Help Obama Kickstart World War 3

Our president can’t launch into another war without you. And remember: when we voted for him in 2008 and 2012, we promised to support him no matter what.

And America is dead-ass broke, so our goal is to raise $1.6 trillion on behalf of the U.S. government.

That’s where you come in.

Even a small donation will make all the difference.

World War III is a very important, very progressive war that Obama tells me is very important. So it must be.

World War III is not going to be like those other Republican wars fought on just 1 percent of the world; this war is going to be fought on 99 percent of the world.

It will be everywhere: Russia, China, Africa, Cincinnati, your favorite brunch spot — the one with those kickass ranchero breakfast burritos.

As an incentive, those pledging $25 a piece of rubble from a war-torn Middle Eastern country, kissed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, while $100 donations gets donors a day pass to leave their local refugee camp.

It’ll be all over Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Pinterest, and whatever eventually replaces Pinterest, and I mean, just think of all the hilarious skits we can make of cats reacting to their owners’ homes being obliterated,” the video says. Lots of shock, but tons of awww.

Ten dollars gets one a “shout out” on social media. In fact, the video promises that World War III will be the most social media-focused war in history.

So please, help us reach our goal of $1.6 trillion so we can make World War III a reality. Why? Because Obama.

Let’s make World War 3 a reality!

By The Second City Network

A Century Of Deceit: World Wars and Zionist Militarism

Some studies estimate that close to 1.5 million Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of the brutal American invasion and occupation of their country in 2003.  Millions more Iraqis have become refugees and orphans with no future prospects for prosperity, sanctity or stability.

Most of the critical infrastructure of the country was bombed into rubble and dust. American depleted uranium weapons have caused cancer rates in some Iraqi cities to skyrocket, permanently destroying the genes of future generations of Iraqis who are being born with horrific birth defects and diseases.

The culprits responsible for this genocidal campaign to subdue and enslave the Iraqi people are not the CEOs of American oil companies as some disingenuous commentators on the Left have claimed. President George W. Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East was not his own nor that of the oil lobby, but was the brainchild of the neoconservative conspirators behind the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and other Zionist-oriented think tanks that dominated the Washington Beltway.

Three of Bush’s principal foreign policy advisors who are widely recognized as the prime movers behind the war in Iraq were neocon ideologues Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom have well-documented histories of Israeli partisanship. Perle and Wolfowitz, for instance, were both investigated by the FBI in the 1980s for passing classified defence documents to Israel.  Perle was once an employee of the Israeli weapons firm Soltam.  Writers for the New York Times described Wolfowitz as one of Israel’s “staunchest allies” in the Bush administration and revealed that Wolfowitz “is friendly with Israel’s generals and diplomats” and that he is “something of a hero to the heavily Jewish neoconservative movement.”   Feith once ran a law firm in Israel and received an award from the Zionist Organization of America for his “services to Israel and the Jewish people.”  The New Yorker revealed that Feith even has a portrait of Zionism’s founder Theodore Herzl hanging on the wall of his home library.  It was Feith and his neocon Zionist colleague Abram Shulsky who oversaw the secretive “Office of Special Plans” in the Pentagon where all of the lies about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were conceived and disseminated.

These Israeli militarists, masquerading as American thinkers, left behind a paper trail that unveiled their true objectives. In 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser – all future Bush administration officials -- authored a strategy paper for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli Likud regime entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”  In the paper, these Zionist hawks advocated an aggressive Israeli foreign policy, calling for the removal of all of Israel’s possible military competitors in the region through force. They spoke of “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria” and of removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, calling it an “important Israeli strategic objective.” Also on their hit list was Iran, whose influence in the region they hoped to neutralize as well. By eliminating Israel’s external enemies the Zionist neocons were in turn endeavoring to subdue Israel’s internal foes, the indigenous Arab Palestinians who continue to resist Israeli occupation and apartheid. 

Meyrav Wurmser, the wife of neocon David Wurmser, confessed that most of the leading neocons are pro-Israel Jews.  Gal Beckerman, a writer for the Jewish Forward newspaper, admitted that the ideology of neoconservatism itself was the brainchild of chauvinistic Jewish intellectuals such as Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it,” Beckerman wrote.  Prominent Israeli journalist Ari Shavit said the Iraq war was engineered by a cabal of 25 mostly Jewish neoconservative intellectuals.  Famed American-Jewish journalist Carl Bernstein expressed the same view on MSNBC. The Iraq war was launched on a phony pretext by Bush, Cheney and “the Jewish neocons who wanted to remake the world,” Bernstein opined, much to the chagrin of the pro-Zionist host.

The engine driving the Zionist-led neoconservative war machine is “holocaust” mythology. “For those of us who are involved in foreign and defense policy today of my generation,” explained Richard Perle in a BBC interview, “the defining moment of our history was certainly the holocaust.”  Douglas Feith often invokes the holocaust to justify his militarism. In a New Yorker profile, Feith asked, “What’s the answer to the Holocaust?” He answered his own question by suggesting that it is not surprising that this alleged event has caused so many Jews to become militant neocons dedicated to aggressive, unyielding warfare against all those who pose a “threat” to Jews and their interests.  In a New York Times profile, Paul Wolfowitz spoke of the holocaust as having a profound impact on his worldview.  Another neocon ringleader, Michael Ledeen, revealed his obsession with the subject in an article he authored entitled “The New Holocaust.”  Political analyst Kevin Barrett observed that the Israelis and their Jewish neocon patrons in Washington “are fanatical extremists who feel that they are being persecuted everywhere they go and that they have to be extremely harsh, unyielding and aggressive, as well as deceptive and violent with the world” in order to ensure their survival.  Somehow it doesn’t dawn on them that maybe it is their unscrupulous behaviour that is the cause of hostility towards them in the first place. Obviously introspection is not exactly a Zionist virtue.

The Zionists’ militarist mindset is evidently motivated by the ethnocentric myths of Jewish victimhood. World-conquering Neocon-Zionist belligerence is driven in large part by the religious adherence to the official propaganda of the victors of World War II. Elite Jews played an important role in bringing about the Second World War as the final phase of their plan to establish the state of Israel. The First World War accomplished several things for the Zionists: it freed up Palestine from Ottoman control (the Ottomans previously rejected Zionist offers to purchase Palestine), it fractured the big empires of Europe who could then be manipulated into future conflicts, and lastly it delivered Russia to the Bolsheviks, a majority of whom were Jewish chauvinists hell-bent on the subjugation of that Christian Empire. With Russia now in the hands of Jewish communist extremists and Palestine falling under British dominion, the Zionist plan for Israel was well on its way.

“It has been repeatedly acknowledged by British Statesmen,” wrote Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in a 1941 letter to British leader Winston Churchill, “that it was the Jews who, in the last [world] war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain. They are keen to do it - and may do it - again.” Wiezmann went on to ask for British assistance in the formation of a “Jewish fighting force” that would be used to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Arab population. Wiezmann promised Churchill that if the British would help create a Jewish militia to conquer Palestine, he would do his utmost to mobilize American Jewry to exert their influence to draw America into the Second World War on Britain’s side, as they did in the first great war.

Benjamin Freedman, a former top-level Zionist, exposed the machinations of his brethren relating to the First and Second World Wars and the Zionist conquest of Palestine. In a 1961 speech at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., Freedman explained that the United States was “suckered into the [first world] war merely so that the Zionists of the world could obtain Palestine.” Freedman described how Zionist Jews made a secretive deal with the British leadership during World War I promising to bring America into the war in exchange for Palestine. The result of this agreement was the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917, a British government decree that promised to make Palestine into a national homeland for the Jews.  Freedman stressed the absurdity that Britain “should offer [Palestine] as coin of the realm to pay the Zionists for bringing the United States into the war.” The Zionists, said Freedman, “have complete control of our government. … The Zionists and their co-religionists rule this United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country.”

In a December 1919 speech in Jerusalem, Chaim Wiezmann boasted about securing the Balfour Declaration from the British government through “persistent propaganda, through unceasing demonstration of the life force of our people.” “We told the responsible authorities: We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not,” Weizmann said. “You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.”  Threatening the world into approving the creation of Israel was part and parcel of the Zionist project from its inception.

In 1903 an early Zionist leader named Max Nordau conspicuously predicted the outbreak of the First World War, which lends credence to the suggestion that a hidden force of Jewish Zionists, Freemasons and bankers are responsible for instigating the conflict for their own purposes. “Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future world war, the peace conference - where with the help of England a free and Jewish Palestine will be created,” Nordau told his compatriots at the sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, 11 years before the outbreak of the First World War and 14 years before the British issued the “Balfour Declaration.”

Such predictive powers unveil a plan that was consciously followed and executed during and after World War I. The “peace conference” Nordau envisioned was the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles, a farce that unjustly punished Germany for a war it did not start, thus laying the groundwork for the inevitable outbreak of the Second World War. An international peacekeeping body was established shortly after World War I known as the League of Nations. The League put its stamp of approval on the British seizure of Palestine after the war, an imperial land-grab that had no real legitimacy outside of the self-serving declarations of the political elites, bankers and oligarchs who chaired the League.

The League essentially functioned as a tool of the financial elite and served the geopolitical aspirations of the Zionists. “The League of Nations is a Jewish idea, and Jerusalem some day will become the capital of the world’s peace,” proclaimed Jewish leader Nahum Sokolow at a Zionist conference in Carlsbad, California, in 1922. “The League has recognized our rights to our ancient home,” he said. “We Jews throughout the world will make the League’s struggle our own and will not rest until there is ultimate victory.”

Even with Palestine now in the palm of their hands, the Zionists still had a problem: convincing Europe’s Jews to leave their lives of luxury and embrace Palestine as their new home. Such a task proved difficult, with only a minority of European Jews strongly identifying with Zionism at this time. This reality sheds a different light on the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany, which proved very convenient from the Zionists’ perspective. While publicly professing scorn and hatred of Nazism, Zionist Jews secretly initiated a deal with Hitler’s government – the “Transfer Agreement” – which saw the transfer of tens of thousands of German Jews and their assets to Palestine. Lasting from 1933 through 1941, the Nazi-Zionist pact proved crucial to the future establishment of the Zionist state. The large amounts of capital and agricultural equipment that was shipped into Palestine by way of this agreement substantially contributed to the creation of Israel. “Through this pact, Hitler’s Third Reich did more than any other government during the 1930s to support Jewish development in Palestine,” opined historian Mark Weber in his article titled “Zionism and the Third Reich.” “[D]uring the 1930s no nation did more to substantively further Jewish-Zionist goals than Hitler’s Germany,” says Weber.

