US Sanctions In Latin America

 Alan MacLeod

The Obama administration's easing of sanctions against the small island nation of Cuba was met with a mixed response at home, to say the least. Could this be the beginning of a new dawn in a more humane foreign policy? Many establishment figures welcomed the move. John Kerry was one of them, stating “it is time to try something new” to give “the best opportunity for the people of Cuba to improve their lives and to take part in the choices about their lives.” Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird agreed, “The more American values and American capital[my emphasis] that are permitted into Cuba, the freer the Cuban people will be,” he said.

However, many po-faced articles attacked the President as a spineless leader, guilty of faulty logic. There was also a good deal of concern about the fate of “free speech advocates” and “human rights campaigners” in Cuba. One Washington Post editorial laments that “with no consequences in sight, Cuba continues to crack down on free speech” while one Times article gives voice to another dissident's opinion: “This is a blank check for the Castros and their heirs in power.” President Obama himself explained the embargo thus: “This policy has been rooted in the best of intentions…it has had little effect.”

Many, even on the left, have hailed the decision as a historic shift in US foreign policy.

While there does appear to be considerable debate among the elite on the subject, a number of key assumptions remain unchallenged and unexplored in the debate and many crucial facts remain unspoken. Firstly, the notion that United States is an honest broker, and its foreign policy has always been designed to improve the freedom and standard of democracy of those in foreign countries is apparent in virtually every article. No opinion column that this author has found challenges the concept of the United States' ethical foreign policy. Remarkable, considering the US props up some of, if not most of, the world's most violent dictatorships. Among these being  Saudi Arabia, where beheadings are common and women are not allowed to drive a car, Egypt, which has seen “unprecedented state violence” to “quash dissent”, according to Amnesty, and Israel, currently carrying out the world's longest-running occupation of another country.  Indeed, as far back as 1981, Lars Schoultz found that the more a Latin American country tortured its own population, the more US foreign aid it would receive. 

Another key assumption underlying the mainstream commentary is that the United States has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. As William Blum has chronicled, the United States has overthrown more than 50 foreign governments since 1945. Yet, it is Cuba's record with regard to its history of human rights abuses and state-sponsored terrorism that is under scrutiny.

This is a shocking reversal of the facts. For one thing, the greatest human rights abuses on Cuba occur at US-controlled Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of political prisoners have been tortured. Furthermore, no mention is made to the fact that the United States has been waging a unilateral terrorist war against Cuba for more than 50 years. This is a war that has included widespread use of banned bio-chemical weapons resulting in a trillion dollars of damage to the island, according to the United Nations.

The embargo is almost unanimously opposed in the international arena. A resolution demanding the immediate end to the blockade of Cuba has been passed 23 times in a row at the UN. In 2012, the vote was 188-3, with the US picking up only Israel and Palau as support while managing to buy only abstentions from the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, apparently too embarrassed to vote against it.

These discarded facts notwithstanding, what makes the situation more extraordinary is that at the same time as lifting sanctions against Cuba, the US is currently placing sanctions on Venezuela for alleged human rights violations. These “human rights violations” include arresting political leaders, funded by the United States government through USAID who tried to overthrow the government last year. The White House went further this week, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” The absurdity of such a statement needs no comment. Suffice to say, Americans will not be panic-buying groceries and going down into their bunkers. Older readers may remember similar outbursts from the Reagan administration, which claimed that Nicaragua “constituted an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.” However, when US officials talk of threats to national security and foreign policy, what they mean is the threat of any country taking matters into its own hands and possibly “threatening” to bar the US government to do whatever it likes around the world.

It is commonly said that the US has taken its eye off Latin America in recent times, particularly since the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. Therefore you will be forgiven for not following what has happened in the region since 2000. Venezuela was the first of eighteen countries to elect (and re-elect) progressive political parties into power. While far from perfect, the so-called “pink tide” has begun to address the shocking problems in their countries, such as poverty, inequality and national sovereignty. Venezuela in particular has been at the forefront of creating new regional institutions designed to replace the US-dominated Cold War organizations. For 500 years many Latin Americans felt the region had been under foreign domination, first European, later American. The continent, which was described by US officials as “America's backyard”and “our little region over here that has never bothered anybody” has begun to free itself from US domination with alarming- or exhilarating depending on your political persuasion- speed. There is a general agreement among these nations that a precondition to genuine independence and integration was freeing themselves from US interference by setting up their own, independent institutions.

ALBA, a Venezuelan-inspired alternative to the US-backed Free Trade Agreement for the Americas, was launched in 2004. In contrast to the FTAA, which promoted free trade, trickle-down economics and investor rights, ALBA was specifically designed as a complimentary, South-South organization based upon the principles of solidarity, social development and cultural protection. Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader described ALBA as “a system of exchange in which each country gives what it has and receives what it needs, according to the capacities and necessities of each participant. It is the only example of this kind of commerce in the world and is quite different from the market-based criteria of the WTO.” It has since expanded to 11 countries, mainly in the Caribbean region. ALBA focuses not only on trade in goods but also in programmes to help the disadvantaged. By 2011, it claimed it had lifted 11 million people out of poverty.

UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, was inaugurated in 2008 and CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, followed in 2011. These are regional organizations not unlike the EU. CELAC consists of every single Western hemisphere countryexcept the United States and Canada, who were deliberately barred from entering. One of the goals of these organizations is to replace the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS). Venezuela pioneered the Bank of the South, opened in 2009, and endorsed by Nobel Prize-winner Jospeh Stiglitz. It is a regional bank designed as an alternative to the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. It has proven successful. Today, every country in South America, bar US-ally Colombia, has rid itself of the IMF once and for all. To go with the bank a new currency, the SUCRE, has been established, designed to replace the US dollar in international business. Trade between Latin American countries has greatly increased, and the United States has lost ground to China in trade in the region. South American governments have also launched their own TV channel, Telesur. The Venezuelan government created Petrocaribe in 2005 in order to promote solidarity with and development for the poorest countries in the region. Under the programme, countries can defer payment for discounted fuel, thus hastening their economic development. The US is known not to agree with the project and has pressured states not to join.

American power and prestige in Latin America has seriously declined since 2000. The US now does not have a permanent military base in South America, the only continent in the world where that is the case. South America was also the only continent where no country cooperated with the US rendition programme. South American countries are willing to grant asylum to Western dissidents like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Uruguay has granted asylum to victims of Guantanamo Bay torture. In 2009, no South American nation recognized Palestine. Today, all, bar Colombia, have done so. So much for “America's backyard.”

The situation in Latin America and the Caribbean is as follows: Venezuelan initiatives are leading countries to turn their backs on the United States. Its threat to the US is much the same as the Nicaraguan threat in the 1980s: the threat of a good example. The real threat to US hegemony in the region is not Cuba anymore: it comes from the potential of Venezuelan-led regional institutions. Hence détente with Cuba and hostility with Venezuela.

By 2006, conservative analysts like Jorge Castaneda recognized the US Empire in Latin America was crumbling and the best way to preserve it was to separate good countries from bad. By 2009, the same analyst lamented the Empire was all but over. It is in this light we should see the recent decisions to lessen the blockade of Cuba and ramp up sanctions against Venezuela. Cuba is simply not geostrategically important any more. Progressives all over the world look to South American states such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador as examples, rather than Cuba. Today, both Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece openly declare their admiration of and links to the Venezuelan government. By softening their stance towards Cuba, the US hopes to regain some influence in the Caribbean.

