The world’s global bankers and purveyors of new world order dictates are relying on two weapons of mass destruction to achieve their ends: the increasingly-antiquated weapon of sanctions and the supranational financial organization-driven weapon of mandatory austerity.
For those nations that have refused to allow their economic futures to be decided by unelected bankers and international bureaucrats on far-away shores, sanctions continue to be the chosen method to force assimilation by the recalcitrant. These nations include Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Syria and Sudan . . . After Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was ousted and assassinated by NATO-financed Islamist guerrillas, Libya is now a member of the “club,” along with post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
For those countries that acceded to the international contrivances of free trade areas and common currency zones, it has been the WMD of austerity and budgets dictated by supranational entities like the European Union, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank that have ruled the day.
U.S. sanctions against Cuba are now engrained in the American body politic. Suggestions by American politicians that trade sanctions against an island that is 90 miles from Key West, Florida, are a Cold War anachronism and should be lifted are met with howls of protest from Cuban-American senators and representatives from southern Florida and New Jersey. The Cuban minority in the United States has emulated a much larger and wealthier minority, Jewish-American supporters of Israel, in their dual and often-coordinated stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy in order to placate a few at the expense of the many.
A recent Bloomberg News editorial indicated where much of Wall Street now leans on the issue of trade sanctions against Cuba. Bloomberg offered the following question: “Is Cuba really America’s most serious national security threat?” The media firm opined, “You might think so from the sanctions the U.S. imposes on it, which are more onerous than those on Iran and North Korea.”
Crippling American sanctions on Cuba resulted in the development of a homegrown health care capability that is now the envy not only of Latin America and the Caribbean but of many poor regions in the United States where adequate health care in non-existent. After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and environs in 2005, the United States was quick to reject a Cuban offer to send doctors and field hospitals to the stricken area lest Americans discover how much more advanced Cuban medicine was to their own second-rate health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and local care.
A decades-long American embargo on pharmaceutical products to Cuba resulted in Cuban researchers developing homeopathic medical products that have provided effective treatment for such diseases as leptospirosis, also known as swamp fever. Cuba also independently developed vaccines for polio, measles, cholera, meningitis-C, diphtheria, and tuberculosis.
EU, U.S., Japanese, and other sanctions on Iran have failed to cripple the nation’s economy as hoped for by the imposers of the trade blockade. The Tehran skyline is rife with construction cranes and although the immediate effect of financial sanctions imposed on Iranian banks drive up consumer prices, the land of the old Silk Road has managed to work around modern contrivances by reengaging old trade routes with the neighboring and friendly government of Iraq, majority Shi’a Tajikistan, and independent elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In addition, the leaders of the BRICS nations, meeting in Durban, South Africa, announced their opposition to Iranian economic sanctions. The emerging powerhouses of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa carry more weight than ever before as EU nations, the United States, Canada, and Japan struggle with austerity programs and severe budget cuts.
Cuba and Iran have been relative success stories in battling against the globalist WMD of economic sanctions. North Korea, for all of its bluster, worsening relations with South Korea, and imposition of retaliatory economic sanctions by the UN, still relies on the Rajin-Sonbong Special Economic Zone along the Chinese border to gain access to consumer goods and hard currency. And the surprising ace up North Korea’s sleeve is the secret relationship between the military clique that pulls the strings for Kim Jong-un and Israel’s military–intelligence complex. Israeli companies have signed contracts with the North to enhance the security fence along North Korea’s border with China. Israel, in fact, markets its wall technology that divides the West Bank to eager “wall builders” abroad.
The other globalist WMD, austerity, has had a devastating effect on Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and more recently, Cyprus . . . Central bankers at first tried to levy a ten percent tax on all Cypriot bank depositors’ savings. It then modified the plan to levy a 40 percent tax on savings accounts over $130,000. The many days of bank closures in Cyprus sent a shock wave through the Cypriot working class as well as throughout other countries that have been suffering from EU, World Bank, and IMF-dictated austerity programs and mandatory budget cuts that have drastically eroded social safety nets and pensions across Europe. The Bank of England followed the Cyprus fiasco by ordering British banks to raise $38 billion to offset future financial quakes. The scenes of working class Cypriots lining up at ATM machines to make government-capped withdrawals sent shivers through many parts of an already snowbound United Kingdom.
The Tory-Liberal Democratic Party coalition government then hit British citizens with an austerity sell-off shock: the Royal Air Force’s famed air/sea search-and-rescue helicopter service was going to be privatized with the contract going to Bristow Group, a Houston firm with close ties to the Texas oil business. Coastal communities bristled at the idea that life and death decisions would be based on profit motives. The Scottish National Party government in Edinburgh, which had just scheduled September 18, 2014 for an independence referendum, saw a new issue with which to convince Scots it is time to leave the embrace of the pin stripe-suited connivers of London and its sacrosanct “City” of secretive bankers.
Residents of Detroit also received a bitter taste of the globalists’ WMD of austerity when Michigan’s Republican Governor, Rick Snyder, appointed Kevyn Orr of the alligator shoe law firm Jones Day as emergency manager for the city that once served as the nexus for America’s automobile industry: Detroit. Emergency managers are the new globalist rage for the United States. Bypassing democratically-elected officials, emergency managers are empowered to cut salaries and pensions of municipal employees and can put city assets on the auction block to be gobbled up by vulture-like greedy investors who seek profits from publicly-owned property.
On the auction block in Detroit were the city-owned Belle Isle Park, an island in the Detroit River between the state of Michigan and Ontario, Canada; Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport; and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.
Americans were getting their first taste of European-style austerity. On the national front, President Obama and his alleged opponents on the Republican side were secretly having their aides meet to plot on ways to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Americans were discovering firsthand what it was like to see their public assets sold off to shyster billionaires in quick fire sales.
Throughout Europe, rail systems, highways, water and electric utilities, seaports, airports and airlines, state banks, oil companies, sports stadiums and arenas, public broadcasters, bridges, ferries, state lotteries, postal services, museums, palaces, parks, foreign embassies, government buildings, even entire islands—everything but the air we breathe—were being hawked to the top unsavory bidder who had dubious cash in hand.
Working class people in Detroit, Madrid, Nicosia, Athens, Lisbon and Rome now had much in common with people who continued to suffer from sanctions in cities like Tehran, Isfahan, Havana, and Cienfuegos. They also had a common enemy who would not hesitate to use the WMD of sanctions and austerity on innocent civilians.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required)
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