Concentratiekampen in VS voor migranten.......

Het Vierde Rijk timmert onder Trump nog harder aan de fascistische weg dan onder Obama en Bush..... E.e.a. blijkt bijvoorbeeld uit de barbaarse omgang met vluchtelingen, waar men zelfs kinderen van hun ouders afnam en deze samen met jongeren die op eigen gelegenheid dan wel onder begeleiding van een volwassene (veelal familie) opsloot in 'jongerencentra', ofwel gevangenissen die  het best te vergelijken zijn met concentratiekampen (een uitvinding van de Britten)......

Bij concentratiekampen denkt men meteen aan de doodskampen van nazi-Duitsland, echter concentratiekampen werden al veel eerder gebruikt door westerse regeringen en zijn zoals gezegd een Britse uitvinding uit de 19de eeuw....... Door WOII spreekt men liever niet meer over concentratiekampen, maar dat wil niet zeggen dat ze niet meer bestaan, zo bewijst o.a. de VS weer......

Concentratiekampen in de VS zijn niets nieuws, zo sloot men tijdens WOII VS burgers van Japanse en Duitse afkomst op in concentratiekampen, iets waar Trump over zei dat hij zich wat betreft de Japanners wel voor kon stellen iets dergelijks te hebben gedaan, 'oorlogen zijn nu eenmaal hard....' (waar hem, zo te zien in het hieronder opgenomen artikel, niet de VS burgers van Duitse komaf werden voorgelegd als voorbeeld, deze komen in het artikel niet eens ter sprake)

Echter met de vinger naar Trump wijzen doet ons vergeten dat bijvoorbeeld Obama 3 miljoen immigranten deporteerde... (hiervoor kreeg hij de naam: 'deporter in chief') Al onder Clinton werden de eerste aanzetten gedaan tot het beleid zoals we dat de laatste jaren hebben gezien...

Kinderen zullen niet meer worden afgenomen van ouders, zo sprak het beest Trump, maar verder verandert er weinig, de concentratiekampen blijven bestaan voor kinderen van wie de ouders niet in de VS zijn....... Zoals het zich laat aanzien krijgen deze kinderen geen rechtsbijstand en blijven ze opgesloten in wat concentratiekampen zijn...... De families die de VS binnenkomen en die worden gepakt, worden in het geheel opgesloten, inclusief peuters en baby's...... Niet dat ze misdaden hebben begaan, maar omdat ze 'illegaal' het land zijn binnengekomen..... (hoe kan je als mens in godsnaam illegaal zijn op onze kleine aarde???)

In het volgende artikel van Elliot Gabriel wijst deze op de VS invloed in Mexico tijdens de 80er en 90er jaren >> via de Wereldhandelsorganisatie (WTO) heeft de VS in feite de arbeidersbevolking aan de bedelstaf gebracht......... Ook verdragen als NAFTA bracht het arme deel van bevolkingen in Midden- (en Zuid-) Amerika vooral veel financiële ellende, ellende waardoor velen uiteindelijk zelfs hun land ontvluchtten richting VS....

Het meest smerige is wel dat Trump, plus een groot deel van de republikeinen en democraten durven te zeggen dat de migranten VS burgers hun banen afnemen...... Terwijl nu juist de grote bedrijven hun fabrieken verplaatsten naar landen in Azië en Midden-Amerika (m.n. naar Mexico) en zij daarmee de verantwoordelijken zijn voor de grote werkloosheid onder het arme deel van de VS bevolking......

Arme mensen die nu bespeeld worden door fascisten als Trump met leugens die hen moeten opzetten tegen migranten, die godbetert maar al te vaak vluchten voor door de VS aangerichte ellende in hun thuisland (neem de totaal mislukte 'War on Drugs' die in Mexico bijkans een oorlog van de drugsmaffia tegen de bevolking heeft veroorzaakt..... Mensen die dat geweld ontvluchten zijn niet langer welkom, zo liet opperschoft Sessions afgelopen week weten*)

Trump gaat zover met zijn angst en haatzaaierij, dat hij migranten beesten noemt die de VS komen ruïneren...... Hitler en Goebbels zouden trots zijn geweest op zo'n ijverige leerling........

Yes, US Immigration Prisons Are Absolutely ‘Concentration Camps’

June 22, 2018 at 9:45 am
Written by Elliott Gabriel

(MPN) — The ongoing furor over a drastic increase in the mass confinement of migrant families and children has forced people in the United States to cast a hard look at the immigration enforcement regime that has aggressively developed in recent years.

The discussion is increasingly recasting immigrant detention centers as U.S. concentration camps. This has brought questions of justice, human and civil rights back into focus — in contrast to the Trump administration’s narrow reliance on the question of law-and-order.

Prisons for detained migrants conform to the basic, literal meaning of a concentration camp: these are security enclosures where masses of people from a targeted community are isolated from the general population and subject to confinement, usually for political purposes. Deprived of liberty, legal protections, or medical care, those incarcerated in such camps see their lives reduced to a basic biological existence.

Sexual abuse, physical punishment, psychological trauma and even the forced injection of children with drugs are the daily reality for those captured at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers or abducted from their homes and workplaces by the Department of Homeland Security – Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or DHS-ICE.

While the term concentration camp is often dismissed as extreme or exaggerated given its connotation of Nazi Konzentrationslager like Auschwitz or Dachau — which could more accurately be called death camps or forced enslavement camps — concentration camps were widely used by Western governments throughout the early 20th century as a means to cope with insurgent populations in the colonies and waves of migrants fleeing war in Europe.

Now, in the 21st century, the U.S. immigrant enforcement regime has assumed monstrous proportions. The country is being progressively enveloped in a steel-clad mesh of stringent bureaucracy and inhumane facilities devoted to legalized violence toward immigrants — naturally, this has come in the name of security, sovereignty, and enforcing the law.

Euphemisms, Lies, and Mass Confinement

Like the fig-leaf covering Adam and Eve’s genitals in Renaissance paintings, a euphemism is a word or phrase meant to hide the true nature of something considered embarrassing or offensive. Euphemisms are common in our social interactions: We’re sleeping together; I’m visiting the water closet; he passed away; we’re downsizing the staff.

For politicians, euphemisms are the bread and butter of “talking-points” (propaganda) and serve to shield the state from public scrutiny and criticism. Authorities will describe repressive police state measures as necessary to public safety, while the elimination of public services is called balancing the budget. Likewise, militaries will refer to a blatantly imperialist war as a “humanitarian intervention,” while an indiscriminate bombing campaign and capture of enemy-held territory is an act of “liberation.”

In the world of criminal justice, solitary confinement and total isolation from human contact — a form of torture – takes place in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), a phrase that almost sounds like a type of condominium apartment.

Immigration-related U.S. concentration camps come in different varieties, each with its own preferred euphemisms: there are detention centers for adults, childcare facilities for young children ripped from their families; and for those incarcerated migrant adults (usually women) fortunate enough to remain with their children, there are Family Residential Centers – a cheerful term that makes it sound as if families are having a therapeutic retreat at Club Med rather than facing incarceration.

The Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, provides a good example of the concentration camps operated by the commercial prison corporation, GEO Group. Immigrant detainees who went on hunger strike last year describe the facility as riddled with filthy, exploitative and abusive conditions. Incarcerated migrants are given cheap, poor-quality food while being forced to wear soiled underwear. Medical care access is restricted and often administered by unqualified prison guards themselves; it’s not uncommon that prisoners die from treatable diseases like staph infection, pneumonia, or diabetes.

Those confined to such camps “temporarily” spend much of their time with no light at the end of the tunnel, as immigration court proceedings face repeated delays without explanation. Forced to languish in horrendous conditions for an indefinite period, prisoners inevitably fall into a state of deep despondency that sometimes leads to suicide. In other cases, prisoners who wage hunger strikes face punitive detention and physical abuse. Prisoners are also expected to take part in manual labor tasks, where they are paid $1 per hour to take care of the upkeep of the facilities, drawing comparisons to enslaved prison labor.

At “childcare facilities,” young children ripped from their families’ arms are kenneled in wire-cage compounds or encamped in overcrowded former Wal-Marts where they are subject to 22-hour lockdown and given only two hours of fresh air — effectively amounting to conditions of punitive incarceration for children as young as seven years old.

