Anti-Colonialism's Unfinished Business

Americans are starting to wake up to reality, as a foreign observer put it:

Western liberal democracies are like a narcissistic wife beater who postures as a sensitive he/him feminist on social media. Like a pop star who makes a show of fighting the power and defending the marginalized while supporting Israel. Our society isn’t what it pretends to be. Our entire civilization sustains itself through an endless river of blood, sweat and tears from the global south while making movies about fighting for justice and saving the world. Our pundits wag their fingers at the “tyrannical regimes” in empire-targeted nations while our own rulers murder, starve and terrorize disobedient populations in order to dominate the planet. In school they teach us that we are lucky to live in a free society where the people command the government with their votes and we have the right to express ourselves in whatever way we choose, when in reality wealthy oligarchs control the entire electoral process and our expression is aggressively manipulated through a complex system of censorship and propaganda. We have no integrity.

How long has this been going on? For that, we might take an historical perspective beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which oversaw the infamous Scramble for Africa:

Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see; and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war today but of the menace of wars tomorrow.

Still can't join the dots? Then listen to Prof. Richard Wolff lay it all out in a succinct summary:



Now we get to the purpose of this post, Anti-colonialism's Unfinished Business. It seems as if the Unfinished Business has finally made it onto the agenda:



And for an oncore, don't miss THIS.

What if everything America did ...

Came Home to America?



UPDATE: As you can see from the above, censorship is alive and well in the USA. Here in its place is a worthy contender:

THE EMPIRE IS RUNNING OUT OF MISSILES.

The Funeral: A Nation’s Verdict

This author summarizes it succinctly:

After the death of {eighth president of Iran, Ebrahim} Raisi, the majority of the people voted for Pezeshkian. They gave the reformist a chance, and he repaid them with appeasement while the enemy repaid them with bombs. The coalition of the United States, Israel, and their Gulf vassals, a cabal of pederasts and client kings, launched two waves of attacks on Iran. They killed thousands of civilians. They struck homes, hospitals, sports complexes, and infrastructure. On the first day, they targeted the Minab school. These were not strategic objectives; there is no military logic to bombing a school. These were satanic sacrifices, rituals of demoralization intended to crush the will of a people, to prove that no place was safe, that even children at their desks were legitimate prey. They armed ethnic minorities to attack infrastructure from within, trying to fracture the nation along fault lines they had spent decades mapping. They violated every conceivable international law with the impunity of those who know the institutions are their own.

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf stated “the era of one-sided deals is OVER,” posting the {Memorandum of Understanding} MOU’s text with Iran’s privileges highlighted: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts” for free passage of commercial vessels through Hormuz, “for 60 days only.”

What happens next?

And what happens now to the (mostly) indifferent public of the West? Here is a possibility (probability?):

An Historic Inflection Point

Just twelve days ago I posted that "Iran is making history". Although many of us somehow intuited that our world was on the cusp of momentous changes, we probably didn't realize (at the time) just how earth-shattering they would be, once the dust cleared. The pace of activity picked up (I won't detail it here since there are a plethora of analyses by capable authors one can reference), and just one week after my post, Peter Haenseler via the blog of former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson summarized the "state of affairs" in the following manner:

No one expected Donald Trump to sign the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)—especially in Versailles. Iran is taking its place at the big table with the major powers, and the world looks different—we’re asking questions—many of which have no answers.

Although the dust hadn't (and still hasn't) settled, the immediate question on everybody's lips was:

What drove Trump to hurriedly sign the MoU?

The President himself let slip the answer to that question during a masterful display of circumlocution at the following press conference. The answer makes its debut at 2:35😆:



Neither I nor Larry C. Johnson are oil industry specialists, but Larry has conveniently done his homework before I could begin researching the issue (more HERE, and a further update HERE). Coming to think of it, I should just refer you to Larry C. Johnson's blog since he has done a masterful job of following, researching and documenting this entire affair.

I will perhaps end with a segment from another Middle East analyst of the highest caliber, the incomparable Alastair Crooke. in which he quotes a former senior Israeli Iran military intelligence analyst:

An unquestioned dogma has bitten the dust:

“The long-standing expectation in parts of Jerusalem and Washington has been that sustained pressure could lead to regime change in Tehran … [However] the announced agreement suggests a [new] fundamental reality: The campaign that many hoped would weaken or even destabilise the Islamic Republic will instead conclude with the regime intact, strengthened, and formally engaged by the U.S. … [This] amounts to the collapse of a broader strategic assumption: that coordinated American and Israeli pressure could generate conditions conducive to fundamental political change inside Iran. Instead, the likely outcome is the opposite … [it is] an outcome likely to reinforce confidence amongst [Iran’s] ruling elite rather than weaken it …”.
This moment represents a major strategic achievement for Iran: A heroic image is surging across the globe – whereas Israel’s isolation on the Iran issue, even amongst its Gulf allies, has spiked. On the personal level, Netanyahu’s standing in Israel has plunged catastrophically.

