In October 1935, Italian troops launched a massive onslaught against the forces of Abyssinia, today known as Ethiopia. The Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini wanted to establish an ‘African empire’, and acquire ‘great power’ status for Italy in competition with the other imperialist powers. Britain, France, Germany and other countries had already brutally conquered vasts portions of the African continent, and Mussolini was eager to ‘catch up’ with the other imperialist states in this macabre contest. Italy already occupied Italian Somaliland, and launched its invasion of Abyssinia from that territory.

The conquest of Abyssinia was noted for its savagery, with thousands of Ethiopians killed, herded into concentration camps where they died of disease and starvation. Chemical weapons were used in that conflict, drawing heavy criticism from the international community. While the Italian government tried to keep its use of poison gas a secret, groups such as the Red Cross exposed its deployment, which the Mussolini government and his generals authorised.

One of the commanders in this Second Italo-Abyssinian war was General Rudolfo Graziani. He had made a name for himself back in the 1920s, when Italian forces used brutal force to attack and suppress the resistance put up by Libyans in that north African country. The Italians were still unable to completely defeat the Libyan resistance to foreign rule since they attempted to capture that country from the Ottoman Turkish empire in 1911. Graziani was the commander of Italian forces in Libya, and he suppressed popular revolts against Italian rule with indiscriminate bombing and pacification campaigns – what today would be euphemistically called ‘counterinsurgency warfare.’ Graziani was responsible for establishing concentration and labour camps, and he eventually had the leader of the Libyan insurgency, Omar al-Mukhtar, publicly hanged. For his efforts, the Libyans came to call him the Butcher of Fezzan, after the region of Libya devastated by Graziani’s murderous campaign. Having gained experience in subjugating the rebellious populations of Cyrenaica and Tripolitana (today part of Libya), he applied his considerable skills in mass murder to the population of Ethiopia. Ordering the use of poison gas, he claimed that Mussolini would have Ethiopia, with or without the Ethiopians.

The Italian generals laid waste to entire villages, resettling Italian immigrants in the conquered territories, and dispossessing the indigenous population. In Libya and Ethiopia, Graziani used weapons of mass destruction, including the authorisation of an aerial campaign of terror. He deliberately poisoned crucial oases and water supplies, and executed thousands of civilians in a campaign of mass reprisals against the civilian populations.

After having a free hand to commit genocidal crimes in Africa, Italian forces were eventually pushed out of North Africa. Graziani returned to Italy to become the defence minister of the short-lived Republic of Salo, the rump state commanded by Mussolini in northern Italy after the Allies occupied the south of the country in 1943. The Republic of Salo’s main achievement was to act as a puppet force for the Germans, and Graziani, along with the overall German commander Albert Kesselring, used the same terror tactics against the Italian anti-fascist partisans. Forced to surrender in 1945 with the defeat of the Axis powers, Graziani was convicted of war crimes and given a 19-year sentence. He was released after only serving two years, thanks to high-level sympathisers in the post-war Italian government, and he died in 1955.

How does this history tie in with contemporary events? In August this year, a mausoleum and memorial park were opened to honour the memory of Rudolfo Graziani in a village east of Rome. As the BBC reported, the mayor of the town of Affile, Ercole Viri, declared to the gathering of 100 people that the memorial was of national importance. Viri even donated a bust of Graziani for the memorial, which is strongly reminiscent of the fascist style of architecture that dominated Italy during Mussolini’s rule. A representative of the Vatican consecrated the mausoleum, and members of the rightwing People of Freedom (PDL) party, were in attendance with appropriately somber declarations and Italian flags. The PDL is the party of the former premier of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi.

The memorial and accompanying ceremony did indeed attract heavy criticism from various political quarters and historians. A councillor in Affile criticised the memorial, underlining that Graziani was indeed a convicted war criminal and the Butcher of Ethiopia. But this ceremony raises disturbing questions about the rehabilitation of fascist war criminals, at first quite underhanded and confined to the Baltic states, but now occurring more openly in Europe. The political row over the monument, while heartening to see, underscores the need to confront the clandestine restoration of fascist war criminals, and the underlying prejudices this brings to the surface. Under Berlusconi’s premiership, right-wing forces escalated the whitewashing of fascist crimes, and promoted the cult of honouring the war criminals who committed them.

As Europe is going through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the financial aristocracy is utilising the social prejudices and national chauvinism to divert the anger of the working class onto the more vulnerable sections of the population, namely immigrants and refugees. Hate crimes and Islamophobic attacks are rising in America and Europe, dividing working class people and encouraging a political climate of surveillance and mutual suspicion. The Italian ruling class is lining up its own austerity programme, corresponding to the package of socially reactionary attacks on the working class and its living standards currently being applied to Greece, Spain, Portugal and other economically struggling capitalist economies. Deep cuts to wages, living standards, health care and education are already in place in Europe, and will be continued in Italy, all aimed at eliminating the social gains made by working people since the end of World War Two. But there is one industry that is doing well in these economically stressful times – armaments sales. The United States registered world-record armaments sales of 66.3 billion dollars in 2011, according to the Congress Research Service. The main customer of US arms was its dependable client, the royalist dictatorship of Saudi Arabia.

Not only must we remember that the Italian bourgeoisie has consistently camouflaged the crimes of the Italian fascist state, we must also remember that they have had strong enablers. After the end of World War Two, the Italian Communist Party had a massive electoral following, and was poised to win the 1948 elections through the ballot box. Powerful financial forces, namely the US ruling class and its proxies in Europe, mobilised their considerable financial resources to undermine the 1948 Italian elections, running a massive scare campaign that thwarted the democratic aspirations of the Italian people. Politicians were bought off, and the leader of the Christian Democrat Party, Alcide de Gasperi, made several trips to Washington to make sure he knew on which side his bread was buttered. After all, the Cold War was on, and Europe had to made secure for imperialist imperatives.

Those who had been second-tier officials in the fascist government were quietly coopted by the US and its servants, the CIA, into subverting a democratic election with scare-mongering, stereotypes and propagandistic images of the ‘good-old American way of life’ – that is, capitalism. The Italian ruling elite has certainly had powerful benefactors, and the 1948 elections went the way that the Americans wanted. The demands of the Italian population were irrelevant. Hollywood ‘razzmatazz’, in the words of William Blum, was activated in the service of capitalist interests.

Godzilla is a Japanese-originated monster character, whose main features are its incredible bulk, its melange of gorilla-like and reptilian aspects, its gargantuan appetite, and its monumentally destructive capacity. Capable of feats of enormous strength, it can defeat other mega-monsters, emitting radiation similar to that of nuclear fission thus poisoning its environs, and terrorises its enemies while leaving a path of death and destruction in its wake. It is normally represented as a towering, dinosaur-like creature, exhibiting the features of terrestrial vertebrates, and also undulating its gigantic tail similar to a crocodile. Godzilla occupies a similar place in Japanese film culture as King Kong does in Western societies; an oversized monster driven by rapacious appetites, hostility to human society and capable of causing catastrophic destruction.

Godzilla (and King Kong) occupy a niche place in the cultural world, however, there is an equivalent in the modern world. Bankzilla, the enormous, rapacious, socially destructive corporation embodied by the large banks and financial institutions, are raking in super profits while the rest of humanity, the 99 percent, are struggling with declining incomes, reduced job prospects, foreclosures and financial strain. The US Socialist Worker reported that “To this day, Bankzilla continues to terrorize whole communities of homeowners while feasting on massive profits.” As Eric Ruder documented in this article, while the economic crisis hit the global community back in 2008-09, the large financial corporations insulated themselves from the worst of the financial disaster they had created. The cost of the ‘recovery’ would be shifted onto the working people. The rate of foreclosures increased, with tent cities arising in major US cities due to the unprecedented hike in mortgage defaults. But the owners of the Wall Street corporations were not complaining; they still managed to obtain super-profits while enjoying essentials such as a personal, nine-hole golf course. This was on top of the 700 billion dollar Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP) passed by the Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress.

What is under-reported is that the massive, taxpayer funded bailout for the ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks has not actually resulted in an economic recovery. If anything, lending by the big banks has actually decreased for the first three months of 2012. The CNN Finance Fortune article cited above elaborates that

“When banks cut their lending, it makes it harder for small businesses to get money to expand. But a drop in lending could also signal a drop in demand for loans, meaning businesses and individual don’t want to borrow because they are worried about the economy.”

A combined amount of 24 billion dollars was cut from lending by J P Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup in the first quarter of 2012. These are not exactly small corner stores, but enormous pillars of the finance-banking sector. The largest drops in lending were recorded in credit card loans (consumer credit) and home equity lines of credit.

The Obama administration, since coming to power in the wake of the November 2008 elections, has acted as a protector and abetter of the financial aristocracy. Not only has the previous criminality of the financial institutions not abated, but more scandals are coming to light. The Libor scandal, which involves rigging the London Interbank Exchange Rate to a level advantageous for the large banking institutions, was exposed only recently even though its antecedents date back four years. A massive case of insider trading, the Libor scandal has exposed the rotting criminality of the capitalist financial architecture.

