THE ROVING EYE The new US-Russia Cold War By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE 
The new US-Russia Cold War
By Pepe Escobar 

Meet the new (cold) war, same as the old (cold) war. Same same, but different. One day, it's the myriad implications of Washington's "pivoting" to Asia - as in the containment of China. The next day, it's the perennial attempt to box Russia in. Never a dull moment in the New Great Game in Eurasia. 

On Russia, the denigration of all things Sochi - attributable to the inherent stupidity of Western corporate media "standards" - was just a subplot of the main show, which always gets personal; the relentless demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. [1] 

Yet Nulandgate - as in US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria "neo-con" Nuland uttering her famous "F**k the EU" - was way more serious. Not because of the "profanity" (praise the Lord!), but for providing what US Think Tankland hailed as "an indicator of American strategic thinking". 

Here's the game in a nutshell. Germany remote controls one of the leaders of the Ukrainian protests, heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko. [2] 

"F**k the EU" is essentially directed towards Berlin and Klitschko, its key protege. Washington sees this going nowhere, as Germany, after all, has been slowly building a complex energy-investment partnership with Russia. 

The Obama administration wants results - fast. Nuland herself stressed (check it out, starting at 7:26) that Washington, over the past two decades, has "invested" over US$5 billion for the "democratization" of Ukraine. So yes: this is "our" game and the EU is at best a nuisance while Russia remains the major spoiler. Welcome to Washington's Ukrainian "strategy". 

The Ukrainian chessboard
US Think Tankland now also peddles the notion that the Obama administration is expertly adept at a balance of power strategy. To include Libya as part of this "strategy" is a sick joke; Libya post-Gaddafi is a failed state, courtesy of humanitarian bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Meanwhile, in Syria, the US "strategy" boils down to let Arabs kill Arabs in droves. 

Iran is way more complex. Arguably, the Obama administration calculates that through talks between Iran and the P5+1 - the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany - it will be able to outmaneuver the Russians, who are close to Tehran. This assuming the Obama administration really wants a nuclear deal with Iran that would later release the floodgates of Western business. 

On Syria, it's the Russian positions that have kept the upper hand; not to mention that Putin saved Obama from yet another Middle East war. As Syria was a Russian win, no wonder Washington dreams of a win in Ukraine. 

We can interpret what's goin' on now as a remix of the 2004 Orange Revolution. But The Big Picture goes way back - from NATO's expansion in the 1990s to American NGOs trying to destabilize Russia, NATO's flirt with Georgia, and those missile defense schemes so close to Russian borders. 

In already trademark Obama administration style, the State Department's support for anti-Russia, pro-EU protests in Ukraine qualifies as "leading from behind" (remember Libya?) 

It comes complete with "humanitarian" appeal, calls for "reconciliation" and good against evil dichotomy masking a drive towards regime change. Abandon all hope to find voices of sanity on US corporate media such as NYU and Princeton's Stephen Cohen, who cut to the chase in this piece, stressing that the essential revelation of Nulandgate "was that high-level US officials were plotting to 'midwife' a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president - that is, a coup". 

Here the "strategy" clearly reveals itself as a US puppet now - coup or no coup - instead of an EU puppet later. No one in the Beltway gives a damn that Viktor Yanukovich was legally elected president of Ukraine, and that he had full authority to reject a dodgy deal with the EU. 

And no one in the Beltway cares that the protests are now being led by Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) - a nasty collection of fascists, football hooligans, ultra-nationalists and all sorts of unsavory neo-Nazi elements; the Ukrainian equivalents of Bandar Bush's jihadis in Syria. 

Yet the US "strategy" rules that street protests should lead to regime change. It applies to the Ukraine, but it does not apply to Thailand. 

Washington wants regime change in the Ukraine for one reason only; in the wider New Great Game in Eurasia context, that would be the rough equivalent of Texas defecting from the US and becoming a Russian ally. 

Still, this gambit is bound to fail. Moscow has myriad ways to deploy economic leverage in Ukraine; it has access to much better intel than the Americans; and the protesters/gangs/neo-Nazis are just a noisy minority. 

