December 31, 2016

OBAMA'S FAILED STRUGGLE AGAINST THE HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONISTS AND THE NEOCONSERVATIVES by Harry Targ




by Harry Targ in: 

Diary of a Heartland Radical

Sat., Dec.  31, 2016



Richard Cohen is one of the Washington Post columnists who is published in small town, conservative newspapers. His December 30, 2016 column which appeared in the Lafayette Journal and Courier entitled “Syria, a Stain on Obama’s Presidency,” lays out a critique from the foreign policy establishment of the president’s foreign policy. Cohen starkly argues that Obama’s Syria policy is second only in its disastrous consequences to “the day of infamy” when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Why? Because...“Turkey, Iran and Russia met in Moscow to settle matters in the Middle East. The United States wasn’t even asked to the meeting.”

Cohen complains about the fact that the United States never engaged in the Syrian civil war. As to Aleppo, “the preeminent power of the region did virtually nothing.” Cohen indicated that Obama could have installed a “no-fly zone,” “established safe zones for refugees,” and demanded that Russia and Iran get out of Syria. But, alas, “Obama did not care enough.”

And, in the end, for Cohen, the cool, sometimes tempered President Obama was too dispassionate about foreign policy. Part of the Clinton presidential defeat resulted from the fact that she had to defend an Obama administration “that was cold to the touch.” The President “waved a droopy flag. He did not want to make America great again. It was great enough for him already.” As to Syria, “he threw in the towel.”

And Cohen repeated the mantra often articulated byPost editorial writers and columnists: “Since the end of World War II, American leadership has been essential to maintain world peace. Whether we liked it or not, we were the world’s policeman. There was no other cop on the beat. Now that leadership is gone. So, increasingly, will be peace.”

Cohen is wrong in virtually everything he wrote in this column. First, for the brutalized people of Syria any ceasefire and resolution of their civil war should be applauded. If the agreement between Turkey, Russia, and Syria holds it would be an extraordinary change from the relentless violence Syrians have suffered, from multiple parties.

In addition, the United States has been involved in the civil war since it grew out of Arab Spring protests in Syria in 2011. Most of the weapons various rebel groups have used since violence escalated have been provided by the United States, Saudi Arabia, or other partners. The U.S. hope was that the Assad regime would fall in a fashion similar to the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya.

Further, as Robert Kennedy Jr. points out (“Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria,” Politico Magazine, February 22, 2016), the United States has been interfering in Syrian affairs since the 1940s. Instability in the whole region-the Persian Gulf and the Middle East-has resulted from United States imperial policies since the end of World War II. What Cohen calls “American leadership” has included the 1945 oil for arms deal with Saudi Arabia; the creation of the state of Israel; growing involvement in the internal affairs of Syria, Iran, and Lebanon; opposition to the Arab socialism of Egypt and Syria; the Eisenhower Doctrine declaring the U.S. right and responsibility to protect the region from communism; to wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain in the contemporary period. Contrary to Cohen, the United States has done more than any other country to destabilize the region and destroy peace.

In terms of the general character of United States foreign policy, President Obama’s biggest failure has been his wavering from the pragmatic path he proposed in 2008 campaign speeches. Candidate Obama articulated the view that diplomacy should be the first tool any administration uses in foreign affairs. Diplomacy involves bilateral and multilateral negotiations, using various institutional venues such as the United Nations, regional organizations, and international economic institutions. And the use of diplomacy is particularly important in relations with countries that are enemies or potential enemies. The United States needs to have channels of communications with those nations who may not share its values or interests.

In addition, the Obama election was greeted with elation all across the globe because he presented the view that the United States needs to respect other countries, cannot be the world’s policeman, and must not act unilaterally has had been done in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in numerous other countries since the last World War. Perhaps Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievements have involved diplomacy with Iran, Cuba, and even sometime cooperation with Russia. Early in his first term he attended a meeting of the G20 countries and seemed to endorse a greater international decision-making role for the countries of the Global South.

But President Obama was subjected to the pressures, the advice, and the sabotage of his pragmatic approach to the U.S. role in the world by a confluence of “humanitarian interventionists,” those who justify intervention on the grounds of promoting human rights, democratization, and markets. Richard Cohen and The Washington Post are exemplars of this perspective.

And also Obama could not withstand the equally powerful pressures of the neoconservatives who take the view that as the most powerful country militarily the United States should intervene everywhere to remake the world in its image. For the neocons, world affairs are ultimately about power. The neoconservatives populate Washington D.C. in think tanks and other institutions. Some were foreign policy advisers in the Bush administration and some hold positions of influence within the Obama administration.

Whether inspired by humanitarian interventionists or neoconservatives, the dark side of Obama’s foreign policy has been illustrated by expanding a military presence in Afghanistan, returning to Iraq, working with NATO to overthrow the regime in Libya, collaborating with Saudi Arabia to crush rebels in Bahrain and Yemen, dramatically increasing drone warfare on a multitude of “enemy” targets, participating in the destabilization of the government of Ukraine, launching a new cold war against Russia, pivoting U.S. military resources to Asia against China, and funding rebels in Syria.

In sum, the track record of President Obama has been tragically flawed not because he “threw in the towel” but because he did not adequately pursue the pragmatic foreign policy agenda he promised his supporters in 2008. Mike Lofgren, (The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, Penguin Books, 2015), writes about a “deep state,” a set of non-transparent institutions, think tanks, and long-time political influentials who determine most of United States foreign policy without any semblance of visibility to the public. As Andrew Bacevich once wrote, the role of the public is to be compliant and supportive of whatever foreign policy decisions are made by these less than transparent influentials.

Occasionally, the President and key spokespersons and publicists are called upon to explain ongoing foreign policies to the public and/or to criticize deviations from the direction of policy a President might initiate.The Washington Post and its pundits explain what the U.S. role in the world should be, “the world policeman,” and call into question any efforts, such as Obama’s pragmatism, when they deviate from what the wise men and women and the deep state institutions demand.

Finally, what Richard Cohen, and other humanitarian interventionists and their neoconservative colleagues, does not realize is that the United States is no longer the hegemonic power in the world. United States foreign policy is going to have to adjust to a multipolar world and a world mobilized for radical economic, as well as political change. The supporters of Obama’s foreign policy vision were inspired by an approach to international relations that while still based on big power muscle was at least tailored for a more complicated world. The alternative might be World War III.

It is unclear what the direction of U.S. foreign policy will be in a Trump administration but most signs point to greater militarism and interventionism. A first response from the peace movement might be to rearticulate the vision of a foreign policy pragmatism that was promised but not delivered by President Obama when he first ran for the presidency.

Posted by Harry Targ

December 30, 2016

A Sour Holiday Season for Neocons - Robert Parry, December 27, 2016


Exclusive: For the past couple of decades, the neocons have ruled the roost of American foreign policy, but they have now suffered some stunning reversals that have left them fuming, reports Robert Parry.


America’s extended Christmas holiday season, stretching through much of November and all of December, has not been a happy time for Official Washington’s dominant neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks.
First, they had to lick their wounds over the defeat of their preferred U.S. presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton; then they had to watch as their “moderate” Syrian rebel proxies and their Al Qaeda allies were routed from east Aleppo; and finally they watched in disbelief as the Obama administration permitted passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian lands.



Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

To say that the neocons and liberal hawks have not taken these reversals well would be an understatement. They have pretty much blamed Clinton’s defeat on everyone but themselves and Clinton herself. They have been apoplectic over Aleppo and their lost dream of “regime change” in Syria. And they have sputtered in outrage over President Obama’s failure to veto the Israeli anti-settlement resolution.
Regarding Clinton’s defeat, her embrace of the neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” obsessions siphoned off enthusiasm among the peace faction of the Democratic Party, a significant and activist part of the progressive movement.
Clinton’s alignment with the neocon/liberal hawks may have helped her with the mainstream media, but the MSM has lost much of its credibility by making itself a handmaiden in leading the nation to wars and more wars.

Average Americans also could feel the contempt that these elites had for the rest of us. The neocons and liberal hawks had come to believe in the CIA’s concept of “perception management,” feeling that the American people were items to be controlled, not the nation’s sovereigns to be informed and respected. Instead of “We the People,” Official Washington’s elites treated us like “Us the Sheep.”
Though this “perception management” idea took hold during the Reagan administration – largely in reaction to the public’s distrust of U.S. foreign policy following the Vietnam War – it became a bipartisan practice, extending through George W. Bush’s WMD sham about Iraq and into the behavior of the Obama administration in manipulating public opinion about Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Russia, pretty much any country targeted for “regime change.”
So, when this establishment tried to force Hillary Clinton’s coronation down the nation’s throat, enough Americans choked at the idea – even to the extent of voting for the eminently unqualified Donald Trump – to deny Clinton the White House. Indeed, many Americans who reluctantly did vote for Clinton did so only because they considered Trump even more unfit to lead the nation. The two candidates were in a fierce competition for who would arouse the most public revulsion.


No Self-Reflection
But the neocons and liberal hawks are not ones for self-reflection and self-criticism. They move from one disaster to the next, finding others to blame and justifying their own failures by publishing self-apologias in the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.



New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)

Thus, for the past several weeks, we have witnessed daily meltdowns across the mainstream media as neocons and liberal interventionists fume about all the forces that conspired to deny them their God-given right to select who runs America.

The mainstream media ranted about a few incidents of “fake news” – concocted stories designed to get lots of clicks from Trump supporters – despite its own long history of publishing false and misleading stories. The MSM then tried to tar with that “fake news” broad brush serious independent Web sites that simply displayed professional skepticism toward propaganda emanating from the U.S. State Department.

The smear blurred the “fake news scandal” with what was deemed “Russian propaganda.” Anyone who wouldn’t march in lockstep with the State Department’s messaging must be a “Kremlin stooge.” Mainstream media outlets even began demanding that major technology companies, such as Facebook and Google, join in establishing a modern-age Ministry of Truth for the Internet that would punish independent Web sites that didn’t toe the Official Line.
Then, there was the hysteria over the CIA’s still-unproven claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a scheme to hack into Democratic emails and expose embarrassing facts, such as the Democratic National Committee’s tilting the primary playing field to favor Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders, the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to her Wall Street benefactors, and pay-to-play features of the Clinton money machine.

Though this information all appeared to be true — and revealed dubious or improper actions by Democratic officials and the Democratic presidential nominee — this truth-telling was also mixed in with the “fake news scandal” and other excuse-making for why Clinton lost. Her defeat was Putin’s fault. It was also FBI Director James Comey’s fault for chastising Clinton for her “extremely careless” handling of U.S. government secrets because she insisted on using a private email server as Secretary of State. And, of course, there was the supposed over-reaction to Clinton calling many Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.”

In other words, the Clinton campaign appears to have been done in by various people telling the truth about a variety of unsavory aspects of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and decision-making. If none of these facts had come out before the election, the thinking was that Clinton would have won and the neocons/liberal hawks could have continued and even expanded their dominion over U.S. foreign policy.

Yet, to me, the biggest head-scratcher about Clinton’s disastrous campaign was why – after she left the State Department in 2013 – did she jump into the sleazy business of collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for brief speeches to Wall Street and other special interests.
Her prospective presidency was crucial to the Clinton business model of soliciting huge donations and fees from corporations and foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation and to allied consulting firms, such as the Podesta Group. These corporate and foreign leaders were pre-paying for “access” to the future U.S. president. However, instead of shielding Clinton from the grubby business of collecting the money herself, she was dispatched to join in the money grabbing.

This greed or hubris left millions of Americans troubled by what a restoration of Clinton control of the Executive Branch might mean. Whether Trump was sincere or not, he hit a nerve when he talked about “draining the swamp.”

‘Regime Change’ Reversals


The neocons and liberal hawks also watched their “regime change” plans for Syria – something that has been on their agenda since the mid-1990s – collapse with this month’s fall of east Aleppo to Syrian government troops, backed by Russia and Iran.
In the battle for Syria, the Obama administration, other Western governments and Persian Gulf states illegally armed a melange of rebels and terrorists. But the West and its allies also deployed state-of-the-art propaganda techniques in which government agencies and like-thinking private foundations invested tens of millions of dollars in training Syrian activists to use social media to rally international support.
This propaganda strategy reached its apex in Aleppo, which was portrayed in Western media as a case of the Syrian government and its allies willfully slaughtering helpless children. The fact that the “moderate” rebels were operating under the command structure of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, such as Ahrar al-Sham, was almost blacked out from the West’s mainstream media coverage.
The last piece of coal in the neocon/liberal-hawk stocking came last week with the U.N. Security Council’s repudiation of Israel’s illegal settlement building on Palestinian lands. Though the Obama administration only abstained from the vote, the lack of a U.S. veto enabled the resolution to pass unanimously, 14-0.
Again, the neocons erupted in fury. Rather than acknowledge that Israel had brought this condemnation on itself by its illegal actions, the neocons lashed out at Obama and the world for not taking Israel’s side. The neocon editors of The Washington Post decried Obama’s decision as “a dangerous parting shot at Israel.”
“It will encourage Palestinians to pursue more international sanctions against Israel rather than seriously consider the concessions necessary for statehood, and it will give a boost to the international boycott and divestment movement against the Jewish state, which has become a rallying cause for anti-Zionists,” the Post lamented.
“At the same time, it will almost certainly not stop Israeli construction in the West Bank, much less in East Jerusalem, where Jewish housing was also deemed by the resolution to be ‘a flagrant violation under international law.’”
Similarly, the neocon editors of the Wall Street Journal labeled Obama’s abstention his “Anti-Israeli Tantrum,” claiming that the non-vote was simply an extension of his “personal pique at adversaries,” in this case toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Like virtually all neocons, the Post’s and Journal’s editors insist that the U.S. government always stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel though that usually means that Netanyahu stands wherever he wants and U.S. officials sidle up to him.
Though neocons always blame the Palestinians for not making the concessions that Israel demands – and thus holding them at fault for the moribund peace process – the reality is that the Israeli leadership has no intention of reaching a reasonable two-state solution with the Palestinians and hasn’t for at least two decades.


A Fig Leaf
The mirage of a two-state solution has simply been a fig leaf for neocons and their liberal allies to cite as an excuse for allowing Israel’s steady gobbling up of Palestinian land to continue apace.