A bank lends and borrows money – that is understood by everyone. The acts of borrowing and lending are accompanied by interest payments. Borrowing money means that you pay interest on the loan repayment, placing savings in a bank means the saver is paid interest on those savings. How are the interest rates determined? The banking experts, given their expertise and knowledge of the world of finance, set the interest rates based on the confidence that their loans will be repaid. The cumulative knowledge of thousands of banker lenders and borrowers are analysed, supply and demand for money is assessed, and the requisite interest rate is established. Libor, the London Interbank Exchange Rate, is the average rate of interest established by the major banks in England when borrowing from other banks. The Libor serves as a benchmark for mortgages, business loans, personal loans, derivatives, credit default swaps, the interest rate on student loans – in short, it provides a benchmark for trillions of dollars worth of loans and finance.

It turns out that the Libor was being rigged, manipulated by the major financial institutions. Starting with Barclays bank, whose top executives resigned and paid out a fine to American and British regulators, the depth of financial criminality has been steadily coming to light. Barclays chief executives defended themselves by stating that they had done nothing wrong – because everybody was doing the same thing. The Euribor, the Brussels-based counterpart of Libor, is also being investigated for manipulation. As Petrino DiLeo explains in the Socialist Worker:

More than a dozen other banks are also being investigated for similar manipulation, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and UBS. More fines, lawsuits and resignations may be in the offing. And there’s mounting evidence that government officials and central bankers were in on the scam, too. As the facts continue to come out, “Liborgate” may end up being the mother of all banking scandals.

The magazine Dollars and Sense noted, when the US economy was stumbling towards the largest crisis since the great depression of the 1930s, the US administration rushed to provide bailout money through the TARP mechanism. The large privately-owned banks and financial institutions were deemed ‘too-big-to-fail’. Currently, numerous state municipalities and local government authorities are facing a financial crisis because they invested in interest rate swaps. While normally borrowing on the basis of the floating exchange rate, the municipalities were offered a seemingly advantageous deal by the Wall Street giants – interest rate swaps. State authorities – responsible for public services and public salaries, pegged their floating-rate debt to a fixed interest rate debt agreed to by the banks. The participant with the higher interest rate had to pay the difference to their partner. While a fixed interest rate seemed like a positive development, the interest rate was set by the major banks, which was established by manipulated mechanisms, like Libor.

The municipalities have been saddled with a fixed interest rate repayment, while the floating interest rates declined in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The public institutions were now required to pay billions in interest repayments to the large banks, while cutting back public services and employment. These interest rate swaps are a widely used derivative device; mechanisms that were at the heart of the original financial meltdown.

The Libor scandal, growing out of the financial catastrophe of 2008, has its historic origins in an earlier measure implemented by the major imperialist powers – bank deregulation. This was the theory that opening up banks and financial institutions to ‘competition’ would lead to greater choice for the individual consumer, loans with cheaper interest rates, and a healthier economic ‘trickle down’ of wealth. Since the mid-1980s, bank deregulation has lead to the monopolisation of the banking and finance sector by a tiny, financial aristocracy, and a transfer of wealth from the working class, the 99 percent, to the richest one percent. The chaos and financial ruin exemplified by Libor arises from an unregulated system, where actually the largest privately-owned corporations end up setting the rules by themselves. The British Bankers’ Association (BBA), the main privately-controlled banking trade and lobby group, was headed by Marcus Agius. Agius was also one of the chief executives of Barclays, and heavily implicated in the Libor manipulation scandal. Agius has resigned his position, but the incestuous, nepotistic relationship between the BBA and the banking-finance sector continues.

The Guardian newspaper noted that in the 1960s and 1970s, a range of strict regulations, capital and liquidity ratios, and limits on excessive mortgage lending, were applied to the banking sector. Since the mid-1980s, as the capitalist classes around the world went on an offensive, attacking the living standards, the job provisions, health and safety regulations that provided a measure of security for workers, bank regulations were also sacrificed on the altar of the ‘free-market’ dogma. The Libor scandal, while correctly called the ‘crime of the century’, represents more than that.

The financial scandals engulfing the financial elite of Europe and America are an indication that we are living in the era of the ‘anti-1989’. In the wake of the collapse of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, the capitalist elites went on a triumphalist frenzy of gloating – the socialist project seemed to have been swept away, and not just the bureaucratically deformed version of it that had obtained prior to 1989 in Eastern Europe. Francis Fukuyama, a professor of political science, enunciated the feeble ‘end-of-history’ thesis, arguing that ‘free-market’ capitalism had proven its superiority over all challenges, and ruling over societies that consented to adopt the capitalist system. Fukuyama took a Hegelian turn and conceived of the capitalist system as the final end-point, the omnipotent state to which we all aspire, much like Hegel in the nineteenth century regarded the monarchist Prussian state.

However, we are now living in the Anti-1989 era. Another nineteenth century thinker, examining the laws of motion of the capitalist system, found that the insoluble contradictions of that system would lead to its inevitable breakdown. Appropriating the same philosophical tools that Hegel used (and Fukuyama alleged borrowed), this thinker elaborated how the capitalist system works, and how it will eventually rot from within. While working class revolution is not on the immediate agenda, the current period is witnessing the re-awakening of the working class as a serious political force. The 1989 consensus that liberal capitalism is the end point of civilisation, has been reduced to ashes.

With the capitalist financial architecture crumbling, the working class, consigned to the role of passive observers in 1989, has re-emerged as a serious political force again. The 99 percent, as expressed by the Occupy Wall Street, the emergence of the Syriza socialist formation in Greece, and the eruption of popular protest throughout the Arab world, indicates that working people can no longer be sidelined by the political and economic system. Across Europe, with the mass protests in Spain, Greece and other countries, the capitalist system is declining starting with its economic periphery in Eastern Europe. Make no mistake, the current economic catastrophe began in the United States and Britain, the countries where neoliberal ‘free-market’ orthodoxy was applied with the strictest attention. Warnings about the dire situation ahead are emanating not just from sources routinely dismissed by the corporate-controlled media as the ‘lunatic fringe’ Left. Heavyweight economic analysts are also weighing in, warning that 2013 will witness further storms and stresses.

A book review

Frank Brady, Endgame: The spectacular rise and fall of Bobby Fischer

The year is 1972, and a young, precociously talented chess prodigy, Bobby Fischer, is playing against Boris Spassky, the World Chess Champion from the Soviet Union. The Russians had dominated the world chess competition, churning out brilliant players from their state-subsidized education and sporting systems. They had dominated chess for decades, and looked set to continue that domination. But now, here was an American wunderkind taking up the challenge and competing with the best chess players in the world. Fischer, of Jewish ancestry from the United States, plainly stated that patriotism, not just the love of the game, motivated him to defeat Spassky, the ranking Soviet champion. Both men were at the height of their chess-playing powers, and no other chess match had garnered as much attention as this one. They played in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the world championship.

Fischer started the match disastrously, which was uncharacteristic of him. Spassky appeared to be on his way to another victory, and keeping the World Chess Championship title in the Soviet Union once again. Their overwhelming domination of the sport seemed to be on track. However, Fischer’s determination, a fierce competitive drive that had seen him progress from child prodigy to American chess champion to world contender, came through. He turned the match around.

Bobby Fischer won. He was the World Chess Champion.

Interest in chess in the United States skyrocketed, with pictures of Bobby Fischer in popular magazines and newspapers, new chess clubs sprouting up across the country, and even then-President Nixon sent a congratulatory telegram to Fischer. The Americans, having witnessed the chess champion frustratingly remain in Soviet hands for so long, now took up the game with enthusiasm. Fischer was regarded as a sporting hero, in the same way as Mickey Mantle for baseball.

After that match, Fischer disappeared from chess competition. He refused to defend his title in 1975 against the next contender, Soviet player Anatoly Karpov, Fischer withdrew from public life, and remained invisible to the public eye for the next twenty years.

In 1992, Fischer re-emerged for a rematch with his old foe, Boris Spassky, which took place in Belgrade, the former Yugoslavia. At the time, Yugoslavia was embroiled in a civil war, and the regime of President Milosevic was subject to sanctions. This meant that no US citizens or businesses could conduct any kind of trade or commerce with entities that originated from Yugoslavia. Fischer, a US national, was in violation of those sanctions by travelling to Belgrade and receiving remuneration for his participation in a business and sporting venture. The US department of Treasury warned Fischer that his participation was in violation of the trade embargo on Yugoslavia at the time. This conflict with the US government escalated when Fischer was presented with an order by the US government forbidding him to play. In response, Fischer called a press conference, removed the letter from his briefcase and proceeded to literally spit on the document. Fischer’s animus for the US government, while always simmering beneath the surface since the mid-1970s, now erupted into the open.

And there was worse to come.

