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By Prof. James Petras

The Trump regime proclaimed that the vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations regarding the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a strategic US decision.

Both President Trump and his bombastic UN Ambassador Nikki Haley threatened that all decisions and agreements regarding alliances, loans, aid and diplomatic relations were at stake.

Moreover, the Trump regime clearly defined the style and substance of US imperial dictates: All UN member nations (large and small) must grovel in the most abject manner to his orders. Ambassador Haley demanded that each nation on earth accept Trump’s and the racist-Zionist Netanyahu’s declaration that the ancient city of Jerusalem is the eternal, undivided and ethnically managed capital of the Jews. Trump’s message was loud and clear – he was the great ‘decider’ and the UN votes would identify America’s true friends and enemies.

“We are making a list… and there will be consequences…”

Clearly Trump’ boast of US power and Haley’s assumption that her terrifying threats would ensure that Washington had a majority vote on the ‘gifting’ of Jerusalem to Zio-fascism. They believed that US dominance and global hegemony was absolute and unassailable. The vote proved something else, something very new was happening.

The US suffered an overwhelming and humiliating defeat, one that kept Ambassador Haley dexterous fingers busy ‘taking notes’: 128 nations demanded that the Trump regime withdraw its declaration that Jerusalem was Israel’s undivided capital for Jews. Only 9 micro-nations (some mere postage stamps and a few death-squad banana-stans) voted with the Trump-Haley decision, 35 mendicant-states put their heads down and abstained while 21 timorous ambassadors chose to hide their shamelessness in the toilet stalls rather than show up for this important vote.

Political Context

First and foremost it is important to discuss the steps leading up to the US suffering such a crushing debacle. In other words, who was responsible for leading the Trump Administration by the nose down the blind alley of submission to the dictates of Zio-fascism.

The leader and driving force behind the UN disaster was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose quest to seize Jerusalem and convert it into the ‘eternal’ capital of the Jews was his top priority. For decades the entire world has rejected Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem and its conversion into an ethnically cleansed capital for the ‘Jewish’ state. The UN and international jurists denounced Israel’s colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Netanyahu took charge with the election of Donald Trump as President. Operation Jerusalem was his first order to Puppet Donald. A number of Israel-First multi-billionaires, who financed Trump’s electoral campaign, demanded an immediate pay-off from their puppet: The Administration’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s agenda. Despite protests from the rest of the world, especially the US closest European allies, Trump plunged the nation right into the Zionist soup: a Jewish Jerusalem; the systematic eviction of all Arabs, Christian, Muslim and secular, and the eventual annexation of all of Palestine; as well as an increasing military confrontation with Iran.

Real estate speculator, Jared Kushner (image left), Trump’s pampered son-in- law, and a complete Netanyahu flunky, became the senior advisor for the Middle East. Kushner pressured Trump’s National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn to intervene with Russia on behalf of Israel’s take-over of Jerusalem. Flynn was subsequently prosecuted for discussing global US Russian relations and the ‘good soldier’ is falling on his sword on behalf of the Zionists. Not surprising, the Congressional Democrats, the FBI and the Special Prosecutor found it easier to prosecute Flynn for his discussion regarding de-escalating the tense US-Russian relations provoked by the Obama administration than his discussions with the Kremlin in support of Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem!

Netanyahu’s operational weapons in manipulating US policy involved Jared Kushner, the billionaire Israel-First donors, the AIPAC and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Tel Aviv succeeded in securing Trump’s commitment to the Israeli agenda, despite opposition from the entire UN National Security Council and the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly. In the style of a typical authoritarian, US President Trump grovels at the feet of his ‘superior’, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while tearing at the throats of his ‘inferiors’, the 193 member nations of the UN General Assembly.

Netanyahu’s vitriolic bar room threats against the entire membership of the UN prior to the vote ensured the repudiation of all Security Council representatives with the exception of his South Carolina puppet, Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump and Haley backed the blustering Netanyahu by issuing gangland threats to all UN representatives who dared to oppose Washington’s dictates.

In this way, Prime Minister Netanyahu secured the greatest diplomatic and political success of his career – the total submission of the US to his agenda, at the risk of a major humiliation in the UN. This, in effect, formalized Israeli hegemony over Washington, for the world to see.

In contrast to Netanyahu’s beaming success, the US suffered a historic diplomatic defeat: Fourteen times as many nations voted against the demands of the US President over– Netanyahu’s grab of Jerusalem.

What makes the defeat even more striking is the fact that all major allies and most of the biggest aid recipients openly defied the US threats. Eight of the ten biggest US aid recipients voted against Trump–Netanyahu–Haley. This bizarre troika is now left with an enemy list circling the entire globe, and a few timorous allies in the South Pacific and among the death squads of Guatemala.

Trump’s total and puerile embrace of the raving Netanyahu has exposed and widened fissures in US global hegemony.

Apart from ‘capturing’ Netanyahu’s vote, the other pro Trump nations included a handful of insignificant Pacific islands (Marshall Islands, Palau, Micronesia), Togo, a corrupt African mini-state and two banana-sized ‘death squad democracies’, Honduras and Guatemala. The latter two regimes hold power via stolen elections backed by narco-thugs in the pay (dubbed ‘foreign aid’) of the US.

All of the leading Asian and Western European countries voted against Trump. They openly rejected the crude blackmail of the US-Israel duet. Subservient regimes in Eastern Europe, corrupt regimes in Latin America and some horrifically impoverished nations in Africa and Asia chose to abstain or excuse themselves to the toilet stalls of Times Square. Narco-neo-liberal regimes in Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Panama and the Dominican Republic abstained. Even rightwing Eastern European regimes, which usually give unquestioned support to all US demands, like Romania, Bosnia, Poland and Latvia defied Nikki Haley’s ‘name taking’ by abstaining. The ‘no-shows’ (hiding in the toilets) included US puppets like Georgia, Samoa, St Kitts and Tonga.

An openly humiliated UN Ambassador Haley was left with the task of thanking the abstainers and ‘no-shows’ for their courage and preparing a few bags of goodies (matzos, Mogan David wine and discounts to the brothels of Tel Aviv) for the torturers of Honduras and half-drowned ‘leaders’ of Palau in gratitude for such loyalty.

Conclusion

Clearly Trump’s championing of a racist, colonialist, ethnic cleansing state like Israel may come to be viewed as a strategic diplomatic disaster. The Manhattan egomaniac has tied the US fortunes to the whims of a pariah state led by a complete lunatic.

Trump’s decision to demonstrate total loyalty to his Zionist billionaire campaign ‘donor-owners’ and his Israel-First son-in-law in his first major foreign policy decision failed to impress any of the influential nations of the world – East or West. Indeed, it showed how fractured and dangerously dysfunctional the US Administration had become.

Most important, Trump’s proclamation of a unipolar world, based on his notion of the US’s economic power, has collapsed. Israel, despite Haley’s bluster and list-taking, has no legitimacy. The continued Mossad assassinations of leading Palestinians and others and the increasing IDF slaughter of the spontaneous Palestinian civilian resistance have failed to improve Israel’s international standing – except among Guatemalan torturers.

However, it is not clear that the US has lost its big power influence regarding other regional conflicts. The subsequent UN Security Council vote in favor of Washington’s demands for added sanctions against North Korea demonstrated Trump’s power to intimidate the oligarchs and leaders of China and Russia.

In other words, limits on US power still depend on the issues, the allies, the diplomatic appeals, the adversaries and the distribution of benefits and costs.

In the case of Jerusalem, Real Estate Mogul Trump’s bizarre decision to hand an entire city over to the Zionists alienated all Muslims and Christians the world over, as well as the secular Western liberal nations and emerging powers, like Russia and China. The US tied its prestige to the whims of a paranoid nation arrogantly flaunting its racist superiority complex, backed by groups of immensely wealthy overseas dual citizens.

Diplomatically, Israel’s vituperative response to any legitimate criticism from world bodies undermines its chances of coalition building.

Finally, Washington’s support for Israel’s perpetual and overt violation of international law and its bombing of humanitarian missions makes Israel a very costly ally.

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York.

2 January 2018

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/president-trumps-jerusalem-decision-the-end-of-hegemony/5624629

By Andre Vltchek

Sometimes it is useful to take a break from news bulletins and newspapers, and even from ‘friendly’ Internet publications.

Occasionally it is good to realize that there are actually two parallel realities that are constantly competing for the ‘hearts and minds’ of people living all over the world. There is real life and ‘fake life’. There is reality and elaborately manufactured pseudo-reality, which is designedto appear more real than the reality itself. It is like that chemically produced green apple shampoo that smells more authentic than the fruit itself.

Periodically I disappear into some jungle or a war zone, in Afghanistan, Southern Philippines or in the middle of plundered Borneo Island. When I return to what some people would readily describe as the‘normal world’, and a news bulletin unexpectedly confronts me at some airport lounge, everything suddenly appears to be bizarre, grotesque, totally surreal, at least for the few initial but excruciating moments.

It is because most of the mainstream news communiqués and analyses are produced in the plush comfort of an armchair, or at a mahogany writing table, thousands of miles from shrapnel, sweat, torn flesh, blood, burning forests, polluted waterways, and the other horrors which are, in fact, nothing other than the true reality for billions of human beings inhabiting our planet.

Remembering how things really feel, taste and smell I get desperate. I don’t recognize places described by the mass media. We are talking about two different universes; yes, about two absolutely opposite realities.

If mainstream reporters go to the field, they are well equipped with bulletproof vests, helmets, with 4×4 vehicles (some of them also bulletproof), with excellent life and health insurances that include airlifts and other evacuation clauses, as well as with hefty salaries and other compensation schemes. On their chests and their backs, it says loudly and explicitly “PRESS”.

So what am I bitching about? Is it wrong to compensate people who are risking their lives, or to try to protect them?

No, it is not; of course it is not wrong.

Except, there is that one tiny ‘but’… You can never, ever get ‘too close’ to anything real, this way. You cannot turn yourself to a buffoon or a walking media Rambo, and expect to uncover something hidden, something important, and something thoroughly groundbreaking.

If you over-protect your life, over-insure your each and every step, you’d build a thick wall between yourself and the real life.

