Manuel E. Yepe 239
Yankee Bombings and Endless Wars
Yankee Worship of Bombings and Endless Wars
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, from Libya to Somalia in Africa, from Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, all forming a U.S. air curtain descending on a huge swath of the planet with the declared goal of fighting terrorism. Its main method is summed up in surveillance, bombardments and more constant bombardments. Its political benefit is to minimize the number of “United States boots on the ground” and, therefore, American casualties in the never-ending war on terrorism, as well as public protests over Washington’s many conflicts. It’s economic benefit: plenty of high-performance business for arms manufacturers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he wants and sell his warplanes and ammunition to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). Its reality for several foreign peoples: a sustained diet of bombs and missiles “Made in the USA” that explode here, there and everywhere.
This is how William J. Astore, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel and now a history professor, interprets the cult of bombing on a global scale that he views in his country, as well as the fact that U.S. wars are being fought more and more from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them increasingly daunting, and finally asks: What is driving this process?
“For many of America’s decision-makers,” Astore says, “air power has clearly become a sort of abstraction. “After all, with the exception of the September 11 [2001] attacks by four hijacked commercial airliners, Americans have not been the target of such attacks since World War II. On the battlefields of Washington, the Greater Middle East and North Africa, air power is almost literally always a one-way street. There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property of the U.S. Air Force and its allies, so we are no longer talking about “war” in the normal sense. No wonder Washington’s politicians and military see it as our strength, our asymmetric advantage, our way of settling accounts with wrongdoers, real and imaginary.
It could be said that, in the 21st century, the count of bombs and missiles replaced the Vietnamese era body count as a metric of false progress. According to U.S. military data, Washington dropped no less than 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, most of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, the “capital of terrorists,” the United States and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city literally to rubble. The Raqqqa bombing coupled with artillery fire killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International.
After Donald Trump took office as president, having promised to get the U.S. out of its endless wars, U.S. bombing has increased, not only against the Islamic state in Syria and Iraq, but also against Afghanistan. Civilian casualties increased even when “friendly” Afghan forces have been mistaken for “enemies” and also liquidated.
Somalia’s air strikes on Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombings continue to be underestimated by the U.S. media and minimized by the Trump administration.
This country’s propensity to believe that its ability to rain infernal fire from the sky provides it with a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the United States can control the air, but that dominance simply has not led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons such as the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military arsenal) have been celebrated as game changers even when they changed nothing. (In fact, the Taliban only continue to strengthen, as does the branch of the Islamic state in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory nor to the closure of anything; only to even greater destruction.
“Such results are contrary to the logic of air power that I absorbed in my career in the U.S. Air Force, from which I retired in 2005,” says Professor William J. Astore.
June 19, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Socialism’s Rebirth in the United States
Rebirth of the Socialist Option in the United States.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The electoral failure of center-left and center parties in Europe and North America has provoked a timid shift to the left in U.S. politics and is encouraging a modest renaissance of the “socialist” option.
With the marginalization of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Socialist Party of France and the Italian Democratic Party by voters angered by their parties’ shift to the right, it was inevitable that some of the leaders of these political formations would project a new orientation, somewhat more to the lef.t. It remains to be seen whether they will implement it. In line with this sentiment, the British Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Spain have made popular advances based on left-wing positions that, in most cases, reproduce the social democratic formulas of the mid-twentieth century.
This is how the acclaimed American communist journalist and writer Greg Godels analyzes it in a thorough work about the situation that left-wing and progressive political organizations in the United States are going through today.
In the United States, the reaction to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 elections generated further rhetoric to the left and the emergence of an important moderate social-democratic faction within the US Democratic Party.
It is driven by the energetic and youthful “veterans” of Bernie Sanders’ campaign called “Sandernistas”. They rally around the social democrats in the United States. The new left of the Democratic Party is trying to transform the old party. Meanwhile, opponents of this trend from the left, both inside and outside the Party, attack them using every possible resource, says Godels.
This, of course, raises the question of where the left is going. In the U.S., the failure to secure deep roots for an independent, internationalist, principled and revolutionary socialist movement – not totally absorbed by bipartisan electoral politics – means that the genuine politics of the left will have to suffer for the next 17-18 months from the bipartisan electoral circus, with guaranteed unsatisfactory results.
