responsiblestatecraft.org
Is it not the whole reason behind the CIA? They've been doing this since their inception.The State Department has NOT been busy...
15 US-backed officers had hand in 12 West African coups
But the State Department doesn’t know anything about it — or doesn’t want to. Why?
They developed a taste for it with Hitler's war.
I am extremely unconcerned about human extinction. We are a very widespread and numerous species. The risks of AI, Nuclear War and Climate Change may be great but it seems doubtful that it will approach anything that dire. Not that it matters if you arent one of the survivors
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,This thought has been niggling at me for a while.
It was a little while ago that I ran across the factoid that Saudi Arabia finally abolished slavery in 1962. That is pretty recent history. It is in my lifetime and it is in the lifetime of King Salman of Saudi Arabia. He was born in 1935. In 1962 he was 27. In 1963 he was named Governor of Riyadh, a role he apparently held for 48 years.
Salman of Saudi Arabia - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Think of that for a minute. The current King of Saudi Arabia grew up in a country where slavery was the norm and had been the norm for millenia. Slaves were part of the financial portfolio of the locals.
Slavery in Saudi Arabia - Wikipedia
As a Brit of a certain age I was raised on tales of Wilberforce, Newton, Amazing Grace, Somersett, Knight, Kames and Dundas and Napier. The abolition of slavery was the key accomplishment of the Enlightenment and it established the difference between the civilized and the rest.
In 1962, as a British kid, slavery was literally a relic of the history books.
And yet, in Saudi Arabia, slavery continued as it had for millenia. It was the norm. Just as it had been in most of the world prior to Wilberforce, Newton, Kames, Dundas and Napier. And it was the strength of that impetus that drove the West Africa Squadron and the missionaries like David Livingstone. It also drove successive British governments, from the 1850s onwards, to actively intervene in slaving countries, like Benin and The Gambia, like Zanzibar and Kenya, like Oman and India, and like China, to eliminate the slave trade.
But...
When Britain outlawed slavery in its colonies it bought the slaves from the slave-owners out of the treasury. The government was well endowed with tobacco and sugar money as well as from the sales of the new Bolton-Watts steam engines that were putting slaves out of work in any case.
Even Gladstone had his hand out wanting to be paid for his father's slaves in the colonies. Dundas was only following the protocol established in Scotland where Scottish coal slaves (white guys with black faces that were tied to the coal mines) gained their freedom over a generation so that the mine owners wouldn't be out of pocket when they swapped slaves for steam.
Britain wasn't so nice to the rest of the slave owning community. It's moral position was imposed on every other nation by gun boat diplomacy and the occasional punitive expedition into Ashanti territory. It was the right thing to do.... but it destroyed the economies of countries all over the world. Countries that relied on slaves to turn cranks to lift water now had to pay those crankers in cash they didn't have. But which the Bank of England would be happy to loan them in return for a small fee. And, if they wanted to trade up they could buy a steam engine instead. Not sure where the slaves were going to go, where they were going to live and what they were going to eat but .... they would be free.
By 1962 Britain had made a fortune. And it had beggared a good chunk of the world in the process. Including Saudi Arabia.
But then it had lost its fortune in two world wars. And the people she had trampled on the way up..... were waiting on the way back down. And leading the pack were the Americans.
Not far behind were the uncivilized/third world/developing countries - including India, Africa and China, and Saudi Arabia.
Who still remember 1962.
Just as they remember 1956 when Britain was humiliated by the Egyptians and the US, 1960 and Harold MacMillan's Winds of Change speech in Africa and 1966 when Denis Healey withdrew from East of Suez because she was broke.
Whereupon Britain joined the EU in 1973 and the US got what it wanted.
Leaving ....
There and Back Again: The Fall and Rise of Britain’s ‘East of Suez’ Basing Strategy - War on the Rocks
“You can’t repeat the past,” Nick Carraway cautions in The Great Gatsby. The U.K. government today is flirting with that hypothesis as it reestablisheswarontherocks.com
And now we are heading back where we started.
One lifetime. Three generations. Long enough for everything to be forgotten.
Coincidentally, it seems that a sizeable contingent of retirees from my old regiment are running bars inThailandPattaya
www.telegraph.co.uk
This thought has been niggling at me for a while.