In his biography of Chilean President Salvador Allende, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera stated that Washington always saw the democratically elected socialist as a far greater threat than the military dictator Castro precisely because he was an avowed democrat and won elections. Thus Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro pose a greater threat to US power. Venezuela is now enemy number one in the region. Therefore the lessening of sanctions against Cuba, while simultaneously imposing sanctions on Venezuela under the pretense of protecting human rights, is nonsensical.

Far from isolating Venezuela, however, the US has succeeded only in isolating itself. Attempts at sowing division between the ‘good' and ‘bad' countries of Latin America have largely failed. Even allies like Colombia cannot be counted on to consistently toe the line. CELAC, representing all Western hemisphere nations except the US and Canada, condemned the new sanctions, with Ecuador's President Correa labeling them “a bad joke.” Even American journalists find it funny. This week, as State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki explained that the US has a “long-standing policy “against backing coups in Latin America, journalist Matt Lee could not contain his laughter (video).

President Correa is correct. Ending sanctions on Cuba in the name of a new foreign policy while at the same time imposing sanctions on Venezuela because of supposed government repression is indeed laughable. It makes absolutely no sense if we take seriously the narrative on human rights and democracy peddled by the White House and echoed in the media. But it makes perfect sense if we view it as a cynical, realpolitik attempt to undermine the threat of a good example and a way of reestablishing American influence in the Caribbean through an increased presence in Cuba. Taking into account these factors, we can see there is no new, enlightened dawn in US policy, rather a switching of targets. It is, lamentably, business as usual.

Selma, Obama and the Colonization of Black Resistance

Ajamu Baraka

“To cleanse history in the name of a false patriotism that celebrates a new illiteracy as a way of loving the United States is a discourse of anti-memory, a willful attempt at forgetting the past in the manufactured fog of historical amnesia.”

— Henry Giroux

I tried! In my capacity as a member of the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Board of Directors (CCR), I traveled to Selma on Friday to attend the induction of Arthur Kinoy and William Kunstler, two of the founding lawyers of CCR, into the Selma National Voting Rights Museum. And even though I knew that I would have to endure Obama’s presence in Selma on Saturday, my plan was to stay in Selma until Sunday to catch up with friends and participate in the peoples’ crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

But I never saw the sun come up in Selma. Before Air Force One ever entered Alabama airspace, Obama’s presence overshadowed the commemoration. In conversations on Friday, I heard over and over again about how Obama was coming to town to symbolically “close the circle” on the struggle for voting rights. And though it shouldn’t have, I could not shake the deep sadness that I felt every time I heard this and similar comments from so many of my people who still had so much invested in this cheap pro-imperialist hustler that after the induction on Friday I found myself on Highway 80 heading out of Selma toward Montgomery.

I made the right decision.

Obama’s presence on Saturday severely crippled most of the people-centered discussions and activities that were scheduled for that day. And as the master propagandist that he is, he gave a magnificent performance blending themes of “American exceptionalism” with the black middle-class version of black history and black struggle to give an emotionally charged twist to an otherwise trite and familiar narrative of racial uplift and progress toward a more perfect union.

In fact his performance was so effective that very few seemed to remember that just two days before the Selma speech his Department of Justice announced that it would not indict the Ferguson killer-cop Darren Wilson.

And none of the mainstream commentators seem to notice the irony in President Obama proclaiming progress toward a more perfect union the morning after another unarmed black teen was gunned down by a cop in Madison, Wisconsin and that Selma and the civil rights movement reflected the importance of non-violence as a principle to resolve social conflicts, while 600 members of the 173^rd Airborne were in the air traveling to Ukraine to train the neo-Nazi Ukrainian national guard to wage war against their own citizens.

Malcolm X once said that the black freedom movement wasn’t integrated by white liberals and their Negro collaborators but was instead infiltrated. That programmatic and ideological infiltration was on full display in Selma on Saturday. In the 1950s and 1960s, the political and ideological space was created for liberal infiltration because of state repression in the 1950s.  A major target of the post-war national security state in the 50s was the radical black movement and individual black radicals. Dozens of radical black activists were prosecuted, jailed, forced out of the country or confined to a form of national house arrest by having their passports seized. Some of the more prominent names associated with this repression included W.E.B. Dubois, Claudia Jones, William Patterson and Paul Robeson.

However, radical human rights organizing and resistance continued, especially in the South. Building on the work that took new organizational forms in the 1930s, a solid social base of organized resistance was established that, while it suffered in the repressive environment of the 50s, nevertheless, provided the social base for what was renamed as the “civil rights movement” reflecting the growing hegemony of more conservative elements of the black freedom movement that started to garner more liberal institutional support.

The elevation of Dr. King after he was chosen by labor leader E.D Nixon to be the face of the Montgomery Improvement Association’s bus boycott and the subsequent creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that provided Dr. King a broader organizational base was facilitated by powerful white allies. Dr. King and SCLC didn’t just give voice to ongoing struggles throughout the Southern region but in many cases they were grafted onto some of those struggles that had a more militant, independent working class social base and set of objectives. And while the racial caste system mitigated the disperate class perspectives and interests within the movement in the 50s and early 60s, the experiences of the Lowndes county Black Panther Party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and the influences of Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) as well as other radical black organizations, progressively sharpened the class and programmatic contradictions of movement by the mid- 60s.

It was precisely the intensification of the black struggle for democratic and human rights that resulted in the state concession reflected in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. But it was the systemic contradiction of ongoing colonial/capitalist reality of the black poor and working classes in the South and the urban areas where blacks had migrated during the second great migration that facilitated the explosion in Watts just five days after the passage of the VRA. The rebellion in Watts was the first in over three hundred urban rebellions that would take place over the next few years.

This was the context that facilitated the placement of Dr. King and SCLC by powerful elements of the ruling elite on front of, and in some cases on top of work being carried out by local organizations, including attempting to displace the national influence and work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Today Barack Obama in his role as the President of the U.S. and chief spokesperson for the white ruling class, and as a representative of the “new” black professional-managerial class, has been assigned the task to explain and legitimate the ongoing subjugation of the black poor and working class five decades after the reform legislation of the 60s.

The speech in Selma, with all of its pro-“American” and settler colonialist sentimentality was delivered with a world audience in mind. Its ideological objective was to counter the idea of an irreconcilable black opposition by co-opting black resistance and imposing a conservative meaning of black oppositional politics.

The presence of George Bush and the imagery of Bush and Obama with the masses of black people behind them as they jointly crossed the bridge was meant to symbolically close any gap between the policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations’ that may have existed in the imagination of people outside of the U.S. related to black people and their loyalty to the U.S. state.

The message that Obama’s speech was meant to convey was that despite killer-cops, mass incarceration and grinding poverty no one should be confused: you will not split black folks away from the state because these black folks belong to us.

And judging by the paucity of criticism or even discussion of the Department of Justice’s decision last week not to indict Wilson and the unrestrained praise of Obama’s speech in various black media outlets, it is once again mission accomplished for the propagandist in chief.

The Venezuelan “Threat”

Andrew Kahn

We are being told by President Obama that Venezuela is a national security threat to the United States of America. Some say it is necessary for this to be claimed so that Obama can legally take punitive actions against Venezuelan officials. Pause for a moment and let the phrase sink in. “National security threat”.

As you let this statement marinate in your mind, consider the abstract idea of working backwards to reach a conclusion. A child determines that vegetables are poisonous. The vegetables aren’t poisonous because they are poisonous but because the child has decided that he or she does not want to eat the vegetables. A reason is needed to justify an action – in this case, the illogical idea that the vegetables are not to be eaten because, well, it doesn’t matter why. So, the vegetables have conveniently become poisonous and the child screams to his or her mother that “They are poison! I will get sick and go to the hospital and turn purple and orange and green if I eat them!” Clearly, none of this is accurate, but a pretext is needed to justify the action of not eating the vegetables. Is this rational?

