied the European concept of property as it developed through the ‘political’ European enclosure movement to ‘American’ lands. ‘Ownership’ was / is an imperial claim, a ‘right.’ As with other rights, it only has meaning through the capacity to enforce it. Slaves were political ‘persons’ whose existence conveyed a right of political representation to slaveholders, not to themselves. As with the lands (link above) upon which indigenous peoples depended for their existence, the claim of ownership applied to it was imperial taking.
Globalization is put forward in the present as an economic process, as the progress of economic freedom through increasingly liberal ‘free-trade’ agreements. A question not often asked is why multi-national corporations— economic entities that exist beyond national boundaries; are the intended beneficiaries of ‘national’ negotiations. Why would U.S. politicians care about the intellectual property ‘rights’ of Apple Computer that (avoids) pays taxes in Ireland? Why can BP (or whatever its name is this week), a nominally British corporation, destroy the Gulf of Mexico, and with it the livelihoods of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, and have the destruction covered up by U.S. politicians? And more pointedly, what possible effect could ‘political’ elections have on the political actions of these multinational corporations whose interests are served by the U.S. political establishment?
urierev2
Russia. Vladimir Lenin led the Russian people against a corrupt, repressive aristocracy that misled them into economic and political ruin. Western powers, in particular the U.S., intervened early to bring ‘moderates,’ meaning technocrats sympathetic to Western interests, to power. Following the socialist (October) revolution Western bankers demanded repayment of war debts incurred by the ousted aristocracy and the U.S. supported counter-revolutionary forces inside Russia. Criticisms of post-revolutionary Russia ignore both the conditions that preceded the revolution and constant Western efforts to undermine its outcomes. Lenin’s ‘The State and Revolution’ explains current events in the ‘developed’ West far more robustly than does Western economics. Original image source: en.wikipedia.org
The legal form of corporation may abstract the economic interests that it represents but it doesn’t reduce them. Criticisms of corporate ‘power’ grant primacy to this legal form when actual persons both run corporations and benefit from the social power they wield. The ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) legal mechanisms that are part of current and past ‘free-trade’ agreements grant the existence of social struggle (‘disputes’) and that economic resolution is a political problem. The tribunals proposed to adjudicate these disputes are composed primarily of corporate lawyers and formalize by degree the interests that ‘sovereign’ courts already represent. The history of the U.S. is breaking treaties, contracts and international law with impunity, particularly when economic interests are at stake. The oft-provided explanation that sovereign power won’t be impinged upon is rendered implausible by the control that moneyed interests exert over it
This distance between formal economic explanations of social outcomes and more plausible ‘compound’ explanations that integrate economics, politics and history provides broad cover for economic actors who use politics as cover for economic machinations. The goods that slaves produced traded in international markets and most of what today is ‘real estate’ had economic value to the indigenous populations who lived on / from it before it was ‘owned’ by others. Western economic explanations are the relation of this imperial taking to ever ‘purer’ apologies for it. The economists’ deference to nature, as in a ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, refers back to the same ‘nature’ embedded in the ‘White man’s burden,’ in theories supporting ‘White supremacy’ and today in ‘market’ explanations of internal and external imperial relations.
urierev3
Cuba. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the people of Cuba overthrew the corrupt government of Fulgencio Batista long allied with U.S. capitalists and U.S. foreign policy ’representatives’ promoting capitalist interests through coups and political assassinations against democratically elected leaders across Central and South America. Che was murdered by the CIA in Bolivia while Fidel Castro successfully withstood a half-century of counter-revolutionary efforts by the U.S. Today Cuba has a high literacy rate and universal education and health care. In contrast to American ‘for-profit’ healthcare, Cuba regularly sends healthcare contingents abroad to serve international healthcare needs. Original source image: toplowridersites.com
Liberal economists have ‘fought the good fight’ for nominally populist economic programs for the last decade with little but growing frustration to show for it. In sequence, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enacted economic policies— deregulation of banks, tax cuts for the very wealthy, the largest bank bailouts in human history and ‘trade’ deals that formalize corporate control over civil governance. There exist economic theories to support each and every one of these policies. Many prominent economists base which economic policies they support or oppose on which political Party is in office at the time they are proposed. The policies enacted are retroactively deemed ‘politically feasible’ in tacit admission that economic outcomes are politically determined. ‘Markets’ are used to explain these outcomes with the politics removed.
