Turkey Declares Ownership On Half Of Eastern Mediterranean Waters
A Turkish diplomat has revealed a map which delineates waters in the Mediterranean claimed by Turkey, amid an ongoing months-long standoff with Cyprus and Greece over Turkish oil and gas exploration and drilling inside Cyprus’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
“After signing deals with its own puppet state in occupied northern Cyprus and with the pseudo-government in Libya’s Tripoli, Turkey declares that it owns half of the eastern Mediterranean,” Aron Lund, an analyst at The Century Foundation, observes of the newly published map.
New map outlining Turkey’s claimed continental shelf and the borders of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), via Hurriyet Daily. Meanwhile the entire eastern side of Cyprus is claimed by the internationally disputed “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.”
And Turkey’s Hurriyet Dailyexplains: “With the chart, Çağatay Erciyes showed the outer boundaries of Turkey’s continental shelf and EEZ, designated in a 2011 agreement between Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), the median line between Egypt and Turkey’s mainlands and a recent memorandum with Libya.”
Over the past year Turkey has sent both oil and gas exploration ships, as well as military transport vessels, into Cypriot waters in the East Mediterranean related to expanded claims based on the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus (since 1974), earning the condemnation of both Nicosia and top EU officials, who have defended EU-Cyprus’ interpretation of the conflict.
Turkey claims western waters off Cyprus, with the so-called TRNC eastern waters; and now Erdogan is cutting deals with Libya to expand from the southern Mediterranean.
In nearby Libya, as Turkish military advisers continue to play a key role in support of the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) against an offensive led by Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), Turkey is also busy expanding maritime defensive operations off North Africa.
“On Nov. 27, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a closed meeting in Istanbul that lasted over two hours with Fayez al-Sarraj, chairman of the Presidential Council of Libya,” Hurriyet Daily reports further.
In that meeting the two leaders reportedly struck a deal which is seen as key to expanding Turkey’s maritime claims:
Stressing that Turkey has the longest continental coast line in the eastern Mediterranean, [Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman] Aksoy said: “The islands which lie on the opposite side of the median line between two mainlands cannot create maritime jurisdiction areas beyond their territorial waters and that the length and direction of the coasts should be taken into account in delineating maritime jurisdiction areas.”
This follows boiling tensions since the early summer after Turkey laid claim to waters extending a whopping 200 miles from its coast, brazenly asserting ownership over a swathe of the Mediterranean that even cuts into Greece’s exclusive economic zone.
After signing deals with its own puppet state in occupied northern Cyprus and with the pseudo-government in Libya’s Tripoli, Turkey declares that it owns half of the eastern Mediterranean. https://t.co/Yvmpi7PA9tpic.twitter.com/N41ERkTTt3
So far Ankara has responded to threats of EU sanctions by reaffirming its rights to waters of all parts of Cyprus’ coast.
Should the Turkish military attempt to enforce its drilling claims and run up against Cypriot and Greek vessels, it could spark a deadly encounter which would force the EU and reluctant NATO to finally weigh in more forcefully.
Nothing can be taken for granted in the United Kingdom these days, but it is now very likely that 2020 will be the year when Brexit finally happens. A majority of UK citizens will probably be relieved to bring this seemingly endless agony to a close, while most European leaders will likely be glad not to have to argue over another postponement. But questions will remain.
To the question of “Who lost Britain?”, the answer must be, first and foremost, Britain itself. Whatever mistakes the European Union’s other 27 members may have made, they cannot be held responsible for the extraordinary behavior of the UK’s three equally amateurish governments of the last five years.
Yet, there are deeper lessons to be drawn from what happened in Britain. The first, as Wolfgang Münchau pointed out in the Financial Times, is that the battle in the UK over EU membership was lost long before it was fought. Since the 1990s, leading pundits and media outlets have routinely portrayed the EU as a stifling bureaucracy obsessed with expanding its own power; few senior politicians have dared to confront such prejudices.
Unfortunately, similar trends are currently visible in other core EU countries. In France, 56% of citizens – as many as in the UK – tend “not to trust” the EU. Working-class voters are especially negative. Confidence in the EU is stronger in Germany, but the European Central Bank’s policies are under attack. For years, horror stories circulated about hidden transfers to the South. Germany’s best-selling tabloid Bild now claims that German savers lost €120 billion ($132 billion) during the tenure of former ECB President Mario Draghi (or “Count Draghila,” as the editors called him). Many politicians, like their British counterparts before them, find it easier to pander to such perceptions than to oppose them. This is paving the way for future backlashes.
At the same time, the EU should not exempt itself from a bit of soul-searching. When the UK’s then-prime minister, David Cameron, sought a temporary limit on immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, it might have been advisable to work out a solution with him. And after the EU started Brexit negotiations with Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, it might have been wise to respond to her calls for a “bespoke” arrangement for the UK. Since the June 2016 Brexit referendum, the EU27 have been surprisingly united, remarkably consistent, and astoundingly bereft of a strategy. Their stance has been motivated not so much by a desire to limit mutual damage, but rather by the fear that any softening in negotiations with the UK could lead to further fragmentation. Their apparent strength concealed internal weakness.
Bygones are bygones. The EU’s priorities now should be to keep mutually beneficial cooperation alive and to avert the danger of the UK pursuing an aggressive regulatory competition strategy.
