Donald Trump's 100% tariff threats against BRICS could seriously backfire

Donald Trump has announced the threat of 100% tariffs on imports from BRICS countries unless they commit to the perpetual superiority of the US Dollar in international trade.

There’s nothing new about Donald Trump threatening extreme protectionist measures against other countries, in fact he’s about to shatter the USMCA trade agreement by imposing 25% tariffs on the United States’ neighbours and allies Mexico and Canada.

However the extreme threat of 100% tariffs on products from Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Iran, Indonesia, and a multitude of other BRICS aligned economies just goes to show how threatened his administration feels by any kind of transnational economic cooperation that doesn’t involve the United States.

Despite all of Trump’s assurances (lies) that the tariffs he imposes will be paid by the countries he’s trying to economically sanction, the reality is that they’ll be paid by US businesses and citizens when they purchase imported products.

Raising the price of imported goods via tariffs incentivises consumers to buy domestically produced goods and services by making them artificially cheaper, however it’s impossible to boost US output overnight, so more tariffs mean more price rises.

And 100% tariffs would mean that prices would literally double.

Take China as an example. Over the last few decades US capitalists have made fortunes by closing down domestic production and importing from China instead, where lower wages, weaker regulation, and poorer environmental standards mean much higher profit margins.

In 2023 China exported $501 billion in goods and services to the US, while the US exported $147 billion to China in return, meaning the US trade deficit with China is over $350 billion.

If Trump were to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, that would end up lumbering US consumers with hundreds of $billions in extra taxes.

Then bear in mind that it wouldn’t just be China either. If you add up US imports from the BRICS member states alone (setting aside the 9 partner states and 8 more that have applied for membership), it adds up to over over $660 billion per year in imports.

It’s beyond fantastical to imagine that US companies that rely on Chinese manufacturing and $160 billion+ in imports from other BRICS member states would be either capable of, or willing to close down their overseas operations and build replacement factories in the US overnight, so prices will go up.

You can’t just expect production to shift back to the United States overnight. Neither for high tech electronic components, nor cheap mass produced consumer goods.

You can’t just slam the door shut on global supply chains and expect factories producing hundreds of $billions worth of goods to spring up in your own country overnight.

Who is going to pay for their construction? Who is going to staff them? Who is going to train up all of these new workers, especially in high tech manufacturing and services? Who is going to cover the additional costs of the required machine tools if they’re produced in countries that are subject to Trump’s sanctions? Where are the raw materials that the US cannot produce for itself in sufficient quantities (rare earth metals for example) going to come from?

Trump’s repeated threats to impose tariffs are akin to the behaviour of a local mob boss trying to bully their local community into conformity. Either everyone does as he says, and conduct business through his cartel, or they suffer reprisals and punishment beatings.

And the punishment beatings aren’t just being meted out on rival economies like China either. Trump’s economic sanctions on Mexico and Canada illustrate the fact that the new US administration is prepared to sanction and destabilise its allies, as well as geopolitical rivals.

There are quite obvious parallels between Trump’s tariffs and Brexit. Both raised trade barriers between themselves and their neighbours; both have been sold to the public with a pack of outright lies about the consequences and exaggerations of the benefits; both can be seen as self-applied sanctions with dramatic effects on domestic businesses that rely on imports and exports; and both diminish the country’s reputation and diplomatic standing by unilaterally tearing up previously agreed treaties and agreements.

Then there’s the fact that previous US attempts at protectionism have backfired spectacularly, like the embargo on the sale of advanced AI chips to China, which seemed to force the Chinese into coming up with better and more efficient AI language models, and the $1trillion implosion of US tech stocks after the release of DeepSeek-R1.

It’s vanishingly unlikely that countries that are targeted by Trump’s tariffs would just lie down and take it, without replying with tit-for-tat tariffs of their own, which would seriously damage US exports.

And seeking to bully other countries into subservience to US interests could end up being highly counter-productive to the stated aim of weakening BRICS.

