In January 2013, the Obama White House released a White Paper on “National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security: Implementation Update.” It was a short document, only 22 pages, almost wholly focused on the security of transport – of ships, air freight, the mails – against terrorism and other threats. What traveled through the supply chain, and from where, does not appear to have been a major concern.
In June 2021, the Biden White House published a “100-day review” entitled “Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing and Fostering Broad-based Growth.” It is focused on a very different concept of what the “supply chain” is; the term now encompasses the entire spectrum of upstream production. The Biden review takes these up in four areas: semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, critical minerals, and pharmaceuticals.
One might ask, why these four areas and not others? There is no clear answer, and it may be that choice was mainly bureaucratic. The review was compiled from separate reports by four cabinet departments: Commerce, Energy, Defense, and Health and Human Services. Had the Department of Agriculture been asked, or the Department of Transportation, one might have gotten different choices. Petroleum comes to mind. Or natural rubber – the linchpin of World War II in the Pacific.
If there is an Ariadne’s thread to these four areas, it is the trading and competitive relationship with China. The reports do not focus solely on China and give what is largely a fair-minded and wide-ranging assessment of vulnerabilities in each sector. For the reader not previously immersed in the structures of semiconductor production or the technology of electrical storage, this document, at 250 pages, is a mine of information. But China lurks in each section, sometimes looming large, in other places only in the background.
The global semiconductor industry is here described in fascinating detail. It is a paragon of extreme specialization, relentless technological improvement, economies of scale, and global division of labor. US firms dominate in semiconductor design and integrated production; Japan produces the wafers; Taiwan and (to a much smaller degree) South Korea do high-end fabrication in “contract foundries,” while China handles a substantial share of low-end chips and of “packaging” – a term that covers the placing of chips into circuit boards including, of course, the assembly of smartphones. American-based production is only 12 percent of the world’s capacity, roughly a third of what it was in the 1990s.
To characterize broadly, the semiconductor supply chain is a network of unique nodes, in which a given firm has one upstream supplier for many major components and perhaps just one downstream customer, creating a web of bilateral monopolies operating in extreme interdependence. Thus a breakdown anywhere along the line can disrupt the entire system. This is, by the way, very much the classic problem of Soviet-style industrial structure, designed to maximize efficiency at each node (in the Soviet case, a matter of scale), but fragile as events in the early 1990s showed.
The review calls attention to several specific events that have led to recent and ongoing shortages in semiconductor supply. These include a fire in March at a facility in Japan and the freeze in February in Texas which took a trio of Austin facilities off-line for up to a month. But the most important was not itself a natural event but rather the reaction to one. As Covid-19 took hold, key figures in the industry shifted capacity to household applications. They failed to anticipate how quickly demand for vehicles would recover as the pandemic waned.
The problem is that chip production takes a lot of time; it is characterized to an extreme degree by what economists of the Austrian school call “roundaboutness.” The multiple steps (etching, doping, and so forth) are repeated “hundreds of times”; producing a single chip “can take up to 26 weeks.” So once locked into a program, the industry has the margin of maneuver, roughly, of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal. Meanwhile, the automakers who have designed a hundred or more distinct chips into their new cars must sit and wait. This accounts, no doubt, in part for the surging prices of used vehicles and the current scarcity of rental cars.
What then is the “China threat” to the semiconductor supply chain? The most important one is stated very plainly. China is the world’s largest semiconductor market, both for home use and for incorporation into products sold elsewhere. The single biggest risk from China is not some nefarious disruption of components or materials. It is rather, a possible fall in the final demand. The review is clear and unambiguous on this point:
US semiconductor companies… thus have the potential to be significantly impacted by trade restrictions between the United States and China, with major portions of their revenue at risk of long-term disruption. Based on the Chinese government’s ambitions in regard to the semiconductor industry, these revenue sources may be at risk regardless, but given that their ability to reinvest is immediately dependent on sales to China, their long-term viability is immediately affected by actions that decrease sales. (p. 57.)
The review goes on to note that since much of the industry operates on the two banks of the Taiwan Strait, “Even a minor conflict or embargo could have immediate major disruptions to the United States and long-term implications for US supply chain resilience” (p. 57). In a White House document, at this moment of heated China-bashing, this is a welcome realism.
With large-capacity batteries, the principal supply-chain issue is not so much a science-driven matter of design and engineering as it is access to key materials, most notably nickel, graphite, cobalt, and lithium. With these materials, it appears reserves are not particularly scarce, although in the case of cobalt they are concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where mining conditions are tactfully described as being “outside of international practice.” The review notes that China’s advantage in materials supply results, mainly, from having invested in finding reserves on its own territory.
But, it turns out, industrial dominance in this area does not rest on the supply side. It lies rather in the development of the industry itself, driven by demand for electrical storage, which is overwhelmingly in the automotive sector. China is the low-cost producer because it is the world’s largest user, consuming 40 percent of global large-capacity battery output. Europe accounts for another 40 percent, and the United States for just 13 percent. Consider this: there are 425,000 electrically-powered buses in the world today. Of these, 300 are in the United States; 421,000 are in China. Perhaps oddly for a report on the supply chain, but not unreasonably under the circumstances, the recommendations in this section are relentless: the United States should work to bolster demand.
In the report on critical materials, prepared by the Pentagon, thirty-eight minerals are listed for which US direct import dependence is above 75 percent. Of these, China is a top supplier in eighteen cases. And why is that? Largely, as the report states, because the growth in China’s own demand for these materials has made it profitable for China to invest in the supply chain, hence to become the high-volume, low-cost producer, to whom the world turns.
The Defense Department is naturally concerned with the possible consequences of conflict, and so with the possibility that access to materials might be lost, especially where there is only one source of supply. This is particularly true in the case of “rare earths” – a grab-bag of exotic minerals – where China had 85 percent of the global market as of 2014 – even though the entire Chinese workforce in the mining of rare earths consists of only 4,000 souls, with an additional 40,000 in smelting. Perhaps understandably, not even the Pentagon has a good answer to this problem, apart from conservation, recycling, stockpiling, and being prepared to divert from routine to essential uses in an emergency. The review laments the decline of mining expertise emerging from US university systems, where educational programs have folded as mines have disappeared. But it is hard to see why students would pursue degrees, or universities provide them, in fields for which jobs no longer exist.
With pharmaceuticals, the problem is not of scarcity but of basic economics. The supply chain moved to India because costs are low as befits the low-price, low-margin, high-volume business of generic drug manufacture. Supply chain resilience would thus be a matter of maintaining a “virtual” stockpile, consisting of manufacturing equipment and precursor chemicals, to be held in reserve in case of emergencies. It is important to note that to be useful, the reserve capacity would have to be kept idle – otherwise it adds no layer of safety in the event of a disruption. The review is realistic about the prospects for this: the scale and complexity of the sector, together with the unpredictability of future biological threats, makes it impractical to maintain large reserves in all areas. In an open global market economy, drugs will be bought from where they are cheapest to produce.
In each area, the Review is critical of Chinese practices, which are said to consist of large-scale, “top-down,” “market-distorting,” public investments, subsidies to Chinese companies, state-sponsored industrial rationalization, and in the case of electric vehicles, large subsidies to consumers to spur demand. Thus we read: “The Chinese Government has focused on capturing discrete strategic and critical material markets as a matter of state policy.” (p. 174). Examples given are that in 2002 China “prohibited foreign investors from establishing rare earth mining enterprises in China” and in 2014 consolidated the business in the hands of a “handful of national champions.” Also, back in 1985, China had established a VAT rebate for rare-earth exports, “which contributed to the erosion and the elimination of US production in the global market.
In this and other instances throughout the Review, the deplorable practices of state planning and national development strategies undertaken by China are, within a few pages, pretty much exactly what the authors recommend for the United States. (The DoD recommendations on critical materials are an exception here, addressing among other things recycling, human rights issues, and environmental concerns, even though these are perhaps somewhat tangential to supply-chain issues per se.) Thus on lithium-ion batteries, we read: “As part of the American Jobs Plan, President Joe Biden has called for transformative investments to spur this demand, including $100 billion in incentives to encourage US consumers to transition to EVs” (p. 134). Similarly on semiconductors: “Consistent with the American Jobs Plan proposals, federal incentives to build or expand semiconductor facilities are necessary to counter the significant subsidies provided by foreign allies and competitors.” (p. 76). How an “incentive” differs from the Chinese practice of “subsidies” is not clearly explained. Nor does the review admit that export rebates on VAT are standard practice everywhere.
Still, from a broad reading and fair appraisal of this genuinely excellent document, two major conclusions may be drawn. The first is that the Chinese advantage – which is by no means absolute in all areas – stems from a pragmatic program of economic development, including infrastructure and human resources, in a vast country able to take advantage of a scale of production and internal market impossible anywhere else. This leads to lower costs across a wide range of industrial and engineering capacities, bolstered by being embedded (as the Review does not point out) in a system oriented toward social stability and steady growth rather than short-term profitability and financial contracts. The Chinese edge – similar to India’s in pharmaceuticals but much more broadly based – is the product of the success of China’s development approach, especially in the post-Mao era, but with roots that go back to the 1949 revolution, to the creation of the People’s Republic and to the restoration of a unitary Chinese state with full control over the nation’s land and resources. This is a fact of life and not an artifact of ruses or dirty dealing.
