The current trade war with China began at the very outset of the Trump administration. Apparently alarmed at America’s dependence on Chinese goods, particularly the extent to which its defence industries are reliant on Chinese components and rare earths, Trump had a point but may have better served to speak softly about this vulnerability. He mentioned only two dependencies, there are thousands of products that America relies on China exclusively for.

In moves that were simply anti-competitive practices he then launched in a “tech war” with China. Banning the sale of chips and semi-conductors, along with bans on Chinese 5G and Huawei the global leader in particular. Not content with that the U.S. launched a global push to pressure its “allies’ to also ban Huawei and its state of the art 5G technology. Not to be taken in isolation, the tech war was just part of an overall strategy to damage and restrain China’s economy. “Decoupling” had arrived into the general lexicon.

To an extent the measures worked, the chip shortage caused a slowdown among many tech dependent sectors, but not for long. China has developed its domestic production at a pace not possible anywhere else. It has also convinced China that it needed to greatly accelerate its self-sufficiency across all sectors.

As it stands today, America has nothing that China needs that it can’t make or buy elsewhere. America conversely needs China desperately, without China’s goods the American economy grinds to a halt. The extent of that dependency has been highlighted by Americaэs ongoing supply chain chaos. Manufacturing, retail, construction and countless other industry sectors have stalled without Chinese goods. No country in the world is as dependent on imports as the U.S. Attempts to find alternatives to China are fruitless, no other country can match the efficiency, infrastructure, economies of scale and cost that China can. American manufacturing only accounts for 20% of the American economy, self-sufficiency for Americans is a fantasy, even in the best case scenario, it is generations away.

Long spoken of is “China’s nuclear option”, dumping its dollar holdings and rendering the dollar worthless. China doesn’t want to do that. Firstly the loss of a trillion of its own dollar holdings is not to be taken lightly, and it would also damage the holdings and economies of its other trading partners around the world. Such a move would be an absolute last resort. China’s real nuclear option is the withholding of essential goods to America.

China has all but monopolised the rare earth industries, now accounting for more than 85% of global production. Without rare earths Americas tech and defence sectors would be paralysed. All the seventeen critical rare earths are mined and refined in China in high volume. Some are mined in other countries in smaller volumes: developing alternative sources to China would a very lengthy process. For the foreseeable future, China decides who gets rare earths, and who doesn’t.

Unknown to many Americans the pharmaceutical industry is among the most heavily dependent of China. 80-85% of its products and precursors come from China, and there are currently few alternatives. I leave it to the reader’s imagination to visualise an America without medications, think Zombie apocalypse.

Some recent developments in China have given us a glimpse of the future. China is stockpiling food and other commodities at unprecedented levels. It is believed to hold more than half the world’s grain and maize already, other essential food stuffs are also being stockpiled at similar levels.

Iron ore, steel and other industrial raw materials are also being hoarded in previously unforeseen quantities. In a world of chronic shortages China has realised that commodities hold more value than cash.

More significantly, China just published a Governmental “White Paper.” It emphasises the need to conserve natural, finite resources (again think rare earths.) It also addresses the paradox that Trump was concerned about, why is China supplying parts to the U.S. military contractors? These among many other sectors will now require a “special export licence”. Read between the lines. China can apply these principles across any exported product it chooses. If they don’t like where it is headed, or what it will be used for, it isn’t going. Fertilisers, for which China accounts for about 30% of the world’s production are already banned from export. This is already forcing American many American farmers to switch from wheat to less fertiliser-intensive crops like soybeans.

China didn’t start or want this trade war, to date it is has been a one-sided assault on the Chinese economy by an increasingly desperate American government. China has not retaliated or employed any of the measures it could have in response, until now.

America now truly has its trade war, and more decoupling will follow, but from here on in, it will be on China’s terms.

TJ COLES

Ever since Belgium’s King Leopold II (1835-1909) established the Congo Free State in 1885, international powers have exploited the region’s vast resources. Leading a regime that went on to kill an estimated eight million people to plunder their gold, ivory, and rubber, Leopold reportedly described Congo as “a magnificent African cake.”

More recently, US President Biden’s International Trade Administration declared: “With total mineral wealth estimated in the tens of trillions of dollars,” what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) “offers opportunities for American firms with a high tolerance for risk.” The role of the Africa Command is to reduce that risk. The US Department of Defense says that Africa “has a plethora of strategic materials, such as cobalt, chromium, tantalum and more. African resources are critical to 21^st century progress” (read: US corporate dominance).

From the late-1990s to the present, Euro-American mining, processing, and financial corporations have relied on the slave-labor of miners and the muscle of armed gangs to export rare earth metals, such as coltan and tantalum, to the West for vital components in computers, phones, missiles, etc. The rush to renewables ushers in a new era of competition for the rare metal, cobalt.

The US sets its sights on a mineral rich Congo

population of 93 million. The country’s entire gross domestic product is around $50 billion, making it one of the poorest countries in the world. As trillion-dollar companies like Apple, Microsoft and Tesla rely on DRC’s materials, seven in 10 Congolese survive on less than $1.90 a day. Life expectancy is 60 years, compared to 78 in the US, and infant mortality is 66 deaths per 1,000 live births compared to 5.6 in the US.

The Pentagon’s main interest in Congo began during the Second World War (1939-45). Owned by Belgium’s Union Minière, the Shinkolobwe mine in the southern Katanga province contained the purest known uranium ore, which the US Army Corps of Engineers used in the Manhattan Project launched in 1942 to construct the world’s first nuclear weapon. Ore from the mine was used in the subsequent manufacture of nuclear weapons.

By the 1950s, the US State Department planned to invest $660 million (around $7 billion today) to “develop” Congo’s infrastructure for corporate exploitation. In 1960, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba declared independence from Belgium, naming the country the Republic of the Congo (RoC), and making relatively mild overtures to the USSR. The politician Moïse Tshombé declared Katanga’s independence from RoC.

MI6 murdered Lumumba and the CIA replaced him with its asset, General Mobutu Sese Seko, who later renamed the country Zaire and ruled until his overthrow in 1997.

Mobutu (left) was a key CIA asset

Throughout the 1960s, the CIA essentially created and managed the Zairian Armed Forces (Forces Armées Zaïroises, ZAC), training special air units and hiring mercenaries to bolster Mobuto’s forces. Tshombé’s secession was crushed, as were intermittent struggles, such as the Simba Rebellion from 1963 to ’65; one of whose leaders was future President, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The US reluctantly tolerated small Cuban and Chinese military contingents in Zaire because they did not affect mining operations. By the 1980s, Belgian, French, German, and Israeli personnel were also training the ZAC.

Washington plays innocent bystander while fueling intrigues

Geographical considerations, the involvement of neighboring states, international interference, the role of specific ethnic groups in particular conflicts, and shifting paramilitary alliances make the Congo Wars extremely complicated. What follows is a basic outline focusing on the largely-overlooked US role.

Since at least 1990, the US has used Uganda as a conduit to arm Zaire/DRC. Until Uganda’s role in the wars was exposed, the Bill Clinton administration’s African Crisis Response Initiative saw an initial round of US military training for the Uganda People’s Defense Force. Clinton’s International Military Education and Training programs continued regardless. Both programs worsened the Congo crises, as we will see.

