Every state tries to make as many profits as possible. These come for the most part from taxes along with customs duties which remain an important source of income. The Obama administration serving the neo-liberal US elites forged a plan to encircle China in the Asia-Pacific region called TPP. The Transpacific Partnership was designed to get China to open its market completely, to waive customs duties and to align its law with that of the US. The TPP has been denounced by many of its critics, oddly enough mainly in Europe and in the United States, and not in China. Julian Assange’s statement is perhaps best known: “If the treaty is adopted, the TPP’s trademark regime will trample on human and civil rights.”The TPP was in fact created to give US corporations a head start in Asia by limiting the sovereignty of participating countries. Trump, realizing that Democrats were on very thin ice with the project, cancelled the contract and began his trade war with… tariffs, which brought considerable gains to the US budget. Both governments – Obama’s and Trump’s – realized and still pursue the same strategy by different means: America must countervail China’s superpower. The strategy fails.

China’s New Silk Road plan opposes American attempts to reduce Beijing’s role in world trade. The TPP works even without the USA and China is surrounded by the participating countries in the Pacific. Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore form a semicircle around the South China Sea, a sea that plays a key role for China in trade with the rest of the world. This is why the Chinese decided to shift trade to the railway. A bold, huge and risky project. Let’s take a closer look at it.

The main difference between the New Silk Road and TPP is that it does not force the countries of Asia and Europe to change their policies or laws. The roads and railway lines to be built as part of the major Chinese project will benefit not only China but also the countries where they will be constructed. Even so, the Chinese can use the same method that Western countries are using everywhere in underdeveloped countries: Beijing might, too, make countries dependent on Chinese companies (e.g. those that will maintain new infrastructure) through loans and dependence on them. On the one hand, this will boost growth in the countries along the New Silk Road, while on the other, they could easily fall into Beijing’s debt trap. By the way, Beijing has already taken over a large port in Sri Lankaand is slowly buying up Pakistan Pakistan
Continue reading →

A good thing – product or service – spreads like wildfire without much talk about it, without much advertising, let alone enforcement. That was the case with automobiles, the radio or television, DVD or CD players, personal computers or cell/mobile phones. A good thing is appreciated by people and demand for it is natural and growing. Advertising only concerns brands but not the thing itself. Have there been a worldwide action undertaken to enforce personal computers? Hardly. The attractiveness of the product, its usefulness in terms of entertainment, business or education could not be overrated. The same was true of mobile cell/phones. Everybody wanted to have one, appreciating the advantages that the device provided its owner with. What does it look like with electric vehicles?

For years we have all been exposed to an intense propaganda; governments have been promising extra money for buyers of electric cars, and people are made to feel guilty if they want to continue to use vehicles running on petrol, oil or gas because they allegedly wreak havoc with the environment. The electric means of transport is said the be the future of communication with no alternative whatsoever. What can be said about this hectic and frantic activity on the part of those who push electric vehicles?

Source: Wharton University of Pennsylvania.

The automotive industry is one of the mainsprings of economy. For all practical purposes it is concentrated in but very few countries – Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Sweden – and it provides those countries with enormous income, giving employment to millions of their residents. The industry had been developing for decades until it reached a saturation point: in the Western world, in the eighties everybody who wanted had an automobile while families often had two. The industry was nearing the dead end. Under such circumstances the dismantling of the Soviet bloc was a godsend, a windfall, a blessing. All of a sudden – from one day to another – the car market enlarged by the whole of Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Asian republics. If you are old enough, you will have remembered: one of the first visible changes that took place in the former socialist countries was the rapid disappearance of Ladas, Trabants, Wartburgs, Skodas, Dacias, Moskvitches, Zaporozhetses and, and, and. They were all scrapped while a string of Western automotive brands flooded East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. On the one hand the West rid itself of its stock of old cars (at that time it was mainly second-hand vehicles that were purchased east of the Elbe), on the other it began setting up chains of car showrooms for East European customers who at the long last could fulfil their dream of possessing a Renault, Peugeot, Citroen, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota, Nissan or Mazda. Was it not a heyday for the Western automotive industry? Continue reading →

or how ethnic, racial, religious or social minorities are revolutionary (read: subversive) rams in the hands of the managers of the world.

If you think that it was Lenin or Mao who victoriously conducted the seizure of power without someone heavily investing in them, their parties and comrades, then think again.

In July this year, much to white Americans’ horror, two marches, made up of blacks – armed with assault weapons, masked, clad in black military gear – were held in the United States: one in the Stone Mountain Memorial Park (July 4) and the other in Louisville, Kentucky (July 25). They were organized by what touts itself as No F***king Around Coalition (NFAC), which is led by John Grandmaster Jay Johnson. That’s at least what he calls himself. In the few disjointed statements that Grandmaster Jay graciously delivered one can learn that the NFAC protests against the systemic racism (as usual), acts of white violence (how many times have we heard this?) and he even demands a separate territory for blacks with Texas being an option.

Grandmaster Jay. Source: Roland S. Marin, YouTube.

These are the facts, such are the events. Now a few observations. Continue reading →

If we were to paint the current situation with a broad brush, we would receive the following simplified picture. The European Union is split into two camps: the old and new member states. The West is split across the Atlantic: it is – roughly – Washington against Paris and Berlin. The world is split into three rivalling superpowers: the United States (strong military and strong economy), Russia (strong military, weak economy) and China (weak military, strong economy). Western Europe gravitates more to Russia than Eastern Europe does; Eastern Europe in turn gravitates more to the United States than Western Europe does.

