The members of the G7 just ended their 41st summit. The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US gathered in a great Bavarian palace, the Schloss Elmau. It was a fitting location for the masters of the universe.They claim that the maintenance of world order is their passtime. In fact, what they are most interested in is the preservation of their power at any cost.

Western confidence rose in the aftermath of the 2011 Nato intervention in Libya. It was now thought that not only was the financial system saved, but that humanitarian interventionism provided the West sufficient legitimacy to use its superior military force to order the planet.

Western pressure against Iran from the mid-2000s intensified as tensions with Russia flashed into the open around Syria and Ukraine. The G8 suspended Russia as member in 2014. In the most recent G7 summit, Russia was the target of overheated rhetoric. The US president, Barack Obama, asked of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin: “Does he continue to wreck his country’s economy and continue Russia’s isolation in pursuit of a wrong-headed desire to recreate the glories of the Soviet empire?”

If the Soviet empire is long gone, the West’s ambition to drive world policy remain intact. Contradictions in G7 policy affect Europe far more than the US – Two big energy suppliers to western Europe, Iran and Russia, are hurt by sanctions promoted by the US through the G7, and Libya, another big supplier, saw its institutions destroyed by the NATO war and its aftermath.

The masters of the universe were busy with each other. They have currencies to protect and countries to bomb.

On June 14, UN-brokered talks will be held in Geneva, but many Yemenis know that with the increasingly hostile armed factions, a destroyed economy and the Saudi/Iran rivalry playing itself out in their country, peace will be hard to come by.

With the Houthi rebels in the north and Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula–AQAP–in the south (targeted by US drone strikes), Yemen has long been a hotbed of strife. But when the Houthi rebels made a daring military move in February 2015 and managed to take over the capital Sanaa, forcing President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to flee, the Saudi government decided to intervene to restore Hadi to power.

On March 26, 2015, the Saudis, under the umbrella of the Gulf Cooperation Council, launched a vicious airstrike campaign against the Houthis. Instead of unseating the Houthis, Saudi interference only escalated the conflict, killing over 2,000 Yemenis and creating a humanitarian crisis that have left 80% of the population in dire need of aid. The heavy military intervention has destroyed homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, and entire villages. Civilians lack basic supplies such as food, water, medicine, and adequate shelter. Doctors Without Borders reports that many people living in frontline areas are unable to travel to clinics or hospitals for medical care both because of the fighting and the lack of fuel. Even those who are able to make it to health facilities often find that they are not functioning.

Most devastating has been the relentless Saudi bombing. When a temporary ceasefire agreement was reached in early May, the Saudis deliberately inflicted as much violence as possible before the ceasefire began and once the ceasefire ended, they promptly reengaged in their strikes.

According to two recent Human Rights Watch investigations, among the weapons being used by the Saudis are cluster bombs, which were banned by the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions because they kill civilians long after the fighting has stopped. Of the three types of cluster munitions identified recently in Yemen, two were manufactured in the United States and supplied by the US government. “The Saudi-led coalition and other warring parties in Yemen need to recognize that using banned cluster munitions is harming civilians,” said Human Rights Watch researcher Ole Solvang. “These weapons can’t distinguish military targets from civilians, and their unexploded submunitions threaten civilians, especially children, even long after the fighting.”

Galvanized by the recent, violent murder of a woman by a man she hardly knew in broad daylight in a populated, public space, women’s rights activists in Argentina have revived the slogan that began in Mexico in response to the mass killings of young women in Ciudad Juárez. Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerta más (not one less woman, not one more female death) was the cry when the murders reached their apex with the discovery of eight dead women and girls in 1996 in Juárez, where the yearly death toll due to femicide reached 304 in 2010 and continues unabated and largely unreported. Those words were spoken by Susana Chávez Castillo, a local poetry prodigy who met the same fate when she took a simple walk in her neighbourhood to visit some friends.[1] Her mutilated body was found on 6 January 2011. In Argentina, they are saying, Ni una menos, not one less female, because every woman and girl’s life matters.