The centerpiece of the First Congo War that began in 1996 was the overthrow of Gen. Mobutu, led by Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre, AFDL). The AFDL was supported by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), whose Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, now the president of Rwanda, had been trained by the US at Fort Leavenworth. RPF personnel were trained by the Green Berets.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame

Described as a “visionary” by US Gen. George Joulwan, Kagame had honed his craft murdering Hutu during the Rwanda Genocide in 1994. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu fled into DRC, settling in the eastern regions where the mineral resources happened to be located. The RPF and its allied paramilitaries occupied DRC, initially to help build up Kabila’s Armed Forces, but also to avenge massacres of Tutsi and secure the mines.

We can plausibly assume based on chronicles of events that Washington’s role was to play innocent bystander while benefiting from the mining and supply-chain operations of the RPF, Ugandan military, and related gangs.

Foreign demand for rare earth minerals drives an unprecedented death toll

Even before Kabila seized power, international mining and infrastructure giants were negotiating contracts with his AFDL party.

American Mineral Fields landed a $1 billion deal to mine DRC. Bechtel hired NASA to provide satellite images of mineral-rich regions and allegedly acquire information on rebel movements for Kabila’s military. As Anglo-American, Barrick Gold, DeBeers, and other corporations signed mining contracts, Kabila created the Banque de Commerce, du Developpement et de l’Industrie to finance mining operations. The bank was based in Rwanda, from which untraceable coltan sourced from DRC conflict areas was exported to Western corporations, including Afrimex, Banro-Resources, and Union Transport.

The Second Congo War, from 1998-2003 and de facto to the present, has led to the deaths of an estimated 5.4 million people: most of them civilians who perished from war-related hunger and disease. The war was, in large part, an effort by different powers and factions to back or depose the Kabila family dynasty, seize control of resource-rich areas, and to settle long-standing rivalries. Unlike the first war, this one was explicitly driven by demand in Asia, Europe, and North America for rare materials.

The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Kabila’s nationalizations “sent a worrying signal … to foreign companies that are eager to do business in this mineral-rich country.” Kabila soon fell out with his Ugandan and Rwandan backers, who in 1998 helped to form a new party: the Rally for Congolese Democracy (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, RCD). The anti-Kabila RCD splintered into militant rebel groups and advanced across the country. Troops from Angola, Chad, Libya, and Zimbabwe entered DRC to back Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001, leaving his son Joseph (b. 1971) to rule from 2003 until 2019.

As far as international investors were concerned, the myriad rebel factions were crucial for maintaining the supply lines of rare materials. Typically, they were smuggled to Europe-bound cargo planes via Rwanda.

From the Kony 2012 psy-op by the NGO Invisible Children

Kony 2012: a US psy-war op aimed at protecting a key proxy

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni was one of America’s top proxies in DRC, and a UN report Uganda as a main sponsor of the conflict. In his effort to remove Museveni, the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by the cultist Joseph Kony attacked Uganda from DCR. In 2006, the UN backed Uganda’s invasion of DRC to hunt for Kony. The newly-formed US Africa Command (AFRICOM) provided covert assistance to Uganda, including training and satellite phones, in a failed counterinsurgency war which caused the LRA to exacerbate their killings in DRC.

From 2011 to 2017, the US initiated the anti-Kony operation, Observant Compass. As part of the mission, the US Special Operations Command Africa established a task force “to command and control the operation that stretched from Uganda, through the eastern [DRC] into the Central African Republic, and across South Sudan.” Personnel from the fabled A-Team “served as advisors to [the] African Union Regional Task Force.”

Released in the eponymous year, the documentary Kony 2012 brought the atrocities of the LRA to international attention. But US Special Operations Command documents suggest that the film’s producer, the NGO Invisible Children, was unwittingly part of a US psychological warfare operation. Army Special Operations Forces name the Congolese and Ugandan militaries, as well as several NGOs including Invisible Children, as “partners” in their operations.

Unlike the first attempt, Observant Compass reduced the LRA’s numbers and notoriety.

As China fears rise, AFRICOM enters the fray – and atrocities ensue

Washington and various European “former” colonial powers shifted policy from indirectly backing proxies, like the Uganda and Rwanda-supported rebels, to “professionalizing” the central Armed Forces (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, FARDC). The George W. Bush administration introduced a DRC “security sector reform” program, which included hiring the private “contractor,” Camber Corporation.

The Bush administration’s urge to “professionalize” and “legitimize” the FARDC coincided with China’s growing activities in the country. A Fort Benning Training and Doctrine Command document bemoaned the fact that in 2007 “China signed an agreement with [DRC] in which China provides $5 billion for infrastructure improvements in exchange for rights to DRC’s natural resources.”

Now that China was in DRC, human rights and traceable supply lines suddenly became a concern for Washington. US advanced training of the FARDC coincided with the passing of Dodd-Frank 2010, which required the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to mandate companies to verify supply chains.

In the same year, AFRICOM facilitated the US-DRC military partnership. The objective was “to transform the [FARDC],” among other things for “internal security operations.” A new Light Infantry Battalion was inaugurated by US Ambassador William Garvelink at the Kisangani Base Camp in north-central DRC. Training was provided under AFRICOM’s Special Operations Command, led by Brig. Gen. Christopher Haas, and unnamed State Department “contractors.”

By September, 750 soldiers had graduated in what AFRICOM describes as “a model for future reforms within the Congolese armed forces” and reveals the creation of a new 391^st Commando Battalion. Commander of training at Camp Base, Maj. John Peter Molengo, said: “In 2006 our president [Bush] promised a transformation of the [DRC] armed forces. I see this as an important step.”

Within a few years, the “important step” was revealed for what it was. Members of the Battalion had been exposed by the UN looting villages, murdering civilians, and raping dozens of women and girls, some as young as six. Stars and Stripes reported: “AFRICOM declined to comment …, referring questions to the U.S. State Department.”

Uganda’s military spreads chaos

If adding to chaos is the goal, AFRICOM’s strategy is working. To date, there are 4.5 million internally displaced Congolese, over one million of whom lost their homes during fighting in 2016-17 alone.

Like the LRA, another rebel group – this time, Islamic – called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), bolted from the Ugandan military and based itself in DRC where it is now attempting to establish a caliphate. The UN Organization Stabilization Mission DRC is helping the FARDC. Operations that began in North Kivu in November 2019 wound up displacing 400,000 people. In a repeat of botched US efforts to conquer the LRA, FARDC tactics caused the ADF to enter previously peaceful territory.

Founded in the 1970s, the Cooperative for Development of the Congo (Coopérative de développement économique du Congo, CODECO) is an umbrella of militia based in Ituri province in the northeast. CODECO mainly consists of ethnic Lendu whose are engaged in long-standing conflict with the Hema people. Despite the July 2020 peace agreement, FARDC operations have exacerbated the violence.

Founded in 1969, the ethno-federalist Kongo-majority Bundu Dia Kongo (BDK) is a Christian cult that encourages violence against non-Kongo peoples, even setting up roadblocks to divide communities. The BDK faces crackdowns by the police and FARDC, which in April 2020 launched anti-BDK operations in Kongo Central and in the capital, Kinshasa.

Greenwashing the race for trillions in renewables profits

As the violence continues across much of the country, so do the exports to most of the world. Corporate profiteering from the global climate emergency has triggered a cobalt rush. The unreliability of DRC supply chains has also triggered a move to design cobalt-free renewables.

Concentrated among 3,000 companies, the so-called global green economy is worth $4.5 trillion; more than the international oil and gas sector. The renewables market alone is worth over $600 billion. Electric vehicles (EV) are valued at around $170 billion and expected to growth to $700 billion within the next five years.