So it is with Venezuela. There is no national security threat to the United States. Period. As the child who claims the vegetables are poison, so President Obama has decided that the Bolivarian Republic is a national security threat to the United States to justify an escalation in what has become a perpetual war against the socialist revolution that began over a decade.

The ruling United States regime – backed in its mission against Venezuela by the nominal opposition party – has made various claims regarding Venezuela since “We don’t like that the Revolution has been democratically elected for 15 years” is not the most politically tenable reason for claiming a national security threat.

Chief among the claims are that Venezuela has cracked down on dissent, imprisoned opposition leaders, allowed impunity for murderous national police and is engaged in corruption. While these questions have been refuted, it should be stated once again why they are not only incorrect but are hopelessly hypocritical – if they were correct – in light of United States’ policy regarding Venezuela’s neighbors.

First, the crack down on dissent is a very long running complaint lodged by the United States against Venezuela. Dating back to the mid-2000s when Venezuela did not renew a public airwave license to racist media outlets that peddled derogatory imagery and views, the accusation has been leveled that Venezuela is censoring the media and opposition views. Rarely mentioned by the mainstream media however is that these same stations – with their racist and violent programming – were never banned in Venezuela (despite some saying they should have been) nor were any of the program directors or company executives imprisoned for their legal, yet detestable, views. The outlets were simply not provided with an extension on having free public airwave space. Instead, the government made a decision to provide this public airwave concession to local community organizations. This, in the twisted logic of US imperialism is a “crack down on dissent”.

Tied to the idea of a “crack down on dissent” is the claim of imprisonment of opposition leaders. This claim, while factually correct, leaves out the most salient point which is the fact that there are prisoners who are opposition leaders…who were involved in planning of violent protests that led to the deaths of over 40 people – the majority of whom were either pro-government civilians or national police who were killed, in part, by snipers. So it is factually correctly that opposition figures are in prison but it is mendaciously disingenuous to leave the discussion at that without clearly noting that any country would imprison a citizen who provoked, plotted and carried out numerous acts of violence including bombings while plotting a violent coup that included attacks on journalist. Ironic how the opposition backed by US propaganda and money claims to be repressed in the media and then proceeds to plot to violently attack the media. It should be noted as well that among those in prison include instigators of the 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez at which time the media was shut down during the less-than-48 hours coup.

Regarding the claim of impunity for police responsible for civilian deaths during last year’s protests, one would only need to go to Venezuela’s prisons where police are currently imprisoned on suspicion of murder. Of course, this too is absent from the media’s discussion of Venezuela. There are no claims that these police are political prisoners or jailed for their beliefs. Unlike the sanctified opposition who were responsible for crimes against the people’s democracy and for the abovementioned violence and death, these police officials – who, it should be noted, were subjected to “protestor” abuse and violence – are unknown. But impunity there is not.

Regarding the last claim of corruption, there is undoubtedly corruption within the Venezuelan state – but unlike previous regimes that doubled down on corruption and spread the wealth with foreign allies, the current government under Nicolas Maduro has admitted that bureaucratic practices that lead to corruption and corruption itself are issues that are present and need to be rooted out. Note also that the actions that would be needed to root out the corruption in Venezuela – strongly tied to the remains of bourgeois capitalism – would involve steps that would engender further attacks on Venezuela for “repression of the opposition” and “crimes against free enterprise and freedom”. For the United States – and indeed the West in general – the specter of “corruption” is a cudgel held over political opponents to justify rhetorical and physical attacks. Yet which state in the world is free of “corruption”. “Corruption” is a term nebulously defined and present everywhere to varying degrees. While needing to be opposed, it is something that will never be defeated completely. One might as well call for a war to eradicate “sin”.

All of this brings us to the issue of Western hypocrisy, a topic that could fill tomes. Without boring the reader with tomes, one needs merely to ask how Venezuela is castigated as a corrupt, freedom-repressing nation (both patently false) when neighbors such as Colombia has a slight issue with assassinations and Mexico to the north has been wracked with one massacre with impunity after the next. Yet somehow Colombia and Mexico are considered allies despite their glaring problems – problems that have been exacerbated directly by the respective governments.

But the “threat to national security” is Venezuela.

Perhaps Venezuela is a threat, however. Perhaps. Indeed, Venezuela is a threat – not to the United States, but to United States influence and hegemony. Venezuela is a threat when the residents of the South Bronx receive affordable heating not from their own government but from humanitarian aid from Venezuela. When a small Black child in the Bronx goes to sleep with heat and is not shivering in their apartment, the Bolivarian Revolution can be thanked. President Obama? No thanks.

This is the threat that Venezuela poses to the United States. A threat that people will see a state based on the value of socialism providing for them when their own leaders fail. A threat that people will see socialism transforming people’s lives in Venezuela and lifting the masses out of poverty. When people are forced into homelessness because of rents in New York City, the Venezuelan threat provides free homes to own for its people. Transformative, revolutionary socialism that does not bend a knee to the gringo imperialists. What is capitalism and American supremacy to the child crying in a homeless shelter? Venezuela is building new houses for its poor. And this is the threat.

The threat in Venezuela is the breaking of the stranglehold of the private elite that dictates to the masses what their dignity will be. The elites, with their allies in Miami and Washington dictating to the masses. “Your dignity? It does not exist.” The deprecations of poverty are not seen. Out of sight, out of mind, out of media. But the Revolution changed that. This is the threat of Venezuela – the threat of exposure of injustice. But not mere exposure, but castigation and revolution. A true changing of power.

An impoverished man named Hugo Chavez, of African and native ancestry, upended Latin America and transformed the region and brought dignity and power to the people. It was a revolution so damnable to the powerful and Washington for it was democratic. It was voted on. The people willingly voted for Revolution and defended it with their arms. Washington could not say “They did not vote for it! We demand elections!” No, Venezuela has voted for 15 years for Revolution and this is impudence to the important people. And now, the bus driver-turned-President Nicolas Maduro leads the people. Impudence. The threat of impudence – or the triumph of a revolution of love and justice.

But this Revolution is not merely a hippie love-in where people hope for justice then sit back and drink their Cafe Americano. The Revolution, as it is driven by a society-state-military coalition – with each complementing the other, the societal dignity of the citizen as the motive force – does not see Revolution as reform or a pacifist attempt to moderate capitalism’s excesses. While driven by a firm sense of love of one’s fellow man and woman, it recognizes the relevance of power. Power never concedes anything without a struggle. Just as there was an initial struggle to wrest power from the traditional capitalist class, the struggle continues – both in continued seizure of power and defense of the power that has been seized.

The liberal and pacifist classes are scared of a power change undertaken by the masses – especially one in which the military is of the people and aligned with the demands of the people. For it is that the liberal class – which traditionally has not ruled the military – cannot accept that an armed force will defend the gains of the working class against the liberal class’ traditional power. For the conservative class, the military has had a mixed legacy in Latin America – at times it has been the force controlling the working class, at other times the force that has guaranteed the working class’ rights. Recall that Comrade Hugo Chavez was from the military and led a failed coup that ended up propelling him to national recognition and the presidency through the democratic vote.