It was a little while ago that I ran across the factoid that Saudi Arabia finally abolished slavery in 1962. That is pretty recent history. It is in my lifetime and it is in the lifetime of King Salman of Saudi Arabia. He was born in 1935. In 1962 he was 27. In 1963 he was named Governor of Riyadh, a role he apparently held for 48 years.
Salman of Saudi Arabia - Wikipedia
Think of that for a minute. The current King of Saudi Arabia grew up in a country where slavery was the norm and had been the norm for millenia. Slaves were part of the financial portfolio of the locals.
Slavery in Saudi Arabia - Wikipedia
As a Brit of a certain age I was raised on tales of Wilberforce, Newton, Amazing Grace, Somersett, Knight, Kames and Dundas and Napier. The abolition of slavery was the key accomplishment of the Enlightenment and it established the difference between the civilized and the rest.
In 1962, as a British kid, slavery was literally a relic of the history books.
And yet, in Saudi Arabia, slavery continued as it had for millenia. It was the norm. Just as it had been in most of the world prior to Wilberforce, Newton, Kames, Dundas and Napier. And it was the strength of that impetus that drove the West Africa Squadron and the missionaries like David Livingstone. It also drove successive British governments, from the 1850s onwards, to actively intervene in slaving countries, like Benin and The Gambia, like Zanzibar and Kenya, like Oman and India, and like China, to eliminate the slave trade.
But...
When Britain outlawed slavery in its colonies it bought the slaves from the slave-owners out of the treasury. The government was well endowed with tobacco and sugar money as well as from the sales of the new Bolton-Watts steam engines that were putting slaves out of work in any case.
Even Gladstone had his hand out wanting to be paid for his father's slaves in the colonies. Dundas was only following the protocol established in Scotland where Scottish coal slaves (white guys with black faces that were tied to the coal mines) gained their freedom over a generation so that the mine owners wouldn't be out of pocket when they swapped slaves for steam.
Britain wasn't so nice to the rest of the slave owning community. It's moral position was imposed on every other nation by gun boat diplomacy and the occasional punitive expedition into Ashanti territory. It was the right thing to do.... but it destroyed the economies of countries all over the world. Countries that relied on slaves to turn cranks to lift water now had to pay those crankers in cash they didn't have. But which the Bank of England would be happy to loan them in return for a small fee. And, if they wanted to trade up they could buy a steam engine instead. Not sure where the slaves were going to go, where they were going to live and what they were going to eat but .... they would be free.
By 1962 Britain had made a fortune. And it had beggared a good chunk of the world in the process. Including Saudi Arabia.
But then it had lost its fortune in two world wars. And the people she had trampled on the way up..... were waiting on the way back down. And leading the pack were the Americans.
Not far behind were the uncivilized/third world/developing countries - including India, Africa and China, and Saudi Arabia.
Who still remember 1962.
Just as they remember 1956 when Britain was humiliated by the Egyptians and the US, 1960 and Harold MacMillan's Winds of Change speech in Africa and 1966 when Denis Healey withdrew from East of Suez because she was broke.
Whereupon Britain joined the EU in 1973 and the US got what it wanted.
Leaving ....
There and Back Again: The Fall and Rise of Britain’s ‘East of Suez’ Basing Strategy - War on the Rocks
“You can’t repeat the past,” Nick Carraway cautions in The Great Gatsby. The U.K. government today is flirting with that hypothesis as it reestablisheswarontherocks.com
And now we are heading back where we started.
One lifetime. Three generations. Long enough for everything to be forgotten.
Brexiteers have been vindicated after years of flawed economic propaganda
Far from being the basket case of Europe, we are doing better than Germany - but there’s much still to do
MATTHEW SINCLAIR3 September 2023 • 11:00am
It looks like the UK has not underperformed our European peers in recent years in the way earlier statistics suggested. Revised estimates from the Office for National Statistics show that the UK has instead been somewhere in the middle of the pack for big Western European economies with growth since the end of 2019 about the same as France and Italy and a bit better than in Germany.
The New York Times just last month was reporting claims that the UK had developed a reputation as a “bit of a basket case among major advanced economies since voting for Brexit” – one of a litany of articles lamenting the state of the country since the vote to leave the EU.
