Economic Cooperations: Militarization and the TPP

Popular Resistance “Stop the TPP” March
Washington D.C.
November 15, 2015

“Economic Cooperations Militarization and the TPP”

I’m going to be focusing on Chapter 21 of the released text which is on Cooperation and Capacity Building.

Hi my name is Arnie Saiki, and I would like to thank the organizers, Mackenzie, Dr Flowers and Kevin Zeese for putting this together. I’m excited to be here, as I think many of us here have been tirelessly working on trying to shine light and bring further perspective to the Trans Pacific Partnership for many years now.

For me, focusing on trade and militarization has been a very personal journey, and much of this is because my great grandparents were contract laborers who arrived in Hawaii in 1893 and 1898, bookending the Republic of Hawaii, the years between the US-backed coup of Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani and what has been fraudulently called the annexation of Hawaii.

The truth—at least if we apply principles of constitutional law in the US at that time, is that Hawaii is and continues to be an occupied state as there was no treaty of annexation. There was no 2/3^rd Senate approval or any treaty of cession, there was only a joint resolution made by Congress, under President McKinley, to annex Hawaii.

Even applying the rules of international law to the process of how Hawaii became a state in 1959 was fraudulent. Hawaii having been placed on a list of non-self-governing territories was mandated as a Sacred Trust under the UN Charter to have the option for self determination. Instead Hawaii was removed from the list without the option of independence, an option that was given to all the colonized territories, an option that led to the independence of nearly 70 countries in Africa, South East Asia, the Caribbean and many of the Pacific Islands.

Obviously, this in not the kind of information that we learn about in school, and it is only the past few years that we have really begun to understand our history—particularly how trade and militarization have not only stolen a kingdom, taken land and resources, or displaced an entire population, but how this continues to this day, through new “legal” processes via privatization, financialization, militarization—all processes that are embedded in free-trade agreements like the TPP.

(Harriet) This is Globalization 101 and what stands out then and what should stand out now, is that this free-trade treaty, called the Reciprocity Treaty between the US and Hawaii—not only provided duty free shipping between the two nations, negotiated tariff schedules that brought sugar and rice and other “plantation commodities” to the US duty free, but also shipped everything else from the US to Hawaii duty free as well.

The Hawaiian government lost revenue from monies it would collect from tariffs, and gave US controlled businessmen unprecedented power over the government, by creating a dependency on corporations and industries to provide revenue for the Kingdom.

It also gave the US exclusive rights to Pearl Harbor—now a naval base and the center for Pacific Command—

Additionally, this free trade agreement also levied heavier tariffs on trade items between Hawaii and China and Japan. Considering the largest population in Hawaii at that time were overwhelmingly from Asia, and that the US population was very small by comparison—the US used the free-trade reciprocity treaty to make money from the contract laborers with Asia, and militarized Pearl Harbor with US war ships that it used in both the Spanish American War against the Philippines and Guam, and led to the militarized coup.

Hawaii became a “customs district” that provided $15 million dollars in value annually—which was a lot by 1890s figures—but also after “annexing” Hawaii, the US took control of the much of the North Pacific territory.

Now, just to gain some perspective of how dependent Hawaii has become, 85-90% of food is imported. Despite there being some self-sufficiency in fruits and vegetables, there has been a huge decline in food production over the last generation which amounts to not only food insecurity but massive job loss in both local production, as well as in the manufacturing and export of cash crops like pineapple, sugar and coffee, of which only coffee is thriving.

This is free-trade. But free-trade agreements now are like a 21^st century Terminator 4 version with a whole new set of legal tools and military technologies.

Four minutes——

I’ve been broadly focusing on the militarization of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, “the Cooperation and Capacity Building” chapter of the “it’s worse that we thought” released text.

This chapter provides context to just how threatening this Pacific partnership is to the region. Cooperation means discussion and consensus, but for the U.S. cooperation and capacity building has taken on an entirely different meaning, one that I think President Bush summarized so eloquently when he said, “If you are not with us, you are against us.”

The TPP is not a partnership. There is no “cooperation,” and the kind of activities that is meant by economic cooperation and capacity building is nothing more than using the kind of “resources and technical information” that partner countries have or can provide to bully forward the kind of neoliberal global corporate governance that much of the world is trying to move away from.