If you go into the field looking like this, you will be spotted and questioned, and you will need all sorts of permits and stamps. It is almost like declaring: “I’ll play by your rules, I’ll not rock the boat, and I’ll let you monitor each step that I take”. Imagine arriving while being decked out like that and attempting to cover genocide in Papua! Good luck, really. About official permits, if you are from a ‘friendly’ mainstream agency, you can get them almost immediately. Yes, of course, organizations such as the BBC or CNN could easily supply you with all the necessary credentials. You could even count on an official government armed ‘escort’, or you could count on an escort supplied by friendly (to the West) ‘rebel groups’. Not to speak of all those ‘all you can eat’ press briefings.

However, the chances that real people would talk to you would be slim. But would you care about hearing from real people if you work for an official mainstream newspaper or a television channel? I doubt it. Real people could, God forbid, say real things, instead of what you are ordered to ‘discover’ in such places as Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria or Afghanistan. In the end, you’ll hear what you came to hear and report, and your writing and clips would be mainly in accordance with the established stereotypes.

Then what, how? Who coulddo it; who could describe reality, and actually stay alive?

In a brilliant film directed by Oliver Stone, Salvador (1986), one of the main characters declared:

“You got to get close to the truth. You get too close, you die.”

He died, but what he said – that is precisely it! There is this invisible, imaginary line, in the air or on the ground, somewhere. You never see it, but if you have worked in many war zones before, you sense it, and it is what actually saves your life. It saves it often, most of the times, but of course not always. Those who usually die are men and women who make crucial mistakes during their first attempts, before developing their instincts. What I’m talking about cannot be taught; it is not logical – it’s just ‘there’.

To get as close to the truth as possible, one has to work, fast, decisively and with certain precision, avoiding obvious blunders.

People around you have to trust you, and you yourself have to know whom to trust and from whom to hide.

You are on your own, or at least most of the time you are.

All this guarantees nothing, but these are some of the basic preconditions, if you want to understand a conflict, a war.

Working in devastated places is very emotional, very deep, and sometimes you get overwhelmed, and sometimes your glasses get blurry. You make mistakes; hopefully not too many. Occasionally you go after a particular story, or you know generally what you want to find and a story bumps into you, or you stumble over it, or it just hits you frontally, brutally and at full strength.

If it is good, it is never just ‘reporting’. It is much more than journalism, or it is simply shit. There must be some poetry in what you are doing, there has to be also philosophy and humanism, as well as plenty of context and ideology and passion.

There can be no ‘objectivity’ in this work: objectivity is just an illusion, a fairytale dispersed by mainstream media. But you should never lie: you witness and say what you have to say, the way you believe it should be said, and while you do it, it is your obligation to inform your readers and viewers where precisely you stand.

As a human being, as an artist and thinker, you should always take sides. But your position – on which side of the ‘barricade’ you stand – has to be clear and honest. Otherwise you are a liar.

The bitter but essential truth is: Even if you put your life on the line, even if you get badly injured or psychologically exhausted, do not expect much gratitude or support.

Many local victims – people whom you came to defend – will suppose and even tell you straight to your face that ‘you came to get rich using their suffering and misery’.

Your readers in wealthy countries will imagine that you are being generously funded. They were conditioned to believe that there are no altruistic individuals, governments and countries left on this earth.

The reality is quite different: if you work independently, if you refuse to repeat lies and take orders, to merge with the mainstream, if you go against the interest of the West and its allies and ‘clients’, the chances are that you will get zero financial support, no protection whatsoever and absolutely no perks.

You may get millions of readers, of course. And you can recycle your reports in your books and films, as I did in my more than 800-page long “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. If your writing is good, your books will sell, somehow, even if they attack the establishment frontally. But don’t count on any support from ‘friendly governments’ or wealthy but ‘left leaning individuals’. There is no Engels around, these days. You are really on your own. Trust me, you are.

You and your determined work may save several villages, or if you are very good, you could make a difference on a global scale. Your writing or your films may help to stop a war. But never expect any official recognition, any practical backing or even mercy from your readers. In 2015, after making several films and writing books about several particularly horrid war zones, mostly in Africa, I totally collapsed. For several weeks, I was not able to move. I thought it was the end. There was no help at all coming from those millions of my readers living in all parts of the world. At that time I made my condition public. Still nothing. Few letters of ‘moral support’ arrived. Few: “Be strong, the world needs you!” In the end, it was my close family circle that literally pampered and rescued me and put me back to my feet and into fighting order.

This is not a reproach, just a warning to those who are getting ready to fight for the survival of humanity: “You will be totally on your own. You will most definitely collapse on several occasions.”

Still, I know no other way how to live meaningfully. I would never trade my life with the life of anyone else.

There is another very important and revealing piece of information, which I’d like to share with you, my readers.

In 2017 I worked in several extremely dangerous parts of the world, including Afghanistan, the Pakistani-Afghan border during the exchange of fire between the two countries, on the Turkish-Syrian border in Euphrates area during the Turkish invasion, in the war-torn southern Philippines, in Lebanon and in the fully devastated (by logging and mining) Indonesian part of the Island of Borneo.

I drove all around Afghanistan, with no protection, no security and no one covering my back. My friendwho doubled as my driver and interpreter was the only man I could count on. Sometimes I held the wheel myself. We even made it into the Taliban controlled territories and drug-infested slums of Kabul. All in a 20 year old, beat up Toyota Corona.

In all these places, I did not see one single Western mainstream reporter. Not one!

Where were they, all those media superstars, I don’t know, but most likely they were holed up somewhere at the NATO headquarters, or at least in the only remaining plush hotel in Afghanistan – Serena.The same can be said about the southern Philippines, although there, to be ‘objective’, one Aussie colleague actuallygothit by a sniper’s bullet, just couple of days before I arrived.

Do never trust those who write about the suffering of others exclusively from the safety of their living room couches. It is fine to write from there, of course, but only after you have actually seen the people you are talking about; after you have seen them at least once, for a substantial amount of time, after you have listened to their stories, to their desperate cries, and after you have got very dirty and very scared yourself, and truly desperate, in short: after you have got right there, near that invisible line which separates life from death, and after you have tastedthe water of the proverbial river Lethe.

But back to where I began.

Imagine: I leave the places where people are fighting for survival, or where they are fighting for true freedom, or against imperialism. I hardlyhave time to take a deep breath, to recover from food and air poisoning, to change into some presentable clothes, and it all hits me directly in my face: I see some news bulletin, I read articles published by mainstream media, and while doing it, I absolutely don’t recognize the world, which I have witnessed in all its rainbow of colors, with all its glory and its misery.

I feel ‘out of place’.

I know, some call it ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. There are many other definitions for these feelings, or for this outrage, or desperation, or whatever you want to call it.

You suddenly feel it, you know it: somewhere far away where you had been living and working just several hours ago, there is still what could be defined as the ‘real world’, inhabited by real people. And then, right now, there is thisother world, which over imposes, almost fully covers(and even dwarfs) that real one, by using its mainstream clichés and false mass-produced certainties.

This year – this ‘departing year’ 2017 – has definitely not been a good year for our planet.

A group of nations, which has been controlling the world for already several centuries brutally and shamelessly, is pushing us, our entire human race, closer and closer towards complete disaster, towards a showdown, towardsa confrontation that may abruptly terminate millions of innocent human lives.

I’m concerned. I’m very concerned. I have already witnessed indescribable calamities in so many places. I know, I can perfectly well imagine, where all this could lead.

Colonialism is always wrong. Imperialism is always wrong. Cultural, religious or economic supremacy theories are wrong, with absolutely no exceptions.

If a group of nations from one relatively small continent has been continuously usurping the entire world, shaping it to its advantage and enslaving people of other colors, beliefs and values, it is all unmistakably wrong.

But the world is like that – brutal, unjust, and controlled by one aggressive, greedy, sly and arrogant minority. The world is still like that. Once again, it is increasingly like that.

And I cannot stand suchan ‘arrangement’.

I don’t want it to be like that. I’m tired of covering grief, pain, horror and violence. I’m exhausted of filming or photographing perpetual destruction and downfalls.

That’s why I’m writing this, at the very end of the year 2017. Perhaps it is just one more futile attempt to stop something inhuman and unnecessary from happening.

Perhaps it is almost impossible to cut through the pseudo-reality manufactured by the mainstream media, academia and ‘culture’. Or maybe it’s not impossible. I actually believe that ‘it is never too late’, as I believe that nothing in life is truly ‘impossible’.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2018!

Let me inform you that the world is totally different, actually much more beautiful and diverse than you have been told. Even most of those places that are now in flames are beautiful. And if left in peace, they’d thrive.

The world is worth fighting for. It is worth defending.

Don’t ever trust the “news” and “information” which is being disseminated by those who are continuously trying to loot and enslave the world. Trust only what you see and hear, and what you feel. Trust people who are in love with this world, if you manage to identify them. Trust your own senses, your inner logic, and your emotions.

Do not vote for bombing or putting sanctionson any foreign country, anywhere on Earth, before you see it with your own eyes, before you are really convinced, before you talk to its people, and before you truly understand what they are saying. Do not make decisions or conclusions after staring at the television set only. Remember: pseudo-reality kills! And it wants you to participate in this murder.

Go!

Discover!

See for yourself. I hope to encounter you, at least some of you, in Syria, in North Korea, in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Russia, China, South Africa, Cuba, and Eritrea –also in hundreds of other great places, which have been brutalized and smeared by those who are dreaming about making this entire world thoroughly banal, consisting only of a few super-wealthy nations served and fed by all those “others”that have been reduced to slavery.

After seeing the world with your own eyes, after understanding it, I’m almost certain that you will agree with me: right now there are two parallel realities on this planet. One consists of true human lives and human stories, the other one only of trivial but manipulative interpretations of the world. One (true) reality is longing for progress, kindness, optimism and harmony; the other (fake one) is constantly spreading uncertainty, nihilism, destruction and hopelessness.

It is not only what they call “fake news”, it is an entire ‘fake reality’ that has been manufactured by the establishment and upheld by men and women with helmets, bulletproof vests, 4WD’s and prominent PRESS insignia.