Washington, tough, won't give up, as it sees both the political crisis in Ukraine as the emerging financial crisis in Kazakhstan as "opportunities" (Obama lingo) to threaten Moscow's economic/strategic interests. It's as if the Beltway was praying for a widespread financial crisis in the Russia-led Customs Union (Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus). 

Pray in fact is all they've got, while the EU, for all the grandiose, rhetorical wishful thinking, remains a divided mess. After Sochi, Vlad the Hammer will be back in business with a vengeance. Nuland and co, watch your back. 

Notes:
1. Journalistic malpractice & the dangers of Russia-bashing, RT, February 9, 2014.
2. EU Grooming Klitschko to Lead Ukraine, Der Spiegel Online, December 10, 2013. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. 

P5+1-Iran: U.S. in search of a new game by Pepe Escobar

P5+1-Iran: U.S. in search of a new game

The P5+1 negotiations with Iran, mostly a Washington-Tehran affair, may be a means to a complex and ambitious end: a new strategic and energy equation in Southwest Asia. U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent State of the Union address indicates that to reach this goal, the U.S. is steering away from war to diplomacy

BY Pepe Escobar 

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Look at how U.S. President Barack Obama configured the U.S.-Iran relationship during his State of the Union address on January 28: “These negotiations do not rely on trust; any long-term deal we agree to must be based on verifiable action that convinces us and the international community that Iran is not building a nuclear bomb. If John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan could negotiate with the Soviet Union, then surely a strong and confident America can negotiate with less powerful adversaries today.”

Admittedly, Obama is fighting a formidable array of interests against a rapprochement between Tehran and Washington – from the Israel lobby and the Gulf petrodollar lobby to the Capitol Hill minefield (Democrats and Republicans alike), some sectors of the industrial-military-surveillance complex, and the neo-cons blaring inside the right-wing corporate media box.

However, it does also sound as if Obama was sabotaging his own negotiations. Iran “is not building a nuclear bomb,” as the alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence has already, tirelessly, established. And Obama’s America is not “strong and confident.” But at least he pledged to veto any bill sent to him by Congress to derail the negotiations. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the U.S.’s pro-Israel lobby, has tried and will keep trying again

Obama is not exactly a master of foreign policy. He “withdrew” from Iraq only because of a formidable rebuff by the Iraqi Parliament. On Afghanistan, it’s the Pentagon – and the CIA – that have always run the show. Because of one of his reckless “red lines,” Obama was, recently, on the brink of bombing Syria – with cataclysmic consequences – until he was saved by Moscow.

But now, it looks like Obama is steering away from war to diplomacy. For his administration, the P5+1 negotiations with Iran – which is essentially a Washington-Tehran affair – are a means to a complex and ambitious end: reaching a new strategic equation in Southwest Asia.

Obama himself would never conceptualise it this way – because he doesn’t know much about China. But it’s as if the Obama administration saw Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a Persian Deng Xiaoping – with all manner of juicy business possibilities open if a definitive nuclear deal is reached. And reaching a deal would be Obama’s “Nixon in China” moment.

As much as Iran does not need to “rejoin the community of nations” (as Obama said), because it was never expelled from it, the myth of U.S. “geopolitical primacy” in Southwest Asia remains what it is – just a myth. You can’t have “primacy” in the region anymore based on a Likudnik Israel, a paltry military dictator in Egypt, and the petrodollar paragons of democracy in the Gulf.

The fact is that in an inevitably multipolar-bound world, Washington needs a new game. And an intelligent game implies a minimally decent relationship with Tehran. Otherwise, Iran will keep advancing as a key developing country on its own anyway, allied with Russia and China and expanding trade/business relations with everyone from Turkey, India and Pakistan to Northeast and Southeast Asia.

So now the formula could be: follow the money; follow the business sense; and follow a new strategic balance. Obama is certainly calculating that a broad understanding with Iran implies no more U.S. wars in West Asia, in parallel to the U.S. depending on less imported oil from the region. No wonder the House of Saud is agitated.

All through 2014, the P5+1 negotiations will hinge on whether we are slowly moving away from U.S. imperial power towards a new Southwest Asia equation where multipolar players include the U.S., Russia, Iran, the European Union and Turkey. The Saudi reaction has been to intensify, weaponise and then try to sell – again – the myth of a Sunni-Shia war, blaming the Shias, Persians and/or Arabs, as the source of all regional problems.

