Is The Us Trying To Start WWIII? Eric Margolis lewrockwell.com February 22, 2014
American diplomacy in the Ukraine crisis was summed up earlier this month by State Department senior official Victoria Neuland, a leading neocon: “F….k Europe.” On Friday, Europe responded by brokering a sensible compromise to Ukraine’s increasingly dangerous crisis just as the army was about to intervene. If the pact holds, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovich will relinquish some of his powers, a unity government will be formed, elections held, and jailed protestors freed. The fate of imprisoned nationalist leader, Yulia Timoshenko, remains unclear. Here was an intelligent diplomatic solution to a crisis that might have led to a head-on clash between NATO and Russia, both nuclear powers. But what if the European Union had not brokered this deal and the US hardline approach had been followed? A basic rule of world affairs is careful what you threaten. Empty threats become loose cannons. Last week, US President Barack Obama warned Russia to back off from strife-torn Ukraine or face “consequences.” “Consequences” has become a favorite threat of Hillary Clinton warlike Democrats. It is even overtaking Washington’s former favored threat of war, “all options are on the table.” We last heard that tired threat over Syria, and look what happened: the White House almost blundered into a totally unnecessary war over Syria and had to be rescued by none other than Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Last week, more warlike threats. What if the wily Vlad Putin calls Obama’s bluff? If the feeble sanctions threatened by Washington did not work, what then? Would the Obama
administration nuke Moscow over Ukraine, a nation that 99.7% of all Americans could not find on a map if their lives depended on it. Would the US try to block Russia’s oil exports, as it does with Iran? Financial markets would go crazy. All over Ukraine? Moscow believes Ukraine’s uprising is funded and fanned by the US and EU. The Kremlin fears the US is bent on tearing down the Russian Federation and eliminating it as a world power. Putin, the target of an intensifying hate campaign by western media, has said so often. Last week, President Obama proclaimed his goal was to allow Ukrainians and Syrians to express their will through free elections. Very nice. Two cheers, Mister President. But democracy and a free press can’t be selective. While western politicians and the increasingly stateguided US media wring their hands over Ukraine and Syria, we’ve seen the dictatorial regimes of Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – all three key US allies –oppressing their own rebellious people. Egypt offers a particularly odious example. Its neo-fascist military junta crushed the nation’s first-ever democracy, killed over a thousand protestors, jailed many thousands more, and brought back torture and a savage police state. Eight journalists from al-Jazeera are in prison facing trial for the crime of reporting facts. Protestors are simply shot down in the street. Washington continues to fund Egypt’s armed forces that crush dissent, and to back Bahrain’s royal family that hosts the US Fifth Fleet. To Putin’s discredit, he just welcomed Egypt’s military dictator to Moscow and showered praise on him. Besides being hypocritical, Washington’s policy towards Russia is increasingly dangerous. Have we learned nothing from the diplomatic folly that led to World War I? The US has steadily pushed its strategic influence to Russia’s borders in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This in spite of a promise to Mikhail Gorbachev by the George Bush Sr. administration not to do so in exchange for the Kremlin allowing the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire. Gorbachev kept his side of the pact; Washington did not. Were he alive, the great statesman Bismarck would have been aghast at the west’s provocations of Russia, As tensions mount in Asia, and a real war between Japan and China grows more likely – a war that Japan would lose unless the US intervened – Washington increasingly needs the support of Moscow. Instead, clumsy, amateur US foreign policy is antagonizing Russia and China at the same time. Bismarck taught us to divide our enemies and pit them against one another. It’s also worth remembering that intense US propaganda against the Soviet Union in the 1980’s, including Reagan’s infamous “Evil Empire,” led the Kremlin to believe a US nuclear attack was imminent. Here we go again. Also recall that Vlad Putin is a judo expert. He well understands how to use an opponent’s weight and poor stance to parry his attack. Putin has so far been doing a successful job wrong-footing Washington. But this is a dangerous game. A few false moves and the result could be a direct clash between nuclear powers. Fortunately, this dire threat appears to have been averted, at least for the time being, by the unity pact in Kiev. Europe, not Washington, is leading this laudable effort – as it should be.
