Britain and America would like everyone to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured more than a century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK Axis don’t want this important slice of history resurrected to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

William Knox D’Arcy, having obtained a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia and with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 and completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually cancelled the D’Arcy agreement and took the matter to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were slightly improved but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company was re-named Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951 while Aramco shared profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls to nationalise its oil could no longer be ignored. In March of that year the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavourable to the host country.

Social reformer Dr Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, cancelling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable:

Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence. (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?

Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. The coup by MI6 and the CIA was successful and in August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

For his impudence Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He was imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

Smouldering resentment for more than 70 years

The British-American conspiracy that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. It all backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word MOSSADEQ – the Iranian who dared to break the chains of slavery and servitude to Western colonial interests.

Is Britain incapable of playing fair? During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

“The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

The company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment and we were mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. They had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it?

Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

In 2022 when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

Now we’re playing dirty yet again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 77 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when the Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”.

Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration and support. UK prime minister Starmer much prefers to talk about “the malign influence of Iran”

The excuse this time is that Iran’s nuclear programme might be about to produce weapons-grade material which is bad news for Israel. There’s a blanket ‘hush’ over Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nukes. The US and UK and allies think it’s OK for mad-dog Israel to have nuclear weapons but not Iran which has to live under this horrific Israeli threat. Then there’s America’s QME doctrine which guarantees Israel a ‘Qualitative Military Edge’ over its Middle East neighbours.

Then consider that Israel is the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention. Yes, it’s quite evident that the Zionist entity, not Iran, is the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Several weeks ago, Michael Langley, the head of US Africa Command (or AFRICOM), testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and stated that Ibrahim Traoré, the current president of Burkina Faso, “is using the country’s gold reserves for personal protection rather than for the benefit of its people,” an absurd claim, considering that the US Department of Defense, which Langley works for, has stolen $1 trillion from US taxpayers in this year’s budget alone. What’s more, AFRICOM itself has a deadly, well-documented history of plundering the African continent, often in coordination with NATO.

Take a guess why Langley might want to delegitimize Traoré’s governance and the larger project of the Alliance of Sahel States/AES (made up of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all of which have recently allied under a confederation after recent seizures of power). Any takers? Hint: the answer is natural resources and military presence. Traoré has nationalized Burkina Faso’s foreign-owned gold mines in an attempt to actually use the land’s resources to benefit its people. Similarly, upon taking power in Niger, the current president, Abdourahamane Tchiani, nationalized uranium and banned foreign exports. Notably, a quarter of Europe’s uranium, crucial for energy usage, comes from Niger. Considering Traoré’s crucial role in developing the identity of the AES as one of the more vocal and charismatic leaders, targeting Traoré is part of a larger project by the US/EU/NATO axis targeting the AES project at large. Recently, this new AES leadership has launched new green energy and educational initiatives. Meanwhile, the US has pulled out of the Sahel states as the AES asserts its sovereignty in defiance of decades of Western-backed instability.

Traore’s Burkina Faso is not the first Pan-African project to come under attack by the US/EU/NATO axis of power. Just as the vague claims from Langley serve to cast doubt on Traore’s ability to lead a nation, past Pan-African leaders who have dared to challenge imperialism and prioritize their citizens have also come under fire. For instance, former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, was assassinated in 1987 after putting the Burkinabè people’s needs first by rejecting IMF loans and demands, implementing nationwide literacy and vaccine campaigns, and spearheading housing and agrarian reform. Time and again, France and the US have taken decisive action against leaders who have promoted Pan-Africanism and environmental stability over the interests of Western powers. We’re watching it happen live now, and have a responsibility to stand up for Traorè and the AES before it’s too late.

When a country doesn’t bend its knees to Washington, the standard US playbook is one of environmental death, either via hybrid or classic warfare. Venezuela has refused to grant US corporations unfettered access to its oil reserves – the world’s largest –  and thus has been forced to use them as a lifeline. The US has punished Venezuela by imposing unilateral sanctions that have prevented the proper maintenance of the country’s oil pipelines, resulting in harmful leaks. In the Congo–one of the lungs of the Earth–the West’s decades-long quest for uranium and other rare minerals has led to mass deforestation, destroyed water quality, and unleashed military forces that have killed millions. And of course, the US is backing the ecocide/genocide in Palestine in order to maintain the existence of a proxy-state in an oil-rich region.

When the US military – the #1 institutional polluter in the world – “intervenes”, the only environmental outcome is climate collapse. And even when countries play by Washington’s rules, the US will still militarize, build more toxic bases, seek continued extraction, and create mass poverty. For the survival of the people and planet, we must resist this imperial expansion.

Any movement concerned with transitioning from an extractive to a regenerative economy must stand against US and Western intervention in the Sahel and advocate for Pan-African projects and a multilateral world. The emergence of a multipolar world means that projects like the AES have partners beyond the region: during Traoré’s most recent visit to Moscow, he met with the heads of state of Russia, China, and Venezuela. The US, of course, threatened by the loss of its dominion, insists on pursuing a dangerous cold war against China, to contain China’s influence, refuses to cooperate on green technology, and plows through any region that it views as a battleground, be it the Asia-Pacific or the Sahel. And always at the expense of life in all forms.

So if we are in a project for life, why, then, are we often met with hesitation in climate spaces to stand against this imperialist extraction? We need to reflect on a few questions. Whose lives do we sacrifice for “strategy”? Which environmental sacrifice zones are we silent about because of the “bigger picture?” What extraction and militaristic build-up do we let happen to theoretically prevent planetary death that is already happening via our own government down the road? Are we avoiding building connections with popular movements because of donors who only fund dead ends? We have a choice to make: allow the doomsday clock threatening climate death and total catastrophe to keep ticking or reverse course and breathe life into something new.

Traorè’s historic meeting with China, Russia, and Venezuela is a glimpse of what’s on the horizon. As people of the world rise against imperialism and neocolonialism, it is up to us in the US climate movement to stand unequivocally in support of projects of self-determination.

Although our lifestyles will certainly look different once we no longer have uninhibited access to the gold, cobalt, uranium, and other resources that are routinely extracted from the African continent and its people, we must prioritize building a more just and healthy relationship with the planet and all its people. If leaders such as Traore succeed in revolutionizing agriculture and resource extraction at a sustainable pace that benefits workers, what might that signal for a new world order in which exploited Africans and their lands do not form the cheap material base for the world? What might we build in place of extractive economies to usher in a green future for all?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Kirshenbaum and Jasmine Butler.

The election victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal Party on April 28, 2025, provoked fresh strain and already rigid posing of Alberta’s separation question. “For the last 10 years, successive Liberal Governments in Ottawa have unleashed a tidal wave of laws, policies and political attacks aimed directly at Alberta’s free economy – and in effect – against the future and livelihoods of our people,” wrote the province’s Premier Danielle Smith. The implementation of the No new pipelines law Bill C-69 as well as the oil tanker ban, increase of taxes on carbon emissions and imposing restrictions on oil and gas industry are just several examples of the liberal governments’ actions that cost Alberta billions of dollars.

It should be emphasized that the province contributes great sums of money to the federal budget of Canada, some hundreds of billions of dollars more, then other parts of the country. Despite this fact, the money is not allocated between provinces in proportion to their contribution. Thus, the Albertans give several times more, than they get.

It’s no surprise that, according to the data reported for May, 2025, the idea of independent Alberta is supported by approximately 36% of the locals. Their desire to leave Canada is quite reasonable as independence will open up new horizons to the current Canadian province and will help to avoid the limits set by Ottawa. Among other advantages Alberta will gain an opportunity to export its natural resources not only to the USA but also to other countries, all money it earns will stay within Alberta that will substantively increase the living standards of the population.

Premier Danielle Smith says she is ready to hold a referendum on provincial separation already in 2026 if citizens gather the required signatures on a petition. Taking into account that Ottawa demonstrates no intention to change its policy towards Alberta as well as to meet the demands voiced by the province’s Premier, there is no doubt the task will be implemented within a short period of time. By the way, it’s important to stress that the Albertans are not the first who started to talk about separation in Canada. The experience of Quebec, that tried to gain independence twice, should help the Albertans to achieve their goal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Denley.

The election victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal Party on April 28, 2025, provoked fresh strain and already rigid posing of Alberta’s separation question. “For the last 10 years, successive Liberal Governments in Ottawa have unleashed a tidal wave of laws, policies and political attacks aimed directly at Alberta’s free economy – and in effect – against the future and livelihoods of our people,” wrote the province’s Premier Danielle Smith. The implementation of the No new pipelines law Bill C-69 as well as the oil tanker ban, increase of taxes on carbon emissions and imposing restrictions on oil and gas industry are just several examples of the liberal governments’ actions that cost Alberta billions of dollars.

It should be emphasized that the province contributes great sums of money to the federal budget of Canada, some hundreds of billions of dollars more, then other parts of the country. Despite this fact, the money is not allocated between provinces in proportion to their contribution. Thus, the Albertans give several times more, than they get.

It’s no surprise that, according to the data reported for May, 2025, the idea of independent Alberta is supported by approximately 36% of the locals. Their desire to leave Canada is quite reasonable as independence will open up new horizons to the current Canadian province and will help to avoid the limits set by Ottawa. Among other advantages Alberta will gain an opportunity to export its natural resources not only to the USA but also to other countries, all money it earns will stay within Alberta that will substantively increase the living standards of the population.

Premier Danielle Smith says she is ready to hold a referendum on provincial separation already in 2026 if citizens gather the required signatures on a petition. Taking into account that Ottawa demonstrates no intention to change its policy towards Alberta as well as to meet the demands voiced by the province’s Premier, there is no doubt the task will be implemented within a short period of time. By the way, it’s important to stress that the Albertans are not the first who started to talk about separation in Canada. The experience of Quebec, that tried to gain independence twice, should help the Albertans to achieve their goal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Denley.

The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.

Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant to the human future. The challenge is not how to do more but how to live with less.

All societies face multiple cascading ecological crises—emphasis on the plural. There are many crises, not just climate change, and no matter what a particular society’s contribution to the crises there is nowhere to hide. The cascading changes will come in ways we can prepare for but can’t predict, and it’s likely the consequences will be much more dire than we imagine.

If that seems depressing, I’m sorry. Keep reading anyway.

Rapid climate disruption is the most pressing concern but not the only existential threat. Soil erosion and degradation undermine our capacity to feed ourselves. Chemical contamination of our bodies and ecosystems undermines the possibility of a stable long-term human presence. Species extinction and loss of biodiversity will have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystems on which our lives depend.

I could go on, but anyone who wants to know about these crises can easily find this information in both popular media and the research literature. For starters, I recommend the work of William Rees, an ecologist who co-created the ecological footprint concept and knows how to write for ordinary people.

The foundational problem is overshoot: There are too many people consuming too much in the aggregate. The distribution of the world’s wealth is not equal or equitable, of course, but the overall program for human survival is clear: fewer and less. If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.

Check the policy statements of all major political players, including self-described progressives and radicals, and it’s hard to find mention of the need to impose limits on ourselves. Instead, you will find delusions and diversions.

The delusions come mainly from the right, where climate-change denialism is still common. The more sophisticated conservatives don’t directly challenge the overwhelming consensus of researchers but instead sow seeds of doubt, as if there is legitimate controversy. That makes it easier to preach the “drill, baby, drill” line of expanding fossil fuel production, no matter what the ecological costs, instead of facing limits.

The diversions come mainly from the left, where people take climate change seriously but invest their hopes in an endless array of technological solutions. These days, the most prominent tech hype is “electrify everything,” which includes a commitment to an unsustainable car culture with electric vehicles, instead of facing limits.

There is a small kernel of truth in the rhetoric of both Right and Left.

When the Right says that expanding fossil energy production would lift more people out of poverty, they have a valid point. But increased production of fossil energy is not suddenly going to benefit primarily the world’s poor, and the continued expansion of emissions eventually will doom rich and poor alike.

When the Left says renewable energy is crucial, they have a valid point. But if the promise of renewable energy is used to prop up existing levels of consumption, then the best we can expect is a slowing of the rate of ecological destruction. Unless renewables are one component of an overall down-powering, they are a part of the problem and not a solution.

Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard. People—including me and almost everyone reading this—find it hard to resist what my co-author Wes Jackson and I have called “the temptations of dense energy.” Yes, lots of uses of fossil fuels are wasteful, and modern marketing encourages that waste. But coal, oil, and natural gas also do a lot of work for us and provide a lot of comforts that people are reluctant to give up.

That’s why the most sensible approach combines limits on our consumption of energy and rationing to ensure greater fairness, both of which have to be collectively imposed. That’s not a popular political position today, but if we are serious about slowing, and eventually stopping, the human destruction of the ecosphere, I see no other path forward.

In the short term, those of us who endorse “fewer and less” will have to make choices between political candidates and parties that are, on the criteria of real sustainability, either really hard-to-describe awful or merely bad. I would never argue that Right and Left, Republican and Democrat, are indistinguishable. But whatever our immediate political choices, we should talk openly about ecological realities.

That can start with imagining an “abundance agenda” quite different than what Klein and Thompson, along with most conventional thinking, propose. Instead of more building that will allegedly be “climate friendly,” why not scale back our expectations? Instead of assuming a constantly mobile society, why not be satisfied with staying home? Instead of dreaming of more gadgets, why not live more fully in the world around us? People throughout history have demonstrated that productive societies can live with less.

Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.

I’m not naïve—given the house I live in, the car I drive, and the food I buy from a grocery store, I’m still part of a hyper-extractive economy that is unsustainable. But instead of scrambling for more, I am seeking to live with less. I know that’s much harder for people struggling to feed a family and afford even a modest home. But rather than imagining ways to keep everyone on the consumption treadmill, only with more equity, we can all contribute ideas about how to step off.

Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Jensen.

State and market solutions to the ecological crisis have only increased the wealth and power of those on top, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Nearly all the experts and professionals are invested, literally, in a framework that is only making things worse. With so much power concentrated in the very institutions that suppress any realistic assessment of the situation, things seem incredibly bleak. But what if we told you that there’s another way? That there are already people all around the world implementing immediate, effective responses that can be integrated into long-term strategies to survive these overlapping, cascading crises?

We spoke with three revolutionaries on the front lines resisting capitalist, colonial projects. Sleydo’ from the Gidimt’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation, in so-called British Columbia, Isa from the ZAD in the west of France, and Neto, a militant with the Landless Workers’ Movement based in the northeast of so-called Brazil. They share their experiences gained from years of building collective power, defeating repression, and defending the Earth for all its inhabitants and for the generations still to come.

They share stories of solidarity spreading across a continent, of people abandoned to poverty and marginalization reclaiming land, restoring devastated forests, and feeding themselves communally, stories of strangers coming together for their shared survival and a better future, going head to head with militarized police forces and winning. And in these stories we can hear things that are lacking almost everywhere else we look: optimism alongside realism, intelligent strategies for how we can survive, love and empathy for the world around us and for the future generations, together with the belief that we can do something meaningful, something that makes a difference. The joy of revolutionary transformation.

We learn about solutions. Real world solutions. Solutions outside of the control of capitalism and the state.

The Revolution is Already Here.

Next up: how do we make it our own?

Revolution or Death is a three-part collaboration between Peter Gelderloos and subMedia. Part 1, ‘Short Term Investments,’ examined the official response to the climate crisis and how it’s failing. In Part 2, ‘Heads Up, the Revolution is Already Here’ we talk with movements around the globe that provide inspiring examples of what realistic, effective responses look like. Part 3 ‘Reclaiming the World Wherever We Stand’ will focus on how we can all apply these lessons at home.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

This is the context for the major crises over Ukraine, in the Middle East, and over Taiwan. Ongoing war in the first two carries the potential for escalation with dire, far-reaching consequences. Each is at once symptomatic of the systemic changes occurring in world affairs and the cause for a raising of the stakes in how that transition is handled or mishandled.

Dilemma 1 USA

There is a lot of talk about how Donald Trump will move quickly to resolve the Ukraine conflict. Maybe not within the advertised 24 hours – but supposedly he sees the pointlessness of an open-ended war with Russia. So, he is expected to get in touch with Putin, personally and/or via a designated envoy, to make a deal. We have heard hints of what the ingredients could be: a ceasefire, the lure of reduced sanctions, some recognition of a special Russian association with the four oblasts Moscow has annexed, Crimea ceded, the remainder of Ukraine autonomous with links to the EU if not NATO. The sequencing, the specifics, ancillary trade-offs are cloudy. To the minds of the more optimistic commentators, an eventual agreement is likely since Trump wants to be unburdened of the Ukraine albatross, since he is not a fan of NATO expansion or NATO itself, since he wants to concentrate on dismantling the federal government while pressing ahead with the rest of the MAGA agenda. Relations with Russia, as with every other foreign power, will be treated in terms of bilateral dealing wherein the U.S, focuses on the trade-offs, i.e. how much it gains as opposed to how much it gives.

It is by no means clear that this approach could achieve the stated goal of ending the war in Ukraine and easing the tense confrontation with Russia. For the Kremlin has set stipulations for a peaceful resolution that could only be met by a broader accord than is visualized in the horse trading anticipated by the Trump entourage and like-minded think tankers. Russia will not stop the fighting until a firm agreement has been reached. That is one. It will not accept any ambiguity as to the future status of the Russophile territories in question. That’s two. It will not tolerate leaving in place a Kiev government controlled by the rabid anti-Russian nationalists who have run it since 2014. That’s three. It will demand a treaty that formally neutralizes Ukraine on the model of post-war Austria. That’s four. It will press hard for the constitution of a pan-European security architecture which accords Russia a legitimate place. That’s five.¹

The implication is that the prospects are dim for a quick, short-term deal that leaves these sensitive issues indeterminate and open to the vagaries of politics in Washington and European capitals. It appears unrealistic that Trump will have the discretionary power, the political will or the strategic vision to design and to implement a multifaceted plan as required to weave together the varied strands of the European security fabric. It is one thing to intimidate the Europeans into taking on a fuller responsibility for their own security by threatening to leave them to their own devices. It is something far more demanding to recast the American relationship with its European allies, with Russia, with other interested, neighboring parties. For meeting that wider challenge has as its precondition a comprehensive redrawing by the United States of the imprinted mental map of the world system. For it is being transformed in basic ways which are at variance with the deep-seated American presumptions of dominance, control and privilege.

Trump is not the man to man to replace the prevailing strategic vision and America’s paramount position in the world with something more refined and in correspondence to the emerging multi-nodule system. Although instinctively he is more of an America firster than a hegemonic imperialist, his actions will be piecemeal and disjointed rather than pieces of an artful new pattern. Even in regard to specific matters like Ukraine or Taiwan it is impossible simply to snap one’s fingers and on impulse shift course. A carefully thought through design and the crafting of a subtle diplomacy is the prerequisite. Donald Trump, incontrovertibly, has no plan, no strategy, no design for any area of public policy. He is incapable of doing so; for he lacks the necessary mental concentration and organized knowledge. The same holds for dealing with China.

[The focal shift from Russia in Europe to China in Asia is less a mechanism for coping with defeat in Ukraine than the pathological reaction of a country that, feeling a gnawing sense of diminishing prowess, can manage to do nothing more than try one final throw of the dice in a vain attempt at proving to itself that it still has the right stuff – since living without that exalted sense of self is intolerable.]

Were Trump to take a series of purely tactical actions that have the net effect of lowering American presence globally, he would be running against the grain of fundamental national beliefs. Belief in the country’s birth under a Providential star to lead the world along the path of enlightenment, belief in American exceptionalism, belief in American superiority (the last jeopardized by signs of losing a battle with a superior armed Russia, by signs of losing an economic battle with a technologically superior China). Moreover, many Americans’ faith in these national myths is bound closely to their own individual sense of self-esteem that already is felt to be under threat in this age of anxiety. Trump is hardly the one to guide them to a mature appreciation of what America is and who they are.²

Dilemma 2 Russia & China

These two great powers, who are the principal obstacles to the United States’ retention of its dominant global position, face a quite different dilemma. Put simply, it is how to deal with an America that remains blind in vision and impervious in policy to the epochal changes reshaping the configuration of the world system. To the extent that Washington does feel the vibrations from this tectonic shift, political leaders are seen as reacting impulsively to deny its practical consequences in striving to assert an endangered supremacy. That compulsion leads American policymakers to set ever more arduous challenges to prove that nothing fundamental has changed. Hence, the drive to overturn a strategic commitment made half a century ago by pressing by every means for Taiwan’s autonomy. Hence, its strenuous efforts to prevent Russia from assuming a place in European (and Middle Eastern) affairs commensurate with its national interests, its strength and its geography.

[The minimalist aim has been to sever its ties to the Europe of the EU – thereby marginalizing it as a peripheral, inconsequential state. The maximalist aim has been to provoke regime change producing of a weaker, Western-friendly provider of cheap natural resources and open to predatory Western finance. A sharecropper on the West’s global plantation – as one Russian diplomatic bluntly put it. Project Ukraine was to be the spearhead].

From this perspective, Moscow and Beijing face a dilemma of a singular nature. They must devise elaborate strategies to stymie American plans to perpetuate its dominance by undermining the growing political, economic and – derivatively diplomatic – strength of these perceived rivals. Containment both in broadly security terms and in terms of their impressive national achievements – the latter that diminishes the American (Western) claim to representing to representing the one true path to political stability and economic sell-being. Resistance to those plans by the Russians and Chinese has become the overriding strategic imperative in both capitals as manifest in their intensifying collaboration in all spheres. As they see the situation, that momentous move is dictated by the reckless conduct of a fading, flailing superpower still in possession of an enormous strength to disrupt and to destroy.

Still, when it comes to direct confrontations with Washington over Ukraine or Taiwan, they are obliged to temper their actions so as to avoid provoking an unwanted crisis with an America they view as unpredictable and unstable. That concern applies to a Trump presidency as much as it does to the outgoing Biden presidency. Striking the correct balance is a daunting challenge.

The upshot is that Putin and Xi tread carefully in treating with their feckless Western counterparts who disregard the elementary precepts of diplomacy. We are fortunate in the temper of Chinese and Russian leadership. Xi and Putin are rare leaders. They are sober, rational, intelligent, very well informed, capable of broad vision, they do not harbor imperial ambitions, and while dedicated to securing their national interests are not bellicose. Moreover, they have long tenures as heads of state and are secure in power. They have the political capital to invest in projects of magnitude whose prospective payoffs will be well into the future.

Dilemma 3. THE EUROPEANS

European political and foreign policy elites are even less self-aware of their untenable circumstances than the Americans. The latter are as one in their blunt conviction that the United States could and should continue to play the dominant role in world affairs. The former have made no considered judgment of their own other than it is imperative to frame their conceptions and strategies to accord with what their superior partner thinks and does. Therein lies the heart of their dilemma.

For the past 75 years, the Europeans have lived in a state of near total strategic dependence on the United States. That has had profound lasting effects. They extend beyond practical calculations of security needs. Now, more than 30 years after European leaders were relieved from any meaningful military threat, they remain politically and psychologically unable to exercise the prerogatives and responsibility of sovereignty – individually or collectively. They are locked into a classic dominant-subordination relationship with America. So deeply rooted, is has become second nature to political elites.

[The extremity of the prerogatives granted the United States to act in disregard for European autonomy and interests was demonstrated in Washington’s destruction of the Baltic gas pipeline. That extraordinary episode punctuated the unqualified Europeans’ commitment to serve as an America satrap in its all-out campaign to prevent China as well Russia from challenging its hegemony. Securing the obedience of the European economic power bloc undeniability represents a major strategic success for the United States. So does cutting off Russia’s access to capital investment, technology and rich markets to the West. The heaviest costs are being paid, though, by the Europeans. In effect, they have mortgaged their economic future for the sake of participating in the ill-thought through severing all connection with what now is an implacably antagonist Russia whose abundant energy and agricultural resources have been a prime element in their prosperity and political stability.]

Under that unnatural condition, European governments have inflicted serious damage on themselves. Moreover, they have jeopardized their strategic and economic future. By following Washington’s lead in the campaign to neutralize Russia as a presence in continental affairs – dating from 2008, they have cut themselves off from their natural partner in natural resource trade, technological development and investment. They have institutionalized a hostile relationship with a neighbor who is a major world power. They have made themselves the residual custodians of a bankrupt, corrupt Ukrainian rump state which carries heavy financial cost. Furthermore, in the process they have undermined the legitimacy of their democratic institutions in ways that open the door to radical Far Right movements. These deleterious consequences are reinforced by the Europeans signing on to the no-holds-barred American economic cum political war against China. This latter misguided action reverses the EU’s eminently sensible prior policy of deepening economic ties with the world’s rising superpower.

The net effect of this unthinking relegation of European countries to becoming a de facto American vassals is a distancing themselves from the world beyond the trans-Atlantic community. When we add to the tilting scales the alienation of global opinion disgusted by Western enthusiastic support for the Palestinian genocide, we discern an historic retrenchment. The once proud rulers of the globe are circling-the-wagons in a defensive posture against forces they barely understand and have no plan for engaging.

Europe’s feeble response to this formidable challenge is a series of schematic plans that are little more than placebos mislabeled as potent medication. The EU’s proposed answer to its acute energy predicament is a vaguely sketched strategy whose central element is a diversification of suppliers alongside acceleration of green energy projects. Various initiatives in this direction taken over the past two years give reason for skepticism. The main substitute for Russian natural gas has been LNG from the United States; attempts to form preferential arrangements with other suppliers (like Qatar) have come up short. Relying on the U.S. has its drawbacks. American LNG is 3 to 4 times more costly than pipeline Russian gas. Trump’s declaration that limiting exports will dampen inflationary pressures raises doubts about that supposed reliability. Most telling is the disconcerting fact that European countries clandestinely have somewhat eased their energy penury by buying Russian oil and gas on the very large grey market. Indeed, there is statistical data indicating that the EU states, at one point this year, were importing more Russian sourced LNG than American LNG!

In the security realm, there is much talk in Brussels about building a purely European security apparatus – linked to NATO while capable of acting independently of the United States. This is an updated and upgraded revival of an idea from the late 1990s that birthed the now moribund Common Security and Defense Policy. This commotion could be taken as just play-acting given that there is no concrete threat to European security outside the fevered imaginations of a political class inflamed by loud American alarums that Putin is bent on restoring the Soviet Empire and dreams of washing his boots in the English channel – if not the Irish Sea. Moreover, there are the provocative Russian actions in relentlessly moving its border closer to NATO military installations.

The likelihood of the current blue-skying will produce anything substantial is slim. Europe lacks the money in its current stressed financial condition, it lacks the industrial base to equip modern armed forces, and it most certainly lacks the political will. Yes, we hear a lot of bombast issuing from Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Rutte and their fellow dreamers of a federal European Union. The truth is captured in a saying that we have here in Texas: “All hat and no cattle!”

The glaring omission is any cogent, realistic diplomatic strategy that corresponds to the present configuration of forces in the world. Instead, we see a heightening of anti-Russian rhetoric, solemn pledges to accompany Ukraine on its path to ultimate victory, and joining Washington in ever harsher measures against China cast as an economic predator and security threat.

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael Brenner.

For the vast majority of Cubans, who were born after the first unilateral coercive measures were imposed, life under these conditions is the only normalcy they have known. Even friends sympathetic to socialism and supporters of Cuba may question why the Cubans have not simply learned to live under these circumstances after 64 years.

The explanation, explored below, is that the relatively mild embargo of 1960 has been periodically intensified and made ever more devastatingly effective. The other major factor is that the geopolitical context has changed to Cuba’s disadvantage. These factors in turn have had cumulatively detrimental effects.

Cuba in the new world order

 The Cuban Revolution achieved remarkable initial successes for a small, resource-poor island with a history of colonial exploitation.

After the 1959 revolution, the population quickly attained 100% literacy. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates soon rivaled far richer countries, through the application of socialized medicine, prioritizing primary care. Cuba also became a world sports powerhouse and made noteworthy advances in biotechnology. At the same time, Cuban troops aided in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, among many other exercises of internationalism.

Cuba did not make those advances alone but benefitted from the solidarity of the Soviet Union and other members of the Socialist Bloc. From the beginning of the revolution, the USSR helped stabilize the economy, particularly in the areas of agriculture and manufacturing. Notably, Cuba exported sugar to the Soviets at above-market prices.

The USSR’s military assistance in the form of training and equipment contributed to the Cuban’s successfully repelling the US’s Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. In addition, the Socialist Bloc backed Cuba diplomatically in the United Nations and other international fora. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, for example, also assisted with economic aid, investment, and trade to help develop the Cuban economy.

The implosion of the Socialist Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s severely impacted Cuba.

No longer buffered by these allies, the full weight of the US-led regime-change campaign sent Cuba reeling into what became known as the “Special Period.” After an initial GDP contraction of about 35% between 1989 and 1993, the Cubans somewhat recovered by the 2000s. But, now, conditions on the island are again increasingly problematic.

A new multipolar world may be in birth, but it has not been able to sufficiently aid Cuba in this time of need. China and Vietnam along with post-Soviet Russia, remnants of the earlier Socialist Bloc, still maintain friendly commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuban but nowhere the former levels of cooperation.

Ratcheting up of the US regime-change campaign

 The ever-tightening US blockade is designed to ensure that socialism does not succeed; to strangle in the cradle all possible alternatives to the established imperial order.

The initial restrictions imposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 banned US exports to Cuba, except for food and medicine, and reduced Cuba’s sugar export quota to the US. Shortly before the end of his term in 1961, the US president broke diplomatic relations.

He also initiated covert operations against Cuba, which would be significantly strengthened by his successor, John Kennedy, and subsequent US administrations. Since then, Cuba has endured countless acts of terrorism as well as attempts to assassinate the revolution’s political leadership.

John Kennedy had campaigned in 1960, accusing the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of failing to sufficiently combat the spread of communism. Kennedy was determined to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in America’s “backyard.” He made deposing the “Castro regime” a national priority and imposed a comprehensive economic embargo.

After Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year, he initiated Operation Mongoose. The president put his brother Robert Kennedy in charge of attempting to overthrow the revolution by covert means. This CIA operation of sabotage and other destabilization methods was meant to bring to Cuba “the terrors of the earth.”

Post-Soviet era

Subsequent US administrations continued the policy of blockade, occupation of Guantánamo, and overt and covert destabilization efforts.

Former CIA director and then-US President George H.W. Bush seized the opportunity in 1992 posed by the implosion of the Socialist Bloc. The bipartisan Cuban Democracy Act passed under his watch. Popularly called the Torricelli Act after a Democratic Party congressional sponsor, it codified the embargo into law, which could only be reversed by an act of congress.

The act strengthened the embargo into a blockade by prohibiting US subsidiaries of companies operating in third countries from trading with Cuba. Ships that had traded with Cuba were banned from entering the US for 180 days. The economic stranglehold on Cuba was tightened by obstructing sources of foreign currency, which further limited Cuba’s ability to engage in international trade.

The screws were again tightened in 1996 under US President Bill Clinton with the Helms-Burton Act. Existing unilateral coercive economic measures were reinforced and expanded.

The act also added restrictions to discourage foreign investment in Cuba, particularly in US-owned properties that had been expropriated after the Cuban Revolution. The infamous Title III of the act allowed US citizens to file lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies “trafficking” in such confiscated properties.

Title III generated substantial blowback and some countermeasures from US allies, such as the European Union and Canada, because of its extraterritorial application in violation of international trade agreements and sovereignty. As a result, Title III was temporarily waived.

Later, US President Barack Obama modified US tactics during his watch by reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba and easing some restrictions, in order to unapologetically achieve the imperial strategy of regime change more effectively.

But even that mild relief was reversed by his successor’s “maximum pressure” campaign. In 2019, US President Donald Trump revived Title III. By that time, the snowballing effects of the blockade had generated a progressively calamitous economic situation in Cuba.

Just days before the end of his term, Trump reinstated Cuba onto the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) after Obama had lifted it in 2015. The designation has had a huge impact on Cuba by reducing trade with third countries fearful of secondary sanctions by the US, by cutting off most international finance, and by further discouraging tourism.

President Joe Biden continued most of the Trump “maximum pressure” measures, including the SSOT designation, while adding some of this own. This came at a time when the island was especially hard hit by the Covid pandemic, which halted tourism, one of Cuba’s few sources of foreign currency.

In the prescient words of Lester D. Mallory, US deputy assistant secretary of state back in 1960, the imperialists saw the opportunity to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

US siege on Cuba perfected

In addition to the broad history outlined above of incessant regime-change measures by every US administration since the inception of the Cuban Revolution, some collateral factors are worthy of mention.

Major technological advances associated with computer technology and AI have been applied by the US to more effectively track and enforce its coercive measures. In addition, the fear of US fines for violation of its extraterritorial prohibitions on third-country actors has led to overcompliance.

Uncle Sam has also become ever more inventive. Visa-free entry (VWP) into the US is no longer available to most European and some other nationals if they stopped in Cuba, thereby significantly discouraging tourism to the island.

The internal political climate in the US has also shifted with the neoconservative takeover of both major parties. Especially now with the second Trump presidency, Cuba has fewer friends in Washington, and its enemies now have even less constraints on their regime-change campaigns. This is coupled by a generally more aggressive international US force projection.

Under the blockade, certain advances of the revolution were turned into liabilities. The revolution with its universal education, mechanization of agriculture, and collective or cooperative organization of work freed campesinos from the 24/7 drudgery of peasant agriculture. Today, fields remain idle because, among other factors, the fuel and spare parts for the tractors are embargoed.

Cuba’s allies, especially Venezuela, itself a victim of a US blockade, have been trying to supply Cuba with desperately needed oil. Construction of 14 oil tankers commissioned abroad by Venezuela, which could transport that oil, has been blocked. Direct proscriptions by the US on shipping companies and insurance underwriters have also limited the oil lifeline.

Without the fuel, electrical power, which run pumps to supply basic drinking water, cannot be generated. As a consequence, Cuba has recently experienced island-wide blackouts along with food and water shortages. This highlights how the blockade is essentially an economic dirty war against the civilian population.

Cumulative effects on Cuban society

Life is simply hard in Cuba under the US siege and is getting harder. This has led to recently unprecedented levels of out migration. The consequent brain-drain and labor shortages exacerbate the situation. Moreover, the relentless scarcity and the associated compromised quality of life under such conditions has had a corrosive effect over time.

Under the pressure of the siege, Cuba has been forced to adopt measures that undermine socialist equality but which generate needed revenue. For example, Obama and subsequent US presidents have encouraged the formation of a small business strata, expanding on the limited “reforms” instituted during Raúl Castro’s time as Cuba’s president.

 The Cubans will surely persevere as they have in the past. “The country’s resilience is striking,” according to a longtime Cuba observer writing from Havana.

Besides, the imperialists leave them little other choice. A surrender and soft landing is not an option being offered. The deliberately failed state of Haiti, less than 50 miles to the east, serves as a cautionary tale of what transpires for a people under the beneficence of the US.

Now is an historical moment for recognition of not what Cuba has failed to do, but for appreciation of how much it has achieved with so little and under such adverse circumstances not of its making.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

So our brand-new prime minister has refused to rule out UK military involvement in any Israeli response to Iran’s recent missile attack, condemning what he calls Iran’s “malign role” in the Middle East.

And he refused to say whether MPs would get a vote beforehand on any military action. “We support Israel’s right to defend herself against Iran’s aggression, in line with international law, because let’s be very clear, this was not a defensive action by Iran, it was an act of aggression and a major escalation in response to the death of a terrorist leader.

“It exposes, once again, Iran’s malign role in the region: they helped equip Hamas for the seventh of October attacks, they armed Hezbollah, who launched a year-long barrage of rockets on northern Israel, forcing 60,000 Israelis to flee their homes, and they support the Houthis, who mount direct attacks on Israel and continue to attack international shipping.”

Of course, Starmer didn’t mention the many attacks Israel had made on Lebanon and Iran over the years or explain why Hamas and Hezbollah came into being.

Be honest: who exactly are the “malign” influences in the Middle East?

Just as Britain and America would like everyone to believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict began on October 7 last year, when it had been going on since 1948 (and before), they’d like us to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured a whole century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK-Israel Axis don’t want this important slice of history to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

In 1901 William Knox D’Arcy, a Devon man, obtained from the Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia. The Persian government would receive 16% of the oil company’s annual profits, a rotten deal as they would soon realize.

D’Arcy, with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually canceled the D’Arcy agreement and the matter went to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were an improvement but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company changed to Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951, while Aramco was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis, Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls for nationalizing its oil could no longer be ignored. In March 1951 the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavorable to the host country.

Social reformer Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, canceling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable: “Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

“Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence.” (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

For his impudence he would be removed in a coup by MI5 and the CIA, imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

America was reluctant at first to join Britain’s destructive game but Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. In August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

The CIA-engineered coup that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. The British-American conspiracy inevitably backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word: MOSSADEQ.

But Britain seems incapable of playing fair. In 2022, when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband back in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

Smoldering resentment for more than 70 years

During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

“The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

As it happens the company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment. We were just mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. Britain had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it? Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

Alston acknowledged that “there is an understandable inclination to exact revenge in such cases” but warned that “to permit such instincts to prevail only sends the message that the rule of law continues to be mocked in Iraq, as it was in Saddam’s own time”.

So now we’re playing dirty again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 76 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. A century later it is quite evident that Zionism has been the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration for it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Very recently I read a scholarly article in which the author attempted to summarize the history of US policy in Africa, dating from when the Kingdom of Morocco was the first government to recognize the newly formed confederation of North American states that had won their independence from Great Britain. The author supplied a diplomatic history which culminated in the regime’s focus on the risks of “terrorism” in Africa as a key element of its foreign policy. Nowhere in the article—and this is no exception—was the concept of terrorism defined or elaborated. Apparently there was no need to identify or even to investigate the content of a “terrorism” or “counter-terrorism” policy.

In previous reflections I have attempted to clarify the political language used to manage and confuse both the ordinary person and those who for whatever reason have devoted professional efforts to understand the course of events since the end of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “long 19th century”. Economist Michael Hudson has argued that until the outbreak of the Great War (World War I) the world—at least the industrialised part—had in fact been moving toward socialism. Anglo-American scholarship has traditionally mocked this observation attributed most notably to Karl Marx. However such a denial of historical facts only served to justify the wars initiated by the British and American Empires to prevent this development. Professor Hudson argued that there were competing forms of socialism. Marx was a partisan for a particular tendency. However, Marx had every reason to believe that some form of socialism was inevitable. The successful October Revolution in Russia and the failed November revolution in Germany were not aberrations. On the contrary the two world wars and subsequent long war after 1945 were concerted efforts by the meanwhile merged Anglo-American Empire to resist and ultimately defeat socialism—except in China.

The summary argument below is based on the assumption that the 20th century and its extension into the 21st century has been shaped by the Anglo-American war against any form of socialism, especially to the extent based upon popular democratic political culture. The principal obstacle to understanding this long war lies in a failure to properly comprehend the underlying philosophy of governance in the Anglo-American Empire and its idiosyncratic use of the term “democracy”. The US, due largely to its settler-colonial history, but also to the culturally diverse immigrant pool that would compose its population, has been the site of considerable conflict over the terms of “democracy” to the extent that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries also brought their own political and social culture with them. Hence, much of US political warfare has been the concerted effort by the Anglo-American elite to impose that idiosyncratic democracy model on ethnic communities with different social and political traditions. The imposition of a highly concentrated mass media propaganda apparatus and industrial management structure was facilitated by the absence of any surviving indigenous socio-political culture or entrenched population. Thus, it is hardly surprising that numerous foreign observers of US society were struck by the extreme conformism among the country’s inhabitants, something quite unfamiliar to visitors from the European continent or other parts of the world.

Anglo-American political theory, going back at least as far as the so-called Glorious Revolution, defined democracy, not as a principle of popular political rule but as a model for the governance of joint stock companies. The franchise was not only explicitly restricted to property ownership. The scope of the franchise extended to the appointment of officers and servants and the allocation of profits generated by business operations. Following the example of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company became the model of the corporate state, where even the monarch was reduced to the role of shareholder. The “democracy” and democratic procedures formulated for directing the business of the chartered companies were never intended for determining, let alone implementing, policies for the general welfare. The general welfare, although occasionally the subject of English and Scottish theories, was effectively limited to the privileges and immunities of shareholders, individually or collectively. The origin of parties in this system was not the organised interest of citizens but of economic actors, i.e. adventurers (investors), landowners, and merchants. The fact that Anglo-American political theory has been extrapolated to include citizens, i.e. nominally independent commercial actors, does not mean that the underlying qualification for the franchise has been altered.

Here it is important to note that the joint stock company is an exclusive not an inclusive entity. The substance of political struggle throughout the 19th and 20th centuries can also be understood as efforts to either reduce the entry barrier to shareholding or expand the scope of business interest to include elements of the general welfare. The so-called progressive movement was essentially an effort to subject social or general welfare interests to the principles of scientific management. Management principles that evolved in the concentration of industry were adapted to discipline populist demands. Professional specialisation in political, social and economic functions created experts in the fields to which citizen interests were allocated. Just as Frederick Taylor used time-motion studies to turn skilled work into discrete operations that could be performed by unskilled workers, the progressive movement and emerging social sciences turned complex social and economic interests into simplified business operations that could be performed without the need for educated, informed and interested deliberation. Politics was established as a management discipline within the dominant ideology of corporatism, the underlying theory of joint stock company governance.

Fast forward to the post-colonial, liberation struggle epoch following the failed attempt to destroy the Soviet Union and prevent the emergence of New China: After the consensus-building diplomacy among the great powers of Europe and North America, culminating in the Berlin Conference, the allocation of overseas territories, mainly but not exclusively Africa, was inscribed in international law. When in 1918, the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire were subjugated militarily, their respective overseas territories or domains were allocated to the victors. In some cases they were absorbed into the winning empires properly and in other cases they were distributed after negotiations to the victors as so-called “mandates”. After WWII the remaining mandates were converted into so-called Trusteeships, reflecting the change in language between the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations. The mandate was a legal concept introduced to conceal the spoils system by which the losers of the Great War were punished by depriving them of their colonial possessions under the pretext of self-determination, whereby the victors’ colonies were not offered such benefits. The survival of the Soviet Union despite all attempts to destroy it since its foundation, left the Western powers, now led by the United States of America, with the unpleasant task of supporting the independence of former colonies while keeping the deep economic control over them that had made them so profitable for their owners. The USSR, which since the consolidation of the October Revolution had renounced imperial aspirations or legacy, became a vocal and occasionally material supporter of the rights to national self-determination which had first been proposed by the insincere US government presided over by Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Whether Wilson actually believed his famous 14 points or simply promoted them as beneficial for US interests can never be known for sure. The man who “kept the US out of war (in Europe)” to win election and then proceeded to approve US war mobilization efforts may be accused of insincerity or impotence (or both). The details are something for archivists and apologists to sort.

One of the less directly advertised outcomes of the Great War was the consolidation of financial capital protected mainly in the City of London, New York City and the Swiss Confederation. The establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 extended the private control of national economies exercised through the Bank of England in the British Empire to the once independent North American federation. Carroll Quigley, in his posthumously published The Anglo-American Establishment, describes the Cecil Rhodes Round Table project for reasserting the British Empire by integrating the United States. What later became known as the Milner group, after Rhodes protégé Alfred Milner, concentrated doctrinal control over the British media, through All Souls and Baliol and the Rhodes Scholarships over British academia, and through the Chatham House consortium (Royal Institute of International Affairs and Council on Foreign Relations) over the formulation of imperial policy. According to Quigley, this doctrinal control was imposed on what passes for journalism and historical scholarship. Thus in combination with its friends in North America, Herbert Hoover comes to mind, what counts as knowledge about the British Empire (and since 1945 the Anglo-American Empire) has been subject to the control and manipulation by a complex cadre structure extending through universities, publishers, research institutions and so-called “think tanks”. While this invisible ministry of truth, as George Orwell called it, has not been able to suppress all dissenting interpretations of the past three centuries of Anglo-American dominance, it has been able to force much of the dissent to the margins. This is done by a) denying access to regular teaching and research posts with the authority they confer; b) strict control of access to archives and official records much of which are held in secured private vaults like those of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; c) exclusion from the reputable press and publishing entities who propagate the authorized history and interpretations; d) rewarding ideological compliance with all the preferment and largesse at the Empire’s disposal; e) the creation and promotion of innumerable institutions with real and simulated scholarly expertise to flood public space with the authorized version(s). Of course, there are less pleasant means available but despite the proliferation of alternative and social media these are sufficient to impose an enormous burden on anyone trying to present facts or interpretations inconsistent with the preservation of the Empire and the devotion it fosters.

Quigley admits that he actually agreed with the objectives of the Establishment he described. As a sympathetic reporter he was more concerned about the potential failures than betraying any secrets that might impede the progress of the world he ardently supported. That is probably one reason why he discusses the problems created by the Rhodes testaments in their various versions, aggravated by the fact that Cecil Rhodes had no heirs to the fortune he had amassed through his British South Africa Company and other entities. Quigley gives little attention to Lord Rothschild, Rhodes’s friend and executor. In fact, the Rothschild interests are barely mentioned. Although the two branches of the infamous financial barony are notorious for the extent of their involvement in international affairs (business and political), discussion of their familial or business interests in the affairs of nations has been consistently trivialized if mentioned at all. In the era when the Habsburg dynasty ruled an “empire upon which the sun never set”—predating British claims to that distinction—no serious historian would ignore the matrimonial arrangements made to extend that control. Yet since the French Revolution, the only attention to dynastic profligacy has been given to the House of Saxe-Coburg/ Battenberg/ Windsor, in short the dispersion of the family of which Britain’s Victoria became “grandmother”. Monarchy, especially the British, is inseparable from pageantry. The display of opulence or even its conspicuous avoidance serves a critical function in maintaining the respect for the power behind it. Although apparently trivial, the fact that the recently deceased and longest reigning British monarch, Elizabeth Windsor, was casually called “the queen” even by people who were not imperial/ commonwealth subjects or citizens demonstrates how an archaic form of personal rule can be popularized even among ostensible republicans. In other words, what is displayed officially should never be treated as accidental. At the same time what is conspicuously absent from public view should not be considered careless omission.

All that said, what does this tell us about the definition of the term “terrorism”? Meanwhile there is an enormous body of literature on the subject. The subject has been treated as a species of crime, as an instrument of political action, as a moral issue, and as a field of behavioural control, e.g. policing, prevention, protection, care for victims etc. Terrorism has been defined sociologically, psychologically and politically. It has been treated as a policing problem and a military threat. An industry has been established and thrives on the products of “counter-terrorism”, “anti-terrorism”, and security. Innumerable institutions have been founded and funded to handle the problem. In my youth the term “terrorism” was used to categorize violent crime or threatened violence by persons or organizations that were not entitled to use violence, usually against—at least it was claimed—unarmed, innocent or defenceless civilians. The most notorious “terrorist” act of my youth resulted in the death of an Israeli Olympic squad during the Munich Olympics. According to the story at the time, a group called “Black September” seized the Israeli Olympic team in Munich as a means of calling attention to the policies of the Israeli government in Palestine. The immediate result of this action was the deployment of a special weapons and tactics team, what became Grenzschutzgruppe Neun (GSG 9) to rescue the hostages whereby all hostages and Black September members were killed. The second result was the first regular and systematic searches of international airline traffic, initially applied to all flights to Israeli destinations.

Of course the actions of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam were also called “terrorism,” but due to the fact that the US was waging a massive war in the then Republic of Vietnam (the scale of which only became apparent after Richard Nixon’s forced resignation) and that all these acts occurred in Vietnam, they were merely local matters for those in Vietnam. Terrorism in the western peninsula of Eurasia was mainly of interest to NATO bases and the political establishment that had been created by the US after 1945. Bombings and kidnapping in Italy or kidnapping and assassination in Germany were designated as terrorism but still treated as local matters. No later than the late 1990s it was revealed that much if not all of that European terrorism was organized by the Gladio network created by the Anglo-American intelligence services at the end of WWII. The term that emerged was the “strategy of tension” whereby covert NATO forces intended to purge what remained of the Left from European politics by associating it with supposed “left-wing terrorism”. The immediate effect of this covert action campaign, aside from the selective death and destruction caused, was the adoption of internal security legislation and proliferation of special police powers throughout the West European Union/ EEC/ EU. Those powers and legislation have only been increased and radicalized with time.

The ideological premise of the “strategy of tension” was that the Soviet Union and its communist allies was funding and arming groups of dissidents (mainly youth) in order to foment revolution and overthrow the “basic democratic order” in the West. In some cases these terrorists were supposed to be Maoists or even Trotskyists. These distinctions added to public confusion and permitted the actual sponsors to manipulate competing groups. As operatives have occasionally admitted, the funding of a Maoist group of “ultra-leftists” was a powerful strategy for dividing mainstream socialist and communist parties, thus diluting their electoral impact in countries like France and Italy where they enjoyed substantial support.

With the demise and annexation of the German Democratic Republic and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union with the entire Eastern European infrastructure it had created, terrorism could no longer be presented as the work of the “Evil Empire” headquartered in Moscow. The only useful terrorist venue remaining was in Palestine where the terrorist regime that established the Israeli State had been waging war against the remainder of the indigenous inhabitants (their “Indians”) at least since 1948. The expansion of the occupation to part of Egypt and parts of the other states reluctantly carved by the French and British out of their Sykes-Picot mandates had elevated the armed resistance to international terrorism. Despite United Nations resolutions adopted with the license given to European and Ottoman terrorists to found an independent state by the name of Israel, recognizing the inherent rights of the indigenous inhabitants as at least equal to those of the invading immigrants, the Israeli terrorist forces were regularized as a national army while the indigenous self-defence was relegated to the status of terrorists. The expansion of territorial control—i.e. conquest and imposition of vassalage—in neighbouring countries created the conditions de facto whereby the indigenous resistance became “international terrorism”. Countries that explicitly supported what would become the Palestine Liberation Organization in compliance with the UN resolutions licensing the establishment of Israel and the inherent rights of Palestine’s historic inhabitants were denounced by the former mandatory powers, under aegis of the Anglo-American Empire, as sponsors of “international terrorism”. While the term terrorism continued to be used in US-led counter-insurgency operations throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America, the focus of attention became the Middle East. Terrorism was popularized as a kind of generic trait of “Arabs”, itself a term of distortion applied now to all people in the Middle East who are not European Jews or their descendants living under the state of Israel.

In 1997, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In this context, such notions as “a new Pearl Harbor” began to circulate in what are called neo-conservative political circles. The “new” American Century refers to the appellation attributed to Henry Luce, that the 20th century, especially in the wake of World War II, was the American century. Kristol, Kagan and their like argued that with the elimination of the Soviet Union as the archenemy the world had essentially been made free for US supremacy. However, such supremacy would be challenged. They asserted that just as “Pearl Harbor” brought Americans together behind strong leadership to wage an international war for American values, it would take extreme stimulus to move the American people from their inherent lethargy and turn them into a force capable of assuring US supremacy around the world. This stood in stark contrast to the idea held widely beyond American shores that the end of the Soviet Union and hence the end of the so-called Cold War would bring the long-desired “peace dividend”. Kristol, Kagan and those who supported them were worried—just as their fathers had been in 1945—that peace would break out. Members of the permanent foreign policy establishment, like George Kennan, and the arms industry, like the DuPont family, were seriously concerned that the enormous profits and power accrued waging covert war against the Soviet Union and counter-insurgency everywhere else would stop once the public on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that there was no more enemy. In fact, the principal occupation of the policy elite in the Anglo-American Empire as it emerged in 1913 has been the threat of peace. Once one understands the implications of that principle then it is no longer a mystery that the longest continuing war since 1945 is the United Nations invasion of the Korean peninsula in 1951.

Just as Carroll Quigley pays almost no attention to the interest the Rothschild dynasty could have in the Round Table project, almost no attention is given to the role of the Rockefeller dynasty—acting mainly, but not exclusively, through the Rockefeller Foundation—in the establishment of the United Nations. However, a sober recognition of the function of so-called philanthropy (the corporate successor to papal or royal patronage and preferment) ought to induce more critical attention to dynastic power. The League of Nations is inconceivable without the establishment of the Federal Reserve System with its merger of Rockefeller and Rothschild interests. The shift from Geneva to New York was an acknowledgement of where industrial and military power lay. The invisible pseudo-neutrality of the imperial-based League was replaced by the unabashed display of US power, managed by its paramount dynasty. While it is true that the Du Pont dynasty is the senior “noble house” in North America it lacked the international scope that the Standard Oil magnates had acquired when dividing the world of petroleum with their British counterparts. The October Revolution and the failure to destroy the Soviet Union by 1943 meant that Standard Oil was simply the more powerful of the two energy kingdoms. Naturally it can only be speculation but it is reasonable to assume that the Anglo-American financial oligarchy consummated in 1913 and baptised in 1918 was ready to wed in 1945.

The preeminence of the financial oligarchy, not just in the latter half of the 20th century, but for the entirety of the 20th century, must be understood in order to grasp what terrorism really means today. Political-economist Michael Hudson has argued—in support of Karl Marx but based on historical analysis—that in fact everyone in the industrialized economies saw socialism as inevitable by the end of the 19th century. Marx was not utopian. Nor did the 1918 German revolutionaries, murdered at the behest of their Social Democratic and aristocratic enemies, err in the judgement that the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy was the signal for socialism in the German Reich. It took enormous violent effort to prevent socialism from becoming the dominant political-economic form in the West. That effort began with the Great War, later World War I, which despite propaganda at the time and since was a class war intended to destroy working class movements throughout Europe and impose the new world financial order on what had been an agricultural and industrial economic system. A lot of popular debate, stimulated by attacks on China, focusses on the deindustrialization of the major Western economies. This is attributed to free trade agreements and expanding offshore manufacturing promoted by the policies introduced under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. While it is true that the end of the war against Vietnam and the artificial oil crisis nominally caused by the 1973 oil boycott were inducements for major manufacturers to look for cheaper labour, this was opportunity not novelty. The end of World War II would have returned the US to massive unemployment had the destruction of competing industrial base not been so thorough, leaving US cartels with seemingly infinite markets for excess production. By 1973 this was no longer the case. European manufacturing, especially in Germany had recovered and was demonstrably more competitive than anything the US had to offer. Thus, the oil boycott purged the SME sector and—because of the secret agreements between the US and the main Arab producers to only bill oil in US dollars—allowed the US to continue to increase its financial stranglehold on much of the world economy that now needed USD liquidity to buy fuel and feed stock. The official media practically equated the results of this covert deal-making with “economic terrorism” by Arab states taking advantage of their nominal sovereignty over much of the world’s known oil reserves in an attempt to impose a solution to the expansion of the Israeli state in the region.

