samedi
Les États-Unis ont organisé la contrebande du pétrole syrien, affirme la Défense russe©
Burn, Neoliberalism, Burn
author
Pepe ESCOBAR
Independent geopolitical analyst, writer and jour
October 23, 2019
© Photo: Wikimedia
Neoliberalism is – literally – burning. And from Ecuador to Chile, South America, once again, is showing the way. Against the vicious, one-size-fits-all IMF austerity prescription, which deploys weapons of mass economic destruction to smash national sovereignty and foster social inequality, South America finally seems poised to reclaim the power to forge its own history.
Three presidential elections are in play. Bolivia’s seem to have been settled this past Sunday – even as the usual suspects are yelling “Fraud!” Argentina and Uruguay are on next Sunday.
Blowback against what David Harvey has splendidly conceptualized as accumulation by dispossession is, and will continue to be, a bitch. It will eventually reach Brazil – which as it stands continues to be torn to pieces by Pinochetist ghosts. Brazil, eventually, after immense pain, will rise up again. After all, the excluded and humiliated all across South America are finally discovering they carry a Joker inside themselves.
Chile privatizes everything
The question posed by the Chilean street is stark: “What’s worse, to evade taxes or to invade the subway?” It’s all a matter of doing the class struggle math. Chile’s GDP grew 1,1% last year while the profits of the largest corporations grew ten times more. It’s not hard to find from where the huge gap was extracted. The Chilean street stresses how water, electricity, gas, health, medicine, transportation, education, the salar (salt flats) in Atacama, even the glaciers were privatized.
That’s classic accumulation by dispossession, as the cost of living has become unbearable for the overwhelming majority of 19 million Chileans, whose average monthly income does not exceed $500.
Paul Walder, director of the Politika portal and an analyst for the Latin-American Center of Strategic Analysis (CLAE) notes how less than a week after the end of protests in Ecuador – which forced neoliberal vulture Lenin Moreno to ditch a gas price hike – Chile entered a very similar cycle of protests.
Walder correctly defines Chile’s President Sebastian Pinera as the turkey in a long-running banquet that involves the whole Chilean political class. No wonder the mad as hell Chilean street now makes no difference between the government, the political parties and the police. Pinera, predictably, criminalized all social movements; sent the army to the streets for unmitigated repression; and installed a curfew.
Pinera is Chile’s 7th wealthiest billionaire, with assets valued at $2.7 billion, spread out in airlines, supermarkets, TV, credit cards and football. He’s a sort of turbo-charged Moreno, a neoliberal Pinochetist. Pinera’s brother, Jose, was actually a minister under Pinochet, and the man who implemented Chile’s privatized welfare system – a key source of social disintegration and despair. And it’s all interlinked: current Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a Chicago boy, lived and worked in Chile at the time, and now wants to repeat the absolutely disastrous experiment in Brazil.
The bottom line is that the economic “model” that Guedes wants to impose in Brazil has totally collapsed in Chile.
Chile’s top resource is copper. Copper mines, historically, were owned by the US, but then were nationalized by President Salvador Allende in 1971; thus war criminal Henry Kissinger’s plan to eliminate Allende, which culminated in the original 9/11, in 1973.
Pinochet’s dictatorship later re-privatized the mines. The largest of them all, Escondida, in the Atacama desert – which accounts for 9% of the world’s copper – belongs to Anglo-Australian giant Bhp Billiton. The biggest copper buyer in world markets is China. At least two-thirds of income generated by Chilean copper goes not to the Chilean people, but to foreign multinationals.
The Argentine debacle
Before Chile, Ecuador was semi-paralyzed: inactive schools, no urban transport, food shortages, rampant speculation, serious disturbances on oil exports. Under fire by the mobilization of 25,000 indigenous peoples in the streets, President Lenin Moreno cowardly left a power void in Quito, transferring the seat of government to Guayaquil. Indigenous peoples took over the governance in many important cities and towns. The National Assembly was AWOL for almost two weeks, without the will to even try to solve the political crisis.
By announcing a state of emergency and a curfew, Moreno laid out a red carpet for the Armed Forces – and Pinera duly repeated the procedure in Chile. The difference is that in Ecuador Moreno bet on Divide and Rule between the indigenous peoples’ movements and the rest of the population. Pinera resorts to outright brute force.
Apart from applying the same old tactics of raising prices to obtain further IMF funds, Ecuador also displayed a classic articulation between a neoliberal government, big business and the proverbial US ambassador, in this case Michael Fitzpatrick, a former Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere matters in charge of the Andean region, Brazil and the Southern Cone up to 2018.
The clearest case of total neoliberal failure in South America is Argentina. Less than two months ago in Buenos Aires, I saw the vicious social effects of the peso in free fall, inflation at 54%, a de facto food emergency and the impoverishment of even solid sectors of the middle class. Mauricio Macri’s government literally burned most of the $58 billion IMF loan – there’s still $5 billion to arrive. Macri is set to lose the presidential elections: Argentines will have to foot his humongous bill.