The second key conclusion is that in critical sectors, in the world we inhabit and from which we cannot escape, US-China interdependence is indefeasible. Rare earths are a minor example, barring new discoveries in other places. Semiconductors are a major one: without the Chinese market, the American firms that presently dominate the high-end design processes would collapse. Bringing manufacturing back to the US, we learn, would come primarily at the expense of allies, including Japan and South Korea as well as, especially, Taiwan. It is hard to see why even the most aggressive China hawk would favor stripping Taiwan of its chip foundries – but even doing that would hardly lessen the dependence of the semiconductor ecosystem on the Chinese market.
So we come to a truly remarkable third conclusion, no less powerful for having been left unstated. It builds on the fact that the integration of the global economy cannot be undone. The division of labor – hence productivity, living standards, and the advance of technologies – is limited by the extent of the market, as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776. China is a now-developed country with about twenty percent of the human population; its advantages are stability and scale, almost exactly as was true in the 18th century. These advantages cannot now be taken away without destroying the world as it is.
To be sure, the Chinese still, in many important advanced areas, draw from and depend on the United States. Certainly, the US can slow the inroads of Chinese firms in some cases, and certainly the US can foster, as this report recommends, its own advantages in new sectors by maintaining and expanding its research and development base. Certainly, there are many things to be done in the United States to meet urgent environmental, public health, and critical social goals.
But the US position, as an economy with only one-fourth the population, equally now depends on the Chinese market, and on downstream Chinese firms supplying applications to the world. While precautions against natural disasters and pandemics can be taken – up to a point – the central unstated message of this 100-day Review is that the greatest risk to the supply chain, in each of the four areas, is disruption of normal trade relations with China. In short, as an objective economic matter, we learn here, the United States has an overwhelming interest in peace.
June 27, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | China, United States |
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This major skirmish could determine the outcome of Africa’s fight for energy freedom
It was quite a shock to Africa Energy Chamber Executive Director NJ Ayuk – and an even bigger shock to the Chamber – that the London-based Hyve group decided to move the annual Africa Oil Week from Cape Town, South Africa to Dubai. It was such a shock that the AEC shortly afterward announced it was sponsoring Africa Energy Week on the same weekend (November 8-12) as the (Out of) Africa Oil Week.
Mr. Ayuk works hard to ensure the interests of African companies and citizens in African energy ventures are widely recognized. He calls the dueling conferences a major confrontation between “Cancel Fossil Fuels” (Dubai) and “Protect our Oil and Gas Industry” (Cape Town).
The Cancel Fossil Fuels movement is currently being led by the International Energy Agency, which recently declared that all oil and gas exploration must cease immediately in order to achieve compliance with the Paris climate accords – and save the world from the mythical fires of hell on Earth.
The Biden-Harris Administration, the European Union, many Western banks and now even Western insurance companies claim the world faces a “climate catastrophe” if we “cling” to fossil fuels. They are lying, of course. There is no actual catastrophe on the horizon. And they know it!
The hysteria in the press (here, here, here and here, for example) is exceeded only by the screeching of Hollywood actors like Leonardo di Caprio and Don Cheadle. Newspaper reports tout compliance with Paris as a litmus test (one of many) for determining one’s humanity.
The hoopla has been so successful that a recent Pew Research Center poll found fully a third of Americans now favor a full-on extinction of fossil fuels and engines that run on them. Only 64% of Americans prefer keeping fossil fuels in the energy mix. This in a nation with 270 million gasoline-powered vehicles and who knows how many gas furnaces and water heaters!
Hardly a day goes by without some entity virtue-signaling disdain for fossil fuels. The media imply that “no fossil fuels by 2050” is “the future.” They are dead wrong. Litigation attorney Francis Menton hit the nail on the head in a recent real-world post: “The current legal onslaught is unlikely to limit world oil production significantly.”
Menton acknowledges the “multi-front legal onslaught” against the “major” oil producing companies (not countries!). The war is not confined to lawsuits. Other weapons include new laws, regulatory initiatives and proxy contests. However, as Menton demonstrates, the oft-targeted “major” Western oil companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Conoco Phillips) “are just not that big a part of world production.”
ExxonMobil, the largest of the group, was ranked just sixth, and Chevron was the only other “major” in the top ten. The top five are Saudi Aramco, Rosneft (Russia), Kuwait Petroleum, National Iranian Oil Company and China National. When is the last time you saw legal actions, major demonstrations or even public demands that those oil giants shut down?
Despite all the official kowtowing to Paris and even the IEA, not even all Western nations have any real intention of decarbonizing. Norway, for example, has openly stated its intention to increase its investments in offshore oil and gas operations in 2021. Of course, in an official “woke” statement, the Norwegian government promised to facilitate long-term economic growth in the petroleum industry “within the framework of our climate policy and our commitments under the Paris Agreement.” Huh?
Meanwhile, the Norwegian Oil and Gas Association bluntly stated that its members do not share “the assumption that OPEC members alone should account for more than half of oil and gas production for the world market in a 2050 perspective.” The reasons are obvious.
First, the result would be soaring energy prices and significant threats to global energy supplies. Second, Norway would lose revenues and jobs associated with industries like oil and gas, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and recovery of seabed minerals.
Africans like Ayuk share similar views: that their countries cannot afford to throw away their best chances for economic growth, full employment, infrastructure development and modern living standards – to satisfy the whims and demands of wealthy Europeans.
To underscore their determination, Canada-based Reconnaissance Energy Africa is on the verge of turning the Namibian part of the Kavango Basin into a world oil capital. Exploratory drilling within the 8.5-million-acre Kavango Basin has confirmed that “Namibia is endowed with an active onshore petroleum basin,” says Namibia Minister of Mines and Energy Tom Alweendo. The country hopes oil and gas development will bring economic stimulus, increased infrastructure, access to potable water, and investments in environmental protection and wildlife conservation.
Just last year the Russian firm Rosgeo signed an agreement with Equatorial Guinea for an historic geological mapping project – the first step toward developing a domestic oil and gas industry and finding other mineral resources. (Guinea withdrew from Africa Oil Week in favor of Africa Energy Week.)
An earlier report identified 70 crude oil and natural gas projects planned for startup in sub-Saharan Africa between 2019 and 2025; it also said Nigeria would be producing over a million barrels of oil per day (BOPD) by 2025.
Two of Africa’s five largest oil and gas projects are in Mozambique: the state-of-the-art Mozambique liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, which plans to tap into an estimated 75 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of recoverable offshore natural gas, and the 85-tcf Area 4 project, which includes the Coral and Rovuma LNG facilities.
BP just awarded a billion-dollar contract for construction of phase 1 of the 15-tcf Tortue Ahmeyim offshore LNG project, which benefits Mauritania and Senegal. Shell is planning to begin construction in 2022 of a $30 billion LNG liquefaction plant in Tanzania, which has over 57 tcf of recoverable natural gas reserves. And the East African Crude Oil Pipeline intends to transport crude oil from Kabaale-Hoima in Uganda to the Tanzanian port of Tanga.
None of these energy-rich African nations is eager to submit to IEA demands, which seem to envision only existing OPEC nations as future producers and refiners. This, it appears, is the dividing line between Africa Oil Week and the new Africa Energy Week.
A leading theme of Africa Oil Week in Dubai is “Africa’s energy transition efforts toward a cleaner environment.” The Dubai event asks, “As the pressure mounts for regions, countries and companies to meet the Paris Agreement targets on eliminating carbon emissions, where does the continent stand?” (Resistance. Is. Futile. attendees want Africans to believe.)
Africa Energy Week has already garnered an impressive list of speakers, sponsors and attendees. It has a much different theme – and no lack of chutzpah. “Replacing Africa Oil Week” is the goal. The creators say their event “seeks to unite industry stakeholders, international speakers, and movers and shakers from the African oil and gas sector … to define and promote the African energy agenda through development, deal-making and private sector participation.”
Key topics at Africa Energy Week include making energy poverty history before 2030, the future of the African oil and gas industry, the role of women in energy, and opportunities and financial challenges. The AEC says this Africa-focused, in-person energy event is fully devoted to promoting African development and growth through African-held programs.
Ayuk says that the AOW’s move to Dubai provided an opportunity for Africans to stand up for African values. “We are going to fight for our future. We are not going to give in to this crowd. I am not worried about the attacks. We are going to stand for what is right.”
Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org).
June 26, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Africa |
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When considering a policy as unprecedented and far-reaching as a nationwide lockdown, you’d assume the Government would carry out a cost-benefit analysis. After all, such analyses are routine in policy-making.
For example, the Treasury maintains a document called ‘The Green Book’, which gives detailed guidance on how to compute the costs and benefits of particular actions. It refers to concepts such as opportunity cost, discount factors and adjusting for inflation.
You might say there wasn’t much time to carry out a detailed cost-benefit analysis before the first lockdown last March. (Though the Government could have provided a few rough numbers for the public to scrutinise.) However, it’s now more than a year later, and there still hasn’t been any attempt to weigh the costs and benefits.
In a report for the Institute of Economic Affairs published last December, the economist Paul Ormerod argued that the Government’s refusal to crunch the numbers reflects a general overreliance on epidemiological expertise, at the expense of economic expertise.
As Russ Roberts, another economist, has observed, “Knowing a lot about the human body does not make you an expert in risk analysis, tradeoffs, or unintended consequences.” Note: this is not to imply that all or even most economists are opposed to lockdowns, but simply that key insights from that discipline have been overlooked during the course of the pandemic.
Several cost-benefit analyses of the UK lockdowns have been published by persons outside the Government, and each one has concluded that the costs almost certainly outweighed the benefits.