If the US gains the reputation of a bully that purposefully disrupts and damages other countries economies to pursue their own agenda, or simply due to the whims of their unstable and unreliable President, doesn’t that make it more likely that countries will turn towards BRICS for stability and mutually beneficial trade, rather than against it?

Wouldn’t Trump’s trail of disruption and broken trade agreements hasten the development of a global currency "to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar" rather than dissuade it?

Take a look at how the World has changed since the beginning of the neoliberal era in 1980 when China was a trading minnow compared to the United States.

By 2018 China was already doing more trade than the United States with well over half the countries in the world.

If the United States becomes a global bully that doesn’t just destabilise China and its allies on the whims of its increasingly deranged President, but attacks its own allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico too, doesn’t that further strengthen the Chinese?

If the US seeks to bully a country into coming over to their side of Trump’s new isolationist iron curtain with the threat of tariffs, but China is their bigger trading partner, and doesn’t resort to intimidation and threats of economic destabilisation, who are they likely to choose?

It seems that all China and BRICS need to do for now is to maintain respectful relations with their trading partners and offer a stable alternative to increasingly erratic Trumpian chaos, and they get to expand their sphere of influence by default, right? 

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The self-awareness deficiency of the common British street thug

In case the news passed you by, the extreme-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon) has been found guilty of contempt of court for ignoring court reporting restrictions, and risking the collapse of three interlinked child sex abuse prosecutions, despite having been previously warned to stop ignoring court orders.

Instead of taking it on the chin, admitting he screwed up, and accepting the judgement of the British rule of law, the treacherous little shit-weasel has resorted to attacking the most senior judge in the English and Welsh legal system as a "liar", and begging Donald Trump for political asylum in the United States!

The lack of self-awareness of this self-styled patriot is extraordinary.

His actions demonstrate that he doesn't actually love Britain or British institutions at all. He hates our justice system and our rule of law, and he seeks to flee the country entirely when things go against him.

There are of course a few problems with street thug Tommy's appeal for asylum in Trump's America. 

The main problem being that he's banned for life from the United States for fraudulently entering the country on a false passport.

Another glaring problem is that his convictions for violent assault and his public boasting about Class A drug use mean that he should definitely be refused entry at the border.

And then there's the sheer hypocrisy of it.

Just imagine the uproar Tommy and his rabble would make if a foreign hate preacher had been thrown out of Britain for life for entering on a fake passport, then cheekily put in an appeal for asylum to the British government to escape being jailed in their own country.

They'd be going absolutely ballistic about it.

But because it's their beloved street thug behaving in this extraordinary way, they're actually rallying around to support him, and repeating his pathetic sob stories about how being punished for his own unlawful behaviour makes him the poor innocent victim of political persecution.

Another problem for Yaxley-Lennon is what to do with all of his property he's invested in, using the donations from all of the absolute dupes who throw so much cash at him?

Surely if he flees Britain in order to evade justice, it must be possible to seize his property, which would provide an excellent opportunity to turn his luxuriant £1 million countryside mansion in Bedfordshire into a refugee hostel until he decides to come back from hiding and see out his sentence?

But the most glaring issue of all is the absolutely barefaced demonstration that Yaxley-Lennon is no patriot at all, to the point of hating and repeatedly undermining our judicial system, then begging a foreign leader to step in and rescue him from the consequences of his own unlawful actions.

This treacherous behaviour gets down to a deeper truth: Claims of patriotism from the modern extreme-right are an absolute fraud.

Theirs is an internationalist movement, in which they're far more likely to adore a misogynist bully like Trump, or an extreme-right harridan like Marine Le Pen, or a murderous extreme-right terrorists like the Christchurch mosque killer or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, because of their shared political ideology, than they are to even tolerate and respect their fellow countrymen who happen not to share their extremist views.

The truth is that it's all about ideology to extreme-right agitators like Yaxley-Lennon, and the flags of the nations they happen to inhabit serve as nothing more than convenience to them. As visual bait to lure in the kind of mindless unthinking idiot who imagines that as long as it's wrapped itself in the national flag, then it unquestionably has to be a true patriot.