Still, the Transfer Agreement alone did not produce the amount of Jewish emigration necessary to form an exclusivist Jewish ethno-state in Palestine, as the Zionists intended all along. There simply were not enough Jews in Palestine that would be required to replace the expelled Arabs and keep them at bay. Not only that, but there was still not enough global support or sympathy for the creation of a state for Jews. Since the dawn of Zionism in the late 1800s, Jewish-Zionist ideologues had been ravenously promoting the story of “six million” persecuted and oppressed Jews. “We Jews need a homeland of our own because we are persecuted wherever we go” was the traditional Zionist argumentation. But the First World War did not produce the circumstances needed to foist this propaganda on the world. Jews were not singled out for persecution or mistreatment by any belligerent in that war, which is why the Zionists, following the dictates of their founder Theodore Herzl, deliberately aided and abetted Hitler’s forces to corral their fellow Jews into ghettos and concentration camps during the Second World War.

Herzl, in his diaries, advocated making use of “anti-Semitism” to spur Jewish emigration to Palestine. “It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of [Jewish] property,” he wrote. “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. … I have already told you that we want to let respectable anti-Semites participate in our project, respecting their independence which is valuable to us—as a sort of people's control authority.”  

Did Hitler not carry out Herzl’s exact mandate? It must be pointed out that Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question” was the same procedure outlined by Zionists decades earlier: 

sequestering all Jews into a single state, isolated from other nations. “The final solution of the Jewish question lies therefore in the establishment of the Jewish State,” said the 1897 manifesto of a German-Zionist group.  In an 1899 letter, Theodore Herzl asked the Russian Czar if he would hear out his “Zionist plan for the final solution of the Jewish Question.”  In 1936, the Jewish nationalist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky laid out what the Zionist plan would ultimately entail: “It is not our task to establish in Palestine a home for selected people, not even a state for a small portion of our people. The aim of our efforts is to organize a systematic massive Jewish evacuation from all the countries in which they live.”

“The transfer of millions of Jews to their homeland [Palestine] will save the European Jewry from extermination,” declared Jabotinsky in 1940, adding, “Evacuation of the Jewish masses is the only cure for the Jewish catastrophe.”  The “extermination” Jabotinsky spoke of was not happening, but that didn’t stop Zionist propagandists from disseminating reckless atrocity stories of systematic genocide in order to win the world over to the Zionist cause. Legends of human soap, skin lampshades, shrunken heads, electric shock chambers, gas chambers and other absurdities were trumpeted from the rooftops by Zionists and their controlled press.

Jewish leaders made numerous public pronouncements designed to provoke Hitler, hoping he would unleash his fury upon Europe’s Jews, and with the help of Organized Zionism spur them to make their way to Palestine. For instance, Organized Jewry made a declaration of war against Germany in March 1933, before Hitler took any serious measures restricting the rights of German Jews. “Judea Declares War on Germany: Jews of All the World Unite in Action,” read the headline of the March 24, 1933, edition of Britain’s Daily Express. The corresponding article declared a Jewish “holy war against Germany.” “The Israeli people around the world,” the article continued, “declare economic and financial war against Germany. Fourteen million Jews stand together as one man, to declare war against Germany.”  A year later Jabotinsky made a similarly bellicose pronouncement, stating:

“For months now the struggle against Germany is waged by each Jewish community, at each conference, in all our syndicates, and by each Jew all over the world. There is reason to believe that our part in this struggle has general value. We will trigger a spiritual and material war of all the world against Germany's ambitions to become once again a great nation, to recover lost territories and colonies. But our Jewish interests demand the complete destruction of Germany.”

As the war drew near, Chaim Weizmann did everything in his power to invite definite reprisals against Jews from Hitler’s regime. In a 1939 letter to British leader Neville Chamberlain, Weizmann declared that “the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies.”  Weizmann and his Zionist colleagues made many public statements to that effect, which Hitler referenced in a July 1942 speech.  In 1941, an American Jew named Theodore Kaufman made an even more brazen effort to deliberately provoke hostility towards Jews. He authored and published a book advocating the genocide of the whole German people by way of a forced sterilization program. 

Kaufman’s text, titled Germany Must Perish!, outlined “a comprehensive plan for the extinction of the German nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people.”  A map illustrating the possible territorial break-up of Germany and the “apportionment of her lands” was also found in the book. “Germany must perish forever from this earth!” Kaufman declared, calling for “a final solution” of German extinction. Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was well aware of Kaufman’s hateful screed, and widely distributed it in Germany to bolster his case of a Jewish conspiracy against his country.

Zionist leaders and activists gave Hitler more than enough ammunition to justify interning Jews in camps as a security threat to Germany. The American and Canadian governments imprisoned Japanese, German and Italian citizens in camps during the war with a far weaker rationale. Japanese, German and Italian citizens of the US and Canada had not declared a “holy war” against their adopted countries, but were interned nonetheless. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that these Zionist provocations were a cleverly calculated ruse intended to create an atmosphere in Europe conducive to the Zionist transfer plan. Without the uprooting process initiated by the National Socialists and their Zionist assistants, it is unlikely that any large amount of European Jews would have voluntarily left Europe for an uncertain future in Palestine.

Some Jewish casualties in a devastating war that took tens of millions of lives was inevitable and very much desired by the Zionist leaders seeking a pretext to invade and conquer Palestine for Jewish colonization. “There are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism,” declared Rabbi Stephen S. Wise at a meeting of Zionists in New York in 1900.  In 1906, a German-Jewish philanthropist named Dr. Paul Nathan publicized the notion that the Russian government had initiated a policy of exterminating its Jews as a “solution” to the “Jewish question” and that six million were in grave danger.  Max Nordau, the Zionist leader who predicted World War I, invoked the story of six million persecuted Jews in 1899, 1911 and 1920.  At a Zionist conference in 1911, Nordau warned that it was only a matter of time before six million Jews would be “annihilated” by European governments.

This familiar narrative was repeatedly advanced a few dozen times before, during and after World War I.  A most interesting example is from October 1919 when the American Hebrew publication carried an alarmist story headlined “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop” which alleged that “six million Jewish men and women” were on the brink of a “holocaust of human life.”  A New York Times report from the same year headlined “Ukrainian Jews Aim To Stop Pogroms” alleged that six million Jews in the Ukraine and Poland were being targeted in pogroms and massacres.  Another report from 1921 titled “Begs America Save 6,000,000 In Russia,” also from the New York Times, said, “Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre.” 

As the Second World War approached, Zionists amplified their atrocity propaganda. In 1936, Chaim Weizmann told a British Commission that “six million Jews” in Europe had “neither hope nor future save in the land of Israel.”  In 1940, World Jewish Congress chairman Nahum Goldmann proclaimed that if the German National Socialists achieved victory in the war “6,000,000 Jews in Europe are doomed to destruction.”  Amazingly, Zionist newspapers betrayed the pre-meditated and fraudulent nature of the six million myth by proclaiming precisely six million Jewish victims six months before the end of the war.   Soviet-Jewish war propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg told his readers that “the world now knows that Germany has killed six million Jews” in March of 1945, two months before the end of hostilities and long before any accurate statistical data of war casualties would become available.  “At that time, no demographic figures could have been available to [Ehrenburg],” writes German Rudolf in the preface of The First Holocaust. “Just a year later,” Rudolf continues, “British Historian David Irving emphasized that as early as June 1945, in other words immediately after the end of hostilities in Europe, some Zionist leaders claimed to be able to provide the precise number of Jewish victims - six million, of course - even though the chaos reigning in Europe at that time rendered any demographic studies impossible.”

In an effort to whitewash their own egregious war crimes, the Allied Powers went along with the Zionists’ pre-meditated fictional account of six million dead Jews. At the post-war Nuremberg trials, an Allied-run kangaroo court staffed to the brim by Zionist Jews and their Allied lackeys, the truth was buried underneath a tidal wave of falsehoods. The Zionist motives for the war itself were purposefully obscured and a cartoonish propaganda narrative of “Nazi evil” was foisted upon the world to advance the victors’ post-war aims for Europe and accelerate the Zionists’ ambitions for a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine. American Senator Thomas Dodd, who was a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials in 1945, revealed in a letter to his wife that the staff at Nuremberg was about 75 per cent Jewish. “Now my point is that the Jews should stay away from this trial -- for their own sake,” Dodd wrote in the letter, adding, “For … the charge ‘a war for the Jews’ is still being made and in the post-war years it will be made again and again. The too large percentage of Jewish men and women here [at Nuremberg] will be cited as proof of this charge.”

When the Soviet Union and its communist satellites in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1991, so did the myth of the six million. The Soviet lie of four million deaths at Auschwitz – a monstrous exaggeration accepted as ‘fact’ for decades -- was officially reduced to around one million, but revisionist historians doubt even that figure. Revisionist scholarship has determined that somewhere between 100-150 thousand people perished in Auschwitz mainly as a result of disease and starvation, which was not a deliberate act on the part of the Germans but rather the outcome of Allied carpet-bombing of Germany’s infrastructure.  For years Zionist propagandists claimed several million Jews had been killed by the Germans at the Mauthausen and Majdanek concentration camps, but recent official revisions place the Jewish death totals there at 74,000 combined.  Despite the vast lowering of the death figures at many major camps, Zionists and those they have convinced through incessant propaganda still repeat the erroneous six million number as fact.

Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein outlined Zionist deceptions vis-à-vis the orthodox holocaust narrative in his book The Holocaust Industry.  Finkelstein observes that a dogma has been fashioned around the “holocaust” by the Jewish-Zionist establishment as a means of thought control. Shielding Israel from criticism and rebuke, Finkelstein argues, is a primary motivation behind the ceaseless promotion of holocaust mythology, in addition to Zionist shakedowns for reparations money from Germany. This profitable industry is bolstered by the Hollywood entertainment establishment which is “totally run by Jews” according to the Jewish Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein.  Not only does the holocaust dogma provide Zionist Jews with psychological cover to commit heinous crimes against the Palestinians and mask them under a façade of victimhood, but it also acts as a perpetual pretext for wars that serve Israel’s interests, such as the war in Iraq.

Gilad Sharon, the son of Israeli war criminal politician Ariel Sharon, vividly unveiled the bloodthirsty and bellicose nature of Zionism in a 2012 op-ed for the Jerusalem Post. Calling openly for the genocidal carpet-bombing of Gaza, Sharon declared: “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.”  