Since the NHS typically pays up to £30,000 to extend a patient’s life by one quality-adjusted life-year, a reasonable estimate of the benefits of lockdown can be obtained by multiplying the expected number of life-years saved by 30,000.
For example, if we assume (generously) that lockdowns saved 50,000 lives and prevented 500,000 people from getting long COVID, then the total benefits would be about £16.5 billion. This figure then has to be weighed against some measure of the costs (including effects on the economy, health, education and civil liberties). Given that the fall in GDP alone last year was over £220 billion, it seems very unlikely that lockdowns would pass a cost-benefit test.
The Government’s lack of interest in cost-benefit analysis was highlighted in a recent LinkedIn post by Daniel Fujiwara – an expert in policy evaluation. Fujiwara was apparently invited to “meet with senior Government officials to discuss the pros and cons of lockdown”. However, despite offering his advice and input pro-bono, he “never heard back from them”.
In the post, Fujiwara goes on to say, “Lockdowns should have stopped at the point where an additional day of #lockdown causes more damage to our society than it benefits us… My analysis of the impacts of lockdown last year suggests that we have gone well beyond this threshold.”
One can only assume that the Government’s failure to publish even basic estimates of the costs and benefits of lockdown is due to fear of what those estimates might show…
June 25, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, UK |
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A group of concert and theatre bosses led by Andrew Lloyd Webber has launched legal action against the British government in a bid to force it to publish data from a trial assessing the safety of indoor events during the pandemic.
The concert managers and theatre producers are demanding that the government provide data from its Events Research Programme – a trial assessing the safety of indoor events – so that they can plan to finally reopen their institutions.
In a statement on Thursday, they said the government had “refused to publish the results from the first phase of the Events Research Programme, despite saying that it would do so on numerous occasions.”
The statement adds that, in addition to not publishing the data from the trial, the government has not provided any form of insurance scheme to safeguard the industry against any further delays following 15 months of closures due to Covid curbs.
The entertainment bosses claim that, according to the government, the trial has been a huge success, which in turn has contributed to the increasing frustration within the entertainment sector concerning the industry’s continuing dormant state.
Pilot events under the programme, which the industry participated in, included the BRIT Awards at the O2 Arena, an outdoor festival event in Liverpool for 5,000 people, a snooker tournament at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, and the Download festival for 10,000 people last weekend.
The reopening of the theatre industry in England has been pushed back from its anticipated late June date until July 19, following the spread of the more infectious Delta variant.
Speaking later on Thursday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the government had made £2 billion available via a major arts funding package. He added that the government understands “the necessary delay to step four is challenging for live events.”
The impresarios note in their statement that live entertainment and theatre generate £11.25 billion for the UK economy each year, supporting just under one million jobs.
June 24, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, UK |
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The veteran politician, who served as Iran’s president between 2005 and 2013, and as Tehran mayor and Ardabil province governor before that, attempted to take part in both the 2017 and 2021 presidential elections, but was barred from doing so by Iran’s powerful Guardian Council.
The world needs to know the truth about the 9/11 terror attacks, and Iran doesn’t need to pursue nuclear weapons because they cannot protect even superpowers from collapse, former President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said.
“Deciphering the events of 11 September, 2001 will be the key to an understanding of all political events and processes in the sphere of global security over the past 70 years, and this will pave the way for us all to a better world,” Ahmadinejad said, speaking to Russian media in a broad ranging interview published on Thursday.
“When the terrorist attack took place, I announced to the United Nations the need to create a consolidated investigative group to establish all the circumstances of the incident and to find the culprit, and said that the Americans themselves were investigating this incident, holding court themselves, deciding everything themselves and fighting wars in other countries on this basis, not allowing anyone to comment on what is happening,” the former president recalled.
“I remember at this time the United States was very angry with me. But all I said was that there was a need for an international investigation, so that the whole world could know who carried out these attacks, and what connections [the attackers] could have to US intelligence and the American security apparatus to be able to break through all defensive barriers and destroy two towers in the very heart of the American nation,” Ahmadinejad added.
According to the politician, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, mounted in the aftermath of 9/11, were an attempt to change the situation in the world and the Middle East in Washington’s favour, and to hide “deep economic and social problems” plaguing the United States. Time has shown that neither war was a success, Ahmadinejad said, with both wars continuing to claim lives and forcing people to flee as their countries, while the states’ infrastructure collapses and their future remains uncertain.
No Need for Nukes
Commenting on Iran’s commitment not to pursue nuclear weapons, and recent attempts by the Biden administration to return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, Ahmadinejad said the Democratic president has failed to make any substantive changes to his predecessor’s policies, but that this was because US foreign policy is not controlled by presidents – who are only a small part of the decision-making process.
As for nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad suggested that “today, nuclear weapons have no practical application, so all the costs of their creation are superfluous. I in principle consider the production and accumulation of weapons an inhuman act and am categorically opposed to it. If world powers reject hegemony and are not looking for disagreements and wars, why start an arms race? Why should the wealth of nations be spent on the production of weapons intended only for murder and not for prosperity?”
“In my first meeting with Mr. Putin at the UN in 2005, I asked him if nuclear weapons could have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union. These weapons were highly developed, yes, but they did not stop the collapse of the USSR. Because weapons, in principle cannot improve human relations. Today, the capitalist world order led by America is in decline. Can American atomic bombs stop the collapse of US global hegemony? I don’t think there is a single wise person in the world who would say yes,” the Iranian politician added.
World Needs Fundamental Changes
Ahmadinejad expressed certainty that the current world order is unsustainable and is in need of “fundamental changes.”
“Over the past 100 years, it has spawned hundreds of wars, assassinations, arms races, broad class divisions, poverty and social constraints for nations. I believe that we must all join hands and build a new world – a world in which all people will be free and respected –and where justice is central. And I believe that the noble people of Russia can play a very important role in this process,” he stressed.
Candidacy Rejected
Ahmadinejad was barred from running in Iran’s presidential elections twice in a row, first in 2017 and then in the June 2021 vote, which was handily won by Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative with close ties to the clergy and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad did not contest the decision to bar him, made by the Guardian Council – Iran’s powerful constitutional watchdog of six high-ranking Shiite clerics appointed by Khamenei and six lawyers chosen by parliament from nominations by the judiciary.
In the West, Ahmadinejad is best remembered for his war of words with the Bush administration over the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his 2006 statement that Israel [sic] (the “Zionist regime” ) must “vanish from the page of history,” often misquoted as “wiped off the map,” which sparked outrage in Tel Aviv and conservatives in Washington. Also in 2006, CNN famously misquoted his statement that Iran has a “right to nuclear energy” as Iran’s “right to nuclear weapons,” with that scandal prompting Iran to boot the US cable news network’s journalists out of the country.
In 2007, Ahmadinejad stirred up anger among liberals during a trip to New York when he told students at Columbia University that gays and lesbians “don’t exist” in Iran.
Since completing his term as president in 2013, Ahmadinejad has occasionally popped up in the news cycle, especially while quoting the lyrics of well-known American rap artists, who he apparently vibes to, to make a political point. Last year, the politician’s use of the late Tupac Shakur’s “Pull the trigger kill a N**** he’s a hero” to refer to the death of Minnesota black man George Floyd got him in trouble online.
In his home country, Ahmadinejad is better known for his ascetic lifestyle, populist economic policies, campaigns against corruption, and programmes to improve Iran’s self-sufficiency in a range of areas, including defence. During his time in office, he advocated for a compromise between Western-style capitalism and socialism. Under him, Tehran was also able to form a strategic alliance with Venezuela – with that partnership remaining strong to this day.
June 24, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | 9/11, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, United States |
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While also potentially being a violation of the law
Schools in the UK have been told by a cross-party committee of MPs that promoting the notion of “white privilege” could breach equality laws while also harming disadvantaged white students.
The committee report found that despite the relentless narrative that “white privilege” is holding back non-white students, white students are actually underperforming.
“In 2019, 17.7 per cent of free school meal eligible white British pupils achieved grade 5 or above in English and maths, compared with 22.5 per cent of all FSM-eligible pupils,” reports Schoolsweek.
The report notes that disadvantaged white children do not have “white privilege,” with MPs “(concerned) about the impact that hearing terms like that presented as fact will have on those children.”
Different language must be used when discussing racial disparities in order “to ensure that young people are not inadvertently being inducted into political movements,” states the report.
The MPs “hope that by highlighting the hardships faced by many white people from disadvantaged backgrounds” their recommendations “may help advance a new way to discuss disadvantage without pitting different groups against each other.”
The report also notes that using terms such as “white privilege” could be a violation of the Equality Act 2010 and only serves to increase racial tension by pitting groups against each other.
“Disadvantaged White children feel anything but privileged when it comes to education,” said Conservative MP, Robert Halfon, adding that there was a desperate need to move away from obsessing over “white privilege” when for most white students, it doesn’t exist.
Education systems in Europe and America are riddled with the cancer that is Critical Race Theory as well as attempts to “decolonise” curriculums, which is a euphemism for making white people feel ashamed of their history.
Despite the fact that “diversity and inclusion” extremists have largely hijacked the education system and weaponized it against white students, the ludicrous narrative that “systemic racism” only impacts non-whites still persists.
Indeed, the only form of acceptable “systemic racism” that still exists in the western world is practiced against white people.
June 21, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Human rights, UK |
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China has discovered a pair of new deposits containing roughly two billion tons of shale oil and gas, according to the state-controlled energy giant China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).