But even as Yaxley-Lennon trash-talks the British judicial system and begs to become a migrant in a foreign land to escape the consequences of his own actions, the hard-of-thinking will continue throwing their cash at him, because easily-duped idiots will always behave like easily-duped idiots.

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OR

"Politics is Broken" and guess what? Only they can save us!

The 11 (and counting) squatter MPs are all pushing this populist "politics is broken" trope as hard as they can, and positioning themselves as the heroic saviours.

In this article I'm going to look at the absolute chaos this "politics is broken" trope has already unleashed in three other major economies, before looking at the squatter MPs and their Independent Group (AKA 'Tinge') in more detail.

What I'm not going to do is argue that politics isn't broken. Britain wouldn't be in this farcical Brexit shit-show if the political establishment class hadn't put us here, and anti-vaxxers, grifters, and smarmy charlatans would never have got their hands on the levers of power in Italy, the United States, and France had their political systems not been flawed enough to allow them to either.

The point is that just because someone is repeatedly saying "politics is broken" doesn't mean you have to unquestioningly accept the way they position themselves as the only possible saviours.

Italy

The Five Star Movement is a populist anti-politics political party founded in 2009 by the stand-up comedian and polemicist Beppe Grillo.

This party has used the big tent political strategy to build a disparate coalition of all kinds of people with eurosceptics, anti-globalists, direct democracy advocates, and anti-vaxxers making up several of their core demographics.

Initially attractive to people on the left for their anti-establishment, environmentalist, and direct democracy advocacy, it soon became clear that this party was shifting rapidly towards the extreme-right.

This rightwards shift became absolutely indisputable when the 5 Star MEPs in the European Parliament joined Nigel Farage's rag-tag band of far-right eurosceptics in 2014, but unfortunately, as in Britain, Italians pay very little attention to the internal machinations of the European Parliament, so this collusion with far-right fanatics and outright fascists went virtually unnoticed.

The March 2018 Italian General Election was the huge M5S breakthrough moment, they won the most votes and landed enough seats to make them kingmakers in the Italian parliament. In May 2018 they created a coalition with the fascist party Lega Nord bringing fascism back to the Italian government for the first time in decades.

Since then the popularity of Five Star has waned (although they're still extremely popular with the anti-vaxxer movement for the radical anti-science policies they've enacted) while the fascists they enabled into power have soared in popularity from the 3rd most popular party to by far the most popular.

So the lesson from Italy is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get anti-vaxxers and fascism.

United States

I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain all that much about the last few years in US politics.

Donald Trump used "politics is Broken" style populism to position himself as the ideological saviour who was going to "drain the swamp" and "bring the jobs back" to places like the rust belt.

People believed him, he got elected, he immediately filled the top administration jobs with more Wall Street bankers, corporate stooges, and inherited wealth billionaires than any government in US history, then he set about attacking the health care and social security systems, and then he implemented the biggest tax handout for the mega-rich ever.

Nothing for the little people who voted him into power, and a massive windfall for his mega-rich mates. Who would have thought such a thing could happen when you elect billionaire from the international speculator class as your President?

So the lesson from the United States is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get Trumpism.

France

The situation in France is by far the most analogous to what's currently happening in Britain.

Emmanuel Macron was a right-wing neoliberal who embedded himself within the centre-left socialist party. 

As minister of economy and finance in the socialist government he set about implementing spectacularly unpopular labour reforms that triggered mass protests and trashed the government's popularity.

After destroying the socialist government from within he walked away to set up a shiny new "centrist" party called En Marche which used the whole "politics is broken" and "we are the saviours" schtick to great effect.

What better way to sell neoliberalism to the public than point out all of the failings of neoliberalism (several of which you were personally involved with), then present yourself as the shiny new alternative?

The problem of course is that when you promise people change, but then deliver more of the same but even worse in the form of massive tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, fuel price increases loaded on the poor, even more ideological attacks on labour rights, deeply unpopular education reforms, and significantly collapsing living standards - people tend to get angry.

And when the French get angry they don't just unthinkingly vote in favour of a massive act of national self-harm and then grovellingly re-elect the bastards who trashed their living standards in the first place like us Brits do. They revolt, they protest, they riot.

