TBR News May 9, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. May 9, 2016: “A constant subject for the high-level intelligence people inside the Beltway is the progress of what is called ‘The Plan.’
This is a long-term program, formulated and implemented, by the far-right element in the government and eagerly supported by the so-called neo-cons.
The purpose of this program is to destabilize Russia, force Putin and his supporters out of office and replace them, as was done during the reign of the CIA-friendly Yeltsin, with persons friendly to the United States aims and, specially, friendly to US business interests.
Russia is in possession of a very large reservoir of natural resources from oil to gold and American interests very nearly had their controlling hands on all of this during the Yeltsin years but lost it when Putin got in control.
They hate his intractable nationalism and have done, and are doing, everything they can to discredit, defeat and eventually oust him.
A major part of The Plan has been to get physical control of countries surrounding Russia from the Baltic states to the ‘Stans and to ring Russia with American-oriented and friendly countries.
Putin, aware of this because of the obviousness of the plottings and also because of very high-level information leaks from Washington, responded and with deadly effect. Georgia was run by a domestic politician who was eccentric, egotistical but in the pocket of Washington, and who allowed American troops and their military equipment to pour into the country.
But two Georgian provinces, inhabited mostly by Russians, objected to the blatantly pro-West government in Tiblisi and protested.
Georgia’s answer was to threaten force and, with full American support, to mass Georgian troops on the borders of these provinces.
Putin responded by sending a Russian military strike force into the area in support of the break-away areas and this caused a two-fold retreat on the part of American supporters. The military units rapidly evacuated west to the Black Sea and US Naval evacuation while an army of CIA personnel fled in terror to the airport at Tiblisi to avoid capture. This demarche disillusioned a number of eastern European countries who then toned down their anti-Russian rhetoric and made pacific moves towards the Kremlin.
A very high-level Polish government contingent flying into Smolensk to confer with the Russians were destroyed when their aircraft, responding to faked ground signals at the fog-shrouded Smolensk airport, slammed into the ground, wiping out the top level Poles. The Russians did not destroy the Poles but American intelligence operatives did.
This pointless slaughter was designed to teach wavering cantonists a lesson.
And the so-called “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine was entirely a CIA operation.
The government in that country was replaced with a pro-Western one and the Ukraine was then viewed in Washington as another country to stock with threatening American missiles and troops.
When the Ukrainians tired of the corruption that inevitably is attendant upon a pro-West government and eventually elected a pro-Russian president, the CIA predictably responded by fomenting civil strife in Kiev and when that appeared to be waning, had their surrogates start shooting at random into the crowd to stir up public anger.
Putin’s response was to occupy the Russian-populated Crimea, hold an election that overwhelmingly supported union with Russia and gained the important naval base at Sebastopol that the Ukraine had promised to the US Navy and, more important, the Crimean off-shore oil fields and a coastline that permitted an easier installation of the South Stream oil transmission line from Russian oil fields to southern Europe.
The fury of the balked intelligence and governmental organs in Washington has been monumental and because a restive Europe is presenting a disunited front in the dictated attacks on Russia, more pressure is being planned to further threaten and pressure Putin.
The oil-rich Arctic is a prime future battlefield selected by Washington to engage the Russians, but the latter hold most of the geo-political cards.
And attempts to economically isolate Russia can easily backfire and create economic chaos with America’s economic powers.
The Russians hold 118 billion dollars worth of US Treasury certificate and their tenative allies, the Chinese, hold one trillion dollars of the same certificates. Should these countries, against whom the United States has been conducting clandestine political warfare, ever decide to jointly dump these financial instruments, the collapse of the dollar as the leading international currency would create an economic crisis that could easily prove fatal to Washington.
When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.”
The Müller Washington Journals 1948-1951
At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office, also known as the Gestapo.
His name was Heinrich Müller.
Even as a young man, Heini Müller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.
This work is a translation of his complete journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.
When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland, James Kronthal in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.
Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.
The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.
. Wednesday, 23 February 1949
Some public talk about German nerve gasses which the papers here call “death sprays.” This is either Tabun, Sarin or Soman, who knows? An American officer now claims that the U.S. found over a hundred tons of it in a cave somewhere and it was destroyed.
What should have been said was that the gasses were sealed in artillery rounds and were dumped into the Baltic. Such stupid people! The shell casings will eventually rust through and that will be the end of everyone in the Baltic states. Since Comrade Josef has either slaughtered most of the Balts, deported the others to Siberia and left only the pro-communists in place, it will be no great loss. As I told Director Hoover, a good communist is a dead communist. He responded that in America they say that a good nigger is a dead nigger. I have heard the same thing about Red Indians and Germans. The CIA has been running fast boats into the Baltic, landing agents there. Much anti-Russian partisan activity there as well as in the Ukraine. Should make Wisner happy. It certainly improves my day when I read the very secret reports about all this. Imagine that here I am, living in great comfort in the very center of power of my late enemies, reading, with permission, some of their most closely guarded secrets! Who would have thought it in April of 1945 with Berlin in ruins and the entire country virtually dead?
Anna Strong, a writer who worships Stalin and his system, is being kicked out of Russia. No one knows the reasons for this but she must have made the Red God mad. Surprising he didn’t have someone stick a pickaxe in her thick head. Now she will come here and perhaps we can get an investigation going although she is supposed to be senile and no one wants to bother.
We had the same problem, albeit with different factors, in the business of Gerstein. There was a man that was totally mad, running around talking about gassing tens of thousands of Jews a day and Hitler watching in glee. Himmler wanted him killed but we decided to put him into a lunatic asylum where he belonged. Now we read books by feeble-minded pseudo-historians who have gotten their hands on a great mass of completely faked papers by G. and write about him as if he were a “great Christian hero” of some vast, mysterious and non-existent resistance. I wonder what happened to the stories about the factories making tons of hand soap out of dead Jews? Or the lampshade business? I suppose wars open up the sewers which underlie so much of humanity and the apes rule for a few months. I believe the Strong woman should have a heart attack. Of course here, they shove them out of windows that shows a lack of professional finesse, not to mention a greater lack of concern for those down below.