One of the wells was discovered in the Fuman oilfield – a major region for crude oil production in the Tarim Basin, in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. It reportedly contains a billion tons of super-deep oil and gas.
With a drilling depth of nearly 27,900 feet (8,500 meters) and a test oil column reaching 1,640 feet (550 meters), the reservoir set new records for the basin’s deepest oil production and highest oil column, and marks the largest discovery of oil in the area in a decade. It is expected to produce four million tons of oil and 49.4 billion cubic feet (1.4 billion cubic meters) of natural gas annually before 2025.
The oilfield is one of the world’s most difficult areas to drill, as most of the reserves are around 26,000 feet (8,000 meters) below the surface of the Earth. After it was discovered in 2015, annual output in the area grew from some 30,000 tons to 1.52 million tons in 2020, with an estimated production of about two million tons since the beginning of 2021.
Another deposit, in the Ordos Basin, also in the northwest, reportedly contains an estimated billion tons of shale oil, according to CNPC making it the biggest shale oil field in the country.
Discovered by Changqing Oilfield Co, a CNPC subsidiary, it is one of several major discoveries in the past three years. Two years ago, the firm discovered 359 million tons of shale oil in the Qingcheng region, in the northwestern Gansu Province.
Changqing has managed to significantly extend the range of its exploration over the past few years and its latest billion-ton discovery will be an important milestone in China’s oil-gas exploration history.
June 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics | China |
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India has a total population of 1.39 billion people . That is 18 percent of the total world population. The median annual per capita income is $616 . Hundreds of millions of people in India survive with a hand to mouth existence.
They work and earn a couple of dollars, and eat once they have earned the money. India has little or no social welfare system. For many people, if they don’t work and earn, they don’t eat.
In 2020, India reported 148,738 deaths due to the coronavirus. That equates to 0.0001 percent of the population. The average death rate in India in 2020 was 7.25 in 1000 of the population.
That means over 10 million people died in India in 2020, and only 1.5% were coronavirus deaths.
And that is assuming that the 148,738 coronavirus deaths reported were actually caused by coronavirus. The WHO guidelines for reporting deaths do not make clear the difference between dying ‘from’ coronavirus, and dying ‘with’ coronavirus.
At the end of March 2020, the India Government took the drastic action of locking down the Indian economy due to the coronavirus pandemic. The government took decisions as to whom they considered an ‘essential worker’ and who was considered ‘non-essential’.
Unlike its Western Government counterparts, the Indian government did not hand out $600 monthly cheques for those that it had determined to be ‘non-essential’ and told to stay at home and not work. And the initial enforcement of the lockdowns was pretty draconian.
Early last April I received a desperate plea from an associate who lives in the slums in Mumbai. His house is 20 square metres, and he lives with 7 of his family members.
He messaged me to say that he was locked down at home with his family and that they had no food and were starving. Could I please send him some money? The next day he called me and said:
Sir, thank you for sending the money. I tried to go out yesterday to buy rations but the police beat me with a lathi and would not let me out of the slum. We now have money but I cannot get outside to buy food.”
I had to intervene and request a friend who had a journalist pass and was considered an ‘essential worker’ to go and buy food and take the food into the slum for him and his family so that they would not starve to death.
They were the lucky ones.
A survey was carried out of the urban poor by a company called IDinsight, a market research firm in the social sector in India. They reported that the respondents that they surveyed had an average weekly income of ₹6858 ($93.6) in March 2020 and ₹1929 ($26.3) in May 2020. That is a 72% reduction in income from a very low base. And the percentage of respondents that reported having no work went up from 7.3% in March to 23.6% in May.
Another research agency called Dalberg reported that the percentage of respondents with no work in May was 52%.
It is a real struggle to understand why the Indian government would shut down large parts of the Indian economy and put potentially hundreds of millions of poor people’s lives at risk of starvation by locking them in their houses because a tiny fraction of the population has caught a flu virus.
There is little or no data available on the numbers of people who have died from starvation. Although, a study was done two years ago which found over 450,000 children alone died as a result of malnutrition in 2017. Those numbers will only have gone up thanks to lockdown.
It is therefore anybody’s guess as to how many of the poor in India have died.
When the dust settles, I would expect that more people will die from starvation in India, than from the coronavirus in the whole world. And there is very little information being collected or reported on it.
The situation on the ground for food distribution in 2021 is reported to be worse than 2020. The Indian food distribution system of getting produce from farm to table is highly inefficient at its best. The lockdowns were reported locally to have amplified the inefficiencies in the food supply chain manyfold.
The issue of potential starvation could become an even greater issue in 2021 as the lockdowns continue. Without data on starvation, the stories remain anecdotal. I have a serious fear that when the coronavirus hysteria blows over, we will discover in its wake, a huge tragedy of mass starvation in India.
David Beasley, executive director of the UNs World Food Programme made a statement on global starvation in April 2021.
We were already calculating 135 million people around the world before COVID marching to the brink of starvation. And now, with the new analysis with COVID, we’re looking at 260 million people, and I’m not talking about hungry. I’m talking about marching toward starvation. And that is a catastrophe in itself.”
June 18, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Covid-19, Human rights, India |
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Since 2014, the US has encouraged Kiev’s leaders to believe that it has their back, come what may. Now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline nears completion, the Ukrainian president is screaming betrayal as he realizes he was misled.
A while back, it used to be popular in some circles to play up talk of the “Putinsliv” – the impending sell-out in which Russian President Vladimir Putin was apparently destined to throw the rebels of Donbass under the bus and surrender them to the tender mercies of the Ukrainian government. The irony is that, while Putinsliv never happened, the fury coming out of Kiev this week suggests that Ukraine itself has suffered a dramatic and unexpected “Bidensliv,” being sold out by US President Joe Biden.
Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had a troubled relationship with the country, which he accused of trying to undermine his election campaign in 2016. Republicans also used the business dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter, in Ukraine to paint Trump’s Democratic opponent as corrupt. Consequently, Ukrainians generally welcomed Biden’s election as president and have viewed him as a much more reliable ally.
Until this week, that is. Now, things are looking a little different.
For the past few months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pressing Biden for a meeting. His position was that this should take place before Biden holds talks with Putin. Otherwise, the argument goes, the Russian and American leaders might stitch up Ukraine’s fate and then present Kiev with a fait accompli. Better that Zelensky gets to Biden first, they say, so as to forestall any attempt by the Americans to betray Ukraine to the Russians.
This, however, was not to be. Speaking to Zelensky by phone on Monday, Biden offered to host him in Washington later this summer, after Biden meets Putin in Geneva on 16 June. Apparently, the White House has decided that managing relations with Russia takes precedence over keeping Ukraine happy – a not unreasonable position given that Moscow has nearly 1,500 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, whereas Ukraine has not a single one. The safety of the world tends to focus the mind on what is really a priority.
In another blow to Zelensky, the Biden administration has finally given up its campaign to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is designed to bring natural gas directly from Russia to Germany. At present, Russia exports natural gas to the rest of Europe largely through an old Soviet pipeline system running through Ukraine, and pays Kiev some $3 billion a year for the privilege. Kiev fears that, once the new underwater link is up and running, Russia will be able to stop the supply of gas through the country, thereby depriving it of much-needed cash.
For this reason, Zelensky and his allies have been lobbying the Americans to prevent the pipeline from being finished. To that end, the Trump administration imposed numerous sanctions on companies involved in the project. Now, though, the Biden government has waived those sanctions on the main German company involved, in effect giving the pipeline a green light for completion.
This was little more than a recognition of reality: Nord Stream 2 was going to be completed no matter what America did. So it made little sense for the US to degrade its relations with Berlin any more than it has already. Given a choice between the goodwill of rich and powerful Germany on the one hand, or of weak and impoverished Ukraine on the other, it was fairly obvious which one Washington would side with. The only surprise was that it took so long to work it out.
Adding insult to injury, Putin announced last week that the first section of the pipeline had been completed. This news provoked Zelensky into a mini tantrum. Speaking to the Axios news website, he complained that he was “confused” and “disappointed” by the American decision to waive sanctions on the project. He was “positive” that America could stop construction if it wanted, he said. Zelensky was also angered by the fact that the Americans didn’t tell him about their decision, and that he had to learn about it from a White House press briefing. “How many Ukrainian lives does the relationship between the United States and Germany cost?” he asked.
The Ukrainian president’s comments reveal a remarkable naivety. It seems he truly believed both that the United States is all-powerful; and that the Americans would prioritize relations with Kiev over relations with Moscow and Berlin. Now he is learning the hard way that in international politics, as Thucydides said, “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must.”
If the episode acts as a wake-up call for Zelensky’s government, that will be a good thing. For too long, Ukrainian leaders have given the impression they are living in a fantasy world in which the West will in due course induce Russia to abandon any support for the rebellion in Donbass with a campaign of massive economic, military and diplomatic pressure. This vision has manufactured an unwillingness in Kiev to make the concessions required to bring peace to Donbass under the Minsk II Agreement of February 2015, most notably the granting of “special status” to the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk. As a result, it has played a major role in perpetuating the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.
To be fair to Zelensky, the Americans have done everything they can to encourage the fantasy that Russia can be pressured into surrender. As he notes in his interview with Axios, Biden had offered him “direct signals” that the US was prepared to block the [Nord Stream 2] pipeline. This is plausible. It fits a pattern of behavior in which Washington has led Kiev’s ruling elite to believe it will have their back come what may, including in its efforts to ignore the Minsk Agreement.