France has been wracked by 14 consecutive weeks of mass protests and Macron has gone from winning the Presidency and an absolute landslide in the French parliament, to being the most unpopular President in French history with an approval rating only slightly better than cancer.

The most incredible thing about it is that he's managed to nose-dive his Presidency and reduce his nation to mass protests, riots, division, police brutality, and chaos in significantly less than two years!

So the lesson from France is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get absolute bloody chaos.

Britain

So the Independent Group ('Tinge') parliamentary squatters are pushing the exact same rhetoric as these other populist movements. "Politics is broken", and guess what? Only they can save us!

The problem of course is that every single one of them is an establishment insider to the core, with several of them being particularly to blame for the current shit-show.

Before the EU referendum Chuka Umunna added fuel to the anti-EU bonfire by fulminating against Freedom of Movement and scapegoating European immigrants. Now he actually expects us to believe him when he positions himself as the glorious saviour to the Brexit mess that he actually helped to create by actively turning Labour Party members against free movement!

Mike Gapes, Joan Ryan, and Ann Coffey are all responsible for the thing that created the biggest ever rift in trust between British people and the Westminster political establishment class. Despite the biggest public protests in British history in 2003, these people voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq on the grounds of terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, these terrifying WMDs were never found because they didn't exist, and Iraq was turned into a lawless terrorism breeding ground that eventually gave birth to the monstrosity of ISIS.

To make matters even worse these warmongers all repeatedly voted against holding an inquiry into their disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and all hate Jeremy Corbyn on the basis that he was absolutely right that Iraq was going to be a disaster, and because they simply can't bear to admit that they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands.

Anna Soubry is one of the three Tories to have joined the squatters citing her opposition to Brexit as a factor in her decision, but incredibly she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right EU Withdrawal Act in January 2018 while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench opposed it! Some brave and principled Brexit saviour eh?
 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that all 11 of the squatter MPs are either austerity-enforcers who actually voted in favour of the ruinous Tory austerity dogma that trashed British living standards and created the massive wave of public anger that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line, or they're austerity abstainers from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party who actually turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens to sit on their hands as the Tories voted though the biggest package of social security cuts in British history in 2015.

Anyone who imagines that this opportunistic group of pro-austerity fanatics, ideological contortionists, self-serving opportunists, and unrepentant warmongers from deep within the ranks of the political establishment class is going to fix our "broken politics" and lead a glorious British revival is clearly working at the same extraordinary level of delusion as those who voted in favour of Brexit thinking a Tory administered abandonment of the EU would immediately turn the UK into the land of milk and honey for all.

But the worrying thing is that there is already a lot of support for this fake political party (established as a private company in order to evade scrutiny of their financial affairs) with no policies, no members, no internal democracy, no leader, no respect for the people in their constituencies, and no disciplinary procedures for bigoted MPs who spout racist nonsense on the TV!

It's looking a lot like the shiny but empty promise of Macronism all over again, built by another bunch of hopeless charlatans desperately trying to keep orthodox neoliberalism alive by rebranding it as a wonderful new form of 'centrism' that will somehow miraculously "fix our broken politics".

Unfortunately this blatant con trick has been shown to work effectively in other major economies with predictably disastrous results, so only the complacent would imagine that it couldn't possibly work here too.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Why do liberals and 'centrists' so often end up supporting the extreme-right?

First things first, this article is not intended as a defence of the Maduro government in Venezuela. Anyone who attempts to present it in such a way is simply lying in a desperate attempt to discredit what they don't like reading, and don't want other people to read.

Whether you like Nicolás Maduro or not, whether you understand the multitude of internal and external factors that have created the current situation in Venezuela or not, whether you even know anything much at all about the Venezuelan political system or not, there's one thing that's undeniable: Anyone who sides with a guy who appoints himself President of a country without standing in a Presidential election is displaying utter contempt for the concept of democracy.

This is exactly what's happened in Venezuela with Juan Guaidó appointing himself President of the country despite the fact he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, let alone win it.