Joint defense initiatives involving the UK and continental partners will most likely survive, cooperation within the multilateral system will almost certainly continue, and ad hoc projects will probably flourish. But the big casualty of Brexit risks being economic integration with the European single market.
A screw is a screw, and a bolt is a bolt. But the UK no longer produces screws and bolts. It is a major exporter of banking, insurance, accounting, communication, and professional services, half of which go to the EU. Moreover, most of these services are regulated.
If the Brexiteers’ “take back control” slogan means anything, it implies substituting UK laws for EU legislation. On the day after Brexit, Britain’s regulatory regime will be identical to that of its EU trading partners, because the UK’s 2018 Repeal Bill copy-pasted all EU laws into domestic legislation. But as the UK Parliament gradually amends these laws, and the EU introduces new laws of its own, the two legal systems will start diverging. The question is: how far can they diverge without endangering economic linkages and destroying prosperity?
There are two possibilities.
One is that the UK adopts laws that differ from those in the EU but are based on the same core principles. For example, there can be different ways to guarantee that insurance contracts offer the same degree of consumer protection, or to uphold bioethics standards. In that case, UK national laws would embody different approaches to regulation, and yet create only limited obstacles to trade in services.
The second possibility, however, is that the UK attempts to undercut EU legislation. In this scenario – often dubbed “Singapore-upon-Thames” – Britain would impose less stringent standards for financial stability, be softer on data protection and, or perhaps relax its labor laws, in the hope of attracting more investors and selling cheaper services. Such a move would rightly be regarded as uncooperative by the UK’s European partners, and would result in the EU cutting off market access for British services exporters (most of which currently supply their continental clients directly from their UK base).
Which route will Britain follow?
Ideally, it would agree with the EU on common principles and credibly commit to sticking to them. But because some of the most adamant Brexit supporters openly dream of completing the Thatcher revolution and turning the UK into a low-regulation paradise, the EU is understandably wary. There is a serious risk of a negative spiral of aggressive British deregulation and forceful EU tightening, with damaging consequences for services trade.
The EU should not ask the UK to copy slavishly its legislation. But it should make clear that aggressive regulatory competition is unacceptable and present the UK government with a black-and-white choice: either it agrees to commit to common principles and exercise regulatory self-restraint in order to maintain good access to the European market, or it refuses – and exposes British firms to a severe, across-the-board curb on their ability to export to Europe.
Assuming Brexit happens, future historians will probably remember 2020 as the year when an enfeebled and vulnerable Europe chose to make itself feebler and more vulnerable. The task for its leaders now is to avoid making matters even worse.
Russian Gas Mega-Pipeline To China Goes Online As Putin & Xi Hail Closer Ties
Late Monday Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin jointly launched the major unprecedented cooperative project that had been years in the making called the ‘Power of Siberia’ gas pipeline.
The China-Russia east-route pipeline is now providing China with Russian natural gas, which according to Chinese state media is expected to reach 5 billion cubic meters in 2020 and increase to 38 billion cubic meters annually from 2024.
Crucially, S&P Global Platts estimates that total sales through the pipeline is projected to meet nearly 10% of China’s entire gas supply by 2022, ensuring vital energy security as Beijing continues to feel the pressure and uncertainty of the trade war with Washington.
A Chinese section of the China-Russia East Route natural gas pipeline in Heihe, China. Image source: CNN/Getty Images
The ceremony to officially bring the pipeline online was held as a video call between Xi and Putin was underway. Xi told Putin: “The East-route natural gas pipeline is a landmark project of China-Russia energy cooperation and a paradigm of deep convergence of both countries’ interests and win-win cooperation.”
The deal had been cemented in May 2014 when Russian gas giant Gazprom signed a 30-year contract with China National Petroleum Corp, after which the pipeline agreements were signed with both leaders present in Shanghai in later 2014.
Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller announced to both leaders that the pipeline had been opened via video link. “Gas is flowing to the gas transmission system of the People’s Republic of China,” he said.
A 30-year deal was signed by Putin and Xi in 2014, and while a final figure has not been announced, it is believed to be worth more than $400 billion.— CNN
Gazprom will oversee operation of the mammoth pipeline which runs more than 8,100 kilometers (5,000 miles) across the two countries.
President #Putin and Chinese President #Xi Jinping launch “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline.
This is a breakthrough in the energy market that will have major geopolitical repercussions. pic.twitter.com/ZKBXpe9RF4
Xi hailed the pipeline’s inauguration as signaling a new start in future China-Russian cooperation and partnerships. And as Putin noted in his comments, the pipeline’s launch date coincided with the 70th anniversary of Russia-China diplomatic ties.
Putin also projected that 1 trillion cubic meters of natural gas will flow through the pipeline from Russia over the next 30 years.
The pipeline crosses over to China from Russia’s Blagoveshchensk, also site of the first major road bridge between the two.
Via Gazprom
“That step brings the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership in the energy sector to a whole new level,” Putin statedto TASS news agency.
In a worrisome sign for Washington as Moscow further cements its energy dominance in the east, the ‘Power of Siberia’ is but the first of a planned for three total major pipeline projects. It will later be joined by ‘TurkStream’ and ‘Nordstream2’, according to official statements.
After presiding over a far-right coup in Bolivia, the US dubbed Nicaragua a “national security threat” and announced new sanctions, while Trump designated drug cartels in Mexico as “terrorists” and refused to rule out military intervention.
One successful coup against a democratically elected socialist president is not enough, it seems.