Once again, HAPPY NEW YEAR 2018!

Happy Discovery Of The World!

Happy Struggle For Survival Of Our Precious Planet!”

Year 2018 will be crucial. Let us all join forces in order for Humanism and that beautiful lady called ‘The True Reality’survive, to prevail, and to triumph.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist.

30 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/30/new-years-message-warning-war-correspondent/

By Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC)

The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) welcomes the cancellation of a $500 million missile deal between India and Israel as a “major blow” to Israel’s military industry.

ovember 21, 2017 — Yesterday, media reported that the Indian Ministry of Defense has scrapped the $500M deal with Israeli arms manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for its missile systems. Years in the making, the deal had been celebrated in international media and was finalized after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel in July. In August, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and its Indian partner Kalyani Strategic Systems opened a facility in Hyderabad to manufacture the missile systems.

The deal was cancelled after India’s state-run Defense Research Development Organisation asserted that India should not import this Israeli technology.

Jamal Juma’, coordinator of the Palestinian Stop the Wall Campaign and BNC secretariat member said:

India’s decision to scrap this massive arms deal with Israel is a huge blow to the Israeli weapons industry. This $500 million deal would have fueled Israel’s military industry, which is deeply implicated in war crimes against the Palestinian people.

It is also a major setback for Israel’s propaganda hubris that its technology is indispensable for India’s development and modernization. As many Indians are recognizing, Israel is marketing military and agricultural technologies in India and trying to cement Indian dependence on Israel.

Israel seeks a flow of Indian cash for it’s own profit and to help finance its criminal wars and apartheid regime.

India is by far the globe’s biggest importer of Israeli weapons, and Israel is enjoying almost unparalleled influence in the Indian military system. Israel is equipping the Indian army with Israeli guns, the Indian airforce and navy with Israeli airplanes and missiles, and is also providing communication systems and technology in all levels of the Indian military.

Over the last two decades, Indo-Israeli military relations have continuously increased despite various corruption scandals and technical failures.

Similar patterns have started to surface in other sectors as well. India’s 16 million-strong farmer’s union AIKS has endorsed the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) “in order to stand for the rights of the Palestinian people and to resist the corporate takeover of Indian agriculture sector by Israeli companies.”

Members of Telengana’s state assembly last week denounced state-sponsored trips of Indian farmers to Israel as “a wastage of money.”

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of  the BNC said:

We hope this is the beginning of the end of Indian complicity in Israel’s egregious violation of international law and Palestinian human rights. As Palestinians we ask the Indian people to maintain their proud legacy of commitment to independence,  to growing local knowledge and to respecting other people’s struggles for freedom from colonialism and apartheid.

Israel’s regime of oppression can never be a model for the great Indian nation that once led the non-aligned movement and upheld the right of all nations to self determination. Israel exports to India what it knows best — technology that represses, militarizes and dispossesses people of their land and water rights. India is better off without that.

Last week it was announced that Indian Oil and Natural Gas Corporations are bidding for drilling rights in gas fields claimed by Israel, despite the many controversies linked to territorial disputes in such fields.  In August, India’s Adventz group signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop Israel’s Jerusalem Light Rail, which serves Israel’s settlements built illegally in and around occupied East Jerusalem.

Omar Barghouti said:

As large multinationals—like Veolia, Orange and G4S— are abandoning their illegal projects in Israel due to effective BDS pressure, Israel has started dragging India into deals fraught with legal and political risks. Indian companies would be well advised to avoid getting sucked into Israel’s human rights violations as more and more international corporations refuse to get involved in such complicity. It is unethical and bad for business in the longer term.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @BDSmovement.

21 November 2017

Source: https://bdsmovement.net/news/india-scraps-500m-military-deal-israel

By teleSUR / MH – rg

For nine consecutive years Cuba has reported a rate of less than 5 per 1,000 live births, lowest than in most countries in the world.

Cuba’s infant mortality rate was 4.1 per 1,000 live births in 2017, the lowest in the history of the Caribbean socialist country, the Cuban ministry of public health announced Thursday.

“This is a milestone that reflects the integration of the entire health care system in the country, which is about lives saved, quality of life, happiness and satisfaction for our people,” Minister of Public Health Roberto Morales said in an event honoring workers in the sector, the state-run Cuban News Agency reported.

Morales added that it is possible that the rate will even be lower by the end of December.

Meanwhile as for congenital malformations, the ministry reported 0.9 deaths per 1,000 live births as a result of the development and improvement of the genetic network, the minister explained.

The results also highlighted the program for cancer control, which in the last three years has halted the increase in disease-related mortality.

He said the elimination of diseases such as poliomyelitis, diphtheria, tetanus in newborns, whooping cough, measles, rubella and mumps is maintained and transmission between mothers and infants has been stopped.

In 2016, Cuba recorded an infant mortality indicator of 4.3, which meant that for nine consecutive years the island reported a rate of less than 5 per 1,000 live births.

Cuba allows expectant mothers to stay in maternity homes where potential health risks to mothers and babies can be identified early on in pregnancy. The homes also provide nutritional support and education.

Unlike in some developed countries including the United States, the infant mortality rate in Cuba remains at similar rate throughout the country regardless of the income and ethnic makeup of an area.

29 December 2017

Source: https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Cubas-Infant-Mortality-Rate-at-Its-Lowest-in-Nations-History-20171229-0005.html

By Eric Zuesse

When Donald Trump ran for the U.S. Presidency, his biggest foreign-affairs promise (which he copied from Ted Cruz) was to defeat “radical Islamic terrorism”; but, on December 27th, the Russian Government publicly accused Trump’s military of backing ISIS terrorists to fight against Syria’s Government (which is allied with Russia). Russia’s RT international television network headlined “US lets militants train, mount attacks from its Syrian bases – chief of Russian General Staff”, and opened:

The US is hosting training camps for militant groups in Syria, including former ISIS fighters who fled from Raqqa, said the head of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, citing data obtained by aerial surveillance.

The US forces have effectively turned their military base near the town of al-Tanf in southeastern Syria into a terrorists’ training camp, Gerasimov said in an interview to Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda daily on Wednesday.

“According to satellite and other surveillance data, terrorist squads are stationed there. They are effectively training there,” Gerasimov said. …

Barely over a month earlier, the BBC had headlined on November 13th, “Raqqa’s Dirty Secret: The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let hundreds of IS fighters and their families escape from Raqqa, under the gaze of the US and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city.” One lorry driver told BBC, “We took out around 4,000 people including women and children — our vehicle and their vehicles combined. When we entered Raqqa, we thought there were 200 people to collect. In my vehicle alone, I took 112 people.” The reporter noted, “Another driver says the convoy was six to seven kilometres long.” Furthermore: “IS fighters took everything they could carry. Ten trucks were loaded with weapons and ammunition. The drivers point to a white truck being worked on in the corner of the yard. ‘Its axle was broken because of the weight of the ammo,’ says Abu Fawzi [a lorry driver].”

So: America’s ISIS training camps might have thousands of extremely well-armed fighters to pay (by the Sauds) and train (by the Americans) to fight against Bashar al-Assad’s forces — prolonging the war against Syria, continuing the Syrian carnage.

One can’t understand this U.S. support of ISIS, unless one recognizes the key fact: that, during the prior, Obama, U.S. Presidency, the U.S. Government was relying principally upon Al Qaeda in Syria to train and lead the various imported-into-Syria Saudi-paid international fundamentalist-Sunni mercenaries (committed jihadists, but all soldiers need to be paid and trained and fed and armed) who served as America’s proxy boots-on-the-ground in Syria to overthrow and replace Syria’s non-sectarian Baathist socialist Government. Furthermore, on 17 September 2016, Obama’s air force bombed Syrian Government troops in Deir Ezzor (or Der Zor) the capital of Syria’s oil-producing region; and the surrounding ISIS forces then rushed in to grab that city to take it over, for the U.S.-Saudi side in the Syrian war. So: Obama sometimes even provided crucial support to ISIS (and not only depended heavily upon Al Qaeda). The U.S. Government, under Obama, even honored internationally the White Helmets wing of Al Qaeda in Syria, at the same time as refusing to allow its leader into the U.S. to receive a ‘humanitarian’ award, because he was on the U.S. terrorism watch-list.

The January 2016 issue of Harper’s featured a landmark article by Andrew Cockburn, “A Special Relationship: The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again”, which included such rare (practically unique in the U.S. press) gems as this:

The Saudis, of course, had been an integral part of the anti-Soviet campaign from the beginning. According to one former CIA official closely involved in the Afghanistan operation, Saudi Arabia supplied 40 percent of the budget for the rebels. The official said that William Casey, who ran the CIA under Ronald Reagan, “would fly to Riyadh every year for what he called his ‘annual hajj’ to ask for the money. Eventually, after a lot of talk, the king would say okay, but then we would have to sit and listen politely to all their incredibly stupid ideas about how to fight the war.”

Despite such comments, it would seem that the U.S. and Saudi strategies did not differ all that much, especially when it came to routing money to the most extreme fundamentalist factions. Fighting the Soviets was only part of the ultimate goal. The Egyptian preacher Abu Hamza, now serving a life sentence on terrorism charges, visited Saudi Arabia in 1986, and later recalled the constant public injunctions to join the jihad: “You have to go, you have to join, leave your schools, leave your family.” The whole Afghanistan enterprise, he explained, “was meant to actually divert people from the problems in their own country.” It was “like a pressure-cooker vent. If you keep [the cooker] all sealed up, it will blow up in your face, so you have to design a vent, and this Afghan jihad was the vent.”

Soufan agreed with this analysis. “I think it’s not fair to only blame the CIA,” he told me. “Egypt was happy to get rid of a lot of these guys and have them go to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia was very happy to do that, too.” As he pointed out, Islamic fundamentalists were already striking these regimes at home: in November 1979, for example, Wahhabi extremists had stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The subsequent siege left hundreds dead.