Saturday, 5 March 1949
Yesterday I was advised that a major arrest would be made involving a member of the Justice Department and a Soviet diplomat. Today it has happened. One Miss Coplon of the Justice Department and a V.A. Gubitchev were bagged by the FBI in New York. The woman, who was having an affair with the Russian, had compromising documents on her at the time of the arrest. Also, yesterday, (Judge) Medina ruled that the case against eleven major communists could proceed. I have met Medina twice now and aside from looking like a French waiter, he is a man of great patience who is determined not to let the attorneys from the other side wear him down. The communists’ lawyers claim that the juries are filled with pro-government witnesses and that Negroes and Jews are being excluded from these juries along with women, other communists, child molesters, the criminally insane, prostitutes and monkeys from the zoo. I believe the attorneys feel that juries made up of these assholes would certainly be in complete sympathy with their accused friends and would let them go free.
Sunday, 6 March 1949
Very lengthy conversation today with Arthur about some of my new superiors. Interesting material although I already knew a good deal of it from the earlier days.
A warning for me not under any circumstances to acknowledge possession of any material in my papers that could be anti-British, nor should I ever make any kind of anti-British remarks to the OSS Dulles, Wisner or Angleton. The other Dulles I am not to worry about at this point…yet. Why? I find that all of these men are in the pay of the British intelligence and that they will give the British anything that might be of use to them, no matter how damaging it might be to this country. Germany no longer counts as far as the British are concerned, and they now concentrate their fishing in troubled waters in Washington, not Berlin. Of course they want their empire back again and they want this country to get it for them. That will never happen. T. said that Roosevelt was anti-colonial and that he, too, had no intentions of helping Britannia rule anything but a pond for geese.
The Dulles brothers have been Anglophiles since they were children. Their uncle was Lansing, once a Secretary of State under Wilson. We knew him as the man whom Whitehall paid to push America into the war on their side. The nephews were influenced by their uncle and apparently have no problem with taking bribes. Here, being pro-British is a mark of refinement and one finds all kinds of British supporters in what passes for the American aristocracy. They used to take speech lessons so they could talk like an Englishman! I heard Dulles, speaking of Ambassador Kennedy whom he has been alleging was a German agent (because the British hated him), that “all Irish were nothing but a pack of damned bog-trotters.” I had to have this explained to me and Arthur, who is Irish in ancestry, thought it was funny! The Irish have quite a sense of humor. Especially in view of the reign of terror the British turned loose there after the 1916 business.
It is doubtful if England will ever instigate another major war and get the Americans to pull their coals from the fire one more time but the real danger here is the Soviet connection. We knew in Germany long ago, and knew very well, that Stalin had many very important agents in England, many in the intelligence area. I am sure that most of them are still in place now. Hoover also thinks so and like me, he simply does not trust any of them.
Anything that might reflect badly on the British, and there is so much, from assassinations to the instigation of wars of extermination, cannot be given to their American foils at all. If I expressed my own views on the British, it would ruin any chances I might have for both the safety of myself and the success of my work.
There is then a problem. Of course not to let these men find out anything but at the same time, should not the President be warned about the treachery of his people? I know from what he and others have said, that T. does not trust either the CIA or the British. Hoover does not and neither do a number of my colleagues. Of course many of them are not of the social level to be pro-British.
The British detest the Jews and the Irish and the Roosevelt administration was full of both and most are still in place. The British government is also filled with an army of ideological communists and, given their detestation and envy of the United States, are very serious menaces to our security in America.
If we are to root out and dispose of the Soviet agents and helpers here, as T. has stated very firmly he wants, the British must not get wind of this program or the information would go straight to Moscow and all of our work would be undone in a minute.
Comrade Josef would at once retrieve all of his pet rats and just put more in place and we would be right back at the beginning. A very sensitive area and one that calls for the greatest caution. I have done this before. When I began with the Gestapo, my worst enemies were our pro-Soviet people in the Foreign Office and the Army.
Just as well we cleaned that shithouse out but it took a bomb under Hitler’s legs to really finish the job. A few may have survived but we got more than our share. Down in Bern, Dulles had a whole stable full of them working for him. Such a stupid, self-righteous asshole after all! I am quickly getting the same attitude towards my American pseudo-aristos as I did towards our von und zu Scheisshaufens. (Piles of shit, ed.) At least the German nobility can trace its ancestry back to something more significant than bigoted religious fanatics who burned their neighbors alive and London’s deported criminals. Not to say much, but a difference.
Monday, 7 March 1949
To Mass early because I missed it yesterday and in the afternoon, discussions about a forthcoming piece of legislation about communists. It is necessary to have this in place before arrests and prosecutions can begin. Irmgard has managed to make friends with Maxl and sometimes can be persuaded to take him for walks when I am very busy. I prefer to take him myself but time does not often permit this. I. seems to be working out very well, especially when I enlightened her as to why the other one departed. My food bill is less now and at present, all seems to be harmonious. Very nice drawings coming up for auction in New York soon and as I have to go up there again for the hearings, I might look in on the bidding. It is not a question of money at this point but actually one of space. This is a large house but there are just so many square feet of wall space and the tapestries have taken up more than I would have wanted.
Tuesday, 8 March 1949
Nixon introduced the legislation I spoke about today. It will be a great setback for the communists here and is sure to stir up an outcry. Nixon said that the Coplon case, especially as it involved a Soviet government agent, is enough to keep the Roosevelt people quiet. Always strike while the iron is hot as Arthur has said, time and time again. He should really find other interesting folk sayings. Once is enough. I suggested the death penalty for those taken in espionage but am told that there is such a penalty but it is seldom enforced. A few examples would do wonders for the rest.