Even toddlers under the age of five have been placed in three so-called “tender age shelters” located in Texas, with a fourth compound planned for Houston at a former warehouse slated to be re-purposed into a “permanent unaccompanied alien children program facility. ”During the  Second World War, the government vocabulary was riddled with similarly clean, bureaucratic euphemisms that obscured the persecution of a community seen as a hostile and inherently “alien” minority: Japanese immigrants and Japanese-descended citizens of the U.S.

The Wartime Precedent: Japanese-American Incarceration

On February 19, 1942, long-seething anti-Asian racism and the Imperial Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor culminated in the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The order gave xenophobia the seal of approval as official state policy and decreed the “evacuation” or forced removal of 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Over two-thirds of those impacted were U.S. citizens, including children.

The mass incarceration of Japanese-descended families was justified on the basis of a fear of sabotage by a yet-to-be-exposed “fifth column,” as well as claims by military authorities that Justice Department investigations were unable to keep pace with wartime national-security needs. However, Depression-era white farmers also saw Japanese Americans as a threat to their economic interests and had clamored for stripping citizenship from the “Japs.”

apanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were detained and placed in assembly centers (temporary detention centers) and relocation centers, which were at the time depicted as akin to “summer camps.” In reality, these were concentration camps in the middle of harsh desert climates, which were surrounded by guard towers and barbed-wire fences, where Japanese-descended prisoners were overseen and routinely abused by U.S. Army personnel equipped with machine guns and even tanks.

By January 2, 1945, the camps were closed; not a single incarcerated Japanese had been successfully prosecuted as a spy or agent of the Japanese government. Yet thousands of

Japanese Americans incarcerated at the notorious Tule Lake Segregation Center in California had already been coerced into renouncing their U.S. citizenship, and were subsequently deported en masse back to a Japan that was shattered by war.

Descendants of incarcerated Japanese citizens and immigrants have struggled hard in recent years to ensure that wartime mass-confinement is described in terms that accurately reflect the unjust nature of their experience. In 2013, the Japanese American Community League responded to criticism over the use of the term “concentration camp,” stating:

Misleading government euphemisms like relocation camp, assembly center, and internment camp should no longer be an insurmountable obstacle to understanding. Ridiculous notions that we were being protected or pampered will diminish.

Honest terms like American concentration camp, incarceration camp, illegal detention center, forced removal, and others, can now truthfully tell a story: How the government used language to cover up the denial of constitutional rights, the racism, forced removal, incarceration, and oppressive conditions directed against 120,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry.”

By 2015, Republican then-candidate Donald Trump began floating the idea of a database of Muslim Americans to prevent, “until we are able to determine and understand,” the alleged threat of “horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad.”

When asked if he would have supported the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, the former reality-TV star answered that it may have been an option he would have favored. He also suggested that the concentration camps may have played a role in the U.S. victory over Japan. Trump explained:

I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer … It’s a tough thing. It’s tough..  But you know war is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We’re not a strong country anymore. We’re just so off.”

‘90s Roots: White “Nativist” Anxiety and the Neoliberal Offensive

Aside from the deeply racist, white-supremacist roots of the United States as a whole, Trump-style xenophobia and anti-immigrant racism became a major phenomenon in the 1990s, when mass-media outlets and right-wing politicians filled Americans’ heads with lurid tales of the threat posed by brown-skinned foreigners. War and terrorism in the Middle East flooded headlines as the Gulf War in Iraq and resistance to Israel in Palestine and Lebanon raged.

Meanwhile, at the southern U.S. border, tens of thousands of Mexican migrants poured through as a result of the desperate conditions and economic chaos unleashed by the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 and previous neoliberal policies foisted on pliant Mexican governments by the World Trade Organization (WTO). NAFTA led to a major influx of investment in Mexico by Canadian and U.S.-based multinationals, yet the net effect was the plundering of the country’s resources and wealth, the devastation of its agricultural sector and rural regions, and a huge uptick in unemployment and poverty in the country.

As scholar Richard D. Vogel wrote in his 2007 meticulously-researched essay, Transient Servitude:

U.S. financial and political intervention in the national life of Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s, often carried out through the WTO, has pauperized the Mexican working class. It is they who have had to suffer the brunt of the mandatory austerity programs, strict debt restructuring, and privatization initiatives that were imposed on Mexico in the 1980s after the credit binge of the Mexican bourgeoisie during the previous decade. The result of this foreign intervention has been widespread unemployment and displacement from the land that has produced onerous hardship and sparked internal migration from the interior of Mexico to the industrialized border region and to the United States.”

Unauthorized migration from Mexico became a driving force for nativist resentment and racism among white workers, resulting in a push for anti-immigrant laws like California’s Proposition 187 ballot initiative in 1994. White workers found convenient scapegoats in the Mexican undocumented workforce, despite the fact that it was U.S. capitalism as a whole that had undercut their jobs and living standards through the search for cheap labor in Mexico and other offshore locations.

The U.S. responded to the nativist clamor by militarizing the U.S. border — resulting in the deaths of thousands of border-crossers who died in the harsh frontier climate — and by conducting showy Border Patrol operations and raids such as 1993’s Hold the Line in San Diego and 1995’s Operation Gatekeeper in El Paso, which did little to stem the flow of migrants.

However, the generally lax open border policy provided employers and corporations with access to a huge pool of cheap labor to tap into, handsomely benefiting a then-booming U.S. economy. By 2005, about 12 million undocumented migrants — over half of whom were Mexican — resided in the United States.

The 2006 implementation of the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA, now CAFTA-DR) had a similarly negative impact on development in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, whose governments each signed. Rural migrants were displaced and found no employment in cities, fueling the growth of organized crime and acting as a sharp push factor for migration to Mexico and the United States.

Subsequent administrations’ security agreements with right-wing governments and imperialist meddling — such as the Obama-Clinton State Department’s success in overthrowing left-populist Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009 — further exacerbated the instability and misery plaguing Central America, creating an inexorable current that continues to tens of thousands of desperate migrants to the doorstep of the southern U.S. border in their life-or-death bid for asylum.

“Fortress America” and the Bipartisan Construction of DHS-ICE

The double standards inherent in U.S. partisan politics have led some to believe that concentration camps were reintroduced on such a broad scale under Trump, when in fact the mass confinement of asylum-seekers and non-citizens was a daily reality under the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who both oversaw the expansion of the sprawling DHS machinery.

Indeed, ever since the Clinton administration’s 1996 Immigration Act, minor misdemeanor convictions are enough reason for even legal permanent residents to be deported.

This history is often ignored by liberal critics of the Trump regime, owing in no small part to his absolute disregard for the multicultural sensitivities of his predecessors who built the immigration enforcement apparatus. The president has no qualms about resorting to blatantly dehumanizing rhetoric when describing whole categories of asylum-seekers as “animals” that are “infesting” the United States, drawing comparisons between the right-wing U.S. leader’s political ideology and that of Nazi Germany.

Yet Trump is merely picking up the baton that was passed to him, albeit with a relish that appears to be both calculating and visceral.

After September 11, 2001, the U.S. was pushed over the brink by hysteria over the fear of another spectacular terrorist attack. Muslim Americans and immigrant communities from Asia, Africa and the Middle East became the target not only of racist attacks on the streets, but also of anti-terrorism bills like the USA PATRIOT Act. The act significantly widened the ability of immigration agents to conduct mass-detention sweeps of terrorism suspects, while allowing for the mandatory detention of non-citizens suspected of terrorism for up to 48 hours after arrest.

In 2003, the PATRIOT Act was followed by the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which consisted of three separate bureaus: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Citizen and Immigration Services (CIS). ICE began to extend its facilities, field offices and subfield offices across the country.

In June, 2003, ICE introduced its 10-year strategic enforcement plan, Operation ENDGAME. The plan called for information sharing across government agencies while also explicitly calling for the forcible removal of the entire unauthorized migrant population of 12 million people from the United States by 2014. In a memorandum describing the program, ICE Office of Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) director Anthony Tangemann stated:

DRO provides the endgame to immigration enforcement and that is the removal of all removable aliens. This is also the essence of our mission statement and the ‘golden measure’ to our successes … We must strive for 100% removal rate.”

Obviously, the plan was never fulfilled, yet the Obama administration stubbornly pushed forward in the fortification of ICE as a highly-funded, fully-staffed and largely unaccountable organization with facilities and contracted privately-operated concentration camps dotting the entire country.