The distractions caused by the absurd RussiaGate, the political trial, the Twitter wars and the mistakes of some celebrities, mean that the fate of Venezuelans, Iranians, Palestinians and many poor and exploited Americans will remain in the hands of the crazy foreign policy team of Trump, a group of which the top of the Democratic Party refuses to shake off.
“We have found a worrying trend toward the normalization of the positive connotation of socialism,” the Victims of Communism (VOC) Foundation bitterly asserted. But most Americans understand socialism very differently from the traditional scientific concept.
According to the VOC study, only 9 percent of respondents associate the idea of socialism with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The most popular reference is Sanders, followed by the leaders of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the New Deal policy set in motion by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.
Some Americans call developed countries with notable official economic regulation socialist: Sweden, Canada and France, even leaving behind nations that explicitly declare their socialist character, such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, Democratic Korea and Venezuela.
For now, Bernie Sanders seems likely to win the nomination and become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.
Unlike the situation three years ago, Sanders would now have to compete with other representatives of the left wing of the Democratic Party. This wing, while not defining themselves as socialists, share some of his more progressive proposals, such as Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, who have supported the fuller version of the free universal health care system proposed by Sanders. Together, they would account for 19% of voters in the primaries, according to this poll.
Since the November 2020 presidential election would probably be the last for Sanders, who will then be 79 years old, it is suspected that his advanced age would lead him to nominate a younger person of a different gender as a vice presidential candidate.
Whatever Sanders’ electoral career, the spread of skepticism toward capitalism within U.S. society results from the country’s socioeconomic status and is objective and positive, experts say.
June 13, 2019.
Sino-Russian Strategic Alliance
China and Russia in Strategic Alliance
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Russian magazine of the Strategic Culture Foundation (FCE) published on 7th June an important editorial dedicated to highlighting the strong contrast between the strategic alliance for the 21st century that is being consolidated between China and Russia and the situation of enmity and confrontation that can be seen among Western leaders.
Russian President Vladimir Putin received his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Moscow this week for a three-day state visit.
The meeting not only enhanced the personal affection cultivated among them in nearly 30 meetings over the past six years. President Xi referred to Putin as a close friend and a great international ally.
Even more important is the fact that the two nations are solidifying a strategic alliance that could define the geopolitics of the 21st century, the FCE editorialist considers.
Putin and Xi – who also recently attended the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg – signed a series of bilateral trade agreements there that will boost Eurasian development and, indeed, global development.
Of particular importance is the continued drive by Moscow and Beijing to conduct international trade in national currencies, thus avoiding the use of the US dollar as a means of payment in international transactions. This is a crucial step in countering Washington’s purported hegemonic control of the global financial system.
Washington today abuses its privileged position of printing or retaining dollars to impose its imperial domination before the eyes of the world. This abuse must stop, and it will stop when Russia and China pave the way for a new, fairer mechanism of international finance and trade.
The policy of cooperation and partnership between equals described by Putin and Xi is based on mutual respect and peaceful prosperity. This vision is not only for those two nations, but for all the others because this policy implies a multi-lateral world without any kind of subjection. In the context of these principles, the consolidation of the alliance between Russia and China represents hope for a peaceful future for the planet, the Russian magazine of the FCE writes.
This positive view is especially welcome at a time when the United States, under President Donald Trump, has unleashed great tension and multiple conflicts in its attempt to shore up its deteriorating global dominance.
The United States is exerting sanctions and threats on numerous nations, including Russia and China, and is doing so even to its supposed allies in Europe, all in a desperate attempt to assert its hegemonic and uni-polar power.
This Imperial policy is the negation of the policies of solidarity and partnership outlined by the Russian and Chinese leaderships. The American style is not only useless, but above all it leads to destruction and war. A path by which, in short, nobody wins, says the FCE editorialist.
History has shown where a policy like the American one leads. In the 20th century, two horrendous world wars were fought – with nearly 100 million dead – largely due to imperialist rivalry.
Russia and China were the two nations that suffered the most in these conflagrations. Both know the horrible cost of conflict, but also how precious peace is. That is why it is encouraging to see those two countries forging a new paradigm of international cooperation based on solidarity and commitment to the development of the common good of all nations.
