By Alex Lantier
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
[dropcap]Directly[/dropcap] challenging the NATO powers’ policy of cutting off credit to Russia to undermine the ruble and bankrupt the Russian economy, China is pledging to extend financial aid to Moscow.
On Saturday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed the need for mutual aid between China and Russia in remarks on the ruble crisis, which has seen a drastic 45 percent fall in its value against the dollar this year. “Russia has the capability and the wisdom to overcome the existing hardship in the economic situation,” Wang said. “If the Russian side needs it, we will provide necessary assistance within our capacity.”
On Sunday, Chinese Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng told Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV that Beijing would strengthen ties with Moscow in energy and manufacturing, predicting that Chinese-Russian trade would hit its target of $100 billion this year despite the ruble crisis. As the ruble’s value in dollars or euros swings wildly, Gao proposed moving away from the dollar in financing Chinese-Russian trade and instead using the Chinese currency, the yuan or renminbi.
Gao said China would focus on “fundamental factors such as how the two economies complement each other,” Reuters reported. “Capital investors may be more interested in a volatile stock or foreign exchange market. But in terms of concrete cooperation between the two nations, we shall have a balanced mentality and push forward those cooperations,” Gao said.
Yesterday, China Daily cited Li Jianmin of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences saying that aid to Russia could pass through channels like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or the BRICS forum. Significantly, both the SCO (an alliance of China, Russia, and Central Asian states) and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) exclude the United States and Europe.
Li noted that already last month, when Chinese and Russian premiers Li Keqiang and Dmitry Medvedev met in Kazakhstan, they signed extensive deals on railways, infrastructure and development in Russia’s Far East region, north of China. “Loans, cooperation in major projects, and participation in domestic infrastructure investment in Russia are options on the table,” he added. In one such deal last month, China signed a $400-billion, 30-year deal to buy Russian gas.
These offers of assistance cut across the economic war on Russia launched by US and European imperialism to punish Moscow for opposing their neo-colonial restructuring of Eurasia.
In retaliation for Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad against NATO’s proxy war in Syria and Russian opposition to the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime in Kiev, the NATO powers sought to financially strangle Russia. As Russian oil revenues fell in line with the fall in world oil prices and the ruble collapsed, they worked to cut off credit to Russia and demanded that Russia acquiesce to the Kiev regime. (See: Imperialism and the ruble crisis)
The basic financial mechanism of this strategy was laid out in London’s Financial Times by Anders Aslund of the Petersen Institute for International Economics. “Russia has received no significant international financing—not even from Chinese state banks—because everybody is afraid of US financial regulators,” he wrote. With a yearly capital outflow of $125 billion, liquid foreign currency reserves of only $200 billion, and total foreign debts of $600 billion, Russia would run out of dollars and be bankrupted in as little as two years, Aslund calculated.
Now, however, Beijing appears to be accepting the risk of a showdown with the United States and publicly preparing to throw a financial lifeline to Russia. Chinese currency reserves of $3.89 trillion are the world’s largest and, on paper at least, allow Beijing to easily repay Russia’s debts.
Angela Merkel: Even Germany is having second thoughts about the strategy pursued by Washington. (Flickr=DonkeyHotey)
Significantly, the calls of Wang and Gao to aid Russia came a day after a divided European Union (EU) summit on Russia last week. Though the EU supported US sanctions against Russia, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, French President François Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi all publicly opposed calls for more sanctions. Leading European newspapers also warned of the risk of a collapse of the Russian state.
As it weighs its response to the ruble crisis, the Chinese regime, facing a cooling economy and rising social protests in the working class and peasant masses, doubtless also fears the consequences of an outright economic and political implosion of its northern neighbor.
The economic conflicts erupting between the major powers over the oil crisis and the imperialist war drive in Eurasia testifies to the advanced state of the crisis of world capitalism, and the rising risk of world war.
Chinese aid to Russia, should it materialize, will exacerbate US conflict with China. Washington has tried to militarily encircle it through the “pivot to Asia,” allying with Japan, Australia, and India. Plans for war with China, both economic and military, are doubtless being pored over on Wall Street and in the Pentagon.