The confluence of interests that led to the so-called Oil Crisis can be grasped by anyone who has read John Blair’s book The Control of Oil (1976), based on his work as a researcher for the US Congress investigating transnational corporations. The original report upon which Blair based his book exposed the intricate workings of the “Seven Sisters”, the world oil cartel, but was suppressed by order of President Eisenhower since its publication would possibly impair national security. Specifically the report showed how the oil cartel, led by Standard Oil (Esso), controlled the world supply of oil—and not the Arab potentates most of whom had been installed through the efforts of those very oil companies. Naturally the Eisenhower administration did not want to expose a key element of its international economic power. More importantly, as the 1973 fixing of oil prices to US dollars demonstrated, the control of oil was integral to the power of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy. Although the Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank and IMF, were initially designed so that the US dollar would replace sterling and subordinate the franc, the oil coup in 1973 gave the regime virtually unlimited power to bankrupt its collective bete noir, the newly independent countries of the fallen empires.

Jamaican prime minister at the time, Michael Manley, made the point clear. When the Bretton Woods accords were signed, Jamaica as well as practically all the newly independent countries were part of either the sterling or franc system. They had no national currencies. Needless to say they were not represented in the negotiations. Until 1973 they imported or exported based on fixed exchange rates for their own currencies. With the Oil Crisis (coup) all these countries had to buy US dollars at exchange rates that could only drive their economies into debt spirals. Meanwhile the US Treasury could issue as many dollars as it needed to buy whatever it desired. Its banks, as owners of the World Bank and IMF, could dictate terms to any country without its own oil reserves and refining capacity. As Cuba learned, US refiners would not process alternative oil supplies from the Soviet Union, forcing it to nationalize plants built and operated by US multinationals. The capacity to manipulate both energy markets and currency markets was lodged in the two biggest banking and oil cartels, those of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families. The story of the international debt crisis is to extensive and complex to elaborate here. Yet it is crucial to recognize that energy and finance are two sides of the same institutional power. There is no financial power without control over energy and no energy policy without brute financial power.

The familial or dynastic element in this analysis will strike many as excessively personal and others as insufficiently dialectical. However, even if men do not make history as they choose, history is nonetheless made by men. Men make history through organized action and through the capacity to shape the perceptions upon which others base their action. Men create institutions and they shape them, even if no one man ever completely controls even the institutions he creates. As I pointed out at the start of this appreciation, there are methods for investigating or at least describing how history is made or how power is exercised. Yet, many of these methods are incomplete or even insincerely applied. Political science and history offer explanations, but these are actually fairly low order descriptions of group behaviour or the results attributed to such actions. The terms of reference are simply too restricted. In the case of the Anglo-American Empire, Quigley argued that these restrictions are not accidental or incidental to some scholarly process which, were it refined, would give better results. Instead, Anglo-American historiography and hence its political science are skewed by those upon whose patronage they ultimately depend. This patronage has long ceased to be merely the gentlemen’s agreements made at All Souls or White’s. It did not take a century, but more than a hundred years have lapsed in which generations of cadre have spread throughout the imperial system. There is a plenitude of institutions whose staff and members may never have heard of let alone seen a Rockefeller or a Rothschild. The last thing that would occur to them is that they are domestic servants or courtiers in some great aristocratic household. However, they were born and raised in a culture which sustains the ideas, values and practices of those who engendered these dynasties. That is what distinguished institutions do. It is their primary function. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale do have the capacity to educate but their foremost role is to indoctrinate, to instil loyalty first to the alma mater but also the culture for which she stands. While the fashions may change, the petty morality be modified, the essence which made these institutions possible and continues to sustain them is spiritual, in the Hegelian sense (cultural in Peckham’s sense). Hence it is from the capacity for cultural continuity along with the capability of undermining or destroying competing cultures that any serious analysis must accept as a foundation to extended power.

It must be added here that the focus on the Rockefeller or Rothschild dynasties is historically accidental. They did not invent the financial system they currently dominate. The central elements of the modern financial system were internationalized by the papal-rabbinical regime in Rome. Meanwhile, these instruments have been digitalized. However the root of them all is the complex of indulgences, auricular confession, Inquisition and crusades. There is really nothing available to the IMF or Goldman Sachs that was not in the purview of Innocent III when waging the Fourth Crusade.

Finance and energy are governed by two rarely stated but cardinal rules: “other people’s money” and “other people’s oil”. Since whatever is called money in any society is ultimately arbitrary, there is no natural limit to the supply. Financial power derives from controlling other people’s money. The Standard Oil trust was established not by owning the oil supplies but by controlling the transport, refining, sale and distribution of oil and oil products. The Anglo-American “central bank” cartel does not create money—that is solely the prerogative of the State. It creates debt for which the State farms taxes and other charges or provides enforcement. This is plain from the statutes establishing the Federal Reserve, the charter of the Bank of England and the agreements by which the Bank of International Settlements, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and their subsidiaries were formed as international entities beyond the reach of sovereign states or their citizens.

Terrorism is not really what masked men do when they try to kidnap someone or seize something to extort a favourable political decision. It is not something Arabs, Muslims or communists do to achieve their aims. Terrorism is not a phenomenon against which one can be protected like locking one’s car or home or wearing safety belts. There is no armour or surveillance that can prevent or interrupt terrorism. Airport controls or entry controls at other public spaces cannot prevent terrorism or limit any damage attributed to it. Neither the amount of fluids carried in hand luggage, nor the prohibition of cutlery or small arms can have any impact on terrorism. Moreover, none of the foregoing are relevant to terrorism at all—in the way has been consistently and deceptively defined for decades.

In order to understand terrorism and its relationship to the innumerable activities supposedly conducted or promoted to counter terrorism, one has to have a proper understanding of the overall cultural system in which this term is applied. It is necessary to examine what behaviour corresponds to terrorism, not the term is used to label. In other words one has to move from the explicit to the implicit or the stated to the unstated. Watch what is done. Do not be distracted by what is said. The overall cultural system is financial. That means that the instructions for performance at the highest explanatory level are governed by what can be called the imperatives of cash flow. Cash flow describes the movement of money, energy, primary commodities, and people (who for all intents and purposes are just another commodity).

In the process of transforming the agricultural – industrial society back into a system of rents (or to use the papal-rabbinical terminology, the trade in grace), an model of allocating economic surplus was replaced with a model for managing scarcity. This model, sometimes attributed to Alfred Marshall but in fact developed by his successors, has been called marginalism. Coincidentally the economic theories upon which marginalism is based were articulated and popularized about the same time chattel slavery was being abolished, at least formally. One can speculate whether a restored theory of economic scarcity just happened to become popular once bonded labour was withdrawn from the market and newly freed labour could demand some of the surplus it had been forced to generate. It is not necessary to prove that the economists of the day devised theories to diminish any demands by freed slaves. If one accepts the premise that an emerging financial oligarchy funding and guiding the direction of teaching and research raises the questions that scholars and scientists ought to answer—as is clearly the case today—then no explicit instruction was needed to shape the overall agenda. At the same time as the political economy of surplus allocation was being realigned to reflect planned scarcity, free labour and other popular movements were being guided by what became known as progressivism in North America and Fabianism in Britain. There many of the proponents were more explicit that professional or expert solutions were needed for systemic problems (disorder) to prevent popular movements from asserting themselves in such a way as to threaten the oligarchy materially. Again the trail of philanthropy can be found. Without disparaging actual improvements in the daily lives of millions, the purpose of philanthropy is not to end the plunder and exploitation which enriches the donor but to selectively dilute resistance to the donor’s plunder and exploitation. Philanthropy is like the fluid a parasite injects into its host to conceal extraction or make it less painful. Progressivism evolved from the same cultural swamp as Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. By analysing the complaints among populists, the pwog administrator performs the equivalent of a time-motion study on the movement under study. Like Frederick Taylor who saw this dissection as a means of replacing skilled workers with interchangeable employees performing subroutines that could be easily taught and learned, the pwog or Fabian sought to identify the elements of discontent which could be corrected by employing professional staff and permanent bureaucrats who were able to perform the needed tasks but immune to the political or social concerns from which they arose.

Parallel to these organizational developments the chartered/ public accounting profession was launched. The financial oligarchy was able to prevent legislation which would oblige public companies (joint stock corporations) to submit their books to government regulators for inspection. Based, among other things, on assertions of intellectual and trade property rights vis a vis competitors but also the State, the legislatures adopted laws which permitted companies to hire their own inspectors whose certificates would be accepted in lieu of government inspection or public disclosure. The employees of these accounting companies would be examined and certified by boards of their peers. Only accountants so credentialed by their peers would be permitted to issue certificates for the accuracy and completeness of corporate financial records. Thus corporate financial records could remain secret and the public demand for disclosure diverted. Certified accountants and lawyers together would protect the public interest in fair dealing vicariously.

For this system to function in an environment dominated by huge, international trusts, internal corporate structures had to change too. Slowly major manufacturing enterprises managed by engineers or men with experience in their respective fields were to be subordinated to the new financial management ideology. The certified accountant gave birth to the controller. The controller or financial controlling department had two basic tasks. One was to translate all the manufacturing management data into accounting figures that could then be rendered in company reports, either to shareholders or regulatory/ tax authorities. The other task was to police material production processes using accounting and measurement criteria. That is to say the physical operations had to be reduced to measurable cash flows. The pinnacle of controlling was articulated in what became known as systems theory. From this controlling function all manner of operations were translated and integrated to produce reporting routines. Reporting, the regular production of measurement data and its application to internal corporate management, expanded wherever there was some movement from which value accumulation or loss could be expected. The bigger the corporation and more diverse the operations, e.g. in the trusts and conglomerates, the more powerful the controlling/ reporting function became. Economic concentration, which has not ceased since the end of the 19^th century, has made central controlling, reporting and planning indispensable. The central controlling and reporting departments do not add value or increase the effectiveness of any manufacturing or other enterprise operation. They provide the means for regulating the extraction of value from the enterprise both upstream in terms of reporting and downstream by dictating which activities are to be preferred or abandoned (because of their impact on key performance indicators). The controlling department is not interested in the end customer, the employee, the supplier of inputs or any other material quality relevant for actual business operation. It is a surveillance instrument. Its mere presence in the form of reporting requirements and planning targets imposes limits on all those doing real work, buying or selling, or anything else entrepreneurial. The demand to reduce everything to some numerical value shapes the corporate environment internally and at all the interfaces between corporation and other actors and entities.

To say that this controlling ideology is a metaphor for observable institutional behaviour beyond the factory gate is too little. The introduction of analogue computing machines in the 1940s found immediate application in state operations. An IBM subsidiary supplied state of the art computing machines to partially automate the administration of forced labour camps in Germany under the NSDAP regime. The creators of the Phoenix Program in the CIA developed—in collaboration with renowned academic institutions—the Phoenix Information System. This computer system reduced the digested interrogation and police surveillance data collected by units of the Republic of Vietnam on behalf of the CIA to numerical input to generate “kill lists” for the US counter-insurgency campaign against the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. One former CIA officer later called it “computerized mass murder”. Recent reporting from occupied Palestine told of a system called “Lavender” that supplies Israeli forces with similar “kill lists”. The controlling systems have been developed and deployed without interruption.

As horrifying as the use of computer technology for planned assassination or mass murder is, that is only the most spectacular and infamous application. The underlying controlling ideology is far more insidious. Controversy, albeit superficial, about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) beyond the industrial applications already common focus on the error rate or the capacity of someone, presumably decent and law-abiding, to control the AI systems and prevent their abuse or defective performance. They only rarely address the ideology embedded in the technology and its social-political genealogy, i.e. its cultural historical content. In a recent interview I was asked if AI, with its military-policing history, could not be converted to benign civilian uses? My reply was simple. Why should any society be spending extraordinary amounts for military technology to convert to civilian use? Would it not make more sense to invest in civilian uses from the very beginning? This economic aspect was so obvious to me that I cannot understand why it is so rarely asked—except as Joan Roelofs has shown, so much of the economy has been literally bought to support military over civilian purposes in return for token support of residual community needs. It is therefore tempting to ask if there really is any meaningful civilian sector in today’s economy or society?

The Anglo-American Empire in its conversion (or reversion) to a quasi-feudal formation ruled by a financial oligarchy adopted or restored systems for policing, regulating, expanding or restricting the flows of money and energy as well as people and primary commodities. The highest order principle in this organization (and hence explanation) is the numerical control of data flows. In the system of domination and enrichment (capital accumulation) these data flows can be distinguished as cash, energy, “contraband”, primary commodities or raw materials, and human populations. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the overall objective of the financial oligarchy or the output of the system it has created can be represented as the rearrangement of human populations such that they are removed from areas where the underlying resources are deemed more valuable than any labour that could be extracted by the inhabitants. These populations are being transferred to the spaces where populations are declining or actively being reduced. This population transfer policy is global and it is organized and conducted by a combination of actors including intergovernmental private-public partnerships (a euphemism for fascist organizations). At the same time resource flows are increasing, e.g., plundering of oil and grain from states under attack and subject to deliberate deportation efforts. One of the ancient professionals using this business model is George Soros, who by his own public admission already enriched himself at the age of 14 with the help of Nazi occupiers of his native Hungary. Another class of professionals use the World Health Organization and related agencies. They follow the Bill Gates version for neutralizing the recalcitrant and profiting through the entire value chain. Those are simply the most notorious. They are creatures of the financial oligarchy and its controlling system. As has been said often enough even Soros or Gates will die, like David Rockefeller finally did. However the proclamation “the king is dead, long live the king” does not apply solely to crowned monarchs. A culture’s resilience, even as a pathology or parasitical form, is reflected in the survival of the system even after the demise of its bodily representatives.

So having said what terrorism is not as well as recounting in summary form a lot of 20th century history, something ought to be said about what terrorism is, besides a much abused and confusing word. When the Project for the New American Century “anticipated” the “new Pearl Harbor” as the bonding moment for another century of US (Anglo-American) supremacy, to the extent that they were honest and not just true believers, they would have understood that they were calling for a state sponsored act that could be manipulated in order to impose a war that no ordinary person otherwise would have demanded—certainly not in the great and insular United States of America. Here is not the place to elaborate the means by which the demolition of the NY World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 was executed. The crucial point is that this event was branded as the “new Pearl Harbor” and led to the declaration of the Global War on Terror and the adoption of the USA Patriot Act.

A “war on terror” reflects language dating back to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson who while presiding over the war against Vietnam also led the launch of a “war against poverty”. This would be followed by “the war on drugs.” This habit of applying war as an instrument of social policy has been called “Wilsonian”. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, kept the US briefly out of the Great War only to turn it into the “war to end war”. American presidents would also advertise “war for democracy”. The real fact, however, has been that the financial oligarchy that seized power in 1913 transformed the US into a war economy and a war society. It was both financialized and militarized at the same time. The Great War—to end war—also gave birth to what is now the largest psychological warfare industry on the planet, comprising Hollywood and Madison Avenue, plus the “Beltway”. The Valstead Act (prohibition of alcoholic beverages) was the first step in the creation of what can now be called the pharmaceutical-military-industrial complex. The 20th century marked the transformation of the United States from a continental empire into the most heavily armed, full spectrum belligerent on the planet. In other words, every aspect of American life was defined by warfare in one form or another. This is reflected in the vernacular as well as the astronomical sums expended officially (the unofficial or concealed budget is immeasurable) for national defence.

What is the Global War on Terror, if it is more than a slogan like so many in American politics? I believe the answer can be found by returning to the cultural historical context—to the conditions under which the financial oligarchy seized power and maintains it. The project for the new American century is undoubtedly a program for permanent war. Yet that is restating the obvious. What is not so obvious, but bears closer scrutiny, are the beneficiaries of permanent war. For much of the twentieth century, the financial oligarchy could be and was identified with the dynasties responsible for its inception, specifically the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, their relatives and retainers. Today the public faces of the financial oligarchy are the CEOs of a small group of hedge funds, BlackRock being the most notorious among them. The hedge fund is the modern manifestation of the financial framework created by the papal-rabbinical monarchy in Rome—it is the modern market-maker in sin, grace and salvation. The hedge fund and its precursors in the evolution of the financial oligarchy rely on the accounting-controlling ideology originally applied within corporations but as the corporation and the State merged was extended to the management of the State itself. Just as the controlling department became the central policing, surveillance and regulatory element of the corporation, its equivalent has become the organizational heart of the State. The corporation is managed using surveillance and reporting the results of which are distilled into key performance indicators and many other measurements. The corporate state is not only a merger of interests, whereby the corporation excludes any previous claims against the State by citizens, it is also a merger of methods and instruments. These methods and instruments are applied to control the flows of cash, energy, contraband, raw materials and crucially people. While cash, energy, contraband and raw materials have historical economic measures that can be easily applied within the controlling framework. People, especially those who are neither bonded labour nor serfs, require intermediary methods and instruments in order to translate them into accounting values. When travel was relatively rare and largely restricted to upper classes, there was little need for mass surveillance. Even the great immigration waves of until the early 1920s were one-time policing actions, except for dissident deportations and race removals on the Pacific coast. Both the relative improvement of living standards in North America and post-war Europe added to the human traffic but not significantly.

The most significant challenges for population control began during the Central American counter-insurgency waged under Ronald Reagan. Eliminating about 20% of the population of El Salvador, by death or migration, was considered sufficient to suppress any nationalist movements that could threaten US domination. As long as the Soviet Union existed immigration/ migration in Western Europe was largely confined to movements from former colonies to the urban conurbations of the colonizers. The defeat of the Soviet Union and with it the expected potential to redesign the planet in the interests of the Anglo-American Empire (financial oligarchy) called for an entirely different scale of management. That was what the Project for the New American Century was actually proposing. That new management system is terrorism. Terrorism is not the advertised acts of politically or economically dissident individuals or groups. Those advertised acts are epiphenomena within what should properly be called the “terrorism system” or “terrorism resource management system”. When the US government—in the widest sense of that term—declared the Global War on Terror they were announcing the introduction of a global surveillance and accounting system intended to manage human flows worldwide. Just as Taylorism once had to be imposed by force in factories, terrorism has been imposed as a management tool wherever humans congregate, labour or are in transit. The arbitrary inspection and “security” measures, whether at airports or other nodes of human movement, are accounting instruments. They are dictated by the controlling department of the corporate state for operational management as well as reporting. Unarmed, ordinary travellers are monitored just as are those whose task it is to transport contraband or deploy to armed propaganda and terror action against targeted populations. The so-called “terrorists”, whether branded as Al Qaeda or ISIS, like their precursors in Phoenix and Gladio are system products and instruments for managing population flows. In some places, like Syria, they are also deployed for the management of resource plundering or demolition of civilian infrastructure, both of which are in turn parts of the cash flow model by which hedge funds operate. In order to understand the elusive meaning of the language around terrorism, a cultural historical concept is needed not merely a trivial political one. The political concept of terrorism is a marketing/ branding idea with no substantive explanatory utility. Just as so much political science is written about politics but not about power, the literature on terrorism describes supposed terrorists and imagined terrorist organizations but does not identify the terrorism system within the financial oligarchical culture that dominates the West in the early 21st century. By expanding the concept of terrorism to include, literally, the full spectrum of domination, the relevance of global psychological and financial warfare campaigns like the Covid-19 war and the Global Climate Change war to a culture of total financial control can be imagined and understood without losing the explanatory power for examining the nature of corporate state violence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

At a time of challenged US dollar hegemony and questioning of the neoliberal order, the three countries striving to build socialist societies in the Americas pose a “threat of a good example.”

Also on April 18,  Biden announced new sanctions on Iran. Globally, Washington has imposed sanctions on some forty countries. Because these unilateral coercive measures are a form of collective punishment, they are considered illegal under international law.

Even the US Congressional Research Service recognizes sanctions have “failed” to achieve their regime-change goals. Yet the empire’s perverse response is to do more of the same rather than reverse course. “Once they are imposed, they become politically impossible to lift without getting something in return,” observed The New York Times.

 Times runs cover for US sanctions on Venezuela

The empire’s “newspaper of record” bewailed that Uncle Sam had “no choice” but to reign more misery on the people of Venezuela even though sanctions do not achieve their purported purpose.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Times, had “promised to take steps toward holding free elections… with the lifting of some American sanctions as an incentive. But the ink was hardly dry before his government upheld a ban on running for office that had been placed on María Corina Machado.”

In fact, the Barbados agreement, negotiated last October, said nothing about Ms. Machado, who had been proscribed from holding public office for fifteen years back in 2015 for financial and treasonous misconduct. There was little chance that the notorious politico would have her conviction reversed by Venezuela’s supreme court which, as in the US, is an independent branch of government not under the dictates of the president.

The US knew this when the agreement was signed, but has subsequently used it as an excuse to delegitimize the upcoming Venezuelan presidential election. Why? One reason may be that the US Intelligence Community’s Annal Threat Assessment anticipates that Maduro will win the contest on July 28.

The article correctly reports that Machado was the “overwhelming victor” of a primary, but omits that her incredulous 93% margin in a crowded and highly contested field raised doubts about its credibility. Another leading opposition figure in the primary accused the process of being a fraud.

The primary was held privately, not by the official election authority as other primaries were. Machado’s own NGO, one that had received funds from the CIA front group, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), had administered the primary. And after Machado was declared the winner, the ballots were destroyed. This news, apparently, was not “fit to print” in the Times.

 Times laments the downsides of US sanctions…to the US

The article raises a concern dear to the Times, which is that the “immigration crisis,” precipitated by the US sanctions, pose “a major political problem for Mr. Biden during an election year.” In addition, the Times noted, the sanctions “pushed Venezuela further into the arms of Russia and China.”

The article, concluding with a hackneyed observation that “dictators do dictatorship,” gripes that “US sanctions can do great harm but rarely delivers the political results that American officials seek.”

However, the US didn’t completely close the door on Venezuelan oil industry for select corporations in the US and abroad. The new policy, while revoking the general license, will allow companies to seek individual licenses. The change, the Wall Street Journal noted, “is likely to benefit large oil companies with lobbying power in Washington.”

More distortions

A second Times editorial on Venezuela appeared the next day, this time masquerading as a news story. “One opposition party was allowed to officially register” in the presidential race, the article reads, inferring that there is only one opposition candidate on the ballot, when Reuters reports there are eleven others.

“Many Venezuelans living abroad,” carps the Times, “have been unable to register to vote because of expensive and cumbersome requirements.” Unreported is the biggest barrier for Venezuelans living in the US to vote remotely in their country’s election. Washington does not recognize the legitimate Venezuelan government, which means no functioning consular services and, therefore, no way to vote.

The Times reporter also complained that deportation of Venezuelan migrants were suspended “without explanation.” While the newspaper’s articles are protected behind a paywall, one would think that staff would have access to a February Times report that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez warned that the flights would be discontinued in response to the US’s reimposition of sanctions on Venezuelan gold sales.

Times acknowledges the purpose of US sanctions

 The Times at least no longer blames the “economic free fall” of the Venezuelan economy on the socialist government but fully admits the economic sanctions have “crippled the country’s crucial oil industry.” Further, the Times acknowledges that the Biden administration’s action, “could carry significant consequences for the future of Venezuela’s democracy, for its economy, and for migration in the region.”

In short, the Times reported that US sanctions, “intensified…the single largest peacetime collapse of any country in at least 45 years.”

Finally, the Times implicitly acknowledged that the sanctions were never to promote democracy, but were “meant to force the Maduro government from power.” An earlier 2019 Times opinion piece included the suggestion that while sanctions “may make the humanitarian crisis worse” they are still desirable as a “source of leverage to remove Maduro.”

Venezuela’s response

The week before the oil sanctions were reimposed, Venezuelans celebrated the anniversary of the defeat of the 2002 unsuccessful 48-hour US-backed coup. Neither the tactics – the continuing coup attempts – nor the US policy of regime-change have changed.  The Venezuelan president’s response: “We are going to keep moving forward with a license or without a license…we are not your colony.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

At the dawn of the capitalist industrial era, that source came mainly from coal. Coal powered the machines that grew the productivity of labor to great new heights. It is reasonable to think that only those countries with easy access to coal could then become great capitalist powers.

Beginning at the turn of the last century, oil — an abundant, efficient, and easily stored and transported energy source– became essential for the exercise of economic and military might. As modes of transportation became dependent upon petroleum products, an intense rivalry was stoked for access to oil, often found in more remote areas of the world, far removed from the great urban centers of the great capitalist powers.

At the same time, the great capitalist powers accelerated their drive to dominate the entire world. Lenin and others saw this as a higher stage of capitalist development impelled by the dominance of monopoly capitalism, finance capital, and capital export.

Access and control of energy resources played an extremely large role in motivating this development, leading to conflict and colonization over the areas offering abundant oil production.

It could be said that “oil imperialism” was a critical factor in the course of the Second World War: Japan — a country without adequate oil reserves — needed to secure resources to pursue its imperialist mission; likewise, Germany’s eastward turn was prodded by its thirst for Soviet oil.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

Having then just departed from two years in Tulsa—he on the World, me, as a journalism professor—we were well aware of oil’s power and domination over Oklahoma, let alone the world. Because neither industries nor the military could last without oil—even before WWII—Allies and Axis nations then fought to seize and/or control the flow from Iran (650 billion barrels ) and pander for the rest from oil-rich Arab countries.

Today’s Department of Defense (DOD) requires at least an estimated annual 4.6 billion gallons of fuel  to cover its global military reach. Small wonder decades of Administrations and lawmakers have been unwilling, or downright frightened, to end the U.S. military’s dependence on the availability and prices of Mideast oil.

So from 2001 to at least 2019, wars in the Mideast and Asia have cost American taxpayers an estimated $6.4 trillion , not to mention millions of dead and wounded, environmental destruction, and millions from the Mideast seeking refuge in Europe. Not to count millions spent by the ferocious joint response of American oil producers and military contractors and their legendary use of election donations to influence both Congress and presidents. Add advertising “buys” to the mainstream-media—all vested interests as usual defending American (business) interests abroad.

Wars to Seize, Control Oil Supplies

The Pentagon’s insatiable fuel demands explain why the Bush Administration almost too quickly used 9/11 as an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq. The real motive was more to “secure” its oil fields and production than to overthrow Saddam Hussain and destroy his nonexistent weapons-of-mass-destruction. It also explains why Iran—with its vast oil reserves—has been sanctioned as a U.S. enemy and is constantly under presidential and Pentagon threats ultimately to seize them as well.

As for Syria, the Pentagon has supported the Kurds’ separation of northern Syria to “help” protect its oil fields supposedly against possible reappearance of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). That rationale has meant taxpayers unknowingly have spent millions to support 10 U.S. bases  (900 troops in Syria, 2,500 in Iraq ). They’ve only become aware of that factor because of recent rocket and drone attacks: 32 times in Iraq, 34 in Syria (70 casualties ) from anti-US militants allegedly supported by Iran.

The response seemingly has been a shocked “Why are our kids still there?”—and sitting ducks for local target practice. The official reason for U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria was the “enduring defeat” of ISIS . But that occurred five years ago. Those recent attacks resulted in three U.S. retaliatory air strikes  killing eight Iraqis, and an outraged Iraqi government (“…a clear violation of the coalition’s mission to combat [ISIS] on Iraqi soil”).

The bigger question now being raised, however, is whether the Administration and Pentagon even have a need for Mideast oil. This despite President Biden’s recent decision to permit $582 millions in weapon sales  to ingratiate this country once again to Saudi Arabia despite unneeded oil.

Or teaming earlier this month with Britain to use a blunderbuss against the Houthi “mosquito” guerillas attacking Red Sea shipping: Two massive retaliatory bombings by air and submarine of more than 28 mostly “militant” targets  along Yemen’s mountainous coast —and warnings of more to come  if the Houthis don’t stop. Never did the Biden Administration consider demanding shippers equip vessels with weapons and hiring “shot-gun” crews for protection. Nor are taxpayers likely to learn the raids’ cost from the Pentagon.

In today’s global uproar for a Gaza cease-fire, at least it’s now unlikely the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs or Biden will put American boots on the ground for Israel. They appear to be keeping their powder dry for the “pivot” to Asia, particularly China which will require massive shifts of personnel and war materiel from the Mideast. But quick exits from Vietnam and Afghanistan have demonstrated the Pentagon’s prowess in rapid-transfer logistics on short notice.

U.S. Is Now Top Global Producer of Oil and Natural Gas

The point is that the U.S. really is no longer dependent on Mideast oil. New drilling techniques such as fracking have made it possible to produce enough oil and gas domestically, as well as importing it abroad.

Millions of Americans probably are unaware that since 2014 the U.S. has become the world’s “top oil and natural gas liquids” producer  (2022: 19.1 million barrels per day).  It even leads Saudi Arabia and Russia.

To arrive at this point took Biden’s betrayal of millions of environmentally conscious voters of his March 2020 campaign promise  (“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends.”). What followed has been his steady approval of 6,430 new permits  for oil/gas drilling on public lands. He also revealed that 9,000 permits  previously issued to companies have yet to be used.

Four key signals have been afoot for months that U.S. decision-makers are planning a Mideast exit after Israel has “cleared” Gaza of Palestinians. The Yemen bombings may be the last hurrah of U.S. meddling in the Mideast. Such an historic, earthshaking shift of policy and subsequent monumental move could be immediately ahead—possibly before the presidential election.

Another telling exit signal is new resistance by American taxpayers to the Armed Services budget (FY24: $841.1 billion ) and endless wars, just demonstrated by Congressional Republicans  opposed to Ukraine spending in FY2024 and/or the Pentagon’s never-ending budgetary increases. Or hiding expenses by its sixth audit failure . Among the expenses revealed by the Pentagon’s inspector-general’s report to Congress was failure to track more than $1 billion  of “highly sensitive and sophisticated equipment and weaponry” to Ukraine.

Too, the Yemen attack without the Constitutional requirement of notifying Congress first brought dozens of lawmakers to the Capitol steps to object, echoing Rep. Cori Bush’s online protest of: “The people do not want more of our taxpayer dollars going to endless wars and the killing of civilians. Stop the bombing and do better by us.”

The Pentagon seems impervious even to possible budget cuts from Congress, illustrated by its latest cliffhanging decision over its allocation and future supplemental appropriations. And with good reason. The House did pass the initial FY 2024 bill by a whisker (218-210 ), then, a reassured temporary resolution (395-95 ). The Senate soon followed (87-11 ). Even in the Yemen attack, Pentagon officials’ influence over Biden  is such that his knowing the nation’s overwhelming mood opposes any more Mideast wars, he failed to go immediately on TV to explain this massive action.

A third signal of a U.S. departure is Saudi Arabia’s replacement effort  by seeking new oil customers in Africa and Asia. No fools about the loss of a major customer, its visionary decision makers have been have been working on an Oil Demand Sustainability Program  to:

“…promote oil-based power generation, deploy petrol and diesel vehicles… work with a global auto manufacturer to make a cheap car, lobby against government subsidies for electric vehicles, and fast-track commercial supersonic air travel.”

Influential Media Calls for a Mideast Departure

A fourth indication of a U.S. pullout is that increasing recommendation by influential publications seemingly based on clues perceived from the Biden Administration and Pentagon.

For example, a November op-ed in Foreign Affairs  strongly suggests the Administration needs a course correction in the Mideast, a rapid withdrawal of the Armed Forces to let the locals handle their affairs.

Jason Brownlee , in the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft newsletter, claims the Administration’s “prolonged… deployment” in the Mideast has been “driven by policy inertia more than strategic necessity.” The White House: “should scrap, not reinforce, America’s outdated and unnecessarily provocative troop presence in Syria and Iraq.” His firsthand observations of Taliban rule since the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, he wrote, showed the country finally had “internal stability” because political violence “plummeted by 80%” in the first year.

Military expert William D. Hartung  added that fears of other great powers filling a withdrawal vacuum were “overblown.” That:

 A more restrained strategy would provide better defense per dollar spent while reducing the risk of being drawn into devastating and unnecessary wars. The outlines of such an approach should include taking a more realistic view of the military challenges posed by Russia and China; relying on allies to do more in defense of their own regions; [and]… paring back the U.S. overseas military presence, starting with a reduction in basing and troop levels in the Middle East.

In the face-off against the monumental challenge of an uninhabitable planet, TIME magazine’s Alejandro de la Garza  noted even two years ago that:

 …the military cannot maintain its globe spanning presence and become carbon neutral at the same time. A sustainable military will have to be smaller, with fewer bases, fewer troops to feed and clothe, and fewer ships and airplanes ferrying supplies to personnel from Guam to Germany.

Leaving the Mideast carries the benefit of loosening the rigid thinking Pentagon leaders fixed on plotting wars to secure Arab and Iranian oil. Shifting plans for the Pacific Rim—North Korea and China—just might transform the Armed Forces into being smaller, fewer, and better. Especially removing our troops as moving targets in Iraq and Syria when we no longer need its oil, nor Iran’s. Trading and diplomatic policies could then lead the way instead of expending any more blood and taxpayers’ treasure on that region of the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

The 2023 war between Hamas and Israel elicits many different explanations. As with previous regional hostilities, here too, the pundits and commentators have numerous overlapping processes to draw on – from the struggle between the Zionist and Palestinian national movements, to the deep hostility between the Rabbinate and Islamic churches, to the many conflicts between Israel and Arab/Muslim states, the contentions between the declining superpowers (United States and Russia) and their rising contenders (like China, Iran, Turkey), the rift between western and eastern cultures, and so on.

The experts also highlight the growing importance of local militias – from Jewish settler organizations, to ISIS, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthi movement, the Wagner Group and Kadyrovites Chechens – groups that operate under different political, religious and criminal guises, with varying financing and support from local, governmental and international sources to proxy and/or challenge different states. [2]

Our article does not deal with these specificities. Instead of focusing on the particular and unique, we concentrate on the general and universal. Concretely, we argue that the current war between Hamas and Israel shares an important common denominator with prior clashes in the region – namely, that it constitutes an energy conflict and that it correlates with the differential nature of capital accumulation. We coined these two terms in the late 1980s and have studied their underpinnings and implications for the Middle East and beyond ever since. [3] Our purpose in this paper is to highlight our theoretical arguments, update some of our key empirical evidence and show how both the theory and findings apply to the current Hamas-Israel war.

2. OPEC and the Petro Core

The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a loose coalition between OPEC, the large oil companies, armament contractors, global construction firms and financial institutions, surrounded by shabby arms dealers, politicians, local militias, terrorist groups and media influencers – all connected, directly and indirectly, to military conflicts and energy crises in the Middle East. We labelled this alliance the ‘Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition’.

The uniting force of this coalition is the price of oil. The gyrations of oil prices cause the incomes and profits of coalition members to soar and sink, as their interests diverge and converge with the ebb and flow of regional conflicts and energy crises.

The process ping-pongs, somewhat mechanically, between arms races, open conflicts, energy crises, rising oil prices, increasing state revenues and soaring corporate profit. The Middle East, soaked in multiple tensions, superpower confrontations and mutual suspicions, generates periodic wars at alternating hotspots. These wars help create a sense of ‘energy scarcity’, leading to ‘oil crises’, higher oil prices, rising oil exports and increasing oil-company profit. Soaring oil revenues are in part recycled by financial institutions into global stock and bond markets, but they also help refuel an arms race of imported weapons and military facilities that enrich swarms of international military contractors and construction companies, while equipping potential combatants for yet another round of hostilities and even higher oil prices, so the lethal creation of wealth can start anew.

Let’s unpack these relations, starting with OPEC and the large oil companies. During the 1960s, oil producing countries embarked on a seemingly independent course, limiting oil company concessions, demanding higher royalties and eventually nationalizing their oil resources and facilities. Initially, these developments seemed congruent with the postwar decolonization movement, but soon enough they metamorphosed into a new, post-imperial alliance between the countries and the companies. On the face of it, the large oil oligopolies were stripped of their physical Middle East assets, but their new collaboration with OPEC’s overlords enabled them to achieve something they could have never accomplished on their own: a large, sustainable increase in the price of oil. Between 1972 and 1980, the price of oil, expressed in constant U.S. dollars, rose more than sevenfold.

The merits of this new arrangement were aptly summarized by Saudi oil minister, Sheikh Yamani, in 1969, well before the first ‘oil crisis’:

For our part, we do not want the [oil] majors to lose their power and be forced to abandon their role as a buffer element between the producers and the consumers. We want the present setup to continue as long as possible and at all costs to avoid any disastrous clash of interests which would shake the foundations of the whole oil industry (cited in Barnet 1980: 61).

The arrangement proved that, in matters of income and profit, prices were often far more important than output; or more accurately, that the threat of restricted output helped solidify prices so that profit could rise by even more. To illustrate, the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran deprived British Petroleum of access to 40 per cent of its global crude supplies; yet, in that year, BP’s profit soared by 296 per cent – more than that of any other major company (Turner 1983: 204; Yergin 1991: 484-487; Fortune 500, 1978, 1979).

Figure 1 shows the intimate connection between OPEC and a Petro Core made up of the world’s leading listed oil companies. The dashed line represents OPEC’s aggregate oil exports (left scale), whereas the solid line shows the combined net profit of the Petro Core (right scale). We show both in constant 2022 dollars.

According to the chart, the flow of oil exports is roughly one order of magnitude larger than the flow of oil profit. But contrary to the politically correct view where OPEC represents the peripheral world (or Global South, in today’s lingo) and the oil companies stand for the West, the data indicate that the interests of the two groups are one and the same. Over the 1960-2022 period, the movements of OPEC’s oil exports and the Petro Core’s net profit have been positively and tightly correlated, with a Pearson coefficient of +0.8 out of a maximum value of 1. In other words, insofar as energy conflicts (or their absence) have enriched (or depleted) the oil companies, they have also enriched/depleted OPEC – and vice versa.

Zeroing in on the more recent period, we can see how the 2010s were disastrous for both groups. By 2020, the Petro Core saw its net profit collapse by a whopping 150 per cent relative to its early-decade highs, leaving it with record losses. OPEC’s downturn seemed a bit less severe, with oil exports falling by ‘only’ 75 per cent. However, considering the organization’s rapid demographic growth – roughly 350 per cent since 1960 – it follows that, in per capita terms, OPEC was back to where it started, before the arrival of the blessed oil crises.

But that was the abyss. Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine helped reverse the downturn with rising OPEC exports and exploding oil company profit, and the 2023 hostilities between Hamas and Israel, although yet to be imprinted on the oil books, could end up boosting them further.

3. It’s all in the price

The tight co-movement of OPEC’s oil exports and the oil companies’ net profit is no coincidence. It arises from their co-dependence on oil prices and is affirmed by their common obsession with differential performance. Let’s see how.

Figure 2 shows the global differential earnings per share (EPS) of listed oil & gas firms, measured as the ratio between their average EPS and the average EPS of all listed firms in the world (solid series, left scale). For context, our theory of capital as power (CasP) argues that, contrary to what mainstream economists tell us, corporations and capitalists are driven not to maximize their profit and wealth in order to increase their hedonic pleasure, but to ‘beat the average’ and exceed the ‘normal rate of return’ in order to augment their organized societal power (Nitzan and Bichler 2009). From this viewpoint, a rise in the differential EPS of the oil companies indicates that they beat the average and increase their power, while a decline suggests that they trail the average and see their power fall.

The figure also plots the relative price of oil, measured as the ratio between the dollar price of crude oil and the U.S. Consumer Price Index, or CPI (dashed series, right scale). [4] An increase in the relative price of oil means that the dollar price of oil rises faster (or falls more slowly) than that of the benchmark basket, while a decrease suggests that it falls faster (or rises more slowly).

So, we have a conceptual correspondence: our differential EPS compares the net profit per share of oil & gas companies to that of all companies, while our relative price relates the price of oil to the average price of commodities sold by all companies.

Before proceeding, note that since crude oil is mostly an input for the oil companies, it takes time for it to be processed/refined, marked up and translated into profit. For this reason, our chart juxtaposes the differential EPS series with the relative prices prevailing 12 months earlier. Also, to smooth out short-term fluctuations, we express both series as 12-month trailing averages.

And the results leave little to the imagination: based on the R², the variance of the relative price of oil explains 66 per cent of the variance of the differential EPS of the oil companies since December 1973, and as much as 73 per cent since January 1980. In other words, oil companies increase their differential EPS mostly through differential inflation. And given the close correlation between net oil profit and OPEC’s oil exports shown in Figure 1, we might expect relative prices to have had a similar impact on the share of OPEC’s oil revenues in global GDP.

This parsimonious relation allows us to dump a lot of unnecessary baggage. To predict next year’s differential EPS of the oil companies (and OPEC’s relative oil exports), we no longer need economists to lecture us about supply, demand and equilibrium, sophisticated analysts to overcharge us for hedged econometric prophecies, strategists to guess future demand from China and supply conditions in Saudi Arabia, and researchers to study the shifting balance between fracking and green energy. [5] All we need to do is simply observe the relative price of crude oil here and now, plug this price into Figure 2 and draw the resulting value for differential EPS 12 months later. Bottom line: it’s all in the price.

And this reductionist rule, although half-a-century old, continues to work like new. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine helped double the relative price of oil from its two-decade low, and according to Figure 2, 12 months later this rise helped multiply the differential EPS of the oil companies (and OPEC’s oil exports) many times over from their half-a-century nadir. And if the current Hamas-Israel war continues and even expands, it is not hard to imagine yet another synchronized rise in differential oil prices, exports and EPS.

4. Energy conflicts and differential returns

So far, we have shown that the net profit of the oil companies and the oil exports of OPEC, measured in constant dollars, are tightly correlated (Figure 1), and that changes in differential oil EPS (and presumably also in OPEC’s oil exports relative to global GDP) correlate tightly with changes in relative oil prices (Figure 2). In this section, we connect these two processes to the periodic eruption of energy conflicts.

The vertical bars in Figure 3 show the differential return on equity of the Petro Core relative to that of the Fortune 500. We compute this differential first by calculating the ratio of net profit to owners’ equity for both the Petro Core and the Fortune 500, and then by subtracting the latter from the former. If the difference is positive (grey bars), it means that the Petro Core beats the average with a higher return on equity. If it is negative (black bars), it implies that the Petro Core trails the average, with a lower return on equity.

For reasons that will become clear in a moment, we consider a stretch of negative differential returns a danger zone – i.e., a period during which an energy conflict is likely to erupt. The breakout of each energy conflict is marked by an explosion sign and named in the notes underneath the figure.

And here there arise three remarkable regularities.

First, and most importantly, every energy conflict save one was preceded by the Petro Core trailing the average. In other words, for a Middle East energy conflict to erupt, the leading oil companies first must differentially decumulate. [6] The only exception to this rule is the 2011 burst of the Arab Spring and the subsequent blooming of ‘outsourced wars’ (our term for the fighting in Lebanon-Syria-Iraq that was financed and supported by a multitude of governments and NGOs in and outside the region). That specific round erupted without a prior danger zone – although the Petro Core was very close to falling below the average. In 2010, its differential return on equity dropped to a razor-thin 0.4 per cent, down from around 25 per cent in both 2008 and 2009.

Second, every energy conflict save one – the multiple interventions in 2014 – was followed by the oil companies beating the average. In other words, war and conflict in the region – processes that customarily are blamed for rattling, distorting and undermining the aggregate economy – have served the differential interest of the large oil companies (and OPEC) at the expense of leading non-oil firms (and countries). [7] This finding, however striking, should not surprise us. As we have seen, differential oil profit is intimately correlated with the relative price of oil (Figure 2); the relative price of oil in turn is highly responsive to Middle East ‘risk’ perceptions, real or imaginary; these risk perceptions tend to jump in preparation for and during armed conflict; and as risks mount, they raise the relative price of oil and therefore the differential profit of the oil companies.

Third and finally, according to these data, the Petro Core never managed to beat the average without there first being an energy conflict in the region. In other words, the differential performance of the oil companies depends not on production, but on the most extreme form of sabotage: war.

With these regularities in mind, the recent decade has been truly exceptional. We have already seen how the 2010s collapse of OPEC’s ‘real’ oil revenues, expressed in per capita terms, rolled these countries back half a century, and how, during that period, the Petro Core sustained its biggest losses ever. This is the picture in absolute terms.

In relative terms – which is the measure capitalists and state rulers revere the most – the situation was equally bad, if not worse. As Figure 3 shows, beginning in 2013, the Petro Core trailed the average with unprecedented differential losses that even the multiple conflicts of 2014 failed to alleviate. On the face of it, the Petro Core’s inability to pull itself out of the danger zone suggested it was withering away, unable to rejuvenate its profit let alone lead the capitalist pack.

But existential crises often tease unity out of division – in this case, unity between the rulers of the losing countries and companies. And indeed, when all seemed lost, the oil market started smelling war: in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, and a year later Hamas burst into Israel. The 2022 differential performance of the Petro Core turned positive, and if the ongoing Hamas-Israel fighting continues – and possibly expands into a border war – these increases, along with OPEC’s relative oil revenues, could be augmented even further.

5. The broader picture

Now, admittedly, our reductionism, although statistically robust, does seem excessive. How can a single variable – in this case, the differential profit of the oil companies – explain more than half a century of Middle East conflicts (and be predicted by these very conflicts to boot)? Can this variable substitute for the region’s local and global complexities? Even if we complemented it with the shenanigans of the superpowers, oil and weapon companies and OPEC executives, the resulting vista would still be too narrow. It would leave out a hugely rich canvas, interwoven by a great many experts from different disciplines, including international relations, economics, culture, orientalism, religion, gender, race, geology, climate and the environment. Is this complex canvas totally irrelevant?

These are valid questions. As noted at the beginning of our paper, the history of Middle East conflicts is affected by numerous interlaced causes: intra-state ethnic tensions, authoritarian regimes exporting their internal conflicts, shifting inter-state alliances and rivalries, superpower confrontations and the rise of contending powers, the disintegration of the old global order, clashes of ideology, nationalism, clericalism and cultural traditions, population growth and water shortages. The list goes on.

But here is the problem. The very specificity of these explanations fractures and disconnects them from each other, and these fractures and disconnections make it difficult if not impossible to capture the general picture we present. Moreover, because these specific explanations are oblivious to the abiding differential logic of the capitalist mode of power, they do not – and cannot – say anything about the overriding regularities of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition and Middle East energy conflicts.

Put somewhat differently, our theoretical approach does not preclude or contest existing explanations of specific conflicts as such; instead, it offers a general perspective that seems to underpin them all. At times, this general perspective coincides or sits side by side with existing explanations of particular conflicts; at others, it transcends them.

Now, although temporally robust, our approach remains historical. And while it is true that the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition is still crucial for understanding Middle East conflicts, it is by no means eternal.

Over the past half century, the position of this coalition has been adversely affected by two important developments. One is that the United States and Russia, besieged by rising inequalities, soaring debts and impoverished populations, have seen their world supremacy challenged by China, India and other big ‘emerging markets’ and their leverage in the Middle East contested by regional powers like Iran and Turkey. The other is that the old-economy emphasis on energy and weapons has been increasingly undermined by a new economy that relies on high technology, communications, pharmaceuticals and biotech.

One result of these developments, crucial to our story, is highlighted in Figure 4. The solid series shows the power of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition, proxied by the global net profit share of listed aerospace companies and integrated oil & gas firms. [8] The series demonstrates that, during the 1970s and 1980s, the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition reigned supreme, muscling roughly 1/5^th of all net profit earned by the world’s listed companies. But it also shows that from then on, the Coalition’s power trended southward. Despite repeated energy conflicts with large-scale military hostilities, millions of casualties, horrific civilian massacres, mass incarceration, deportation and the wholesale destruction of societal infrastructures that together brought oil-market panics, systemic instability and the disintegration of states, the global net profit share of the armament and oil firms has continued to shrink.

By 2000, this share was down to a mere 4 per cent – 80 per cent below its all-time peak in the early 1980s. The bellicose aftermath of September 11, 2001, gave the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition a facelift, pushing its global net profit share to 12 per cent by the end of the decade. But the recovery was short lived. In the 2010s, the Coalition’s net profit share drifted further down, and in 2017 it hit a 3 per cent nadir. The 2022 Russia-Ukraine and 2023 Hamas-Israel wars seem to have once again revived the Coalition’s dwindling prospects, but whether this revival marks the onset of a long-term uptrend or a temporary blip in its continued decline is anyone’s guess.

This long-term descent is mirrored by the uptrend of the ‘Technodollar-Pharmadollar Coalition’, made up of listed technology, pharmaceutical and biotech firms. The differential power of this new alliance, measured by its global net profit share, is shown by the dashed red series, which, in the early 2020s reached 20 per cent – almost as high as the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition’s peak of the early 1980s. Significantly, the chart also shows that the two coalitions move countercyclically over shorter periods.

This inverse performance is not difficult to explain. The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition is ‘brick and mortar’. It sells tangible stuff and profits differentially from the relative inflation induced by international instability and chaos. By contrast, the Technodollar-Pharmadollar Coalition relies primarily on ‘intangible’ commodities. Its differential profit comes from privatizing collective societal knowledge as intellectual property, appropriating the rights to this property, and upping the relative markup on those rights.

And here is the key point: the general conditions necessary for the spread, imposition and inflationary appreciation of intellectual property rights are opposite to those conducive to the inflation of weapon and oil prices. They require not instability, naked force and open violence, but the appearance of stability, both domestic and international, and the seeming prevalence of ‘law and order’.

In other words, the overall settings that boost one coalition tend to undermine the other – and vice versa. And since both coalitions have considerable leverage in domestic policy and international relations, it makes the conflict between them crucial for the fate of the Middle East and beyond.

And this is not a new phenomenon. The potential significance of intraclass conflicts was illustrated during the 1960s by Michael Kalecki. In his essays ‘The Fascism of Our Times’ (1964) and ‘Vietnam and U.S. Big Business’ (1967), he predicted that continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam would increase the dichotomy between the ‘old’, largely civilian business groups located mainly on the U.S. East Coast, and the ‘new’ militarized business groups, primarily the arms contractors, of the West Coast. The rise in military budgets, he anticipated, would force a redistribution of income from the old to the new groups. The ‘angry elements’ within the U.S. ruling class would then be significantly strengthened, pushing for a more aggressive foreign policy and a war economy: ‘It is a sad world indeed where the fate of all mankind depends upon the fight between two competing groups within American big business. This, however, is not quite new: many far-reaching upheavals in human history started from a cleavage at the top of the ruling class’ (Kalecki 1967: 114).

ENDNOTES

[1] The article’s title pays homage to Lev Nussimbaum’s riveting historical novel, Blood and Oil in the Orient (Bey 1932; This is the second time we borrow his title. The first was in Bichler and Nitzan 2017a). Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan teach political economy at colleges and universities in Israel and Canada, respectively. All their publications are available for free on The Bichler & Nitzan Archives (https://bnarchives.net). Work on this paper was partly supported by SSHRC.

[2] Note that militias are also growing in number and importance elsewhere in the world. In our view, this worldwide phenomenon reflects, at least in part, the widening mismatches and contradictions between the nation state and global accumulation.

[3] On the connection between energy conflicts and differential accumulation, see Bichler and Nitzan (1996, 2004, 2015, 2017a, 2017b, 2018, 2020), Bichler, Nitzan and Rowley (1989), Bichler, Rowley and Nitzan (1989), Nitzan and Bichler (1995; 2002: Ch. 5; 2006), Nitzan, Rowley and Bichler (1989) and Rowley, Bichler and Nitzan (1989).

[4] Since the CPI covers only consumer goods and services, it might seem better to use the comprehensive GDP deflator. The drawback is that, unlike the CPI, which is a monthly fixed-basket index, the basket of the GDP deflator changes continuously, and the index itself is estimated only quarterly. Fortunately, the two measures tend to move in tandem, so we use the more familiar CPI.

[5] Surprising as it may sound, mainstream economists cannot explain actual profits and prices, and for the simplest of reasons: their key explanatory categories of supply, demand and equilibrium – and therefore of scarcity – can be neither observed nor measured. They are purely imaginary (Bichler and Nitzan 2021; Nitzan and Bichler 2009: Chs. 5 and 8). The practical implications of this theoretical vacuum for the oil business are examined in Nitzan and Bichler (1995: 487-492) and Bichler and Nitzan (2015: 50-54; 75-76).

[6] In the late 1970s and early 1980s, and again during the 2000s, differential decumulation was sometimes followed by a string of conflicts stretching over several years. In these instances, the result was a longer time lag between the initial spell of differential decumulation and some of the subsequent conflicts.

[7] A key point to note here is the effect of energy conflicts not on absolute but differential oil returns. For example, in 1969-1970, 1975, 1980-1982, 1985, 1991, 2001-2002, 2006-2007, 2009 and 2012, the rate of return on equity of the Petro Core fell; but in all cases the fall was either slower than that of the Fortune 500 or too small to close the positive gap between them, so despite the absolute decline, the Petro Core continued to beat the average.

[8] Note that this measure focuses on overall net profit, which is different from the one based on EPS in Figure 2.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan.

A screen grab from Danish Defense shows the gas leak from the exploded Nord Stream pipelines causing bubbles on the surface of the Baltic Sea on September 30, 2022. / Photo by Swedish Coast Guard Handout / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

I do not know much about covert CIA operations—no outsider can—but I do understand that the essential component of all successful missions is total deniability. The American men and women who moved, under cover, in and out of Norway in the months it took to plan and carry out the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea a year ago left no traces—not a hint of the team’s existence—other than the success of their mission.

Deniability, as an option for President Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, was paramount. No significant information about the mission was put on a computer, but instead typed on a Royal or perhaps a Smith Corona typewriter with a carbon copy or two, as if the Internet and the rest of the online world had yet to be invented. The White House was isolated from the goings-on near Oslo; various reports and updates from the field were directly provided to CIA Director Bill Burns, who was the only link between the planners and the president who authorized the mission to take place on September 26, 2022. Once the mission was completed, the typed papers and carbons were destroyed, thus leaving no physical trace—no evidence to be dug up later by a special prosecutor or a presidential historian. You could call it the perfect crime.

There was a flaw—a gap in understanding between those who carried out the mission and President Biden, as to why he ordered the destruction of the pipelines when he did. My initial 5,200-word report, published in early February, ended cryptically by quoting an official with knowledge of the mission telling me: “It was a beautiful cover story.” The official added: “The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

This is the first account of that flaw, on the one-year anniversary of the explosions, and it is one President Biden and his national security team will not like.