Consequently, it is perhaps not surprising that Zelensky feels betrayed. The American government has misled Ukraine’s leaders into thinking that it will go the whole hog on the country’s behalf. To an outside observer, this was never plausible. But in the desperate world of Ukrainian politics, it may well have appeared otherwise. Kiev’s bubble has long since needed bursting. To the extent that the Nord Stream 2 debacle has done that, it has paradoxically been a rather good week for Ukraine – no matter what Zelensky or his supporters may think.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog
June 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics | Joe Biden, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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One of the most striking characteristics of ‘lockdownism’ – though one which, seen in the cold light of day, is hardly surprising – is that support for it has been generated through confluences of interests. The most obvious example of this is the way in which the aims of public health bodies (preventing excess deaths) have aligned so closely with those of certain big, incumbent market actors, such as supermarkets, social media giants, and online marketplaces (that is, profit). Lockdowns appear to suit those with self-consciously virtuous motives; they also very often suit those who want to make money. When people stay at home, they stop the virus spreading – but they also spend more time online, buy more from online stores, and rely on big ‘essential’ supermarkets rather than small, independent ‘mom and pop’ nonessential retail.
In light of this, are we at all surprised that it is very often the big social media firms, streaming services and the like that have been most strongly in favor of restrictions? There is nothing conspiratorial about this, nor probably even anything intentional. It is just the straightforward application of one of the most fundamental lessons of classical economics: incentives matter, and the incentives of these actors just tend to point in the same direction. It’s not that these businesses consciously support lockdowns due to a naked profit motive, in other words; it’s simply that their incentives to reject lockdownism are not strong, or are lacking entirely, because their interests are not in conflict with it.
One of the most important, helpful, but least well-systematized concepts in the study of regulation is the ‘bootleggers and Baptists’ phenomenon, coined by Bruce Yandle. Yandle observed that political activism in favour of the prohibition of alcohol sales and Sunday closing laws in the US was often a combination of high and low motives. Baptists are in favor of restricting the selling of alcohol because it is ‘good for society.’ Bootleggers are in favor of it because, for their purposes, the less alcohol that is lawfully available the better. The two groups do not conspire with one another, openly or otherwise. But the alignment of their interests is a kind of pincer movement which regulators find difficult to resist.
Bootleggers’ and Baptists’ coalitions, then, are circumstantial alignments between virtue and the profit motive. And they are everywhere in public life. To pick just one example, the Scottish and UK governments increasingly regulate the consumption of alcohol and sugar, through a variety of price floors, mandatory packaging requirements, and surcharges. These measures satisfy public health advocates, whose motives are pure (if probably misguided). But they also satisfy big incumbents, who can usually swallow increased costs much more readily than smaller operators, and who are adept at finding ways to sell smaller portions of familiar brands for the same price. Is there a conspiracy taking place? No: it’s just that incumbents are not strongly incentivized to lobby against the measures in question, because those measures are not actually very harmful to them.
The alignment of interests between public health advocates and certain market actors during the Covid period is, then, readily conceptualized in bootlegger-and-Baptist terms. It isn’t that there is any conniving or ‘backstairs intrigue’ going on. It’s simply that public health advice has gone strongly in one direction, and there has been no real incentive for certain sections of the corporate world to push back against it – rather the opposite.
This is not an entirely novel observation, and will have been evident to many observers. What has been less well-noticed is that there is something of a psychological bootlegger-and-Baptist phenomenon taking place within individuals’ minds as well – and that this has been particularly important in building support for lockdowns among the professional classes.
This was brought home to me early on in the pandemic, when an acquaintance sent me an email proclaiming how important the stay-at-home message was, but also saying that he regretted the fact that, having recently bought a new house, he was (I quote directly) ‘too busy to enjoy lockdown.’ This person’s rather blithe allusion that lockdown was something one should be enjoying was strikingly indicative, I thought, of the general mood among professional people that I knew. And indeed this was hardly the only person who, accidentally or openly, admitted to me that they rather liked the prospect of being shut at home. (I am sure that most readers of this post will have noticed the same phenomenon.) Many people seem to have relished the opportunity to get lots more work done. Others have found the release from stressful commuting or other commitments blissful. Being able to work from home, and often having quite nice homes, a lot of professional people have felt that lockdown gave them a better work-life balance. In other words, lockdown simply wasn’t a great hardship for a certain chunk of the population – and in fact came as something of a blessing.
This is not to suggest for a moment that support for lockdowns has been selfish, of course. Far from it. Rather, it is simply to observe that there has, again, been a strong confluence of interests – except here it is within the individual mind. I do not doubt that people have generally felt that all the restrictions they have been subjected to have been morally right (the ‘Baptist’ motive). But it is also true that they have had self-interested reasons for finding that the measures have not been all that bad of an idea, as well (the inner ‘bootlegger’).
It is the combination of the bootleggers and the Baptists working in tandem that is so effective, in Yandle’s sketch, and the same is true within us, as well. Our internal respective bootlegger, and Baptist, impulses are strong in their own right, and if they had been at odds during the pandemic, they would have tended to cancel each other out and there may have been more of a pushback against the restrictions. But because they have been working together, they are very powerful. This goes a long way toward explaining the behavior of white collar professionals during the pandemic: they have been acting out of a genuine sense of virtue, but they have also done rather well out of doing so, at least in the short term. It’s not one or the other, and high and low motives are not mutually exclusive – it’s both in combination that does the trick.
David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. Before entering academia, he lived and worked in Japan for the best part of a decade. His research focuses on human rights law and the law of contract, in respect of both of which he tends to adopt a classical liberal perspective.
June 9, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, United States |
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The Biden Administration has proposed what it calls a $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” legislation which it calls the “American Jobs Plan.” Far from addressing the huge deficit in America’s highway, bridges, railway, electric grid, water supply and such economically vital infrastructure that would address critical problems in the functioning of the economy, the Biden planners have cynically taken a politically popular word, “infrastructure,” and packed hundreds of billions of dollars into economically wasteful, destructive initiatives having more to do with the Green Agenda than rebuilding a healthy economy. If passed, it will have negative consequences for the world’s once-leading economy with serious geopolitical implications.
In March Biden signed another huge extra-budget bill, the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” That one was allegedly to aim at dealing with the impact of COVID. The bill dealt in fact with almost everything but COVID. The act is a grab bag of partisan pet projects. Among other things the act provided $12 billion for foreign aid; $15 billion for health care for illegal immigrants; $112 billion for welfare benefits and a generous $350 billion for Democrat-run states. Less than 10% was directed at COVID relief measures. In politics how you frame or package a bill is more important than the true content. Critics claim these huge spending bills are aimed at buying a future Democratic voter base with government handouts.
‘Everything is Infrastructure’
No surprise then that now the Biden team has rushed another multi-trillion bill to Congress. The $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan is a bill where way less than half of the measures have to do with conventional infrastructure investment in roads, rails, electric grids, water supplies, ports or airports—all the areas essential to the efficient functioning of the economy. A total of $750 billion or only 32% of the total actually goes for infrastructure such as highway or bridge repairs. Yet even that total includes only $115 billion of real infrastructure for highways, bridges, and surface streets. But the $750 transportation infrastructure section proposes $174 billion for more government subsidies for Green Agenda electric vehicles in what might be called a “make Elon Musk richer” subsidy. The White House fact sheet says that this will help make the US more competitive with China’s electric cars. But the best selling E-car in China today is Musk’s Tesla. That $174 billion is far more than the total $115 billion earmarked for real highway, bridge and transportation infrastructure spending. Yet the White House promotes the bill by referring to the need to address America’s crumbling highways and bridges as though this was what the bill is focused on.
The Biden bill defines pretty much everything as “infrastructure.” His American Jobs Plan calls among other items for spending on what it terms “care infrastructure.” They define this as $25 billion to upgrade child care facilities and $400 billion expenditure on care for the elderly and disabled, spending which might be justifiable, but not as “infrastructure.”
Buried in the text of the bill’s $100 billion to go to electric grid modernization and another $27 billion for something called a “clean energy and sustainability accelerator,” is a proposal that would extend generous tax credits to promote solar and wind energy alternatives to reach “zero carbon” electricity by 2035, a ruinous idea. It has been estimated that to make US electricity 100% carbon free, it would require a staggering 25% to 50% of all land in the United States. Today’s coal, gas and nuclear grid requires 0.5 percent of land in the United States. Clearly Biden’s Green jobs plan is hiding a far more sinister agenda.
What the Administration also hides is the fact that it would be a huge boon to China which has a global near-monopoly on production of solar panels, and Denmark or Germany which make most windmill turbines today. Those do not create American jobs as Biden Climate Czar John Kerry once claimed. Ironically, the Biden Administration sees Germany as the model, the place where the Merkel green energy program has created the highest electric costs in all Europe.
Then the Biden bill proposes $10 billion to create something called a “Civilian Climate Corps,” something that deliberately sounds like Roosevelt’s Depression era Civilian Conservation Corps, but with a Green New Deal politically correct “woke” update. The White House says that it will “put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience (?), and advancing environmental justice (whatever that means-w.e.) through a new Civilian Climate Corps.” No doubt in Biden-Harris America that has something to do with race and gender, but not with infrastructure.
Another $20 Billion should go “to Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice.” Apparently that means destroying existing highway infrastructure in cities where it is claimed to divide neighborhoods racially. Further an impressive $213 Billion will go to build or retrofit 2 Million Houses and Buildings. Then it adds another $40 billion for public housing, arguing this will “disproportionately benefit women, people of color, and people with disabilities.” For anyone familiar with America’s inner-city public housing ghettoes, this is hardly positive for the people who should live in the places.