While Putin and Xi contribute to a solid project for the future, those of the United States and some other Western countries publicly show their disagreements. The false camaraderie of Western leaders is disproved by their ongoing disputes and rivalries. Trump and other European leaders have just celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landing in June 1944, a military event that announced the opening of the Western front in Nazi-occupied Europe. It contributed to the defeat of the Third Reich, but it was by far not the most important battle. The so-called D-Day was not a definitive milestone in the course of the war.
The historical truth is different. It is indisputable that it was the Soviet Red Army and the colossal sacrifices of Soviet citizens that constituted the fundamental force to defeat Nazi Germany and achieve the liberation of Europe from fascism. The momentous Battle of Stalingrad, which destroyed the Nazi war machine, ended in February 1943, some 16 months before the Western Allies launched their “D” day.
Western leaders enjoy smugly speculating about alleged past glories. This vanity fair does not change the historical record or objective truth. Those who do not learn from history repeat their mistakes and fall back into a dead end. They are leaders who are afraid of the future, says the FCE.
*This article can be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO! as a source.
Ottawa and the Venezuelan Opposition
Ottawa and the Worst of the Venezuelan Opposition
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Canada has not only financed and supported opposition parties in Venezuela, but has also openly allied itself with some of that country’s most undemocratic and extremist elements. The Canadian liberal government has openly supported the Voluntad Popular (VP) party’s offer to seize power by force since January 2019, although Ottawa has actually given its support for years to this electorally marginal party in the US nation.
The VP party that sponsors Juan Guaidó has an unfortunate history for Venezuelans. Shortly after Henrique Capriles, the presidential candidate of the opposition coalition Mesa Redonda de Unidad Democrática recognized his defeat in January 2014, its leader, Leopoldo López, launched the “La Salida” movement in an attempt to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, VP activists formed shock troops for the 2014 guarimbas protests that left 43 Venezuelans dead, 800 wounded and a large amount of property damage. Dozens more died in a new wave of VP-backed protests in 2017.
While VP has been effective in fuelling the violence, it has not, however, managed to win many votes. It occupied 8% of the seats in the 2015 elections, in which the opposition won control of the National Assembly. With 14 of the 167 deputies in the Assembly, VP won the majority of the four seats in the Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition. In the December 2012 regional elections, its vice president was only the sixth most successful party and performed somewhat better in the next year’s municipal elections.
Founded in late 2009 by Leopoldo Lopez, VP has always been known for its close contacts with the United States, especially its relations with U.S. diplomats, according to the Wall Street Journal.
López studied at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Internally, Lopez skillfully manages his distant relatives as great-great-grandson of Latin American independence leader Simón Bolívar, and his status as great-grandson of a president and grandson of a member of a presidential cabinet.
Between 2000 and 2008 he was mayor of Chacao, a Venezuelan municipality of some 65,000 inhabitants.
During the 2002 military coup, López orchestrated public protests against legitimate president and revolutionary leader Hugo Chávez and played a leading role in the “citizen’s arrest” of the Venezuelan interior minister. In 2014 Leopoldo López was sentenced and sentenced to 13 years in prison by the attorney general’s office and the Supreme Court of Justice for inciting, planning and leading violence during the guarimbas protests of that year.
Canadian officials are known to have had close contact with López’s emissaries after his conviction. In November 2014, his wife Lilian Adriana Tintori Parra, a well-known Venezuelan sportswoman and political activist, visited Ottawa to meet with Foreign Minister John Baird, his colleague in the conservative cabinet of Jason Kenney, Prime Minister of Alberta Province since 2019, and leader of the Conservative Party of that province since 2017. After meeting Lopez’s wife, Baird demanded the release of Lopez and other political prisoners of VP.
Three months later, Carlos Vecchio, National Policy Coordinator of the fantom government of Guaidó, visited Ottawa along with Diana López, Leopoldo López’s sister, and Orlando Viera-Blanco to speak before the Subcommittee on Human Rights of the United Nations Permanent Commission on Foreign Affairs and International Development. There, in a press conference, they attacked the Venezuelan government and in a forum at McGill University they spoke about the supposed “crisis due to the decline of democracy and the repression of human rights in Venezuela”.