The possibility of a marriage of reason between Washington and Tehran is as enticing as the certainty of a divorce in the money marriage between Washington and Riyadh.

If he’s being true to himself, Obama ought to have observed that there are absolutely no common values between the U.S. he extolled at the State of the Union address and the land of a universal, non-stop jihad. Without those millions of barrels of oil a day, Saudi Arabia would have been “sanctioned” to death, if not outright shocked and awed, a long time ago.

But it’s too early to tell whether we are about to marvel at the first post-imperial U.S. presidency since World War Two. There’s always 2016; meanwhile, perhaps a U.S.-Iran deal may still be reached in 2014.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, Hong Kong. He has been a foreign correspondent for 30 years, working out of Europe, the U.S., and Asia. He is also an op-ed writer and contributes to various websites and radio stations from South America to West Asia. He is the author of five books, including ‘Obama does Globalisation’ (2009).

Iran looks to private sector By Chris Cook

Don't miss the latest from Chris Cook at Asia Times on everybody and his neighbor wanting to do business with Iran. 

Iran looks to private sector By Chris Cook As the saying goes: "It's an ill wind blows nobody any good." The almost unprecedented snowfall across northern and mid Iran last week spread as far south as the desert town of Yazd and forced the cancellation of a major conference hosted by the energetic Yazd Chamber of Commerce on the subject of empowering the private sector. I was to be virtually the only non-Iranian plenary speaker during a series of Iranian ministers. But the Yazd snowstorm that forced the cancellation of all flights cleared my diary and opened the way to unplanned and unexpected meetings in Tehran with key public, private and state-sponsored institutions. I was therefore able to outline in Tehran the simple framework agreements, credit instruments and financing and funding techniques that open up new public/private policy options for domestic energy economics and international "energy diplomacy" that are emerging as cornerstones of the Hassan Rouhani administration. Private sector in the lead In meetings with the public sector oil companies and pension institutions there was great interest in the proposed outcomes but complete pessimism that the public sector could do anything in the face of sanctions. But as my Iranian colleague pointed out, if what we propose were conventionally possible, it would already have been done: our role is to discover and implement new "adjacent possible" solutions. Following an excellent meeting with the heads of the leading Iranian oil policy think tank we heard today that the Majlis - Iran's parliament - is instructing the oil ministry, using our language almost word for word, to engage with and support Iran's private sector both in domestic and international energy co-operation initiatives. The international dimension Meanwhile, it is at last beginning to dawn on Israel that the tactic of attempting to force through further US sanctions and thereby implode negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 - the UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany - has become completely irrelevant in the face of the gold rush now gathering pace. The Israelis have been unusually slow to recognize what has been apparent to the global private sector for some time: Iran means business. By way of example, last week, I ran into some of the 120-strong French delegation who were all over Tehran like a cheap suit. You name it, they were flogging it, with the exception of EDF and their nuclear technology, (who are probably champing at the bit). The US petro-corporations are watching the Europeans eat their lunch, and you can be sure that the wires to the White House and State Department will be humming. Hot off the press, Mahdi Hosseini, who was appointed by Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh to lead the development of new Iranian contractual terms to entice the oil majors, dangled the prize of US$150 billion in upstream investment in the next five years alone. Hosseini's team has been trawling the contractual terms of 33 countries, has assimilated 71 PhD dissertations, and now believes that it is closing in on a new hybrid form of contract nearer to production-sharing agreements than the buyback contracts that were so detested by the oil majors. The riskier the project, the more the terms will approach the production-sharing arrangements preferred by the majors, but which they can only impose on minor producing nations. The dollar trap As I have been saying in Iran for several years, such contracts can only ever have short- to medium-term application for a very simple reason. This is that these contracts are based upon the pricing and settlement of sales of oil production in US dollars. So, even if - after long negotiation - a satisfactory formula may be achieved for short-term pricing and settlement in dollars, sooner or later the relationship between Iran's riyal and the dollar, and the relationship between the buyer's currency and the dollar must always diverge. So whichever way this divergence takes place, sooner or later the disadvantaged party will default or demand renegotiation. The prepay solution The solution we propose in order to address this intractable issue - which is hard-wired into the bank-centric dollar economy - is for settlement to be made through energy swaps of "prepay" energy-based credits. These are returnable in payment for the downstream energy products such as oil products, petrochemicals, electricity, heat or power, which are the outcome of suitable partnership supply arrangements with Iran. Now that Iran is once more led by sophisticated strategists of the caliber of President Rouhani, Oil Minister Zanganeh, and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, not to mention Iran's massively experienced and canny OPEC representative Kazempour Ardebili, the possibility of meaningful energy diplomacy becomes more likely by the day. We recently saw a serious US article contemplating the re-opening of an Iran/Israel relationship once the Palestine question is resolved, which may seem unlikely. But even here I believe that there is scope for an unconventional "adjacent possible" consensual agreement which meets the needs of all stakeholders. Post Sanctions Iran For my part, I have another trek to Istanbul in prospect to pick up my visa for the upcoming Post Sanctions Iran conference on March 8/9 at which I am speaking. I am also awaiting formal confirmation of an invitation to present our thinking to another extremely influential institution within the complex Iranian power structure which wields a veto on policy decisions. My visit to Yazd - one of the most historic of Iran's cities - will have to wait for better weather, which is a shame. Chris Cook is a former director of the International Petroleum Exchange. He is now a strategic market consultant, entrepreneur and commentator.  (Copyright 2014 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

