South American Shockwaves Bring the New Silk Road Into the Americas as Neo-Liberal Order Crumbles

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture

Over the past several years Latin America has become a strategic battleground which involves much more than merely “geopolitical power plays” between the USA vs China as many commentators are asserting. Of course this is not to say that there are no geopolitical battles occurring. The entire western sponsored regime change operation in Venezuela couldn’t be understood unless one realized that China and Russia see Venezuela as a strategic ally in the Americas and a future zone for Belt and Road projects which are sweeping across the world… but something more is happening.

Over the past three years, over 17 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations have signed onto the new operating framework of the Belt and Road Initiative which extends far beyond the limited China-to-Europe corridor which many presumed it to be when it was announced in 2013. With its focus on long term planning and interconnectivity, China is already number one in vital infrastructure investments globally and while not number one in overall trade in the Americas, has now produced over six times more investment into Latin American energy infrastructure than the World Bank.

This new paradigm has been a breath of fresh air for many nations of the south that have been gripped by Western drug money laundering, poverty, debt slavery and organized crime which has been kept in place by over four decades of IMF-World Bank dictates enforced by London/Harvard trained economists positioned as local governors over the bodies of nationalist leaders.

In spite of the 17 nations on board the BRI, the big four powers (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia) have not yet joined, which has been a frustrating obstacle for the greater vision of integrated infrastructure to blossom. However, in the past few weeks, even this has begun to change.

Read more

The Next Economic Crisis, The Looming Post-Multipolar System And Hybrid War Forever

South Front

The Impending Crisis

At one time, specifically during the post-World War 2 Bretton Woods era, it looked like as if the capitalist model could be indefinitely sustainable and avoid plunging the world into major world conflicts. That era began to come to an end during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and came to a complete end at the end of the Cold War which ushered in the era of the so-called "globalization" which took form of unbridled competition for markets and resources. At first this competition did not show many signs of trouble. There were many "emerging markets" created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc into which Western corporations could expand. However, the law of diminishing returns being what it is, the initial rapid economic growth rates could not be sustained and attempts to goose it using extremely liberal central bank policies, to the point of zero and even negative interest rates, succeeded in inflating-and bursting-several financial "bubbles". 

Even today's US economy bears many hallmarks of such a bubble, and it is only one of many. Sooner or later the proverbial "black swan" event will unleash a veritable domino effect of popping bubbles and plunge the global economy into a crisis of a magnitude it has not seen since the 1930s. A crisis against which the leading world powers have few weapons to deploy, since they have expended their monetary and fiscal "firepower" on the 2008 crisis, to little avail. The low interest rates and high levels of national debt mean that the next big crisis will not be simply "more of the same." It will fundamentally rearrange the global economy. 

Read more

Ecuador Bows to US and IMF, Entering New Neoliberal Era

Elliot Gabriel

Mint Press News

The warmth displayed by authorities over the past month to visiting U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and the IMF, respectively, further proves that Ecuador is melting back into the arms of international financial interests.

UITO, ECUADOR – Ecuador’s passionate re-embrace of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) offers one of the clearest and most dramatic signs that the country’s leadership is dead-set on shedding any vestiges of the “post-neoliberal” era it was said to have entered a decade ago during former President Rafael Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution.

 

The warmth displayed by authorities over the past month to visiting U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and a team from the IMF, respectively, further proves that Ecuador is melting back into the arms of international financial interests. Yet, despite authorities’ almost apologetic attitude toward foreign capital over the spats and breakups of the past, the people of Ecuador appear destined to suffer further abuse at the hands of the domestic and transnational capitalist interests that inflicted such grievous harm on it in the past.

Pence’s visit to the Andean nation last month to meet with President Lenin Moreno offered one such occasion for the groveling attitude the once-proud government of Ecuador has adopted toward the U.S. and IMF. It comes amid the rolling reversal of fortunes faced by the wave of left-nationalist social democratic governments that rose in response to the devastation wrought by U.S.-dictated neoliberalism.

On June 29, Economy and Finance Minister Richard Martinez told reporters at the Carondelet Presidential Palace in Quito, that the country requires U.S. backing to obtain new loans from international institutions amounting to nearly $4 billion.

“We communicated to the vice president the need for support to permit multilateral organizations to generate sources of financing with favorable conditions for Ecuador,” said Martinez.

Days prior, the Ecuadorian presidency received approval from the National Assembly to move forward with the Law on Productive Development, which critics blasted as a threat to the country’s social services and welfare programs. The law will require that the government approves only budgets that result in revenue — i.e., taxes– outweighing expenditures on such vital state functions as public education, health care, national defense and public security.