Fischer had been living outside the US since his 1992 rematch with Spassky. His violation of the trade embargo, and his avoidance of paying income taxes to the US government, did nothing to endear him to US authorities. He had been living in Japan since the 1990s, and he gave regular radio interviews to various broadcasting stations, expounding his increasingly conspiratorial and anti-Semitic viewpoints about “the Jews”, powerful financial interests, the Russian chess establishment, the American government, the media and just about anyone else that he believed was opposed to his rightful place as chess champion. On September 11, 2001, in the wake of the terrible terrorist attacks, Fischer was interviewed by a Filipino station Radio Baguio, and he was asked for his opinion about the attacks. In part, Fischer responded with the following:

Fischer: Yes, well, this is all wonderful news. It’s time for the fucking U.S. to get their heads kicked in. It’s time to finish off the U.S. once and for all.

The interviewer continued with his questions, and Fischer responded with more invective:

Fischer: Yes, I applaud the act….Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

After expressing his desire that military officers launch a coup d’etat and take over the United States, he continued:

Fischer: I say death to President Bush! I say death to the United States. Fuck the United States! Fuck the Jews! The Jews are a criminal people. They mutilate (circumcise) their children. They’re murderous, criminal, thieving, lying bastards. They made up the Holocaust. There’s not a word of truth to it….This is a wonderful day. Fuck the United States. Cry, you crybabies! Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming.

Fischer meteoric rise to world chess champion and spectacular fall from public view into a hateful vitriol-spewing recluse has been wonderfully told by Frank Brady in his book Endgame: The spectacular rise and fall of Bobby Fischer. Brady is an international grand chessmaster and successful author in his own right, and has written an engaging and accessible biography of Fischer. He avoids going into junk psychoanalysis, and instead offers an honest portrait of a brilliant chess champion and hypersensitive man who succumbed to conspiracy theories.

Brady admirably recounts the life of the chess prodigy, a young Bobby Fischer who dropped out of high school to concentrate exclusively on chess. Fischer frequented the chess clubs of New York to develop and refine his talent. Jack Collins was an early teacher of Fischer, and he nurtured the skills of the precocious and aggressively determined Fischer. One can only wonder why, years later, Fischer, in a fit of pique, dismissed his former teacher, plainly stating that he (Fischer) had learned nothing from Collins.

Brady examines the rising Fischer, pitted against no-less talented and determined opponents in the Brooklyn and Manhattan Chess Club. The child prodigy would lose a few at first. But he learned from his defeats, and was soon overwhelming the older players and displaying a searing persistence to win. Fischer would analyse the games that he had lost, or was close to losing, hours after the matches had ended. His ability was extraordinary, and he outshone his competitors, many of whom went on to become chess masters in their own right. William Lombardy and the late Larry Evans were Fischer’s contemporaries, and they played against him in their many hours of chess competition. Both had been Fischer’s second (an assistant to help prepare and analyse chess matches) for some of the major chess competitions. But Fischer soared above the rest, and brought his own innovations to the game.

Brady avoids using chess tables and chess notation in the book, and yet conveys the tension, drama and excitement surrounding chess competitions. Fischer railed against the Russians, whom he accused of conspiring to stop him from winning matches and taking his rightful place as world champion. While the Soviet side certainly encouraged cooperation among their chess players, analysing moves, creating new manoeuvres to stump the opposition, Brady finds that there was no organised conspiracy to deliberately exclude Fischer from competition.

Brady includes engaging, pithy portraits of all Fischer’s major American chess competitors, the people that Fischer fought and defeated in his ascent to the American chess championship. His style was one of relentless aggression and solid persistence. He wore down his competitors, and he took that attacking style with him into international competitions.

Fischer had a life-long interest in conspiracy theories, and he collected and read a vast amount of rightwing hate literature, ranging from Holocaust denial books, anti-Semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, denunciations of powerful financial interest groups, and right-wing populist literature. All these theories began to meld into a worldview where ‘they’ are ‘against’ him from succeeding. Fischer found a ready explanation for any perceived lack of progress in his chess career. Any frustration or impediment he experienced could be attributed to this vast, conspiratorial network ranged against him.

Brady had written a biography of Fischer back in 1965, and his thorough research and meticulous knowledge shines through in his Endgame book. Brady knew of Fischer’s petulance and hypersensitivity, but nowhere does Brady portray Fischer as a man to be reviled or hated. Rather, Fischer comes across as a tortured soul, a brilliant champion whose unstable temperament marred his otherwise incredible achievements.

Fischer’s outbursts were initially directed against the Russian and their alleged ‘machinations’. But his attentions eventually turned against the United States. His failure to defend his title in 1975 against Karpov was the beginning of a long decline for Fischer. Brady commendably does his best to document this twenty year period of oblivion, with Fischer living in squalor. His vagrant condition at this time only helped to turn Fischer’s mind against the government of his country. Fischer rebuffed million-dollar offers to return to chess, only agreeing to a rematch with Spassky in 1992.

Brady examines the last periods of Fischer’s life with humanity and compassion. Fischer eventually found refuge in Iceland, where he had maintained his popularity because of his brilliance at the chess board. Passing away in 2008, Fischer should be remembered as an extraordinary chess champion and, while not excused his hateful rhetoric, his vitriolic outbursts can now be forgotten. Brady never loses sight of the fact that his subject, while achieving remarkable heights of success, was also a flawed, eccentric, human being. The revulsion that his spiteful comments elicited recede into insignificance compared to the admiration that his chess prowess engendered. Brady’s book is riveting and compelling reading.

Imagine living in a police state, where all citizens are subject to constant surveillance. Information is gathered about the people of that state by an enormous intelligence apparatus, part of a police-state infrastructure. Informers routinely collect information about the political activities and working lives of the citizens, and this information is stored in enormous databases where government officials can access that information with impunity. The citizens have no legal recourse, and they can be surveilled, arrested and held without charge or trial indefinitely. That scenario sounds like something out of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

In my previous article, I examined the increasing reliance on the use of drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, for the purpose of intelligence-gathering and warfare.

The US military and aviation authorities recently revealed plans to deploy 30 000 drones, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), in the United States itself. Working out of US military bases, the drones will be able to gather information on citizens by using facial recognition software, thermal imaging and other sensor technology. This domestic surveillance, authorised by the National Defence Authorisation Act (2012), will integrate with the capabilities of law enforcement agencies with regards to intelligence-gathering, but also will become weaponised. Some of the UAVs, no larger than an insect, will be able to enter homes and collect information undetected. Military and domestic surveillance is becoming combined into one huge police-state apparatus the likes of which dictators like Hitler could only dream.

Northrop Grumman is one of the major companies involved in UAV research and development. Investing billions of dollars, is the fourth largest weapons manufacturer in the world. The company has excellent relations with the US Congress, and Northrop made $2.12 billion in profits last year. This company typifies the merging of political and corporate power – actually the privatisation of political power, where the political and economic elites seamlessly integrate into one overarching class.

This creeping and massive expansion of UAV technology, and its deployment against US citizens, is being carried out by the Obama administration. Deploying drones in the United States is consistent with the increasing militarisation of American society, and follows on from the use of UAV technology in US wars overseas. Drones have been used to kill civilians in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other countries where the US ruling class has a strategic interest. Indeed, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, recently made a report attacking the use of drone warfare as a violation of 50 years of international law. Christof Heyns, the special rapporteur, suggested that the United States’ drone warfare would only encourage other regimes to pursue lawless behaviour, violating long-established human rights standards. The Chinese and Russian governments issued a statement to the UN Human Rights Council denouncing the criminality of drone strikes.

The increasing deployment of drones has been carried out with hardly any debate in the US Congress, the supposed citadel of democratic republican government. Democratic protections that go back centuries, such as habeas corpus, are being steadily eroded. In purely legal terms, the US president can now order the assassination of any US citizen he deems to be a security threat. Such power was used by Obama in the targeted killing of US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was never charged with any crime, and never given the opportunity to defend himself, whatever repugnant views he may have held.

The US ruling elite and its media outlets, like the New York Times, made much of the fact that Awlaki preached an extremist, hateful brand of Islam. If preaching hateful religious rhetoric is an offense punishable by death, one wonders why Obama has not dealt with other vitriolic religious demagogues in the United States, whose homophobic and hate-filled rants reach millions of listeners –  like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell Junior, Jim Bakker, John Haggee and Jimmy Swaggart in similarly stern fashion.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the ruling elites in the United States made a tactical shift in their war plans. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld method of warfare, involving direct military intervention, was no longer practical given the strength of domestic and international opposition. The US oligarchy was shaken by the serious economic crisis, and its political authority was undermined worldwide. It sought ways to compensate for its decline on the international stage.

Increasingly militarising the society, eroding basic living standards and civil liberties is the option taken by the financial aristocracy and its political organs, the main US political parties. The US has launched predatory wars of expansion in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries to try and compensate for its perilous economic position. Obama has continued, even intensified, the attacks on democratic rights begun under his predecessor.

The US ruling class is eroding democratic rights amid the widening growth of social inequality. In 2010, the incomes of the top one percent of US households increased, corporate profits have soared, while the growth of the poor and the immiseration of increasing numbers of Americans has accelerated.