THE ROVING EYE The NSA does the 1980s By Pepe Escobar

Hope you enjoy my Back to the Future trip in 1986, from MIT to Stanford and Berkeley, when artificial intelligence was all the rage and I learned what the NSA was already up to.

THE ROVING EYE 
The NSA does the 1980s
By Pepe Escobar 

In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley Blade Runner Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as "the acting president", was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as "freedom fighters". 

The world was mired in Cyber Cold War mode; the talk was all about electronic counter-measures, with American C3s (command, control, communications) programmed to destroy Soviet C3s, and both the US and the USSR under MAD (mutually assured destruction) nuclear policies being able to destroy the earth 100 times over. Edward Snowden was not yet a three-year-old. 

It was in this context that I set out to do a special report for a now defunct magazine about Artificial Intelligence (AI), roving from the Computer Museum in Boston to Apple in Cupertino and Pixar in San Rafael, and then to the campuses of Stanford, Berkeley and the MIT. 

AI had been "inaugurated" in 1956 by Stanford's John McCarthy and MIT professor Marvin Minsky, then a student at Harvard. The basic idea, according to Minsky, was that any intelligence trait could be described so precisely that a machine could be created to simulate it. 

My trip inevitably involved meeting a fabulous cast of characters. At the MIT's AI lab, there was Minsky and an inveterate iconoclast, Joseph Weizenbaum, who had coined the term "artificial intelligentsia" and believed computers could never "think" just like a human being. 

At Stanford, there was Edward Feigenbaum, absolutely paranoid about Japanese scientific progress; he believed that if the Japanese a fifth-generation (5G) program, based on artificial intelligence, "the US will be able to bill itself as the first great post-industrial agrarian society". 

And at Berkeley, still under the flame of hippie utopian populism, there was Robert Wilensky - Brooklyn accent, Yale gloss, California overtones; and philosopher Robert Dreyfus, a tireless enemy of AI who got his kicks delivering lectures such as "Conventional AI as a Paradigm of Degenerated Research". 

Meet Kim No-VAX
Soon I was deep into Minsky's "frames" - a basic concept to organize every subsequent AI program - and the "Chomsky paradigm"; the notion that language is at the root of knowledge, and that formal syntax is at the root of language. That was the Bible of cognitive science at the MIT. 

Minsky was a serious AI enthusiast. One of his favorite themes was that people were afflicted with "carbon chauvinism"; "This is central to the AI phenomenon. Because it's possible that more sophisticated forms of intelligence are not incorporated in cellular form. If there are other forms of intelligent life, then we may speculate over other types of computer structure." 

