- One of the key distinctions between a capitalist and
a non-capitalist (socialist, feudal, absolutist state) economy is the separation
of state and private enterprise. In a capitalist state, economic enterprises
are supposed to operate according to market principles, seeking to maximize
profits and expand market shares. The state is supposed to act on behalf
of capitalist enterprises, ensuring their protection and furthering their
pursuit of profits and markets.
-
- Recent history of foreign relations provides ample evidence
that the reverse is true: private corporations, especially banks have
been converted into adjuncts of the US state , serving as transmission
belts of US military policy, by sacrificing markets, profits and opportunities
for future economic growth.Another important reason for keeping US multinational
corporations out of a country. Moreover, the state both in the US and Europe
have seized billions in private investment funds and dispossessed their
owners, in the process scuttling major financial transactions adversely
affecting the biggest Western financial houses.
-
- The dispossession of private capitalists and the harnessing
of private firms to state policy have grown in scope and depth over the
current decade, revealing the growing subordination of private capitalism
to a militarist imperialist state. Sacrificing private profits and free
markets to the edicts of state officials has been implemented via state
coercion and severe sanctions against any transgressors.
-
- How and why the world's biggest propagandist of "free
enterprise" and de-regulated capitalism has successfully converted
major international financial and industrial enterprises into tools of
foreign policy at enormous costs to their bottom line is yet an untold
story. Given the enormity of the historical change in the relation between
state and market, the shift in power has enormous consequences for peace,
prosperity and freedom.
-
- How the State Dominates "the Market": The
Historical Context
-
- Beginning in the 1990's under President Clinton and
escalating under Bush and Obama, the US imperial state imposed economic
sanctions first in Iraq and later on Iran and more recently on Libya.
In effect the state dictated to its petroleum multi-nationals and biggest
banks that they should sacrifice lucrative investment opportunities, ongoing
profits and markets to serve imperial state interests. Billions of dollars
were lost during the 1990's, in the face of Iraq sanctions, forcing many
US oil companies to engage clandestine "third party" intermediaries,
to secure a reduced share of the petrol market. The imperial state imposed
severe penalties fines, jailing's and exclusion from the US market
to any of the CEOs and private corporations that did not abide by
the sanctions. Clearly the state was in command; the corporate ruling
class became the executive committee of the imperial state.
-
- The sanctions policy applied to the Middle East under
Clinton was only the beginning; it was deepened and vastly expanded under
Presidents Bush and Obama, especially after 2004.
-
- The Levey Levy: How American Zionists Freeze Financial
Profits
-
- In 2004 a little noticed administrative add-on in the
US Treasury Department took place that has had world historic significance:
AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) pressured Treasury to
create the position of "Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial
Intelligence". Equally important, under strong pressure from AIPAC,
a zealous Zionist of immense energy, Stuart Levey was appointed to head
the new agency.
-
- Levey used all the administrative mechanisms in the Treasury,
from threats of penalties, fines and ostracism, to friendly and hostile
persuasion, to line up US federal and state public and private pension
funds to sacrifice lucrative investments in targeted countries, most of
whom, lo and behold, were adversaries of Israeli occupation of Palestine.
-
- Even as Levey was imposing state constraints over the
operations of private investors in the US, he organized his entire staff
to police the financial world abroad. Levey and his Zionist allies in
the so-called "Israel lobby" called on their Congressional cronies
to approve sanction policies which not only affected US banks, manufacturers
and construction companies but which penalized any European, Asian and
Middle Eastern bank which had economic dealings with Iran and other countries
on his list (Cuba, North Korea among others).
-
- Levey extended the sanctions to cover firms and investors
with even indirect economic ties to the US: his secret financial police
located funds which passed from one private bank to another which had tangential
links to US banks and Levey applied and secured hundreds of millions in
fines against Swiss, Chinese (Macao) English and other banks. Effectively
the US imperial state via its Undersecretary of Treasury, harnessed the
entire world's financial system to serve US and Israeli foreign policy.
Levey is explicit about his role in creating a state within a state.
"The US Treasury is the only Treasury in the world with a fully functioning
intelligence office." He might have added that the US Treasury is
the only
-
- Treasury in the world which sacrifices the economic
interests of its private investors and those of its allies in pursuit of
the interests of a foreign power (Israel).