Sharon’s remarks are not the ravings of a fringe lunatic -- they are completely consistent with the teachings of the pioneers of Zionist ideology, like Dr. David Wolffsohn, the late World Zionist Organization chairman, who told a meeting of Zionists in 1907 that Jews must put aside their differences and unite to “conquer the world.”  Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of the Revisionist strain of Zionism, said candidly, “We want a Jewish Empire.”  Zionism is a “death-crazed narcissistic cult,” said Rich Siegel, a former Zionist who saw the light.  The inhuman precepts of the Jewish supremacist mentality that is so prevalent in Israel today can only result in more violence and bloodshed, more misery and suffering for the Palestinians and Arabs in general. 

While the West bears much shame and responsibility for aiding and abetting the Zionist project and all of its murderous and destructive consequences, bringing history into accordance with the facts is one way to uplift the Palestinians whose struggle for freedom and justice goes on.

Brandon Martinez is a freelance writer and journalist from Canada whose area of expertise is foreign policy, international affairs and 20th and 21st century history. His writing is focused on issues such as Zionism, Israel-Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. Readers can contact him at martinezperspective@hotmail.com

The Different Face Of The Third World War

By Siv O'Neall
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Courtesy Of "Axis Of Logic"

Make no mistake. The third World War is right here. Now. It has been here for longer than you would believe.

The world is at war. Unrelenting, genocidal war. Another war that is a racket, but with a different face and a different racket. A war that kills millions, as is usually the case. There are two sides to this war, but it is not the East against the West. It’s not even the South against the North. It is not a geographical war. It’s a class war. It is the Poor against the Rich on all five continents. And right now the Rich are winning.

A Brief Look Back

The much touted Founding Fathers wanted nothing more praiseworthy than an oligarchy, a country ruled by an elite where Blacks and women were not citizens with equal rights, not even the right to vote. Women only gained the right to vote through the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution in 1920.

In spite of the half-heartedness and hesitations by President Roosevelt and some egregious mistakes that had serious consequences, the end of this era still came out as far more people-friendly than anything the country had seen before. Labor unions experienced tremendous gains during the thirties and Social Security was created in 1935.

Fast forward to Lyndon B. Johnson and his signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, obviously a big step in the direction of democracy. U.S. citizens were now convinced that their country was not just the most prosperous in the world, but also the most moral, the most free and the most civilized. And the most powerful.

The social contract that stemmed from the last Great Depression has been torn apart bit by bit in the decades that followed. The second-rate movie actor Ronald Reagan took the first big steps towards corporatism, intrinsically accompanied by total contempt for the people. This glamorous president who was playing Hollywood with the country seriously set about undermining the social safety net, a gradual thawing of programs focused on the welfare of the citizens.

The War Has Become Globalized

Things are changing however. The sudden collapse of the Twin Towers and the screams of dying people made it possible. Civil rights have been dramatically stifled through the Patriot Act, furtively steered through a Congress in shock and almost total ignorance in October of 2001. The country has since then been in a state of permanent war.

We are living the war. It just has a different face. I am not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan. I am not talking about the renewal of the Cold War, as the U.S. Empire is staking its last pennies on establishing influence in republics of the former Soviet Union, desperately trying to outdo Russia in countries where the main or the second language is Russian. In these countries dependence on Russian oil and gas is of such primary importance that even Ukraine has had to listen to the loud voices of the people and move over to the Russian sphere, for economic and certainly also for cultural reasons. The U.S.-supported orange revolution is over. Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko is history.

This current war has no borders. War is globalized, like everything else steered by the obscene organization that rules the world of today. The hugely powerful multinationals in collusion with the governing bodies of the world have orchestrated a way of running the world which seems to them to be a given winner. It is not even Whites against the brown peoples who by far dominate the world population. The White upper-class people are of course scared out of their wits knowing well that one day soon they will be outnumbered even in their own home countries, which is most of the West. Racism, in each individual country and globally, is very clearly part of this ugly war.

However, globalization is the ruling principle of today’s war. If the Chinese want to take a part in this upper class war on the poor, they are welcome to the country club. If the Indian political leaders are willing to make a deal with the multinationals, they are also taken into the club as full members. But at the origin of the scheming by the Neocon cavemen, the Multinational Money Men alone are the Übermenschen; the secondary collaborators get a fair share only because, for financial reasons, their weight is impossible to ignore.

The U.S. leaders may finally have realized that there is no way they can win a geographical war in the Middle East, in Central Asia, in Africa or anywhere else. They are now having a hard time extracting themselves from the senseless wars that are going on full speed in Afghanistan and now also Pakistan, turning both these countries into a maelstrom of ubiquitous local wars. Iraq is a ruined country but the U.S. will probably manage one day fairly soon to withdraw most of its military, declaring victory.

The reasons for this unending war (and possibly the solution to it) is the major equation we have to solve in order to understand the world we live in. It is not the United States alone that is in this war. It is not a war of one country against another country. It is the multinational corporations that are sucking up the entire wealth of the world, leaving the crumbs to the people so that they can survive as the slaves of the powerful leaders.

The center of gravity has changed in this new world of robots and money makers. Washington is no more the unilateral leader. The U.S. government has turned into a group of yes-sayers to the Big Corporations that are spread all over the planet. The world economy is in free fall, but you are soon about to see the top Money Men come out of the squeeze with all their billions intact, if not multiplied.

Poverty Kills

The poor are being squeezed almost out of their existence and the educated and formerly prosperous middle classes are disappearing from the rosters of the comfortable class that included, for instance, middle-range businessmen, managers and intellectuals. Medium-sized businesses are being squeezed to death and the educated middle classes are seen as less and less essential in a world where money alone rules. Education and the arts are dying a slow death, not being considered as necessary, in fact seen rather as a menace to the new world order where dumbed down and docile slaves are the kind of pliable citizens the power people thrive on.

Small retail businesses are being squeezed out of existence by the Walmarts and the Carrefours all over the world. Subsistence farmers are being bankrupted by huge industrial farms every day. In Africa, the family farms that provided for the basic needs of the family and possibly left some produce over to sell at the local market are being killed by the requirements by IMF and the World Bank, the two major contributors to worldwide poverty.

The big money lenders demand, as a requirement for a loan, that the poor farmers produce flowers and fruit for export to the rich West and are thus forced to buy food products imported from the West, in particular from the U.S. They can’t afford buying all the products they need for a decent livelihood. They go bankrupt and they move to the enormously overpopulated shantytowns around the megacities of the world, Lagos, Cape Town, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangkok, Mexico City, São Paolo, Shanghai, etc., and even the outrageous slums in the richest country in the world are fighting against obscene poverty, hunger and malnutrition¹. One billion people, almost one tenth of the population of the world now live in shantytowns all over the world.

The War On The Poor People Across The World

The war on poverty has taken on a new meaning. It is a war on the poor. The poor are the major victims of the Third World War. AIDS and other diseases, violent droughts, inundations and natural catastrophes are used to eradicate the billions of poor people who are seen as dead ballast that is making the steering of the ship difficult to handle. Dead mass that is better gotten rid of - by any means available.

If nature comes to their help, so much the better. Let the victims of hurricane Katrina keep getting swallowed up by poverty and early death. Let Haiti disappear as an island for poor people where those victims of hundreds of years of cruel colonialism were managing to squeeze out a living only by sheer willpower, in spite of the ruining of their environment by these colonial powers. New Orleans and Haiti will now be made into luxury tourist sites for the wealthy who don't know what to do with their money.

Let the poor victims of the scandalous gigantic BP oil leak in the Gulf die a slow death, deprived of their livelihood as hard-working fishermen or the owners of small businesses by the shoreline. The entire area is now polluted beyond repair or at least suffering the devastating impact of the disaster through the destruction of the offshore, shoreline and significant tidal wetland ecosystems, due to criminal neglect by the oil company and by the government². It is the little people who will be suffering from this devastation for years to come. The big companies always keep their profits intact.

The progress towards civil rights and a government for the people has been in steady decline ever since the big steps forward that were made by FDR and LBJ. In fact, the U.S. leadership, in tight partnership with the Big Corporations, has taken increasingly big steps towards stifling every effort in favor of people’s rights or easing the plight of the poor that might have appeared (and been ignored) on the Washington radar, emanating from people-friendly organizations. The Supreme Court which is supposed to rein in the other two branches of the Government, has been stacked with regressive judges and even the last vestiges of democratic rights are in danger of being overruled by that Court.

The ‘War on Terror’ serves the purpose of idealizing the West and demonizing the Arab world, the Islam religion and all people of darker skin color. The war was not born out of 9/11. The ‘War on Terror’ had been invented well before that shocking event. Defeating the Taliban, taking over Iraq and the Middle East had been in the eye of the Washington telescope for a long time.

But the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, whoever was the real agent behind the deed, served to reinforce the making of the U.S. citizens into docile lemmings, flag waving non-thinking ‘patriots’, blind to the killing of their civil rights and the making of the Constitution into a quaint document.

The Base Of Neoconservative Ideology

Globalization enters the stage. It too has been a long time coming. Washington is now going to wage a war without borders, a war of economic conquest that will make Washington into the capital of the Planet. They are probably capable of seeing that a unilateral world is no more realistic, but the U.S. power people are certainly counting on Washington carrying the heaviest stick in the fashioning of the world into a money making machine. Multi-nationalism will have to be accepted. U.S. leaders don’t even need to steep the world in ‘Americanism’ by spreading their gospel of consumerism and ignorant worship of ‘the only free and civilized country in the world’. The corporations are doing the work for them. Buying is the only remaining virtue.

Thinking and straight vision are doomed, killed in the cradle. History is taught the way it suits the U.S. leadership and the apathy of ignorance is taking over the populace. News is skewed to fit the powers that be. The media has been bought up by Big Money and has become infotainment, the opium of the people. Hand in hand with religion of course. Patriotism and fundamentalist religion become the ersatz for critical thinking. Only the sheep and lemmings are encouraged. People who don’t toe the line are tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

This is the New World Order. The Neocons are sitting on the throne. Democracy is gone. Corporatism alone rules the world. Countries all over the planet are turning into police states where people are not expected to have any constitutional rights.