At the MIT cafeteria, Minsky delivered a futurist rap without in the least resembling Dr Emmet Brown in Back to the Future:

I believe that in less than five centuries we will be producing machines very similar to us, representing our thoughts and point of view. If we can build a miniaturized human brain weighing, let's say, one gram, we can lodge it in a spaceship and make it travel at the speed of light. It would be very hard to build a spaceship to carry an astronaut and all his food for 10,000 years of travel ...

With Professor Feigenbaum, in Stanford's philosophical garden, the only space available was for the coming yellow apocalypse. But then one day I crossed Berkeley's post-hippie Rubicon and opened the door of the fourth floor of Evans Hall, where I met none other than Kim No-VAX. 

No, that was not the Hitchcock blonde and Vertigo icon; it was an altered hardware computer (No-VAX because it had ceased to be a VAX), financed by the mellifluous Pentagon military agency DARPA, decorated with a photo of Kim Novak and humming with the sexy vibration of - at the time immense - 2,900 megabytes of electronic data spread over its body. 

The US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - or DARPA - was all about computer science. In the mid-1980s, DARPA was immersed in a very ambitious program linking microelectronics, computer architecture and AI way beyond a mere military program. That was comparable to the Japanese 5G program. At the MIT, the overwhelming majority of scientists were huge DARPA cheerleaders, stressing how it was leading research. Yet Terry Winograd, a computer science professor at Stanford, warned that had DARPA been a civilian agency, "I believe we would have made much more progress". 

It was up to Professor Dreyfus to provide the voice of reason amidst so much cyber-euphoria; "Computers cannot think like human beings because there's no way to represent all retrospective knowledge of an average human life - that is, 'common sense' - in a form that a computer may apprehend." Dreyfus's drift was that with the boom of computer science, philosophy was dead - and he was a philosopher; "Heidegger said that philosophy ended because it reached its apex in technology. Philosophy in fact reached its limit with AI. They, the scientists, inherited our questions. What is the mind? Now they have to answer for it. Philosophy is over." 

Yet Dreyfus was still teaching, as much as at the MIT Weizenbaum was condemning AI as a racket for "lunatics and psychopaths" but still continued to work at the AI lab. 

NSA's wet web dream 
In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI "secret" would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency - already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as "no such agency", with double the CIA's annual budget and snooping the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net - that was years before all the hype over the "information highway" - and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades - remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on - AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades). 

So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine? 

They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command just like Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed "only in the next century" we would be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation, and MIT on another system identifying words spoken by different people, while Intel was developing a special chip for all this. 

Although, predictably, prevented from visiting the NSA, I soon learned that the Pentagon was expecting to possess "intelligent" computing systems by the 1990s; Hollywood, after all, already had unleashed the Terminator series. It was up to Professor Wilensky, in Berkeley, to sound the alarm bells:

Human beings don't have the appropriate engineering for the society they developed. Over a million years of evolution, the instinct of getting together in small communities, belligerent and compact, turned out to be correct. But then, in the 20th century, Man ceased to adapt. Technology overtook evolution. The brain of an ancestral creature, like a rat, which sees provocation in the face of every stranger, is the brain that now controls the earth's destiny.

It's as if Wilensky was describing the NSA as it would be 28 years later. Some questions still remain unanswered; for instance, if our race does not fit anymore the society it built, who'd guarantee that its machines are properly engineered? Who'd guarantee that intelligent machines act in our interest? 

What was already clear by then was that "intelligent" computers would not end a global arms race. And it would be a long time, up to the Snowden revelations in 2013, for most of the planet to have a clearer idea of how the NSA orchestrates the Orwellian-Panopticon complex. As for my back to the future trip, in the end I did not manage to uncover the "secret" of AI. But I'll always remain very fond of Kim No-VAX. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. 

The real State of the Union By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
The real State of the Union
By Pepe Escobar 

US President Barack Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address was a somewhat surrealist spectacle. Way beyond avalanches of PR spin, the US government for a long time has not exactly done wonders for the public good. So as it advertises itself in front of a dysfunctional US Congress dismissed as repellent by an overwhelming majority of Americans - including, and expanding, on those 76% who are living paycheck to paycheck - what's left is a grand, old Hollywood production. 

