U.S. Government’s Global Hypocrisy Ridiculed

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US and its allies build a stage for human rights over innocent Afghan lives. Cartoon: Vitaly Podvitski

Written by Eric Zuesse

The U.S. Government holds in its prisons a higher percentage of its citizens than does any other government anywhere on the planet but accuses every national government that it seeks to overthrow and replace, of being a ‘police state’ (and therefore supposedly deserving to be overthrown and replaced). 

On 8 August 2022, one of the U.S. regime’s targets to conquer, China, headlined in its Global Times newspaper, “Report on human rights violations in Middle East exposes US’ barbarity, cruelty and hypocrisy”, and reported that

The China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS) on Tuesday released a report, revealing a series of crimes committed by the US in the Middle East and surrounding areas that have seriously violated the basic human rights of people and caused permanent damage and irreparable losses to countries and people in the regions. …

The report said that the US has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, arbitrary detention, torture of prisoners, and indiscriminate unilateral sanctions in the Middle East and surrounding areas. It is a usual practice of the superpower … to conduct unilateral cruel actions, including launching wars and imposing sanctions, to deal with its conflicts with foreign countries and regions, Chang Jian, a professor and director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Nankai University, told the Global Times on Tuesday. Under the disguise of democracy and human rights, the real intention of the US’ cruel actions against foreign countries and regions is purely to serve the interests of its domestic capital groups and its military-industrial complex, Chang noted.

However, China’s Government doesn’t yet have the international system set in place to ‘authenticate’ its accusations such as the U.S. regime has established for this purpose, of expanding the U.S. regime’s empire to include foreign countries, like Germany, Japan, France, and other such (U.S.-‘allied’, or vassal-nation) aristocracies, which benefit from associating themselves with America’s aristocracy (its billionaires) and from thus becoming enabled to form global oligopolies or cartels which will crush unaffiliated “upstart” competitors that can arise in the empire’s ‘enemy’ countries.

For example: one of the U.S. regime’s main agencies in order to extract wealth from countries that have resistent aristocracies (which in the U.S.-and-allied sphere are therefore called instead “oligarchies,” so as to distinguish them pejoritatively against their U.S.-and-allied equivalents) is Transparency International (TI). Agents of U.S. billionaires had actually established Transparency International at the very same time as they did the Washington Consensus (in 1993, by agents of the U.S.-created World Bank), as a means to rig the corruption-rankings of countries, so that the World Bank would be able to ‘justify’ charging higher interest rates to countries that America’s aristocracy aim to conquer (regardless of whether that conquest was by subversion — such as in Brazil — or else by sanctions, or by coup, or by military invasion).

There is also Reporters Without Borders, or Reporteurs sans frontières (RSF), which was founded in 1995, also by the aristocracies of U.S.-and-allied countries, in order to serve as a ‘press freedom’ component in the Rhodesist global-conquest scheme, since the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for their imperialism (the Cold War) needed now to be replaced, because communism had ended in 1991 in Russia. As-of 8 December 2017, at least, RSF’s list of “Our Supporters” consisted almost entirely of U.S.-and-allied corporations, foundations, and governments. RSF is just another version of TI (Transparency International, formed at around the same time and for the same reason), to sucker the public on a different ‘democratic’ and ‘human rights’ concern. Instead of TI’s “Corruption Perceptions Index” there is RSF’s “World Press Freedom Index.” Anything in order to hide the viciousness of the group’s actual aristocratic and imperialistic motivation and mission. Both RSF and TI are hoaxes, propaganda operations, not at all trustworthy.

This imperialistic squid has many tentacles. For example, in 2008, Oxford University Press published Rebuilding War-Torn States, by Dr. Graciana del Castillo, and with a Foreword by Nobel economics laureate Edmund S. Phelps. The book’s Introduction said that the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have been so bad for Iraq if only the U.N. had not “failed” to authorize it. This paean to U.S.-and-allied imperialism devoted a chapter to “9: UN-led reconstruction following US-led military intervention: Afghanistan”, and Dr. Castillo said there, on page 189, that:

“Private capital will not flow into the country — on the contrary, capital flight will continue — unless the security situation improves, electricity is restored, other basic infrastructure is built, a simple and non-corrupt legal and regulatory framework is in place, and human capital is upgraded. The earlier the economy shifts from reliance on foreign aid to trade and foreign investment, the better the peace transition’s outcome will be.”

Dr. Castillo’s obituary at Columbia University’s Center of Capitalism and Society said that “Graciana was Associate Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society from 2008 until late 2009. She was an economist with a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University and occupied prominent positions in several international organizations, including Director of Sovereign Ratings at Standard & Poor’s, where she helped alleviate economic crises in several countries.” So, she had been S&P’s top person deciding how high an interest-rate to charge the impoverished people of Afghanistan.

Wikipedia’s article concerning the Center on Capitalism and Democracy says the Center “seeks to determine the means by which a country can successfully achieve economic success through its ability to generate and develop sound commercial ideas. The Center’s work is based upon a theory of capitalism where entrepreneurs and financiers are the key actors and the discovery of viable ideas is the essential activity. The director is Professor of Economics and Nobel-Laureate Edmund Phelps.”

Of course Afghans might find that they can make lots more money farming opium than as “entrepreneurs and financiers.” But who cares about farmers? Does the Taliban?