Thus Venezuela now has two Presidents. One who won the 2018 Presidential election and the other who didn't even participate in it and simply appointed himself because he didn't like the outcome of the ballot he didn't even contest.

The United States immediately backed this anti-democratic coup and recognised the self-appointed coup-President, just like they rushed in to back the spectacularly failed 2002 coup in the country too.

Back in 2002 the US were the only country to recognise the coup leader Pedro Carmona as President of Venezuela before the coup rapidly collapsed and Hugo Chávez returned to power within two days.

The international reaction to this 2019 coup is very different, with numerous other countries rushing to throw their support behind this unelected self-appointed fake President.

The UK foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that the human rights defying Tory government support the unelected coup-President.

Another leader to have immediately thrown their support behind the coup-President is the recently elected Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro.

Several other hard-right governments in Latin America have backed the unelected coup-President, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Paraguay.

None of this is remotely surprising given Britain's increasingly pathetic subservience to US foreign policy, and the massive historic divide in Latin America between US-backed right wing governments and US-opposed left-wing governments that has existed since the United States began their outrageous campaign of toppling left-leaning Latin American governments in the region decades ago.

What's ostensibly a lot more surprising is the way European liberals and self-declared centrists have been rushing to support the US-backed "regime change" that's happening in Venezuela. 

Take the leader of the Liberal grouping in the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt. His reaction to the coup attempt has been to personally recognise the self-appointed coup-President, lie that he's elected when he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, and then call for the EU to join Trump and Bolsonaro in recognising this coup leader as the legitimate President!

The very same guy who was furiously attacking Donald Trump as an "autocrat" and "a threat to Europe" back in 2017 is now wilfully sitting on Trump's knee like a yapping imperialist poodle!

Another Liberal to jump on the extraordinary 'this is a good coup' bandwagon is the centrists' darling Emmanuel Macron, who even had the gall to praise the bravery of the anti-government protesters in Venezuela as the French state brutally attacks and systematically represses the gilets jaunes protests against his own government!

Everyone knows that this US-backed coup is all about access to Venezuela's oil reserves (the biggest in the world) because Donald Trump's already publicly declared that US interventionism should be used to steal the natural resources of other nations.

It's extraordinary that so many trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are openly supporting this US imperialist "regime change" agenda while Trump's people openly talk about the prospect of making the already desperate situation even worse by launching military action in Venezuela.

They can't pretend to not understand what the motivation actually is after Trump's spelled it out for them so clearly. And it's especially alarming given the way that these people really should have learned all about the appalling consequences of imperialist "regime change" agendas after the Iraq invasion in 2003, and the destruction of Libya in 2011.

Both of these countries have been reduced to lawless terrorism breeding grounds with humanitarian conditions far worse than they ever were under the authoritarian governments of Hussain and Gadaffi.

Of course it's understandable that European liberals are no great fans of Maduro (neither am I, and I'm a leftie), but what does it tell you about their political principles when they're clamouring to align themselves with Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to support a brazenly anti-democratic coup?
Even if you believe the 2018 Presidential election in Venezuela was rigged, supporting a self-appointed coup-President who didn't even stand in the election is utterly nonsensical from a democratic point of view. 

And what does it tell you about their bone-headed refusal to learn the lessons of history when they wilfully ignore the unspeakable levels of death, destruction, and suffering that imperialist "regime change" policies have caused in Iraq and Syria to support the exact same imperialist agenda in Venezuela, only this time orchestrated by an even more unstable, profit-driven, and fanatically right-wing US President than George W. Bush was?

It's beyond question that anyone supporting the self-appointed and unelected fake-President Guaidó is siding with extreme-right ideologues like Trump and Bolsonaro, refusing to learn the lessons of history about the horrific consequences of imperialist "regime change" policies, and displaying their absolute contempt for the concept of democracy.

One of the most extraordinary things is that many of these liberals and centrists pledging support for the Venezuelan coup were the ones crying the loudest when Donald Trump won the US Presidential election, and bitterly decrying the rise of far-right populism when Bolsonaro won the Brazilian Presidential election in October 2018.

