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By Michael T. Klare

How Big Oil Is Responding to the Anti-Carbon Moment

Around the world, carbon-based fuels are under attack. Increasingly grim economic pressures, growing popular resistance, and the efforts of government regulators have all shocked the energy industry. Oil prices arefalling, colleges and universities are divesting from their carbon stocks, voters are instituting curbs on hydro-fracking, and delegates at the U.N. climate conference in Peru have agreed to impose substantial restrictions on global carbon emissions at a conference in Paris later in the year. All this has been accompanied by what might be viewed as a moral assault on the very act of extracting carbon-based fuels from the earth, in which the major oil, gas, and coal companies find themselves portrayed as the enemies of humankind.

Under such pressures, you might assume that Big Energy would react defensively, perhaps apologizing for its role in spurring climate change while assuming a leadership position in planning for the transition to a post-carbon economy. But you would be wrong: instead of retreating, the major companies have gone on the offensive, extolling their contributions to human progress and minimizing the potential for renewables to replace fossil fuels in just about any imaginable future.

That the big carbon outfits would seek to perpetuate their privileged market position in the global economy is, of course, hardly surprising. After all, oil is the the most valuable commodity in international commerce and major producing firms like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell regularly top lists of the world’s most profitable enterprises. Still, these companies are not just employing conventional legal and corporate tactics to protect their position, they’re mounting a moral assault of their own, claiming that fossil fuels are an essential factor in eradicating poverty and achieving a decent life on this planet.

Improbable as such claims may seem, they are being echoed by powerful officials around the world — typically, the leaders of carbon-producing nations like Russia and Saudi Arabia or the representatives of American energy-producing states like Texas and Kentucky. Count on one thing: this crew of fossil fuel enthusiasts is intent on ensuring that any path to a carbon-free future will, at best, be long and arduous. While you’re at it, add top Congressional leaders to this crew, since many of the Republican victors in the 2014 midterm election are from oil and coal-producing states and regularly laud carbon production for its contribution to local prosperity, whilepocketing contributions by Big Oil and other energy firms.

Unless directly challenged, this pro-carbon offensive — backed by copious Big Energy advertising — is likely to attract at least as much favor as the claims of anti-carbon activists. At this point, of course, the moral arguments against carbon consumption are — or at least should be — well known. The oil, gas, and coal companies, it is claimed, are selfishly pursuing mega-profits at the expense of the climate, the environment, our children and grandchildren, and even possibly a future of any reasonable sort for humanity as a whole. “Basically [the big energy companies have] said, we’re going to wreck the planet, we don’t care what you say, we think we can, and we dare you to stop us,” observed climate activist and 350.org cofounder Bill McKibben in a recent interview. This outlook was reflected in many of the signs carried by the estimated 400,000 demonstrators who participated in the People’s Climate March in New York City last September.

The fossil fuel industry is often also portrayed as the nucleus of a global system of wealth and power that drags down democracy and perpetuates grotesque planetary inequalities. “Fossil fuels really do create a hyper-stratified economy,” explained Naomi Klein, author of the bestselling bookThis Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. “It’s the nature of the resources that they are concentrated, and you need a huge amount of infrastructure to get them out and to transport them. And that lends itself to huge profits and they’re big enough that you can buy off politicians.”

Views like these animate the struggles against “fracking” in the United States, against the transport of tar-sands oil via the Keystone XL pipeline, and against the shipment of coal to ports in the Pacific Northwest. They also undergird the drive to rid college and university endowments and other institutions of their fossil fuel stocks, which gained momentum in recent months, thanks to the decisions of both the Stanford University board of trustees to divest from coal company stocks and of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to eventually rid itself of its fossil fuel stocks and invest in alternative energy.

Once upon a time, the giant carbon companies like Exxon sought to deflect these attacks by denying the very existence of climate change or the role of humans in causing it — or at least by raising the banner of “uncertainty” about the science behind it. They also financed the efforts of rogue scientists to throw doubt on global warming. While denialism still figures in the propaganda of some carbon companies, they have now largely chosen to embrace another strategy: extolling the benefits of fossil fuels and highlighting their contributions to human wellbeing and progress.

At the moment, this carbon counterattack is most clearly and fully articulated in the speeches of top industry officials and in various corporate publications. Of these, the most recent and authoritative, ExxonMobil’s The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040­, was released in December. Described as a planning guide for future corporate investment and decision-making, the Outlook combines an analysis of global energy trends with a summary of the company’s pro-carbon ethos –and so offers us a vivid look at where Big Energy is heading in its counterattack on the climate movement.

If a climate movement is going to challenge the energy powers of this planet effectively, it’s crucial to grasp the vision into which Big Energy is undoubtedly planning to sink incredible resources and which, across much of the planet, will become a living, breathing argument for ignoring the catastrophic warming of the planet. They present it, of course, as a glowing dreamscape of a glorious future — though a nightmare is what should come to mind.

Here, then, in a nutshell is the argument that Big Energy is going to seed into the planet for the foreseeable future. Prepare yourself.

No Growth Without Us

The cornerstone of the Exxon report is its claims that ever-increasing supplies of energy are needed to sustain economic growth and ensure human betterment, and that fossil fuels alone exist in sufficient quantity (and at affordable enough prices) to satisfy rising international demand. “Forecasting long-term energy trends begins with a simple fact: people need energy,” the report asserts. “Over the next few decades, population and income growth — and an unprecedented expansion of the global middle class — are expected to create new demands for energy.”

Some of this added energy, Exxon acknowledges, will come from nuclear and renewable energy. Most, however, will have to come from fossil fuels. All told, the Outlook estimates, the world will need 35% more energy in 2040 than it does today. That would mean adding an additional 191 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) to global supplies over and above the 526 quadrillion BTUs consumed in 2010. A small percentage of those added BTUs, about 12%, will come from renewables, but the vast majority — estimated by Exxon at 67% — will be provided by fossil fuels.

Without fossil fuels, this argument holds, there can be no economic growth. Here’s how Exxon CEO and Chairman Rex Tillerson puts it: “Energy is fundamental to economic growth, and oil is fundamental because to this point in time, we have not found, through technology or other means, another fuel that can substitute for the role that oil plays in transportation, not just passenger, individual transportation, but commercial transportation, jet fuel, marine, all the ways in which we use oil as a fuel to move people and things about this planet.”

Natural gas is equally essential, Tillerson argues, because it is the world’s fastest-growing source of energy and a key ingredient in electric power generation. Nor will coal be left out of the mix. It, too, will play an important role in promoting economic growth, largely by facilitating a rapid increase in global electricity supplies. Despite all the concern over coal’s contributions to both urban pollution and climate change, Exxon predicts that it will remain“the No. 1 fuel for power generation” in 2040.

Yes, other sources of energy will play a role in helping to satisfying global needs, but without carbon-based fuels, Exxon insists, economic growth will screech to a halt and the world’s poor and disadvantaged will stay immersed in poverty.

Propelling the New Global Middle Class

If there is one overarching theme to the new Exxon ethos, it is that we are witnessing the emergence of a new global middle class with glittering possibilities and that this expanding multitude, constituting perhaps one-half of the world’s population by 2040, will require ever greater quantities of oil, coal, and natural gas if it is to have any hope of achieving its true potential.

Citing data from the Brookings Institution, the company notes that the number of people who earn enough to be considered members of that global middle class will jump from approximately 1.9 billion in 2010 to 4.7 billion in 2030 — representing what it calls “the largest collective increase in living standards in history.” China and India will be the two countries adding most substantially to the global middle class, with each acquiring hundreds of millions of newly affluent citizens, but substantial gains will also be achieved by such “key growth” countries as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia.

The emergence of a middle-class bulge on a planetary scale, representing a kind of consumerism gone wild, is something to be celebrated the company insists in its new report, echoing the words of the U.N. Development Programme: “When dozens of countries and billions of people move up the development ladder, as they are doing today, it has a direct impact on wealth creation and broader human progress in all countries and regions of the world.”

For all this to occur, however, that rising middle class will need staggering amounts of added energy — of course, we’re talking about new supplies of the same old carbon-based energy forms here — to build and power all the cars, homes, businesses, appliances, and resorts that such consumers would undoubtedly crave and demand. More income, Exxon explains, “means new demand for food, for travel, for electricity, for housing, schools, and hospitals” — and all of these benefits “depend on energy.”

By itself, an increase in world energy supplies could indeed be widely beneficial, if supplied largely by climate-friendly fuels. But such genuinely “alternative” sources of energy (into which, by the way, the giant energy companies have invested next to none of their profits) generally cost more than fossil fuels to produce, at least initially, and that, says Exxon, creates a problem once you consider where demand will be coming from in 2040.