Obama Retains ‘gun Salesman Of The Year’ Title As Industry Sales Continue To Explode Tom Tillison BizPacReview February 22, 2014
When the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported the economic impact of the firearms industry increased from $19 billion in 2008 to $31 billion in 2011, it became a running joke that President Barack Obama was the “gun salesman of the year” for 2012. And the phenomenon was trending upward, as there were a record 1.5 million background checks requested in December 2011. It’s hard to say how Obama may have felt about his faux-title, but he’s all but certain to retain it based on a Bloomberg News report Thursday that said U.S. gun makers “churned out a record number of firearms in 2012.” According to Bloomberg News: More than 8.57 million guns were produced in 2012, up 31 percent from 6.54 million in 2011, according to data released this week by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which has been tracking the statistics since 1986. Almost as many guns — 26.1 million — were produced during Democrat Barack Obama’s first term as president as during the entire eight-year presidency of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, the ATF data show. The last sentence bears repeating — almost as many guns were produced during Obama’s first term as
during Bush’s entire eight-year presidency. While Bloomberg tried to make the case that gun sales increase under all Democrat presidents, that stat is telling. A few highlights: Smith & Wesson reported record sales of $588 million for the fiscal year that ended April 30, up 43 percent over 2012. Sturm Ruger reported net sales of $506.4 million during the first nine months of 2013, a 45 percent jump from the same period in 2012. Clearly, the Obama administration and its gun control mentality has been a boon to the gun industry. “Barack Obama is the stimulus package for the firearms industry,” Dave Workman, senior editor of Gun Mag, told Bloomberg. “The greatest irony of the Obama administration is that the one industry that he may not have really liked to see healthy has become the healthiest industry in the United States.” Even more ironic, it may be the gun industry that’s keeping the economy afloat. According to The Washington Times, Lawrence Keane, a senior vice president for National Shooting Sports Foundation, said in 2012: “It’s fair to say, and the numbers demonstrate it, that our industry in a very poor economy is doing very well and is helping to lead the economic recovery.” As for the gun salesman of the year, the industry may very well retire the award at the end of Obama’s second term.
It’s Not Only Conservative Politicians Backing Giant Multinational Corporations Over National Sovereignty Washington’s Blog February 22, 2014
Preface: Liberals might assume that it is Republicans who are cheerleaders for global corporations at the expense of government. But, as shown below, liberal politicians have been just as bad … or worse. Matt Stoller – who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters – knows his way around Washington. Stoller – a prominent liberal – has scoured the Congressional Record to unearth hidden historical facts. For example, Stoller has previously shown that the U.S. government push for a “New World Order” is no wacky conspiracy theory, but extensively documented in the Congressional Record. Now, Stoller uses the Congressional Record to show that “free trade” pacts were always aboutweakening nation-states to promote rule by multinationals: Political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing. *** Liberal internationalists, including people like Chase CEO David Rockefeller and former Undersecretary of State and an architect of 1960s American trade policies George Ball, began pressing for reductions in non-tariff barriers, which they perceived as the next set of trade impediments to pull down. But the idea behind getting rid of these
barriers wasn’t about free trade, it was about reorganizing the world so that corporations could manage resources for “the benefit of mankind”. It was a weird utopian vision that you can hear today in the current United States Trade Representative Michael Froman’s speeches. I’ve spoken with Froman about this history, and Froman himself does not seem to know much about it. But he is captive of these ideas, nonetheless, as is much of the elite class. They do not know the original ideology behind what is now just bureaucratic true believer-ism, they just know that free trade is good and right and true. But back to the 1967 hearing. In the opening statement, before a legion of impressive Senators and Congressmen, Ball attacks the very notion of sovereignty. He goes after the idea that “business decisions” could be “frustrated by a multiplicity of different restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations,” and lauds the multinational corporation as the most perfect structure devised for the benefit of mankind. He also foreshadows our modern world by suggesting that commercial, monetary, and antitrust policies should just be and will inevitably be handled by supranational organizations. [Background.]