But scroll forward just a few months and these same trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are now wilfully stepping in line with the extreme-right demagogues they decried when they won power to actively support the transparently anti-democratic coup they've orchestrated in Venezuela.

This farce in Venezuela is far from the first time that liberals have ended up supporting and enabling extreme-right demagogues. We can delve into history to look at the way the liberal German establishment wilfully handed power the Nazis in 1933 by making Adolf Hitler Chancellor, or we can look to current day Italy to see how the trendy liberal MS5 party have enabled the fascist Lega Nord into power by joining them in a coalition government.

The fact is that given the choice between moving leftwards towards socialism, and rightwards towards fascism, an awful lot of self-declared centrists and trendy liberals will chose the fascist option because they understand that fascism goes hand-in-hand with corporatism meaning that their financial interests will be protected.

As long as corporations and their personal financial interests are protected, a lot of liberals and self-declared centrists are willing to overlook the obvious dangers of enabling the extreme-right into power, or siding with the extreme-right axis when it comes to global politics.
 

This centrist willingness to overlook the dangers of fascism most often comes from the position of extreme privilege.

Most wealthy, white, westerners know they have the least to fear from fascism (unless they have leftist political sympathies) because it's always the political left, minorities, the vulnerable, and people in the developing world who bear the brunt of the persecution and suffering under extreme-right rule.

Of course people should be able to recognise the thin end of a wedge, and they should be aware of Martin Niemöller's warning about the danger of escalating fascism (see picture), but in reality these coddled liberals and centrists keep making the same mistakes over and again.

Liberals and centrists will have tantrums for a while when fanatical right-wing ideologues like Trump or Bolsonaro are elected because they hate not having things their own way, and because deep in their hearts they know the extreme-right is wrong, but when push comes to shove they repeatedly fall into line and quickly start supporting them.

The gleeful reaction of so many self-declared centrists and trendy liberals to the anti-democratic US-backed imperialist coup in Venezuela is yet another perfect illustration of their outrageous tendency to wilfully align with and support the extreme-right thanks to the shared belief in corporatism.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The forgotten victims of September 11th

Since the atrocities in 2001, the 11th of September has become a national day of mawkish commemoration in the United States, despite the fact that the same kind of extreme Islamist terrorists are still wreaking havoc across Europe and the Middle East, largely thanks to the US invasion of Iraq that followed 9/11 and ended up creating the biggest lawless terrorism breeding ground on earth.

It would take an extremely blinkered view of history to not know that in the 1980s the US actually funded, supplied and trained Al Qaida in Afghanistan, when they were considered "brave freedom fighters" against the Soviet occupation by the western media. 

It would take more historical ignorance/revisionism to fail to realise that the US intervened to fight alongside Islamist militias in Kosovo in the late 1990s, support for Islamist fanatics that was provided several years after the first Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Center in 1993!

And it would take a severe level of self-deception to deny that the September 11th terrorist attacks are "blowback" from the United States' foreign policy tactics from the mid 20th Century onward.

Over the space of just a few years we've seen Al Qaida morph from US funded and supported allies in places like Afghanistan and Kosovo into supposedly the greatest ever threat to American freedom in history. A threat that has been used to impose all kinds of unconstitutional and totalitarian attacks on the liberties of American citizens (and citizens of the rest of the world) such as the "Patriot" Act and the incredible expansion of NSA spying activities. 

This rapid conversion of Al Qaida from US allies to dangerous terrorists was bad enough, but the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies in 2013 were marred by the fact that the US government were straining at the leash to actually help Islamist terrorists in Syria by bombing the Syrian government and creating yet another Iraq style power vacuum for them to thrive in.

Just 12 years since after the 9/11 attacks and the US administration were assuming the American public to be so gullible and compliant that they would accept the US openly siding with the same kind of Islamist terrorists as those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and inordinately more innocent civilians in Iraq,Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and in terrorist atrocities across Europe too during the last 17 years.

