Trump’s America would go it alone against Iran

Saudi Arabia and Israel have long called for regime change, but are wary of taking part in an actual conflict

By ALISON TAHMIZIAN MEUSE

BEIRUT

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/05/article/trumps-america-would-go-it-alone-against-iran/

The United States under President Donald Trump would go it alone in a potential military confrontation with Iran, as neither its Middle East allies nor its Western partners see utility in such an endeavor.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who is known for his staunch enmity towards the Islamic republic – this week convened his security chiefs for an urgent meeting, instructing them to “take steps to isolate Israel from any developments and ensure that Israel is not dragged into this escalation,” Israel’s Channel 13 reported Wednesday.

They concluded, the outlet reported, that Tehran posed no “immediate concern” for Israel.

In the Gulf – where tensions are running high in the wake of reported attacks against shipping vessels and oil infrastructure – some of America’s staunchest allies are similarly unenthusiastic about the prospect of a new war.

The United Arab Emirates, for one, would not be “baited into a crisis” with Iran, a senior diplomat told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday night.

His comments came days after the Emirati Foreign Ministry said that four commercial vessels had been “sabotaged” off its coastal province of Fujairah. In the wake of that incident, multiple US media outlets have quoted unnamed Trump administration officials suggesting without evidence that Iran was behind the incident.

The Emirati minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, emphasized that an investigation, supported by the French and Americans, was ongoing.

“This is the region we live in and it’s important for us that we manage this crisis,” he added.

Saudi Arabia, embroiled since 2015 in a military intervention in neighboring Yemen with no end in sight, has offered only rhetoric and propaganda against Iran.

An editorial published Thursday in the Riyadh-based Arab News said the US should move beyond sanctions in its so-called “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran.

“The next logical step – in this newspaper’s view – should be surgical strikes. The US has set a precedent, and it had a telling effect: The Trump strikes on Syria when the Assad regime used sarin gas against its people,” it said.

The editorial notably did not advocate for Saudi involvement in said military action. The historical precedent mentioned – the 2017 US strikes on a Syrian military airbase – had no meaningful impact on the broader war.

For Iraq, which the US military invaded in 2003, a move stoked by intelligence claims over non-existent weapons of mass destruction and breathless media coverage of purported threats, a conflict between Tehran and Washington threatens to undermine what fleeting security the country has clawed back after a years-long war to rid its territory of ISIS militants.

“Iraq is a sovereign nation. We will not let [the US] use our territory,” Iraq’s ambassador to Russia, Haidar Mansour Hadi, was quoted as telling reporters in Moscow this week. The envoy said he hoped the latest developments in the region, including the pullout of US non-essential embassy staff from Iraq, would amount to nothing.

Iraq, he said, “does not want a new devastating war in the region” and would prefer to be a mediator between its rival allies than get caught in the middle.

America’s allies in Europe are no more enthusiastic.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who crashed a European Union gathering in Brussels on Monday in a bid to close ranks for his maximum pressure campaign, was met with a cool reception from his diplomatic counterparts.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters that the US top diplomat “heard very clearly … from us, not only from myself but also from the other ministers of EU members states, that we are living in a crucial, delicate moment where … the most responsible attitude to take … should be that of maximum restraint, avoiding any escalation on the military side.”

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt went so far as to express his concern that “an escalation that is unintended” could spark a “much more serious situation than we’re fearing.”

The following day, the UK’s Major General Chris Ghika said there was “no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.”

The statement – from the number two officer in the US-led coalition to defeat ISIS – appeared in sharp contrast to a sudden US evacuation of non-essential staff from Iraq this week over announced Iranian threats.

Brett McGurk, the former US envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition who served under both Trump and Barack Obama, said the ordered departure from Iraq was unprecedented.

“Even when ISIS was bearing down on Baghdad in 2014, the US did not trigger ordered departure in light of its serious repercussions,” he tweeted, adding: “The big question now is where this leads. Trump again said he expects Iran to call him. They won’t. So then what?”

Speaking from Japan on Thursday, part of a diplomatic tour meant to shore up Asian alliances amid the US pressure campaign, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told Kyoto News Agency there was no possibility for direct talks with the Trump administration at this juncture.

Zarif heads next to powerhouse China, where he will meet with officials engaged in their own standoff with the US over trade. 

