-by Eric Zuesse
On February 11th, the New York Times bannered “Spurning Demand by the Taliban, Biden Moves to Split $7 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds”, and reported that “President Biden will start to clear a legal path for certain relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion from assets that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York,” though Afghanistan is facing “a mass starvation that is in turn creating an enormous and destabilizing new wave of refugees-- and raising a clear need for extensive spending on humanitarian relief” (greatly burdening the U.N. and other relief-agencies). This Afghan starvation is largely due to Biden’s having frozen the Afghan Government’s funds as retaliation for Afghans’ having so unceremoniously driven out the U.S. occupying forces and enormously embarrassed him by so publicly displaying their revulsion at what America had done to them, and at the supreme corruption of the Government that America had installed to rule them.
America’s Government is now stealing $3.5 billion from starving Afghans-- who had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks-- in order to pay this money to “a group of relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks” who felt that this money from the savings and checking accounts of Afghan citizens should go to them instead.
This is how Biden panders for votes in order to keep a Democratic Party majority in Congress, instead of a Republican Party majority (which, of course, would be no less cruel).
The NYT report said that Biden has concluded that it “is in the national interest” for this money to go to these American families, instead of to starving Afghans, though “It is highly unusual for the United States government to commandeer a foreign country’s assets on domestic soil.” If this is the price that ‘ungrateful’ starving Afghans will have to pay in order for Biden to be able to retain his Party’s dominance in Congress, then they’ll just have to pay it, even if many thousands of Afghans might starve to death as a result.
On January 17th Oxfam headlined “Ten richest men double their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall”, but hid the identities of those 10; however, Investopedia bannered just two days later, “The 10 Richest People in the World” and reported that these 10 men were: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison-- 9 out of ten were Americans (only Arnault was not). So: those were the people who have doubled their wealth during the Covid-19 plague, while the bottom 99% (including maybe all Afghans) have experienced “falling incomes,” and while Afghan families can’t even get their own money out of their banks, because Biden needs his revenge against Afghans, and needs a Democratic Party majority in Congress.
By no means do all 9/11 families feel that this money from poor Afghans should go to these Americans instead. The NYT said:
Not all relatives of the Sept. 11 victims agree. This week, Barry Amundson, whose brother Craig was killed in the Pentagon that day, said his group-- September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows-- thought all of the money should go to benefit Afghans.
“I can’t think of a worse betrayal of the people of Afghanistan than to freeze their assets and give it to 9/11 families,” Mr. Amundson said.
Furthermore, largely because of Biden’s revenge, "the value of the Afghan currency has plummeted, and with it, the ability of millions of people who were already living on the edge to buy enough food to eat… The situation has rapidly grown dire."
Also on February 11th, the Moon of Alabama blogger headlined “When Cruelty Is The Point-- U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People”, and he explained the Biden Administration’s legal argument, and concluded that, “To give money that is owned by Afghanistan's central bank and is needed to help Afghan people to relatives of people who died in 9/11 is completely unjustified.” But Biden is trying to find a way to get it done.
Moreover, though Trump started the policy of stealing Syria’s oil, that barbaric policy has continued under Biden, such as has been reported here and here and here. America is now all-out a gangster-country, but it arrogantly pontificates ‘morality’ to the whole world. And it’s the ONLY country (except its 2014 coup-grabbed vassal, Ukraine), that at the U.N. votes (and repeatedly) against resolutions to condemn nazism and racism. Even if there might possibly be another country’s Government that is as evil as America’s is, there is nonethat compares with the U.S. Government for the number and barbarism of its sanctions, coups, subversions, and outright military invasions (all being against countries that never threatened America, far less invaded it), nor for the U.S. Government’s sheer hypocrisy: it’s by far the worst international gangster.
So: what Biden is doing to Afghanistan is really just par for the course. And, just as the U.S. public in 2002-3 were overwhelmingly suckered to believe the Government's (and news media's) lies against Iraq that led to the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. public still are overwhelmingly suckered to believe the Government's (and news media's) lies against Russia and China in 2022-- apparently, once a fool, always a fool, and most people are fools. Even the outright cruelty of America’s leaders can’t shake the public’s trusting ‘their’ Government (and that ‘their’ links to identifying whom it actually represents-- the billionaires, the people who have doubled their wealth during covid-19 while everybody else has become less wealthy than before-- and that group are also the world’s most rapacious individuals, and are also the most corrupt, and the most corrupting).
Before one can understand a problem, one must first know what the problem actually is. America’s public doesn’t know what the problem is, because the people who are the problem don’t want them to.