Vulture(fund)s Reloaded: Madeleine Albright Comes on the Scene
The question Leslie Stahl, moderator in the U.S. news show 60 Minutes asked Madeleine Albright in 1996 was, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
The then U.S. ambassador’s answer stopped the interviewer in her tracks. Albright responded unhesitatingly before the U.N. during the Clinton Administration’s first term, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.” The “we” in question included her superior, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, his cabinet, the congressional representatives that supported the aggression, and of course, herself.
Her answer was unfazed, without this atrocity even having left the slightest trace of compassion or regret in her hardened features. A crime against humanity was “worth it” for this sinister individual. And many more crimes were perpetrated in the seven years that followed, continuing into Clinton’s second term — aided and abetted by Albright in her capacity as Secretary of State — and the torch passed on to George W. Bush, culminating in an invasion and mass destruction which historians, archeologists, and anthropologists unapologetically characterized in large part as the destruction of the cradle of civilization.
Albright is a representative archetype of North American imperialism in her disrespect for international rule of law, and in the genocidal racism that informed her political career, from her domestic to her foreign policies.
She is now making herself useful again. A few days ago, the consulting firm that presides over the holdout creditors announced that they hired Albright as adviser in seeking a “satisfactory resolution” to the court ruling issued by Judge Thomas Griesa’s ruling. Obviously, Paul Singer and his cronies are looking for someone with extensive political experience and connections to the dominant groups in the empire (not to mention the obligatory complete lack of moral criteria) to assist the gaggle of financial con artists in bringing Argentina to its knees and make a killing in doing so.
We are talking about a person whose unscrupulous nature was honed during her eight years under the Clinton administration, when she defended the indiscriminate bombardment of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, and the following year, when she justified U.S. intervention in the former Yugoslavia, sanctioning a two-month long bombardment that devastated the country. The latter decision, instrumentalized by NATO under Washington’s leadership, was carried out in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter and without the Security Council’s required approval, which was utterly dismissed by Ms. Albright.
The incursion of the United States along with its European lackeys into the Balkans triggered one of the most bloody civil wars in recent history, which produced “mistakes” like the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade — a pattern of intervention that was to repeat later in Libya and Syria. Add to this mix Albright’s key role in continuing the blockade and periodic bombings in Iraq; the United States’ surreptitious support of the Brothers to the Rescue mission in Miami, a mounted attack by the anti-Castro mafia which resulted in tightening the economic blockade against Cuba; the sanctioning of the infamous Helms-Burton law; and lastly, the coup d’etat in Haiti and the imposition of the Jean-Bertrand Aristide government under the condition that he institute policies directed by the White House, and you get a cocktail that destroys any hope that anything good for Argentina can come out of any arbitrations with a personage that has presided over such outrageous policies.
Two final things to consider here. First, it’s necessary to highlight the immoral character of someone who has already reached the end of their political and administrative career, and will enjoy a excellent retirement for the rest of her life, but still seeks to aggrandize her fortune by power-brokering for the wealthy, as consultants like Albright or even more famously Henry Kissinger have always done. Alternatively, she could be dedicating her enormous pension and plentiful free time to loftier goals, but this is not the way people of her class operate. Secondly, it is not a coincidence that the vulture funds contracted the services of an ex-Secretary of State of such questionable ethics to “resolve” the differences confronting Argentina with the most predatory and repugnant sector of international finance capital. According to her past convictions, it is easy to assume that her “solution” will be in line with her defense of child genocides in Iraq: a savage “readjustment” in Argentina where those who should will perish, those who should will fall ill, those who should shall be excluded and oppressed, and that those who should will fall into abject poverty and misery in order to comply with the insanely unjust, illegal and immoral court ruling issued by Judge Griesa and to ensure that the vultures are free to feed on the world’s carcases. If this tragedy comes to pass, what I don’t believe will happen, surely in a future interview Albright will likewise say that all the suffering inflicted on the Argentine people as a result of her services “was worth it.”
(From the: Telesur)