Washington dubbed Nicaragua a threat to US national security, and announced that it will be expanding its suffocating sanctions on the tiny Central American nation.
Trump is also turning up the heat on Mexico, baselessly linking the country to terrorism and even hinting at potential military intervention. The moves come as the country’s left-leaning President Andrés Manuel López Obrador warns of right-wing attempts at a coup.
As Washington’s rightist allies in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador are desperately beating back massive grassroots uprisings against neoliberal austerity policies and yawning inequality gaps, the United States is ramping up its aggression against the region’s few remaining progressive governments.
These moves have led left-wing forces in Latin America to warn of a 21st-century revival of Operation Condor, the Cold War era campaign of violent subterfuge and US support for right-wing dictatorships across the region.
Trump admin declares Nicaragua a ‘national security threat’
A day after the US-backed far-right coup in Bolivia, the White House released a statement applauding the military putsch and making it clear that two countries were next on Washington’s target list: “These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua,” Trump declared.
On November 25, the Trump White House then quietly issued a statement characterizing Nicaragua as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
This prolonged for an additional year an executive order Trump had signed in 2018 declaring a state of “national emergency” on the Central American country.
Trump’s 2018 declaration came after a failed violent right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua. The US government has funded and supported many of the opposition groups that sought to topple elected Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and cheered them on as they sought to overthrow him.
The 2018 national security threat designation was quickly followed by economic warfare. In December the US Congress approved the NICA Act without any opposition. This legislation gave Trump the authority to impose sanctions on Nicaragua, and prevents international financial institutions from doing business with Managua.
Trump’s new 2019 statement spewed outlandish propaganda against Nicaragua, referring to its democratically elected government — which for decades has been targeted for overthrow by Washington — as a supposedly violent and corrupt “regime.”
This executive order is similar to one made by President Barack Obama in 2015, which designated Venezuela as a threat to US national security.
Both orders were used to justify the unilateral imposition of suffocating economic sanctions. And Trump’s renewal of the order paves the way for an escalated economic attack on Nicaragua.
The extension received negligible coverage in mainstream English-language corporate media, but right-wing Spanish-language outlets in Latin America heavily amplified it.
And opposition activists are gleefully cheering on the intensification of Washington’s hybrid warfare against Managua.
More aggressive US sanctions against Nicaragua
Voice of America (VOA), the US government’s main foreign broadcasting service, noted that the extension of the executive order will be followed with more economic attacks.
Washington’s ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Carlos Trujillo, told VOA, “The pressure against Nicaragua is going to continue.”
The OAS representative added that Trump will be announcing new sanctions against the Nicaraguan government in the coming weeks.
VOA stated clearly that “Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela, is one of the Latin American countries whose government Trump has made a priority to put diplomatic and economic pressure on to bring about regime change.”
This is not just rhetoric. The US Department of the Treasury updated the Nicaragua-related sanctions section of its website as recently as November 8.
And in September, the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced a “more comprehensive set of regulations,” strengthening the existing sanctions on Nicaragua.
Voice of America’s report quoted several right-wing Nicaraguans who openly called for more US pressure against their country.
Bianca Jagger, a celebrity opposition activist formerly married to Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, called on the US to impose sanctions on Nicaragua’s military in particular.
“The Nicaraguan military has not been touched because they [US officials] are hoping that the military will like act the military in Bolivia,” Jagger said, referring to the military officials who violently overthrew Bolivia’s democratically elected president.
Many of these military leaders had been trained at the US government’s School of the Americas, a notorious base of subversion dating back to Operation Condor. Latin American media has been filled in recent days with reports that Bolivian soldiers were paid $50,000 and generals were paid up to $1 million to carry out the putsch.
VOA added that “in the case of the Central American government [of Nicaragua], the effect that sanctions can have can be greater because it is a more economically vulnerable country.”
VOA quoted Roberto Courtney, a prominent exiled right-wing activist and executive director of the opposition group Ethics and Transparency, which monitors elections in Nicaragua and is supported by the US government’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Courtney, who claims to be a human rights activist, salivated over the prospects of US economic war on his country, telling VOA, “There is a bit of a difference [between Nicaragua and Bolivia] … the economic vulnerability makes it more likely that the sanctions will have an effect.”
Courtney, who was described by VOA as an “expert on the electoral process,” added, “If there is a stick, there must also be a carrot.” He said the OAS could help apply diplomatic and political pressure against Nicaragua’s government.
These unilateral American sanctions are illegal under international law, and considered an act of war. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, has characterized US economic warfare “financial terrorism,” explaining that it disproportionately targets civilians in order to turn them against their government.
Top right-wing Nicaraguan opposition groups applauded Trump for extending the executive order and for pledging new sanctions against their country.
Estados Unidos amplió por un año más la vigencia de la Declaración de Emergencia Nacional con respecto a la Situación en Nicaragua. https://t.co/Xq8m8UWVfr
The Nicaraguan Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, an opposition front group that brings together numerous opposition groups, several of which are also funded by the US government’s NED, welcomed the order.
Trump dubs drug cartels in Mexico “terrorists,” refuses to rule out drone strikes
While the US targeting of Nicaragua and Venezuela’s governments is nothing new, Donald Trump is setting his sights on a longtime US ally in Mexico.