What the conclusion of the TPP has done is draft an “if you are not with us, you are against us” road map, and although the TPP is not a declaration of war, this is an agreement that if ratified, seeks to lay out the clear priorities and processes that broadly define a national strategy (pdf) for implementing military cooperation within the Asia-Pacific.

It has long been a priority for Washington to advance a maritime policy for economic and security reasons and earlier this year the U.S. Department of Defense introduced its Maritime Strategy for the region:

“Maritime Asia is a vital thruway for global commerce, and it will be a critical part of the region’s expected economic growth. The United States wants to ensure the Asia-Pacific region’s continued economic progress. The importance of Asia-Pacific sea lanes for global trade cannot be overstated. Eight of the world’s 10 busiest container ports are in the Asia-Pacific region, and almost 30 percent of the world’s maritime trade transits the South China Sea annually, including approximately $1.2 trillion in ship-borne trade bound for the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world’s oil shipments transit through the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, and in 2014, more than 15 million barrels of oil passed through the Malacca Strait per day.”

The language in the Cooperation and Capacity Building chapter is deliberately vague, but read alongside DOD Operational Directives like the Defense Security Cooperation, it’s very clear that the ongoing provocation by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in the disputed islands in the South China Seas is effectuating Trans-Pacific partners to provoke, obstruct, and contain China.

Like clockwork, once the TPP negotiations concluded, the U.S. entered within 12 nautical miles of China’s territorial claim of the Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands. That’s why when Defense Secretary Carter said that the TPP was worth as much to him as a new aircraft carrier, you didn’t need a crystal ball to understand that the South China Seas was the “crown jewel” of Obama’s trade and military rebalance.

Since 2009, global military sales to partner countries have amounted to nearly $200 billion dollars, averaging about $27 billion annually (pdf). For perspective, in the five regions, military sales in the Asia-Pacific ranks second, about 25% behind the Middle East, but far ahead of Europe, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, which is confounding considering that previous to the TPP, military sales in the Asia-Pacific were on par with the other regions.

I would argue that the South China Sea has been an organizing tool for the TPP since the beginning. It was only in 2009, when Obama announced joining the TPP that Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei (TPP countries), and the Philippines and Indonesia (both having Trade and Investment Framework Agreements and Mutual Defense Agreements with the U.S.) concertedly began to assert territorial definitions in the South China Seas through a multilateral approach.

There was already a bilateral agreement that was signed in 2002 called the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Seas, signed between China and ASEAN, but perhaps it wasn’t the “Gold Standard” that Obama sought.

Complicating the issue, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea recognizes both multilateral and bilateral approaches to resolving the territorial dispute, despite Washington’s continued push for a multilateral solution as the only option.

Also, I think it’s important to understand the DOD already maintains about 400 military installations (pdf) in the region. China, with its artificial island outposts have four. Additionally, Obama has– without any serious disputes from Pacific Island governments or other countries– recently annexed about 1.3 million square kilometers of Pacific Ocean territory through the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument Act (PRIMNM) co-managed by the Department of the Interior and the Department of Defense. Hypocrisy!

Without coloring judgement, much of the territorial debate around the South China Seas is being undercut with misinformation coming from Western sources, and it’s important that we get some historical accuracy.

The nine-dash line was once an 11-dash line (pdf) that was drawn and supported by the U.S.-backed Kuomintang while fighting the Japanese occupation of China which ended during WWII (more maps here). When the 11-dash line was drawn, there was no disagreement or controversy by either the U.S., the U.K., the Soviet Union, or any of the United Nations members when it was formed. For the U.S., the expectation had been that Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist party would succeed but it was not until just after “Title IV” of the 1948 Economic Cooperation Act was signed that US support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s leadership began to flounder and the U.S. shifted military resources to Korea.
The BBC wrote: In 1974 the Chinese seized the Paracels from Vietnam, killing more than 70 Vietnamese troops. But historically, in 1974, civil war was still going on and the China-backed North Vietnamese had recognized China’s claim of the Paracels. It was the U.S. backed South Vietnamese troops that were killed.
As much as the media tries to say that the U.S. is not provoking China, how is it not provocative interference when the Brookings Institute writes: “The U.S. government should make clear to the other claimants, and to other ASEAN countries like Singapore and Thailand, that we expect them to be public in their rejection of the nine-dash line under international law.”