-
- The Levey regime by leveraging ties with private US
financial institutions and access to US markets, effectively controls the
financial transactions and market operations of European, Asian and Middle
Eastern private enterprises.
-
- What appears as merely a relatively minor administrative
post in Treasury has in fact created an administrative empire which has
effectively converted private international banking and manufacturing
corporations into instruments of US and Israeli policy.
-
- In office Levey engineered the seizure of billions of
dollars of overseas assets of private and public funds of adversaries.
One of his last moves before leaving office (march 2011) was to seize
$32 billion in Libyan funds using the pretext that the non-US bank to which
the funds were entrusted invested in US Treasury notes.
-
- Levey has clearly defined the new relation between private
capital (the market) and the State: "Governments around the world
(sic) see the power of these types of measures and the relevance of the
private sector to the overall [imperial] effort and that is something that
has changed in the last four or five years."(my emphasis) (Financial
Times, March 10, 2011, pg. 5).
-
- The "measures" that Levey refers to are the
state sanctions and the coercion and penalties applied to the private sector
to ensure their conformity with imperial and Israeli military interests
at the expense of profits and markets.
-
- The Visible Hand of the State
-
- Levey and his Zionist colleagues have ensured that his
"state within a State" will continue beyond his tenure in office.
He was succeeded by David Cohen, his former law firm partner and promoter
of the very same Israeli interests. Levey/Cohen have institutionalized
and set in stone the mechanisms to further imperial state control over
market operations .Cohen's appointment ensures the continuation of the
Zionist dynasty in the "State within the State".
-
- The biggest economic losers in the state centered "sanction"
policies pursued by Treasury (read Levey/Cohen) have been the international
banks, petroleum and gas companies and pension funds. The banks have lost
access to investment funds and lucrative management fees; the petroleum
companies have lost profits and access to oil fields. The military-industrial
complex has lost arms sales. The agro-exporters have lost markets in food
deficit oil producers. Who have been the "winners" certainly
not the Generals who are engaging in a third costly war when the sanctioners
decided to escalate to the 'military option', once their sanctions policies
failed to result in the overthrow of the Libyan regime.
-
- On the surface the main 'winners' of sanction policies
are their advocates in the White House, Congress, Treasury, the leaders
of the two major parties and the ideologues and Islamaphobes in the mass
media. And of course, the biggest winners of them all are Israel and their
Zionist power configuration embedded in the key agencies of Treasury, the
key committees in Congress, and
-
- their colleagues in the most influential Middle
East posts in the State Department (James Steinberg, Mark Grossman, Dennis
Ross, Jeffrey Feltman) and Treasury(Cohen)
-
- If one asks the logical question why doesn't Big Banking
or Big Petroleum make a fight over policies prejudicing their economic
interests and subjecting them to the harsh oversight of Levey/Cohen investigators
in Treasury, the most reasonable assumption is that they are not willing
to engage in a knockdown fight with three potent adversaries: the politically
influential Zionists in the government who design, implement and enforce
sanctions; their counterparts in the prestigious mass media who support
their policies and the 300,000 active members of the 52 major American
Jewish organizations who threaten to organize boycott campaigns. An implausible
assumption is that the bankers and oil majors have become altruistic and
patriotic and are willing to sacrifice billion dollar deals to serve our
"national security" as defined by Levey/Cohen and their cohorts
in AIPAC. When we speak of US 'sanction policies' or when we read of European
bankers '
-
- "following Washington's lead" let's be clear
about what "state" within the US we are talking about and which
agencies in Washington are ensuring that European banks follow "our"
lead.
-
- While we might not shed tears about an intrusive government
curtailing the profit-making of Big Oil and Big Banks, or interfering with
free market operations, let us not forget that "the state within the
state" that dictates economic policy is not accountable to our citizens;
moreover, if it dictates foreign economic policy to the multi-nationals
surely it has no scruples in doing the same to ordinary Americans. Next
on the AIPAC/Levey/Cohen agenda is a "request" by Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu for an additional $20 billion dollars in "aid"
to ensure Israel's protection from the pro-democracy movements sweeping
the Arab world and to finance a new batch of settlements in the West Bank.
-
- Israel needs US aid like American taxpayers need a hole
in their pockets.According to the latest study
-
- of billionaires published in the March 20 2011 of Forbes
,Israel has more billionaires per capita than any country in the world.
|