In one of the most curious “infrastructure” proposals, Biden would spend $100 billion for New Public Schools and Making School Lunches “Greener.” This comes just after the COVID bill in March gave an unprecedented $128 billion for public schools. The American system gives control over education to local municipal governments and not the Federal government, leading some to suggest the agenda of the Biden crew is imposing a stealth Federal government takeover of public school education. What the Biden people mean by “green lunches” includes “reducing or eliminating the use of paper plates and other disposable materials.” Presumably that includes eliminating plastic knives and forks, leaving the children perhaps to eat with their fingers?
And, for good “infrastructure” measure, more billions will go to “Eliminate ‘Racial and Gender Inequities’ in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) research and development.” How that helps America’s crumbling basic infrastructure is not made clear.
All this $2.3 billion grab bag of mainly Green Agenda projects will be financed by the largest tax increases since the 1990’s as well as a wider Federal deficit.
The Real Infrastructure Deficit
The entire Green New Deal and UN Agenda 2030 is a fraudulent cover to deliberately deindustrialize not only the United States, but also Europe and the entire industrialized world. No economy in history outside of damages of war or depression has deliberately gone from a more energy efficient infrastructure to a lower one. Notably China, while pledging agreement, also says it will comply with Net Zero Carbon, but only ten years after the US and EU, by 2060. Right now they are adding new coal plants at a rapid pace.
The real infrastructure deficit in the US economy is in hundreds of thousands of miles of national Interstate highways. As well, a deteriorating electric grid is made more vulnerable by forced purchase of high-cost unreliable solar or wind energy.
In March the American Society of Civil Engineers released its analysis of US infrastructure, before the Biden $2.3 billion proposal. The report evaluates the state of bridges, roadways, public transit, ports, airports, inland waterways, water supplies. It does so every four years. They estimate that a total of at least $6 trillion is needed to repair or fix America’s deteriorated infrastructure. This is basic infrastructure, not Green Agenda. The report notes that infrastructure that brings clean water to major cities, as well as thousands of miles of wastewater pipelines, sewer systems built decades ago, are badly in need of renewal. The report adds that the drinking water infrastructure system, some 2.2 million miles of underground pipes, is ageing and badly in need of renewal. Local water utilities are replacing some 1% to 5% a year, far too little, due to lack of funding.
The ASCE report notes that of the 617,000 bridges across the United States, “42% are at least 50 years old, and 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition.” Alone the backlog of urgently needed bridge repair would require $125 billion. And they estimate that over 40% of the nation’s roads and highways are in poor or mediocre condition.
This is just a partial indication of the huge deficit in real economic infrastructure needed to maintain and improve the economic performance of the US economy. The fact that the Green Agenda of the pro-global warming Biden Administration is misusing popular calls for maintaining this basic necessary infrastructure in favor of inefficient and destructive Green and other schemes will mean that the economic foundation of the United States will weaken at an accelerated pace. Some influential circles such as BlackRock apparently want this. Biden’s two senior economic advisers are from BlackRock. Brian Deese, head of green or sustainable investment (ESG) at BlackRock, is director of the National Economic Council, and Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, former chief of staff to BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, is Deputy Treasury Secretary under former Fed head Janet Yellen. BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm with more than $9 trillion under management, is a lead player in the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset agenda and clearly, in the Biden “infrastructure” agenda.
F. William Engdahl is a strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.
June 2, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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The following article will tackle the phenomenon of racism inside the Israeli society. It will critically analyze the ideology that sustains racism inside the social fabric of Israeli society.
Despite the fact that the manifestation of racism in Israel is distinct and apparent against Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, African refugees and foreign workers, nevertheless, this research article will concentrate on racism that is practiced against the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. Other types will be tackled in a future research article.
Consequently, the following research article will not review aspects and history of Zionist racism against the indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel, but will be a critical exploration of the reasons and motives that stand behind the phenomenon of Zionist racism.
Definitions of Racism
Racism is, historically, a concept that was developed by Europeans five centuries ago. It has been defined, in various ways, by a number of scholars. Their definitions were neither uniform nor comprehensive.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, racism is,
… the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. The term is also applied to political, economic, or legal institutions and systems that engage in or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of race or otherwise reinforce racial inequalities in wealth and income, education, health care, civil rights, and other areas…[1]
Moreover, “… the false notion that “white” people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite people became accepted worldwide. This categorization of people became a justification for European colonization and subsequent enslavement of people from Africa…”[2]
In reality, racism, is a human-manufactured concept that lacks any genuine scientific basis. Furthermore, this concept has been imbibed by the capitalist ruling class to become part of its ruling ideology. According to the leftist Haitian revolutionary, Jan Makandal, racism has a social class dimension. It is
… a system of behaviors regulating in a very oppressive manner the fundamentally antagonistic class relation … for the reproduction of the whole society, in the interest of the dominant classes. Racism is all about class relations and class antagonism. Some ideological behaviors [traditions, customs] do transcend different modes of production and have adapted to the existing mode of production.[3]
The Ruling Zionist Ideology
In their book, “The German Ideology – Theses on Feuerbach”, Karl Marx and Frederic Engels analyzed the ideology of the capitalist ruling classes. They asserted that,
[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.[4]
The bourgeois settler colonial consciousness has been the ruling idea since the establishment of the Zionist colonial project. Through the process of ruling, this settler colonial ideology inculcated inside the social fabric of Zionist society. It spread out to all socio-economic segments of the Zionist settler society. All segments have been affected by it. This settler colonial ideology affected all social classes, including the Jewish working class. As a result, Through the process of racist ideological indoctrination, Jewish workers, have developed false consciousness.
Israeli Jewish workers harbor racist hatred towards Palestinian Arab workers. They do not sympathize with Palestinian Arab workers who are discriminated against, receive lesser wages than the Jewish workers and are more exploited by the Zionist settler bourgeoisie. They also do not see any common interests with the Palestinian Arab workers.
The Zoomorphic Bigotry of Zionist Leaders
As Jewish supremacy becomes entrenched at the highest levels of power and in the collective consciousness of the Israeli masses, their racist leaders voiced it out by means of racial slurs.
In an attempt to dehumanize the indigenous Palestinians, their racial slurs utilized a combination of names of wild animals and insects. The following is only a segment of the racial slurs that were used by Zionist politicians.
After the failure of the Camp David talks with Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak, the ex-Prime Minister of Israel, described the Palestinians as “… crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more.”[5]
While discussing the resumption of peace talks in a radio interview in 2013, Jewish Home MK and deputy defense minister Eli Ben Dahan described the Palestinians in the following terms. “To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”[6]
Likud Member of Knesset Oren Hazan, called the Palestinians “dogs”, “terrorists” and beasts.[7]
Other Zionist leaders have a long history of comparing Palestinians to animals. In a speech to the Zionist parliament, Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin described the Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs”.[8]
In a speech to Jewish settlers, Zionist Prime Minister Yitshaq Shamir, remarked, that “The Palestinians would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.”[9]
Ex-Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, Raphael Eitan, depicted the Palestinians after colonial settlement as follows. “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”[10]
In a speech to the Knesset, Likud minister and leader of the largest settler lobbying group, Yehiel Hazan, declared that “The Arabs are worms. You find them everywhere like worms, underground as well as above… “[11]
The ex-Minister of Justice and one of the leaders of the settler “Jewish Home” party, Ayelet Shaked, depicted, the Palestinians on her Facebook page as “little snakes”.[12] During the 2019 election campaign, ex-Minister Shaked “… released a controversial ad depicting herself as a model in a perfume commercial, spraying herself with scent labelled “Fascism.” At the end she says to the camera, “To me, it smells like democracy.”[13]
Minister of Culture and Sports Miri Regev “… is also known for fueling racism and violence against Palestinians and African refugees. In 2012, she helped incite a wave of anti-African violence, including assaults and arson attacks, targeting people from countries like Sudan and Eritrea, telling an angry mob that asylum seekers “are a cancer in our body.” The same year, she told an interviewer, “I’m happy to be a fascist.” …”[14]
It should be pointed out that an evaluation, very close to a prediction, was voiced out in 2016 by former prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak. During an Israeli TV interview in 2016, Barak declared that Israel has been “infected by the seeds of fascism … What has happened is a hostile takeover of the Israeli government by dangerous elements. And it’s just the beginning. Barak added “This government needs to be brought down before it brings all of us down,”. He concluded by saying that “Life-sustaining Zionism and the seeds of fascism cannot live together”.[15]
On Feb. 9th, 2016, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the construction site of the barrier on the eastern border. During that tour, Netanyahu stated that:
“At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all … I’ll be told, ‘this is what you want, to protect the villa?’ The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.”[16]
In September 2011, Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of settlements in Hebron and Kiryat Arba and head of the West Bank setter rabbis’ council, told a conference that Arabs are “wolves”, “savages” and “evil camel riders.”[17]
It should be pointed out that Zionist settler colonialists `are motivated by a colonialist superiority complex towards the indigenous Palestinians as well as towards the surrounding indigenous Arab nations. Zionist settler colonialists have always depicted their Zionist settler entity as being the “only democracy in the Middle East”. When comparing the Zionist entity with the surrounding Arabs, some Zionist leaders went as far as depicting their entity as a “prosperous modern villa in the jungle”.