The legislation Müller mentions consisted of two bills presented to Congress, using the case of Judith Coplon, a Justice Department employee who gave secrets to one Valentin Gubitchev, a Soviet agent. The bills were introduced by Republican Congressman Richard Nixon of California and Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota and another, nearly identical one introduced by Senator Homer Ferguson, Republican from Michigan. These bills required all communists and their front organizations to register with the U.S. government with severe penalties for failure to do so. There was a stipulated fine of $10,000 and 10 years in prison for violators. Also, all of their propaganda had to be clearly listed as communist in nature. Other punishments were the denial of passports to communists and a prohibition against their holding any U.S. civil service job. This sort of legislation could never have been contemplated during the Roosevelt era, and only after the accession of Harry Truman could such legislation have been introduced in either house.
Nearly half of Europeans in poll want own votes on EU, like UK
May 8, 2016
by William Schomberg
Reuters
Nearly half of voters in eight big European Union countries want to be able to vote on whether to remain members of the bloc, just as Britons will in a referendum next month, according to an opinion poll published on Monday.
Forty-five percent of more than 6,000 people surveyed in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden said they wanted their own vote, and a third would opt to leave the EU if given the chance, poll firm Ipsos-MORI said.
The size of the potential “Out” vote ranges from as high as 48 and 41 percent in Italy and France respectively to as low as 22 and 26 percent in Poland and Spain, the firm said.
“The Italians in particular hope to have their own opportunity to go to the polls on their EU membership, which lends a sense that even if the (British) vote does … stick with the status quo in June, it will not be the end of the EU’s woes,” said Bobby Duffy, head of social research at Ipsos-MORI.
Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement has grown into the country’s second-biggest political force, and wants an exit from the euro currency zone. France’s hard-right National Front party also wants to drop the single currency.
The Ipsos-MORI online poll found that 49 percent of people in the eight countries thought Britain would vote to leave the EU on June 23, higher than the number in Britain itself, which stood at 35 percent, the survey showed.
And 51 percent said a so-called Brexit would hurt the EU’s economy, while only 36 percent thought it would hurt Britain’s.
British “Out” campaigners have said the country would be in a strong position in any negotiations on a new trade deal after leaving the bloc, given its standing as the world’s fifth-biggest economy.
The “Out” campaign has also warned that the EU is destined for deeper political union, but the Ipsos-MORI poll showed few voters in Europe think that is likely.
Just over 20 percent of respondents in all nine EU countries covered by the survey, including Britain, thought there would be more integration by 2020 compared with 40 percent who thought there would be less.
Forty-eight percent of voters thought a Brexit vote next month would result in other countries also leaving the bloc, compared with 18 percent who disagreed.
The poll was conducted between March 25 and April 8.
(Writing by William Schomberg; editing by Andrew Roche)
Hitler statue fetches $17.2 million at auction
A statue of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan has been sold for a record 15.1 million euros at a New York auction. The wax and resin piece had been expected fetch a fraction of that.
May 9, 2016
DW
The highly anticipated art auction season opened Sunday with a specially curated sale where a sculpture of a kneeling Hitler by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan fetched a record price for the artist.
Entitled simply “Him” the controversial sculpture of Hitler, appears as a small child kneeling in prayer when approached from the rear. But from the front, the viewer comes face-to-face with the unmistakable likeness of the 20th century dictator.
“Hitler is pure fear. It’s an image of terrible pain. It even hurts to pronounce his name. And yet that name has conquered my memory. It lives in my head, even if it remains taboo,”Cattelan said. “I wanted to destroy it myself. I changed my mind a thousand times, every day.”
‘Extremely disconcerting’
Catellan “defied the taboos of representation by disguising evil incarnate under a cloak of innocence,” curator Loic Gouzer, a deputy chairman of Christie’s auction house in New York, said.
The piece that sold is the artist’s proof from an edition of three and was included in the artist’s retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2011.
The previous record for a work by the 55-year-old Cattelan was $7.9 million
Some 1,500 pieces of art are to set to be auctioned over five days and are expected to fetch more than a billion dollars.
American Power Under Challenge
Masters of Mankind (Part 1)
by Noam Chomsky
TomDispatch
[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books). Part 2 will be posted on Tuesday morning.]
When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.
States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people” — a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world.
In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate.
The Second Superpower
The neoliberal programs of the past generation have concentrated wealth and power in far fewer hands while undermining functioning democracy, but they have aroused opposition as well, most prominently in Latin America but also in the centers of global power. The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the post-World War II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors). Democracy has been undermined as decision making shifted to the Brussels bureaucracy, with the northern banks casting their shadow over their proceedings.
Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova attributes the general disenchantment to “a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders [who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations,” quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the world.
The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of “spectators” (rather than “participants”) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”
In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from “the American insurgency” to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that General Washington “was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution.” Indeed, he “might have actually done so” had France not massively intervened and “saved the Revolution,” which until then had been won by guerrillas — whom we would now call “terrorists” — while Washington’s British-style army “was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”
A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the “dirty and nasty people” who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for “the lower class of these people” has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s.
Sometimes states do choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in centers of power. One dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush administration called on Turkey to join its invasion of Iraq. Ninety-five percent of Turks opposed that course of action and, to the amazement and horror of Washington, the Turkish government adhered to their views. Turkey was bitterly condemned for this departure from responsible behavior. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, designated by the press as the “idealist-in-chief” of the administration, berated the Turkish military for permitting the malfeasance of the government and demanded an apology. Unperturbed by these and innumerable other illustrations of our fabled “yearning for democracy,” respectable commentary continued to laud President George W. Bush for his dedication to “democracy promotion,” or sometimes criticized him for his naïveté in thinking that an outside power could impose its democratic yearnings on others.
The Turkish public was not alone. Global opposition to U.S.-UK aggression was overwhelming. Support for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10% almost anywhere, according to international polls. Opposition sparked huge worldwide protests, in the United States as well, probably the first time in history that imperial aggression was strongly protested even before it was officially launched. On the front page of the New York Times, journalist Patrick Tyler reported that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”
Unprecedented protest in the United States was a manifestation of the opposition to aggression that began decades earlier in the condemnation of the U.S. wars in Indochina, reaching a scale that was substantial and influential, even if far too late. By 1967, when the antiwar movement was becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall warned that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction… [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.”