So what is the center-piece of this new war? It is getting rid of the poor to make room for the super rich. Reducing the world population by all possible means. By starving the masses, by spreading diseases, by killing and rendering homeless millions of innocent civilians. Sure, drones and missiles still have an important function to fill. Only the rich so-called elite is going to have any say at all in this paradise for the leaders of the world. The question they don’t seem to pose is: Who is going to buy the products and who is going to make them, other than the Chinese and people in sweatshops in the third world?

Recolonizing Africa still looks like a possibility for Washington, even though they are in for a hard fight with China on that continent. Ruling over the oil rich Middle East and Central Asia still seems like a half-won goal for the U.S generals and politicians. Globalization is going to serve as a magic wand for Washington to extend its rule to countries via the multinational corporations. They can not possibly invade China, nor India, nor Russia, nor Brazil. But they plan on being the bosses in the running of the world corporations and that way they will still come out as the winners. The stealing of the national resources of countries all over the world will be reinforced and turned into the hands of the corporations. But the signature on the document will be Washington’s. They make trade deals with the countries they can’t conquer and the future is theirs.

The Colossus Is Bleeding

However, what is the real future going to be like? What the present rulers don’t take into account is people’s never-ending fight for their own freedom. For self-rule. For their dignity.

People are rising up all over the world. They don’t want to be globalized, to become numbers in a world of increasing profit for the wealthy only. They don’t like to lose their savings because of the zero-producing speculation of a tiny clique of callous gamblers. They don’t like for the government to use their tax money to bail out banks who go bankrupt when their CEOs still get billions of $ in bonuses.

They don’t like money for education and social budgets to be cut short and their children to be faced with up to $100,000 in loans for their college education to pay off after graduation - even though they can’t get decent jobs. They don’t like jobs to be outsourced to low-paying countries and business plants to be closed down in their home town, leaving them jobless. They don’t like to have to pay higher taxes because the rich hide their profits in tax havens, such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands and hundreds of other nations.

One day they are bound to see that Europe, which they call socialist – the horror! – can afford free university education, good health care and decent social services, partly because European countries spend a fraction of the outrageous amounts of the people's money the U.S. spends on its military budgets.

Major Southeast Asian countries have formed their own free trade zone, AFTA – 'ASEAN Free Trade Area'. They simply don’t need the West. And China alone is now the world’s second largest economy, having passed by Japan in 2009. Several Latin American countries are equally leading a life increasingly independent of the U.S. Empire, forming their own free trade zone, MERCOSUR, passing on the profits from their national resources to their own people³.

Is it finally becoming obvious that globalization the way Milton Friedman and the Chicago School boys saw it – shock and awe, conquer and buy – is just not going to work?⁴ The world economy is in a meltdown and the dominoes are falling in Europe after the upcoming bailout of Greece. The effects are spreading to the far corners of the world. More and more countries were already turning their backs on the U.S. - Turkey, Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and others have no use for the former Empire any more. And the Middle East is burning.

Was it maybe an illusion that the planet could be made into one huge corporation with the U.S. as its CEO?

Are the people in all parts of the world going to follow the example of the Greeks and put all business to a standstill unless they are given their rights? Is a people’s revolution finally about to take the stage away from the usurpers?

References

1. See Mike Davis and Planet of Slums A Dickensian world of Victorian poverty is being recreated, but on a scale that would have staggered the Victorians.” Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Green Zones and Slum Cities.
   
   
2. Louisana Workers denounce BP’s oil spill response
   
   
3. For more information on NAFTA and MERCOSUR - see Siv O’Neall: ‘Capitalism Is Dying a Natural Death
   
   
4. ‘Blurred Clarity: Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economic Have Much to Answer For.’

   ---

   Read her Biography and more of articles
   by Siv O'Neall on Axis of Logic.

   Siv O'Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. Her insightful essays are republished and read worldwide. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com.

© Copyright 2010 by AxisofLogic.com

This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article in its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of Logic as the original source including a "live link" to the article. Thank you!

A Third Muslim-World War?

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu would do anything to protect Israel—as long as he doesn't have to believe in peace.

By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Mar 18, 2010
Courtesy Of Newsweek Magazine

Back when Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu was elected Israel's prime minister for the first time, in 1996, a Jordanian political scientist with a grim sense of humor said the only way to describe him was like a villain out of an old Western: "He's a lyin', cheatin', deceitin' son of a bitch!"

The Obama administration, without using quite such colorful language, might be inclined to agree. As Aluf Benn, the respected diplomatic correspondent for Israel's Haaretz newspaper wrote in these columns recently, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel last week, he "had come to offer not just friendship, but support (and protection) against Iran—Israel's greatest bogeyman—in exchange for a few concessions from Netanyahu. Instead, he got a finger in the eye."

The announcement of government-approved plans to build 1,600 new Israeli homes in largely Arab East Jerusalem was a direct challenge to Biden's efforts to move peace talks forward. The Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem as the capital of their state, accuse the Israelis of using such projects to create "facts on the ground" that vastly complicate future negotiations—and, indeed, that is precisely the intent of many Israelis who support the building program.

But the problem as Benn presented it was more complex than that: a combination of brinkmanship and blackmail in which Netanyahu's government makes veiled threats to attack Iran, or not, depending on how much pressure it feels on the Palestinian issue.

U.S. military planners have little doubt that an Israeli air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities would provoke Iranian retaliation against Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers allied with the United States. American efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which border Iran, would come under threat. And there would be no way that any U.S. administration, after so many decades pledging undying support for Israel, could make a convincing claim in Muslim eyes that it was not complicit in the attack.

One of the cardinal rules of realism in international politics—and Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both pride themselves on their realism—is "never allow a weak ally to make decisions for you." Political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau wrote in his classic Politics Among Nationsthat great powers "lose their freedom of action by identifying their own national interests completely with those of a weak ally." And for all its bluster, Israel is, at the end of the day, a tiny country with a population smaller than that of New York City. "Secure in the support of its powerful friend, the weak ally can choose the objectives and methods of its foreign policy to suit itself," Morgenthau warned. "The powerful nation then finds it must support interests not its own and that it is unable to compromise on issues that are vital not to itself, but only to its ally."

Netanyahu wants to make sure that his priorities are America's priorities on many issues. So he and his supporters argue that if they're forced to make concessions that would create an independent, viable, contiguous Palestinian state, Israel would feel so insecure that it would have to attack Iran to protect itself—no matter what the implications for Americans and their men and women in the field.

"On both sides they are talking in terms of life and death," Benn wrote in Haaretz a couple of days ago. "Netanyahu's backers charge [President Barack] Obama with sentencing Israel to death via the Iranian nuclear program and 'Auschwitz borders' from which rockets would be fired [by Palestinians] onto Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion International Airport. For their part, the Americans warn that Israel's desire for settlements is endangering their soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Actually, the American warning is a little more pointed even than that, and it's not just from the politicians in the Obama administration, it's from the military. As reported by Mark Perry at Foreign Policy, back in January a briefing prepared for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff by senior officers at the U.S. Central Command under Gen. David Petraeus reported "a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel," that the leaders of the many Arab governments in CentCom's area of responsibility were "losing faith in American promises," and that "Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region."

Humiliation, weakness, and vulnerability go hand in hand, and Netanyahu seems intent on dishing up all three to the Obama administration lest he himself be made to look like "a sucker," according to Benn.

This sort of attitude isn't new. Netanyahu summed up his core thinking in his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World, when he said it was naive for Israelis to believe that "Arabs loathed war as much as they themselves." He derided Israelis who thought of peace as "a kind of blissful castle in the clouds, a Jewish never-never land in which the Jews will be able finally to find a respite from struggle and strife."

In Bibi's view, the fight will go on and on. "True, continuing struggle does not necessarily mean perpetual war, but it does mean an ongoing national exertion and the possibility of periodic bouts of international confrontation ... You cannot end the struggle for survival without ending life itself." So to protect itself, in Netanyahu's view, Israel has to be aggressive on all fronts, controlling the land, the sea, the sky, and above all the message—never giving an inch. To paraphrase the late Erich Segal, being Bibi means never having to say you're sorry.

So it is difficult, to say the least, to be Netanyahu's friend, and nobody knows that better than the Jordanians, who tried to build a solid peace with Israel during his last term as prime minister in the 1990s. "Today everything is déjà vu," says Randa Habib, author of the forthcoming Hussein and Abdullah: Inside the Jordanian Royal Family.

Jordan had signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 only to see the architect of that accord, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, gunned down by an Israeli terrorist in 1995. When Netanyahu won the elections that followed, Jordan's late King Hussein had hopes he could work with Bibi. Hussein tried to build confidence by receiving the Israeli prime minister in Amman in August 1996, only to have the Israelis begin digging a tunnel under Muslim holy places in Jerusalem a few days later. In February 1997, Hussein invited Netanyahu to Amman again, hoping to improve the atmosphere, but the next day the Israelis announced approval of a whole new Jewish neighborhood, Har Homa, to be built in East Jerusalem. In both cases the timing seemed planned not only to embarrass King Hussein, but to implicate and weaken him.

Finally, King Hussein wrote bluntly to Netanyahu: "You are destroying peace. I have no trust in you." In his response to the king, Netanyahu professed to be "amazed by your personal attack."

A few months later, Israeli agents tried to kill Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who was then in Amman, by spraying an exotic poison in his ear. Unlike the killers of another Hamas official in Dubai in January this year, the ones in Jordan were caught. Hussein demanded the antidote from Netanyahu, as well as the release of another Hamas leader, and did not turn over the captured Mossad agents until he got them. The Canadian government protested the use of its passports by the assassins, another harbinger of the Dubai case. But in the end, like today, nothing happened. "The Israelis will get away with all this; they always get away with it," says Habib.

I am not so sure. Even a dozen years ago, the American public was largely passive about Middle East issues. Congressmen proclaimed undying support for Israel, and their constituents asked few questions. Now, with America involved in two wars in the Muslim world, that's not the case. The 1,000-plus comments on Aluf Benn's NEWSWEEK column make that clear. But the decisive voices may belong to America's generals. Are they ready to have Bibi Netanyahu's vision of war-without-end dictate endless wars for American troops? The answer, almost certainly, is no.

© 2010

Is A Major War A Possibility In 2009?

The Historical Antecedents

By Dr. Frederic F. Clairmont
February 27, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

In these lectures I shall venture to answer some of the queries made regarding the prospects of a major war . The notes to these lectures were scribbled over time in the corner of the living room.

There are two large standing lamps that illuminate the copy book that I am using to scribble these lines. The thin light black pen is gliding effortlessly over the paper. It is one of my inseparable companions. It is Made in China as well as the copy book with squared paper.