And perhaps this too is the threat of Venezuela – the concrete establishment of a socialist society that boldly declares its independence and it not cowered into refusing legitimate means of power to defend the stated will of the people. The West allows reformism by its “lesser brothers” – as long as it is within the context of accepted Western norms. Reformism guided by the wise hand of progressive thinkers of the West that pontificate in classrooms and international conferences. But revolution? And revolution from the bottom up? And revolution when the bottom declares its power? Revolution where the people of the bottom – the “disposable” – do not simply ask for rights but they seize power? This is the threat.

As it was in Cuba, the mental ideology of revolution is as great, if not greater, than the revolution itself. Once a people have decolonized their minds, everything else will fall into place in time. Power may be re-seized, but the people, once liberated, will not return to subjugation under the heel of either bare-toothed imperialists or the paternalism of Western progressives and faux-allies. The fire of freedom will continue to burn.

Perhaps then, in a way, Venezuela is a threat.

The threat lives. The threat of freedom and justice.

Israel Against the Jews

Pierre Stambul

Paris.

It is a well worn refrain. You criticize Israel and Zionism? You are an anti-Semite! A French Jew wants to be able to ‘live fully his Judaism’? He is invited to make ‘aliyah’ and to do his bit for the colonization of Palestine. It is hammered into us that the history of Jewry has been brought to an end and that Israel is its end point. Israel functions as an eraser of Jewish history, of memory, of languages, of traditions and of Jewish identities. Israeli politics is not only criminal against the Palestinian people. It claims to be the heir of Jewish history when it has misrepresented that history and betrayed it. Israel knowingly puts the Jews in danger wherever they find themselves. And it transforms them into robots summoned to justify the unjustifiable.

Revisiting the recent past

The history of French Jewry has strictly nothing to do with Israel. Perennially dispossessed, massacred or expelled by a variety of very Christian Kings, the Jews have acquired French citizenship not least thanks to the advocacy of a priest, Henri Grégoire, during the Revolution. The last two centuries have been marked by a quest for citizenship and for equal rights under the law.

The Dreyfus affair highlighted that, if one part of French society was anti-Semitic, another part, ultimately the majority, considered that the acquittal and rehabilitation of Dreyfus was the objective of all those who were enamored of liberty and rejected racism. The history of French Jewry has been distinguished by its significant involvement in the resistance against Nazism and the Vichy regime, then by the engagement of many amongst them in progressive and/or anti-colonialist struggles. Among the notable Jewish intellectuals of this era were Raymond Aubrac, Marc Bloch, Laurent Schwartz, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Stéphane Hessel.

It was an era when many Jews thought that their own emancipation was part of a universal emancipation. It was an epoch when racism, fascism and the hatred of ‘the other’ were considered as utterly unacceptable and had to be fought. Jewish children went to the public school system; the idea of separating themselves from others into faith-based schools would never have occurred to them.

In Israel today, there has been a concerted attempt to erase the history of Jews in the different countries where they lived. If Jews have for a long time been considered by anti-Semites in Europe as inassimilable pariahs and if they have been persecuted because they have constituted an obstacle to the mad nationalisms which dreamt of ethnically pure societies, they have never sought separation but, on the contrary, the integration into the societies in which they lived.

A call to desertion

One jumps forward to more recent times. At the head of a huge Parisian demonstration supposedly organized against terrorism, one finds three war criminals, Netanyahu, Lieberman and Bennett, who just made a name for themselves by massacring of more than 2000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) in Gaza during the summer of 2014. Profiting from the emotion generated by the anti-Semitic murders at the Porte de Vincennes, Netanyahu is empowered (by the French government)1 to declare to French Jews that they live with insecurity in France and that they should move to their ‘true’ country, Israel.

In fact, Zionism has never combated anti-Semitism. It has always endlessly fed on it with a single and unique objective: to entice as many Jews as possible to immigrate to Israel. As a result, Netanyahu has not hesitated to put French Jews in danger. He makes them into foreigners in their own country, ‘tourists’ who have not understood that their ‘homeland’ is down there. Jews are enjoined to become either ‘traitors’ (to the single and unique cause, that of Greater Israel from the river to the sea) or accomplices. France has always been considered a failure for Israel: hardly 80,000 Jews have left since 1948 and half of them have returned to France. Then the propaganda becomes deafening. However, if there is clearly a country where Jews live in insecurity, it is Israel itself and it will be thus as long as Israel pursues the destruction of Palestine.

To the aliyah (‘going up’) of the living towards Israel, is now added that of the dead. The Israeli authorities actively incite French Jews to bury their dead in Israel. Thus the victims of the killing at the Porte de Vincennes have been buried at the Givat Shaul cemetery. This district of Jerusalem is actually the former Deir Yassin, the village martyred in the 1948 war where the Irgun militias directed by Menachem Begin massacred the entire population so that the village, like so many others, could be erased from the map. How symbolic!

Israel in the avant-garde of Islamophobia

Jews have lived for centuries in the Islamic world. They have even been welcomed by the Ottoman empire after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Today, Israel participates in the demonization of Arabs and of Muslims by behaving as a model pupil in the ‘clash of civilizations’ classroom. Some politicians having made it their stock in trade, anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia is openly displayed, and acting on them is not uncommon.

The mass crime in Gaza or the multiplication of racist statements (for Rabbi Rosen, the Palestinians are akin to Amelekites and the Torah dictates that we should kill them as well as their wives, their children, their flocks) will leave traces. How does one imagine that what is inflicted on the Palestinians will be without consequences?

In Israel, propagandists compete to explain that Jews have lived in hell in the Muslim world, concealing the fact that anti-Semitism has been above all of European and Christian origins. In Israel, Oriental Jews experience social discrimination and racist contempt. They have often been humiliated and discriminated against on their arrival. They are cut from their roots and urged to renounce their identity. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is presented as an ‘exchange of populations’ whereas Zionism is the principle cause, both of the Nakba and of the departure of Oriental Jews from their countries.

What does it mean to be Jewish in Israel?

Zionists have theorized the idea that Jews and non-Jews are not able to live together. This is totally contrary to all that has taken place for hundreds of years. It runs contrary to the aspiration of Jews to leave the ghettos, the mellahs and the juderias to become normal citizens.

Devout Jews who emigrate to Israel rarely encounter there the religion that they have practiced for centuries. The national-religious movement is dominant. This integrationist current has transformed the character of religion. A ‘chosen people’ never meant one having more rights than others but, on the contrary, one having more obligations. Among the precepts, there is ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself’. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ was never meant as the inspiration for the ethnic cleansing now taking place but was an expression of eagerly ‘anticipating the Messiah’.

Hebrew has always been a religious language whose profane usage is forbidden. The Jewish religion is a religion of ‘exile’. The settlement on this land (of Israel/Palestine) before the arrival of the Messiah and a fortiori the creation of a Jewish state was forbidden. Besides, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 did not go to Jerusalem. Herzl met an almost unanimous hostility against the Zionist project from the rabbis when the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was proposed.

For secular Jews, the dominant values of Israel are the antithesis of their understanding of the values of Judaism. Where does one find in the Jewish tradition the racism, the chauvinism, the militarism, the negation of the existence and of the dignity of the other? What is there in common between what great Jewish intellectuals (Einstein, Freud, Arendt, Kafka, Benjamin …) represented and the war criminals who run Israel? What has Israel done with their memory and that of those who struggled against fascism and colonialism (Marek Edelman, Abraham Serfaty, Henri Curiel …)? From what Jewish heritage can the settlers and the military draw to justify in advance the violence and crimes committed against the Palestinians?

As the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has written a propos the book of Yakov Rabkin Comprendre l’État d’Israël [Understanding Israel]2, “those who see in Zionism a continuation of Judaism would benefit from reading this book. But those who believe that the state of Israel is a Jewish state have an obligation to read it.”