The spectral government of Juan Guaidó named Carlos Vecchio and Orlando Viera-Blanco as its ambassadors to the United States and Canada, respectively. In October 2017, Vecchio and Congresswoman Bibiana Lucas attended an Anti-Maduro group meeting in Toronto.
Canada has undoubtedly strengthened the VP’s hard-line position within the opposition. A February Wall Street Journal article titled “What the hell is going on,” asks, “How did a small group seize control of the opposition?
As Montreal writer and political activist Yves Engler writes, Venezuelans did not need Canada to come and give impetus to a marginal party that can only help lead their country into an increasingly serious and complex conflict.
June 5, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
The Bilderburg Meetings in Switzerland
The Bilderberg Meetings in Switzerland
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The 67th Meeting of the fearsome Bilderberg group was held from 30 May to 2 June 2019, with some 130 guests from all over the world. 23 countries that stayed in one of the most sumptuous places in Switzerland, the Montreux Palace Hotel.
The Bilderberg meetings began at the start of the Cold War as a discussion club of American and European leaders against communism or, more specifically, against the Soviet Union. The first event took place in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel (which remained as the name of the group), in the Dutch city of Oosterbeek. Since then its meetings have been in various places in the western world, most of them in North America.
Switzerland has been one of the Group’s preferred host countries after the United States. Switzerland had hosted it five times before this occasion (1960, 1970, 1981, 1995 and 2011).
Bilderbergers conferences are secret events, run by those who pull the strings behind world leaders – politicians, CEOs, big financiers and other business executives, artists and personalities from the Western world. They are almost always American and Euro-Western. This time there are a dozen from Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria and Estonia.
The most they get to the East is Turkey, perhaps in the hope of attracting it back to NATO as an alternative to its inclusion in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO is not an Eastern version of the Bilderbergers but an open forum for economic development policies and defense strategies, without Western-style secrets or manipulations.
Bilderbergers’ associates overlap with those of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission and the London-based Chatham House, which sets the rules for meetings, not to mention the World Economic Forum (WEF), held every January in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF represents a relatively transparent window to the world, although it also holds its meetings behind closed doors. The Bilderbergers are a completely secret organization, although it is said that their meetings are informal conversations that allow participants to freely use the information they receive, although they are not allowed to reveal the identity or affiliation of the speakers, nor of any participant in the particular talks.
Switzerland is one of the most secretive countries in the world, it is the world of banking, of big finance, it is the safe haven for international corporations that are privileged simply because they are domiciled in Switzerland. Not only do they pay lower taxes, but they also escape the ethical standards they would have to apply when doing business exploiting natural resources in developing countries.
As a nation, the Helvetic Confederation (Switzerland) is run by the US Federal Reserve (FED) debt-based monetary system, a scheme that has survived for the last hundred years, under the leadership of the Rothschild banking clan.
It is closely associated with and controls the Western banking system’s gold bunker, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, also called the “central bank of central banks”.
The BIS is intimately linked to Swiss finances, conveniently located near the German border, it served as an intermediary of the FED to finance Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union.
It is no coincidence that Switzerland was spared destruction in both world wars. It is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country where laws are made directly by big finance and big corporations, i.e. where parliamentarians sit on the boards of directors of corporations and financial institutions, when they make laws for the people, a country where a white-collar interest group makes the laws that big capital requires.
One of the permanent agenda items propagated by the Bilderbergers is the reduction of the world’s population, so that the few at the top can live better and longer with the world’s rapidly diminishing resources.
Talking about the future of capitalism does not mean that we consider that to be the only possible system,” André Kudelski, organizer of the event, told the Swiss newspaper 24 Heures. And in that he is right, capitalism is not only not the only viable system. It is the only one that is proven not to be viable, because it has demonstrated its feasibility by spreading injustice, inequality, crime and misery all over the world.
John Bolton’s Dangerous Psychopathology
John Bolton’s Dangerous Psychopathology
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
John Bolton has been saying for years that he wants to overthrow the Iranian government, but this time he seems to have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News and former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and many other newspapers.