The extreme ignorance and gullibility that would be necessary for the American public to accept the idea that the US political establishment openly siding with Al Qaida and other extreme Wahabi Islamist terrorist groups in Syria, simply because their terrorist activities there coincide with American imperialist interests is also on display in the fact that so many Americans still believe the absurd narrative that "America fights for freedom and democracy across the World".

40 years ago the US backed a violent coup d'etat in Chile and the
imposition of a brutal neoliberal regime led by Augusto Pinochet.

One of the clearest demonstrations of the American determination to actually undermine and destroy freedom and democracy came in Chile after a US-backed military coup that took place on September 11th 1973.

This coup marked the birth of the toxic neoliberal ideology pushed by the Chicago school pseudo-economists. 

In 1973 neoliberalism was a fringe anti-communist economic ideology supported by virtually nobody, today this bankrupt pseudo-economic gibberish is the global economic orthodoxy adhered to by almost all political parties in the West, and enforced across the globe by the machinery of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

To say that neoliberalism had a painful birth in Chile would be an understatement. The man that the neoliberals backed in Chile was a brutal dictator called General Pinochet. 

During his dictatorship over 3,000 people were "disappeared" (captured and tortured to death) whilst another 28,000 were detained without trial, most of them suffering torture and in many cases sexual abuse too. 

Aside from those tortured and killed and the families that survived them, other victims of this brutal US backed dictatorship included protesters that were burned alive in the streets by the police and musicians who had their fingers broken before being machine gunned to death.
 

The Americans weren't the only ones to back
Pinochet's murderous right-wing dictatorship,
The Thatcher government in Britain
supported him too.

  This brutal and oppressive Chilean regime was supported by the US administration because to successive American governments and their corporate backers, right-wing military dictatorship, imprisonment without trial, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings were an insignificant price to pay when it came to securing access to the Chilean economy so that it could be used as a playground for the neoliberal pseudo-economists from the Chicago School, and opened up for exploitation by US corporations.

The Chilean regime was part of the US financed Operation Condor, which was a plan to control the population of the southern cone of South America through the instillation of  brutal right-wing military dictatorships. 

The members of this anti-democratic group were the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile, the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, the Banzer military dictatorship in Bolivia, the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 and the 12 year military dictatorship in Uruguay. 

Undoubtedly the most brutal members of Operation Condor were the US backed Argentine Junta that joined in 1976, after the military coup against Isabel Perón.

Photos of the disappeared in Buenos Aires, 2004.

The US backed military dictatorship in Argentina was yet another playground for the Chicago school neoliberal pseudo-economists. 

Whilst the US backed military dictatorship were busy murdering an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians and torturing countless thousands more, "the Chicago Boys" were imposing their favoured economic ideology (deregulation, mass privatisation, lax tax enforcement, massive tax cuts for the rich, regressive tax hikes for the poor and ordinary, destruction of welfare provision, revocation of rights and liberties, wage repression ... ), resulting in poverty and chaos for millions of Argentines. 

The state terrorism of this savage regime meant that few people dared to speak out against this US-backed economic vandalism.

Some of the favoured tactics of the Argentine junta included torture, extrajudicial killings, throwing people out of aeroplanes without parachutes (death flights) and the kidnapping of pregnant women in order to steal their babies to give to supporters of the regime, after which the mothers were executed without trial.

In the late 1970s the US and the Argentine junta collaborated in "Operation Charly" to export their model of brutal right-wing dictatorship to Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) and in 1980 the Argentine junta, the US administration and the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie collaborated to assist the "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia which installed Luis García Meza. 

Meza was another brutal dictator and upon his instillation in power he immediately outlawed all political parties, exiled opposition leaders, banned trade unions, silenced the press and oversaw the murder of over 1,000 people in just 13 months in power.

The 45th anniversary of the US backed military coup in Chile will pass virtually unnoticed in the United States, and great swathes of the public will continue to believe the comforting lies that the US has a history of promoting democracy and freedom, rather than a demonstrable history of deliberately and callously undermining them.

The millions of victims of the vile US backed Latin American dictatorships are not the only people that should be remembered on September the 11th. 

