Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin (GEAB) anticipates...

Global systemic crisis / Second half of 2010: The global system’s four single points of failure

For LEAP/E2020, the second half of 2010 will thus correspond to a new step in the global geopolitical dislocation, characterized by an acceleration in the process of strategic, financial, economic and social convulsions centered on four single points of failure (1) of the international system analyzed in this GEAB issue. The general context is that which has been outlined in previous GEAB reports, that’s to say a recovery … of the world economic crisis after a temporary freeze due to stimulation measures. But before entering into the detail of these anticipations on the unfolding of the economic and financial crisis in the second half of 2010, let’s take note that the beginning of June 2010 provides two particularly striking examples of the accelerated collapse of the global system of these past decades: one in terms of global economic governance, the other concerning the ability of the United States to control its own allies (see GEAB N°46).

Having put recent events, symptomatic of the acceleration of world geopolitical dislocation, into perspective, the four individual points of failure in the second half of 2010 (2), according to LEAP/E2020, are as follows:

• Western public debt: when insolvency becomes intolerable
• European austerity: when contextual growth is abandoned in favour of structural stablility
• Chinese inflation: when China is going to begin to export its inflation
• US contraction: from « hidden mass austerity » to « imposed Federal austerity »

Each one will be affected by a major shock during the course of the second half of 2010, leading to a sectorial, regional or global crisis.

Today’s world, plunged into the global systemic crisis, is in transition towards a new order. The U.S. power is weakening, new powers are emerging and world geopolitical order is reconfiguring. Countries’ major challenge consists of entering the new era in the best possible political and economic position. In this sense, the United States is trying to maintain the domination on its natural region, the Americas.

The facts prove that the strategy is the same as the one applied to the Middle East. If we replace the word “Eurasia” by “America” in the above mentioned excerpt, the parallel is clear, the purpose being (using the same words as the author) to reach the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategics: prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals; keep tributaries flexible and protected; and keep the barbarians from joining forces.

Putting it into the present language, the U.S. is seeking to subordinate to its own interests its backyard in the global economy. It is trying to secure its domination over the new world order, looking for raw materials and energy sources, as well as spaces for its production and investments, at a moment when the global systemic crisis and the resulting economic contraction prove that infinite economic expansion and the related model of raw materials production prescribed to countries in the region by multilateral banks has become untenable. In doing so, they are trying to export their systemic problems to the periphery while importing economic resources from this periphery, by means of loans perpetuating dependence.

In the light of this strategy, it is of vital importance for them, first, to identify which countries are pivotal in any shift of the region’s power balance out of its sphere of influence and, then, to offset, co-opt, and/or control those states.

 snapshots of an upside down world...

Solidaridadpanama.blogspo


Panama: General Strike Against Killings

On July 2, 4500 mostly indigenous workers belonging to the powerful Banana workers union (Sitribana) began a strike at the Bocas Fruit Company in the province of Bocas del Toro.

Workers from nearby farms quickly joined the strike. Other workers set up road blockades and occupied the airport. Employees on the project to widen and deepen the Panama Canal also downed tools.

In response, the government mobilised 1500 police to brutally repress protesters.

The deadly repression left at least 11 people dead and more than 200 injured. The National Front for the Defence of Economic and Social Rights (Frenadeso) said on July 16 that, “following the clashes, corpses were found in rivers and farms”.

“There is talk of at least two children dying due to respiratory problems caused by the large amount of tear gas canisters fired. In the Changuinola morgue, it is still unclear whether some of the corpses there are of citizens who died during the protests.”

The repression continued with the arrest of 30 construction unionists, as well as Professor Juan Jovane, a key left-wing leader.

Protesting students at the University of Panama (UoP) also faced repression, with 157 students detained.