The reality is that Israel is on a steady march to become a full-scale apartheid state in which Palestinians are kept as either stateless or second-class citizens indefinitely. When these facts on the ground can no longer to obfuscated or denied, then the world will have little choice but to engage in the sort of moral and economic pressure that confronted racist South Africa in the 1980s.
At that point, peaceful pressure, such as boycott and divestiture, will be the most reasonable steps to convince Israel that it has veered off onto a dangerously racist course that can’t be justified simply by mystical allusions to ancient biblical text.
But the American neocons and their liberal-interventionist junior partners seem more committed to defending Israeli interests than American interests. So, they denounce any international criticism of Israel as “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic,” a smear that has for years terrified politicians and journalists in Official Washington but may now be so overused and abused that it is no longer taken seriously.
The other grave danger from this neocon manipulation of America on behalf of Israeli interests is that this behavior will revive the historical evil of actual anti-Semitism, a threat that could be avoided now by convincing Israel to act like a responsible global partner, not a racist rogue state.
There is some hope among hardline pro-Israeli Americans that Donald Trump will support Israel as it encroaches more and more onto Palestinian lands. But the neocons and liberal hawks recognize that Trump’s “America First” rhetoric is implicitly critical of undertaking more “regime change” projects against governments on Israel’s enemies list.
By appointing a pro-settler American lawyer, David Friedman, as ambassador to Israel, Trump also may be, in effect, giving Netanyahu encouragement to cast aside the “two-state” fig leaf and reveal his territorial ambitions in all their nakedness.
The neocons, of course, would still find arguments to defend Israeli apartheid – we’d hear about what animals the Palestinians are, much as we heard about the savagery of South Africa’s blacks from defenders of white supremacy – but that might finally be pushing beyond what the modern world could tolerate.
Thus, 2016 is ending on a decidedly sour note for the neocons and liberal interventionists. They had high hopes that 2017 would mark the beginning of an escalated “regime change” adventure in Syria and the start of their “mother of all regime change” schemes for destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia and somehow staging a “color revolution” in Moscow, all while Hillary Clinton took the relationship with Israel “to the next level” as she promised in her speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Now, the neocons and liberal hawks find themselves on the outside looking in and one can expect their anger to be voiced at increasing decibels across the mainstream media. But whether anyone still takes them seriously is another question.

December 27, 2016

The New (Cold?) War With China by ALAN NASSER DEC 27, 2016


by ALAN NASSER in COUNTERPUNCH  DEC 27, 2016




Washington has recently initiated major war games in the neighborhoods and on the borders of Russia and China, the most intense martial exercises since the end of the Second World War. The old Cold War ante has been upped, and the danger of military confrontation between Washington and Russia and/or China looms large. (See my extensive discussion in “How Clinton Could Make a War”, in CounterPunch magazine, volume 23, number 5.) No less an authority than Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that Hillary Clinton’s promise to implement a no-fly zone over Syria would entail war with Russia. Some have claimed that Trump’s reluctance to impose no-fly in Syria is the silver lining on the dark cloud of his coming presidency. But more impressive commentators have argued that war with China is an equally horrific possibility. (John Pilger, “The Coming War on China”, CounterPunch, December 2, 2016.)
Stephen Kinzer’s foreign-policy commentaries stand head and shoulders above the rest of mainstream reporting. Kinzer was for more than 20 years a premier foreign correspondent for The New York Times. His book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror is a first-rate analysis of exactly what the title describes and his Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq, details some of the major U.S. overseas interventions and exposes the corporate origins of each. Kinzer is no Washington apologist. He too warns of Washington’s provocations of China. But his remarks reveal some of the major weaknesses in the thinking of even the left-ist of liberal commentators. (Stephen Kinzer, “China is a Psychological Problem”,The Boston Globe, December 5, 2016)

Do the United States and China Have the Same Global Ambitions?
Kinzer correctly points out that China’s economic and military growth will eventually pose a problem for Washington, which touts itself as the world’s sole superpower. Kinzer reminds us that “For the first time since we became a world power, we face a rival with…a bigger economy… China’s share of world power is likely to continue growing while ours declines… Both our doctrine and our habit of command tell us we must limit its rise. That is a recipe for confrontation.” But according to Kinzer it’s not merely Washington’s “habit of command”, i.e. insistence on global predominance, what elites used to call Full Spectrum Dominance, that portends confrontation. Equally dangerous, he claims, is the likelihood that China, as it grows in power and influence, will ape Uncle Sam’s imperial ambitions. This is a key premise in Kinzer’s thinking. Here is his reasoning: “The United States began its rise by securing a continental empire, became an overseas empire by subduing weak island nations, and then began projecting power around the world. China might follow the same path… [China] could take another leaf from our book and use their island dependencies as a springboard to global power.”
Kinzer seems to think that two factors threaten to set China upon the path of empire building, the historical behavior of the United States and the sheer fact of economic enormity. It was the United States’s aspirations to and ultimate achievement of global economic hegemony that induced it to aspire to rule the world. Because China will some day surpass the U.S. economically, it too, Kinzer writes, may seek worldwide domination.
Kinzer’s article contains the seeds of his own position’s destruction. He writes that “if we continue to insist on policing East Asia” we will be drawn into confrontation with China. This is not essentially about bigness, economic or military. It is about Washington’s desire to be the predominant power in every strategically important area of the globe, i.e. in the entire world. China does not currently police North America, nor does its leadership aspire to rule the world. But Washington’s aspiration to endless expansion is as old as the hills. America’s history from its very beginnings illustrates George Washington’s characterization of the republic as a “rising empire.” Westward expansion did not stop at the border, as the Hawaiians and Filipinos would learn. China exhibits no such history. In On China, Henry Kissinger noted that China never sought and does not now seek to obtain colonies (i.e. control over non-contingent territory that was not “Chinese”). Kinzers’s inference from Washington’s historical imperialism to China’s prospective global policy is a non sequitur.
These historical observations are necessary but not sufficient for a realistic assessment of the danger of war with China. Required in addition is familiarity with U.S. policymakers’ recently revised position of the feasibility of nuclear war and their application of the new stance to China. Let’s have a look at Washington’s current military taunting of China and its relation to policymakers’ recently heightened fantasies of U.S. military omnipotence. These are the background circumstances and ambitions that inform the world view and potential policy recommendations of Trump’s major advisors. They display a predisposition to war. And worse, a resurrected conviction that nuclear war is back on the table.
Washington’s “Tilt To Asia” and Provoking China
Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Washington sent the Navy surveillance ships the USNS Impeccable and the USNS Victorious into China’s EEZ (exclusive economic zone). This was the beginning of a series of escalating provocations. The Chinese responded rationally, by installing defensive missiles around the zone.
The New York Times reports the most recent application of U.S. strategy, in a story titled “U.S. Carriers Sail in Western Pacific, Hoping China Takes Notice.” In mid-June Washington engaged two U.S. carrier groups, led by the U.S.S. John Stennis and the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, in joint deployments into the Philippine Sea. 12,000 sailors, 140 aircraft, and six smaller battleships conducted joint surveillance operations. This was only the most recent incitement in a series of instigations.
In the 10 days prior to the above exercise, Stennis and Reagan had conducted joint maneuvers in the South China Sea with Japanese and Indian navies, after deploying four navy Growlers, electronic warfare planes and 120 military personnel to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. In the past year the U.S. has conducted four “freedom of navigation” patrols, the most recent in October, as a challenge to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. But China’s claims are within the boundaries of traditional rough measures of what counts as a country’s national waters. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provides no precise geographical coordinates specifying what counts as China’s territorial waters. In fact, these very waters are currently contested by many nations, including Brunei, China, Taiwan (not really a nation, according to current U.S. “one China” policy, but Trump sees it differently), Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Given that none of the nations claiming these waters has been as boldly harassed by the U.S. as has been China, China’s claim is defensible. China’s installation of anti-missile systems on seven of the Nansha islands is entirely rational under the circumstances. Washington would surely take comparable steps were China conducting war games in the waters off California.
But war drums are beating in Washington in response to China’s defenses. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has demanded that the U.S. take military action against China. Its defenses “allow its military to project power and assert control of one of the most vital international waterways. This is unacceptable,” McCain asserted. Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center For Strategic and International Studies, claimed “This is militarization. The Chinese can argue that it’s only for defensive purposes, but if you are building giant anti-aircraft gun and CIWS emplacements, it means that you are prepping for a future conflict.” Of course it does. Nowhere did Poling mention Washington’s extensive operations in the South China Sea. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang responded that he “did not understand” Poling’s charges: “If China’s building of normal facilities and deploying necessary territorial defensive facilities on its own islands is considered militarization, then what is the sailing of fleets into the South China Sea?”
The bottom line rationalization of Washington’s aggression is that China’s island claims and its installation of anti-missile equipment threaten “freedom of navigation.” But what strategic aims would impel China to restrict navigation in this essential trade route? One of China’s overriding geopolitical strategies is to build regional alliances with local partners, all of whom have trade interests in access to these waters. Across the board restriction of access would make no sense. Possible restriction of U.S. access, given current American instigations in the region, is another story.
Trump’s comprehensive ignorance permits full-throttle, and perhaps unwitting, fabrication of Chinese offenses. A recent Trump tweet alleges that “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters – rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented [sic] act.” In fact, the Chinese and the Pentagon had already “secured an understanding… through direct engagement,” as the Pentagon put it. A Chinese naval vessel had detected an unknown device in its waters and took measures to prevent its possible endangering of passing ships. After the object was identified as a U.S. asset, the Chinese communicated to Washington its intention to return it. Trump was probably unaware of this scenario. The man is unaware of so very much. Therein lies the rub. The instigators of past wars typically knew what they were doing. Factual ignorance has rarely triggered a major confrontation. Now things are different.

