September 3, 2016
It’s amazing to be promoting Peace Week while the Port of LA is celebrating Fleet Week. Not coincidentally, the current military tensions in the world revolve around the current competition over the rules of trade—the movement of goods—across regions, and so it is only appropriate that we are here promoting peace.
These ports represent the center for the trade of goods that come in and out of the US from Asia and this port’s five top trading partners are China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
It’s remarkable how big this port is. Earlier this year I hosted a contingent from the Pacific and took them on a demilitarization tour of the Southland that was broken up over four days—these were people from various Pacific Islands, and it was an amazing experience to introduce that intersection of military and trade in the Southland with people from Fiji, Solomon Islands, West Papua, Samoa, and Papua New Guinea. The Demil tour was exhausting, but driving across the bridges with a van full of Pacific Islanders, looking at the sheer size of the shipyards and the number of container cranes really gave one a sense of scale.
When you combine the twin ports of LA and Long Beach, you have one of the busiest trade gateways in the world, whose trade value is nearly half a trillion dollars—which to give you perspective, is three times larger than the annual GDP of every Pacific Island combined, and I’m including both the independent States and occupied territories like French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Hawaii, West Papua, South Moluccas, Rapa Nui, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Marianas.
The first Moana Nui event we did was in Honolulu during the APEC conference in Honolulu and we did this in collaboration with the International Forum on Globalization. It was at this APEC meeting that Obama officially launched the Pacific Pivot or the Asia-Pacific Rebalance.
Been giving a series of presentations about the intersection of trade and militarization and have been focusing on the containment and obstruction policy that intersects with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and this intersection is not so much abstracted by trade figures and political and economic theory, but rather with shipping.
When US Navy Admiral Locklear said that we needed the TPP as much as a new aircraft carrier, he was referring to the Pacific Pivot, the realignment of military and trade investments in the Asia-Pacific. And I want to make clear that the TPP, although it is being touted as a free-trade agreement—only about a third of it is trade related—the rest is a blueprint for global corporate governance and a cooperation agreement for a containment and obstruction policy that is aimed at China—who was excluded from the TPP—and who really is the center of the economic world in Asia.
How this TPP is evolving is that it is the US rewriting the rules of trade—not China so much, as we often hear repeatedly in the news.
To be as clear and simple as I possibly can, because it is complicated if you have not been following it—it really is the US that is rewriting the rules of trade by circumventing the World Trade Organization which has been stalled for many years under what is called the Doha Development Round.
This history is really important so please bear with me. For global trade to work there have to be different rules for advanced economies, emerging economies, and developing countries—otherwise, the large advanced economies like the US or the EU, or Japan can bully smaller countries into really terrible deals when it comes to resource extraction, food production, education, water and energy management, health care, housing, finance, etc…
Developing Countries seek different more equitable trade rules while the advanced economies seek to maintain what is arguably just a more updated and technically more complex colonial relationship with its former colonies. Since about 2001, the WTO has been at a standstill over these development rules.
When the financial collapse occurred in 2008, it impacted the advanced economies more than the emerging economies. And by 2014 the emerging economies formally created a new institution called BRICS—an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—creating rules and an economic partnership outside of Washington’s influence. In terms of public or government debt, By 2013 BRICS countries were as a whole, fairly low with a median debt ratio of 36%, while the US debt had skyrocketed to 106% under the bailouts and quantitative easings, Japan was 240% and the EU was 88%.
BRICS created several new international institutions like the New Development Bank, an alternative to the World Bank—the Contingency Reserve Arrangement, an alternative to the IMF—and an entirely new infrastructure development crossing Asia, into the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South America and into the Pacific called the New Silk Road or the One Belt One Road. The One Belt One Road or OBOR, appears to draw upon the Developing Countries’ agenda in the WTO, but at the moment it is too soon to tell what the future impacts might be—but so far, the developing countries who are participating are hungry for these new development projects—and that scares Japan and the U.S.
What we do know however, is that since BRICS, Washington has been quietly engaging in a new Cold War rife with regime change and regional destabilization and engaged in a program of manufacturing information that seeks to build credibility by cooperation and consensus building, and I’m speaking about all the manufactured narratives about Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and on and on and on.
Washington, Wall St, and the 1%– literally, at all costs, want to maintain their unipolar control over the global economy. The writing on the wall reads that it is over, that Reagan’s neoliberal experiment has failed—and it didn’t go out with a bang, but rather with a whimper. The world wants to move forward, but the Wall St. Washington elite is treating this like a no-holds-barred, final-inning competition, provoking other countries to ensure that if neoliberalism should truly die, it will go out dragging the world down with it.