Last week, when Defense Secretary Carter provoked China by sailing the USS Lassen through the disputed Spratly Islands, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein rightfully said, “I don’t welcome anything that can disrupt the stability of the region,”. “This is our region. We cannot allow other parties to determine our future.” The Malaysian Defense Minister also clarified that the South China Sea issue itself was not under the purview of the defense ministry and would be discussed by ASEAN foreign ministers during the 27th ASEAN Summit to be held in a couple of weeks.

Geographically speaking, it’s also not a coincidence that the four ASEAN countries that have a stake in the South China Seas dispute against China are also TPP countries. Looking at the non-OECD (pre-2009), countries in the TPP (Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam), what they all have in common is that they all strategically impede China’s access to Africa, the Mid-East and Latin America.

Maritime access among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) partners and their regional trade alignments are geographically blocked by this partnership and the “Cooperation and Capacity Building” of integrated TPP militaries, headed by both Pacific Commands in Hawaii and Singapore can create a series of log jams for non-TPP flagged container ships and the not so favored-nation countries like China.

I call this containment policy containerment policy

As a result of BRICS, I’m probably more optimistic in stating that these “its-worse-than-we-thought” TPP rules will not win over the global multilateral agreements that will become mainframed in international agreements like the Convention on Climate Change or the Sustainable Development Goals.

Given the opportunity to develop accordingly, the new BRICS institutions can provide for Civil Society Organizations to advance Climate-based and Development Goals. Additionally, the “Belt and Road”, or the new Silk Road/Maritime Silk Road, will help global campaigners steer the world away from the 1%’s agenda of Global Corporate Governance.

While it may be wise to reserve a dose of cynicism when it comes to the BRICS alignment, we should be careful to not let misinformation campaigns cloud the equitable rebalancing of the global economy. BRICS, after all, has been established as a multipolar institution made up primarily of developing countries and emerging economies no longer content to be subjugated by the old colonial ambitions of leveraging debt against commodity resources.

Following speculation bubbles and economic crashes that have thrown countries like Greece and Argentina into turmoil, the BRICS model offers a development model that is not based on excessive debt and speculation. What BRICS provides is not a Wall St. investment-driven secret society for Global Corporate Governance, it is a partnership built off the principles of trade and development that is in line with the needs of developing countries.

Regardless of what one thinks about China’s claim in the South China Seas, we should not underestimate that Washington’s strategy for undermining this claim is enmeshed in obstructing the BRICS agenda. Simply put, the U.S. does not want to conform to a multilaterally-led trade alignment like BRICS, and will pull at nothing to advance a maritime policy seeking to embed itself as a unipolar power in the Asia-Pacific.

I want to introduce Herman Wainggai. He is a political prisoner of Indonesia. He will speak about the genocide that has been going on in West Papua by Indonesian security forces and I’ve asked him to come speak because President Joko Widodo has expressed his will to join the TPP. The further militarizing of the region will force even greater security investments on Indonesia and the US company Freeport McMoRan already owns the largest goldmine in the world which is located in West Papau, and the US has just transferred Apache attack helicopters to Indonesia.

I should let you know that West Papua was independent but it was a deal between JFK and Sukarno called the New York Agreement, that gave Indonesia West Papua, before West Papua could claim its seat in the United Nations General Assembly.

Here’s Herman

<<SKIP>> I should add that last month, I was in Madang, Papua New Guinea at a meeting with several prominent Civil Society Organizations like the Pacific Council of Churches, the Pacific Network on Globalization, professors, international lawyers, activists, artists, poets, and several of us were organized in a side session to discuss trade and militarization and how best to confront it from an Oceania-wide coalition. It became clear that beyond the art and activism, the poetry and practitioner protocols, there is an under-utilized approach that CSOs could use towards defending small islands from the bully power of large economies, and that is with big data and statistics. So, having opened my big mouth, I was tasked with producing some work. And what I’m presenting today is part of a larger work towards perpetuating peace and economic justice in the Pacific.

The Pacific Pivot was announced by President Obama during APEC, the Asia Pacific “Economic Cooperation” when it was hosted in Honolulu in 2011. Structural alignments emerged in the trade and military intersections that suggested that this was not simply a free-trade agreement, but rather, an attempt to keep the investment regime solvent at a time when US deregulatory free-trade or free market policy should have been left to die in the 2008 recession, like the Frankenstein monster it had become.