According to the Outlook, virtually none of the expected increase in global energy demand will come from the older industrialized countries, which can afford more costly alternatives; rather, its source will be developing countries, which generally seek cheap energy quickly — that is, coal and natural gas for electricity generation and oil for transportation. Of the 201 quadrillion BTUs in added energy required by the developing world between now and 2040, predicts Exxon, 148 quadrillion, or 74%, will be provided by fossil fuels — a statistic that, if accurate, should chill us to the bone in climate change terms.

The role of fossil fuels in satisfying the aspirations of the world’s growing middle class is especially evident in the field of transportation. “Rising prosperity will drive increased demand for transportation,” the Outlooknotes. “An expanding global middle class means millions of people will buy a car for the first time.” Between 2010 and 2040, the human population is expected to grow by 29%, from approximately seven billion to nine billion people; the global population of cars, SUVs, and other light-duty vehicles, however, is projected to grow by more than 100%, from 825 million to 1.7 billion. And while an increasing number of these vehicles will be powered by gas-electric hybrid engines, the majority will still be fueled by petroleum, pushing up the demand for petroleum and pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

A rising middle class seeking more consumer products, urban amenities, and travel opportunities will also require a commensurate fleet of trucks, buses, trains, ships, and planes. Reliance on trucks and container ships for moving goods around the world will, in turn, generate a huge demand for diesel and heavy oil, while all those low-cost air carriers (like ill-fated Air Asia) will only up the requirement for aviation fuel.

Finally, the new global middle class will want more computers, flat-screen TVs, air-conditioners, and other appliances, stoking a soaring demand for electricity. Among the advanced nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a growing share of the energy used in generating electricity will indeed come from renewables and natural gas, while coal use will decline sharply. In non-OECD countries, however, the drive for electrification will be accompanied by a significantincrease in the consumption of coal — from 54 quadrillion BTUs in 2010 to 82 quadrillion in 2040. This means that the non-OECD’s contribution to global warming will continue to soar, although that’s not a point that Exxon is likely to emphasize.

Carbon Humanitarianism

Nor does the Exxon blueprint neglect the needs of the world’s poorer citizens. “The progress enabled by modern energy has not reached everyone,” the Outlook notes. “One out of every five people in the world still has no access to electricity. Even more lack modern cooking fuels.”

This is the basis for what can only be termed “carbon humanitarianism” — the claim that cheap carbon-based fuels are the best possible response to the energy-poor of the planet (despite everything we know about the devastation climate change will cause, above all in the lives of the poor). This vision of Big Energy as the Good Samaritan of our world was articulated by Rex Tillerson in a June 2013 address to the Asia Society Global Forum. “Approximately 1.3 billion people on our planet,” he said, “still do not have access to electricity for basic needs like clean water, cooking, sanitation, light, or for the safe storage of food and medicine… [which means that] the need to expand energy supplies has a humanitarian dimension that should inform and should guide our energy policy.”

Asked whether climate change didn’t pose a greater challenge to the world’s poor, Tillerson chose to demur. “I think here are much more pressing priorities that we… need to deal with,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2012. “There are still hundreds of millions, billions of people living in abject poverty around the world. They need electricity… They need fuel to cook their food on that’s not animal dung… They’d love to burn fossil fuels because their quality of life would rise immeasurably, and their quality of health and the health of their children and their future would rise immeasurably. You’d save millions upon millions of lives by making fossil fuels more available to a lot of the part of the world that doesn’t have it.”

In fact, Exxon predicts that reliance on fossil fuels will grow fastest in the poorest parts of the world — precisely the areas that are expected to suffer the most from climate change. Africa, for example, is expected to witness a 103% increase in net energy consumption between now and 2040, with 83% of that increase supplied by fossil fuels.

We Can Do It Better

The final part of the industry’s counterattack is the claim that, for all their purported benefits, renewable sources of energy like wind and solar power are just not up to the task of providing the necessary extra energy needed to sustain economic growth and propel billions of people into the middle class.

The problem, Exxon claims, is that wind and solar are more costly than the fossil fuel alternatives and so are not growing fast enough to meet rising world demand. Even though the energy provided by these renewables will expand by 315% between now and 2040, it still represents such a small shareof the total global energy mix that, by the end of this period, it will only reach the 4% mark in its share of total world energy consumption (compared to 77% for carbon fuels). Renewables are also said to be problematic as they provide only intermittent sources of energy — failing at night and on windless days — and must be bolstered by other fuels to ensure uninterrupted energy output.

Facing the Challenge

Put together, this represents a dazzling vision of a future in which growing numbers of people enjoy the benefits of abundant energy and unlimited growth. You can already imagine the heartwarming TV commercials that will be generated on a massive scale to propagate such a message: pictures of hard-working individuals of all genders and hues enjoying the American Dream globally thanks to Exxon and its cohorts. Needless to say, in such imagery there will be nothing to mar the promise of unbridled prosperity for all — no horrific droughts, colossal superstorms, or mass migrations of desperate people seeking to flee devastated areas.

But this vision, like so much contemporary advertising, is based on a lie: in this case, on the increasingly bizarre idea that, in the twenty-first century, humanity can burn its way through significant parts of the planet’s reserves of fossil fuels to achieve a world in which everything is essentially the same — there’s just more of it for everyone. In the world portrayed by Exxon, it’s possible for a reassuring version of business-as-usual to proceed without environmental consequences. In that world, the unimpeded and accelerated release of carbon into the atmosphere has no significant impact on people’s lives. This is, of course, a modern fairy tale that, if believed, will have the most disastrous of results.

Someday, it will also be seen as one of the more striking lies on whatever’s left of the historical record. In fact, follow this vision to 2040, burning through whatever fossil fuels the energy companies and energy states can pull out of the earth and the ballooning carbon emissions produced will ensure planetary warming far beyond the two degrees Celsius deemed by scientiststo be the maximum that the planet can safely absorb without catastrophic climate effects.

In fact, those dreamy landscapes in the new pro-carbon version of the planetary future will, in reality, be replaced by burning forests, flooded coastlines, and ever-expanding deserts. Forget the global rise of the middle class, forget all those cars and trucks and planes and resorts, forget the good life entirely. As climate conditions deteriorate, croplands will wither, coastal cities and farmlands will be eradicated, infrastructure will be devastated, the existing middle class will shrink, and the poor will face ever-increasing deprivation.

Preventing these catastrophes will involve sustained and dedicated effort by all those who truly care about the future of humanity. This will certainly require better educating people about the risks of climate change and the role played by fossil fuel combustion in producing it. But it will also require deconstructing and exposing the futuristic fantasies deployed by the fossil fuel companies to perpetuate their dominance. However fraudulent their arguments may be, they have the potential to blunt significant progress on climate change and so must be vigorously repudiated. Unless we do so, the apostles of carbon will continue to dominate the debate and bring us ever closer to a planetary inferno. This is the only way to thwart and discredit those who seek to perpetuate the Reign of Carbon.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left.

08 January, 2015
TomDispatch.com

 

By Mahboob A. Khawaja

Today’s cold blooded massacre of French journalists of satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” in Paris underlines the imperative of critical thought towards understanding the global affairs. Emerging crises are not being understood rationally and consequently large segments of humanity are in chains. Leaders around the world are quick to condemn the cruelty of the few against many innocents caught in the firing. But the same leaders fail to take initiatives to use dialogue and peaceful resolution of current one-sided aggressive wars. No matter where on planet, the daily killings of the innocents in France, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, The US or elsewhere, it demands fair and objective-oriented analysis to come to grip with the prevalent facts of human affairs. The global humanity longs for peace, not for terrorism. But many egoistic leaders deliberately override the facts to pursue strategic agendas to run down the mankind under false pretexts of Islamic terrorism. Those who take up arms in the Arab Middle East continuing war theater are often doing it as a reactionary challenge to the imposed tyranny of more than decade-old bogus war on terrorism. Despite having advanced knowledge and technology, wide range of systematic human surveillance and curtailment of freedom and violations of human rights, crises are not managed by informed leaders and national security apparatus across the globe. The ordinary citizens are targeted and victimized beside the whims of leadership presence in staged news media appearances. There is gulf between knowing from the problematic media screen and understanding the pivotal issues deserving rational rethinking and policy changes. Undoubtedly “Je Suis- Charlie.” There is pain and feelings of anti killings across the globe. The human unity of ultimate aim must assume top priority.

Chris Hedges (“A Society Of Captives” Truthdig: 12/07/2014) is a reputable international scholar and journalist previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent and reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times. He explains the disorientation approach of the security apparatus:

Police and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elite’s brutal enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror, to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the legislative bodies give us back our rights—which they have no intention of doing—things will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We live in a post-constitutional era…. Hannah Arendt warned that once any segment of the population is denied rights, the rule of law is destroyed. When laws do not apply equally to all they are treated as “rights and privileges.” …Elites who feel increasingly threatened by the wider population do not “resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police,” Arendt writes. This is what is taking place now. The corporate state and its organs of internal security are illegitimate. We are a society of captives.