From the time of the American Revolution to today, with a brief compromise between 1948 and about 1973, the U.S. has been run by and for a self-serving plutocracy. Slavery and genocide weren’t ‘accidents’ nor were they the product of primitive thinking. U.S. wars in Central America, Southeast Asia and Iraq were / are as primitive, in the sense of being for-profit and brutal, as any in human history. And it is hardly an accident that elite impunity and immunity from prosecution for crimes, including War Crimes, is matched by brutal repression of the economic underclasses. Banks and corporations are the social forms of economic imperialism, necessary to the imperial project that places the rest of us as imperial subjects. Back to the start: the American Revolution was fought for the freedom to repress while the revolutions of liberation it has opposed were / are by-and-large fought against it.
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Nicaragua. ‘Freedom rope’ helps a Nicaraguan citizen understand that America values freedom. Despite the murders of tens of thousands of Nicaraguan citizens by U.S. and U.S. proxy forces, Nicaragua today is one of the few ‘beneficiaries’ of American military ‘interventions’ that avoided being turned into a narco-state run by gangsters, largely because the socialist government the U.S. sought to ouster was brought back to power after the Americans departed. While the Cold War was used as cover, U.S. interventions have served to prevent minimum wage laws from being enacted and to gain / keep access to cheap economic resources— ‘markets’ had nothing to do with it. While some political theory on the left has it that the engineered chaos that is the typical result of U.S. foreign policy is intended to prevent competing hegemons from arising, opportunistic gangsterism also fits the facts. Original image source: cinemawithoutborders.com.
The obligatory liberal chides against Russian and Cuban totalitarianism, in their contemporary incarnations against ‘strongman’ Vladimir Putin and the aging Fidel Castro, never admit to two centuries of American crimes or to never ending U.S. attempts to undermine democratic revolutions around the globe. This isn’t to gloss over crimes— the U.S. is the only nation in history to drop atom bombs on largely civilian populations, U.S. General Curtis LeMay joked that had the U.S. lost WWII he would have hung for the bombing of Tokyo, three million killed in the Korean War, three million killed in Vietnam, one million killed in Iraq and substantial portions of Central America turned into right-wing gangster states. Cuba is poor today because the U.S. has enforced an economic blockade of it for half a century. And the only guarantee from ‘liberalized’ relations between the U.S. and Cuba is that Cuba will get the worst of it.
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Vietnam: freedom the American way. The Cold War ‘domino theory’ explanation of America’s devastation of Southeast Asia provides a rational patina to wholesale technocratic insanity. According to now public records the war in Vietnam was known to be a lost cause a decade or more, and three-million Vietnamese lives, before it finally ended. The genesis of the war was the friendly takeover of the French colonial ‘possession’ to better ‘manage’ it against the Chinese ‘hegemon’ that the Vietnamese had spent the prior millennium fighting off. Were it not for the rest of American history, the war in Southeast Asia would be one of the greatest crimes in human history. As with other devastated former colonies, the Vietnamese now sew underwear for Walmart for pennies an hour. This makes the ‘free’ in ‘free-trade’ a reference to the pay that neo-colonial subjects receive for working for multinational corporations. Original image source: gigapica.geenstihl.nl
It is often convenient to let history lay where it is found. But what doing so leaves to the present is anti-history, ideological explanation of historical outcomes. Endless American prattle about ‘freedom’ is tragic for both the internal and external delusions it grants. In recent history the ‘liberation’ of Iraq was a cynical grab for oil and strategic situation sold to the gullible American kids who fought it as an ideological struggle. From the perspective of the American press the slaughter was initially presented in ideological terms as well, as liberation from a tyrant. The hostile takeover of Abu Ghraib prison should have demonstrated American intentions if aerial bombardment and the ground assault had left any ambiguity. New reports, backing old reports, have over one-million Iraqi civilians murdered to add a few dollars to Exxon-Mobil’s stock price.
The human and strategic catastrophe in Iraq can only be seen as unforetold, as an outlier, through the denial of history. Most Americans, dazzled by the calculated public relations ploy of ‘mission accomplished,’ never knew that the original version of the ‘Iraqi’ Constitution was written by the White House and that the economic program forced on occupied Iraq was a neoliberal wish-list complete with unhindered Western extraction of Iraqi oil and ‘free-markets’ in the sense that Western corporations were free to exert monopoly control over the goods and services available in Iraq. The much lauded success of the ‘surge’ was a market outcome— local Iraqi leaders were paid to stop attacking U.S. troops. As with NAFTA and the proposed TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) and TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) ‘trade’ deals, there was / is nothing natural about the ‘free’ economic circumstances imposed on occupied Iraq.