Within a few short years, however, the sponsoring governments began to recognize a flaw in the scheme: the vent was two-way. I heard this point most vividly expressed in 1994, at a dinner party on a yacht cruising down the Nile. The wealthy host had deemed it safer to be waterborne owing to a vigorous terror campaign by Egyptian jihadists. At the party, this defensive tactic elicited a vehement comment from Osama El-Baz, a senior security adviser to Hosni Mubarak. “It’s all the fault of those stupid bastards at the CIA,” he said, as the lights of Cairo drifted by. “They trained these people, kept them in being after the Russians left, and now we get this.”

The CIA, and the entire U.S. federal government, is presented there as servicing the aristocrats (the billionaires) not only in the U.S., but in the countries that are allied with the U.S., America’s vassal nations. America’s taxpayers are funding the protection of foreign billionaires — the individuals who control those vassal governments — in addition to funding foreign land-clearance operations to benefit America’s billionaires. Normally, this fact is simply unpublishable inside the United States, but it’s essential for any American voter to understand in order to be able to vote in an accurately informed (instead of deceived) way; and Harpers should therefore receive an award for having had the guts to publish this customarily unpublishable information. Unfortunately, it’s not the type of article the Pulitzers etc., grant awards to. That’s how the American Government and its media have so successfully kept such crucial information a secret. Thus, for example, Pew was able to headline on 15 December 2014, “About Half See CIA Interrogation Methods as Justified”, and they reported that: “51% of the public says they think the CIA methods were justified, compared with just 29% who say they were not justified; 20% do not express an opinion. The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Dec. 11-14 among 1,001 adults, finds that amid competing claims over the effectiveness of CIA interrogation methods, 56% believe they provided intelligence that helped prevent terrorist attacks, while just half as many (28%) say they did not provide this type of intelligence.” But, in fact, the reason for the waterboarding and other tortures wasn’t to find truths (such as those 51% had been deceived to think why tortures were used), but instead to ‘find’ (i.e., to provide fake ‘evidence’ for) lies, which they could then use to convince the public to believe America’s case that Iraq needed to be invaded — and invaded urgently, not to wait for the U.N.’s weapons-inspectors to finish their job. Bush and Cheney demanded the CIA to extract confessions and other testimonies saying that Saddam Hussein was to blame for 9/11, and only few of the captured suspects in 9/11 even knew enough about Hussein to be able to concoct sufficiently credible accusations against him to be used in America’s propaganda-media; so, Bush-Cheney’s CIA would then turn the interrogation screws even harder against a given suspect, and the waterboard was part of that. Pew found that Republicans were overwhelmingly more likely than Democrats to say that waterboarding and other tortures were ‘justified’. Perhaps a reason for this finding was Bush-Cheney’s having been Republicans, mere partisanship; but, for at least the past hundred years, Republicans have almost always been more effusive supporters of dictatorship in America than Democrats have been. (However, the KKK prior to 1960 was virtually a branch of the Democratic Party in the South, and today’s Democrats remain proudly supportive of the vile Obama, and even of Hillary Clinton.) Without doubt, the Republican Party has generally stood for “authoritarianism” (a.k.a., dictatorship) in America, more than has the Democratic Party (at least until recently); but the anti-FDR, pro-fascist, Clinton-Obama pro-aristocratic Democratic Party might be dominant for long into the forseeable future, so that the two Parties could become more obviously just branches of each other, both representing the U.S. aristocracy equally.

One of the current U.S. regime’s (Trump’s) main challenges in servicing these billionaires is continuance of hiding the real reason those tortures had actually been ordered.

On 27 December 2017, NPR’s David Welna was among the first journalists ever to interview defense lawyers for inmates at the super-secret “Camp 7” in America’s notorious Guantanamo prison in Cuba, and he reported:

WELNA: James Connell also visited Camp 7. He is the lead attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, another 9/11 defendant and high-value detainee. Connell thinks the real reason for all the secrecy is because those locked up there can reveal what the CIA did to them.

CONNELL: The high value in the high-value detainee does not refer to either any information that they had prior to their abduction or to their role in any act of terrorism. The high value refers to their possession of information about the CIA torture program.

WELNA: … Camp 7’s location remains a state secret. When I asked the Pentagon to visit the lockup, the answer was no.

In other words: The reason why these men have been hidden from the public for 16 years is probably that our Government doesn’t want the American voting public to know that the whole U.S. torturing program was designed so as to obtain false testimony from these men in order to implicate Saddam Hussein in having caused 9/11, which could be used to ‘justify’ our invading and destroying Iraq as retaliation for 9/11. Although such ‘information’ was not forthcoming, the U.S. Government and its ‘news’ media managed to be able to do it anyway — and most Americans are still successfully conned by this operation, even decades later. It continues unabated. That’s what passes for ‘democracy’ in today’s America (hiding the truth from the public, and constantly lying, does the job). And yet, this country condemns Iran, Syria, Russia, and China, as being ‘dictatorships’, and imposes sanctions against them, on concocted charges, which, however, are far less evil (even if they were true) than the reality of the U.S. Government’s ceaseless string of international crimes (such as destroying Iraq in 2003, destroying Libya in 2011, destroying Syria since 2012, and destroying Ukraine in 2014). Terrorism is, above all, America’s foreign-policy tool. The U.S. Government (and its allies, such as NATO, and the Gulf Cooperation Council) are the supreme masters of the craft. In retrospect — and at the deepest level — maybe Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, actually won World War II’s aftermath. A global repudiation of fascism is thus now essential. At the U.N., America is, every year, among only two or three nations standing up to defend fascism. (Here is Obama doing it in 2014; here is Trump doing it in 2017.) If you didn’t learn about it in the press or on TV, that’s because each year, this news (now become history) is hidden from the public. (For example, even today, the Western press never calls the bloody overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President in 2014 a “coup” — which was perpetrated by the U.S. — but instead they call it a “revolution,” or even a “democratic revolution,” though it actually ended Ukraine’s democracy, and installed a racist-fascist U.S.-allied regime.) Of course, one would expect dictatorships, such as America, to hide the essential facts. But, there is no excuse for hiding this information; it’s hidden only so that the American public won’t be aware of how deep this country’s dictatorship has already become. It’s very deep.

And that’s why (as Welna said), “When I asked the Pentagon to visit the lockup, the answer was no.” Of course, the Government shouldn’t even have the power to say no to such a request; but the U.S. Government functions as a dictatorship, no actual democracy — and it invades other countries, alleging them to be dictatorships.

So: though the U.S. Government never publicly supports, and uses, Islamic terrorists, the U.S. Government often supports (and uses) them secretly (and far more meaningfully). The aristocracy has its own demands, separate from those of the American public; and the U.S. Government serves those demands, not the public.

On 8 November 2016 when Trump was elected, there was “regime change” in Washington about domestic policies, such as about privatizing schools, and about whether America’s poor should be treated even worse than they already are (as Trump’s Administration is doing), but there is not, as yet, any basic change regarding international policies. Trump fulfilled on Bush’s and Obama’s and Clinton’s promises to relocate the Tel Aviv Embassy to Jerusalem, and his announcement of that long-promised policy is considered by some in Washington to indicate regime-change — a fundamental change in policy in Washington — but it’s not. There has actually been no U.S. regime-change yet, regarding foreign policies — the U.S. Government is the same regime of lies, as it has been (and such as it was, for example, on 7 September 2002, when U.S. President George W. Bush lied that the IAEA had then come out with some ‘new report’ saying that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon), but the language Trump employs is generally more crude than the super-slick liar Obama so skillfully displayed, and this increased crudity constitutes a regime-change of style, but that’s about all, as far as foreign policies are concerned.

Furthermore, in mid-October of 2016, the Governments of U.S., Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, agreed to provide, for ISIS jihadists who were fleeing from America’s bombing campaign in Mosul Iraq, safe passage to Deir Ezzor in Syria, so as to enable ISIS to reinforce and solidify its grip on that key Syrian city; so that, for example, on 1 May 2017, Al Masdar News bannered “Syrian Army tank takes direct hit from ISIS guided missile in Deir Ezzor.” The Turkish Government’s 15 October 2016 “‘Sensitive’ Operation Plan for Mosul” even stated, “An escape corridor into Syria will be left for Daesh [ISIS] so they can vacate Mosul.” America’s bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq was, thus, not only a campaign against ISIS in Iraq, but, it was, also, a campaign to assist ISIS in Syria — to strengthen ISIS at Der Zor (which city stands at the exact opposite end from Mosul, along that “escape corridor” — it’s where the U.S. and its allies were wanting those jihadists to go).

In other words: the U.S. coalition has fed ISIS terrorists from Iraq into Syria, and has fed ISIS terrorists from Raqqa into U.S.-allied training camps elsewhere in Syria.

So: the reason why Trump’s troops are training ISIS terrorists in Syria is simply in order to conquer some land in Syria. ISIS have been among America’s many proxy boots-on-the-ground fighting to take down and replace Syria’s Government. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. has been trying to conquer Syria ever since the CIA was created, and a CIA coup-attempt there failed in 1949. Kennedy informatively titled his article, “Syria: Another Pipeline War”, which is a good summary of the reason why the U.S. aristocracy want to control at least enough of a corridor through Syria so as to enable construction there of U.S. oil and gas pipelines from America’s allies — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE — into the world’s largest energy-market, the EU, so as to displace Russia’s oil and gas in Europe. Furthermore, most of Russia’s oil and gas has been pipelined into the EU through Ukraine, which is a reason why Obama took Ukraine in a coup in 2014 — thus squeezing Russia out of its main pipelines into the EU, at the same time as (yet again) trying to open up (through Syria) U.S. pipelines for America’s allies to replace Russia as being Europe’s main energy-suppliers.

The aristocracy, in any country, don’t want the public to understand international relations, and why their government is doing what they are doing, because, if the public knew, the aristocrats (and their government) would be in a very dangerous situation. And that’s also a reason why billionaires build and buy all of the major newsmedia, so that the public won’t understand these things. And, of course, no major brand of any product or service will be likely to advertise in any news-medium that violates the collective interests of all of the owners — the billionaires and centi-millionaires who own controlling interests in America’s international corporations. Though some are Republicans and others are Democrats, they all are in this boat together, and so the two sides of the Establishment share crucial things in common, even though they try to present to the public the opposite side of the aristocracy as being either stupid or evil. (For example: whereas the Democrat George Soros is vilified by Republicans, the Republican Koch brothers are vilified by Democrats. It’s America’s political theater, “rooting for the home team,” where “home” is whichever side of the aristocracy the particular audience-member happens to identify with and cheer for.) What the contending aristocrats cannot accuse the other side of, however, is what both sides share in common with one-another, against the public-at-large. And, so, nobody talks about America’s ongoing support for terrorism. It’s not published (with rare exceptions, such as that Harper’s article).