Being from a place that has been so completely colonized and occupied by the US military has given me a unique view of trade and militarization. For example, we cannot separate trade from militarization. Pearl Harbor is Pacific Central Command. The coup of our Queen Liliuokalani was at the gunpoint of the US military supporting American businessmen looking to annex Hawaii for the sugar trade.
Hawaii is that place that commemorates Pearl Harbor year after year, is confronted with all the negative impacts of militarism, spent uranium depleted in our water table, militarizing Native Hawaiian sacred lands like Pohakuloa, and Kahoolawe, and we can never forget the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki any more than we can ignore the Marshallese and Micronesians, victims of immense radiation exposure, disease and birth defects from years of nuclear testing. Now in the Northern Marianas, the U.S. military is removing the natives from Pagan Island and Tinian Island for military exercises.
Washington has embarked upon a very dangerous initiative. One that is a hair trigger away from exploding and that is the issue of the South China Sea.
There will be no winning this and the U.S. needs to step back and allow disputes in the South China Sea to resolve in accord with its proper jurisdiction. No matter how many countries the US can rally over on its team, China will defend its territorial claim.
What I want to do tonight is to a least give you something to work with in regard to the relentless barrage of propaganda regarding the South China Sea. Both corporate and independent news has been regurgitating the same manufactured information regarding the South China Sea.
• While CNN DOES NOT report the current sacred struggle at Standing Rock over the protection of land and water from the Dakota Access Pipeline, CNN reports that China will be prosecuting people who enter the waters that China illegally claims.
Let’s tell CNN to stop manufacturing propaganda. China is issuing these new regulations because the US has been provoking China by sailing warships close to the disputed islands.
• While the New York Times reports that the Permanent Court of Arbitration rejects China’s maritime claim.
Let’s tell the New York Times to stop manufacturing propaganda. The Permanent Court of Arbitration should never have made a ruling and should have ruled it “unmaintainable,” since China did not participate in this case.
• When the Washington Post reports that China has been illegally building bases and illegally expanding the islands in the South China Sea,
Let’s tell the Washington Post to stop manufacturing propaganda. The island building conforms to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and is abiding by the laws China signed with ratifying UNCLOS. Let’s tell the Washington Post that the US has over 400 military bases, outposts, and structures across the Pacific and has annexed hundreds of thousands of Pacific Ocean territory to maintain its military. For China, these new bases fall within its territory.
• When the LA Times reports that China’s nine-dash line is against international law,
Let’s tell the LA Times to stop manufacturing propaganda. It was the government of the Republic of China that drew the 12-dash line, demarcating China’s territory when China was fighting Japan’s occupation. This was a territory recognized by the United States, and no one questioned it. And when the communist People’s Republic of China won they inherited that 12-dash line, which Zhou Enlai reduced to the 9-dash line—erasing the line between Hainan Island and Vietnam, when China backed the North Vietnamese.
• When Bloomberg reports that China could use its territory to impede shipping by other countries,
Let’s tell Bloomberg to stop manufacturing propaganda. The US State Department has been publishing reports on the South China Sea since the 1950s and only in the latest 2015 issue does the State Department begin to draw conditional conclusions, like “If China does this,” then yadayada. China has only conformed to international maritime rules and allowed the free transport of goods through its territory. The more likely scenario is that the US, by patrolling the South China Sea will use its presence to slow China’s shipping. On the technological end, one of the advantages of joining the TPP is that member economies will utilize fast-track information to move ships through bottlenecks like the Strait of Malacca faster.
It’s important to understand that when China ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS recognized that there were stand-alone exceptions to territories and jurisdictions, and the South China Sea was one of them.
China and ASEAN signed the 2002 Declaration on the Code of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, which gave jurisdiction over territorial issues to ASEAN. What the Philippines did, is break that treaty by taking this up to the Permanent Court of Arbitration—not the International Court of Justice—but the PCA. They make rulings based on arbitration, not formal trials, meaning that rules of evidence are much more relaxed, as the cases are heard by third-party arbitrators, not formal judges. China did not participate in these hearings and any determination should not have been made.
This is not to say that there is no territorial dispute in the South China Sea, only that the jurisdiction to resolve this dispute is between ASEAN and China. Even in the 1996 State Department issue on the South China Sea, it says, and I quote: Excessive baseline claims are all too common in Asia and elsewhere, Those of Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia, North Korea, Russia, Thailand, and Vietnam are as extreme as that of the PRC… In order to resolve these disputes “We must now wait for the proverbial other shoe to drop.”
What that proverbial other shoe is, is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. What was at one time, just a theory has become crystal clear, that the tensions over the South China Sea have everything to do with the TPP, and they are the TPP countries Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Japan that are pushing this, with the Philippines being used as a proxy agent.
Stop the TPP. US out of the South China Sea.
Stop the TPP, US out of the South China Sea…