Some Jews think that after the Nazi genocide, Israel is the ultimate refuge. On what grounds is the Israeli leadership able to brandish everywhere anti-Semitism and the memory of the genocide? Zionists played only a marginal role in the struggle against anti-Semitism and the resistance to Nazism. Some Zionist leaders had themselves engaged in shameful behavior during the rise of fascism (Ben Gurion with the 1933 Haavara Agreement) and during the period of extermination (the Stern group murdering soldiers and British dignitaries).

How is it possible to not understand that the memory of the genocide signifies ‘never again’ and not ‘never again TO US’, the latter denoting a tribal vision of humanity in total opposition to all forms of the Jewish heritage.

Refusing dictates and fear, refusing all forms of racism and of discrimination

There are confrontations which make sense: struggles against oppression, domination, colonialism, for equality under the law. But we are being sold a war that is not ours: that of a world supposedly civilized against ‘Islamic terrorism’. In this war, Muslims are considered potential terrorists and are enjoined to ‘prove’ that they are not accomplices of Daesh.

And Jews are commanded to support without reserve Israeli policies that are criminal against the Palestinians and suicidal for Jews. This headlong rush into criminality works on fear. This syndrome assures consensus to a point such that a Palestinian negotiator (Professor Albert Aghazarian) has claimed that the Israelis fear no longer living in fear. This irrational fear has infected many French Jews.

In the context of the ‘clash of civilizations’, pretext for the powerful to drench the world in blood, there is in France a general escalation of all forms of racism. Contrary to the image manufactured by the mainstream media, racism hits essentially those ‘dominated’, all the victims of social apartheid: Arabs, Blacks, Roms. The trend takes a new form by concealing itself behind Islamophobia. As it is no longer politically correct to say ‘dirty Arab’, one demonizes Islam. There is also an incontestable and detestable increase in anti-Semitism. But the different forms of racism are not treated in the same manner.

The Israeli leadership, and CRIF [Conseil Répresentatif des Institutions Juives] in France, are actively involved in the stigmatization of Muslims. They assert, against all evidence, that there is only one racism to denounce (anti-Semitism) and that we are on the brink of a newkristallnacht. They identify Jews as those that that the authorities protect; whereas the ‘law and order’ ideology, the declarations of the political leadership and the nauseating work of pseudo intellectuals, are aimed solely at a population which has been declared dangerous.

Moreover, the anti-Semitic stereotypes are nourished by the complicity of CRIF with Israeli policies and of the evident partiality of the French state. In this time of disarray, the legitimate indignation against Israeli crimes brings a rise in anti-Semitism and the few misfits attracted by the frightful violence of Daesh to commit criminal murders against Jews for being Jews.

The struggle against racism can’t be divided into isolated compartments. To choose certain ‘good’ victims against others is the antithesis of the anti-racist struggle. Israeli policies and the total negation of the rights of the Palestinian people cannot protect the Jews. On the contrary. To create the new Israeli, it is necessary to ‘kill the Jew’, the one who thought that his emancipation was dependent on the general emancipation of humanity. As the militant anti-colonialist Israeli Eitan Bronstein said: “we will never be free as long as Palestinians aren’t free”. In rejecting tribalism, French Jews reaffirm a history for which they can be proud.

Everybody is required to combat all racisms, all stigmatization, all discrimination. It is necessary for everybody to defend justice, in Palestine as well as here in France.

This article was published on the site of the Union Juive Française pour la Paix. It has been translated by Evan Jones.

The United States and the Cycle of Aggression

Robert Fantina

On April 4, 1967, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the United States was ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’ This was in a speech about the Vietnam War; that war killed over 55,000 U.S. soldiers, and at least 2,000,000 Vietnamese men, women and children. Over 7,000,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, more than twice the tonnage dropped on Europe and Asia in all of World War II. This, on an area of land slightly larger than the state of Massachusetts. Forty-eight years later, nothing has changed: the U.S. remains the greatest purveyor of violence and terrorism on the planet.

With the largest military budget in the world, greater than that of the next eight nations combined, one might think that the U.S. would have all it needed to protect itself and its enemies; what more could be required? And it is a fact that the U.S. could, indeed, protect itself, if that is what it actually wanted to do, and if it weren’t forever creating new enemies. Let’s look at these two topics is some detail.

Protection against enemies

It is possible that any nation in the world may have enemies. One country may look at another and see natural resources in abundance that it lacks, and want to procure them. Or, some perceived or real historical injustice may cause one country to consider another its enemy. With the overwhelmingly largest military in the world, with the most technologically-advanced weaponry on the planet, the U.S. can have no reasonable fear from any nation that might threaten it. So why, then, does the military budget, which now represents 55% of discretionary spending, need continual increases? Why is it that $585 billion is needed in 2015? What was lacking in 2014 that must be built or purchased now, to protect U.S. citizens from their ‘enemies’ (see below)?

It must be remembered that munitions and all their associated tools are big business in the U.S., and in that country, the customer, not the voter, is definitely king.

In 2014, just six so-called defense (read: military) contractors spent almost $62 million lobbying Congress to pass bills favorable to their industry. That equates to approximately $10 million per company.

During that same year, over $80 million was spent by education lobbies; however, unlike the six military contractors that spend $62 million, that $80 million was spent by 642 entities. That equates to less than $125,000.00 per educational group. Where, one wonders, is Congress going to pay the most attention? Why talk to 642 people, begging for paltry campaign contributions, when chats with only six can bring so much greater rewards? Congress members are nothing if not pragmatic about their re-election campaign finances.

But with all that military hardware being purchased, won’t the voters be a bit concerned if it’s not being used? Might they not see that public schools that don’t prepare students to participate in a global economy may be a national detriment, and could benefit from a few billion dollars? Couldn’t they recognize that some of that money could be used to rebuild and repair roads and bridges that are deteriorating? But wait, Congress has resolved that problem by initiating what will be discussed next: inventing enemies.

The enemy du jour

When one has a military system that could destroy the world ten times over, and one must also feed an ever-hungry military industry, what can one do to justify that food frenzy? Why, the answer is simple: if there are no enemies, invent them! This worked so successfully for generations, when the big, bad wolf of communism filled the average U.S. citizen’s heart with jingoist fear. There was no threat so huge, a long list of presidents said darkly, with the same sentiment echoed in the hallowed halls of Congress, as a communist, ready to destroy motherhood, apple pie and the U.S. flag. Their goal was nothing short of conquering the U.S. and subjecting all its citizens to poverty and oppression. Therefore, the U.S. must retain the capacity to destroy Russia at least five times over, before Russia can ever have a chance to implement its dastardly intentions.

Well, in the course of time, communism faded from much of the world, as revolutions throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union established some semblance of democracy (how close that is to real democracy is a topic for a different essay). So what was the government to do? Military industries employed lots of people, and creating alternate employment opportunities for them might require some actual work. No, much better to keep those industries humming, with campaign donations and the other perquisites of lobby groups coming their way. So with communism no longer a sufficient bugaboo, a new enemy was needed.

In Afghanistan, Russia was still at war. Well, what if, some genius in the State Department said, we arm the rebels to fight Russia? The U.S. would still need to purchase armaments, thus keeping the military industry happy. As a result, the mujahedeen (fanatical Islamic ‘holy warriors’) fighting the Russian invaders, received the very generous benefit of U.S. military might, and Russia did, eventually, depart from Afghanistan. However, the mujahedeen weren’t quite ready to walk away and let the U.S. select a new puppet-leader for Afghanistan, one whose strings were firmly attached to U.S. governance. So with the arms and guerrilla education proudly provided by the U.S., the mujahedeen became the Taliban. So the U.S., as this is being written, is involved in the longest war in its history, fighting against people it armed and educated in the fine art of war.