But the antiwar movement did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor could it be ignored when Ronald Reagan came into office determined to launch an assault on Central America. His administration mimicked closely the steps John F. Kennedy had taken 20 years earlier in launching the war against South Vietnam, but had to back off because of the kind of vigorous public protest that had been lacking in the early 1960s. The assault was awful enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where “the second superpower” imposed its impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse.
It is often argued that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of Iraq had no effect. That seems incorrect to me. Again, the invasion was horrifying enough, and its aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it could have been far worse. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of Bush’s top officials could never even contemplate the sort of measures that President Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely without protest.
Western Power Under Pressure
There is far more to say, of course, about the factors in determining state policy that are put to the side when we adopt the standard convention that states are the actors in international affairs. But with such nontrivial caveats as these, let us nevertheless adopt the convention, at least as a first approximation to reality. Then the question of who rules the world leads at once to such concerns as China’s rise to power and its challenge to the United States and “world order,” the new cold war simmering in eastern Europe, the Global War on Terror, American hegemony and American decline, and a range of similar considerations.
The challenges faced by Western power at the outset of 2016 are usefully summarized within the conventional framework by Gideon Rachman, chief foreign-affairs columnist for the London Financial Times. He begins by reviewing the Western picture of world order: “Ever since the end of the Cold War, the overwhelming power of the U.S. military has been the central fact of international politics.” This is particularly crucial in three regions: East Asia, where “the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an ‘American lake’”; Europe, where NATO — meaning the United States, which “accounts for a staggering three-quarters of NATO’s military spending” — “guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states”; and the Middle East, where giant U.S. naval and air bases “exist to reassure friends and to intimidate rivals.”
The problem of world order today, Rachman continues, is that “these security orders are now under challenge in all three regions” because of Russian intervention in Ukraine and Syria, and because of China turning its nearby seas from an American lake to “clearly contested water.” The fundamental question of international relations, then, is whether the United States should “accept that other major powers should have some kind of zone of influence in their neighborhoods.” Rachman thinks it should, for reasons of “diffusion of economic power around the world — combined with simple common sense.”
There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically important ones.
The Challenges Today: East Asia
Beginning with the “American lake,” some eyebrows might be raised over the report in mid-December 2015 that “an American B-52 bomber on a routine mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials said, exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing.” Those familiar with the grim record of the 70 years of the nuclear weapons era will be all too aware that this is the kind of incident that has often come perilously close to igniting terminal nuclear war. One need not be a supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake.” Luckily for the world.
Chinese leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits and beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves toward integration. In part, these developments are within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the Central Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as one of the observers — a status that was denied to the United States, which was also called on to close all military bases in the region. China is constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions. It is pouring huge sums into creating an integrated Asian energy and commercial system, with extensive high-speed rail lines and pipelines.
One element of the program is a highway through some of the world’s tallest mountains to the new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which will protect oil shipments from potential U.S. interference. The program may also, China and Pakistan hope, spur industrial development in Pakistan, which the United States has not undertaken despite massive military aid, and might also provide an incentive for Pakistan to clamp down on domestic terrorism, a serious issue for China in western Xinjiang Province. Gwadar will be part of China’s “string of pearls,” bases being constructed in the Indian Ocean for commercial purposes but potentially also for military use, with the expectation that China might someday be able to project power as far as the Persian Gulf for the first time in the modern era.
All of these moves remain immune to Washington’s overwhelming military power, short of annihilation by nuclear war, which would destroy the United States as well.
In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated in the opening in Beijing in June, including U.S. allies Australia, Britain, and others which joined in defiance of Washington’s wishes. The United States and Japan were absent. Some analysts believe that the new bank might turn out to be a competitor to the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank), in which the United States holds veto power. There are also some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a counterpart to NATO.
The Challenges Today: Eastern Europe
Turning to the second region, Eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes — all too plausibly — that the “Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to stop NATO enlargement’; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not clear whether humanity would survive a third.”
The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO enlargement is a “tragic mistake,” and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions.”
The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting visions of a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwa’s words, one vision was of a “‘Wider Europe,’ with the EU at its heart but increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of ‘Greater Europe,’ a vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued the continent.”
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives. However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the 1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly “called for the geopolitical unification of all of ‘Greater Europe’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to create a genuine ‘strategic partnership.’”
These initiatives were “greeted with polite contempt,” Sakwa writes, regarded as “little more than a cover for the establishment of a ‘Greater Russia’ by stealth” and an effort to “drive a wedge” between North America and Western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier Cold War fears that Europe might become a “third force” independent of both the great and minor superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and other initiatives).
The Western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as signaling “the end of history,” the final victory of Western capitalist democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a NATO member — a remarkable concession, in the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility that NATO might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even if privately considered.
Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” sharply different from the official U.N. version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S. command.
Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO. The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized U.S. support for Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report revealed.
Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S. establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.”
“Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it.” That should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, “The United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”
In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo — as happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme prejudice,” to adopt CIA lingo.
As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as far — literally — as questions of survival.
The Challenges Today: The Islamic World
Let us turn to the third region of major concern, the (largely) Islamic world, also the scene of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that George W. Bush declared in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attack. To be more accurate, re-declared. The GWOT was declared by the Reagan administration when it took office, with fevered rhetoric about a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself” (as Reagan put it) and a “return to barbarism in the modern age” (the words of George Shultz, his secretary of state). The original GWOT has been quietly removed from history. It very quickly turned into a murderous and destructive terrorist war afflicting Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East, with grim repercussions to the present, even leading to condemnation of the United States by the World Court (which Washington dismissed). In any event, it is not the right story for history, so it is gone.
The success of the Bush-Obama version of GWOT can readily be evaluated on direct inspection. When the war was declared, the terrorist targets were confined to a small corner of tribal Afghanistan. They were protected by Afghans, who mostly disliked or despised them, under the tribal code of hospitality — which baffled Americans when poor peasants refused “to turn over Osama bin Laden for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25 million.”