In 1996, Ehud Barak, the Zionist Labor Party leader, gave a speech, as foreign minister, to Jewish communal leaders in St. Louis, the United States. His speech included the following “innovative” comparison between Israel and the surrounding Arab world.
“The dreams and aspirations of many in the Arab world have not changed. We still live in a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle, a place where different laws prevail. No hope for those who cannot defend themselves and no mercy for the weak.”[18]
Barak’s depiction of the surrounding Arab world as a jungle “… has inescapable colonialist undertones… the jungle — a loaded concept, not a scientific designation — represents the limits of European ability to impose order, and thus to make sense of their surroundings…”[19]
Of course, this “jungle” is populated by Arabs whom he regards as predators, beasts and ferocious animals that pose a threat to the Jewish “villa”. Barak did not elaborate why such a “modern and prosperous villa” has developed an apartheid-like colony with an illegal separation wall. He neither explained why this assumed “civilized villa” still commits a number of war crimes such as: torture of Palestinian detainees, assassination of Palestinian leaders, administrative incarceration without trial for Palestinian activists, expropriation of Palestinian-owned land, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, national oppression of the indigenous Palestinians, plunder of Palestinian natural resources, massacres of Egyptians, Palestinians and Lebanese, and ongoing aggressive wars against the Arab residents of this “jungle”. So, could we truly and logically consider this aggressive war mongering entity “a villa in the jungle”? or is it in reality nothing but a despicable settler colonial entity that could not but develop its compatible Zionistans.
Moreover, another pretender is Zionist ex-president of Israel and Likud leader Moshe Katsav, who compared the Palestinians with Jews, then pointed out the differences as including the following:
“There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies? Not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbours here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.”[20]
Katsav’s moral convictions were put on test when he was convicted, on December 30, 2010, by an Israeli court of law, of two counts of rape, sexual harassment and obstruction of justice. Katsav was sentenced to seven years in prison. On 7 December 2011, Katsav arrived at Maasiyahu Prison in Ramleh to begin serving his seven-year sentence. He was released from prison, under restrictive conditions, on 21 December 2016, having served five years of his sentence.[21]
In their attempt to appear tough on “security” affairs, Zionist politicians indulged in a “zoomorphic bigotry”[22], in which they depicted the Palestinians with animal and insect names. This animalization of Zionist narrative is very typical of colonial settlers who aim at the dehumanization of the indigenous Palestinian population, a step Zionist settlers deemed necessary for covering up their plunder and for justifying the war crimes they have committed against the indigenous Palestinians.
Consequently, an ingrained racist frame of mind and a clear racist consciousness could be found among segments of Israeli Jews. Such racist way of thinking is typical of white settler societies like colonized French Algeria, Apartheid South Africa, the United States, Australia, and Canada. The following is a brief review of racism among Israeli Jews that was openly expressed in national polls.
Israeli Polls and Racism
In the period 2001-2016, numerous public polls on ethnic cleansing were held in Israel. In a total of thirteen polls, Israeli Jewish citizens openly expressed their support for the removal of Palestinian Arab citizens outside Israel. The percentage of Jewish support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians ranged between 40 percent of the respondents in 2006 to 75 percent in 2015. In the year 2006, a total of “… 40 percent believed that the State should encourage Arabs to emigrate from the country.”[23], while in the year 2015, a total of “… [t]hree-quarters want[ed] the government to prepare a practical plan to encourage Muslim Arab-Israelis to emigrate…”[24]
The distribution of Jewish citizens support for ethnic cleansing ranged between 40-48 percent of the Jewish respondents in five polls and between 50-66 percent of the Jewish respondents in six other polls. In 2006 a total of “…40 percent believe[d] that the State should encourage Arabs to emigrate from the country.”[25], while in 2016 “… 48 per cent of Jewish respondents said Arabs should be removed from Israel…”[26]
Racist Israeli Laws
In 2017, 156 racist laws were presented to the Knesset, out of them 25 were enacted as laws while the rest are still in the process of being prepared for legislation.[27]
According to another source, “[t]here are more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. directly or indirectly, based solely on their ethnicity, rendering them second- or third-class citizens in their own homeland.”[28]
In an attempt to uphold a “… permanent Jewish control of the majority of the land… the Israeli cabinet, in a vote of 17-2, recommended the adoption of a new bill to restrict access to ‘state land’ to Jews only…”[29]
This bill “… was formulated as a response to a High Court decision on 8 March 2000, which upheld the right of Adel and Iman Qaadan, a Palestinian couple from Baqa al-Gharbiyya in the Galilee, to lease a plot of land and build a home in the nearby Jewish “lookout” settlement of Katzir.”
Zionist law-makers assume that once racism and racist practices get regulated by a law, it automatically becomes legitimate, justifiable and acceptable. However, these racist laws allow the state of Israel to slowly drift into an “Apartheid political system” that exists on the ground but still fiercely denied by Zionist apologetics.
This bill actually “… resembles, in principle, South Africa’s 1950 Group Areas Act, under which the vast bulk of the country was reserved for White ownership and occupation…”[30] However, the Israeli government’s endorsement of the bill was in reality the provision of a “… legal backing to a situation that has existed in practice since the establishment of the state.”
Ex-Israeli minister and member of Knesset Shulamit Aloni depicted this law as racist. She added that “[b]y the right of our might, we are acting as a racist nation. South Africa, as well, was white and democratic…”[31]
In 2013, far-right member of Knesset Bezalel Smotrich[32] presented a new law to the Ministerial Committee on Legislation which allowed small Jewish villages of 600 families to set up acceptance boards. This law empowers acceptance boards to bar Palestinian Arab citizens from moving in under the “claim that his or her lifestyle is incompatible with life in the village.”[33]
In January 2021, the Israeli parliament, passed “… a controversial bill declaring that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country. [T]he bill is unashamedly majoritarian and illiberal…”[34] Moreover, the Hebrew language was declared to be the sole official language and Arabic was relegated to an inferior status.
In response, Netanyahu commented that “…“Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people – and them alone.” He also added that there are “22 other Arab countries” where Palestinian citizens of Israel can go live…”[35]
Racial Segregation and Zionist Apartheid
In accordance with article II of the 1973 “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid”, apartheid is defined as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”[36]
All settler colonialist projects pursue exclusive and segregationist policies towards the indigenous peoples. One manifestation of these policies is the setting up of apartheid-like structures that exclude the indigenous peoples and keep them outside the settler colonialist demographic perimeters. A number of examples can be cited here. The American settler colonialists set up the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)[37], and the Canadian settler colonialists set up the “Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada”[38], while the South African settler colonialists set up the “Native Affairs Department”[39] or Bureau of Bantu Affairs.
Being a settler colonialist project, the Zionist regime has its own departments of “Arab affairs”. In 1948, Ben-Gurion appointed Bichur Shitreet, a Mizrahi Jew, as ‘Minister for Minorities Affairs’. But in 1949, he dismissed him and imposed a colonial military government on the Palestinian residential areas, then appointed himself as Defence Minister in charge of “Arab affairs”.
Moreover, each Israeli ministry has its own Department of Arab Affairs. Even the Zionist army has its “Druze Battalion” which is exclusively for Palestinian Druze and is called the “Battalion for Minorities” or the Herev Battalion.[40]
The Israeli trade union, the Histadrut, began to accept Palestinian Arab citizens as members only in 1958. Palestinian Arab workers were kept segregated inside the “Arab Department”. Later on, and in an attempt to integrate the Palestinian workers, the Histadrut set up the ‘Department of Assimilation’ so as to assimilate the Arab workers inside the Histadrut.[41]
In April 5, 2016, Voice of Israel Radio, reported that “… when possible maternity wards [in Israeli hospitals] separate between Jews and Arabs.” This fact was reiterated by Member of Knesset Betzalel Smotrich, who added that “it is only natural that my wife will not want to be next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who in 20 years’ time may try to kill her baby.”[42]
Zionist apartheid could, also, be found inside the colonized West Bank. One example that could be cited is that of Brian Walt, an ex-South African Jewish Rabbi. In 2012 Rabbi Brian Walt, the founding executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, led a delegation of American civil rights leaders to the colonized West Bank. While visiting the West Bank city of Hebron, “… Michael Manikin, a leader with the Israeli human rights group “Breaking the Silence”, gestured to Shuhada Street, the street our group was about to walk down, and told us it was a “sterile street” — a street forbidden to Palestinians. Only Jews and other tourists were permitted to walk down the street.”[43]
Upon hearing this, Rabbi Brian Walt reported: “I was horrified. My heart beat fast as tears rolled down my face. As a child growing up in Apartheid South Africa, I was intimately familiar with separate beaches, buses, cabs, entrances to post offices and public benches with “Whites Only” signs. But even in Apartheid South Africa, there were no “sterile streets” that only white people could walk on.”[44]
It is worthwhile to bring out a remark by the editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times of South Africa, Mondli Makhanya, a member of another delegation who concluded his visit to the colonized West Bank in 2009 by remarking, “When you observe from afar you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. In a certain sense, it is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of the apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.”[45]
The Development of the Zionistan Solution
Through segregation, racist laws and military orders, Zionist settlers were provided, by the Zionist colonial administration, with a number of tools, to help them to dominate the indigenous Palestinians. Indigenous land and water resources were expropriated for the exclusive benefit of Jewish settler colons. Indigenous Palestinians were severely exploited, enormously oppressed and collectively punished for struggling to regain their national rights.