Towards Understanding the Critical Issues facing the Mankind:

According to the media reports, the President of the Muslim Organization of France has condemned the killings of the journalists and others in Paris. So do many religious leaders in Paris and elsewhere in Western Europe. The killings were not part of any Islamic issues supported by any religious decree. If the killers shouted ‘God is Great- Allah-O-Akbar’, it does not prove that attackers were Muslims unless the investigation provides the evidence. Such phrases have been imitated before by non-Muslims too. Why do some media analysts jump to conclusion and blame game when essential facts of a crisis are unknown? When unusual crises whether state sponsored terrorism or individual terrorism make its presence, the situation requires careful thought and intellectual comprehension to avoid hasty reaction. The global warriors – some of the leading Western leaders do not seem to learn the lessons from the contemporary history. Consequently, the War on Islam and Muslims – the bogus war on terrorism continues with multiple belligerent reactions. There is an overwhelming Western media obsession to link the blame of some of the crises to Islam and Muslims around the world. Irrational as it seems when another person commits a crime, the identity would not include religious or ethnic cliché. Should rational people make irrational assumptions and undermine the societal harmony and co-existence because an individual is at the center of some ugly or false accusations? Are we not supposed to know the facts before we could draw extreme conclusion about some faith, ethnicity or group of minority living in a society? Truth-telling and critical rational analysis of the prevalent political imperatives of global political affairs must penetrate to open-up the thinking of the closed global leadership mindset. Across the Arab Middle East the only known conflict was between Israel and Palestine and to search for a peaceful settlement of the existence of State of Israel and establishment of an independent State of Palestine. But the US-led war on terrorism is a gateway to many emerging conflicts in the Arab Middle East and elsewhere in the world. The voices of reason and human conscience must speak out loud and clear. With unstoppable cycle of political killings, sectarian massacres and daily bloodbaths happening across the Arab world – Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen, and spill-over impacts to other oil producing Arab nations – and reactionary militancy against the authoritarian rule and dismantling of the socio-economic infrastructures. Could the global affairs change if the leaders imagine political change and pursue it for peaceful co-existence?

John Horgan (“Countering Students’ Fatalism Toward War” The Chronicle Review, V. 55, Issue 31: 4/10/2009) is a science journalist and director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Horgan points out the issues involved in man and human nature and optimism that societal change is real in the course of history:

History offers many other examples of warlike societies that rapidly became peaceful. Vikings were the scourge of Europe during the Middle Ages, but their Scandinavian descendants are among the most peaceful people on earth. Similarly, Germany and Japan, which just 70 years ago were the world’s most militaristic, aggressive nations, have embraced pacifism, albeit after catastrophic defeats.

The current wave of fatalism is all too understandable, given September 11 and its bloody sequelae, not to mention conflicts roiling the Middle East, Central Africa, and other troubled regions. ….. My overarching goal in “War and Human Nature” is to persuade my scientifically oriented students to see war not as a permanent part of the human condition, stemming from our genes or original sin, but as a potentially solvable scientific problem. To be sure, war is a dauntingly complex phenomenon, with political, economic, and social ramifications……. Peace is a challenge at least as worthy of pursuit as cheap, clean, renewable sources of energy or cures for AIDS or cancer.

To Face Up Realism and Work for Global Peace and Not Terror

Leaders create leaders. Likewise warmongers indulge in violence and threats of bombing other weak nations to undermine the very existence of human existence as was the case during the Two World Wars and the current unending bogus War on Terrorism. Everywhere mankind is being oppressed, exploited by the few and systematically victimized under various slogans of freedom, rule of law, democracy and human rights. Ironically, how much more bloodshed is needed to gather momentum for priority in resolving the man-made conflicts and ushering a new era of peaceful co-existence? One must resist the temptation to become indoctrinated by grim prophesies of spearheading freedom, rule of law, democracy and protection of human rights by egoistic leaders waiting to launch next election campaigns. West Europeans have critical issues of social, economic and human emancipation. The EU is a framework but often of competing national interests overlapping the collective interests and resolve of the purpose ingrained in the EU mission and role. The pride and prejudice of European nationalism and sketchy borders fought for many generations and engulfed the good part of mankind with similar institutions and unending trends of military invasions, terrorism against the poor and weak Asian-African and Muslim nations. They need to uplift their thinking capacity from superficial imagination to realism corresponding to the 21st century knowledge-based age and its imperatives. Do they still long for historical flaws to view them as politically superior and ethnically top notch people and races of the world? Time is critical for self-reflection and finding out ways and means to critical thinking and be able to have unity of purpose and proactive leadership to deal with complex political crises and consequential catastrophic humanitarian problems. Reason reveals itself in the unity of the heart and mind. Wickedness and righteousness cannot be combined in one leadership characteristics. The unwarranted madness witnessed today in the heart of Paris and brutal killings of the Charlie Hebdo journalists and security personnel need not be defined in political motivation and images. Change in global affairs is possible and attainable if people of reason long for peace and not for terrorism. The crusades against Muslims and unwanted military interventions in the Arab Middle East must be stopped. Every beginning has its end. The global humanity longs for peace and co-existence and war is not its agenda item. It is possible through transformational leadership if educated and intelligent people of the new generation come to assume the power and leadership role. Falsehood and truth are not the same. With certain imperatives of cultural- religious norms, Western journalists need not to carve sensitive cartoons of others to invest in hatred and animosity. More so, of religious beliefs and personalities. Perhaps the Charlie Hbedo did that in the past. But a rational person would not react to known falsification of some religious entities. There should be rapprochement to respect and understand the religious differences without agreeing or disagreeing.

Why should few West European leaders and President Obama have free hand in launching bombing campaigns and killing the innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? What rights do these figures enjoin to engage in military invasions and commit massacres in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria day in and day out? When would this planned and continuing cruelty come to an end? Is there a sense of superiority and indifference to the interests of the global mankind? In its 2014 Global Thinkers statistics, Foreign Policy (“A World Disrupted: The global Thinkers of 2014”) pinpoints that “something big requires a team rather than an individual….” To enhance global peace and to undo the war on terrorism, there is an urgent need for teamwork by all concerned not just the few self- addicted warmongers who have consciously undermined the vital interests of the mankind. The teamwork if undertaken with unbiased mind and without pre-conceived notions could usher sustainable change and a new beginning between those who claim to be at peace and somewhat superior than the ordinary folks and those who are fighting reactionary wars of freedom against insanity and catastrophic devastation of the human habitats. Under ‘Advocates’, the Foreign Policy notes:

“The global thinkers herald causes often wrongly considered inconsequential or verboten. They support forgotten victims of sexual violence, protect civilian targeted in internecine violence, count casualties in the fog of war, and demand legal protection for world’s most vulnerable migrants. Often these men and women, scholars, activists and religious leader among them- do this work on their own peril and pay the price landing in court or in prison in some of the world’s most repressive countries. For all of them, however, the risk is worth the possible rewards.”

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations.

08 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

Colleagues pay tribute to Muslim officer who was shot at point blank range during raid on Paris magazine

By Anne Penketh

It was a Muslim policeman from a local police station who was “slaughtered like a dog” after heroically trying to stop two heavily armed killers from fleeing the Charlie Hebdo offices following the massacre.

Tributes to Ahmed Merabet poured in on Thursday after images of his murder at point blank range by a Kalashnikov-wielding masked terrorist circulated around the world.

Related: Charlie Hebdo attack: Dammartin-en-Goele sealed off in major police operation – live updates

Merabet, who according to officials was 40, was called to the scene while on patrol with a female colleague in the neighbourhood, just in time to see the black Citroën used by the two killers heading towards the boulevard from Charlie Hebdo.

“He was on foot, and came nose to nose with the terrorists. He pulled out his weapon. It was his job, it was his duty,” said Rocco Contento, a colleague who was a union representative at the central police station for Paris’s 11th arrondissement.

Video footage, which has now been pulled from the internet, showed the two gunmen get out of the car before one shot the policeman in the groin. As he falls to the pavement groaning in pain and holding up an arm as though to protect himself, the second gunman moves forward and asks the policeman: “Do you want to kill us?” Merabet replies: “Non, ç’est bon, chef” (“No, it’s OK mate”). The terrorist then shoots him in the head.

After the rise in online support for the satirical magazine, with the catchphrase “Je Suis Charlie,” many decided to honour Merabet, tweeting “Je Suis Ahmed”. One, @Aboujahjah, posted: “I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so.”

Another policeman, 48-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, was killed moments earlier in the assault on Charlie Hebdo where he was responsible for the protection of its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the 11 killed in the building. A colleague said he “never had time” to pull his weapon.

Brinsolaro’s twin brother, Philippe – a senior police officer in the Marseille region – said on Thursday that all French people should unite to condemn the massacre. “The whole of France must mobilise against the horror that struck our country yesterday. You can’t attack freedom of expression, attack the authority of the state in this way,” he was quoted as telling reporters.