For the top one percent of American households, the year from 2009 to 2010 saw their average income increase by 12 percent, and this has occurred in the wake of the deepest and most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. For the ninety-nine percent, the current period has meant job layoffs, cutbacks to services and attacks on living standards. The US Census Bureau released figures back in 2010 showing that social inequality has reached a record high, and the vast accumulation of wealth by a tiny minority while millions of Americans experience worsening economic conditions. The ‘American Dream’ is contracting, with the average net worth of American families dropping by 40 percent between 2007 and 2010. But there is one segment of the population doing well, as the article from Yahoo Finance news reports;

As average families become poorer, rich Americans are growing richer. The Fed survey showed the wealthiest 10% of families actually saw their net worth rise from 2007 to 2010. Over that time period, their net worth increased from $1.17 million to $1.19 million.

The quote can be found here.

In the film Johnny English Reborn, Rowan Atkinson plays a woefully inept British secret service agent. The film is a parody of the James Bond, British espionage genre of films. The sequel to Johnny English, Atkinson’s character is recalled to MI7, an obvious satire on the English secret service. Atkinson enters the London Headquarters of the intelligence agency to be confronted by a highly modernised, computerised reception area. The MI7 has been taken over by a private company, and is now named “Toshiba British Intelligence”. The large reception area is replete with computerised directions, and the receptionists are speaking in the bland, telephone-speak of modern corporations – “for our electronic products, press one; to speak to a secret agent, press two.” The film is a satire, but like all comedies, contains an element of truth. Can intelligence services and the coercive apparatuses of the state be taken over by private companies?

There is the old saying, “life imitates art”. With that in mind, the Guardian newspaper reported earlier in June that the head of G4S, a large multinational security solutions firm, predicted that in five years time, large portions of the English police will be completely privatised. The head of the company’s operations in the United Kingdom stated that his organisation, G4S, will take over the functions of the state-run police force. There are already such arrangements in place in parts of England, with outsourcing deals being considered by various police stations across the UK. G4S is already providing the bulk of security for the London Olympics. Lincolnshire police station has already outsourced its operation to G4S. While the English Home Office denied that the police force was being privatised, the G4S corporation was pushing in that direction.

Confronted with this situation, the working class, the 99 percent, has no alternative but to fight back. Groups such as Occupy Wall Street, and its offshoots around the world, offer an alternative to the corporate control of our lives. The poor, the unemployed and underemployed, have to help themselves. The main political parties have become morally and political bankrupt, offering nothing except even more decrepitude. An alternative is not only possible, it is practical.

In April 2012, a number of high-level political officials attended conferences in Paris and Istanbul organised by the Friends of Syria group. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton attended these meetings, and joined the foreign ministers from the NATO powers and Arab Gulf monarchies in denouncing the killings committed by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The Friends of Syria meeting brought about greater collaboration between the various imperialist countries and the Syrian rebel forces. One of the main attendees at these meetings, and now major sponsor of the Syrian rebel groups, is Saudi Arabia. Clinton and the Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud al-Faisal. Clinton, former French President Sarkozy, and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan all expressed their commitment to democracy and vowed to do all they could to topple the Ba’athist dictatorship in Damascus. Saudi Arabia, and its Gulf ally Qatar, have led the charge to arm and finance Syrian rebel forces.

It is worthwhile to take a closer look at the history of cooperation between the imperialist powers and Saudi Arabia. Claims by Clinton, Sarkozy and Erdogan that democracy is uppermost in their minds are absolutely ludicrous. Last year, Amnesty International issued a report on the Saudi Arabian government called “Saudi Arabia: Repression in the name of security”. The report details the many crimes of the Saudi Arabian government, specifically its total repression of political dissent, the imprisonment and torture of dissidents, the repeated crackdowns on freedom of expression, and the broad and sweeping definition of terrorism as a way to suppress a wide variety of political groups.

Saudi Arabia, ruled by a dictatorial royal family, has been at the forefront of opposition to democratic and revolutionary movements throughout the Arab world. While the Syrian uprising has received extensive media coverage, the conduct of the Saudi ruling elite, its repressive policies and its close ties to the United States receive scant attention. Saudi Arabia has been, continues to be, a key pivot of US foreign policy, coordinating efforts to destabilise and undermine any Arab regime or group that espouses Arab nationalist, secular or revolutionary demands.

The Saudi regime is currently the base of US-sponsored manoeuvres to oppose the growing tide of uprisings and demands for democratisation in the region. The ruling clique in Riyadh espouse a particularly fanatical, puritanical version of Sunni Islam called Wahhabism. The Riyadh regime spends billions of dollars each year on campaigns to promote fundamentalist doctrines, broadcasting and propagating its version of Islamic creationism and reactionary royalism to counter the surge of Arab nationalist, secular and democratic protests.

Saudi forces have actively intervened in neighbouring Bahrain and Yemen to assist those authoritarian regimes suppress pro-democracy protests in their respective countries, with the full compliance and permission of Washington and other imperialist powers. Its enormous oil wealth is used to enrich a tiny minority elite, and the Shia minority suffers from harassment and discrimination. Nearly six million workers are migrant labourers, mainly from South-East Asia, who work the most dangerous and menial jobs with little regard for their rights.

Since its founding in 1932 as a united country, Saudi Arabia has countered the spread of secular, socialist and democratic ideas throughout the Arab world. As Charles Allen documents in his book God’s Terrorists, countering non-religious forces, such as the Arab nationalist and semi-socialist Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a top priority. The ruling Ibn Saud family pushed to establish organisations such as the Founding Committee of the Muslim World League, the Supreme Committee for Islamic Propagation, and other similar bodies specifically to promote the Wahhabist denomination of Islam and counter socialist and secular tendencies. These initiatives were welcomed and promoted by the ruling class of the United States, as a counter to any moves by Arab countries to move away from the American sphere of influence and set up an alternative, non-aligned political and economic orientation. Egypt’s Nasser, after having been rebuffed by the US and Britain, opened up to the socialist bloc for economic development and political support.

Saudi Arabian state is formed

In 1932 the emirates of Nejd and Hijaz, created by Ibn Saud were united into one political federation. The founding doctrines of the Saudi emirate go back to the mid-eighteenth century and the campaigns by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to purify Islam; rescue it from what he saw as its atrophy and deterioration. Wahhab advocated a particularly strict and literalist interpretation of Islam, and sought to combat what he determined were corrupting outside influences. Forming an alliance with a tribal chieftain in eastern Arabia, Muhammad ibn Saud, he launched a series of military and religious campaigns to stamp out any practices and influences deemed to be heretical. Wahhab made a political alliance with one of the main clans in the Arabian peninsula, al-Saud. This alliance formed the basis for continued cooperation, merging religion and the state into an emirate.

The House of Saud captured the city of Riyadh in the early 1900s, and this city became the eventual capital of a unified Saudi state.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the al-Saud and various clans in the Arabian peninsula were courted by the British, through the emissary of Harry St. John Philby. The British wanted to foment an Arab uprising that would drive out the Ottoman Turkish rulers of the Arabian lands and install a friendly pro-British regime. The Wahhabist ideology, and its Saudi backers, formed useful allies for the cause of the British empire. The Arab revolt against the Turkish empire succeeded in installing a new Saudi emirate, with Ibn Saud as the first recognised king.

The new kingdom of Saudi Arabia was one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, but in the mid-1930s, vast commercially viable quantities of oil were discovered in the Arabian peninsula. While the British wished to exploit these oil reserves, and extend their business interests which were already significant in Iraq and Iran, it was the Americans who moved into Saudi Arabia expeditiously. In 1933, the Saudi government granted an oil concession to the American company Standard Oil of California. The latter company has since been absorbed into Chevron corporation. The Saudi Arabian National Oil Company, Aramco, is owned by the Saudi regime and was an estimated net worth of $781 billion dollars back in 2005. The Saudi regime ensures the flow of oil to the imperialist countries is uninterrupted. In 2010, the revenue of the Saudi Aramco company was $210 billion. All this wealth has enriched a tiny minority of princely families, while the majority of workers in the country, mostly foreign nationals, labour in appalling conditions for pitiful wages. In 2011, Saudi Arabia was poised to overtake Russia as the world’s leading exporter of oil.

US President Franklin D Roosevelt met with King Saud aboard the warship USS Quincy in 1945, signs military and commercial agreements to exploit Saudi Arabia’s massive oil reserves. The US ruling class had begun on a course of active collaboration with an Islamist fundamentalist rightist regime. This meeting was pivotal in developing ties between the two states. The United States began its long and active flirtation with rightist Islamism, and continues until the present day.

In the late 1940s, US military personnel turn in the Kingdom to provide training and technical military assistance. Riyadh and Washington start to cooperate in the Cold War. In 1951, the US and Saudi Arabia signed and implemented a mutual defence agreement, and the US established a permanent military presence in the country. It was President Eisenhower, in the 1950s, who expanded and consolidated the support of US imperialism for Saudi-style Islamist fundamentalism. Eisenhower and the US government reasoned that with the Cold War, it was imperative to combat the spread of pan-Arab nationalism and socialism in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia formed the perfect candidate to provide the antidote, radical rightist Islamism.

The US ruling elite welcomed the Saudi kingdom as a necessary and valuable partner in the Cold War. Eisenhower noted that the Saudi regime’s militant religiosity and strident anti-Communism made it an indispensable partner in countering the spread of secular, socialist ideas and movements in the Arab world.