There are good reasons to believe that a well-constructed police action, or even serious diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, might have placed those suspected of the 9/11 crimes in American hands for trial and sentencing. But such options were off the table. Instead, the reflexive choice was large-scale violence — not with the goal of overthrowing the Taliban (that came later) but to make clear U.S. contempt for tentative Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden. How serious these offers were we do not know, since the possibility of exploring them was never entertained. Or perhaps the United States was just intent on “trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.”
That was the judgment of the highly respected anti-Taliban leader Abdul Haq, one of the many oppositionists who condemned the American bombing campaign launched in October 2001 as “a big setback” for their efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, a goal they considered within their reach. His judgment is confirmed by Richard A. Clarke, who was chairman of the Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House under President George W. Bush when the plans to attack Afghanistan were made. As Clarke describes the meeting, when informed that the attack would violate international law, “the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'” The attack was also bitterly opposed by the major aid organizations working in Afghanistan, who warned that millions were on the verge of starvation and that the consequences might be horrendous.
The consequences for poor Afghanistan years later need hardly be reviewed.
The next target of the sledgehammer was Iraq. The U.S.-UK invasion, utterly without credible pretext, is the major crime of the twenty-first century. The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American and British sanctions that were regarded as “genocidal” by the two distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned in protest for this reason. The invasion also generated millions of refugees, largely destroyed the country, and instigated a sectarian conflict that is now tearing apart Iraq and the entire region. It is an astonishing fact about our intellectual and moral culture that in informed and enlightened circles it can be called, blandly, “the liberation of Iraq.”
Pentagon and British Ministry of Defense polls found that only 3% of Iraqis regarded the U.S. security role in their neighborhood as legitimate, less than 1% believed that “coalition” (U.S.-UK) forces were good for their security, 80% opposed the presence of coalition forces in the country, and a majority supported attacks on coalition troops. Afghanistan has been destroyed beyond the possibility of reliable polling, but there are indications that something similar may be true there as well. Particularly in Iraq the United States suffered a severe defeat, abandoning its official war aims, and leaving the country under the influence of the sole victor, Iran.
The sledgehammer was also wielded elsewhere, notably in Libya, where the three traditional imperial powers (Britain, France, and the United States) procured Security Council resolution 1973 and instantly violated it, becoming the air force of the rebels. The effect was to undercut the possibility of a peaceful, negotiated settlement; sharply increase casualties (by at least a factor of 10, according to political scientist Alan Kuperman); leave Libya in ruins, in the hands of warring militias; and, more recently, to provide the Islamic State with a base that it can use to spread terror beyond. Quite sensible diplomatic proposals by the African Union, accepted in principle by Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, were ignored by the imperial triumvirate, as Africa specialist Alex de Waal reviews. A huge flow of weapons and jihadis has spread terror and violence from West Africa (now the champion for terrorist murders) to the Levant, while the NATO attack also sent a flood of refugees from Africa to Europe.
Yet another triumph of “humanitarian intervention,” and, as the long and often ghastly record reveals, not an unusual one, going back to its modern origins four centuries ago.
After the Recent Battles in Syria and Iraq, How Close Is Isis to Losing the War?
May 6, 2016
by Patrick Cockburn
The UNZ Review
In northern Syria carnage alternates with ceasefires as the Syrian air force pounds the rebel-held eastern side of Aleppo in a bid to drive out the remaining civilians. Rebel artillery replies in kind against government areas in the west of the city, but cannot match the firepower used against their enclave. Airstrikes on Thursday killed at least 28 people in a refugee camp close to the Turkish border.
The purpose of the Syrian government’s air and artillery attacks has remained the same over the last five years and is to separate opposition fighters from the civilian population. “This is the same classic counter-insurgency strategy that was used by the French in Algeria and the US in Vietnam,” says Fabrice Balanche, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Syrian government forces target rebel-held zones and essential infrastructure such as hospitals and markets so whole districts of cities like Damascus and Homs are reduced to rubble.
In Iraq, the US led coalition is more careful about avoiding civilian casualties, but even so 70 per cent of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, has been destroyed and surviving houses have been turned into death traps by booby traps and IEDs planted by Isis. In both Syria and Iraq, inadequate numbers of ground troops – Syrian army, Syrian Kurds, Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi army – claim great victories but in reality act as mopping up forces that can only advance after a devastating aerial bombardment.
The Syrian, Russian and US-led air campaigns have all had their successes, but they have their limitations. Dr Balanche says that the population of opposition-held east Aleppo may be down to as low as 100,000 because of airstrikes, while the much safer government-controlled west of the city still has a population of two million. The US and the coalition have carried out 8,067 air strikes in Iraq and 3,809 in Syria which have inflicted heavy casualties on Isis and interrupted their communications. But strict rules of engagement, intended to avoid civilian casualties, mean that Isis and al-Nusra fighters can stay safe by taking over one floor in a five storey building and leaving the other four floors occupied by ordinary families. While the term “human shield” is much abused, the armed opposition in places like Mosul, Raqqa and Eastern Ghouta forbid civilians from leaving, so terrified people must balance the possibility of being killed by air strikes against that of being murdered or detained by salafi-jihadi checkpoints.
Bombs and drones weaken Islamic State, but probably not as much as is hoped in Washington and European capitals. Isis fighters have generally not being fighting to the last man for cities like Ramadi and Palmyra, but pulling back and resorting to guerrilla warfare. In the last few days they claim to have captured the important Shaer gas field in the desert not far from Palmyra. Isis and al-Nusra’s many enemies are divided and pursue different goals. The US and its allies want to defeat Isis, but do not want the Syrian army or the Iraqi Shia militias to be the instruments which inflict that defeat. Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish leaders detest each other, but they are at one in fearing that their value to the West will lapse once Isis is defeated and they will be left to the mercy of Turkey and resurgent regimes in Baghdad and Damascus.