In fact, America’s CIA is actually the world’s senior master at terrorism, not only in places such as Afghanistan, and Syria, but also in Europe. It’s what Americans are increasingly buying with our tax-dollars. But, billionaires are the people who benefit from it — the publics (even in America itself) lose from it, in both money and blood. For the billionaires, it’s just a big blast (especially if their foreign competitors — such as in Russia or China — end up being among the people who get blasted by these U.S.-taxpayer-funded operations).

In any chess game, pawns give up their lives for their respective royals. That’s what pawns are for. Billionaires have almost all of the pieces. Pawns are the least of these. But, being a pawn is the only real job that many people will ever have. Not many make it all the way to the final row and becoming crowned as the most powerful type of piece on the board (a queen). But the myth that “I’ll win that crown” keeps every pawn working to rise, from oppressed, to oppressor, in the system of exploitation, the hierarchy, which is the essence of fascism. After all: it’s not just the American way. And nowhere is it justice. It’s unlimited greed, that’s been placed onto a greed-is-good pedestal, as the given nation’s ideology, which in today’s United States is branded and sold as being the very essence of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. It’s freedom for the billionaires; serfdom for everyone else.

On 27 September 2015, Donald Trump told Scott Pelley on CBS “60 Minutes”:

Why aren’t we letting ISIS go and fight Assad and then we pick up the remnants? Why are we doing this? We’re fighting ISIS and Assad has to be saying to himself, “They have the nicest or dumbest people that I’ve ever imagined.”

Scott Pelley: Let me get this right, so we lay off ISIS for now?

Donald Trump: Excuse me, let —

Scott Pelley: Lay off in Syria, let them destroy Assad. And then we go in behind that?

Donald Trump: — that’s what I would say. Yes, that’s what I would say.

And, so, this is why Trump’s troops are training ISIS terrorists.

Protecting the American (or any other) public is only an excuse that the U.S. ruling class — the richest 0.01% — use; the super-rich are vastly more interested in conquering Russia and its international allies (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych), and in boosting the stock-value of American ‘defense’ (aggression) contractors, which they control, such as Lockheed Martin, than in the safety of the American (or any other) people. It’s all merely a con, to fool and control the gulls, so as to conquer foreign lands, on the cheap. Proxy foreign mercenaries cost far less than U.S. troops do.

That’s what the evidence says. However, this is not what America’s government and their newsmedia say. It’s an entirely different world. This is the real world — not the lies.

“… let them destroy Assad. And then we go in behind that?

Donald Trump: — that’s what I would say.”

By contrast, Obama was skillful enough a liar to deceive the public to take seriously what he said.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

31 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/31/trumps-troops-training-isis-terrorists/

By Kathy Kelly

People living now in Yemen’s third largest city, Ta’iz, have endured unimaginable circumstances for the past three years. Civilians fear to go outside lest they be shot by a sniper or step on a land mine. Both sides of a worsening civil war use Howitzers, Kaytushas, mortars and other missiles to shell the city. Residents say no neighborhood is safer than another, and human rights groups report appalling violations, including torture of captives. Two days ago, a Saudi-led coalition bomber killed 54 people in a crowded market place.

Before the civil war developed, the city was regarded as the official cultural capital of Yemen, a place where authors and academics, artists and poets chose to live. Ta’iz was home to a vibrant, creative youth movement during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Young men and women organized massive demonstrations to protest the enrichment of entrenched elites as ordinary people struggled to survive.

The young people were exposing the roots of one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today.

They were sounding an alarm about the receding water tables which made wells ever harder to dig and were crippling the agricultural economy. They were similarly distressed over unemployment. When starving farmers and shepherds moved to cities, the young people could see how the increased population would overstress already inadequate systems for sewage, sanitation and health care delivery. They protested their government’s cancellation of fuel subsidies and the skyrocketing prices which resulted. They clamored for a refocus on policy away from wealthy elites and toward creation of jobs for high school and university graduates.

Despite their misery, they steadfastly opted for unarmed, nonviolent struggle.

Dr. Sheila Carapico, an historian who has closely followed Yemen’s modern history, noted the slogans adopted by demonstrators in Ta’iz and in Sana’a, in 2011: ‘Remaining Peaceful Is Our Choice,’ and ‘Peaceful, Peaceful, No to Civil War.’”

Carapico adds that some called Ta’iz the epicenter of the popular uprising. “The city’s relatively educated cosmopolitan student body entertained demonstration participants with music, skits, caricatures, graffiti, banners and other artistic embellishments. Throngs were photographed: men and women together; men and women separately, all unarmed.”

In December of 2011, 150,000 people walked nearly 200 kilometers from Ta’iz to Sana’a, promoting their call for peaceful change. Among them were tribal people who worked on ranches and farms. They seldom left home without their rifles, but had chosen to set aside their weapons and join the peaceful march.

Yet, those who ruled Yemen for over thirty years, in collusion with Saudi Arabia’s neighboring monarchy which fiercely opposed democratic movements anywhere near its borders, negotiated a political arrangement meant to co-opt dissent while resolutely excluding a vast majority of Yemenis from influence on policy. They ignored demands for changes that might be felt by ordinary Yemenis and facilitated instead a leadership swap, replacing the dictatorial President Ali Abdullah Saleh with Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, his vice-president, as an unelected president of Yemen.

The U.S. and neighboring petro-monarchies backed the powerful elites. At a time when Yemenis desperately needed funding to meet the needs of starving millions, they ignored the pleas of peaceful youths calling for demilitarized change, and poured funding into “security spending” – a misleading notion which referred to further military buildup, including the arming of client dictators against their own populations.

And then the nonviolent options were over, and civil war began.

Now the nightmare of famine and disease those peaceful youths anticipated has become a horrid reality, and their city of Ta’iz is transformed into a battlefield.

What could we wish for Ta’iz? Surely, we wouldn’t wish the terror plague of aerial bombardment to cause death, mutilation, destruction and multiple traumas. We wouldn’t wish for shifting battle lines to stretch across the city and the rubble in its blood-marked streets. I think most people in the U.S. wouldn’t wish such horror on any community and wouldn’t want people in Ta’iz to be singled out for further suffering. We could instead build massive campaigns demanding a U.S. call for a permanent cease fire and an end of all weapon sales to any of the warring parties. But, if the U.S. continues to equip the Saudi-led coalition, selling bombs to Saudi Arabia and the UAE and refueling Saudi bombers in midair so they can continue their deadly sorties, people in Taiz and throughout Yemen will continue to suffer.

The beleaguered people in Ta’iz will anticipate, every day, the sickening thud, ear-splitting blast or thunderous explosion that could tear apart the body of a loved one, or a neighbor, or a neighbors’ child; or turn their homes to masses of rubble, and alter their lives forever or end their lives before the day is through.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

31 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/31/remaining-peaceful-choice/

By Pankaj Mishra

Many Indian houses still have a simple pit toilet, which consists of a large hole in the floor. The feces are collected at night by “manual scavengers,” who, Sujatha Gidla writes in Ants Among Elephants, “carry away human shit” and whose “tools are nothing but a small broom and a tin plate.” Most are women. In the past, they would “fill their palm-leaf baskets with excrement and carry it off on their heads five, six miles to some place on the outskirts of town where they’re allowed to dispose of it.” In many places today, baskets have been replaced with buckets and carts, but the disease-ridden job of cleaning toilets, septic tanks, gutters, and sewers still falls on Dalits, formerly “untouchable” Hindus.1

One out of six Indians is a Dalit, but for years I neither witnessed nor imagined the life of one, although almost every week small columns in the newspapers reported the murder, rape, and torture of them. If any of the students at my schools were Dalits, I did not know—such obliviousness about a hierarchy that benefited me was part of my upper-caste privilege. I did hear much whispered malevolence among relatives against the “Scheduled Castes” (the official name of Dalits) and the affirmative action program designed to bring them equal citizenship. It was only at my provincial university, in a left-wing student group, that I first came into regular contact with Dalits; and it was while reading Ralph Ellison in my late teens that I began to reflect on the historical injustices and social and psychological pathologies that had conspired to make tens of millions of people invisible.

India, the world’s largest democracy, also happens to be the world’s most hierarchical society; its most powerful and wealthy citizens, who are overwhelmingly upper-caste, are very far from checking their privilege or understanding the cruel disadvantages of birth among the low castes. Dalits remain largely invisible in popular cinema, sitcoms, television commercials, and soap operas. No major museums commemorate their long suffering. Unlike racism in the United States, which provokes general condemnation, there are no social taboos—as distinct from legal provisions—against hatred or loathing of low-caste Hindus. Many Dalits are still treated as “untouchables,” despite the equal rights granted to them by India’s democratic constitution.

This constitution was drafted in the late 1940s with the help of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader, whose reputation as a bold and iconoclastic thinker has been eclipsed by the cults of his upper-caste rivals Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi. The founding principles of India’s democracy that Ambedkar helped enshrine are even more far-reaching than America’s in their guarantee of equal rights and absolute prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. But high-minded legislation in India is rarely accompanied by a necessary change in hearts and minds. The institution of caste, the social group to which Indians belong by birth, remains the most formidable obstacle to an egalitarian ethos.