In 1952, when the pro-British monarchy of Egypt was toppled in a revolution by the Arab nationalist Free Officers Movement led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saudi Arabia became the focal point of intrigues against that country, to combat the rise of socialistic, Arab nationalist ideas. Nasser gravitated towards the Eastern bloc, and the Arab monarchies, led by Saudi Arabia, launch concerted efforts to stifle the Egyptian, pan-Arab revolutionary movement.

In the 1960s, a number of pan-Islamic institutions are formed to combat the rising ideology of secularism in the Arab countries, all with the backing of the United States. The Islamic University of Medina and the King Abdel Aziz University are formed in the 1960s to become intellectual centres for rightist political Islamism, and inculcate the ideas of the puritanical Wahhabist creed in its students. One of the leaders of the Islamic institutions, Sheikh Abdel Aziz bin Baz, was a fanatical Wahhabist who insisted on the literal interpretation of the Quran. He announced in 1966 that the Copernican world-view – that the earth and planets revolve around the Sun – was heretical and contrary to the teachings of the Quran. From Saudi Arabian universities, thousands of mullahs were turned out to spread political Islamist doctrines. The US has helped to train and arm fundamentalist Islamism in the Arab world.

Saudi role in Syria’s rebellion

Saudi Arabia is currently leading efforts to arm and train factions of the Syrian rebels to impose a strict fundamentalist political agenda on that country’s rebellion. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have supported American plans for military confrontation with the Iranian regime. The royalist dictatorship in Riyadh has played a pivotal role in gathering support among the Arab world for the US designs on the region, including escalating tensions with Iran.

There was a time when Saudi Arabia funded and trained groups of rebels to fight against a progressive, socialist government. Back in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia, along with other reactionary Islamic states, funded and trained Afghan rebel groups to fight against the secular, socialist government of Afghanistan. The Islamist groups spent most of their time fighting and destroying other Afghan rebel groups, thus promoting a political agenda of the former reactionary mullahs and landlord class dispossessed by the Afghan socialist government.

When the masses of Bahrain rose up in 2011 in protest against the royalist dictatorship in that country, the Saudi regime sent thousands of troops to violently suppress the rebellion. Bahrainis were killed and wounded, but the military contracts, and supply of military equipment, that Riyadh depends upon from the various imperialist powers continued unhindered.

The US and imperialist countries have continuously relied on the Saudi state to crush any pro-democracy uprisings, support reactionary Islamist groups and steer any political movements in the Arab world in a direction friendly to the US and its interests. The political leaders of the US, Britain, France and other powers shed crocodile tears for the casualties of the Arab Spring, but completely ignore the total lack of democratic freedoms in their own key ally in the region. Maintaining close relations with Riyadh involves guaranteeing the steady flow of oil and profits from the Saudi state, and the latter performs its role as the ‘policeman’ in the Persian Gulf region.

While using its oil wealth to cultivate Wahhabist groups and finance religious education in the Arab world, Saudi has played a key role in supporting plans to promote US economic and political interests in the region. While the imperialist countries disguise their interventions in the Middle East in a ‘humanitarian’ garb, they actively cooperate and support repressive, anti-democratic regimes such as the Saudi state.

This month marks two years since the environmental catastrophe known to the world as the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. A British Petroleum (BP) oil rig off the coast of Louisiana exploded, killing 11 oil rig workers and expelling 25 000 barrels of oil, and over the following three months 4.9 million barrels of oil, into the Gulf of Mexico. The scale of the disaster has become known through the work of independent teams of scientists, environmental activists, Native American and immigrant groups that have monitored the scope and impact of the catastrophe on the environment and the economy of the Gulf of Mexico states.

What is scandalous is the way in which BP executives, oil industry corporate managers, US politicians and government regulatory agencies minimised the extent of the disaster, and failed to provide adequate protection for the affected communities. Until today, not a single BP executive has been held responsible for the oil spill, and all the while the BP corporation continues to rake in billions of dollars in profits.

The Socialist Worker newspaper published a book review of Black Tide: The devastating impact of the Gulf Oil spill by Antonia Juhasz. Not only should we remember the terrible impact of this disaster on the lives and economic wellbeing of the afflicted communities, but we should bear in mind that BP continues to push for further offshore oil drilling projects, all with the active permission of the Obama administration. Rather than advocate for compensation for the victims of the spill, and demand a review of the dangerous practices that led to this disaster, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the oil multinational in reducing the ability of plaintiffs to sue for compensation, and allow further offshore oil drilling. The ecologically lethal practices of the BP corporation have not been changed.

The book review by the Socialist Worker contains a number of insights into the way that safety and environmental standards were compromised in the lead-up to the oil spill. One fascinating episode concerns the actions of the rig’s captain towards Andrea Fleytas. The latter, was on the crew when the explosion occurred. Realising that something drastic had happened, the article continues with Juhasz’s words:

It was Fleytas, one of three women on the crew, who manually set off the ship’s general alarm at 9:47 p.m. when the automatic alarms failed to signal that combustible gas had entered parts of the rig where crews were working…

It was Fleytas who…four minutes after the explosions–with power out, communication out, engines down, fires throughout the rig, and men throwing themselves overboard–noticed that no one had sent a distress signal to the outside world.

For her courage in the face of danger, Fleytas was officially reprimanded by the rig’s captain.

The incestuous relationship between corporate power and the media monopolies was in full evidence in the days after the disaster. The mainstream corporate media dutifully accepted all the assurances and conservative diagnoses of the BP multinational giant. As the full scale of the disaster and its aftermath became obvious, the Obama administration moved to insulate BP and its executives from further damage and litigation. Over the objections of scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used a toxic chemical dispersant to control the oil spill, only aggravating the environmental damage.

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the subsequent behaviour of the US political system, demonstrates that the capitalist system, driven by profit maximisation and the accumulation of untold wealth by a tiny financial elite, is incompatible with ecological sustainability and community needs. The financial power of the large multinational corporations and banks must be confronted to resolve the ecological and humanitarian needs of the wider society.

Go read the whole article.

The current US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, speaking to the US Senate Appropriations Committee in February 2012, stated that the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets the criteria of a war criminal. The   Telegraph newspaper in Britain reported as follows:

“Based on definitions of war criminal and crimes against humanity, there would be an argument to be made that he would fit into that category,” she said in Washington.

“But I also think that from long experience that can complicate a resolution of a difficult, complex situation because it limits options to persuade leaders perhaps to step down from power.”

This raises a number of interesting questions regarding the application of international law to heads of state and corresponding government officials. What constitutes war crimes, and how can we evaluate whether or not a state leader is a war criminal?

Nuremberg and war crimes

Definitions of war crimes date from the end of World War Two. The charter that established the framework for the Nuremberg war crime trials of Nazi leaders has also been incorporated into today’s International Criminal Court. The charter of the International Military Tribunal defined war crimes defined the following as war crimes in Article 6:

The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:

(a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

(b) WAR CRIMES: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;

(c) CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The following quote from Article 6 is particularly relevant:

Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.

The Nuremberg principles are a set of guidelines, established by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, to undergird the legal principles of the Nuremberg trials. These principles clearly state that any person charged with a war crime has the right to a fair trial, but if a person committed such a crime while performing their duties as head of state or a government official, such a position does not relieve them of their responsibility under international law.

The Assad regime

The Assad regime has unleashed terrifying violence to suppress an uprising by the Syrian people, particularly in the city of Homs. The Ba’athist regime in Syria is guilty of torturing dissidents, imposing itself in power by force. The elder Assad, Hafez, carried out a coup d’etat in 1970, and his son, Bashar, has continued to rule a police state. Syrian Baathism, which started out back in the 1940s as an ideology that articulated Arab nationalism and semi-socialist independence for all the Arab states, has deteriorated into a tyranny that has no problems making it accommodations with US, British, French, Russian imperialist powers. In June 2005, at the Tenth Regional Ba’ath Party conference, the party adopted a new economic approach it calls a ‘social market economy’, trying to balance the public system while introducing more privatisations in all areas of the economy. As one expert put it, opening up to private corporations “is destroying the daily life of the Syrian people.” While Ba’athism supports state ownership of the major branches of the economy, it is opposed to the confiscation of private property, and has actively cultivated the growth of private business in the countries it ruled (in Iraq until the March 2003 US invasion, and Syria until today).

The Ba’athist party, advocating Arab nationalism, was established by Michel Aflaq. Born in Damascus, Aflaq was a sociologist and philosopher who elaborated a vision of pan-Arab nationalism, intending to revive the Arab nationality through a renaissance of Arab culture and education. Ba’athism is officially secular, but has accommodated the Islamic beliefs of the Arab people.

An Arab-centric ideology, Ba’athism rejects Communism as atheistic and inapplicable to the conditions of the Arab world. Aflaq himself was a Christian, but supported Islam and viewed the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as fully compatible with an Arab socialist outlook. The Syrian Ba’athist party has been in power since 1963. The faction led by Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970 and ruled until his death in office in 2000. The son, Bashar, has continued his father’s legacy.