Macri’s economic model could not but be Pinera’s – actually Pinochet’s, where public services are run as a business. A key connection between Macri and Pinera is the ultra-neoliberal Freedom Foundation sponsored by Mario Vargas Llosa, who at least boasts the redeeming quality of having been a decent novelist a long time ago.
Macri, a millionaire, disciple of Ayn Rand and incapable of displaying empathy towards anyone, is essentially a cipher, pre-fabricated by his Ecuadorian guru Jaime Duran Barba as a robotic product of data mining, social networks and focus groups. A hilarious take on his insecurities may be found in La Cabeza de Macri: Como Piensa, Vive y Manda el Primer Presidente de la No Politica, by Franco Lindner.
Among myriad shenanigans, Macri is indirectly linked to fabulous money laundering machine HSBC. The president of HSBC in Argentina was Gabriel Martino. In 2015, four thousand Argentine accounts worth $3.5 billion were discovered at HSBC in Switzerland. This spectacular capital flight was engineered by the bank. Yet Martino was essentially saved by Macri, and became one of his top advisers.
Beware the IMF vulture ventures
All eyes now should be on Bolivia. As of this writing, President Evo Morales won Sunday’s presidential elections in the first round – obtaining, by a slim margin, the necessary 10% spread for a candidate to win if he does not obtain the 50% plus one of the votes. Morales essentially got it right at the end, when votes from rural zones and from abroad were fully counted, and the opposition had already started to hit the streets to apply pressure. Not surprisingly, the OAS – servile to US interests – has proclaimed a “lack of trust in the electoral process”.
Evo Morales represents a project of sustainable, inclusive development, and crucially, autonomous from international finance. No wonder the whole Washington Consensus apparatus hates his guts. Economy Minister Luis Arce Catacora cut to the chase: “When Evo Morales won his first election in 2005, 65% of the population was low income, now 62% of the population has access to a medium income.”
The opposition, without any project except wild privatizations, and no concern whatsoever for social policies, is left to yell “Fraud!”, but this could take a very nasty turn in the next few days. In the tony suburbs of southern La Paz, class hate against Evo Morales is the favorite sport: the President is referred to as “indio”, a “tyrant” and “ignorant”. Cholos of the Altiplano are routinely defined by white landowning elites in the plains as an “evil race”.
None of that changes the fact that Bolivia is now the most dynamic economy in Latin America, as stressed by top Argentine analyst Atilio Boron.
The campaign to discredit Morales, which is bound to become even more vicious, is part of imperial 5G war, which, Boron writes, totally obliterates “the chronic poverty that the absolute majority of the population suffered for centuries”, a state that always “maintained the population under total lack of institutional protection” and the “pillaging of natural wealth and the common good”.
Of course the specter of IMF vulture ventures won’t vanish in South America like a charm. Even as the usual suspects, via World Bank reports, now seem “concerned” about poverty; Scandinavians offer the Nobel Prize on Economics to three academics studying poverty; and Thomas Piketty, in Capital and Ideology, tries to disassemble the hegemonic justification for accumulation of wealth.
What still remains absolutely off limits for the guardians of the current world-system is to really investigate hardcore neoliberalism as the root cause of wealth hyper-concentration and social inequality. It’s not enough to offer Band-Aids anymore. The streets of South America are alight. Blowback is now in full effect.
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La Grèce refuse de rejoindre la coalition US/Israël contre l'Iran
"La Turquie n'a d'autre choix que de se rendre"
6:3AM
AccueilMoyen-Orient
L'armée turque avance vers la région sensible Raas al-Ayn, malgré la signature d'une trêve avec les Kurdes ©Sputnik
Quelque chose de déjà-vu: la trêve que les Américains disent avoir arrachée aux Turcs pour "sauver la vie des Kurdes" a servi surtout à l'armée turque largement appuyée par l'OTAN dans son entreprise de conquête du nord est syrien : Sans tirer une seule balle les miliciens des YPG se sont retirés samedi d'Al-Shokriyah dans la banlieue de Ras al-Aïn pour laisser place aux mercenaires d'Ankara qui à bord des convois de blindés ont débarqué dans la ville. Ce scénario, les USA l'ont déjà joué plus à l'est à savoir à Deir ez-Zor quand leurs agents takfiristes de Daech abandonnaient sans se battre réellement leurs positions aux miliciens des FDS qui une fois installés ont ouvert les vannes des puits de pétrole de la province aux Américains.
La Turquie qui n'a pas du tout respecté les 120 heures de trêve dans le nord de la Syrie, s'était emparée du village d’Om al-Assafir, située là aussi dans la banlieue nord de la ville de Ras al-Aïn », selon Sana.PressTV
PressTV-Turquie: la triple revanche d'Assad?