One of my Associates raised the question the other night: is there any manufactured products that American capitalism can produce that China cannot produce better and in greater quantities and considerably cheaper?

This is not fanciful speculation. It therefore follows whether American capitalism in its current state of indebtedness, mass impoverishment and financial disintegration will be able to compete internationally. Or put it another way: how and by what means will it pay for its imports, for what it consumes? Will it be able – on present evidence it is not – to shave and ultimately to eliminate its trade deficit by exporting more than it imports? Further, can the dollar be an acceptable medium of payment and exchange given the battering to which it has been unrelentingly subjected for many years? The observation by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Greenback is worth less than used toilet paper is ungracious, but it is shared by many leading spirits in the world of finance capitalism.

In subsequent lectures we shall explore the ramifications of these issues. Suffice it to say that it is a matter of life and death that takes us into the deepest reaches of the conflictual contradictions within world capitalism and the imperialist lethal that I have will give you more than an idea of what is meant when we say that China has become the industrial hub of our planet; as well as an idea of what we mean when we speak of financial imbalances. Of that more later.

The Ramifications

Some of you have evoked the possibility of a world conflict in the course of 2009.. I shan’t say that this prediction is far-fetched; or remote. Doubtless, many of you do not mean a regional conflict as in Ossetia and Gaza . Nor do I exclude the possibility of the US / Israel on Iran . In the making of war, madness can never be excluded. Let us keep in mind that the US caste oligarchy (USCO) and its trillion dollar militarist appendage is at war on several front in areas engulfing tens of thousands of kilometers: It is pursuing a war in Gaza via its surrogate; it is pursuing a war in Iraq; and of course it is escalating its military drive in Afghanistan; it has extended its killing fields to Pakistan. Recall that Pakistan has a frontier of 2,500 kms with Afghanistan .

Such a possibility cannot be ignored. How does one approach the subject? What is the most appropriate method? I am aware that itemizing the potential flashpoints gives us individual dots but the dots are not connected. They remain separate and cannot provide an insight of the detonator. I am sympathetic to your speculation. The historian must select his facts This is a matter of personal choice. But how and to what purpose he selects his facts stems from his principle of selectivity that is a part of a process of abstraction.

His selection and his interpretation of events are thereby conditioned by his ideological and philosophical predilections. His class affiliations. His personal experience. One may itemize a list but itemizing single events do not give us a handle to comprehend these complex phenomena.. The assassination of Kronprinz Franz Josef by a young Serb nationalist was certainly the detonator but it tells us very little without disentangling the complex of nationalist convulsions and economic and dynastic rivalries that shredded the vitals of the world economy. Nor can we ignore the military naval buildup of the German empire that challenged the centuries old supremacy of the Royal Navy. As David Lloyd George - the shrewdest of imperial artisans and a paramount Hatchet man the Great War noted : “if 1914 had not come when it did it would have inevitably come later”. The key words are ‘come later’. What Lloyd George had in mind was that the power politics of finance capitalism and imperialism, and the carnage it irrepressibly incubated, was inherent in the evolution of world capitalism given its ceaseless lunge for territorial and financial spheres of aggrandizement. And its wars were confirmatory.

The Arms Race.

Many of you have emphasized the fact that the USCO is likely to boost expenditures to offset the fall in demand in the private sector thereby raising the level of employment. It is not a new recipe but the thesis has a defect in the present context of international relations. The U S CO is already spending more than twice or three times what the rest of the world is spending on arms. SIPRI in Stockholm that you’ll find on the Internet provides the exact numbers. But I am not momentarily concerned with such numbers.

The USCO and its military lackeys has been at war since 1945 non- stop. And that includes its role in the Chinese Civil War that ended in 1949, in Indochina since 1945, in Korea , in Iraq twice over.etc. Its colonial wars fought exclusively against peoples of colour have driven the US economy into a state of bankruptcy.

At the latest count, it has 250 military bases outside the United States . It is spending more than it earns. It is the world’s biggest mendicant. It is spending other people’s borrowed money. In Iraq alone, according to the figures of Stiglitz, the number is $3.5 trillion and the wars are not yet over. In these wars it has slaughtered millions. It is fighting wars in Iraq , Afghanistan , Pakistan and Israel ’s attack against Gaza , as in Lebanon , was inconceivable without US support. This is a banality. Let me say that the phosphor bombs used in Gaza were made in Virginia . The uranium enriched artillery shells were manufactured in Tennessee . The bombers were F-18’s of American fabrication. Gaza was one more testing ground for its weapons of mass slaughter. That makes four wars. Some are right to stress that wars, preparations of wars, boosts output and employment. What matters here is the nature of the output and its related employment impact. It is unproductive and does not add to productive capacity.

This was certainly the case of Hitler’s Third Reich in which arms outlays provided a booster that eliminated the ranks of the jobless. And of course the jobless could always find jobs in the Wehrmacht subsequently transformed into cannon fodder. This was true of the U K from 1937 onwards. As you recognize the changes wrought by FDR’s New Deal , admirable but illusory in several ways, did not curtail the Great Depression. What did the job was massive public sector war expenditures bankrolled by debt.

Let me repeat that what ended that satanic slump triggered in 29 was the advent of World War 2. Can it therefore be suggested that war and preparations for war offers a ‘final solution’ for achieving full employment? In the case of the US capitalism the answer is unequivocally no. War expenditures - bankrolled by foreign borrowing and ever swelling debt holes – sets the stage for endemic corruption, national indebtedness and bankruptcy and all its innumerable toxic corollaries. The debts of American capitalism - Federal, corporate and household - will never be repaid. They cannot be repaid. With the economy imploding daily USCO does not have the wherewithal to repay its debts. Frankenstein defaults are on the horizon.

One may contend that it raises the revenues of the arms producers. In what sectors is this true? In what individual enterprises does this hold? If you take pains to examine the share prices of all of the big arms producers i.e. Lockheed at the Standard & Poor's and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) you’ll find that their revenues and profits have tumbled as have their share prices .

Given the capital intensity of modern arms output the labour inputs required i.e. employment is sharply reduced. Productivity, (ratio of inputs to outputs) has risen sharply resulting in a cutback in labour requirements with collateral falls in wages. I believe you’ll find that for the most part their balance sheets have been battered although perhaps not as bad as the financial sector .The conclusion appears obvious: stimulus plans, or pumping the prime as it was earlier called, will obviously not do the trick. I return again to the estimates of Stiglitz.

In Iraq alone, it is spending $3.5 trillion. Where is the money coming from? By borrowing. As I said repeatedly in these lectures the world capitalist economy has entered into a deflationary stagnationary phase , or defstag as I’ve called it. The USCO is living off borrowed time and other people’s borrowed money, a parasitical binge that is sustained by 70% of the world’s savings, palpably unsustainable even over the short haul.

Israel and the Middle East .

I suspect that some are correct to surmise that Gaza is too small an area to be considered the likely detonator of a major world conflict. Size, however, is not the only benchmark. Serbia in 1914 was also a very exiguous geo-demographic area. But it provided the detonator and is therefore not the only factor in play; it is the larger forces that are set in motion. Gaza and Israel are segments of a .larger empire writhing in its final apoplexy. The goal of the US/Israeli onslaught is to obliterate Hamas as its onslaught in Lebanon was to eliminate the Hezbollah. They failed miserably. The citizens of the Zio-fascist state applauded the rape of the Gazans. And here we come not to abstract forces but the role of individuals in history. Netanyahu an outright exponent of unrelenting Arab exterminism has succeeded in climbing the greasy pole of a state that itself is riven by ethnic and class divisions. .

His speech in Davos, like that of Olmert , is more than the howlings of a politico bent on the destruction of Arabs, and what his fascist cronies call Hamastan. His utterances, like that of Lieberman, could be translated into reality. Netanyahu/ Lieberman could demolish the entire Middle East and that includes the Hebrew sate. . And by that I mean it could lead to the unmaking of Mr. Obama and , I daresay , to his political destruction given the unquestioned reach of the Zionist lobbies. Mr. Obama is a fragile politician and the untamed capitalist convulsions, nationally and internationally, will shove him into raging cross currents.

We know who the Netanyahu/Lieberman duo is . There is nothing nebulous in their blueprint. “My highest priority” Netanyahu thunders “is Iran ”. Need we say more? Has Obama plumbed the meaning of that statement? There is nothing cryptic about it. The duo’s unrivaled standing in the Zionist lobbies and in the dominant spheres of the USCO the US is high. Hence we cannot ignore the possibility that in their desperation they could trigger a wider war. Such a course could not be confined to the region.

The goal of US imperialism, conflated with that of Israel , is the destruction of Iran , the ally of both Hamas and Hezbollah. This is not speculation. It is stated policy. The Iranian prime minister has pushed his pawns. The game has started. The launching of their satellite into space injects into our calculations new and terrible variables.

Can Israel reconcile itself to coexist with Hamas and an increasingly militant anti-American and anti-Zionist world? The change in tone of the Arab world seen in the unambiguous article of a member of the Saudi Royal family – and a powerful intellect – in The Financial Times - suggest a turning of the tide. The Arab street is a reality. It is angry and getting angrier with each passing day. It is unemployed. It is poverty stricken but Al Jazzera with a 140 million viewers reaches them. A stooge like Mahmoud Abbas is a ghost and his power is eviscerated. He too was in Davos and his speech like that of Karzai was written by his American touts. The Israeli leadership sounded out Bush (whose administration turned them down) for overflying Iraq to bomb Iran ’s nuclear facilities.

It appeared in The New York Times. They were turned down by the Bush cabal not because of humanitarian reasons but because they understood for once the far-reaching consequences. You will also recall H. Clinton current mistress of State Department had the gall to proclaim that she would obliterate Iran during her electoral jousts. It is not the moment to discuss the implications of that projected genocidal act. The position of Bush and Obama on the attack against Iran are identical.

Iran has made it clear that it intends to pursue nuclear enrichment for civilian purposes and Russia will complete this year the building of the nuclear facility at Bukwear. In chess, it is not sufficient to decide what your is but to foresee that of your opponent . Let me proceed to a no less significant flashpoint. The relationship between China and the USA which have scaled new heights of trade tensions despite the mellifluous babbling to the contrary.. Protectionism or call it economic nationalism if you prefer in a multiplicity of guises is omnipresent. And that I shall deal with presently.