While supporters of Obama will quickly point to his 2013 granting of temporary relief to non-prioritized unauthorized migrant youth, in the form of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), immigration-rights advocates will be just as quick to point to his introduction of Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens (SCOMM).

SCOMM, which was guided by the goals stipulated in Operation Endgame, cleared the way for ICE to deport hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants through biometric data-sharing between federal immigration authorities and thousands of local jails — leading to the deportation of people convicted of minor crimes such as driving under the influence or the possession of small amounts of drugs.

SCOMM was eventually phased out by Obama owing to public pressure, only to be revived by the Trump administration. Obama’s campaign promises to reform the U.S. immigration enforcement regime were never fulfilled and instead, around three million were deported on his watch – earning the former president the ignominious title “Deporter-In-Chief.”

The Danger of Ignoring Homeland Security State Cruelty

Amid the exponential growth of the federal government’s need for jails, encampments, and kennels for migrant families, immigration-related concentration camps are increasingly being normalized by an unashamed Republican Party with Trump as its capo and ideological lodestar. Even mainstream news hosts like Laura Ingraham of FOX News have audaciously described incarceration facilities for children as “essentially summer camps.”

And on Wednesday — lost in the fanfare of his apparent family-separation feint — Trump issued an executive order extending the ability of ICE to incarcerate unauthorized migrants from 20 days to an indefinite period.

The United States government has long maintained the largest and most technologically advanced system of mass confinement in human history. Over time, a growing component of this system has consisted of new migrant concentration camp.

It’s about time that we recognize what led the U.S. to this point and where that path may lead. Even the most superficial reading of history reveals how in times of crisis, legal rights taken for granted as permanent or foundational vanish like a puff of smoke when security threats and a push to restore “law and order” casts a dragnet into civilian populations.

In 1973, constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel offered a prescient criticism of the concept of “citizenship as the tie that binds the individual to government and [serves] as the source of his rights,” noting that the right to citizenship can easily be revoked at the will of the state:

A relationship between government and the governed that turns on citizenship can always be dissolved or denied … No matter what safeguards it may be equipped with, it is at best something that was given, and given to some and not to others, and it can be taken away. It has always been easier, it always will be easier, to think of someone as a noncitizen than to decide that he is a nonperson.”

As history teaches us, threats to the nation — both external or internal — can suddenly or gradually change. Today’s flash-in-the-pan monster at our door might be migrant “animals” from Latin America, but tomorrow it may take the form of anyone or any group who threatens or disrupts social order — be it a religious group, a national minority, the swelling homeless population, the politically non-compliant or any other class of people criminalized by a government that exclusively caters to the needs of capital.

Disoriented by sensationalist propaganda presented as objective news or informed commentary, U.S. citizens gripped by anxiety and fear eagerly cheer on the promise of misery for the “alien” as a means to ensure fortune and safety for the “native.” Blinded by the false pride found in white supremacy and the nostalgic idyll peddled by Trump and his cohort, “conservatives” applaud as new walls, “residential centers” and open-air penitentiaries for “illegals” are constructed in their hometowns.

Trapped in a daze of patriotic fervor, supporters of the punitive immigrant policy regime under Trump remain oblivious to the consequences of their faith in state violence guided by policies of official bigotry.

And as for the rest of us, wringing our hands and expressing outrage alone will get us nowhere in terms of preventing systematic cruelty and state terror. Instead, we should continue to develop a serious analysis of the overall situation and organize to defend our basic rights before the windows of opportunity are bolted shut.

By Elliott Gabriel / Creative Commons / MintPress News / Report a typo

==============================

Hier nog een video van Brasscheck TV met dezelfde strekking:

CONCENTRATION CAMPS FOR CHILDREN IN THE US

SOME SIMPLE FACTS YOU ARE NOT BEING TOLD

THIS IS A BUSINESS OPERATION

1. Seeking asylum in the US is not a crime. It’s an administrative process. After the hearings, the US can always no to the application.

2. There’s absolutely no legal basis to take the children of asylum seekers from their parents.

3. People who cross the border illegally and are found not to have criminal records used to be returned to the border they crossed. Now they are being jailed for six months – at taxpayer expense – and having their children taken from them.

4. The revenues for these interments are going to the shareholders of PRIVATELY owned prisons.

5. Privately owned Prison companies like GEO and CoreCivic donated nearly $500,000 to support Trump’s election campaign and underwrite his inauguration.

6. The Trump administration has no procedure in place for reuniting children with the parents they have been taken from.

     7. The government will not disclose where the children they have seized are being held. Nor               will they allow Congressman or the news media to enter these facilities.

======================================

* Zie: 'VS martelt gevluchte kinderen.....'

Zie ook: 'Jeff Sessions: 'asielzoekers zijn alleen welkom in de VS als ze kunnen bewijzen dat ze overleden zijn t.g.v. geweld..........''

'Immigrants& Muslims Are Trump's Jews ... Until He Comes for theActual Jews' (van Harvey Wasserman)

'VS sluit zelfs kinderen van 10 jaar op..... Met dat land onderhoudt Nederland hechte banden, een rechteloos land waaraan 'we' zelfs mensen uitleveren.....'

'A Grandmother Seeking Asylum Separated From Disabled Grandson at the Border. It’s Been 10 Months'

'Met nieuw VS 'vluchtelingenbeleid' zullen nog meer kinderen seksueel misbruikt worden.....'

Children Drugged, Given Forced Injections at Texas Detention Facility: Lawsuit

Pentagon Accepts Trump’s Call to House 20,000 Children on US Military Bases

'VS wil van 3.000 migrantenkinderen DNA afnemen om zo de ouders op te sporen.....'

'De VS heeft een lange geschiedenis in het ontvoeren van kinderen uit niet witte families.......'

'Nikki Haley (VS ambassadeur bij de VN) UNHRC heeft commentaar op een land met een goede mensenrechten reputatie, t.w. Israël.... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'

Geld verdwijnt als betaalmiddel, of hoe u een volgend reuze oor wordt aangenaaid..........

Zwitserland, is na Scandinavische landen, het volgende land dat geld als betaalmiddel meer en meer onmogelijk maakt, de proeftuin voor de hele EU en uiteindelijk de wereld....... Mijdt winkels waar u alleen digitaal kan betalen!

Lezen mensen!

Runaway Train Towards Full Digitization of Money and Labor: We must wake up to see the propaganda fraud going on before our eyes

Berlijn, de kerstmarkt aanslag: wie trok er aan de touwen.....??

Eergisteren publiceerde Information Clearing House, het volgende artikel van Peter Koenig. Hij zet (wat mij betreft) terecht grote vraagtekens bij de aanslag op de kerstmarkt in Berlijn. Zoals u zo kan lezen, er zijn teveel vreemde 'toevalligheden', zoals we die bij eerdere aanslagen ook hebben gezien.

'Vreemd genoeg' overleeft geen van de daders de arrestatie na de aanslag. De grote reguliere media draaien braaf het verhaal af, dat de autoriteiten hen voorhoudt, daarvoor worden deze media dan ook betaald, door het relatief lage aantal eigenaren van deze grote reguliere: kranten, tijdschriften, tv en radiostations. Wat betreft de nationale radio en tv zenders is de link al helemaal simpel, wil men de baan behouden, zal men mee moeten doen, en zoveel mogelijk herkauwen, wat hen door de neoliberale overheid en het grote bedrijfsleven wordt voorgeschoteld..... Waar deze mediaorganen (ook de commerciële) zich niet alleen bezondigen aan het brengen van pure propaganda leugens (neem Aleppo), maar zich zelfs schuldig maken aan zelfcensuur..........

Mensen lees het artikel! Onder het artikel kan u klikken voor een 'Dutch vertaling'.

Berlin – Another False Flag?

By Peter Koenig 

December 28, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - 12 dead, about 40 injured, is the result of the latest terror attack in Berlin, when on 19 December, a truck plouged into a Christmas market at Berlin’s Bretscheideplatz, near the lush Kurfuerstendamm.

Is it not a ‘déjà-vu’ of not even half a year ago, when in Nice, France, on 14^th July a truck mowed down hordes of people celebrating Bastille Day?

In Berlin, the first ‘culprit’ was a Pakistani who apparently ‘escaped’. When later he turned up and explained with proof his innocence, they had to let him go. In the cabin of the truck they also found a dead man of Polish origin. He couldn’t be accused, since he was dead.