In 2018, Mexican voters made history when they elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president in a landslide. López Obrador, who is often referred to by his initials AMLO, is Mexico’s first left-wing president in more than five decades. He ran on a progressive campaign pledging to boost social spending, cut poverty, combat corruption, and even decriminalize drugs.
AMLO is wildly popular in Mexico. In February, he had a record-breaking 86 percent approval rating. And he has earned this widespread support by pledging to combat neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy.
“The neoliberal economic model has been a disaster, a calamity for the public life of the country,” AMLO has declared. “The child of neoliberalism is corruption.”
When he unveiled his multibillion-dollar National Development Plan, López Obrador announced the end to “the long night of neoliberalism.”
AMLO’s left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.
On November 27 — a day after declaring Nicaragua a “national security threat” — Trump announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”
Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.
Trump revealed this new policy in an interview with right-wing Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. “Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them with drones and things like that?” O’Reilly asked.
The US president refused to rule out drone strikes or other military action against drug cartels in Mexico.
President @realDonaldTrump tells me he is 90 days into the process of designating Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations – which would give US forces more leverage in taking them out. pic.twitter.com/ewSJMkt6rr
Trump’s announcement seemed to surprise the Mexican government, which immediately called for a meeting with the US State Department.
The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central America.
These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed, trained, and funded far-right Islamist extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from Washington when he was fighting against Russia.
The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to cartels in Mexico.
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration’s designation of cartels as terrorists, “They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security.”
“Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in Mexico?” Duarte asked.
She noted that the US corporate media has embarked on an increasingly ferocious campaign to demonize AMLO, portraying the democratically elected president as a power-hungry aspiring dictator who is supposedly wrecking Mexico’s economy.
Duarte discussed the issue of US interference in Mexican politics in an interview with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, on their podcast Moderate Rebels:
Now, a whisper campaign over fears that the right-wing opposition may try to overthrow President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spreading across Mexico.
AMLO himself has publicly addressed the rumors, making it clear that he will not tolerate any discussion of coups.
“How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are,” López Obrador tweeted on November 2. Referencing the 1913 assassination of progressive President Francisco Madero, who had been a leader of the Mexican Revolution, AMLO wrote, “Now is different.”
“Another coup d’état will now be allowed,” he declared.
Ahora es distinto. Aunque son otras realidades y no debe caerse en la simplicidad de las comparaciones, la transformación que encabezo cuenta con el respaldo de una mayoría libre y consciente, justa y amante de la legalidad y de la paz, que no permitiría otro golpe de Estado.
In recent months, as fears of a coup intensify, López Obrador has swung even further to the left, directly challenging the US government and asserting an independent foreign policy that contrasts starkly to the subservience of his predecessors.
AMLO’s government has rejected US efforts to delegitimize Venezuela’s leftist government, throwing a wrench in Washington’s efforts to impose right-wing activist Juan Guaidó as coup leader.
AMLO has welcomed Ecuador’s ousted socialist leader Rafael Correa and hosted Argentina’s left-leaning Alberto Fernández for his first foreign trip after winning the presidency.
In October, López Obrador even welcomed Cuban President Díaz-Canel to Mexico for a historic visit.
Trump’s Operation Condor 2.0
For Washington, an independent and left-wing Mexico is intolerable.
In a speech for right-wing, MAGA hat-wearing Venezuelans in Miami, Florida in February, Trump ranted against socialism for nearly an hour, threatened the remaining leftist countries in Latin America with regime change.
“The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua and in Cuba as well,” he declared, adding that socialism would never be allowed to take root in heart of capitalism in the United States.
While Trump has claimed he seeks to withdraw from wars in the Middle East (when he is not occupying its oil fields), he has ramped up aggressive US intervention in Latin America.
During the height of the Cold War, Operation Condor thousands of dissidents were murdered, and hundreds of thousands more were disappeared, tortured, or imprisoned with the assistance of the US intelligence apparatus.
Today, as Latin America is increasingly viewed through the lens of a new Cold War, Operation Condor is being reignited with new mechanisms of sabotage and subversion in play. The mayhem has only begun.
Drug Cartels Invade Quiet Mexican Town Packed With Americans
The failures of the nationalist Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) are starting to be realized in a huge way.
First, the economy is decelerating, second, murders across the country are hitting record highs, and third, there are small towns filled with Americans that cartels are now invading.
Mexico’s economy entered a recession in 1H19, AMLO promised to “Make Mexico Great Again,” though an economic downturn has unfolded and has derailed his beautiful plans of revitalization.
An imploding economy comes at a time of worsening cartel wars and record homicides, a story we’ve been documenting for the past five years. So far this year, 28,741 people have been killed as the socio-economic crisis deepens.
President Trump is ready to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, and this will one day allow the US military to fight drug cartels on Mexican soil.
And as Bloomberg reports Tuesday, drug cartels have poured into San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-era city in Mexico’s central state, home to 160,000 folks, and approximately 10,000 Americans and Canadians.
What’s currently happening are violent drug gangs are now a demanding property tax on small businesses and have flooded the town with cocaine, resulting in turf wars and a jump in homicides.
The chaos began several months ago, but before that, the small town was peaceful. Now people are dying in a hail of gunfire every week.
Cartel members are killing non-compliant business owners who refuse to pay the property tax.
Manuel, a local restaurant manager, told Bloomberg that this kind of crime was unimaginable over the summer. “It’s still hard to believe” that there’s so much chaos across the city.