Last week's rain storm which destroyed - yet again - hundreds of people's homes should serve as a wake-up call. According to CNN, only 2% of the $5.3 billion in aid that was promised for the next 18 months at the March 31st UN Donors Conference (see www.refondation.ht for pledges) has actually materialized. Most other reports say 10% - but there is not, to my knowledge or internet access, a site that details the actual disbursement of pledges. Such a site would be welcome and go far to alleviate tension and rumors. France, for example, hasn't paid up - and it vehemently denied a prank that it would pay restitution for the 90 million gold francs Haiti paid its former colonizer from 1825 to 1947 as indemnity. The U.S. has still to pay its $1.15 billion in pledged aid.

Making matters worse, the foreign-led Haiti Interim Reconstruction Commission, co-chaired by UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Max Bellerive, is replacing Haiti's elected government now that Parliament has expired, and it postponed its second meeting scheduled for Jul. 22 by a month.

Haiti had some very promising opportunities following the earthquake. First was general goodwill and unity. In the days immediately following the quake, people worked across extreme class and political divisions to survive. And they did. As the urgency wore off, the old divisions came back with a vengeance.

For example, on Jul. 21, the Provisional Electoral Commission (CEP) reiterated its 2009 decision to exclude Fanmi Lavalas, the party of exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from this year's legislative and presidential elections postponed from Feb. 28 to Nov. 28, 2010. The UN has proclaimed April and June 2009 partial Senate elections, in which almost no one voted because Fanmi Lavalas was excluded, a success.

 Assange...

Julian Assange, in or before 2006


Wikileaks: We don't know source of leaked data

Back in London, Assange agreed that the files offered insight into U.S. tactics.

But he said that was none of his concern, and he noted that his Web site already carried a copy of the U.S. Special Forces' 2006 Southern Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Manual, among other sensitive U.S. military documents.

"We put out that stuff all the time," he said.

He seemed irritated when a member of the audience pressed him on whether he believed there were ever any legitimate national security concerns that would prevent him from publishing a leaked document.

"It is not our role to play sides for states. States have national security concerns, we do not have national security concerns," he said.

"You often hear ... that something may be a threat to U.S. national security," he went on. "This must be shot down whenever this statement is made. A threat to U.S. national security? Is anyone serious? The security of the entire nation of the United States? It is ridiculous!"

He said he wasn't interested in the safety of states, only the safety of individual human beings.

The Afghan papers mark the biggest case in the short history of Wikileaks, which he set up in 2006. But for Mr Assange, it was the latest stage in a life of action against vested interests.

His parents met at an anti-Vietnam demonstration. His mother believed that a formal education would instil an unhealthy respect for authority on her son and he moved 37 times before he was aged 14. During one of the moves, he lived opposite an electronics shop and went there to write programmes on an early home computer, quickly learning to crack into programmes. "The austerity of one's interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me," he told last month's New Yorker magazine.

With his sharp mind, growing computer skills and outsider mentality, he entered the nascent world of hacking, setting up a group that came to be known as International Subversives. He is said to have broken into the US Defence Department and other supposedly secure sites.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

The Pentagon Papers were high-level, top-secret documents of decisionmaking estimates. They were alternative strategies. They were being debated, and they were presidential decisions of various kinds. It was a more revealing set of documents about the way in which the country was being deceived into continuing a hopeless war. So, you could say that the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan remain to be revealed, and I hope someone does that. And, for that matter, the Pentagon Papers of Iraq we have yet to see. But this is a very good start. The drama of such a huge volume being released is giving the public media attention and the public attention that President Nixon’s injunctions gave to the Pentagon Papers. So, I’m glad to see the press really is taking the content of these documents seriously so far and not focusing solely on the question of the leak itself or the process.

 Let the dead bury the dead...

Hungry Like the Wolf: Obama's Legacy of Hope and Change in Honduras

In the first year of his presidency, the first year of the "hope and change" he promised to bring to the conduct of American affairs, Barack Obama countenanced -- and abetted -- a coup in Honduras that ousted a mildly reformist, democratically elected president and replaced him with a clique of thuggish elites who now rule, illegitimately, through repression, threat and outright murder.