The term femicide is apparently formed from the two words “female” and “homicide,” and is generally defined as the intentional killing of women and girls because they are female, or better yet and more inclusively, female-identified. It is what is happening in Juárez, what happened in Caballito, what happens when baby girls are left to die. And it happens in the home, hidden from view. According to the World Health Organization’s information sheet entitled “Femicide: Understanding and Addressing Violence Against Women,” “Most cases of femicide are committed by partners or ex-partners, and involve ongoing abuse in the home, threats or intimidation, sexual violence or situations where women have less power or fewer resources than their partner.”[5]

But often and sadly, this latter definition is taken to imply a shared responsibility on the part of women, leading mistakenly to endless discussion, programmes, training and proscriptions, as if it were in their power to avoid abuse and femicide. But in Juárez and Caballito, one cannot in any way implicate the women who were killed; there was nothing they could have done. As Diurno writes, “Femicide is nothing more than patriarchy’s greatest expression, the dominion of male over female, and the response is brutal for females who want to escape this destiny.”[6]

In the words of prolific author Ilka Oliva Corrado, “Saying not one less means no more defenseless princesses and violent little he-men. It means taking down trafficking and prostitution networks. No more precarious labour, equal pay for equal work. Sexual education to decide. Contraception to not abort. Legal abortion to not die. No more assaults and violence against women, justice for the victims.” [7]

Must Europe really be dragged into a potentially catastrophic war with Russia?

At present the United States government is trying to force the European members of NATO to participate in aggressive operations in connection with the coup which it carried out in Ukraine. Europe must refuse.

The hubris, and reckless irresponsibility of the US government in risking a catastrophic war with Russia is almost beyond belief, but the intervention in Ukraine is only one in a long series of US interventions:

During the period from 1945 to the present, the US interfered, militarily or covertly, in the internal affairs of a large number of nations: China, 1945-49; Italy, 1947-48; Greece, 1947-49; Philippines, 1946-53; South Korea, 1945-53; Albania, 1949-53; Germany, 1950s; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1953-1990s; Middle East, 1956-58; Indonesia, 1957-58; British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64; Vietnam, 1950-73; Cambodia, 1955-73; The Congo/Zaire, 1960-65; Brazil, 1961-64; Dominican Republic, 1963-66; Cuba, 1959-present; Indonesia, 1965; Chile, 1964-73; Greece, 1964-74; East Timor, 1975-present; Nicaragua, 1978-89; Grenada, 1979-84; Libya, 1981-89; Panama, 1989; Iraq, 1990-present; Afghanistan 1979-92; El Salvador, 1980-92; Haiti, 1987-94; Yugoslavia, 1999; and Afghanistan, 2001-present, Syria, 2013-present. Egypt, 2013-present.

Most of these interventions were explained to the American people as being necessary to combat communism (or more recently, terrorism), but an underlying motive was undoubtedly the desire of the ruling oligarchy to put in place governments and laws that would be favorable to the economic interests of the US and its allies. Also, the military-industrial complex needs justification for the incredibly bloated military budgets that drain desperately needed resources from social and environmental projects.

In 2009, after years of bloody insurrection in Congo, General Laurent Nkunda was ‘arrested’ with great fanfare in Rwanda. Wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not a word about his situation has been reported for years. Are the regimes in Rwanda and Uganda using Laurent Nkunda and comrades in a new thrust to destabilize eastern Congo? The perpetual aggressors in this long, bloody saga of despair and death served on millions of innocent people in central Africa, Rwanda and Uganda protect the interests and insure the profits of their U.S., Canadian, European and Israeli patrons. Meanwhile, with a new insurrection afoot in eastern Congo, the western media and its modern day intelligence mercenaries spin disinformation to project black African chaos and whitewash the corruptions of Empire.

Israeli Dan Gertler — one of the Congo’s greatest current enemies — has bought up petroleum operations in the lakes regions on the Uganda-Congo frontier. Gertler’s political allies in power in Israel have been making deals with Rwanda. Another Israeli has been awarded oil-drilling rights in Virunga National Park just in the past two weeks after Canadian oil company SOCOM pulled out under public pressure.