Cathodes are an essential part of the lithium ion batteries (LiBs) that, until recently, had been ubiquitous but tiny, hitherto requiring small amounts of cobalt. The emerging EV market means that large 100 kilowatt-per-hour LiBs contain 20 kg of cobalt in their cathode components. The US Department of Energy explains that in addition to being mined, cobalt (Co) is obtained as a by-product of other materials and almost entirely sourced from abroad, making US businesses dependent on metal markets and exporting countries. American corporations are therefore “looking to secure sources of Co, to drastically reduce the Co content in LiBs, or both.”

At present, 255,000 Congolese mine for cobalt, mainly in the conflict-free south, earning less than $2 per day with no benefits in conditions that are both immediately hazardous (e.g., collapsing tunnels, dangerous tools) and carry long-term risk (e.g., respiratory, orthopedic). Some 40,000 cobalt miners are children.

Bolstered by their legal obligations to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, numerous US corporations have attempted to greenwash their supply chains by claiming that they are sourced ethically. The Anglo-Swiss mining giant, Glencore, has a market capitalization roughly equal to DRC’s entire GDP. In recent years, it has signed partnership pledges with renewables customers to ethically source cobalt.

Other initiatives include Apple’s Supplier Responsibility Progress reports. BMW, Samsung, and others, meanwhile, have launched the Cobalt for Development Project. Tesla says that it will phase out cobalt from its lithium batteries and, in the meantime has, joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance. But a recent class action lawsuit on behalf of several injured Congolese miners alleges that Alphabet (Google), Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla are “aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children … to mine cobalt.”

Playing the blame China game

Despite the greenwashing, the cobalt mining, refining, smelting, and exportation industries remain dangerous, exploitative, polluting, and terrible for public relations. On the other hand, these conditions help to keep production costs low and profits high. The informal solution for many Western businesses and governments is to deploy media, NGOs, and the intelligentsia to point the moral finger of blame at China, whose corporations operate extensively in southern, cobalt-rich DRC.

For example, a recent article exposes the cruel working conditions in the town of Fungurume imposed on small and “artisanal” miners contracted by the big, so-called legitimate companies, like China’s Molybdenum. Describing a “slave and master” relationship, one of thousands of miners revealed how he works for $3.50 a day, eating two tiny bread rolls, with wages deducted for missing work.

A November 8, 2021 Guardian article sponsored by Pam Omidyar’s Humanity United

The report was funded by Humanity United, an NGO founded by eBay billionaire and Intercept owner Pierre Omidyar’s wife, Pam. Humanity United has received grant money from numerous sources, including the William J. Clinton Foundation. “This grant funded Humanity United’s continued contribution and membership to the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative.”

But such reports omit that China’s Molybdenum is owned by US institutional investors: JPMorgan Funds, Vanguard Total International, Vanguard Emerging Markets, BlackRock, and others. Amnesty International traces the “downstream” supply chain of Chinese-acquired cobalt to Asian, European, and US corporations.

Cobalt is typically smelted and refined by China’s Huayou and its CDM subsidiary, put into batteries by Amperex, BYD, LG, Samsung, Sony, and others, and sold as components in Apple, BMW, Dell, Fiat-Chrysler, GM, Microsoft, Tesla, and other Western products.

Weaponizing space to win the “Great Power Competition”

DRC is directly linked to Washington’s long-term efforts to rule the world by force. Just as King Leopold II described Congo as a “magnificent African cake,” ex-US Naval Intelligence Officer, Dr. Mir Sadat, Policy Director of the National Security Council, says:

“Great Power Competition in space is in some ways analogous to the Great Game of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries between Great Britain and Russia, which competed over access to resources and geostrategic positioning in Central and South Asia. Today, there is a similar great game brewing between China and other spacefaring nations led by the United States over access to potential cislunar [between Earth and Moon] resources and overall space dominance.”

But it wasn’t China that first declared its intention to rule space and therefore the world. In 1997, the US Space Command published its “full spectrum dominance” doctrine: to weaponize space by the year 2020 “to protect U.S. interests and investment” (read: corporate profits). Endangering us all, “full spectrum dominance” includes hypersonic missile drones and high-altitude craft that can strike Russia and/or China with “low-yield” nuclear weapons.

Like other products that emerged from taxpayer funding under the cover of military research and development (satellites, computers, the internet, etc.), space exploration is now commercialized through companies like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company, while serving the Pentagon by, for instance, launching military satellites, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX has done. The Pentagon and other federal agencies describe this arrangement as the Space Industrial Base.

Sadat helped to establish the Space Force, which largely took over from the Space Command. Specifically naming cobalt and other rare materials as the “greatest” supply risks, a fear-mongering report about supposed lack of US influence, co-authored by Sadat and sponsored by the Space Force, says: “The United States must compete for global market share and leadership – currently dominated by China, Russia over terrestrial commodities – basic and manufactured – into the space economy.”

It may turn out that the millions of destitute Congolese sitting on tantalum and coltan, and the hundreds of thousands of slave-like and child miners toiling in hazardous conditions to extract these products are not the only victims. If the “Great Game” for “full spectrum dominance” continues without grassroots pressure to end it, escalating geopolitical “competition” between nuclear powers could annihilate the rest of the world as well.

thegrayzone.com

By Raul DIEGO

Buried deep in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2015, section 3003 calls for the expeditious facilitation of a land exchange agreement between Resolution Copper Mining, LLC and the United States government to create one of the largest and deepest copper mines in the country, spanning nearly 11,000 square miles of national forest terrain and penetrating 7,000 miles into beneath the surface of the earth.

The land swap specifically targets approximately 2,500 acres that are not already owned by the mining concern and which rest inside Apache hallowed ground known as Oak Flat in the Tonto National Forest in central Arizona. Considered sacred by the Apache and other First Nation peoples who still use the land they call Chich’il Bildagoteel for important ceremonies, food, and a vital link to their heritage, Oak Flat has been at the center of a decades-long battle between the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Resolution Copper, comprised of extraction industry behemoths Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

Closed to mining activities by President Eisenhower in 1955, Oak Flat has since flourished as a significant habitat for wildlife, including several endangered species of fish, snakes, and birds, as well as a popular campground and world-renowned rock climbing destination. Reaffirmed in the early ‘70s the protective regulations have nevertheless been incessantly targeted by UK-based Rio Tinto, whose lobbying efforts to obtain burrowing rights to the land have been rebuffed 13 times since.

In 2014, John McCain – the largest recipient of Rio Tinto political contributions in Congress that year ­– inserted the aforementioned rider in the 2015 NDAA, effectively reversing 66 years of environmental protection law and betraying his own history of advocating for indigenous rights as a ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs in 1989, when he led a Republican minority in the fight for the religious freedom of First Nations and the protection of sacred lands.

More than 30 years later, as President Trump leaves office, his administration looks to finish this act of duplicity initiated by his biggest political enemy in yet another demonstration of the hypocrisy that runs through the American political system and pervasive history of broken treaties and disenfranchisement of Native peoples.

Rushing into destruction

The U.S. Forest Service will release the final version of the environmental analysis for the Resolution Copper Project and Land Exchange in three days’ time and a full year ahead of schedule as a result of pressure from the Trump administration, according to local officials.

Members of the San Carlos Apache Nation have been camping out at Oak Flat since January 2020 as part of their continued effort to halt the mining project. Tribal member Wendsler Nosie Sr, interviewed by The Guardian in November described the urgency of their plight as the “fourth quarter with two minutes left in the game,” adding that Trump’s move to push the approval process forward by a year meant they now only “have one minute left.”