An Imperial Rule: Provoke With Allies
Washington’s taunting follows a familiar imperial rule: gather as many allies as possible in order to enhance the credibility of the intended threat. Washington has in the last two years recruited leading powers in the Asia-Pacific region, and in March and April began a sharp escalation of its military threats. Japan and Australia, and other allies including Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia have initiated hostile operations against China. Most of these countries have been encouraged by Washington to develop their naval power, and have subsequently increased their military spending. In 2015 alone the Philippines increased military spending by more than 25 percent, and Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia by 5 to 16 percent.
Age-old and geopolitically insignificant contestations over reefs and small islands have been stoked in defense of these provocations. Vietnam has in recent months secretly fortified several of its islands in the Spratly group in the South China Sea with mobile long-range rocket launchers. It would take only days to make them operational with rockets capable of striking Chinese-held islets. Hanoi’s move is certain to further accelerate the arms race that is already underway and to heighten the risk that an incident or provocation could lead to military conflict. That danger has escalated in the wake of a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in favor of a US-backed case brought by the Philippines to challenge China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
A recent Reuters report revealed that Vietnam has shipped its launchers to five of its Spratly islands and hidden them from aerial surveillance. The launchers are part of Vietnam’s EXTRA rocket artillery system purchased recently from Israel. The system uses targeting drones, is highly accurate up to 150 kilometres and can deliver a 150 kilogram warhead that can hit ships and land targets. Chinese installations on Subi, Fiery Cross and Mischief Reef would be well within the range of Vietnamese rockets.
Admiral Henry Harris, the commander of U.S. Pacific Forces, and the Pentagon, see Australia as the essential southern dock of the “rebalance” to Asia. Within the next three years 60 percent of U.S. air and naval forces are earmarked for the Indo-Pacific. This month Harris signed an agreement with the Australian military to expand Washington’s military presence there in 2017 with advanced F-22 Raptor fighters. He has also shared Trump’s enthusiasm for bloating the navy with 350 warships almost entirely allocated to the Pacific.
Donald Trump will inherit this tinderbox from Obama. The entire setup invites a segue from threats to action. Compounding the danger is the mania for confrontation displayed the Pentagon’s main man in the Pacific.
In an alarming development, Admiral Harris is pressing for further aggression to take place inside the 12-mile exclusion zone around territory held by China. According to Navy Times the commander “wants to drive through an area and do military operations,” which would include launching aircraft and firing weapons systems. “We will be ready to confront when we must.” The Obama administration is reluctant to push that hard, but Trump, who has made countless threats against China, is more in tune with these more aggressive recommendations.
Navy Times warned that, in the light of the current escalations “some sort of confrontation seems increasingly likely.”
Chinese officials agree. A specialist in military strategy associated with the People’s Liberation Army warns that “China will very likely strike back if the US comes within 12 miles of the [Nansha] islands.” Another military authority at Nanjing University alerted Washington that “The US provocation has boosted the chance of military confrontation between Beijing and Washington.” And the state-controlled Global Times warns that “China hopes that disputes can be resolved by talks, but it must be prepared for any military confrontation.”
This has not deterred the U.S. from developing detailed plans for war with China. The Mitchell Institute For Aerospace Studies has reported that Air Force officers are preparing the most detailed plans to date for deploying the F-35, the most advanced fighter plane, in an all-out war with China. Is our next president licking his chops at this prospect? Prominent think tanks have recently provided grist for Trump’s mill.

Policymakers’ New and Improved Militarism
Last year the Council on Foreign Relations, the leading elite foreign-policy think tank, released a study titled Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China. The upshot is that antagonisms are growing between what the Council considers the world’s two most powerful nations, tensions that require an escalation of Washington’s policy of confrontation. The hostilities are grounded in China’s reluctance to embrace the core of U.S. foreign policy, identified thus by the Council: “Preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the twenty-first century.” The “threat” to U.S. national interests consists in China’s refusal to submit to the U.S. demand that it exercise no predominant influence in its own neighborhood! What unsettles elites most, according to the Council, is the “challenge by China to U.S. primacy in Asia.” This is but one of the horrifying corollaries of what used to be called Full Spectrum Dominance and is now called simply global “predominance” or “primacy.” Under a Trump presidency, this amounts to a recipe for war.
The RAND Corporation too has taken up planning for war with China in a study commissioned by the U.S. Army titled “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable.” The phrase “thinking the unthinkable” was coined in 1960 by RAND’s chief postwar strategist, the Strangelove counterpart Herman Kahn, whose book On Thermonuclear War advanced a strategy for winning a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The study makes it clear that war with China is by no means out of the question, but stresses that as time passes Washington’s nuclear advantage is sure to decline. The clear implication is that sooner is better than later.
Note that RAND’s logic renders unimpressive Kinzer’s consolation that “No war is likely soon. China’s military is far weaker than that of the United States. It is engaged in a long-term buildup that, if unchecked, will substantially increase its offensive power.” But according to RAND’s wisdom, the relative weakness of China’s military is all the more reason to assault China now, before it gains the capacity to deter.
RAND anticipates that military action against China will foment a resurgent antiwar movement, in which case the “system of civilian control” will be deployed for large-scale suppression. The Ur-retaliatory and repression-prone Trump cannot be averse to the prospect.
As if to prepare the way for the coming commander-in-chief, the Obama administration has begun a massive nuclear weapons “modernization” program. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute comments that “The ambitious US modernization plan presented by the Obama Administration is in stark contrast to President Barack Obama’s pledge to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the role they play in US national security strategy.” The Stockholm Institute is shocked, shocked by yet another Obama lie, another U.S. military escalation.
Against this background, only the blind fail to see the coming to power of a man with grandiose illusions of brutal omnipotence as potentially placing another world-historic crisis on the agenda.
The pivotal notion of maintaining the credibility of Washington’s will to maintain its status as sole superpower is central to the new militarism and to the return to the table of the option of nuclear war. Current elite thinking has it that the only surefire way to convince those who resist American global hegemony that their recalcitrance will be in vain is to threaten punitive damage. And the only credible threat is thought to be nuclear. Hence the enormous, multi-billion dollar nuclear upgrade initiated by the Obama administration.
I have found no mention of the Obama escalation in press reports of Trump’s recent tweets calling for an expansion of U.S. nuclear capability. Trump is indeed more dangerous on the war-making front than Obama. But not that much more dangerous.
Policymakers perceive the decline of American economic dynamism and global political power  -its inability to win the numerous wars it has brought about, its decline as a major exporter, its inability to reprise the economic growth rates it enjoyed during the Golden Age of its economic hegemony, the increased mistrust at best, loathing at worst, it has engendered worldwide, the mistrust of the political system evinced by very many Americans-  as something that can be reversed only militarily. War may be perceived by the Trump junta as the only way to “bring us together” and “make America great again.”
The ability of the U.S. to regain its former glory by economic means is not merely the conviction of its foreign antagonists, it is lamented by some of America’s most distinguished economists. Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman foresee a future of “secular stagnation” and our most distinguished scholar on growth and technological innovation, Robert J. Gordon, has recently described, in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the exhaustion of the possibilities for the development of further innovations spurring sustained and prosperity-generating economic growth rates. All are agreed that the inevitable results are growing inequality and lowered living standards. Adding insult to injury, the U.S. dominated world order is threatened. And it cannot be lost on elites that the Sanders and Trump phenomena indicate mass disillusion with the domestic economic and political systems, what the wags call a “legitimacy crisis.”
The turn to war is not unprecedented under these political-economic circumstances.
We shouldn’t characterize elites’ apprehensions as “paranoia.” That’s irrational fear, but the rich and powerful are freaked by something real. Their premonitions are rational. Let’s look further into elites’ anxieties and their renewed willingness to “think the unthinkable.”