In the hierarchical order, a Brahmin ranked highest due to his “pure” occupations of priest and scholar, and the Dalit was degraded to the lowest rung because of his proximity to human excreta and other polluting bodily substances. Ambedkar, for instance, belonged to a subcaste whose members were forced to walk with brooms tied to their waists, sweeping away their evidently contaminating footprints. Among many activists he was deeply frustrated by how Dalits, denied access to education and property, had been “completely disabled,” as he wrote in Annihilation of Caste (1936):

They could not bear arms, and without arms they could not rebel. They were all ploughmen—or rather, condemned to be ploughmen—and they never were allowed to convert their ploughshares into swords. They had no bayonets, and therefore everyone who chose, could and did sit upon them. On account of the Caste System, they could receive no education. They could not think out or know the way to their salvation. They were condemned to be lowly; and not knowing the way of escape, and not having the means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which they accepted as their inescapable fate.2

This terrible destiny has been justified over time by all kinds of religious and philosophical rationalizations. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi claims that manual scavengers realized ages ago that it is their “duty to work for the happiness of the entire society and the Gods” and “that this job of cleaning up should continue as an internal spiritual activity for centuries.” Such opinions are encouraged by the fact that the values, beliefs, prejudices, phobias, and taboos of the caste system were deeply internalized by its victims, including Indian Christians and Muslims, whose ancestors tried to escape the stigma of untouchability by renouncing Hinduism: the family of Sujatha Gidla converted to Christianity.

This implicit surrender to the hierarchical norms of deference and obligation has long prevented solidarity among the oppressed castes, forestalling any concerted challenge from below to the entire iniquitous system. Indeed, India’s multilayered social order seems more fiendishly organized than the simple hierarchy that placed whites over blacks in the United States. The advent of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of white supremacism has refocused attention on how the degradation of African-Americans in the nineteenth century served to affirm the rights and dignity of poor white men. “White men,” the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis wrote, “have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.”

But in the Hindu caste system defined by “graded inequality,” as Ambedkar brilliantly defined it, “there is no such class as a completely unprivileged class except the one which is at the base of the social pyramid”; “every class is interested in maintaining the system” and indeed does so by dominating or degrading the one just below it. The Marathi poet Govindaraj put it more bluntly: Hindu society consists of men “who bow their heads to the kicks from above and who simultaneously give a kick below, never thinking to resist the one or refrain from the other.”

Govindaraj offered this generalization in the late nineteenth century; it remains largely valid in the twenty-first. In rural areas, which many upper-caste Hindus have migrated from, members of India’s formerly subordinate middle castes, for instance, are often responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Dalits today. It is also true that a growing number of people at the very bottom of the hierarchy are vigorously resisting the kicks from above. Political parties and social movements organized around Dalit identity have emerged in recent decades.3 Such is the electoral potency of this Dalit political awakening that India’s present Hindu nationalist regime, though dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has had to position itself as the benefactor of Dalits. The liberalization of the Indian economy since 1991 has helped some Dalit entrepreneurs, provoking ambitious claims by some commentators that global capitalism is finally bringing about a long-delayed emancipation from the inequities of caste.4

The range and intricacy of Dalit experience can be grasped by English-language readers through the works of scholars and critics such as Anand Teltumbde, Gopal Guru, and D.R. Nagaraj.5 Daya Pawar’s pioneering Dalit autobiography, Baluta, which describes caste violence in Mumbai in the 1940s and 1950s, appeared in a fine English translation in 2015. Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan and Vasant Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography are eye-opening memoirs of impoverished Dalit childhoods in the mid-twentieth century, while Ajay Navaria’s stories in Unclaimed Terrain turn an ironic gaze on the recent emergence of a Dalit middle class through affirmative action and economic liberalization.

Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants, which records the life of a Dalit family in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and spans nearly a century, significantly enriches the new Dalit literature in English. Gidla grew up in India and now works as a conductor on the New York City subway. She knew firsthand the poverty and discrimination that several generations of her family had suffered. Defiant in the face of endless cruelty and misery, and tender with its victims, she seems determined to render the truth of a historical experience in all its dimensions, complexity, and nuance. The result is a book that combines many different genres—memoir, history, ethnography, and literature—and is outstanding in the intensity and scale of its revelations.

Gidla is fully aware of the sanction the caste system receives in Hindu scripture. She seems more interested, however, in how the twin shocks of colonialism and capitalism in nineteenth-century India turned the caste system into a more exploitative force. A brisk account of her ancestors describes how

they worshipped their own tribal goddesses and had little to do with society outside the forest where they lived.

When the British cleared the forests for teak plantations, my great-grandparents’ clan was driven out onto the plains, where the civilized people, the settled ones, the ones who owned land and knew how to cultivate it—in a word, the Hindus—lived. The little clan, wandering outside the forest, found a great lake and settled around it. There was no sign of human life for miles and miles. They took up farming. The land around the lake was fertile and gave them more than they needed. They called their new settlement Sankarapadu, after one of their gods.

But soon the civilized people took notice of them. They were discovered by an agent of the local zamindar—the great landlord appointed by the British to collect revenue in that area—who saw the rice growing in their fields and levied taxes, keeping the bulk of what he extracted for himself.

But that was not enough for this agent. He and his family and his caste people moved nearby and set about stealing the land by force and by cunning. They loaned the clansmen trivial sums at usurious rates to buy small necessities such as salt, seeds, or new clothes for a wedding. Unable to pay off these debts, the villagers gave up their land acre by acre. My ancestors, who had cleared and settled the area, were reduced to working on their old fields as laborers.

In a few simply phrased sentences, a great movement of Indian and world history is compressed: the corralling of peoples in subsistence economies into the world made by feudalists, colonialists, capitalists, and other “civilized” peoples. Gidla is acutely aware of how modern much of what we call tradition is. Take her account of the “vetti system” in central India, in which “every untouchable family in every village had to give up their first male child as soon as he learned to talk and walk” to the local landlord. The system had its origins, she writes, in “British demands to maximize revenues” and land reforms that created a class of oppressive landlords while turning low-caste peasants and artisans into slave labor. “Although based on traditional caste hierarchies,” Gidla writes, “the vetti system was not a traditional system. However antiquated it appeared, it was unknown before the end of the nineteenth century. Like chattel slavery in the Americas, it was a modern product of the capitalist world market.”

But Gidla’s characters are not two-dimensional victims, poor and weak, waiting to be liberated from their primitive existence by some modern ideology or institution such as secular democracy, Hindu nationalism, or global capitalism. Rather, she commemorates their ingenuity and creativity, their repertoire of cultures and memories. A tireless interviewer, she displays an ethnographic fidelity to the stories, images, gods, taboos, and fears of her community—her account of its tradition of pig-hunting and wedding feasts is particularly vivid. And the emotional current is always strong. People fall in love, and are cruelly thwarted, by both fate and man-made prohibitions.

The book’s most memorable character is the author’s mother, Manjula. This gifted woman’s struggles with entrenched caste prejudice and misogyny form the emotional core of the narrative. But the largest place in it is reserved for Gidla’s maternal uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy, a famous poet and revolutionary who in the 1970s organized a guerrilla group that aimed “to liberate the countryside village by village, driving off the landlords and gathering forces to ultimately encircle the cities and capture state power.”

This was a doomed project, given the superior military strength of the Indian state. But it would be too easy to judge its advocates as deluded losers who failed to grasp the emancipatory potential of liberal democracy and free markets. Many Dalits were not enraptured by freedom from British rule or what they saw as the substitution of a white ruling class by high-born Hindus. In the midst of India’s independence day festivities in August 1947, a “boy Satyam had never before seen” asks him: “Do you think this independence is for people like you and me?” Nehru, India’s first prime minister, soon clarified this issue by unleashing his British-trained military on rebellious landless peasants in Satyam’s region.

While revealing Nehru, a hero to middle-class and upper-caste Indians, as another tormentor of Indian’s most wretched, Gidla’s book also clarifies why Dalits were not much attracted by the upper-caste paternalism of Gandhi, who narrowed the manifold cruelties of India’s social system to the issue of manual scavenging, claiming that the institution of caste needed to be reformed rather than abolished. Gidla may disconcert more of her readers when she writes that “everything exciting and progressive” in the 1950s and 1960s was “associated with communism.” But this is true not only for India or Dalits, but also for many other postcolonial peoples in Asia and Africa. Much seemingly disparate activity—writing plays and novels, making films, reciting poetry, organizing reading clubs, libraries, labor, and protest movements—was indissolubly linked to the promise of a more extensive liberation than the first generation of anticolonial leaders had achieved.

It is arguable that the delegitimation since 1989 of Communist ideals of justice and dignity and social-democratic notions of collective welfare created a great vacuum—one that various ethnic and racial fundamentalisms eagerly fill today. Gidla’s account of Satyam’s life as a radical valuably illuminates the moral energy and purpose the pursuit of these ideals brought (and continue to bring) to the lives of the oppressed, long after the revolutions made in their name in Russia and China mutated into tyrannies. It is also true that communism appeared irresistible to Satyam and fellow Dalits because no other ideology on offer—whether liberalism, nationalism, or Gandhism—could match its combined promise of intellectual growth, political fraternity, and redemptive action. Saytam, Gidla writes, “was amazed by this way of thinking—that one can look at society, the people in it, the things they do, in the same manner as a natural process that can be studied in a science lab” and how “the struggle between classes in society is reflected in something called ideology—in ideas and culture. Under the right conditions, the spread of certain ideas could in turn spur social change.”

Social change was what India needed above all, with or without communism. For as Ambedkar warned in 1951 in resigning from Nehru’s cabinet, “to leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.” Gidla expands these insights into a devastating critique of not only India’s iconic leaders but also its Communist bosses, who were mostly Brahmin men parasitic on the Soviet Union and China for ideological guidance. “When Stalin was alive,” she writes caustically, “everyone took his sayings as verses from the Vedas.” These camp followers neglected the central problem of caste and gender discrimination, assuming that it would disappear with the reordering of socioeconomic structures. Such mechanical application of Marxist dogma to uniquely Indian situations explains the historic failure of the mainstream left in India to build support among the country’s numerous trampled-upon peoples.

Many disenchanted Dalits chose to organize themselves into guerrilla groups rather than be represented by upper-caste Communists-by-rote in local and national legislatures. Political activism for them became a way of life and a source of meaning; and this in itself represented a triumph over adversity and misfortune. Gidla writes on the occasion of her grandmother’s death:

Who could have imagined that the body of this diminutive black-skinned untouchable woman, a gleaner of fields, a singer of songs of toil, a pounder of rice, a Bible woman, the widow of a railway coolie, the mother of a plantation slave, a woman who’d never spent a single moment of her life on herself, would be carried to her grave in a procession of hundreds of men and women carrying red flags and singing “The Internationale”?

