EUROPEAN UNION

PEPE ESCOBAR—Washington’s wishful thinking cum P.R. offensive boils down to selling itself as the primus inter pares of the West as a revitalized global leader. Why the Global South is not buying it can be observed, graphically, by what happened for the past eight years. The G7 – and especially the Americans – simply could not respond to China’s wide-ranging, pan-Eurasian trade/development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The American “strategy” so far – 24/7 demonization of BRI as a “debt trap” and “forced labor” machine – did not cut it. Now, too little too late, comes a G7 scheme, involving “partners” such as India, to “support”, at least in theory, vague “high-quality projects” across the Global South: that’s the Clean Green Initiative , focused on sustainable development and green transition, to be discussed both at the G7 and the US-EU summits. Compared to BRI, Clean Green Initiative hardly qualifies as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. BRI has been endorsed and partnered by over 150 nation-states and international bodies – and that includes more than half of the EU’s 27 members.

RON RIDENOUR—These so-called “social democrats”, who are usually referred to as “socialists” by the likes of wishy washy Bernie Sanders, even “communists” by the likes of Donald Trump and other Republicans, are the most endearing Danish politician lap dogs, even more so than the more honest bourgeois politician hawks, who openly swear never-ending loyalty to the United States no matter what.

Another irony is that Denmark’s media, both DR and daily newspapers, did not even cover the extradition trial of Julian Assange in England—nor do they support him. Apparently, Danish media is afraid to back up an active publisher who reveals how the U.S. spies upon any and all, as well as conducting aggressive wars for self-interest profiteering. Yet DR has published a Danish whistleblower’s expose of its own government spying for Big Daddy.

The EU’s vassalage to Washington cannot get much more repugnant than this. Laughable, too. Rarely has a onetime powerful and proud civilisation degenerated so far and so quickly into abject kowtowism, cowardice and rank stupidity.

DAVID GAMBLE—A common enemy unifies people. While the Yellow Vest protests have underscored the economic and financial crises of capitalism as they rally against austerity and privilege, a gasoline tax and inequities, the traumatised French population gathered en masse in unified nationalism.  They confronted the Muslim enemy, alleged radical separatism which, in some aspersions, is somehow leftist Islamo gauchisme.  What, then, is left of solidarity of the Arab working class with the general population? They have been dismissed with a word in the current rightward trend. The religious rights of Muslims need to be included. This is not limited just to Muslim students but to Arab workers who compose 3.3% of the French population.

Since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 the US dollar had become the global currency – a pure fiat currency without any gold backing – and had been used widely and routinely by other states as international reserves; as monies circulating in the dollarized countries; and as a means of payment in international trade. Ever since the US had allowed its currency to float freely the US trade balance has been negative. Surplus European countries, but which also included Japan, had earned US dollars which at one time had only been redeemable in gold payments by the US. But this arrangement ended when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in August 1971. From this time on the surplus countries could only swap their dollars for US Treasury Bills, that is to say, American debt.

In this way the US has appropriated real goods and services from the surplus countries and exported debt back to those same countries.