The Fragility of the “Liberal International Order” and the Chinese/Russian Challenge
Washington’s current escalations against Russia and China are reflected in recent elite exhortations to revive the military confrontations of the Cold War era. In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt state, “There are regions outside the Western Hemisphere that are worth expending American blood and treasure to defend… In Europe and Northeast Asia, the chief concern is the rise of a regional hegemon that would dominate its region, much as the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere.” Here is an explicit statement both of the doctrine of U.S. predominance and primacy, that the U.S. must dominate the globe’s every region, and of the perception that this hegemony is in jeopardy.
In a May Washington Post editorial titled “The Liberal International Order is Under Fire. The United States Must Defend It.” We are warned that
“Hardly a day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image… This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president… no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage to demand difficult decisions to save the liberal international order… The United States must keep trying to integrate China into the rules and traditions of the liberal international order… while also marshaling forces to confront China’s assertive and unilateral grab of territory in the South China Sea.”
The “liberal international order” is the world as dominated by the U.S. China and Russia are not attempting to “fashion the world” into anything at all. Russia is involved in no “violent subversion.” The reality is that these powers are feared to develop sufficient power and influence to obstruct America’s ability to call the international shots, to predominate politically and militarily everywhere, including in China’s and Russia’s neighborhoods. A comparably enormous U.S. hegemonic counterpower, elites believe,  must be put into place. This will involve “difficult decisions.” Meaning that the U.S. leadership must be prepared to risk military confrontation in order to scare away these obstacles to U.S. hegemony. The Post cites a report by the Center For a New American Security, chaired by the neocon war hawk Robert Kagan, in support of a stepped-up global imperial campaign. Kagan’s report, titled “Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand U.S. Engagement in a Competitive World Order,” lays the cards on the table:
“At a time when partisanship in the American political establishment has reached unprecedented heights, the group believes it is more important than ever to rebuild the national consensus on America’s role in the world. This project promotes the idea that American leadership is critical to preserving and strengthening the bedrock of today’s international order, which is being shaken by a variety of forces.”
We are told that the State managers, the governing class, is in disarray and a “national”, i.e. popular, consensus on “America’s role in the world” is eroding – the masses are fed up with the wars. Moreover, the global system directed by America’s “leadership” is under threat. Steps must be taken. And Kagan deploys the erstwhile strategy of externalizing domestic tensions. The Trump-Clinton-Sanders debate has reintroduced a dangerous “partisanship” [read: debate beyond permissible orthodox limits] which threatens “national consensus” [read: vanilla debate within mainstream parameters]. A national campaign peddled as a defense against global threats to American freedom can neutralize partisanship by directing domestic discontent to external enemies. And there’s nothing like war to unite a nation internally riven.
A report by the influential Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments rationalizes Obama’s current multi-billion dollar nuclear buildup. The report focuses on U.S. tensions with Russia, and makes it clear that the recommended prescriptions apply as well to China. The report is frighteningly titled Rethinking Armageddon (RA). The conceit behind the title is that we must put behind us the belief that the Soviet Union’s achievement of nuclear parity with the U.S. guaranteed Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), and rendered self-destructive the use of nuclear weapons. On the contrary, argues RA, we are now in a “second nuclear age” which frees the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons “in a discriminate manner.” The report is introduced with a citation from the Cold Warrior John Foster Dulles: “If you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.”

How Dangerous Is Trump as a War Monger?
Were we posing this question about Hillary Clinton it’d be a no brainer. The woman’s history tells an unambiguous story. Her role in the Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya and Syria debacles is sufficient to fan the flames of panic. As noted above, her plans re a no-fly zone over Syria virtually guaranteed a confrontation with the Bear. Clinton’s obsession with unqualified U.S. global dominance made nuclear war more threatening than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis. She had a political cosmology, bad in every way, and her commitment was assured and single minded. She would have been a disaster.
Trump has no policy record, and he has no politics beyond his general far-right leanings. His racism, gynophobia and ultra-nationalism will issue in the policies we’d expect regarding e.g. abortion, the harassment of anyone of color and the patented and “bipartisan” threats of the political leadership of both Parties against countries failing to march in step with Washington’s global ambitions. On matters pertaining to the specifics of foreign policy, including the use of nuclear weapons, Trump exhibits his notorious incoherence. He routinely contradicts himself.
We don’t know what he really thinks, any more than he knows what he really thinks, because there does not seem to be anything at all that Trump really thinks. He believes both sides of a contradiction. He claims that he is “highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely” to ever use nuclear weapons, even as he “won’t take off the table” nuking ISIS or even Europe. All-encompassing ignorance cannot avoid contradiction, with the result that anything is as likely to be said, or done, as anything else. Nuclear war is as likely as not. It is an elementary truth of logic that from a contradiction anything whatever can be validly(i.e. consistent with the rules of logic) inferred. In this case, what is required to tilt the scales is an influence external to the “mind” of Trump. That can only be his advisors. You know, the junta.


Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College. His website is:http://www.alannasser.org.  His book, United States of Emergency American Capitalism and Its Crises, will be published by Pluto Press early next year.

December 25, 2016

How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans, The Atlantic, By WILLIAM A. DARITY JR.

How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans
The country’s first black president never pursued policies bold enough to close the racial wealth gap.  