“Sometimes you get the feeling that the police are misunderstood by [French] people but it must not be forgotten that yesterday’s gesture shows that a policeman is ready to intervene at any time when he has to protect the nation.”

Franck Brinsolaro, also from Marseille, had recently married a journalist, Ingrid, who ran a weekly newspaper in Normandy. Her newspaper chain issued a statement saying that editors “will never yield to threats and intimidation of the untouchable principles of freedom of expression”.

But it was the image of Merabet’s killing on a Paris pavement that most shocked French police and the wider public.

French police unions, which carried the now-universal message of solidarity in support of Charlie Hebdo #jesuischarlie, posted on their websites and on Twitter black banners proclaiming #jesuispolicier in memory of their two dead colleagues.

Nicolas Comte, the deputy secretary general of Merabet’s union, Unité SGP Police, said colleagues had been “deeply affected by the video” and the assassination of the policeman “who was slaughtered like a dog”.

Flowers and messages of condolence were piled outside Merabet’s police station, in a side street which was blocked off by metal barriers on Thursday morning. Armed police stood guard on the street and there were further barricades outside the police station entrance.

Its telephone line played sombre music all day – an official day of mourning in France – and a policewoman said that Merabet’s colleagues were “very sad” at his passing.

Merabet had been a policeman for eight years and had just qualified to become a detective. Rocco Contento, who as Paris regional secretary of the union knew Merabet personally, spent time with him at a course at the end of the year. He described him as quiet and conscientious. His family came originally from Tunisia, he said.

Officials at the Bobigny business registry office said a person with the same name and age as Merabet ran a cleaning company between 2003 and 2006 in Livry-Gargan, a north-east Paris suburb where he went to school.

The headteacher at the local lycée, Marie-Pierre Pillet, confirmed he had been a pupil from 1989 to 1995, but nobody remembered him because of the 20-year time lapse.

Merabet was officially described as single, although he had a girlfriend, according to Contento.

“Now we’re on a war footing,” said the head of the union France Police, Michel Thooris. “They’re out there with AK47s, the weapons of war.”

On Thursday, a 25-year-old police officer, Clarissa Jean-Philippe, was killed in an attack in the south Paris suburb of Montrouge. The tragedy was not linked by her colleagues to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity. Thooris said that once the dust had settled and those responsible for both armed attacks were brought to justice, the police would be demanding action from the government.

“Now isn’t the time to criticise, but for decades there have been no-go zones in the council estates where there are arms caches and drug running,” he said. “We must terrorise the terrorists.”

8 January 2015

By Garibaldi

In 2011, when Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed I wrote an article titled, The Politics of Provocation: What the Firebombing of Charlie Hebdo Magazine Means. In that post I noted that Hebdo’s purpose in publishing its racist and Islampohobic cartoons was to provoke, specifically its favorite target being Islam and Muslims (particularly French Muslims),

“Charlie Hebdo knew what it was doing, they wished to provoke, they created a buzz and got world-wide media attention for their magazine which had little following outside of France.”

I wrote then that the best response “for those offended or upset would have been to peacefully protest, or to satirize the Charlie Hebdo publication, or to do as most have done and simply ignore it.”

I also related the suffocating xenophobic, anti-Muslim context of France with its marginalization of its Muslim and African minorities in all spheres of the social and political life of the nation and the increase in hate crimes against Muslims (since then matters have worsened),

“Lastly, the untold context in which this French saga must be viewed is the souring relations between the French establishment and their Muslim minority. Islam has been “otherized” in France and across Europe, just as it has in the States, but in France it is taken to the next level.”

“In the past few years, anti-Muslim bigotry has risen to epidemic proportions. The hijab was banned from public schools, the face veil has been banned altogether, and after a surge in popular support for Marine Le Pen’s anti-Muslim nationalist party, Sarkozy and co. instituted an unprecedented “national dialgoue” on Islam.”

“According to a recent report Islamophobia is rapidly on the increase in France…”

It appears that Alqaeda in Yemen, a foreign, non-French entity is playing its own politics of provocation. It wishes to, as Juan Cole aptly notes “sharpen the contradictions” and foment a greater clash between Muslims and non-Muslims in France. Of course, there are far too many willing to oblige such a plan, since as we have noted from the start, extremists on both sides, feed off of each other like parasitic leeches.

So why am I not Charlie Hebdo? Why can’t I join the feel good Twitter trend, #JeSuisCharlie?

I cannot in good conscience lie and say that those murdered were “martyrs of free speech.” I believe what happened was a massacre, despicable and the result of the cynical ploys of a foreign extremist organization that masquerades under the banner of Islam, when all they wish to achieve is power for themselves–damned be the Muslims who suffer because of their actions.

See, at the same time as these paramilitary style terrorists were mowing down French Muslim police officer Ahmed Merabet, who was the first on the scene to help at the Hebdo offices, 35 Yemeni Muslim police cadets were blown up by one of Alqaeda’s bombs. Yet, no one considers them part of the story?

I cannot say “JeSuisCharlie” because I know what this neo-liberal* publication stood for: racist, sexist and Islamophobic hate speech. Take just a few samples out of many:

That’s a representation of a hook-nosed-goofy-smirking-Ayrab-Mooslim that one would expect from racists. Or take their publication after the Nigerian girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram:

The girls are represented as screaming, “hands off our benefit checks!” A not so subtle reference to the racist narrative of the right, found all over the Western world, not just France, about impoverished minorities.

Or take this gem, I wonder what it could be saying?

 

The hypocrisy of Charlie Hebdo when it comes to free speech must also be pointed out. It fired one of its cartoonists for the offense of anti-Semitism because it mocked a former French president’s son who converted to Judaism, as NBC reporter Ayman Mohyeldin wrote,

Hebdo fired one of its cartoonists and accused him of anti-semitism because he mocked the son of a former living French President who converted to Judiasm. Why is mocking a living person anti-Semitic hate speech but mocking sacred religious figures not? Who decides what is anti-Semitic and who decides what is Islamophobic?

This is not a tabloid whose record of hate speech and hypocrisy should be whitewashed into a monument to martyrs of free speech. It’s satire was aimed against the oppressed and for the benefit of the powerful.

Lastly, I again would emphasize that there is no justification for the massacre in Paris or in Yemen carried out by Alqaeda, I hope the perpetrators are caught and speedily brought to justice so the families can have some semblance of peace and solace.

However, in the process Muslims should not have their individuality denied and erased, by being asked to condemn over and over actions which they had no part to play in but are considered guilty of because of their mere presence.

*[Edit: apparently there’s been a lot of confusion over my use of “right-wing” and so at the advice of some French readers I’ve changed it to the more apt description of neo-Liberal]

 

By Jean Shaoul

Israel has announced it will withhold $127 million in monthly tax funds, about 70 percent of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) budget that it collects on the PA’s behalf.

It is considering a raft of other measures against the Palestinians.

Israel’s vindictive action came hours after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application to join the International Criminal Court, following the rejection by the United Nations Security Council of a resolution aimed at ending the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and the establishment of a Palestinian state by 2017.

Under the UN’s Rome Statute, the ICC has the power to prosecute individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed since July 2002, when the statute came into force. Neither the US or Israel have signed up to the ICC, as their record of wars of aggression and criminal actions would open them up for prosecution.

If the PA’s application is accepted, the Palestinians will be able, in three months’ time, to pursue Israel through the ICC for war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza in the wars of 2008-09, 2012 and 2014. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said it was a “very significant step,” which was necessary to seek justice for crimes against the Palestinian people. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, confirmed Gaza would be one of the cases referred to the ICC and added that the Palestinians were putting together a file on Israeli settlement building in the West Bank that was seized during the 1967 war. Such activity also constitutes a war crime.

Shawan Jabarin, director of the Ramallah-based rights group Al-Haq, said the Palestinians had decided to file suit over Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip starting from June 13, 2014, when Israel began a massive crackdown in the occupied territory. Israel used the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers to root out Hamas supporters, whom it claimed—without evidence—were responsible. The deaths of the teenagers were later used as the pretext to launch a one-sided war on Hamas, which controls Gaza. More than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed.

Washington and Tel Aviv have long opposed any move by the PA to take action in The Hague. Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu demanded that the ICC reject the Palestinian application out of hand, as the PA was not a state.

The Israeli moves are designed to bully into submission the cash-strapped PA, upon which many Palestinians depend for their livelihoods. On Sunday, Nissim Ben Sheetrit, director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said that Israel’s response to the Palestinian bid to join the ICC would be much harsher and more extensive than just freezing the PA’s tax revenues. “Israel is about to switch from defence to attack mode,” he said.

In a statement of breath-taking cynicism, Sheetrit said that Israel would not be launching a new wave of settlement construction and it had no interest in undermining security cooperation with the PA or causing its collapse. This was immediately contradicted by Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz who said, “If the Palestinian Authority doesn’t take a step back, I think we have to take much more severe steps,” referring to a “gradual dissolution” of the PA. He added, “We should not aid the existence of this authority.”

Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu said, “The Palestinian Authority has chosen to launch a confrontation with Israel.” He added that Israel would not sit idly by but would respond. “We won’t let them drag Israel Defence Force soldiers and officers to The Hague,” he said, continuing, “The ones who must give an accounting are the heads of the Palestinian Authority, who formed an alliance with the Hamas war criminals.”

The security cabinet will meet later this week to decide on the new measures.

Senior legal officials said that Israel was ready to counter the Palestinian move with its own lawsuits against Abbas and other Palestinian officials in the US and elsewhere, either officially in the name of Israel or via pro-Israel organisations. They would argue that Abbas’s partnership in a unity government with Hamas makes him complicit in their rocket attacks launched from Gaza on civilians in Israel.

They added that Jerusalem would be contacting Israel’s friends in the US Congress to ensure enforcement of legislation requiring that the State Department stop US aid to the PA, some $400 million a year, should the Palestinians take action against Israel at the ICC. The strongly worded law bans President Barack Obama from waiving any decision to halt aid to the PA. The incoming Congress will be controlled by the Republican Party.

Erekat condemned the Israeli measure, calling it a “new war crime” and said, “Israel is once again responding to our legal steps with further illegal collective punishments.”

He added, “This is money that is Palestinian money, and therefore the decision of the Israeli government and Netanyahu to freeze it is against international law, and proves the justice of our request to the International Criminal Court.”
It is not the first time Israel has frozen the monthly transfers. It imposed a similar sanction in April 2014, after Abbas applied to join a series of international treaties and conventions.

Abbas said he was discussing with Jordan, which holds a seat on the UN Security Council, plans to resubmit the resolution on Palestinian statehood when new members who are supportive of the Palestinians will take seats. Washington, however, is guaranteed to use its veto to kill any such resolution.

There is an element of electioneering in Tel Aviv’s response, with Netanyahu competing fiercely with his right-wing coalition partners, particularly Economy Minister Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home Party, over who has the harshest proposals for punishing the Palestinians. Nevertheless, these events and Tel Aviv’s response are indicative of Israel’s extreme nervousness and increasing diplomatic isolation. After all, the ICC has long been under US control, with the vast majority of cases referred to the ICC from sub-Saharan Africa and heard according to the degree to which they are flavour of the month with Washington.

The governments of Sweden and Belgium and the legislators of France, Britain, Portugal, Ireland, and the European Union itself have voted to recognise Palestine, a symbolic move that will not immediately affect their diplomatic status, but demonstrates the growing European impatience with Israel for actions that cut across strategic interests and destabilise the oil-rich region.

Relations have deteriorated particularly with France, which voted in favour of the UN resolution on Palestinian statehood. Over the last few months, a number of meetings and events with French organisations have been cancelled at the last minute, including a conference of Israeli and French high-tech companies and a visit by French lawyers to Israel. Although different reasons were given for each, Israeli officials said there was a feeling that the French were trying to link its relations with Israel to progress in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Israel has taken action to exonerate itself and challenge any UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry into possible war crimes, which will not investigate if Israel carries out its own criminal investigations. A total of 85 incidents arising from the 50-day long assault on Gaza last summer are under legal investigation.

The Israeli defence establishment is in an uproar over 13 investigations launched by the Military Police under instructions from the Military Advocate General’s Office, in what they see as persecution by the IDF’s legal authorities. This is despite the fact that few charges have ever been brought against officers for either criminal or disciplinary infractions in battle.

It is unlikely that any conclusions to these investigations or any of the parliamentary inquiries into the war will be published before the March 17 elections—if indeed they are ever published at all.

06 January, 2015
WSWS.org

By Subhash Gatade

The saffrons have done it again.

They have once again showed utter contempt towards the legacy of legendary Tipu Sultan, (20 November 1750 – 4 May 1799) one of those rare kings who was martyred on the battlefield, while fighting the Britishers at the historic battle at Srirangpatnam and whose martyrdom fighting the colonials preceded the historic revolt of the 1857 by around 50 years. Not very many people even know that he had even sacrificed his children while fighting them.

The immediate reason for stigmatisation of Tipu Sultan, by the leaders of Hindutva Brigade, concerns move by the Karnataka state government led by the Congress to celebrate Tipu Jayanti or Tipu’s birth anniversary. The Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had made this announcement releasing a book ‘Tipu Sultan: A Crusader for Change’ by historian Prof B Sheik Ali.

A ruler much ahead of his times Tipu Sultan, a scholar, soldier and a poet, was an apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity, was fond of new inventions, and is called innovator of the world’s first war rocket, one who felt inspired by the French Revolution and who despite being a ruler called himself Citizen and even had planted the tree of ‘Liberty’ in his palace. History bears witness to the fact that Tipu sensed the designs of the British and tried to forge broader unity with the domestic rulers and even tried to connect with French and the Turks and the Afghans to give a fitting reply to the hegemonic designs of the British and had defeated the British army twice with his superior planning and better techniques earlier.

An interesting episode in his eventful life throwing light on his character which the saffrons love to forget is worth emphasising. It was the year 1791 when Maratha Army raided the Sringeri Shakaracharya mutt and temple, plundered the monastery of all its valuables and even killed many. The incumbent Shankaracharya wrote to Tipu Sultan for help. He immediately ordered the Asaf of Bednur to provide help to the mutt. An exchange of around thirty letters written in Kannada is available which took place between Tipu Sultan and the Shankaracharya, which were discovered in 1916 by the Director of Archaeology in Mysore.

Expressing his indignation at the raid Tipu had written

“People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds at no distant date in this Kali age in accordance with the verse: “Hasadbhih kriyate karma rudadbhir-anubhuyate” (People do [evil] deeds smilingly but suffer the consequences crying).”

It is evident that the proposal to celebrate Tipu Jayanti has stirred a fresh controversy in the state. BJP, the main opposition party, has termed it ‘vote collection’ exercise. One of their senior leaders, called Tipu a ‘tyrant’ and even questioned the government’s move to celebrate the day. Another saffron leader D H Shankaramurthy called Tipu “anti- Kannada” as he “was not a Kannadiga”. He also blamed him for ‘replacing Kannada – which was supposedly the official language before Tipu ruled Mysuru- with Persian.’ People can brush up their memories and can find that this was the same gentleman who as higher education minister had announced his move to ‘obliterate the great Tipu Sultan’s name from the pages of Kannada history.’ It is a different matter it was a time when BJP shared power with JD(S) then and this move faced stiff opposition from different sections of society and had to be dropped ultimately.

It need be reminded that last year the decision of the Karnataka government to honour him with a tableau at the Republic Day parade had provoked the Hindutva Brigade. They had also felt agitated when the then central government was contemplating naming a central university after him. It was the time when UPA II government had decided to set up a non-religious central university bearing Tipu’s name in Srirangpatnam – the very place he was martyred.

Two years back when countdown had already begun for the BJP led government in the state another stalwart from the saffron family – the then education minister of Karnataka – had unashamedly compared Tipu to Britishers and called him “a foreigner” like British (Jan 25, 2013, 16:38 IST , DNA).

It is worth looking into why the saffrons love to hate Tipu Sultan and what is the basis of their allegations against him. But before that it would be opportune here to look into how ‘falsification of history’ to suit the ‘divide’ and ‘rule policy of the Britishers vis-a-vis Tipu has been going on since quite some time. In this connection Prof B N Pandey’s speech in the Rajya Sabha, titled ‘History in the Service of Imperialism’ is worth quoting (1977). Professor B. N. Pandey, Professor of History in Allahabad University, who later became Governor of Orissa, had narrated his experience. In his speech he mentioned how way back in 1928

“..[w]hen he was a Professor of History in Allahabad University some students came to him with a book written by one Professor Harprasad Shastri, Professor of Sanskrit of Calcutta University in which it was mentioned that Tipu Sultan told 3000 Brahmins to convert to Islam otherwise they will be killed, and those 3000 Brahmins committed suicide rather than becoming Muslims. On reading this Professor B. N. Pandey wrote to Professor Harprasad Shastri asking him on what basis have you written this? What is the source of your information? Prof. Harprasad Shastri wrote back that the source of information is the Mysore Gazetteer. Then Prof. Pandey wrote to Prof. Shrikantia, Professor of History in Mysore University asking him whether it is correct that in Mysore Gazetteer it is mentioned that Tipu Sultan told 3000 Brahmins to convert to Islam. Prof. Shrikantia wrote back that this is totally false, he had worked in this field and there is no such mention in the Mysore Gazetteer, rather the correct version was just the reverse, namely, that Tipu Sultan used to give annual grants to 156 Hindu Temples, he used to send grants to the Shankaracharya of Shringheri, etc.”

“it is perhaps ironic that the aggressive Hinduism of some members of the Indian Community in the 1990s should draw upon an image of Tipu which, as we shall see, was initially constructed by the Subcontinent’s colonisers.”