The Syrian regime has committed horrendous crimes – against the Palestinians. In the mid-1970s during the Lebanese civil war, the Syrian army intervened to slaughter thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians to ensure the ascendancy of pro-Syrian factions in any post-civil war political arrangement in that country. Palestinians who opposed the domination of Syria were killed, and the Syrian army actively assisted rightwing extremist Lebanese groups in besieging Palestinian refugee camps. Until today, no-one has brought the Syrian leaders to trial for their responsibility in these killings of Palestinians.

War crimes hypocrisy

In November 2011, a Malaysian tribunal basing itself on the principles of the Nuremberg trials convicted former US President George W Bush, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, of war crimes for their attack on Iraq in March 2003. As the Common Dreams web site reported:

Last November, for instance, a War Crimes Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia convicted both Bush and former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair of “crimes against peace.”  The verdict concluded that “Weapons investigators had established that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was also not posing any threat to any nation at the relevant time that was immediate that would have justified any form of pre-emptive strike.”

While this tribunal received scant attention in the American press, it appears that the chief defendant, George W Bush, is aware of the guilt on his conscience. The article continues:

Yet while official America may not take the idea of Americans being charged with war crimes seriously, it’s not absolutely clear that George W. Bush counts himself among that consensus.  In February, 2011, he cancelled a trip to a charity gala in Switzerland for reasons that are disputed.  Event organizers attributed the cancellation to demonstrations planned to protest the alleged torture of U.S.-held detainees during his presidency.  Human rights groups, however, thought the cause was their announced intention to file an official criminal complaint against him with Swiss prosecutors upon his arrival (along with the call for his arrest by a right-wing member of the Swiss parliament.)  A Bush spokesman declined comment at the time, but in a later story about Amnesty International’s call for his arrest during an upcoming visit to Africa, CBS News attributed the Switzerland cancellation to “fears that he may have faced legal action there.”

The elephant in the room

By the standards elaborated by international law, the US government of Obama and Clinton must be indicted for war crimes. The Socialist Worker reported back in March 2011 that US soldiers in Afghanistan, for instance, are torturing, mutilating and killing Afghan civilians as part of their war in that country. The soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Army infantry were photographed gloating over the bodies of their victims. While the US military claimed that such incidents are isolated and do not represent the values that motivate the American armed forces, the 5th Stryker Brigade was armed, trained, undergone psychological testing and entrusted with carrying out orders from the highest levels of the US military and political authorities.

In 2011, during the Libyan civil war, NATO forces targeted and completely destroyed the town of Sirte, killing thousands of civilians. The Deccan Chronicle reported that residents fleeing Sirte were furious with NATO, and demanding to know why their home town was being targeted in such a systematic fashion. The article elaborated that:

But many among the thousands of Sirte residents who managed to escape said the biggest danger was not Gaddafi loyalists but the bombs that drop from the sky and the ones the NTC fighters lob into their Mediterranean port city.

John Pilger, the veteran investigative journalist, said that the residents of Sirte are regarded as ‘unworthy victims’, and therefore expendable. This bombing alone constitutes a war crime for which the responsible parties – Obama, Clinton and NATO commanders – should be indicted on charges under international law. The NATO bombing of Sirte can be compared to the German bombing of the town of Guernica during World War Two. The bombing of Guernica was intended as a demonstration of German imperial might. Today’s imperial powers demonstrated their terrible ferocity in Sirte.

There was a town in Iraq called Fallujah. As the US occupation of Iraq continued and the insurgency gained in strength, the US government decided to make an example of that city, and unleashed a massive offensive in November 2004. All infrastructure in that city, and the civilian population, were targeted by American forces. The entire city became a killing zone, and even the hospitals in the town were attacked. US marines boasted of their technique of ‘dead-checking’; when entering a room of wounded people, they would determine if anyone was still living by pressing their boots on the eyes of their victims. If the person moved, they were immediately shot.

The attack on Fallujah, while carried out under the Bush-Cheney administration, had the full support of the American Democrat party, the party of Obama and Clinton. No-one has ever been brought up on charges for that massacre. This was an act of collective punishment, an act of retribution because the people of Fallujah resisted the depredations of US imperial forces. Collective punishment is actually defined as a war crime under international law.

Two approaches

Back in 2008, the Georgian government, armed and supported by the United States, waged a short war on the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. The Russian military, having supported South Ossetia, quickly intervened and defeated the Georgian troops. Then Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, issued a statement responding to the crisis. While pointing out that the Georgian government had repeatedly violated international law in contravention to the United Nations, Medvedev explained there was no reason why all the relevant parties could not resolve this dispute on the basis of international law. He explained that the current “provisions of the U.N. Charter, the 1970 Declaration on the Principles of International Law Governing Friendly Relations Between States, the C.S.C.E. Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and other fundamental international instruments” provide a solid, relevant and just basis for resolving this dispute between all the parties involved. Medvedev demonstrated to the international community that, even in a time of military conflict, he is willing to respect and implement international law.

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize back in 2009. During his acceptance speech, he elaborated his vision of a peaceful world – the US has the right to launch ‘preemptive strikes’ against those forces that threaten its interests. Invoking the concept of ‘evil in the world’, just like his predecessor George W Bush, Obama outlined his intention to wage unilateral war against any regime or force that Washington deems to be an ‘outlaw’. Obama assured his listeners that the United States did not intend to impose itself by force – heavens no – but because the US is motivated by ‘enlightened self-interest’ to propagate its values around the world. His speech, while more subtle and refined than the speeches of his predecessor, was no less effusive in its praise of US militarism. In one speech, Obama rejected the entire basis of the Nuremberg tribunals, advocating the illegal doctrine of ‘preemptive war’, and repudiated the foundations of international law since the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials.

The outlaw in the world today is the Obama administration. We would do well to hold their government officials to account in the dock.

The SunHerald newspaper, located in south Mississippi, carried a small story recently that has far-reaching implications for the capitalist economy and democratic rights. The multinational corporation Northrop Grumman, manufacturer of aerospace and military equipment, opened a new centre in Mississippi devoted to the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), popularly known as drones. The SunHerald article was gushing over the vast commercial and investment opportunities for Mississippi, and stated that spending on UAVs is estimated to increase over the next decade from $5.9 billion annually to $11.2 billion. The article focused on the opportunities for corporate profits, ignoring the terrible human toll that UAVs have taken during the US imperial wars abroad.

Drones are becoming well-known as instruments of warfare, and the Obama administration has expanded their use dramatically. While UAVs are primarily used in the US military conflicts overseas, their use for civilian purposes, such as monitoring US borders, the surveillance large tracts of real estate, surveying people and wildlife from the sky, and a host of other commercial and law enforcement purposes.

Unmanned aircraft have become a weapon of choice for the Obama administration. Their use in US imperial wars predates the Obama era, having been used first in 1995 in Bosnia. Remotely piloted aircraft were used by the Bush-Cheney regime in their invasion of Iraq in 2003. Predator drones have flown surveillance missions, gathering information about targets on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military began to use armed pilotless aircraft soon after 2003, and have been using them with devastating effect in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and now over the skies of Iran and Syria.The Israelis have used both unarmed and armed drones in their various wars in Lebanon.

Drones are equipped with state-of-the-art computer technology, such as infrared and live video cameras, heat sensors and radar. They can upload vast amounts of data, even eavesdrop on electronic media, wi-fi networks and mobile phone conversations. While the reconnaissance capability of the drones is vital, they can be armed with Hellfire missiles and have rained down lethal force on their victims.

They are the feature weapon in covert wars the US has conducted in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other countries. Since the Bush-Cheney regime resorted to open, conventional warfare that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties, Obama the ‘anti-war’ president, has increased the use of UAVs as a form of covert warfare. Obama did order and carry out the assassination of US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The latter was a radical Islamic cleric who was never charged with any crime, or brought before any court of law. Awlaki was killed in a Predator drone strike.

Awlaki preached an extremist, hateful brand of Islam, we were told by media outlets. If preaching hateful religious rhetoric is an offense punishable by death, one wonders why Obama has not dealt with other vitriolic religious demagogues in the United States, whose homophobic and hate-filled rants reach millions of listeners –  like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell Junior, Jim Bakker, John Haggee and Jimmy Swaggart in similarly stern fashion.

US imperial wars expanded

Obama has expanded the Afghanistan war into Pakistan through the method of drone strikes. Pakistani civilians have been bearing the brunt of this aerial warfare, and Obama only publicly acknowledged such warfare in Pakistan earlier this year. The Afghanistan war, while started by Bush-Cheney regime, has now escalated into the ‘Af-Pak’ conflict thanks to the Obama presidency. The terror drones – because that is what they are – have also claimed the lives of those other dangerous people – rescue workers and attendees at funerals. Such killings of civilians have been occurring since May 2009, according to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. At least 2413 civilians have been killed in Pakistan so far because of drone strikes. These atrocities are emblematic of the Obama era of covert warfare.