And Obama, of course, is a decent actor who can deliver a decent speech - certainly better than Ronnie Reagan, whom Gore Vidal used to describe as "the acting president". 

The key theme of SOTU 2014 was the appalling income inequality in the US. Call it an appendix of this past week at the World Economic Forum in Davos - that snowy Vegas for the 0.00001% - in which the Masters of the Universe finally "discovered" inequality. So much inequality, in fact, that 2014 was instantly tagged by the Masters - and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - as the new 1914, all that furiously tweeted to all corporate boardrooms of the liquid modernity elite. 

As Obama got into his groove, he proclaimed that Obamacare had won; that he would resort to ruling by executive order to get things done; and that a mixed salad of platitudes and vague proposals/generalities attested to the imminent success of his agenda of improving "opportunity" as the only answer to fighting inequality. Oh yes; and that the American Dream was not in a coma. 

No word, of course, about the "gentle", progressive dismantling of what's left of US democracy, via the Orwellian/Panopticon complex, through which 0.00001% elite rule is painfully achieved in a sanitized Total Information Awareness (TIA) environment. With the US government in total control of the Internet, that once-upon-a-time dream - the revolution will be televised - won't happen even on the web. 

Neoliberalism or death
In the absence of the late, great Howard Zinn, Americans now have to put up with historic Clintonista Robert Reich. Reich may be correct on two of his reasons for the American malaise. 

With the US working class paralyzed and fearful of losing their jobs (labor unions have been virtually destroyed), and with students mired in horrendous debt (even as the average starting salary for graduates has been dropping steadily), two key vectors of protest are neutralized. 

But Reich is wrong on his third reason - that over 80% of US public opinion distrusts government so much that they have given up on any possibility of reform. 

The key point would be to examine how American turbo-financial capitalism has been drifting since the mid-1970s. The point is not that a cabal of medievalist Republicans, evil corporate CEOs (and their handpicked pols), plus Wall Street is in charge. The point is to examine how demented financial asset speculation plus a demented inflation of dodgy financial securities have been the defining features of the US and global system. 

This would imply a hardcore critique of advanced capitalism - which in fact is neither "advanced" nor really capitalism - that is absolute taboo in US corporate media. And the whole thing started even before the prophet Ronnie Reagan, then through Bubba Clinton and all the way to the Dubya/Obama continuum. 

The latest graphic illustration is a system in which 85 people - packable in a London double-decker - own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of humanity. How's that possible? A cursory examination of David Harvey's groundbreaking A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005) would answer most questions - all related to such tricks as trickle-down economics, slashing taxes for the wealthy and corporations, the destruction of labor unions, lower real wages, job outsourcing, the disenfranchising of just about anyone who's not part of the 0.00001%, and a free for all in the 0.00001% banking and finance casino. End result; a vortex of wealth concentration - which has absolutely nothing to do with democracy in a republic. 

Good ol' Uncle Marx would tell it for what it is: a class war. And the 0.00001% has won, hands down, fast and loose. 

It's easy to forget that Dubya inherited a sizable budget surplus. He then slashed taxes for the wealthy; presided over two horrendously expensive wars, one because he "had to bomb somebody" and the other a war of choice; and then he was the MC of the biggest Wall Street crash since the Great Depression. 

And yes, it's all about the Bush-Obama continuum. In Obama's "recovery" era, asset values for the wealthiest 7% of Americans has shot up 28% while declining 4% for the rest. 

At least 80% of US voters don't want social programs to be cut so the budget can be balanced; they want more taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Obama instead cut from social security. 

Then there's the destruction of American cities; this study details how Detroit was screwed while the state of Michigan was spending a fortune on "business incentives". 

And to top it off, there's the Jamie Dimon syndrome, as in the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, aka Obama's "one of the smartest bankers we've got". Even if the US's number one bank has lost billions in dodgy toxic mortgage-backed securities, manipulated energy prices and even defrauded credit card customers, your CEO still gets a hefty bonus as the bank's stock were up 21% in 2013. 