San Miguel has joined the list of popular destinations, such as Cabo San Lucas, Cancun, and Mexico City, where drug wars have erupted over the last several years.
ALMO’s laissez-faire approach in crime-fighting has widely been viewed as a failure.
“Security is a nation-wide problem now, and unfortunately no one can escape it,” said Javier Quiroga, head of the bar and cantina association in Guanajuato, the state where San Miguel is located. “It’s getting harder for people to go about their regular activities.”
Local reports said cartels had not attacked the resort part of town, popular with tourists and ex-pats. Large multinationals, such as Volkswagen AG and General Motors Co., who have manufacturing facilities in the area, have also reported that cartels aren’t disturbing them.
At the moment, cartels are only targeting small business owners, but that can certainly change.
The surge in cartel violence has led to hotel occupancy rates declining in August, down 15% over the year, according to government data.
Some shop keepers have fled the city after failing to pay cartel property taxes. Others have been murdered.
Cartel members have dropped off sacks of cocaine to shop owners, demanding them pay for the drugs.
Bloomberg notes that one reason for the surge in violence is due to “the government crackdown on fuel thefts in the region spurred cartels to look for alternative income sources to finance their operations and turf wars.”
Cartels “are looking to make a name for themselves and to get some money quick,” said Gladys McCormick, a professor of Mexico-U.S. relations at Syracuse University in New York. “Extortion is the easiest way to do that.”
McCormick said the violence in San Miguel “is a dark cloud on the horizon because it heralds that nowhere is safe anymore. The fact there is such an international presence in San Miguel de Allende guarantees that the fear felt inside the city will echo beyond Mexico.”
Anyone paying close attention at the turn of the 21st century could foresee the impending failure of the social-democratic consensus throughout the developed world.
The exalted experts who rose to power in the postwar period built gigantic state-based systems of social management and control and took over vast swaths of private society, imposing planning schemes across many sectors of economic life. They imagined themselves to be permanent fixtures of the socio-economic system. After all, this approach won the war (so they said), so why couldn’t it win the peace?
But there was a problem: over time nothing worked as it was supposed to. There were massive internal contradictions within the model, as Amity Shlaes shows in her new book on the Great Society. The new systems relied on bureaucratic command, not market signals. There was another problem: they were hugely imposing on people’s lives and property, and people don’t like that. Or rather: they will put up with it so long as they perceive that the benefits exceed or at least match the costs.
Building that apparatus – the efforts really began about a century ago, extended through the New Deal, but became a full model of social control in the postwar period – depended fundamentally on its successful sales pitch: these were programs built by workers for the sake of social justice, for the poor, for the marginalized, against plutocratic elites.
But as F.A. Hayek had long demonstrated about socialism, the movement was in fact nothing of the sort. It was originated by elites and largely served elites: intellectuals, the people who knew better than the masses, the people in power or wanting power, the winners in the game of political manipulation.
These systems reached their breaking point by the late 1970s. For the following three decades we observed piecemeal reform efforts such as those that would re-incentivize investment and work, privatize labor relations, control rates of money printing, deregulate, bring back market forces, cut taxes, and re-empower society.
By the time socialism in China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe were abruptly swept off the map – a devastating blow to the whole model of top-down control – there arose an inconvenient problem. Many institutions constructed in developed capitalist societies were of the same mode: centralized, managed by elites, vastly more expensive than the benefit, ill-managed, and ultimately unworkable.
The dramatic events abroad further humbled the left in the developed world. In the 1990s, the socialist left mostly went into hiding, as even the Democrats in the U.S. and the Labour Party in the U.K. pursued real reforms to welfare systems. It seemed like everyone had made his or her peace with markets and free enterprise as the only system that truly provides the goods.
As always with politics, the reform efforts were too little too late. Public anger at the status quo built until the end of the century even as private enterprise effectively constructed a completely new system based on information and decentralized control. Ten years later, we had the app economy, the ubiquitous cell phone, and globalized commerce to the point that more than 60% of the GNP of the world was attributable to imports and exports. It seemed like there was no going back.
Looking at this sweep of events led liberals like me to conclude that history was on the right path. The state was failing in every area and less popular than ever. There were too many anomalies to be sustained. Social consensus was breaking down for a simple reason: the ethos of social democracy presumes that society should operate like a large clan, an impossibility in the context of a modernized globalized economy with mass migration. Politicians came to be loathed alongside the bureaucrats that managed the systems that political forces created. In the course of a half century, public confidence in government had slipped from two-thirds to one-tenth of the public.
The experts we put in charge of the state apparatus to rule us through compulsion and coercion had proven to be an enormous flop. Their wars on everything from poverty to drugs to illiteracy to terrorism had made each of the targetted areas actually worse, while market forces themselves – mercifully neglected by the state – were creating vast new technologies in the newly dawned digital age and creating glorious new opportunities for everyone. It was markets, not welfare, that lifted billions out of poverty, opened up information economies, created dazzling new modes of communicating and living, and blasted open the possibilities for progress like we’ve never seen in human history.
But we liberals proved naive in our belief that history would march along a linear path toward the light. We had presumed some or another version of the “end of history” thesis that the next stage of history was moving us toward human liberty and that the state would realize its obsolescence and die a merciful death.
