A century of plunder

The question that these vicious free-marketeers and US imperialists asked was: "Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests?"

And, looking through the foreign pages of this paper today, the answers are there for all to see.

Everywhere the US writ runs, there is poverty, war, hunger, killing and oppression.

There is the collapse of the rule of law and the overweening ambition of the US to ignore international standards in favour of its own interests as it chooses to advance them.

In its continuing vendetta with Iran, the US collaborated with Israel to avoid the international Atomic Energy Authority and conduct an illegal air raid on what it claimed was a nuclear plant in Syria, even though its own experts admitted that there was no likelihood that this was other than a power plant, without any weapons manufacturing capacity.

In Palestine, even the international Monetary Fund admits that US Middle-East stooge Israel is crippling the nascent Palestinian economy with its illegal apartheid walls and barriers.

The World Food Programme is in crisis, with huge new demands being made on it because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq being conducted by the US and its allies are creating starvation, disrupting farming and generating displaced persons and refugees by the thousands.

Floods of needy people are going hungry and in desperate need of aid because of what WFP director Josette Sheeran tags "market shock," although free-market shock might be a more appropriate label.

In Nigeria, US and European transnationals proceed apace to strip the country of its oil, leaving the inhabitants of that country as poor as they were before the oil exploitation commenced, enriching only the transnationals themselves and a complaisant government only too happy to enrich themseves by doing big oil's dirty work for it.

Meanwhile, the efforts to shift some fuel production to biofuels in order to feed the car culture of the developed world and its perpetually growing thirst for fuel, and, according to the White House, to safeguard the US fuel supply as oil grows more difficult to obtain and extract, crops are being diverted to ethanol production, leading to food riots in over 34 countries and bans on food exports in 40 states, while the free market drives prices ever higher.

In India and Pakistan, a deal for a new gas pipeline to provide fuel from Iran is being opposed by the US, which feels that this might weaken its efforts to isolate Iran into submission to US diktats.

And, throughout the last few months, the consistent efforts by the US to neuter the battle against global warming have effectively stalled attempts to replace the Kyoto agreement

Yes, the Project for a New American Century is working, but it is not working for the people of the world, or even the people of the US.

It is working for a handful of plutocrats who are enriching themselves at the whole world's expense.

And if we don't stop them, the world they leave in their wake will not be fit for us, let alone our children.