When speaking about trade agreements, we’re really addressing treaties, something that has a legally binding force behind it, a marriage if you will, something that on the one hand may seem very simple, but if you’ve ever tried to end that marriage, may be technically very complicated.

Trade agreements establish the rules and regulations as to how we move goods and services across national boundaries, which in regard to the TPP is the entirety of the Pacific Ocean.

In the US, there may be federal regulations like Dodd-Frank that have evolved to, or at least attempted to protect its citizens from corrupt liberalizing interpretations of the free-market system, but internationally these regulations don’t exist..

Ever since the fall of the old Soviet bloc, we have seen the world tip toward the demands of the neoliberal investment empire.

Free trade agreements like NAFTA– the North American Free Trade Agreement– are a special kind of privileged, deregulated free-market investment principle that the US continues to tout as the moral compass of the global economy. And it is because of this alluring seduction of democracy and transparency that the ideals of a free market are like the puppy dog vows of honeymoons that could quickly turn rabid. And we know these vows to be untrue because the blowback of the US-led NAFTA and CAFTA have turned around and bitten labor and farmers in the ass, and the marriage hasn’t even been that long!

To get a sense of how long it has been, NAFTA was concluded in 1994– a year before the WTO was signed—and it was the first FTA after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Which just to give you some context was also the same year that Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released.

So I put up this timeline to give you a sense of how long these marriages have actually been around, and to look at some of the geopolitical conditions to draw you into thinking about why this marriage may have taken place and whom it really benefited.

<<yellow=other investments: currency and deposits, loans, insurance technical reserves, trade credits and advances that are debts of US residents to foreign residents>>

To quickly illustrate, before NAFTA, Mexico was a Marxist revolutionary state that went through massive agrarian land reform in the early part of the 20^th century. Up through the mid-1980s they had cultivated relations with both the US and the Soviet Union as part of its overall foreign-policy strategy. So Mexico was not solely dependent on the Soviet Union, like Cuba was for example, and benefited from their relations with Russia as a means to give Mexico greater independence from the United States. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Mexico and most of the ex-Soviet states became failing states.

For those that had become failed states, the US and other bully economies took full advantage of their economic weight and began to assert the neoliberal infrastructure, exploiting labor and national resources through private or public-private partnerships and undermining state-owned resources and enterprises.

Just to lay a very basic groundwork on what the TPP is: In 2008, the US joined the original TPP4 when it was an exploratory Asia-Pacific deal between Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brunei. Since joining, it has grown into a 12-member, strategic economic partnership, led by the US and is part of Obama’s overall Pacific Pivot, a “rebalance” that is shifting US economic and military focus into the region.

The TPP facilitates the trade arm and accounts for about $28 trillion dollars GDP, which is about 32% of the global economy.

Despite the ongoing instabilities of hotspots across all regions in other parts of the world, plans to transfer 60% of its military assets to the Pacific by 2020 are still very much underway.

And this 60% build-up includes base-building and integrating the militaries with those whom we are already implementing trade and security arrangements with.

In Japan’s case, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security was recently and controversially expanded to allow for the overseas exercise of Japan’s “Self-Defense Forces”.

<<DON’T READ>> “a Cabinet Resolution under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, that changed the government’s long-standing position that Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution prohibited the country from engaging in collective self-defense (military action in support of an ally that has come under enemy attack).”

The integration of US forces with the militaries of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam, is ramping up defenses alongside territorial claims against China in the South China Seas.

If you look closely, all these conflicts impede China’s shipping routes.

This 60% shift, I’d argue, has more to do with containment or obstruction of shipping than mineral or oil resources in the region.

Looking at the base building in Guam, Okinawa, Jeju, the destabilization around the Senkaku/Daioyu islands, Paracel Islands, or the Spratly islands, we’re really looking at the US setting up shop, trying to maintain a presence around this busy intersection. It’s almost as if the military is a franchise expanding upon its brand on every available street corner.

Across the Pacific, there are around 400 US bases and other expansions of land that the DOD accounts for in their annual Base Structure reports.

Hawaii alone has over a hundred military sites accounting for over 230,000 acres of prime real estate and Guam has nearly 50 sites and is a fraction of the size of Hawaii.