Looking back, we can see that the very same naive confidence in the capacity of human beings to learn from experience also afflicted the liberals of the late 19th century. Surrounded by the products of liberty, innovations that were dramatically changing the world and leading humanity to a new level of prosperity and peace – flight, internal combustion, the commercialization of steel – they rested on their laurels with a sense that their victory was somehow baked into the narrative story of human evolution. Then came World War I. They had clearly grown overconfident.
The equivalent happened to us in the last half decade. My own opinions had previously trended in the direction of believing that everyone would see the obvious failures of the state as an institution and thus would the progress toward liberty continue in the right direction. Instead, something remarkable and unexpected happened (though it is all perfectly obvious in retrospect): the reaction to the failure of leftist-style social democracy was not to embrace liberty but rather to rally around the emergence of a new form of authoritarianism that sought to govern with rightist-style rhetoric.
Which is to say: the state reinvented itself to live another day, forestalling the hoped-for push to emancipate humanity from the constructed oppressions of the last one hundred years.
The new movements came to power under a global surge of populist agitation. Trump in the US is the most obvious case but a deeper look shows that he was only one player among many in countries all over the world. Rightist movements that were against the old order but for a new form of state-imposed order rose up in Europe, Russia, and Latin America too.
I’ve called this new form of populism (which is a method of rhetoric and a means of retaining power) “right-wing collectivism.” It feeds off public resentment of the previous type of elite management of the social order. It rejects the universalism (globalism) of the social-democratic way and embraces instead a new form of nationalism that bleeds into every application of reactionary statism: racism, religious bigotry, misogyny, intolerance. It is invariably restrictionist on immigration and protectionist on trade. It celebrates all the things the left puts down such as faith and family but demands that these institutions serve the common national project under a Carlyle-style great leader. It brings back the leadership principle and executive rule. It is as ill-liberal as that which it replaces but not obviously so since this style of governance is more tolerant toward finance capital and nominally capitalistic production, though also celebratory of industrial planning.
Its champions called the model the “politics of human nature” without noting that there are both lower and higher angels of nature: the rightist brand of collectivism was all about tapping into the lowest instincts.
The problem was not only the right. What happens on the right somehow always finds its mirror image on the left. The rise of this new form of rightist extremism further fed the resurgence of the same on the left, which similarly tried an experiment with the populist style. Down with the rich. Pillage the millionaires and billionaires. Impose new global plans of economic management. A green new deal. Punitive taxation. The return of socialism itself!
The whole thing has been incredible to watch, but this is what happens: one form of extremist paradigm shift creates an appetite for another form, which is precisely why several astute observers have noted the strange overlap in the proposed policies of Trump/Warren/Sanders: statism becomes a kind of echo chamber of voices that seeks control by seizing the machinery of power for their own purposes.
In the end, every form of state planning uses the same methods with the same collectivist goal even if the details change depending on the constituency being served.
The question that has been on my mind constantly for these last five years has been: when does this all end? At what point does the populist model die the death too?
I must give credit to David Brooks for drawing my attention to a trend this year that I had missed. His column came and went in the flurry of minute-by-minute information flows but, to my mind, this is one of the most important writings I’ve seen on politics in years. His prescience here could define the look of the next half decade.
Have you noticed that the world is on fire?…
The populist/authoritarian regimes are losing legitimacy. The members of the urban middle class in places like Hong Kong and Indonesia are rising up to protect the political and social freedoms.
These days, it doesn’t take much to set off a giant wave of anger. In Lebanon it was a proposed tax on WhatsApp. In Saudi Arabia the government raised taxes on hookah restaurants. In France, Zimbabwe, Ecuador and Iran it was rising fuel prices. In Chile it was a proposed 4 percent rise in subway fares.
The world is unsteady and ready to blow. The overall message is that the flaws of liberal globalization are real, but the populist alternative is not working.
Bingo! Here’s the problem. The populist must rely on exactly the same means of control as their managerial elite predecessors from the social-democratic project. The state is the state and there is no other kind. Control is control and force is force, and they breed as much popular resentment as the other managerial type from which populism emerged as a reaction.
State control does not work. It never has. It can’t because, as it turns out, the people who manage state programs are no smarter than the people they manage; in fact, it is worse because the managers lack access to reliable signals of market forces. Also, a revolution on this scale is bigger than another person who purports to lead it. Rise to power in a revolt and prepare to be the next scapegoat.
That is precisely what is happening right now. The new movements of protest are only nominally about left and right, despite the media attempt to make them fit those categories. As Brooks says, “the protests in all these places are leaderless, so it’s unrealistic to expect them to have policy agendas. But the big question is, what’s next? What comes after the failure of populism?”
He doesn’t dare point to the actual answer because he can’t come around to facing it, because doing so would amount to admitting that a century-long intellectual project is an enormous failure. There is an answer to the question of which paradigm best suits the needs of a modern, progressing, global, diverse world order powered by technological innovation that enshrines human choice as a first principle. The answer is now what it has always been: a free society protected from the wiles of political machines through extreme restraints on the state, any state of any flavor, whether managerial or populist.
The next paradigm of history – once we stop experimenting with mad ideologies, populist reactions, fake paths to manufactured progress, and top-down means of enforcement – needs to be human liberty itself.
Warren: I’ll Be The “Last American President Elected By Electoral College”
Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted a short clip of her speaking at a townhall event over the weekend, indicating that she would eliminate the Electoral College and allow the popular vote to choose the president in 2024, basically implying a massive overhaul of the US Consitution would be coming if she became president, reported The Daily Caller. “My goal is to get elected—but I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College. I want my second term to be elected by direct vote,” she tweeted.