Hopefully they will report just as prominently on this much better news. But I am not holding my breath: for years now a toxic narrative has built up about Britain which has enabled rampant pessimism about our prospects. This hurts consumer and business confidence in an already challenging macroeconomic environment and encourages short-term politics. A corrective is long overdue to the fatalism that pervades too much institutional thinking here.
The UK has real advantages over its Western European peers. Whether that is strengths in financial and business services or the creative economy, we are well-positioned in many of the sectors that are growing fastest as economies everywhere mature. Our labour market is still better and freezes fewer people out, though too many people are out of employment since Covid.
But that does not mean everything is awesome. The position the UK finds itself in is still incredibly challenging. It’s just about as dire as the position of other large European economies, with outsized welfare states and high taxes in common. In an upcoming book, Chris Pope at the Manhattan Institute traces Europe’s high taxes (particularly on poor- and middle-income families) to fund increasingly unaffordable entitlements right back to the exceptional circumstances at the end of the war.
The perception of inevitably weak growth is too often an excuse for inaction on those kinds of long-standing challenges. The UK economy has been outperformed over years by the US, by fast-growing Eastern European economies and by East Asian success stories.
In the short-term, there were always going to be costs to Brexit with the transition out of the EU. Too many of the compensating opportunities for more flexible self-government have been neglected with politicians instead empowering an administrative state.
This is happening at home, for example with draconian new powers for regulators to intervene in digital markets. It is happening internationally, for example giving up the right to set our own corporate tax policy to the OECD, a right governments of all parties defended against EU encroachment when we were a Member State.
It is remarkable that the UK has done as well as it has with the terrible obstacles that politicians have put in the way of building things here. It can take seven years or more to get a grid connection for a new industrial facility. Tens of thousands of street-by-street permits to install fast broadband. As well as delaying new services, that drives up the cost of infrastructure. Britain Remade has found that the UK is taking longer and therefore spending far more per mile of road or track. We are working with weaker infrastructure as a result.
We can take on these problems more effectively if we are clear about the issues in front of us: the UK is not condemned to be a basket case compared to our European peers; no that does not mean that our economic performance is good enough. Growth means opportunities, stagnation means our best and brightest looking abroad. Now we have a more accurate picture of what has been going on in the UK economy, there is a fresh opportunity to lift our ambition and get out of the low growth club.
www.telegraph.co.uk
How Emmanuel Macron became the most powerful leader in Europe
France is exploiting a power vacuum to mould the Continent in its image
BySzu Ping Chan3 September 2023 • 10:00am
France’s love affair with trade barriers stretches back more than a century, ranging from the Méline tariff in 1892 that slapped taxes on imported foods to jibes about the country’s so-called “strategic yoghurt” policy in 2005 when Danone faced a US takeover threat. (Edit: Go back further through Colbert to Phillip II's war on Lombards, Jews and Templars to find enough gold to finance his authority)
Paris’ international trade policy is now ceded to a bigger club: the European Union. But rather than watering down the protectionist impulses of the Élysée Palace, membership has allowed Emmanuel Macron to pursue the policies on a bigger stage.
Only this time the French president has declared that it’s not France first, but Europe – with Paris very much in the driver’s seat.
“The main source for EU protectionism is the Élysée Palace in Paris and Emmanuel Macron who represents a very Gaullist type of idea of political control over the economy,” says Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), in Brussels.
In the 2010s, Berlin was the centre of EU power, with Paris and London providing a counterbalance. Germany, with its close economic ties to China, and Britain, with its vibrant international financial sector, favoured open trade, while France was more focused on protecting its national champions.
But with Britain now out of the EU and German power weakened as its economy struggles, France is exploiting a power vacuum to mould the EU in its image.
In Macron’s eyes, the bloc should focus on sovereignty above trade and relax EU restrictions to allow lavish support for domestic industries.
Macron’s vision of a sovereign Europe was first articulated in a speech delivered six years ago at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
In it, he called for a bigger EU budget, a complete banking union and even a European army. He knew others would baulk at the idea of endowing Brussels with even more power.
“Some will tell you it’s not the right moment. But it’s never the right moment,” he told the audience seated in the Sorbonne’s ostentatious amphitheatre.