Whether Obama played ball - small or otherwise - at the SOTU is irrelevant. Apart from flagrant absurdities on Iran, Syria and Israel-Palestine, and not a word on Russia and China, no wonder the climatic Hollywood tear-jerker sequence involved an Army Ranger almost killed by an improvized explosive device in Afghanistan. He was Obama's living metaphor of "Yes We Can", the 2014 remix. 

Curiously, just before SOTU, the US government and the Pentagon leaked to the New York Times that if "a small number" (Obama) of US troops actually remain in Afghanistan, the CIA will continue to drone the tribal areas of Pakistan to oblivion, and will continue to use Afghan bases to spy on Pakistan. 

So it's all about the CIA's dirty wars. Obviously none of the AfPak components want this state of affairs - so it looks like Obama's heroes will have to beat the hell out of Dodge for good. Good for them, as they will be exchanging lethal IEDs for a new shot at the ultimate land of "opportunity." Is that a fact? Yes, because POTUS said so. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. 

US military says Martin Luther King would be proud of its weapons

A repellent piece of propaganda appropriates the words and images of this nonviolence advocate to glorify US militarism

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  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 22 January 2013 21.34 GMT
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A posting from the US Air Force's Global Strike Team claims Martin Luther King would be "proud" of its weapons. Photograph: screen grab of US Air Force release.

(updated below)
Yesterday, I highlighted the extraordinary anti-war speech Martin Luther Kinggave in 1967, in which he said, among other things, that the US government is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and the leading exponent of "the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long." The speech was devoted to arguing that America's militarism and war-fighting were degrading the soul of the nation and the citizenry and - for financial, political and cultural reasons - were making domestic progress impossible.

The US Air Force's Global Strike Command yesterday posted a truly vile bit of propaganda in which it appropriates King's image, name and words in order to claim that he would "be proud to see our Global Strike team . . .standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense" (ellipses in original):

"The Department of Defense is a leader in equal opportunity for all patriots seeking to serve this great nation. . . The vigilant warriors in AFGSC understand they are all equal and unified in purpose to provide a safe, secure and effective deterrent force for the United States. . . .

"Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team - comprised of Airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion - standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense. . . Our team must overlook our differences to ensure perfection as we maintain and operate our weapon systems. . . Maintaining our commitment to our Global Strike team, our families and our nation is a fitting tribute to Dr. King as we celebrate his legacy."

The US military - which is currently bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen at least, all in secret - just exploited one of the 20th Century's greatest proponents of nonviolence and most vehement opponents of US militarism as a public face for its aggression and violence in the world. While King may have preferred to see an integrated military rather than one divided by racial strife, his condemnations of US militarism were particularly harsh when it came to the way the US military taught American citizens to embrace a culture of violence ("I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government").

The self-described mission of the Global Strike Command is to "develop and provide combat-ready forces for nuclear deterrence and global strike operations". The US military is actually publicly claiming that the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner and steadfast critic of US imperialism would be an admirer of its massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, its global assassination programs, and its covert use of violence in multiple countries around the world, including where no wars are declared (in fairness, though, its Commander in Chief is himself a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize). Merely to describe this agitprop is to illustrate its repulsiveness.

"Dirty Wars"

The great war journalist Jeremy Scahill, and the accomplished filmmaker Rick Rowley, have just premiered their new documentary, "Dirty Wars", at the Sundance Film Festival. I hosted a panel discussion of political documentarians in New York several months ago that included Scahill and "Dirty Wars", and this film - which chronicles the Obama administration's secret wars in Yemen and other places - will make a huge impact. I really encourage you to watch or read the transcript of the interview Scahill and Rowley did today on Democracy Now about their new film and the militaristic policies of the Obama administration. As you do so, I don't think you'll have much doubt about whether "Dr. King would be proud" of these policies.

UPDATE

Having the military exploit Martin Luther King to support the militarism which he despised seems to be a trend. Here's a tweet posted on the official account of the US Marine Corps on Monday:

And an article posted on the official Pentagon website last year during the week of King's birthday celebration expressly argued that King would support current US wars:

This isn't a grotesque one-time aberration but rather a grotesque, institution-wide propaganda theme: to hold up Martin Luther King, of all people, as the justifying symbol of US aggression. That is just unspeakably foul.