This probably won’t happen for some time. The US is pressing for a swift attack on Mosul and may be deceiving itself about the real military strength of the Iraqi Kurds and the Iraqi Army with the result that US Special Forces get sucked into the fighting when their local ally falters. US military aid is now very extensive. The Pentagon recently announced that “US artillery will support the Iraqi ground offensive against Mosul and the United States will provide up to $415 million to the Kurdish Peshmerga.” There is a small but politically significant trickle of US casualties including a Navy SEAL killed by Isis fighters in a surprise attack north of Mosul last week.
Isis is battered and on the retreat, but is unlikely to be defeated this year. It is losing territory but it is important to keep in mind that much of this is desert or semi-desert. More important is its progressive loss of access to the Turkish border which has been largely sealed off by the advance of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia assisted by a US air umbrella. The increasingly narrow corridor between Aleppo and the Euphrates that links the self-declared Caliphate to Turkey is under threat from the YPG and their Arab proxies in the east and the Syrian army in the west. If this gap is closed then Isis will have great difficulty receiving foreign volunteers or dispatching terrorists to carry out attacks abroad.
If Isis and al-Nusra are defeated, what will be the impact on the political geography of this part of the Middle East? Sunni Arabs in Iraq make up 20 per cent and in Syria 60 per cent of the population but there is really only one battlefield, so, if the salafi-jihadis lose, so too will the Sunni Arabs as a whole in the band of territory between the Iranian border and the Mediterranean. “In Iraq the war is destroying the Sunni population,” says Professor Joshua Landis who heads the Centre for Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University, pointing out that most of those displaced in the fighting in Iraq over the last two years are Sunni Arabs and the Sunni had already been driven out of much of Baghdad in the sectarian slaughter of 2006-7. A prolonged struggle for Mosul would reduce the last great Sunni stronghold in the country to ruins. “We Sunni in Iraq are going to end up like the Palestinians,” predicted a Sunni Arab from Ramadi last year before the city was partly destroyed.
President Bashar al-Assad said last week that he would fight on to recapture all of Syria and he might go a long way to achieving this. But it would be the triumph of a minority government that could only maintain its authority by terror and military force. It would resemble Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime in Iraq after he had crushed the rebellions of the Shia and Kurds, together with 80 per cent of the population, in 1991.
It may not come to this. Not all the news is bad. The most hopeful sign in Syria is that Russia and the US are on occasion acting in unison and have been able for the first time in five years to prod their allies into agreeing ceasefires however shaky and short term. The lesson of the last five years in Syria and the last 13 years in Iraq is that it is very difficult for any single army, government, militia, party, sect or ethnic group to fight successfully for a long period without the support of a foreign power or powers. They may not want to compromise but they may be forced to do so if the alternative is the loss of this essential outside backing. Given that the Assad and anti-Assad forces hate each other, want to kill each other and have no intention of sharing power in future, such compromises are likely to be grudging and short term.
The real test over the coming months will be the extent to which the US and Russia have the desire and capability to enforce a ceasefire or at least a de-escalation of the fighting. A state of permanent war has suited both the government in Damascus and its extreme fundamentalist enemies, because many Syrians who do not like Assad feel that the only alternative to his regime, as the French Algerians used to say, is “the suitcase or the coffin.” Anti-Assad Syrians are likewise faced with a black-or-white choice between a murderous government and murderous Islamists. Only a de-militarisation of Syrian politics might open the way to other alternatives and a distant prospect of permanent peace.
Netanyahu slams general for likening Israeli attitudes to Nazi Germany
A general’s comments that there are worrying trends of intolerance in Israel reminiscent of Nazi Germany have been called “outrageous” by the Israeli prime minister. However, the soldier’s words also found some support.
May 8, 2016
DW
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is lashing out at a top Israeli general, Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, for saying that in today’s Israel there are “nauseating processes” reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
During the government’s weekly cabinet meeting Netanyahu described the general’s comments as outrageous and said, “they cause harm to Israel and cheapen the Holocaust.”
“The comparison drawn in the words of the deputy chief of staff regarding events which characterized Nazi Germany 80 years ago is outrageous,” said Netanyahu.
“The deputy chief of staff is an outstanding officer, but his remarks on this issue were utterly mistaken and unacceptable to me,” the Israeli leader added.
Golan, the military’s deputy chief of staff, quickly won voices of support from the defense minister, military chief and other officials who said Golan was warning of worrying trends in society.
His controversial comments came Wednesday, during a speech on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Golan said the commemoration “must bring us to reflect deeply on the nature of man, even when that man is ourselves.”
Echoes of Nazi Germany
“If there is something that frightens me with the memory of the Holocaust,” he said, “it is identifying horrifying processes that happened in Europe, and specifically in Germany, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding testimony to them amongst us, today, in 2016.
“There is, after all, nothing easier and simpler than hating the foreigner… arousing fears and terrifying,” he added.
This is not the first time that Israel’s right-wing politicians have appeared more militant than top members of Israel’s military. In February, chief-of-staff Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot, angered conservative politicians when he warned young soldiers not to use excessive force in subduing suspected Palestinian assailants.
More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in a wave of violence that broke out in October. In most cases, the Palestinians have been armed with a knife. In all, 28 Israelis have been killed.
Human rights groups want Israel to stop using “lethal force” against attackers, and Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom has accused the Jewish state of carrying out “extrajudicial executions.”
Sue your bank! Why it’s better to go to court than to arbitrate in the long run
New rules aim to return a consumer’s right to sue financial institutions – and the banks and credit card companies aren’t happy about it
May 8, 2016
by Suzanne McGee
Reuters
If your bank hits you with what you consider to be unfair overdraft fees, or fails to notify you in a timely manner of new, higher fees – thus making it impossible for you to avoid them – you may end up losing enough money for it to be painful. But getting it back may be even more costly, too costly to make it worthwhile.
That’s because the small print covering your bank account, credit card and most other financial institution agreements requires you to submit to binding arbitration to resolve any disputes with your bank. Only 34% did not require binding arbitration, the Pew Charitable Trusts found in a survey last year, down from 38% in 2013.
In plain English, that means you’re losing your right to join together with other bank customers who have been hit by the same kind of fees and push back against the policy in a class-action lawsuit. A lawyer isn’t likely to represent just you – unless you’re really wealthy, in which case, the bank probably would be waiving all those fees anyway, right?