Whether current chatter about the U.S. as an empire in decline turns out to be accurate or not, the combination of U.S. military prowess, an aggressive neo-imperial economic program and cloistered, delusional leadership keep the U.S. at the top of a list of dangers to both external and internal peace. The potent myth of ‘freedom’ finds people who history should have taught better clinging to ‘internal’ resolution of political economy largely structured as it always has been— as ‘freedom’ for an unaccountable elite to use and abuse ‘the world,’ including the most vulnerable among us, as they see fit. This isn’t to discount internal disagreements, struggles and contradictions, but rather an effort to craft a path forward that isn’t led by the forces of military, economic and environmental catastrophe.
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America. The hostile takeover of the Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. forces at the behest of the political leadership brought new management to an existing torture regime. While War Crimes charges against this political leadership are fully supported here, the idea that ‘America doesn’t torture’ requires an implausible parsing of terminology. Burning Vietnamese villagers to death and slicing Nicaraguan peasants from loin to head in front of their neighbors and families may be murder, but the terror inflicted while doing so is also torture. The constant threat of death across the Middle East from U.S. drones is likewise torture. And the treatment of U.S. citizens in U.S. prisons is torture under international standards. Original image source: telegraph.co.uk
A short while before he died Alex Cockburn cogently argued that the likelihood of wholesale revolution was unlikely and that some form of constructive incrementalism was the best way forward. And in fact, none other than Karl Marx supported reforms that helped the poor and working classes live fuller lives. But Marx, through his historical determinism, saw reform as an intermediate step toward revolutionary change. Lenin faced internally and externally imposed ‘reformers’ as a foil to successful change, socialist revolution. Fidel Castro faced a gangster cooperative of homegrown and U.S. business and foreign policy interests determined to maintain the existing order. The unity here, the historical constant, is that the U.S. reflexively resisted, undermined, and then attempted to overthrow revolutionary forces determined to rid themselves of predatory gangsters.
With occasional clarity the American left has seen the political tendencies embedded in American institutions and being sold as freedom from oppression as its truer character: the freedom to repress. The American ‘view’ is of internal characterization of ‘external’ actions, e.g. war against Iraq or Vietnam, without recognizing the opportunistic nature of the posed distinction. That the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and local police departments consider ‘free’ political expression through protests and political organizing a threat to national security illustrates the idea of freedom at work. Current and past ‘free-trade’ agreements enshrine the right of corporations owned / run by social elites to control civil governance. No American institutions are calling Wall Street and multi-national corporations ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy’ because they are working to gain political control. So again, the American idea of freedom is the right to oppress, not freedom from political and economic oppression.
Incrementalism and reform only become a problem when they devolve into ever shifting ground as the Democrat Party is skilled at doing. A recent, much derided, editorial in the New York Times asks “Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?” without articulating that it is a right-wing take on many of the same talking points used by liberals to sell Barack Obama’s second run for the Presidency. In his ‘debate’ with Glen Ford on DemocracyNow! Michael Eric Dyson made many of the same arguments from a ‘liberal’ perspective in favor of re-electing Mr. Obama. What both Mr. Dyson and Peter Wehner, author of the editorial, use as their frame of political reference is a contemporary ‘left’ that promotes the political economy of the far right. Mr. Obama’s support for truly odious ‘trade’ deals is finally getting this point through to perpetually resistant liberals. This ever rightward shift is what incrementalism and reform have produced for the American left.
Something to consider is that in the midst of the heavily promoted sense of economic and political ‘recovery’ in the developed West tens of millions of people are living in destitution, violence and misery. From the palaces of the Tsars and the urban towers of ‘Batista’s’ Havana the destitution of the majority was well-hidden as well. Readers can view U.S. history as a series of accidents that somehow always benefit American elites while punishing an external, and variably internal majority, or as intended outcomes. Principled political reforms proceed from so far left that I leave to readers to judge their value. Unprincipled reforms are the purview of the Democrat Party. The people still in that camp get what they deserve. Radical change, if it ever comes, will be a product of the powers that be, of the circumstances they create and perpetuate. Ideology has nothing to do with it. At present, they seem to be up to the task. Viva la revolucion!