Since the installation of these throwbacks to the corrupt and brutal 'banana republics' of yore, Obama's secretary of state, the "progressive" Hillary Clinton, has spent a good deal of time and effort trying to coerce Honduras' outraged neighbors in Latin America to "welcome" the thug-clique, now led by Porfirio Lobo, back into the "community of nations." Let bygones be bygones, Clinton says, as Lobo's regime murders journalists (nine so far this year), political opponents and carries on the wholesale trashing of Honduran independence (such as sacking four Supreme Court justices who opposed the gutting of liberties and the overthrow of constitutional order). After all, isn't that Obama's own philosophy: always "look forward," forget the crimes of the past? Every day is a new day, a clean slate, a chance for a new beginning -- indeed, for "hope and change."

In other words: let the dead bury the dead -- and the rich and powerful reap their rewards.

[I]t is the parties that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of government action, and the public whose purpose is to ensure that beneficence by supplying the labor and capital needed to implement government action (or inaction) mandated by the bipartisan directorate. For example, it is the public’s duty to:

* provide a mass base of unthinking public approval for the status quo, such as by voting for Democrats and Republicans only (and so helping decide the biannual and quadrennial local and national contests selecting which partner will be the respective pork barrel meister-in-chief for the term), by manning party and race rallies (to maintain public social disunity), and following directions en masse in the many sanctioned corporate-financed political campaigns;
* supply the living and future dead soldiers for the ongoing foreign wars;
* buy products and services as directed by the entertaining and instructional advertisements in major media;
* assume the tax burden necessary to underwrite the profitability of otherwise failing corporations, which profitability the bipartisan directorate deems to be a “national interest”;
* be an absorptive market for the waste production of national security industries (e.g., assume liability for civilian nuclear power; sustain the use of high-tech para-military cop equipment);
* sustain the operation of a wealth-based adjudication-prison system, a corporate-government partnership and punitive element of social control;
* support by every thought, word and deed the primacy of national security needs, as defined by the Pentagon and the bipartisan directorate, to the access of national resources over any selfish humanitarian or public social considerations (e.g., expending tax revenues — “emergency war supplemental” — to continue funding the bombardments in Central Asia and East Africa, instead of profitless subsidies for continuing unemployment benefits or a variety of public social services);
* remember that the nation is defined by its national security tasks framing its corporate financial capital essence, NOT by the massed and, by definition, petty concerns of its self-absorbed “rubber bumper” population.

At this time in U.S. history, the Republican Party commands the loyalties of those motivated by simple white Judeo-Christian supremacy, finance capital greed, and hegemonic US militarism. Humanitarian, cultural, artistic and environmental considerations are absent, except when seen as impediments. This is the mindset of social inertia supporting exploitation full speed ahead. The Democratic Party captures the hopes of people who want to live like Republicans, but want to think of themselves as nice. It is easy to see how minimal intellect presents few problems in maintaining a Republican mindset, yet how helpful intellectual agility can be for a Democrat, whose self-image can require considerable mental gymnastics to maintain. In both cases, the identification with a party is usually reduced to a habit, because most people try to minimize their amount of thinking (which is sad, because this popular lack of thought is a very useful lever exploited by the manipulators of social control).

 Time for real change?

black agenda report


Tea Partyers, Fox News, "Negativity" Against the President? Are These Really Black America's Most Pressing Problems?

From the established civil rights organizations like the NAACP to legions of elected Democrats and preachers and even people like our good friends at Color of Change, the main activity these days is an endless circling of wagons around the president, defending him against the flood of racist bile that spews daily from the likes of Fox News, the Tea Partyers and naysaying Republicans. But is that really where so much of our energy and creativity should be going? Aren't there other urgent matters more deserving of the attention of black America's political leadership, our pastors and spokespeople and self-described activists? Matters like black mass incarceration, record unemployment, and the sinking of vast resources into multiple wars abroad?