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Shifting gears somewhat, Pacific Islands, being islands, had over the centuries, evolved what is generally a customary land structure that was organized around both ocean and land resources. These customary land structures were important to communities who stewarded and maintained what are essentially resource commodities, as that provided value or equity to a people and place.

What the shift of militarization and colonization has done, and this should come as no surprise to anyone, is that it hyper-valued land costs and resources creating incredibly destructive demands upon peoples and regional biodiversity, creating conditions of poverty, environmental degradation, and resource depletion. What is surprising, however, is that we continue to see this replayed over and over again, despite protests and organized demands for economic justice.

To see that the largest corporations continue to bully their way in through government ministers and backdoor trade agreements has become so common, that participating in the simple task of food preparation within the community has become a privilege.

While there is an abundance of food, land, water, and resource equity, there is no good reason for the Pacific to not be more self-determining in terms of trade. The simple fact is that there is no equitable policy in place to promote genuine security, genuine health, and biodiversity within the various trade sectors.

Hawaii is a perfect example of this imbalance. According to a 2012 strategy by Hawaii’s Department of Business Economic Development & Tourism, 85-90% of food is imported. Despite there being some self-sufficiency in fruits and vegetables, there has been a huge decline in egg, dairy and livestock over the last generation which amounts to not only food insecurity but massive job loss in both local production, as well as in the manufacturing and export of cash crops like pineapple, sugar and coffee, of which only coffee is thriving.

One of the conditions of NAFTA is that there are regulations in place against subsidizing farmers and “buy local” labeling, that make it unfeasible to compete with food imports. The TPP will only create further disparities.

As of last month, Hawaii has a new anti-homeless sit-lie law that makes it a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $1000 fine to sit or lie on sidewalks in Waikiki. As Laulani Teale points out in her campaign– which this is a photo of– Hawaii has what is called “kanawai mamalahoe”, the historic “law of the splintered paddle, which King Kamehameha decreed and is still in the books to this day.

The law states, “Let every elderly person, woman, and child lie by the roadside in safety.”

In the meantime, there is so much base building going on in Hawaii as a result of this Pacific Pivot, that two things are happening: there are more armed servicemen transferring to Hawaii, and the mega-rich are buying and privatizing huge swaths of property displacing the local citizenry. Per capita, Hawaii now has the largest homeless population in the United States and it is impacting Native Hawaiians and other Pacific peoples most. What should be apparent to the world is that if US economic policy fails its own citizenry, who does it really benefit?

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The Office of the US Trade Representative promotes the TPP as accounting for 40% of global trade with much of it accounting for US-China trade.

Another question we might ask is: if China accounts for such a sizable chunk of our trade, why is the TPP aligning itself as a containment strategy and an obstructionist policy that has more in common with the Cold War economic cooperation agenda than simply a trade policy?

Here’s what the Pacific looks like so that you can visualize just how busy the intersection is when you cross trade and militarization. To make sense of this map: the targets represent a small percentage of the US military bases. I didn’t even bother putting up NATO bases.

The white arrows are simplified ocean currents and the red lines represent shipping traffic.

These events are very nuanced and we could, and really should study these in much greater detail, but at least with this broad brush stroke, I think it will provide some context as to why the geopolitical mapping is heading in the direction it’s going.

The countries in red, are the TPP countries, the ones that are highlighted in yellow are the BRICS countries.

The combined BRICS economy is about 30 trillion in US GDP, according to 2013 World Bank, Purchasing Power Parity data. That’s about 1.5 trillion dollars more than the combined GDP of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

What’s amazing about this, is that when the US announced joining the TPP in 2008, the US was far ahead of BRICS. China’s exclusion had more to do with alienating China in an attempt to bully and force open free-market reforms away from the government control over state-owned investments and state-owned enterprises.

To this day, you will continue to hear reports and congressional demands of how state-owned investments are unfair and that the US trade negotiators need to demand an end to State-owned Enterprises across all partner TPP countries.

But who are they unfair to? Here in the US, the investment regime and large corporations continue to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and now the government is turning to public-private partnerships to fund public utilities and services. Earlier this month, the Department of Transportation held a public hearing reviewing public-private partnerships. This places the burden on taxpayers to pay not only taxes but also to pay for corporations to maintain our roads and public transportation services.