The operations of the big mining companies present in eastern Congo are completely whitewashed by the western press and western mercenaries and intelligence front group organizations like the International Crises Group, International Rescue Committee, ENOUGH, Raise Hope For Congo, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and the Social Science Research Council.54

The reappearance on the ground in Congo of these Rwandan warlords illuminates the apparatus of impunity involving western governments, non-government front organizations, the United Nations, multinational corporations, think tanks, western academia, the genocide industry, and the industries that profit through the creation of careers and markets for the euphemistically named AID, charity, humanitarian relief, conflict-resolution, and development industries. None of these latter industries would flourish without the market-based manufacture of suffering, despair, disease and deracination, or the market-based production of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees.

As it with the western human rights corpus “that keeps intact the hierarchical relationships between European and non-European populations,”55 so it is with all these other industries. Suffering is big business.

In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window. And that could help explain the desperate rush to “fast track” not only the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA would nip attempts to implement public banking and other monetary reforms in the bud.

The Banking Game Exposed

The BOE report confirmed what money reformers have been saying for decades: that banks do not act simply as intermediaries, taking in the deposits of “savers” and lending them to borrowers, keeping the spread in interest rates. Rather, banks actually create deposits when they make loans. The BOE report said that private banks now create 97 percent of the British money supply. The US money supply is created in the same way.

TiSA Exposed

TiSA involves 51 countries, including every advanced economy except the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The deal would liberalize global trade in services covering close to 80% of the US economy, including financial services, healthcare, education, engineering, telecommunications, and many more. It would restrict how governments can manage their public laws, and it could dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, turning those services over to the private sector.

Recall the secret plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials in the 1990s to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally, so that money would not flee to nations with safer banking laws. The vehicle used was the Financial Services Agreement concluded under the auspices of the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The plan worked, and most countries were roped into this “liberalization” of their banking rules. The upshot was that the 2008 credit crisis took down not just the US economy but economies globally.

Nasser Nawaj’ah held Laith’s hand as, beside me, they walked down the dirt and pebble path of Old Susya. Nasser is 33 years old, his son six. Nasser’s jaw was set and every few moments he glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was approaching. Until Laith piped up with his question, the only sounds were our footsteps and the wind, against which Nasser was wearing a wool hat and a pleated brown jacket.

“Why did they take our home?” the little boy asked.

“Why did they take it? Good question,” replied Nasser, pausing to choose his words carefully. “They don’t want Palestinians. They don’t want us here.”

Laith was, in fact, asking about something that had happened 29 years ago when his father was a young boy. But he could just as well have been referring to the imminent threat of expulsion facing his family and his community today.

I had spent the previous night with Nasser and his family in their tent on their farmland in Khirbet Susya in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank. Since 1986, they have have lived there, one-third of a mile from their old home, which is now an Israeli archeological park. Perched on the hill above us is an Israeli settlement built on land occupied by Israel in 1967. That settlement, which is considered illegal under international law, was established in 1983 and is also called Susya. Where we now are, a few hundred meters away across the road, was once Old Susya, the former village of Nasser’s family.

I asked Nasser how it felt to show his son the place of his birth. “I feel something, but there are no words for it,” he replied. He struggled for a moment to articulate his emotions, but broke off in mid-sentence, took Laith’s hand, and walked with him towards the cave’s exit. Father and son climbed the stairs out into the brightness of the cold winter day, where they would continue to explore Old Susya, before returning to their current home in Khirbet Susya — another home from which they may be expelled at any moment.

On this web page, the Canadian government asks if we are “Looking for a brief recap of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiating rounds? “

This is a representative sample of what it offers to explain two years worth negotiations since Canada joined other governments in writing the TPP:

“Among the topics discussed in Washington were legal and institutional issues, textiles, rules of origin, state-owned enterprises, environment, goods market access, technical barriers to trade, and e-commerce.”