In the life of the fugitive activist, the personal was always and inescapably political. Here is Manjula leaving her home to enter a dubiously arranged marriage:

The moment Manjula stepped out of the house, Satyam broke down, fell to his knees, and wept. No one could console him. They all thought that he wept because he couldn’t attend his sister’s wedding. But it wasn’t that. He was thinking of their common struggles, growing up motherless and abandoned by their father, their efforts to get educated, the shameful way in which her match had been arranged. What was to become of Satyam-Carey-Manjula?

At such moments, Gidla’s book achieves the emotional power of V.S. Naipaul’s great novel A House for Mr. Biswas, which describes the solitary struggles of a descendant of indentured laborers. The contrast between the two books is instructive. Mr. Biswas, modeled on Naipaul’s father, is an educated Brahmin in a small colony, dreaming of individual redemption through writing and affiliation with the imperial metropolis—an ambition that his son eventually realizes. For a Dalit woman in India who confronts centuries of structural and legitimated injustice, salvation lies in a broader social and political revolution at home.

The signs lately are both promising and discouraging. The first generation of Dalit political parties has been undermined by their own self-serving leaders, who sought in politics easy access to wealth and power. Everyday violence against Dalits has spiked in recent years, largely as a result of their greater political assertiveness. Dalits face discrimination in employment and housing even in the urban and globalized sectors of the economy; they are still exposed in rural areas to murder, rape, and torture; recourse to the police can invite more violence.6 Last year in the state of Gujarat, a mob of cow vigilantes—one of the many unleashed by Modi’s regime—assaulted several Dalits whose traditional occupation is to retrieve and skin dead cattle. The Dalits were tied to the rear of a car and dragged to a police station where they were beaten again; their persecutors also felt emboldened enough to post a video of the flogging on social media.

Today, however, a major agitation in Gujarat is being led by those same Dalit victims of mob violence. They have renounced their occupation in an attempt to undermine the very basis of a society in which degrading work is reserved for low-castes. Their protests have been strong enough to help force the state’s chief minister out of office and provoke Modi into publicly admonishing his cow vigilantes: “If you feel like attacking someone, attack me, not my Dalit brothers.” Certainly Ambedkar would have approved of a movement that aims at a profound transformation of Indian society instead of expanding the palace built on a dung heap. As he put it, the struggle of the Dalits is “not for wealth or for power.” Rather, “it is a battle for freedom…for the reclamation of the human personality”—an arduous, never-ending battle in which Gidla’s book represents an all too rare victory.
__________________________________________

1. Nearly a million Dalits still work in this dangerous and debasing profession, though manual scavenging, as it is called in India, was banned in 2013. A new documentary titled Kakkoos, directed by Divya Bharathi, gives a searing account of their working conditions.  ↩

2. Ambedkar’s major work is available in a new edition, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (Verso, 2016).  ↩

3. For a broad account of these developments, see Christophe Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India (London: Hurst, 2011).  ↩

4. See, for instance, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, “Capitalism’s Assault on the Indian Caste System: How Economic Liberalization Spawned Low-Caste Dalit Millionaires,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 776, July 21, 2015.  ↩

5. There are some stimulating essays on contemporary Dalit writing in Namit Arora, The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities (Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective, 2017). ↩

6. For a probing account of one such atrocity and how it was reported in the upper-caste-dominated media, see Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (New Delhi: Navayana, 2008). ↩
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Pankaj Mishra lives in London and India. His books include From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia and Age of Anger: A History of the Present.
 (December 2017)

21 December 2017

Source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/dalits-gods-oppressed-children/#fnr-6

By Peter Singer

A Saudi prince has been revealed to be the buyer of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” for which he spent $450.3 million. Had he given the money to the poor, as the subject of the painting instructed another rich man, he could have restored eyesight to nine million people, or enabled 13 million families to grow 50% more food.

PRINCETON – Last month, “Salvator Mundi,” Leonardo da Vinci’s portrayal of Jesus as Savior of the World, sold at auction for $400 million, more than twice the previous record for a work of art sold at auction. The buyer also had to pay an additional $50.3 million in commissions and fees.

The painting has been heavily retouched, and some experts have even questioned whether it really is by Leonardo. Jason Farago, a New York Times art critic, described it as “a proficient but not especially distinguished religious picture from turn-of-the-16th-century Lombardy, put through a wringer of restorations.”

The buyer – who many believe to be the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, acting through a distant cousin – has paid a very high price for a painting of a man who is said to have told another rich person: “Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” That makes it relevant to ask: what could someone with a spare $450 million do for the poor?

The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit organization that I founded a few years ago, has a Charity Impact Calculator that enables you to see what can be achieved by donations to charities with a proven record of effective aid for the world’s poorest people. It shows that, for $450 million, you could restore sight to nine million people with curable blindness, or provide 13 million families with the tools and techniques to grow 50% more food.

If you want to follow Jesus’s command in a more literal manner, you could simply give the money to the world’s poorest families to use as they wish. A nonprofit called Give Directly will locate the neediest families and transfer your money to them, deducting only 10% for its administrative costs.

In case you think that people receiving such a windfall will spend it on alcohol, gambling, or prostitution, an independent evaluation has shown that they don’t. Give Directly’s cash transfers increase recipients’ food security, mental health, and assets. For $450 million, you could also buy 180 million bed nets, enough to protect 271 million people from malaria. (For all these interventions, the numbers are likely to be somewhat smaller, because the Charity Impact Calculator is not designed for such large sums, and so does not take into account that costs will rise once the needs of those who are easiest to reach have been met.)

When a person chooses to buy “Salvator Mundi”rather than restore sight to nine million people, what does that say about their values? One thing is clear: they cannot care very much about other people. Whatever pleasure they, their family, and friends will get from viewing the painting, it can hardly compare with the benefit that restoring sight provides to one person, let alone many millions.

Rightly or wrongly, most of us do give much more weight to our own interests, and those of our children and other close relatives and friends, than we do to the interests of others. The more distant, and the more different from us, those others are, the higher the rate of discount that we apply in practice.

Yet there is a line at which the discount rate becomes so great, and the interests of others are treated with such indifference, that we must say no, that is going too far. We could argue that most affluent people are on the wrong side of that line. What seems to me unarguable is that to care more about owning a painting than about whether several million people can see is a long way beyond it.

In 2006, the legendary investor Warren Buffett pledged to give most of his wealth – around $30 billion – to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help people in extreme poverty. That gift – the single biggest gift anyone has ever given to anyone for anything – doubled the resources of the foundation. To mark the tenth anniversary of Buffett’s pledge, Bill and Melinda Gates recently reported to him on what the foundation, together with other organizations, achieved to improve global health over that decade.

The figure that Bill and Melinda Gates highlight is 122 million. That’s the number of children’s lives saved since 1990 by progressive reductions in the rate of child mortality. In other words, if the rate of child mortality had remained constant between 1990 and today, 122 million more children would have died than did in fact die over that period.

Perhaps the biggest contribution that the Gates Foundation made to that decline was pledging $750 million to establish the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (now known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance), a public-private initiative that works with governments and United Nations agencies to improve the rate of vaccination in poor countries and foster the development of new vaccines. Now 86% of the world’s children receive basic vaccines – the highest rate ever.

The Gateses claim that every dollar spent on childhood immunization yields $44 in economic benefits, including the money that families otherwise lose when a child gets sick and a parent cannot work. Warren Buffett’s contribution to immunizations may be the best investment he has ever made.

What do you think would make a person happier? Owning a painting – even if it were the most marvelous painting in the world – or knowing that you had kept millions of children healthy, saving lives and benefiting families economically at the same time? Both common sense and psychological research suggest that it isn’t owning the painting.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne.

12 December 2017

Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/salvator-mundi-purchase-price-world-s-poor-by-peter-singer-2017-12?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9279d87ece-sunday_newsletter_17_12_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-9279d87ece-104996581

By Nouriel Roubini

In the first year of his presidency, Donald Trump has consistently sold out the blue-collar, socially conservative whites who brought him to power, while pursuing policies to enrich his fellow plutocrats. Sooner or later, Trump’s core supporters will wake up to this fact, so it is worth asking how far he might go to keep them on his side.

NEW YORK – Donald Trump won the US presidency with the backing of working-class and socially conservative white voters on a populist platform of economic nationalism. Trump rejected the Republican Party’s traditional pro-business, pro-trade agenda, and, like Bernie Sanders on the left, appealed to Americans who have been harmed by disruptive technologies and “globalist” policies promoting free trade and migration.

But while Trump ran as a populist, he has governed as a plutocrat, most recently by endorsing the discredited supply-side theory of taxation that most Republicans still cling to. Trump also ran as someone who would “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street. Yet he has stacked his administration with billionaires (not just millionaires) and Goldman Sachs alumni, while letting the swamp of business lobbyists rise higher than ever.

Trump and the Republicans’ plan to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would have left 24 million Americans – mostly poor or middle class, many of whom voted for him – without health care. His deregulatory policies are blatantly biased against workers and unions. And the Republican tax-reform plan that he has endorsed would overwhelmingly favor multinational corporations and the top 1% of households, many of which stand to benefit especially from the repeal of the estate tax.

Trump has also abandoned his base in the area of trade, where he has offered rhetoric but not concrete action. Yes, he scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but Hillary Clinton would have done the same. He has mused about abandoning the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), but that may be just a negotiating tactic. He has threatened to impose a 50% tariff on goods from China, Mexico, and other US trade partners, but no such measures have materialized. And proposals for a border adjustment tax have been all but forgotten.

Trump’s bullying tweets against US firms that move production offshore or undertake tax inversions have been no more than cheap talk, and business leaders know it. Manufacturers who fooled Trump into thinking they would keep production in the US have continued to transfer operations quietly to Mexico, China, and elsewhere. Moreover, international provisions in the pending tax legislation will give US multinationals an even greater incentive to invest, hire, and produce abroad, while using transfer pricing and other schemes to salt away profits in low-tax jurisdictions.