Read more

The Scourge of Modern 'Liberalism' in France

Comment: I remember thinking at the time that there was something very fishy about the timing of this and the theatrical nature of the event. Something didn't sit right at all. This article shows us why.

------------------------- 

Pierre Lescaudron
Sott.net

In these depressing times marked by lies, fear and nihilism, I would like to brighten your mood by sharing a heart warming story. A real life event that is better than a fairy tale and should restore your faith in humanity and our burgeoning postmodern society.

A Modern Fairy Tale

What happened? In a nutshell, a heroic individual saved a 4 year old boy from a deadly fall.

Gassama climbing up to save the boy

On Saturday, May 26th 2018, at 8:00 p.m. in Paris 18th district, the boy was left alone by his white French father who was busy playing Pokemon Go. The boy went to the balcony and fell from the 6th floor over the handrail.

During the fall, the vigorous young boy managed somehow to grab the 4th floor handrail as he hurtled toward the ground. Hanging there precariously, death seemed just a few moments away.

Fortunately, Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant from Mali was in the right place at the right time. He saw the distressed boy and swiftly climbed 4 floors of the building exterior, pulled up the boy over the handrail and safely dropped him on the balcony while the crowd cheered and clapped.

Here is the video made by an eyewitness: 

Read more

The Swamp Strikes Back

Pepe Escobar
Sputnik

The tawdry Michael Flynn soap opera boils down to the CIA hemorrhaging leaks to the company town newspaper, leading to the desired endgame: a resounding victory for hardcore neocon/neoliberalcon US Deep State factions in one particular battle. But the war is not over; in fact it's just beginning.

Even before Flynn's fall, Russian analysts had been avidly discussing whether President Trump is the new Viktor Yanukovych — who failed to stop a color revolution at his doorstep. The Made in USA color revolution by the axis of Deep State neocons, Democratic neoliberalcons and corporate media will be pursued, relentlessly, 24/7. But more than Yanukovych, Trump might actually be remixing Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping: "crossing the river while feeling the stones". Rather, crossing the swamp while feeling the crocs. Flynn out may be interpreted as a Trump tactical retreat. After all Flynn may be back — in the shade, much as Roger Stone. If current deputy national security advisor K T McFarland gets the top job - which is what powerful Trump backers are aiming at - the shadowplay Kissinger balance of power, in its 21st century remix, is even strengthened; after all McFarland is a Kissinger asset.

This call won't self-destruct in five seconds

Flynn worked with Special Forces; was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); handled highly classified top secret information 24/7. He obviously knew all his conversations on an open, unsecure line were monitored. So he had to have morphed into a compound incarnation of the Three Stooges had he positioned himself to be blackmailed by Moscow. What Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak certainly discussed was cooperation in the fight against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, and what Moscow might expect in return: the lifting of sanctions. US corporate media didn't even flinch when US intel admitted they have a transcript of the multiple phone calls between Flynn and Kislyak. So why not release them? Imagine the inter-galactic scandal if these calls were about Russian intel monitoring the US ambassador in Moscow. 

Read more

The Triumph of the Technocrats

Charles Hugh-Smith
Of Two Minds

We cannot advance until we dump the Technocrat Class and decentralize the power that the Liberal Establishment happily concentrated into the hands of corporate cartels and the central state.
 
Those who don't yet understand our centrally-planned cartel-state system will benefit from reading How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul (The Atlantic). I've presented related analyses in three recent essays: 

The Protected, Privileged Establishment vs. The Working Class
The Collapse of the Left
25 Years of Neocon-Neoliberalism: Great for the Top 5%, A Disaster for Everyone Else
 
What we're talking about here is the Triumph of the Technocrats. There are multiple levels to this triumph of the technocrat class: 

1. The dumbing down of the Technocrat Class via a Higher Education system that optimizes technocrat specialization at the expense of real-world business experience and broad-based knowledge. 

As a result, the technocrat class has a very high opinion of its intelligence and judgment because it has no idea how little it actually knows or understands. It believes Higher Education's hype that specialization has given it a superior understanding that entitles it to control and power. 

This overweening belief in its own superiority sets the stage for hubris and catastrophically ungrounded decisions. 

Need we look any farther than the invasion of Iraq or the Establishment's response to the insolvency of self-liquidating money-center banks in 2008? 

The roots of the Technocrat Class's hubris and self-congratulatory bias go all the way back to the 1960s-era "whiz kids" described by David Halberstam's classic account The Best and the Brightest. 