Drone warfare has been going on in Somalia at least since June 2011. In a country racked by political instability, economic breakdown and lawlessness, drone strikes are the last thing that will bring a stable, unified, democratic society. But the aim of the Obama administration is not to implement meaningful democratic changes, but to expand the reach of US military and economic interests. The US has been conducting covert military operations in Somalia since 2001, but drone warfare has increased civilian casualties, radicalising a whole new layer of people turning them into potential recruits for extremist groups.

Journalists are increasingly bringing the issues of unmanned drones to the attention of the public. Even that exemplar of journalistic integrity, Fox News, pointed out that Obama authorised the use of armed drones in Libya in April 2011. Obama had been at great pains to emphasize that the United States took a ‘back seat’ in that conflict. The initial rationale for NATO intervention in Libya was that of humanitarian intervention, the establishment of a ‘no-fly zone’ and the safety of Libyan civilians under threat from former leader Qadhafi’s forces. Then Defence Secretary Robert Gates rejected suggestions that authorising drone warfare was a form of mission creep – a stealthy expansion of war aims from the initially stated justification. The ‘humanitarian’ rationale was exposed as a complete lie when NATO forces, using their aerial warfare capabilities, carried out the wholesale destruction of the town of Sirte, an act of collective punishment that resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians. The senior political analyst for Al Jazeera, Marwan Bishara, wrote that the initial justification for NATO intervention in Libya turned out to be false.

Expansion of drones into the United States

In mid-February 2012, Obama signed the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) Modernization and Reform Act (2012) preparing the way for the use of UAVs in the United States itself. The Minneapolis-based Star Tribune carried a story warning that US citizens should get ready for US drone flights in their home territory. While the bill’s passage was couched in terms of upgrading the air traffic technology in the country, this bill paves the way for a robust expansion of a police state in the United States. Drones will now be used to conduct high-tech surveillance of the population, collect information about their movements, monitor any individuals or groups that are of interest to law enforcement authorities, and can intercept electronic communications. Multinational corporations like Northrup Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, all lobbied heavily for the passage of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organisation of activists, lawyers, political analysts and concerned citizens, is disturbed by the growing impact of electronic media on democratic rights. The EFF filed a lawsuit in January 2012 against the FAA which seeks full disclosure by the FAA about the use of drones for domestic purposes. The EFF noted that the market for unmanned aerial vehicles is rapidly expanding, and more companies are investing in UAV technology. The Teal Group corporation, an aerospace company, published a report in 2011 reviewing the world market, cited by the EFF, which states that the outlook for UAV technology is very positive, and predicts that worldwide UAV research and development expenditures will increase over the next decade from $5.9 billion to $15.1 billion.

George Monbiot, veteran journalist and political commentator stated it plainly in his column that the US drone war is a coward’s war. The more that we can distance ourselves from the immediate, lethal and tragic consequences of warfare through computerised warfare, the less accountable we are and further desensitized to the plight of the victims of imperial wars. Warfare using PlayStation-like technology makes us all avoid any obligation to explain or justify our actions, let alone apologise for the ruinous consequences.

Meanwhile the rest of the US economy….
While the Obama administration and its corporate supporters are hailing the commercial opportunities posed by the UAV industry in the United States, his administration has done nothing to prosecute the Wall Street racketeers and financial parasites that caused the 2008 global financial meltdown. The very people that made billions through financial speculation and wildly inflating finance bubbles, are back making money while the rest of the US economy stagnates. People for instance, like Greg Lippmann, a former trader at Deutsche Bank, has returned, making millions buying up securities that are based on mortgages – the very practice that contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. An article that appeared in the New York Times explains that bonds backed by cheap mortgages are ‘regaining their allure’. The article states that:

The attraction is the price. Some mortgage bonds are so cheap that even in the worst forecasts, with home prices falling as much as 10 percent and foreclosures rising, investors say they can still make money.

Lippmann is just one example of a trader who bought up collaterised debt obligations (CDO)s during the speculative housing bubble, just before it imploded. He started his own hedge fund which speculates on mortgage-backed securities – recreating the conditions that lead to the last crash. So the bankers who swindled billions in the financial sector, and then were bailed out by the US government, are once again in a position to continue their reckless and socially destructive financial practices.

It is hardly surprising that such practices can continue. The position of the Wall Street parasites only demonstrates the utter political bankruptcy of both the Republican and Democrat parties in the US. Obama is ruling to advance the interests of a narrow financial oligarchy. The role of monopoly finance capital, as elaborated by the contributors of Monthly Review, is still apparent in the US. John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology and editor of Monthly Review, wrote back in December 2006 that the US economy has reached the stage of monopoly-finance capitalism, where all sectors of the economy are dominated by giant multinational corporations. His article was included in a volume called ‘The Great Financial Crisis’.

Professor Foster has documented the financialisation of capitalism, which consists of the increasing, and now predominant, mode of economic activity being financial speculation, the sale of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, derivatives – making money out of speculating on making money. Not only are financial bubbles created, but they become whirlpools of speculation, to use the famous phrase by John Maynard Keynes. The beginnings of the financialisation of capitalism can be traced back to the 1970s, when the global capitalist system entered a period of long stagnation. Investment in productive activities has declined precipitously since then, but trading in ‘financial products’ has boomed, especially since the early 1990s.

Rather than invest in productive enterprises, the main economic activity became investing in financial speculation – insurance, stocks and bonds, credit swaps. Back in December 2006, Professor Foster wrote that given the massive growth of financial speculative bubbles, it was not difficult “to envision a meltdown of truly earth-shaking proportions”. But somehow, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 2000s, when asked about how the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s escaped his attention, stated that he ‘did not see it coming’.

The imperial wars of the United States have been redesigned, rather than ended, by the Obama-Clinton regime. Rather than a casino economy based on ever-increasing corporate profits, the enormous wealth of the financial speculators and playgrounds of the wealthy elite need to be expropriated. An economy based on meeting basic human needs is urgently needed.

Back in 1989, Romania was gripped by mass protests, lead by miners, against the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Ceausescu. The protests in Romania were part of the generalised ‘Velvet Revolution’ against the dictatorial, bureaucratised, deformed workers’ states in Eastern Europe. Ceausescu, the last Communist head of state of Romania, headed a regime that was based on nationalised property and government-run industry, but implemented a bureaucratised, distorted form of socialism. While its dictatorial nature was well-known, the regime was the beneficiary of multinational business dealings with the West. Many western transnational corporations and business-people (including Australian Lang Hancock) never stopped concluding deals and conducting trade with that regime. The Queen of England bestowed an award on Ceausescu back in 1978.

Ceausescu’s regime earned the wholehearted cooperation of the wealthy elites of Western Europe. Ceausescu sold Soviet military information to the United States, which resulted in the Romanian dictator being welcomed as a ‘freedom fighter’ by former US President, Jimmy Carter. The former British media tycoon, the late Robert Maxwell, who built his fortune extolling the virtues of the ‘free market’, warmly appreciated the Ceausescu regime’s business-friendly political climate.

The capitalist press in Australia, the media being composed of large transnational corporations, seized the opportunity to denounce the entire socialist project, claiming that it failed to provide for even the most basic needs of the population, condemned the majority to poverty, and backed up these claims with heart-rending images from abandoned orphans in Romania’s villages.

Here we are in 2012, and there have been mass protests against the rampant corruption and inequality implemented by the capitalist parties in Romania. The demonstrations have been lead by workers opposed to the harsh austerity measures demanded by the World Bank, the IMF and the European powers France and Germany. They have been the largest mass protests seen in Romania since 1989. Police and demonstrators clashed in Bucharest, and the Prime Minister, Emil Boc was forced to resign. Unemployment is running at 7.3 percent, and the average wage is €350 a month which is about 500 US dollars. As even the mouthpiece of US capitalism, the New York Times, readily admits:

Romania suffered a sharp reversal of fortune as the global economic crisis worsened and foreign lending tightened up. After the economy grew 7.3 percent in 2008, it shrank a painful 6.6 percent in 2009, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency. The country was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union in 2009 for emergency loans totaling $27 billion at the exchange rates at the time.

The Romanian economy faced a serious budget deficit of seven percent back in 2009, and the prescription of the IMF, the European Commission and World Bank was to impose ‘austerity’, meaning further cuts to public expenditure, pensions and public sector wages.

The Romanian secret police under Ceausescu, the Securitate, became synonymous with torture, brutality and state-wide repression. Its activities were shrouded in secrecy until the 1989 ousting of the Ceausescu regime. Surely the new Romania would never descend to such barbaric practices? The location of CIA secret prisons has been confirmed in that country. Former CIA operatives described how detainees were rendered to Romania and tortured in the dungeons of the Office of the National Register for Secret State Information, abbreviated as Orniss. Extraordinary rendition refers to the kidnapping and extradition of any terrorism suspects to a third-party country, usually a country governed by a regime that practices torture. The prison – code named Bright Light – was just one of a network of secret prisons across Europe.