The countless global victims of the vile "greed is a virtue" neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology devised by the Chicago Boys, supported by the US government and born in Chile on this day in 1973 also just as worthy of remembrance as the victims of the September 2001 atrocities.
                        

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Does Jonathan Sacks really speak for "all Jews"?

After the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks hit the headlines by comparing Jeremy Corbyn's criticism of a tiny bunch of extremely rude Zionist extremists who had been abusing the Palestinian ambassador in 2014 with Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech, many people quite rightly asked what gave him the authority to make such a hyperbolic judgement, especially given that it was only last year that he was publicly praising an extreme-right, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, Enoch Powell-praising diatribe as "a good book".

As far as I'm concerned Sacks has every right to criticise Jeremy Corbyn (and anyone else for that matter) but he's left himself wide open to accusations of rank hypocrisy by promoting a book that praised Enoch Powell for his divisive xenophobic rhetoric one minute, then using the horrible spectre of Enoch Powell to launch a hyperbolic and politically partisan attack on the lifelong anti-racist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn the next.

The response of the Jewish Chronicle to people criticising Sacks' comments was an extraordinary defence headlined "the trashing of Jonathan Sacks is a trashing of all Jews".

Now if anyone else was making generalisations about "all Jews" they'd quite rightly be criticised for anti-Semitism given that there is definitely no all-encompassing belief system all Jews adhere to, but the fanatically right-wing Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard (who once said "the left,in any recognisable form, is now the enemy") and the author of the piece obviously see themselves as arbiters of what "all but a tiny minority of Jews" think.

Now I'm certainly not going to argue that Sacks is a completely bad person. He's clearly served the Orthodox Jewish community very well over the years otherwise he would never have risen so high, he's lectured in moral philosophy which is a subject I'd surely enjoy discussing with him despite our obvious political differences, and he's done quite a bit of Interfaith work too which I approve of.

However, many of his views are problematic to say the least.

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to his vehement opposition to gay rights? Or is it fair to argue that a significant proportion of British Jews support Britain's gradual move towards gay equality?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to supporting the far-right, pro-settler Mizrachi Olami organisation that organises divisive Zionist marches through the occupied Palestinian settlement of Hebron? Or is it fair to argue that at least a significant proportion of British Jews oppose the illegal Israeli settlements and strongly disapprove of divisive Zionist marches where people chant "death to Arabs"?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to his 2010 comments about secularism being to blame for "Europe dying" or his claim that atheists "lack family values"? Or is it fair to argue that a significant proportion of British Jews support western secularism, and another significant proportion of British Jews who self-identify as atheists would be outraged at the allegation that atheists are somehow inferior parents to religious people?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it comes to his public recommendation of an extreme-right, xenophobic, anti-Muslim Enoch Powell-praising diatribe as "a good book"? Or is it fair to argue that a significant proportion of British Jews strongly oppose the attempted gentrification of extreme-right, xenophobic, and bigoted ideas, and disagree with anyone who uses their public platform to recommend this kind of extremism as "good"?

• Is it correct to say that Sacks speaks for "all Jews" when it came to him helping to write a speech for the hard-right, homophobic, anti-abortion US Vice President Mike Pence? Or is it fair to say that an awful lot of Jewish people would be horrified that a senior British representative of the Jewish community would involve himself with such a divisive character?

I'm guessing that pretty much everyone reading this would agree that Sacks doesn't represent "all Jews" or even "all but a tiny minority of Jews" on at least one (if not all) of these issues ...

So how can it be correct to claim that he speaks for "all but a tiny minority of Jews" when it comes to his highly partisan attack on Jeremy Corbyn?

And how can it be correct to claim that people critiquing Jonathan Sacks' partisan hyperbole, pointing out his hypocrisy, or highlighting his other views are somehow guilty of attacking "all Jews"?

If any non-Jewish commentator was claiming the words of one Jewish person were representative of "all Jews", or deliberately othering and marginalising any Jewish people who choose to disagree with their personal view of what Jews should think as "a tiny minority", they'd quite rightly be castigated as anti-Semites. 

But somehow these kinds of warped generalisations are being passed off as fair commentary by the Jewish Chronicle!

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