Read more

IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro and apologises for the immolation of Greece

Comment: This is tragi-comedy. What this shows above anything else that the sheer stupidity of these people is beyond dispute. They were not informed?? Really? They're like spoilt children playing with people's lives. "Sorry, we destroyed a country and its its citizens. We'll do better next time and put in measures that ensure a country's wealth passes into our and the banking fraternity's coffers in a more civilised and less transparent way."

The IMF is an enabler and tool of neo-liberal economic policy thus it cannot be reformed. The only course of action is to erase it from existence as soon as humanly possible.

---------------------- 

Telegraph

 

“The possibility of a balance of payments crisis in a monetary union was thought to be all but non-existent,” it said. As late as mid-2007, the IMF still thought that “in view of Greece’s EMU membership, the availability of external financing is not a concern".

At root was a failure to grasp the elemental point that currency unions with no treasury or political union to back them up are inherently vulnerable to debt crises. States facing a shock no longer have sovereign tools to defend themselves. Devaluation risk is switched into bankruptcy risk.

“In a monetary union, the basics of debt dynamics change as countries forgo monetary policy and exchange rate adjustment tools,” said the report. This would be amplified by a “vicious feedback between banks and sovereigns”, each taking the other down. That the IMF failed to anticipate any of this was a serious scientific and professional failure.

In Greece, the IMF violated its own cardinal rule by signing off on a bailout in 2010 even though it could offer no assurance that the package would bring the country’s debts under control or clear the way for recovery, and many suspected from the start that it was doomed.

The organisation got around this by slipping through a radical change in IMF rescue policy, allowing an exemption (since abolished) if there was a risk of systemic contagion. “The board was not consulted or informed,” it said. The directors discovered the bombshell “tucked into the text” of the Greek package, but by then it was a fait accompli.

The IMF was in an invidious position when it was first drawn into the Greek crisis.  The Lehman crisis was still fresh. “There were concerns that such a credit event could spread to other members of the euro area, and more widely to a fragile global economy,” said the report.

The eurozone had no firewall against contagion, and its banks were tottering. The European Central Bank had not yet stepped up to the plate as lender of last resort. It was deemed too dangerous to push for a debt restructuring in Greece.

Read More

‘Tony Blair lied on Iraq and will be exposed by Chilcot report’ – Corbyn

Comment: I'll believe when I see it.

-------------------

RT 

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lies about weapons of mass destruction and his secret war pact with former US President George W Bush will be exposed by the Chilcot Inquiry, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has said.

Sir John Chilcot is due to finally release his long-delayed report on the legality of the 2003 Iraq invasion on July 6, seven years after the inquiry was commissioned.

Corbyn made the remarks on Tuesday in a speech at the London School of Economics to honour the late Ralph Miliband, a Marxist scholar and father of Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband.

While Corbyn supported some of the domestic achievements of Blair’s “New Labour,” he argued it had stuck too closely to its neoliberal, Thatcherite ideological roots.

Addressing Blair’s Iraq legacy, Corbyn warned: “The Chilcot report will come out in a few weeks’ time and tell us what we need to know, what I think we already know: There were no weapons of mass destruction, there was no ability to attack within 45 minutes and a deal had been done with Bush in advance.”

Corbyn took a leading role in opposing the 2003 invasion both inside and outside parliament.

Asked if Blair should be tried for war crimes, Corbyn said: “If he’s committed a war crime, yes. Everyone who’s committed a war crime should be.

“I think it was an illegal war, I’m confident about that, indeed [former UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan confirmed it was an illegal war, and therefore [Blair] has to explain to that.”

“Is he going to be tried for it, I don’t know. Could he be tried for it? Possibly,” Corbyn added.

Some MPs are trying to revive a campaign to have Blair prosecuted for his part in the war, either at an international tribunal or by a special parliamentary impeachment process.

Although rare, parliament can impeach a current or former official. It would involve a member of the Commons presenting evidence in the manner of a parliamentary motion, and if carried, it would then move to the House of Lords. If it was also passed by the Lords, the impeachment process would resemble a conventional trial.

The last time parliament attempted to impeach anyone, however, was in 1806, according to the BBC.

Scottish National Party (SNP) MP Alex Salmond said Monday that, rather than parliamentary impeachment, he favored Blair being brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

However, the ICC has said it is not yet able to exercise jurisdiction over international “crimes of aggression” – the offense often connected with Blair’s role in Iraq.

The ICC will rule on whether to extend its powers to try suspects of aggression on January 1, 2017.