Instead, you’re required to submit to a different kind of process, known as arbitration. The banks – and the many other businesses that increasingly have chosen to insist that their consumers or employees submit to arbitration and explicitly relinquish any right to sue them – argue that the process, which is binding on both sides, is more efficient.
So score one for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has proposed a new rule that – if it overcomes what is likely to be fierce objection from the big banks and credit card companies – would return to us the right to bring class-action lawsuits against those institutions.
The American Chamber of Commerce hovered on the edge of apoplexy in its response to the CFPB’s announcement of the proposed new rule. The agency “is proposing to give the biggest gift to plaintiffs’ lawyers in a half century – at the expense of the consumers the agency is charged with protecting,” the business group said in a statement.
Arbitration may be efficient, but it’s costly for consumers – especially for those concerned about precisely the kind of small fees that can put immense pressure on already struggling families.
It also can be a process that, while efficient, is far from equitable or just. A 2011 supreme court ruling opened the way for many companies to insist that their consumers or employees sign away their right to sue in favor of arbitration clauses. People who might have banded together as plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit – sharing the costs of fighting a large corporation or finding a lawyer willing to shoulder those costs in hopes of a share of a payout on behalf of thousands of plaintiffs, not just a single individual – must act individually in arbitration.
A team of New York Times reporters last year pointed out the abuses inherent in this system, which they described as amounting to a “privatization of the justice system”, in a series of articles that were finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Among the cases they documented were a woman working aboard a cruise ship, who, after alleging that two fellow employees had drugged her, raped her and left her unconscious in her cabin, discovered that she couldn’t sue her employer for permitting an unsafe workplace to occur.
There are myriad ways in which arbitration doesn’t measure up to the kind of recourse that you can seek in a court, if you feel that your bank or credit card company has taken advantage of you, sought to mis-sell you a product from a mutual fund to a mortgage, that isn’t in your interests, or simply overcharged you. First of all, any lawyer could hear your case (not necessarily a judge), and that lawyer could have done work (or still be working) for JP Morgan Chase or American Express while deciding your case. There’s no way to appeal the outcome – remember, this is binding arbitration. The bank that you’re up against gets to pay witnesses to testify on their behalf and can order its own employees to do the same. Little or none of that would be acceptable in a court of law.
And it isn’t just banks that do this. If you have a mobile phone contract, you’ve agreed to arbitration. If you’ve signed an employment agreement, ditto. Have you shopped online? Rented a car? Signed up for cable internet? Yup, you’ve signed that small print. The banks are the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
The banking industry, if anything, has become worse in the way it has treated those customers least able to push back: ordinary checking account customers. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ study found that “the prevalence of harmful overdraft fees and account terms showed little change or” had grown worse since its prior study a few years earlier. Only 16% of banks automatically decline charges that would result in a bank customer overdrawing an account – even though most bank customers don’t recall opting into overdraft service, a lucrative source of bank fees. Of the largest banks, more than a third still don’t have a complete disclosure of all banking terms and fees.
Against that backdrop, there is plenty of room for problems to emerge, and forcing bank clients into arbitration just ensures that the banks will win, by default, if only because so few consumers will ever file a case. It’s a few hundred dollars to do so, but if you lose, you may have to pay the bank’s costs.
Look for a lot of infuriated rhetoric and saber-rattling from the banks during the 90-day comment period, and before the new CFPB rule takes effect next year. Because this is the biggest constraint on their ability to make money from consumer banking in decades, and the biggest restriction imposed on their overall business since the passage of Dodd-Frank Act and the Volcker Rule, which required them to strip themselves of some of their riskier (and more profitable) businesses. Now, lumbered with the need to keep more capital on their balance sheets as a result of those post-crisis regulations, the banks already have turned to consumer banking fees as one lucrative source of income.
The disconcerting element of this reaction is the threat of punishment to be directed at precisely those small consumers, already struggling with higher banking fees. It echoes, eerily, what we’ve already heard from the financial industry in the wake of the Labor Department’s announcement of tougher new rules (the new “fiduciary” standard) requiring that financial advisers be more prudent and vigilant when it comes to managing our retirement assets. The industry has said that’s going to cost them so much more in time and money that they’ll simply stop working with a lot of clients altogether – of course, the smaller, less affluent clients.
Now, the infuriated bankers are warning of something similar: that consumers will find loans more costly or harder to get, because the higher costs of all the class-action lawsuits that banks expect to be hit with will have to be passed along to someone.
Here’s a thought. Maybe they could just stop doing stuff that leaves them liable to either class-action lawsuits or arbitration complaints? Then everyone would be happy. I know – this is planet Earth we’re living on, but it’s worth throwing out for discussion, before all the shouting starts.
Canada wildfire: 20% of Fort McMurray homes destroyed, says MP
May 8, 2016
BBC News
About a fifth of homes have been destroyed in Fort McMurray, a Canadian city ravaged by a huge wildfire, the local MP has told the BBC.
After touring the damage David Yurdiga said it might be years before the city was running normally again.
More than 100,000 residents of the city and surrounding area fled after an evacuation order was issued.
Officials say the fire, now burning for a week, grew more slowly at the weekend than first feared.
Firefighters held key areas and the blaze now covers about 1,610 sq km (620 sq miles) – less than the 1,800 sq km (700 sq miles) estimated on Saturday.
Mr Yurdiga said while most of the city was intact the area was still too dangerous for residents to return home.
“An estimate: 20% of the homes have been burnt, but the majority of homes are standing, no damage at all,” Mr Yurdiga said.
“So you know what? It’s a lot better than I thought it was.”
On Sunday, fire chiefs spoke of getting a “death grip” on the fire, which has been fed by hot weather and tinder dry terrain.
“With a little help from mother nature and a bit of a break in the weather, and all the hard work of all the firefighters we were able to hold most of the line in Fort McMurray,” said Chad Morrison from Alberta wildfire.
But it could be months before the fire is fully brought under control. Officials warned only significant rainfall could fully halt its spread.