Inevitably, my initial story caused a sensation, but the major media emphasized the White House denials and relied on an old canard—my reliance on an unnamed source—to join the administration in debunking the notion that Joe Biden could have had anything to do with such an attack. I must note here that I’ve won literally scores of prizes in my career for stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker that relied on not a single named source. In the past year we’ve seen a series of contrary newspaper stories, with no named first-hand sources, claiming that a dissident Ukrainian group carried out the technical diving operation attack in the Baltic Sea via a 49-foot rented yacht called the Andromeda.

I am now able to write about the unexplained flaw cited by the unnamed official. It goes once again to the classic issue of what the Central Intelligence Agency is all about: an issue raised by Richard Helms, who headed the agency during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and the CIA’s secret spying on Americans, as ordered by President Lyndon Johnson and sustained by Richard Nixon. I published an exposé in the Times about that spying in December 1974 that led to unprecedented hearings by the Senate into the role of the agency in its unsuccessful attempts, authorized by President John F. Kennedy, to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Helms told the senators that the issue was whether he, as CIA director, worked for the Constitution or for the Crown, in the person of presidents Johnson and Nixon. The Church Committee left the issue unresolved, but Helms made it clear he and his agency worked for the top man in the White House.

Back to the Nord Stream pipelines: It is important to understand that no Russian gas was flowing to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines when Joe Biden ordered them blown up last September 26. Nord Stream 1 had been supplying vast amounts of low-cost natural gas to Germany since 2011 and helped bolster Germany’s status as a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But it was shut down by Putin by the end of August 2022, as the Ukraine war was, at best, in a stalemate. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021 but was blocked from delivering gas by the German government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz two days prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Given Russia’s vast stores of natural gas and oil, American presidents since John F. Kennedy have been alert to the potential weaponization of these natural resources for political purposes. That view remains dominant among Biden and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, now the acting deputy to Blinken.

Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings late in 2021, as Russia was building up its forces along the border of Ukraine, with an invasion seen as almost inevitable. The group, which included representatives from the CIA, was urged to come up with a proposal for action that could serve as a deterrent to Putin. The mission to destroy the pipelines was motivated by the White House’s determination to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan’s goal seemed clear. “The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” the official told me. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”

I now know what I did not know then: the real reason why the Biden administration “brought up taking out the Nord Stream pipeline.” The official recently explained to me that at the time Russia was supplying gas and oil throughout the world via more than a dozen pipelines, but Nord Stream 1 and 2 ran directly from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. “The administration put Nord Stream on the table because it was the only one we could access and it would be totally deniable,” the official said. “We solved the problem within a few weeks—by early January—and told the White House. Our assumption was that the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war.”

It was no surprise to the agency’s secret planning group when on January 27, 2022, the assured and confident Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, stridently warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine, as he clearly was planning to, that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The line attracted enormous attention, but the words preceding the threat did not. The official State Department transcript shows that she preceded her threat by saying that with regard to the pipeline: “We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.”

Asked by a reporter how she could say with certainty that the Germans would go along “because what the Germans have said publicly doesn’t match what you’re saying,” Nuland responded with an astonishing bit of doubletalk: “I would say go back and read the document that we signed in July [of 2021] that made very clear about the consequences for the pipeline if there is further aggression on Ukraine by Russia.” But that agreement, which was briefed to journalists, did not specify threats or consequences, according to reports in the Times, the Washington Post, and Reuters. At the time of the agreement, on July 21, 2021, Biden told the press corps that since the pipeline was 99 percent finished, “the idea that anything was going to be said or done was going to stop it was not possible.” At the time, Republicans, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, depicted Biden’s decision to permit the Russian gas to flow as a “generational geopolitical win” for Putin and “a catastrophe” for the United States and its allies.

But two weeks after Nuland’s statement, on February 7, 2022, at a joint White House press conference with the visiting Scholz, Biden signaled that he had changed his mind and was joining Nuland and other equally hawkish foreign policy aides in talking about stopping the pipeline. “If Russia invades—that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again,” he said, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how he could do so since the pipeline was under Germany’s control, he said: “We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

Scholz, asked the same question, said: “We are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not be taking different steps. We will do the same steps, and they will be very very hard to Russia, and they should understand.” The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Seymour Hersh.

Belgium accounts globally for 17% of Russia’s exports, behind only China and Spain.

Later in an interview with the Financial Times, Van der Straeten said she was “not happy” about the fact that Russian gas kept flowing into Europe. She then understated Belgium’s share of Russian gas, indicating it was merely 2.8% of Europe’s imports that remained in Belgium, the rest was “in transit”. How wrong or misleading her statement was is revealed by the Global Witness NGO.

She admitted, though Belgium supports sanctions on Russian fuel, it was unlikely to happen. It would require the unanimous support of all EU members.

Earlier this week, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer admitted that Russian LNG was difficult to replace, pointing out that while it was “not cheaper than any other” gas, the way the pipeline system is arranged in Europe makes it difficult to substitute.

There is no end to excuses and pretexts in explaining why Europe must continue to import Russian hydrocarbons. Amazing. No word about the European economy which is at the brink of total collapse. Maybe Germany has already passed the point of no return.

And no word, of course, that this suicidal path to follow the Washington Masters and their overlords dictate is due to an utterly corrupt European leadership, combined with the equally corrupt strongest economy’s leadership, Germany – something that has hardly been seen in recent history.

How vassalic must you be to commit suicide on the orders of Washington and the corporate financial overlords who pulls the strings on Washington, pretending to run the world.

And they may if we just stand by and watch.

See also this by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts about the west’s lost integrity – “The Disappearance of Integrity: Organized Suppression of the Facts, Only Writers Who Support ‘Official Narratives’ Are Tolerated.”

This is just the beginning. The EU Russian energy apologists start talking about energy imports from Russia – and how it is necessary for now – but also how to wean themselves off Russian energy dependence very, very soon.

The Guardian puts it this way: “EU countries bought 22m cubic meters of Russian LNG between January and July 2023, compared with 15m during the same period in 2021, Global Witness said. “Buying Russian gas has the same impact as buying Russian oil. Both fund the war in Ukraine, and every euro means more bloodshed.”

This is, of course, a mainstream media blow on Russia. Never a reason or history on how NATO provoked the war in Ukraine.

This is just part of the story. What the holy west and particularly the vassal-EU does not mention are the other more than 100 essential products they keep importing from Russia at ever larger quantities, and – yes – despite the sanctions.

These table speak for themselves:

And the list goes on – another 82 lines of imports.
2022 EU Imports from Russia are the 3 largest since 2013, despite sanctions.

People are fooled.
Europe cannot live without imports from Russia.
So, what are the sanctions for?
Propaganda?
Russia bashing?
Your mind control?

Another legitimate question one may ask: why does Russia sell to the sanctioning countries? Russia does not really need Europe and the US for trade and for economic survival.

President Putin’s Press Secretary, Dmitry Peskov, recently said that Russia is doing well and growing, despite western sanctions. See this.

Russia is well integrated into the Asian complex.  It is a co-founder of the original BRICS and now the new BRICS-11. Russia is also a key player in the Global South which becomes ever more important on the global stage.

Uranium imports by the US and Europe from Russia is another unwritten sheet and rarely published news. Russia sold about $1.7 billion in nuclear products to firms in the U.S. and Europe, and this despite the western stiff sanctions, due to the western provoked war in Ukraine. The West calls it a Russian invasion. In reality, it was a NATO-triggered move for preserving Russian sovereignty – and against some 20 to 30 war-grade biolabs in the Ukraine, built and funded by the US. See this.

The United States’ uranium purchases from Russia have doubled since last year. The U.S. bought 416 tons of uranium from Russia in the first half of the year, more than double the amount for the same period in 2022 and the highest level since 2005.

One may question the seriousness of the US Russia bashing, especially since according to a report by RT, Russia is supplying the U.S. only with enriched uranium, a critical component for civil nuclear power generation, but also for nuclear weapons – according to a report by RT.  How come Russia is selling Washington Weapon-grade enriched uranium?

See full report.

Given the foregoing inconsistencies with “sanctions” – mind you, highly publicized sanctions – how serious can the West be taken?

The world must wake up. People of western countries, whose democracy has long been abolished, trampled by the tyrannical western powers “rules-based order”, must stand up against these rulers, invent alternatives to their corporate financial empires and build a world of peace and harmony outside the dictatorial matrix.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

Then there was the other one: “Tax the Rich, Tax the Mother-F—ing Rich!”, also a big hit all throughout the week of actions in New York City. The most memorable time chanting it for me was on the morning of the 18th. I was with a group of 27 other people arrested, handcuffed and stuffed into an old police bus after blocking one of the entrances to the Federal Reserve bank in the Wall Street area. As the bus pulled away heading towards 1 Police Plaza and hours of processing, someone started up this chant. We must have chanted it for at least 5-6 minutes with no let up and loud-loud-loud as the bus traveled through the Wall Street area streets. And since our windows were partly open, there’s no question a lot of people heard us.

This was the spirit of the week of resistance to end fossil fuels and build another world, another world that looks much more possible now that we’ve shown each other just what we can do when we work hard together in a cooperative and respectful way.

It is just tremendous, a huge and very important thing that, according to mainstream media reports, 75,000 people took part in the March to End Fossil Fuels on September 17. The organizers of the march did their job and did it well, and masses of people responded. It was and is, clearly, a movement moment.

It’s special that almost 200 arrests were made for the many acts of determined nonviolent direct action throughout the week.

It is a very big deal that there were many hundreds, possibly close to a thousand, local actions happening around the country and around the world over this weekend. The world is rising up together again on this most critical of issues, the rapidly deepening climate emergency.

And the mix of people! From where I was on Sunday, deep in the middle of the march, it was great to experience:

• the racial diversity—predominantly white but with a stronger mix of people of the global majority/people of color than I expected; and,
• the issue diversity—anti-militarism, feminism, youth, plastics, labor, elders and more, all in the context of the overall climate justice focus of the action.

Then there was the press coverage, lots and lots of it. One of special note is the New York Times on the day after the march displaying a big color picture on the front page, with a very good article and more pictures inside that front section of the paper.

This was a week not to be forgotten. This week really can be a turning point moment for climate justice-centered, mass movement-building. But what is next? Here are my thoughts:

This showing, this showing to one another what we can do when unified, has to continue. A top priority has to be support for the many battles raging against new fossil fuel pipelines like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, LNG export terminals in the Gulf states and elsewhere, other infrastructure, and oil and gas leases. All of us need to do whatever we can when the calls go out for supportive acts of resistance, whether electronic or in person, responding as best as we can.

But we need more. The success of this week that was, this historic week in NYC and around the world, was seen and heard about by literally tens of millions of people who had no idea that our movement was this big, this unified, this organizationally capable. We need to take visible action in local areas all over the country, and maybe the world, on a regular basis, in part to give these new people an on ramp into the world of activism for justice.

Young people with Fridays for Future gave leadership on this tactic beginning years ago via the local, distributed-but-connected actions on the same Friday day. Jane Fonda’s Fire Drill Fridays did something similar for a while, and national webinars are still being done monthly.

What if one of the main follow-ups from this historic week is something similar: End Fossil Fuels Fridays, every month, like the first Friday of every month. Local groups would use the political framework of the March’s four demands and the context language going with them—see below–but they would determine what specifically is done each month, what important local or other fights are prioritized and what exactly happens. A diversity of nonviolent tactics would be the overarching tactical approach.

Can we do this? After what we’ve just done, of course we can. Is there a better idea? Very possibly. Let’s discuss! But not too long, sisters, brothers, cousins, friends. Every day we need to go about our life-saving work acting with the urgency, but also with the love and compassion, that the times require.

We need clean air, not another billionaire!

From www.endfossilfuels.us:

We call on Biden to:

-STOP FEDERAL APPROVALS for new fossil fuel projects and REPEAL permits for climate bombs like the Willow project and the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

-PHASE OUT FOSSIL FUEL DRILLING on our public lands and waters.

-DECLARE A CLIMATE EMERGENCY to halt fossil fuel exports and investments abroad, and turbo-charge the build-out of more just, resilient distributed energy (like rooftop and community solar).

-PROVIDE A JUST TRANSITION to a renewable energy future* that generates millions of jobs while supporting workers’ and community rights, job security, and employment equity.

* Our renewable energy future must not repeat the violence of the extractive past. Justice must ground the transition off fossil fuels to redress the climate, colonialist, racist, socioeconomic, and ecological injustices of the fossil fuel era.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

In a historic referendum, people in Ecuador have voted to block oil drilling on uncontacted tribes’ land in the Yasuní National Park.

Leonidas Iza, President of Ecuador’s national Indigenous organization CONAIE, said today:

The Ecuadorian people, mindful of life, in solidarity with our uncontacted Tagaeri, Taromenane and Dugakaeri brothers and sisters, said “Yes to Yasuní” in this referendum on August 20th. We have saved their territory, their lives, their food sovereignty, and their medicines in the sacred Yasuní forest”. He added: “In this little piece of territory in the heart of the Amazon, we can find solutions to problems that most affect humanity. Science has shown that the best protected territories in the fight against climate change are Indigenous territories. That’s why we invite the international community to lend a hand, in solidarity and sensitively, to protect the territories that balance the life of Mother Nature, which save species and also humanity.

Julio Cusurichi Palacios from Peru’s Amazon Indigenous organization AIDESEP said:

It is extremely important to protect the territory of uncontacted tribes who share land in Ecuador, in the Yasuní National Park, and in Peru, in the Napo Tigre Indigenous Reserve (awaiting creation), to guarantee their rights to life, health, survival and territory, in compliance with international frameworks that governments must implement. In Peru, the government has officially recognized five uncontacted tribes in the Napo Tigre area. These peoples are cross-border peoples, who live on both sides of the border between Peru and Ecuador in the basins of the Napo, Curaray, and Tigre rivers, and their tributaries. They have lived on their ancestral lands for hundreds of years, even before the countries of Ecuador and Peru were established, and they do not recognize artificial borders.

Survival International is fighting globally for the survival of all the world’s uncontacted tribes. Sarah Shenker, head of Survival’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign, said today:

This is a major victory for Ecuador’s Indigenous movement, and for the global campaign to recognize the rights of uncontacted tribes.

The uncontacted Tagaeri, Dugakaeri and Taromenane have for years seen their lands invaded, firstly by evangelical missionaries, then by oil companies. Now, at last, they have some hope of living in peace once more. We hope this prompts greater recognition that all uncontacted peoples must have their territories protected if they’re to survive, and thrive.

Apart from anything else, we know that their territories are the best barrier to deforestation, particularly in the Amazon rainforest. Uncontacted tribes are our contemporaries, a vital part of humankind’s diversity, and the guardians of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

In Peru, Indigenous organizations have been fighting for more than 20 years to create and protect the Napo-Tigre Indigenous reserve for uncontacted tribes, adjacent to Yasuní. Currently, the oil and gas company Perenco is exploiting Napo-Tigre oil.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

• CATL develops and researches electric batteries in Germany
• More support measures for the real estate sector
• Clean energy targets achieved 5 years ahead of schedule
• China Railway completes 453 km/h train tests

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

Although the decline of the West is rapidly becoming more evident to informed observers of current events, the start of that decline is less easy to pinpoint, in part because it seemed less inevitable and more reversible until quite recently. Was the high point the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Victorian England? The U.S. Eisenhower administration? Some might date it from the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, marking the beginning of the truncated “New American Century.”

That “century” appears to be ending in the manner of so many other powers that fill the pages of Kennedy’s book – through imperial overreach, excessive military spending, lagging economic productivity and competitiveness, and failure to invest in the physical, technical and human resources necessary to remain a dominant power. In short, the West is flagging.

The signs for this are too evident to ignore. The industrial base of the West is withering. Post-WWII, the U.S. dominated because it was the only major industrial power to survive unscathed, and its investment in western Europe and Japan increased the wealth of all three. Over the last half of the 20th century, however, these economies began to shift much of their industry to countries with cheaper labor and more efficient production, such that by the 21st century much of their manufacturing capability had vanished, and they became mainly consumer societies.

2023 has become a watershed year for the power shift, due to dramatic western weaknesses exposed by the Ukraine war. The war revealed that a relatively modest economy (Russia) had the capability to outproduce the U.S. and all the NATO countries combined in war materiel. The U.S. “arsenal of democracy” and its European partners proved unable to provide more than a fraction of the weapons and ammunition that Russia’s factories produced. Ukrainian soldiers supplied by NATO countries found themselves vastly outnumbered in tanks, artillery, missiles, unmanned and manned aircraft, and even the latest hypersonic and electronic weapons that were arrayed against them in seemingly limitless supply. The U.S. and European NATO partners could only cobble together small numbers of incompatible weapons from their diminishing inventories, and make promises of future deliveries after months or years.

But the U.S. and its allies were not counting on physical weapons alone. They weaponized the U.S. dollar, through seizures of Russian accounts in U.S., European and other banks totaling more than $300 billion, and through application of economic sanctions, including expulsion of Russian banks from the SWIFT dollar trading system. This also backfired.

First, Russia retaliated by seizing U.S. and European assets within Russia, in equal or greater amounts. Second, they “pivoted east,” negotiating new trading partnerships with China, India and other countries. Third, they and their new partners, including other targets of U.S. sanctions, began to develop financial agreements to displace or reduce the use of SWIFT. Even countries that had heretofore not been threatened with asset seizure or economic sanctions, like Brazil, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia, joined these agreements, in order to expand their trading base, and as insurance against use of the USD for financial pressure or threats. The result was that the Russian economy proved astonishingly resilient – moreso even than many of the NATO countries. The Russian GDP fell by less than 2% in 2022 and is expected to rise by up to 2% in 2023, despite the war and sanctions. Russia has opted for a sustainable but inexorable war with less than 1/6 the casualties of Ukraine. Visitors report that it hardly feels like a country at war. The annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum attracted 17,000 participants from 130 countries and concluded 900 deals and contracts worth 3.9 trillion rubles ($46 billion).

The decline of Europe was further illustrated by the consequences of the US bombing of the Nordstream gas pipelines in September, 2022, and the sanctions on Russian natural gas and petroleum products imposed by NATO. Together, these ended the competitiveness of the European economies, which had hitherto thrived on accessibility to cheap Russian fuel. As predicted by Radek Sikorsky, MEP, this meant

… double-digit inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and electricity shortage, … Germany will be deindustrialized, … German industries, scientists and engineers will move to the US, who will generously accept them.

And Europe will be set back a couple of decades. Already, most European countries — France, Italy, Spain etc. — have had zero growth in GDP-per-capita for more than a decade. Add in inflation, the standard of living will soon be down 30-40%.

In effect, the U.S. had defeated its NATO “partners” (mainly Germany) and cannibalized their industries for the sake of its own benefit, potentially short-lived.

But the United States believed that its mighty dollar could offset its faded industry and increasingly toothless military – that it could be printed in unlimited amounts without losing value, and could become its most powerful weapon. The history of this dollar began in 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that, in effect, the U.S. dollar would no longer be backed by gold, but rather by whatever the dollar could purchase in the U.S., i.e. by the U.S. economy itself. This became widely accepted because a) the U.S. was the world’s largest economy, b) the two great international regulatory financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were also based on the dollar, and c) nearly all the world’s countries outside of the Soviet Union and other socialist societies used the dollar as the reserve currency for their own money. In addition, the world shed fixed exchange rates, with their troublesome periodic revaluations, for floating rates, which generally made the changes more gradual and more stable for the major currencies, and especially the dollar.

The effect of so many dollars circulating so widely was to invest most of the world in protecting its value. The more a country’s non-dollar currency became based on the dollar as its reserve currency, the more the incentive for that country to defend the dollar. Later, as the U.S. began to lose its industry, it came to depend on this value to maintain its economy. It marketed its debt to other countries and “persuaded” other countries to fund U.S. bases on their territories for the purpose of “mutual defense.” This is part of the reason the U.S. now has more than 800 military bases worldwide. Although the U.S. national debt is, at time of writing, more than $33 trillion, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board seem to think that they can continue to unload it without limit onto other countries.

Decision makers in the U.S. seem to think that they have found the goose that lays the golden egg: when they need more money, they have only to borrow indefinitely and market their IOUs to buyers, many of whom don’t really have the option of saying no. Thus, for example, it used unlimited borrowing to fund without hesitation a very costly Ukraine war by more than $100 billion in 2022 alone, while denying basic services to its own citizens.

But borrowing is not the only way that the U.S. raises funds. Given the stability of the dollar, many countries store or invest them in the U.S. But when a country has a disagreement with the U.S., or chooses a leadership or policies not approved by the U.S., the U.S. is not above confiscating those funds. In 2011, this is what it did with $32 billion of Libyan funds, the largest but by no means the only such confiscation of another nation’s funds at that time. Since then, similar confiscations have occurred with Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan and other nations. Eclipsing Libya, however, was the confiscation of Russia’s $300 billion by the U.S and its mostly NATO allies, an estimated $100 billion of it by the U.S. alone.

Recently, however, other countries are becoming wary of the U.S. and choosing other options that reduce their participation in what they view as a Mafia-style protection racket as well as their placement of assets in places where they could be confiscated in case of disagreement. As noted earlier, a growing number of countries are opting to either bypass the dollar-based SWIFT system, or to complement it with new agreements where goods are paid in another currency or with multiple currencies. Even Saudi Arabia has begun accepting payment in Chinese Yuan and paying Russia in rubles. In addition, China and other countries have decided to limit or reduce their USD exposure. So far, this has had no appreciable effect on the value of the USD. But if the dollar starts to become less desirable, it may become a questionable investment, in which case the U.S. risks losing its status as a world power – even a modest one. At that point, having demolished German and other European access to cheap fuel, the U.S. will join the rest of the west in its decline, leaving the rising economies of China, India, Brazil, Russia and other countries in Asia, Latin America and possibly Africa to displace them.

Is the Dollar overvalued? By the laws of supply and demand, one could argue that it is not. But it is a fair question when the supply is enormous and growing, and the demand is artificial and coerced. What will happen when the dollar’s near monopoly as an exchange medium ends? The dollar has not always been the preeminent tool for pricing international transactions. At the turn of the 20th century, the British pound sterling was literally the gold standard. But the British economy was fading, and the pound continued to fall against both gold and the USD. Now, although it is still a major currency, it is a mere shadow of its former self. If or when the many dollars worldwide come home to claim their true value, we may discover that they buy little more than castles of sand.

When world power has shifted elsewhere, the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, France and the entire West may come to depend for glory upon their historical and cultural treasures, like the ones of other bygone civilizations that western tourists once visited so widely.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

On June 23, Jamison Cocklin headlined at Natural Gas Intelligence, “Venture Global Set to Become Germany’s Biggest Long-Term LNG Supplier” and reported: “Venture Global LNG Inc. has agreed to supply a state-owned German company with the super-chilled fuel for two decades as European offtakers continue to line up deals to replace Russian natural gas imports.” Upstream Energy simply bannered “Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier”. It’s a very big deal.

This is the culmination of an agreement that was signed just a year earlier. As Cocklin had bannered on 6 October 2022, “Germany’s EnBW to Buy More Venture Global LNG in Ongoing Shift from Russia”. At that time, he reported that, “Venture Global LNG Inc. said Thursday German utility EnBW AG would expand the amount of LNG it would take under a 20-year sales and purchase agreement (SPA) signed in June.” So: the basic agreement had been signed in June 2022.

Here is what is now known about the price that will be paid for that “amount of LNG”: Nothing. However, something is known about the history of this deal:

On 22 June 2023, Venture Global headlined “Venture Global and SEFE Announce 20-year LNG Sales and Purchase Agreement. Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier, with a combined 4.25MTPA of 20-year offtake agreements signed. Approximately half of CP2 20MTPA nameplate capacity has been sold, with 1/3 of the contracted capacity committed to German customers. Construction expected to begin in 2023.”

As-of yet, no one has indicated what the delivered price of product to Germany will be under this contract, nor what the price to Germany had been of the Russian pipelined gas that it will now be replacing. Of course, only on that basis can the net annual added cost to Germany, that will end up being paid by Germans, under this historic contract, be calculated.

Whatever it will turn out to be, the June 22 announcement gives good indication that the biggest payoff from blowing up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines from Russia to Germany will end up in American hands.

Venture Global Partners was founded on 30 July 2008, by Robert Pender and Mike Sabel. In 2010, they established Venture Capital Partners, and then they announced in 2013, that their “development strategy is to be a long-term, low cost producer of LNG Working with a global LNG technology vendor.” They received venture-capital funding of $125M in 2015, then in February 2021 $500M debt-funding from Morgan Stanley, Mizuho Capital, Bank of America, and JP Morgan, and then in January 2023, an additional loan of $1B from an unspecified source.

The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of Germany — and also of other European countries that had been buying the extra-cheap Russian pipelined gas — who will now be paying Americans a much higher price than previously they had been paying Russians. Not only will Germans and other Europeans now be paying for the super-chilled canned and cross-Atlantic shipped gas that previously was simply pipelined, but Europeans will now have lost what little sovereign independence they had formerly had when the U.S. Government allowed them to buy their gas and oil from Russia.

Perhaps they will be learning the hard way that it’s no fun to be a vassal nation.

For example: slide 2 of the 9 November 2017 “US LNG vs Russian pipe gas: impact on prices”, by Dr. Thierry Bros of the Oxford University Institute for Energy Studies, states that Russian gas is the least costly, US LNG can’t compete with it on price, Nord Stream 1 (NS 2 hadn’t yet been approved) is cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine, and Nord Stream 2 (once operational) will be cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine.

Slide 6 shows that the ”Full cost of US LNG” is more than twice the “Henry Hub” (or “HH”) gas price.

A CSIS (Pentagon think tank) blog post on 5 July 2019 was headlined “How Much Does U.S. LNG Cost in Europe?” and asked the “familiar question: Can U.S. LNG compete with Russian gas in Europe?” but conspicuously refused to answer it.

A 25 March 2021 German study concluded that Russia outcompeted America even on LNG supplied in Europe: “LNG exports from Qatar and Russia are relatively competitive in Western Europe,” and even under the best of circumstances, “U.S. LNG only displaces small volumes from other LNG suppliers in Western Europe.”

Germans will be paying the extra price for this, for at least 20 years.

If America still is a successful country, then this is the way it will be happening. The wealth will be coming from their colonies. It won’t just be trickle-down (as has been the case domestically in America ever since at least 1980) but also trickle-in (from the colonies). Uncle Sam has been getting hungrier, and is grabbing now from across the Atlantic.

At least there are some Americans who benefit from what Biden has been doing.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

We in the USA need to remember not just those who have died or risked death in one of the many wars the USA has been part of, going back to the original revolutionary war for independence from Britain. We also need to remember those who died or risked death or imprisonment in battles for the rights of workers to unionize, against Jim Crow segregation and for equal rights for all, for peace in Vietnam and against all imperialist wars, for the rights of women and lgbtq people, and against polluting industries and for the rights of nature and all its life forms.

The White House/Republican House debt ceiling bill underlines how important it is to draw strength from those before us who refused to accept unjust laws and practices, because this is a draft law which must be fought and fought right now, this week.

This legislation, if passed, would mandate the completion and operation of the destructive Mountain Valley Pipeline. It would roll back key provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act to enable a continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry. It apparently does almost nothing to advance clean renewables like wind and solar, including doing nothing to make it easier for new renewables to gain access to the electrical grid. It would weaken important social safety net provisions that help those of low income and low wealth while almost certainly increasing the nearly one trillion dollar per year military budget. And it requires student loan payments to restart for millions of young people.

There is no question that corrupt dirty-dealer Joe Manchin had a lot of do with this result. Joe Biden and his administration seem to have decided that appeasing this coal baron is the path forward when it comes to energy. They continue to disregard the statements made over the last two years by the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, just recently, Pope Francis that the deepening urgency of the climate emergency requires that the world’s industrialized countries stop the expansion of new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Some progressives who get it on these and other issues nevertheless have begun to come out in favor of this latest version of the Manchin dirty deal. There is little doubt that on this one there will be a divide among those on the political Left. Those who openly support this flawed compromise will be saying, in essence, that Biden had no choice, which of course is just not true. For weeks other progressives, like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna, have been calling upon the Biden administration to continue to pay US debts on the basis of the 14th Amendment, but so far that rational argument has fallen on deaf ears in the White House.

At this point I have no sense as to where House and Senate members are on this latest dirty deal. What I do know is that, once again, those of us who appreciate the importance of fighting against, not weakly compromising with, the Maga Republicans and Democrats like Manchin, must flood Congress right now and every day this week, with calls and texts and faxes and tweets and visits to and actions at Congressional offices.

Let’s act in the spirit of our justice-seeking ancestors who have come before us, remembering our children and grandchildren and the seven generations coming after us. They are depending on us to take action right now.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

Helicopter flyovers of the area revealed heartbreaking footage of the destruction of our territory, currently otherwise inaccessible to us due to the ceaseless harassment of our people by the CIRG and CGL security and by gates put up to limit our access.

CGL received permits to construct a “trenchless crossing” of the Gosnell Creek and surrounding wetlands, a vital tributary to our Wedzin Kwa (Morice River) and in January, they laid down rubber and timber mats over frozen wetlands, in order to bring in heavy equipment. If they were going to do the crossing in this manner, it was imperative that they complete it in winter.

While machines sat idle, predictably, May brought spring melt. As the snow and ice pack dissolved into the river, the equipment, mats, pipes, and other infrastructure sank into the wetlands and Gosnell Creek itself.

On May 9th, the EAO inspected the area and dropped a stop work order for a 5km radius surrounding the crossing. The order does not include “activities necessary for the watercourse crossing of Gosnell Creek”. Further attempts to cross the river at this time will cause enormous additional harm.

CGL has left their equipment to sink into the river and the wetlands, and it has been sinking for weeks. This was the 6th stop work order issued to CGL in two weeks, covering 6 sections of the pipeline. Many areas of the damage appear to be outside of the stop work order area, and traffic through the area does not seem to have decreased at all.

The Gosnell is thick and sludgy. Where it enters the Wedzin Kwa, the Wedzin Kwa changes from clear blue green to an opaque brown.

The violent history of colonization, the Indian Act, the reservation system, and residential schools have sought to disconnect us from the healing and nourishing power of our lands. These wetlands are part of a federally protected wetland complex. They are the nurseries for moose in calving season, home to beaver and marten, and a much needed respite from the heat for other animals in summer. They provide us with cranberries, rice root, and a resting place for birds. They filter and oxygenate the water that feeds the rivers like Wedzin Kwa, absorb spring runoff and flood waters to prevent erosion and filter silt that can ruin salmon spawning beds. Salmon that many of us in the northwest coast rely on spawn in these waterways.

The future of the Healing Centre and its vital work in connecting our people with our culture and roots, with our way of life and medicine, with who we are as people, depends on the survival of our territories, and our territories are rooted in the survival of our waterways and wetlands.

CGL promised that this would be a trenchless crossing and instead they have made a landfill of our bread basket. The Gosnell is as opaque as pavement. Salmon cannot survive without light and air.

This cannot continue. CGL must be held accountable for their actions, and consistent unbiased inspections must be done over the length of the pipeline to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening again.

We call on you to ask your MLAs, MPs, the National Resource Violations office, the Environmental Enforcement office, and especially Minister of Environment George Heyman (250-387-1197) and Minister of Energy Josie Osborne (250-953-0900) to call for an immediate cease work order on the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline until a full inspection has been conducted and all remedial and repair work has been completed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

Like other civil wars, this war is the continuation of simmering, expanding political, economic, and social issues– politics by other, more violent, brutal, and dangerous means. Except for the Soviet period, there has never been a stable, viable, enduring Ukrainian state. Nor has there been a Western-style “democracy” with sufficient popular support and legitimacy.

But the war is something more than a civil war. It is also an imperialist war contested between great powers claiming to defend the interests of factions engaged in the civil war. As with other imperialist wars, the great powers are contesting over direct and indirect economic interests while seeking to maintain or establish spheres of interest.

Russia, for its part, as a relatively new, emergent capitalist power, has an unbalanced economy, relying heavily on the export of its abundant natural resources, principally gas and oil. As a result of Cold War aggression, Russia also has a highly developed military-weapons industry as a legacy of the Soviet Union. Its role in the imperialist conflict revolves around defending its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the economic links established during the Soviet era, maintaining and expanding its share of the Western European energy market, and burnishing its position in supplying weaponry in the ever-expanding global armament frenzy.

The US, on the other hand, as the self-styled leader and police of the capitalist world order, opposes Russia’s independent foreign policy and economic and political influence in Eastern Europe. Support for Syria, a country at odds with US and Israeli interests in the Middle East, undoubtedly brought Russia into even sharper conflict with the US. The dream of unchallenged US global hegemony was, no doubt, interrupted by Russia’s failure to pay obeisance.

But the battle over natural gas markets– seen as the transitional “clean” carbon-based energy source– played an oversized role in motivating the conflict. With US potential natural gas production nearly limitless thanks to new technologies, the US urgently needed new markets. Most recently, investors were backing away from the industry because of low prices and shrinking profits.

As I wrote on February 2, 2022, more than three weeks before the Russian military invasion started:

…Biden’s administration harps on Trump-like sanctions aimed at the Russian economy and, not least of all, its energy sector.

If oil was a motivating factor in US foreign policy activism in the 1980s and 1990s, then natural gas is a decisive motivating factor today. Where the US was determined to secure oil resources in the past, energy independence and the fracking revolution motivate US policy makers to secure natural gas markets today.

In essence, the US is baiting the Russians into actions that will encourage the Europeans to reject their dependence upon cheap Russian natural gas. Instead, they want Europe to rely on expensive US liquified natural gas, a change that Europeans have, so far, resisted. War hysteria is meant to frighten the Europeans into rejecting the nearly completed Nord Stream pipeline and, instead, build costly liquified natural gas terminals to accept US gas. Thus, the underlying strategy is economic– a not-so-subtle bullying of Europe into aligning with US economic interests.

The goal is to restart the botched, overinvested, badly managed fracking revolution that would now ride the tide of high energy prices.

The criminal destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines by the US and its allies only underscores the above analysis.

Today, the US is the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG). Also, oil purchases from the US by the UK, Netherlands, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany have increased by 344,000 barrels a day since last February, according to the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ article quotes Daniel Yergin, an oil energy historian and vice chairman of S&P Global: “America is back in the most predominant position it has been in world energy since the 1950s… U.S. energy now is becoming one of the foundations of European energy security.” Those who see US imperialism as in a stage of irreversible decline might find this statement sobering.

The stakes of inter-imperialist conflict were established well before the intervention of February 24. To anyone paying attention, the worsening conflict was about much more than Ukrainian self-determination, democracy, or sovereignty. The encroachment of NATO was motivated by far more than protecting Eastern Europe from Russian aggression. And the Russian interests were less idealistic than simply liberating Ukrainians from themselves or neo-Nazis.

In response to the many who found noble motives on one side or the other, I wrote on February 14, ten days before the operation:

Those who remain skeptical of the economic motives behind the US warmongering must explain why Biden placed natural gas politics ahead of any other matter before him and his German ally [Scholtz] in this first significant policy exchange. Biden’s glee– not shared by his German counterpart– reveals the importance the US government places on seizing the natural gas market from the Russians, their rival in the energy business.

The Ukraine crisis presents other economic advantages as well. In less than two weeks, the US has sent eight cargo planes to the Ukraine with military supplies, part of the $200 million Biden authorized in new military aid. The xenophobic, ultra-nationalist Baltic states and Poland have sent massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine as well, much of which is sourced from US corporations and will be replaced by aid or purchases from the US.

Whether Ukraine joins NATO or not, Ukraine is being militarized and will continue to be a destination for US arms. On this front, the US military-industrial establishment will win, regardless of the crisis outcome.

Adversaries on both sides of the Cold War-like divide will be armed to the teeth and the possibility of war raised accordingly.

US “aid” to Ukraine since last February is rapidly approaching 100 billion dollars– far more than US aid to any other country or any other country’s contribution to Ukraine’s war effort.With the Russian military invading on several fronts on February 24 of last year, the civil war reached a qualitatively greater intensity, with NATO sharply increasing its participation. Weapons poured into Ukraine, guaranteeing a conflict of a dimension unseen in Europe since World War II. Predictably, the Western propaganda machine spoke with one voice, portraying Ukraine as a hapless victim of unprovoked Russian invasion.

Sadly, the social democratic and liberal left in Europe and the US– blinded by the missionary zeal of the twisted doctrine of “humanitarian interventionism” and intoxicated by a media smear of everything Russian– quickly fell in line with NATO’s militarization of Ukraine, going so far as calling for a military victory over Russia and regime change in Moscow.

Western ruling classes proved adept at winning the broad center-left to the bizarre notion that a moral defense of Ukraine constructed around the principle of self-determination could be applicable to a regime that itself violated the democratic principle of self-determination by staging a violent coup d’état eight years earlier.

As in 1914 in the early stages of World War I, the liberals and social democrats betrayed any anti-war principles to the fever of war. No anti-war movement was forthcoming from this camp.

In the US, this left-center opportunism is firmly held in place by fealty to the Democratic Party, whose imperial adventures are only softly challenged by liberals or social democrats.

Others on the left– whether from a nostalgic conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union or a failure to understand Russia’s role in the imperialist system– portrayed the Russian government as a liberator or as a paragon of anti-imperialism. This naive view turned reality on its head and imagined a corralling of imperialism– a step towards a multipolar utopia– as an anticipated result of Russia’s defeat of NATO’s surrogates on the battlefield of Ukraine.

How Russia prevailing or any other alternative military outcome could benefit the working classes of Ukraine, Russia, or the West is beyond credulity. Illusions of a Russian version of humanitarian intervention unfortunately infect some elements of the left. Meanwhile, the bodies are piling up, homes are destroyed, and families are forced to flee.

Too few of us on the left rejected the two misguided choices, recognizing the essence of the war as imperialist conflict.

As the war ground on, I wrote on May 9, 2022:

The great tragedy is that the broad left– the historical foil to war and imperialism– remains divided, confused, and inactive while a bloody, destructive war rages, threatening to expand and escalate. As the war continues with no resolution, the only winner is US imperialism.

Trade union militants in Italy and Greece took to the streets to oppose the war, along with Greek Communists. Thousands marched in Prague in September against rising energy and other costs as a result of the war in Ukraine. Yet no national action against the war occurred in the US, and little in the rest of Europe.

The fact that the Zelensky regime outlawed political parties, stripped labor regulations, and criminalized the opposition found most of the liberal and social democratic left unmoved (The AFL-CIO– a strong supporter of Zelensky– was eventually forced to object on behalf of its favored anti-Communist unions).

Efforts for a peaceful settlement were persistently undermined by the Western powers– the US, UK, and their NATO partners.

In the face of intransigent Western governments and a lame, disputatious left guilty of misguided partisanship, the cause of peace was left to others. The populist right has attempted to take on the role of peacekeeper, at least to the extent of questioning the unconditional support for the further escalation of the war. As the war stalemated, right-wing politicians in opposition found mismanagement of the war to be a fertile field for political advantages. For a vivid example of right-populist war skepticism, see Representative Matt Gaetz’s scathing rebuke of US Defense Department officials, concluding that US money spent on guaranteeing Ukrainian pensions would be better spent in the US on bolstering pension reserves here.

Democratic Party elected officials, on the other hand, have been unmoved, staying solidly behind Biden’s instigation and expansion of the war.

The notorious corruption of successive Ukrainian regimes, the mobilizing of more troops and the introduction of more lethal and longer-range weapons, and weariness over the dwindling prospect of early victories are spawning questions and doubts. As the conflict is prolonged, support in the opinion polls is now sagging. This is reflected in less cheerleading and more nuance in coverage by leading newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

A recent feature article in the Wall Street Journal, “Domestic Political Troubles Return for Ukraine’s Zelensky,” recounts both the checkered trajectory of Zelensky’s career and his immersion in a sea of corruption. Recently, a large number of his colleagues were ousted or forced to resign for serious corruption.

The article cites opposition politicians who portray the leader as “authoritarian” over his total dominance of the Ukrainian media. In addition, The WSJ reminds us that Ukrainian trust in Zelensky was down to 28% before the war. In short, the lengthy article tarnishes the image of the celebrity figure formerly viewed by the media as whistle-clean and selfless, perhaps a telling sign of some cracks in ruling class consensus.

Also, the sunny prospects of Ukrainian victory with advanced Western technologies are beginning to turn a little gloomy; in late February Zelensky  fired a top general serving as the commander of the joint forces of Ukraine. Apparently, Russia has seized the military initiative in Eastern Ukraine to rhe chagrin of Ukraine’s leaders.

Most countries are refusing to be bullied by US efforts to steer them into condemning or sanctioning Russia. Both Peoples’ China and Lula’s Brazil have proposed plans for all parties to cease fighting and negotiate.

These and other changes and initiatives offer hope that resistance to the war will grow. This year, two encouraging national actions in opposition to the war were planned to rally in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the organizers of the events engaged in bitter Internet battles where some questions of substance were poisoned by egos, turf wars, and pettiness. Historically, rival peace organizations settle their differences and validate their approach in practice. We have seen factional and sectarian conflict in the peace movement before. At least, there is now motion to halt the war and negotiate, with another rally scheduled for March 18.

Recent actions in Europe are encouraging, as well. Thousands have marched in Berlin, London, and other cities.

Maybe we are seeing the first shoots of a soon-to-blossom movement to end the war and reject militarism.

As I wrote last September 7:

The war in Ukraine is the logical outcome of the unwinding of globalization, a process that began with the 2007-2009 world economic crisis…

Competition intensified and rivalries became more virulent. Inevitably, economic competition leads to confrontation and confrontation leads to war.

The circumstances of war become less important and the deadly outcomes and possible escalations take center stage. Today, the likelihood of a long, bloody war and its potential expansion beyond borders demand action.

As this tragedy unfolds, the only answer– the working-class answer– is to pull out all stops to end it. We desperately need a militant movement to stop this war.

The need is even more urgent today.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

• Local officials become influencers
• Schools strengthen digital education
• Expanding GM soybean and corn areas
• Iraq will use yuan in oil trade with China

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

On the other hand, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by 35% or more, despite $46 billion in economic aid from generous U.S. taxpayers, on top of $67 billion in military aid.

European economies are also taking a hit. After growing by 3.5% in 2022, the Euro area economy is expected to stagnate and grow only 0.7% in 2023, while the British economy is projected to actually contract by 0.6%. Germany was more dependent on imported Russian energy than other large European countries so, after growing a meager 1.9% in 2022, it is predicted to have negligible 0.1% growth in 2023. German industry is set to pay about 40% more for energy in 2023 than it did in 2021.

The United States is less directly impacted than Europe, but its growth shrank from 5.9% in 2021 to 2% in 2022, and is projected to keep shrinking, to 1.4% in 2023 and 1% in 2024. Meanwhile India, which has remained neutral while buying oil from Russia at a discounted price, is projected to maintain its 2022 growth rate of over 6% per year all through 2023 and 2024. China has also benefited from buying discounted Russian oil and from an overall trade increase with Russia of 30% in 2022. China’s economy is expected to grow at 5% this year.

Other oil and gas producers reaped windfall profits from the effects of the sanctions. Saudi Arabia’s GDP grew by 8.7%, the fastest of all large economies, while Western oil companies laughed all the way to the bank to deposit $200 billion in profits: ExxonMobil made $56 billion, an all-time record for an oil company, while Shell made $40 billion and Chevron and Total gained $36 billion each. BP made “only” $28 billion, as it closed down its operations in Russia, but it still doubled its 2021 profits.

As for natural gas, U.S. LNG (liquefied natural gas) suppliers like Cheniere and companies like Total that distribute the gas in Europe are replacing Europe’s supply of Russian natural gas with fracked gas from the United States, at about four times the prices U.S. customers pay, and with the dreadful climate impacts of fracking. A mild winter in Europe and a whopping $850 billion in European government subsidies to households and companies brought retail energy prices back down to 2021 levels, but only after they spiked five times higher over the summer of 2022.

While the war restored Europe’s subservience to U.S. hegemony in the short term, these real-world impacts of the war could have quite different results in the long term. French President Emmanuel Macron remarked, “In today’s geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine, there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices… The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling at a high price… I don’t think that’s friendly.”

An even more unfriendly act was the sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines that brought Russian gas to Germany. Seymour Hersh reported that the pipelines were blown up by the United States, with the help of Norway—the two countries that have displaced Russia as Europe’s two largest natural gas suppliers. Coupled with the high price of U.S. fracked gas, this has fueled anger among the European public. In the long term, European leaders may well conclude that the region’s future lies in political and economic independence from countries that launch military attacks on it, and that would include the United States as well as Russia.

The other big winners of the war in Ukraine will of course be the weapons makers, dominated globally by the U.S. “big five”: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. Most of the weapons so far sent to Ukraine have come from existing stockpiles in the United States and NATO countries. Authorization to build even bigger new stockpiles flew through Congress in December, but the resulting contracts have not yet shown up in the arms firms’ sales figures or profit statements.

The Reed-Inhofe substitute amendment to the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act authorized “wartime” multi-year, no-bid contracts to “replenish” stocks of weapons sent to Ukraine, but the quantities of weapons to be procured outstrip the amounts shipped to Ukraine by up to 500 to one. Former senior OMB official Marc Cancian commented, “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”

Since weapons have only just started rolling off production lines to build these stockpiles, the scale of war profits anticipated by the arms industry is best reflected, for now, in the 2022 increases in their stock prices: Lockheed Martin, up 37%; Northrop Grumman, up 41%; Raytheon, up 17%; and General Dynamics, up 19%.

While a few countries and companies have profited from the war, countries far from the scene of the conflict have been reeling from the economic fallout. Russia and Ukraine have been critical suppliers of wheat, corn, cooking oil and fertilizers to much of the world. The war and sanctions have caused shortages in all these commodities, as well as fuel to transport them, pushing global food prices to all-time highs.

So the other big losers in this war are people in the Global South who depend on imports of food and fertilizers from Russia and Ukraine simply to feed their families. Egypt and Turkey are the largest importers of Russian and Ukrainian wheat, while a dozen other highly vulnerable countries depend almost entirely on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat supply, from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Laos to Benin, Rwanda and Somalia. Fifteen African countries imported more than half their supply of wheat from Russia and Ukraine in 2020.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered by the UN and Turkey has eased the food crisis for some countries, but the agreement remains precarious. It must be renewed by the UN Security Council before it expires on March 18, 2023, but Western sanctions are still blocking Russian fertilizer exports, which are supposed to be exempt from sanctions under the grain initiative. UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told Agence France-Presse on February 15 that freeing up Russian fertilizer exports is “of the highest priority.”

After a year of slaughter and destruction in Ukraine, we can declare that the economic winners of this war are: Saudi Arabia; ExxonMobil and its fellow oil giants; Lockheed Martin; and Northrop Grumman.

The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones. But also in the losing column are working and poor people everywhere, especially in the countries in the Global South that are most dependent on imported food and energy. Last but not least is the Earth, its atmosphere and its climate—all sacrificed to the God of War.

That is why, as the war enters its second year, there is a mounting global outcry for the parties to the conflict to find solutions. The words of Brazil’s President Lula reflect that growing sentiment. When pressured by President Biden to send weapons to Ukraine, he said, “I don’t want to join this war, I want to end it.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.

The key takeaway of President Ebrahim Raeisi’s state visit to Beijing goes way beyond the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements.

This is a crucial inflexion point in an absorbing, complex, decades-long, ongoing historical process: Eurasia integration.

Little wonder that President Raeisi, welcomed by a standing ovation at Peking University before receiving an honorary academic title, stressed “a new world order is forming and taking the place of the older one”, characterized by “real multilateralism, maximum synergy, solidarity and dissociation from unilateralisms”.

And the epicenter of the new world order, he asserted, is Asia.

It was quite heartening to see the Iranian president eulogizing the Ancient Silk Road, not only in terms of trade but also as a “cultural bond” and “connecting different societies together throughout history”.

Raeisi could have been talking about Sassanid Persia, whose empire ranged from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, and was the great intermediary Silk Road trading power for centuries between China and Europe.

It’s as if he was corroborating Chinese President Xi Jinping’s famed notion of “people to people exchanges” applied to the New Silk Roads.

And then President Raeisi jump cut to the inescapable historical connection: he addressed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), of which Iran is a key partner.

All that spells out Iran’s full reconnection with Asia – after those arguably wasted years of trying an entente cordiale with the collective West. That was symbolized by the fate of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal: negotiated, unilaterally buried and then, last year, all but condemned all over gain.

A case can be made that after the Islamic Revolution 44 years ago, a budding “pivot to the East” always lurked behind the official government strategy of “Neither East nor West”.

Starting in the 1990s that happened to progressively enter in full synch with China’s official “Open Door” policy.

After the start of the millennium, Beijing and Tehran have been getting even deeper in synch. BRI, the major geopolitical and geoeconomic breakthrough, was proposed in 2013, in Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

Then, in 2016, President Xi visited Iran, in West Asia, leading to the signing of several memoranda of understanding (MOU), and recently the wide-ranging 25-year comprehensive strategic agreement – consolidating Iran as a key BRI actor.

Accelerating all key vectors

In practice, Raeisi’s visit to Beijing was framed to accelerate all manner of vectors in Iran-China economic cooperation – from crucial investments in the energy sector (oil, gas, petrochemical industry, pipelines) to banking, with Beijing engaged in advancing modernizing reforms in Iran’s banking sector and Chinese banks opening branches across Iran.

Chinese companies may be about to enter the emerging Iranian commercial and private real estate markets, and will be investing in advanced technology, robotics and AI across the industrial spectrum.

Sophisticated strategies to bypass harsh, unilateral US sanctions will be a major focus every step of the way in Iran-China relations. Barter is certainly part of the picture when it comes to trading Iranian oil/gas contracts for Chinese industrial and infrastructure deals.

It’s quite possible that Iran’s sovereign wealth fund – the National Development Fund of Iran – with holdings at estimated $90 billion, may be able to finance strategic industrial and infrastructure projects.

Other international financial partners may come in the form of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and the NDB – the BRICS bank, as soon as Iran is accepted as a member of BRICS+: that may be decided this coming August at the summit in South Africa.

The heart of the matter of the strategic partnership is energy. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) pulled out of a deal to develop Phase 11 of Iran’s South Pars gas field, adjacent to Qatar’s section.

Yet CNPC can always come back for other projects. Phase 11 is currently being developed by the Iranian energy company Petropars.

Energy deals – oil, gas, petrochemical industry, renewables – will boom across what I dubbed Pipelineistan in the early 2000s.

Chinese companies will certainly be part of new oil and gas pipelines connecting to the existing Iranian pipeline networks and configuring new pipeline corridors.

Already established Pipelineistan includes the Central Asia-China  pipeline, which connects to China’s West-East pipeline grid, nearly  7,000 km from Turkmenistan to the eastern China seaboard; and the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline (2,577 km, from northwest Iran to the Turkish capital).

Then there’s one of the great sagas of Pipelineistan: the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline, previously known as the Peace Pipeline, from  South Pars to Karachi.

The Americans did everything in the book – and off the books – to stall it, delay it or even kill it. But IP refused to die; and the China-Iran strategic partnership could finally make it happen.

A new geostrategic architecture

Arguably, the central node of the China-Iran strategic partnership is the configuration of a complex geostrategic economic architecture:  connecting the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship of BRI, to a two-pronged Iran-centered corridor.

This will take the form of a China-Afghanistan-Iran corridor and a China-Central Asia-Iran corridor, thus forming what we may call a geostrategic China-Iran Economic Corridor.

Beijing and Tehran, now on overdrive and with no time to lose, may face all manner of challenges – and threats – from the Hegemon; but their 25-year strategic deal does honor historically powerful trading/ merchant civilizations now equipped with substantial manufacturing/ industrial bases and with a serious tradition in advanced scientific innovation.

The serious possibility of China-Iran finally configuring what will be a brand new, expanded strategic economic space, from East Asia to West Asia, central to 21^st century multipolarity, is a geopolitical tour de force.

Not only that will completely nullify the US sanction obsession; it will direct Iran’s next stages of much needed economic development to the East, and it will boost the whole geoeconomic space from China to Iran and everyone in between.

This whole process – already happening – is in many aspects a direct consequence of the Empire’s “until the last Ukrainian” proxy war against Russia.

Ukraine as cannon fodder is rooted in Mackinder’s heartland theory:  world control belongs to the nation that controls the Eurasian land mass.

This was behind World War I, where Germany knocking out Russia created fear among the Anglo-Saxons that should Germany knock out France it would control the Eurasian land mass.

WWII was conceived against Germany and Japan forming an axis to control Europe, Russia and China.

The present, potential WWIII was conceived by the Hegemon to break a friendly alliance between Germany, Russia and China – with Iran as a privileged West Asia partner.

Everything we are witnessing at this stage spells out the US trying to break up Eurasia integration.

So it’s no wonder that the three top existential “threats” to the American oligarchy which dictates the “rules-based international order” are The Three Sovereigns: China, Russia and Iran.

Does that matter? Not really. We have just seen that while the dogs (of war) bark, the Iran-China strategic caravan rolls on.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pepe Escobar.

The 20th anniversary of the illegal, unprovoked US-UK war of aggression on Iraq comes at an awkward time for a UK press currently suppressing the truth of the illegal, provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s particularly awkward for our fearless watchdogs to recall the great anti-war march of 15 February 2003 when, in 2023, they are busy stifling dissent protesting America’s horrific proxy war in Ukraine.

In the Observer, Tim Adams wrote a piece under the joyous title: ‘“A beautiful outpouring of rage”: did Britain’s biggest ever protest change the world?’

Now that it doesn’t matter – Iraq hasn’t mattered, or even existed, for the UK press for years – the Guardian Media Group can allow one of its journalists to portray the protest as ‘beautiful’. Ironically, Adams’ piece is an ugly rejection of everything it professes to admire. This comment says it all: ‘Knowing what we know now, those who gathered that day in the capital were on the right side of history.’

In fact, on 15 February 2003, it was absolutely clear that we protestors ‘were on the right side of history’ on the basis of what we knew then! But 20 years on, as though caught in a time warp, Adams persists with the fake ‘mainstream’ focus of the time:

‘The marchers at the time did not agree on everything, but they shared a commitment to try to silence the drumbeat to war – or to at least to give the UN weapons inspectors more time to find the fabled weapons of mass destruction on which the rhetoric of Blair and President George W Bush depended (the previous day, Hans Blix, leader of those inspectors, had again informed the UN that no such weapons had yet been found).’