The Atlantic   http://theatln.tc/2hZLI3s  







photo: Bill Frakes / AP


Born in 1953, I am a child of the waning years of legal segregation in the United States. My parents, on the other hand, spent about 40 years of their lives under Jim Crow, and all of my grandparents lived most of their lives under official American apartheid. At the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, my mother and all four of my grandparents were deceased. But my father was alive and well—and absolutely thrilled to have lived to see the election of a black man as president of the United States. Usually deeply cynical about American politics and politicians, my dad could not comprehend my deep reservations about Barack Obama’s leadership. Indeed, he viewed any criticism of Obama as bringing aid and comfort to white supremacists.


My father hardly was alone among black Americans, across all generations. The near complete unanimity of passionate black American admiration for Obama carried with it an absolute resistance to hearing any complaints about the black president. And, indeed, there was much to admire: an exceptional resume, an attractive family with a black wife who is his professional and intellectual equal, handsome and greying toward distinguished maturity, a strategically wise moderate progressive political position, and a place as the—sometimes self-professed—messianic fulfillment of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. For many black Americans, the ascent of Barack Obama to the presidency was equivalent to the moment of jubilee.
An extraordinarily disciplined individual, Barack Obama preempted the smallest hint of scandal by admitting that he had smoked pot during his youth. He even crafted a narrative of a rise from adversity—growing up successfully by the efforts of a single parent despite a missing father—albeit a white single mother with a Ph.D. whose own parents were affluent residents of Hawaii. With every drop of respectability in place, his somewhat icy intellect coupled with his enthusiasm for basketball and for black music across a half century of styles, he was an inordinately appealing candidate, with an ideal combination of the cool and the rational.

For many white Americans his elections confirmed their belief that American racism is a thing of the past. But an underemphasized dimension of each of Obama’s campaigns—a dimension patently relevant to the most recent presidential election—he only received a minority of votes among whites who cast ballots. In fact, he would have been swept away in a landslide had only whites been the voters. In 2008, 55 percent of white voters cast their ballots for John McCain; in 2012, 59 percent of white voters cast their ballots for Mitt Romney.

Leaders who look like you do not necessarily act in ways that benefit you.

Nevertheless, some of those white voters who did not vote for him took his eight years as president as license to assert that the country is post-racial, even while attacking him with both veiled and overt racial slurs. But racism is organic to American life, and it sits at the core of persistence of racial economic inequality. In his fascinating profile of Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to the “mark of a system engineered to place one on top of the other”—to place white over black. He offers some examples: the facts that blacks with a college degree have an unemployment rate almost as high as white high school graduates, that completion of a college education leads blacks to carry twice the level of student loan debt than whites four years after the degree, that blacks experience a significantly higher default rate on their loans, that black households have one-seventh of the wealth of white households, and that black families with $100,000 or more in income reside “in more disadvantaged neighborhoods than white families making less than $30,000.”

Sadly, these actually are softer illustrations of “the mark of the system” than findings that have emerged from research I have done with Darrick Hamilton, Anne Price, and other members of the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) research team. We find a much higher discrepancy between black and white wealth than the gap that Coates reports. Blacks with some college education actually have higher unemployment rates than whites who never finished high school. At each level of education, the black rate of unemployment is twice as high as the white rate. Moreover, the relative economic position on virtually all indicators, including the racial unemployment rate gap, has not improved since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Estimates generated from the 2013 round of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances indicate that black households have one-thirteenth of the wealth of white households at the median. We have concluded that the average black household would have to save 100 percent of its income for three consecutive years to close the wealth gap. The key source of the black-white wealth gap is the intergenerational effects of transfers of resources. White parents have far greater resources to give to their children via gifts and inheritances, so that the typical white young adult starts their working lives with a much greater initial net worth than the typical black young adult. These intergenerational effects are blatantly non-meritocratic.

Indeed, the history of black wealth deprivation, from the failure to provide ex-slaves with 40 acres and a mule to the violent destruction of black property in white riots to the seizure and expropriation of black-owned land to the impact of racially restrictive covenants on homeownership to the discriminatory application of policies like the GI Bill and the FHA, created the foundation for a perpetual racial wealth gap.
Blacks working full time have lower levels of wealth than whites who are unemployed. Blacks in the third quintile of the income distribution have less wealth (or a lower net worth) than whites in the lowest quintile. Even more damning for any presumption that America is free of racism is our finding that black households whose heads have college degrees have $10,000 less in net worth than white households whose heads who never finished high school. As we point out in our report, “Umbrellas Don’t Make It Rain”, studying hard and working hard does not enable blacks to eliminate the racial wealth gap. Doing the right thing is far from enough.
I had a queasy feeling about Barack Obama’s candidacy from the moment I heard his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that lifted him into national prominence, a speech that Coates summarizes in the profile. Toward the end of the speech Obama observed that black families in urban centers realized “that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn … that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” “The acting white” libel—a myth that will not die—argues that low school performance for black students is a product of a culturally based black opposition to high academic achievement.

I long have been baffled by the tenacious hold this argument has on the American imagination. After all, black families have fought for education for their children against insuperable odds from slavery times. White students who label their high achievers “geeks” and “nerds” have no less a degree of anti-intellectualism. In fact, they may have a higher degree of anti-intellectualism, since black students from families with a given level of parental income or education get more years of schooling and more credentials than white students from families with comparable socioeconomic status. In our research for the NASCC project we discovered that black parents who provide some financial support for their children’s higher education have one-third of the wealth of white parents who provide no financial support for their children’s higher education. Black culture, if anything, has been ferociously supportive of education.
The “acting white” libel is symptomatic of a more general perspective—a perspective that argues that an important factor explaining racial economic disparities is self-defeating or dysfunctional behavior on the part of blacks themselves. And Barack Obama continuously has trafficked in this perspective. Of course, there are some black folk who engage in habits that undermine their potential accomplishments, but there are some white folk who engage in habits that undermine their potential accomplishments as well. And there is no evidence to demonstrate that are proportionately more blacks who behave in ways that undercut achievement, especially since it is clear that blacks do more with less. Nevertheless, Obama consistently has trafficked heavily in the tropes of black dysfunction. Either he is unfamiliar with or uninterested in the evidence that undercuts the black behavioral deficiency narrative. These tropes, in my view, do malicious work.

I worried that it was possible for the symbolic and inspirational aspects of having a black president more than offset by the damages that could be done by the messages delivered by a black president. And it has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk. This has been the deal breaker for me: not merely a silence on white physical and emotional violence directed against black Americans, but the denial of the centrality of American racism in explaining sustained black-white disparity.
Apart from black dysfunction, Obama does acknowledge that ongoing discrimination is a partial factor explaining racial inequality and says that anti-discrimination enforcement is the type of black-specific measure that he can endorse. Of course, anti-discrimination laws do not operate exclusively on behalf of black folk. They really are universal measures intended to contain all forms of discrimination, and, while effective enforcement can improve black employment opportunities, it will do little to address massive, inherited racial wealth differences.
Obama’s general position is racial equality can be achieved—or at least approached—via policies that uplift all Americans experiencing poverty and deprivation. Obama has said that “as a general matter, my view would [be] that if you want to get at African American poverty, income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids: higher minimum wages, full employment programs, early childhood education, those kinds of programs are by design universal but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit black Americans.”

My Brother’s Keeper is a program premised on the view that young black men constitute a social problem.