Then the chase was stalled, until miraculously, about a day later, they found in the truck identity papers of a Mr. Anis Amri (24) of Tunisian citizenship beneath the driver’s seat.  As is usual with these terrorists, they like to leave their ID cards behind. It seems to be part of their strategy to be caught and killed.

Then, once more there was a ‘suspect’, who could be chased, throughout Europe.

At three in the morning of December 23, again miraculously, Anis Amri turned up on a plaza in Milan, got allegedly into a confrontation with two policemen, who claimed he pulled a gun, when one of them shot and killed him. No witness, no proof.

Two Italian policemen killed a young man, whom – they say – they didn’t even have a clue who he might be. They became heroes, literally overnight. Italy’s new PM, Paolo Gentiloni, thanked and congratulated them; and so did Mme. Merkel and her Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière.

The same pattern all over again.

DEAD MAN CAN’T TALK. It’s Paris (Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan); Nice; Brussels; Munich; Orlando, Florida; San Bernardino, California …… all over again- and again – and again.

The ‘plowing-through-a-celebrating-crowd’ is in many regards “a carbon copy” of  the 14^th July massacre in Nice (see image below). At the end, the designated ‘Muslim’ terrorist was  killed. No witness. No testimony.

Questions to be fully investigated: Were the secret services, the core of which are the CIA, Mossad and MI6, with the collaboration of Germany’s BND involved. Was it a false flag?

Don’t believe one minute that your respective governments didn’t and don’t know what’s going on.

Who are the real perpetrators?

The real perpetrators are not Muslims. They are your own spineless puppet governments, all of which (covertly) support the ISIS and al Qaeda. They obey orders to demonize the Muslim faith and society.

That’s what the west knows best – denigrating and discriminating, accusing the innocent, to serve their purpose, sanctions for those who do not submit.

In reality, no change for the last 800-some years, colonizing, exploiting, murdering the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Today’s ‘leaders’ are the descendants of the colonial era killers of times past.  They form the core of our “western killer civilization”.

These western ‘leaders’ are mere puppets, because they have been put in ‘power’ by the the elusive elite, also called the “Deep State” – the Deep State gone global.

Democracy is dead. It’s become a useless defunct slogan. No so-called election over the past decade or so, in the western world has been democratic. They were all scams and manipulations of peoples’ minds and wills.

And if they didn’t conform to what the Washington masters and their supreme masters needed, Plan B of ‘regime change’ kicked in.

They have become experts of semi-clandestine ‘regime change’ through parliamentary coups – i.e. Paraguay, Ukraine, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Spain and many others.

If these eventually ‘elected’ western leaders (sic-sic), from Obama, to Merkel, Hollande, May, Gentiloni – and the entire EU / OECD clan, don’t behave, they are ‘cooked’, the target of political destabilizaion. That’s the extent of impunity which drives this hegemonic and criminal process towards the New World Order, or the One World Order, led by the global finance and war industry.

The finance clan, the lords of money, the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, et al, the FED, BIS (Bank for International Settlements, the secretive central bank of all central banks) and Goldman Sachs, have to act fast; otherwise they might lose the key instrument of their power – the sham dollar pyramid economy – may fall apart, before they have actually reached their goal – a world under constant chaos, never-ending conflicts and wars.

A world under which a small elite, enslaves the 99.99% of ‘Us, the People’ — under ever worsening life conditions, unemployment, misery, disease, privatized social services, all contributing to a steady decline in life expectancy.

Among their instruments is permanent chaos. Economic dislocation and social crises.

Open borders forced by trade lobbies and WTO (World Trade Organization) will wipe out small farmers and manufacturers in developing countries, thus eventually handing monopolies to large, mostly US corporations, to the detriment of already impoverished nations, whose vulnerability will be further abused to extract their natural resources for a pittance, so they may repay their IMF / World Bank imposed and leveraged debt.

Floods of refugees from war zones to industrialized wealthy countries, currently happening from the war-torn Middle East to Europe, will disrupt the labor market, push down wages, create massive unemployment. These are all tools towards enslavement of populations. People who have to fend and fight for daily food and often for sheer survival, have no energy or time to take to the streets and protest. That’s the plan; already being enacted. Just look at Greece.

What does all that have to do with the Berlin massacre? –

Everything. Berlin, like Paris, Brussels, Munich, Orlando… is just a cog in the wheel of the monster’s drive towards full world hegemony.

Unexpected, haphazard carnage and terror acts are spreading misery, poverty and fear.

People who are afraid will call for more police and military protection.

They will voluntarily give up their human and civil rights for what they hope will be more ‘protection’, being totally oblivious to the fact that the very governments from whom they are seeking more protection are those that commit these acts of treason and terror, those who are behind the killings. The Anglo-american  controlled presstitute mainstream media is in permanent brainwashing mode. Unless you search the news and information for yourself on alternative media, they will never tell you the truth, but their lies, after lies, after more of the same lies will fabricate the public truth.

Peoples’ fear and absence of civil rights are easy steps towards increased militarization of the west, already happening – look at France – President (sic) Hollande was just able to extend the State of Emergency through July 2017. [The Paris November 2015 terror attacks played a key role in justifying the State of Emergency.]

The goal is to include it into the French Constitution, basically putting the French people under permanent actual or threat of Martial Law. Others might follow – Germany, Italy – all those whose constituents are ever warier of the EU and their ‘monopoly money’, the euro, and who may seek EUREXIT. This would break the camel’s back, so to speak, or at least put a wrench in the boundless onslaught of the hegemon.

Peoples’ fear may also re-strengthen the faltering justification of NATO. The fall of NATO must be halted. NATO is the Deep State’s warrior flagship, the military fear- and war monger vis-à-vis Russia and eventually China – the last vestiges to be conquered by the self-styled almighty empire, the invisible elite that pretends to rule the globe. Fortunately, they cannot stand up to the Russia-China chess duo which is gradually outsmarting the west’s ostentatious killer exploits.

Imagine, your own spineless governments, following orders of the globalized Deep State – in Berlin, Munich, Nice, Paris, Brussels, Orlando, and an almost endless list of false flags.

How can we respect our so-called leaders? They have zero esteem for us, who are their bread-earners. They kill us, no hesitation, if it pleases them and serves their purpose – and their greed.

In the case of Berlin, is the German government complicit? Blaming Muslims, finding a pre-identified victim, Mr. Anis Amri, who most likely had no clue that he was framed.

In Italy, the police catches him (or somebody who has been given the pre-identified Tunisian victim’s name), they kill him – and, bingo – case closed. Another fear-inflicting false flag was born and concluded, advancing the bulldozer of empire’s destruction a notch closer to Full Spectrum Dominance.

The MSM will do the rest – until the next fake exploit. Be prepared. But this can happen only if we let our governments get away with it, if we close our eyes to reality; if we keep believing the presstitute media.

People wake up! – Boycott the MSM. Take the time to seek the truth elsewhere, for example, on RT, TeleSur, Global Research, ICH, New Eastern Outlook (NEO), CounterPunch, The Saker, Voltairenet — and many more. The Deep State cannot win without your participation.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. 

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.

Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht terug kan vinden.

VS dwarsboomt Rusland en China via het IMF en de Wereldbank, terreur op een ander niveau......

De VS dwarsboomt Rusland en China: Oekraïne is het eerste land, dat zegt een lening van Rusland niet terug te betalen, ook al was één van de condities voor die lening 5% rente, veel gunstiger dan die van het IMF en de Wereldbank..... Oekraïne was het eerste land, dat stelde een schuld van 3 miljard dollar aan de Russen niet terug te betalen..... China en Rusland varen een steeds onafhankelijker koers op financieel gebied, als tegenhangers van het uiterst asociale, inhumane, neoliberale aandelenkapitalisme, dat in feite wordt geleid vanuit de VS, via het IMF en de Wereldbank, waarbij de belangen van de VS en haar munt altijd voorop gaan......