And again:

‘The Observer was split down the middle over whether to support the government in its desperate efforts to get a UN mandate for war…

‘Although the news section of that day’s Observer was solidly in awe of the peace march, elsewhere the leader column suggested that, “as the least worst option” it reluctantly went along “with a majority in Britain who would accept military action if backed by the UN security council”.’

It’s fine to mention that these were indeed ‘mainstream’ obsessions at the time, but not without pointing out that it was all nonsense. The whole focus on ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) was fake, a crude deception. There were no ‘weapons of mass destruction’ left in Iraq by 2002 – as chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter was telling anyone who would listen in 2002 and 2003. But even if there had been, they were battlefield weapons, artillery shells, made with Western assistance by an Iraqi government that had no links whatsoever to the September 11 terrorists; a government that had shown no interest whatever in waging a terror campaign against the US or Britain – countries that had been using any manufactured excuse to torture the country into submission through genocidal sanctions for 13 years.

There was never any question of Iraq possessing nuclear weapons. But even if there had been battlefield biological and chemical weapons, and even if Iraq had had links with al-Qaeda, Britain and the US would have had no right to invade a country by which neither had been attacked or even threatened. And what would Saddam Hussein, clearly facing an all-out superpower oil grab, possibly gain by attacking or supporting attacks on the West? Any such attacks would have dramatically increased the risk to his own life for no practical gain.

But even if Britain and the US had been attacked by Iraq, they would not have had the right to devastate the country with a completely disproportionate invasion and occupation. Would we argue that Iraq had the right to invade, occupy and devastate the United States and Britain in response to ‘our’ air attacks and invasion?

We very much doubt that the Observer’s then editor, Roger Alton, was ‘solidly in awe’ of the peace march. In January 2003, as war loomed, Alton told his staff:

‘We’ve got to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.’ (Nick Davis, Flat Earth News, Chatto & Windus, 2008, p.350)

In September 2006, the Evening Standard reported that Alton had been on ‘something of a lads’ holiday’ in the Alps. His companions included Jonathan Powell, ‘Tony Blair’s most trusted aide’, and staunch Blairite MP and propagandist Denis MacShane. (Gideon Spanier, ‘In the air,’ Evening Standard, 6 September 2006)

A few days after the march, leading Observer columnist Nick Cohen poured scorn on:

‘The satisfaction of an anti-war movement which persuaded one million people to tell Iraqis they must continue to live under a tyranny…’ (Cohen, ‘The Left’s unholy alliance with religious bigotry,’ The Observer, 23 February 2003)

What does Adams have in mind when he writes of ‘Knowing what we know now’? Of course, he means there were no WMD and the results of the war were catastrophic for Iraqis (although not for the US-UK; the war was not at all a ‘failure’, as is often claimed). But that is a tiny part of what we now know, and no thanks to the Observer and the Guardian. As we reported last year, any casual reader can Google ‘BP and Iraq’ and find:

‘In 2009, bp became the first international oil company to return to Iraq after a period of 35 ‎years…

‘‎Today, bp, PetroChina and BOC are working in partnership to develop Rumaila, the ‎second-largest producing field in the world, estimated to have around 17 billion barrels of ‎recoverable oil remaining.‎’

Anyone can Google ‘Exxon and Iraq’ and find:

‘In January 2010, ExxonMobil Iraq Limited (EMIL), an affiliate of Exxon Mobil Corporation, signed an agreement with the South Oil Company of the Iraq Ministry of Oil to rehabilitate and redevelop the West Qurna I field in southern Iraq…

‘In October 2011, ExxonMobil signed six Production Sharing Contracts covering more than 848,000 acres in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.’

Last year, the BBC somehow broke with its long-standing tradition of ignoring US-UK crimes in Iraq to report: ‘BP in oil field where “cancer is like the flu.”’

The BBC commented: ‘Prof Shukri Al Hassan, a local environmental scientist, told us that cancer here is so rife it is “like the flu”.’

In other words, ‘Knowing what we know now’ really has to include the fact that the end result of the illegal war of aggression that cost the lives of more than one million Iraqis was that Britain’s BP and America’s Exxon got the oil. And Iraqis are once again paying the price.

But that is not controversial, or even news, for Tim Adams, or anyone else at the Observer and Guardian celebrating 2003’s ‘beautiful outpouring of rage’.

Knowing what we know now, a November 2001 report in the Guardian titled, ‘Among friends at “Blair Petroleum”’, does indeed take on a new and terrible significance:

‘Anji Hunter will be among New Labour friends when she starts her new job as director of communications at BP – nicknamed Blair Petroleum for its close links with the government.

‘The chief executive John Browne is close to the prime minister and a grateful Mr Blair added a peerage to the oilman’s knighthood after he helped end the fuel protests of summer last year.’ (Kevin Maguire, Guardian, 9 November 2001)

The report continued:

‘Lord Simon was chairman of BP until May 1997, when he resigned to become trade minister in Mr Blair’s first government, sparking a row when it emerged he still owned a considerable shareholding in the company… BP appears to have been embraced by the New Labour establishment and is thought to be the government’s favourite oil giant.’

Knowing what we know now it seems clear that Blair joined George W. Bush in exploiting the atrocity of September 11 to provide a fake justification for liberating Iraq of its oil for the benefit of ‘Blair Petroleum’. It reads like a horror story.

When we add the recent news that ‘BP’s annual profits more than doubled to $28bn (£23bn) in 2022 after a sharp increase in gas prices linked to the Ukraine war boosted its earnings’ at a time when the climate is collapsing, when we need to Just Stop Oil, it reads like dystopian science fiction.

Rather than discuss any of these real issues, Adams focused on:

‘The unprecedented diversity of the protesters… captured in the front-page Observer report from the march by my late, lamented colleague Euan Ferguson:

‘“There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War….”’

Ah, ‘diversity’, virtually the sole ‘mainstream’ ethical concern; universally favoured because it offers no challenge to the ‘two-party dictatorship… in thralldom to giant corporations’ identified by three-time US presidential candidate Ralph Nader (Interview with the Real News Network, 4 November 2008).

A second piece in the Guardian by Clea Skopeliti appeared three days after Adams’ article under the title, ‘“It changed my life”: protesters look back on 2003 Stop the War march’. Diversity was again the focus, remarkably even referencing the same quote:

‘It was a protest marked by its breadth, with Euan Ferguson writing in the Observer: “There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War …”’

Protest presented as a spectacle, a social event. The arguments that motivated the protestors – that the US was an imperial rogue state motivated by greed, that there should be ‘No blood for oil’, that an already crushed Iraqi society would be utterly devastated by yet another war – were not re-examined in the light of history. What actually happened to Iraq twenty years on? Doesn’t it matter? What is the state of its democracy, its human rights, its healthcare, its free press, its freedom? Serious politics, adult analysis, are replaced by vacuous, wistful reflections on the past. The issue of oil was unmentioned in either piece.

Letting the Germans Freeze: The US Terror Attack on Nord Stream

The cynical opportunism of the Observer’s supposed affection for the anti-war marches of 2003 is thrown into stark relief by the paper’s complete blanking of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s recent assertion that the US was responsible for the terrorist attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea last September.

The pipelines from Nord Stream 1, the first phase of the infrastructure, were already supplying cheap Russian gas to Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The US had long made clear its opposition to Nord Stream 2 going ahead. On 6 February 2022, more than two weeks before Russia’s invasion, US president Joe Biden said:

‘If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the… border of Ukraine again, then there will be… no longer a Nord Stream 2. We, we will bring an end to it.’

Asked how this would be done, given the project is under German control, Biden said: ‘I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.’

In January 2022, Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, had stated: ‘I want to be clear with you today, if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.’

In congressional testimony this January, Nuland actually gloated:

‘I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.’

On the Jimmy Dore Show, Aaron Maté shared an extraordinary video compilation of US officials insisting, before the bombing, that Nord Stream had to be ‘stopped’, ‘killed’, ‘shut down’, ‘cancelled’.

Hersh’s report, citing an unnamed source ‘with direct knowledge of the operational planning’ relates what happened. In June 2022, under cover of a naval exercise, US Navy divers planted explosive devices on three of the four Nord Stream pipelines. In September, these were then remotely detonated on Biden’s orders. This took place with the assistance of the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy, but without the awareness of Germany or other western allies.

If Hersh’s account is accurate, this was a massive US terrorist attack on one of its own allies (Germany), as well as being one of the world’s worst environmental disasters causing a huge release of global-warming methane gas. The lethal consequences of the attack for the people of Europe have been almost completely ignored. In November, The Economist examined the relationship between ‘Fuel prices and excessive deaths’:

‘Although heatwaves get more press, cold temperatures are usually deadlier than hot ones. Between December and February, 21% more Europeans die per week than from June to August.’

The report continued:

‘In the past, changes in energy prices have had a small effect on deaths. But this year’s cost increases are remarkably large… if past patterns persist, current electricity prices would drive deaths above the historical average even in the mildest winter.

‘Exact mortality totals still depend on other factors, particularly temperature. In a mild winter, the increase in deaths might be limited to 32,000 above the historical average (accounting for changes in population). A harsh winter could cost a total of 335,000 extra lives.’

The US attack will certainly have contributed to these tens or hundreds of thousands of excess deaths – appalling figures made uglier by the huge profits of the likes of BP and Shell. As we were writing this alert, the BBC reported:

‘British Gas owner Centrica has posted huge profits after energy prices soared last year.

‘Centrica’s full-year profits hit £3.3bn for 2022, more than triple the £948m it made the year before.

‘Energy firms have seen record earnings since oil and gas prices jumped following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.’

Hersh commented:

‘The point is that Biden has decided to let the Germans freeze this winter. The President of the United States would rather see Germany freeze than have Germany possibly stop supporting Ukraine, and that to me is a devastating thing for this White House…

‘The people involved in the operation saw that the President wanted to freeze Germany for his short-term political goals, and that horrified them.’

Burying Seymour Hersh

Writer and media analyst Alan MacLeod detailed how Hersh’s account of the Nord Stream attack has been buried out of sight by US corporate media:

‘A MintPress News study analyzed the 20 most influential publications in the United States, according to analytics company Similar Web, and found only four mentions of the report between them.

‘The entirety of the corporate media’s attention given to the story consisted of:

‘A 166-word mini report in Bloomberg;

‘One five-minute segment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (Fox News);

‘One 600-word round up in The New York Post;

‘A shrill Business Insider attack article, whose headline labels Hersh a “discredited journalist” that has given a “gift to Putin”.

‘The 20 outlets studied are, in alphabetical order:

‘ABC News; Bloomberg News; Business Insider; BuzzFeed; CBS News; CNBC; CNN; Forbes; Fox News; The Huffington Post; MSNBC; NBC News; The New York Post; The New York Times; NPR; People Magazine; Politico; USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.’

Much the same is true of UK state-corporate media. In particular, BBC News, the Guardian and the Observer have simply ignored Hersh’s story, except for a passing mention emphasising White House denials in a Guardian live blog on 12 February. Curiously, despite writing in depth about Nord Stream last March, George Monbiot, the Guardian’s supposed dissident fig leaf, has not mentioned Hersh’s report, other than to retweet a thread that contained this comment:

‘…in short, the publicly available data does not corroborate Hersh’s reporting. I should have additional vessel tracking data soon, and if that shows otherwise I’ll update here’.

Recall that Hersh is a renowned reporter who exposed the US My Lai atrocity in Vietnam, Nixon-era CIA spying on left-wing dissidents, and the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq.

The Independent managed a grand total of 324 words under the politically correct headline: ‘White House denies journalist’s claims it blew up Russian gas pipeline’.

Hersh’s report was, the White House claimed, ‘utterly false and complete fiction’.

The Daily Mail devoted 600 words to the story. Tragicomically, by way of ‘balance’, the Mail included a James Bond-style graphic under the title: ‘How Putin’s Forces Might Have Sabotaged Nord Stream Pipelines’.

We also found a single mention in The Times, hidden behind its paywall.

Media Lens does not have the resources to scour the airwaves for possible mentions on radio and television.

A piece by Snopes, the ‘fact-checking website’, dismissed Hersh’s analysis – misspelling his name three times as ‘Hersch’ – claiming it relied on a single ‘omnipotent anonymous source.’ In fact, in an interview with Radio War Nerd, Hersh made clear that he had corroborated his account with other sources. The reality of what happened was, he said, ‘well-known’ in the pipeline industry: ‘Let me just say something to you: This isn’t a hard story to find.’

Jeffery Sachs – a world-renowned economist and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University – commented:

‘Even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me “of course” (the US did it), but it doesn’t show up in our media.’

It is also worth noting that in his 2018 book, Reporter – a Memoir, Hersh wrote:

‘I resolved early that I would never publish information from someone on the inside without verifying it elsewhere, even if a second source insisted I had to pretend he didn’t exist.’

None of this matters to the ‘free press’. And yet, the rational journalistic response to Hersh’s claims would be to follow them up – check them, challenge them, test them. As Craig Murray commented, the ‘mainstream’ treatment of Hersh is ‘a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called western democracies’. We have indeed entered a new and disturbing phase of extreme ‘mainstream’ censorship by omission.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

The industry’s assertion that they need more permits to drill on public lands is false, first, because Big Oil already holds about 9,000 permits to drill on federal land they’re not using. Second, even if government granted new leases and companies decided to drill, it wouldn’t have an effect on current prices because new oil wouldn’t reach gas stations for years. Gas prices did shoot up after the announcement of the embargo on Russian oil. The embargo effected the world market, but only about three percent of our crude oil supply comes from Russia.

In the past, American petroleum companies increased production when prices started to climb. But as a CNN report noted, that approach cut into corporate profits by glutting the oil market and driving the price of oil and gas down. If over-supply of gas is the problem, as oil executives believe, planned scarcity is the solution. And that’s just what the giant oil corporations are doing. According to oil analyst Pavel Molchanov, current U.S. oil production is still below the 2019 level, and despite pressure from the Biden administration to produce more, the companies are planning to keep supplies limited. The point is, oil companies and not the U.S. government control supply, and oil companies want to limit supply to maximize profits.

Keeping the spigots turned down has proved exceedingly profitable for America’s major oil producers. As noted earlier, on January 31 the two-hundred- and sixty-billion-dollar Exxon-Mobile corporation announced profits of more than fifty-five billion dollars, its biggest haul ever. Chevron, America’s second largest oil giant worth around two hundred billion, raked in more than thirty-five billion in profits last year. Rather than using these enormous profits to increase production, the lion’s share went to stockholders and to buy back company stock, which, of course, drove up the stock’s market value. Exxon-Mobile and Chevron are not alone in their relentless pursuit of profits. The world’s oil majors – Exxon Mobile, Chevron, Shell, British Petroleum and Total Energies – collectively pocketed one hundred and ninety billion in profits last year, leading one oil company stockholder activist to characterize 2022 as “the year the empire struck back.”

Big Oil wants us to believe that the spike in prices is a function of a self-regulating free market. Free market theory is premised on the idea that there are many producers and consumers, and no one is capable of controlling supply or demand. According to this idea, if one producer overcharges consumers, an infinite number of others draw customers away with a lower more competitive price. In a competitive market, prices continually drop, and profits tend to approach zero. But the ideals of free market capitalism are nothing more than a fairy tale in the oil industry where a handful of huge companies control the bulk of production. The industry spends ten of millions in campaign contributions, political lobbying, and on public relations to convince the public and elected officials that the fairy tale is real. But it’s not. Unless this fairy tale is exposed for what it really is – a justification for price gouging – oil prices will generally continue to trend upward simply because Big Oil can get away with it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William E. Scheuerman.

In the 1970s, it was already engaged in research of farsighted worth. As a co-authored study published this month in Science shows, the scientists in the employ of Exxon between 1977 and 2003 correctly predicted the rate of temperature rises as a result of carbon emissions, accurately predicted that anthropogenic global warming would be detectable by 2000 (within a 5 year margin) and even went so far as to throw in reasonable estimates as to how much carbon dioxide would lead to dangerous levels of warming.

In 2015, internal documents revealed that the company was already chewing over the issue of climate change in the latter part of the 1970s. In July 1977, senior scientist James Black stated that there was “general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from burning of fossil fuels.” What followed was ominous. The current state of thinking held “that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

The documents also showed that, between the 1970s and 1980s, scientists were brought in to participate in a research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and modelled climate change impacts. Exxon even went so far as to fork out $1 million on a tanker project to assess the absorption rates of carbon dioxide in oceans.

At the time of these revelations, the company, now ExxonMobil, unleashed its public relations battalions to douse the fires. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they [the investigators of InsideClimate News] suggest,” complained ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers to Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me most is that we’ve been saying this for years, and that we have been involved in climate research.” Shocking indeed.

Jeffers went on to blame those cheeky investigators for going down and pulling “some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and selective use of materials.” The insinuation here: the company was being punished for its transparency and hounded by those nasty cherry-picking greenies and gossips.

ExxonMobil can hardly dispute the latest assessment of its quantitative climate change projections by Geoffrey Supran of Harvard University, along with his colleagues. Supran and his co-authors, on examining the documents, found that accuracy, in terms of predicting rates of global warming, was in the order of 63 to 83 per cent. They even go so far as to regard such predictions as skilful.

As Supran describes it, the projections were so accurate they proved “consistent with subsequent observations” and on par with independent models. Admiration is expressed for the scientific fraternity. “Excellent scientists modelled and predicted global warming with shocking skill and accuracy, only for the company to spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.” Supran is silent on the moral culpability for those same scientists who continued to benefit from the employ of the company, raking in benefits yet publicly muzzled.

Parallel universes thereby functioned in the laboratory and in the company boardroom. The lab results were troubling, even disconcerting, though Supran is overly generous in suggesting that those working there “contributed quietly to climate science.” The boardroom grew increasingly belligerent in denying the broader implications of the research. All were compromised.

The public face of the endeavour was typified by a strategy that simultaneously spoke about positive efforts being made to mitigate climate change effects while claiming that the science on the issue was not settled. In April 2000, Exxon published a number of Op Eds across the United States with such titles as “Do No Harm”, “Unsettled Science”, “The Promise of Technology” and “The Path Forward on Climate Change.”

In his introduction to a booklet outlining the pieces, then CEO and Chairman Lee R. Raymond sums up the hedging mood. “As you will read, we believe that climate change may pose a legitimate long-term risk and that much more needs to be learned about it. We believe that enough is known to address climate change through responsible actions now, but not enough to impose unworkable short-term agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, which would adversely affect the well being of people everywhere in the world.”

The following year, an ExxonMobil press release pursued the lack of consensus theme, suggesting that “during the 1970’s [sic], people were concerned about global cooling.” In 2003, US Senator James Inhofe revealed the influence of the fossil fuel lobby – he had received to date $2.3 million in campaign contributions, including from ExxonMobil – by parroting the idea that the science on anthropogenic global warming was “far from settled”.

Now, as in 2015, ExxonMobil’s response is nothing but disingenuous. “Those who suggest ‘we knew’ are wrong,” yet another spokesperson claimed in a statement. “Some have sought to misrepresent facts and ExxonMobil’s position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign.”

The denial flies in the face of knowledge across the entire fossil fuel industry, including other companies such as electric utilities and the motor companies GM and Ford. The approach there is sly and dissimulating. Our scientists told us one thing, but our communications team prefers to tell you something else.

What Supran and his colleagues have shown us is that the very companies responsible for carbon emissions can be hoisted by their own petard. As they put it, “bringing quantitative techniques from the physical sciences to bear on a discipline traditionally dominated by qualitative journalistic and historical approaches offers one path to remedying this blind spot [regarding climate lobbying and propaganda by fossil fuel interests].” Ignorance was never a good defence, but it has now been entirely scuppered.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

It would be so tempting to qualify Chinese President Xi Jinping landing in Riyadh a week ago, welcomed with royal pomp and circumstance, as Xi of Arabia proclaiming the dawn of the petroyuan era.

But it’s more complicated than that. As much as the seismic shift implied by the petroyuan move applies, Chinese diplomacy is way too sophisticated to engage in direct confrontation, especially with a wounded, ferocious Empire. So there’s way more going here than meets the (Eurasian) eye.

Xi of Arabia’s announcement was a prodigy of finesse: it was packaged as the internationalization of the yuan. From now on, Xi said, China will use the yuan for oil trade, through the Shanghai Petroleum and National Gas Exchange, and invited the Persian Gulf monarchies to get on board. Nearly 80 percent of trade in the global oil market continues to be priced in US dollars.

Ostensibly, Xi of Arabia, and his large Chinese delegation of officials and business leaders, met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to promote increased trade. Beijing promised to “import crude oil in a consistent manner and in large quantities from the GCC.” And the same goes for natural gas.

China has been the largest importer of crude on the planet for five years now – half of it from the Arabian peninsula, and more than a quarter from Saudi Arabia. So it’s no wonder that the prelude for Xi of Arabia’s lavish welcome in Riyadh was a special op-ed expanding the trading scope, and praising increased strategic/commercial partnerships across the GCC, complete with “5G communications, new energy, space and digital economy.”

Foreign Minister Wang Yi doubled down on the “strategic choice” of China and wider Arabia. Over $30 billion in trade deals were duly signed – quite a few significantly connected to China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects.

And that brings us to the two key connections established by Xi of Arabia: the BRI and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The Silk Roads of Arabia

BRI will get a serious boost by Beijing in 2023, with the return of the Belt and Road Forum. The first two bi-annual forums took place in 2017 and 2019. Nothing happened in 2021 because of China’s strict zero-Covid policy, now abandoned for all practical purposes.

The year 2023 is pregnant with meaning as BRI was first launched 10 years ago by Xi, first in Central Asia (Astana) and then Southeast Asia (Jakarta).

BRI not only embodies a complex, multi-track trans-Eurasian trade/connectivity drive but it is the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept at least until the mid-21st century. So the 2023 forum is expected to bring to the forefront a series of new and redesigned projects adapted to a post-Covid and debt-distressed world, and most of all to the loaded Atlanticism vs. Eurasianism geopolitical and geo-economic sphere.

Also significantly, Xi of Arabia in December followed Xi of Samarkand in September – his first post-Covid overseas trip, for the SCO summit in which Iran officially joined as a full member. China and Iran in 2021 clinched a 25-year strategic partnership deal worth a potential $400 billion in investments. That’s the other node of China’s two-pronged West Asia strategy.

The nine permanent SCO members now represent 40 percent of the world’s population. One of their key decisions in Samarkand was to increase bilateral trade, and overall trade, in their own currencies.

And that further connects us to what has happening in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in full synchronicity with Riyadh: the meeting of the Supreme Eurasia Economic Council, the policy implementation arm of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Kyrgyzstan, could not have been more straightforward: “The work has accelerated in the transition to national currencies in mutual settlements… The process of creating a common payment infrastructure and integrating national systems for the transmission of financial information has begun.”

The next Supreme Eurasian Economic Council will take place in Russia in May 2023, ahead of the Belt and Road Forum. Take them together and we have the lineaments of the geo-economic road map ahead: the drive towards the petroyuan proceeding in parallel to the drive towards a “common paying infrastructure” and most of all, a new alternative currency bypassing the US dollar.

That’s exactly what the head of the EAEU’s macroeconomic policy, Sergey Glazyev, has been designing, side by side with Chinese specialists.

Total Financial War

The move towards the petroyuan will be fraught with immense peril.

In every serious geo-economic gaming scenario, it’s a given that an enfeebled petrodollar translates as the end of the imperial free lunch in effect for over five decades.

Concisely, in 1971, then-US President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon pulled the US from the gold standard; three years later, after the 1973 oil shock, Washington approached the Saudi oil minister, notorious Sheikh Yamani, with the proverbial offer-you-can’t-refuse: we buy your oil in US dollars and in return you buy our Treasury bonds, lots of weapons, and recycle whatever’s left in our banks.

Cue to Washington now suddenly able to dispense helicopter money – backed by nothing – ad infinitum, and the US dollar as the ultimate hegemonic weapon, complete with an array of sanctions over 30 nations who dare to disobey the unilaterally imposed “rules-based international order.”

Impulsively rocking this imperial boat is anathema. So Beijing and the GCC will adopt the petroyuan slowly but surely, and certainly with zero fanfare. The heart of the matter, once again, is their mutual exposure to the Western financial casino.

In the Chinese case, what to do, for instance, with those whopping $1 trillion in US Treasury bonds. In the Saudi case, it’s hard to think about “strategic autonomy” – such as what’s enjoyed by Iran – when the petrodollar is a staple of the Western financial system. The menu of possible imperial reactions includes everything from a soft coup/regime change to Shock and Awe over Riyadh – followed by regime change.

Yet what the Chinese – and the Russians – are aiming at goes way beyond a Saudi (and Emirati) predicament. Beijing and Moscow have clearly identified how everything – the oil market, global commodities markets – is tied to the role of the US dollar as reserve currency.

And that’s exactly what the EAEU discussions; the SCO discussions; from now on the BRICS+ discussions; and Beijing’s two-pronged strategy across West Asia are focused to undermine.

Beijing and Moscow, within the BRICS framework, and further on within the SCO and the EAEU, have been closely coordinating their strategy since the first sanctions on Russia post-Maidan 2014, and the de facto trade war against China unleashed in 2018.

Now, after the February 2022 Special Military Operation launched by Moscow in Ukraine and NATO has devolved into, for all practical purposes, war against Russia, we have stepped beyond Hybrid War territory and are deep into Total Financial War.

SWIFTly drifting away

The whole Global South absorbed the “lesson” of the collective (institutional) west freezing, as in stealing, the foreign reserves of a G20 member, on top of it a nuclear superpower. If that happened to Russia, it could happen to anyone. There are no “rules” anymore.

Russia since 2014 has been improving its SPFS payment system, in parallel with China’s CIPS, both bypassing the western-led SWIFT banking messaging system, and increasingly used by Central Banks across Central Asia, Iran and India. All across Eurasia, more people are ditching Visa and Mastercard and using UnionPay and/or Mir cards, not to mention Alipay and WeChat Pay, both extremely popular across Southeast Asia.

Of course the petrodollar – and the US dollar, still representing under 60 percent of global foreign exchange reserves – will not ride into oblivion overnight. Xi of Arabia is just the latest chapter in a seismic shift now driven by a select group in the Global South, and not by the former “hyperpower.”

Trading in their own currencies and a new, global alternative currency is right at the top of the priorities of that long list of nations – from South America to Northern Africa and West Asia – eager to join BRICS+ or the SCO, and in quite a few cases, both.

The stakes could not be higher. And it’s all about subjugation or exercising full sovereignty. So let’s leave the last essential words to the foremost diplomat of our troubled times, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, at the international interparty conference Eurasian Choice as a Basis for Strengthening Sovereignty:

The main reason for today’s growing tensions is the stubborn striving of the collective West to maintain a historically diminishing domination in the international arena by any means it can… It is impossible to impede the strengthening of the independent centers of economic growth, financial might and political influence. They are emerging on our common continent of Eurasia, in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

All aboard…the Sovereign Train.

• Originally published at The Cradle.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pepe Escobar.

On 9 December, China’s President Xi Jinping met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to discuss deepening ties between the Gulf countries and China. At the top of the agenda was increased trade between China and the GCC, with the former pledging to ‘import crude oil in a consistent manner and in large quantities from the GCC’ as well to increase imports of natural gas. In 1993, China became a net importer of oil, surpassing the United States as the largest importer of crude oil by 2017. Half of that oil comes from the Arabian Peninsula, and more than a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports go to China. Despite being a major importer of oil, China has reduced its carbon emissions.

A few days before he arrived in Riyadh, Xi published an article in al-Riyadh that announced greater strategic and commercial partnerships with the region, including ‘cooperation in high-tech sectors including 5G communications, new energy, space, and digital economy’. Saudi Arabia and China signed commercial deals worth $30 billion, including in areas that would strengthen the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Xi’s visit to Riyadh is only his second overseas trip since the COVID-19 pandemic; his first was to Central Asia for the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in September, where the nine member states (which represent 40% of the world’s population) agreed to increase trade with each other using their local currencies.

At this first China-GCC summit, Xi urged the Gulf monarchs to ‘make full use of the Shanghai Petrol and Gas Exchange as a platform to conduct oil and gas sales using Chinese currency’. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia suggested that it might accept Chinese yuan rather than US dollars for the oil it sells to China. While no formal announcement was made at the GCC summit nor in the joint statement issued by China and Saudi Arabia, indications abound that these two countries will move closer toward using the Chinese yuan to denominate their trade. However, they will do so slowly, as they both remain exposed to the US economy (China, for instance, holds just under $1 trillion in US Treasury bonds).

Talk of conducting China-Saudi trade in yuan has raised eyebrows in the United States, which for fifty years has relied on the Saudis to stabilise the dollar. In 1971, the US government withdrew the dollar from the gold standard and began to rely on central banks around the world to hold monetary reserves in US Treasury securities and other US financial assets. When oil prices skyrocketed in 1973, the US government decided to create a system of dollar seigniorage through Saudi oil profits. In 1974, US Treasury Secretary William Simon – fresh off the trading desk at the investment bank Salomon Brothers – arrived in Riyadh with instructions from US President Richard Nixon to have a serious conversation with the Saudi oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani.

Simon proposed that the US purchase large amounts of Saudi oil in dollars and that the Saudis use these dollars to buy US Treasury bonds and weaponry and invest in US banks as a way to recycle vast Saudi oil profits. And so the petrodollar was born, which anchored the new dollar-denominated world trade and investment system. If the Saudis even hinted towards withdrawing this arrangement, which would take at least a decade to implement, it would seriously challenge the monetary privilege afforded to the US. As Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for Analysis of Global Security, told The Wall Street Journal, ‘The oil market, and by extension the entire global commodities market, is the insurance policy of the status of the dollar as reserve currency. If that block is taken out of the wall, the wall will begin to collapse’.

The petrodollar system received two serious sequential blows.

First, the 2007–08 financial crisis suggested that the Western banking system is not as stable as imagined. Many countries, including large developing nations, hurried to find other procedures for trade and investment. The establishment of BRICS by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is an illustration of this urgency to ‘discuss the parameters for a new financial system’. A series of experiments have been conducted by BRICS countries, such as the creation of a BRICS payment system.

Second, as part of its hybrid war, the US has used its dollar power to sanction over 30 countries. Many of these countries, from Iran to Venezuela, have sought alternatives to the US-dominated financial system to conduct normal commerce. When the US began to sanction Russia in 2014 and deepen its trade war against China in 2018, the two powers accelerated upon processes of dollar-free trade that other sanctioned states had already begun forming out of necessity. At that time, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin called for the de-dollarisation of the oil trade. Moscow began to hurriedly reduce its dollar holdings and maintain its assets in gold and other currencies. In 2015, 90% of bilateral trade between China and Russia was conducted in dollars, but by 2020 it fell below 50%. When Western countries froze Russian central bank reserves held in their banks, this was tantamount to ‘crossing the Rubicon’, as economist Adam Tooze wrote. ‘It brings conflict in the heart of the international monetary system. If the central bank reserves of a G20 member entrusted to the accounts of another G20 central bank are not sacrosanct, nothing in the financial world is. We are at financial war’.

BRICS and sanctioned countries have begun to build new institutions that could circumvent their reliance on the dollar. Thus far, banks and governments have relied upon the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) network, which is run through the US Federal Reserve’s Clearing House Interbank Payment Services and its Fedwire Funds Service. Countries under unilateral US sanctions – such as Iran and Russia – were cut off from the SWIFT system, which connects 11,000 financial institutions across the globe. After the 2014 US sanctions, Russia created the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), which is mainly designed for domestic users but has attracted central banks from Central Asia, China, India, and Iran. In 2015, China created the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), run by the People’s Bank of China, which is gradually being used by other central banks.

Alongside these developments by Russia and China are a range of other options, such as payment networks rooted in new advances in financial technology (fintech) and central bank digital currencies. Although Visa and Mastercard are the largest companies in the industry, they face new rivals in China’s UnionPay and Russia’s Mir, as well as China’s private retail mechanisms such as Alipay and WeChat Pay. About half of the countries in the world are experimenting with forms of central bank digital currencies, with the digital yuan (e-CNY) as one of the more prominent monetary platforms that has already begun to side-line the dollar in the Digital Silk Roads established alongside the BRI.

As part of their concern over ‘currency power’, many countries in the Global South are eager to develop non-dollar trade and investment systems. Brazil’s new minister of finance from 1 January 2023, Fernando Haddad, has championed the creation of a South American digital currency called the sur (meaning ‘south’ in Spanish) in order to create stability in interregional trade and to establish ‘monetary sovereignty’. The sur would build upon a mechanism already used by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay called the Local Currency Payment System or SML.

A March 2022 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) entitled ‘The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance’ showed that ‘the share of reserves held in US dollars by central banks dropped by 12 percentage points since the turn of the century, from 71 percent in 1999 to 59 percent in 2021’. The data shows that central bank reserve managers are diversifying their portfolios with Chinese renminbi (which accounts for a quarter of the shift) and to non-traditional reserve currencies (such as Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Singaporean dollars, Danish and Norwegian kroner, Swedish krona, Swiss francs, and the Korean won). ‘If dollar dominance comes to an end’, concludes the IMF, ‘then the greenback could be felled not by the dollar’s main rivals but by a broad group of alternative currencies’.

Global currency exchange exhibits aspects of a network-effect monopoly. Historically, a universal medium emerged to increase efficiency and reduce risk, rather than a system in which each country trades with others using different currencies. For years, gold was the standard.

Any singular universal mechanism is hard to displace without force of some kind. For now, the US dollar remains the major global currency, accounting for just under 60% of official foreign exchange reserves. Under the prevailing conditions of the capitalist system, China would have to allow for the full convertibility of the yuan, end capital controls, and liberalise its financial markets in order for its currency to replace the dollar as the global currency. These are unlikely options, which means that there will be no imminent dethroning of dollar hegemony, and talk of a ‘petroyuan’ is premature.

Ramses Younane (Egypt), Untitled, 1939.

In 2004, the Chinese government and the GCC initiated talks over a Free Trade Agreement. The agreement, which stalled in 2009 due to tensions between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is now back on the table as the Gulf finds itself drawn into the BRI. In 1973, the Saudis told the US that they wanted ‘to find ways to usefully invest the proceeds [of oil sales] in their own industrial diversification, and other investments that contributed something to their national future’. No real diversification was possible under the conditions of the petrodollar regime. Now, with the end of carbon as a possibility, the Gulf Arabs are eager for diversification, as exemplified by Saudi Vision 2030, which has been integrated into the BRI. China has three advantages which aid this diversification that the US does not: a complete industrial system, a new type of productive force (immense-scale infrastructure project management and development), and a vast growing consumer market.

Western media has been near silent on the region’s humiliating loss of economic prestige and dominance during Xi’s trip to Riyadh. China can now simultaneously navigate complex relations with Iran, the GCC, Russia, and Arab League states. Furthermore, the West cannot ignore the SCO’s expansion into West Asia and North Africa. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Qatar are either affiliated or in discussions with the SCO, whose role is evolving.

Five months ago, US President Joe Biden visited Riyadh with far less pomp and ceremony – and certainly with less on the table to strengthen weakened relations between the US and Saudi Arabia. When asked about Xi’s trip to Riyadh, the US State Department’s spokesperson said, ‘We are not telling countries around the world to choose between the United States and the PRC’. That statement itself is perhaps a sign of weakness.

The post The Road to De-Dollarisation Will Run through Saudi Arabia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/15/the-road-to-de-dollarisation-will-run-through-saudi-arabia/feed/ 0 357964 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/08/freezing-to-fighting-climate-change/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/08/freezing-to-fighting-climate-change/#respond Tue, 08 Nov 2022 15:42:00 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=135159 … the Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window – Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies finds that the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster. — “Emissions Gap Report 2022” UN Environment Programme The UNEP sounds the alarm, […]

The post Freezing to Fighting Climate Change first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

… the Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window – Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies finds that the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.
— “Emissions Gap Report 2022” UN Environment Programme

The UNEP sounds the alarm, but what is the morality of cutting back sharply on fossil fuels without sufficient climate-friendly alternative energy sources in place to keep people warm and working?

The post Freezing to Fighting Climate Change first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/08/freezing-to-fighting-climate-change/feed/ 0 349032 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/09/can-europe-afford-to-turn-a-blind-eye-to-evidence-of-a-us-role-in-pipeline-blasts/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/09/can-europe-afford-to-turn-a-blind-eye-to-evidence-of-a-us-role-in-pipeline-blasts/#respond Sun, 09 Oct 2022 17:50:39 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=134212 The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming. […]

The post Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.

This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.

Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.

Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.

The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.

It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly.

The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.

Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.

Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.

Media taboo

This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on Bloomberg TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo among Western elites by citing evidence suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs [Columbia] on Bloomberg causing chaos saying US was most likely involved in Nordstream leaks according to data & other experts “even reporters tell me …. privately of course …” and that we are on a pretty dangerous path to a nuclear conflict pic.twitter.com/U6FsC2tdp6

— detty (@0ddette) October 3, 2022

Western media like the Associated Press have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the US above Russia.

There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by US president Joe Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how that would be possible, Biden asserted: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time, Victoria Nuland, a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the same warning, telling reporters: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Victoria Nuland: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”

Also this is the same Victoria Nuland who said fuck the EU, and she sure did it to you Germany.#NordStream2 #Nordstream #Nordstream1pic.twitter.com/GGMzrSbwT7

— Syrian Girl (@Partisangirl) September 28, 2022

That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the US to help overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.

And for those still puzzled by what motive the US might have for perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”.

Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” – argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.

Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has already stated is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine.

Or, as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the US for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.

Meddling in Ukraine

US hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite openly seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.

One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was recorded secretly meddling in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.

Speaking to German TV, Rice said the Russian economy was vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related. Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are, she asserted confidently: “People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy.”

Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”

She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”

Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major US foreign-policy goal overnight.

It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass protests and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now, the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their population with Russian gas.

‘Thank you, USA’

One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the US security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as Official Enemy No 1.

But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui bono” arguments.

And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in this case is the US – or, at the very least, that Washington authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader would dare to publicly accuse the US of carrying out the attacks, none would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from Washington.

That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, who tweeted a “Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline was ruptured.

Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and an influential figure in US policy circles who has long advocated for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.

But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how should Europe read its relations with the US in the light of that deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers are not pretty.

Demand for fealty

If the US was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties between the US and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.

Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war with Russia. It would indicate that the US is willing to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally treated weak allies in the Global South.

In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty, that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever dictates it imposes.

That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan, Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly expanding US industries.

By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to US energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large stick at them.

Pitiless aggression

For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner against them. The implications are more than unsettling.

The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire.

The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.

At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:

• NATO’s relentless expansion across Eastern Europe despite expert warnings that it would eventually provoke Russia.
• Biden and Nuland’s meddling to help oust an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow.
• The cultivation of a militarized Ukrainian ultra-nationalism pitted against Russia that led to bloody civil war against Ukraine’s own ethnic Russian communities.
• And NATO’s exclusive focus on escalating the war through arms supplies to Ukraine rather than pursuing and incentivizing diplomacy.

None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.

Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.

But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind their backs.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

People from the Danish Defence Academy, other military experts – e.g. those of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation – most major Danish media and – of course – the Ukrainian President’s advisor uniformly point – to Russia as the saboteur of the Nordstream gas pipelines near Bornholm, the Danish island south of Sweden.

The Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen and Defence Minister Bødskov, however, are a little lower than usual on Russia, pointing out how important – and difficult – it is to get clarity on this kind of thing so far down on the ocean bed.

Read Denmark Radio’s always politically correct public service “take”: “Ukraine on the gas leak in Baltic Sea: Russian terrorist attack. Russia wants to create panic before winter, says advisor to Ukraine’s president” and here on the prime time news, TV-Avisen, Defence Minister Bødskov explains that we may never get clarity on who carried out the blast, that it is all very difficult and will take time and that Denmark has full backing from NATO…

Here’s UPI’s take on the EU: “Sept. 28 (UPI) – The European Union on Wednesday said breaches in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines happened because of a “deliberate act” but stopped short of blaming Russia for the leaks.”

How interesting they stopped short. For once.

This is, of course, a political water-cycle ride into the blue deep sea.

Surely, Russia has a tap – the kind you know you have on your kitchen sink – with which to stop the gas? Why take the big risk with such a difficult and profound espionage attack? And if it was a signal to Denmark, why do it in international waters?

As usual, the Danish media seem unfamiliar with web search engines. And if they do, it must be that they are not reporting everything they have seen and are thus engaging in a rather narrow public education – leaving out what they believe that the citizens, for political reasons, do not need to know.

You can search for yourself – don’t use Google because that’s part of US foreign policy – but e.g. DuckDuckGo – with the words “Biden on no Nordstream 2” and there are tons of references to Biden and his famous promise at a press conference with German chancellor Schilz that “we’ll bring an end to it” – Nordstream 2 – if Russia invades Ukraine.

That was February 7 of this year – 3 weeks before Putin’s international law-breaking invasion in response to the provocation Russia perceives NATO’s 30-year systematic build-up of Ukraine as a future NATO country to be.

Here’s a Reuters video of the already then sensational plan, which Biden clearly doesn’t want to explain and Chancellor Scholz looks a bit befuddled about:

It’s also clear that Madam “Fuck-the-EU” Victoria Nuland – Biden’s Under-Secretary of State – has said the same thing just as unequivocally – see this video on Twitter. And on YouTube:

I wish Frederiksen and Bødskov, the Danish underwater military experts and divers as well as the Danish media all the best with the difficult, lengthy investigation into the suspected Russian terrorist attack.

The truth has long since become implausible…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jan Oberg.

• China’s nanochips breakthrough
• Didi fined for data breaches
• Turning coal to ethanol
• Rising workplace accidents

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

On 26 March 2018, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau spoke of the six Tsilhqot’in chiefs who were arrested during a sacred peace-pipe ceremony and subsequently hanged for their part in a war to prevent the spread of smallpox by colonialists: “We recognize that these six chiefs were leaders of a nation, that they acted in accordance with their laws and traditions and that they are well regarded as heroes of their people.”

“They acted as leaders of a proud and independent nation facing the threat of another nation.”

“As settlers came to the land in the rush for gold, no consideration was given to the rights of the Tsilhqot’in people who were there first,” Trudeau said. “No consent was sought.”

In recent years, the Tsilhqot’in people were engaged in a long, drawn-out fight to gain sovereignty over their unceded territory, spurred by the attempts of Taseko Mines to situate an open-pit copper-and-gold mine near the trout-rich Teẑtan Biny (Fish Lake). Also proposed was “destroying Yanah Biny (Little Fish Lake) and the Tŝilhqot’in homes and graves located near that lake, to make way for a massive tailings pond.”

The Supreme Court decision in Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia, (2014), upheld Indigenous title as declared in an earlier Supreme Court decision, Delgamuukw v British Columbia, (1997).

The Wet’suwet’in Struggle

Sometimes the law works (even colonial law), and sometimes it doesn’t. Neither the Tsilhqot’in or Delgamuukw legal precedents have, so far, buttressed the Wet’suwet’en people’s fight against the encroachment of a pipeline corporation.

In the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, corporate Canada and the government of Canada are violently seeking to ram a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory despite its rejection by all five hereditary chiefs; i.e., no consent has been given for the laying of a pipeline.

The Gidimt’en land defenders of the Wet’suwet’en turned to the international forum and made a submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People on the “Militarization of Wet’suwet’en Lands and Canada’s Ongoing Violations.”  The submission was co-authored by leading legal, academic, and human rights experts in Canada, and is supported by over two dozen organisations such as the Union of BC Indian Chiefs and Amnesty International-Canada.

The submission to the UN was presented by hereditary chief Dinï ze’ Woos (Frank Alec), Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), and Gidimt’en Checkpoint media coordinator Jen Wickham. It makes the case that forced industrialization by Coastal GasLink and police militarization on Wet’suwet’en land is a repudiation of Canada’s international obligations as stipulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Their submission states:

Ongoing human rights violations, militarization of Wet’suwet’en lands, forcible removal and criminalization of peaceful land defenders, and irreparable harm due to industrial destruction of Wet’suwet’en lands and cultural sites are occurring despite declarations by federal and provincial governments for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. By deploying legal, political, and economic tactics to violate our rights, Canada and BC are contravening the spirit of reconciliation, as well as their binding obligations to Indigenous law, Canadian constitutional law, UNDRIP and international law.

Sleydo’ relates the situation:

We urge the United Nations to conduct a field visit to Wet’suwet’en territory because Canada and BC have not withdrawn RCMP from our territory and have not suspended Coastal GasLink’s permits, despite the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calling on them to do so. Wet’suwet’en is an international frontline to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and to prevent climate change. Yet we are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada.

In the three large-scale police actions that have transpired on Wet’suwet’en territory since January 2019, several dozens of people have been arrested and detained, including legal observers and media. On 13 June 2022, the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade expressed outrage that the BC Prosecution Service plans to pursue criminal contempt charges against people opposed to the trespass of Wet’suwet’en territory, including Sleydo’.

Treaty Treatment

The Wet’suwet’en are on their ancestral unceded lands. Would it have made a difference if they had signed a treaty with the colonial entity?

The book We Remember the Coming of the White Man (Durville, 2021), edited by Sarah Stewart and Raymond Yakeleya, does not augur a better outcome for the First People.

We Remember adumbrates how the treaty process operates under colonialism:

When our Dene People signed Treaty 11 in 1921, there had been no negotiation because the Treaty translators were not able to translate the actual language used in the document. There was not enough time for our People to consult with each other. Our Dene People were given a list that had been written up by bureaucrats declaring the demands of Treaty 11. They dictated to the Dene, ‘This is what we want. You have to agree, and sign it.’ We did not know what the papers contained. (p ix)

Treaties and contracts signed under duress are not legally binding. Forced signing of a treaty is on-its-face preposterous to most people with at least half a lobe. It is no less obvious to the Dene of the Northwest Territories:

How can you demand something from People who cannot understand? That’s a crime. I have often said that Treaty 11 does not meet the threshold of being legal. In other words, when we make a treaty, it should be you understand, I understand, and we agree. In this case, the Dene did not understand. (p x)

Unfortunately, the Dene trusted an untrustworthy churchman. The Dene signed on the urging of Bishop Breyant, a man of God, because they had faith in the Roman Catholic Church. (p x)

Oil appeals to those with a lust for lucre. This greed contrasts with traditional Dene customs. Walter Blondin writes in the Foreword,

We Dene consider our land as sacred and owned by everyone collectively as it provides life…. [T]here were laws between the families that insured harmony and sharing. No one was left behind to face hardships or starve when disasters such as forest fires devastated the lands. The Dene laws promoted sharing, and this was taken seriously as failure to follow these laws could lead to war and bloody conflict. (p 3)

The Blondin family of Norman Wells (Tlegohli) in the Northwest Territories experienced first hand the perfidy of the White Man. The Blondins gave oil samples from their land to the Roman Catholic bishop for testing. The Dene family never received any report of the results. Later, however, a geologist, Dr Bosworth staked three claims at Bosworth Creek that were bought by Imperial Oil in 1918. (p 5-6)

Imperial Oil told the families: “You are not welcome in your homes and your traditional lands and your hunting territory.” The Dene people were driven out. “Elders say, ‘It was the first time in living memory where the Dene became homeless on their own land.'” (p 6)

The Blondin family homes were torn down with possessions inside and pushed over the river bank. “No apology or compensation was ever received from Imperial Oil. Imperial Oil considered Norman Wells to be ‘their town—a White Man’s town’ and the Blondin family and other Dene were not welcome.” (p 6)

“Treaty 11 became the ‘treaty for oil ownership.'” (p 8)

“One hundred years after the fact, the Dene can see the collusion between the British Crown, Imperial Oil [now ExxonMobil] and the Roman Catholic Church in the fraud, theft and embezzlement of Dene resources.” (p 10)

Sarah Stewart writes, “Treaty 11 was a charade to legitimize the land grab in the Northwest Territories.” The land grab came with horrific consequences. Stewart laments that the White Man brought disease, moved onto Dene lands and decimated wildlife, and that the teaching of missionaries and missionary schools eroded native languages, cultures, and traditions. (p 14)

Indigenous People, whose land it was, were never considered equal partners in benefiting from the resource. As Indian Agent Henry Conroy wrote to the Deputy General of Indian Affairs in January 1921, the objective was to have Indigenous people surrender their territory ‘to avoid complications in the exploitation of oil.’ (p 15)

Filmmaker Raymond Yakeleya elucidates major differences between the colonialists and the Dene. He points to the capitalist mindset of the White Man: “‘How can we make money off this?’ Dene People are not motivated by that.” (p 24) A deep respect and reverence for all the Creator’s flora and fauna and land is another difference. “When you kill an animal, you have a conversation with it and give it thanks for sharing its body. There are special protocols and ceremonies you have to go through.” (p 28)

While Yakeleya acknowledges that not all missionaries were bad, (p 30) he points to a dark side:

A major confusion came to our People with the coming of the Catholic missionaries. I see the coming of the Black Robes as being a very, very dark cloud that descended over our People. All of a sudden you have people from another culture with another way of thinking imposing their laws. We see that they did it for money, control, and power. I heard an Elder say to me once that the Christians who followed the Ten Commandments were the same people who broke all of them.

The first time we ever questioned ourselves was with the coming of the Christians and to me, I think there was something evil that came amongst our People…. The missionaries were quick to say our ways were the ways of the devil, or the ways of something not good…. Now we see they are being charged with pedophilia and other crimes. (p 29)

As for the discovery of oil, Joe Blondin said, “The Natives found it and never got anything out of it and that’s the truth.” (p 159) As for Treaty 11, John Blondin stated emphatically, “We know that we did not sell our land.” (p 171)

At the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in Fort McPherson [Teetł’it Zheh], Dene Philip Blake spoke words that resonate poignantly with the situation in Wet’suwet’en territory today:

If your nation chooses … to continue to try and destroy our nation, then I hope you will understand why we are willing to fight so that our nation can survive. It is our world…. But we are willing to defend it for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. If your nation becomes so violent that it would tear up our land, destroy our society and our future, and occupy our homeland, by trying to impose this pipeline against our will, but then of course we will have no choice but to react with violence. I hope we do not have to do that. For it is not the way we would choose…. I hope you will not only look on the violence of Indian action, but also on the violence of your own nation which would force us to take such a course. We will never initiate violence. But if your nation threatens by its own violent action to destroy our nation, you will have given us no choice. Please do not force us into this position. For we would all lose too much. (p 229)

The Nature of Colonialism and Its Treaties

Spoken word poet Shane L. Koyczan captures the nature of colonialism in Inconvenient Skin (Theytus Books, 2019):

150 years is not so long
that the history can be forgot

not so long that
forgiveness can be bought with empty apologies
or unkept promises

sharpened assurances that this is now
how it is

take it on good faith
and accept it

except that
history repeats itself
like someone not being listened to
like an entire people not being heard

the word of god is hard to swallow
when good faith becomes a barren gesture

there were men of good faith
robbing babies from their cradles
like the monsters we used to tell each other about

ripping children out of their mother’s arms
to be imprisoned in the houses of god
whose teachings were love

did no one hear?
did god mumble?

god said love

but the things that were done
were not love

our nation is built above the bones
of a genocide

it was not love that pried apart these families
it is not love that abandons its treaties
…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

This action is happening first and foremost to kill the MVP, but it also calls for jobs with justice, for renewable energy, and for mobilizing the resources so that the people of Appalachia can exercise control over their lives and communities. In the words of West Virginia farmer, activist, and one of the Walk leaders Maury Johnson:

There is no reason to build new pipelines. We have far too many destructive pipelines already. We need to fully electrify our energy sector with renewable energy and build a smart, modern electrical grid. Senator Joe Manchin, MVP supporter and coal plant owner, is not only wrong, he is DEAD wrong, and the human race will be too if we continue down the path that he is pushing.

The primary purpose of the Walk is to amplify the voices of frontline Appalachian communities and others in their fight for environmental justice and renewables. The mission statement goes on:

We will say loudly and clearly that politicians need to stop doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and get serious about the urgent need to shift in a just way from coal, oil and gas to renewables. All along the pipeline route we will inspect damages to water, air, animals, and the Earth, and the people who depend on them; and we will every morning have ceremonies honoring the heroes in our states who have died during these fights to protect Appalachia.

The first, long, multi-day political walk I was ever on took place in Appalachia, in 2011, the March on Blair Mountain. Over the course of a week we walked from Charleston down into coal country in the southwest part of West Virginia. That march had four demands: preserve Blair Mountain, abolish mountaintop removal, strengthen labor rights and invest in sustainable job creation for all Appalachian communities. Blair Mountain is where 10,000 armed coal miners fought in 1921 against the coal operators and their supporters who were severely repressing them as the miners attempted to organize. The 2011 action was well attended, received much state and national media attention and was a big deal.

Organizers for this Walk 11 years later are from West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and beyond. They are active members of organizations such as 7 Directions of Service, POWHR, Beyond Extreme Energy, NC Alliance to Protect the People and the Places We Live, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Th!rd Act, and others. Hopefully, this Walk will come to be seen as an important part of what put the final nails in the coffin of the MVP, as well as advancing the urgently needed, justice-grounded, community-involving transition from fossil fuels to a jobs-creating, renewable energy economy, toward thriving and prosperous Appalachian communities.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

Surging gasoline prices at the pump are not met with excess profits taxes on profit-glutted Big Oil. Rather the GOP and the Democrats are suspending taxes on gasoline sales that are used to repair roads and bridges. An excess profits tax could be used to provide rebates to consumers who are being gouged at the pump.

The case for an excess profits tax is made in a new report, Big Oil’s Wartime Bonus: How Big Oil Turns Profits Into Wealth, April 5, 2022, by Bailout Watch, Public Citizen and Friends of the Earth. Profits (and stocks) of companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron zoomed so much that Big Oil, not wanting to moderate their wholesale prices, have spent $45 billion of your money to buy back their stocks this past year and increase the compensation of their bosses.

Unleashing their lobbying forces in Washington, Big Oil and Gas are demanding, the report relates, “faster approval for natural gas pipelines … and increased drilling on public lands and waters.” Biden is opening up more oil and gas leases on public lands even though he reported some 9000 leases already granted are still not being utilized by the oil and gas companies.