PressTV-Turquie: la triple revanche d'Assad?
L’accord entre les kurdes et Damas a changé la donne au détriment d’Ankara.
Samedi, aussi, soit au premier jour de la soi-disant trêve USA/Turquie, Sana avait fait part de la chute de deux autres villages de Ras al-Ain à savoir Jan Tamer Charqi et Al-Chakriyah qui sont tombés entre les mains de l'armée turque.
L'opération "Source de paix" est-elle pour autant un succès? Les observateurs militaires relèvent une stratégie de combat qui a conduit l'armée turque dans l'impasse: le déploiement-éclair des forces de l'armée syrienne et de leurs alliés à Manbij à Raqqa à Hassaka et ce, sur fond d'un accord avec les Kurdes qu'Ankara a sous-estimé à tort, a fait que ce dernier et à travers lui les Etats-Unis se sentent désormais totalement piégés. En l'espace de quelques heures en effet, les forces syriennes ont bloqué toute voie d’acheminement de renforts depuis Idlib et Afrin aux supplétifs de l'armée turque. Quant au centre, les forces terrestres de l’armée syrienne ont traversé suite à un saut inattendu le barrage de l’Euphrate dans la ville de Tabqa et ont pris le contrôle de la ville d’Aïn Issa, ayant ainsi resserré l’étau sur les forces turques à Dalan. Sur un territoire de 340 km prévu dans le plan d’Ankara, les forces turques n’ont réussi donc qu’à s’emparer de la bande d’une superficie de 80 km située entre les villes de Tall Abayd et Ras al-Aïn.
Ce lundi trois régiments blindés de l'armée syrienne font route avec la même rapidité que leurs paires il y a quelques jours en direction de la banlieue de l'Euphrate pour y prendre position et bloquer de facto l'avancée des mercenaires d'Ankara. Il y a deux jours un hélicoptère Blackhawk de l'armée turque s'est écrasé non loin de Hassaké dans un tir de missile qui ressemblait surtout à un tir de sommation russo-syrien contre les forces turques.
PressTV-Syrie: un hélicoptère turc abattu
PressTV-Syrie: un hélicoptère turc abattu
Un hélicoptère de l'armée turque s'est écrasé ce vendredi 18 octobre lors d'une opération dans le nord de la Syrie, a annoncé le ministère turc de la Défense.
A ce rythme même si l’armée turque est entrée ce dimanche dans Ras al-Aïn suite au retrait des Kurdes, comme l’a annoncé la télévision d’État syrienne, il n’est pas certain que les Turcs restent dans la ville qui est déjà encerclée par les forces armées de Damas.
Dans une interview accordée à Sputnik, la députée syrienne Janset Kazan a exclu la possibilité selon laquelle l’armée turque pourrait rester dans les villes de Ras al-Aïn et Tall Abyad : «Il existe une possibilité que l’armée turque se trouve dans Ras al-Aïn, mais que cela ne dure pas […], elle est encerclée par l’armée syrienne et elle va reculer.», a-t-elle déclaré.
L'état-major de l'armée turque comprend par ailleurs très justement ces évolutions et les ressorts du piège qui se referme sur Erdogan et ses forces armées. Ce lundi matin, Hurriyat, organe de l'AKP au pouvoir évoque " les efforts russo-iraniens" pour préparer une rencontre Erdogan-Assad" qui si elle a lieu, marquerait la reddition pure et simple de la Turquie après plus de sept ans de guerre directe et indirecte contre l'Etat syrien, sous la bannière des Etats-Unis et de l'OTAN. Le journal rappelle la quasi simultanéité de la visite à Ankara du couple Pence-Pompeo avec celle d'une délégation russe dirigée par l'émissaire spécial de Poutine, Alexandre Lavrantiev : " Lavrantiev s'est rendu ensuite à Damas et s'est entretenu avec Assad. Ses négociations à Ankara et à Damas s'étaient axées sur la stabilisation durable de l'est de l'Euphrate pour y asseoir la souveraineté de l'Etat syrien.... Le récent entretien du ministre iranien des Affaires étrangères avec son homologue turc va aussi dans ce sens, Moscou et Téhéran exerçant des pressions sur la Turquie pour qu'elle amorce un dialogue direct avec Damas".
S'il est vrai que le journal affirme que le président turc n'a pas encore donné sa réponse, il n'en reste pas moins que ce dernier n'a plus trop le choix : militairement, l'opération "Source de paix" a été un échec et toute obstination pour inverser la donne militaire sera punie par l'armée syrienne et ses alliés, constate un analyste.
Jeu russe : Ankara mis échec et mât
Les premiers clashs Armée turque/Armée syrienne ont apporté de terribles surprises pour Erdogan.
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