China and the US

Before I proceed, however, to examine whether mounting trade and payment tensions could lead to a deadly military confrontation we should remind ourselves of the nature of the trade rivalries and weapons deployed in those economic wars in the thirties. The speech of the Chinese president lambasting the United in Davos , as did Putin, is indicative of the drift of economic war. Davos is the pivot of globalization. It is the cockpit of corporate power, of world leaders and aspiring leaders. Davos underlined the penurious fragility of financial institutions once regarded as the bedrock of the system.

Words as stability and confidence have been wiped out from their slate. The debacle of U B S and of The City and the ongoing tremours in Wall Street , matched by such spectacular swindlers as Madoff and Stanford The anger can no longer be dissimulated nor more than it can be concealed in the mass labour demonstrations in Paris and all French cities and in the neo-colony of Guadeloupe. The tensions are mounting. They go beyond beggar-my-neighbour policies first created by Joan Robinson of Cambridge University in the thirties’.

No where was the nature of these conflicts more clearly delineated than by Sir Percy Bates, chairman of the Cunard Steamship Company (April 1935) at a moment when the Great Depression raged. Its relevance to our times is all too obvious:

“We are going through a war…The arms that are being employed are not battleships, armies, aircraft, but tariffs, quotas and currencies. No international monetary standard is recognized, and every time that a tariff, quota or a currency varies, one is confronted with a manoeuvre, a hostile manoeuvre, a war manoeuvre. The worst of all is the reluctance to admit officially the existence of a state of war.”

Capitalism as the present crisis lumbers on is no longer able clamber out of its defstag pit. A predicament that worsens by the hour. The war for world markets and market shares continues at an undiminished tempo. This is mirrored in the relative economic performance of the United States and China that has become the hub of world manufacturing. The USCO in contrast is caught in the throes of the dis-accumulation of capital and a rapidly wilting industrial base. As in the U K, its once mighty industrial base has been hollowed out. Let us cast a glance at these numbers to grasp their divergences and which highlights the tensions that could lead to war.

8. What the numbers say: These comparative figures are indicative. Recall that China has now shoved aside Germany in world GDP rating tables to become the third world largest country. Preceded by Japan and the USA . With the crumbling of indebted Japanese capitalism hovering at zero growth rates it is set to shovel Japan into the backwaters of history. Let us deal first with some of the major indicators (2008) of the USA and compare them with China :

USA : G D P (0.9%); Trade Balance ( -$833bn); Current Account Balance ( -$697bn); Industrial production ( -7.8%)

CHINA : GDP (9.1%) ; T B ( + $295BN); C A B ($371bn.);)+ I P (5.7%)

These numbers highlight their mounting economic disparities. I must confess at this point that I am not sure that in the near future the abyss will ever be bridged Let us focus simply on the foreign trade sector. U S. imports are growing faster than its exports. The US capitalism is in a downward deflationary spiral that bears similarities with Japan ’s so-called ‘lost decade’ in the 1980s.. True, China ’s growth is adversely affected by the world slump, but it is growing several times faster than the US . Compound growth rates are at once constructive and destructive forces . This is a point you’ll recall that I noted in my discussion of the US balance of payments in my book on Cuba and I would suggest that you consult that section again. The ratio of its imports to its exports is about 1:5

That gap is unbridgeable.. Hence the USCO must borrow to finance its imports. Borrowing is debt. And debt must be repaid at compound interest rates or defaulted.. China recycles its trade surplus by buying US securities and Treasury bonds. This is a familiar story. Whether the Chinese political elite will continue to recycle their foreign exchange earnings to prop up US deficits remains problematical.

American capitalism has been the world’;/s biggest debtor for more than two decades. Its biggest lender is China . The size of the figures are important. China ’s almost $2,000 bn in foreign exchange reserves are the world’s largest. Much of these reserves are being directed to the purchase of U S Treasuries. ` According to the estimates of Brad Selser the real figure is nearer $2,300bn.. or equivalent to $1,600 for every Chinese citizen.

Of this sum about $1,700bn is invested in dollar assets, making China the biggest creditor of American capitalism and the single largest purchaser of US Treasury bonds. It is entirely addicted and dependent on Chinese money. Never in its history has the USCO been so dependent on any foreign creditor. The opposition within the leading echelons of China’s power elite are aware that such massive capital flows going to a stricken economy, that is in the throes of an ever deepening crisis and with low-yielding dollar assets, is perilous. China has already lost billions And this is so given the depreciating dollar stemming from its rising level of indebtedness, low savings, zero interest rates and a GDP that hovers around zero . Without this avalanche of Chinese money the USCO would not be able to pursue its militarist expansion abroad.

But what we can say is that the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency which has conferred extravagant power ( that was the designation of de Gaulle on US imperialism can obviously not endure. Chinese misgivings are present but they have made a pact with the devil and can do little to alter this state of affairs. “Except for US Treasuries what can you hold” asks Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission. “You don’t hold Japanese government bonds or UK bonds. US Treasuries are the safe haven. For everyone, including China , it is the only option”. This in my view is the tragedy of China ’s power elite presiding over a capitalist economy that has shed all pretences of being socialist.

It is deliberate policy choice that reveals its class and ideological alignments. They have already paid a terrible price for such a policy choice of being the savior and supreme benefactor of American capitalism. . With capitalism’s crisis now howling in its agony and the dollar’s continued slide the costs to the Chinese workers and peasants that the Chinese elite have long ceased to represent the losses to China rise to even greater heights. To put it in non-technical jargon the masters of China ’s money box has so much money that it does not know where to invest that money save in wretchedly low yielding US Treasuries.

The battle over exchange rates is fought on the killing fields of foreign exchange markets.

The Big Mac Index

To understand, in my view why there can be no amicable resolution of the Sino-American trade war and rivalry it is well that we should say a few words on the nature of foreign exchange markets. That is where money is bought and sold and is the object of ferocious speculation on international markets. Money we must not forget is the commodity of commodities . It is the King of commodities. The market on which these money transactions are carried out is the Forex market.

In a very illuminating but non-technical language we perceive that the index of The Economist is based on the idea of purchasing power parity (PPP). This says that currencies should trade at a the rate that makes the price of goods the same in all countries. The Big Mac that costs $3.54 cents in the USA becomes the benchmark for evaluating whether another currency is under-valued or over-valued.

In China , the price of the Big Mac is $1.83. Thus it is 40% cheaper. In Switzerland ( we use foreign exchange rates prevailing on a specific date) $5.75 i.e. it is 60% higher. This is the crude test of undervaluation or overvaluation. Hence the conclusion we draw - (and I repeat that this is not only the basis of comparison for measuring foreign exchange disparities but it is certainly the simplest and the most ingenious) is that China’s Renminbi or Yuan is 40% higher than the Greenback which gives supposedly gives it an export trade advantage by the calculus of the US Treasury .The U S government has already imposed tariffs on China, and accuses it of currency manipulation. A charge that we hear with a grain of salt given the fact that US government and all its works has never been a custodian of morality. .

The problem of China ’s competitive advantage goes of course beyond foreign exchange rates . Comparative wage labour rates are no less important. China ’s wage rate in manufacturing is 10% that of the US rate. But we are not only dealing with a disparity in labour costs. Let us add that China ’s industrial productivity has been remarkable .

China as you are aware is present in all world markets and its foreign trade and direct investment has rocketed in the last decade strikingly so in Latin America and Africa, Australia all Asian markets ,not to speak of Russia . A single example clinches what I am saying. The Chinese/Venezuelan economic development fund will now double from $6bn to $12bn in just over a year. The role of the USCO, the European Union and Japan are of peripheral importance in Venezuela . The conquest of world markets and market share is continuing at unstoppable speeds. The leading ten capitalist countries are already in recession. Let there be no ambiguity on this score. The goal of China ’s policy makers and their capitalists is market aggrandizement .

Dynamics of Overproduction .

One of the traits of the current defstag, and I don’t exaggerate when I use that word, means that there are too many goods chasing too few buyers, too much money chasing too few profitable investment outlays, too many workers chasing too few jobs; too many banks chasing too few impoverished savers and depositors. etc. This is true not only of capitalism’s current cyclical slump but applies to all facets of the crisis. The essence of the crisis of capitalism is overproduction. Or over-accumulation.

What is overproduction? What are its properties? At what stage in the cycle of capital-accumulation does it emerge? What is its cyclical duration? What is its role in capitalism’s business cycle? Milton Friedman , one of the major propagandists of free market fundamentalism and a vulgar apologist of capitalism , put this succinctly when he shoved aside the nostrum of social responsibility on the part of the capitalist: “ a company’s only responsibility is to increase profits for shareholders”. Capitalism defines the relationship between a possessing / exploiting class whose incomes are profits, dividends and rents, and an exploited propertyless class whose income is wages.

It defines the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. Hence capitalism’s overriding objective, its alpha and omega, and the masters of capital is not the provision of goods and services to the workers it exploits. That is a surface phenomenon. That is a fetishism. The goal of capital accumulation is to expand and ensure an ever rising mass of profits for a class of propertied owners. The overriding goal is profit and profit maximization. Overproduction is thus not an aberration of the system but inherent in its operation. And this goes back to the beginnings of capitalism’s first Great Depression of 1873, as noted by the Royal Commissioners in their final report. in words that are superbly relevant to the crash of 1929 and our present slump.:

“We think that…over-production has been one of the most prominent features of the course of trade during recent years; and that the depression under which we are now suffering may be partially explained by this fact....The remarkable feature of the present situation, and that which in our opinion distinguishes it from all previous periods of depression, is the length of time during which this over-production has continued …We are satisfied that in recent years, and more particularly in the years during which the depression of trade has prevailed , the production of commodities generally, and the accumulation of capital in this country, have been proceeding at a rate more rapid than the increase of population.”

The insight of these findings underscore not merely the nature , genesis and rationale of the business cycle that we shall explore in subsequent lectures , but its relevance and kinship to other great depressions that have devastated world capitalism such as the Great Depression of 1929 and the current economic depression we are now traversing. What it is important to recall are the consequences of that great depression that lasted , with its rises and falls, until the start of the 1890s.

The Emergence of Monopoly and Its Implications

Capitalism and its class rule is a system driven by competition. This is true at all phases of its growth. The period from 1873 to 1914 that ushered in the great carnage saw the structural changes in capitalism from its competitive to monopolistic phase. Competition kills competition. Or , as Marx would have said, one capitalist kills another capitalist. The Great Depression gave a spur to the concentration and centralization of capital that Marx had analyzed with such trenchancy. It saw the rise of the Trust and the Cartels. The names of Rockefeller, Buchanan – the tobacco king, Krupp, Vanderbilt , Morgan, Carnegie epitomized the face of capital.