Daar de VS feitelijk aan de touwen trekt bij het IMF en de Wereldbank, besloot het IMF niet langer garant te staan voor leningen, die bijvoorbeeld Rusland aan andere landen heeft verstrekt, zoals de hiervoor aangeduide lening van 3 miljard dollar aan Oekraïne. Met andere woorden maande het IMF deze landen en in dit voorbeeld Oekraïne, de lening van Rusland simpelweg niet terug te betalen!! Sterker nog: voorwaarde voor een lening van het IMF, is het niet terugbetalen van schulden aan Rusland of China....... Hiervoor  moest het IMF de regels tijdens het spel aanpassen, een schoftenstreek van enorme grootte!! Oekraïne was normaal gesproken niet zo maar in aanmerking gekomen voor een lening van het IMF of de Wereldbank, vanwege de bestaande schuld aan Rusland, maar kan nu gewoon miljarden extra lenen en het eerder geleende geld in de zak steken.

Voor een lening van het IMF en de Wereldbank moet wel een fiks deel van de soevereiniteit worden ingeleverd en zal het land het neoliberale systeem moeten invoeren, waarbij de bevolking uiteraard de klos is, zoals de Grieken dat nu dagelijks merken: leven in armoede en zelfs met een baan, zullen velen in armoede blijven steken, daar de salarissen gigantisch naar beneden werden bijgesteld........ Uiteraard moeten zoveel mogelijk staatseigendommen worden verkocht, zoals openbare nutsvoorzieningen, waar mensen bijvoorbeeld veel meer zullen moeten betalen voor water, de gezondheidszorg en scholing........

Hier het artikel van Information Clearing House, waarin e.e.a. uit de doeken wordt gedaan, een lang artikel, maar uiterst verhelderend:

The IMF Changes its Rules to Isolate China and Russia

By Michael Hudson - Guns and Butter

Dr. Hudson discusses his paper, The IMF Changes Its Rules To Isolate China and Russia; implications of the four policy changes at the International Monetary Fund in its role as enforcer of inter-government debts; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an alternative military alliance to NATO; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank; the Trans Pacific Partnership Treaty; the China International Payments System (CIPS); WTO investment treaties; Ukraine and Greece; different philosophies of development between east and west; break up of the post WWII dollarized global financial system; the world dividing into two camps.

Posted February 05, 2016

A New Global Financial Cold War

By Michael Hudson

A nightmare scenario of U.S. geopolitical strategists is coming true: foreign independence from U.S.-centered financial and diplomatic control. China and Russia are investing in neighboring economies on terms that cement Eurasian integration on the basis of financing in their own currencies and favoring their own exports. They also have created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an alternative military alliance to NATO.[1] And the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank tandem in which the United States holds unique veto power.

More than just a disparity of voting rights in the IMF and World Bank is at stake. At issue is a philosophy of development. U.S. and other foreign investment in infrastructure (or buyouts and takeovers on credit) adds interest rates and other financial charges to the cost structure, while charging prices as high as the market can bear (think of Carlos Slim’s telephone monopoly in Mexico, or the high costs of America’s health care system), and making their profits and monopoly rents tax-exempt by paying them out as interest.

By contrast, government-owned infrastructure provides basic services at low cost, on a subsidized basis, or freely. That is what has made the United States, Germany and other industrial lead nations so competitive over the past few centuries. But this positive role of government is no longer possible under World Bank/IMF policy. The U.S. promotion of neoliberalism and austerity is a major reason propelling China, Russia and other nations out of the U.S. diplomatic and banking orbit.

On December 3, 2015, Prime Minister Putin proposed that Russia “and other Eurasian Economic Union countries should kick-off consultations with members of the SCO and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on a possible economic partnership.”[2]Russia also is seeking to build pipelines to Europe through friendly secular countries instead of Sunni jihadist U.S.-backed countries locked into America’s increasingly confrontational orbit.

Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov points out that when Russia’s 2013 loan to Ukraine was made, at the request of Ukraine’s elected government, Ukraine’s “international reserves were barely enough to cover three months’ imports, and no other creditor was prepared to lend on terms acceptable to Kiev. Yet Russia provided $3 billion of much-needed funding at a 5 per cent interest rate, when Ukraine’s bonds were yielding nearly 12 per cent.”[3]

What especially annoys U.S. financial strategists is that this loan by Russia’s National Wealth Fund was protected by IMF lending practice, which at that time ensured collectability by withholding credit from countries in default of foreign official debts, or at least not bargaining in good faith to pay. To cap matters, the bonds are registered under London’s creditor-oriented rules and courts.

Most worrisome to U.S. strategists is that China and Russia are denominating their trade and investment in their own currencies instead of dollars. After U.S. officials threatened to derange Russia’s banking linkages by cutting it off from the SWIFT interbank clearing system, China accelerated its creation of the alternative China International Payments System (CIPS), and its own credit card system to protect Eurasian economies from the threats made by U.S. unilateralists.

Russia and China are simply doing what the United States has long done: using trade and credit linkages to cement their diplomacy. This tectonic geopolitical shift is a Copernican threat to New Cold War ideology: Instead of the world economy revolving around the United States (the Ptolemaic idea of America as “the indispensible nation”), it may revolve around Eurasia. As long as global financial control remains grounded in Washington at the offices of the IMF and World Bank, such a shift in the center of gravity will be fought with all the power of an American Century (and would-be American Millennium) inquisition.

Any inquisition needs a court system and enforcement vehicles. So does resistance to such a system. That is what today’s global financial, legal and trade maneuvering is all about. And that is why today’s world system is in the process of breaking apart. Differences in economic philosophy call for different institutions.

To U.S. neocons the specter of AIIB government-to-government investment creates fear of nations minting their own money and holding each other’s debt in their international reserves instead of borrowing dollars, paying interest in dollars and subordinating their financial planning to the U.S. Treasury and IMF. Foreign governments would have less need to finance their budget deficits by selling off key infrastructure. And instead of dismantling public spending, a broad Eurasian economic union would do what the United States itself practices, and seek self-sufficiency in banking and monetary policy.

Imagine the following scenario five years from now. China will have spent half a decade building high-speed railroads, ports, power systems and other construction for Asian and African countries, enabling them to grow and export more. These exports will be coming online to repay the infrastructure loans. Also, suppose that Russia has been supplying the oil and gas energy for these projects on credit.

To avert this prospect, suppose an American diplomat makes the following proposal to the leaders of countries in debt to China, Russia and the AIIB: “Now that you’ve got your increased production in place, why repay? We’ll make you rich if you stiff our adversaries and turn back to the West. We and our European allies will support your assigning your nations’ public infrastructure to yourselves and your supporters at insider prices, and then give these assets market value by selling shares in New York and London. Then, you can keep the money and spend it in the West.”

How can China or Russia collect in such a situation? They can sue. But what court in the West will accept their jurisdiction?

That is the kind of scenario U.S. State Department and Treasury officials have been discussing for more than a year. Implementing it became more pressing in light of Ukraine’s $3 billion debt to Russia falling due by December 20, 2015. Ukraine’s U.S.-backed regime has announced its intention to default. To support their position, the IMF has just changed its rules to remove a critical lever on which Russia and other governments have long relied to ensure payment of their loans.

The IMF’s role as enforcer of inter-government debts
When it comes to enforcing nations to pay inter-government debts, the IMF is able to withhold not only its own credit but also that of governments and global bank consortia participating when debtor countries need “stabilization” loans (the neoliberal euphemism for imposing austerity and destabilizing debtor economies, as in Greece this year). Countries that do not privatize their infrastructure and sell it to Western buyers are threatened with sanctions, backed by U.S.-sponsored “regime change” and “democracy promotion” Maidan-style. The Fund’s creditor leverage has been that if a nation is in financial arrears to any government, it cannot qualify for an IMF loan – and hence, for packages involving other governments. That is how the dollarized global financial system has worked for half a century. But until now, the beneficiaries have been U.S. and NATO lenders, not been China or Russia.

The focus on a mixed public/private economy sets the AIIB at odds with the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s aim of relinquishing government planning power to the financial and corporate sector, and the neoliberal aim of blocking governments from creating their own money and implementing their own financial, economic and environmental regulation. Chief Nomura economist Richard Koo, explained the logic of viewing the AIIB as a threat to the U.S.-controlled IMF: “If the IMF’s rival is heavily under China’s influence, countries receiving its support will rebuild their economies under what is effectively Chinese guidance, increasing the likelihood they will fall directly or indirectly under that country’s influence.”[4]

This was the setting on December 8, when Chief IMF Spokesman Gerry Rice announced: “The IMF’s Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors.” Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov accused the IMF decision of being “hasty and biased.”[5] But it had been discussed all year long, calculating a range of scenarios for a sea change in international law. Anders Aslund, senior fellow at the NATO-oriented Atlantic Council, points out:

The IMF staff started contemplating a rule change in the spring of 2013 because nontraditional creditors, such as China, had started providing developing countries with large loans. One issue was that these loans were issued on conditions out of line with IMF practice. China wasn’t a member of the Paris Club, where loan restructuring is usually discussed, so it was time to update the rules.