A year ago, in an article titled “China must not copy the Kaiser’s errors,” Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf warned China against any action that could be construed as a challenge to US global hegemony. He indicated that a Chinese policy replicating the German Kaiser’s challenge to British hegemony before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 would lead to a similar outcome: all-out conflict.
“If open conflict arrived, the US could cut off the world’s trade with China. It could also sequester a good part of China’s liquid foreign assets,” Wolf wrote, recalling that China’s “foreign currency reserves, equal to 40 percent of GDP are, by definition, held abroad.” Such naked theft of trillions of dollars that China has earned from trade with the United States and Europe would directly raise the prospect of a collapse of global trade and preparation for war between nuclear-armed powers.
With its ever more reckless and violent policies, US imperialism is vastly overplaying its hand, discrediting itself at home and fueling opposition from rival states. By driving Russia and China together, in particular, Washington is undoing what was long seen as a major achievement of US imperialist statecraft: the 1972 rapprochement between US President Richard Nixon and Chinese leader Mao Zedong, which turned China into a US ally against the former Soviet Union.
“Many Chinese people still view Russia as the big brother, and the two countries are strategically important to each other,” Renmin University Associate Dean Jin Canrong said, referring to Soviet backing for China as it fought the United States in the Korean War, shortly after the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949. “For the sake of national interests, China should deepen cooperation with Russia when such cooperation is in need.”
“Russia is an irreplaceable partner on the international stage,” the CCP-linked Global Times wrote in an editorial yesterday. “China must take a proactive attitude in helping Russia walk out of the current crisis.”
The author is a senior analyst with wsws, information arm of the Social Equality Party.
And now a word from the Editors of The Greanville Post
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D.P. GREANVILLE
A photo-op hugging phoney and supreme opportunist, Giuliani typifies the politics of the rightwing, and the establishment, for that matter. “America’s Mayor” a guy whose ethics are not much above those of an ambulance chaser, gained his title by showing up on the ruins of the Twin Towers barely after the dust had settled (CC/Wikipedia)
[dropcap]How do you[/dropcap] distinguish liberals from radicals? There are many tests, but one of the most reliable is that liberals will by default preach that peaceful protest will get the system changed, that nonviolence is the golden path, and that, in consequence, no strikes, no public mobilizations, confrontations, let alone violence, is or will be necessary to change an institutionalized evil.
The establishment mouthpieces—a sector of the official state that also goes normally under the label “liberal” (vide Obama, and the rest of the Democrats and a few Republicans) is insistent on that point, as one of their self-assigned missions is to defang and deflect real challenges to the sacred and most profitable order. Thus safely delineated—who’s “respectable” in his right to protest and who’s not, the latter being again by definition the “crazies” of the left and the right, or people belonging to the “wrong” race—the guardians of the ship of state can pick policies to neutralize the challengers.
U.S. Marines from 1st Battalion, 5th Marines fire at insurgent positions during the First Battle of Fallujah.
That nonviolence and rigorous pacifism rarely gets a well-entrenched system of iniquity to change its spots, not to mention disappear, is an inconvenient but easily ascertained historical fact that liberals and conservatives would rather not dwell upon. Thus it is never mentioned that, yes, while Gandhi may have been instrumental in formally throwing the Brits out of India, filthy, barbaric evil in the Western-suported oligarchies and dictatorships of the Third World, in the European fascist nations, and so on, could not be dislodged without a monumental war that cost in excess of 70 million people, and protracted class struggles, and the evil was not really completely and definitely expunged, as the struggle against a resurgent fascism in Europe has become a reality once again, this time with the epicenter of the infection not in Berlin but in Washington.
It’s a fair assumption that Gandhi would not have lasted a minute if he had been preaching his gospel of peaceful activism in nations festering with brutal militaries, US-sponsored and trained death squads, and rightwing militias ready to do the plutocracy’s bidding. The shameful record is there for all to see, even if the mainstream media, the professional politicos and establishment historians and punditocracy keep looking the other way.
By not recognizing elementary facts, hotheads like Patrick Lynch raise the temperature of the social dialog, making it impossible, and actually endangering those in the police who discharge their duties according to fair and professional standards.
The relative silence in the United states about such criminal policies is of course deliberate, for in the modern world such situations are part of the engineered social space, the democratic illusion and consequent thick hypocrisy in the capitalist democracies being the price that systemic vice pays virtue to legitimate its rule.