Likewise, despite Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on immigration, his policies have been relatively moderate, perhaps because many of the businesspeople who supported his campaign actually favor a milder approach. The “Muslim ban” doesn’t affect the supply of labor in the US. Although deportations have accelerated under Trump, it’s worth remembering that millions of undocumented immigrants were deported under Barack Obama, too. The border wall that Trump was going to force Mexico to pay for remains an unfunded dream. And even the administration’s plan to favor skilled over unskilled workers will not necessarily reduce the number of legal migrants in the country.

All told, Trump has governed like a plutocrat in populist clothes – that is, a pluto-populist. But why has his base let him get away with pursuing policies that mostly hurt them? According to one view, he is betting that social conservatives and white blue-collar supporters in rural areas will vote on the basis of nationalist and religious sentiment and antipathy toward secular coastal elites, rather than for their own financial interests.

But how long can anyone be expected to support “God and guns” at the expense of “bread and butter”? The pluto-populists who presided over the Roman Empire knew that keeping the populist mob at bay required substance as well as diversion: panem et circenses – “bread and circuses.” Raging tweets are meaningless to people who can scarcely afford a dignified living, let alone tickets to the modern-day Colosseum to watch football.

The tax legislation that Republicans have rushed through Congress could prove especially dangerous, given that millions of middle-class and low-income households will not only get little out of it, but will actually pay more when income-tax cuts are phased out over time. Moreover, the Republican plan would repeal the Obamacare individual mandate. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, this will cause 13 million people to lose health insurance, and insurance premiums to rise by 10%, over the next decade. Not surprisingly, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that a mere 29% of Americans support the Republican plan.

Nevertheless, Trump and the Republicans seem willing to risk it. After all, by pushing the middle-class tax hikes to a later date, they have designed their plan to get them through the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 general election. Between now and the midterms, they can brag about cutting taxes on most households. And they can expect to see the economic-stimulus effects of tax cuts peak in 2019, just before the next presidential election – and long before the bill comes due.

Moreover, the final legislation will likely lower the federal deduction for mortgage interest and eliminate deductibility for state and local taxes. This will hit households in Democratic-leaning states such as New York, New Jersey, and California much harder than households in Republican-leaning states.

Another part of the Republican strategy (known as “starve the beast”) will be to use the higher deficits from tax cuts to argue for cuts in so-called entitlement spending, such as Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security. Again, this is a risky proposition, given that elderly, middle-class, and low-income Americans rely heavily on these programs. Yes, the working and non-working poor who receive welfare payments or food stamps include minorities who tend to vote for Democrats. But millions of the blue-collar, socially conservative whites who voted for Trump also rely on these and similar programs.

With the global economy expanding, Trump is probably hoping that tax cuts and deregulation will spur enough growth and create enough jobs that he will have something to brag about. A potential growth rate of 2% won’t necessarily do much to help his blue-collar base, but at least it could push the stock market up to its highest point ever. And, of course, Trump will still claim that the US economy can grow at a rate of 4%, even though all mainstream economists, including Republicans, agree that the potential growth rate will remain around 2%, regardless of his policies.

Whatever happens, Trump will continue to tweet maniacally, promote fake-news stories, and boast about the “biggest and best” economy ever. In doing so, he may even create a circus worthy of a Roman emperor. But if gassy rhetoric alone does not suffice, he may decide to go on the offensive, particularly in the international sphere. That could mean truly withdrawing from NAFTA, taking trade action against China and other trading partners, or doubling down on harsh immigration policies.

And if these measures do not satisfy his base, Trump will still have one last option, long used by Roman emperors and other assorted dictators during times of domestic difficulty. Namely, he can try to “wag the dog,” by fabricating an external threat or embarking on foreign military adventures to distract his supporters from what he and congressional Republicans have been doing.

For example, following the “madman” approach to foreign policy, Trump could start a war with North Korea or Iran. Or he could post further inflammatory tweets about the evils of Islam, thereby driving disturbed and marginalized individuals into the arms of the Islamic State (ISIS) or other extremist groups. That would increase the likelihood of ISIS-inspired attacks – for example, “lone wolves” blowing themselves up or driving trucks through crowded pedestrian areas – within the US. With dozens, if not hundreds, slain, Trump could then wrap himself in the flag and say, “I told you so.” And if things got bad enough, Trump and his generals could declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties, and transform America into a true pluto-populist authoritarian state.

You know it’s time to worry when the conservative Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Bob Corker, warns openly that Trump could start World War III. And if you’re not convinced, consider the recent history of Russia or Turkey; or the history of the Roman Empire under Caligula or Nero. Pluto-populists have been turning democracies into autocracies with the same playbook for thousands of years. There’s no reason to think they would stop now. The reign of Emperor Trump could be just around the corner.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates.

11 December 2017

Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-populist-plutocracy-by-nouriel-roubini-2017-12?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9279d87ece-sunday_newsletter_17_12_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-9279d87ece-104996581

By Ishaan Tharoor

“You will not replace us!” went the guttural cry from a small, torch-wielding crowd of American white nationalists and neo-Nazis. They marched in August through a leafy Virginia town in defense of monuments to Confederate leaders, figures from the past who had waged a war to preserve slavery. In the uproar surrounding the rally, an anti-fascist activist was killed when a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. The far right spilled blood on American soil.

Despite national outrage over the episode, President Trump struck an awkward pose, infamously remarking that there were “some very fine people” among the neo-Nazis. Trump’s attempts at condemnation rang hollow. The young, mostly white men who marched in Charlottesville, Va., may be reprehensible adherents of a fringe ideology, but they had been galvanized by the president, who, throughout both his election campaign and subsequent year in power, constantly pulled from a dark seam of ethno-nationalism underlying American politics.

A year ago, in the wake of Trump’s stunning election victory, it was in vogue to talk about the “populist” moment upending the West. Elections on both sides of the Atlantic demonstrated how a wide segment of the electorate was fed up with the status quo, skeptical of elites ensconced in their country’s financial and political capitals, and eager to throw up walls around their nations in the face of the forces of globalization. Looking back at this year’s events, it is clear that their anxieties were more cultural than economic.

The politics of many Trump voters, and their counterparts overseas, were less truly “populist” — anchored in some moral vision of a united people — than “nativist,” animated by divisive, ethnic tribalism.

It may thus be unsurprising that Trump’s first legislative victory of his presidency is a deeply unpopular tax overhaul. In the long run, the reforms will likely provide the greatest benefits to corporations and the mega-rich, possibly to the detriment of virtually everyone else. “Trump has governed like a plutocrat in populist clothes,” wrote Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University. “He is betting that social conservatives and white blue-collar supporters in rural areas will vote on the basis of nationalist and religious sentiment and antipathy toward secular coastal elites, rather than for their own financial interests.”

So the cry of “you will not replace us” can be heard in Trump’s hectoring over “rapist” immigrants and bans on Muslim-majority nations. And like a lot about current far-right American politics, it’s imported from Europe. The right-wing, xenophobic French polemicist Renaud Camus popularized the idea of the “great replacement:” That somehow trends of immigration in the West would lead to a kind of demographic extinction event. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people,” he said.

Stephen Bannon, the ultra-nationalist ideologue who entered the White House with Trump and whose rhetoric fueled Trump’s demagoguery over immigrants and Muslims, feeds off these narratives. He cites approvingly the garish visions of Jean Raspail, another French anti-immigration writer, whose apocalyptic, racist work prefigured far-right opposition to refugees and asylum seekers.

“We are a country, a civilization, a language, a way of life,” Raspail told journalist Sasha Polakow-Suransky, author of a new book featured by Today’s WorldView. “If we blend it with something that does not correspond at all to who we are, it won’t work, and we’ll be lost.”

This once-fringe racial paranoia, combined with a resentment of the “establishment,” has found a home in the White House. “There is, and there are, people at the highest levels of government that don’t want to let America be America,” declared Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., at a rally on Wednesday.

In Europe, this discourse found its way to the heart of political campaigns. “The radical right has by and large defined the discussion around the refugee crisis and the project of European integration,” Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, told Today’s WorldView.

In 2017, far-right parties — including factions linked to a past of fascism and Nazi apologia — did not “win” elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands, but they performed better than ever before. And in countries like the Netherlands and Austria, nativist platforms have shifted policy to the right or even been brought into power. That we even considered the thwarted election challenges of far-right leaders like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders “defeats,” argued Mudde, “says such much about the normalization of their politics.”

And what are those politics? Post columnist Anne Applebaum offered a searing encapsulation in a lengthy essay earlier this year: “They conjure up worlds made up of ethnically or racially pure nations, old-fashioned factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders. Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities, advocates of human rights, the media, and the courts,” she wrote. “They are often not real Christians but rather cynics who use ‘Christianity’ as a tribal identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they are ‘Christians’ fighting against ‘Muslims’ — or against ‘liberals’ if there are no ‘Muslims’ available.”

Applebaum was writing on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and was struck by the extent to which the Europe’s far right operates in a neo-Bolshevik mold. “To an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise,” she wrote, referring to both entrenched illiberal regimes in Poland and Hungary, as well as the right-wing populists farther west.

“I think Lenin would have recognized 2017 as a revolutionary moment as was 1917,” Victor Sebestyen, author of a new biography of the Soviet leader, told Today’s WorldView. “The neo-Bolsheviks are using a similar game, intolerant rhetoric and similar tactics, creating scapegoats who are later identified as ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘saboteurs.’ It is happening in Eastern Europe, certainly in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Bannon, significantly, has styled himself in the past as a “Leninist,” eager to “destroy the state” and “bring everything crashing down.” White House intrigues forced him away from the Oval Office, but his fingerprints remain all over Trump’s rage, from the president’s war on the media, to his denunciations of judges that get in his way, to his sweeping contempt for his opponents and perpetual appeals to a thinly veiled white nationalism.

“What we learned in 2017 is that institutions by themselves cannot defend liberal democracy,” Mudde said, “and mainstream politicians won’t either.”

And so as polarization deepens, and bad blood builds up, the question begs: Can they replace us?

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Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

21 December 2017

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/21/in-2017-nativism-went-mainstream-in-the-west/?utm_term=.f2a663b9305d