Oak Flat is just one of several large-scale mining and energy projects the outgoing administration is looking to approve before the proper assessments and consultations with affected populations are made. Other projects include a lithium mine in Nevada; a helium extraction project in Utah and an oil and gas drilling venture in Alaska, among others.

Virtually every one of these projects is facing opposition from Native tribes, whose very survival is threatened by the relentless advance of the extraction industry. That industry not only represents a catastrophic menace to their sources of clean water and food but also poses a direct risk to their safety as the proliferation of so-called “man-camps” or the temporary labor sites, plays a central role in the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered indigenous women.

In the case of Oak Flat, Native communities have found an unlikely ally in their fight against Rio Tinto and BHP. A British government pension fund group with a stake in both companies has requested more information from their subsidiary, Resolution Copper, as to the potential impacts the proposed mine would have on Native American cultural and religious sites.

Ally or cover?

Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (LAPFF) Chairman, Doug McMurdo, has voiced his opposition to the mining method Resolution Copper is expected to use in Oak Flat, should the project move forward. The head of the £300 Billion pension investment fund echoes the concerns of the indigenous communities who oppose the “block caving” method planned, which consists of blasting beneath the surface to extract the copper ore through tunnels and inevitably cause the collapse of the rock above, taking ancient burial grounds, petroglyphs, and medicinal plants with it.

LAPFF has advocated for communities affected by Rio Tinto’s irresponsible mining practices in other parts of the world as well. Last year, Rio Tinto faced an official inquiry from the Australian government after the company blew up 46,000-year old caves in Western Australia that were part of the country’s Aboriginal heritage. McMurdo participated in the parliamentary inquiry that found Rio Tinto culpable of knowingly destroying the Aboriginal cultural heritage site. The LAPFF Chair pointed to the conclusions as the reason why the fund “has increased its call for companies to engage meaningfully with affected communities. The fact that Rio Tinto’s senior management had not reviewed a critical report about the site itself calls into question the company’s governance and oversight processes.”

But, at the end of the day, the question arises whether such remonstrations are enough to curtail the irreparable damage the extraction industries have done and continue to do to the environment and to the indigenous communities who are not only fighting for their own survival but the survival of the entire planet.

The legend of Oak Flat 

One of the most significant areas of Oak Flat threatened by Resolution Copper’s project is a place called Apache Leap. The 400 foot-high cliff is the site of a historic incident of Native American resistance, from which 75 Apache warriors leaped to their death rather than be captured by the U.S. troops that surrounded them after a sneak attack that took the lives of 50 Apache warriors within minutes.

The Legend of Apache Tears is an enduring account of defiance against an enemy that keeps coming. When the wives and children discovered the bodies of their brave men at the bottom of the precipice, the legend states that their tears turned the white earth at their feet into black stones (obsidian) and, henceforth, anyone who acquired any such stones would never have to cry again since so many tears had already been shed by the Apache women on that tragic occasion.

If we stand with our Native American brothers and sisters against the destruction of their sacred sites, we might realize that they are sacred to us as well and then we might be able to arm ourselves with obsidian to begin the hard road back to living in harmony with nature and avert the creation of the Legend of Oak Flat.

mintpressnews.com

I attended a rain dance 40 years ago in the Southwest. At the end of the 6-hour ceremony, it rained. My final memory of the event was a small, elderly lady chasing an immense clown, who had ritually molested her in the ceremony, beating him about the head and shoulders with an umbrella. The next day the clown showed me the welts and bruises she left on him. Regardless, the dancing, drumming, and sanctified elder-lady groping had produced the desired result, more water. Some of those clouds sailing over the plateau had heard the call, lingered, and shared some of their precious cargo with needy, righteous folks below.

It’s not an experience any farmer from the drought plagued West is likely to forget. And so, decades later, the rain dance surfaced in my memory when I read that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (now the CME Group) had opened up a futures market in California water (Nasdaq Veles California Water Index [NQH2O]) last week.

One can imagine derivative tranches composed of portions of irrigation-district allotments of riparian water, some private well water, water from the odd ephemeral creek, pre-1914 rights water, added to a slice or two of federal bureau water and some of that State Water Project water that has remained, as some say, “notional.”

Of course, we here in the San Joaquin Valley, which without millions of acre feet of irrigation water would dry up in a dusty cough in one season, are familiar with the derivative-market deal from our experience with real estate-mortgage tranches, derivatives described by Warren Buffett 20 years ago as “weapons of mass destruction.” And many a former homeowner, now a renter without savings and living on the Social Security check, would agree. That’s the view of ordinary folks. But, according to the Public Trust Doctrine, enshrined in California water law, at least surface water is held in trust by the state and nation for the use and enjoyment of all the people, not just agribusiness or the kinds of water-management distortions that would arise as the result of a derivative market in an “asset” no one ought to be allowed to speculate on. And groundwater is undergoing a very imperfect process of regulation of its own, too little too late but at least it saves the faces of the regulatory agencies involved.

But, for Big Shots, those large enough to rank a numbered and colored ball on the great Thomas Hobbes Memorial Pool Table of Agribusiness, where those balls are constantly crashing into one another over the heads of ordinary folk, now that they’ve rigged the Farm Bills to where they cannot lose however badly they farm and little water gets delivered, playing the futures market in bundles of water of various dubious provenances might be better than Poker Night at the Country Club. The next Farm Bill will probably have a feature that protects agriculture from any harm arising from water derivatives and the inevitably following collateralized debt obligations that created such joy in the mortgage markets.

But will it make another more water?

It might stimulate renewed interest in putting new dams in rivers that already have dams so that less water will escape – free, with some Salmon smolts and Steelhead fry – into the ocean. Maybe the Chicago derivative traders can figure away to monetize that water, too, and call it the Revolutionary Green Futures Market, so that not one drop of fresh water, produced from ice, snow, sleet, rain, or from deep, deeper and much deeper in the earth, will go unwagered upon into the Bounding Main.

And how about a market devoted to subsidence futures, predictions of how far what land where sinks over a season? What about a Selenium Index derivative, estimating the increase in poisonous concentration per acre-foot? Or a Migratory Water Fowl Index, betting on the rate of decline per season of water fowl on the Pacific Flyway? And while we are at it, why couldn’t they develop a futures market based on the state’s Cancer Registry?

The San Joaquin Valley, which can be regarded along with arid urban Southern California, as the table on which this game is to be played, has always rested on two absolute poles: every inch of farmland is for sale; and water runs uphill to money. This derivative market, far from “rationalizing” water distribution in the state, is going to disturb the magnetic field that is the Prime Mover and Original Cause of all economic activity in our region. How are you going to determine the price of an acre of “prime” farm land, i.e. irrigated farm land, if some commodity trader in Chicago or New York is using the precious acre-feet required to irrigate those almonds in some elaborate “play” that flops and suddenly our almond farmer doesn’t get his water because nobody knows who might have owned it or had the right to use it when and where anyway; but the only thing for certain is that somebody didn’t pay his derivative contract on time so … Maybe, the farmer’s irrigation district got a better deal selling it to Los Angeles than to him, so off it went and the farmer can’t get the water he needs when he needs it at any price. But no, he can get it from some well owner west of Oroville for $200/acre-foot if he can wheel it through Marysville down to the Delta, through the Delta-Mendota and maybe part of the San Luis canals. But, of course, it isn’t really the well water from west of Oroville at all, but off of some westside sedge farm that has some federal water for sale at $500 an acre-foot.