The state of affairs on the Old Continent is as follows.

[1] Germany wants a stable energy supply in the form of natural gas and from among a number of providers it has decided on Russia because

[2] Russia has large natural gas deposits and being in need of hard currency is willing to sell its energy resources to any bidder.

[3] Germany and Russia countries entered a commercial agreement which resulted in the construction and completion of one pipeline laid on the bottom of the Baltic: NordStream 1.

[4] Since the capacity of one pipeline was not sufficient to satisfy the needs of Germany and other West European states, another agreement was concluded to build a second pipe along the bottom of the Baltic – NordStream 2 – which is now near completion.

[5] Both pipelines sidetrack eastern European countries – Ukraine, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia – which makes them alarmed because soon Russia will be able to cut off its gas supplies to and through those countries – the Yamal (Poland, Belarus) and Brotherhood (Czechia, Slovakia, Ukraine) pipelines – while continuing the provision of gas to Western Europe, thus breaking the economic solidarity of the European Union.
Continue reading →

The well-orchestrated Arab Spring that toppled many a government in a few countries also hit Libya, a country that for forty-two years was under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, under whose governance the country’s people counted as the most prosperous in the whole of Africa. The ensuing and up to now incessant civil war created a power vacuum with various players vying for control over the country, which is rich in crude oil and natural gas. From the almost ten years of strife there have emerged two major rivals: the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HOR). The former is supported by Turkey and the United Nations, which by the way helped form the GNA, while the latter is backed by Russia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Turkey’s chip in the game appeared to have turned the scales in favour of the GNA. Up to Ankara’s involvement the Libya National Army (LNA) commanded by General Khalifa Haftar, the supporter of the HOR, had conquered most of the country and was about to advance on Tripoli. Turkish intervention came just in time to save the GNA and repulse LNA’s approaching units back to their previous positions. Why is Ankara interested in the region?

Libya (i.e. the provinces of Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica put together) for centuries used to be a part of the Ottoman Empire, so naturally Turkey’s policymakers gravitate to the regions where Turkish rule has historical precedent. They are trying to extend their influence in the Balkans – in Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina with their significant Muslim or Turkish minorities, in Albania, which is predominantly Muslim – in Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, in Syria and Iraq and lately in Libya. Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been more and more intensively making attempts at expanding its international leverage and freeing itself from the constraints imposed on it by the Western powers after the First World War, especially in the form of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which limits Ankara’s control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits and thus its sovereignty. In an attempt to shake off these restrictions, Turkey has elaborated and been implementing the doctrine of the Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan)) which envisages the expanding of the country’s maritime exclusive economic zones.

Turkey-Libya Agreement on Maritime Boundaries, Turkey’s Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan) and the EEZ boundaries in East Mediterranean. Source: reddit.
Continue reading →

The five post-Soviet Central Asian republics – Kazakhstan (19 mln inhabitants), Kyrgyzstan (6), Tajikistan (8,5), Uzbekistan (30) and Turkmenistan (5) – making up a joint area of almost 4 million square kilometers (by roughly one million larger than the area of India or Argentina), with the total population equalling 68 million (comparable to that of France or Great Britain) is a very important spot on the globe, landlocked between Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. In the 19th century it was the Russian and the British that penetrated the area and vied for dominance there: the former from the north-west, the latter from the south-east. Their rivalry received the name of the Great Game. The five countries were a sort of colonies of the Russian Empire, though – due to the territorial proximity – incorporated into it. The indigenous populations – confessionally, linguistically and racially entirely alien to European, orthodox Russians – would pose problems occasionally, which twice morphed into an open uprising against Russian rule: in 1916 and in between 1923-24. Both attempts were quelled, which resulted in the loss of many lives and massive emigration. Bishkek, Kyrgyztan’s capital, was then renamed to Frunze, to honour the Soviet general who had vanquished the insurgents. While the people of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan had no political representation in the Russian Duma under the tsars, they enjoyed it during the time of the Soviet Union; at that time they also exercises a sort of statehood, albeit within the framework of the communist superstate. In the 1980s they constituted the bridgehead for Soviet troops invading Afghanistan. The scars left by the Russians did not really heal: they were only allayed for a time. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the five republics declared independence, and began gravitating towards the United States.

Central Asia. Source: Wikipedia.

At present the five Central Asian states are in the cross hairs of such potent players as Russia, China and the United States. Also Turkey, due to the commonality of the religion and the ethnic relationship (notice the overlap of the demonyms Turkey and Turkmenistan), plays a certain role in the region. The residents of this area seek employment in Russia or let themselves be recruited to fight in Syria against Bashar al-Assad backed by Russia. The collective historical consciousness is fraught with bitter memories of Russians fighting against the forefathers of today’s residents of the area and of Russians combating their brothers in faith in Afghanistan four decades ago. That is something that Washington has been trying to skilfully exploit. To this purpose the United States created the C5+1 political initiative that combines the effort of the five countries and those of the United States to stymie terrorism, boost economic growth and foster the human rights in the region, as the official documents and statements say.

Continue reading →