Feel better informed?

They might as well have said “we talked about a lot of stuff” and left it at that.

Here is something way more informative to read: a list of the 605 (overwhelmingly corporate) official “advisers” in the USA who have seen, and helped write, the TPP.

You can ignore all the talk of a “Grexit,” the bluff and bluster of right-wing German ideologues such as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble who would celebrate it, and repetitive, stubbornly dire warnings that time is running out. Did you notice that the much-hyped June 5 deadline for the Greece’s payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came and went, Greece didn’t pay and nobody fell off a cliff? Trust me, this is not a cliffhanger.

Although there have been numerous references to game theory in the ongoing commentary, it’s really not necessary if you look at the revealed preferences of those who the Syriza government is polite and diplomatic enough to call its European partners. Take partner-in-chief German Chancellor Angela Merkel: If there’s one thing she doesn’t want to be remembered as, it’s the politician who destroyed the eurozone.

Of course, we don’t know if a Greek exit would do that, but there’s a chance that it could. Even if the European Central Bank would be able to contain the resulting financial crisis, it is possible that Greece would, after an initial shock, ultimately do much better outside the euro, which might convince others to want to leave. Whatever the probability of that scenario, Merkel is, like most successful politicians, a risk-averse creature who won’t roll those dice.

And there is an elephant in the room that she is not going to ignore: the United States. There are scattered press reports that Barack Obama’s administration has put pressure on Merkel to reach an agreement with Greece, but the importance of that has been vastly understated. Unless it is a request that could get a German government voted out of office — such as George W. Bush’s bid for support of his invasion of Iraq in 2003 — something that is strategically important to Washington is extremely likely to find agreement in Berlin. And in this case, Merkel and Obama are basically on the same page.

The politics of empire are much more important than any economic concerns here. For the same reasons that the United States intervened in Greece’s civil war (1946 to ’49) and supported the brutal military dictatorship (1967 to ’74) — with all the murder, torture and repression that these involved — Washington does not want to have an independent government in Greece.

The never-ending Greek crisis witnessed a dramatic acceleration last week: the government submitted a list of proposals, the troika (the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank) came back with a list of its own, the Greek side rejected them out of hand, a parliamentary debate followed in Athens during which the prime minister repeated the rejection, and finally Greece failed to make a scheduled payment to the IMF on 5 June, presumably bundling all its payments for the end of the month.

After five years of catastrophic failure, there is a sense that the crisis is about to reach a denouement, perhaps involving default and exit. There is frustration among the population with what is perceived as the unbending attitude of the lenders. But there is also deep concern regarding the implications of default and exit.

The proposals by the Syriza government represent a painful compromise compared to its electoral promises. It has accepted tight fiscal targets, and to achieve them it is offering to raise VAT on several goods, while also imposing a substantial tax burden on the rich, thus achieving some redistribution. It has also toned down its policies on privatisation and pensions. In return it is asking the troika for an immediate injection of liquidity, as well as for a serious commitment to reduce Greek debt and to promote long-term investment. There is hardly anything revolutionary, nor even particularly radical, in these demands.

The response of the eurozone creditors, judging by a leaked “official” document, has been ruthless. They have set fiscal targets slightly above those of Syriza, but to achieve these they are demanding a substantial increase in VAT, including a rise of 10% on electricity, thus hitting the poorest where it hurts. They are also demanding the abolition of subsidies and tax relief measures (including for farmers and poor pensioners), and pension cuts. Finally they demand an end to collective bargaining, no increase of the minimum wage and sustained privatisations.

These are familiar measures proposed by the IMF on many occasions across the world. They represent failed and outdated economic thinking, and are likely to mean low growth, high unemployment and low incomes. Even worse, the troika is making no suggestions regarding the settlement of debt and future investment.

These are familiar measures proposed by the IMF on many occasions across the world. They represent failed and outdated economic thinking, and are likely to mean low growth, high unemployment and low incomes. Even worse, the troika is making no suggestions regarding the settlement of debt and future investment.