[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report

[Bill Totten]

Read this or George W Bush will be president the rest of your life

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org (June 06 2008)


The Empire - A Status Report

There are a number of expressions and slogans associated with the Nazi
regime in Germany which have become commonly known in English.

"Sieg Heil!" - Victory Hail!

"Arbeit macht frei" - Work will make you free.

"Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt" - Today
Germany, tomorrow the world

But none perhaps is better known than "Deutschland über alles" - Germany
above all.

Thus I was taken aback when I happened to come across the website of the
United States Air Force - www.airforce.com/ - and saw on its first page
a heading "Above all". Lest you think that this refers simply and
innocently to planes high up in the air, this page links to another -
www.airforce.com/achangingworld/ - where "Above all" is repeated even
more prominently, with links to sites for "Air Dominance", "Space
Dominance", and "Cyber Dominance", each of which in turn repeats "Above
all". These guys don't kid around. They're not your father's imperialist
war mongers. If they're planning on a new "thousand-year Reich", let's
hope that their fate is no better than the original, which lasted twelve
years.

The events of recent years indicate that the world is wising up to and
becoming less intimidated by Washington's overarching ambition for world
dominance. Latin America is increasingly attempting to escape the
empire's clutches. Leaders keenly aware of how US imperialism works and
determined to keep it out of their own country are in power in
Venezuela, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and perhaps the latest addition, Paraguay.

And now Africa has turned down Washington's offer to be part of the
imperial family. African governments have refused to host Africom, the
US Africa Command. The Washington Post reported that "worry swept the
continent that the United States planned major new military
installations in Africa", and despite the promise of new development and
security partnerships, many Africans concluded that Africom was
primarily an extension of US counterterrorism policy, intended to keep
an eye on Africa's large Muslim population. The United States "equates
terrorism with Islam", said a senior Kenyan diplomat, and few African
governments wanted to be seen as inviting US surveillance on their own
people. [Note from your editor: It would be more instructive to equate
anti-American terrorism with American foreign policy, including building
military bases in other people's countries.]

When Bush visited Africa in February, he was told by the Ghanian
president: "You're not going to build any bases in Ghana". US-funded aid
groups protested plans to expand the American military's role in
economic development in Africa, sharply objecting to working alongside
US troops. Said an Africom officer: "[Africom] was seen as a massive
infusion of military might onto a continent that was quite proud of
having removed foreign powers from its soil". {1}

There's also the oil factor. The US imports more oil from African
nations than from Saudi Arabia, and the continent has huge unexplored
areas. This undoubtedly is a major motivation behind Washington's desire
for an expanded military presence in the region. The United States is
not about to take Africa's rejection of Africom as the last word;
indeed, some of the tough rhetoric by African officials may be for
public consumption, for the US already has somewhat of a military
presence on the continent. It will be interesting to observe the ongoing
tug of war between Washington and African nationalists &
anti-imperialists over expansion of the American presence.


Democracy American Style. You gotta problem wit dat?

Here's White House spokeswoman Dana Perino at a recent press briefing:

Reporter: The American people are being asked to die and pay for this,
and you're saying that they have no say in this war?

Perino: I didn't say that ... this President was elected ...

Reporter: Well, what it amounts to is you saying we have no input at all.

Perino: You had input. The American people have input every four years,
and that's the way our system is set up. {2}


In 1941, Edward Dowling, editor and priest, commented: "The two greatest
obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread
delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the
chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it".

Can we look forward to Perino's memoir after she leaves the White House
in which, like her predecessor Scott McClellan recently, she confesses
that she was part of a "permanent campaign" mode to deceive the American
public? I'm prepared to welcome her into the fold as I have McClellan. I
have a soft spot in my heart for political late bloomers. I used to work
for the State Department when I was a good, loyal anti-communist.


Washington's grand and noble new ally in the Free World

Scott McClellan has been criticized for not expressing his reservations
about Bush administration policies while still at the White House. This
would have indeed taken a measure of courage few people have, and likely
meant his job and career committing suicide. I'm reminded of Carla Del
Ponte, the Swiss diplomat who in 1999 became Chief Prosecutor for the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, located in
The Hague, Netherlands. In accordance with her official duties, she
looked into possible war crimes of all the participants in the conflicts
of the 1990s surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia and the NATO (read
the United States) 78-day bombing of Serbia and its province of Kosovo,
where ethnic Albanians were trying to secede. In late December 1999, in
an interview with The Observer of London, Del Ponte was asked if she was
prepared to press criminal charges against NATO personnel (and not just
against the former Yugoslav republics). She replied: "If I am not
willing to do that, I am not in the right place. I must give up my mission."

