The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Washington Tries to Break BRICS – Rape of
Brazil Begins
By F.
William Engdahl
September 26, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "NEO"
-
Washington’s regime change machinery has for
the time being succeeded in removing an
important link in the alliance of large
emerging nations by railroading through a
Senate impeachment of the duly elected
President, Dilma Rousseff. On August 31 her
Vice President Michel Temer was sworn in as
President. In his first speech as president,
the cynical Temer called for a government of
“national salvation,” asking for the trust
of the Brazilian people. He indicated plans
to reform, and has also signaled his
intention to overhaul the pension system and
labor laws, and cut public spending, all
themes beloved of Wall Street banks, of the
International Monetary Fund and their
Washington Consensus. Now after less than
three weeks at the job, Temer has unveiled
plans for wholesale privatization of
Brazil’s crown jewels, starting with oil.
The planned Wall Street rape of Brazil is
about to begin.
It’s
important to keep in mind that elected
President Rousseff was not convicted or even
formally charged with any concrete act of
corruption, even though the pro-oligarchy
mainstream Brazil media, led by O’Globo
Group of the billionaire Roberto Irineu
Marinho, ran a media defamation campaign
creating the basis to railroad Rousseff into
formal impeachment before the Senate. The
shift took place after the opposition PMDB
party of Temer on March 29 broke their
coalition with Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, as
accusations of Petrobras-linked corruption
were made against Rousseff and former
president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
On
August 31, 61 Senators voted to remove her
while 20 voted against removal. The formal
charge was “manipulation of the state
budget” before the 2014 elections to hide
the size of the deficit. She vehemently
denies the charge. Indeed, the Senate issued
its own expert report that concluded there
was “no indication of direct or indirect
action by Dilma” in any illegal budgetary
maneuvers. According to the Associated
Press, “Independent auditors hired by
Brazil’s Senate said in a report released
Monday that suspended President Dilma
Rousseff didn’t engage in the creative
accounting she was charged with at her
impeachment
trial.” Under an honest system that
would have ended the impeachment then and
there. Not in Brazil.
In
effect, she was impeached for the dramatic
decline in the Brazilian economy, a decline
deliberately pushed along as US credit
rating agencies downgraded Brazilian debt,
and international and mainstream Brazilian
media kept the Petrobras corruption
allegations in the spotlight. Importantly,
the Senate did not ban her from office for 8
years as Washington had hoped, and she has
promised an electoral return. The
Washington-steered Temer has until end of
2018 to deliver Brazil to Temer’s foreign
masters before his term legally
ends.
Notably, Temer himself was accused of
corruption in the Petrobras state oil
company investigations. He reportedly asked
the then-head of the transportation unit of
Petróleo Brasileiro SA in 2012 to arrange
illegal campaign contributions to Temer’s
party which was running a Washington-backed
campaign to oust Rousseff’s Workers’ Party.
Then this June, only days into his serving
as acting president, two of Temer’s own
chosen ministers, including the Minister of
Transparency, were forced to resign in
response to allegations that they sought to
subvert the probe into massive graft at
Petrobras.
One of
the two, Temer’s extremely close ally Romero
Jucá, was caught on tape plotting Dilma’s
impeachment as a way to shut down the
ongoing Petrobras corruption investigation,
as well as indicating that Brazil’s
military, the media, and the courts were all
participants in the impeachment plotting.
In
brief, the removal of Dilma Rousseff and her
Workers’ Party after 13 years in Brazil’s
leadership was a new form of Color
Revolution from Washington, one we might
call a judicial coup by corrupt judges and
congressmen. Of the 594 members of the
Congress, as the Toronto Globe and Mail
reported, “318 are under investigation or
face charges” while their target, President
Rousseff, “herself faces no allegation of
financial
impropriety.”
The
day after the first Lower House impeachment
vote in April, a leading member of Temer’s
PSDP party, Senator Aloysio Nunes, went to
Washington, in a mission organized by former
Bill Clinton Secretary of State Madeline
Albright’s lobbying firm, Albright
Stonebridge Group. Nunes, as president of
the Brazilian Senate’s Foreign Relations
Committee, has repeatedly advocated that
Brazil once again move closer to an alliance
with the US and
UK.