“The Washington Consensus” is a “consensus” in hostility against whatever countries the U.S. Government wants to be regime-changed — to turn into an American colony. This “Consensus” is actually an imposed ‘consensus’. It’s a consensus against nations that disobey this ‘consensus’.

The very concept of the “Washington Consensus” was created in 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the communist Soviet Union, was unwilling to apply the amount of force that might hold the Soviet Union together, and the anti-communist Revolutions of 1989 in the Soviet Union and in China made clear that communism was about to end in at least the Soviet sphere (and transform in the Chinese sphere), and that consequently the American rationale for the Cold War — anti-communism — would soon end. So, America, having perpetrated many ‘anti-communist’ (but actually anti-independence, and in some cases even boldly anti-democracy) coups in Thailand 1948, Syria 1949, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, and many other lands, needed a changed ideological excuse, in order to continue building-out its empire (not yet called “the Washington Consensus”); so, the “Washington Consensus” became, itself, the new excuse. This ‘consensus’ of the U.S. and its allies consists in the imposition of “libertarian” or “neo-liberal” economic policies, as being an international obligation for countries in the “developing world” to accept and apply (often called “austerity,” because it is austerity for the masses of that underdeveloped country’s citizens, so that foreign investors can reap and even rape the profits from it). This ‘consensus’ became the new ideological excuse to extend the American empire. However, as the appeal of “neo-liberalism” began to wane (as a result of its increasingly bad international reputation), a new excuse was increasingly needed. “R2P,” or “Responsibility to Protect” the residents in other lands, became introduced, especially after around the year 2000, as the new, ‘humanitarian’, excuse for America and its vassal nations (‘allies’) to apply sanctions against, and even to invade and occupy, countries such as Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela — countries that, ‘just by coincidence’, happened to reject the Washington Consensus. This new excuse for America’s spending approximately half of the entire world’s annual military costs was more clearly putting forward the Washington Consensus as constituting the ‘real’ United Nations — the one that had a military force (and that didn’t have Russia, China, or any other recalcitrant nation, on any “Security Council”). It’s called, by the U.S.-and-allied regimes, “the rules-based international order” and is intended to replace the U.N. and its laws-based international order, by this American hegemony or global dictatorship, which will create its “rules” to replace existing international laws. R2P is to ‘justify’ the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire. The U.S. regime champions R2P as being a ‘humanitarian’ motivation behind such sanctions, coups, and invasions, for ‘regime-change’ against recalcitrant countries, such as Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela. The American anti-‘communist’ organization, Human Rights Watch, and the British anti-‘communist’ organization Amnesty International, now became especially prominent, as public endorsers of R2P.

The normally secretive AI issued “Amnesty International Limited (a company limited by guarantee) Report and financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2010”, which said: “The Directors are pleased to acknowledge the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Oak Foundation, Open Society Georgia Foundation, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Programme, Mauro Tunes and American Jewish World Service. The UK Department for International Development (Governance and Transparency Fund) continued to fund a four year human rights education project in Africa. The European Commission (EuropeAid) generously awarded a multi-year grant towards Amnesty International’s human rights education work in Europe.” On 6 January 2021, Investopedia headlined “Top Lockheed Martin Shareholders” (that’s the world’s largest arms-peddler) and reported that #1 was State Street Corporation at “42.2 million shares”; #2 was Vanguard Group at “22.0 million shares … representing 7.9% of shares outstanding”; and #3 was BlackRock at “17.2 million shares.” AI was PR for such corporations. (One of the main attractions of those huge mega-funds is to help submerge and hide whom the few controlling individual investors actually are, in order to enable those few people to control their empire anonymously, based upon mutual agreement amongst them.)

Often, however, subversion by the U.S. succeeded at conquest, without there even being any need to apply sanctions (or worse). R2P isn’t necessary for those types of operations — subversion. An example is Brazil, in regard to the ending of any functional democracy in Brazil and the imprisonment of the popular democratically elected President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) and replacement of him by a far-right regime. The U.S. regime, prominently including Joe Biden, did it, so as to extract from Brazil’s poor the money to pay to foreign investors to buy and strip that nation, in accord with the dictates of the IMF and the rest of the Washington ‘consensus’ (using the methods that the classic Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man described). By the time of 19 July 2017, the U.S. ‘Justice’ Department publicly admitted “It is hard to imagine a better cooperative relationship in recent history than that of the United States Department of Justice and the Brazilian prosecutors” who had rigged the ‘evidence’ that got President Lula thrown into prison. A remarkable article at Brasil Wire — which has been copied many times to the web archives — “Hidden History: The US ‘War On Corruption’ In Brasil”, documents (with 77 links) U.S. subversion, which had regained U.S. control of that country, by means of a coup that was a cooperative effort by the aristocracies of both the United States and Brazil. Subsequently, on 15 June 2019, The Intercept bannered “Glenn Greenwald Explains the Political Earthquake in Brazil Caused by Our Ongoing Exposés” and linked to, and described, how the anonymously supplied evidence that they had published had laid bare the rigging of the case against Lula that had transformed Brazil from being a budding democracy, into its present fascist regime — again into being a country that U.S.-and-allied billionaires can exploit virtually without limit. (It’s for reasons such as this that Greenwald became forced to leave the billionaire-backed The Intercept website.)

MORE ON THE TOPIC:

• America’s Deep State Is Its ‘Elected’ Government
• Western Liberals Act As The Thought Police Of American Imperialism When It Comes To The War In Ukraine

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