Throughout the Middle East one finds many people who follow the Islamic religion. Their style of dress is generally different from what is typically worn in the West, and their houses of worship look far different. There is a great amount of hostility towards the United States by people in many Middle Eastern countries, resulting from the U.S.’s decades-long financing of the brutal Israeli regime, and the bombing and invasion of Iraq, ostensibly to rid that country of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (which it didn’t have), but really to get greedy U.S. hands on oil reserves, and dole out no-bid contracts to rebuild the country, after U.S. bombs destroyed it, to government-associated companies.

At least partly due to these reasons, fanatics, who extract out of context certain phrases from the Qur’an, have committed violent acts against the U.S. and some of its allies. How convenient for the U.S! Just when a new enemy is needed, a small (miniscule, actually) number of criminals pervert the teachings of a religion with which most of the U.S. is unfamiliar, and commit some high-profile crimes. Presto! A new enemy is created! And with 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, the war against them can last a long time, thus justifying, at least in the minds of Congress members and those who believe what they say, the need for ever-increasing military expenditures.

It might be interesting to note that ignorance about religion is nothing new in the U.S. So-called Christian-right ministers and spokespeople never tire of telling the world that the U.S Constitution calls for it to be a Christian nation, despite the fact that it simply doesn’t. They condemn homosexuals, criticize other religions and disparage the poor, not knowing or understanding that Jesus Christ, whom they purport to follow, never did any of those things. Indeed, he embraced society’s outcasts and unceasingly helped the poor and less fortunate. He called on those who followed him to do the same. He told people not to judge others. But, if violating the teachings of Jesus Christ by people claiming to following them plays well on the news, what do facts and reality have to do with anything anyway?

So there you are. The U.S. needs a huge military budget to supply revolutionary groups to fight governments the U.S. doesn’t like, and then, when the former revolutionary group is in power, some other ragtag group will begin to oppose it, and the U.S. will arm and educate that group. Once they are in power, the U.S. will need to fight them.

There are alternatives; but as long as the U.S. has a ‘Department of Defense’, which has nothing to do with defense, and Congress remains in the pocket of the military industry, little will change without voter intervention. The time is now; with more and more Republicans striving to curtail voting rights, the window of opportunity may be closing. Not finding and implementing alternatives to the current military and war industry would be a tragedy for the world that must not be allowed to happen.

The Global Currency Wars

Jack Rasmus

Capitalism is by nature based on intense, and often destructive, competition.  Not only between capital and labor, but between capitalists themselves. But not all competition is the same. There is competition when the global economic pie is growing; and there is competition when it is stagnating or declining.  And in recent months signs are growing that new forms of more intense, aggressive inter-capitalist competition are emerging as the global economy continues to slow in general, and even stagnant and slide into recession in a growing number of countries.

Competition in ‘good’ times of steady economic growth occurs within certain generally accepted rules of capitalist competitive behavior:  permitted, and even expected, are inter-capitalist competition over who can cut costs and prices the most or fastest to grab another capitalist’s market share, who can get a bigger investment foothold in their competitor’s home market, or get a competitive product faster to market, who can leverage new production technologies faster, or who can get one’s government to provide a better tax cut, better manipulate free trade to open up foreign direct investment into another capitalist’s local economy, and so on.

Governments always have played a key role in the inter-capitalist competition game. But the forms of assistance that governments undertake in support of the competition game also can change over time: manipulating domestic tax policy, lowering interest rates, cutting benefits costs, and assisting companies in holding down wage gains, are all typical measures governments employ on behalf of their home-grown capitalists (and electoral campaign contributors) in ‘good’ times.  Such measures represent enhancing capitalists’ competitive positions at the expense of their domestic working class, consumers, and/or wage earning taxpayers. But there are still other potential measures, ways for ‘taking away’ shares of income not only from workers but from other capitalists outside the home market, i.e. in other countries and economies.

As the ‘good’ times have transitioned to ‘bad’ in recent decades, and especially since 2008, the rules of the competition game have been changing—not only with regard to ‘taking away’ income from workers and consumers, but from gaining income at the expense of foreign capitalist competitors.

When the rules of the competition game between capitalists break down altogether, the result is war—i.e. the ultimate form of inter-capitalist competition.   The two World Wars of the 20th century immediately come to mind. The fight for colonies and resources was particularly obvious in the case of the First World War, while the Second War was the consequence of unresolved issues left over from the First World War, as well as the consequence of the economic collapse of global capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s.

More recent and on-going, USA led wars in the middle east this century are also testimony of the periodic resort to war and military conflict on behalf of national capitalists interest. The Middle East wars starting in 1990 and intensifying in the early 21st century, have been fundamentally about ensuring resource availability to USA and the other advanced economies, especially oil.

Memoirs of key members of the US economic elite after the 2003 invasion of Iraq have admitted that the Iraq invasion was fundamentally about oil—even if that acknowledgement by US politicians and the press still has not been forthcoming.

More contemporary still, there’s the USA direct intervention to pull off a coup d’etat in the Ukraine last year, and then subsequently the setting up of USA neocon-cum-shadow bankers to run that country’s economy that took place last December 2014.

Competition by war may be forbidden within and between the advanced economies, but Ukraine is viewed as an acceptable ‘border conflict’ outside the ‘no military economic competition zone’, at least to the USA. To the Europeans, on the other hand, the Ukraine is viewed as more internal to the zone. Hence, they are more nervous about the conflict.

The related case of Russia is even more interesting. The Europeans are more nervous than the USA about the new ‘rules of the competitive game’ in the case of Russia. Those new rules mean severe economic sanctions to undermine Russia’s economy. Strongly favored by the USA, for Europeans economic sanctions are considered risky. Not only because of the reverse impact those sanctions are having on their European economies, but also because of the potential precedent setting they represent.  If Russia is within the ‘no military competition’ zone, as many Europeans see it, then to economically compete with Russia by means of sanctions is a dangerous precedent. Like competitive devaluations, economic sanctions can cut both ways. Both competitors can resort to the same, and neither typically prevails in the end economically.

Furthermore, where do sanctions stop?  What if Greece refuses to abide by the European Troika’s demands for a new debt agreement? What if Greece unilaterally leaves the Eurozone? Are economic sanctions against Greece a proper response to force them to pay up the $270 billion Greece owes the Eurozone bankers and governments should Greece leave?

Recent wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere have not involved military conflicts between the advanced economies of North America, Europe and Japan. Instead, what they represent is the advanced economies beating up on local emerging market capitalists and their governments, as the former maneuver to secure key interests on behalf of their respective capitalist classes at the direct economic expense of those emerging markets.

Obviously, inter-capitalist competition by means of military conflict between the advanced economies (USA, Europe, Japan) is not on the global agenda today. Not even close. It is reserved for those countries and economies outside the advanced economies’ orbit. But the rules of the competitive game within and between capitalists in the advanced economies, rules that that were in effect in previous years, also appear to be fading.

New rules are emerging. More accurately, the old rules are breaking down over what’s ‘off limits’ in terms of acceptable forms of inter-capitalist competition within and between the advanced economies. The advanced capitalist economies are thus entering a stage—a kind of competitive ‘no man’s land’—where new and more aggressive forms of competition between them are emerging.