The Biden administration is spending $6 billion to shore up aging nuclear plants that safety advocates say should be mothballed.

Washington is silent on using taxes on fossil-fuel price profiteering for more wind, solar and the little mentioned energy conservation retrofits of buildings throughout the U.S. The energy savings and renewable approach would be faster, cleaner, produce more jobs and benefit more directly to Main and Elm Streets USA.

The becalmed Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission should swing into bold action under their anti-monopoly and consumer protection authorities.

It shouldn’t have taken Consumer Watchdog in California to sound the alarm on the price manipulation by the five big oil refiners that control 96 percent of the gasoline made in California, led by Chevron. Jamie Court, the dynamic president of Consumer Watchdog, declared: “with California taxes and environmental fees adding about 60 cents per gallon, Californians have long wondered where the extra $1.50 per gallon more they are paying than other US drivers (from 5 to 7 dollars per gallon) goes, and with this legislation (SB1322) we will finally know. California has been an ATM for oil refiners for too long. SB1322 requires California oil refiners to document monthly how much they pay for the average barrel of crude oil they process into gasoline and how much they charge for the barrel of finished gasoline. At 42 gallons per barrel, we will then know how much they are making per gallon of gasoline sold in California, and be able to take back the excessive profits.” That is, assuming the completely Democratic Party dominated California state legislature enacts this legislation.

If Democrats do not stand tall in going after gasoline price inflation and other price gouging, the GOP will succeed in putting the blame on the Dems in the November elections. Washington is decades late in cutting our addiction to fossil fuels that are causing the climate crises.

On the first Earth Day in April 1970, over 1500 demonstrations against air, water and pesticide pollution were held on college campuses around the country. With the onset of the omnicidal fossil-fuel-driven climate catastrophes, leading to even more virulent wildfires, hurricanes, droughts and floods, the college campuses are now too silent, the streets are too empty, and the Congress too somnolent.

Congress is on another vacation this week so citizens should be buttonholing their representatives back home and pressing them to take action to counter the fossil fuel industry’s greed and to move toward a clean energy future.

Except for the far too small number of authentic advocates pressing decision-makers in government and industry to “follow the science”, the country’s officials appear too resigned, too attentive to short-term campaign money and political myopia to be stewards of the people, the natural environment and the planet.

If these power brokers need any more evidence of the ominous threat to humanity and its tiny planet, they should read the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said humanity has a “brief and rapidly closing window” to head off a hotter, deadly future.” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe” as the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and lack of political willpower undermine the necessity to cut greenhouse gas pollution by about half before 2030 and get rid of the carbon footprint by 2050.

It is not as if an abused Nature is not warning homo sapiens daily with unprecedented intensifications of its deadly outbursts and disruptions all around the world.

Once again, given the way our government is structured, it is the Congress – with just 535 members – which can become the rapid engine of energy transformation to the readily known renewable solutions. Solar panels are now seen on rooftops, and windmills on hillsides. Energy efficient technologies are affordable and abundant. Unfortunately, the GOP blocked the infrastructure proposals for clean energy proposed by Biden and the Democrats. Will the voters remember in November?

You know the Congressional switchboard number: 202-224-3121. Summon your representatives to your own town hall meetings and directly confront their desire for re-election in the fall. Tell them, for the sake of the world, their country and their state, it is time to shake off whatever invisible chains are around them and do what they and most of America knows has to be done. A clean energy future is better for the climate, the economy, the health and consumer pocketbooks of ALL THE PEOPLE, regardless of their self-described political labels.

When it comes to the ravaging climate disruptions, all people bleed the same color. Summon your Senators and Representatives directly to your community. (See my book, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, Pages 144-145).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Inflation, Already Bad, Will be Worsened by the War in Ukraine.

The Times’s report on Harris’s declaration, however, concluded with this sobering reminder:

The sanctions could also complicate the political situation back in the U.S., where Americans have for months grappled with growing inflation, which has driven down the approval ratings of the Biden presidency.

The Consumer Price Index rose by 7.9 percent through February, the fastest pace of inflation in 40 years. The average price for a gallon of gas was $4.32 on Thursday, according to AAA. Economists say because of those record gas prices, inflation is expected to climb even more.

To be clear, the extraordinary 7.9% inflation increase predates the crisis in Ukraine although Joe Biden has attempted to blame it all on the thoroughly demonized Putin. But unless cause can come after effect, Joe has a tough argument to make there. However, it is clear that the war and the sanctions that go with it are accelerating inflation. And it is also clear from every poll that inflation (and the pandemic) are very much on the minds of Americans. Political analysts tell us that the 2022 Congressional elections and probably the 2024 elections will turn in large part on the issue of inflation.

A grassroots approach to stopping the war in Ukraine.

It is clear that the public is very likely to oppose US sanctions on Russia and US involvement in Ukraine IF either proves to drive up gas prices, food prices and other items in an accelerated inflationary spiral.

Our strategy should be to link the inflation with prolonging a war in a far-away land which has little to do with US security and risks a nuclear confrontation with Russia.

We should have rallies opposing ALL US involvement in Ukraine by tying them to gas prices, food prices, rents and other items.

Let us have demonstrations, not at the US Congress and not at military bases, but at gas stations and supermarkets.  Especially highly visible gas stations; there is surely one near you.

Let us hold up placards with a simple message:

Biden’s arms to Ukraine = Longer War.

Longer War = Higher Gas Prices.
Ukraine is not our biz.

Come Home, America.

Ukraine as US proxy war against Russia to be fought to the last Ukrainian.

The war in Ukraine is a US war with Russia, with Ukraine as a US proxy.  So we in the US can stop it by getting one of the parties, the US, to end its involvement.  That is the right and moral responsibility of those in the US.  And it is the action that we as citizens are best positioned to do.  The effective action.

If, in the face of facts, one believes that this is not a US proxy war but a war between the US and Ukraine, then it is none of our business.  But the course of action is the same. We should still call for an end to sending weapons, materiel and “advisors” to Ukraine and its environs. We should stay out it and avoid foreign entanglements in European disputes – the very thing that the Founders warned us about. That course is anti-interventionism as opposed to pursuing imperial or dubious ideological agendas.

The best way to stop escalation of the war is to take the offensive.

The Biden administration is getting a lot of credit for refusing to be part of a no-fly zone and turning thumbs down on US troops on the ground in Ukraine.  But as time goes by, pressure is building for escalation.  At a recent press briefing we saw a number of reporters from the White House press core badgering Jen Psaki and inquiringly petulantly why the President has not done more. And on top of that we have Biden embarrassing himself by making statements contrary to his own policy – either out of confusion or as a way of telling people what the real policy is. Dangerous escalation is waiting just around the corner.

The best way to stop this vehicle from going forward is to apply the brakes, put it in reverse and leave the question of escalation in the rearview mirror. Let us make de-escalation not escalation the question of the day. Let us push escalation off the table altogether.

Let’s go out to our local gas station or supermarket to stop the war in its tracks and not only avoid escalation but save countless lives. As I finish here, I just heard Max Blumenthal on the Jimmy Dore show suggest something along the same lines, signage at gas stations linking the war and inflation. Let’s try it.

No weapons to Ukraine. No sanctions on the world. End the war and stop the inflation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John V. Walsh.

Inflation, Already Bad, Will be Worsened by the War in Ukraine.

The Times’s report on Harris’s declaration, however, concluded with this sobering reminder:

The sanctions could also complicate the political situation back in the U.S., where Americans have for months grappled with growing inflation, which has driven down the approval ratings of the Biden presidency.

The Consumer Price Index rose by 7.9 percent through February, the fastest pace of inflation in 40 years. The average price for a gallon of gas was $4.32 on Thursday, according to AAA. Economists say because of those record gas prices, inflation is expected to climb even more.

To be clear, the extraordinary 7.9% inflation increase predates the crisis in Ukraine although Joe Biden has attempted to blame it all on the thoroughly demonized Putin. But unless cause can come after effect, Joe has a tough argument to make there. However, it is clear that the war and the sanctions that go with it are accelerating inflation. And it is also clear from every poll that inflation (and the pandemic) are very much on the minds of Americans. Political analysts tell us that the 2022 Congressional elections and probably the 2024 elections will turn in large part on the issue of inflation.

A grassroots approach to stopping the war in Ukraine.

It is clear that the public is very likely to oppose US sanctions on Russia and US involvement in Ukraine IF either proves to drive up gas prices, food prices and other items in an accelerated inflationary spiral.

Our strategy should be to link the inflation with prolonging a war in a far-away land which has little to do with US security and risks a nuclear confrontation with Russia.

We should have rallies opposing ALL US involvement in Ukraine by tying them to gas prices, food prices, rents and other items.

Let us have demonstrations, not at the US Congress and not at military bases, but at gas stations and supermarkets.  Especially highly visible gas stations; there is surely one near you.

Let us hold up placards with a simple message:

Biden’s arms to Ukraine = Longer War.

Longer War = Higher Gas Prices.
Ukraine is not our biz.

Come Home, America.

Ukraine as US proxy war against Russia to be fought to the last Ukrainian.

The war in Ukraine is a US war with Russia, with Ukraine as a US proxy.  So we in the US can stop it by getting one of the parties, the US, to end its involvement.  That is the right and moral responsibility of those in the US.  And it is the action that we as citizens are best positioned to do.  The effective action.

If, in the face of facts, one believes that this is not a US proxy war but a war between the US and Ukraine, then it is none of our business.  But the course of action is the same. We should still call for an end to sending weapons, materiel and “advisors” to Ukraine and its environs. We should stay out it and avoid foreign entanglements in European disputes – the very thing that the Founders warned us about. That course is anti-interventionism as opposed to pursuing imperial or dubious ideological agendas.

The best way to stop escalation of the war is to take the offensive.

The Biden administration is getting a lot of credit for refusing to be part of a no-fly zone and turning thumbs down on US troops on the ground in Ukraine.  But as time goes by, pressure is building for escalation.  At a recent press briefing we saw a number of reporters from the White House press core badgering Jen Psaki and inquiringly petulantly why the President has not done more. And on top of that we have Biden embarrassing himself by making statements contrary to his own policy – either out of confusion or as a way of telling people what the real policy is. Dangerous escalation is waiting just around the corner.

The best way to stop this vehicle from going forward is to apply the brakes, put it in reverse and leave the question of escalation in the rearview mirror. Let us make de-escalation not escalation the question of the day. Let us push escalation off the table altogether.

Let’s go out to our local gas station or supermarket to stop the war in its tracks and not only avoid escalation but save countless lives. As I finish here, I just heard Max Blumenthal on the Jimmy Dore show suggest something along the same lines, signage at gas stations linking the war and inflation. Let’s try it.

No weapons to Ukraine. No sanctions on the world. End the war and stop the inflation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John V. Walsh.

Invoking the fabled trope of American patriotism, Biden urged the consumers not to hesitate from paying twice the amount while filling gas tanks in order for the military-industrial complex to reap billions of dollars windfalls by providing anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to NATO’s proxies in Ukraine. “This is a moment of consequence and peril for the world, and pain at the pump for American families. It’s also a moment of patriotism,” Biden said at an event at the White House.

The US announcement came a day before the International Energy Agency member countries were set to meet on Friday to discuss a further emergency oil release that would follow their March 1 agreement to release about 60 million barrels that would cover only two-third of a single day’s oil demand, as the global net oil consumption per day is over 90 million barrels. With over 10 million barrels daily oil production capacity, Russia, alongside Saudi Arabia, is the world’s largest oil producer accounting for providing over 10% of the world’s crude oil demand.

As far as military power is concerned, Russia with its enormous arsenal of conventional as well as nuclear weapons more or less equals the military power of the United States. But it’s the much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare for which Russia seems to have no answer following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the nineties and consequent dismantling of the once-thriving communist bloc, spanning Eastern Europe, Latin America and many socialist states in Asia and Africa in the sixties.

The current global neocolonial order is being led by the United States and its West European clients since the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War. Historically, any state, particularly those inclined to pursue socialist policies, that dared to challenge the Western monopoly over global trade and economic policies was internationally isolated and its national economy went bankrupt over a period of time. But for once, it appears Washington might shoot itself in the foot by going overboard in its relentless efforts to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.

On March 17, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, two British-Iranian nationals held in Iran since 2016 and 2017, respectively, were unexpectedly set free and were permitted to travel to the United Kingdom. In return, the British government, in what gave the impression of a ransom payment, triumphantly announced it had settled a £400m debt owed to Iran from the seventies.

The thaw in the frosty relations between the Western powers and Iran signaled that a tentative understanding on reviving the Iran nuclear deal was also reached behind the scenes, particularly in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and the Western efforts to internationally isolate Russia. After sanctioning Russia’s 10 million barrels daily crude oil output, the industrialized world is desperately in need of Iran’s 5 million barrels oil production capacity to keep the already inflated oil price from causing further pain to consumers.

Last month, Venezuela similarly released two incarcerated US citizens in an apparent goodwill gesture toward the Biden administration following a visit to Caracas by a high-level US delegation, despite the fact that Washington still officially recognizes Nicolas Maduro’s detractor Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate president.” Nonetheless, Venezuela is one of Latin America’s largest oil producers and opening the international market to its heavy crude might provide a welcome relief in the time of global oil crunch.

Niftily forestalling the likelihood of strengthening of mutually beneficial bonds between China and Russia when the latter is badly in need for economic relief, the United States pre-emptively accused China of pledging to sell military hardware to Russia, when the latter, itself one of the world’s leading arms exporters, didn’t even make any such request to China.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held an intense seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on March 15, and warned China of “grave consequences” of evading Western sanctions on Russia. Besides wielding the stick of economic sanctions, he must also have dangled the carrot of ending trade war against China initiated by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration until Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.

Despite vowing to treat the Saudi kingdom as a “pariah” in the run-up to November 2020 presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported last month the White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the US was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices.

“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.

“‘There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,’ said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. ‘It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].’

“But the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to pump more oil, saying they are sticking to a production plan approved by OPEC. Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.”

To add insult to the injury, Saudi Arabia has reportedly invited Chinese President Xi Jinping for an official visit to the kingdom that could happen as soon as May, and is also considering pegging its vast oil reserves in yuan, a move that could spell end to the petrodollar hegemony.

The United States and Britain were ramping up pressure on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil and join efforts to isolate Russia, while Riyadh had shown little readiness to respond and had revived a threat to ditch dollars in its oil sales to China, Reuters reported last month.

“If Saudi Arabia does that, it will change the dynamics of the forex market,” said a source with knowledge of the matter, adding that such a move—which the source said Beijing had long requested and which Riyadh threatened as far back as 2018—might prompt other buyers to follow.

Trump aptly observed: “Now Biden is crawling around the globe on his knees begging and pleading for mercy from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.” It appears quite plausible that in its relentless efforts to internationally isolate Russia, the Biden administration is likely to unravel the whole neocolonial economic order imposed on the world after the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord following the Second World War in 1945.

In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 266 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, over half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.

In many ways, the current oil crunch caused by Washington’s unilateral decision to impose economic sanctions on Russia’s vital energy sector is similar to the oil crisis of 1973. The 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West following the Arab-Israel War lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs dubbed the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

Regarding the reciprocal relationship between Washington and the Gulf’s autocrats, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable for nurturing terrorism.

It’s noteworthy that $750 billion was only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in the Western Europe and the investments of the oil-rich U.A.E, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in the economies of North America and Western Europe.

Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.

Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia.

The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales and, over a period of 10 years, total sales could reach $400 billion, as Donald Trump himself alluded to in his conversations with American journalist Bob Woodward described in the book Rage.

President Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

“I saved his ass,” Trump said in 2018, according to the book. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded: “He says very strongly that he didn’t do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time,” Trump said.

“And you know, they’re in the Middle East. You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion,” Trump noted. “They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it,” he added.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab States by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.

All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Western powers and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies is much older. The British Empire stirred uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War, as the Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany during the war.

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the war, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his violent insurgency against Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali, because the latter was demanding too much of a price for his loyalty, the unification of the whole of Arabian peninsula, including the Levant, Iraq and the Gulf Emirates, under his suzerainty as a bribe for stabbing the Ottoman Empire in the back during the First World War.

Consequently, the Western powers abandoned the Sharifs of Mecca, though the scions of the family were rewarded with kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan, imposed the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 dividing Arabs into small states at loggerheads with each other, and lent their support to the nomadic Sauds of Najd.

King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the financial and military support of the British Empire. However, by then the tide of the British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former territorial possessions of the British Empire.

At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring alliance which persists to this day. During the course of that momentous meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam War veterans to train and equip 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud.

In addition, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of 266 billion barrels Saudi oil reserves are located.

Currently, the US has deployed tens of thousands of American troops in aircraft carriers and numerous military bases in the Persian Gulf that include sprawling al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi, al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nauman Sadiq.

Writers are well aware that Cuban approaches are adapted to the unique geography and history of the island. What readers should take away is not so much the specific actions of Cuba as its method of studying a wide array of approaches and actually putting the best into effect (as opposed to merely talking about their strengths and weaknesses). The book traces Cuba’s preparedness from the threat of a US invasion following its revolution through its resistance to hurricanes and diseases, which all laid the foundation for current adaptions to climate change.

Only four years after the revolution, in 1963, Hurricane Flora hit the Caribbean, killing 7000-8000. Cubans who are old enough remember homes being washed away by waters carrying rotten food, animal carcasses and human bodies. It sparked a complete redesign of health systems, intensifying their integration from the highest decision-making bodies to local health centers. Construction standards were strengthened, requiring houses to have reinforced concrete and metal roofs to resist strong winds.

Decades of re-designing proved successful. In September 2017 Category 5 Hurricane Maria pounded Puerto Rico, leading to 2975 deaths. The same month, Irma, also a Category 5 Hurricane, arrived in Cuba, causing 10 deaths. The dedication to actually preparing the country for a hurricane (as opposed to merely talking about preparedness) became a model for coping with climate change. Projecting potential future damage led Cubans to to realize that by 2050, rising water levels could destroy 122 coastal towns. By 2017, Cuba had become the only country with a government-led plan (Project Life, or Tarea Vida) to combat climate change which includes a 100 year projection.

Disaster Planning

Several aspects merged to form the core of Cuban disaster planning. They included education, the military, and social relationships. During 1961, Cuba’s signature campaign raised literacy to 96%, one of the world’s highest rates. This has been central to every aspect of disaster preparation – government officials and educators travel throughout the island, explaining consequences of inaction and everyone’s role in avoiding catastrophe.

Less obvious is the critical role of the military. From the first days they took power, leaders such as Fidel and Che explained that the only way the revolution could defend itself from overwhelming US force would be to become a “nation in arms.” Soon self-defense from hurricanes combined with self-defense from attack and Cuban armed forces became a permanent part of fighting natural disasters. By 1980, exercises called Bastión (bulwark) fused natural disaster management with defense rehearsals.

As many as 4 million Cubans (in a population of 11 million) were involved in activities to practice and carry out food production, disease control, sanitation and safeguarding medical supplies. A culture based on understanding the need to create a new society has glued these actions together. When a policy change is introduced, government representatives go to each community, including the most remote rural ones, to make sure that everyone knows the threats that climate change poses to their lives and how they can alter behaviors to minimize them. Developing a sense of responsibility for ecosystems includes such diverse actions as conserving energy, saving water, preventing fires and using medical products sparingly.

Contradictions

One aspect of the book may confuse readers. Some authors refer to the Cuban disaster prevention system as “centralized;” others refer to it as “decentralized;” and some describe it as both “centralized” and “decentralized” on different pages of their essay. The collection reflects a methodology of “dialectical materialism” which often employs the unity of opposite processes (“heads” and “tails” are opposite static states united in the concept of “coin”). As multiple authors have explained, including Ross Danielson in his classic Cuban Medicine (1979), centralization and decentralization of medicine have gone hand-in-hand since the earliest days of the revolution. This may appear as centralization of inpatient care and decentralization of outpatient care (p. 165) but more often as centralization at the highest level of norms and decentralization of ways to implement care to the local level. The decision to create doctor-nurse offices was made by the ministry which provided guidelines for each area to implement according to local conditions.

A national plan for coping with Covid-19 was developed before the first Cuban died of the affliction and each area designed ways to to get needed medicines, vaccines and other necessities to their communities. Proposals for preventing water salinization in coastal areas will be very different from schemas for coping with rises in temperature in inland communities.

Challenges for Producing Energy: The Good

As non-stop use of fossil fuels renders the continued existence of humanity questionable, the issue of how to obtain energy rationally looms as a core problem of the twenty-first century. Disaster Preparedness explores an intriguing variety of energy sources. Some of them are outstandingly good; a few are bad; and, many provoke closer examination.

Raúl Castro proposed in 1980 that it was necessary to protect the countryside from impacts of nickel mining. What was critical in this early approach was an understanding that every type of metal extraction has negatives that must be weighed against its usefulness in order to minimize those negatives. What did not appear in his approach was making a virtue of necessity, which would have read “Cuba needs nickel for trade; therefore, extracting Cuban nickel is good; and, thus, problems with producing nickel should be ignored or trivialized.”

In 1991, when the USSR collapsed and Cuba lost its subsidies and many of its trading partners, its economy was devastated, adult males lost an average of 20 pounds, and health problems became widespread. This was Cuba’s “Special Period.” Not having oil meant that Cuba had to abandon machine-intensive agriculture for agroecology and urban farming.

Laws prohibited use of agrochemicals in urban gardens. Vegetable and herb production exploded from 4000 tons in 1994 to over 4 million tons by 2006. By 2019, Jason Hickel’s Sustainable Development Index rated Cuba’s ecological efficiency as the best in the world.

By far the most important part of Cuba’s energy program was using less energy via conservation, an idea abandoned by Western “environmentalists” who began endorsing unlimited expansion of energy produced by “alternative” sources. In 2005, Fidel began pushing conservation policies projected to reduce Cuba’s energy consumption by two-thirds. Ideas such these had blossomed during the first few years of the revolution.

What one author refers to as “bioclimatic architecture” is not clear, but it could include tile vaulting, which was studied extensively by the Cuban government in the early 1960s. It is based on arched ceilings formed by lightweight terra cotta tiles. The technique is low-carbon because it does not require expensive machinery and uses mainly local material such as terra cotta tiles from Camagüey province. Though used to construct buildings throughout the island, it was abandoned due to its need for skilled and specialized labor.

Challenges for Producing Energy: The Bad

Though there are negative aspects to Cuba’s energy perspectives, it is important to consider one which is anything but negative: energy efficiency (EE). Ever since Stanley Jevons predicted in 1865 that a more efficient steam engine design would result in more (not less) coal being used, it has been widely understood that if the price of energy (such as burning coal) is cheaper, then people will use more energy.

A considerable amount of research verifies that, at the level of the entire economy, efficiency makes energy cheaper and its use goes up. Some claim that if an individual uses a more EE option, then that person will use less energy. But that is not necessarily so. Someone buying a car might look for one that is more EE. If the person replaces a non-EE sedan with an EE SUV, the fact that SUVs use more energy than sedans would mean that the person is using more energy to get around. Similarly, rich people use money saved from EE devices to buy more gadgets while poor people might not buy anything additional or buy low-energy necessities.

This is why Cuba, a poor country with a planned economy, can design policies to reduce energy use. Whatever is saved from EE can lead to less or low-energy production, resulting in a spiraling down of energy usage. In contrast, competition drives capitalist economies toward investing funds saved from EE toward economic expansion, resulting in perpetual growth.

Though a planned economy allows for decisions that are healthier for people and ecosystems, bad choices can be made. One consideration in Cuba is the goal to “efficiently apply pesticides” (p. 171). The focus should actually be on how to farm without pesticides. Also under consideration is “solid waste energy capacities,” which is typically a euphemism for burning waste in incinerators. Incinerators are a terrible way to produce energy since they merely reduce the volume of trash to 10% of its original size while releasing poisonous gases, heavy metals (such as mercury and lead), and cancer-causing dioxins and furans.

The worst energy alternative was favored by Fidel, who supported a nuclear power plant which would supposedly “greatly reduce the cost of producing electricity.” (p. 187) Had the Soviets built a Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor, an explosion or two would not have contributed to disaster prevention. Once when I was discussing the suffering following the USSR collapse with a friend who writes technical documents for the Cuban government, he suddenly blurted out, “The only good thing coming out of the Special Period was that, without the Soviets, Fidel could not build his damned nuclear plant!”

Challenges for Producing Energy: The Uncertain

Between the poles of positive and negative lies a vast array of alternatives mentioned in Disaster Preparedness that most are unfamiliar with. There are probably few who know of bagasse, which is left over sugar cane stalks that have been squeezed for juice. Burning it for fuel might arouse concern because it is not plowed into soil like what should be done for wheat stems and corn stalks. Sugar cane is different because the entire plant is hauled away – it would waste fuel to transport it to squeezing machinery and then haul it back to the farm.

While fuel from bagasse is an overall environmental plus, the same cannot be said for oilseeds such as Jatropha curcas. Despite the book suggesting the they might be researched more, they are a dead end for energy production.

Another energy positive being expanded in Cuba is farms being run entirely on agroecology principles. The book claims that such farms can produce 12 times the energy they consume, which might seem like a lot. Yet, similar findings occur in other countries, notably Sweden. In contrast, at least one author holds out hope of obtaining energy from microalgae, almost certainly another dead end.

Potentially, a very promising source for energy is the use of biogas from biodigesters. Biodigesters break down manure and other biomass to create biogas which is used for tractors or transportation. Leftover solid waste material can be used as a (non-fossil fuel) fertilizer. On the other hand, an energy source which one author lists as viable is highly dubious: “solar cells built with gallum arsenide.” Compounds with arsenic are cancer-causing and not healthy for humans and other living species.

The word “biomass” is highly charged because it is one of Europe’s “clean, green” energy sources despite the fact that burning wood pellets is leading to deforestation in Estonia and the US. This does not seem to be the case in Cuba, where “biomass” refers to sawdust and weedy marabú trees. It remains important to distinguish positive biomass from highly destructive biomass.

Many other forms of alternative energy could be covered and there is a critical point applying to all of them. Each source of energy must be analyzed separately without ever assuming that if energy does not come from fossil fuels it is therefore useful and safe.

Depending on How You Get It

The three major sources of alternative energy – hydroturbines (dams), solar, and wind – share the characteristic that how positive or negative they are depends on the way they are obtained.

The simplest form of hydro power is the paddle wheel, which probably causes zero environmental damage and produces very little energy. At the other extreme is hydro-electric dams which cross entire rivers and are incredibly destructive towards human cultures and aquatic and terrestrial species. In between are methods such as diverting a portion of the river to harness its power. The book mentions pico-hydroturbines which affect only a portion of a river, generating less than 5kW and are extremely useful for remote areas. They have minimal environmental effects. But if a large number of these turbines were placed together in a river, that would be a different matter. The general rule for water power is that causing less environmental damage means producing less energy.

Many ways to produce energy start with the sun. Cuba uses passive solar techniques, which do not have toxic processes associated with electricity. A passivehaus design provides warmth largely via insulation and placement of windows. Extremely important is body heat. This makes a passivhaus difficult for Americans, whose homes typically have much more space per person than other countries. But the design could work better in Cuba, where having three generations living together in a smaller space would contribute to heating quite well.

At the negative extreme of solar energy are the land-hungry electricity-generating arrays. In between these poles is low-intensity solar power, also being studied by Cuba.

The vast majority of Cubans heat their water for bathing. Water heaters can depend on solar panels which turn sunlight into electricity. An even better non-electric design would be to use a box with glass doors and a black tank to collect heat, or to use “flat plate collectors” and then pipe the heated water to an indoor storage tank. As with hydro-power, simpler designs produce fewer problems but generate less energy.

Wind power is highly similar. Centuries ago, windmills were constructed with materials from the surrounding area and did not rely on or produce toxins. Today’s industrial wind turbines are toxic in every phase of their existence. In the ambiguous category are small wind turbines and wind pumps, both of which Cuba is exploring. What hydro, solar and wind power have in common is that non-destructive forms exist but produce less energy. The more energy-producing a system is, the more problematic it becomes.

Scuttling the Fetish

Since hydro, solar and wind power have reputations as “renewable, clean, green” sources of energy, it is necessary to examine them closely. Hydro, solar and wind power each require destructive extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, silver, aluminum, cadmium, indium, gallium, selenium, tellurium, neodymium, and dysprosium. All three lead to mountains of toxic waste that vastly exceed the amount obtained for use. And all require withdrawal of immense amounts of water (a rapidly vanishing substance) during the mining and construction.

Hydro-power also disrupts aquatic species (as well as several terrestrial ones), causes large releases of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from reservoirs, increases mercury poisoning, pushes people out of their homes during construction, intensifies international conflicts, and have killed up to 26,000 people from breakage. Silicon-based solar panels involves an additional list of toxic chemicals that can poison workers during manufacture, gargantuan loss of farm and forest land for installing “arrays” (which rapidly increases over time), and still more land loss for disposal after their 25-30 year life spans. Industrial wind turbines require loss of forest land for roads to haul 160 foot blades to mountain tops, land loss for depositing those mammoth blades after use, and energy-intensive storage capacity when there is no wind.

Hydro, solar and wind power are definitely NOT renewable, since they all are based on heavy usage of materials that are exhausted following continuous mining. Neither are they “carbon neutral” because all use fossil fuels for extraction of necessary building materials and end-of-life demolition. The most important point is that the issues listed here are a tiny fraction of total problems, which would require a very thick book to enumerate.

Why use the word “fetish” for approaches to hydro, solar and wind power? A “fetish” can be described as “a material object regarded with extravagant trust or reverence” These sources of energy have positive characteristics, but nothing like the reverence often bestowed upon them.

Cuba’s approach to alternative energy is quite different. Helen Yaffe wrote two of the major articles in Disaster Preparedness. She also put together the 2021 documentary, Cuba’s life task: Combatting climate change, which includes the following from advisor Orlando Rey Santos:

“One problem today is that you cannot convert the world’s energy matrix, with current consumption levels, from fossil fuels to renewable energies. There are not enough resources for the panels and wind turbines, nor the space for them. There are insufficient resources for all this. If you automatically made all transportation electric tomorrow, you will continue to have the same problems of congestion, parking, highways, heavy consumption of steel and cement.”

Cuba maps out many different outlines for energy in order to focus on those that are the most productive while causing the least damage. A genuine environmental approach requires a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA, also known as cradle-to-grave accounting) which includes all mining, milling, construction and transport of materials; the energy-gathering process itself (including environmental disruption); along with after-effects such as continuing environmental damage and disposal of waste. To these must be added social effects such as relocating people, injury and death of those resisting relocation, destruction of sacred cites and disruption of affected cultures.

A “fetish” on a specific energy source denotes tunnel-visioning on its use phase while ignoring preparatory and end-of-life phases and social disruption. While LCAs are often propounded by corporations, they are typically nothing but window-dressing, to be pitched out of window during actual decision-making. With an eternal growth dynamic, capitalism has a built-in tendency to downplay negatives when there is an opportunity to add new energy sources to the mix of fossil fuels.

Is It an Obscene Word?

Cuba has no such internal dynamics forcing it to expand the economy if it can provide better lives for all. The island could be a case study of degrowth economics. Since “degrowth” is shunned as a quasi-obscenity by many who insist that it would cause immeasurable suffering for the world’s poor, it is necessary to state what it would be. The best definition is that Global Economic Degrowth means (a) reduction of unnecessary and destructive production by and for rich countries (and people), (b) which exceeds the (c) growth of production of necessities by and for poor countries (and people).

This might not be as economically difficult as some imagine because …

1. The rich world spends such gargantuan wealth on that which is useless and deadly, including war toys, chemical poisons, planned obsolescence, creative destruction of goods, insurance, automobile addiction, among a mass of examples; and,

2. Providing the basic necessities of life can often be relatively cheap, such as health care in Cuba being less than 10% of US expenses (with Cubans having a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate).

Some mischaracterize degrowth, claiming that “Cuba experienced ‘degrowth’ during its ‘Special Period’ and it was horrible.” Wrong! Degrowth did not immiserate Cuba – the US embargo did. US sanctions (or embargo or blockade) of Cuba creates barriers to trade which force absurdly high prices for many goods. One small example: If Cubans need a spare part manufactured in the US, it cannot be merely shipped from the US, but more likely, arrives via Europe. That means its cost will reflect: [manufacture] + [cost of shipping to Europe] + [cost of shipping from Europe to Cuba].

What is amazing is that Cuba has developed so many techniques of medical care and disaster management for hurricanes and climate change, despite its double impoverishment from colonial days and neo-colonial attacks from the US.

Daydreaming

Cuba realizes the responsibility it has to protect its extraordinary biodiversity. Its extensive coral reefs are more resistant to bleaching than most and must be investigated to discover why. They are accompanied by healthy marine systems which include mangroves and seagrass beds. Its flora and fauna boast 3022 distinct plant species plus dozens of reptiles, amphibians and bird species which exist only on the island.

For Cuba to implement global environmental protection and degrowth policies it would need to receive financing both to research new techniques and to train the world’s poor in how to develop their own ways to live better. Such financial support would include …

1. Reparations for centuries of colonial plunder;

2. Reparations for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, multiple attacks which killed Cuban citizens, hundreds of attempts on Fidel’s life, and decades of slanderous propaganda; and,

3. At least $1 trillion in reparations for losses due to the embargo since 1962.

Why reparations? It is far more than the fact that Cuba has been harmed intensely by the US. Cuba has a track record proving that it could develop amazing technologies if it were left alone and received the money it deserves.

Like all poor countries, Cuba is forced to employ dubious methods of producing energy in order to survive. It is unacceptable for rich countries to tell poor countries that they must not use energy techniques which have historically been employed to obtain what is necessary for living. It is unconscionable for rich countries to fail to forewarn poor countries that repeating practices which we now know are dangerous will leave horrible legacies for their descendants.

Cuba has acknowledged past misdirections including an economy based on sugar, a belief in the need of humanity to dominate nature, support for the “Green Revolution” with its reliance on toxic chemicals, tobacco in food rations, and the repression of homosexuals. Unless it is sidetracked by by advocates of infinite economic growth, its pattern suggests that it will recognize problems with alternative energy and seek to avoid them.

In the video Cuba’s Life Task, Orlando Rey also observes that “There must be a change in the way of life, in our aspirations. This is a part of Che Guevara’s ideas on the ‘new man.’ Without forming that new human, it is very difficult to confront the climate issue.”

Integration of poor countries into the global market has meant that areas which were once able to feed themselves are are now unable to do so. Neo-liberalism forces them to use energy sources that are life-preservers in the short run but are death machines for their descendants. The world must remember that Che’s “new man” will not clamor for frivolous luxuries while others starve. For humanity to survive, a global epiphany rejecting consumer capitalism must become a material force in energy production. Was Che only dreaming? If so, then keep that dream alive!

Don Fitz (moc.loanull@nodztif)is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought, where a version of this article originally appeared. He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor. His articles on politics and the environment have appeared in Monthly Review, Z Magazine, and Green Social Thought, as well as multiple online publications. His book, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, has been available since June 2020. Thoughts from Stan Cox and John Som de Cerff were very helpful for technical aspects of this review.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Fitz.

It was sort of like New Year’s Eve, except it was agreed it should be a simultaneous moment all over the Earth. Having it be the same very moment for all seemed right, it was important to feel the connection with everyone and everything. So the time came and we listened to the voices on our phones. We are the children of the planet, we are going to sing its praises all together, all at once, now is the time to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of the earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet, on and on it went…

— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry of the Future, p. 537-538

As I read through prolific science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent novel, The Ministry of the Future, first published in October of 2020, I began thinking: why didn’t I learn about this before now, the beginning of 2022? Because if you are a person who gets it on the seriousness of the climate emergency we are in, this is nothing less than an absolute must-read.

After you read this book you’ll appreciate that, no, it’s not too late. Yes, there is hope that we can slow, stop and reverse global overheating and in the process truly change our world for the better. There is hope that our children and grandchildren and the seven generations coming after us will have lives better than the ones we are experiencing today. Yes, there is hope for the human race and all life forms on earth.

Hope, hope grounded in an objective and scientific assessment of reality, is a powerful thing. No progressive revolutions have ever been made by hopeless people.

Robinson’s 564 page masterpiece begins in the middle of the current 2020s decade with a world-changing extreme weather event, a deadly heat wave in India which causes 20 million deaths, which in turn leads to a political revolution within India and a new progressive national government which, for the first time in the history of nation states, takes action to address the climate emergency at the scale needed. This was the turning point for the world.

25 years later, the earth’s physical reality had reversed course, first by the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere plateauing, and then, over a five year period, going down each year for a total of 27 parts per million, from 478 to 451 ppm. And with that huge accomplishment—or because of what made that accomplishment possible—the lives of people and all life forms on the planet had taken a definite turn for the better.

What, more specifically, happened that led to this huge result?

Some of it was not surprising: “increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions among the six biggest emitting sectors: industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation, and cross-sector” (p. 251)—a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy as the primary energy source—widespread socialization of energy, ending it being a commodity for private profit—the substitution of energy efficient ships, planes and land vehicles for transportation, like mainly wind-powered “clipper ships” for ocean and river transport—and more:

“Regenerative ag, landscape restoration, wildlife stewardship, Mondragon-style co-ops, garden cities, universal basic income and services, job guarantees, refugee release and repatriation, climate justice and equity actions, first people support, all these tended to be regional or localized, but they were happening everywhere, and more than ever before.” (p. 455)

And there was much more, many positive environmental, social, economic and cultural changes.

How did it happen?

Absolutely key was the building and maintaining of broad coalitions of sectors of society who, in their massive numbers, made it increasingly difficult for the powers that be to not change.

One key tactic was massive occupations: “Despite this sense that the world was falling apart, or maybe because of it, demonstrations in the capitals of the world intensified. Actually these seemed to be occupations rather than demonstrations, because they didn’t end but rather persisted as disruptions of the ordinary business of the capitals. Within the occupied spaces, people were setting up and performing alternative lifeways with gift supplies of food and impromptu shelter and toilet facilities, all provided or enacted by the participants as if in some kind of game or theater piece, designed mainly to allow unceasing discourse demanding the official governments respond to the needs of their people rather than to the needs of global capital; and the governments involved had to face either siccing their police and militaries on their own people, or waiting out the occupations for what could be months, or actually changing in the way demanded. Time to dismiss the people and elect another one! as Brecht had so trenchantly phrased it.” (p. 286-287)

It happened via geoengineering, not a popular thing among more than a few climate activists. What were the specifics? It began after the 20 million heat wave deaths in India when, in response to popular outrage and pressure, the Indian government sprayed sulfur dioxide above and over the country to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s surface. It worked; and in the book it had little negative impact. A second, less controversial tactic was to spend tens of billions of dollars to drain water from the base of the great ice masses in Antarctica and Greenland. Doing so stabilized them and dramatically reduced sea level rise.

It happened through carbon taxes and through directly taking on the immense power of the world’s largest private banks. Some were nationalized. But the most effective way was through their being forced by massive, widespread political pressure, violent pro-earth terrorism (see below) and leadership by some within the system to bring them around to acceptance of a new, worldwide form of currency to replace, over time, dollars and marks and francs and pesos and all the others: a currency valued and accepted because it was based on investments in carbon drawdowns. A carbon currency. Carbon coins. “The new carbon coin had stimulated many short-term investments in carbon sequestration projects, and many longer-term investments in the coin itself. It had caused some of the biggest carbon owners to cash out and keep fossil carbon in the ground… They had created and paid out trillions of carbon coins, and yet had seen no signs of inflation, or deflation, for those who held that theory; no noticeable price change.” (p. 420-421)

And then there was the tactic of selective but violent terrorism, eco-terrorism, begun in India after the great heat wave die off. “It was a question of identifying the guilty [overwhelmingly the fossil fuel CEO types] and then finding them and getting to them. Methods were worked up over many iterations. Drones were best. Much of the job becomes intelligence; finding the guilty, finding their moments of exposure. Not easy, but once accomplished, boom. The drones keep getting faster and faster. The guilty often have defenses, but these can often be overwhelmed by numbers. The guilty died by the dozens in those years. Eventually, a decade into the campaign, they knew they were in trouble. The only thing we worried about was what the guilty ones always call ‘collateral damage.’ In other words, the accidental killing of innocents to kill your target. [We] were very fair and very meticulous. If to kill a hundred guilty you had to kill one innocent, no. It’s against the law.” (p. 135-136)

As someone not a pacifist but who believes that nonviolent tactics are generally the most effective and quickest way to build strong movements, this was the part of the book that I had the most trouble with. Relatedly, I was also troubled that there was nothing in it about the increasingly effective and continuing movements in the USA and elsewhere in the world to prevent the expansion of new fossil fuel infrastructure, like the Indigenous-led resistance to the KXL and Dakota Access and Line 3 and Line 5 tar sands oil pipelines, or the movement to stop expansion of the vast array of methane gas pipelines and infrastructure—gas is 86 times as powerful as CO₂ over a 20 year time period–all over the US and elsewhere, the expansion of coastal terminals to ship out and ship in gas. There is a strong movement in the US against all of that, winning victories, preventing more and more of these from being built or putting up major, public battles to do so. Without question, the success of this movement can and will limit the power of the fossil fuel CEO’s and their financial backers to keep expanding. It will accelerate the needed shift away from fossil fuels to renewables, battery storage, energy efficiency and more.

Nonviolent tactics have been used to go after, to shame, to publicly embarrass and expose individual heads of corporations and heads of energy regulatory agencies. They have been visited at their homes. People have slept out overnight in front of their homes. Neighbors have been leafletted about the crimes committed by their neighbor. In years past powerful people have been “pied,” had a cream pie pushed into their face while in public.

And I am sure there are similar nonviolent tactics along these lines that exist or that could be evolved if they increasingly became seen as an important component of building the bottom-up movement which is an essential if Robinson’s vision, our collective vision, our rising demand for a new world is to come to be.

Hopefully, 25 years on, when the history of how the world changed over these years is written, Robinson’s book will be one of the things historians reference as to what helped to change it. Thank you, Kim Stanley Robinson.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

World Beyond War

Toronto, Ontario, Canada — This morning, Toronto supporters of the Wet’suwet’en land defense struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline set up construction sites at the Toronto homes of TC Energy Board Chair Siim Vanaselja and Royal Bank of Canada Executive Doug Guzman. The supporters also flyered the neighborhood with photos of the two men with signs warning, “Your neighbour is pushing the Coastal Gaslink pipeline through Wet’suwet’en Territory at gunpoint.”

Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, said, “Today supporters took action to bring the message home to Siim Vanaselja and Doug Guzman, two men leading companies that are orchestrating, funding, and profiting off of the violent colonial invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The decisions they make are directly linked to the militarized violence that the RCMP has carried out on Wet’suwet’en people over the past several months to shove through the Coastal Gaslink pipeline at gunpoint.”

In November, RCMP deployed military-style police units – including snipers, heavily-armed assault teams, and canine units – against unarmed Wet’suwet’en land defenders during a raid on land defense camps set up to stop pipeline construction crews from drilling under the Wedzin Kwa river. During these raids, the RCMP destroyed several of the land defenders’ homes, using axes and a chainsaw, and burned one home to the ground.

“The home of my sister, Jocelyn Alec, was burned down and bulldozed after she was violently arrested and removed at gunpoint,” said Wet’suwet’en Land Defender Eve Saint. “She is the daughter of Hereditary Chief Woos, and her home was on our traditional, unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.”

Rachelle Friesen from Community Peacemaker Teams expressed support for the action, “We can’t stand by and let executives like Siim and Doug continue to ignore the impacts of their decisions while militarized police force through their investments. Across Turtle Island people are rising up to show that we will not back down until the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project and the RCMP leave Wet’suwet’en territory.”

TC Energy is constructing Coastal GasLink, a $6.6 billion dollar 670 km pipeline that would transport fracked gas in northeastern B.C. to a $40 billion LNG terminal on B.C.’s North Coast. The project runs through the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation and has been met with ongoing resistance from the nation’s hereditary leadership who hold authority over traditional territories. Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters have vowed that they will not allow construction to continue on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory without the consent of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs.

RBC is one of the Coastal GasLink pipeline’s primary financiers, and played a leading role in securing the project finance package that would cover up to 80% of the pipeline’s construction costs.

On January 4, 2020, Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs issued an eviction order to Coastal GasLink, which one of the nation’s five clans, the Gidimt’en, enforced in November by blocking roads and preventing pipeline workers from accessing work sites. The eviction orders Coastal GasLink to remove themselves from the territory and not return and highlights that TC Energy’s construction on Wet’suwet’en land ignores the jurisdiction and authority of Hereditary Chiefs and the feast system of governance, which was recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997.

Said Gidimt’en spokesperson Sleydo’ of the ongoing invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, “It’s infuriating, it’s illegal, even according to their own means of colonial law. We need to shut down Canada.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Swanson.

Starting at 5 am Sunday, the clan told workers they had eight hours to “peacefully evacuate” the area before the main road into the Lhudis Bin territory was closed at 1 pm.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by APTN.

COP26, or the UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, had a mission of “Uniting the world to tackle climate change.”  The tackling, however, fell rather short, though countries, in the main, were trying to sell the final understanding as a grand compromise of mature tidiness.  COP26 president Alok Sharma called the outcome “a fragile win”, the outcome of “hard work” and “great cooperation” from the parties.

The Pact is a flurry of words, acknowledging, for instance “the importance of the best available science for effective climate action and policymaking.” Alarm and utmost concern is expressed by the parties at the fact “that human activities have caused around 1.1 °C of global warming to date and that impacts are already being felt in every region”.  There is a stress on “the urgency of enhancing ambition and acting in relation to mitigation adaptation and finance in this critical decade to address gaps between current efforts and pathways in pursuit of the ultimate objective of the Convention and its long-term global goal”.

The pact had gone through a few iterations, stirring interest, sparking hope, even inducing, at points, a giddy optimism.  The first draft had called upon the Parties “to accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil-fuels”.  Its appearance was considered by The New Scientist to be “remarkable” for explicitly mentioning fossil fuels, while Ed King of the European Climate Foundation suggested that it was “the first time fossil fuels have been called out in a draft UN climate decision text”.

But in the final statement, an exit for countries still keen to keep the heart of coal alive, was carved.  The parties might well ensure that technologies and policies would be adopted “to transition towards low-emission energy systems”, scale up the “deployment of clean power generation and energy efficiency measures” but this would also entail “accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.  As this was undertaken, “targeted support” would be directed towards “the poorest and most vulnerable in line with national circumstances and recognizing the need for support towards a just transition”.

And there were those words slipped in with conspiratorial deftness: “phasing down”.  Elastic, open, accommodating to the emitters and the vendors.  A world left to the beholder. The change of language had been encouraged by India, with the support of other coal-dependent states.  The Indian environment and climate minister, Bhupender Yadav, had been less than impressed with the singling out of coal, given the previous text’s deafening silence on natural gas and oil.

The reasons for such omissions were clear enough: countries such as the United States continue to nourish their interest in oil and gas investment.  On November 17, the Biden administration will hold the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in US history, covering 80 million acres off the Gulf of Mexico.  Again, President Joe Biden shows that anything his predecessor, Donald Trump, did, he can do several times better.

After the conclusion of COP26, Yadav merrily declared the summit a success for India, as “we articulated and put across the concerns and ideas of the developing world quite succinctly and unequivocally.”  His country had a lesson for the developed world, fattened by a certain lifestyle that required modification to cope with the climate crisis.

It was the hook upon which the Modi government could fasten a new, lecturing mantra: LIFE, or Lifestyle for Environment, one that valued “moderation over excess.”  “Today,” stated Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the summit, “it’s needed that all of us come together and take forward LIFE as a movement.” Presumably a phasing down movement.

Indian voices in the climate action sector did not shy away from approving the dilution of the language on coal.  Their targets were the misdeeds of the United States and the European Union, who had, according to Aarti Khosla of Climate Trends, failed “to deliver on the promised $100 billion in climate finance”.  Kamal Narayan, CEO of the Integrated Health and Well Being Council, suggested that the use of “phasing down” coal instead of “phasing out” should not be a source of concern, given “the kind of commitment and leadership India has shown in building renewable energy infrastructure”.

While not quite music, the softening approach in the final text was melodious enough for former Australian resources minister Matt Canavan to claim that the coal industry had been victorious in Scotland.  Proudly visible before him in an interview with the Today program was a screen with an unequivocal message: “Glasgow: A Huge Win for Coal.”  An adventurous reading of the Glasgow text was in order.  The agreement had provided “wiggle room” for countries. “Given the fact that the agreement did not say that coal needs to be phased down or taken out, it is a green light for us to build more coal mines.”

For a delightedly cynical Canavan, no country was really taking the agreement seriously, and the likes of India, China and those in South-East Asia were insatiably hungry for coal, with a “demand” that “almost has no limit”.  On Twitter, he reiterated the theme with a call to rent the earth with urgent, patriotic enthusiasm.  “Let’s get digging then and sell more of the best coal in the world to others, and bring millions more people out of poverty.”

Pacific Island states were resigned, disappointed and despairing.  Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama could only entertain some frail optimism, praising the “heroic effort” of the Pacific negotiators at COP26. “The 1.5-degree target leaves Glasgow battered, bruised, but alive.”

Other states were angrily baffled by the subversion evident in the final text.  Mexico’s envoy, Camila Isabel Zepeda Lizama, expressed anger at her country being “sidelined” in a “non-transparent and non-inclusive process”. “We all have remaining concerns but were told we could not reopen the text … while others can still ask to water down their promises.”  A cabal of powers had done its trick.

For activists, there was no death knell to coal, as the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, confidently claimed. “This is no longer a climate conference,” lamented climate change activist Greta Thunberg, the tenured voice of climate change catastrophism.  “This is now a global greenwashing festival.”  And with greenwashing shall come the vanishing, but not before a few more, gasbagging efforts.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The image was published in the Monday, July 26, 1937 edition of the Brownsville Herald. The caption above it read “Spain—One Year.” It referred to the Spanish Civil War.

This artistic expression would have been evocative even without a caption; but, generally speaking, I pay attention. I knew immediately how prophetic this editorial image had been.

The illustration was created to make a point about a tragedy that was playing out. The fascist, conservative-leaning Spanish military had risen up to rid the country of its liberal government, and the carnage was frenzied and ruthless. The coup sparked international outrage. Thousands of progressives from all over the world came to join or support the liberal freedom fighters, including Langston Hughes (black poet, activist and leader of the Harlem Renaissance), Paul Robeson (black athlete, singer, activist and stage and film actor), Ernest Hemingway (whom the struggle inspired to write For Whom the Bell Tolls), George Orwell (author of 1984), etc. All cultural heavyweights, no question. But the fascists were supported by Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Texaco.

If American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had properly leashed Texaco [Parent company is Chevron — Ed]—who fueled the fascist military vehicles and planes (which were furnished by Germany and Italy) on credit, the good guys might have prevailed. And if the Roosevelt Administration had realized that the Spanish Civil War was a proving ground for German tanks and aircraft, and supplied the freedom fighters instead of allowing Texaco to bankroll the fascist transport and bombing enterprises, World War II might have been averted altogether—or at least reduced in scope and scale.

That’s why I saved this illustration.

It’s our waking nightmare.

Time is running out.

Our foe is not a mad dictator or foreign, rogue nation. Our enemies are complacency, apathy, ignorance and greed, and we seem powerless against them. We don’t even seem to be able to act in ways that assure or even improve the chances of our own long-term survival. We are afraid to rock the proverbial boat. We don’t want to get passed up for that next promotion or pay raise, or jeopardize our retirement plans. We cling wishfully to the notion that things can continue on as they always have. We want to have fun and indulge ourselves, and enjoy the fruits of our acquiescence. Perhaps, especially if the end is nigh.

But make no mistake. This illustration depicts our current future and the natural world’s only hope. It’s unpleasant to contemplate, but unequivocally criminal not to address.

We still have flesh on our bones. We have, at the very least, a disappearing window of opportunity, a hope, a slim chance. And if we acknowledge and accept the dangers of climate change, the growing catalog of environmental perils and the certainty of widespread ecosystem collapses, maybe we can finally act and survive, atone and replenish.

Oblivion doesn’t discriminate between Republican or Democrat. Extinction will not be reserved for Liberals or Conservatives. And neither side can solve these issues unilaterally.

Surely you and I can find common ground here.

It’s true, I’ve written fiery diatribes and practically entire books condemning American conservatives, but Republicans and Democrats are both failing us. And the empty skulls draining through the narrowed hourglass passage won’t just be emblazoned with swastikas or peace signs. We will all be represented. The timekeeper has been turned and our existences are piling up. Can you love thine enemy? Can we love our own neighbors? Do we still give a damn about our children’s and grandchildren’s futures? Will the meek inherit the earth or are they actually destroying it?

Can we find common ground in time? Can we join forces before the forces that threaten us all seal our fate?

Can we get our leaders to put a leash on the oil and gas industry? Can we come together and serve our mutually beneficial collective interests?

Fossil fuel apologists will cry foul here, but the industry’s record is clear. They’ve been aware that their products were bad for us and our environment for decades. And they’ve openly and unconscionably lobbied against efforts to clean up their act over the same period. In fact, they’re really no different than Texaco in the late 1930s, embracing fascism, profiting off death and ensuring injustice and widespread destruction.

Forward-thinking folks around the globe are once again joining the good guys, but America, again, is not. Our supposed land of the and the home of the brave is standing on the sidelines. But who are we kidding?

The United States is the most reprehensible fossil fuel profiteer on the planet and, to most of the rest of the world, America appears to be the mad dictator and rogue nation that sentient humanity must stop.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by E.R. Bills.

Last year, President Xi Jinping pledged that China’s carbon-dioxide emissions would peak before 2030, and that the country would become carbon-neutral before 2060.

China has a history of setting ambitious, nearly impossible goals and then achieving them –often before deadline – so this pledge is significant.

Under the Communist Party of China (CPC), Beijing has already created an “economic miracle” in transforming China into the largest economy in the world. It ended extreme poverty while creating the largest middle class in the world.

It has virtually eradicated Covid-19 through non-pharmaceutical methods, while vaccinating up to 20 million people daily, and pledging the largest number of vaccines (2.2 billion) and distributing more than a billion to the rest of the world.

It has also been applying similar focus and national resolve to tackle climate change.

China has the greatest program of adopting renewable energy of any country. It generates more renewable power than North, Central and South America – 42 countries – combined.  It has more solar parks and wind farms than any other country. Last year it established more wind power than the rest of the world combined.

It has more electric vehicles than any other country: it operates 420,000 electric buses, 99% of the world’s total; Shenzhen alone has 16,000 e-buses and 22,000 e-taxis. It aims to have 325 million electric vehicles operating by 2050.

Its high-speed rail network spanning 38,000 kilometers is so extensive and effective that air travel is starting to become obsolete.  No country has as dense, large, and efficient system of clean public transportation and high-speed rail as China.

In addition, China has the greatest carbon-sequestration afforestation program in the world, creating forests the size of Belgium every year. It has doubled its forest coverage to 23% over the past 40 years. Satellite analysis over the past 20 years by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Lab proves that China has contributed more to greening the planet than any other country in the world.

In other words, by almost every sustainability index, China is a world leader – far ahead of the US, for example – and is pioneering a way forward for the planet. It will likely hit its targets ahead of time.

These things are happening because the CPC has written sustainability and ecological development directly into its constitution. This is then implemented into regional and local policy, such as sustainable eco-city mandates, transportation policy, energy infrastructure, and advanced research, as well as dedicated funding for alternative energy development for companies to start up and build clean energy technology.

These commitments exist despite the fact that China’s historical and per capita GHG and CO₂ emissions are a fraction of the world’s total. According to the World Bank, on an annual per capita basis, China’s share is less than half of the United States; its household energy consumption is one-eighth of America’s.

Even more important, here’s a chart showing the cumulative emissions by country.

Cumulative historical amounts matter because CO₂ does not dissipate but accrues in the atmosphere: stocks, not flows, are what matter. In accounting, you look at one’s total accrued debt, not one’s daily credit expenditures, to determine what he or she owes to others. Likewise, you have to look at historically accrued GHG to understand harms, liabilities, and mitigation responsibilities accurately.

Note also, between 14% and 33% of China’s annual GHG emissions are actually the West’s that have been offshored through manufacturing. This way, the West gets to have its cake and eat it too: consume, pollute and destroy the planet, while virtue-signaling and blaming developing countries like China for the cost of Western consumption.

Coal: the real story

Much, too, has been made of China’s coal plants, but the fact is that they are advanced supercritical or ultra-supercritical plants, which means they are much more efficient and cleaner than many of the industrial-era legacy plants of the US.

China has a more sustainable approach along the entire chain of production and consumption. That said, China understands coal as a transitional source that it wants to phase out, except that the US has an explicit military plan to choke off China’s alternative fuel imports through the South China Sea.

China needs to maintain backup capacity in clean coal as it leapfrogs into renewables, which will constitute fully 80% of its energy portfolio by 2060. As for funding overseas coal plants, 87% of that finance comes from the West or Japan, and China has committed not to fund any more foreign coal plants.

With these commitments, China has demonstrated that it is dedicated and committed to both national and global sustainability and carbon neutrality.

Credit where it’s due

Last, most calculations of GHG emissions leave out the US military boot print, the single largest institutional emitter in the world, greater than the combined emissions of 140 nations. Add the cost of endless US wars, and subtract offshored GHG from the West from China’s total, you get a different picture of responsibility for global emissions.

Despite the hypocritical finger-pointing at China at COP26 by the worst polluters, the US and the West, the simple facts refute the lies.

China is a net GHG creditor nation, not a debtor. The Lancet showed that 92% of emissions above the safe level of 350 parts per million can be attributed to the Global North, of which 40% of these emissions are the United States’ alone. By contrast, China is a net creditor nation.

In other words, the atmosphere (atmospheric carrying capacity), a precious global commons, has been colonized and monopolized by the West to the detriment of the rest of the world. In this, the US bears the greatest individual responsibility for the global climate crisis.

Despite all this, China leads in solutions – in technology, policy, transition planning, and implementation.  It is not only pulling its weight, it is showing the world a way forward.

This is in stark distinction to the US, where 25% of Congress members still refuse to believe in human-caused climate change and where the last president claimed that global warming was a “Chinese hoax.” The US was also responsible for disabling the original 1997 Kyoto Protocol by lowering standards, engineering carbon indulgences (“carbon trading”), exempting military emissions, and unjustly trying to offload responsibility to developing countries.

In the recent China-US Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action, the US momentarily dropped its China-bashing, and pledged to strengthen implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Is this about-face a sign of meaningful attempt to work together, or is it a temporary, opportunistic respite for  domestic electoral reasons? Is the US capable of cooperating for the global good, or is this a momentary tactical reset within a general strategy of escalating hostility against China?

The constant demonization of China by the US leadership, not only on climate change, but on all fronts, reinforced through endless echo-chambering in the mainstream media, would suggest that this is not a good-faith change of heart.

For the sake of the planet, sanity must prevail to seek real win-win cooperation on all fronts to tackle the existential threat of our time. China is doing its part by demonstrating what an ecologically sustainable civilization based on common prosperity could look like.

Will the neoliberal West and the US follow suit, learn and cooperate, or will they play at politics and war, doubling down on the suicidal carbon-fueled endgame?

Clear-sighted citizens must challenge the lies, the mendacity, and the escalating demonization, and urge their governments to work for peace and cooperation.

The future of the world depends on it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by K.J. Noh and Michael Wong.

November is National Native American Indian Heritage Month

By Paul K. Haeder

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

– Chief Seattle

It’s sad to gauge the ignorance Central Coast residents possess regarding Native American history and present day activities: education, culture, arts, language and political engagement.

The month of November is mostly the only time K12 students learn about Native Americans, and even then, it is most always in the past tense and lessons about Indians as helpless “wards of the state.”

Most of my students over four decades have had trouble with the concept that hundreds of books — especially textbooks — can lie. That first week of class, we research students’ family lines – those not native come from myriad of places. We then make up a passport of those countries they or their ancestors came from.

Accordingly,  I steal them for a few weeks. Eventually, we see this theft as a process of stealing their own pasts, their histories, and their very identities.

I run into people DAILY in Lincoln County, who most vociferously display ignorance and outright racism when discussing Native Americans.

However, I’ve clashed with this ignorance in other parts of the USA:  Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon.

I’ve confronted college students’ parents who wanted to give my department heads  a piece of their mind about the materials students in my research writing, composition and literature classes were asked to read, view and discuss.

I am embarrassed at the ignorance of who and what Columbus was and represents to many millions of people who are not Anglo Americans. Many college students do not know when the Civil War was fought (or why) or what James Madison or Frederick Douglass did.

Most do not know which Native lands their schools or neighborhoods are built upon. For sure, though, they enter the classroom with this myth of a brave fellow named Christopher Columbus “who discovered America” (sic).

Again, school textbooks have, by omission or otherwise, lied to them.

Today more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprise nearly three million people. Today’s doctors, lawyers, educators, nurses, construction workers and, yes, homeless, sick and substance abusers, are the descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land.

I’ve utilized interviews of, and essays by, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to enlighten students (and de facto, their parents/ the public) on a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.

The original peoples did resist expansionism and genocide. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz takes readers into a deep dive debunking the official founding myth of the United States.

Part of the book and teachings give students a sense of how policy against Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize their territories, displacing or eliminating them.

This gives students who might be watching (or attending) COP26 (climate change summit in Glasgow) a sense of a worldwide effort by Indigenous activists to stop the pollution, water theft, elimination of ancestral lands through outright criminality.

Teaching about Native American history, I can challenge students to reflect upon their future, whereupon the youth understand they must act locally, learn deeply their own regions but also think and respond globally.

Global Witness’s, Last Line of Defense, looks into land defenders around the globe who have been murdered for fighting for their right to water, land and liberty. Teaching about Native American present day issues, we will broach these larger issues.

We don’t have to go far back to see how the fight in the US for Native American sovereignty is a constant reckoning with racist roots:

• In August 2011, environmental and indigenous groups launched a massive campaign designed to press President Obama not to approve Phase IV of the Keystone XL Pipeline project that would run through and near tribal lands, water resources, and place of spiritual significance.
• In 2013, the Havasupai Tribe Files a Lawsuit to Stop the Operation of a Uranium Mine.
• On April 1st, 2016, citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and ally Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota citizens, under the group name “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po” founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access. They are dedicated to stopping the Dakota Access pipeline, illuminating the dangers associated with pipeline spills and the necessity to protect the water resources of the Missouri river.

The educators I have met in the Lincoln County School District who work with the youth of Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians on the history, culture and current struggles of the Central Coast original people are amazing and should be regarded as cultural heroes.

What Local Residents Really Can’t Take

The amount of racism I experienced teaching/subbing just a year in this Coastal County is not so unusual, but still disheartening. This concept of “we beat them, so they have to eat our crow” is how the lowly, the poor speak, and the more educated, well, they have seven syllable words and books 22 people read that say the same things, but in a thousand pages.

Hick, small-town, and backwards? Nah, the great liberal city of Portland now is going after BIPOC.

Yeah, this is a story, November 3, 2021, the blue state, the build back better retrograde land:

“Analysis finds property owners in Portland’s most diverse, gentrifying areas hardest hit by code violation fines”

An analysis by a Portland city watchdog found that complaints about property maintenance have been highly concentrated in the city’s most diverse and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.

The report from the city ombudsman’s office made public Wednesday showed that neighborhoods with some of the fastest-rising home prices, and those with the most racially diverse residents, tend to also face the most financial consequences for property violations like overgrown grass, trash in a yard or a deteriorating building.

But back to the Native American Indian Heritage Month. I have countless fights with co-workers, members of the public, students, and more. Countless. As if I am the first asshole in their lives to put up a resistance to their racism. It is a deep racism. All the way to the core, and while I don’t pull my revolutionary anti-USA, anti-Military, anti-Anything-to-do-with-capitalism rank on them immediately, I do not stand for insipid ignorance that pushes racism as a way to delineate the victors and the losers. Again poor white trash, or rich white trash, complaining about China, about billionaires, about misrepresentative government for, by, because of the rich, the lobbyists, on both sides of the red-blue manure pile. Yet, they do not see themselves now as the losers in this billionaire’s game. Nope. Every social safety net, every infrastructure net, every security net, frayed, cut, burned, and they still believe that the Indians, or the Africans, or whomever, if they are under the thumb of this or that white great savior, so be it. But, again, these whites losing everything, including their Oxi lives, their coronary arterial clogged lives, but they do not see that as “well, we are the losers in this rich man’s/oligarchy system, so shut up and take the comeuppance delivered . . . just like we think the conquered tribes should too.”

Old Teddy — Swing a Big Racist Stick, Roosevelt, oh, that family!

When Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901, he already had a long legacy of animosity toward American Indians.

Seventeen years earlier, Roosevelt, then a young widower, left New York in favor of the Dakotas, where he built a ranch, rode horses and wrote about life on the frontier. When he returned to the east, he famously asserted that “the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” (source)

And, so, what does this racist’s offspring have to say? You got it, once a racist from their loins, always a millionaire racist with loins to breed more and more racists:

“He was a man of his times,” said Tweed Roosevelt, a great-grandson to Roosevelt and interim director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. “In his presidency, he wanted the Native Americans to experience the American dream, but to do that by assimilating. The Indian population had been shrinking for a long time, and he believed that if they assimilated, that meant prosperity for everyone.” (source)

And Build Back Better Biden, oh, man, 2021, and his level of enlightenment, whew:

There’s no federal environmental impact statement on this project, which is why we want Joe Biden to stop it. I mean, they stole 5 billion gallons of water, fracked 28 rivers out, and then they have this broken aquifer losing 100,000 gallons a day of water. They have no idea how to fix this stuff, since January. You know, it’s really horrible up here. So, you know, Enbridge has been trying to rush to get this online before the court will rule against them, because, generally, courts have not ruled in favor of pipelines. That’s the status that we have seen, you know, in the federal court ruling on the DAPL, where the federal court ordered them to close down. This is the same company. Enbridge was 28% of DAPL. And when the federal court ordered them to close down the pipe, they said no. When the state of Michigan ordered them to close down a pipe this last May, they said no. So they’re just trying to continue their egregious behavior.

It’s so tragic that, you know, on one hand, the Biden administration is like, “We are going to have Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but we’re still going to smash you in northern Minnesota and smash the rest of the country.” Same thing, you know, Klobuchar and Smith, the two Minnesota senators, shameful their lack of courage, not only for Indigenous people but for the planet, you know?

When I left there to go to the second gathering of another couple thousand people closing down the line at the headwaters of the Mississippi, shortly after that is when they came in with the helicopter and kicked up this sandstorm so everybody could get all beat up by sand. And I just want to put out: That’s a federal agency; that’s not a state agency that came in. Most of the cops have been just financed by Enbridge, but that helicopter was financed by Biden. So, we have some really — we’re really concerned that Department of Homeland Security would come in and basically assault Indigenous people in our own homeland.

— Winona LaDuke

And this is what a strong advocate for Native American truth gets in the USA: You will have to read between the crap lines of Mother Jones, if you want the entire story — Churchill is 73 now,  “I Never Claimed I Was F***ing Sitting Bull“:

Standing before the crowd, the 69-year-old Churchill cut the image of the bomb-throwing radical—“a traitor,” as O’Reilly put it—that he’d been cultivating his entire life: 6-foot-5 in cowboy boots, with a long gray-black ponytail cinched with a black band and his waist lassoed with a beaded belt. He grit his teeth while talking, like he was chewing tobacco, and spat out his words with disgust. “American jockstrap sniffers,” he called his critics, in particular the academics who’d picked apart his scholarship and helped get him fired. He compared them to SS officers, to apparatchiks helping the trains of a supposedly corrupt University of Colorado system run on time. “That’s what Eichmann did,” he said. The crowd gasped with delight.

Churchill’s penchant for this comparison, ad-Nazium, runs deep. Each of his 18 books is a brick in a monumental project dedicated to proving that Native Americans were subjected to a genocide comparable to the Holocaust. The day after September 11, he published an essay describing the stockbrokers and technocrats who died in the Twin Towers as “little Eichmanns.” Right-wing media was incensed: The O’Reilly Factor aired 41 segments on him. The Weekly Standard tagged him “the worst professor in America.”

Back on the highway, Churchill stomped on the pedal and gunned it to 80 mph. He lit his last Pall Mall. “I’m only human,” he said, as the city he no longer recognized gave way to farmland and snowy peaks. He went even faster—85, 90.

It was as though he were trying to outrun Boulder, but without a clear destination in mind. The seatbelt warning screamed. “It hurts,” he said. “I’ve been hurt. No one said the fucking process of decolonization was going to be painless.”

[Ward Churchill in 2006, before he was fired from the University of Colorado. Thomas Boyd/Zuma]

So, any National Indigenous People’s month should be National Indigenous People’s Year, full of reparations, full of the white man’s own burdens cast away on some Gates or Soros or Trump Island.

And of course, it is Heineken, brothers and sisters. Of course, AMLO, el presidente de Mejico, is not socialist. Wine, soda pop, booze, beer.

In front of  the cameras of a national newspaper, he showed the arid land where there used to be fruit trees:

“All of this disappeared due to lack of water; because we don’t have enough water.  We do not have a permit to extract water with a well, and we would like Blanca Jimenez, the head of CONAGUA, to consider us before the large water consuming companies. Heineken has more than 12 wells, and the aquifer is overexploited.”

The Kumiai people don’t have water to plant. Óscar recently participated in an assembly and in organizational meetings for the self-determination of the Kumiai people; to defend the water against the constant assault of the corporations. He was always on the lookout to prevent wineries, foreigners or avaricious locals, (he called them “vivillos”), from taking land away from the community. (source)

This has been going on throughout Mexico’s history with those drug-dealing and neoliberal and thieving last six presidents — 36 years since they serve 6 year terms. Since 2017, Mexicali resistance groups have been defending the capital of Baja California’s water supply against foreign investment brewery Constellation Brands. Booze all with these double dealings and contracts with the state government of Baja California and its governor Francisco “Kiko” Vega.

Of course, Constellation Brands is a Fortune 500 company, an international producer and marketer of beer, wine and spirits with recognizable imported brands such as Corona Extra, Corona Light, Modelo Especial, Modelo Negra, Pacifico and Ballast Point.

Ahh, not just booze — Coca-Cola, FedEx, Walmart, Samsung and Hyundai are among the more than 400 companies stealing water and polluting rivers and water systems.

Baja California governor accuses big US companies of water theft

Man, is this coming close to home — since 1981 when I was a reporter in El Paso, the entire black lagoons and multiple strange diseases from pollutants coming from the transnational twin plants (maquiladoras) got many of us militarized against these pigs of profits. Babies born with part of their brains outside their skulls. Flesh eating parasites. More and more cancers. This is the gift that keeps on giving in capitalism, and that was 40 years ago.

And it is, of course, worse: “That corruption contributed to chronic under-funding of the state water agency, known as the Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana or CESPT, Bonilla said. To cover up the water theft, the auditor says, some companies also installed their own clandestine drainage systems to illegally discharge contaminated water into Tijuana’s already strained storm drains and canal.”

Here’s a student at Cal State Fullerton:

In a 2016 letter to Coahuila state Governor Rubén Moreira, former Mayor Leoncio Martínez Sánchez of the municipality of Zaragoza wrote, “We have no water for human consumption.”

The ache I feel from that single sentence grows in addition to anticipating the worst to come once the brewery completes its Mexicali plant. There is not one community in that city I don’t worry about. Constellation Brands damaged Zaragoza, so who’s to say it won’t hurt my home as well?

I have yet to see people move away from beers like Modelo, mainly my peers at Cal State Fullerton. — “Column: Modelo’s time is up after shady business”  by Rebecca Mena 

So yes, this is National Indigenous People’s Year, Decade, Century. As always, it’s about the beer, the coffee, the sugar, the needless shit of tourism and the rich and the disposable income fucks:

In October 2019, the Mexican Association of Beer Makers (ACERMEX), an organization similar to the United States’ Brewers Association, estimated the country would surpass 1,000 craft beer companies by the start of 2020, many of whom are based in the state of Baja California. But this persistent rise of beer businesses has been fraught with roadblocks, forcing scrappy entrepreneurs to fight tooth and nail to operate openly.

These obstacles range from a near-complete stranglehold of the market by Anheuser-Busch InBev–owned Grupo Modelo and Heineken-owned Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma to prohibitively expensive import taxes on ingredients. When asked what’s stifling Baja breweries’ growth, Collin Corrigan, a San Diego native and founder of Ensenada’s Cervecería Transpeninsular, just laughs. “Do you have a couple days to listen? I could go on for hours.”

So that Dutch company is still the colonizer, and those indigenous heroes are murdered so the 12 wells that this amazing man was protesting can continue to pump while thousands of people can’t grow bean, squash, tomatoes, and more. Ownership of  Heineken Holding N.V is listed on the NYSE Euronext Amsterdam. Its single investment is Heineken International. It is majority owned by L’Arche Green N.V an investment vehicle of the Heineken family and the Hoyer family. All in the family, in MEXICO, Baja!

Native Americas Month, no?  Turtle Island. All of the Americas.

[Óscar Eyraud Adams: A Warrior Who Defended the Water of the Kumiai People]

And then, the white guy (Louis Wilson, Global Witness senior adviser) with the British accent tells us today on Amy “Soros” Goodman this —

Absolutely. So, the stories that we hear — and they’re each, in each instance, a tragedy, but as you look at the global picture, you see a common thread: The threats against environmental activists are caused by the same forces that are driving the climate crisis. So, the same force that is pulling minerals out of the ground, that is felling trees, that is polluting our air, is also causing violence and threats against activists.

So, the case you’ve just referenced in Mexico was just a month prior to Fikile’s death. An activist called Óscar Eyraud in Tecate, in northern Mexico, had been protesting for years water access. His community, an Indigenous community there, had been denied access to traditional water resources, at the same time as a big corporation, Heineken, was granted additional access by the local government. Óscar was murdered on September 22nd. And nobody, I think, would suggest that Heineken directly organized that killing, but it’s clear that they created the conditions that made that murder possible. And it’s very difficult to see that murder, or indeed many of the other 227 murders, taking place without that resource extraction by big companies.

Link

And this is the stuff of Americans, of the consumers, the consummate consumers and thieves of cultures, both indigenous and those in conquered lands of their own doing.  “Baja Beer Is Crushing It — The craft beer scene in Baja is emerging from San Diego’s shadow and coming into its own” by Beth Demmon February 10, 2020 — San Diego Magazine

This is the heartlessness of the American and Canadian and European and Australian and elites in all the other capitalist strongholds scene. Cancel Culture, for sure — no more people of the land, no more farmers of the land, no more cultures of the land, no more unique tribes and communities of the land, no more languages and arts of those people. It is all Edward Bernays, Madison Avenue and the other bourgeois sickness that is the “scene.”

And this, of course: “Every Monday night in the small community of Shiprock, New Mexico, a group of young Navajo leaders meet to decide how they will help their community. For more than seven years, the Northern Diné Youth Committee has worked to give youth opportunities to directly make changes within their community. But while the NDYC works to make changes, many members also consider their own futures, commitments to family and the world outside of the Shiprock. While they love their community, they all must consider their options both on and off the reservation.”

So there you have it — Heineken, oh, the innocence of this Dutch Company and the Family, man, the Family.

And relevant for COP26, the green porn, man, killing native communities, one activist after another. The horror, man, the horror of it all.

“Heineken Mexico has been present in Baja California for 76 years, and represents employment for 2,200 citizens, which are added to 100 employees, who operate in a brewery, in nine distribution centers and in continuous improvement,” said Escobedo.

On the other hand, Oscar Galvez, General Director of Corporate Affairs of Heineken Mexico, stated that the company’s commitment is based on the sustainable development of the country and Baja California. Proof of this is that since 2015 the company began the transition from a linear economy to a circular economy and implemented ecological chillers in which 98% of its components are recycled or reused and achieved a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.

It is worth noting that Baja California ranks fourth in beer production in Mexico and third in job generation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The language was promoted through sponsored imagery in Times Square, New York, with advertising space purchased by a crowdfunding campaign of considerable success.  Billboards featured the prime minister as a “Coal-o-phile Dundee”, mercilessly mocked Australia’s climate policies and responses to the murderously scorching bushfires of 2020.

It had begun modestly: a target of $12,500 to fund a few billboards in Glasgow during COP26 as part of the project JokeKeeper: Shaming Australia’s climate inaction, described as, “Subversive comedy to ridicule fossil fuel supporting parties in the upcoming federal election.”

But the contributions gushed in, passing $160,000.  It was then that Ilic began to think even more boldly. On October 14, he announced that JokeKeeper was rolling “into New York City on the way to COP26 in Glasgow”.  New Yorkers were advised to head down to Times Square “to see our billboard wrapping the Marriot Marquis for a full 10 minutes.”  It also included a 3min20s loop viewable 3 times. “So you can keep track of it all we’ve made you a handy Bingo Card.” In simple terms, Ilic had secured a 10-minute slot on the 77-foot “Godzilla” billboard.  The headline parody: “Visit Australia, we’re rich in wind, sunshine and climate denial”.  For good measure, it features a kangaroo ablaze and koalas perched in a tree. Hug them before they vanish.

On CNN, Ilic was also ablaze.  “We have a PM who at the height of the bushfires took a holiday in Hawaii.”  Morrison was the sort of fellow who “always runs away from a national crisis.  We have to lead our leaders.”

Morrison is certainly one to run away from a certain target towards the sunset of vague aspiration.  His mantra of “technology not taxes” is one such example.  While few would disagree that technology will play a vital role in reducing carbon emissions, stimulating its development can come from, as Michael Keating puts it, implementing “policies to first encourage this innovation and then the take-up of the resulting new technologies.”

To aid what is essentially a non-policy, Morrison has his truculent junior Coalition partners.  The Nationals portray themselves as the party of opposition, despite being part of the government.  Former political advisor John Menadue sums up the somewhat perverse situation by remarking that a party which draws in only 5 percent of the national vote “is holding Australia to ransom on climate change.”

In a truly absurd spectacle, National Party politicians pontificate in favour of the fossil fuel industry, seeking a socialist-styled underwriting of its workings and policies that would chastise banks for not funding policies that rent the earth.  Their traditional base – the farming constituency – risks suffering the most from this suicidal adventurism.

Certain figures in the mining industry can only delight in such committed subservience.  Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest individual, has become the lumpy Boadicea of climate change denial, funding think-thanking endeavours that seek to deny anthropogenic change while keeping her influence strong with the Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, former resources minister Matt Canavan and the current Attorney-General Michaelia Cash.

As owner of Hancock Prospecting, her interests in coal are global and unsparing, featuring such projects as an expansion into North America.  Her ventures into Canada’s Rocky Mountains have so far been frustrated by the governments of Alberta and the federal government but that has not stopped her from taking them to court.  She was undeterred by the 679-page report by the Joint Review Panel led by the Alberta Energy Regulator and the federal Impact Assessment Agency on her proposed Grassy Mountain project.  The authors had taken a dim view of potential effects of selenium pollution, threats to water quality in the Oldman River basin and dangers posed to the cutthroat trout.  The Australian, however, remains a devotee of both fossil fuel exploitation and litigation.

Earlier this month, Rinehart revealed to students attending her old Perth school St. Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls, how the recipient of a wealthy mining fortune can diminish science and embrace a stubborn parallel reality.  In her 16-minute long video showing a modest command of language and much footage of herself at school, she wishes to set the record straight on the lunacy of climate change, though the ABC tells us that only portions of the production were shown to those tender school minds.  “Rationale should ask, why does the media in general and those they influence now call for reducing carbon?   More questions spring to mind.  Please be very careful about information spread on an emotional basis, or tied to money, or egos or power seekers.”  A marked, if unintendedly accurate self-portrait, a warning for all those around her, if ever there was one.

Rinehart continues her lesson, reflecting on an education free of propaganda (because Australian school curricula were obviously free of that) and full of analytical thrust. “It concerns me greatly, that the current generation of school leavers and attendees, too often miss such important basics.  As too often propaganda erodes these critical foundations.”  Rinehart, it should be remembered, has a psychological profile befitting many a dysfunctional Roman emperor, with demanding and suspicious children to boot.

With such characters in the fossil fuel consortium, Ilic has his dark comedic scripts written for him.  The billboard effort in Times Square has as its target something the German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace: the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.  And cheap grace is precisely the sort of thing the Australian delegation at Glasgow will be offering in spades and tailings.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Today is Indigenous Peoples Day. Across the country, a growing number of cities and states are recognizing this day in place of the traditional Columbus Day. This change reflects the growing awareness that holidays like Columbus Day are used to rewrite the past and uphold institutions of white supremacy, racism and settler colonialism. As Justin Teba writes, in Albuquerque, they issued a proclamation to recognize this as a day “ to reflect upon the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples on this land.”

I can only write from the perspective of a settler, but I do want to highlight a few of the current struggles. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves about the history of the founding of the United States, to join in struggle with those who are oppressed and to transform our society to end these devastating institutions.

Increased attention to the finding of children’s graves at residential boarding schools has brought the reality of the American Genocide to the forefront. Residential boarding schools for indigenous children started in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a way to erase indigenous knowledge and culture. These were brutal places where children were killed through violence and neglect. The last schools closed in the 1990’s so there are still survivors who are speaking out about their experiences.

On September 30, Canadians recognized the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Canada established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission following a class action lawsuit settlement that held hearings to gather testimony from 2008 to 2014 about the residential schools. They heard from 6,500 people. Establishing the national day to raise awareness was one of the recommendations, but there is still a long way to go to repair the relationships between indigenous peoples and settlers.

The Tulalip tribe in Everett, Washington also participated in the national day on September 30 with a vigil and speak out. They called it Residential Boarding School Awareness Day or Orange Shirt Day because one survivor Phyllis Webstad’s favorite orange shirt was taken from her on the first day of school. It wasn’t until 1978, through the Indian Child Welfare Act, that indigenous parents gained the right to keep their children out of those schools. Now that act is under threat of being overturned by the US Supreme Court and big oil is behind that attack.

That big oil would go after indigenous children is a response to the effectiveness of indigenous leadership in the fight to protect the planet. A recent report led by the Indigenous Environmental Network found that just in the past ten years, indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects “stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.”

Texas lobbyists are behind the effort to end the Indian Child Welfare Act too. Perhaps this is also a response to indigenous organizing. For example, the Karankawa People, who once controlled 300 miles of the Texas coastline and were thought to be extinct, have made a comeback and are fighting the oil company, Moda Midstream, that owns their land and is trying to expand its export facility there.

Another current indigenous-led struggle against fossil fuel infrastructure is the fight to stop Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. Activists have taken direct action all year to stop construction. There have been nearly 900 people arrested. Despite their efforts, it looks like Canadian tar sands will soon be flowing through that pipeline, but activists are not giving up, just as the fight to stop the Dakota Access pipeline continues. Just last week, Water Protectors confronted Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison at a public event.

This week, they are in Washington, DC with the Build Back Fossil Free campaign to demand that President Biden take actions consistent with his words. They are holding actions each day to force President Biden to choose a side, the people and planet or the fossil fuel industries. The Biden administration recently opened up 78 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil drilling saying that the Code Red report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was not “sufficient cause” to halt the drilling. Environmental groups are uniting to sue the administration over this. The Biden administration could also halt the expansion of oil exports from Texas, but it is not doing that. I spoke with activist Diane Wilson on Clearing the FOG during her hunger strike against the export expansion.

The Indigenous Environmental Network is also highly critical of the Biden infrastructure plan. They write:

Specifically, we demanded Congress oppose false ‘clean energy’ solutions in the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), include set-asides for frontline communities, and include both Justice40 and climate standards in the Build Back Better Act. Unfortunately, these important requests and demands were undermined through a political process intentionally designed to silence the voices of impacted communities while maintaining the status quo.

Indigenous voices and leadership are also being excluded from the upcoming COP 26 meetings this November in Glasgow, Scotland. As the extreme events of this year demonstrate, we have no time to lose to act on the climate crisis. Those who are most impacted and who have the knowledge and skills to protect the planet must be at the forefront of the talks and decision-making process. Efforts are underway to create a People’s Climate Conference to make recommendations to the COP26 meetings.

Another indigenous-led effort is the global campaign to force banks to stop investing in new and current fossil fuel infrastructure. They are also focused on the COP26 meetings with their global call to action. Many people are calling for the creation of a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty by the United Nations. While the UN did not take action on that during the recent general assembly, the Human Rights Council did recently pass a resolution declaring that access to a healthy environment is a human right.

Going after the fossil fuel industry is a great risk. Activists have faced violent repression, murder, incarceration and retaliation. Activists are labeled as eco-terrorists, a designation that should be used for those who are destroying the planet, not for those who are trying to save it. This past week, human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who represented an indigenous community in Ecuador that won a $9.5 billion dollar settlement against the Chevron oil company, was sentenced to six months in jail after more than two years on house arrest. The United Nations Human Rights Commissioner declared that the treatment of Donziger violates international law and ordered the United States to free him, but the judge didn’t listen. That case is rife with court abuse.

Not going after the fossil fuel industries carries an even greater risk – mass extinctions, environmental devastation, extreme weather events and an uninhabitable future. Around the world, people are fighting to address these crises. Indigenous peoples, who are currently protecting 80% of the planet’s biodiversity, are fundamental as leaders in this struggle. This Indigenous Peoples Day, let’s recognize that we must end the attacks on indigenous peoples, support their work and create a new world that puts people and the planet over profit.

Nicaragua is one country that is demonstrating this is possible. Through its investment in efforts to create food sovereignty using agroecological methods, clean energy and returning land to indigenous ownership, Nicaragua demonstrates what a livable future can look like. It is up to us to do the same everywhere.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Margaret Flowers.

For 48 hours last month, a small group of progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives succeeded in sabotaging a measure to pick up the bill for Israel to replenish its Iron Dome interception missiles. The Iron Dome system was developed by Israel, with generous financial backing from successive US administrations, in the wake of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Today, it ostensibly serves to protect Israel from short-range, largely improvised rockets fired intermittently out of Gaza.

Supplies of the Iron Dome missiles, each of which cost at least $50,000, were depleted back in May, when Israel triggered widespread confrontations with Palestinians by intensifying its settlement of Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem’s Old City and violently raiding al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian militant groups fired large numbers of rockets out of Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel for the past 15 years. Iron Dome intercepted the rockets before they could land in Israel.

The group of progressive Democrats, known popularly as the Squad, scotched an initial move by their congressional leadership to include the $1bn assistance to Israel in US budget legislation. But the money for Iron Dome was quickly reintroduced as a stand-alone bill that passed overwhelmingly, with 420 votes in favour and nine against. Two representatives, one of them the prominent Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,  voted “present” – counting effectively as an abstention.

This week, the furore moved to the Senate when Rand Paul, a strong Republican critic of US foreign aid, refused to nod through the bill and thereby give it unanimous assent. It will now need to go through a more complicated legislative process.

The latest funding for Iron Dome comes in addition to the $3.8bn Israel receives annually from the US in military aid, which has made Israel the biggest recipient, by far, of such largesse. Putting the new tranche of Iron Dome aid into perspective, it is twice what Washington contributes annually to Nato’s budget.

The previous administration, under former President Donald Trump, turned US funding for Nato into a big domestic controversy, arguing that the US was shouldering too much of the burden. But there has been barely a peep about the massive military bill the US is footing for Iron Dome.

Debate stifled

The Squad’s main achievement in launching its brief blocking move was to force out into the open the fact that the US is paying for Israel’s stockpile of missiles. Like the House leadership, the Israel lobby had hoped the money could be transferred quietly, without attracting attention.

What little debate did ensue related to whether Israel really needs US military assistance. A few commentators asked why Washington was kitting out one of the richer countries on the planet with missiles in the midst of a pandemic that has hit the US economy hard.

But the lobby quickly stifled a far more important debate about whether the US should be encouraging Israel’s use of Iron Dome at all. Instead, US funding for the interception missile system was presented as being motivated solely by a desire to save lives.

In attacking Paul’s decision to block the bill, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Congress, AIPAC, argued this week that his move would “cost innocent lives, make war more likely, and embolden Iran-backed terrorists”.

It was precisely the claim that the Iron Dome is defensive that appeared to push Ocasio-Cortez, usually seen as one of the few US politicians openly critical of Israel, into a corner, leading to her abstention.

Images from the House floor showed her tearful and being given a hug by another representative after the vote. She later attributed her distress in part to how Iron Dome funding had a polarising effect at home, noting that the House bill was a “reckless” move to “rip our communities apart”.

That was an apparent reference to factional tensions within the Democratic Party between, on one side, many Jewish voters who back what they see as Israel’s right to defend itself and, on the other, many Black and Hispanic voters who think it is wrong for the US to financially support Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Some saw her indecision as evidence of her ambitions to run for the Senate, where positions critical of Israel would be more likely to damage her prospects of success.

Expiring in silence

In Israel, and in Jewish communities beyond, the conversation about US support for Iron Dome is even more detached from reality. The nine US representatives who voted against were roundly castigated for willing the deaths of Israelis by voting to deny them protection from rockets fired from Gaza. In predictable fashion, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called those who voted against “either ignorant or antisemitic”.

But some liberals took the argument in a different, even more fanciful direction. They called the Squad “hypocrites” for voting against the $1bn funding, arguing that Iron Dome missiles not only save Israelis, but Palestinians too. One Haaretz commentator went so far as to claim that Palestinians were actually the main beneficiaries of the Iron Dome system, arguing: “The fact Israel has a defensive shield against rocket attacks makes a wide-scale military operation with thousands of – mainly Palestinian – casualties less likely.”

Of course, there is the small question of whether Israel has indeed been “forced” into its attacks on Gaza. It is precisely its military superiority – paid for by the US – that has freed it to carry out those massive attacks, in which large numbers of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, are killed, rather than negotiate an end to its decades-long occupation.

Just as in life, bullies resort to intimidation and violence because they feel no need to compromise. But even more to the point, Iron Dome is central to Israel’s efforts to keep Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, entirely subjugated and stripped of any power to resist.

With Israel patrolling tiny Gaza’s land borders and coast, sealing off the enclave from the rest of the world, Palestinians have few options to protest their slow starvation – or to gain attention for their plight. Israeli snipers have fired on Palestinians staging unarmed, mass protests at the fence caging them in, killing and wounding thousands. The Israeli navy fires on or sinks Palestinian boats, including fishing boats, in Gaza’s waters if they stray more than a few kilometres from the shore.

Iron Dome, far from being defensive, is another weapon in Israel’s armoury to keep Palestinians subdued, impoverished, corralled and silent. For those claiming to want peace in Israel-Palestine, the extra funding for Iron Dome just made that prospect even less likely. As long as Palestinians can be made to slowly expire in silence – their plight ignored by the rest of the world – Israel is free to seize and colonise yet more of what was supposed to become a future Palestinian state.

Systems of domination

But there is another reason why Ocasio-Cortez should have voted against the Iron Dome resupply, rather than tearfully abstaining – and that is for all our sakes, not just the sake of Palestinians.

The US foots the bill for Iron Dome, just as it does for most of Israel’s other weapons development, for self-interested reasons: because it helps its own war industries, as Washington seeks to maintain its military dominance globally.

With western populations less willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters for the sake of modern wars, which seem less obviously related to defence and more transparently about the control of key resources, the Pentagon has worked overtime to reframe the public debate.

It is hard to disguise its global domination industries as anything but offensive in nature. This is where Israel has played a critical role. Not only has Israel helped to develop weapons systems like Iron Dome, but – despite being a nuclear-armed, belligerent, occupying state – it has leveraged its image as a vulnerable refuge for the long-persecuted Jewish people. It has been able to make more plausible the case that these domination systems really are defensive.

In recent decades, Israel has developed and tested drone technology to surveil and assassinate Palestinians, which has proved invaluable in the US and UK’s long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel’s latest “swarm” technology – making drones even more lethal – may prove particularly attractive to the Pentagon.

Israel has also been the ideal partner for the Pentagon in testing and refining the battlefield use of the new generation of F-35 fighter planes, the most expensivemilitary product in US history. Uniquely, Israel has been allowed to customise the jet, adapting its capabilities in new, unforeseen ways.

Bowing to US hegemony

The F-35’s ultimate role is to make sure major rival airforces, such as Russia’s and China’s, are elbowed out of the skies. And Israel has been at the forefront of developing and testing a variety of missile interception systems, such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which are intended to destroy incoming projectiles, from short-range rockets to long-range missiles.

Last December, Israel announced it had successfully launched Iron Dome interception missiles for the first time from the sea. Reports noted that the US arms maker Raytheon and the US defence department were involved in the tests. That is because, behind the scenes, the US is not only paying for the development and testing of these systems; it is also guiding the uses to which they will be put. The Pentagon has bought two Iron Dome batteries, which, according to Israeli media, have been stationed in US military bases in the Gulf.

The US has its own interception systems under development, and it is unclear which it will come to rely on most heavily. But what is evident is that Washington, Israel and their Gulf allies have Iran in their immediate sights. Any country that refuses to bow to US global hegemony could also be targeted.

US interest in these missiles is not defensive. They are fundamental to its ability to neutralise the responses of rivals to either a US military attack, or more general moves by the US to dominate territory and control resources.

Just as Palestinians have been besieged by Israel for 15 years, the US and Gulf states may hope one day to deal a knockout blow to Iran’s oil exports. Washington would be able to ignore current concerns that Tehran could retaliate by firing on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz or on hostile Middle Eastern capitals. If Iran’s missiles can be intercepted, it will be incapable of defending itself against increasing economic or military aggression from the US or its neighbours.

Less safe world

Following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, there has been plenty of naive talk that the US is seeking a diminished role in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ultimately, the US is seeking global dominance at arm’s length – through a combination of long-range military power, cyber warfare, robotics and artificial intelligence – that it hopes will lift the restraints imposed by American casualties and domestic opposition.

Israel’s playbook with regards to Palestinians is one that elites in Washington trust can be exported to other corners of the globe, and even outer space. Interception missiles lie at the heart of that strategic vision, as a way to neutralise and silence all resistance. This is why no one who cares about a less violent, exploitative and dangerous world should be indifferent to, or neutral on, congressional funding for Iron Dome.

Missile interception systems are the face not of a more defensive, safer world, but of a far more nakedly hostile, aggressive one.

• First published at Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The access road to Coastal GasLink’s drill site at the Wedzin Kwa river was destroyed. Blockades have been set up and sites have been occupied to stop the drilling under the sacred headwaters that nourish the Wet’suwet’en Yintah and all those within its catchment area. Cas Yikh and supporters have gained control of the area and refuse to allow this destruction to continue.

Days ago CGL destroyed our ancient village site, Ts’elkay Kwe. When Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ attempted to monitor the CGL archaeological team and contest the destruction of Wet’suwet’en cultural heritage she was aggressively intimdated by CGL security guards. Tensions have continued to rise on the Yintah as CGL pushes a reckless and destructive construction schedule with the support of private security and the RCMP.

Now, CGL is ready to begin drilling beneath our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa. We know that this would be disastrous, not only for Wet’suwet’en people, but for all living beings supported by the Wedzin Kwa, and for the communities living downstream. Wedzin Kwa is a spawning ground for salmon and a critical source of pristine drinking water.

“our way of life is at risk. Wedzin Kwa is the river that feeds all of Wet’suwet’en territory and gives life to our nation.” -Sleydo’, Gidimte’en Checkpoint Spokesperson

As Coastal Gaslink Continues to trespass, we will do everyting in our power to protect our waters and to uphold our laws. Gidimt’en Checkpoint has issued a call for support, asking people to travel to Cas Yikh Territory to Stand with them.”

Video Update from Yintah_access

Warriors Watch Over Wedzin Kwa

“Sleydo’ and Shay speak about the importance of defending Wedzin Kwa. Every day is a fight when you commit to living an Indigenous way of life. They have been trying to kill us since contact. What they haven’t learned yet and what Sleydo’ articulates so perfectly is:

“Our warrior spirits are stronger than they’ll ever be”

Our ancestors fought for our yintah, we have stories of great wars, and we will continue their work.

Today there was another arrest, after release the person was sent to get medical attention in an ambulance. There are no broken bones thankfully and the person is resting comfortably tonight.

We anticipate more RCMP tomorrow. We ask anyone thinking of coming out to support locally please come early in the day, we will have coffee on and a place for you to gather. Check in at 44 km. Covid protocols in place, please bring a mask and a mug.

For more information visit yintahaccess.com.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!… Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination …

— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Ch 25

The world is threatened with environmental disaster and capitalists hope to make a killing off of it.  Fossil fuel (FF) companies claim they are “environmentally friendly.”  Other corporations promote nuclear energy, hydro-power (dams), and solar and wind power as the best energy alternatives.

Yet environmentalists have known for decades that reduction of useless and harmful energy is the “greenest” form of energy available.  Over 50 years ago, the first Earth Day recognized this with the slogan “Reduce; Reuse; Recycle.”  Today, corporate “environmentalism” chants “Recycle; Occasionally Reuse; and, Never Utter ‘Reduce.’”  Even mentioning the word “reduce” can be met with howls of derision that “Reduction means ‘austerity,’” as if any type of collective self-control would plunge the world into depths of suffering.

This can lead to a belief that supporting “alternative energy” (AltE) allows everyone on Earth to pursue a lifestyle of endless consumerism.  It avoids the real problem, which is capitalism’s uncontrollable drive for economic growth.

Overproduction for What Purpose?

Acceptance of consumerism hides the twin issues that AltE creates its own disastrous outcomes and that lowering the amount of harmful production would actually improve the quality of life.  Simply decreasing the amount of toxic poisons required for overproduction would cut down on cancers, brain damage, birth defects and immune system disorders.

No one would suffer from the massive toxins that would be eliminated by halting the manufacture of military armaments or disallowing the design of electrical devices to fall apart.  Very few would be inconvenienced by discontinuing lines of luxury items which only the 1% can afford to purchase.

Food illustrates of how lowering production has nothing to do with worsening our lives.  Relying on food produced by local communities instead of food controlled by international corporations would mean eliminating the processing of food until it loses most nutritional value.  It would mean knowing many of the farmers who grow our food instead of transporting it over 2000 miles before it reaches those who eat it.  It would cut out advertising hyper-sugarfied food to kids.

When I first began studying environmentalism over 30 years ago, I remember hearing that if a box of corn flakes costs $1, then 1¢ went to the farmer and $.99 went to the corporations responsible for processing the corn, packaging it, transporting the package and advertising it.  Reduction does not mean “doing without” – it means getting rid of the crap.

Closely linked to food is health.  My book on Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution points out that the island nation’s life expectancy is longer and infant mortality lower than that in the US while it spends less than 10% per person of what the US does.  Reducing energy devoted to health care does not mean less or worse care.  It means getting rid of the gargantuan unnecessary and expensive components which engulf health care in capitalist society.

Electric vehicles (EVs) embody collective environmental amnesia.  Once upon a time, not too many decades ago, people wrote of walkable/bikeable communities and some even put their dreams to the test.  Well … crush that dream.  Since AltE has become a fad, the idea of redesigning urban space is being dumped so that every person can have at least one EV.  Memory of environmental conservation has fallen into oblivion.

Not Getting Better All the Time

Despite the hype about AltE, capitalist use of energy is expanding, not contracting.  We are constantly told to buy the latest electronic gadget – and the time period between successive versions of gadgets gets shorter and shorter.   AltE exacerbates the crisis of capitalist energy by distracting society from practicing conservation.

The Bitcoin Ponzi scheme reveals the expansion of energy in the service of uselessness.  Jessica McKenzie describes a coal-burning power plant in Dresden, NY.  The plant was shut down because the local community had no use for its energy.  But Bitcoin needed energy to compute its complex algorithms.  So, like Dracula, the coal plant rose from the dead, transformed into a gas burning plant.

What, exactly, are Democratic Party politicians like Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even Bernie Sanders doing to put the brakes on this expansion of FFs in programs like the Green New Deal (GND)?  Actually, nothing.  As Noam Chomsky points out in his forward to Stan Cox’ The Green New Deal and Beyond, “… the GND does not challenge the fossil-fuel industry.”  Congressional proposals leave out the most critical part of reducing FFs – limiting the total quantity that can be produced.  Instead, they rely on the fantasy that increasing AltE will somehow cause a decrease in FF use.  This is a myth that we know all too well: corporate politicians toss around empty phrases like “net zero” as they further proposals to add AltE to the energy mix in.

Are Problems with AltE “Minimal?”

Despite stated goals to “end” FF production by such-and-such a date, the high heat they generate is essential for producing (1) silicon wafers for solar panels, (2) concrete and steel used in construction of windmills and dams, and (3) plastic coverings for industrial windmill blades.  Every type of AltE requires FFs.  Supporters of AltE often say that it is so much smaller as to pale by comparison to direct use of FFs.

Claiming that the amount of FFs used by AltE is trivial ignores both the quantities actually being used now and, most importantly, the uncontrollable urge of capitalism toward infinite growth.  Hydro-power (dams) is currently the greatest source of AltE and is in line to expand most rapidly.  Ben Gordesky describes research showing that “Canadian large-scale hydro projects have an ongoing carbon footprint that is approximately 40% that of electricity generated by burning natural gas.  These emissions do not include the carbon footprint of dam construction.”  This is not a trivial amount of FFs used by dams, especially since hydropower “is expected to grow by at least 45% by 2040.”

Estimates are that “Solar and wind have a carbon footprint of 4% to 8% of natural gas.”  For the sake of simpler arithmetic, let’s say that hydro, wind and solar average 12.5% of the carbon footprint of FFs (even though is it probably much higher).  Then, let’s say that healthy capitalism grows at least 3% annually (even though the phrase “healthy capitalism” is highly dubious), which means a doubling in size every 25 years.  If AltE requires 12.5% of the equivalent FFs now, then,

• in 25 years it will require what is twice that, or 25% of current FF use;
• at 50 years, it again doubles (to four times its current size), requiring 50% of current FF use; and,
• at 75 years, the economy doubles (to eight times its current size), reaching 100% of current use.

To put it bluntly, reliance on AltE in no way eliminates FF usage – in only 75 years economic growth would return us to current FF levels.

But would we have to wait 75 years to see current levels of FF restored?  For some parts of the economy, the answer is definitely “No.”  As Stan Cox documents, “… the huge increase in mines, smelters, factories and transportation required for this transition [to EVs] would continue heightened CO2 levels long before any emission savings would be realized.”

It might be possible theoretically to concentrate energy to reach the extremely high temperatures necessary for production of wind turbines and silicon wafers for solar arrays.  Relying on Cox’ calculations, expanding infrastructure to reach 100% AltE by 2030 “… would require a 33-fold increase in industrial expansion, far more than has ever been achieved anywhere and would result in complete ecological devastation.  One little fact regarding this quantity of build-up is that 100% RE would require more land space than used for all food production and living areas in the 48 contiguous states.”

Time for Despair?

Is it time to throw up our hands in despair that the only route to preserve humanity is a return to hunter/gatherer existence?  Not really.  Focusing on local, community-based energy can create sufficient production for human needs.

Many underestimate the ability of low tech devices.  When in high school during the 1960s, my science project was a solar oven that could cook via medium heat.  When I returned from college a few years later, my mom intimated that my dad, an engineer, thought that a solar reflector device could not possibly generate much heat.  So, one morning he used it as a greenhouse for his vegetable seedlings.  When he returned later that day, the plants were fried.

Solar power does not require high-tech based on massive arrays.  Few techniques are more powerful at reducing energy than a passive house design or use of passive solar for existing homes.  It is even possible to run a website via low tech solar without destroying farmland for gargantuan solar arrays.

The story of wind power is somewhat different.  Kris De Decker edits Low-Tech Magazine which spans a variety of ways to heat, cool and provide energy.  An outstanding article covers the sharp contrast between ancient wind mills vs. modern industrial wind turbines:

For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal…  It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills.  New wood production technology and design makes it possible to build larger wind turbines almost entirely out of wood again… This would make the manufacturing of wind turbines largely independent of fossil fuels and mined materials.

A Global Struggle

The obsession of capitalism with expanding production is a social disease that infects every aspect of exploring, mining, transporting, using and disposing of energy infrastructure.  For decades, this has been painfully obvious for FFs and nuclear power.  Except for those who refuse to see, the opposition rippling through AltE is increasingly clear.

The two key words common to all of these efforts is “Stop it!”  A better life for all begins with rejecting the limitless growth of capitalism by developing technologies that minimize mining, processing, over-producing goods with short durations, and transporting products over long distances.  Instead, we must develop locally-based products that have the least harmful effects.  One of the main problems with tunnel visioning on AltE is that how that approach accepts and perpetuates the ideology of greed, which insists that everyone in the US (and, of course, the world) must adopt the consumerist life-style of the upper middle class.

Everyone in the world believes in preserving what they hold sacred.  For most of us, these include sacred places and beings, the inorganic world, creatures that sleep in water or on land, and human Life.  For others, what they hold most sacred is corporate profits.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Fitz.

The Sunrise Movement is also shifting gears, away from the zoom-call-only mode into something much more visible. Several days ago they sat in at the White House and on June 28 they are planning a major DC action—Biden Be Brave, No Compromise, No Excuses–demanding that “Democrats must take their power seriously and stop negotiating with a GOP which is not serious about climate action or delivering jobs for the American people.”

Also in late June, from the 20th to the 28th, there will be a 2021 Walk for Our Grandchildren from Scranton, Pa. to Wilmington, De. “to remind the Biden Administration and others that our love for our families and their futures requires a rapid, uncompromising transition away from unhealthy, unsafe extraction and burning of fossil fuels while embracing renewable energy, especially solar and wind power.”

This upsurge of in the streets activism is happening, not coincidentally, at the same time that COVID 19 is being defeated, at least in the US and at least for now. This is the case primarily because of the effectiveness of the vaccines and the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign begun on January 20 when Biden/Harris took office. The science is telling us that, at least for this summer, many things that couldn’t happen over the last 15 months now can.

It is essential that our movement of movements on a wide range of issues recognize and act upon this new reality. From a strategic perspective, as far as how fundamental social, economic, political and cultural change happens, actions in the streets are essential. We must intelligently organize public marches, demonstrations, work and hunger strikes and nonviolent direct actions that underline the seriousness of our issue campaigns, inspire millions of people who hear about them, and bring pressure to bear on decision-makers to do the right and needed things.

This is not the only thing we need to be doing. It is also essential that our movement be grounded in day-to-day, community-, workplace-, and issue-based organizing by millions of volunteer and paid activists and organizers, utilizing popular education, dialogical approaches and techniques as much as possible. And we need to engage in the electoral arena, supporting independent and progressive candidates, and sometimes, for tactical reasons, people like Biden because of the threat from the Trumpists, racists and neo-fascists. We need do this from the most local to the highest national level, doing so in a tactically flexible way as far as whether to run on a Democrat, independent, Working Families, Green, or other line.

At any one time, one of these three legs of our movement-building stool—street action, electoral action and day-to-day dialogical organizing—will take precedence. In 2020 electoral action was the priority. Right now street action, holding those elected accountable, bringing political pressure to bear, has to be the priority, and not just via zoom calls. It’s time to hit the streets!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

On April 24, 2021, US President Joseph Biden declared that the massacre of 1.5 million Turkish Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide. As to whether genocide is the word Americans can consent to use about Native Americans who suffered death, torture, displacement, apartheid and disease at the hands, mainly, of European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a lot less clear, although some state governors have gone for it. As for slavery, not until July 2008 did the US House of Representatives apologize for American slavery of blacks and the subsequent discriminatory laws and practices that have continued to marginalize and oppress a population that today constitutes over 47 million or 14% of the US population. 9 States have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans.

European and American histories are replete with massacres, genocides, and unjust applications of overwhelmingly disproportionate force against indigenous peoples and others who have stood in the way of the material interests of their invaders and conquerors. The US slow determination to condemn Turkey for crimes not dissimilar to those that it has itself committed, abundantly, and in recent history, serves the cause of an official hypocrisy that has long characterized US foreign policy – bedazzling, confusing or distracting its own domestic citizenry from the ugliness of forever imperialism.

Turkey, none too happy about being charged with genocide was hardly taken by surprise. While Turkey has always defended itself against such charges, several Ottoman officials were indeed tried and hanged for their role in the Armenian atrocities. (Which Americans were hanged for atrocities against the Indigenous peoples?). It was not only Turks who were implicated. Many Kurds, who today represent Turkey’s major internal nemesis (matching its external, Greece), participated. Others condemned the atrocities. Some Kurds who participated later atoned. Both Armenian and Kurdish exiles of the collapse of the Ottoman empire ultimately established themselves in Syria under French administration and where the Allawi Shia minority was later to extend protection to Christians against Sunni extremism and concede a fragile autonomy to the Kurds. Today, the Assad regime and Syrian Kurds face off against Turkish invaders who have afforded protection to as many as five million jihadist and former-ISIS supporters around Afrin and Idlib, while the US uses Kurdish forces (principally the SDF) to exploit Syrian oil and gas on its behalf and has them maintain prisons and camps for ISIS remnants.

Biden’s charge was a politically nuanced expression of growing US dissatisfaction with its NATO partner even if, by the same token, it extended a measure of sympathy to the former Soviet and still pro-Russian nation of Armenia, which had suffered at the hands of Azerbaijan and its ally, Turkey, in the 2020 battle for and successful acquisition of disputed territories of Nagorno-Karabakh. Might Armenia, possibly overcome by US moral magnanimity, wrench itself further away from the sphere of Russian influence and look with greater favor upon the USA? Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous oblast in Azerbaijan but sharing religious, cultural, and linguistic features of neighboring Armenia. In 1988 the parliament of Nagorno-Karabakh had voted to unify with Armenia. A UN Security Council resolution in 1993 called on Armenia to withdraw its forces from the Azerbaijani district of Kelbajar. Turkey imposed an economic embargo on Armenia and the border was closed. The eruption of hostilities in 2020 was possibly triggered by Armenia’s decision to restore an old border checkpoint, located 15km from Azerbaijan’s export pipelines or by an Azerbaijani incursion into Armenian territory.

Turkish relations with Turkic Azerbaijan, whose population is around 10 million, and with whom it shares 11 miles of border have always been strong. Turkey has helped Azerbaijan realize its economic potential from the Caspian Sea by purchasing Azerbaijani gas and cooperating with Azerbaijan and Georgia in infrastructural projects such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Trans-Anatolian pipeline that connects to the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) at the Turkish border with Greece at Kipoi.

A Renascent Empire

It is doubtful that Biden’s endorsement of the “G” word will do much to further complicate relations between the USA and Turkey, but it represents a good moment to pause and reassess what those complications are and the directions in which they point for the future of global peace and conflict. For the major questions today are not to do with the question of genocide as such but with whether, having breathed new life into the Ottoman corpse, Turkey rejoins the ranks of forever empires and, if so, the regional and global impacts this will have. The questions invoke more than empirical calculations of national interest since they have as much or more to with religion (especially Sunni Islam), transnational ethnic (Turkic) identity, national regeneration, energy policy under conditions of climate change and, not least, social class and gender inequities.

That Turkey is a renascent empire is clear enough. By 2021, Turkey had engaged in barely contested or recent uncontested military actions in Iraq, Syria and Libya, had played proxies in South Caucasus and Yemen while engaging in disputes with Greece, strongly supporting the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and aspiring eastward along the pan-Turkic horizon towards western China. On February 19, 2021, the nationalistic State-owned Turkish television station TRT1 showed a map of the territories it claimed Turkey would control within the next thirty years. They included many Russian and FSU territories including Rostov, Volgograd, Astrakhan, Samara Oblasts, Chuvashia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Adygea, North Ossetia, and Crimea, including Sevastopol. Turkey was predicted to extend its sphere of influence to include Greece, southern Cyprus, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Gulf countries, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Curiously, the map originated in a book published in 2009 by the founder of Stratfor Center for Research in International Politics.

It might be appropriate to laugh this off as fanciful delusion, as did many Russian commentators, but by 2021 it was at least clear that Turkey had considerably and aggressively expanded its regional and global influence. Turkey had joined the Council of Europe in 1950 and the European Customs Union in 1995 and embarked on negotiations for membership of the EU in 1999. Yet mirroring the pro-Islamist orientations of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Justice and Development Party (AKP) that has held power continuously since 2003 — and in a corrective to the overly coercive imposition of western legal, cultural, and technological practices by the country’s founder Kemal Ataturk from 1923 (sustained by the military up until its participation in an attempted coup against Erdogan in 2016) – the AKP has exerted a strong eastward pull in recent years. This was partly cause and partly result of the stalling in 2015 of negotiations for entry to the EU, reflecting EU concerns about human rights and the rule of law, particularly in the light of the merger in 2015 of the AKP with the anti-European Nationalist Movement Party. In addition, the escalation of Turkish tensions with fellow NATO member Greece, as Turkey pressed claims to the right to prospective oil and gas deposits in what may be Greek maritime territories, has further impaired its image in Brussels.

A Militaristic Empire of Bases, Interventions, and Soft Power

Turkish forces were mainly instrumental in bringing about the formation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in 1974. This gained independence in 1983 but is only recognized by Turkey. Since 2018, Turkey has occupied a significant stretch of Syrian land along Turkey’s border with Syria, enveloping as many as five million people.

Earlier, it had invaded northern Iraq in its perpetual quest to subjugate Kurdish populations. Turkish armed attacks in Iraq started in 2007 with an air attack involving 50 fighter jets. Turkey’s 2008 “Operation Sun” involved 10,000 troops. Turkey would likely be an influential party to the takeover by NATO, involving 5,000 NATO troops, of US training and military operations in Iraq from 2021.

It was engaged in the conflict in southern Yemen through its support for the country’s local branch (the Reform Party) of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is represented in the government of Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed based in the south-eastern port city of Aden, thus helping fill the vacuum created by the downfall of the Ali Abdullah Saleh regime in February 2012 and an Iranian-staged coup by Houthi militia against President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi in March 2015. This raised concern in Egypt that Turkey’s efforts to increase its presence near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which Gulf oil is transported before reaching the Suez Canal, will threaten the security of Egypt and the Arabian Gulf. Turkey maintains a military base in Djibouti, has tried to gain a foothold both in Somalia and the Sudanese Red Sea island of Suakin.

Altogether, Turkey maintained bases in Qatar, Libya, Somalia, Northern Cyprus, Syria, and Iraq. Turkey had established a strong alliance with the UN-approved Government of National Accord (the GNA) in Tripoli, Libya, by agreeing to establish an Exclusive Economic Zone in the Mediterranean as a step towards claiming rights to ocean bed resources, and by stationing Turkish forces in January 2020 in defense of Tripoli against the forces of a rival government based in Tobruk, eastern Libya, under former CIA asset Khalifa Belasis Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army. While the UN Secretary General registered the deal on October 1, 2020, the Tobruk government (supported by the EU, Greece, Russia, Egypt, Cyprus, Malta, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Serbia, Syria, Israel, Bahrain. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Arab League) denounced Turkey’s agreement with the GNA as illegal. Notably, Greece protested that it ignored the presence of Greek islands Crete, Kasos, Karpathos, Kastellorizo and Rhodes, and their respective maritime borders. Turkey’s seismic survey ships and navy vessels regularly clash with Greek vessels near the Greek island of Kastellorizo. In August 2020, Greece and Egypt signed their own maritime deal in response, an exclusive economic zone for oil and gas drilling rights. Yet Turkey wields considerable influence over the coalition government that was established in March 2021.

Turkey played a significant role in support of Azerbaijan in the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2021. Turkey’s President Erdogan was the guest of honor at the Azerbaijani victory ceremony in Baku in December 2020, and hailed the “one nation, two states” relationship between Turkey and Azerbaijan.

In the gathering conflict over water rights between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in spring 2021, it was expected that Turkey (leader of the Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States which comprises Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan) would side with Kyrgyzstan, which considers itself a Turkic nation. Tajikistan speaks a language that is related to predominantly Iranian languages Farsi and Dari.

Turkish influence is further enhanced by its considerable diaspora, giving Turkey some leverage over the internal politics of advanced nations with large Turkish immigrant populations, including France and Germany. This extends beyond Turkish ethnic communities as such to all Muslim communities, especially Sunni, open to persuasion that the Turkish state speaks on behalf of the Islamic world. Turkish charities have been active among the 5.7 million Muslims in France, for example, where 50% of imams are trained in turkey and serve Turkish interests while benefitting from Qatari funding.

In addition to its international interventions Turkey’s natural assets grant it considerable leverage over global and regional trade, and military uses of the Turkish straits, Black Sea and Sea of Azov.

A Troubling US and European Ally

Turkey has been a principal ally of the USA throughout much of the Syrian conflict, following the uprisings against the Baathist regime of Bashar Assad in 2011. Experts are divided as to the extent to which these were genuine outpourings of Arab-Spring demands for more democracy, on the one hand, or incited, exploited and expropriated by jihadist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood — that thirty years previously had staged a violent campaign against Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father — and for which there was considerable support from Sunni Turkey as well as funding from Qatar. Turkey turned a blind eye to CIA and jihadist trafficking of fighters and materiel across the border with Syria and allowed itself to be used as a base for oppositional groups. (See also here). Despite a souring of US-Turkish relations following the attempted “Gülen” coup in 2016 against Turkish President Erdogan (who claimed that the USA had harbored its alleged progenitor, Muhammed Fethullah Gülen), the USA did little or nothing to contain a Turkish invasion of northern Syria that year, even though its most prominent victims were US allies, the Kurds, thousands of whose families around Afrin were displaced to make room for hundreds of thousands of oppositional Syrians and foreigners. Some of the new arrivals were bussed up from Ghouta under the terms of a deal agreed between Turkey and Russia. Turkey set up its own administration in the area, and incorporated it within Turkish electricity grid, cellphone networks and currency. It trained and incorporated oppositional militia who were integrated into a military police force, while establishing compliant local Syrian councils to run things. 500 Syrian companies were registered for cross-border trade. In 2019 the USA appeared to greenlight a further Turkish invasion by removing (some) US troops from the area, and in 2020 Turkey stood against a Russian and Syrian offensive on Idlib, although sources differ as to whether it was a win or a lose for Turkey. A continued Turkish occupation of northern Syria assists the USA and NATO in a medium-term policy, following a decade of inconclusive war, to impoverish and destabilize what remains of Assad’s Syria, even as some Arab nations, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, seek a road back to Damascus despite steep US sanctions that stand in their way. Turkish intervention in Syria has come at a high price: 3.7 million Syrian refugees on top of a domestic population of 84 million, and this in time will likely prove a major source of domestic aggravation. Whether Turkey’s Syrian intervention has achieved greater national security against Kurdish PKK insurrectionists or, to the contrary, consolidated Kurdish opposition to Turkey and provoked an assured succession of Kurdish terrorist attacks into the foreseeable future, is moot.

Turkey has proven helpful to the USA as a member of NATO since 1952, its hosting of US military and air bases (notably Incirlik) and nuclear weapons and, more recently, in its military assistance to Azerbaijan against the much weaker Armenian (and Russian) interests in Nagorno-Karabakh (which Russia did little or nothing to defend despite Armenia’s membership of the Russian-led Collective Treaty Security Organization [CTSO], and despite Azerbaijan’s shooting down of a Russian helicopter over Armenian territory).

Turkey provided robust support for the US-backed coup regime of President Zelensky in Ukraine against Russia, including the sale to Ukraine of up to 17 unmanned aerial vehicles in 2019, persistent refusal to recognize Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 (to which Turkey itself may lay historical claim), [There was a referendum where Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia — DV Ed] its assistance to the anti-Russian Tatars of Crimea, its cooperative partnerships with anti-Russian Georgia, and its control over access from the Aegean to the Black Sea (through the Turkish straits which include the Bosporus, sea of Marmara and Dardanelles), which it helps to patrol, and the Sea of Azov. In all these and other ways Turkey has contributed to US and NATO efforts to harass and contain Russia.

Troubled US Patron

The USA is not happy with (and has implemented sanctions in retaliation for) Turkey’s purchase in 2017 of Russia’s S-400 military defense system. The purchase had helped Turkey atone for its shooting down, for little apparent reason, of a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M attack aircraft in 2015 that had allegedly strayed into air space above the formerly Syrian province of Hatay – Syrian rebels shot the pilot as he descended by parachute and downed a rescue helicopter – constituting the first NATO downing of a Russian or Soviet warplane since an attack on the Sui-ho Dam during the Korean War in 1953. The USA is also irritated by Turkey’s conciliatory stance towards Nord Stream 2 and its involvement in TurkStream 1 and TurkStream 2, all of which facilitate the delivery of Gazprom oil and gas to Europe and impede US designs on the European market for its liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Turkey’s Bi-Polar Economy

Turkey’s economy has grown considerably in the 21st century, with average GDP growth averaging 5.4% 2003-2013 and, apart from China, Turkey outperformed all its peers in the fourth quarter of 2020. Turkey’s GDP growth of 5.9% was faster than for the G-20 nations in 2020 excepting China’s 6.5% rate. Its relations with China and China’s Belt and Road initiative are robust, even to the point of Turkish disinclination to intervene in the controversies over allegations of China’s treatment of the Turkic Uyghurs, another source of immigration to Turkey.

Yet Turkey’s currency is fragile. The lira collapsed 50% against the US dollar 2017-2020, and inflation hit 15% in 2019 in response to government’s resort to printing money via its ownership of the Central Bank. While net national debt is a healthy 35.2% of GDP, foreign currency reserves are relatively low and inflation is high. The currency crisis reflects domestic political instability, international diplomatic errors, a balance of trade deficit, over-reliance on construction for growth, and over-dependence on foreign currency loans in the private sector. The Covid 19 epidemic badly bruised Turkey’s income from tourism. The crisis intensified in the final quarter of 2020 with the resignation of Turkey’s finance minister (son-in-law to President Erdogan) and ouster of the head of the Central Bank, following a precipitate further collapse of the lira. Erdogan took the opportunity to reassure the investment community of his faith in financial profiteering and in Turkey as a globally attractive source of cheap labor. Foreign investors likely to be of considerable importance in efforts to stabilize the Turkish economy include China, which is expected to participate in the Istanbul Canal project, and Qatar, which promised billions of new investments at the end of 2020.

The Energy Factor

Energy lies close not just to the country’s economy but to the existential center of neo-Ottomanism and its many apparent contradictions between domination, self-sufficiency, and dependency. It has both nurtured and stifled Turkey’s vacillating economy. This dynamic plays out in at least four principal ways:

1. Control over oil, gas, and other energy flows by tanker through the Turkish (Bosporus) straits and a planned additional waterway, Erdogan’s pet project, the Istanbul Canal. As a hub for the supply of gas from Central Asia, Russia and the Middle East to Europe and other Atlantic markets, Turkey exercises enormous potential leverage over other nations that is immediately susceptible to political manipulation. State-owned corporations are powerful players in Turkish energy politics. They include TPAO for petroleum, domestically producing 7% of Turkish petrol consumption; BOTAS, the state-owned Petroleum Pipeline Corporation; and state-owned Tupras which controls 85% of Turkey’s refinery capacity. Countries that border the Black and Azov Seas are significantly dependent on the Bosporus Straits for passage of imports and exports. Many ports on the Azov ship grain to Turkey, for example. Russia exerts significant control over passage from the Black to the Azov seas via the Kerch strait, half of which it owns. Future monetization of Turkey’s advantage as gatekeeper of the potential Bosporus chokehold will likely be enhanced by construction of the Istanbul Canal which may not be constrained, it is thought, by the Montreux Convention of 1936 that currently regulates conditions of passage through the Straits, and that will permit Turkey to charge additional fees in return for speedier, more expansive permissions and passage. Critics fear the costs (an estimated $15 billion) of such an enormous enterprise and its environmental consequences. Russia fears that that the new canal will facilitate Black Sea access for NATO ships.

2. Permission for and participation in the construction of regional pipelines (as in the Trans-Anatolian pipeline that delivers Azeri gas from the Caspian to the Trans-Aegean pipeline and on to Europe). Pipeline fees of passage are an important source of revenue. In 2021, Turkey had four long-term pipeline contracts with Russia, Azerbaijan, and Iran. Two major pipelines include the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan), linking Turkey, George and Azerbaijan, and the Iraqi Pipeline from northern Iraq to Ceyhan (in the southeast corner of Turkey). The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) pipeline runs from Erbil in Iraq to Ceyhan. Ceyhan is an important port for Caspian and Iraqi oil imports. Under the US Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, the US has sanctioned both TurkStream 1 & 2. But these are of declining significance to Turkey, in any case, given the competition from the Sakarya gas field in the Black Sea, and transit fees for passage through the new Istanbul canal that will likely prove more lucrative than pipeline fees. Another imminent threat to TurkStream 2 is the north-south corridor formed by Greece, Turkey and Ukraine that can be fed by LNG from the Mediterranean with reverse flows back to Ukraine.

3. The purchase of Liquefied Natural Gas from the USA and other suppliers (Turkey is a primary destination for US LNG) and its rerouting by pipeline, tanker, or truck – a development that reduces the significance of regional pipelines, affords Turkey more flexibility in routing and also the blocking of competitors, and puts the USA in a potentially strong competitive position against Russia’s Nord Stream 1&2 and TurkStream 1&2 for delivery of gas to Europe. LNG gas imports from the USA, Qatar, Algeria, Nigeria were cheaper in 2021 than constructed pipeline gas from Gazprom. Turkey was now Europe’s third largest importer of US LNG behind Spain and France.

4. The development of new oil and gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Seas. These acquire considerable relevance in the context of Turkey’s near total oil and gas dependency, which has been a major economic stumbling block. Almost all (99%) of Turkey’s natural gas was imported in 2015, of which 56% came from Russia’s Gazprom (other suppliers were Iran and Azerbaijan), although Russia’s share had fallen to 34% by 2019. Turkey spent $41 billion on natural gas imports alone in 2019. 60% of Turkey’s crude oil imports are from Iraq and Iran, and 11% from Russia (2015). This very dependence has served as inspiration to Turkey to establish its own supplies of fossil fuel both in the Eastern Mediterranean, in partnership with Libya (where both the US and Russia have tacitly supported a policy of opposition to new developments lest these compete with their own exports) and in the Black Sea.

In August 2020, President Erdogan announced a major find (320 billion cubic meters but may well prove much more) of natural gas reserves in the Black Sea within the western part of Turkey’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – the Sakarya field, on the perimeter of Bulgaria’s and Romania’s maritime borders. Critics worry about the costs of deep-water drilling and extraction from Sakarya, an ultra-harsh environment. Erdogan has expressed his desire that Turkey should develop Sakarya independently but, if the capability of TPAO falls short, involvement of non-Turkish majors could eat into profits considerably. For the longer term and as the impacts of climate change intensify, Turkey’s energy plans are uncomfortably wedded to planetary-menacing fossil fuel while at home, coal constitutes 40% of Turkey’s domestic energy production in conditions of escalating demand.

Favoring Greece

US unhappiness with Turkey as a partner stands at a crossroads. Turkey remains a strategically useful regional proxy force for the USA, alongside Israel, for the advancement of US interests in Syria. This can last indefinitely, even as Israeli preoccupation with Turkey’s expansion intensifies and as Turkey’s bid for leadership of Sunni Islam proves more compelling. This is particularly true of the Palestinian cause in Israeli-occupied Gaza. Turkish humanitarian organizations were behind the Gaza Freedom Flotilla of six ships in 2010 that sought to bring relief to the Gaza Strip. The ships were forcibly detained by Israeli forces in international waters and 10 Turkish activists were slaughtered. Israel has since paid compensation.

The recent surprising alliance between the USA and Israel may be seen in this light, i.e. as Israel’s targeting of Turkey, not Iran, while Turkish interventions are perceived by the UAE, Egypt, and the Arab League as a threat to Arab security, a perspective that is shared by France and probably other European powers. UAE’s Foreign Affairs minister has even said that the UAE wants Turkey to stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, bête noire of Sisi’s post-Morsi Egypt and Syria’s Assad regime, among others. Turkey’s bid for Sunni leadership, therefore, cannot advance far in competition with powerful regional rivals, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt but, in as much as both Saudis and Egypt have recklessly betrayed the Palestinian cause in their attempt to maintain US favor, Turkey has uncovered a strong and unpredictable weapon of soft power. Turkey’s capability as US proxy in the Turkic world will prove increasingly useful as the USA persists in its attempt to destabilize, fragment, contain and threaten the Russian Federation and in its gathering assault on Chinese power. But on the other hand, Turkey’s quest for independent power may lead it towards seemingly unlikely alliances with Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China, possibly in league with Russia and Iran, against the USA and India in Asia. There have been two trilateral summits between Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan (2017, 2021). It is envisaged that there may be nuclear cooperation between Pakistan and Turkey (Pakistan has nuclear warheads), and Russia is building 4 nuclear energy plants in Turkey. China has supplied missile technology. The further the USA moves away from Turkey, the closer, inevitably, Turkey will draw towards Russia with implications for the way Turkey chooses to nurture its ties to Turkic powers within and close to the borders of the Russian Federation.

In the Western world, on the other hand, the USA has increasingly less cause for sympathy with Turkish ambitions since these irritate both the European Union and NATO. US disillusionment may go so far as a US withdrawal of its military facilities in Turkey (including its air base in Incirlik and NATO’s Land Command in Şirinyer, Izmir) in favor of Greece as its new major Mediterranean center of operations, embracing new or expanded US facilities in Souda (Crete), Volos, Larissa, and Alexandroupolis. By 2025, Souda will become the largest and most important US naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean with 25,000 personnel. While Turkey has been suspended from the purchase of F-35 war planes since its purchase of Russian S-400 air defense in 2019, Greece is now planning expenditure of $3 billion on F-35s. A US-Greek Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement signed in October 2010 provides a framework for this expanding partnership. In line with US favoring of Greece against Turkey, Greece is set to intensify cooperation with Israel, as in pipeline deals to bring Eastern Mediterranean gas to Europe. Andrew Lee has called this overall strategy a version of the “Intermarium” – a geopolitical concept originating in the post-World War 1 era that envisages an alliance of countries reaching from the Baltic Sea, over the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea that would serve as an alternative power bloc between Germany and Russia.

Conclusion

In conclusion we can infer the following:

(1) Turkey, released at least in part by Erdogan’s AKP from the foundational Ataturk mission of westernization and secularization, has rediscovered in Islamism an Ottoman legacy that could enable it to re-establish a regional, even a global influence – political, cultural, economic and military – throughout the Muslim and Turkic worlds and the Muslim diasporas of the non-Muslim and non-Turkic worlds.

(2) Combining and deploying the advantages of new sources of energy independence and its traditional chokehold power in the Bosporus (extended now to the Istanbul Canal), Turkey will ascquire a much stronger negotiating position in its relations with Russia, the USA and EU.

(3) Its economic fragilities notwithstanding, Turkey will grow in its attraction to international investors, particularly China, on account of its net international and regional energy networks.

(4) Turkey’s greater activity in the Middle East will be perceived as a growing threat to the established powers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to Israel and the UAE, while its growing involvement in Yemen may give it a stronger toehold in the politics of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.

(5) In Syria, Turkey will for some time exercise a significant constraint on the restitution of Syrian sovereignty and therefore will be regarded with suspicion both by Iran and by Lebanon whose interests are directly impacted by deterioration of the Syrian economy.

(6) Domestically and regionally, Turkey must still worry about Kurdish irredentism which it has done little to soothe and much to anger. To this is added the pressure of a large, new, unsettled immigrant population of Syrian exiles.

(7) Through its recently established links with Libya, and its long-standing influence over Northern Cyprus, Turkey will be a stronger contender for influence in the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa.

(8) Most importantly, Turkey’s relatively recent and aggressive renascence in some of the world’s most strategically and militarily sensitive parts of the world exponentially increases the likelihood of reckless behavior – on the parts of many players – and unforeseen consequences any of which could easily ignite regional tensions, in conflagrations that almost certainly will suck in the world’s major nuclear powers.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Oliver Boyd-Barrett.

The consequences are telling.  The operator, taken offline to enable an investigation to be conducted by US cybersecurity firm Mandiant; fuel left stranded at refineries in Texas; a spike in fuel prices at the pump – up six cents per gallon on the week to $2.967 per gallon of unleaded gasoline.  “Unless they sort it out by Tuesday,” warned oil market analyst Gaurav Sharma, “they’re in big trouble.”  The impact would be felt first in Atlanta, then Tennessee, perpetuating a domino effect to New York. “This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we’ve seen from a cyberattack, full stop,” opined Rob Lee of the cybersecurity firm Dragos.

The company, in unconvincing tones, issued a statement that it was “continuing to work with third-party cybersecurity experts, law enforcement, and other federal agencies to restore pipeline operations quickly and safely.”  President Joe Biden rushed to calm fears that this had compromised fuel security.  “The agencies across the government have acted quickly to mitigate any impact on our fuel supply.” The deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies Anne Neuberger waffled to the press that the Biden administration was “taking a multi-pronged and whole-of-government response to this incident and to ransomware overall.”

On May 9, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration within the Department of Transportation issued a temporary hours of service exemption for motor carriers and drivers “transporting gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other refined petroleum products” across affected States.

Finding the culprit in such operations is almost boringly predictable.  The Kremlin tends to get top billing on the list of accused, but on this occasion interest centred on DarkSide rather than President Vladimir Putin.  “I’m gonna be meeting with President Putin,” promised Biden, “and so far there is no evidence, based on our intelligence people, that Russia is involved.”  That did not mean that Russian officials were to be spared scrutiny.  There was “evidence that the actors’ ransomware is in Russia – they have some responsibility to deal with this.”  DarkSide, in other words, is being singled out as a bold and enterprising Russian cybercrime outfit, going where even intelligence operatives fear to tread.  Out in that jungle of compromised cybersecurity, money is to be made.

DarkSide is cybercrime with a professional face, pirates and buccaneers of the internet with some understanding of public relations.  They court the press when they need to.  They even operate with a code of conduct in mind.  And they are experienced.  “Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society,” lamented the group after the operation.  “We do not participate in geopolitics, do not see need to tie us with a defined government and look for… our motives.”  The firm claimed ignorance that one of its affiliates had taken it upon themselves to target Colonial.  “From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”

This event has revealingly exposed the state of poorly protected critical infrastructure run by private companies.  “When those companies are attacked,” remarked deputy national security advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “they serve as the first line of defence, and we depend on the effectiveness of their defences.”

As security analyst Richard Stiennon described it, the decision to shut down the pipeline showed that Colonial understood the risks.  “On the other hand, it shows that Colonial does not have 100% confidence in their operational systems’ cybersecurity defenses.”  Colonial was doing its best to sound competent, stating that it “proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat.”

A less generous reading of this is that the company never genuinely appreciated those risks, given inadequate backup systems or forking out funds for software with fewer vulnerabilities.  The company had effectively issued an open invitation to be targeted, despite warnings made in early 2020 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that a ransomware attack on a US-based natural gas compression facility had taken place.

The provider has done little in terms of clearing the air on how it will deal with the ransom threat.  “Colonial is a private company and we’ll defer information regarding their decision on paying a ransom to them,” stated the less than helpful Neuberger.  Neuberger also spoke of the “troubling trend … of targeting companies who have insurance and may be richer targets”.  More had to be done to “determine what we do in addition to actively disrupting infrastructure and holding perpetrators accountable, to ensure we are not encouraging the rise of ransomware.”

The Biden administration is currently drafting an executive order that will create new digital safety regulations applicable to federal agencies and contractors who develop software for the government.  Those developing the software would have to be compliant with adequate security safeguards.  A layer of investigative bureaucracy is also contemplated: a cybersecurity incident review board.

At the very least, optimists in the field will see some value in having glaring faults in security systems exposed, even if it pertains to critical infrastructure.  Cyber extortionists can be turned into constructive citizens, identifying vulnerabilities – for a price.  A better option for corporate management and the boardroom would be to listen to the IT crowd.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The consequences are telling.  The operator, taken offline to enable an investigation to be conducted by US cybersecurity firm Mandiant; fuel left stranded at refineries in Texas; a spike in fuel prices at the pump – up six cents per gallon on the week to $2.967 per gallon of unleaded gasoline.  “Unless they sort it out by Tuesday,” warned oil market analyst Gaurav Sharma, “they’re in big trouble.”  The impact would be felt first in Atlanta, then Tennessee, perpetuating a domino effect to New York. “This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we’ve seen from a cyberattack, full stop,” opined Rob Lee of the cybersecurity firm Dragos.

The company, in unconvincing tones, issued a statement that it was “continuing to work with third-party cybersecurity experts, law enforcement, and other federal agencies to restore pipeline operations quickly and safely.”  President Joe Biden rushed to calm fears that this had compromised fuel security.  “The agencies across the government have acted quickly to mitigate any impact on our fuel supply.” The deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies Anne Neuberger waffled to the press that the Biden administration was “taking a multi-pronged and whole-of-government response to this incident and to ransomware overall.”

On May 9, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration within the Department of Transportation issued a temporary hours of service exemption for motor carriers and drivers “transporting gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other refined petroleum products” across affected States.

Finding the culprit in such operations is almost boringly predictable.  The Kremlin tends to get top billing on the list of accused, but on this occasion interest centred on DarkSide rather than President Vladimir Putin.  “I’m gonna be meeting with President Putin,” promised Biden, “and so far there is no evidence, based on our intelligence people, that Russia is involved.”  That did not mean that Russian officials were to be spared scrutiny.  There was “evidence that the actors’ ransomware is in Russia – they have some responsibility to deal with this.”  DarkSide, in other words, is being singled out as a bold and enterprising Russian cybercrime outfit, going where even intelligence operatives fear to tread.  Out in that jungle of compromised cybersecurity, money is to be made.

DarkSide is cybercrime with a professional face, pirates and buccaneers of the internet with some understanding of public relations.  They court the press when they need to.  They even operate with a code of conduct in mind.  And they are experienced.  “Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society,” lamented the group after the operation.  “We do not participate in geopolitics, do not see need to tie us with a defined government and look for… our motives.”  The firm claimed ignorance that one of its affiliates had taken it upon themselves to target Colonial.  “From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”

This event has revealingly exposed the state of poorly protected critical infrastructure run by private companies.  “When those companies are attacked,” remarked deputy national security advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “they serve as the first line of defence, and we depend on the effectiveness of their defences.”

As security analyst Richard Stiennon described it, the decision to shut down the pipeline showed that Colonial understood the risks.  “On the other hand, it shows that Colonial does not have 100% confidence in their operational systems’ cybersecurity defenses.”  Colonial was doing its best to sound competent, stating that it “proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat.”

A less generous reading of this is that the company never genuinely appreciated those risks, given inadequate backup systems or forking out funds for software with fewer vulnerabilities.  The company had effectively issued an open invitation to be targeted, despite warnings made in early 2020 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that a ransomware attack on a US-based natural gas compression facility had taken place.

The provider has done little in terms of clearing the air on how it will deal with the ransom threat.  “Colonial is a private company and we’ll defer information regarding their decision on paying a ransom to them,” stated the less than helpful Neuberger.  Neuberger also spoke of the “troubling trend … of targeting companies who have insurance and may be richer targets”.  More had to be done to “determine what we do in addition to actively disrupting infrastructure and holding perpetrators accountable, to ensure we are not encouraging the rise of ransomware.”

The Biden administration is currently drafting an executive order that will create new digital safety regulations applicable to federal agencies and contractors who develop software for the government.  Those developing the software would have to be compliant with adequate security safeguards.  A layer of investigative bureaucracy is also contemplated: a cybersecurity incident review board.

At the very least, optimists in the field will see some value in having glaring faults in security systems exposed, even if it pertains to critical infrastructure.  Cyber extortionists can be turned into constructive citizens, identifying vulnerabilities – for a price.  A better option for corporate management and the boardroom would be to listen to the IT crowd.

This article was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2021 at 7:18am and is filed under Cyber attacks, Cybersecurity, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines.

But the last of these hits a stumbling block. Creation of all forms of energy contributes to the destruction of nature and human life. It is possible to increase the global quality of life at the same time we reduce the use of fossil fuels and other sources of energy.  Therefore, a “deep” GND would focus on energy reduction, otherwise known as energy conservation. Decreasing total energy use is a prerequisite for securing human existence.

Recognizing True Dangers

Fossil fuel (FF) dangers are well-known and include the destruction of Life via global heating. FF problems also include land grabs from indigenous peoples, farmers, and communities throughout the world as well as the poisoning of air from burning and destruction of terrestrial and aquatic life from spills. But those who focus on climate change tend to minimize very real danger of other types of energy production.  A first step in developing a genuine GND is to acknowledge the destructive potential of “alternative energy” (AltE).

Nuclear power (nukes). Though dangers of nuclear disasters such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are horrific, problems with the rest of its life cycle are often glossed over.  Mining, milling, and transporting radioactive material to supply nukes with fuel and “dispose” of it exposes entire communities to poisoning that results in a variety of cancers.  Though operation of nukes produces few greenhouse gases (GHGs), enormous quantities are released during production of steel, cement and other materials for building nuclear plants.  They must be located next to water (for cooling), which means their discharge of hot water is an attack on aquatic life.  Radioactive waste from nukes, kept in caskets for 30-50 years, threatens to poison humanity not for decades or centuries, but for millennia (or eternity), which makes nukes at least as dangerous as FFs.  Inclusion of nuclear power as part of a GND is not the slightest bit green.  The only way to address nuclear power is how to abolish it as rapidly as possible while causing the least harm to those who depend on it for energy and income.

Solar power requires manufacturing processes with chemicals which are highly toxic to those who work with them.  Even before production begins, many different minerals must be mined and processed, which endangers workers and communities while destroying wildlife habitat.  Additional minerals must be obtained for batteries.  Once solar systems are used, they are discarded into large toxic dumps.  Though few GHGs are created during use of solar panels, large amounts are created during their life cycle.

Wind power creates its own syndrome of nerve-wracking vibrations for those living next to “wind farms,” along with even larger issues with disposal of 160-foot blades.  Like solar farms, wind farms undermine ecosystems where they are located.  The life cycle of wind power includes toxic radioactive elements to produce circular rotation of blades.

Hydro-power from dams hurts terrestrial as well as aquatic life by altering the flow of river water.  Dams undermine communities whose culture center around water and animals.  Dams destroy farms.  They exacerbate international conflicts when rivers flow through multiple countries, threaten the lives of construction workers, and result in collapses which can kill over 100,000 people at a time.

Several problems run through multiple AltE systems:

• Despite claims of “zero emissions,” every type of AltE requires large amounts of FFs during their life cycle;
• Every type of AltE is deeply intertwined with attacks on civil liberties, land grabs from indigenous communities, and/or murders of Earth defenders;
• Many have cost overruns which undermine the budgets of communities tricked into financing them.
• Transmission lines require additional land grabs, squashing of citizen and community rights, and increased species extinctions; and,
• Since the most available resources (such as uranium for nukes, sunny land for solar arrays, mountain tops for wind farms, rivers for dams) are used first, each level of expansion requires a greater level of resource use than the previous one, which means the harvesting of AltE is increasingly harmful as time goes by.

Taking into account the extreme problems of the life cycle of every type of energy extraction leads to the following requirements for a genuine GND: Nuclear energy must be halted as quickly and as safely as possible with employment replacement.  FF extraction should be dramatically reduced immediately (perhaps by 70-90% of 2020 levels) and be reduced 5-10% annually for the next 10 years thereafter.  Rather than being increased, extraction for other forms of energy should be reduced (perhaps 2-5% annually).

Since honesty requires recognition that every form of energy becomes more destructive with time, the critical question for a deep GND is: “How do we reduce energy use while increasing employment and the necessities of life?”

The Naming of Things

But before exploring how to increase employment while reducing production, it is necessary to clean up some greenwashing language that has become common in recent years.

Decades ago, Barry Commoner used the phrase “linguistic detoxification” to describe the way corporations come up with a word or phrase to hide the true nature of an ecological obscenity.  One of the best examples is the nuclear industry’s term “spent fuel rods” which implies that, once used, fuel rods are not radioactive, when, in fact, they are so deadly that they must be guarded for eternity.  An accurate term would be “irradiated fuel rods.”

Perhaps the classic example is the way agribusiness came up with “biosolids” for renaming animal sewage sludge containing dioxin, asbestos, lead, and DDT.  As John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton describe in Toxic Sludge Is Good for You (1995), industry persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to reclassify hazardous animal waste to “Class A fertilizer” biosolids so they could be dumped on fields where food is grown.

Rather than preserving traditions of early environmentalists, many current proponents of AltE use the terms “clean” and “renewable” to describe energy which is neither.  AltE is not “clean” due to the many GHG emissions throughout the life cycle of all types of energy in addition to assaults on ecosystems and human health.  Though the sun, wind and river power may be eternal, products that must be mined are very much exhaustible, meaning that no form of AltE is renewable.

An honest GND would never refer to AltE as either “clean” or “renewable.”  Such a GND proposal would advocate the reduction of FFs but would not suggest a goal 0% of FFs by such-and-such a date because it is unattainable.  Every type of AltE requires FFs.  While it may be possible to produce some steel and some cement by AltE, it is impossible to produce massive quantities of energy for the entire world with AltE.  Instead, a genuine GND would explain that the only form of clean energy is less energy and specify ways to use less energy while improving the quality of life.

A genuine GND would never imply that FFs are the only source of monstrously negative effects.  Privileging AltE corporations over FF corporations is stating that environmental problems will be solved by choosing one clique of capitalists over another.  This means that (a) if FFs should be nationalized, then all mining, milling and manufacturing processes to produced materials needed for AltE should be nationalized; and, (b) if FFs should remain in the ground, then all components for operating nuclear plants, dams, solar facilities and wind farms should also remain in the ground.

A Shorter Work Week for All

The greatest contradiction in current versions of the GND is advocating environmental improvement while having the most massive increase in production the world has ever seen.  These two goals are completely irreconcilable.  A progressive GND would address this enigma via shortening the work week, which would reduce environmental damage by using less energy.

It is quite odd that versions of the GND call for Medicare-for-All, Housing-for-All, Student Loan Forgiveness-for-All; but none of them suggest a Shorter-Work-Week-for-All.  The absence of this old progressive demand could be due to the incorrect neoliberal assumption that the best way to solve unemployment is via increased production.

Increased production of goods cannot create a long-term increase in employment. (It was WW II and not Roosevelt’s New Deal that consistently increased employment.)  US production increased 300-fold from 1913 to 2013.  If employment had increased at the same pace, everyone would be working at dozens of jobs today.

Unemployment increases from recent economic disruptions like the 2008 financial crisis and Covid in 2020 were due to the inability to shift work from some areas of the economy to others.  A planned shrinking of the economy would require including the entire workforce in deciding to shift from negative to positive employment.

As the work week is reduced, every group of workers should evaluate what it does, how labor is organized, and how jobs should be redefined so that full employment is preserved.  The only part of this idea which is novel is making changes democratically – job categories continuously change, with some types of work shrinking (or disappearing entirely) and other types of work expanding or coming into existence.  Just as economic growth does not guarantee increases in employment, economic shrinking need not worsen unemployment if the work week is shortened.

However, a shorter work week will not accomplish environmental goals if it is accompanied by an “intensification of labor” (such as requiring workers at Amazon to handle more packages per hour or increasing class size for teachers).  This means that a genuine GND requires workers’ forming strong unions which have a central role in determining what is produced as well as working conditions.

Producing According to Need Instead of According to Profit

If a core part of a GND becomes a shorter work week (without speed-up), the question naturally arises: “Will lowering the amount of production result in people going without basic necessities of life?”  It is important to understand that production for profit causes the manufacture of goods that have no part of improving our lives.

Current versions of the GND are based on the neoliberal assumption that the best way to provide for necessities of life is through increased payments for purchases (ie, market economics).  A progressive GND would advocate that the best way to provide the necessities of life is by guaranteeing them as human rights.  This is often referred so as replacing individual wages with “social wages.”  For example, the neoliberal approach to healthcare is offering medical insurance while a progressive approach is to offer medical care directly (without giving a cut to insurance companies). Likewise, a neoliberal GND would offer cash for food, housing, transportation, education and other necessities while a progressive GND would provide them directly to people.  Green economics must be based on making dollar amounts less important by replacing individual wages with social wages.

Current versions of the GND seek to provide necessities by increasing the quantity of products rather than focusing on creating things that are useful, reliable and durable. A massive increase in production is an unnecessary attack on ecosystems when there is already much more production than required to provide essentials for everyone on the planet.  Needs are not being met because of production which …

• … is negative, including war materials, police forces and production which destroys farmland and habitat (all of which should be reduced immediately);
• … is wasteful, which includes both (a) playthings of the richest 1%, and (b) things which many of us are forced to buy for survival and getting to work, the most notable being cars;
• … requires unnecessary processing and transportation, the most notable example being food which is processed to lose nutritional value, packaged to absurd levels, and shipped over 1000 miles before being consumed; and,
• … involves planned obsolescence, including design to fall apart or go out of style.

One important aspect of reducing production is often ignored.  Each product manufactured must have a repairability index.  At a minimum, criteria for the index should include (a) availability of technical documents to aid in repair, (b) ease of disassembly, (c) availability of spare parts, (d) price of spare parts, and (e) repair issues specific to the class of products. The index should become a basis for strengthening production requirements each year.  A durablility index should similarly be developed and strengthened annually.  Since those who do the labor of manufacturing products are more likely than owners or stockholders to attain knowledge of how to make commodities that are more reliable and durable, they must have the right to make their knowledge public without repercussions from management.

There will always be differences of opinion regarding what is needed versus what is merely desired.  A progressive GND should state how those decisions would be made.  A major cause of unnecessary production is that decisions concerning what to manufacture and standards for creating them are made by investors and corporate bosses rather than community residents and workers manufacturing them.  A genuine GND would confront problems regarding what is produced by involving all citizens in economic decisions, and not merely the richest.

Reparations!

Perhaps the issue which is least likely to be linked to the GND is reparations to poor communities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia who have been victims of Western imperialism for 500 years.  This connection forces us to ask: “Since most minerals necessary for AltE lie in poor countries, will rich countries continue to plunder their resources, exterminate what remains of indigenous cultures, force inhabitants to work for a pittance, jail and kill those who resist, destroy farmland, and leave the country a toxic wasteland for generations to come?”

For example, plans to massively expand electric vehicles (EVs) undermine the vastly more sustainable approach of urban redesign for walkable/cyclable communities.  Plans would result in manufacturing EVs for the rich world while poor and working class communities would suffer from the extraction of lithium, cobalt and dozens of other materials required for these cars.

Africa may be the most mineral-rich continent.  In addition to cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for EVs, Mali is the source of 75% of the uranium for French nukes, Zambia is mined for copper for AltE and hundreds of other minerals are taken from dozens of African countries.

If there are to be agreements involving corporations seeking minerals for AltE, who will those agreements be with?  Will the agreements be between the ultra-rich owners of the Western empire and its puppet governments?  Or, will extraction agreements be with villages and communities which will be most affected by removal of minerals for the production of energy?

Discussions of relationships between rich and poor countries make much of having “free, prior and informed consent” prior to an extraction project.  Such an agreement is far from reality because (a) corporate and governmental bodies are so mired in corruption that they contaminate bodies which define and judge the meaning of “free, prior and informed,” (b) no prediction of the effects of extraction can be “informed” since it is impossible to know what the interaction of the multitude of physical, chemical, biological and ecological factors will be prior to extraction taking place, and (c) affected communities are typically bullied into accepting extraction because they fear that families will die from starvation, lack of medical care or unemployment if they do not do so.  Thus, the following are essential components of a socially just GND:

• Reparations which are sufficient to eliminate poverty must be paid prior to signing extraction agreements; and,
• Every community must have the right to terminate an extraction agreement at any stage of the project.

This is where the other meaning of “deep” comes in.  When people hear “deep green,” they often think of how industrial activity deeply affects ecosystems.  “Deep” can also refer to having a deep respect for poor communities whose lives are most affected by extraction.  Respect is not deep if it is unwilling to accept an answer of “No” to a request for exorbitant, profit-gouging extraction.  Peoples across the world may decide that since they have received so little for so long, it may be time for rich countries to share the wealth they have stolen and dig up new wealth much, much more slowly.

A New Green Culture

Just to make sure that it is clear and not forgotten, the fundamental question regarding extraction of material needed for AltE is: “Will rich countries continue to plunder minerals underneath or adjacent to poor communities at a rate that corporations decide?  Will they expect poor communities to be satisfied with a vague promise that, for the very first time, great things will happen after the plundering?  Or should reparations be fully paid for past and current plundering, with poor communities deciding how much extraction they will allow and at what speed?”

Essential for building a New Green World is the creation of a New Green Culture which asks all of the billions of people on the planet to share their ideas for obtaining the necessities of life while using less energy.  Such a culture would aim for one idea to spark to many ideas, all of which strive more toward living together than on inventing energy-guzzling gadgets.

In order to build a New Green Culture which puts the sharing of wealth above personal greed, several things that must happen:

1. To bring billions of people out of economic misery, every country should establish a maximum income which is a multiple of the minimum income, with that multiple being voted on (no less than every five years) by all living in the country.
2. Every country should establish a maximum wealth which is a multiple of the minimum wealth, with that multiple being voted on (no less than every five years) by all living in the country.
3. Global reparations, including sharing wealth and technological know-how between rich and poor countries, is essential for overcoming past and ongoing effects of imperialism. Establishing maximum incomes and maximum wealth possession within countries must be quickly followed by establishing such maximum levels between countries.

A core problem of current versions of the GND is that they propose to solve employment, social justice and energy problems with increased production, which is not necessary to solve any of these.  Attempts to solve problems by increasing wealth feeds into the corporate culture of greed and become a barrier to creation of a New Green Culture.  Increasing production beyond what is necessary increases environmental problems that threaten the Earth.  It tells those who are already rich that they should grab more, more and more.  It tells those who are not rich that happiness depends upon the possession of objects.  The survival of Humanity depends on the building of a green culture that prizes sharing above all else.

(A webinar at 7 pm CT on May 5, 2021 on “Envisioning a Greener New Deal” will explore concerns with alternative energy, the need for global reparations and ask how to create a better world while using much less energy.  Email the address of the author below for details.)

This article was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2021 at 8:21pm and is filed under Green New Deal, Nuclear Energy, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Renewables.

We are on stolen CSḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) land and what is happening here today, the assault of Indigenous peoples and the invasion of their territories by Canada, its corporations and economic elites is also happening to the San people in Southern Africa. In a recent petition by activists we have learned that: “ReconAfrica has been given permission to drill for fossil fuels in the Kavango basin between Namibia and Botswana and the Kalahari Desert extending to the south eastern banks of the Okavango River and Delta. This area includes numerous areas of international significance, but for the San indigenous people who live there this is their sacred and ancestral ‘homeland’. The San people are the rightful current inhabitants and have been the custodians of this land for thousands of years. They have never been consulted, nor have they given their consent to any entities to prospect for oil and gas in their lands. By pursuing oil and gas development in the are the governments of Botswana and Namibia, and the Southern African region contravene their commitments to various international declarations an agreements as well as their own national laws. The oil and gas drilling operations will ruin roads, damage Indigenous livelihoods, deplete water resources and negatively impact biodiversity within the precious region. The Kavango Basin, which includes the Okavango Delta, lies beneath one of Africa’s most biodiverse habitats. It is home to a myriad of bird and megafauna species—including the largest herd of African elephants and African wild do populations—as well as many other threatened and endangered species. Potential impacts to local people and ecosystems include: massive water resource depletion, human induced earthquakes, disruption of avian species communication, breeding and nesting.”

Sounds familiar? This is because it is.

San hunter-gatherers walking across the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. (Courtesy of L.K. Marshall and L.J. Marshall. Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum #2001.29.390.)

The struggles of the San people connect with the struggles of Indigenous peoples here in settler Canada. We should remember that despite the fact that we are separated by different colonial contexts and most importantly by continents and oceans the history of colonization in the two continents is very similar even though the trajectories are different; and what happens here also happens there. Because in a globalized world we are all interconnected and what we do here has a violent impact there. As Ina-Maria Shikongo, a climate activist from Namibia states: “The problem with this whole deal is we can really see what is happening all around the globe, it is a total take over of the oil industries of the last reserves of the green spaces that we have. They don’t care about the people, the animals, nothing! They just care about the money. We can all see that the weather patterns are changing drastically and we are still talking about digging up fossil fuels when we should stop.”

ReconAfrica is a Canadian-US corporation whose headquarters are based here in so-called Vancouver, that is on stolen land. And I can’t help it but notice the irony that this Canadian company on stolen land is set to seize the land of the San people in Southern Africa. The theft might affect different peoples but bears the same racist and colonial violence. The theft follows the same patterns of white supremacy and environmental racism that has devastated First Peoples and their sacred territories around the globe.

ReconAfrica does not come out of the blue. It continues the early legacies of racist colonialism and racial capitalism, systems that are 500 years old but have now mutated into resource capitalism spurred by oil and gas corporations and new forms of land grabs. The very country this company operates from, (Canada), is itself a petro-state, that often behaves as a corporation and has a violent and non-consensual relationship with its own Indigenous peoples. Canada consistently props up the mining and fossil fuel industries and together state and industry break treaties, invade Indigenous territories without their consent and often with the help of militarized police and the criminal justice system, pillage their lands, criminalize land defenders and throw them in prisons. By displacing them from their land, Canada and its corporations systematically destroy their cultural and food systems and subject Indigenous communities into abject poverty, homelessness, and food and water insecurity, all in the name of profit. Canadian companies either wreck the homes of Indigenous peoples here domestically or the homes of First Peoples there, internationally. The game and the pattern are the same: there is no corner of the earth and no people that resource capitalism will not ravage.

Let there be no mistake: ReconAfrica is an extension of the colonial project that began in Europe 500 years ago and has morphed today into local and global extractivism. Since the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century European extractivism intensified and ran rampant during colonialism through the extraction of materials such as minerals, gold, silver, timber, furs, fish an so on. Naomi Klein tells us that before Canada became a nation it was an extractivist company, the Hudson Bay Company trafficking in furs, and pelts. Recon’s greed for oil follows in the footsteps of the Hudson Bay Company. Through Recon the Canadian model of unbridled extraction and devastation of ancestral Indigenous land and livelihoods is being now exported from this continent to the African continent and the ransacking of its First Peoples, the San people.

And like the Hudson Bay Company, ReconAfrica is genocidal: it is a symptom of toxic colonial land grabs that some commentators link to the industrial genocide of Indigenous peoples. Original peoples across the globe have experienced genocide since the moment the European colonizers arrived uninvited on their territories. By pillaging their land, reducing it to commodities whose goal was to flow into and eventually industrialize Europe, the violent eviction and systematic extermination of Indigenous peoples became the very foundation of the wealth of Europe and settler states such as Canada. Indigenous peoples not only lost their land and thus their sustenance, and their livelihoods, they impoverished, relocated into reserves, starved, and their children were abducted, abused and experimented upon in residential schools to be assimilated in settler society and their cultures to be ethnically cleansed. Their communities are still experiencing profound poverty, higher rates of incarceration, addiction and suicide, and lack of fundamental human rights such as access to health, education and clean drinking water. As Jason Hickel has forcefully claimed in The Divide the Western world including Canada are the developed and industrialized First World that they are today because they have methodically and brutally de-industrialized and underdevelop the rest of the world.

In other words, their industry and wealth are not some sign of good luck or ingenuity or innovation owed to European and Western superior genes of civilization; rather it was built on the violence of colonialism and stolen from Indigenous peoples. Western industrial “progress” has been made on the backs of First peoples and what is happening today to the San people is an iteration of that earlier colonial and genocidal project. It is fair to say that the economic prosperity of Canada and its corporations depends on the racist violence that is about to be inflicted onto the San people. And it is also fair to say that ReconAfrica’s money is nothing but blood money. And it is also fair to say that some prosper on the death of others and the destruction of their homes. And it is also fair to say that our energy greed is built on the devastation of people, lives, homes, ecosystems, the planet. I don’t know what you call Recon but to me they sound like parasites and scavengers of lives in pursuit of profit.

In fact, ReconAfrica is guilty of environmental injustice that is racist, white supremacist and colonial. In “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” Naomi Klein argues that environmental injustice is also directly connected to environmental racism through the process of othering of sacrificial and disposable people. For ReconAfrica and the political and local elites of Namibia and Botswana the San people are not people but just obstacles to their drilling goals and so called economic development of these countries. Their land and entire rich ecosystems are simply impediments and the groundwater, the aquifiers, the endangered species are nothing but hindrance to the oil and gas that lie beneath.

Recon and economic elites have so dehumanized and othered the San people and their land that they do not count and therefore they can be removed or poisoned, or pillaged or destroyed. Who cares if the groundwater is contaminated through the drilling and mining operations? Who cares if this impacts the health and food security of the San people? Economic development and profit matter more than Indigenous peoples’ lives. As Klein further reminds us othering is also directly connected to notions of racial and civilizational superiority because in order to have other and disposable people you need to have people and cultures that they count so little for their exploiters that they deserve sacrifice for the ever expanding energy needs of the Global North. And in contrast, you need to have people that see themselves as superior, as uniquely human and thus deserving of having it all, excessive lifestyles at the expense of those other thought of as subhuman.

Our economic elites think of our culture as superior because we are developed; we arrogantly call ourselves the “developed world,” and we call the cultures we ravage and dehumanize “underdeveloped,” “not yet advanced,” “primitive savages” that just sit on oil and precious metals used for our laptops and electronic devices. And we arrogantly think that all we need to do is remove them to get to that black gold. In the early colonization of the so-called Americas, Indigenous peoples often were completely shocked to see the deranged behaviour of the Spaniards lusting after gold. And there is an urban legend that tells the story of how some Original peoples of this continent thought of gold as the “excrement of the devil.” Who would have thought that Recon continues the legacy of the Spanish conquistadores in its frenzied greed after the excrement of the devil we now call black gold, oil.

Klein also cautions us that toxic colonialism justifies the sacrifice of people and dispossession of land through virulent intellectual theories that Western culture has harnessed to legitimize their destruction. Colonialism has always been aided by scientific racism and its cousin, Social Darwinism, theories that are fraught with racist ideas about the superiority of Northern races destined to rule weak Southern races economically, politically, culturally. Again we might want to remember that we call Northern cultures “developed” and Southern cultures “under- or un- developed.” And we keep saying to ourselves the patronizing and self-serving myth: “They do not know their own good, they can’t understand the wealth they sit on and if only they let us develop them. This is also called the “White man’s burden” that the Northern nations have to bring civilization in the form of economic prosperity to Southern peoples living in the dark ages. We are the advance and they are the barbaric.