The IMF intended to adopt a new policy in the spring of 2016, but the dispute over Russia’s $3 billion loan to Ukraine has accelerated an otherwise slow decision-making process.[6]

The target was not only Russia and its ability to collect on its sovereign loan to Ukraine, but China even more, in its prospective role as creditor to African countries and prospective AIIB borrowers, planning for a New Silk Road to integrate a Eurasian economy independent of U.S. financial and trade control. The Wall Street Journal concurred that the main motive for changing the rules was the threat that China would provide an alternative to IMF lending and its demands for crushing austerity. “IMF-watchers said the fund was originally thinking of ensuring China wouldn’t be able to foil IMF lending to member countries seeking bailouts as Beijing ramped up loans to developing economies around the world.”[7] So U.S. officials walked into the IMF headquarters in Washington with the legal equivalent of suicide vests. Their aim was a last-ditch attempt to block trade and financial agreements organized outside of U.S. control and that of the IMF and World Bank.

The plan is simple enough. Trade follows finance, and the creditor usually calls the tune. That is how the United States has used the Dollar Standard to steer Third World trade and investment since World War II along lines benefiting the U.S. economy. The cement of trade credit and bank lending is the ability of creditors to collect on the international debts being negotiated. That is why the United States and other creditor nations have used the IMF as an intermediary to act as “honest broker” for loan consortia. (“Honest broker” means being subject to U.S. veto power.) To enforce its financial leverage, the IMF has long followed the rule that it will not sponsor any loan agreement or refinancing for governments that are in default of debts owed to other governments. However, as the afore-mentioned Aslund explains, the IMF could easily

change its practice of not lending into [countries in official] arrears … because it is not incorporated into the IMF Articles of Agreement, that is, the IMF statutes. The IMF Executive Board can decide to change this policy with a simple board majority. The IMF has lent to Afghanistan, Georgia, and Iraq in the midst of war, and Russia has no veto right, holding only 2.39 percent of the votes in the IMF. When the IMF has lent to Georgia and Ukraine, the other members of its Executive Board have overruled Russia.[8]

After the rules change, Aslund later noted, “the IMF can continue to give Ukraine loans regardless of what Ukraine does about its credit from Russia, which falls due on December 20.[9]

The IMF rule that no country can borrow if it is in default to a foreign government was created in the post-1945 world. Since then, the U.S. Government, Treasury and/or U.S. bank consortia have been party to nearly every major loan agreement. But inasmuch as Ukraine’s official debt to Russia’s National Wealth Fund was not to the U.S. Government, the IMF announced its rules change simply as a “clarification.” What its rule really meant was that it would not provide credit to countries in arrears to the U.S. government, not that of Russia or China.

It remains up to the IMF board – and in the end, its managing director – whether or not to deem a country creditworthy. The U.S. representative can block any foreign leaders not beholden to the United States. Mikhail Delyagin, Director of the Institute of Globalization Problems, explained the double standard at work: “The Fund will give Kiev a new loan tranche on one condition: that Ukraine should not pay Russia a dollar under its $3 billion debt. … they will oblige Ukraine to pay only to western creditors for political reasons.”[10]

The post-2010 loan packages to Greece are a case in point. The IMF staff saw that Greece could not possibly pay the sums needed to bail out French, German and other foreign banks and bondholders. Many Board members agreed, and have gone public with their whistle blowing. Their protests didn’t matter. President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner pointed out that U.S. banks had written credit default swaps betting that Greece could pay, and would lose money if there were a debt writedown). Dominique Strauss-Kahn backed the hard line US- European Central Bank position. So did Christine Lagarde in 2015, overriding staff protests.[11]

Regarding Ukraine, IMF executive board member Otaviano Canuto, representing Brazil, noted that the logic that “conditions on IMF lending to a country that fell behind on payments [was to] make sure it kept negotiating in good faith to reach agreement with creditors.”[12]Dropping this condition, he said, would open the door for other countries to insist on a similar waiver and avoid making serious and sincere efforts to reach payment agreement with creditor governments.

A more binding IMF rule is Article I of its 1944-45 founding charter, prohibiting the Fund from lending to a member state engaged in civil war or at war with another member state, or for military purposes in general. But when IMF head Lagarde made the last loan to Ukraine, in spring 2015, she merely expressed a vapid token hope there might be peace. Withholding IMF credit could have been a lever to force peace and adherence to the Minsk agreements, but U.S. diplomatic pressure led that opportunity to be rejected. President Porochenko immediately announced that he would step up the civil war with the Russian-speaking population in the eastern Donbass region.

The most important IMF condition being violated is that continued warfare with the East prevents a realistic prospect of Ukraine paying back new loans. The Donbas is where most Ukrainian exports were made, mainly to Russia. That market is being lost by the junta’s belligerence toward Russia. This should have blocked Ukraine from receiving IMF aid. Aslund himself points to the internal contradiction at work: Ukraine has achieved budget balance because the inflation and steep currency depreciation has drastically eroded its pension costs. But the resulting decline in the purchasing power of pension benefits has led to growing opposition to Ukraine’s post-Maidan junta. So how can the IMF’s austerity budget be followed without a political backlash? “Leading representatives from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc are insisting on massive tax cuts, but no more expenditure cuts; that would cause a vast budget deficit that the IMF assesses at 9-10 percent of GDP, that could not possibly be financed.”[13]

By welcoming and financing Ukraine instead of treating as an outcast, the IMF thus is breaking four of its rules:

1. Not to lend to a country that has no visible means to pay back the loan. This breaks the “No More Argentinas” rule, adopted after the IMF’s disastrous 2001 loan.
2. Not to lend to a country that repudiates its debt to official creditors. This goes against the IMF’s role as enforcer for the global creditor cartel.
3. Not to lend to a borrower at war – and indeed, to one that is destroying its export capacity and hence its balance-of-payments ability to pay back the loan.
4. Finally, not to lend to a country that is not likely to carry out the IMF’s austerity “conditionalities,” at least without crushing democratic opposition in a totalitarian manner.

The upshot – and new basic guideline for IMF lending – is to split the world into pro-U.S. economies going neoliberal, and economies maintaining public investment in infrastructure n and what used to be viewed as progressive capitalism. Russia and China may lend as much as they want to other governments, but there is no global vehicle to help secure their ability to be paid back under international law. Having refused to roll back its own (and ECB) claims on Greece, the IMF is willing to see countries not on the list approved by U.S. neocons repudiate their official debts to Russia or China. Changing its rules to clear the path for making loans to Ukraine is rightly seen as an escalation of America’s New Cold War against Russia and China.

Timing is everything in such ploys. Georgetown University Law professor and Treasury consultant Anna Gelpern warned that before the “IMF staff and executive board [had] enough time to change the policy on arrears to official creditors,” Russia might use “its notorious debt/GDP clause to accelerate the bonds at any time before December, or simply gum up the process of reforming the IMF’s arrears policy.”[14] According to this clause, if Ukraine’s foreign debt rose above 60 percent of GDP, Russia’s government would have the right to demand immediate payment. But President Putin, no doubt anticipating the bitter fight to come over its attempts to collect on its loan, refrained from exercising this option. He is playing the long game, bending over backward to behave in a way that cannot be criticized as “odious.”

A more immediate reason deterring the United States from pressing earlier to change IMF rules was the need to use the old set of rules against Greece before changing them for Ukraine. A waiver for Ukraine would have provided a precedent for Greece to ask for a similar waiver on paying the “troika” – the European Central Bank (ECB), EU commission and the IMF itself – for the post-2010 loans that have pushed it into a worse depression than the 1930s. Only after Greece capitulated to eurozone austerity was the path clear for U.S. officials to change the IMF rules to isolate Russia. But their victory has come at the cost of changing the IMF’s rules and those of the global financial system irreversibly. Other countries henceforth may reject conditionalities, as Ukraine has done, as well as asking for write-downs on foreign official debts.