These were not simply what President Theodore Roosevelt called ‘the malefactors of Great Wealth’. This was the new phase of monopolistic capitalism stemming from accelerated competition within and between nation states , and the falling rate of profit. More and more competition led to excess capacity and its corollary cut-throat prices, a drop in wholesale and retail prices descriptive of the deflationary stage. This opened the belligerent quest for privileged spheres of investment and foreign trade. Monopolistic capitalism fuelled the drive to imperialism.

The period opened the floodgates to what George Bernard Shaw called ,at the time of the Boer War, the age of The Merchants of Death. You will recall what President Eisenhower in his Farewell address called the Military/Industrial Complex. and what generated an enormous body of literature. The formulas was novel but its substance was not.. The reality of this phenomenon was vigorously present in its concentrated form in the decades leading up to the Great War. Arms manufacturers as Krupp and Siemens and Mercedes Benz in Germany , Vickers-Armstrong and Rolls Royce in the U K , Creusot-Schneider in France and Mitsubishi in Japan symbolized the linkages of the Merchants of Death and State Power. Almost 70% of all the artillery pieces and shells used by the Kaiser’s army, not to speak of the steel that went to the massive build up of the German Navy since 1890, were produced by Krupp. The House of Krupp became enmeshed with the Hohenzollerns through ties of marriage. Such was the muscle of imperialist matrimonial interconnectivity.

Drive to Colonial Expansion

I have explored this process in much greater detail in my work on The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism. During the 1870s and 1880s and after five million square miles of African territory, with populations exceeding 60 millions were grabbed and subjected to European imperial rule. In Asia ,during the same decade, the U K annexed Burma and brought under its control the Malay peninsula and Baluchistan . France began the breakup of China by annexing Annam and Tonkin . The industrial tycoon and parliamentarian, Joseph Chamberlain called for protectionism at home as well as “to create new markets “ abroad. He raised his glass to the simultaneous toast of: “Commerce and Empire, because, gentlemen, the Empire, to parody a celebrated expression is Commerce.” This is the meshing of Big Capital and Big bourgeois politics. The battles of imperialism were leading to conflict and war. Chamberlain again in a speech before the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce in 1896 he noted:

“If we had remained passive …the largest part of the African continent would have remained occupied by our commercial rivals…Through our colonial policy as soon as we acquire and develop a territory, we develop it as the agents of civilization, for the growth of world trade”.

Note the terminology. The rape and pillage of Africa and colonial conquests were rationalized in the name of civilization or ‘la mission civilisatrice ’ and the French called it. For the colonizers and the colonized words have different meanings or as Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) declared: “you can always spit in the face of the colonialists and they’ll call it rain.” Imperialism has pursued its policies using the same labels in the ensuing decades. In our time the US conquest of Afghanistan is labeled ‘Enduring Freedom’.

What we witnessed at the end of the 19th century was the expansion and clash of national capitalisms. This is how it was propounded by Cecil Rhodes, one of the leading architects of British imperialism in Africa :

“I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread’, ‘bread’, and on my way home I pondered over the scene and became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism…My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem ,i.e., in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population, to provide new market for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”

By ‘ solution’ of the civil war he meant the class war between capitalists and workers, the exploiters and the exploited spawning socialist revolutions. Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) incarnated the racist and expansionist thrusts of imperil conquest as well as the inter-dependence of the State and British capitalism. By its very essence imperialism was the quintessence of racialism.

“ We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the slave(sic) labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. I contend that we are the first race in the world , and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race… If there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible.”

Let me add as a footnote that the statement was made in 1896 , the same year that the Durand Line was drawn by the British Raj that demarcated the 2,300 kms frontier of British India [ now Pakistan ] and Afghanistan . Political power and colonial conquest moved in easy concert. Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape colony, and Managing Director of the British South Africa Company. A reportage of The Times noted that there was hardly a single member of Parliament that were not stockholders in his company. Nor is this surprising given the congenial rapport between the political elite and the business elite and the luscious pickings that were available. It was the interconnectivity of one hand scratching another. He had become one of the biggest tycoons of all times, with Chamberlain one of his most powerful political backers. . He was the founder of De Beers ( backed with the funds of Lord Rothschild) which, at its zenith, marketed around 90% of the world’s rough diamonds.

Success depended on ‘law and order’ and on ‘slave labour, ’ as he called it, that marched hand in hand with the mass expropriation of African land A process that had the legal backing of the Glen Grey Act of which understandably he was one of the drafters. Indeed, in the imperial order of things the borderline between slave labour and free labour was always fuzzy, point that Rhodes readily grasped. The expansionist drives of Rhodes and his cronies in the Colonial Office was the major catalyst of the Boer War (1899-1902).

Historical processes cannot be abstracted from the role of the individual in history and its major actors. It’s for this reason that I have singled merely the British Empire and three of its major statesmen: Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) and Lloyd George (1862-1945) in the shaping of British imperialism, one of the most obnoxious and criminal constructs of all times, that incubated, with its other imperial accomplices, the Holocaust that was the Great War.

Suffice it to say that imperialism and all of its projects, designs and expansionists blueprints were inseparable from racial oppression. And indeed many of you will recall the Nazi-like branding of the Chinese people by Lord Curzon (1912) as “a moribund and decadent race”. That coming from a country that imposed the Opium trade on the quasi-colonial Chinese empire. Imperialism was the Godfather of imperialism and you have not forgotten Hitler’s great admiration for British rule in India articulated once again the eve of his war against the Sov iet Union .. “The Soviet Union ”, he declared,. “will become our India ”.

The trio exhibited par excellence the meshing of business, politics and the imperial drive for conquests. Chamberlain’s family was the founder of one of the largest machine tool factories in the U K producing around 75% of the country’s metallic screws. As the master of the Colonial Office, which opened up for him the mightiest of personal El Dorado’s, he used his portfolio to push British business interests into every corner of the planet and that of course embraced his firm’s products. This was the perfect example of the case of State power being dovetailed to interests of individual capitalists.

Chamberlain was an intimate friend and business associate of Rhodes and hence their uninhibited racialism ran on parallel lines conferring an ideological coherence to the British ruling class. This reminds me of a portrait I saw a long time ago in the National Gallery that showed Queen Victoria presenting a bible to a kneeling half-naked African chief. The lashes of imperial rule were supposedly mitigated by the balms of Christianity. As George Bernard Shaw once said, colonialists picked the pockets of the Blacks, gave them a few rags to cover their nakedness, and then sent missionaries to reduce them to Christianity.

“I believe that the British race” Chamberlain boasted, “is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen…It is not enough to occupy great spaces unless you can make the best of them. It is the duty of the landlord to develop his estate.” The inference was all too apparent: since the British Empire was the world’s biggest landlord it required the cheap undifferentiated labour of its colonial subjects to work for the prosperity and profits of the superior race of white masters.

His fanatic pursuit to intensify the exploitation of Africa (and Asia as well) , earned him the sobriquet of Joseph Africanus. The promise of the superior imperial race that the untrammeled rape of the colonial peoples would, - the mechanism of how this was to be achieved was never spelt out – trickle down to British working peoples proved to be one of the supreme hoaxes in the history of British capitalism.

To be sure, the mega-profits gouged from subsistence labour power was ‘mouth-watering’ as many apparatchiks of the Colonial Office boasted, but few were the crumbs that drifted into the bellies of the British workers. Writing in his War Memoirs (Vol.1 1933), at the apex of another great economic collapse, Lloyd George found no need for persiflage glimpsed in his depiction of the phony ‘social peace’ of the Edwardian epoch.

“It was becoming evident to discerning eyes that the Party and the Parliamentary system were unequal to the task of coping with grave issues rapidly becoming graver…The shadow of unemployment was rising ominously above the horizon. Our international rivals were forging ahead at a great rate and jeopardizing our hold on the markets of the world. There was an arrest of that expansion of our trade of an earlier epoch…our working population, crushed into dingy and mean streets with no assurance that they would not be deprived of their daily bread by ill-health or trade fluctuations, were becoming sullen with discontent.”

What is this last sentence other than the unacknowledged lingo of the class war.? Lloyd George was never a radical. Despite his anodyne welfare state reforms( based on the Bismarck Ian model) that even earned him the plaudits of the Kaiser he was wedded, like the vicious anti-labour repressionists of the German ruling class, to the perpetuation of the existing social property order, the arms race and imperialist expansion abroad. He became one of the most virulent proponents of empire matched by his no less vociferous support for the Great War.

Lloyd George, a tireless war monger, not only fanned the flames of war, but was one of the most unbendable advocates (like his close crony Winston Churchill) of military intervention (1918-21) of the Russian revolution. Which true to form he caricatured as ‘the greatest scourge that has ever afflicted humanity’. We are not concerned to examine the sheer stupidity of that utterance but merely to remark that it came from a paramount politico that was one of the leading criminal instigators that engineered the grimmest mass slaughter that humanity had ever witnessed. A remark emanating from a criminal who according to the diary of his wife “who insisted on reserving the right, as David puts it, to bomb niggers.”[1]

In large measure a war against an emergent state that unique among members of the Second International (1889-1916) that opposed the war and whose rallying cry was : Bread and Peace. A ruthless war of intervention (a term coined by the British Foreign Office) that cost millions of lives (in addition to that of Great War) with famines and its horrendous political sequels. The British government, and recall that he was Prime Minister, bankrolled 70% of the cost of this intervention.

His blood gurgling cry: “kill them, ill them now” was symptomatic not merely of the man and his class but of the direction of imperialism.” “I shall always remain an implacable enemy of the Bolsheviks up to the end of my life” A promise kept but which , not surprisingly, finds no mention in his War Memoirs.

The wars for conquest of world markets and their repercussions were stated with terrible clarity by The Saturday Review (1897) premonitory of things to come,. tantamount to a declaration of war. It took economic and political analysis one giant step forward in contrast to the hollowed out constructs of Marshalian economics and the waffling of Fabian thinking:

“Is there a mine to exploit, a railway to build, a native to be converted from breadfruit to tinned meat the German and the Englishman are struggling to be first. A million petty disputes build-up the greater cause of war the world has ever seen. If Germany were extinguished tomorrow, the day after tomorrow there is not an Englishman in the world who would not be richer. Nations have fought for years over a city or a right of succession; must they not fight for two hundred and fifty million pounds sterling of yearly commerce”?