THE YOUNG TURKS: Mayor De Blasio Blamed For Horrific Killing Of NYPD Officers
Published on Dec 22, 2014
“We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police,” said Giuliani during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t care how you want to describe it — that’s what those protests are all about.”
Watch Rudy Guiliani’s interview here: GIULIANI INTERVIEW (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/21/giuliani-new-york-police-obama_n_6362724.html)
Republican Rep. Peter King of Long Island, appearing on Fox News Sunday, cited the death of two NYPD officers as reasons for President Obama and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to “stop the cop bashing and anti-police rhetoric.”
The hidden history of the CIA’s prison in Poland, as reported of all places in the Washington Post, normally an instrument of imperialist propaganda.)(1)
The purpose of such international maneuvers has never changed. There is no nation where “American aid” —open or surreptitious—has not been used primarily to keep their populations at bay, while advancing the interests of the capitalist hegemon, lest the downtrodden unwashed masses, so cynically praised in Christian liturgy, assume their rightful and sovereign place under the sun. As preached by the Church and the Empire, this- wordliness is wrong, wrong, but other-wordliness is fine, indeed encouraged.
The precedent for the fact that institutionalized evil may require huge armies to uproot, equipped with the massive weaponry enabled by modern industrialism, was already seen in the US “war between the states” more than 150 years ago, a colossal clash that consumed the lives of more than 650,000 Americans, and which laid waste to significant swaths of the young nation’s territory. As is now well known (at least among politically aware publics), contrary to myth the war was not originally fought for noble reasons, to emancipate slaves or discombobulate the Southern plantocracy, but it ended up packaging that goal, which it filled formally by 1865, although in practice the old system continued to oppress African Americans for another 100 years. It took massive and brave mobilizations to dislodge the more blatant aspects of such tyranny, but the second-class, oppressed status of Black America remained in place, and is obvious today to any impartial observer, despite the sprinkling of affluent, “non-threatening” Blacks such as Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the celebrity preacher-politicians, and that ubiquitous nincompoop bunch, the Real Housewives of Atlanta.
Repressing the “crazies” and “those who choose violence” over peaceful protest
The state as the pinnacle of organized power defending the ruling, privileged minority does not and will never operate even-handedlly in its administration of justice and state-sanctioned violence. Thus it’s delusional to believe that when push comes to shove the rightwing militias and similar crypto-fascist formations—no matter what outrages they commit— will be repressed by the police with the same all-out vigor and viciousness reserved for the left. In fact, you can bank on the idea that in a situation of widespread public mobilization against the plutocratic order the rightwing crazies will be armed or indirectly mobilized to act as judicially above the law shock troops, death squads, etc., on behalf of the establishment. The precedent has been seen in a number of nations, the most notable example being Germany’s Weimar Republic, where the social democratic regime, by betraying the workers and colluding with the aristocratic and military sectors, midwifed the ascent to power of the Nazis.
Both the police and military understand their assigned role. While not exactly populated with geniuses, by temperament and acculturation, they are averse to disorder, whose systematic causes they do not understand.
Now that the militarized police are almost in open rebellion against its nominal civilian command, having seen their favorite m.o. questioned by a wider sector of the population, including some public figures, and at a moment when opportunistic rightwing politicians, typical filth like George Pataki or Rudy Giuliani, quickly rush before the cameras to add petrol to the fire, it’s useful to keep a few things in mind. Forgive me if some of these things seem obvious to you.
FIRST
As pointed out by Rob Urie and Glen Ford in their excellent pieces on the topic, the police feel betrayed by the very layers of society it sees as loyally and selflessly protecting. Glen Ford notes that,
The cops threaten mutiny if the State does not stick up for the men and women who do its dirty work. PBA honcho Patrick Lynch denounced “those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did everyday. We tried to warn, ‘It must not go on. It cannot be tolerated.’”
To which the protesters answer: the police killings and the criminalization of a whole people must not go on and cannot be tolerated.