“I met John Bolton and interacted with him almost daily with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations Headquarters in New York, when he was the United States ambassador there between August 2005 and December 2006. Most of his diplomatic colleagues, officials and journalists were surprised that Bolton was appointed as the representative of the United States for his long and public disdain for the UN.
In 1994 Bolton had said publicly that “the United Nations Secretariat in New York has 38 floors and if I lost ten floors, nothing would change.” Even more revealing was when in that same conference he confessed that “no matter what the UN decides, the United States will always do what it wants”.
For Bolton, these frank admissions classify as signs of force, should not be taken as reasons for alarm.
He is a man without a sense of humor and, at least at the UN, he always seemed to think that he was the most intelligent person in the room. In 2006, he gave a conference at the United States mission to correspondents at the UN, on nuclear enrichment. Its objective was to convince the audience that Iran was close to having an atomic bomb despite a 2007 National Intelligence Calculation of the United States that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But arrogance may have finally defeated Bolton. At the top of that agenda has maintained the stated goal for years: bomb and overthrow the Iranian government.
Bolton has a very high judgment on himself, rooted apparently in a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness. He always seems angry and one can never define if the reason for the dispute is personal or diplomatic. He personally takes on political or other differences with nations that disagree with the positions of the government of the country he represents. In this field, he links his sense of personal power with that of the United States as a nation.
It is more than any ideology. It is fanaticism. Bolton believes that the United States is exceptional, indispensable and superior to all other nations … and is not afraid to say it in public. He is not the typical government official who moves from passivity to aggression. It is aggressive always. He is always willing to make intimidation personal in the name of the country he represents.
It is, of course, a vociferous instigator of the US coup in Venezuela and was the one who organized the “Brooks Brothers mutiny” that interrupted the vote count in Florida in the disputed presidential election of 2000.
Practice the common tactic in the US ruling class to describe the disobedient leaders who are about to be overthrown: Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Hitler Putin. This derives from a false rebirth of the glory of the USA after World War II: painting the adventures abroad as moral crusades, and not as naked aggressions in search of gain and power.
Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. It is unique in the purity of this pathology.
He was chosen for the position by a president with very limited knowledge of international affairs – except in the case of real estate.
Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the six-nation agreement that caused Tehran to reduce its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for a relaxation of US and international sanctions. In response to increasingly stringent sanctions, Iran said on May 5 in Tehran that it would restart partial nuclear enrichment.
If this were a White House that worked properly, it would be the president who would order a military action, and not a national security adviser. “I do not think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are doing to him. “They are manipulating him,” former US Senator Mike Gravel told RT this week.
The New York Times recently reported: “Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing a confident Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States in the process of war. before the president notices. “
The Imperial Triumvirate of War
The Imperial Triumvirate of War
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
In the midst of so many terrible things happening in the world, it’s easy to be depressed by the torrent of bad news generated by the Trump administration in foreign policy matters.
Resistance to the edicts of the U.S. Empire is growing daily. We see it in the reactions towards the trio of idiots who make up the Triumvirate of War: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and John Pence.
Trump’s government has abandoned diplomacy to such an extent that only their crude and naked aggressions are evident. And it has gotten to the point that even the most accomplished diplomatic agents of Washington seem to have dispensed with subtleties as part of the tools of their profession.
Only the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, continues to speak in classical diplomatic language.
In his annual address to the diplomatic academy in Moscow, the Russian Foreign Minister hailed a new geopolitical era marked by multi-polarity. Lavrov explains that the emergence of new and rising centers of power to maintain stability in the world requires the search for a balance of interests and commitments.
He said that there has been a change in the center of global economic power from the West to the East and a markedly globalizing liberal order started losing its attraction and is no longer seen as a suitable model for all.
“Sadly, our western partners, led by The United States, do not want to agree on common approaches to resolve problems,” Lavrov said, accusing Washington and its allies of trying to “preserve their secular dominion of world affairs despite objective tendencies towards the formation of a poly-centric world order.”
He argued that these efforts were contrary to the fact that now, economically and financially, the United States can no longer solve the economy problems and other world affairs single-handedly.
“To fictitiously maintain its dominance and previous positions, Washington resorts to blackmail and economic coercion, making use of the media,” says Lavrov.
There is much to be drawn from this statement, which was published in Newsweek and many other media without much editorial comment.