Madeline Albright, a Director of the leading
US think-tank, Council on Foreign Relations,
is also chair of the prime US Government
“Color Revolution” NGO, the National
Democratic Institute (NDI). Nothing fishy
here, or? Nunes reportedly went to
Washington to rally backing for Temer and
the unfolding judicial coup against
Rousseff.
A key
player from the side of Washington,
Rousseff’s de facto political executioner,
was, once again, Vice President Joe Biden,
the “Dick Cheney” dirty operator-in-chief in
the Obama Administration.
Biden’s fateful Brazil trip
In
May, 2013, US Vice President Joe Biden made
a fateful visit to Brazil to meet with
President Rousseff. In January 2011 Rousseff
had succeeded her Workers’ Party mentor,
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, or Lula, who
constitutionally was limited to two
consecutive terms. Biden went to Brazil to
discuss oil with the new President.
Relations between Lula and Washington had
chilled as Lula backed Iran against US
sanctions and came economically closer to
China.
In
late 2007 Petrobras had discovered what was
estimated to be a mammoth new basin of
high-quality oil on the Brazilian
Continental Shelf offshore in the Santos
Basin. In total the Brazil Continental Shelf
could contain over 100 billion barrels of
oil, transforming the country into a major
world oil and gas power, something Exxon and
Chevron, the US oil giants wanted to
control.
In
2009, according to leaked US diplomatic
cables published by Wikileaks, the US
Consulate in Rio wrote that Exxon and
Chevron were trying in vain to alter a law
advanced by Rousseff’s mentor and
predecessor in her Brazilian Workers’ Party
, President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. That
2009 law made the state-owned Petrobras
chief operator of all offshore oil
blocs. Washington and the US oil giants
were not at all pleased at losing control
over potentially the largest new world oil
discovery in decades.
Lula
had not only pushed ExxonMobil and Chevron
out of the controlling position in favor of
the state-owned Petrobras, but he also
opened Brazilian oil exploration to the
Chinese, since 2009 a core member of the
BRICS developing nations with Brazil,
Russia, India and South Africa.
In
December, 2010 in one of his last acts as
President, Lula oversaw signing of a deal
between the Brazilian-Spanish energy company
Repsol and China’s state-owned Sinopec.
Sinopec formed a joint venture, Repsol
Sinopec Brasil, investing more than $7.1
billion towards Repsol Brazil. Already in
2005 Lula had approved formation of Sinopec
International Petroleum Service of Brazil
Ltd as part of a new strategic alliance
between
China and Brazil.
In
2012 in a joint exploration drilling, Repsol
Sinopec Brasil, Norway’s Statoil and
Petrobras made a major new discovery in Pão
de Açúcar, the third in block BM-C-33, which
includes the Seat and Gávea, the latter one
of the world’s 10 largest discoveries in
2011. USA and British oil majors were
nowhere to be
seen.
Biden’s task was to sound out Lula’s
successor, Rousseff, about reversing that
exclusion of US major oil companies in favor
of the Chinese. Biden also met with leading
energy companies in Brazil including
Petrobras.
While
little was publicly said, Rousseff refused
to reverse the 2009 oil law in a way that
would be suitable to Biden, Washington and
US oil majors. Days after Biden’s visit came
the Snowden NSA revelations that the US had
also spied on Rousseff and top officials of
Petrobras. She was livid and denounced the
Obama Administration that September before
the UN General Assembly for violating
international law. She cancelled a planned
Washington visit in protest. After that,
US-Brazil relations took a dive.
After
his May 2013 talks with Rousseff, Biden
clearly gave her the kiss of death.
Before
Biden’s May 2013 visit Dilma Rousseff had
70% of popularity rating. Less than two
weeks after Biden left Brazil, nationwide
protests by a very well-organized group
called Movimento Passe Livre, over a nominal
10 cent bus fare increase, brought the
country virtually to a halt and turned very
violent. The protests bore the hallmark
of typical “Color Revolution” or Twitter
social media destabilizations that seem to
follow Biden wherever he makes a presence.
Within weeks Rousseff’s popularity plummeted
to 30%.