The Tribunal then announced that it had completed a study of possible
NATO crimes, declaring: "It is very important for this tribunal to
assert its authority over any and all authorities to the armed conflict
within the former Yugoslavia".

Was this a sign from heaven that the new millennium (2000 was but a week
away) was going to be one of more equal international justice? Could
this really be?

No, it couldn't. From official quarters, military and civilian, of the
United States and Canada, came disbelief, shock, anger, denials ...
"appalling" ... "unjustified". Del Ponte got the message. Her office
quickly issued a statement: "NATO is not under investigation by the
Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO
during the conflict in Kosovo." {3}

Del Ponte remained in her position until the end of 2007, leaving to
become the Swiss ambassador to Argentina; at the same time writing a
book about her time with the Tribunal - The Hunt: Me and War Criminals,
published two months ago but available at the moment only in Italian. It
hasn't been much reported yet what del Ponte has said about NATO, but
the book has already created a scandal in Europe, for in it she reveals
how the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted hundreds of Serbs in 1999,
and took them to Kosovo's fellow Muslims in Albania where they were
killed, their kidneys and other body parts then removed and sold for
transplant in other countries.

The KLA for years has been engaging in other equally charming
activities, such as heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women,
various acts of terrorism, and carrying out ethnic cleansing of Serbs
who have had the bad fortune to be in Kosovo because it's long been
their home. Between 1998 and 2002, the KLA appeared at times on the
State Department terrorism list; at first because of its tactic of
targeting innocent Serb civilians in order to provoke retaliation from
Serbian troops; later because Mujahadeen mercenaries from various
Islamic countries, including some tied to al Qaeda, were fighting
alongside the KLA, as they were in Bosnia with the Bosnian Muslims
during the 1990s Yugoslav civil wars {4}. The KLA remained on the
terrorist list until the US decided to make them an ally, in some
measure due to the existence of a major American military base in
Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel. (It's remarkable, is it not, how these bases pop
up all around the world?) In November 2005, following a visit there,
Alvaro Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of Europe,
described the camp as a "smaller version of Guantanamo", referring to
the detainees there at the time from Washington's various wars,
including the so-called War on Terror {5}.

On February 17 of this year, in a move of highly questionable
international legality, the KLA declared the independence of Kosovo from
Serbia. The next day the United States recognized this new "nation",
thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of
another country's territory. The new country has as its prime minister a
gentleman named Hashim Thaci, described in Del Ponte's book as the brain
behind the abductions of Serbs and the sale of their organs. The new
gangster state of Kosovo is supported by Washington and other Western
powers who can't forgive Serbia- Yugoslavia- Milosevic - "the last
communists of Europe" - for not wanting to wholeheartedly embrace the
NATO/US/European Union triumvirate, which recognizes no higher power,
United Nations or other. The independent state of Kosovo is regarded as
reliably pro-west, a state that will serve as a militarized outpost for
the triumvirate, which is intent on further encircling Russia and
pushing it out of Europe.

In her book, Del Ponte asserts that there was sufficient evidence for
prosecution of Kosovo Albanians involved in war crimes, but the
investigation "was nipped in the bud", focusing instead on "the crimes
committed by Serbia". She claims that she could do nothing because it
was next to impossible to collect evidence in Kosovo, which was swarming
with criminals, in and out of the government. Witnesses were
intimidated, and even judges in The Hague were afraid of the Kosovo
Albanians.

In April, the Swiss Foreign Department issued a statement that Del
Ponte's book "contains statements which are impermissible for a
representative of the government of Switzerland", ordered her to return
to her ambassadorial post in Argentina, and prohibited any further
appearances promoting her book. The Swiss have officially recognized the
independence of Kosovo and established an embassy in the country. Kosovo
appears likely to remain a highly controversial issue in Europe and
Washington for some time to come. {6}


Reason number 3,468 to yearn for the lifting of the capitalist weight
from our souls

My phone company, Verizon, recently raised the monthly charge for my
international call plan by thirty percent. I phoned them to find out the
reason for this and was told that their competitors had raised their
charge for the international plan and so Verizon was doing the same. "To
stay competitive", the earnest young man told me. I thought I must be
misunderstanding him. We've all been raised to believe that one of the
beauties of capitalism is that it provides a competitive environment
which induces businesses to lower their rates so as to lure away
customers from their competitors. In the end, the consumer benefits from
lower prices. And this makes sense, at least within the capitalist
framework. (Although there have of course been numerous cases of large
companies lowering prices to force a small company - which initiated the
price cuts - out of business, after which the large companies raise
their prices back up.) But now? Now we're told that competition leads to
price increases. What, pray tell, is there left of the system for us to
believe in?