The Democratic Party has made itself people-proof, and activist-proof.

In response to efforts like ours around the country, the Democratic Party, as a vehicle of corporate rule, has evolved mechanisms to protect itself against the democratic influences of its activists and voters. Both houses of every state legislature, and the federal House and Senate, have house speakers and senate presidents, whips, minority and majority leaders. These are not the legislators with the most expansive view of how government can serve their constituents. These party leaders are elected on the basis of who can attract the largest amount in corporate campaign contributions. Some of the funds are used to guarantee the re-election of the Democratic Party leader on the state or federal level, and the party leader distributes the remaining funds to those of his or her fellow legislators most loyal to the corporate agenda. At best, Democrats who listen too closely to their constituents, and to the activist base that makes their elections possible, get nothing. At worst, they find their party's leaders are funneling corporate money to right wing Democrats who oppose them in Democratic primary elections. That's what happened to former Atlanta congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, to name just one example, and it happens scores of times every election cycle on the state and local levels. Rahm Emanuel, now White House Chief of Staff, performed this duty for Congressional Democrats in 2006, ensuring that even if Democrats had a whopping majority during the final years of the Bush Administration, they would pose no effective opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars, or the Bush-Cheney crime wave in general.

 Why are the NY Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel publishing this info?

Leaky Vessels: Wikileaks "Revelations" Will Comfort Warmongers, Confirm Conventional Wisdom

The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given 92,000 reports by Wikileaks, including thousands of pages of raw "human intelligence" (i.e., uncorroborated claims and gossip from interested parties and anonymous sources pushing a multitude of agendas), and diplomatic notes passed between the promulgators of the occupation in Washington and their factotums "in country" -- reports which you might imagine also purvey a multitude of agendas ... not least the supreme agenda of all officials involved in a dubious enterprise: ass-covering.

Yet these reports are being treated as if they are the "grim truth" behind the shining picture of official propaganda. But what do these stories in the NYT and Guardian actually "reveal"? Let's see:

* That the occupation forces kill lots of civilians at checkpoints and botched raids, then lie about it afterward.
* That these killings make Afghans angry and fuel the insurgency.
* That elements of Pakistani intelligence are involved with some elements of the many resistance groups known collectively (and incorrectly) in the West as the Taliban.
* That the Americans are using more and more robot drones to kill people.
* That the Americans are running death squads in Afghanistan aimed at Taliban leaders.
* That Afghan officials are corrupt, and that Afghan police and military forces are woefully inadequate.

Is there anything in these breathless new recitations that we did not already know?

After working for years to divert popular hostility to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into the safe channel of support for the Democratic Party, the liberal and ex-radical groups that comprised the protest outfits have embraced Obama’s “progressive” agenda, largely accepting the official line that Afghanistan is a “good war.” There is no reason to expect that the massive body of evidence to the contrary disclosed this week will shift that position.

Despite the continuing mass opposition to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, revealed in poll after poll, there is no doubt a degree of discouragement over the inability to shift US policy. Millions went to the polls to vote against war in 2008, only to get an Obama administration that has escalated the reign of terror against the Afghan people, while continuing the Iraqi occupation.

What is required is the organization of a genuine popular antiwar movement. Real opposition to war can be developed only as part of the independent political mobilization of the working class against the profit system—the source of militarism—and both the Democratic and Republican parties, which defend and promote it. This movement must advance the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American and other foreign occupation troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. It must also demand that all those responsible for these wars of aggression—in both the Bush and Obama administrations—be held accountable.

Significantly, none of the publications who broke the story called for opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Guardian editorial called for its indefinite extension. It wrote that the revelations in WikiLeaks’ documents meant that “this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain is about to hand over gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national government in Kabul.”