Page 2, Brittlebank, Kate (1999). Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-563977-3

Anyone who has closely followed stories of Tipu Sultan’s alleged religious persecution of Hindus and Christians would find that works of early British authors – like Kirkpatrick and Wilks – acts as a basis for all of them who were very much against Tipu Sultan. In fact they had strong vested interest in presenting Tipu Sultan as a tyrant and project Britishers as the ‘liberators’. In her recent work Brittlebank also writers that both Wilks and Kirkpatrick had taken part in the wars against Tipu Sultan and were closely connected to the administrations of Lord Cornwallis and Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley and therefore ‘must be used with particular care’.

Mohibbul Hasan, in his monograph ‘The History of Tipu Sultan (Delhi) 1971, p 36, sheds light on this demonisation of Tipu. He writes

“The reasons why Tipu was reviled are not far to seek. Englishmen weire prejudiced against him because they regarded him as their most formidable rival and an inveterate enemy, and because, unlike other Indian rulers, he refused to become a tributary of the English Company. Many of the atrocities of which he has been accused were allegedly fabricated either by persons embittered and angry on account of the defeats which they had sustained at his hands, or by the prisoners of war who had suffered punishments which they thought they did not deserve. He was also misrepresented by those who were anxious to justify the wars of aggression which the Company’s Government had waged against him. Moreover, his achievements were delibrately belittled and his character blackened in order that the people of Mysore might forget him and rally round the Raja, thus helping in the consolidation of the new regime” The History of Tipu Sultan (Delhi) 1971 p368

And this one sided presentation of history is not limited Tipu only. In fact, on further studies one finds a deep resonance between how the colonial historians understood/packaged Indian history and how the communals used it to their convenience. James Mill in his book ‘The History of British India’ divided Indian history into three periods Hindu, Muslim and British. This problematic characterisation not only silenced/invisiblised the Buddhist/Jain and various other groups role/contribution but it also tried to present a very homogenised view of the periods – discounting any possibility of fissures within them. Interestingly it also took care not to mention ‘Christian’ in case of ‘British’ while dividing Indian history. Prof D N Jha in one of his interviews (www.countercurrents.org) tells :

When Majumdar authored a multi-volume Indian history published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, he devoted much space to “Hindu period,” promoting revivalism and communalism. It was the communal history produced by colonial historians that influenced views about Muslims being “foreigners” and Hindus being “indigenous”.

History writing in post-independent India, which drew on colonial writings, did talk about “the great Indian past”. RSS and its ideologues today are busy propagating this very myth of “Greater India” Prof D N Jha further tells :

The anti-Muslim attitude of the RSS was shaped by the colonial historians such as H. M. Elliot and John Dawson, who compiled The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians . They denounced Muslims, contending that they destroyed temples and prosecuted Hindus. The real purpose of Elliot’s formulation was to inject a heavy dose of communalism in the minds of people of the 19th century.

It is now history how the colonials distorted our history to suit their imperial interests. One very well knows they called our uprisings as mutinies, our heroes as villains, and our freedom fighters as usurpers and terrorists.

For a formation like RSS and its allied organisations, which kept away from the heroic anti-colonial struggle supposedly to concentrate on building organisation and was in fact engaged in breaking broad unity of people cutting across community lines against the Britishers this move to have a biased view of Tipu does not appear surprising. Perhaps by attacking Tipu Sultan, and presenting a distorted version of his legacy, the saffrons think that they would be able to avoid discussion on their not so glorious role in the anti-colonial struggle. But can anyone forget that there is enough documentary evidence to prove that Hedgewar – founder of RSS and Golwalkar, one of its chief ideologue, who shaped the organisation, asked/instructed the RSS members not to participate in the anti-British campaigns/struggles.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who is held in high esteem by them, even went to the extent of asking Hindus to join the British led military when on the one had the ‘Quit India’ movement was at its peak (1942) which had posed tremendous challenges before the Britishers and on the other Azad Hind Fauz led by Subhash Chandra Bose was delivering mortal blows to it in the war. In fact Savarkar went on an all India tour holding public meetings with due support from the rulers then and tried to mobilise the Hindus – under the slogan ‘Hinduise the Military, Militarise Hinduism’ – to join British forces. Not only that the Hindutva forces had no qualms in joining hands with Muslim League and other Islamist Parties to form coalition governments in Bengal and Punjab and other adjoining states during that tumultous period. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who was instrumental in establishing Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the first political outfit launched by RSS, who is revered by the saffrons was a member of the cabinet led by Shahid Suhrawardy then in Bengal. It is clear that when there was time to fight the anti-colonials, the saffrons stayed away from it and when they were facing crisis because of people’s struggles they went to the extent of propping their regime by providing legitimacy to their actions.

The continued stigmatisation of Tipu by the saffrons and their refusal to honour the sacrifices he made fighting the Britishers presents before the Hindutva Brigade another set of dilemma. What to say of all those Hindu kings and warriors– whom they rever – who committed atrocities on ordinary people and looted. In fact, one of their most revered Maratha king had raided Surat – a main trading town in those times – and plundered it like a marauder more than once. If Tipu is a ‘bigot’ in their view then what would they say about the Marathas led by the Peshwas then who had raided the Sringeri Shakaracharya mutt and temple and plundered it ? And it was not the only attack by Hindu Kings on Hindu religious places, one can cite n number of examples from pages of history which demonstrate other similar attacks undertaken by these kings at different places. What would they say about the Peshwas under whose regime Shudras-Atishudras were denied all human rights and Dalits were even compelled to wear a earthen pot so that they even their spit does not fall on the streets?

“We plan to lay the foundation stone of a temple for Akhand Bharat Mata and Godseji on January 30. We also plan a big congregation of people where the ashes of Godse ji, currently kept in Pune, will be brought to this temple in Sitapur. We are working towards creating a Hindu Rashtra and an undivided Bharat is our dream. We will immerse his ashes only after his dream has been realised,” Hindu Mahasabha’s working president Kamlesh Tiwari told Headlines Today.

(http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/godse-temple-hindu-group-gandhi-killer-nathuram-ghar-wapsi-akhil-bharat-mahasabha/1/408811.html)

The ‘Hate Tipu’ syndrome much visible in the ranks of the RSS and all its affiliated as well as like minded organisations needs to be seen also in the backdrop of the growing euologisation of Nathuram Godse, the Hindutva terrorist who assasinated Mahatam Gandhi. (for more details on this episode see http://kafila.org/2013/11/15/first-terrorist-of-independent-india) and their continued silence over it.

Not some time ago BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj stirred a huge controversy when he called Godse a nationalist and a patriot. In October, a Malayalam mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had said that Nathuram Godse should have killed former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and not Gandhi. The writer was none other than a BJP leader who had contested elections to the Parliament . Forget taking any action against this glorification of Godse, RSS tried rather unsuccessfully to distance itself from this article saying that it was his ‘private opinion’. We also know that moves are even afoot to build this ‘great Patriots’ temples all over the country. (http: //www. thehindu.com/ news/national/other-states/meerut-villagers-rally-against-godse-temple/article6754164.ece) The Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha – whose most prominent leader Savarkar was the main conspirator in Gandhi’s assasination (Thanks to the painstaking investigation done by Jeevanlal Kapoor Commission) – also plans to establish Godse’s busts at different places in the country.

A close look at this ‘Love Godse’ campaign and RSS-BJP’s silence over it can be construed in two ways.

One, it wants to send a message to the core constituency which yearns to carve out a Hindu Rashtra that they should not get misled by the talk of ‘development’ which became necessary because of electoral compulsions.

Secondly, by avoiding any discussion on Gandhi’s assasination and the role of Godse and other Hindutva organisations in it, they want to move ahead unhindered in co-opting Gandhi.

It is a different matter that people are slowly waking up to the real meaning glorification of Godse and are coming forward to challenge their machinations. A rally was held in Meerut recently which was attended by thousands of people is an indication of the brewing storm.

Subhash Gatade is the author of Pahad Se Uncha Aadmi (2010) Godse’s Children: Hindutva Terror in India,(2011) and The Saffron Condition: The Politics of Repression and Exclusion in Neoliberal India(2011).

05 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Chris Hedges
The battle for the rights of animals is not only about animals. It is about us. Once we desanctify animals we desanctify all life. And once life is desanctified the industrial machines of death, and the drone-like bureaucrats, sadists and profiteers who operate them, carry out human carnage as easily as animal carnage. There is a direct link between our industrial slaughterhouses for animals and our industrial weapons used on the battlefields in the Middle East.