Employment for All

Published in leading Pakistani newspaper Dawn, April 24th, 2019 – The article explains, and makes a case for the Job Guarantee Program of MMT, for popular press.

by Asad Zaman

April 30, 2019

https://weapedagogy.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/employment-for-all/

GLOBAL experience shows that market economies create massive inequalities, enriching the top one per cent, while leaving the bottom of the population far behind. One key to prosperity is to provide productive jobs for all who would like to participate in the production process. Unfortu­nately, contemporary macroeconomics, which was blind to the possibility of the global financial crisis, is not equipped with the ideas and tools required to create full employment.

Conventional macro blames the poor for their poverty, and suggests education and training to fit them into existing jobs. However, the private sector does not naturally create enough jobs to employ everyone.

Experience with Keynesian remedies shows that expansionary monetary policy starts to create inflation a long time before full employment is achieved. Modern Monetary Theory provides a genuine alternative, a job guarantee (JG) programme.

Instead of preparing people to fit them into existing or potential private sector jobs by providing them with education and training, we must create jobs tailored to the people. Jobs should be provided to take people as and where they are. Skills should be provided via on-the-job training. There are a huge number of jobs which require low levels of skill and education, and provide enormous benefits to society, but are not profit-making for the private sector.

Planting trees, building roads, cleaning dams, infrastructure projects, a range of social services, all provide benefits to society, and make a measurable impact on appropriate measures of GNP, but may not be privately profitable. Engaging the entire working population in productive jobs is a win-win solution since it will add enormously to the economy’s productive capacity of the economy, while providing a living wage for all members of society. We must solve a complex set of structural problems to make this work.

The first problem is institutional. Just as the private sector cannot provide enough jobs, the government too lacks the capacity or capability to productively employ millions of people. Since neither the government nor the private sector has sufficient capacity, we must turn to communities for provision of jobs. Fortunately, community-driven development was pioneered by Akhtar Hameed Khan in the Comilla Project, and has been replicated across Pakistan. Both the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund and National Rural Support Programmes have created thousands of living communities across Pakistan. These communities can be given the responsibility of providing productive jobs, for which funding can be provided by the government.

Next, we must examine the consequences of pumping billions into the economy by providing millions of jobs to all who wish to work, taking them as they are, where they are. A huge amount of additional demand for goods and services will be created by this additional money being paid to the formerly unemployed. Using household income and expenditure surveys which describe consumption patterns of the poor, we can come up with first-round estimates of the nature of the additional demand generated.

To prevent inflation, we need to ensure that employment is provided to produce the goods for which we anticipate excess demand will be generated, eg if we forecast additional demand for a million tonnes of food, we must employ the labourers to produce the additional million.

Careful sectoral planning is needed to ensure a match between additional demands generated and the additional production that will be created.

However, even if we fail in matching supply to demand, excess demand which leads to inflation is not necessarily harmful. Rising prices signal high demand and set off private mechanisms to create additional capacity to meet new demands. Large amounts of labour made available by the JG programme would facilitate expansion of supply in response to increased prices and profits.

A surfeit of money would create excess demand for imports. With an overvalued rupee, we subsidise all imports and can’t afford to increase demand, since that drains our forex reserves. However, an undervalued rupee acts as a tax on imports which creates forex reserves for the State Bank. Many economies like Japan, China, and East Asia have used undervaluation to promote domestic industries and accumulate dollars. It is true that essential imports with inelastic demands will become more expensive. However, we can use the surplus generated by undervaluation to subsidise essential imports. This dual exchange rate policy is far more efficient than a general across-the-board subsidy to all imports, which is created by overvaluation.

Many aspects of the JG programme require careful planning and adaptation to local social and institutional structure. But the payoff of prosperity for all makes it worthwhile to invest in the required efforts.

The writer is a member of the Economic Advisory Council.

What 50 Countries are Backing Guaidó? Who Knows? Who Cares? If the Media Say It Enough It Must Be True

MAY 16, 2019                                      

by DAVE LINDORFF

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/16/what-50-countries-are-backing-guaido-who-knows-who-cares-if-the-media-say-it-enough-it-must-be-true/

American media still refer to Juan Guaidó, America’s hand-picked “legitimate leader” or “legitimate president” of Venezuela, as having an “administration.”

The truth is that his “administration” — consisting of advisors and other opposition leaders — are all either arrested and being held by the government, hiding, seeking asylum in various foreign embassies (Spanish, Italian, Brazilian and Argentinian) in the capital of Caracas, or have fled to other countries like Brazil and Colombia.