Prophetic it was and indeed just 17 years, and 40 million butchered, were needed to test the validity of this blood-drenched belligerent utterance. Within the land of The Saturday Review , whose cataclysmic outcome was utterly inconceivable, 6 million out of 10 million were conscripted; around 750,000 killed; 1.7 million wounded; 160,000 wives lost their husbands; 300,000 children lost their fathers. On the ideological front The Great War had wiped out the vestiges of laisser-faire and economic liberalism.

The Encroaching Net

The headlong drive that pushed the European powers to imperialist conquests was no less true for the United States and Japan . Imperialism is therefore the ultimate globalization of capital accumulation on a world scale in its moment of crisis and upheaval. Since the Meiji Restoration (1868), indeed in just three decades, Japanese capitalism had surged at a dazzling tempo into a vigorous industrial and world trading nation unrelentingly pursuing overseas expansion and colonial conquests. In Japan , the big trading corporations such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Itoh, Marubeni, Sumitomo and others, collectively known as the Zaibatsus, with their trading arms the Soga Shoshas, were metamorphosed into the leading echelons of Japanese imperialism.

Together with the military (the gumbatsu) they became the spearhead of colonial expansion with the occupation of Formosa that plunged Japan into the orbit of imperialism. In 1895, this was followed by the conquest of Korea and the invasion of southern Manchuria . The stage was set for yet another imperialist war between Czarist Russia and Japan , culminating in Russia ’s crushing defeat in 1905 in the Battle of Tsushima Bay and the grabbing of Sakhalin . We might add in parenthesis that this defeat spawned the Russian Revolution (1905), that shaped subsequent events. Historically significant, as you observe, was the bunching of events. The re-division of colonies, quasi-colonies and spheres of influence were now being settled by wars of ballooning intensity.

A mightier but still embryonic imperial force had now staked its claims to the cornucopia of empire. “This is our Manifest Destiny”, boasted Theodore Roosevelt. “We are now a world power and the glory of our race and nation have not reached the end of our road, and we must push on”. The effete and inglorious Spanish Empire , that had endured for 500 years ,was busted in 1898 – a venture completed in a couple of weeks - with the grabbing of its colonies, notably its crown jewels Cuba and the Philippines. This marked a further phase in the re-division of the world market that brought the approaching Armageddon one step closer.

The Versailles Treaty

The end of the Great War was not the “war to end all wars” as Woodrow Wilson fatuously declared. The yearnings of a return to an imagined normality by laisser faire nostalgics were dashed. It signaled not the end of imperialism but its escalation to yet higher and more destructive phases with Fascism its most racialist and politico-economic format. After Versailles (1919) the world map was given the chop.. The Habsburgs, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottomans were bulldozed into the ditch of history. Germany was now a vanquished nation stripped of Alsace Lorraine and its colonies. Of crucial militaro/industrial strategic importance , however, was that the unreconstructed bureaucracy, its financial and militarist establishment and the powerful national bourgeoisie - the central components of class rule – were still intact.

A revolutionary Russia , whose leadership had resolutely opposed the war turned the war into a battering ram for an assault on the Tsarist autocracy. In so doing, it severed its links with imperialism and the national chauvinism of social democracy and oriented its thrust to the building of a socialist order , and the obliteration of the colonial/capitalist/ imperialist survivals. Clemenceau encapsulated the tragic moment of truth when he lugubriously confessed: “We have won the war but we are broke.” The older surviving colonial empires , France and the U K, were bled white thrashing on the brink of financial bankruptcy. Their foreign exchange and gold reserves were deployed to pay for the war. In addition they were now confronted with rising labour agitation on the domestic front , and sustained mass rebellions in India and Indochina , their two greatest colonial crown jewels.

Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes .

Lloyd George may not have said that “we shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak” but what he did say was similar to what ‘Tiger’ Clemenceau was thinking: “We must have the uttermost farthing, and we shall search their pockets for it.” The question of reparations to be gouged from Weimar Germany was one of the burning issues of international relations and imperialist bickering. It was here that John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) acquired international celebrity by his opposition to the provisions of the Treaty in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) that focused on the implications of reparations.

I shall deal at this point with one of the most effective counterblasts to J M Ks pamphlet that came from an American academic whose very short book review appeared in an obscure American publication in 1920. In but three pages Thorstein Veblen ( (1857-1929) hammered home the point that J M K (who participated at the Paris Conference as a member of the British delegation) had sedulously avoided the central issue of the Treaty.

Before I proceed, however, let me add that Veblen was an acute theorist and observer of American capitalism during the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons ( (1890-1914). At no point however was he an active adversary of the. system. He never believed that an alternative project in class and property relations was feasible. In that sense, he was never a radical. Nor did he condemn the rapacities of the American empire notably those committed by such colonial-predator politicos as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the Americas . Nor did he support the struggle for the emancipation of the American negro as the militant young scholar Du Bois was doing.

Nor for that matter did he publicly manifest any sympathies for the American socialist movement under the leadership of Eugene Debs. He was a rebel to be sure. What I have said is not to demean his stature as a thinker and his contribution to American letters and economics. The Great War, as with many others,pushed him into a sharper and more questioning mode of thought, and the same was true of Keynes. It was a catalyst that occurred in the autumn of his life. In that review published in The Political Science Quarterly (1920), a year after the publication of J M Ks pamphlet, he luminously saw what was the reality that the Treaty had concealed that Keynes had ignored. It was an inspired piece of criticism drafted at a moment when the corrupt and war enriched USCO had plunged into the apoplexy of anti-progressive and anti-Bolshevik hysteria.

In his impressionistic overview The Treaty (which he always capitalized) was the antithesis of democracy and nothing more than a screen of ‘diplomatic verbiage’ It brings to mind Jacques Attali’s description of the Davos World Economic Forum as ‘le bavardage’. Behind the ‘verbiage’ however was the unseen butcher’s knife of the imperialist victors. It was the screen alright in what Veblen called sarcastically ‘the Elder Statesmen of the Great Powers’ who, in his view, continued “their pursuit of political chicanery and imperialist aggrandizement”. In so doing, Veblen brought imperialism’s reality into the epicenter of international relations.

The onus of Keynes’s criticism was The Treaty’s adverse contractionary impact on Germany ’s output, employment and consumers’ effective demand. This in Veblen view was the shadow and not the substance. It ignored the far wider geo-strategic and political and ideological consequences that were in play. By the spring of 1919, when The Treaty negotiations had struck their grand climacteric, the War of Intervention to destroy the Russian revolution was also at its highest pitch. The Bolsheviks were battling the armies of 21 nations in addition to the white forces led by Generals Kolchak (1874-1920), Wrangel (1878-1928). Kornilov (1870-1918), Denikin (1872-1947).

Veblen made the incisive point that revealed the cutting-edge of his reasoning. “But for all their vulpine secrecy, the temper and purpose of that hidden conclave of political hucksters were already becoming evident to outsiders a year ago…The Treaty is therefore designed to indicate that the most binding provision of The Treaty ( and of The League) is an unrecorded clause by the governments of the great powers that are banded together for the suppression of Soviet Russia…” Note his stylistic mutation. No longer are they referred to deferentially as The Elder Statesmen but as a bunch of hucksters.

Such a forthright analysis required a great deal of moral fortitude at a time when more than nine-tenths of American academics were quivering in their cloisters , hunkered down under the whip lash of a brutal police state in everything but name. Veblen was one of the very rare voices, another was Lincoln Steffens, who saw the onslaughts against the emergent socialist country as one of the greatest mistakes and injustices of all times. Central to his critique was that Keynes was blinkered in failing to perceive that the Conclave’s goal was the destruction of Bolshevism that shaped the design of The Treaty. Anti-Bolshevism and the preservation of the status quo ante was the cementing force that united Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Orlando, the Italian, had been shunted off to the sidelines with Lloyd George derisively depicting him as “as a morsel of mouldy spaghetti.”.

In demolishing the constructs of Keynes , a life long anti-Soviet and anti-communist, Veblen did not fail to draw the inference that the Bolshevik/ imperialist confrontation had now become a war to the death. It therefore followed, then, “that Bolshevism is a menace to absentee ownership. At the same time, the present economic and social order rests on absentee ownership.” Absentee ownership was nothing more than a euphemism to describe the capitalist mode of production, distribution and exchange. He also saw that Keynes had deliberately omitted the central role assigned to a resurgent Germany as the battering ram of the counter-revolution.

Veblen was of course wrong in stating that ‘the hucksters’ were waging a surreptitious war against a resurgent Russia . By the end of 1917, it was a covert war deploying vast armies. The Whites were even contemptuously labeled by Lloyd George, Churchill, the Foreign office as ‘our mercenaries’. Bolshevism and the revolutionary labour movements that surfaced during the Second International (1889-1916) were not historic aberrations. They were the outgrowths of capitalism’s convulsions and crises.

Veblen was surely not oblivious that Rosa Luxembourg (1871-1919) and Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919), the two legendary German social democrats were hostile to the war for which they paid the ultimate price. They were arrested and murdered by right wing militarists of the Reichswehr. As was the German social democratic leader Leo Jogiches (1867-1919). The year 1919 is a pivotal year in the history of social democracy, The Treaty and imperialism.

It was the end of an ignoble chapter in the history of social democracy battered in a sea of social chauvinism and opportunism. And the opening chapter of Fascism as the savior of Big Capital and the established order. Soviet Russia, soon to be re-baptized the Soviet Union, and Germany had now become the pivotal actors in the historic drama now unfolding : the former casting its revolutionary reach across the planet; the latter the chosen bulwark of counter-revolution.

In Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, what Veblen’s ‘hucksters’ of Versailles were seeking had made its appearance as a benediction. In 1932, the Fuhrer addressing his S S Praetorian Guard roared that “the streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. The Soviet Union is threatening us with her might and the republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order.”[2] This was Veblen’s vision but he did not live to see its purgatorial crystallization.

Frederic F. Clairmont is a prominent Canadian academic and researcher who for many years was a permanent senior economics affairs officer at the United Nations Economics Commission for Africa and the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He taught at the University of Kings College and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His classic work is The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism and his latest book is: Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of Imperialism published by Citizens International in Penang, Malaysia. He is a a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique and The Economic and Political Weekly.

Frederic F. Clairmont is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Frederic F. Clairmont