Consequently, these Zionist-ruled Palestinian areas inside the West Bank were described by various terms such as: ‘self-rule areas’, ‘autonomous areas’, ‘Palestinian Cantons’, and Palestinian ‘Bantustans’. However, these terms cannot be regarded but as misnomers. They are inadequate and, at the same time, they reveal a lack of a concise term to precisely describe these political entities. Therefore, I decided to call them “Zionistans”, a name that was coined by me to describe the Apartheid-like entity that was developed by Israeli settler colonialists. This new concept is more suitable for their colonial nature and can adequately describe their settler Apartheid-like features.
Consequently, a Zionistan could be defined as: a territory set aside by Israel as a racially segregated entity that was developed specifically for the indigenous Palestinians. These Zionistans were actually designated as: Area-A, Area-B, and Area-C. Then Hebron was subdivided into Area H-1 and Area-H-2. All Zionistans were given partial municipal independence and zero sovereignty. They were made to have full politico-economic subordination to Israel.
Concluding Remarks
Within the sea of fragmentation, disintegration and manufactured political chaos that was developed by Western imperialism, the leaders of the Zionist settler colonialist state developed the concept of the “Jewish State”, that was later ‘upgraded’ to the slogan of the “Jewish Democratic State”. Zionist and imperialist strategists planned the Middle East region to become conducive for the growth of sectarian, weak and waring entities. Inside this conglomeration of waring entities, the vicious Zionist sectarian entity was supposed to dominate them politically, economically and militarily. Moreover, this narrow Jewish sectarian state would look to outside observers, as a normal sectarian entity situated among a sea of sectarian entities. Therefore, it was extremely important to destroy the national state of Syria and Iraq, a step that preceded sectarianism and was necessary for its founding.
In conjunction with that colonial target, Western imperialism launched in 2011 its counter-revolution in Iraq and Syria. They brought into occupied Iraq a collection of bands of Muslim thugs, killers, rapists, robbers and pyromaniacs that were picked from various Muslim and Arab societies. Members of these criminal bands were trained by the CIA, the Mossad, the secret services of Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. A well-developed plan of destruction was provided to them and they began their diabolical destruction of the state structures and institutions of Iraq and Syria. They hoped that once the unifying state structures were dismantled, sovereignty would disappear and disintegration would appear. Only in this conducive environment can the Zionist sectarian entity thrive and prosper.
But, due to Israel’s ongoing colonial Zionistan project, the slogan of the Jewish State began to erode then it transformed itself into the Jewish Democratic State, a kind of Jewish fallacy. This metamorphosis was eloquently expressed by the American writer Richard Silverstein.
“The “Jewish” gave “democracy” a knockout, smashing it to the canvas. Israelis want more and more Jewish and less and less democracy. From now on don’t say Jewish democracy. There’s no such thing, of course. There cannot be. From now on say Jewish state, only Jewish, for Jews alone. Democracy – sure, why not. But for Jews only.” [46]
Finally, the Zionist capitalist regime of settler colonialism is the cardinal source of racism in Israel. Capitalist colonialist racism incorporates all layers, segments, and classes of Israeli society: secularist, religious, Ashkenazi’s and Afro-Asians, Zionist left and Zionist right, kibbutz members, workers, bourgeoisie, settlers, military, civilians, and politicians.
Dr. Zuhair Sabbagh is a retired professor of sociology who use to work at Birzeit University in the colonized West Bank. He is a resident of Nazareth, Israel. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Manchester and is author of a number of books and research articles.
[1] Smedley, Audrey, https://www.britannica.com. Retrieved on: 15-1-2021
[2] Ibid.
[3] Makandal, Jan, “A Contribution to the Ongoing Debate on Racism”, www.koloksyon.inip.org, 7-1-2015
[4] Marx, Karl, “The German Ideology – Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy”, https://www.goodreads.com. Accessed on: 23-3-2021
[5] Yahoo/Answers, “what do you think of these quotes from Israelis about Palestinians?”, https://answers.yahoo.com. Retrieved on: 17-2-2021
[6] Pileggi, Tamar, “New deputy defense minister called Palestinians ‘animals’”, https://www.timesofisrael.com, 11-5-2015
[7] Deger, Allison, “Israeli lawmaker calls Palestinians visiting relatives in Israeli prison ‘beasts’ and ‘human scum’ ”, http://mondoweiss.net, 26-12-2017
[8] Quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”, New Statesman, 25 June 1982. As reproduced by Yahoo/Answers, “what do you think of these quotes from Israelis about Palestinians?”, https://answers.yahoo.com. Retrieved on: 17-2-2021
[9] As quoted by the New York Times, April 1, 1988. Reproduced by Yahoo/Answers, “what do you think of these quotes from Israelis about Palestinians?”, https://answers.yahoo.com. Retrieved on: 17-2-2021
[10] Yahoo/Answers, “what do you think of these quotes from Israelis about Palestinians?”, https://answers.yahoo.com. Retrieved on: 17-2-2021
[11] Shirazi, Nima, “Netanyahu’s Zoomorphic Bigotry: A Retrospective”, http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com, 10-2-2016
[12] Sims, David, “Jews: Exempt from the Rules They Force on Us” , http://nationalvanguard.org, 29-5-2019
[13] IMEU, “Israeli Election Guide 2019”, https://imeu.org, 1-4-2019
[14] Ibid.
[15] Channel 10, as quoted by Haaretz, “Israel Has Been Infected by the Seeds of Fascism, Says ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak”, http://www.haaretz.com, 20-5-2016
[16] As quoted from Ha’aretz correspondent Barak Ravid, by Shirazi, Nima, “Netanyahu’s Zoomorphic Bigotry: A Retrospective”, http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com, 10-2-2016
[17] IMEU, “Discrimination Against Palestinian Citizens of Israel”, https://imeu.org, 28-9-2011
[18] Berman, Lazar, “After walling itself in, Israel learns to hazard the jungle beyond”, https://www.timesofisrael.com, 8-3-2021
[19] Berman, Lazar, “After walling itself in, Israel learns to hazard the jungle beyond”, https://www.timesofisrael.com, 8-3-2021
[20] Katsav, Moshe, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001. Quoted by Israel Forum, “Israeli quotations about Palestinians”, www.israelforum.com, Copyright 2010
[21] Katsav, Moshe, http://e-wikipedia.org. Accessed on 1-4-2021
[22] Shirazi, Nima, “Netanyahu’s Zoomorphic Bigotry: A Retrospective”, http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com, 10-2-2016
[23] Roffe-Ofir, Sharon, “Poll: Israeli Jews shun Arabs”, https://www.ynetnews.com, 22-3-2006
[24] Sales, Ben, “Most religious Zionists want Arabs out of Israel, study finds”, http://www.timesofisrael.com, 23-10-2015
[25] Roffe-Ofir, Sharon, “Poll: Israeli Jews shun Arabs”, https://www.ynetnews.com, 22-3-2006
[26] Dearden, Lizzie, “Nearly half of Israeli Jews believe Arabs should be ‘expelled’ from Israel, survey finds”, https://www.independent.co.uk, 8-3-2016
[27] MADAR Center, Report, “156 racist laws were put forward in the Knesset”, https://www.arab48.co, 30-7-2017
[28] IMEU, “Discrimination Against Palestinian Citizens of Israel”, https://imeu.org, 28-9-2011
[29] BADIL Resource Center, “Land in Israel For Jews Only”, Quoted by Ha’aretz, 9 July 2002, www.nonprofitnet.ca, 9-2002
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Bezalel Smotrich is ideologically affiliated with the late Meir Kahana who called for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian Arabs. Smotrich, along with Atamar Gvier another Kahanist, are currently members of the Netanyahu coalition camp. They both support the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arabs (ZS).
[33] MEE staff, “New poll shows rampant racism in Israel”, https://www.middleeasteye.net, 11-12-2018
[34] Editorial, “The Guardian view on Israel’s new law: popular will is being weaponized”, https://www.theguardian.com. Accessed on: 11-1-2021
[35] IMEU, “Israeli Election Guide 2019”, https://imeu.org, 1-4-2019
[36] Ben, Norton, “Israel’s ‘Apartheid Regime’ Is a ‘Crime Against Humanity’: UN Report”, http://www.accuweather.com, 15-3-2017
[37] Wikipedia, “Bureau of Indian Affairs”, https://en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on: 23-11-2020
[38] Derworiz, Colette E., “Federal Departments of Indigenous and Northern Affairs”, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, 18-4-2020
[39] Christie, Pam and Collins, Colin, “Bantu Education: Apartheid Ideology or Labor Reproduction?”, Comparative Education, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1982), pp. 59-75. As republished by http://www.jstor.org. Accessed: 31-10-2012.
[40] Battalion for Minorities or Herev Battalion, https://www.youtube.com, 24-11-2020
[41] Interview with Head of the Department of Assimilation, Histadrut Headquarters, Tel-Aviv, 2-8-2020.
[42] Israel Today, “Poll ‘Proves’ Israelis Are Racist; Are They Really?”, https://www.israeltoday.co.il, 13-4-2016
[43] Walt, Brian, “As a Rabbi Raised in South Africa, I Can’t Ignore Israel Is an Apartheid State”, https://truthout.org, 17-2-2021
[44] Ibid.
[45] Levy, Gideon, “Worse than apartheid”, www.haaretz.com, 9-11-2009
[46] Silverstein , Richard, “Israelis Support Ethnic Cleansing, Annexation and Apartheid State”, https://www.richardsilverstein.com, 22-10-2010
May 31, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism |
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