Criticism from the charity’s food policy director came in response to a new United Nations report revealing that around 1 in 10 people worldwide went hungry last year.
Archive for category: Uncategorized
By Jeffrey D. Sachs – Jun 27, 2022
The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.
The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Cohen, Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).
The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China. For this purpose, US military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the US should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the US only when useful for US purposes.
This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.
The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:
[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union — in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?
Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, “the Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US “hegemony” while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well. Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.
Kagan penned the article as a private citizen while his wife Victoria Nuland was the US Ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, Jr. Nuland has been the neocon operative par excellence. In addition to serving as Bush’s Ambassador to NATO, Nuland was Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs during 2013-17, where she participated in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, and now serves as Biden’s Undersecretary of State guiding US policy vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine.
The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who’s who of defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory. Regarding Russia’s advances, the ISW offered a typical comment: “[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back.”
RELATED CONTENT: Doubling Down on Threat to Russia, Blinken Seeks Finland, Sweden Entry Into NATO
The facts on the ground, however, suggest otherwise. The West’s economic sanctions have had little adverse impact on Russia, while their “boomerang” effect on the rest of the world has been large. Moreover, the US capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America’s limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia’s industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine’s. Russia’s GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before war, and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.
The most likely outcome of the current fighting is that Russia will conquer a large swath of Ukraine, perhaps leaving Ukraine landlocked or nearly so. Frustration will rise in Europe and the US with the military losses and the stagflationary consequences of war and sanctions. The knock-on effects could be devastating, if a right-wing demagogue in the US rises to power (or in the case of Trump, returns to power) promising to restore America’s faded military glory through dangerous escalation.
Instead of risking this disaster, the real solution is to end the neocon fantasies of the past 30 years and for Ukraine and Russia to return to the negotiating table, with NATO committing to end its commitment to the eastward enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in return for a viable peace that respects and protects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is an economics professor; Director of the Center for Sustainable Development in the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
As with a star, when the mass of accumulated capital exceeds the capacity of living labour to breathe life into it, the moment of crisis has arrived, and swathes of capital are destroyed in a financial crash.
Obvious examples of Central Intelligence Agency covert action abroad are difficult to identify today, save for occasional acknowledged calamities, such as the long-running $1 billion effort to overthrow the government of Syria, via funding, training and arming barbarous jihadist groups.
In part, this stems from many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Founded in November 1983, then-CIA director William Casey was at the heart of NED’s creation.
The post How CIA Front Laid Foundations For Ukraine War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 5, 2022 ~ The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will release its advance estimate for U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the second quarter of 2022 at 8:30 a.m. on July 28. All eyes on Wall Street will be glued to that number as a gauge of where stock prices are headed. As of this morning, the highly respected number crunchers at the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model are forecasting a contraction of -2.1 percent in U.S. economic growth in the second quarter. (That’s the real GDP growth/seasonally adjusted annual rate.) The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow modelers will update their forecast five more times, based on additional economic data releases, before the advance estimate for second quarter GDP is officially released by the BEA on July 28. GDP contracted at a -1.6 percent annualized rate in the first quarter. Two quarters of negative … Continue reading →
This isn’t just about abortion. This is about impact on the health and safety of pregnant patients
GABRIELA USA Press Release
GABRIELA USA joins Filipino women across the country in protest to reject the inauguration of both Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte. Marcos Jr. took over the Presidential office in the Philippines after one of the most fraudulent elections in recent Philippine history. The return of the Marcos dynasty to power comes as a result of their decades long campaign of historical revisionism and whitewashing of their plunder and crimes against the Filipino people. GABRIELA USA calls on all freedom and democracy loving people to join local protest actions to reject the inauguration of the illegitimate Marcos-Duterte regime.
“Marcos Jr.’s inaugural speech was full of empty promises for the Filipino people,” said Terrie Cervas, Secretary General of GABRIELA USA. “As an overseas chapter of GABRIELA, established in 1984 during the time of Martial Law and Marcos, Sr.’s dictatorial rule over the Philippines, we will never forget the plunder of the nation’s wealth and human rights violations committed by the Marcoses. We will not stand idle to the continued revision of history spewed by the Marcoses, but we will continue the fight for national democracy and genuine liberation of the Philippines.”
The Filipino people can expect that Marcos Jr. will follow in the footsteps of his dictator father. According to data from Amnesty International, 72,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3,240 were killed under Marcos Sr.’s Martial Law. Just like his father, Marcos Jr. plans to continue to terrorize the Filipino people, as he committed to ensuring additional funding for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC)–the government agencies responsible for terror tagging and carrying out counterinsurgency operations against the people.
One week ago the National Telecommunications Commission blocked the websites of various alternative media and people’s organizations, and just yesterday news website Rappler was ordered to shut down. The current attacks on press freedom repeat the same tactics that Marcos Jr.’s father used during Martial Law. Through various means, the mass media is prevented from performing their work of reporting the truth. Marcos’ officials drown out and shut down mass media, while amplifying their own government backed media and social media trolls, who spread lies about the supposed achievements of the Marcos dynasty, while covering up their crimes against the Filipino people.
Just as Filipino women participated in the people’s struggle against Marcos Sr.’s Martial Law, so will we continue the struggle in the face of the new Marcos-Duterte regime. We have faced down a dictatorial regime in the past and persevered until its defeat. We will take our lessons from all those who struggled against dictatorship and fascism in the Philippines and we will carry the torch forward to victory!
Reject and Fight the Marcos-Duterte Regime!
Makibaka! Huwag Matakot!
Abante Babae! Palaban Militante!
It’s time to examine alternative ways of living and loving found in other cultures and LGBTQAI+ communities
Document set to go to voters in September though some investors worry about future business climate
Brazil is heading towards this year’s elections with a strong appetite for change after four years of Jair Bolsonaro which followed a coup against President Dilma Rouseff.
In São Paulo, Camila spoke to Cassia Bechara of the National Board of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) at the movement’s Armazém do Campo store where one can find a selection of agroecological, organic and family farming products. Cassia sets the backdrop for the upcoming electoral campaign and describes some of the main issues in Brazil today and reflects on the recent victory of Gustavo Petro in Colombia.
The post Brazil’s MST on the Fight Against Evictions and Bolsonaro appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.