Scandalous Reflections on Scandal

Paul Street

Mistakes v. Crimes
One useful measure of a political culture’s moral level is the nature of what counts as a terrible outrage, disgrace, or scandal in that culture. The Vietnam War – really an imperial U.S. war on Vietnam and neighboring countries – has a bad reputation in the United States. That’s a good thing, no doubt, but consider the main reason for the war’s poor standing in the nation’s collective memory. It’s not because the U.S. “crucifixion of South Asia” (as Noam Chomsky aptly described it at the time) was a monumentally immoral and imperial crime that killed from 3 to 5 million Southeast Asians (along with 58,000 U.S troops) between 1962 and 1975. No, the Vietnam War’s bad name results from the fact that the crime is understood to have been a humiliating failure, costing tens of thousands of U.S lives, stirring up mass protest, and damaging the credibility of U.S. foreign policy in a blundering but supposedly well-intended “mistake” that ended with the North Vietnamese sweeping into Saigon.
A similar moral cluelessness mars the national U.S. memory of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is commonplace by now for many U.S. politicians on both sides of the nation’s partisan divide to refer to the absurdly named Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) as “a mistake.” What you won’t hear except on the mostly excluded margins of U.S. media and politics culture is serious reference to OIF as immoral, imperial, and/or criminal. Such descriptions are wholly appropriate for a transparently illegal war of unprovoked invasion driven by blatantly petro-imperial, racist, and commercial imperatives.  Granted advance approved in Congress by then US Senator Hillary Clinton and many other hawkish Democrats, including Reille Hunter’s future sex-scandal partner John Edwards (then a US Senator from North Carolina), this astonishing imperial transgression killed as many as 1 million Iraqis, injured and displaced millions more, and devastated social and civil infrastructure across Mesopotamia. Still, the invasion can be discussed as a “mistake” only in the same sense as Vietnam: as a well-intended policy that didn’t work.
Much the same vapid moral nothingness surrounds the debates over the U.S. military and CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” (torture) techniques and murderous drone strikes across the Muslim world in the wake of the 9/11/2001 jetliner attacks. The disputes are mainly about whether or not these terrible, arch-criminal tools of repression actually work or not in the so-called war on terror, more accurately described as a war of terror. The fact that these outrageous methods and weapons have immorally traumatized, maimed, crippled, and killed human beings on a mass scale is beside the point, for Uncle Sam is never a criminal. “The United States,” Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright explained in 1999,”is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
Watergate v. COINTELPRO
The infamous Watergate Scandal is another case in point. It was a petty burglary of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in 1972 by a handful of thugs working for the Republic National Committee. It became a giant national media obsession that led to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. And it was nothing compared to COINTELPRO. As the leading left US intellectual Noam Chomsky explained 25 years ago:
“at the exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive F.B.I. operations to undermine political freedom in the United States, running back to Roosevelt but really picking up under Kennedy. It was called ‘COINTRELPRO’ [short for ‘Counterintelligence Program’], and it included a vast range of things….the straight Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader [Fred Hampton];…organizing race riots in an effort to destroy black movements; …
paulstreetattacks on the American Indian Movement, the women’s movement, you name it…fifteen years of F.B.I. disruption of the Socialist Workers Party – that meant regular F.B.I. burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and getting people fired from their jobs and so on. That fact alone…is already vastly more important than…a bunch of Keystone Kops [breaking] into the Democratic National Committee headquarters one time. The Socialist Workers Party is a legal political party after all…And this wasn’t just a bunch of gangsters, this was the national political police; that’s very serious….In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party” (Chomksy, Understanding Power [New Press, 2002], 118).
Very serious, that is, to anyone who cares about basic civil liberties. It wasn’t terribly serious as far as the Washington Post and other Watergate-obsessed corporate media institutions were concerned, which is why you will get blank stares (“Coinwhatmo?”) when you mention “the COINTELPRO scandal” to all but a few Americans.
Missiles, Coups, and Mass Murder vs. Cigars and a Stained Dress
Watergate and even COINTELPRO were small crimes compared also to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s transgressions abroad, including in Nixon’s case the secret, mass-murderous bombing of Cambodia (leading to the rise of the proto-genocidal Pol Pot regime there) and US coordination and support of a fascistic military coup that overthrew the democratically elected Chilean government of the Salvador Allende and killed thousands of workers and activists in 1973. During the televised Watergate hearings, nobody in the reigning mass media or in Congress bothered to mentioned that Nixon had carried out “one of the most intense bombings campaigns in history in densely populated areas of a peasant country [Cambodia], killing maybe 150,000 people” (Chomsky,Understanding Power, 120).