The fire is being blown east away from communities, but still threatens to cross from Alberta province into neighbouring Saskatchewan.
Air quality warnings have been issued for Saskatchewan and Northwest Territories, with locals advised to close windows and doors due to smoke.
The final evacuations of 25,000 people who headed north from Fort McMurray after the blaze began was completed on Sunday.
Schools in the provincial capital Edmonton are arranging for displaced families to send their children to local schools from Monday.
No deaths or injuries have been reported from the fire, but two people died in traffic accidents during the mass evacuation
The fire is expected to be the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, with insurance costs alone already running into billions of dollars.
Fort McMurray is in the heart of Canada’s oil sands country, and the region has the world’s third-largest reserves of oil. Workers at major oil companies have also been evacuated.
As much as a quarter of the country’s oil production has been halted by the fire, raising concerns about the effect on the Canadian economy.
‘There’s nobody left’: Evangelicals feel abandoned by GOP after Trump’s ascent
May 8, 2016
by Katie Zezima
Washington Post
LINCOLN, Neb. — Pastor Gary Fuller planned a Sunday service focused on involving Christians in the political process and featuring a speech by the pastor father of Sen. Ted Cruz. But after a week in which Cruz abruptly dropped out of the race, his father scrapped his appearance here and Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, a dismayed Fuller kept the political portion short.
“Vote according to your convictions,” Fuller told congregants at Gentle Shepherd Baptist Church who will cast ballots in Nebraska’s presidential primary Tuesday. “What you believe is the right thing to vote for, according to the Scriptures.”
He told congregants that the church can’t and won’t promote one candidate over another. But Fuller has a hard time stomaching Trump as the Republican nominee and plans to vote for Cruz on Tuesday, even though the senator has dropped out of the race.
“In a sense, we feel abandoned by our party,” Fuller said. “There’s nobody left.”
Fuller and other conservatives whose voting decisions are guided by their Christian faith find themselves dismayed and adrift now that Trump has wrested control of the Republican Party. It is a sentiment that reaches from the small, aluminum-sided church with a large white cross on its front that Fuller and his wife built on the Nebraska plains to the highest levels of American religious life. Even progressive Christians — evangelicals and Catholics, among others — who don’t necessarily vote Republican are alarmed that Trump is attracting many voters who call themselves religious. A coalition of nearly 60 Christian leaders — many progressive and some conservative — published an open letter last week asking voters of faith to reject Trump and his “vulgar racial and religious demagoguery,” warning that the nation faces a “moral threat” from the candidate.
“Certain kinds of political appeals and certain kinds of political developments are fundamentally antithetical to the Christian faith and must be named as such,” said David Gushee, a professor of ethics at Mercer University who signed the letter.
There is consternation about the hard line Trump takes on immigrants and about the morality of a thrice-married man who has long bragged about his sexual conquests. But another factor is at work as well: The traditional social and cultural positions that drive many religious conservative voters, including same-sex marriage and abortion, have been cast aside by a candidate who seems to have little interest in fighting the culture wars.
In the past, Trump has espoused social views to the left of his party, including a longtime acceptance of gay rights, although he has since moved right on many of them. He has praised Planned Parenthood for helping millions of women. He is running as an antiabortion candidate but had said in the past that he supported abortion rights and would not ban the procedure known as partial-birth abortion.
And while he says he is against same-sex marriage, he has attended a same-sex wedding and is opposed to a North Carolina law — aimed at transgender people — that requires people to use bathrooms that correspond with the gender on their birth certificate. He said transgender activist Caitlyn Jenner could use the women’s room at his properties.
“This year the Republican Party has not just surrendered on the culture wars, they’ve joined the other side. And that’s a unique situation,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Cruz crusaded for social issues, making opposition to the transgender bathroom law one of his biggest fights at the end of his candidacy. The gambit failed when the senator from Texas lost badly to Trump in Indiana, a state that passed a controversial religious freedom law last year that led to a heated fight few want to relitigate.
“Trying to use social issues as primary issues to define a campaign has not borne out as effective for those candidates who embraced it,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, which advocates for conservative gays and lesbians.
But there are voters like Fuller for whom “it’s always about social issues.” He cast ballots for John McCain and Mitt Romney despite not loving their platforms, but he felt they were men of character who would do right by the country. Many at a Baptist conference he attended last week were shaking their heads, he said, unsure about how to handle the upcoming election; supporting Hillary Clinton and her liberal positions seems contrary to everything many of them stand for.
“I got the idea of ‘Who would Jesus have voted for, Herod or Pilate?’ and probably neither one, and that’s where I feel we’re at here,” Fuller said.
Fuller said some voters of faith he has spoken with in recent days simply want to stop Clinton from becoming president. His sister is one; she plans to vote not so much for Trump but against Clinton. Others in Nebraska are still holding out hope at the long-shot idea that Cruz, whose name is still on the ballot, will somehow win the state and get back in the race. Still others are intrigued by the idea of a third option, a notion one of this state’s Republican senators, Ben Sasse, has pushed for on social media.
Moore said many evangelicals are “horrified” to have to choose between Trump and Clinton. More conservative evangelicals like Moore are concerned about moral and social issues. Gushee said that progressive ones such as himself and the other letter-signers are worried about the “bigotry, xenophobia and misogyny” they see from Trump.
Despite this, many self-described evangelicals have cast ballots for the brash New Yorker. Trump has captured about a third of the vote of white born-again or evangelical Christians and tends to do well among evangelicals who don’t frequent church. He has also won the endorsement of leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, where Trump spoke this year and where Cruz announced his candidacy in March 2015.
Trump has made overtures to conservative Christians — he often alleges that people are discouraged from saying “Merry Christmas” — but has also frequently stumbled. He misstated the name of a book in the Bible, and on another occasion struggled when asked to cite a favorite Bible verse.
The splits over Trump reflect demographic and theological differences within the evangelical community, Moore said. The debate over whether evangelical Christians can support Trump’s candidacy while keeping true to their beliefs “may be shaping the very nature of evangelicalism,” Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today, wrote in March.