When Acme, ABC, and XYZ hedge funds take big plunges into the California water-derivative market while federal and state resource-regulation agencies are still trying to do their job, for example, continuing to make some water available for the environment, then Acme and its competitors are going to get together, hire themselves lobbyists and buy chunks of local members of Congress, who are going to apply even more pressure than is already applied by agribusiness on these agencies to perform one great task: Non-enforcement of state and federal environmental laws and regulations. Not that any old real estate developer in the state can’t already buy non-enforcement of any environmental law or regulation, sometimes just for the asking, if he knows how to ask right.

And so, the Invisible Pool Cue of the Free Market will scatter the precariously racked balls in all directions at once and a new game will develop, even more remote from the actual work of growing food and fiber.

However, it won’t make it rain, more water, or any prosperity for ordinary people in the San Joaquin Valley.

counterpunch.org

Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, wants to build an electric car factory in Brazil. He was supposed to meet Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, in Miami in early March, but he was too busy; instead, Musk will go to Brazil sometime this year. All eyes are on the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, whose Secretary of International Affairs Derian Campos is in direct contact with Musk. Two automobile manufacturers—BMW and GM—already have factories in Santa Catarina. Marcos Pontes (Minister of Science, Technology, Innovation, and Communications) held a video conference with Anderson Ricardo Pacheco, a senior Tesla official. They were joined by Daniel Freitas, a congressman, and Claiton Pacheco Galdino, who is the business development director for Criciúma, a city in Santa Catarina. They are eager for Tesla to open a Gigafactory—Tesla’s name for a big factory—in South America’s largest economy.

It helps that Brazil has considerable lithium deposits—mostly in the southeastern states of Minas Gerais and Paraíba and in the northeastern states of Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte. The production of lithium is limited, largely having been used for ceramics and glass production. The Bolsonaro government is interested in increasing the production of lithium, including as a key raw material for the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars such as those made by Tesla. But Brazil’s lithium will not be sufficient. Tesla would need to import lithium from elsewhere.

The Lithium Triangle

Over 50 percent of the world’s known lithium deposits are in the “Lithium Triangle”—the lithium concentrated brine sources in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Bolivia’s high mountain deserts—the Salar de Uyuni—have by far the largest known reserves of lithium.

In a bizarre tweet, the Bolivian entrepreneur Samuel Doria Medina wrote that since Elon Musk and Jair Bolsonaro will discuss the Tesla plant in Brazil, they should add to this initiative the following: “build a Gigafactory in the Salar de Uyuni to supply lithium batteries.” Doria Medina is not just an entrepreneur. He is the vice-presidential candidate alongside the “interim president” Jeanine Áñez for the May 3, 2020, Bolivian presidential elections. Áñez came to power only because of the coup d’état against Evo Morales in November 2019. Doria Medina’s welcome mat to Tesla should, therefore, be seen as having the full authority of the coup government behind it.

Morales’ government had been very cautious with these lithium reserves. It had made clear that these precious resources were not to be turned over to transnational corporations in deals favorable to the firms; what gains come from lithium, Morales had pointed out, must be properly shared with the Bolivian people. The point that Morales’ government made is that any deal must be done with Comibol—Bolivia’s national mining company—and Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos—Bolivia’s national lithium company. The monetary gains from the mining would come into the Bolivian exchequer and then fund the social programs so necessary for the country. This sensible socialist policy was too much for three major transnational firms—Eramet (France), FMC (United States), and Posco (South Korea)—all three of whom turned tail and went to Argentina.

The Lithium Coup

It was Morales’ socialist policy toward Bolivia’s resources that doomed his government. The oligarchy, which was angry with Morales’ government and its socialism, used every mechanism to undermine the election of 2019. Forest fires in the northern and eastern regions of Bolivia provided the oligarchy’s media with the weaponry to suggest that Morales had abandoned his commitment to the environment and to Pachamama (Mother Earth), and that he was now working to benefit the cattle ranchers; it is important to point that this is not only ridiculous, but that as soon as the coup government of Áñez came into office, it passed legislation that allowed the ranchers to extend their lands into forested areas.

Morales’ opponent—Carlos Mesa—and other senior leaders of the oligarchy’s political parties openly said long before the election that Morales could only win by fraud. A self-proclaimed Council for the Defense of Democracy said that Morales was an illegitimate candidate because he had lost the 2016 constitutional referendum. The media—backed by these corporate and neofascist interests—banged the drum of fraud, while Carlos Mesa—on the night of the election—said that there was “monumental fraud” in the election. These provocations from Mesa, the neofascists, and the corporate elites resulted in street violence; in the midst of this, the police—sections of whom were angry with Morales for cracking down on police corruption—mutinied. The 36 Bolivians who died in the immediate post-election aftermath are victims of Mesa’s incendiary language. The Organization of American States (OAS), egged on by the U.S. government, came up with a “preliminary report” of fraud in the election; the hard conclusions in the report were not substantiated by the data in it. The OAS report played an important role in legitimizing the coup against Morales.

It is important to point out that there was no controversy about Morales’ election in 2014; in that election, Morales won 61 percent of the votes to defeat the entrepreneur Samuel Doria Medina, who won 24 percent (Doria Medina is the same person who is now running for vice president and welcomes Tesla to Bolivia’s lithium). Morales’ term, from the 2014 election, had not yet expired in November 2019; the removal of Morales then violated the mandate of 2014, a point that has received almost no discussion either inside Bolivia or abroad.

John Curiel and Jack Williams of the Election Data and Science Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) went over the Bolivian election data and found no fraud: “There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find,” they wrote conclusively in the Washington Post. Curiel and Williams contacted the OAS, but they note, “We and other scholars within the field reached out to the OAS for comment; the OAS did not respond.” By their assessment, Morales won the election in November 2019 and should have been inaugurated this year to a new term.

Terrible pressure by the coup government against the party of Morales (the Movement for Socialism, or MAS)—as well as the presence of USAID monitors and a U.S.-backed head of the election commission, Salvador Romero—suggests that this election on May 3 is not going to be at all fair; it will likely favor the coup government, including the entrepreneur who wants to turn over Bolivia’s lithium to Elon Musk’s Tesla and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

A World of Lithium

In 2019, the benchmark Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s “Energy Storage Outlook 2019” report anticipated that by 2030, the price of the lithium-ion battery would drop dramatically, and that—as a consequence—renewable energy (solar and wind) plus storage of energy in batteries will expand exponentially. By 2040, there is an expectation that wind and solar will produce 40 percent of world energy consumption, rather than the 7 percent it now produces. For this, demand for energy storage will increase. “The total demand for batteries from the stationary storage and electric transport sectors is forecast to be 4,584GWh (Gigawatt hours) by 2040,” write the Bloomberg analysts, “providing a major opportunity for battery makers and miners of component metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel.” The current use is merely 9GW/17GWh.

The key point to emphasize here is that this will provide “a major opportunity” for “miners of component metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel.” When Bloomberg’s analysts use a word like “miners,” they do not mean the Bolivian miners or the Congolese miners, but the transnational firms, such as Tesla and its chief, Elon Musk. As far as Bloomberg and Áñez are concerned, South America is no longer to follow the resource nationalist project of Evo Morales; this is Elon Musk’s South America, a place for the neo-conquistadors to make money and leave behind them social carnage.

counterpunch.org

Rare earth minerals do not easily roll off one’s tongue in the same manner as gold, silver, and platinum. For example, yttrium oxide and europium, while sounding unimportant, are what provide the red hue in color televisions.