Watergate was also a much smaller crime than the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra cockup. That scandal involved elite US military, White House, and intelligence officials illegally funding the right-wing Nicaraguan terrorists known as the Contras by covertly selling missiles to Iran. Reflecting the U.S. Establishment’s sense that Sixties-inspired press freedom and independence had gone far enough with the Watergate coverage, corporate media chieftains agreed not to pursue the Iran-Contra Scandal to the point where another criminal U.S. President might have had to resign – this time over a matter that was explicitly problematic for the notion that US foreign policy is always conducted with good and noble intentions.
Thanks in no small part to that agreement, the next biggest scandal in the official U.S. memory after Watergate involves not the murder of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants but rather the unseemly soiling of a young White House staffer’s blue dress with Bill Clinton’s well-travelled DNA. Clinton currently enjoys remarkably high popularity in the U.S. He does so with no small assistance from a corporate media that helped nearly force his resignation in the face of a monumental presidential scandal two decades ago. So what brought Clinton to the brink of defenestration from the Oval Office: passing the arch-regressive and corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) over and against his campaign promises not to do so?; pushing and signing the vicious elimination of poor families’ prior entitlement to minimal federal cash assistance in the name of “welfare reform” while embracing endemic corporate welfare and pushing through the deadly de-regulation of high finance?; humiliating Russia, criminally bombing Serbia (on falser pretexts), and otherwise generating a New Cold War with Russia that helped crush hopes for a desperately needed diversion of resources from the bloated Pentagon System to the meeting of human and social needs?; imposing the savage “economic sanctions” that killed more than a million Iraqis? No, what almost proved Clinton’s undoing was the childish Monica Lewinsky cigar and fellatio fiasco – one of Wild Bill’s copious sordid sexual escapades – and the silly lies he told about his private skullduggery.
“The People Who Own the Place”: Clinton v. Edwards and Nixon
Clinton has been forgiven and redeemed in the “mainstream” U.S. media and politics culture. Such exoneration will never be extended to John Edwards. The reasons for this contrast include the particularly twisted nature of Edwards’ baby-Daddy transgression (committed while Elizabeth Edwards struggled with ultimately terminal cancer) and his subsequent bizarre cover-up. At the same time, however, crazy John Edwards committed an even more unpardonable sin in the corporate-managed “democracy.” He campaigned eloquently, passionately, and perhaps even sincerely against the moneyed elite and corporate-financial domination of both of the nation’s leading political organizations. Whether he meant it or not, candidate Edwards went off the reservation on concentrated wealth.
The more interesting Clinton comparison is with Nixon. Reflecting on why Nixon was removed from the White House over the “triviality” of Watergate, Chomsky noted that Nixon “made a lot of powerful enemies” when he tore apart the post-World War II Bretton Woods system. The Bretton Woods framework established the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency fixed to gold and placed restrictions on import quotas and the like. It made the U.S. the world’s banker, in essence. When Nixon took the nation off the gold standard, suspended the convertibility of the dollar, and raised import duties, he messed with “the people who own the place.” Leading “multinational corporations and international banks relied on the [Bretton Woods] system, and they did not like it being broken down” (Chomsky, Understanding Power, 119). This elite anger over Nixon’s move was evident in the Wall Street Journal and other elite business venues, suggesting strongly that more than few powerful people were happy to see Nixon go.
Clinton, it should be remembered, stayed carefully obedient to the nation’s corporate and financial masters. The “people who own the place” occupied key positions and maintained hegemonic influence in his militantly neoliberal, NAFTA-signing administration. As Charles Ferguson notes in his useful book Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (2012), Clinton’s “economic and regulatory policy was taken over by the [financial] industry’s designated drivers – Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan…[and] investment bankers were given clear signals that they could behave as they wished.”
Deflategate vs. Militarism Promotion
A revealing episode in the United States’ rich history of selective public outrage comes from the world of sports. Look at the high-profile media scandal that emerged before the most recent Super Bowl merged over supposedly shocking revelations that the National Football League (NFL) champion New England Patriots manipulated the air-pressure of game footballs in accord with the preferences of their quarterback Tom Brady. “Deflategate” is a minor matter even on purely athletic and sportsmanship grounds but it has received enormous media attention and popular discussion over the last seven months. It is now the biggest NFL scandal ever.