Guaidó, apparently a government of one, has so far avoided arrest probably because the elected Venezuelan President Maduro doesn’t want to give the US an excuse to try and rescue him, or to launch military actions of some kind against Venezuela as the White House keeps threatening to do.

Clearly, in calling for US military intervention, Guaidó has both demonstrated almost his total lack of backing among the masses of Venezuelan people, as well as his desperation, given most Latin Americans’ visceral resentment of US interventions in their country, all of which have been designed to put autocrats or even military juntas in power, and many of which have openly overthrown popularly elected governments, as in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.

None of this gets reported in the US. Only recently has the New York Times, always a reliable backer of US imperial policy in Latin America, at least hinted at the possibility that the reason Maduro remains president and that Guaidó’s efforts to oust him are failing for abysmally could be that the Venezuelan people want him to stay president, and do not want a US-backed coup or a US military intervention to replace him.

At this point the huffing and puffing coming from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and especially from the White House National Security Advisor and chief militarist blowhard John Bolton, are looking pretty pathetic, with Bolton trying to sow dissension and distrust by hinting that Maduro “better not trust” his own generals’ loyalty, and by offering rewards to those generals willing to abandon Maduro.

It is an indication of the United States’ declining power and influence in Latin America that few outside the US with its insular mass media believe that the US would or even could successfully invade Venezuela and impose a government on that country of 32 million (a number that keeps declining as the upper middle class and rich flee).

If anything, US sabotage and threats and US backing for a government of the wealthy are probably galvanizing support for Maduro. While people in the US, if they are paying any attention at all to events in Venezuela, may believe that Maduro is a corrupt thug, people in Venezuela itself, and in most of Latin America know full well that the main problems in that oil-rich country have to do with the collapse in oil prices since the heady days of Hugo Chavez when it was going for $100 a barrel, to American efforts to block Venezuela from exporting its oil now, and to freeze or even seize Venezuelan assets and oil receipts from the oil it does manage to export, and to other forms of economic warfare engaged in by the United States. As in Cuba, this kind of strategy by the US only works to build support for the country’s existing government.

At some point Guaidó is going to go. He will either be written off by the US media — his main backer — or will be arrested. Probably the latter will follow the former since once he’s recognized as an impotent charlatan, his arrest will not make him a martyr for the opposition. Already he has lost what public support he had as Venezuela’s wealthy abandon the country for Florida. As well, the “50 countries” that we in the US keep hearing which supposedly back Guaidó as Venezuela’s “legitimate leader” are realizing that they were hoodwinked by the US, and are mostly calling for a calmer response to the crisis in Venezuela, refusing to buy into US military threats against the Maduro government. Nobody mentions that over 140 countries in the world support Maduro as the leader of Venezuela.

In truth it’s impossible to find that list of “more than 50 countries” backing a self-proclaimed and unelected Guaidó as Venezuela’s president. The closest I could find by working google searches was a map produced by Bloomberg News listing 13 countries besides the US as supporting Guaidó. These included Canada, the UK, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. That is 13 plus the United States. Listed as supporting Maduro as elected President are Russia, China, Turkey, Bolivia, and Cuba, though I believe Bloomberg neglected to mention Nicaragua, a strong Maduro backer, which would make it six.

For a time, most of the countries of Europe were lining up behind Guaidó, particularly after Germany announced that it was recognizing him as the new interim leader of Venezuela in late January, and ousted the country’s ambassador, but then by late March Germany was having second thoughts, and rejected the person sent there by Guaidó to assume the position of Venezuelan ambassador. At this point except for the UK, the countries of Europe, along with Mexico and Uruguay are simply calling for a dialogue and a negotiated solution to the Venezuela political crisis, and in addition to opposing any talk of military action or a coup, are seeking nothing more than a new election (which Maduro would probably win, given the alternative of the return of a government of the rich). They’re no longer really backing Guaidó.

The reporters who continue to refer to “more than 50 countries” calling for Maduro’s ouster all must be using the same wrong news clip or some dated State Department press release.  (I asked the State Department for an updated list today but so far none has been sent to me, though it would appear it shouldn’t take long to compile.)

The Brink of Climate Catastrophe with David Wallace-Wells

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AssOK7Go7JU

Arctic Temperatures Shatter Records

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwLpcdc4hbw

FDA Keeps Deadly Secrets From Us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nbbaWGnWqk

AOC Brilliantly Explains How Ronald Reagan Was Racist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXtVonCXRBE