Gideon Polya — Britain Robbed India Of $45 Trillion & Thence 1.8 Billion Indians Died From Deprivation

Eminent Indian economist Professor Utsa Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University) has estimated that Britain robbed India of $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938, However it is estimated that if India had remained free with 24% of world GDP as in 1700 then its cumulative GDP would have been $232 trillion greater (1700-2003) and $44 trillion greater (1700-1950). Deprivation kills and it is estimated that 1.8 billion Indians died avoidably from egregious deprivation under the British (1757-1947). The deadly impact of British occupation of India lingers today 71 years after Independence, with 4 million people dying avoidably from deprivation each year in capitalist India as compared to zero (0) in China....

To say nothing of many other colonies of the Empire, or the submission of China.

CrossCurrents — Imperialism
Britain Robbed India Of $45 Trillion & Thence 1.8 Billion Indians Died From Deprivation

Gideon Polya

Moon of Alabama — Theresa May Says "Enough Is Enough" - We Agree - Remove Her From Office

Brits especially should read this. Good links. Pass it on.

Moon of Alabama
Theresa May Says "Enough Is Enough" - We Agree - Remove Her From Office

b

Felicity Arbuthnot — The Betrayal of Syria - The US, France and Britain’s UN Ambassadors at the United Nations

The US is the current imperial power in the region while France and Britain are the former imperial powers there.

Katehon
Felicity Arbuthnot: The Betrayal of Syria - The US, France and Britain’s UN Ambassadors at the United Nations

Rakesh Krishna Simha — How the West used radical Islam and unleashed global terror

Western nations have backed fundamentalist forces at the expense of secular, nationalist Muslims. With western funding and support, the Islamic fringe has come to occupy the mainstream.…

How it all began.

“The British Empire had an overprotective attitude toward Islam,” writes Nu’man Abd Al-Wahid of the Lebanon-based Al-Akhbar.

Considering that Britain was one of the prime culprits in the destabilisation of Iran in the 1950s and is behind the devastation of Iraq, Libya and Syria in more recent times, one would be tempted to take the view the British are anti-Muslim. But in fact they are only opposed to nationalist Muslims and the moderate middle classes.

Al-Wahid explains: “When the Empire began to consolidate its lordship over the Arab world after World War I, it partnered with Saudi Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. The trends these movements represented were not so much ‘invented’ by the British but favoured and promoted.

"Before the British allowed the Wahhabis to establish themselves in Riyadh in 1901, they were an isolated, exiled cult in the Basra region known as ‘Kuwait’. With further support from the Empire, the Wahhabis expanded into the western part of the Arabian peninsula in 1924 and 1925.”

The British advocated the Muslim Brotherhood brand of Islam rather than the traditional moderate Islam as practised by the oldest university in the Islamic world, Al-Azhar.

“The British Empire...heroically and selflessly defended Islam, even if al-Azhar, the traditional bastion of Islamic learning in the world, didn’t comprehend this urgency. By the time these two major trends of Islamism strategically coalesced in the 1950s to meet the challenge of third world independence and socialism, the Americans had embraced the British Empire’s imperialist strategy.”

“This embrace meant bringing British puppets, such as the al-Saud clan of Saudi Arabia and the Thani clan of Qatar, under its protective umbrella. This American appropriation of the puppets had initially gained doctrinal credibility through the Eisenhower doctrine and extended all the way until the 1980s to support the Islamist mercenaries, or mujahideen, against the Soviets in the 1980s.”

Downhill from there.

During the Carter administration, under the influence of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US began to employ Wahhabi, Salafi, Takfiri mujahideen as "freedom fighters" and used them subsequently in  proxy wars — until the mujahideen turned on them. But the mujahideen presented too good an opportunity to give up entirely so the US still incorporates them.

However, the desire to play cynical geopolitical games is too strong in the West. In most cases western politicians and generals are way over their heads in events they cannot begin to understand, let alone control. Meanwhile, the battle is spilling over into the streets of Europe and occasionally the United States. The West’s ‘Freudian Bargain’ is clearly coming unstuck.

Russia & India Report
How the West used radical Islam and unleashed global terror
Rakesh Krishnan Simha

There they go again. Jerks at S&P and Fitch downgrade Britain's credit rating.

Haven't we seen this movie before?

Remember when the idiots at S&P downgraded the U.S. credit rating in 2011? I was on TV that morning and was pounding the table telling people to buy Treasuries.

Now you have the same idiot, S&P, plus a new idiot, Fitch, downgrading Britain's credit rating because of Brexit.

Hey you morons at the credit rating agencies...a sovereign nation that spends in its own currency and where all its obligations are denominated in that currency cannot become insolvent. There can never be an inability to pay its debts.

What idiots.

Buy gilts.

Manila Dinucci — Nuclear Escalation in Europe

For all you folks living in the vicinity.

Since reagan announced Star Wars and G. W. Bush unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty, things nuclear have been headed down the slippery slope. Now process is accelerating.

Voltaire Network
Nuclear Escalation in Europe
Manlio Dinucci

Nafeez Ahmed — Britain’s secret ties to governments, firms behind ISIS oil sales

Key allies in the US and UK led war on Islamic State (ISIS) are covertly financing the terrorist movement according to senior political sources in the region. US and British oil companies are heavily invested in the murky geopolitical triangle sustaining ISIS’ black market oil sales.

The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Turkish military intelligence have both supported secret ISIS oil smuggling operations and even supplied arms to the terror group, according to Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish officials.

One British oil company in particular, Genel Energy, is contracted by the KRG to supply oil for a major Kurdish firm accused of facilitating ISIS oil sales to Turkey. The Kurdish firm has close ties to the Iraqi Kurdish government.

Genel operates in the KRG with the backing of the British government, and is also linked to a British parliamentary group with longstanding connections to both the British and KRG oil industries.

The relationship between British and Kurdish energy companies, and senior British politicians, raises questions about conflicts of interest — especially in the context of a ‘war on terror’ that is supposed to be targeting, not financing, the ‘Islamic State.’…

Of course, the Western explanation is that ISIS is selling the oil to Assad.

Worse —

“Turkey has sponsored Islamist groups in Syria, including ISIS, since the beginning, and continues to do so. The scale of ISIS smuggling operations across the Turkish-Syrian border is huge, and much of it is facilitated with the blessings of Erdogan and Davitoglu, who see the Islamists as the means to expand the Turkish foothold in the region.”

Insurgent Intelligence
Britain’s secret ties to governments, firms behind ISIS oil sales
Nafeez Ahmed

Jaume Ventura and Hans-Joachim Voth

Is debt really that bad? This column looks at the towering debts, rapid tax hikes, and constant state of war that led to Britain’s Industrial Revolution, showing that the devil is in the detail when assessing sovereign debt. When we consider the dangers of debt in today’s world, we should keep an eye on its potential benefits as well.

vox.eu
Debt miracle: Why the country that borrowed the most industrialised first
Jaume Ventura, Senior Researcher, CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra; International Macroeconomics Programme Director, CEPR, and Hans-Joachim Voth, Chair of Development and Emerging Markets at the Economics Department, Zurich University and CEPR Research Fellow

ht Ralph Musgrave

The Greanville Post — Britain must pay reparations to India—and possibly others she victimised

Refresher course in colonialism. Some interesting history here — a truly disgusting tale. Churchill may not have been Stalin, but.…...

At the beginning of the 18th Century, India’s share of the world economy was 23%, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to less than 4%.

The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

By the end of the 19th Century, India was Britain’s biggest cash-cow, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants – all at India’s own expense.

And then there was that opium "trade" forced on China at gunpoint.

The Greanville Post
Britain must pay reparations to India—and possibly others she victimised
Staff

WikiLeaks — US, Saudis Planned to Topple Syria's Assad in 2012

Saudi Arabia, the United States, France, and Britain were involved in a secret 2012 deal to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Sunday. 

RELATED: Saudi Cables: We Have Ten Times More, Says Wikileaks ​"Saudi has been one of the dogs of the United States in the Middle East on a leash, and you think the man is walking a dog, but sometimes, if it is a big dog, the dog starts pulling a man," Assange told Russia 1 TV. 

Last week, Assange’s whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released a batch of more than 60,000 of what it said were classified Saudi diplomatic cables. ​The leak aimed to prove that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey had a secret deal to topple Syria’s President Bashar Assad as far back as 2012.

teleSUR
WikiLeaks: US, Saudis Planned to Topple Syria's Assad in 2012

Telegraph — George Osborne spearheads assault to stop Greece 'suicide'

Elite freak out underway as Sampson Syriza pulls down the pillars. Shades of Lehman looming.

George Osborne on Monday led attempts to strong-arm Greece into voting for a bail-out package as he warned that a Greek exit would threaten Britain’s financial stability.
Britain joined Germany, France, Italy and the European Commission in telling the Greek people that refusing austerity measures in next Sunday’s referendum would catapult them “from the eurozone and from Europe".

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, warned the Greeks – who are on Tuesday night expected to default on a €1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – not to “commit suicide” by rejecting the proposed €12 billion loans-for-reforms package. The threat comes despite voters being asked only whether they support the bail-out.

Some £36 billion was wiped off the value of major British companies on the FTSE 100 as markets slid around the world, while Greeks queued in their thousands at cash machines, petrol stations and supermarkets for a third day....

Hold strong Syriza. Democracy is working.

Best line:

Greece on Monday published the ballot paper for Sunday’s vote, with No, or Oxi, at the top. The word carries powerful resonance in Greece from the day in October 1940 when it refused Mussolini’s ultimatum.

If this weren't so pitiful, I'd be laughing. The eurocrats are getting what they deserve. And no, they are still not willing to compromise one inch. That's the real neoliberalism on display. It's like catching a monkey by putting a banana in pot. The monkey grasps the banana and won't let go, so it is caught by its own greed.

The Telegraph
George Osborne spearheads assault to stop Greece 'suicide'

Matthew Holehouse, Brussels, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Justin Huggler, Berlin and Steven Swinford

Mark Fleming-Williams — China: The Next United States?

Stratfor's economic assessment of US-China rivalry.

EconMatters
China: The Next United States?
Mark Fleming-Williams, Stratfor Global Intelligence

Stuart Leavenworth — How Britain failed to ensure democracy in a China-ruled Hong Kong

Paradoxically, Great Britain never introduced democracy to Hong Kong; the governor was appointed by London and there were no elections.…

McClatchy
How Britain failed to ensure democracy in a China-ruled Hong Kong

Stuart Leavenworth | McClatchy Foreign Staff

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/10/27/244820/how-thatcher-failed-to-ensure.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/10/27/244820/how-thatcher-failed-to-ensure.html#storylink=cpy

Lambert Strether — False Flag?

Pushing Ukraine to the Brink Counterpunch (bwilli123). Fun read from July 9. Because it would be irresponsible not to speculate:

[A]ll Putin has to do is sit-tight and he wins, mainly because the EU needs Moscow’s gas. If energy supplies are terminated or drastically reduced, prices will rise, the EU will slide back into recession, and Washington will take the blame. So Washington has a very small window to draw Putin into the fray, which is why we should expect another false flag incident on a much larger scale than the fire in Odessa. Washington is going to have to do something really big and make it look like it was Moscow’s doing. Otherwise, their pivot plan is going to hit a brick wall.

Then again, we could be looking at opportunists taking advantage of a happy accident! That said, it does make one wonder whether the Dutch being self-sufficient in gas could have formed part of the realpolitik….

Anyone who didn't think of this before reading the Counterpunch article either wasn't paying attention or is not much of an analyst, especially based on the history of Washington and London's black ops stretching back at least to the overthrow of democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh and install at of the domestically repressive but US compliant regime of the Shah in the Iranian coup of 1953 — to which the CIA has recently admitted (Operation Ajax) and the overthrow and murder of democratically elected Salvador Allende and his replacement by US compliant dictator Augusto Pinochet. Only fools would not suspect another false flag operation to accomplish the same "dirty tricks" in the Ukraine, given that Washington and the US intelligence service were involved in the overthrow of democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Anyone see a pattern of thuggery here?

This is particularly suspect in the rush to judgment in blaming Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian "rebels," who are actually fighters in a civil war that is raging, and branding them as terrorists. Russia had no motivation to do this, and in fact, the strategy it has been pursuing is contrary to it. Nor did the Ukrainian opposition have anything to gain by it. On the other hand, there is a strong motivation on the part of both the Ukrainian government and the United States, both of which have a lot to gain in provoking Moscow to react.

Not rushing to judgment here. Let's wait for an investigation if one ever transpires. Jus' saying'.

Naked Capitalism
Links 7/20/14
Lambert Strether

Lambert documents it in The Mystery of Flight MH17: Motives, Missiles, Flight Plans, and the Media

Wonkish, but your future depends on the outcome of this. Russia is neither an Iran of 1953 nor Chile of 1973. Nor is it just another minor nuclear state like NK. The Russian military can inflict terminal damage on CONUS (military jargon for continental US).

British government getting ready to use water cannons against the very citizens it's stealing from

Britain has purchased a bunch of  water cannons to use on its citizens should they decide to protest the dismantling of their social safety nets or otherwise wholesale looting of their wages, pensions, education, health care and housing.

(Here in the U.S. law enforcement doesn't pussy foot around with water cannons. Police departments have tanks.)

This would be the first time ever that Britain has employed these devices. More humane, perhaps, than teargas and rubber bullets or outright head smashing with batons some would say. What's not humane or moral or just is the  policy of granting massive welfare benefits to the rich and big business in the form of tax breaks, privatizations and interest payments.

Let's also not forget the total immunity that is given to the financial predators (i.e. the entire class of finance capitalists) who are routinley caught rigging markets, trading on inside information or, blowing up the economy with outrageous speculative bets, leaving poor stiff working class British taxpayers on the hook. (Some of the very same taxpayers who will be on the receiving end of those water cannons.)

And, yes, the spending cuts and austerity "needed" to make the predators whole are nothing more than tax increases on the working class and poor.

But, hey, at least those downtrodden masses won't be dirty. They'll get a nice shower from the water cannons.

Alert — Freedom of the press under attack?

Guardian journalist Luke Harding says paragraphs of his writing mysteriously disappeared while working on his latest book 'The Snowden Files.'

Bizarre. Much more to the story than the headline implies. 

Transcript of Amy Goodman's interview of The Guardian's Luke Harding.

AlterNet
'The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete': Did NSA Hack Snowden Biographer's Computer?
Amy Goodman | Democracy Now!

Bill Mitchell — Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 7

I am now using Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to complete the text during 2013 (to be ready in draft form for second semester teaching). Comments are always welcome. Remember this is a textbook aimed at undergraduate students and so the writing will be different from my usual blog free-for-all. Note also that the text I post is just the work I am doing by way of the first draft so the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change once the two of us have edited it.



Previous parts:

▪ Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 1

▪ Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 2

▪ Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 3

▪ Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 4

▪ Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 5

▪ Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 6

Case Study – The British IMF loan in 1976

The demise of the Bretton Woods system

[SHORT SECTION THAT FOLLOWS REPEATS THE LAST FEW PARAGRAPHS FROM LAST WEEK TO PROVIDE CONTEXT]

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Case Study – British IMF loan 1976 – Part 7
Bill Mitchell – billy blog

Giancarlo Corsetti and Luca Dedola — Is the euro a foreign currency to member states?

Spain and Britain have similar debt problems. So why does Spain face far higher sovereign-interest rates? Is this only about Eurozone membership? This column argues that Eurozone membership does not fully explain this discrepancy and that, in fact, it is central banks which cannot provide an effective backstop to national debt that are the root cause of high sovereign-interest rates. Eurozone members are more vulnerable to debt crises to the extent that the ECB cannot count on the joint support of national fiscal authorities.

VOX.eu
Is the euro a foreign currency to member states?
Giancarlo Corsetti, Professor of Macroeconomics, University of Cambridge and Programme Director, CEPR, and Luca Dedola, Adviser in the Directorate General Research, European Central Bank; Research Affiliate, CEPR

Ian Welch — Assange and Wikileaks: the basics

"The Assange Affair" will go down in history along with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, only much bigger in significance and with broader import globally.

IanWelch.net
Assange and Wikileaks: the basics

Ian Welch