Lavrov said he understands the conflict in its entirety and its depth in the psyche of US and European leadership, considering the feeling of ownership that does not abandon them.
This is what explains the intensification of aggression on the part of the Trump administration on the world stage.
Meanwhile, fear grows in the western halls of power.
Countries like Iran, Lebanon and Russia can do simple things like getting together to sign some kind of contract on oil exploration, or railroad financing, and the United States will freeze it out of the global financial system.
That is why the ultimate goal of this resistance is not a decisive and satisfying victory for all, but to survive long enough so that the opponent finally has no choice but that of stopping and going home.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo travels the world like a mobster. He lies about all matters and demands allegiance, but goes away empty-handed. Blackmail only works with the weakest and most isolated, like Ecuador, where what was at stake was “only” the life of Julian Assange. Ecuador is about to discover how expensive the generosity of the United States and the IMF are.
Such was the essence of Pompeo’s statement on the destabilization of Venezuela by China. It’s also why Maduro refused US and IMF aid, and why he had to pay for this with the destabilization of his country, through sanctions, threats and blackouts….
No wonder the ambassador of China in Chile exclaimed: “Mr. Pompeo has lost his mind.”
For Trump’s foreign policy team, the moment of truth is approaching. Will they start a war with Iran at the instigation of the newly re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu?
Empires don’t like to be disrespected; less still to be ignored. Therefore, there seems to be no possibility that Trump’s plan may work. The axis of resistance, despite all the small moves, is to win the war of attrition. The U.S. maximum pressure policy has a finite lifespan, because –like all things in economics– it has a temporary function.
And every small movement, every action big or small, whether in response to sanctions or behind-the-scenes pressure, changes the state of the conflict. And it is not in the nature of the people behind Trump’s policies to admit failure. They will continue to push until there’s a catastrophic outcome.
April 24, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Behind the US-China Tension
Reasons for Tension Between Washington and China
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Philippe Waechter, Chief Economist with French Company Ostrum Asset Management, published on May 17 last year an interesting analysis of the current tensions between China and the United States.
The French expert explains that Donald Trump’s tweets of May 5 increased tension between Washington and Beijing and re-launched new discussions on the terms of a trade agreement between the two powers.
Chinese retaliation against US imports in response to the new U.S. tariffs calls into question the lengthy period of calm begun after the G20 meeting on December 1st last year.
Trump’s desire to impose new restrictions on China reflects his desire to repatriate jobs, especially in the manufacturing sector, and also to reduce US dependence on China.
In 2018, the U.S. external trade balance with China showed a more than $400 billion deficit.
The counterpart of this Chinese surplus with the United States reflected Chinese financing of the U.S. economy through the purchase of U.S. federal bonds. The logic was that the Chinese products in the U.S. market financed the U.S. economy to compensate for the lack of savings there.
The functioning of the Chinese-American trade was on the basis of complement, but this balance is now changing in nature because China’s weight in financing the US economy has been declining.
In March 2019, the weight of U.S. financial assets in the hands of China as part of the total U.S. foreign funding had fallen to the low level observed in June 2006.
The balance of the relationship between the two countries is changing and the United States no longer has the capacity to influence China as it did in the past. China now has more autonomy, says Waechter.
The White House is impatient over Chinese unwillingness to respond to its requests. By taxing Chinese imports, Washington wants to influence Beijing’s economy by creating strong social tension there that would force the hand of the Chinese authorities who do not wish to take this social risk.
The slow pace of Chinese activity indicators since the beginning of the year could validate Washington’s analysis and encourage it to further harden its commercial tone.
At the beginning of 2019, the weight of the United States in Chinese exports slowed significantly. China’s dependence on the United States is being reversed and, at the same time, the Chinese are re-launching the New Silk Road initiative, whose objective is, among others, to further diversify Chinese markets.
China is now expanding market opportunities and effectively limiting the influence of the U.S. on its internal economic situation.
The other major point of disagreement between Washington and Beijing concerns technology. “It seems to me that this is the main point of the differences between the two countries,” says Waechter.
The Chinese have updated technologically very quickly in the last twenty years. This has been the case both in technology transfers as in resources to facilitate it. And this has worked so well that the Chinese are now considerably ahead of the U.S. in 5G and Artificial Intelligence, among other significant developments.