My goal is to get elected—but I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College. I want my second term to be elected by direct vote. pic.twitter.com/a2Lj2a9F0F
Warren told dozens of people at an Iowa town hall event that she is ready to “get rid of” the Electoral College and replace it with a popular vote.
“I just think this is how a democracy should work,” she told the townhall. “Call me old-fashioned, but I think the person who gets the most votes should win.”
Warren has mentioned before that she would abolish the Electoral College if she became president. There’s even a section on her website that says, “Presidential candidates should have to ask every American in every part of the country for their vote. Add your name if you agree: It’s time to abolish the Electoral College and to have a national popular vote.”
“Everyone’s vote should count equally — in every election — no matter where they live.
But right now, presidential candidates don’t even go to places like Mississippi, where I was last night, because it’s a deep red state. They also don’t go to deep blue states like California or Massachusetts because they’re not presidential battlegrounds.
I believe presidential candidates should have to ask every American in every part of the country for their vote, not just a few random states that happen to be close,” Warren’s website said further.
Her critics were quick to respond and bashed the unfair election system that has elected Democrats for decades:
My goal is to get elected and then abolish the unfair corrupt system that elected me. https://t.co/d57PGgElX9
Los Angeles’ head of homelessness is resigning after presiding over a 33% increase in homelessness over the course of just five years.
Peter Lynn, head of the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, announced that he would leave at the end of the year, with the LAHSA having splashed out a total of more than $780 million to no avail.
The city’s homeless population jumped a further 12% from 2018 to 2019 but despite Lynn’s total failure, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti claimed he did an excellent job and oversaw “historic action.”
One wonders how badly Lynn would have had to perform for officials to consider his tenure a failure.
Lynn’s $242,000-a-year role appears to have had little success in addressing not just homelessness, but also the directly related problems of leprosy, typhoid fever and even bubonic plague.
Earlier this year, Dr. Drew Pinsky said the public health situation in America’s second largest city was in utter turmoil.
“We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now,” said Pinsky.
1.5 per cent of rats in L.A. now carry bubonic plague. If that figure hits 2 per cent, the medieval disease will start jumping to humans.
In other words, if LA doesn’t sort out its trash problem and its homeless problem, the return of bubonic plague is virtually guaranteed.
And don’t even get me started on San Francisco.
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“Chill Out About The Candidates”: Obama “Does Not Care” If You Like The Nominee, Just Vote Democrat
When it comes to the 2020 elections, the Democrats’ most powerful if ineligible candidate, former president Obama, just can’t quite put his finger on who he wants to be the next democratic president. Two weeks ago, Trump’s predecessor cautioned 2020 Democratic candidates not to move too far to the left – a clear warning not to vote for Warren or Sanders – as messages of sweeping societal and government transformations risk turning off the party’s moderate base, the New York Times reported.
“Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality,” said Obama – who told a room of wealthy liberal donors: “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality.”
“The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”
Even odder has been Obama’s failure of explicitly endorse his own vice president and the on again, off again frontrunner in the democratic primary, Joe Biden.
So as many Democrats look to Obama for inspiration on who to pick amid a field of candidates where nobody sticks out, last week, the former president gave some additional insight into his thought process regarding the coming elections, and last Thusday Obama simply said that he doesn’t care if his fellow Democrats like the 2020 candidate, he just wants them to pull the lever for whoever wins the nomination.
“Everybody needs to chill out about the candidates, but gin up about the prospect of rallying behind whoever emerges from this process,” Obama told tech leaders during a fundraiser in Silicon Valley last Thursday, the Daily Wire reported.
Barack Obama
And though he stressed that he was calling for unity, Obama reiterated some of his latent criticism.
“When you listen to the average voter — even ones who are stalwart Democrats, are more independent or low-information voters — they don’t feel that things are working well but they’re also nervous about changes that might take away what little they have,” he said. “So there’s always a balance in politics between hope and fear.”
The event — which featured a top-ticket price of $355,000 — was expected to raise over $3 million for the Democratic National Committee. The fundraiser was hosted at the home of Karla Jurvetson, an ascendant Democratic megadonor in Silicon Valley politics. Other key fundraisers for the event included former Twitter executive Katie Jacobs Stanton and former Obama ambassador Denise Bauer. Stephen Curry, the star point guard of the Golden State Warriors, also attended alongside his wife Ayesha, who spoke at the event.
While there are still 15 candidates running for the Democratic nomination (after the withdrawal of Kamala Harris earlier today), only four are polling in double digits, with most either at 1% or 0%. But Obama said whoever gets the nod should get the vote.
“There will be differences” between the candidates, Obama said, “but I want us to make sure that we keep in mind that, relative to the ultimate goal, which is to defeat a president and a party that has … taken a sharp turn away from a lot of the core traditions and values and institutional commitments that built this country,” those differences are “relatively minor.”
“The field will narrow and there’s going to be one person, and if that is not your perfect candidate and there are certain aspects of what they say that you don’t agree with and you don’t find them completely inspiring the way you’d like, I don’t care,” he said. “Because the choice is so stark and the stakes are so high that you cannot afford to be ambivalent in this race.”
Obama was directly addressing Silicon Valley’s wealthiest Democratic donors, telling them to “chill” in their debate over the party’s candidates, and seeking to ease the tensions among tech billionaires who have broken into separate camps backing Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and — most surprisingly — Elizabeth Warren, according to recode.