Glory Be!

Iran is making history.



More from former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, Larry C. Johnson.

This is where the stock markets stood yesterday. What will they be like today?

The Crash of the International Dollar Market?

The background to understanding what may be imminent is the recycling of the Petro-dollar:

Especially during the years 1974–1981 and 2005–2014, oil exporters amassed large surpluses of "petrodollars" from the sale of oil at historically high prices.[1][2][8] (The word has been credited alternately to Egyptian-American economist Ibrahim Oweiss and to former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson, both in 1973.)[9][10][11] These petrodollar surpluses could be described as net U.S. dollar-equivalents earned from the export of petroleum, in excess of the internal development needs of the exporting countries.[12] The International Monetary Fund argues that these surpluses could not be efficiently invested in their own economies, due to small populations or being at early stages of industrialization. Instead, the IMF advocated for the surpluses to be invested in other locations, most notably the United States, or spent on imports such as consumer products, construction supplies, and military equipment. Additionally, the IMF also argues that global economic growth would have suffered if money was withdrawn from the world economy and stored in the reserves of developing nations, while the oil-exporting states needed to be able to invest profitably to raise their long-term standards of living.[13] Alternatively, critics argue that the international monetary system, reliant on petrodollar recycling, exploits developing nations while advancing American imperialism.[14]

Economist Michael Hudson is more blunt:

Under the rules of (the 7th US national security advisor and 56th US secretary of state, serving under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) (Henry) Kissinger — and all this was explained to me by the Treasury and the State Department, in 1974 and 1975 — the US military told Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, “You can charge whatever you want for oil, but you have to use the surplus have to invest in the United States. We’re not going to let you buy control of any major American firms. You can’t buy American companies; only we can buy control of foreign economies. You’ll buy bonds. You can finance American industry and American companies. You can buy stocks in the companies. You can make money by just depositing your money in banks”. These were the petrodollars. The petrodollars were the savings of OPEC countries invested in banks.

Enter the War against Iran, resulting in extensive damage to oil facilities and US military bases in the Middle East, not to mention the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Michael Hudson adds:

Now that the OPEC countries are blocked from having export earnings, they’ve announced, “Well, we’ve actually debt-leveraged our own economy. Rich as we are, our real estate projects and our investments are financed by debt, and we have to begin selling off our holdings of US securities, and gold, in order to keep our domestic budgets and the balance of payments in balance”. So all of this now is leading to a sell-off of dollars. And this has reversed what was the whole petrodollar, the whole inflow of OPEC money, into the currency, of oil into dollars. Now, this is becoming a drain on dollars.

Analyst Alexaner Mercouris sounds the alarm in the case of the United Arab Emirates' petition for US dollar swaps in this podcast (from 1:30 to 14:30), but the key discussion is undertaken by Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau in the following video:

Beyond a Failed Narrative

This memorable speech was given by author, essayist, and lecturer Patrick Lawrence, previously a correspondent abroad for the International Herald Tribune, upon the publication of his book Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.

Americans are living a failed national narrative. Our almost universal belief in our exceptional status as a providentially "chosen people" suspends us in a beguiling myth beyond the reality of history. On September 11, 2001, we reacted with an almost child-like innocence. President George Bush soared in the polls when he doubled down on the familiar troupe that America has the ability to remake the world in our own image through the force of arms. Rather than summon imagination, wisdom and courage to offer an alternative, Democratic presidential hopefuls fell over themselves to support Bush in invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. In his most recent book Time No Longer, Patrick Lawrence movingly regrets the road not taken. The events of 2001 confronted us with choice. We could accept that our national narrative had failed and that the time had arrived to abandon our dreams of empire and dismantle our imperial presidency. Or we could resist change and remain in a state of denial that would compound our self-destructive conduct. The Republican and Democratic parties -- who purport to lead America -- choose wrongly. Instead of restoring separation of powers and embracing the constitutional exceptionalism of the American Republic, America would continue down the militarized path of telling the world what to do.