For his part, evoking the indignation of the top US military brass and politicians to the audacity of Fallujah resisting and fighting back against a brutal army of occupation, Rob Urie reminded us that,
“When Ismaaiyl Brinsley murdered NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in self-proclaimed revenge killings for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner spokespersons for the NYPD and the PBA (Police Benevolent Association) were quick to personalize the victims while using the language of belligerent militarism to politicize the broader context of growing public resistance to police violence. What wasn’t expressed by NYPD spokespersons was any regret for the unjustifiable murder of Eric Garner or any number of other black and brown youth, for participation in systematic racial repression like stop-question-and-frisk or for the acting as an occupying army in poor neighborhoods of color. What was affirmed through the words of spokespersons for the police was that black lives don’t matter but that cop lives do.
So the cops are up in arms, almost literally, and the insurrection, their bitterness, while going underground, may not extinguish itself as long as public criticism continues.
SECOND
All violence is not equal. The nature of violence and its moral content varies according to the social matrix in which it originates. This is not Marxist but Jesuist logic. As a rule “retail violence,” as opposed to massive, organized, direct and indirect, violence, as the system practices it daily, begins to occur when the conditions of life become unbearable for a sector of the population in which all hope has vanished.
Minimal and sporadic as the instances of violence against the police may be, this is usually enough to spark a disproportionate retaliation by the forces of order. Thus, in almost all cases studied, from Rome on down, violence in a society defined by enormous inequity starts with the state.
It’s a lie that it is the left, the revolutionists, the people yearning for true social change, who fire the first shots. History shows that, except for those instances in which a small, adventurist nucleus, way ahead of the masses’ consciousness, attempts to spark a rebellion by using armed force, it is the praetorian guard of the established order—whether Czardom, military tyranny, or capitalist democracy—that moves to “decapitate” and intimidate the nascent democratic movement via the liberal administration of state violence. Eventually, a self-defense force is organized and the outcome of that struggle is either liberation, a worse form of tyranny or a new, highly imperfect but perhaps more tolerable status quo. The cases of South Africa and El Salvador testify to that. History guarantees nothing except that ignoring its lessons perpetuates its tragedies.
Final comment
While rightwing politicians like Giuliani (as is customary) hardly help the situation by providing respectability to the fascistic utterances of narrow-minded zealots like Patrick Lynch, the card-carrying “liberals” are equally toxic.
Their language is characteristically more convoluted (see sidebar below), but the message is clear: the United States is NOT a nation in which African Americans might feel justified in resisting the police or believe that their lives are endangered by their presence. Instead such thinking should be classified as a form of insanity. As usual it’s easy to see the world in conciliatory tones when comfortably perched on the rungs of the upper middle class in the underbelly of the ruling class.
Indeed, what we witness here is a massive failure of the empathetic imagination, which should surprise no one given the natural predisposition to selfish behavior that characterizes American society. Considering how extreme and vitriolic guys like Lynch can get when their peripheral self-interest is threatened, one may justifiably ask if they would be as peaceable and law-abiding as the vast majority of Black people still are if they had to endure the ministrations of a constantly intrusive and brutal police force. Does Lynch and his ilk ever think (or heard) of the Black & Tan? It might be salutary if they did. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen.
Patrice Greanville is editor in chief of The Greanville Post.
NOTES
Rogue State—A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, and use, too, the formidable works of Michael Parenti, plus Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. In fact, there is no dearth of credible historians, and once a person succeeds in learning how to lift the status quo fog, things begin to pop up all over.
And now a word from the Editors of The Greanville Post
FRIENDS AND FELLOW ACTIVISTS—
AS YOU KNOW, THERE’S A COLOSSAL INFORMATION WAR GOING ON, AND THE FATE OF THE WORLD LITERALLY HANGS ON THE OUTCOME.
THEIR LIES.
THEIR CONSTANT PROPAGANDA.
OUR TRUTH.
HUGE ISSUES ARE BEING DECIDED: Nuclear war, whether we’ll live in democracy or tyranny, dignity or destitution, planetary salvation or doom…It’s a battle of communications we can’t afford to lose.
So, we request that you do something.
Reading is not enough. Action of some sort is needed.
Start with something simple: Share our posts.
If you don’t, how can we ever neutralize the power of the corporate media?
And if you took the time to read this article, and found it worth SHARING, then why not sign up with our special bulletin to be included in our future distributions? And please tell others about The Greanville Post.
YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO THE GREANVILLE POST BULLETIN, SEE BELOW) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES—EVER. That’s a guarantee.