But my friends, I know of no other barbarism than the one Western economic elites inflict in devastating the home of First peoples, driving the climate crisis and destroying the planet. The eviction of the San people is a barbarity and those who do it are the barbarians and the savages. The climate crisis is a barbarity, not progress, and certainly not civilization. The collapse of the planet is a barbarity and those who are responsible for it are criminal and genocidal. Our economic institutions, our corporations and our economic elites are driving us all to destruction; not development. They are a threat to all Indigenous peoples across the globe and the existential annihilation of all life on this planet. I call them profiteers of death.

As Bay Street depicts the Kavango Basin (green patch)

What is happening in the Kavango basin is not just outright racism. It is also the story of commodity frontiers and capitalist expansion and is an extension of the colonial principle of the “doctrine of discovery” or in the words of some commentators “the doctrine of Native genocide.” You may know that when Europeans arrived here they thought of it as empty land that they had just discovered. Of course, what is really arrogant and foolish about it is that “you can’t discover something that is already the home of Indigenous peoples living here.” For Europeans the doctrine of “Discovery” served to remove the Original people to settle on their land, commodify it, exploit it and eventually degrade it, cut down its forests, toxify its watersheds, poison the soil, overfish it, kill its buffalo, endanger and eclipse multiple species. Here in so-called British Columbia, settler culture is wiping out the salmon along with countless plant and non-human animals. But I’m digressing. The doctrine of discovery serves the capitalist desire for a never ending expansion and growth. As land is being exhausted in one place and its peoples are driven out, “new” land needs to be “discovered and thus occupied.”

Today the global capitalist economy and financial markets of which Recon is a symptom continue to “discover new land” to grab. They might not call these “discovered territories” but they have invented highly elaborate euphemisms that mean exactly the same thing. They now call “discovered land” “new market opportunities” or “land investments” or “economic development.” We must see these new terms for what they are: “the emperor has no clothes” because the naked truth is that the global empire we call capitalism continues to treat the entire world as a frontier of conquest and terra nullius, or empty land to satisfy larger economic interests that are specifically located in the Global North. And that entails genocide of traditional peoples that live on those lands.

The truth of the matter is that African countries since colonization were “discovered” by European powers only to be harnessed to the global economy and serve as the economic satellites of the Global North. African countries have always been used as exporters of raw materials including human enslaved labour to Europe and later its colonies and even later what we call the Global North. In parallel, African nations have been importers of manufactured products from the North. This condensed history of unequal economic relationships mired in brutal exploitation must not also omit the violent legacy of the slave trade in which millions of Africans were abducted from their ancestral homelands to work in what is euphemistically called plantations—but were actual death camps—in the American continent and industrialize its economy. And there we have it again: the enslavement of humans that gave rise to the economic prosperity of this continent is not separate from the enslavement of land and nature through the extraction of energy and raw materials for the enrichment of corporate elites in the Global North.

African American scholar, Cedric Robinson calls this phenomenon racial capitalism. This is an economic system that on the one hand was built on the exploitation of the free labour of African people who were once Indigenous to the African continent; and on the other racial capitalism thrives on the genocide of First peoples in the American continent that are displaced from their ancestral homelands. Racial capitalism is also a system that treats the world as a storehouse of endless commodities or commodity frontier ever expanding to amass more land. As Robinson suggests, capitalism “emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism and racial hierarchies about superior people and inferior others whose land and labour can therefore be exploited. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and Indigenous genocide.” Within this context, we can clearly see how ReconAfrica is a symptom of a larger disease: that of racial capitalism.

Let there be no mistake: when you treat the world and its Original Peoples as a frontier of conquest you establish with the earth an exploitative relationship based on ever expanding places to commodify and people to remove or enslave. And when that place is exhausted and its populations ethically cleansed the search begins again for another place, another frontier and another people to dispossess so long that your degradation of the “new” land and your crimes against the communities you displace remain invisible to energy consumers in the Global North. Out of sight, out of mind, none of us need to worry where did this energy or coltan for our electronic devices came from.

We see the logic of the frontier of conquest not just in the Kavango basin but here closer to home and the way domestic companies including the Crown corporation of TMX and foreign corporations have been stealing Indigenous land, breaking their treaties, dispossessing them from their territories, and fuelling the climate crisis, we are all subjected to today.

Windigo by Norval Morrisseau

Ojibwe activist and scholar Winona LaDuke calls this form of greed the Windigo disease: In Anishinaabe tradition understanding the need to avoid a culture of commodification, domination, exploitation, greed, consumption, and destruction of the planet is guided by the Windigo teachings. The Windigo is a cannibalistic being that is cursed with an overwhelming hunger that can never be satisfied, no matter how much it consumes. The Windigo wanders the Earth, destroys whatever it finds in its path, in an agonizing and unending quest for satisfaction, an unending quest for more land to pillage and more people to destroy in the name of profit and greed. ReconAfrica is Windigo. TMX is Windigo. Coastal Gas Link is Windigo. Line 3 is Windigo. Barrick Gold is Windigo. Enbridge is Windigo. Imperial Metals is Windigo. Anvil Mining Limited is Windigo. Suncor is Windigo. Teck Resources is Windigo. Canada and its extractivist economy are Windigo.

While Indigenous peoples across the globe have been treating the land as our sacred home corporations such as Recon have been treating it as a frontier of conquest. Unfortunately, we are running against severe ecological limits: this is called climate crisis and the collapse of living ecosystems as well as the extermination of Indigenous peoples across the world.

We denounce ReconAfrica and its crimes against the San people and the land. We denounce Recon’s environmental racism. We denounce the Canadian government’s complicity in allowing this company to exploit and potentially destroy million acres of the Kalahari Desert. We will resist along the San people who are the rightful custodians of their land against the Windigo disease called ReconAfrica. We will remain unwaveringly committed to Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island and their fierce resistance that began 500 years ago and still continues strong till they slain all the snakes of pipelines, and the Windigo of corporate greed in this continent and defend their land.

This article was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2021 at 9:08am and is filed under Botswana, Canada, Capitalism, Colonialism, Culture, Environment, Genocide, Namibia, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Original Peoples, Racism, Resistance, Turtle Island.

by RT / February 13th, 2021

On finding some subterranean cables near a railway track, the pensioner diligently set to work. Little did she know, however, that she was hacking through a crucial piece of infrastructure: a fibre optic cable bringing internet to the entire neighbouring country of Armenia. She would unwittingly leave the population of that neighbouring country – more than three million Armenians – staring at blank screens. They were without internet access for twelve hours, with whole swathes of Georgia and Azerbaijan also hit with a blackout.

“I have no idea what the internet is,” she said afterwards.

Infrastructure – by definition – has a tendency to fade into the background. It is akin to a hammer, to take an example famously elaborated by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. When engaged in the act of construction, we use a hammer without theorising, without much thought as to its provenance or its functioning. We use it skilfully and it becomes an extension of us. He called this state of invisibility ‘readiness-to-hand’.

When the hammer breaks, however, when the handle snaps, the head comes flying off, or it otherwise fails to function, it becomes resolutely ‘present-at-hand’. It loses its transparency and we become all-too-aware of how it emerges into the foreground.

The way of life which so many in the overdeveloped countries have become accustomed to – with stable electricity grids, food delivered ‘just-in-time’ from across the globe to the shelves of a nearby supermarket, living transfixed by glowing screens for work, relaxation, or numbed distraction – is more vulnerable than we would probably imagine. Spellbound, we move from large screen to small and back again, seamlessly connected by wireless internet, unaware that it could fade at any moment. It is ready-to-hand.

However, the dense web of technological prostheses which we wrap ourselves in turns out to be vulnerable to disruption, when you know where to look. And even when you don’t look, as the case of the Georgian grandmother Hayastan Shakarian showed.

Albeit maintaining his focus firmly on shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure, calculating and exploiting this sort of vulnerability is at the core of the Andreas Malm’s new book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021, Verso). The Marxist historian draws inspiration from recent waves of climate activism (think of the millions mobilised by Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion) but argues for the necessity of stepping up the climate movement’s militancy: moving beyond colourful protests and civil disobedience, towards targeted property destruction.

Malm is dismayed by the line these movements refuse to cross – their ideological pacifism. A brief historical review shows how the dominance of this philosophy in the climate movement, as Malm puts it, ‘is sanitised history, bereft of realistic appraisals of what has happened and what hasn’t, what has worked and what has gone wrong: it is a guide of scant use for a movement with mighty obstacles.’ Taking aim at the inaccurate and partial use of social science by Extinction Rebellion, he instead highlights the diversity of tactics – peaceful and less so – which have played an important part in successful historical struggles, from the suffragettes and the US civil rights movement, to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Indeed, the reader is told, ‘Pacifism has perhaps never existed as a real thing. What exists is the ability, or not, to distinguish between forms of violence.’

At this ecological eleventh hour, Malm proposes that it is high time to take inspiration from such historical successes and ratchet up activist tactics. He draws contemporary inspiration from struggles such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and direct action against the Dakota Access Pipeline. His proposal? ‘Damage and destroy new CO₂-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.’

‘We are the investment risk’, is the famous slogan from the German movement Ende Gelände, from which Malm also takes encouragement. But, he says, “the risk clearly needs to be higher than one or two days of interrupted production per year.”

On the one hand, this is a visceral, powerful book, containing an urgent call to fight for the planet. Malm is surely right that greater thought must be put into the efficacy of environmental protest tactics. This was highlighted, for example, in the embarrassing debacle in London in October 2019, when XR activists occupied a London Underground train during rush hour, provoking a violent clash with working class Londoners who pointed out that they were blocking public transport – hardly the sharp edge of fossil capital. However, there are worrying absences in Malm’s own visions of the tumultuous social change to come, three of which I would like to highlight here.

1) The first relates to renewable energy which, as is common in this type of literature, acts as a deus ex machina for the urban industrial way of life. Malm envisions the state – in a vague ‘dynamic relation’ to the radical infrastructural disruption described above – as the only agent of change capable of ‘ramming through’ the necessary transition. While it is easy to fantasise about the state abolishing SUVs (a target of Malm’s activism in an earlier life, and continued subject of his ire in the book), has he really considered the consequences and cascading disruptions the end of fossil fuels would bring? It would seem not: the way Malm glosses over this point indicates a failure to acknowledge the true extent that fossil infrastructure threads through so many lives of the global North and, increasingly, the South. Instead, he pins his hopes on a smooth, rapid – perhaps even magical – state-led civilisational transition to so-called renewable energies.

For someone portraying themselves as a kind of hard climate realist, this level of wishful thinking is alarming. Perhaps Malm is blinded by the useful – albeit all-too-clean – distinction the book uses between luxury and subsistence emissions (“states should attack luxury emissions with axes – not because they necessarily make up the bulk of the total, but because of the position they hold”). The former refers to the superfluity of SUVs and private jets used by a small global elite, for instance, while the latter are those emissions engaged in by the working class for survival. You can rightly start by attacking the former, as Malm recommends, but you will eventually come up against the issue that an entire way of life has been built in a way which earns it the title ‘the imperial mode of living’. In the face of this mundane ecocide, renewables remain a stubbornly marginal source of global energy.

Furthermore, Malm’s hoped-for renewable revolution sidesteps the reality that new sources of energy in recent centuries have led to ‘energy additions’, not ‘energy transitions’. Indeed, the discovery of oil didn’t displace the use of coal, but merely compounded it, and the same is happening with renewables today. While renewable energy may be zero emission (at least, if we plead ignorance to the emissions from its mining, manufacture, transport and installation), it is also more minerally intense than fossil fuels. Every 1 kWh of renewable energy requires ten times more metals than fossil fuels. This is no argument in favour of fossil fuels, but rather an argument for truly considering the implications of our choices in full depth. As the authors of one recent paper noted, ‘Renewable energy can mitigate some environmental impacts, but only at the expense of exacerbating others.’

2) A second blind spot in the book is Malm’s divisive and dismissive treatment activist movements from decades past. The reader waits and waits for an acknowledgement that Malm is of course reinventing the wheel – after all, monkeywrenching has a decades-old history among radical Western environmentalists articulating themselves as ‘the earth defending itself’. When he does finally decide to acknowledge this, with mention of Earth First! and the ELF, Malm dismisses the experiences of all these earlier pioneers with an insulting wave of his hand: Such experiences are irrelevant, the reader is informed, because these activists were deep ecologists and anarchists, not potential foot soldiers for Malm’s statist project of ecological Leninism.

Deep ecology, we learn, is ‘a deeply reactionary type of ecology, which locates the source of the malaise in human civilisation as such, zooms in on overpopulation and prescribes the contraction of humanity to a fraction of its current size as the remedy.’ Malm goes on to make the absurd claim that deep ecology ‘wants to wage war against civilisation and indeed humanity as such’. This is an inadequate parody of what a large corpus of decades of deep ecological thought really stands for. Ecomodernist trots have had half a century to put such a stunted understanding right, and yet it clearly serves their ideological purposes more to pretend that deep ecologists are mere vulgar misanthropes.

In 1973, in his essay “The shallow and the deep, a long-range ecology movement,” Arne Naess laid out a complex and egalitarian social vision premised on wide-ranging ecological principles which would go on to inspire millions with respect and moral regard for the non-human. If others went down some suspect paths – and certain figures undoubtedly did – that is no reason to write off the entire project. For a Marxist, of all people, to take such an uncharitable approach seems particularly inappropriate. Rather than caricatures and straw men, perhaps we should pay more attention to the colourful and active life which Naess led, engaging in risky and important collective struggles on more than one occasion. Beyond his work in the Norwegian resistance during World War II, saving students who were due to be shipped to concentration camps, Naess would put his body on the line once more in 1970. He chained himself to rocks at the majestic Mardalsfossen waterfall, alongside 300 others, and refused to come down until plans to build a dam were scrapped. The hard-fought campaign was successful.

Any and all such earlier activism – no matter how successful – is written off by Malm as achieving ‘little if anything…[having] no lasting gains to show for them.’ He is furthermore derisive of such activism because it is ‘not performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.’ Choosing to be dismissive of important threads of activist history, then, it seems that actions only count as successful for this author when they involve saving human structures.

3) The final flaw in How to blow up a pipeline worth noting here arises when Malm constructs his plea for greater activism in contrast to people who he describes as ‘climate fatalists’, such as Roy Scranton and Jonathan Franzen. For these detestable types, he says, it is easier ‘to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider some militant resistance.’ Based on caricature and partial readings, this appears to be another false dichotomy, another wedge which simply doesn’t need to be driven any deeper.

You don’t need to agree with every word from Franzen et al. to argue that the distinctive tenor of the latest flourishing of climate activism – from which Malm draws inspiration and wishes more from – in some ways springs from the vital spaces which these supposed fatalists have opened. Rather than paralysis, perhaps the depth of their acknowledgement of the death drive of contemporary civilisation leads in turn to a deeper activism. It is no surprise that the tone and rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion, for instance, has been so distant from earlier climate activism – the quantitative, carbon-based focus of the likes of 350.org, say – and that this has been much of its strength.

Prospects are grim, and time and power would appear to be against us. In his haste, Malm clearly wishes to belligerently divide and conquer. But perhaps we need to slow down further still. After all, patience, dialogue and respect would be a better place to set out for the long road ahead. The division isn’t fatalists against activists, but life against death – and you wouldn’t have climate activism without the new movements putting the reality of death (whether of other species or an entire way of life) and grief back where it belongs. This is not a project of ‘stopping’ climate change, but of salvaging what is left of our wonderful living earth.

This article was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2021 at 5:02pm and is filed under Activism, Book Review, Environment, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines.

To ingratiate himself to the United States, Moreno ejected WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy, arrested computer programmer and privacy activist Ola Bini on a concocted case, and launched a frontal attack against the Correistas. The political organisation of the Correistas was broken up, its leaders arrested, and any attempt to regroup for elections denied. Once such as example is the Social Compromise Force or Fuerza Compromiso Social platform, which the Correistas used  to run for local elections in 2019; this platform was then banned in 2020. A February 2018 referendum was barrelled through the country, allowing the government to destroy the democratic structures of the National Electoral Council (CNE), the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Council, the attorney general, the comptroller general, and others. Democracy was hollowed out.

A month before the 7 February 2021 presidential election, it appeared clear that in a fair election the candidate of the left, Andrés Arauz Galarza, would prevail. A range of pollsters suggested that Arauz would win in the first round with over the threshold of 40%. Arauz (age 35) is an attractive candidate with not a whiff of corruption or incompetence around him for his decade of service in the Central Bank and as a minister in the last two turbulent years of Correa’s government. When Correa left office, Arauz went to Mexico to pursue a PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The oligarchy has used every means to block his victory.

Some skeptical questions

Is nuclear energy safe? What can we do about the waste? What about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima – don’t they prove that we can’t rely on nuclear reactors? Won’t a tiny amount of radiation kill you? Why are reactors so expensive to build with so many delays? Why don’t we just use renewables? Why don’t we just abandon dirty, wasteful industry and go back to the land?

These are some of the skeptical questions on the minds of progressives and even socialists. In this article I will try to answer them and make the case for a global program to replace fossil fuels with nuclear fuels in the interest of climate change mitigation and human well-being.

A promising start

Until the 1970s nuclear energy was generally recognized as the energy source of the future. Many industrial countries had started installing cheap, clean nuclear power plants to produce electricity. Although only 2% of electricity in the US was produced by nuclear power plants in 1970, they were already seen as an important alternative to the fossil fuel plants that dominated the market. In 1974, the far-sighted French government launched a program to diminish France’s reliance on imported petroleum by constructing nuclear power plants that today account for 75% of France’s electricity production. In the United States, President Eisenhower had in 1956 threatened King Saud of Saudi Arabia with disruption of oil markets by sharing nuclear technology with European countries.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: BIG OIL CREATES FRIENDS OF THE EARTH

The oil industry quickly acted to protect its market share. In 1969 Robert O. Anderson, CEO and founder of Atlantic Richfield Oil, made a gift of $200,000 (half a million today) to David Brower to create Friends of the Earth, which became the leading voice internationally in creating opposition to nuclear energy and spreading inaccurate information about it. Soon the Council on Foreign Relations and the mass media, both of which have ties to the petroleum industry, jumped on the band wagon. Rapidly, a propaganda campaign that exists to this day was put together to denigrate nuclear energy to Big Oil’s benefit. Even Hollywood helped out at a critical moment with the film “China Syndrome”.

The lesson from this bit of history is that we have been had by the same capitalists whose propaganda machine leads us into war, tells us every day that there is no alternative to their insanely anarchic economy, and lies systematically about all the socialist countries. Everything that you think you know about the dangers of nuclear energy is wrong. It is simply the outcome of an advertising campaign that trashes the competition.

WHAT DO NUCLEAR REACTORS DO BETTER THAN FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS?

Nuclear reactors provide clean electricity at a reasonable price. They do not pump pollutants into the air that kill millions of people every year. They do not produce greenhouse gases that aggravate climate change.

By replacing fossil-fueled electrical plants with nuclear, we can eliminate 27% of current US greenhouse gases. As I will explain later, we can’t do that with solar and wind, which require fossil-fueled or nuclear backup plants to cover their down times.

By converting to all electric vehicles, we can eliminate an additional 28% of US greenhouse gases.

By converting to all electric residential and commercial heat we can eliminate most of the 12% of US greenhouse gases from that source.

By satisfying industrial energy needs with nuclear-generated electricity we can eliminate a significant portion of the industry’s 22% contribution to US greenhouse gases.

HOW CAN WE MAKE THIS CONVERSION HAPPEN?

Capitalism cannot do the job

A conversion project of the magnitude described above is beyond the capabilities of the global capitalist economy in its current state of decay. A cut in petroleum product consumption in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the price of oil negative for a while, and it is currently selling below $40/barrel less than production costs for many producers. The first large victim of this relatively minor disturbance has been ExxonMobil, which Dow Jones no longer lists. Imagine the effect on the oil industry, in particular, and capitalist economies in general were a decision to replace petroleum with uranium to become policy. Every oil company would have to write down the value of its assets, oil in the ground and equipment, and rapidly declare bankruptcy. It would be necessary to artificially maintain oil production during the interim period until it is no longer needed.

Not only is private capitalist finance manifestly incapable of supporting projects on this scale, but nor do capitalist priorities – putting return on investment before all else – sufficiently value human well-being to put it before the scramble for profit. Although the US government was once able to launch a program to land a man on the moon, it is politically impossible to launch a similar program to massively convert to nuclear energy as the levers of power are completely compromised by the petroleum industry and the economy would face near certain ruin.

Nuclear power under socialism

However, a socialist economy has massively different priorities and is impervious to the capitalist drive for profits. The first and essential priority of a socialist economy is the betterment of living conditions for all humans. In practice, this means:

• the elimination of poverty;
• provide adequate food;
• clothing;
• shelter;
• education;
• healthcare;
• transportation; and,
• safety.

In a planned economy, the active population deliberates on what it needs to accomplish with the material and intellectual resources at hand. We have plenty of examples of this from socialist history.

From its beginning, the Soviet Union created a national healthcare system where none had previously existed. At the same time, its leadership recognized early on that it would be attacked and obliterated by the capitalist powers unless it could create a modern industrial economy and build the weaponry of modern warfare in time. As we know it made the necessary decisions and destroyed the invading German army in WWII.

Early after the revolution, poverty-stricken Cuba decided that literacy was a priority and with the help of its school children virtually eliminated illiteracy in the adult population. Cuba also made it a priority to create a first-class healthcare complex, not only for Cubans, but for any people in the world who need its help. We know what Cuba’s success in this area has done for the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In about 1980 the Chinese Communist Party decided to eliminate absolute poverty. Since then 800 million Chinese have been lifted from the lowest internationally recognized category of poverty, and the last few Chinese citizens will be raised from absolute poverty in 2020. Current projects that the Chinese people are working tt to include achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 and evolving toward a totally socialist economy in 2049, the centenary of the Chinese Revolution. Nuclear energy looms large in the plan to achieve carbon neutrality. The current plan is to increase nuclear electricity production to six times the current level by 2050 – from about 70GW to 400GW.

Never, to my knowledge, has a capitalist economy been able to plan for national goals, nor achieve them, except in war. The best capitalists can do is to plan for individual enterprises, or perhaps even a few related enterprises. Even in a country like Germany, which was well on the way to conversion to full nuclear-generated electricity, opposition capitalists were able to sabotage the plan. Now, German nuclear installations are being shut down and replaced with coal-fired plants.

LET’S REFUTE SOME FALSE CLAIMS ABOUT NUCLEAR ENERGY

What is ?

Radioactivity is the emission, spontaneous or induced, of particles from decaying atomic nuclei. The particles can be electrons, protons, neutrons, ionized light atoms such as helium, photons, neutrinos, or antineutrinos. All these decay products together are called radiation. Some of them are ionizing radiation, since they carry enough energy to knock electrons off atoms as they pass near them. The neutrinos, however, can traverse the entire earth and touch nothing.

Radioactivity is not harmful in small doses

There is a lot of mystery, misunderstanding, and outright obfuscation about radiation. Let us be clear. Radiation, like many other things we encounter in nature — snakes, cyanide, some mushrooms and plants, lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!) – can kill. This is a good thing. Radiation therapy kills cancers and saves the patient. It can also kill microbes and sterilize surfaces and foods. In large doses it can kill human beings. In small doses it is harmless.

In fact, you are being continuously bombarded with cosmic radiation and you are totally unaware of it. Radiation doses are measured in Sieverts (Sv). At sea level, you absorb about 0.1 micro Sv every hour of every day. At higher altitudes and during air travel, doses can be significantly higher — 2, 4, or even 9 micro Sv/hour. Cosmic rays account for about one tenth of the radiation that you absorb from nature. The rest enter your body from things you breathe in or eat, or things just around where you are. For example, by entering Grand Central Station in New York City, which is made of granite, you increase your radiation dose from the naturally decaying materials in the granite.

In our evolutionary history we have built up a certain degree of immunity

So, why haven’t you already died from radiation poisoning? Every living thing since the beginning of life on Earth has been subjected to all this natural background radiation. Every living species has ancestors who evolved mechanisms to repair radiation damage. Those species that didn’t don’t exist. Our species did. Congratulations to us. As a gift from our evolutionary forebears, we have natural immunity to a certain level of radiation.

How does a nuclear reactor work?

Nuclear reactors cause atomic nuclei to split in a controlled environment. When the nuclei split, they release energy in the form of moving atomic particles (atomic nuclei, protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.). Some of the neutrons go on to induce other nuclei to split. This is called a chain reaction. The other particles dissipate their energy, generating heat as they ionize atoms in the reactor. This heat is used to produce steam to turn electrical turbines. In the future, reactors still in the design stage may be able to perform other tasks such as generating hydrogen, producing reactor fuel, and neutralizing nuclear reactor waste products.

Why nuclear waste is not an uncontrollable danger

The simple truth is that nuclear reactors do not produce very much waste. After some months of operation, the fuel in a reactor is consumed. In order to sustain the reaction, uranium, for example, must be treated so that its fissile isotope, U-235, is concentrated (usually to 3-5%) to provide a sufficient number of targets to sustain the chain reaction.

An isotope is a nucleus with a specific number of neutrons. For example, U-235 has 92 protons, like all the different isotopes of uranium, but has 235-92 or 143 neutrons. Saying that the fuel is consumed means that the concentration of U-235 has fallen below the level necessary to maintain a chain reaction. There are still significant quantities of U-235 in the spent fuel, just not enough to do the job.

Fortunately, the spent rods can be recycled as raw material to produce new fuel rods. Another one of the byproducts of nuclear fission is the element plutonium, which can also be used as fuel in a reactor. At present the United States does not recycle spent nuclear fuel. However, France, the UK, Russia, Japan, and India do. In fact, France recycles waste for several European countries in its facility at La Hague on the Normandy coast. There is a very informative film about the La Hague facility here.

Other byproducts are just waste at our current level of technology. At some future time, they may turn out to be useful. If not, there may one day be reactors that can break them down into harmless material. In the meantime, these byproducts are embedded in glass pellets and stored.

What about nuclear accidents?

Well, there was the accident in 1979 at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, PA. A minor malfunction led, through a series of operator errors, to the partial meltdown of the nuclear core. At one time during the recovery process a small amount of radioactivity, well within the range of background radiation in the region, was released. During 17 years of monitoring, the Pennsylvania Department of Health found no deleterious effects on the health of the 30,000 people who lived near the reactor at the time of the accident. A lot of money was spent cleaning up the damaged reactor, while the other one on the site is in operation, certified until 2034. There is a detailed description of the accident and the aftermath here.

Fukushima: On March 11, 2011, a tsunami damaged three of five nuclear reactors at Fukushima, Japan. The three damaged reactors are a write-off. High levels of radioactivity were released to the environs at the time of the accident, but only insignificant amounts have been released subsequently. The local population was immediately evacuated and has suffered no deleterious effects from the radioactivity. Currently, some residents are being allowed to return. No deaths or injuries occurred due to the accident. A detailed report can be found here.

A great deal of radioactive water, used to cool the damaged reactor cores, has accumulated since the accident. It is stored on site after radioactive contaminants have been removed. One contaminant, tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, remains in the water. the Japanese government plans to dump the water into the ocean at the site. This decision has led to a great deal of adverse press, largely due to ignorance about what the contaminated water contains and the significance of the contaminant.

As tritium spontaneously decays into helium-3, a stable isotope, it emits a low energy electron. This particle can barely penetrate matter, so its ability to ionize, for example, human tissues is nearly negligible. However, in concentrated doses, it can be dangerous. No concentrated doses of tritium are stored at Fukushima. When the water is eventually dumped into the ocean, the tritium will be diluted to the point that the radioactivity will be hardly detectable at exit from the plant’s harbor. Here is an article about the current situation.

Chernobyl: In 1986 a reactor with a flawed design suffered a steam explosion. The accident was exacerbated by the presence of poorly trained staff. Twenty-eight people working at the plant died of acute radiation syndrome (ARS). Nobody off site suffered from ARS; however, some thyroid cancer deaths in people who were children at the time may have occurred.

In the area around Chernobyl 350,000 people were evacuated. Resettlement is ongoing, and it is possible to make tourist visits to the reactor site. A detailed report of the accident and the aftermath can be found here. As a condition for entering the European Union a number of countries have closed their Chernobyl-style reactors.

Nuclear construction projects so often incur cost overruns and delays in the US and Europe, but not everywhere

It is true that nuclear reactor construction in the United States has been plagued for years with cost overruns and long delays. Until recently, I thought that this problem was primarily political. Anti-nuclear activists, I thought, had thrown enough impediments, legal and regulatory, in the way that utilities were hamstrung in their efforts to build new nuclear capacity.

I recently discovered, to my surprise, in an article from Forbes Magazine that my assumption is wrong. It turns out that delays and costs are a problem in the US and Europe, but not in Asia and the Middle East. The article indicates that, according to a MIT study, the problem stems from poor project management:

• Construction is begun before site design is complete;
• Insufficiently committed management teams cannot adapt to changing conditions; and,
• Supplies are unreliable and trained workers are lacking.

This last problem is a direct result of western lack of commitment to installing nuclear power plants in recent decades.

Why regressing to pre-industrial times will not work

What are we trying to achieve as we abandon fossil fuels? Clearly, we want to halt the climate change associated with increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. That said, what kind of society do we want once we no longer depend on fossil fuels?

In advocating in favor of nuclear energy over several decades, I have been struck by a remarkably naïve line of argument. Radical environmentalists sometimes claim that humans are a blight or a cancer on the planet. Our industrial society, they say, is nothing but an assault on Nature, and we must return to a more natural, simple agrarian economy.

This cannot occur, and here is why. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, world population is estimated to have been between 800 million and 1.1 billion. Current world population is about 7.8 billion.

That increase in population is due, among other major achievements, to our success in defeating disease and hunger, increasing crop yields, providing safe drinking water, making possible moderately livable urban environments, creating a global division of labor, and neutralizing religious rejection of science and education. By continuing in this direction, world population will soon peak, and before the end of the century it will decrease to about 8.8 billion.

Were we to return to a pre-industrial life, the world population would have to decrease to a billion or fewer people. We cannot do that in a humane way. Furthermore, why would we want to?

Pre-industrial societies suffered from high infant mortality, for example. We would not be able to provide the energy-intense health environment to maintain current low infant mortality rates. We would not be able to maintain highly energy-intensive production of medications for otherwise mortal diseases for people of all ages. Life expectancy would severely decline. We would not be able to produce fertilizers and pesticides that protect crops and increase their quantity and quality. Famine would become commonplace, as it always has been in pre-industrial societies. We would have to abandon the use of electricity production, which depends on energy-intensive materials such as steel for both generation and transmission equipment. In any real and politically acceptable sense, there is no way to go back to a not so idyllic pre-industrial past. That leaves us the imperative to work out the political and technical means to achieve a sustainable industrial future.

Why wind and solar energy are not enough

In fact, there is not a single solar, wind, biomass or other “renewable” energy source capable of matching the power density that nuclear reactors provide. That means that any of these “green” options gobble up vast amounts of the earth’s surface simply for energy production, leaving less space available for, say, agriculture or natural habitats. What are the numbers? The best we can hope for is desert solar photovoltaic farms, which can produce electricity at the rate of up to 20W/m². By contrast, both nuclear and fossil fueled plants achieve outputs in excess of 1000W/m² — at least 50 times more power density than the best-case green solution. In practice, this means that some countries like Germany and the UK would need to cover half their area in wind turbines to supply energy at current consumption rates. Other industrial countries, Japan and South Korea, are too small to supply their own electricity needs. Both nuclear and fossil fuels can easily meet the density constraint, and nuclear energy meets it without greenhouse gas emissions.

There is no need to invoke the effects on the environment of massive electricity generation from low intensity solar and wind farms. Nor need we critique the short mean time between failures of these technologies, their short life span or the significant pollution problems caused by disposal of failed equipment.

CONCLUSION

In this article, I focus on the energy needs for a sustainable industrial future. Two criteria suffice to determine how to go forward:

• We will need to be able to guarantee stable base-line electricity production for both home and industrial/commercial needs; and,
• We will need to provide high temperature process heat for industry.

Today baseline electricity comes from a mix of fossil fueled generators (coal, oil, natural gas), hydroelectric facilities, and nuclear fueled reactors. To achieve sustainability, we will need to remove fossil fuels from this mix. Electricity generated by direct solar and wind energy cannot fill that gap. Quite simply, they are, and always will be, unreliable. When the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing, electricity production stops.

Process heat is today provided both by fossil fuels and electricity. For example, iron and steel production require high temperatures to purify and manipulate the final product. Both glass and ceramics require high temperature ovens. Production often continues around the clock and furnaces can be damaged or destroyed if the internal temperature drops. Because neither solar nor wind powered generators can meet this constraint, they are unsuitable.

In some cases, furnaces heated with fossil fuels can be replaced with electrical furnaces. Nuclear reactors are currently used as well. For information about this technology see this article.  In short, nuclear energy can replace fossil fuels both generating reliable base-line electricity and producing industrial process heat.

The upshot of our history of nuclear accidents is that they are uncommon, but can cost the utility owner a lot of money, and they rarely cause radiation injuries. The more we use nuclear reactors, learn from mistakes, and improve them, the fewer accidents will occur and the less significant they will be. That is the general history of the development of any technology. Consider, for example, what has occurred with automobiles and airplanes.

Remember Ford’s Model T? Probably not. You would likely have been terrified to ride in one. There were no seat belts or air bags. The windows were not shatter proof. There were hardly any paved roads. The steering wheel and front axle were held on with cotter pins! To complete the picture of how vehicle safety has improved as the technology evolved, look at the chart “Deaths and MV rates” here. The point is that for any technology, the same thing happens. As it is introduced, innovations make it work better with less danger to people who depend on it.

One word about airplane evolution: Charles Lindberg crossed the Atlantic with no navigation system other than the seat of his pants.

People often fear novelty and are easily manipulated to reject it. When I see the fear-mongering that the anti-nuclear movement carries out, I am reminded of an editorial in the New York Times. At the time of the debate about electrification in New York City, the Times ran a fear-mongering editorial claiming that power lines would collapse in the first storm, leaving electrocuted horses in the streets. No comment.

REFUTING FRIENDS OF THE EARTH PROPAGANDA ABOUT NUCLEAR ENERGY  

Now that we have explained what nuclear energy is all about, let’s see what Friends of the Earth says today, half a century after it was created to crush the nuclear power industry.

After 60 years, despite massive subsidies, the nuclear industry is dying of its own accord.

— Not true. It is flourishing in Asia and provides much of the electricity in Western Europe.

Because it’s too expensive, too dangerous and dirty, and takes too long to deploy. 

— Not true. If you have read this article diligently, you can refute Friends of the Earth and their friends.

Reactors are closing across the country, and major corporations have declared bankruptcy.

— Misleading. Despite efforts of the petroleum industry and its allies like Friends of the Earth who have done everything they could to sabotage the nuclear power industry, nuclear reactors have supplied about 20% of US electricity since the late 80s. In order to do so, more reactors have had to come online to maintain that level as electricity demand has increased. Without The petroleum industry’s sabotage, nuclear reactors would probably provide an even greater proportion electricity today.

Nuclear power simply cannot compete against safer, cleaner and cheaper renewable energy.

— Not true. Nuclear power doesn’t need a backup energy source for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. In fact, nuclear energy provides the backup, when it isn’t a fossil fuel burning plant.

Nuclear power is also expensive.

— Not true. Whole countries depend on nuclear energy to supply their electricity. Some even sell their excess electricity to their neighbors at competitive prices.

Nuclear’s subsidies have been buried in hundreds of spending bills, it’s [sic] costs externalized to the environment and future generations, and its bills literally unpaid, defaulted on or passed to taxpayers. Conservative estimates suggest that the nuclear industry has received more than $85 billion in subsidies. A centrist estimate might double that.

— So what? Go find out how much the petroleum industry receives in subsidies.  Spoiler alert: Lots. This is a feature of a capitalist economy that applies to every industry, even pork.

For 60 years, nuclear power has posed a serious risk to people and our planet.

— Not true. Friends of the Earth is confusing nuclear with the fossil fuel industries, whose pollution kills millions of people every year. Review the discussion of nuclear accidents.

It will be the same for the next 10,000 years. Our children and generations of their children will be forced to endure the radioactive pollution and fallout from devastating accidents like 3 Mile Island, Fukashima [sic] and Chernobyl, and the permanent waste that no one can safely store.

— Not true. Review the section on nuclear waste storage and recycling of nuclear fuel. Then take a guided tour to Chernobyl.

The risks of nuclear proliferation and the spread of dangerous weapons and technology only adds to this.

— Partially true. Nuclear proliferation is a byproduct of capitalist warfare. Nuclear fuel cannot be used for nuclear weapons since the concentration of radioactive material is far too low. If capitalist nations want to build atomic bombs, they won’t use reactor fuel; they will directly enrich the materials they need.

This whole screed from the Friends of the Earth website reminds me of advertising. One soap manufacturer insinuates that his competitor’s product leaves a ring around your collar. If you are naïve enough to fall for it, you buy his product. At the beginning of this article, we reviewed the role of Robert O. Anderson, CEO of Atlantic Richfield Oil, in providing the money to create Friends of the Earth. He gave about half a million current dollars for this advertising campaign in 1969. Boy, has he gotten his money’s worth!

• First published in Planning Beyond Capitalism

This article was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2020 at 11:46am and is filed under Capitalism, Disasters, Energy, Fearmongering, Fukushima Daiichi, Hypocrisy, Japan, Media, Media Bias, Nuclear Energy, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Propaganda, Renewables, Science/Technology, Transparency/Secrecy, United States, US Hypocrisy.

by UnistotenCamp / October 13th, 2020

While the climate justice movement has been winning important victories, stopping and slowing pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure, and putting the future of fossil fuels in doubt, the political system, long connected to the fossil fuel industry, is still fighting the urgently needed transition to clean sustainable energy. Both President Trump and former Vice President Biden put forward energy plans that do not challenge fossil fuels.  The only candidate with a serious climate plan is Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins.

The movement needs to build momentum from these successes for more actions to stop fossil fuel infrastructure. As the reality of the climate crisis hits more people, fossil fuels will become high-risk investments while the cost of solar, wind, thermal, and ocean energy is declining.

Propped Up by Massive Subsidies

The fossil fuel industry is being propped up by massive subsidies without which its extinction would be faster. A 2019 IMF report found that $5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, the equivalent of over 6.5% of global GDP. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found “the $649 billion the US spent on these subsidies in 2015 is more than the country’s defense budget and 10 times the federal spending for education.”

In the era of the climate crisis, COVID-19, and recession, these subsidies are not justifiable. Christine Lagarde of the IMF has called for removing fossil fuel subsidies, noting the investments made into fossil fuels could be better spent elsewhere. She notes: “There would be more public spending available to build hospitals, to build roads, to build schools and to support education and health for the people.”

The era of fossil fuel domination is coming to an end. It is up to people to organize to hasten the transition to a clean, sustainable energy economy. The deeply embedded fossil fuel industry can be defeated. The people have shown they can make it impossible to build fossil fuel infrastructure.

Friends of Nelson Facebook page

Movements Can Stop Fossil Fuels

In early July, three pipeline projects suffered major blows. Their defeats were the result of more than a decade of activism by thousands of people. People risked arrest, went to jail, confronted police, petitioned, lobbied and litigated, slowing the projects down and making it impossible to profitably build pipelines and other infrastructure.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was canceled on July 5. On July 6, a federal court ordered Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down pending an environmental review. Unfortunately, a court of appeals ruling allows the pipeline to continue to operate while the litigation is resolved. That night, the Supreme Court let a Montana court ruling on the Keystone XL pipeline stand, meaning the project cannot be built until much of the litigation is settled.  Construction of the Keystone XL is blocked until 2021. Joe Biden has pledged to oppose the Keystone XL. If he is elected, activists will have to hold him to that promise.

The Keystone XL pipeline was designed to carry Alberta’s dirty tar sands oil across the US-Canada border into Nebraska and has been fought since 2011 by the Tar Sands Blockades, Bold Nebraska and others.  The Dakota Access pipeline was opposed by the Standing Rock Sioux uprising that brought Indigenous nations and climate activists together in a months-long struggle, often facing violent police repression. The DAPL is transporting fracked oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale basin to Gulf Coast refineries. And, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline would have carried fracked gas through the Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia to North Carolina. All along the route, people aligned to oppose the project. Litigation and delays forced the large companies, Dominion and Duke Energy, to cancel the project even after investing $3.4 billion in it.

In another defeat that will empower climate activists, on June 30 in a 10 to 1 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to allow people impacted by fossil fuel infrastructure to sue 31 days after filing an administrative appeal on a permitted project. FERC had been preventing litigation by delaying the 30-day administrative appeal an average of 7 months and up to 15 months during which pipelines were being built.

FERC has been critical for the fossil fuel boom of the Obama and Trump eras. FERC and the fossil fuel industry act as one as all FERC funding comes from industry fees, not taxpayers. According to Ted Glick of Beyond Extreme Energy, which has been battling FERC for a decade, in an interview on WBAI, the vast majority of FERC commissioners since it was founded in 1978 have come out of the fossil fuel industry and many go back to the industry after leaving FERC. The same revolving door exists for many staff members too. FERC and the oil and gas industries have been working together to prevent court review, but with this new DC Circuit Court decision, that should stop.

All of these victories were the result of grassroots struggles by the climate justice movement. As one activist tweeted, “In case you thought that small actions don’t matter . . . this is a result of every tree-sitter, each person who chained herself to a piece of equipment, sat at an air board mtg, blocked a site.” Campaigns that challenge infrastructure at every turn make a difference. These victories are part of a nationwide uprising against fossil fuel infrastructure and the resultant thievery of private property by abusing eminent domain, the pollution of farms, rivers and forests and FERC’s steamrolling over communities.

The movement is making pipelines more expensive to build. Increased costs combined with low fossil fuel prices and low costs for solar and wind energy are making the industry a risky investment. There have been hundreds of bankruptcies. Symbolic of this is the recent bankruptcy of Chesapeake Energy, which was a leader in the fracking boom. It started to decline after one of the CEOs, Aubrey McClendon, died in a car crash in 2016 after being charged with corruption. Steve Horn reports on their ongoing corruption, writing, “Just a month ago, in fact, Chesapeake executives showered themselves with $25 million in bonuses, despite the company tumbling toward bankruptcy.”

USA Today reported that 24 oil and gas companies have already filed for bankruptcy since the COVID-19 pandemic and recession began. The Wall Street Journal reports that potentially 200 fracking corporations could declare bankruptcy in the next two years if the price of oil stays at current levels.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline on March 22, 2012 in Cushing, Oklahoma (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

The Fossil Fuel Industry is Not Defeated

Fossil fuel industry ties to presidents have run deep for decades. Both George H. W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush, were oil men. President Obama, who made the US a top producer of oil and gas, bragged, “We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.” During his term, over a period of two years, the US built 29,604 miles of new pipeline. According to NASA, the equatorial circumference of the Earth is 24,873.6 miles.

President Trump, who denies climate change, is seeking to expedite the approval of oil and gas infrastructure. Former Vice President Biden said he will protect the fracking industry and opposes the Green New Deal. His recently announced climate plans do not confront the fossil fuel industry.

The Trump administration has issued a proposed rule to undermine the 50-year old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by not requiring any consideration of climate impacts as part of the review of fossil fuel infrastructure. His proposal will play out over months or years during a public comment process. If it is approved, litigation can be used to stop it.

Trump is building on the work of the Obama-Biden administration that issued executive orders to speed up environmental reviews and did not include climate considerations in NEPA reviews until his final year in office. Their administration allowed large pipeline projects to be broken into small segments to skirt the NEPA review. Through the signing of the FAST Act in 2015, which led to the creation of a Federal Permit Improvement Steering Council, federal permits and the NEPA review process were streamlined.

Biden is doubling down on fossil fuels and trying to confuse people with the fraudulent phrase of “net-zero” emissions, which is a shell game that will not cut fossil fuel production. He is calling for investment in carbon capture utilization and sequestration to claim he will offset carbon emissions, but this is a political fraud as the technologies are unproven. Even inside the DNC, this strategy is questioned by their Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis, which opposes reliance of offsets and asks, “Why would we rely on it when we already have much less expensive, proven, clean green technologies?”

The movement must be clear in its demand to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, and other clean sustainable energy sources. We must demand policies that are consistent with the reality of the climate crisis requiring urgent action.

Indigenous Environmental Network

Building On Our Victories

The recent victories indicate that the more we show our determination, risk arrest, challenge projects in the courts and build the case against fossil fuels in the era of climate crisis, the more infrastructure projects will be shelved. For those projects currently underway, the movement must continue to challenge them at every turn using the creativity and tactical variety that come from a movement composed of a broad base of people with different backgrounds, experiences and concerns.

The profitability of pipelines is already in doubt due to the strategic nonviolence of the movement and the changing energy market. Even with Trump and Biden mouthing support for the industry, they will not be able to overcome the realities of the market failure, the climate crisis and that people want funds spent on public health, remaking the economy and transitioning to a clean energy economy.

The nationwide uprising against racism and the movement against pipelines already have close connections due to environmental racism and alliances with Indigenous struggles. We need to make these cross-issue relationships stronger.

The economic collapse is an opportunity to remake the economy with the Green New Deal as the centerpiece of massive job creation, investment in education and the development of new industries. There is a growing labor uprising with PayDay Report tracking more than 900 wildcat strikes since March 1. Workers need to understand that confronting climate change will create 30 million good-paying union jobs and the Green New Deal is key to rebuilding the economy.

The climate movement against fossil fuels has already shown the ability to create this broad movement. Native Americans, climate scientists, farmers and ranchers, big environmental groups, veterans and activists all came together for the first time in some of these struggles. Future efforts can link climate justice, anti-racism, and workers’ rights work, as well as the anti-war movement because the US military is the biggest polluter and fossil fuel user on the planet, to create an unstoppable movement no matter who is the next president.

This article was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2020 at 3:56pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Climate Change, Climate Science, Courts and Judges, Donald Trump, Economy/Economics, Energy, Fossil Fuel Emissions, George W. Bush, Global Warming, Joe Biden, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Original Peoples, Social Movements.

And here’s my take on Presstv. I’m on at 3:30.

Not only is it obscene to dig up and export our precious natural resources, but this particular pipeline is doubly odious. It is to export FRACKED gas. That means pounding the priceless lands in the Rockies, effectively bludgeoning Mother Nature, raping her to squeeze the last gasp of poisonous gas, so we can heat up her up even faster.

Passing around the burning sage at Queens Park

The demonstrators were/are young, newly ‘energized’, using our renewable ‘energy’ without any pollution. We sense that time is short, that Mother Earth’s human children look evil these days, that we have a moral duty to protest, to stop this ‘Coastal GasLink’ pipeline, to stop all pipelines.

Passing the memorial to Canadians who died in the Boer War; i.e. , for Apartheid

GasLink snake in the grass

I love the homemade, heartfelt cardboard posters best.

Passing our halls of justice

Dancing round East, South, West, and North (black, red, yellow, white)

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the Wet’suwet’en!

• Photos by Eric Walberg

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 at 5:56pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/activism/" rel="category tag">Activism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/environment/" rel="category tag">Environment</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/energy/oil/" rel="category tag">Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/protests/" rel="category tag">Protests</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/solidarity/" rel="category tag">Solidarity</a>.


Indigenous people in Canada are giving the world a demonstration of the power of nonviolent action. The justness of their cause — defending the land from those who would destroy it for short term profit and the elimination of a habitable climate on earth — combined with their courage and the absence on their part of cruelty or hatred, has the potential to create a much larger movement, which is of course the key to success.

This is a demonstration of nothing less than a superior alternative to war, not just because the war weapons of the militarized Canadian police may be defeated by the resistance of the people who have never been conquered or surrendered, but also because the Canadian government could accomplish its aims in the wider world better by following a similar path, by abandoning the use of war for supposedly humanitarian ends and making use of humanitarian means instead. Nonviolence is simply more likely to succeed in domestic and international relations than violence. War is not a tool for preventing but for facilitating its identical twin, genocide.

Of course, the indigenous people in “British Columbia,” as around the world, are demonstrating something else as well, for those who care to see it: a way of living sustainably on earth, an alternative to earth-violence, to the raping and murdering of the planet — an activity closely linked to the use of violence against human beings.

The Canadian government, like its southern neighbor, has an unacknowledged addiction to the war-oil-genocide problem. When Donald Trump says he needs troops in Syria to steal oil, or John Bolton says Venezuela needs a coup to steal oil, it’s simply an acknowledgement of the global continuation of the never-ended operation of stealing North America.

Look at the gas-fracking invasion of unspoiled lands in Canada, or the wall on the Mexican border, or the occupation of Palestine, or the destruction of Yemen, or the “longest ever” war on Afghanistan (which is only the longest ever because the primary victims of North American militarism are still not considered real people with real nations whose destruction counts as real wars) , and what do you see? You see the same weapons, the same tools, the same senseless destruction and cruelty, and the same massive profits flowing into the same pockets of the same profiteers from blood and suffering — the corporations that will be shamelessly marketing their products at the CANSEC weapons show in Ottawa in May.

Much of the profits these days comes from distant wars fought in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but those wars drive the technology and the contracts and the experience of war veterans that militarize the police in places like North America. The same wars (always fought for “freedom,” of course) also influence the culture toward greater acceptance of the violation of basic rights in the name of “national security” and other meaningless phrases. This process is exacerbated by the blurring of the line between war and police, as wars become endless occupations, missiles become tools of random isolated murder, and activists — antiwar activists, antipipeline activists, antigenocide activists — become categorized with terrorists and enemies.

Not only is war over 100 times more likely where there is oil or gas (and in no way more likely where there is terrorism or human rights violations or resource scarcity or any of the things people like to tell themselves cause wars) but war and war preparations are leading consumers of oil and gas. Not only is violence needed to steal the gas from indigenous lands, but that gas is highly likely to be put to use in the commission of wider violence, while in addition helping to render the earth’s climate unfit for human life. While peace and environmentalism are generally treated as separable, and militarism is left out of environmental treaties and environmental conversations, war is in fact a leading environmental destroyer. Guess who just pushed a bill through the U.S. Congress to allow both weapons and pipelines into Cyprus? Exxon-Mobil.

Solidarity of the longest victims of western imperialism with the newest ones is a source of great potential for justice in the world.

But I mentioned the war-oil-genocide problem. What does any of this have to do with genocide? Well, genocide is an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Such an act can involve murder or kidnapping or both or neither. Such an act can “physically” harm no one. It can be any one, or more than one, of these five things:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Numerous top Canadian officials over the years have stated clearly that the intention of Canada’s child-removal program was to eliminated Indigenous cultures, to utterly remove “the Indian problem.” Proving the crime of genocide does not require the statement of intent, but in this case, as in Nazi Germany, as in today’s Palestine, and as in most if not all cases, there is no shortage of expressions of genocidal intent. Still, what matters legally is genocidal results, and that is what one can expect from stealing people’s land to frack it, to poison it, to render it uninhabitable.

When the treaty to ban genocide was being drafted in 1947, at the same time that Nazis were still being put on trial, and while U.S. government scientists were experimenting on Guatemalans with syphilis, Canadian government “educators” were performing “nutritional experiments” on Indigenous children — that is to say: starving them to death. The original draft of the new law included the crime of cultural genocide. While this was stripped out at the urging of Canada and the United States, it remained in the form of item “e” above. Canada ratified the treaty nonetheless, and despite having threatened to add reservations to its ratification, did no such thing. But Canada enacted into its domestic law only items “a” and “c” — simply omitting “b,” “d,” and “e” in the list above, despite the legal obligation to include them. Even the United States has included what Canada omitted.

Canada should be shut down (as should the United States) until it recognizes that it has a problem and begins to mend its ways. And even if Canada didn’t need to be shut down, CANSEC would need to be shut down.

CANSEC is one of the largest annual weapons shows in North America. Here’s how it describes itself, a list of exhibitors, and a list of the members of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries which hosts CANSEC.

CANSEC facilitates Canada’s role as a major weapons dealer to the world, and the second biggest weapons exporter to the Middle East. So does ignorance. In the late 1980s opposition to a forerunner of CANSEC called ARMX created a great deal of media coverage. The result was a new public awareness, which led to a ban on weapons shows on city property in Ottawa, which lasted 20 years.

The gap left by media silence on Canadian weapons dealing is filled with misleading claims about Canada’s supposed role as a peacekeeper and participant in supposedly humanitarian wars, as well as the non-legal justification for wars known as “the responsibility to protect.”

In reality, Canada is a major marketer and seller of weapons and components of weapons, with two of its top customers being the United States and Saudi Arabia. The United States is the world’s leading marketer and seller of weapons, some of which weapons contain Canadian parts. CANSEC’s exhibitors include weapons companies from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

There is little overlap between the wealthy weapons-dealing nations and the nations where wars are waged. U.S. weapons are often found on both sides of a war, rendering ridiculous any pro-war moral argument for those weapons sales.

CANSEC 2020’s website boasts that 44 local, national, and international media outlets will be attending a massive promotion of weapons of war. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Canada has been a party since 1976, states that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.”

The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are routinely used in violation of laws against war, such as the UN Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact — most frequently by Canada’s southern neighbor. CANSEC may also violate the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court by promoting acts of aggression. Here’s a report on Canadian exports to the United States of weapons used in the 2003-begun criminal war on Iraq. Here’s a report on Canada’s own use of weapons in that war.

The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are used not only in violation of laws against war but also in violation of numerous so-called laws of war, that is to say in the commission of particularly egregious atrocities, and in violation of the human rights of the victims of oppressive governments. Canada sells weapons to the brutal governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Canada may be in violation of the Rome Statute as a result of supplying weapons that are used in violation of that Statute. It is certainly in violation of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. Canadian weapons are being used in the Saudi-U.S. genocide in Yemen.

In 2015, Pope Francis remarked before a joint session of the United States Congress, “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”

An international coalition of individuals and organizations will be converging on Ottawa in May to say No to CANSEC with a seris of events called NoWar2020.

This month two nations, Iraq and the Philippines, have told the United States military to get out. This happens more often than you might think. These actions are part of the same movement that tells the Canadian militarized police to get out of lands they have no rights in. All actions in this movement can inspire and inform all others.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2020 at 9:39pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/anti-war/" rel="category tag">Anti-war</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/genocide/" rel="category tag">Genocide</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/energy/oil/" rel="category tag">Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/solidarity/" rel="category tag">Solidarity</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/militarism/weaponry/" rel="category tag">Weaponry</a>.