In this question of technological supremacy, there is a radical change because the Chinese have the means to develop these technologies without American support.
This situation could have arisen with Japan a few years ago, but the Japanese always opted for remaining in the US fold, which is not the case in Beijing –says Waechter– because China has a very large internal market and this them to create conditions for autonomous technological dynamics.
The stakes are simple:
Whoever sets the standards for these new technologies will have a considerable comparative advantage. It will be easier to develop innovations using these technologies. That’s why this is where the negotiations get stuck.
The Chinese have devoted significant resources to achieving this technological advantage and will not fall naively under U.S. control.
This technological stagnation will not be resolved spontaneously, and the possibility of an agreement between the two countries seems unlikely.
“The dynamics of the world economy are changing. This is the first time in modern history that a situation occurs that makes it likely that the world economy moves to a new region due to criteria related to technological innovation.”
When the core of the world economy moved from the United Kingdom to the United States, there was a continuity that does not exist in the current situation. This will alter the dynamics of the world economy and will inevitably redistribute the cards among the regions of the world,” concludes Philippe Waechter.
May 22, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Insecure Nuclear Arms Control
Insecure Nuclear Arms Control
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
Last month marked a decade since President Barack Obama declared, standing before a crowd in Prague, the United States’ commitment to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. However, today we are on the top of that world, but with more weapons, not less.
The future of the United States-Russia Arms Control agreement to reduce the threat of both superpowers instigating a nuclear war –a bilateral tradition that goes back to the governments of Nixon and Brezhnev– looks bleak.
Once that both countries officially abandon the treaty on Non-Proliferation of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) next August, only the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) will remain in force as a formal agreement limiting the size and range of the nuclear arsenals between the two major nuclear-weapon states. And as if that weren’t enough, the New START expires in February 2021.
The Trump administration says it is considering extending the new START, but there are reasons for skepticism about this affirmation.
U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has set standards in the United States by abandoning the Iran’s Nuclear Treaty and the INF Treaty, is a very likely advocate of dismantling the New START as well.
In fact, Bolton has already loudly referred to the participation of the United States in that treaty by calling it “unilateral disarmament”. According to what has been published, Trump himself rejected Putin’s offer to extend the New START during the first official telephone conversation that they held.
Russia is still supposed to be interested in extending the treaty beyond 2021, and President Vladimir Putin has already extended an open invitation for talks with a view to an extension.
The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, expressed a similar interest at this year’s Munich security conference.
Putin manifests his disinterest in bilateral agreements and prefers a multilateral framework based, as he explained in 2012, on the fact that the US and Russia could end up “disarming endlessly while other nuclear powers accumulate weapons.”
But without these agreements, Moscow and Washington could be heading towards a new arms race: a possibility that the Russians and Americans seem to have grasped. (According to a recent survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Levada Analytical Center, seven out of ten Russians (72%%) and 70% of Americans fear that their countries will move toward a new arms race.
But there is still room for hope. Most Russians (87%) and Americans (74%) are in favor of reaching an agreement to limit nuclear weapons.
In 1982, three-quarters of Americans favored freezing nuclear weapons production (75%), according to a joint survey by NBC News and Associated Press. Most of the U.S. public also disagreed with Reagan’s assertion that the freeze movement was being manipulated by foreign interests to weaken the country (48%). Reagan soon changed course.
The Nuclear Freeze campaign –which included a million-person US protest calling for an end to the arms race– is considered to have forced Reagan’s hand to begin negotiations with Gorbachev in 1985.
By 1982, three-quarters of Americans were in favor of freezing the production of nuclear weapons, according to a joint survey by NBC News and Associated Press.
Most Americans also disagreed with Reagan’s assertion that the freezing movement was being manipulated by foreign interests to weaken the country (48 %). Reagan soon changed course.
By 1982, the United States had lived 35 years of Cold War. Americans had practiced protection exercises since primary school and most remembered the missile crisis in Cuba and the constant threat of nuclear war.
This partly explains why, despite the support we see among the American people to a new arms control agreement and the sensation that a new arms race looms above our heads, only 54% of Americans opposed the U.S. decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty.