During wars in rural societies, where the butchering of animals is intimately familiar, butchering techniques are often used on enemies. The mutilation of bodies was routine in the wars I covered in Central America, the Middle East and the Balkans. Throats were slit. Heads were cut off. Eyes gouged out. Hands severed. Genitals stuffed into victims’ mouths. Body parts such as ears and fingers were collected as souvenirs. Balkan villages, which hung slaughtered pigs by their feet from tree branches to drain the carcasses of blood and so the hair could be shaved off, on some days dangled human corpses along the roadsides. Cattle prods were a favored torture implement in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Killing in our mechanized slaughterhouses is overseen by a tiny group of technicians. Industrial farms are factories. Machines kill the animals. And in modern warfare machines kill our enemies. Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yemenis are condemned, like livestock, from a distance. Hired killers push buttons. Slaughter, at home and at war, is automated. The individual is largely obsolete. The mechanization of murder is terrifying. It creates the illusion that killing is antiseptic. This illusion is sustained by state-imposed censorship that prevents us from seeing the reality of war and the reality of animal slaughterhouses. Killing has gone underground. And this has made vast enterprises of killing palatable.

I witnessed the dismembering and evisceration of human bodies during the siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It was impossible not to make the link with animals. For several years after the war I would walk out of a restaurant if I saw blood pooling around a piece of rare meat on a plate. All blood is red. Hunks of meat from cattle look like hunks of human flesh. The high-pitched wail of a pig being butchered sounds like the wail of a wounded person on a battlefield.

I recently met Gary Francione, perhaps the most controversial figure in the modern animal rights movement, for lunch at the vegetarian deli of the Whole Earth Center in Princeton, N.J. With me was my wife, Eunice Wong, who was the driving force in our family’s decision last year to become vegans.

Francione is l’enfant terrible of the animal rights movement. He is a law professor and philosopher who founded, along with his partner Anna E. Charlton, the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic at Rutgers School of Law. He and Charlton have five rescue dogs, all of them vegans. In his 1996 iconoclastic book “Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement” he criticized animal rights activists for refusing to challenge the idea of animals as property. Many animal rights activists call for more humane treatment of animals—leading to the conscience-soothing labels “ethically raised,” “free-range” and “cage free”—before they are slaughtered, but Francione calls this form of animal activism “tidying up the concentration camps.” He maintains that promotion of what he calls “happy exploitation” deludes consumers into believing they can exploit animals in a “compassionate” way. We have no moral right, he says, to use animals as human resources.

His position puts him at odds with nearly every animal rights group, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), as well as most of the major writers about animal rights. Theorists on animal rights such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Peter Singer believe animal rights revolve primarily around how we use animals, not whether we should use them. Francione attacks this position in his 2008 book “Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.” His iron condemnation of all forms of violence, including by animal rights activists, has enraged militants. Like most other important moral voices, Francione stands almost completely alone.

“These are fundamental issues of justice,” he said of animal rights during our lunch. “These are fundamental issues that require that we take nonviolence seriously. You cannot speak about nonviolence and stick violence into your mouth three times a day. How many of us have grown up with a dog, a cat, a parakeet or a rabbit? Did we love those beings? Did we love them in a different way from the way we ‘loved’ our car or our stereo? Why is that love different? It is different because that is the love of an other, whether that is a human person or a nonhuman person. It is love for an other who matters morally. Did we cry when that being died? It is moral schizophrenia to treat some animals as members of our family and then roast and stick forks into other animals, which have been abused and tortured and that are no different from our nonhuman family members.”

“This is not, however, an issue about whether animals are tortured,” he went on. “The big issue now is factory farming. Do I think factory farming is bad? Well, yes, but so what? Family farms are bad as well. There is a lot of violence that happens on family farms. Consider two slaveholders—one who beats his slaves 25 times a week and the other who beats his slaves once a week. Is Slaveholder Two better? The answer is yes, but it does not address the morality of slavery.”

“It is impossible to participate multiple times a day in victimizing the vulnerable and supporting the suffering and death of sentient others for trivial reasons and not have it make a profound impact,” he said. “It means we accept the injustice of violence. It means injustice is not taken seriously. Injustice fails to motivate us. Violence works when we ‘otherize’ groups of beings and put them on the ‘thing’ side of the line between persons and ‘things.’ The paradigmatic example of this is what we do to nonhuman animals. If we stop otherizing nonhumans it becomes impossible to otherize humans.”

Francione rejects the idea that ovo-lacto vegetarianism and family farms are incremental improvements. The egg and dairy industries, he points out, are vast systems of reproductive enslavement of female animals. Laying chickens and dairy cows are abused as grievously as animals raised for meat, and usually for many more years. Once these animals are “spent” and unable to produce eggs or milk at a profitable rate, they too are slaughtered. And because it is only the females that produce milk and eggs, the dairy and egg industries early year kill approximately 250 million newborn male chicks—often ground up alive for “raw protein” used in pet food and fertilizer—and approximately 2 million male calves, used for veal.

We are told from childhood that cows “give” milk, as though needing to be milked is a cow’s natural state. “Like other female mammals, including human women, female cattle produce milk as a complex hormonal response to pregnancy and birth,” Sherry F. Colb, a former colleague of Francione’s at Rutgers, writes in “Mind If I Order the Cheeseburger?” “Dairy farmers,” Colb continues, “regularly and forcibly place each dairy cow into what is sometimes called a ‘rape rack,’ a device on which animals are restrained while they are inseminated. … If left to her own devices, the mother cow would nurse her baby for nine to 12 months. And as dairy farmers accordingly acknowledge, cows suffer tremendously when farmers take their calves away from them shortly after birth. Cows bellow, sometimes for days on end, and behave in ways that plainly exhibit desperation and misery, including a lack of interest in eating and a tendency to pace around the area where they last saw their calves. … A dairy farmer cannot make a living from this work unless he subjects a cow to pregnancy, removes her calf from her side, and then slaughters the mother cow once her milk production diminishes. These are each unavoidable aspects of dairy farming.”

“All animal agriculture involves violence, suffering and death, including the most humanely produced dairy and eggs,” Francione told us. “The male chicks are ground up alive or pounded or gassed to death. If you are a feminist and you consume dairy you are confused. One of the worst things in the world is the sound of cows when their babies are taken from them. In a conventional dairy the calves are taken away the same day or the next day. In an organic dairy, which is a supposedly higher-level animal welfare ‘happy place,’ they are taken away two or three days later. The mothers cry for days. The fact that we will take a cow with a natural life span of 30 years, impregnate her six times and take away her baby six times and kill her after she has had mastitis for five years is dreadful. This is the commodification of the reproductive processes of a female other, the commodification of a mother and her baby. The reproductive process and the relationship of a mother and her child become a product. I don’t understand how someone can say, ‘I am a feminist, but I drink milk.’ ”

Francione excoriates organic family farms that raise free-range chickens and grass-fed cattle. “The idea that loving something is consistent with killing it is not dissimilar from the man who says ‘I love my wife but I beat her a lot,’ ” he said. “I am not interested in discussions about the cruelty of factory farming. It does not matter. It is not a question of whether you go into the woods, buy a small farm and the animals come into the house at night so you can all play cards. The entire institution of animal exploitation is wrong. Our moral thinking about animals is terribly confused.”

When asked how he thought this happened, he answered: “Where we have gone wrong is our belief that because animals are cognitively different from us they have lesser moral value. They are not as cognitively sophisticated as we are—they don’t write symphonies or do calculus—so we can eat, wear and use them, as long as we do so ‘humanely.’ Most animal rights activists argue that ‘using them is not the problem, the problem is how we treat them.’ My view is that using them is the problem. It does not matter how well we treat them. Obviously, it is worse to impose more suffering than less suffering, but that does not mean it is all right to use them in a ‘humane’ way. If someone sneaks into your room while you are sleeping and blows your brains out and you do not feel a thing, you are still harmed. You may not have suffered. But you have been harmed.”

The idea that … animals [are] of lesser moral value is dangerous,” he added. “It creates hierarchies that can also be used within human communities. Once you are sentient, or are subjectively aware, you have one moral right—the right not to be used as a resource. It does not mean you get treated equally for all purposes, but it does mean you are not treated as a slave or as a commodity. A slave is excluded from the moral community. A slave has no inherent value. A slave has only external value. A slave is a thing. This is what we have done to animals. Animals are property. Animal welfare laws cannot work because they are based on balancing the interests of humans and nonhumans. As long as animals are chattel property the animal owners win. As long as animals are chattel property the standard of animal welfare will always be tied to what we need to exploit them because we will generally protect animal interests only to the extent that we get an economic benefit from doing so. Animal welfare reform, for this reason, has usually worked to make animal exploitation more economically efficient. The reason why you have the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, which requires that large animals be stunned before they are shackled and hoisted, is because if you have a 2,000-pound animal hanging upside down the cow hits workers. Workers are injured. You have carcass damage. If you look at the arguments put forward for chicken producers to switch to controlled atmosphere killing, essentially gassing, from the electrical stunning method, still widely used, those arguments—made by groups such as PETA and HSUS—are based on economic efficiency. Animal advocates are [in effect] arguing that if you gas the chickens it cuts down on carcass damage. This does not move animals out of the property paradigm. It further enmeshes them in it. It is only about efficient exploitation.”