Here’s just some of that statement. It really is worth reading, I’ve bolded the surprising parts. “For the widespread development of the multinational corporation is one of our major accomplishments in the years since the war, though its meaning and importance have not been generally understood. For the first time in history man has at his command an instrument that enables him to employ resource flexibility to meet the needs of peopels all over the world. Today a corporate management in Detroit or New York or London or Dusseldorf may decide that it can best serve the market of country Z by combining the resources of country X with labor and plan facilities in country Y – and it may alter that decision 6 months from now if changes occur in costs or price or transport. It is the ability to look out over the world and freely survey all possible sources of production… that is enabling man to employ the world’s finite stock of resources with a new degree of efficiency for the benefit of all mandkind. But to fulfill its full potential the multinational corporation must be able to operate with little regard for national boundaries – or, in other words, for restrictions imposed by individual national governments. To achieve such a free trading environment we must do far more than merely reduce or eliminate tariffs. We must move in the direction of common fiscal concepts, a common monetary policy, and common ideas of commercial responsibility. Already the economically advanced nations have made some progress in all of these areas through such agencies as the OECD and the committees it has sponsored, the Group of Ten, and the IMF, but we still have a long way to go. In my view, we could steer a faster and more direct course… by agreeing that what we seek at the end of the voyage is the full realization of the benefits of a world economy. Implied in this, of course, is a considerable erosion of the rigid concepts of national sovereignty, but that erosion is taking place every day as national economies grow increasingly interdependent, and I think it desirable that this process be consciously continued. What I am recommending is nothing so unreal and idealistic as a world government, since I have spent too many years in the guerrilla warfare of practical diplomacy to be bemused by utopian visions. But it seems beyond question that modern business – sustained and reinforced by modern technology – has outgrown the constrictive limits of the antiquated political structures in which most of the world is organized, and that itself is a political fact which cannot be ignored. For the explosion of business beyond national borders will tend to create needs and pressures that can help alter political structures to fit the requirements of modern man far more adequately than the present crazy quilt of small national states. And meanwhile, commercial, monetary, and antitrust policies – and even the domiciliary supervision of earth-straddling corporations – will have to be increasingly entrusted to supranational institutions…. We will never be able to put the world’s resources to use with full efficiency so long as business decisions are frustrated by a multiplicity of different
restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations, reflect no common philosophy, and are keyed to no common goal.” *** These ["free trade"] agreements are not and never have been about trade. You simply cannot disentangle colonialism, the American effort to create the European Union, and American trade efforts. After their opening statements, Ball and Rockefeller go on on to talk about how European states need to be wedged into a common monetary union with our trade efforts and that Latin America needs to be managed into prosperity by the US and Africa by Europe. Through such efforts, they thought that the US could put together a global economy over the next thirty years. Thirty years later was 1997, which was exactly when NAFTA was being implemented and China was nearing its entry into the WTO. Impeccable predictions, gents. *** I guess it turns out that the conspiracy theorists who believe in UN-controlled black helicopters aren’t as wrong as you might think about trade policy, and not just because United Technologies, which actually makes black helicopters, has endorsed the TransPacific Partnership. *** These agreements are about getting rid of national sovereignty, and the people who first pressed for NAFTA were explicit about it. They really did want a global government for corporations. *** Ball in particular expressed his idea of a government by the corporations, for the corporations, in order to benefit all mankind. Keep that in mind when you think you’re being paranoid. The full hearing can be downloaded here, though it is a big file. The bottom line is not that liberals – or conservatives – are evil. It’s that neither the Democratic or Republican parties reflect the true values of the American people (andsee this). Indeed, a scripted psuedo-war between the parties is often used by the powers-that-be as a way to divide and conquer the American people, so that we are too distracted to stand up to reclaim our power from the idiots in both parties who are only governing for their own profit … and a small handful of their buddies. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
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