At least state-owned investments keep government services solvent and the US should be the last country in the world to criticize state ownership.

The importance of BRICS—and this all just happened this past summer on the sidelines of the World Cup in Fortaleza, Brazil—and what happened was that BRICS released the Fortaleza Declaration, which I encourage you all to read. BRICS officially established the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement as an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF, respectively.

Shifting gears, we may not often think about shipping, so what I want to highlight are primary passages in the Asia Pacific. There is the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. COMLOG WESTPAC in Singapore is the gateway and stands for Commander Logistics, and it’s also where the Navy’s Region Center is housed. Although not technically a base, it is the US command outpost of the region.

On the other side of the Pacific is the Panama Canal which used to be a US territory but then in 1979 it was handed back to Panama under joint US-Panama control and now it’s under full Panama control but with a sizable US military presence remaining.

You’ll also notice the amount of traffic to and from Hawaii. Much of this traffic is not only commercial but also military to and from San Diego.

Pearl Harbor is home to US PACOM. The commander of Pacific Command is the supreme military authority for the various branches of the Armed Forces in the Pacific.

This past summer RIMPAC held their 22-nation war game in Hawaii despite protests against the damaging of not only indigenous properties but also ecological impacts of ocean systems.

Although innocent passage through territorial seas and canals is a right of nations, there is a wide range of international laws and new treaty obligations pertaining to fisheries, wildlife, customs, immigration, environmental protection, marine safety, etc. that are enforced by regional or national coastal agencies and could be used to involve the U.S. Department of Defense, not to mention the transport of illegal substances and weapons, which would directly involve the military.

As the self-appointed global maritime police force, the US, through its military and port operations gives special privileges to its trade partners while moderating the movement of goods across borders from their trade competitors. I call this containment policy a “container-ment” policy, because legally, even though militaries cannot detain cargo ships that have no contraband, it can slow the supply chain considerably if so willed.

For perspective, China’s container traffic measures 5000+ transits a year exceeding 10,000 gross tonnage per ship. According to the World Bank Data, China exceeds the US by nearly 3:1.

Now what I really quickly want to draw your attention to is the green line near the equator because for Asia-Latin American trade, this would seem like the most obvious route, but then it would completely bypass the US.

A couple of years ago, Wang Jing, a Hong Kong businessman, signed a 40 billion dollar investment agreement with Nicaragua president Daniel Ortega to create the Nicaragua Canal.

This canal will bypass the US-controlled Panama Canal and bring real trade opportunities to both Latin America and Asia—and hopefully to Pacific Island Countries as well.

Also, Russia has jumped on board with plans to construct outposts on either side of the canal.

This past May, Russia, and China signed a huge economic partnership agreement

So if I can draw your attention back to the data, what I placed there was the 2012, IMF’s percentage debt to GDP. You’ll notice, the US debt is 106% of its GDP, which is huge—but as a percentage, not as large as Japan’s debt, which in 2012 was 237%. China and Russia’s debt is 22 and 10 percent, respectively. So you may be asking what’s up with the debt?

I spoke about this at length last week, but in a nutshell, developed economies are privileged in that they’ve been borrowing– or acquiring debt– by leveraging debt on the equity of developing countries, whereas, developing countries can only leverage their debt on their own equity.

The success of neoliberalism was predicated on the global economy being unipolar, run by the US/Wall St. investment regime. Hence that is why I consider that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that gave rise to neoliberalism, and why BRICS plays an important role, by creating new opportunities for developing countries to create an alternative development/aid structure that is not based on privatization and vulture capitalism.

Much will be revealed next month during the APEC summit that is being held in Beijing. The TPP, ASEAN-plus, and the RCEP are all looking to advance their FTAAP, Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific. Any FTAAP has to include China and Russia as they are now the dominant economic base in the region.

Unless there is a massive flare-up, we will likely see greater integration towards BRICS, because we’re talking about a fraternity of countries who’ve all been thoroughly screwed by the colonial and post-colonial investment regime.

Here is ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Countries. You might notice that only Singapore has a debt that exceeds its GDP. Singapore and Brunei are the only advanced economies in ASEAN.

Here’s a map of the Latin American alignment.