It seems now his time has come. The clearest recent example of Macron’s rising power is the French president’s decision to publicly intervene in the appointment of American economist Fiona Scott-Morton as chief competition economist at the European Commission.
Macron called the appointment “dubious”, forcing Scott-Morton to turn the job down after she concluded her position would have been untenable. Scott-Morton told The Telegraph she blamed “insecure” France for the debacle.
Fiona Scott-Morton’s routine appointment quickly spiralled into a diplomatic furore CREDIT: Frederic Camallonga/Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Alexandre de Streel, a former Belgian diplomat and professor of European law at the University of Namur in Brussels, says: “What it says about Europe is that Macron was able to influence that kind of position, which shows his and France’s influence in the Commission.”
Macron’s star has risen after he played a pivotal role brokering a deal on Europe’s new leadership team in 2019 that placed Ursula Von der Leyen at its helm.
Her first speech as the European Commission’s president elect drew clear parallels with Macron’s speech at the Sorbonne. In it, she called for more collective action on a range of issues from climate to completing a banking union.
De Streel says: “I actually do this with my students - ask them to compare the texts.
“It’s almost as if she plagiarised parts of [Macron’s speech].”
Erixon says: “The Commission led by Von der Leyen has sought to drive up the amount of money that is going to be given in industrial subsidies. This is something that has been called for by France for ages: a muscular industrial policy that is going to sprinkle a lot of cash on favoured industries.”
“Sprinkle” is an understatement. Official figures show more than €650bn (£550bn) of state aid has been doled out since March 2022, when the rules were relaxed to allow national governments to subsidise “the manufacturing of strategic equipment” such as solar panels, batteries and heat pumps, as well as the production of key components and related critical raw materials.
Germany, desperate to support its industrial base, has been the biggest beneficiary, accounting for more than half of the subsidies doled out.
Together with France, the two biggest economies in Europe account for almost 80pc of all subsidies handed out so far.
One former Brussels diplomat says: “In the gap left by the UK, some had speculated that other non-euro members would step up with more clout advocating the UK’s less interventionist path.
“That did not happen, in my opinion. The Danes, Swedes and Poles did not fill that role. Instead, the German-French duopoly became more prominent. The French and Germans almost always discuss all EU issues amongst themselves before they come to the broader EU venues and they try hard to get on the same page.
“This gives them more power now than before Brexit because there isn’t a counterweight in the UK.”
Germany’s role in the relationship has been diminished in recent years as its attention has been focused elsewhere. Erixon says a “gradual weakening has accelerated under this German government, which is focused very much on its own energy transition because it was overwhelmed by its misjudgment of Russia”.
Meanwhile, a global trend towards protectionism has provided the perfect excuse for France to ramp up its rhetoric.
State-backed industrial policies such as Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 are attempts to create a future shaped by sovereignty and security.
The IMF says trade restrictions have “exploded” in the past five years, with subsidies the protectionist measure of choice.
Erixon says there are few willing to stand up to Paris.
“Many of these small economies are exhausted. They’re exhausted by the avalanche of interventionism that this Commission has come up with. Some of them have kept a low voice because they have been prioritising other issues.
“For the Nordics, like Finland and Sweden, if you look at what’s happening to the east of them you can see that priority number one for these countries is Nato membership. Priority number two is Nato membership and priority number three is Nato membership.”
De Streel suggests maintaining a power balance in Brussels is the key to the EU’s future.
He says: “I think Europe can only work if [France and Germany] are equally strong and equally influential in the political decision making, because they reflect two different cultures. “There is always this risk that one member state becomes too powerful and imposes their values to the detriment of the others. But I still think Germany is economically powerful enough to exert its influence so I’m not sure we are there yet.”
Erixon believes Europe is losing its focus on economic growth in pursuit of power and influence.
Yet the EU can ill-afford to ignore its economy in pursuit of international status to rival the United States. Recent research from the ECIPE found that European countries would rank among the poorest states in the US if they were part of the union.
Protectionism is even more problematic for the wider challenge of raising living standards, Erixon warns.
“There is nowhere through history where any country regulated their way to economic success. That’s not a way to create more prosperity.”
As Macron’s influence grows, it’s a warning other EU leaders may do well to heed.
www.telegraph.co.uk
