Peace and Socialism

The attempted coup in Venezuela looks like it might be the brainchild of Zalmay Khalilzad, now back in the American jihad driver’s seat. ZKh’s counterinsurgency thoughts in The Envoy about Iran fit the bill.


Stick with soft power


“Washington,” he writes boldly, “had a contradictory policy on Iran. It spoke loudly against Iran, and it refused to talk with Iranians.” He was frustrated as ambassador to Iraq 2004-7, alert to the instability that the US occupation had caused, the horrendous deaths from the defection to the rebels of fired Iraqi army soldiers/ officers.


The humiliated soldiers were pushed into the hands of the hastily founded Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) by the US after disbanding the Iraqi Army. There had been no al-Qaeda before the invasion. The US created it, whether by bungling (or to play the devil, Israeli-style).

Suddenly President Trump’s no longer the fool, the dupe of his generals. His latest, historic tweets are bombshells. “Getting out of Syria was no surprise. I’ve been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer. Russia, Iran, and Syria & others are the local enemy of ISIS” and the US was “doing there [sic] work.”


The shouts ‘Bring the troops home’ filtered through Washington’s cacophony -- Russiagate, hookergate -- and Trump was listening. 72% are in favour of pulling out of Syria, though you wouldn’t know it if all you listen to is “fake news” from the MSM. Sometimes Trump delivers, practices what he preaches. Wow.

Finally Trump is doing something he promised on the campaign trail: "Russia wants to get rid of ISIS. We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let them get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?"

The ‘deep state’ was listening in 2016, and prepared their cold war arsenal,

In “How a just peace in Palestine-Israel can save our planet”,* Beit Zatoun director Robert Massoud stressed that the UN’s failure to deal with its first major crisis, the establishment of Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, seriously compromised it as a forum for international relations and world peace. Seventy years later, the UN is still impotent in the face of imperialism, and the Palestine issue is still, literally, burning. Among its atrocities, Israel uses white phosphorus--WP, know affectionately by WWII soldiers as Willie Pete--against Palestinians. Israel is not alone, as (US-made) WP is used by Saudi Arabia in its bombing in Yemen, and somebody is using it in Syria and it ain't Assad.


British invention

The power to create money is equivalent to splitting the atom.


John Law (1671--1729) is a forgotten prophet of economic theory, though everything we do today is based on his Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705). Schumpeter described him as “in a class by himself … in the front ranks of monetary theorists of all time.”


But it was Marx that really understood Law, “the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.” Law’s misuse of his own theory exposed in embryo, spectacularly (and disastrously), how the stock market and speculation would lead to “a new mode of production”, where “enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others [becomes] the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling,” reducing “more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth.”


1893, 1929, 2008, anyone? Law was dismissed as a charlan and murderer,* the confidence man behind the Mississippi bubble in 1720. A Scottish economist who believed that money was only a means of exchange that did not constitute wealth in itself, and that national wealth depended on trade. Did I hear ‘banking is theft’ and ‘globalization’?


Gold as money: misplaced concreteness

So are the banksters all right after all?


Nope. All there is to show after 400 years is a kind of Pax Hamstera, or better, Pax Lemmus. The horrors of the 19th--20th centuries, now going off the horror chart in the 21st century. We run faster and faster, inventing and marketing ever new gadgets, and the standard of living, we now realize, is plummeting, not so much in dollar terms (that, yes) but in terms of all the ‘external economies’ which come along with those gadgets, and the lifestyle of homo hamsterus.


Keynes gave us a banker’s version of the basic income -- government debt in order to stimulate demand, but to be financed based on taxation and government deficit, not on government-created money, as C.D. Douglas wanted. Bankers do not want to give up their power, and Keynes was their boy. Probably it will take another 1917 to do that, and the prospects are poor, given the fact that the bankers defeated the Bolsheviks in the end.


Reinventing the wheel


But this is intuited by smart politicians, even if they do little to fight back. America was created out of fiat money created by the colonists.

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Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s.

He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeerah and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio.

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Eric's latest book The Canada Israel Nexus is available here http://www.claritypress.com/WalbergIV.html