Sections of the US political establishment are pressing to use the WikiLeaks material to carry out a tactical shift in US-NATO war policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan. US Senator John Kerry published a statement, writing: “However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”

Kerry is holding hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Afghanistan war today.

The leaking of the documents has been accompanied by a campaign in the US press, denouncing the Pakistani government’s support for Afghan warlord factions opposed to the Karzai regime in Kabul.

 Startling new danger revealed: "self-radicalization with the aid of the Internet"...

Terror's Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

In January, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano even offered a fix for “self-radicalization.” It is called, you guessed it, “counter-radicalization.” Napolitano described the concept:

“How do we identify someone before they become radicalized to the point where they’re ready to blow themselves up with others on a plane? And how do we communicate better American values and so forth … around the globe?”

Has no one told Napolitano, Mullen, Gates and Clapper what can be gleaned from the ample reporting on what was driving Hasan, including his anger over U.S. military interventions in Muslim lands?

And what about the motives of the Christmas bomber, 23 year-old Nigerian Abdulmutallab? His friends in Yemen described him as “not overly extremist,” but very angry, nonetheless, over Israel’s actions in Gaza. Does that fit under the rubric of “self-radicalization?”

Have our senior officials learned nothing from reports on the motivation of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian physician of Palestinian origin who used a suicide bomb to kill seven CIA operatives and one Jordanian intelligence officer in eastern Afghanistan on Dec. 30?

Al-Balawi’s widow said her husband “started to change” after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. His brother added that al-Balawi “changed” during the three-week-long Israeli attack on Gaza, which left 1,400 Palestinians dead, an attack defended by Washington as justifiable self-defense.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan may be the most recent example of an increasingly common type of terrorist, said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who studies terrorism.

Hoffman studies people who have become self-radicalized with the aid of the Internet and who commit violence without having to cross borders to reach their targets, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Such cases appear to be growing, with most of them involving people who have no direct ties to overseas terror networks, Hoffman said.

Al-Qaida leaders have encouraged a trend of self-radicalization through voluminous messages on the Web, Hoffman said, citing a shooting at an Arkansas military recruitment center, synagogues targeted for attack in New York and thwarted bombing schemes in Illinois and Texas.

Gates also would give commanders “more comprehensive information on individuals — particularly if there have been behavioral issues that have been noted ... under previous assignments.”

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said military leaders need an “active focus” on transferring information on potential problematic individuals.

“The issue of self-radicalization is one that we have really got to focus on because ... there is clearly more and more of that going on, and how much of it we have in the military is something that we ought to really understand,” Mullen said.

 Katie's Krops...

From Seedlings to Servings: 11-Year-Old Grows Tons of Veggies for the Homeless

It all began in third grade, when Katie Stagliano's 40-pound cabbage fed 275 homeless people. Now, Katie's six gardens have produced over 4,000 pounds of vegetables to feed the needy.

When Katie Stagliano was in third grade, she planted a cabbage in her family's small garden. When it grew to an astounding 40 pounds, she donated it to a soup kitchen, where it was made into meals for 275 people (with the help of ham and rice). "I thought, 'Wow, with that one cabbage I helped feed that many people?'" says Katie, now entering sixth grade. "I could do much more than that."

So Katie started planting vegetable gardens as part of her nonprofit Katie's Krops — she has six right now — including one the length of a football field at her school in her hometown of Summerville, S.C. Classmates, her family and other people in the community help plant and water, and Bonnie Plants donates seedlings. This past year, Katie took her commitment to a new level: she has given soup kitchens over 2,000 pounds of lettuce, tomatoes and other vegetables. Katie and her helpers are now harvesting the spring planting, and another 1,200 pounds will be donated by October.

"She just walks in like a proud little girl with her treasures in her arm," says Sue Hanshaw, CEO of Tricounty Family Ministries, the soup kitchen in Charleston, S.C. where Katie first brought her 40-pound crucifer. "I love what she exudes, caring for others. It's made a big impact on a lot of people."