But these particular programs—all, even in their diluted forms likely to be under assault under the new regime—are incremental and display no boldness of spirit. Obama’s evocation of the notion that “better is good” and his own acknowledgment that “maybe I’m not just being sufficiently optimistic or imaginative” is testament to his inveterate cautiousness. The timid nature of these policy changes dooms their disproportionate benefit for blacks to be marginal at best.

A higher minimum wage does not ensure individuals, black or white, actually will have jobs nor does it insure adequate hours of work to generate non-poverty incomes. Full employment policies under the Obama administration have meant old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus policies that rely heavily upon the unpredictable response of the private sector to the prompt of government expenditures. Quality early childhood education for all is wonderful, but the racial achievement gap widens most dramatically during comparatively later years of schooling. Furthermore, none of these policies promise any significant effect on the most pernicious economic disparity—the racial wealth gap.
Admittedly, there is one major initiative that the Obama administration has inaugurated that is black-specific, but it is the exception that proves the rule. It exposes all the issues at play. My Brother’s Keeper is a program premised on the view that young black men constitute a social problem and need interventions that will alter their outlook and actions. The focus is on reforming young men rather than directly increasing the resources possessed by them and their families and removing the constraints they face. Again, the underlying ideological motivation is the belief in black cultural deficiency, and, again, this type of initiative is another expression of failure to pursue bold policies that confront the fundamental causes of racial disparity in American society.

The Obama administration never gave serious consideration to aggressive transformative universal policies like a public-sector employment guarantee for all Americans, a federally financed trust fund for all newborn infants with amounts dictated by a child’s parents’ wealth position, or the provision of gifted-quality education for all children. These are universal programs that can have a significant “disproportionate impact and benefit for African Americans,” in the process of helping all Americans—unlike the types of universal programs endorsed by the president.
And the emphasis on exclusively universal programs yields the spectacle of a black president who opposes the most dramatic black-specific program of all—reparations for African Americans. This opposition ultimately seems to amount to a matter of political expediency. In his conversation with Coates, the president appears to acknowledge that there is a sound moral and philosophical case for reparations, particularly if—as Coates presses him to concede—incremental changes in existing social programs will not close the gaps, especially the racial wealth gap. The president ultimately takes the position that it is politically untenable to enact a reparations program. If so—or if nothing comparable can be realized—then I contend that it is impossible to close the racial wealth gap.

If black reparations is the right thing to do, then we should work to make it happen, no matter how long the odds.

But why does the president believe it is impossible? He says “it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence [of] historic wrongs we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time, to make that right.” The United States has taken a small chunk of the nation’s resources over a short period of time to try to make right on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Malaysia’s New Economic Policy has taken a large chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to correct the inferior position of the native Malays. However, the native Malays are a numerical majority in their country who also are the recipients of the wealth redistribution program conducted there.

There is no doubt that the political obstacles to congressional approval of black reparations are significant. But in 1820 in the United States one might not have been able to conceive that American slavery would ever come to an end, but there were some who advocated abolition. In 1950 in South Africa one might not have been able to imagine that apartheid would ever come to an end, but there were activists who already had begun to oppose the system. If black reparations is the right thing to do—and I know in the depth of my soul that it is—then we should work to make it happen, no matter how long the odds. We should not bow at the altar of presumed political expediency.
After all, it may be the case that the president simply is wrong about the impossibility of making reparations happen. His deference to achieving “the better” over the determination to achieve “the best” may be a mistake. There are times when the effort to get to “the better”—the marginal change that appears to be an improvement—is so exhausting that its accomplishment becomes a barrier to getting to the best. Mark Gomez at the Haas Institute at Berkeley has said time and again in municipal struggles for minimum-wage increases that the “fight for 15” is easier than a “fight for 10.”
And sometimes Obama’s careful assessments of the political landscape are wrong. For example, he has said repeatedly that you do not win elections by telling the American people that things are going wrong. But that is precisely what Donald Trump did in winning the most recent presidential campaign. Black reparations can become a legitimate policy claim if and when a majority of Americans are convinced that it is an idea with merit. As Obama’s two elections demonstrate it does not necessarily require a majority of white Americans to support such a program. The political challenge is to forge that national majority, presumably with approximately 40 percent of white Americans on board.


Having a black president oppose reparations does not help the cause, particularly when that black president makes the case that an important source of black disadvantage is black folk’s own behavior. But black America should have paid attention to the experience of post-colonial black Africa and the Caribbean; leaders who look like you do not necessarily act in ways that benefit you. So be it. The struggle for reparations—and for black lives and justice—must and will continue, with or without Barack Obama in the fold.

December 22, 2016

[VID] Former UK ambassador to Syria Peter Ford debunks anti-Assad western propaganda (BBC)



Year-ender from China News: Frustrated with Washington, Russia defies West with Syria campaign, turns to Eastern neighbours. by Ding Chao





Source: xinhuanet.com/ 

by Ding Chao
MOSCOW, Dec. 22 (Xinhua) -- 

If outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama would bother to assess what Washington has gained in his administration's anti-Russia attempts since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in early 2014, he might be sad to find that Washington has lost in almost every front -- from Ukraine to Syria, and then to the looming new arms race.
By contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is experienced in jangling nerves in the West with unexpected tactical moves, was widely regarded to have broken out of the diplomatic, military and economic encirclement led by the United States.

Throughout the year 2016, Russia has been trying hard by diplomatic maneuvers to gain a bigger say in the protracted Syrian crisis, which has helped consolidate its role in the Middle East, and in the meantime, Moscow has stepped up its own version of a "Pivot to Asia" with a focus on the economic sphere.


MILITARY FEELERS IN SYRIA


Starting with a dramatic bombing campaign in Syria in September 2015, Russia's first military intervention outside the former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War, the country has not only showed its ability in the global use of force that the United States has long bragged about, but gained increasing political leverage in the war-ravaged country and even the wider region, reminding the United States not to treat Russia as an outsider when it comes to one of the most complicated regions in the world.
The mission let the already deep rift between the two powers further fester as Washington slammed Moscow for not intending to hit terrorist targets, but to empower Syrian government troops, and the White House was considering striking Bashar al-Assad's forces in an attempt to bring Damascus back to the negotiating table.
Russia, in response, deployed the advanced S-400 and S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria, warning to shoot down U.S.-led coalition missiles if they were used against the Syrian army. Moreover, in September, Russia's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, was put in combat duty off Syria's coast to support its air mission.
Admittedly, this show of Russia's military prowess did come with a cost. The most recent cost was the assassination of its ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, who was shot dead by an off-duty Turkish policeman in Ankara, an act believed to be linked with Moscow's anti-terror operation in Syria.
In November 2015, a Russian bomber was downed by a Turkish fighter jet near the Syrian-Turkish border, an incident described by Putin as "a stab in the back" that dealt a crushing blow to Moscow-Ankara ties, which have only begun to recover after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apologized to Putin in June.
Washington's decision in October to suspend its dialogue with Moscow on Syria is a golden opportunity for Russia to boost its presence in the Syrian settlement. Backed by Russia's air force, the Syrian army encroached on the contested city of Aleppo and cleared the northern Syrian city of militants with the evacuation of civilians, which would jump-start the liberation of other Syrian cities.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the Boston Globe in a recent interview that he regretted Washington failed to "set up a joint cooperative effort" because of differences in the U.S. government. By quitting the talks, the United States ended up as a non-cooperator.