That was the great fear of neoliberal U.S. and Eurozone strategists last summer, after all. The reason for smashing Greece’s economy was to deter Podemos in Spain and similar movements in Italy and Portugal from pursuing national prosperity instead of eurozone austerity. “Imagine the Greek government had insisted that EU institutions accept the same haircut as the country’s private creditors,” Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov asked. “The reaction in European capitals would have been frosty. Yet this is the position now taken by Kiev with respect to Ukraine’s $3 billion eurobond held by Russia.”[15]

The consequences of America’s tactics to make a financial hit on Russia while its balance of payments is down (as a result of collapsing oil and gas prices) go far beyond just the IMF. These tactics are driving other countries to defend their own economies in the legal and political spheres, in ways that are breaking apart the post-1945 global order.

Countering Russia’s ability to collect in Britain’s law courts
Over the past year the U.S. Treasury and State Departments have discussed ploys to block Russia from collecting by suing in the London Court of International Arbitration, under whose rules Russia’s bonds issued to Ukraine are registered. Reviewing the excuses Ukraine might use to avoid paying Russia, Prof. Gelpern noted that it might declare the debt “odious,” made under duress or corruptly. In a paper for the Peterson Institute of International Economics (the banking lobby in Washington) she suggested that Britain should deny Russia the use of its courts as a means of reinforcing the financial, energy and trade sanctions passed after Crimea voted to join Russia as protection against the ethnic cleansing from the Right Sector, Azov Battalion and other paramilitary groups descending on the region.[16]

A kindred ploy might be for Ukraine to countersue Russia for reparations for “invading” it and taking Crimea. Such a claim would seem to have little chance of success (without showing the court to be an arm of NATO politics), but it might delay Russia’ ability to collect by tying the loan up in a long nuisance lawsuit. But the British court would lose credibility if it permits frivolous legal claims (called barratry in English) such as President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk have threatened.

To claim that Ukraine’s debt to Russia was “odious” or otherwise illegitimate, “President Petro Poroshenko said the money was intended to ensure Yanukovych’s loyalty to Moscow, and called the payment a ‘bribe,’ according to an interview with Bloomberg in June this year.”[17]The legal and moral problem with such arguments is that they would apply equally to IMF and U.S. loans. They would open the floodgates for other countries to repudiate debts taken on by dictatorships supported by IMF and U.S. lenders.

As Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted, the IMF’s change of rules, “designed to suit Ukraine only, could plant a time bomb under all other IMF programs.” The new rules showed the extent to which the IMF is subordinate to U.S. aggressive New Cold Warriors: “since Ukraine is politically important – and it is only important because it is opposed to Russia – the IMF is ready to do for Ukraine everything it has not done for anyone else.”[18]

In a similar vein, Andrei Klimov, deputy chairman of the Committee for International Affairs at the Federation Council (the upper house of Russia’s parliament) accused the United States of playing “the role of the main violin in the IMF while the role of the second violin is played by the European Union, [the] two basic sponsors of the Maidan – the … coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.”[19]

Putin’s counter-strategy and the blowback on U.S.-European relations
Having anticipated that Ukraine would seek excuses to not pay Russia, President Putin refrained from exercising Russia’s right to demand immediate payment when Ukraine’s foreign debt rose above 60 percent of GDP. In November he even offered to defer any payment at all this year, stretching payments out to “$1 billion next year, $1 billion in 2017, and $1 billion in 2018,” if “the United States government, the European Union, or one of the big international financial institutions” guaranteed payment.[20] Based on their assurances “that Ukraine’s solvency will grow,” he added, they should be willing to put their money where their mouth was. If they did not provide guarantees, Putin pointed out, “this means that they do not believe in the Ukrainian economy’s future.”

Implicit was that if the West continued encouraging Ukraine to fight against the East, its government would not be in a position to pay. The Minsk agreement was expiring and Ukraine was receiving new arms support from the United States, Canada and other NATO members to intensify hostilities against Donbas and Crimea.

But the IMF, European Union and United States refused to back up the Fund’s optimistic forecast of Ukraine’s ability to pay in the face of its continued civil war against the East. Foreign Minister Lavrov concluded that, “By having refused to guarantee Ukraine’s debt as part of Russia’s proposal to restructure it, the United States effectively admitted the absence of prospects of restoring its solvency.”[21]

In an exasperated tone, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Russian television: “I have a feeling that they won’t give us the money back because they are crooks … and our Western partners not only refuse to help, but they also make it difficult for us.” Accusing that “the international financial system is unjustly structured,” he nonetheless promised to “go to court. We’ll push for default on the loan and we’ll push for default on all Ukrainian debts,” based on the fact that the loan

was a request from the Ukrainian Government to the Russian Government. If two governments reach an agreement this is obviously a sovereign loan…. Surprisingly, however, international financial organisations started saying that this is not exactly a sovereign loan. This is utter bull. Evidently, it’s just an absolutely brazen, cynical lie. … This seriously erodes trust in IMF decisions. I believe that now there will be a lot of pleas from different borrower states to the IMF to grant them the same terms as Ukraine. How will the IMF possibly refuse them?[22]

And there the matter stands. On December 16, 2015, the IMF’s Executive Board ruled that “the bond should be treated as official debt, rather than a commercial bond.”[23] Forbes quipped: “Russia apparently is not always blowing smoke. Sometimes they’re actually telling it like it is.”[24]

Reflecting the degree of hatred fanned by U.S. diplomacy, U.S.-backed Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie A. Jaresko expressed an arrogant confidence that the IMF would back the Ukrainian cabinet’s announcement on Friday, December 18, of its intention to default on the debt to Russia falling due two days later. “If we were to repay this bond in full, it would mean we failed to meet the terms of the I.M.F. and the obligations we made under our restructuring.”[25]

Adding his own bluster, Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk announced his intention to tie up Russia’s claim for payment by filing a multibillion-dollar counter claim “over Russia’s occupation of Crimea and intervention in east Ukraine.” To cap matters, he added that “several hundred million dollars of debt owed by two state enterprises to Russian banks would also not be paid.”[26] This makes trade between Ukraine and Russia impossible to continue. Evidently Ukraine’s authorities had received assurance from IMF and U.S. officials that no real “good faith” bargaining would be required to gain ongoing support. Ukraine’s Parliament did not even find it necessary to enact the new tax code and budget conditionalities that the IMF loan had demanded.

The world is now at war financially, and all that seems to matter is whether, as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had put matters, “you are for us or against us.” As President Putin remarked at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly regarding America’s support of Al Qaeda, Al Nusra and other allegedly “moderate” ISIS allies in Syria: “I cannot help asking those who have caused this situation: Do you realize now what you have done? … I am afraid the question will hang in the air, because policies based on self-confidence and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity have never been abandoned.”[27]

The blowback
America’s unilateralist geopolitics are tearing up the world’s economic linkages that were put in place in the heady days after World War II, when Europe and other countries were so disillusioned that they believed the United States was acting out of idealism rather than national self-interest. Today the question is how long Western Europe will be willing to forego its trade and investment interests by accepting U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Russia, Iran and other economies. Germany, Italy and France already are feeling the strains.

The oil and pipeline war designed to bypass Russian energy exports is flooding Europe with refugees, as well as spreading terrorism. Although the leading issue in America’s Republican presidential debate on December 15, 2015, was safety from Islamic jihadists, no candidate thought to explain the source of this terrorism in America’s alliance with Wahabist Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and hence with Al Qaeda and ISIS/Daish as a means of destabilizing secular regimes in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and earlier in Afghanistan. Going back to the original sin of CIA hubris – overthrowing the secular Iranian Prime Minister leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 – U.S. foreign policy has been based on the assumption that secular regimes tend to be nationalist and resist privatization and neoliberal austerity.

Based on this assumption, U.S. Cold Warriors have aligned themselves against democratic regimes seeking to promote their own prosperity and resist neoliberalism in favor of maintaining their own traditional mixed public/private economies. That is the back-story of the U.S. fight to control the rest of the world. Tearing apart the IMF’s rules is only the most recent chapter. Arena by arena, the core values of what used to be American and European social democratic ideology are being uprooted by the tactics being used to hurt Russia, China and their prospective Eurasian allies.