In between the one extreme of government intervention on behalf of home-grown capitalist interests in the form of direct military conflict—and the other of advanced economy governments engaging in normal competitive measures (such as domestic tax, trade, monetary, and wage policies on behalf of their respective capitalist interests)—lay a ‘middle ground’ in which new forms of inter-capitalist competition that are more confrontational are emerging, but which are yet short of direct violence and war. Not the ‘normal’ forms of competition based on trade, technology, cost reduction, etc., and not yet military confrontation to secure economic interests, but something in between in terms of intensity and aggressiveness.

Some of the more obvious forms of this new, more aggressive, intensifying capitalist competition include the following:

*The USA government going after the European banks by levying and extracting multi-billion dollar fines and by introducing measures making it more costly for Euro banks to do business in the USA market—both measures of which are undertaken in order to boost the poor economic performance of US commercial banks

*The European governments, in a tit-for-tat response, going after USA tech companies, requiring multi-billion dollar equivalent payments in taxes, levying fines, demanding organization divestment and break ups of the US companies in Europe, in an effort to make their own European tech companies more competitive with USA tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and others.

*The eruption of the global fight between the US shale gas/oil producers and the OPEC oil producers, led by Saudi Arabia and its neighbor oil emirates.

*The massive Quantitative Easing (QE) programs introduced by Japan in 2013 and 2014, and the Eurozone’s imminent QE in 2015—both programs of which designed to gain exports at the direct expense of other capitalist economies (including each other) and to stimulate capital inflows from other economies into their own to boost their stock and bond markets, make up for failing Euro bank lending, and promote foreign direct investment into Europe from Asia, China, and emerging markets.

*The increasing use of economic sanctions as a means to drive competitors out of targeted regional markets, and open up the same to one’s own capitalist producers

Since the 2012 national elections in the USA, the Obama government has been leading the charge on behalf of major commercial banking interests in the USA against Eurozone banks in particular. Fines for having violated US rules have been levied heavily on Euro banking counterparts, especially on Swiss, French and even UK banks—most notably recently the giant UK bank holding company, HSBC.

The USA has also mobilized its central bank, the Federal Reserve, in the effort. The Fed is about to employ the heretofore unprecedented tactic of subjecting the Euro banks to US ‘stress tests’ for the first time, to force the Euro banks to set aside more capital. This is allegedly to ensure against future financial crises. But that’s only the cover. Forcing the Euro banks to set aside more capital means less competitive lending to USA banks. Two of the largest Euro banks—Deutsche Bank and Banco Santander, the largest Euro bank in terms of assets—are expected to fail the Fed’s imminent stress test. Previously, the USA allowed Europe to conduct its own stress tests, which it accepted. And both Deutsche Bank and Santander passed Euro stress tests late last year. But they likely won’t pass the US Fed’s.

If the Euro banks fail the US tests, it is possible their lending limits in the USA economy will be curtailed. That in turn will allow US banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America, and others to pick up their business. Less for Deutsche means more for JP. The Euro banks’ test failure could also mean less investment in Euro banks by US stock investors, thus boosting the stock values of US banks.

Not to be outdone, the Europeans have launched an offensive of their own against US tech companies. The primary target is Google. Europe sees Google not only as an obstacle to it building its own tech industry, but as a threat to various Euro industries in the future, as Google plans to expand into new markets. Google threatens the Euro advertising and publications industries as well.  The fact that the company manipulates Euro tax rules to avoid billions of tax payments also irks Europe, not to mention its central role in USA direct surveillance of the Euro population and even its governments.  In November 2014 the European Parliament took the unprecedented vote to break up the company in Europe.

Other USA tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Uber are also targets, given their well-known tax avoidance schemes. The UK even announced it was introducing its own ‘google tax’.  Not only US tech companies, but US corporate giants like GE and Exxon, and many US pharmaceutical companies, regularly manipulate tax rules to avoid paying both US and European governments hundreds of billions of dollars every year. But the intensity and broad-based European offensive against US tech and other large corporations would not likely have occurred, were it not for the USA’s parallel and unprecedented offensive against European banks.  In short, capitalists and their governments within the advanced economies are now targeting entire industries in order to improve the competitiveness of their respective industries as the threat of a continued global slowdown appears more likely.

In times past, such extreme forms of government-assisted corporate competition would have been quietly worked out between US and Euro representatives. But in a world of slowing economic growth, declining government spending and revenues, and different degrees of austerity fiscal policies, major offensives against entire industries by different sectors of the advanced economic elites are now being launched—with the major participation and direction of their respective governments. This is something new, a disregard for prior ‘limits’ and competitive rules of the game.

Yet another major event that represents a disregard of prior ‘competitive rules of the game’ is the eruption of the intense economic conflict last year between the major oil producing states of OPEC, especially Saudi Arabia and its emirate neighbors, on the one hand, and the new fast growing shale oil and gas interests in the USA.   In the past, the Saudis and other OPEC players would not risk a collapse of the global oil market, which is potential, in order to counter the strategic competitive threat posed by the shale revolution, which is centered largely in north America. The Saudi’s are consciously driving down the price of oil in the short run, in the hope of driving the shale companies into bankruptcy.  The extreme response by the Saudis and OPEC to the shale competition not only threatens global oil and other commodity prices, but also the global financial market in corporate junk bonds.

In the past, the very great risks that the current Saudi offensive poses to the very stability of the global capitalist system would not have occurred. Understandings would have been quietly worked out behind the scenes. But in a global economy slowing and an already naturally falling demand and price for oil, the stakes for the Saudis and all of OPEC are high.  Inter-capitalist competition is thus assuming new and more destabilizing forms.

The resort to extreme forms of quantitative easing by the central banks of Japan and the Eurozone marks another new form of competition. Since 2010 both the Japanese and Eurozone economies have been the worst performers globally, each slipping in and out of repeated recessions.  The political systems of both are in turn beginning to fray and fragment. Both of these sectors of the advanced economies region of the global economy, representing perhaps $20 trillion in annual GDP, recognize they cannot continue on their present economic and political paths much longer. Given that both Japan and Eurozone are heavily dependent on exports production to regenerate their domestic economies, and equity and bond markets, both have introduced massive central bank liquidity injections in the form of multi-trillion dollar equivalent QE programs.  The goals are several. But the main objective is to drive down the values of their currencies, the euro and the yen, in order to ‘de facto devaluate’ by means of monetary policy. It is hoped the devaluation will lead to cheaper exports, export growth, and an export-driven economic recovery.

But what their desperate QE initiatives fundamentally means is that Europe and Japan have engaged in government-assisted programs, aimed at ‘stealing’ global export market share from other capitalist economies, both in the advanced economy sector, as well as from China, the BRICs, and emerging markets in general.  Their QE programs represent a desperate competitive move, after their prior policies for five years have proved dismal failures, as their economies sink further into stagnation or worse.  Were it not for the economic desperation now engulfing these two important wings of the advanced economies region of the global economy, their shift to ‘competition by competitive devaluation’—a development not seen since the 1930s—would not be occurring.

A final area of emerging new rules for inter-capitalist competition is the emergence of greater resort to introduce economic sanctions as a competitive measure.  The best case is Russia today, and the US-led sanctions.  It should not be misunderstood: the sanctions on Russia are in the last analysis an economic competitive measure, not a politically motivated initiative.  Behind the sanctions is the USA objective of driving Russia out of the European economy.  Europe was becoming too integrated and dependent on Russia. Not only its gas and raw materials, but trade relations and money capital flows were deepening on many fronts between Russia and Europe in general prior to the Ukraine crisis that has provided the cover for the introduction of the sanctions.  Russia’s growing economic integration with Europe threatened the long term economic interests of US capitalists. Strategically, the US precipitated coup in the Ukraine can be viewed, therefore as a means by which to provoke Russian military intervention, i.e. a necessary event in order to deepen and expand economic sanctions that would ultimately sever the growing economic ties between Europe and Russia long term. That severance in turn would not only ensure US economic interests remain dominant in Europe, but would also open up new opportunities for profit making for US interests in Europe and Ukraine as well.