Nations around the world are scrambling to secure reserves containing rare earth minerals. China, where one-third of the planet’s rare earth minerals are currently found, has severely restricted the export of the minerals to friends and competitors. One of the largest known reserves of rare earths is the Bayan Obo deposit in China’s Inner Mongolia.

China’s export restrictions have sent nations around the world on search missions to secure both known and untapped rare earth deposits. One such mother lode of rare earth minerals has been discovered in the eastern southern Pacific Ocean. The estimates are that the deep ocean region contains twice the amount of rare earths than found in China.

Some of these deposits are in undersea geologically active zones, where deep sea floor vents spew rare earth minerals from expulsions of lava and hot gases. The discovery that the South Pacific region is rich in rare earths has led European nations, including France and Britain, which maintain colonies in the area, re-staking their colonial footprints. France, for example, is reticent to grant further autonomy or independence to New Caledonia, where an independence referendum is scheduled for November 8, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna. Similarly, Britain has showed a renewed interest in the Pitcairn Islands, where a handful of descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers continue to live.

In 2015, Australia stamped out self-government of Norfolk Island, turning the island into a hybrid municipality of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. New Zealand has vetoed ambitions by two of its elf-governing “associated states” – the Cook Islands and Niue – for full membership in the United Nations. For these colonial powers, it is not what is about what lies above the sea – island resorts – but what lies under the sea within the marine borders of the territories and that is rare earth minerals.

With the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, rare earth reserves have been discovered in Greenland, a “self-governing” territory of Denmark. Moves by the Greenland government to seek independence from Denmark and permit Chinese companies to mine rare earth minerals have met with stiff opposition from Denmark, the United States, and NATO.

Other countries possessing significant deposits of rare earths include India, Russia, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and the United States. These nations, as well as China, all have varying degrees of the necessary political, economic, and military might to protect their rare earth resources.

However, some developing nations, where rare earths have been discovered, are candidates for ruthless exploitation by multinational firms, some under the direction of governments, to secure exclusive mining rights. In fact, Toyota, which has a tight relationship with the Japanese government, bought a rare earth mine in Vietnam to ensure such exclusivity rights.

Japan may not have to worry about Vietnam as its major source of rare earths. Earlier this year, a deposit of some 16 million tons of rare earth mineral oxides was discovered in deep sea mud located 1150 miles southeast of Tokyo. The deposit contained much of the rare earths upon which Japan’s consumer electronics industry is reliant: yttrium, dysprosium, terbium, and europium.

In countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, columbite-tantalite, a mineral used in the manufacture of semi-conductor chips, is such a hot commodity that rival warlords, some acting on behalf of outside players, including Rwanda, Uganda, Israel, Japan, China, and the United States battle one another for control of the mineral’s extraction and export.

The Rwanda Mines, Petroleum, and Gas Board signed a deal in 2017 with a major Japanese rare earth extraction firm for the exploration and mining of rare earths, as well as tungsten, in Rwanda. However, Rwandan President Paul Kagame is known to have backed fellow Tutsi rebels in the DRC, who exploit rare earth mines in South and North Kivu provinces and send the stolen minerals to Rwanda. There have been attempts to curtail the trade in “conflict minerals” in the Great Lakes region of Africa, but they have all come to no avail.

Currently, US and Chinese firms are waging a political and economic influence “war” for access to lithium, cassiterite, and cobalt reserves in the DRC.

Next door to the DRC, in civil war-ravaged Burundi, there was a discovery of exceptionally high-grade “main vein” of rare earth minerals in 2017. Burundi, which was once a German colony, saw Germany’s ThyssenKrupp move in to exploit the mineral resources. ThyssenKrupp also began building a processing plant in Burundi. The German government has come under attack from human rights groups that accuse it of backing the German mining venture, known as the Gakara Project, even though Burundi’s president, President Pierre Nkurunziza, was dubiously elected to a third term in office. German business groups have countered with the argument that if Germany was not mining Burundi’s rare earths, China would be doing so.

The French government is not only concentrating its rare earth mining activities in its traditional Francophone sphere of influence in Africa – Morocco, Burkina Faso, Niger, Madagascar, Guinea – but further afield, including the pursuit of joint venture mining activities in Kazakhstan.

In the United States, the Pentagon has recognized the military importance of rare earths. The Defense Logistic Agency's Strategic Materials department is tasked to ensure a continued supply of rare earths to US defense contractors. The US Energy Department tracks rare earth discoveries and mining operations around the world, thanks to a constant infusion of intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency. The Trump administration has moved to open US federal wildlife areas, national parks, and other lands to exploration and mining of rare earths to private companies, much to the chagrin of environmentalists and Native American tribal governments.

In a rush to lessen dependence on Chinese exports of rare earths, which have, in any event, been restricted by Beijing, nations and companies around the world have launched a cut-throat competition to gain leverage over the rare earth market. What peaks the interest of gatherers of economic intelligence are references in email, video conferences, phone calls, faxes, and financial documents to such terms as europium, terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, samarium, and other rare earths.

As the world becomes more dependent on high-tech and an “Internet of things,” consisting of computers, mobile phones, appliances, televisions, security systems, automobiles, etc., the economic war for control of rare earth minerals will increase. There is the extreme possibility that economic warfare could turn into shooting wars, as has already been the case in the DRC.

This may not be about condos on North Korean beaches after all. Arguably, the heart of the matter in the Trump administration’s embrace of Kim Jong-un has everything to do with one of the largest deposits of rare earth elements (REEs) in the world, located only 150 km northwest of Pyongyang and potentially worth billions of US dollars.

All the implements of 21st century technology-driven everyday life rely on the chemical and physical properties of 17 precious elements on the periodic chart also known as REEs.

Currently, China is believed to control over 95% of global production of rare earth metals, with an estimated 55 million tons in deposits. North Korea for its part holds at least 20 million tons.

Rare earth elements are not the only highly strategic minerals and metals in this power play. The same deposits are sources of tungsten, zirconium, titanium, hafnium, rhenium and molybdenum; all of these are absolutely critical not only for myriad military applications but also for nuclear power.

Rare earth metallurgy also happens to be essential for US, Russian and Chinese weapons systems. The THAAD system needs rare earth elements, and so do Russia’s S-400 and S-500 missile defense systems.

It’s not far-fetched to consider ‘The Art of the Deal’ applied to rare earth elements. If the US does not attempt to make a serious play on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK’s) allegedly vast rare earth resources, the winner, once again, may be Beijing. And Moscow as well – considering the Russia-China strategic partnership, now explicitly recognized on the record.

The whole puzzle may revolve around who offers the best return on investment; not on real estate but sexy metal, with the Pyongyang leadership potentially able to collect an immense fortune.

Is Beijing capable of matching a possible American deal? This may well have been a key topic of discussion during the third meeting in only a few weeks between Kim Jong-un and President Xi Jinping, exactly when the entire geopolitical chessboard hangs in the balance.

So metals are not sexy?

Researcher Marc Sills, in a paper titled ‘Strategic Materials Crises and Great Power Conflicts’, says: “Conflict over strategic minerals is inevitable. The dramas will likely unfold at or near the mines, or along the transportation lines the materials must travel, and especially at world’s strategic chokepoints the US military is now generally tasked to control. Again, the power equation is written to include both control of possession and denial of possession by others.”

This applies, for instance, to the Ukraine puzzle. Russia badly needs Ukraine’s titanium, zirconium and hafnium for its industrial-military complex.