The Enlightenment’s ideals were of secular democracy and the rule of international law applied equally to all nations, classical free market theory (of markets free from unearned income and rent extraction by special interests), and public investment in infrastructure to hold down the cost of living and doing business. These are all now to be sacrificed to a militant U.S. unilateralism. Putting their “indispensable nation” above the rule of law and parity of national interests (the 1648 Westphalia treaty, not to mention the Geneva Convention and Nuremburg laws), U.S. neocons proclaim that America’s destiny is to prevent foreign secular democracy from acting in ways other than in submission to U.S. diplomacy. Behind this lie the special U.S. financial and corporate interests that control American foreign policy.

This is not how the Enlightenment was supposed to turn out. Industrial capitalism a century ago was expected to evolve into an economy of abundance worldwide. Instead, we have American Pentagon capitalism, with financial bubbles deteriorating into a polarized rentier economy and a resurgence of old-fashioned imperialism. If and when a break comes, it will not be marginal but a seismic geopolitical shift.

The Dollar Bloc’s Financial Curtain 
By treating Ukraine’s repudiation of its official debt to Russia’s National Wealth Fund as the new norm, the IMF has blessed its default. President Putin and foreign minister Lavrov have said that they will sue in British courts. The open question is whether any court exist in the West not under the thumb of U.S. veto?

America’s New Cold War maneuvering has shown that the two Bretton Woods institutions are unreformable. It is easier to create new institutions such as the AIIB than to retrofit the IMF and World Bank, NATO and behind it, the dollar standard – all burdened with the legacy of their vested interests.

U.S. geostrategists evidently thought that excluding Russia, China and other Eurasian countries from the U.S.-based financial and trade system would isolate them in a similar economic box to Cuba, Iran and other sanctioned adversaries. The idea was to force countries to choose between being impoverished by such exclusion, or acquiescing in U.S. neoliberal drives to financialize their economies under U.S. control.

What is lacking here is the idea of critical mass. The United States may arm-twist Europe to impose trade and financial sanctions on Russia, and may use the IMF and World Bank to exclude countries not under U.S. hegemony from participating in dollarized global trade and finance. But this diplomatic action is producing an equal and opposite reaction. That is the Newtonian law of geopolitics. It is propelling other countries to survive by avoiding demands to impose austerity on their government budgets and labor, by creating their own international financial organization as an alternative to the IMF, and by juxtaposing their own “aid” lending to that of the U.S.-centered World Bank.

This blowback requires an international court to handle disputes free from U.S. arm-twisting. The Eurasian Economic Union accordingly has created its own court to adjudicate disputes. This may provide an alternative to Judge Griesa’s New York federal kangaroo court ruling in favor of vulture funds derailing Argentina’s debt settlements and excluding that country from world financial markets.

The more nakedly self-serving U.S. policy is – from backing radical fundamentalist outgrowths of Al Qaeda throughout the Near East to right-wing nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltics – then the greater the pressure will grow for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, AIIB and related institutions to break free of the post-1945 Bretton Woods system run by the U.S. State, Defense and Treasury Departments and their NATO superstructure of coercive military bases. As Paul Craig Roberts recently summarized the dynamic, we are back with George Orwell’s 1984 global fracture between Oceania (the United States, Britain and its northern European NATO allies as the sea and air power) vs. Eurasia as the consolidated land power.

Footnotes:

[1] The SCO was created in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan are scheduled to join, along with Iran, Afghanistan and Belarus as observers, and other east and Central Asian countries as “dialogue partners.”

[2] “Putin Seeks Alliance to Rival TPP,” RT.com (December 04 2015). The Eurasian Economic Union was created in 2014 by Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, soon joined by Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. ASEAN was formed in 1967, originally by Indonesia, Malaysia the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. It subsequently has been expanded. China and the AIIB are reaching out to replace World Bank. The U.S. refused to join the AIIB, opposing it from the outset.

[3] Anton Siluanov, “Russia wants fair rules on sovereign debt,” Financial Times, December 10, 2015.

[4] Richard Koo, “EU refuses to acknowledge mistakes made in Greek bailout,” Nomura, July 14, 2015.

[5] Ian Talley, “IMF Tweaks Lending Rules in Boost for Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2015.

[6] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin: Policy Change Means Ukraine Can Receive More Loans,” Atlantic Council, December 8, 2015. On Johnson’s Russia List, December 9, 2015, #13. Aslund was a major defender of neoliberal shock treatment and austerity in Russia, and has held up Latvian austerity as a success story rather than a disaster.

[7] Ian Talley, op. cit.

[8] Anders Åslund, “Ukraine Must Not Pay Russia Back,” Atlantic Council, November 2, 2015 (from Johnson’s Russia List, November 3, 2015, #50).

[9] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin,” op. cit.

[10] Quoted in Tamara Zamyantina, “IMF’s dilemma: to help or not to help Ukraine, if Kiev defaults,” TASS, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 9, 2015, #9.

[11] I provide a narrative of the Greek disaster in Killing the Host (2015).

[12] Reuters, “IMF rule change keeps Ukraine support; Russia complains,” December 8, 2015.

[13] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin,” op. cit.

[14] Anna Gelpern, “Russia’s Bond: It’s Official! (… and Private … and Anything Else It Wants to Be …),” Credit Slips, April 17, 2015.

[15] Anton Siluanov, “Russia wants fair rules on sovereign debt,” Financial Times, op. cit.. He added: “Russia’s financing was not made for commercial gain. Just as America and Britain regularly do, it provided assistance to a country whose policies it supported. The US is now supporting the current Ukrainian government through its USAID guarantee programme.”

[16] John Helmer, “IMF Makes Ukraine War-Fighting Loan, Allows US to Fund Military Operations Against Russia, May Repay Gazprom Bill,” Naked Capitalism, March 16, 2015 (from his site Dances with Bears).

[17] “Ukraine Rebuffs Putin’s Offer to Restructure Russian Debt,” Moscow Times, November 20, 2015, from Johnson’s Russia List, November 20, 2015, #32.

[18] “Lavrov: U.S. admits lack of prospects of restoring Ukrainian solvency,” Interfax, November 7, 2015, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 7, 2015, #38.

[19] Quoted by Tamara Zamyantina, “IMF’s dilemma,” op. cit.

[20] Vladimir Putin, “Responses to journalists’ questions following the G20 summit,” Kremlin.ru, November 16, 2015. From Johnson’s Russia List, November 17, 2015,  #7.

“Lavrov: U.S. admits lack of prospects of restoring Ukrainian solvency,” November 7, 2015, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 7, 2015, #38.[21]

“In Conversation with Dmitry Medvedev: Interview with five television channels,” Government.ru, December 9, 2015, from Johnson’s Russia List, December 10, 2015,  #2[22]

[23] Andrew Mayeda, “IMF Says Ukraine Bond Owned by Russia Is Official Sovereign Debt,” Bloomberg, December 17, 2015.

[24] Kenneth Rapoza, “IMF Says Russia Right About Ukraine $3 Billion Loan,” Forbes.com, December 16, 2015. The article added: “the Russian government confirmed to Euroclear, at the request of the Ukrainian authorities at the time, that the Eurobond was fully owned by the Russian government.”

[25] Andrew E. Kramer, “Ukraine Halts Repayments on $3.5 Billion It Owes Russia,” The New York Times, December 19, 2015.

[26] Roman Olearchyk, “Ukraine tensions with Russia mount after debt moratorium,” Financial Times, December 19, 2015.

[27] “Violence instead of democracy: Putin slams ‘policies of exceptionalism and impunity’ in UN speech,” www.rt.com, September 29, 2015. From Johnson’s Russia List, September 29, 2015, #2.

http://michael-hudson.com/

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.

Zet dit eens af tegen de enorme berg VS propagandafilms (die Goebbels jaloers zouden maken) waarin de VS altijd de goede partij en het slachtoffer is, neem de film; 'Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit', hierin wordt de VS bijna het slachtoffer van o.a. financiële manipulaties door Rusland.... Uiteraard een belachelijk scenario, zoals in al deze films het geval is, maar wel met de bedoeling de kijkers te hersenspoelen met de idee, dat de de uiterst agressieve VS, dat in een flink deel van de wereld ongekende terreur brengt, de goede partij is, die continu het slachtoffer is van kwade manipulaties door landen als Rusland en China............

Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het voorgaande, klik op één van de labels,die u onder dit bericht aantreft, dit geldt niet voor de labels: AIIB, ASEAN, Aslund, CIPS, G. Rice, Hudson, Lavrov, SCO en Siluanov. Helaas kan ik maar een beperkt aantal labels plaatsen (maximaal 200 tekens.....).