In purple, you see the Pacific Alliance, which are all TPP countries, except Colombia which already has a trade agreement with the US. The Pacific Alliance is the purple wall separating China from its BRICS counterpart, Brazil.

The countries in bright green are part of ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance which includes Cuba and Bolivia, and many of the small Caribbean countries.

In darker green, the Mercosur, or Southern Common Market group, includes most of the other South American countries that are neither part of the TPP, nor have US military bases on them.

Nicaragua is part of both ALBA and CAFTA, the US-led Central American Free Trade Agreement. This was nothing more than a bullying agreement between one very dominant country and six very poor and hungry developing countries.

Depending on your point of view, the opportunity or threat that the Nicaragua Canal and BRICS poses is that it could break up CAFTA, drawing El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala along with Nicaragua away from US dominance into the BRICS alignment. The downside is that there is a looming military presence in this hemisphere that will do everything in its power to prevent that from happening.

Back to the busy intersection– as I mentioned earlier, the green line represents a kind of idealized route from China’s manufacturing corridor through the Pacific Islands.

Traveling along the eastbound equatorial currents is a beeline to Nicaragua’s maritime exclusive economic zone into the Caribbean where it can more readily access its BRICS counterpart Brazil as well as the Mercosur and ALBA groupings.

This gives unprecedented access for BRICS to not only begin to open trade with Latin America on one side of the Pacific but also gives Latin America new access to the Asian economies on the other side of the Pacific.

Also just to quickly add. Just before the Nicaragua Canal agreement was signed, the International Court of Justice expanded Nicaragua’s maritime boundaries, which was truncated when Nicaragua was under US occupation. This took territory away from Colombia’s expanded boundary and resulted in a lot of military posturing by Colombia.

So earlier this year, maybe a year after the announcement of the Nicaragua Canal, Obama announced the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Those are the bright green areas.

This would add about 2 million square kilometers of Pacific Ocean territory to the United States, using the EEZs of US-occupied shoals and atolls and territories to place into a reserve that would be managed by the DOD and the Department of the Interior. As a marine reserve—not to be confused with “preserve” which has a heck of a lot more regulations attached—the US intends to manage the area, its fisheries, and biodiversity. You can only imagine what peoples in the Pacific think about this. As a US environmental reserve, this can also impose limitations to the right of passage of freight, further militarizing and carving up the Pacific, further away from Pacific Islanders who’ve been the traditional stewards of the region.

This map is very nuanced, in political, economic, indigenous, and ecological terms. There is an abundance of various collaborations crossing from Timor Leste to Hawaii to Rapa Nui amongst academics, activists, and practitioners. On the one hand, you have the Pacific Island States, previous territories that won their independence, and there are the occupied territories, which include Hawaii because of the surreptitious way it was removed from the UN list of non-self-governing territories. These are the territories that are seeking independence from the US, France, New Zealand, Chile, and Indonesia.

Throughout Oceania, the US has been asserting its influence in the Pacific Island Forum, and at this time, there is only one state that seems to be moving to closer relations with BRICS, and that is Vanuatu. Generally speaking, Pacific Islands have been so embedded as donor clients, that I think that maybe it is difficult for them to envision an alternative.

And so to conclude, the context of trade and militarization is a very dangerous game evolving in real-time. It’s dangerous because, with the stacking of these regional commitments, schemes, and ambitions that are housed in the legalities of trade and cooperation agreements, it’s going to be inevitable for empires to not trespass through these newly constructed boundaries. So, unless there can be greater cooperation among all the stakeholders, large and small, all that could be construed as reasonable in international law and normative convention will be sucked into a black hole of globalization.

This is the mindset of the too-big-to-fail investment regime. There is an entire international legal system that props up these institutions, in World Bank dispute settlement bodies, and these tribunals have the authority and audacity to impose harsh punishing sanctions against those who refuse to comply. If these investment and financial institutions are indeed too-big-to-fail, then what choice is there other than to submit to the bleakness of a nuclear option?

This deep, pathological greed that this system perpetuates, can only understand the economic and military dominance and hegemony that has come to define the 21^st century. So if we are to avert away from the black hole of globalization, what is needed are not only protests and actions of political goodwill, but also a strong regulatory authority that can properly moderate the economic, ecological, and resource accounting of not only our borders and EEZs, but the way in which we all account for our equity as well.

END