Earlier this year Japanese researchers discovered a deposit of 16 million tons of rare earth elements (less than the North Korean reserves) beneath the seabed in the Western Pacific. But that’s unlikely to change China’s – and potentially the DPRK’s – prominence. The key in the whole rare earth element process is to devise a profitable production chain, as the Chinese have done. And that takes a long time.

Detailed papers such as ‘China’s Rare Earth Elements Industry’, by Cindy Hurst (2010), published by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS) or ‘Rare Earth in Selected US Defense Applications’, by James Hedrick, presented at the 40th Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals in 2004, convincingly map all the connections. Sills stresses how minerals and metals, though, seem to attract attention only in mining trade publications: “And that would seem to explain in part why the REE contest in Korea has eluded attention. Metals just ain’t that sexy. But weapons are.”

Metals are certainly sexy for US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It’s quite enlightening to remember how Pompeo, then CIA director, told a Senate Committee in May 2017 how foreign control of rare earth elements was “a very real concern.”

Fast forward to one year later, when Pompeo, taking over at the State Department, emphasized a new “swagger” in US foreign policy.

And fast forward again to only a few weeks ago, with Pompeo’s swagger applied to meetings with Kim Jong-un.

Way apart from a Netflix-style plot twist, a quite possible narrative is Pompeo impressing on Kim the beauty of a sweet, US-brokered rare earth elements deal. But China and Russia must be locked out. Or else. It’s not hard to visualize Xi understanding the implications.

The DPRK – this unique mix of Turkmenistan and post-USSR Romania – may be on the cusp of being integrated to a vast supply chain via an Iron Silk Road, with the Russia-China strategic partnership simultaneously investing in railways, pipelines and ports in parallel to North-South Korean special economic zones (SEZs), Chinese-style, coming to fruition.

As Gazprom’s Deputy CEO Vitaly Markelov has revealed: “The South Korean side has asked Gazprom” to re-start a key project – a gas pipeline across North Korea, an umbilical cord between South Korea and the Eurasian landmass.

Since key discussions at the Far East Summit in Vladivostok in September 2017, the roadmap is set for South Korea, China and Russia to attach the DPRK to Eurasia integration, developing its agriculture, hydropower and – crucially – mineral wealth.

As much as the Trump administration may be late in the game, it’s unthinkable Washington would abandon a piece of the (metal) action.

atimes.com

While the deputy chief of Exxon, Tillerson was involved in a oil royalty payment issue with Chad that saw the oil firm ordered to pay billions of dollars by a Chadian court, however, that was not the key issue at play in adding Chad, a US military ally, to the visa ban list. The decision was pressed by the Israeli government over Chad's reported secret relationship with Iran and Syria. Jared Kushner is a favorite Trump administration interlocutor for both Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Netanyahu and Trump supporter Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate.

In 2016, Israel attempted to re-establish diplomatic relations with Chad, which has a population that is 55 percent Muslim and 40 percent Christian. Chad-Israeli relations were broken in 1972 by Chadian President Francois Tombalbaye. The State of Palestine opened an embassy in Ndjamena, Chad in 1988.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold paid a rare visit to Chad in August 2016 to patch up relations between the two countries. The meeting between Gold and Chadian President Idriss Deby, a one-time ally of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, in Ndjamena, the Chadian capital, was to set the stage for a side meeting at the Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York the following month between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Chad's Deby. Netanyahu did meet with some 15 African leaders in New York, but Deby was not one of them. Deby was seen as key to the Israelis, since he served during 2016 as the chair of the African Union.

Relations were not re-established with Chad to the dismay of Netanyahu's government, which had embarked on a major diplomatic mission to curry favor in Africa.

Chad was clearly blindsided by the Trump administration’s decision to ban tourist and business travel to the United States. President Deby, clearly trying to forge closer ties with US allies in Africa, decided to attend the fourth Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa in November 2017, a conference hosted by Senegal’s President Macky Sall, The Senegalese president met Trump at the July 2017 G20 Summit in Hamburg and, once again, at the UN General Assembly Plenary Meeting last month. Deby may assume that Sall maintains good offices with Trump and that attending the “Club of Dakar” may boost currently frayed Chadian-American relations, however, that is a big assumption, given Trump’s racist oft-demonstrated attitudes toward people of color in the United States and abroad.

In July 2016, Netanyahu attended a summit with a select group of African leaders in Uganda, a meeting held under the auspices of the Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni. Present, in addition to Museveni, were the leaders of Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia.

A planned Israeli-African summit planned for the Togolese capital of Lomé for the end of this month was canceled after protests broke out around Togo during the summer against Togo's dictator Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe. Delegations from 54 African countries, including Chad, were invited to meet with the Israelis in Togo, however, Israel claimed that the summit was canceled because the Palestinians, acting through Morocco and South Africa, pressured Togo to cancel. Gnassingbe visited Israel last month to request that Israel "postpone" the summit.

Kushner, Friedman, and other Israeli agents-of-influence within the Trump administration wanted to demonstrate to Africa that there are consequences for refusing to deal with Israel. Chad was the country selected as the African country, currently lacking relations with Israel, for which an example would be made.

Trump held a meeting with African heads of state while attending this year’s plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly. One of the leaders Trump went out of his way to chat with was Guinea’s President Alpha Condé. After telling the Guinean president and the other African leaders, “I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich.," Trump paid special attention to Condé. Among the brigands who are getting “rich” in Africa are business associates of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his family.

Kushner’s business partners include the billionaire Steinmetz family of Israel. Beny Steinmetz, Israel's second-richest person, was arrested in August of this year by Israeli police in a major investigation of global money laundering. Steinmetz's BSGR, headquartered on the isle of Guernsey, has been the subject of the Justice Department criminal probe of bribing officials in the Republic of Guinea in West Africa for lucrative mining concessions, particularly the Simandou iron mine concession. The Justice Department's investigation is focused on Steinmetz's violation of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Beny Steinmetz's nephew, Raz Steinmetz, is a real estate partner of the Kushner Companies in the Trump Bay Street tower in Jersey City, New Jersey. The Steinmetz and Kushner families also co-own 15 buildings in Manhattan. In early 2017, Kushner Companies and Steinmetz jointly purchased, under the corporate name "Gaia," a Brooklyn pasta factory for $56 million.

Condé, whose government initiated a criminal investigation of Steinmetz companies, much to the chagrin of Jared Kushner and his family, may have received a signature Mafia-like “strong-arming” by Trump during their brief encounter in New York.

Another one of Kushner's business partners is the firm Stonehage Fleming, a wealth management firm that oversees a $40 billion fund for 250 of the world's wealthiest people, many of whom are Trump's "friends" who have staked various claims for Africa's natural resources. The Fleming side of the firm was founded by relatives of James Bond's creator Ian Fleming, himself a one-time British MI-6 intelligence agent. Before its merger with Fleming Family & Partners in 2014, Stonehage, a South African firm, maintained offices in South Africa, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Australia, Luxembourg, British Virgin Islands, and the US

Trump and the Kushners see Africa as one huge "get rich quick scheme." Trump’s rhetoric about his friends getting rich in Africa came as music to the ears of the African grifters — presidents like Uganda's Yoweri Museveni and Côte d'Ivoire's Alassane Ouattara — who were present at the New York UN luncheon and who have also made certain that their offshore bank accounts are flush with bribe money paid by Trump's rich pals.