Today, the INF’s decision has been turned into a partisan issue, with 73% of the Republicans supporting Trump’s decision to withdraw and 74% of Democrats who oppose him. The challenge for defenders of arms control today is to break with the partisanship that surrounds the decisions on arms control.
According to Lily Wojtowicz, associate researcher at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs which studies Russian and American public opinion: although 78% of Americans describe Russia as a rival and not as a partner, they all support the search for new restrictions on the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia (90 % of Republicans, 89% of Democrats, and 84% of Independents).
May 20, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
The Bolsonaro Phenomenon May Be Brief
The Bolsonaro Phenomenon May Be Brief
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Right now, there’s a good chance that the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, be very brief. The word impeachment is already part of the current language in the media and social networks in the South American giant.”
At least that’s what Andrés Ferrari Haines, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, wrote in an article published, on May 21, by the Argentinean newspaper “Página 12”.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son, warned in Buenos Aires that an electoral victory of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s would represent the risk of turning Argentina into another Venezuela.
Curiously, says the newspaper, his father is achieving in Brazil what mercenary Juan Guaidó could not achieve in Venezuela: to have protests everywhere promoting the rule of law and opposition to the President.
An historic march took place on Wednesday, May 15, in which nearly two million people took to the streets in 200 Brazilian cities to protest against the budget cuts in education. It was a turning point in the rejection of President Jair Bolsonaro, his children and several personalities close to him.
Those who, during his electoral campaign, thought that his violent and bellicose style was part of an electoral strategy to attack his opponents are realizing that this is a trait of his personality.
It seems that his capacity for dialogue is zero, and he can only express himself aggressively –even if this might not be his intention.
One could think that Bolsonaro, together with his sons, tried to strengthen his image in a direct relationship with his electoral base, discrediting sectors that were part of the coalition government, such as the military, which occupy several positions in allied political parties.
Even more serious, in the field of the economy, has been the appointment of his “super minister” Paulo Guedes, an extreme neoliberal choice, submissive to U.S. capital, especially to those that seek the extreme exploitation of natural resources and the control of state financial institutions and companies such as Petrobras.
In his strategy, Guedes placed all his chips in favor of the approval of a brutal reform aimed at preventing an “inevitable” economic catastrophe. Here he is meeting great resistance in and out of parliament.
It is a strategy of submission to private activity that launched Minister of Education Weintraub who, summoned by Congress, in the midst of a student protest, made it clear that the objective was not to cut the educational budget, but to extinguish the public education system.
In line with his President, the minister ignored the students and affirmed that “the graduates of the Brazilian public universities don’t know anything.”
Reality, however, has demonstrated the opposite: public schools are at the top of the list in the national ranking –with only two or three private ones– in the front rank. Even more so: the public ones are among the first in comparisons with those in emerging countries, and some have reputable placements at the international level. Thus, it is clear that there is no basis whatsoever for the government project aimed at dismantling public education to the benefit of private education that the minister so much praises.
For his part, Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo aligned Brazil’s foreign policy to the United States in a moralistic crusade that identifies “globalization” with a process driven by “cultural Marxism” and climate risks with a “communist conspiracy”, even at the expense of losing important foreign markets.
Meanwhile, the economy comes to a standstill, the stock market falls and the dollar soars.
In addition, it has become known that consulting firm A.T. Kearney removed Brazil –for the first time—from the top 25 destinations for the United States investors. During the government of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil was in the third place.
Bolsonaro was losing so much support in the last week that even his “guru,” astrologer Olavo de Carvalho, predicted that he will abandon politics in Brazil.
The Brasil LIbre [Free Brazil] Movement, a great player in the fall of Rousseff and in the anti-PT wave, also announced its breaking up Bolsonaro.
The students are calling for a mobilization on May 30 and, in addition, they have joined the General Strike, on June 14, against Bolsonaro’s reforms.
The main print media, O Globo de Rio and Folha do Estado de Sao Paulo, in their editorials are very critical of the political maneuvers of the President and his attacks on democracy.
Investigations of corruption and illicit association against one of his sons, Flavio, are growing every day, and affect nearly one hundred people who were hired or moved fortunes in connection with his office, including the President’s wife herself.
May 24, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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