TIT-FOR-TAT WITH WEST


The standoff between Russia and the United States reached its climax in October when Moscow halted an agreement with Washington on the disposal of weapons-grade plutonium because of "hostile actions" by the United States. Before that in April, Putin was absent from a nuclear security summit held in Washington. This means that the two powers have broken in their last possible area of cooperation -- non-proliferation, in addition to anti-terrorism, which, too, has failed, as evidenced by their differences on Syria.
Accusations of Russia's involvement in the U.S. presidential elections have been frequently heard during the whole campaign, and they have been heating up recently as Obama, at his wits' end, accused Putin of personally sponsoring the hacking of Democratic Party emails, which was believed to have helped Donald Trump secure the presidency. According to Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Moscow has demanded facts from Washington on the investigation, but "there is silence on the opposite side."
Meanwhile, Russia and NATO, perceiving each other as mutual threats, have been increasingly flexing their muscles in Eastern Europe, which indicates the risk of a new arms race. NATO's eastward expansion, military buildup close to the Russian borders and frequent drills have been met with Russia's warning to exit the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which has set a limit to the number of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles Russia and the United States can keep.
The Western alliance criticized Moscow for declining all its proposals for cooperation on a regime to ensure missile defense transparency, while Moscow feels it isn't trusted by the military bloc and fears being encircled. The ever-deepening distrust only risks a new Cold War that will compromise everyone's security.
The European Union (EU), a traditionally important partner of cooperation with Russia and highly dependent on its energy and natural gas, now seems unsure of how to work with Moscow, while increasingly following Washington's lead in absence of independent judgment.
The EU has decided to extend sanctions against Russia for another six months, until July 31, 2017. European Council President Donald Tusk even admitted that the EU was awaiting a clarification of the new U.S. administration's policy in relation to Russia, a move that Moscow said only demonstrated the weakness of the alliance.
Brussels decided to expand the sanctions based on such an assertion that Russia failed to honor its commitments in the Minsk agreement aimed at ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine, while Moscow insists it is Kiev that should be blamed for the failure of the deal that they agreed upon together with France and Germany.
Russia has responded with countermeasures of its own, and so far, there is no sign of any ease of the diplomatic stalemate except for the resulting reciprocal sanctions. But Moscow has at least gained an upper hand in thwarting Kiev's pursuit of EU membership, in addition to the takeover of the militarily significant Crimea peninsula.

TURNING EAST


There is no denying that Russia's constrained economy in the past two years has been in part caused by the confluence of sluggish oil prices and Western sanctions. This does not get down to the very essence of the issue, however.

In his annual state of the union address to Russia's Federal Assembly earlier this month, Putin explicitly said that "internal problems" have been the main reasons for the country's economic slowdown. With its advantages of a large domestic market, rich natural resources and vast underdeveloped territory in its Far East, Moscow sees great potential in improving ties with its Asia Pacific neighbors in a bid to get itself out of the plight.
Russia launched the first Eastern Economic Forum in the Far Eastern port city of Vladivostok in September 2015, and the second one was held as scheduled this autumn in the same city with participants from across Eurasia. A number of agreements were inked at both forums on boosting cooperation with China, Japan and South Korea, among others, with a view to attracting investment from eastern Asia for Russia's development projects and expanding exports to the Asia-Pacific market.

In Russia's Black Sea city of Sochi in May, Russia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a five-year action plan to boost cooperation and deepen their partnership. Trade volume between Russia and ASEAN members was 13.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, rather modest compared with ASEAN's trade performance with some other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Russia has given special emphasis to link its development programs with those of China, particularly the alignment of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. In the energy sector, the construction of the Eastern Route pipeline proceeded smoothly this year, and it is expected to start supplies to China in 2018. China is developing Russia's first high-speed rail line connecting Moscow and Kazan with an investment of about 300 billion rubles (5.2 billion dollars).
What's more, the two sides are working on a joint program of developing and building wide-body aircraft, a model of which was displayed at this year's Zhuhai Air Show in south China's Guangdong Province. Financial institutions of both countries have clinched agreements to support those projects.


Editor: ying

December 20, 2016

Poland now a Monarchy, having officially crowned Jesus Christ as King, Nov. 2016


Ten years ago Polish politicians shelved an unusual suggestion that Jesus should be crowned king of this unrelentingly Catholic country. But in mid-November 2016 his enthronement went ahead in Krakow at the Church of Divine Mercy.


After a vote in the Polish parliament in April, Our Lord Jesus Christ was officially crowned the king of Poland in weekend ceremonies of the second weekend of November.  The coronation took place in the presence of the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, and many pilgrims.
The idea of the coronation of Jesus surfaced in the first half of the twentieth century. Polish nurse Rosalia Zelkova allegedly heard voices that told her that Jesus had listed a set of demands, one of which was to made king of Poland. It was a necessary condition for the salvation of the country in the upcoming war.

A decade ago, the BBC reported that a bill to make Jesus king was kicked into the long grass, despite the fact that 46 – 10 per cent of the lower house – signed the bill.

If it had become law, Jesus would have followed the path of the Virgin Mary, who was declared honorary queen of Poland by King John Casimir 350 years ago.

The motion had been been backed by MPs from the far right League of Polish families (LPR), the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and the Peasants’ Party (PSL).
They argued Jesus should be made King on both theological and historical grounds.

PiS deputy Artur Gorski said colleagues were:
Praying in the parliamentary chapel for Jesus’ coronation.

But Monsignor Tadeusz Pieronek, a member of Poland’s Episcopate and rector at Krakow’s Papal Academy of Theology, dismissed the move.
Christ doesn’t need a parliamentary resolution to be the king of our hearts.
These lawmakers would do better to look after their constitutional prerogatives and let religious institutions and the Church do our work.

Since then, the politicians and the Episcopate appear to have had a change of heart.
A wee spat has now erupted on Reddit Catholicism, where one commenter, “Turbolamer”, pointed out that the report of Jesus being made King of Poland originated from Gazeta.pl, and is a lie:
Gazeta.pl is a left-wing, anti-church news source. I’m not 100% sure but I think the statement ‘King of Poland’ is false and misleading. The event seems to be about accepting him ‘as a King’, not ‘as a King of Poland.
“Turbolamer” provided a more reliable link to the Episcopate’s own statement regarding the matter.
Zenon Czosnek hit back, saying that the Episcopate statement reads :

We profess in face of God and Earth, that we need your rule. We profess, that you and only you have holy rights to us that never expired. Therefore with humility we bend our heads to you, The Lord of the Universe, and we recognize your rule over Poland and our whole nation, that lives in the motherland and away in the wide world.
Hereby Poland in 1050 anniversary of it’s baptism, solemnly recognized the rule of Jesus Christ.

Czosnek added:
So your claim that Gazeta.pl is lying about Jesus being officially recognized as King of Poland is quite hard to defend … in this case, there is nothing wrong with that news item. Jesus was officially recognized as King of Poland, and Episcopate has changed opinion about that in recent years, probably due to the fact that the idea became quite popular amongst part of Polish Catholics, and nobody in Poland cares about people who are non-Catholics.
As for example, I happen to be a non-Catholic, and while I consider the whole affair to be little ridiculous, this is my private opinion and I don’t try to impose it on others. But I am not happy that someone thinks it’s appropriate to act on my behalf and recognizing a rule of anyone over me or my country.
I do believe that Catholic Church has too much influence in Poland as it is, and I am not happy about it.
The only comfort is the fact that … the plan will only work if the recognition of Jesus as King of Poland will be supported by ‘complete rejection of sin and turning towards God’, and I am not planning on any of such things. So sorry for spoiling your cunning plan, but, let me quote a classic on that, ‘I didn’t vote for him’.

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