Washington had clearly sent a signal that
Rousseff had to change course or face
serious problems. The Washington regime
change machine, including its entire array
of financial warfare operations ranging from
a leaked PwC audit of Petrobras to Wall
Street credit rating agency Standard &
Poors’ downgrade of Brazil public debt to
junk in September 2015, went into full
action to remove Rousseff, a key backer of
the BRICS New Development Bank and of an
independent national development strategy
for Brazil.
Selling the Crown Jewels
The
man who has now manipulated himself into the
Presidency, the corrupt Michel Temer, worked
as an informer for Washington the entire
time. In documents released by Wikileaks, it
was revealed that Temer was an informant to
US intelligence since at least 2006, via
telegrams to the US embassy in Brazil
classified by the Embassy as “sensitive” and
“for official use
only.”
Washington’s man in Brazil, Temer, has lost
no time appeasing his patrons in Wall
Street. Even as acting President this May,
Temer named Henrique Meirelles as Minister
of Finance and Social Security. Meirelles, a
Harvard-educated former President of the
Brazilian central bank, was President of
BankBoston in the USA until 1999, and was
with that bank in 1985 when it was found
guilty of failing to report $1.2 billion in
illegal cash transfers with
Swiss banks. Meirelles is now overseeing
the planned selloff of Brazil’s “crown
jewels” to international investors, a move
that is intended to gravely undercut the
power of the state in the economy. Another
of Temer’s key economic advisers is Paulo
Leme, former IMF economist and now Goldman
Sachs Managing Director of Emerging
Markets Research. Wall Street is in the
middle of the Temer-led economic rape of
Brazil.
On
September 13, Temer’s government unveiled a
massive privatization program with the
cynically misleading comment, “It is clear
the public sector cannot move forward alone
on these projects. We are counting on the
private
sector.” He omitted to say the private
sector he meant were his patrons.
Temer
unveiled plans that would complete the
country’s largest privatization in decades.
Conveniently, the process us to be completed
by end of 2018, just before Temer’s term
must end. The influential US-Brazil Business
Council detailed the privatization list on
its website. The US-Brazil Business Council
was founded forty years ago by Citigroup,
Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemicals and other
US multinationals.
Tenders for the first round of concessions
will be issued before the end of this year.
They will include privatization of four
airports and two port terminals, all
auctioned in the first quarter of 2017.
Other concessions include five highways, one
rail line, bidding on small oil blocks and a
later round for large, mainly offshore, oil
development blocks. As well the government
will sell selected assets currently
controlled by its Minerals Research
Department plus six electric power
distributors and three water treatment
facilities.
The
heart of his planned privatization are, not
surprisingly, Joe Biden’s coveted state oil
and gas companies along with chunks of the
state Eletrobrás power company. Temer plans
to get as much as $24 billion from the
selloff. Fully $11 billion of the total are
to come from sale of key oil and gas state
holdings. Of course, when state assets such
as huge oil and gas resources are sold off
to foreign interests in what will clearly be
a distress sale, it is a one-off deal. State
oil and gas or electric power projects
generate a continuing revenue stream many
times any one-off privatization
gains. Brazil’s economy is the ultimate
loser in such privatization. Wall Street
banks and multinationals are of course, as
planned, the winner.
On
September 19-21, according to the US-Brazil
Business Council website, the Brazilian
government’s key ministers for
infrastructure including Minister Moreira
Franco; Minister Fernando Bezerra Coelho
Filho, Minister of Mines and Energy; and
Minister Mauricio Quintella Lessa, Minister
of Transport, Ports and Civil Aviation, will
be in New York City to meet with Wall Street
“infrastructure investors.”
This
is Washington’s way, the way of the Wall
Street Gods of Money, as I title one of my
books. First, destroy any national
leadership intent on genuine national
development such as Dilma Rousseff. Replace
them with a vassal regime willing to do
anything for money, including selling the
crown jewels of their own nation as people
like Anatoli Chubais did in Russia in the
1990’s under Boris Yeltsin’s “shock
therapy.” As reward for his behavior,
Chubais today sits on the advisory board of
JP MorganChase. What will Temer and
associates get for their efforts remains to
be seen. Washington for now has broken one
of the BRICS that ultimately threaten her
global hegemony. It is not likely to bring
any lasting success if recent history is any
guide.
F. William Engdahl is
strategic risk consultant and lecturer,
he holds a degree in politics from Princeton
University and is a best-selling author on
oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the
online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook.” |