In reality, however, two other NFL-related scandals would deserve considerably more attention in a morally serious culture. The first is the NFL’s campaign to undermine and discredit recent path-breaking medical research showing beyond reasonable doubt that the frankly vicious and super-violent game sold by the massively profitable and powerful league has a pervasively crippling and deadly impact on the brains of many of its players from top professional ranks down, This is no small moral matter given the extreme popularity of football in the US, where the more than 1.1 million high school students and more than 90,000 college students play the brain-damaging sport each year.
The second scandal has to do with recent reports that NFL teams have received millions of dollars from the US Defense Department in exchange for honoring US troops and veterans in on-field ceremonies and on stadium screens before and during games. There’s something more than a little distasteful about the NFL taking cash to salute the nation’s military personnel. The league, after all, is rolling in profits thanks in no small part to its cozy relationship with Washington. Thanks to its highly favored status with Washington, it functions as a de facto legal monopoly. It is classified as a 501(c)6 and therefore pays no taxes. No wonder the billionaires who own all but one of the league’s teams (the Green Bay Packers belong to 360,584 stockholders) all make handsome profits on their franchises (no other major U.S. sports league can say that). Surely, one might imagine, these uber-wealthy beneficiaries of corporate welfare would not need to be paid to throw some love at “our troops” – at the people who are sent off to kill, maim, die, and suffer horrible injuries in the names of “freedom” and “civilization.” But no, football barons must have their pound of flesh even for that little bit of “giving back” to the military “heroes” – something that militaristic Republican politicians like John McCain (R-AZ), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Chris Christie have called “disgraceful” and “outrageous.”
Note, however, what is not a scandal in the national coverage and commentary, trapped in the usual moral quicksand of American Exceptionalism, which dictates that the United States and above all its military and its wars are inherently good and noble: the federal government takes millions of taxpayer dollars to invest in promoting the imperial militarism that produces mass-murderous crimes like the U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Iraq and the torture and drone strikes that have helped push untold masses of Muslims into the arms of the Islamic State and other extremist Islamist groups. If the taking of the taxpayer money by explicitly commercial, profit-seeking football capitalists is scandalous, so is the giving of it by the purportedly higher-minded Pentagon. The Defense Department spends the public money with the intention of advancing its ability to garner recruits and continued lavish taxpayer funding s for its murderous activitieis across a war-ravaged planet in which the U.S. accounts for nearly half of all military spending.
Poor Folks’ Welfare v. Rich Folks’ Welfare
Still, it’s good, I suppose, to see any scandal emerge that focuses some attention, however briefly, on federal payouts to the rich. In the U.S. for many decades, “mainstream” media and politics culture has advanced the noxious notion that there is something scandalous about the comparatively tiny percentage of resources the United States government spends on assistance to the poor. This poisonous and reactionary sentiment helped drive Bill Clinton (and Newt Gingrich’s) aforementioned welfare “reform” (elimination), a Dickensian policy that has proved calamitous for the nation’s many millions of impoverished Americans in the current century. Meanwhile, U.S. government welfare remains all too quietly alive and well, free of scandal – for the wealthy corporate and financial Few, that is. As the leading U.S. business paper Bloomberg Business candidly informed its elite (and therefore safe) readers two years ago, reporting on research from the International Monetary Fund:
“the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all…the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders [are] almost entirely a gift from taxpayers…The top five banks – JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co,. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc…the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry – with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy – would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.”
By “corporate welfare,” Bloomberg Business meant not just the massive bailouts the big banks received after helping crash the economy in 2008 and 2009, but also and above all the reduction of their borrowing costs by the federal government’s policy of loaning them money at low to zero interest rates.
It isn’t just in the financial sector, of course, where big, politically influential corporations receive giant government subsidies and protection, all free from the tough-love “free market discipline” of “welfare reform.” The aforementioned Pentagon System is itself a giant form of corporate welfare for high-tech U.S. and other global corporations, one of countless ways in which the federal government funds and protects Big Business, including the highly subsidized and super-profitable fossil fuel firms who are leading humanity over the cliff of radical anthropogenic climate change, Funny how that never quite makes it to real scandal status in the U.S. – no more than the millions killed abroad as “collateral damage” by the U.S. Empire, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East.