In summary, the economic offensives by the USA and Europe impacting entire industries, not just companies, represent a new phase in global inter-capitalist competition within and between the advanced economies. This industry for industry tit for tat is something new in terms of inter-capitalist competition within the advanced economies. The fight over global energy market share, between the advanced economies’ once reliable OPEC partners, signals another major qualitative change in global capitalist competitor behavior.  It represents not only a new kind of qualitative clash in the energy markets, but one that raises the risk of multiple threats to the global financial markets in general. Monetary policy-driven currency devaluation and export competition by exchange rate manipulation also reflects a desperate resort to new competitive strategies within the advanced economies not seen since the 1930s depression—a strategy that failed in that former period and likely extended the depression period, and a strategy that will likely have similar effects on the global economy today.

Capitalists have begun fighting over a smaller export economic pie. That fight has set in motion global currency wars, and a crash of interest rates into negative territory as well, the consequences of which may prove highly risky and are yet unknown. Finally, the resort to economic sanctions as a inter-capitalist competitive measure, while taking the apparent form of a political event, in fact also represents a shift to a more risky long term form of inter-capitalist competition between entire macro-regions of the global capitalist economy.

Secret History Of My Geography Teacher, Also Cofounder Of Hamas

 Ramzy Baroud

This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle.

Hasanat was buried among the refugees of the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in the central Gaza Strip. He died on 2 March, at the age of 80.

“Hammad al-Hasanat co-founded the terrorist group (Hamas) on December 14, 1987,” wrote British tabloid by way of introducing the black Palestinian leader. I say ‘black,’ although, skin colour was never an issue worth discussing within the Palestinian Gaza political context.

But Hasanat had an affinity to Africa. I should know that. He was my geography teacher, and my favourite one throughout my three years at the Nuseirat’s UNRWA Boys’ Prep School.

Hasanat’s popularity stemmed largely from the fact that he “didn’t give too much homework” and that “he didn’t hit” as other teachers habitually did. In that way, his class was quite ideal: learning about the world at large and where winds come from and why, but the lessons included much storytelling. He was an agreeable character, and unlike our math teacher - whose name I am withholding because he still scares me to this day - who often came to class drunk and violent, Hasanat was a kind, fatherly figure to many of us.

But being teenagers and all, we exploited our geography teacher’s benevolence. Once we circulated a rumour that Hasanat naps in class because he was bitten by a bug while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

In a way, Hasanat asked for it, for he spoke disproportionately about that particular mountain. And whenever he needed to pronounce it, he would put less emphasis on the word “mount” and sharply increase the pitch of his voice when he phonated “Kilimanjaro”. It was as if the whole classroom would shake, as the thunderous voice of Hasanat would echo around the decayed walls of our UN funded refugee school.

We laughed at Hasanat’s expense, who rarely responded angrily at our snickering. Whenever he failed to mention Kilimanjaro, we would remind him with a sneaky question like “Abu Yaser, what is the highest mountain in Africa, you know, the one in Tanzania?” He would readily answer, then we would burst out laughing once more, and so on.

Hasanat was not a militant, even though an assault rifle was laid on his chest in preparation for burial. But, when stacked in the right order, historical circumstances could turn a kindly geography teacher, in the words of the condemnatory Daily Mail, into a “cofounder of a terrorist group”.

Hasanat’s oldest son is Yaser, thus he was “Abu Yaser” - father of Yaser. I have never met Yaser, but I knew Tariq Dukhan well. Both Tariq and Yaser, along with two other teenagers started the militant wing of Hamas, known as Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Tariq went to my school in Nuseirat. He was the son of our Principal, Abdul Fatah Dukhan, a friend of Hasanat. Together, Abdul Fatah and my geography teacher, along with Sheik Ahmed Yassin, launched the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas on 14 December, 1987. Their children were also the founder of the Qassam Brigades.

That fateful decision by some teachers at UN schools in my refugee camp and other areas in the Strip had fundamentally altered Palestine’s political landscape, and set the stage for the rise of the strongest fighting force in Palestinian armed struggle, ending with Israel’s summer war against Gaza last year. Nearly 2,200 Palestinians, mostly civilians were killed in the so-called Operation Protective Edge, but also 70 Israelis, over 60 of whom were soldiers. The Hamas legend had never been more pronounced in Palestinian society.

Yasser, Tariq and two others were killed after a brief period of daring battle with the Israeli army. Tariq’s place was filled by his brother, Mohammed, who was a classmate of mine starting in the third grade. Back then, I liked him particularly because he gave me access to the UNRWA-supplied football after school hours. He stole the keys from his dad whenever we needed to get access to the storage room of the school. Mohammed was killed by Israel at the age of 20.

Although al-Qassam’s first cadre was quickly eliminated at the hand of the Israeli army, they managed to register their permanent presence through opening a platform for scores, hundreds and eventually thousands more to join in. The kids of the neighbourhood, despite limited means and access, founded an army-like brigades, disciplined, tough and unyielding.

But Ustaz Hasanat (“Ustaz” meaning teacher) as we called him, was never a militant in any stereotypical sense, nor was Abdul Fatah. He was and will always be my geography teacher, and truly passionate about geography. He had a degree from Cairo University that he received in 1963 confirming his passion.

The man was also a refugee from the Palestinian city of B’ir Sabe’, expropriated after the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe of 1948) to become the Israeli city of Beer Sheba. He, like the vast majority of the nearly one million refugees, was born in a simple “peasant” family - fellahin. The family was struck with another tragedy in 1951, when his two brothers Raji and Muhareb were killed by the Israeli army, both on the same day.

I wonder if Hasanat’s love for geography was compelled by the feeling of captivity one develops living in Gaza most of his life? The confines of life for a refugee can be overpowering. And why the fascination with Mount Kilimanjaro in particular?

One may never know. The current Hamas leader in Gaza, and the former Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh said in a statement that Hasanat “was a brilliant leader of the Islamic movement, and one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Hamas movement in Palestine”. He may have been a “brilliant leader,” after all he founded the Islamic Society in Nuseirat, which had an important role in the formation of Hamas, but, to me and many of his students he never came across as a “fundamentalist” or a zealot in any way.

When he was exiled to Lebanon’s Marj al-Zuhur, starting in the winter of 1992, I was still living in Palestine, and I remember the trepidation that many felt that some of these old men would die amid the bareness of the snowy mountains. He was one of 419 members of mostly Islamic leaders. Somehow, he survived the harsh winter of that mountainous region, before they were allowed back into the occupied territories, many of them back into Israeli jails.

My geography teacher, who took naps quite often during class, was much tougher than many had assumed. As most of the founders of Hamas were killed, he escaped drones, warplanes and much destruction that followed, to die from old age after a brief illness.

Hasanat’s story is that of most refugee families; typical in its origins, but also unique in how each family coped with exile. My geography teacher died with a rifle on his chest, although I doubt that the old man even knew how to operate an assault rifle. He was carried to his grave by thousands of refugees in a funeral procession that teemed with scores of fighters, many of whom must have not been born yet when Yaser and Tariq established al-Qassam some 26 years ago.

When I told Ustaz Hasanat why we giggled every time he pronounced “Kilimanjaro,” he laughed too. But I never told him that we were the ones who started the rumour of the African bug that made him nap all too often during class.