Supply and demand? Like in Burma, following the recent devastating
cyclone? Prices for food and other essentials have risen significantly
since the disaster. As they should, according to the revered and beloved
law of supply and demand, inasmuch as things are obviously in short
supply in Burma and people's needs are plainly much greater than usual.
What could make more sense under circumstances of human desperation than
to raise prices?

Yet, though questioning the law of supply and demand is normally
regarded in the same light as being skeptical of the law of gravity, I
have to do so, and refer to things I've expressed before: The price of
gasoline in the United States has been increasing on a regular basis for
a rather long time now, but there's no shortage of supply. There are no
lines of cars waiting hours at gas stations trying to fill up before the
pumps run dry. And there's been a considerable fall in demand as
less-than-rich drivers cut back on car use. It does not require total
cynicism to wonder whether the law of supply and demand has been
repealed. Or can it be that what is known as "supply and demand" is not
really any kind of immutable "law", but rather (choke, gasp) "corporate
policies"?

The oil companies are currently spending big bucks to convince the
American public that the super-high gasoline prices are not the
companies' fault. "The industry", reported the Washington Post, "is
trying to convince voters - who, in turn, will make the case to their
members of Congress - that rising energy prices are not the producers'
fault and that government efforts to punish the industry, especially
with higher taxes, would only make pricing problems worse" {7}.

Do the oil companies think they're being misunderstood? The next time
you run into a friendly oil company executive ask him this: "If you
lowered prices to what they were two years ago, would consumers stage
protests outside your headquarters? Would the FBI raid your offices?
Would your breathtakingly obscenely high profits drop into the red?
Could you still maintain your decadent millionaire lifestyle? The oil
companies are perfectly free to very significantly lower prices without
anything that you or I would call financial suffering. But they don't do
it. So what's being misunderstood by the public which obliges the
companies to spend millions on advertisements? Money which could go
toward price reductions.

Oil company executives at least produce a useful product compared to
people in the hedge funds business. What are hedge funds, you ask?
They're private, largely unregulated pools of capital whose managers can
buy or sell any kind of assets. The income of the fund's executives -
often in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes even a
billion - is taxed as capital gains, a much lower tax rate than if it
were taxed as regular earnings. One can say that hedge funds are simply
pure speculation carried to absurdity; typical of the new American
Dream: getting rich through speculation and inheritance instead of
through skill, enterprise, and filling a human social need.

Here is Daniel Strachman, a former hedge fund consultant and author of
The Fundamentals of Hedge Fund Management (2007). He's skeptical of
raising taxes on hedge fund managers, saying they should be rewarded for
taking huge risks. (So do firefighters, police officers, and bank
robbers of course.) Most managers have their own money in their funds,
he declares, and suffer massive losses when their investments go bad.
"It's clear somebody has to win and somebody has to lose", says
Strachman. "It's not pretty at all because people say, 'Oh my God. Look
how much money these guys are making while people are losing their homes
and are complaining about the cost of eggs and sugar'. But so what? We
don't live in a society that is pretty all the time. That's why it's
capitalism." {8}


Notes

{1} Washington Post, June 01 2008, page 18

{2} White House press briefing, March 20 2008

{3} The Observer (London), December 26 1999; Washington Times, December
30 and 31 1999; New York Times, December 30 1999

{4} There are numerous articles in the world press of the past twenty
years about the KLA's inordinate thuggery; Google "KLA" and one or more
of the key words, such as drugs, prostitution, ethnic cleansing,
transplants, et cetera.

{5} http://wikipedia.org/, under "Camp Bondsteel"

{6} Del Ponte's book and the turmoil it's produced have been largely
ignored in the US media, but if one does a Google on her name and the
book, one will find many reports from Europe.

{7} Washington Post, May 09 2008, page D1

{8} Washington Post, April 17 2008, page D1


William Blum is the author of:-

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two
(Common Courage Press, 1995)

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002)

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common
Courage Press, 2004)


Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at
http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read
at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to
bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and
city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in
case I'll be speaking in your area.

Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite.

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd
appreciate it if the website were mentioned.

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer58.htm


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/