One of First Daughter Ivanka Trump’s close friends and business associates in her diamond retail businesses – Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry and Madison Avenue Diamonds LLC – is Moshe Lax, a rather problematic character prominent in the Orthodox Jewish diamond trade in Manhattan. Lax has been involved in lawsuit after lawsuit in New York, mostly for his failure to pay his bills or defrauding business partners. Manhattan’s infamous 47th “Diamond District” has been a center for numerous illegal operations involving the smuggling of “blood diamonds” from Africa’s killing fields in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, and Guinea-Bissau, among other nations.

When it comes to Trump’s policy on Africa, the quench for diamonds, gold, rare earth minerals, and oil has seen the policy co-opted not only by Jared Kushner and Trump’s “rich friends,” but also the most unsavory of the deplorables.

Endless US aggression in Afghanistan has nothing to do with combating terrorism (America supports it), everything to do with controlling the country, using it for oil and gas pipelines, part of encircling Russia and China with US military bases, and plundering vast Afghan mineral riches – likely worth trillions of dollars, a prize corporate predators covet.

They include barite, chromite, coal, cobalt, copper, gold, iron ore, lead, enormous amounts of highly-valued lithium and other rare earth metals vital for high tech products, natural gas, oil, precious and semi-precious stones, potash, salt, sulfur, talc, zinc, among other minerals.

The nation is a resource treasure trove, a key reason why US occupation is permanent, unjustifiably justified by war, the idea not winning it, just waging it endlessly, a forever war.

On Thursday, Trump met with US-installed puppet president Ashraf Ghani, developing Afghan resources discussed, code language for plunder by US corporate predators.

A White House statement said “(t)hey discussed economic development issues, including how American companies can help quickly develop Afghanistan’s rich rare earth mineral resources.”

“They agreed that such initiatives would help American companies develop materials critical to national security while growing Afghanistan’s economy and creating new jobs in both countries, therefore defraying some of the costs of United States assistance as Afghans become more self-reliant.”

Translation: Ghani agreed to let US corporate predators plunder his country, helping America’s economy, not Afghanistan’s, doing nothing to improve the lives of its people, exploiting them instead.

If Ghani balks at any time, he’ll be removed and replaced by a more compliant puppet, the way imperialism works.

The scheme has nothing to do with defraying the enormous cost of endless war, everything to do enriching US corporate predators, along with controlling Afghan mineral riches.

Pre-9/11, Taliban officials met with US oil giant Unocal in Houston regarding construction of a trans-Afghan pipeline.

The 1999 US Silk Road Strategy Act aimed to develop US regional business opportunities, along with undermining, destabilizing, and isolating Russia, China and Iran – a new Great Game to control vital resources in this strategic part of the world.

Clinton administration talks with Taliban officials broke off in 1999, resumed by Bush/Cheney, again ending unsuccessfully.

The rest, as they say, is history, 9/11 followed, four weeks later Afghanistan attacked, a war planned months in advance.

Another key reason for launching it was reviving opium production, largely eradicated by the Taliban, a key source of income for the CIA, Western banks and other financial interests, besides organized crime.

Things are virtually never as they seem, the public lied to about bin Laden, a CIA asset when alive before perishing from illness in December 2001, the 9/11 mother of all false flags, and why America launched war on humanity in its wake, beginning in Afghanistan following the Clinton administration’s rape of Yugoslavia.

Trump continues what his predecessors began, escalating wars he inherited, threatening North Korea with likely catastrophic war if launched, Iran on his target list, maybe Russia and China to follow.

Today is the most perilous time in world history, things worsening, not improving.

Hawkish generals in charge of US warmaking threaten humanity’s survival, nuclear war an ominous possibility, a doomsday scenario if launched.

stephenlendman.org

The opposition parties know they are not in a position to take power democratically, so the only choice they have is to destabilise the situation in the country. To be more precise, this means provoking bloodshed and seeing it through to a regime change. The actions of the parliamentary Economic Freedom Fighters party – insulting the country’s president or the parliamentary speaker and behaving like clowns – only seem like hooliganism at first glance. In fact, the tactic is intended to bring different segments of the population into conflict with each other and cause riots that will lead to fatalities. In the meantime, the Economic Freedom Fighters have so far done nothing to try and achieve their declared objectives legislatively. One of the main points of their political programme was the nationalisation of land without compensation, but while the Freedom Fighters were raising an uproar, a bill to change the Land Act, which provides for such nationalisation, was put forward by the African National Congress. This initiative of the ruling party led to even more ferocious attacks being launched against it by the Democratic Alliance, which represents the interest of local and transnational monopoly capital (1).

On 22 February, the High Court of North Gauteng (where the country’s government is located), ruled in the case brought by the Democratic Alliance that South Africa’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is «unconstitutional and invalid». What’s more, the court ordered President Zuma to revoke the notice of withdrawal. Against the backdrop of the recent coup in Gambia, the events in South Africa seem like an attempt, amid instigated large-scale riots, to make the government use force against ‘peaceful protesters’, thereby paving the way for an investigation by the International Criminal Court. 

The danger of last year’s pogroms against ‘foreigners’ has come back with a vengeance. On 24 February, large-scale demonstrations were held in a number of cities, including the capital, against immigrants, who then held their own demonstrations in response. Violence was unavoidable. The situation was summed up fairly shrewdly by the leader of the Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa: «In our view, the xenophobic attacks are well coordinated and political. Opposition parties which are fighting the ANC government want to make South Africa ungovernable and they are mobilising communities to attack foreigners».

Behind this picture is the blatant desire to disrupt the government’s plans outlined in President Jacob Zuma’s address to parliament. These plans include amendments to the law on mineral resources in terms of the State’s right to exercise sovereignty over all the country’s mineral resources, and changes to the racial imbalance within the country’s mining industry. At present, nearly all of the major mining companies are owned by transnational corporations (diamond mining is dominated by De Beers, which is owned by Anglo America plc, and platinum mining is dominated by Anglo Platinum Limited, which is part of Anglo American Platinum Ltd owned by Anglo American plc). The government is planning to pursue direct state involvement in this sector of the economy. A bill on these issues will be introduced into parliament this year.

There are also other plans. An interesting programme is being implemented in South Africa’s agricultural sector to create collective farms. The construction of free housing will continue – more than four million families have already been provided with houses. Nine million households that did not have electricity have now been connected to the grid. Only two of the six million jobs that the government planned to create by March 2019 have so far materialised, but this is also an achievement. A total of seventeen million people, almost one in three, receive social support from the government.

In addition, the government has responded to last year’s mass student protests over the increase in university tuition fees by allocating 32 billion rand to support higher education. This will not solve the problem entirely, but it will allow those less well-off to continue on with higher education.

The bold steps being undertaken by President Jacob Zuma in the social and economic sphere are being reinforced by the pan-African scope of South Africa’s foreign policy. Good examples of this are the plans to create a pan-African free trade zone by merging three regional organisations – the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC) – and South Africa’s participation in peacekeeping operations in Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Mozambique, South Sudan, Libya, and Somalia.

The ruling African National Congress party conference is set to take place at the end of 2017. The ANC will elect its new leader and, by extension, the country’s most likely president (should the ANC win the parliamentary elections). The approach of this political challenge, along with the South African government’s determination to continue along its chosen course, is increasing the anxiety of those who regard what’s going on as a threat to their centuries-old positions – positions that are no longer looking quite so unshakeable.

(1) e.g. the Absa Bank – a South African bank officially, but the majority of its shares are owned by Barclays, a British bank.