Remember the abandoned orphans? In 2009, even the Bullshit Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) carried images of starving orphans in Romania’s dilapidated orphanages, lambasting the lack of care and failure of the political establishment to serious address the plight of orphans in that country. Twenty years after the overthrow of Ceausescu, the institutions designed to care for orphans are in a dilapidated, crumbling state, and their meagre resources are overstretched. As the BBC article comments:

The Carpenis institution is just 32km (20 miles) from the capital Bucharest, the heartbeat of the country’s growing economy. In the main squares, neon lights advertise the biggest Western brands; shopping centres are bursting with families spending new money on Christmas gifts. It is a measure of how far Romania has come since the fall of its dictator Nicolai Ceausescu who bankrupted the country. But not everyone has seen change in the last 20 years.

In Bolintin, another village close to the capital, a lone nurse and six helpers take care of more than 100 patients – they are not sure exactly how many. They were wrapped in blankets and thermal jackets to escape the freezing cold.

Political instability brought on by squabbling, ultra-nationalist-chauvinist parties, using patriotism as a diversion to implement strict IMF-regulated privatisation and austerity, have brought the economy to near collapse. In conditions of a deteriorating economy, the ultra-nationalist and racist parties exploit grievances to channel discontent into electoral popularity. In Romania, as with the rest of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitic prejudice is the usual conduit for parliamentary success.

The president, Traian Basecu, has minimised the culpability of Romanian authorities during World War Two for their anti-Semitic measures and pogroms. In an interview in 2011, Basescu stated that he saw nothing wrong with the 1941 decision by Romania’s military government to join Nazi Germany and attack the Soviet Union, even though the 1941 attack resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jews and Russians. Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romania’s wartime dictator, enthusiastically joined the Nazi war on the USSR and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Basescu has repeatedly ‘softened’ Antonescu’s image, much to the outrage of Russia and the Jewish community. It appears that anti-Semitic killers have their defenders in high places in Romania.

Romania is today one of the poorest countries in ‘united’ Europe. In November 2011, Austrian authorities instructed their largest three banks to restrict the amounts of cross-border loans to eastern European countries, in particular Romania. The Economist bemoans the ‘free-falling’ Romanian political system and doubts the country’s ability to implement its austerity package.

It is time to question the viability of the neoliberal, capitalist project, and highlight its failure to meet the basic needs of the working people in society. The austerity measures being demanded in Romania are very similar to the cutbacks and reductions in wages being demanded in Greece, Italy and other European countries. When an economic system fails to provide a living for the majority of its people, it is time to ask wide-ranging questions about the ideological dogma that was implemented in Eastern Europe since 1989. The ‘free-market’ fundamentalism of the IMF, the World Bank and the European capitalist states must be rejected because its failures are becoming increasingly obvious by the day. The combativeness of the Romanian workers is a sign of a growing class struggle. In 1989, Ceausescu’s dictatorship fell, and the corporate media were beside themselves with excitement – a new era of prosperity and affluence would begin in Eastern Europe. The capitalist class, shifting the costs of the failing capitalist experiment onto the shoulders of working people, are forcing people to rise up against the capitalist system itself.

Back in October 2011, the Obama administration made a startling announcement – the US government had uncovered a conspiracy initiated by the Iranian government to assassinate officials of the Saudi Arabian government on US soil. Their method of choice? Paying killers from the Mexican drug cartels to carry out killings of the Saudi ambassador to the United States; an operation that would have taken the lives of innocent civilians in the immediate vicinity. According to the US government’s accounts, the culprits were also planning to attack the Israeli embassy in Washington, as well as the Israeli and Saudi embassies in Argentina. The Attorney General of the US, Eric Holder, assured the public that swift action would be taken to catch the perpetrators of this murderous conspiracy, and prevent any loss of life or damage to property.

Here was incontrovertible evidence, so the US administration said, of the murderous intent of the Iranian regime. Another reason why the US war drive against Iran should be welcomed in the court of public opinion. Here was another example of the sinister, evil machinations of the Iranian regime, and the Obama administration’s tireless quest to oppose this evil must be supported. A terrible atrocity was averted by the ever-vigilant US authorities – or perhaps not. Even the corporate-owned press began to cast doubts on the official version of events. The Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite fighting force in Iran, had plotted with failed used-car salesman Iranian-American Mansoor Arbabsiar, to blow up the Saudi embassy in Washington, using paid hitmen from Mexican drug cartels. As veteran commentator Glenn Greenwald stated in an opinion piece written the day after the revelations, “the most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyse it.” Bands of terrifying Mexican drug cartel killers let loose in the United States to kill Saudi Arabian government personnel is something more akin to a Hollywood production than to an actual criminal plot.

The details of the plot become murkier when it is revealed that the plot, such as it is, was agreed between Arbabsiar and a member of the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, who also just happened to be an undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In a convoluted case that is sounding more like entrapment by the minute, the undercover DEA informant and Arbabsiar discussed payment options for the contract killing of the Saudi ambassador. The only evidence that the US Attorney’s office provided was the testimony of the undercover DEA agent. Gareth Porter covers the case in some detail, set in the context of ever-increasing use of entrapment tactics by DEA and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) officers especially in terrorism-related cases. The FBI has been announcing in recent years that it foiled several terrorist plots – after confirming that the alleged perpetrators were undercover FBI agents targeting the Islamic communities in various cities. Various FBI sting operations have entraped members of the already heavily-surveilled and intimidated Muslim communities in the United States.

But there is one aspect that requires further examination. The US authorities, upon announcing the discovery of this alleged conspiracy, moved determinedly to construct their case, publicise the findings and pursue the alleged culprits. The motivation of the US legal authorities to catch people guilty of serious crimes, especially using financial means to incite terrorism, is beyond reproach – isn’t it? As Glenn Greenwald wrote, the US government made clear their determination to hold those responsible to account. So the US federal agencies pursue those who would conspire to commit murder, especially cracking down on the Mexican drug cartels, known for their violence and reckless disregard for human life, right?

Well that is interesting, because back in April 2011, six months before the Iran bomb plot, Ed Vulliamy ran a story in The Observer newspaper (republished in the Guardian in Britain) detailing how the murderous Mexican drug cartels laundered billions of dollars through a large US bank. When an investigator, Martin Woods, an employee of the US bank, raised this issue to the proper authorities, he was ignored, his evidence sidelined, and his integrity attacked by the highest levels of management of the US bank.

Wachovia, currently absorbed by the Well Fargo bank, had been laundering billions of dollars through various methods – wire transfers, traveler’s cheques and cash shipments. The money was laundered through intermediaries on behalf of Mexican drug cartels, criminal enterprises that make their money through narco-trafficking and maintain their businesses through murder, torture and thuggery. Over a period of 22 months, the DEA, the Internal Revenue Service and other US agencies amassed evidence that Wachovia was the conduit for the drug money handled by the Mexican criminal syndicates. Three hundred and seventy eight billion dollars was funneled through Wachovia to launder the ill-gotten proceeds of the Mexican drug trade.

What is even more surprising is that while criminal charges were brought against the Wachovia bank, the case never saw the light of day. Wachovia had violated the banking regulations systematically through a prolonged period, washing billions of dollars worth of drug money that had been obtained at the cost of lives, and Wachovia simply paid an amount in compensation through the district court in Miami. The condition was that Wachovia had to promise they would not violate banking laws – in other words, simply promise not to do anything naughty again, and the prosecution would be deferred.

Martin Woods, an employee of Wachovia located in London, began to raise concerns about financial irregularities from his London office. The bank’s directors simply ignored the increasing evidence of financial impropriety, and Woods own position in the bank was threatened. Woods was basically hung out to dry for pointing out the failure of his superiors to apply anti-money laundering procedures. In March 2010, the senior vice-president of Wachovia, Douglas Edwards, signed off on a settlement where the bank admitted its role in the money-laundering, but agreed to abide by the law for one year after which the charges would be dropped – the deferred prosecution scenario.

The money laundering case at Wachovia bank raises serious questions about the lack of regulatory governance over the entire financial system. How is it possible for banks to launder billions of dollars with such impunity for so long? Enormous profits from the narco-trafficking industry are based on the suffering, broken lives and misery of millions of drug addicts. Governments have not only become unwilling to apply basic financial regulation when the big banks and multinational firms are wasting billions, but are actively compliant in creating a climate where corporate criminality is encouraged. Monopoly capitalism, arising from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has transformed into monopoly-finance capital, where making money from money is more important and prominent than creating wealth through productive industrial or manufacturing activity. The financialization of capital, as John Bellamy Foster puts it, has created the conditions where dominant finance-capital, owning enormous amounts of financial assets, and leaving the stagnation-afflicted economy to its own devices, is the overwhelming feature of this latest state of decaying, imperialist capitalism.

Even the New York Times, the mouthpiece of the American ruling class, admitted in a recent article that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the main body responsible for investigating corporate criminality, regularly grants legal waivers and exemptions for the largest firms to escape punishment and liability. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America and other leading financial institutions would not have been able to get away with billions in profits and bailouts were it not for the machinations of the SEC to shield bankers and executives from criminal prosecution. The corrupt and incestuous relationship between the large Wall Street firms and the regulatory authorities is all the more reason to support the 99 percent, occupy wall street, and sweep away this entire system of criminality that is responsible for the orgy of speculation and graft that makes economic crashes, like the 2008 financial collapse, unavoidable.