Obama may have his job cut out for him: with many Democratic voters confused or merely bored silly by the current roster of candidates, two newcomers, Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, entered the race adding further to the confusion. Last month, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, drew fewer than 100 people to a South Carolina “Environmental Justice” forum. And she’s a frontrunner!
Meanwhile, Gallup released a poll last week that had some troubling news for Democrats, as only 66% of the party faithful said they’re enthusiastic about the upcoming election. And while for Republicans the number is 65%, “this differed from the typical pattern Gallup has seen over the years, whereby those who identify with the political party of the incumbent president have been less enthusiastic about voting than members of the opposing party,” Gallup wrote.
Ironically, Obama isn’t alone in saying Democrats need to hold their nose when they vote for the eventual nominee. Joe Biden’s wife, Jill, said in August that her husband might not be the best candidate, but told voters “maybe you have to swallow a little bit” and vote for him anyway.
“Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, health care, than Joe is,” Jill Biden said on MSNBC, “but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘OK, I personally like so-and-so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.”
During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, she repeated the point. “I know that not all of you are committed to my husband, and I respect that. But I want you to think about your candidate, his or her electability, and who’s going to win this race. So I think if your goal — I know my goal — is to beat Donald Trump, we have to have someone who can beat him,” she said.
Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) or drones, both armed and unarmed, have altered how states and insurgents conduct warfare in the Middle East. The widespread proliferation of these weapons, combined with the range of capabilities they confer and their potential to alter the logic of escalation between states, may cause significant inter-state conflict to occur.
An increase in proliferation
Since the Cold War, the US has attempted to stop the spread of unmanned systems by pursuing a limited export policy. However, states in the Middle East have responded by either producing their own (Israel, Turkey and Iran) or by importing them (Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE). Perhaps the most troubling development is yet to come; in November the US Defense Secretary, Mark Esper warned that China was beginning to export drones with fully autonomous offensive capabilities. Although China’s policy has been described as ‘ask no questions’, it is constrained by its desire to avoid arming non-state actors and therefore legitimising separatist movements.
Further, declining costs of commercial drones, combined with some DIY ingenuity has meant that groups such as ISIS and the Houthis rebels have been able to field aerial support, a capability that insurgent-type groups have lacked in the past. ISIS allegedly use UASs as light bombers and as reconnaissance aircraft to help coordinate devastating suicide attacks, whilst the Houthis (with Iranian assistance) have used drones as aerial improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for targeted assassination missions.
Evolving capacity, multiplying impact
One emerging capability of drone operators is ‘swarming’, where multiple systems are used to achieve a shared objective. A crude version of this, in conjunction with cruise missiles, was utilised during the attack on Aramco’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities on September 14 (crude because true swarming requires that the individual systems alter their behaviour based on communication with one another and there is little evidence that this occurred). As a result of the attack, production of 5% of the global oil supply was temporarily halted and, the global price rose by 15%. Although Houthi rebels initially claimed credit, a consensus that Iran was responsible has emerged. The attack was successful, despite the Saudi Aramco sites enjoying protection from the Kingdom’s US ally, in the form of Patriot PAC-2 surface-to-air missile batteries but which proved entirely ineffective.
The Centre for the Study of the Drone recently found that the number of systems and products claiming to protect against UASs had risen from just 10 in 2015 to 235 by 2018. Perhaps not surprisingly, the counter-drone industry (at least in the civilian world) has been described as “peddling snake oil.” Given that very few sites are of such strategic importance in the Middle East (recall the impact on the global oil supply), this swarm technology may prove extremely effective in crippling key national infrastructure and military installations across the region, especially in lieu of a “silver bullet” solution to countering drones.
Likelihood of conflict escalation
In the immediate aftermath of the Aramco attack, Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, expressed his deep concern that tensions would increase and accused Iran of “destabilising the whole region.” Nevertheless, the attack, perhaps surprisingly, did not lead to a military response.
In 2015, a wargame entitled ‘Game of Drones’ held in Washington DC concluded that that the presence of UASs in contested space had the effect of “lowering the threshold for military action in some circumstances because the perceived risk was lower.” However, this relies on the belief that your adversary will not treat the engagement of a manned system in the same way they would a drone in the same scenario. Even as advances in surveillance technology means UASs can reveal more of the battlefield, a new “fog of war” is introduced. This ambiguity, reflected in President Trump’s initial decision to launch counter-strikes against an Iranian attack, and then quickly to cancel, could lead to an escalation via two mechanisms.
First, a state could be baited into engaging a UAS, which is then used as a legitimising pretext to launch further strikes. Indeed, it has been suggested that “baiting” has been a significant facet of the Trump administration’s policy towards Tehran. The second mechanism is via miscalculation. Given the right set of conditions (perhaps a hawkish domestic base), repeated attacks on unmanned systems may compel one side to escalate, despite reluctance on both sides.
The emergence of autonomous and swarm drone technology across a range of actors, combined with an unclear logic of how targeting unmanned systems affect inter-state relations could, therefore, trigger conflict. The primary risk is that heightened short term tensions over drones lead to a conflict before longer-term issues can be solved. As these systems develop technologically and operationally – the emergence of autonomous systems will complicate the matter – close attention to the mechanisms involved in precipitating conflict in the Middle East must be made.