“All of the large animal charities, such as PETA and HSUS, are businesses,” he said. “They want to maximize their donor base so they try and let everyone stay in their comfort zone. They don’t take the position that veganism is the only rationally and morally acceptable response to the recognition that animals have moral significance. They promote reform and not abolition. Unfortunately, we live in a postmodern, poststructuralist society. No one is supposed to be a moral realist. And yet we all have certain intuitions that we accept as true. We know, for example, that suffering is bad. Nobody says suffering is good, except for perhaps a masochist, but even then the masochist only embraces suffering when he or she gets pleasure from it. You can derive an enormous amount of what you need morally in the world from the simple idea that suffering is morally bad. You can’t justify doing to someone else what you would not want done to you. This is a moral truth. We all say it’s wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering. We all agree that necessity cannot mean just pleasure. But the only justification we have for eating any animal foods is palate pleasure. We don’t need animal foods for optimal health, and animal agriculture is an ecological disaster. We criticize people like Michael Vick for inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals, but we’re all Michael Vick. Our exploitation of animals is no more necessary.”

“I worry that we have raised a generation that has not been taught to think morally,” Francione said. “Yes, my generation often thought about morality superficially. I do not want to romanticize the past. But events such as the Vietnam War forced us to ask what were we doing as a nation. We feared getting drafted, of course, but the war helped us see. It forced us to think about moral issues. But morality today has been reduced to a matter of mere opinion. This is dangerously wrong. The morality of unjustified and unjustifiable exploitation is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of moral fact.”

“There is an intimate relationship between human rights and animal rights,” said Francione, who teaches a course on human rights and animal rights with Charlton at Rutgers University. “You cannot think about this in isolation. Sexism, racism and classism are about turning others into objects. How can we talk intelligently about nonviolence when we are putting the products of violence into our mouths? We are wearing the products of violence. This is about justice. It is about justice for nonhumans, for women, for Palestinians, for African-Americans and for prisoners. Pornography represents the commodification of women. When you use pornography there is no longer a person there. There is a body part that you fetishize. The person has become a thing. You are consuming that thing. This is not all that different from going to the store and buying chicken in a Styrofoam package. The chicken is not [seen as] an animal. It is a product in Styrofoam covered with cellophane. All commodification is connected, and it’s all wrong.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer in his short story “The Letter Writer” said that human beings were Nazis to animals and had created “an eternal Treblinka” for the animal world. He, as well as writers such as Marguerite Yourcenar and J.M. Coetzee, saw in animal slaughterhouses the preliminary models for torture centers, extermination camps, genocide and war. Kazuo Ishiguro explored the idea of sentient beings raised “humanely” as commodities in his dystopian novel “Never Let Me Go,” in which cloned children, “donors,” are nurtured in special boarding schools resembling the finest private schools, but die in young adulthood when their organs are harvested for “normals”—uncloned humans.

“I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale,” Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz wrote in his “Dachau Diaries” while he was held in that Nazi concentration camp.

“Even though the number of people who commit suicide is quite small, there are few people who have never thought about suicide at one time or another,” Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote. “The same is true about vegetarianism. We find very few people who have never thought that killing animals is actually murder, founded on the premise that might is right. … I will call it the eternal question: What gives man the right to kill an animal, often torture it, so that he can fill his belly with its flesh. We know now, as we have always known instinctively, that animals can suffer as much as human beings. Their emotions and their sensitivity are often stronger than those of a human being. Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal—be it a dog, a bird or even a mouse—knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty. … [A]s long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers à la Hitler and concentration camps à la Stalin … all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice’. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com.

05 January, 2015
Truthdig.com

 

By Paul Gallagher

It is becoming clear to more experts on debt in the trans-Atlantic banking system, that the outrageous mid-December power play by which Wall Street banks forced Congress to grant FDIC insurance to their commodity and credit derivatives, was directly linked to the oil and gas price collapse. This outrage in Congress may lead to the government bailing out Wall Street banks in crisis, sooner than any of the suborned members of Congress thought when they went along with urgent telephone calls from JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and from the Obama White House. The impact of the oil price collapse in the derivatives markets is a time-bomb for an already bankrupt Wall Street.

That mid-December bribery-and-corruption orgy was led by Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley banks (along with their stickman, Barack Obama). Those three banks, along with Goldman Sachs, are the most exposed to oil/gas sector debt— which has been ballooning by an average $100 billion in net new debt per year for a decade—and to $20 trillion in risky commodity derivatives exposure which has now put them in trouble. Citibank has the largest oil debt exposure, approximately 7% of its total asset book, and Citi was at the center of the “budget bill” wing-ding which put the Federal government back on the hook for the coming commodity derivatives losses by these banks. Citigroup is now the target of a “break up Citigroup” campaign proposed by MIT economist Simon Johnson and which will have some bipartisan support in the Senate of the new Congress.

The oil price collapse began in late October as the collusion by U.S. officials with Saudi Arabia’s monarchy to hit Russia with an “oil sanction”; but it has gone out of their control. Notably, on Dec. 20, it was not Russia whose credit was downgraded, but the European oil majors BP, Total, and Shell, all placed on negative credit watch by Standard and Poor’s. The oil majors have been loading up with debt for a decade, with an emphasis on paying dividends and buying back their own stock. That debt was piled up despite the fact that demand for oil and gas, throughout the trans-Atlantic economies, has become more and more depressed since the 2007-08 financial collapse. The sector now has roughly $1.6 trillion in debt with—if oil prices remain in the $50 per barrel range—not much more than $300 billion in revenues, a highly leveraged situation. Keep in mind that during December, the natural gas price has also plunged by a third, down to the range of $3/cubic foot.

Junk Debt Markets Shake

The “front end” of this debt bubble problem is in the North American shale sector, whose production of oil and gas is less efficient, more expensive, and more environmentally damaging than the industry as a whole. Here bankruptcies of drilling and rig companies are already occurring and the debt in trouble is highly leveraged and high-interest (junk bonds and leveraged loans). It is, along with long-term, high-interest auto loans, essentially the banks’ subprime debt bubble of this decade. These two subprime sectors have been dominating new capital investment and employment creation in the U.S. economy. The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 17, in “Junk Bond Worries Spread Beyond Oil,” reported that these sectors of debt, totalling about $2.4 trillion, have actually started to contract, after rising sharply from 2011 through mid-2014.

London Telegraph financial analyst Andrew Critchlow warned already on Nov. 14 that oil shale drillers had come to be nearly one-third of all “highyield, sub-investment grade” (subprime) borrowers in the United States. He estimated that if the oil price stayed in the $60s (it has been in the $50s for more than a month), 30% of high-yield B- and CCC-grade (energy) borrowers would default. “A shock of that magnitude could be sufficient to trigger a broader high-yield market default cycle,” Critchlow warned. That the Wall Street banks are being hit by this, was shown by the end-of-November report—ironically, put out by Citibank’s research team—that the U.S. banking sector’s revenue had dropped by 17% in the third quarter, and its loan revenue, the area which has been dominated by high-interest lending to the energy sector, had dropped by 60%. At the same time, the banking sector’s exposure to foreign exchange derivatives rose by 90%, and to commodity derivatives by 40%.

This highly dangerous situation for the banks goes back to the Federal Reserve’s allowing the big Wall Street banks to own commodities and commodities infrastructure (warehouses, tankers, electric utility plants, etc.), by giving them waivers of the Bank Holding Company Act in the 2002-05 period.

This ownership of commodities by banks—which are also controlling the debt, futures, and derivatives markets for the same commodities at the same time— was the subject of highly condemnatory hearings in Sen. Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) Permanent Investigations Subcommittee in the waning days of the 113th Congress.

These Wall Street practices, which the Glass-Steagall Act also prohibited to commercial banks, allowed the big banks to run up key commodity prices and, at the same time, collect large secondary profits (from derivatives markets) on the commodity prices they were manipulating.

They also put the banks in danger of being hit by huge losses in case of certain “commodity catastrophes,” like the breakup of a large oil tanker with a massive oil leak, for example.

Wearing Heavy ‘Collars’

But a very large price shock for which the banks’ trading programs are not prepared, is the biggest danger to them.

In 2012 the Federal Reserve began publicly “debating” the possibility of forcing the banks out of commodities and infrastructure holdings, but did nothing about it. The Fed “advised” the Wall Street banks to get out of commodity holdings; the banks ignored this. While JPMorgan Chase exited some commodity holdings which had just cost it large fines for market manipulation, Goldman, Citi, and Morgan Stanley went deeper into commodity holdings.

In 2013, the Fed started jawboning Wall Street to stop making massive amounts of “leveraged loans,” which were going most heavily to energy firms related to the “shale boom” or to similarly inefficient wind power and solar power schemes. The Fed has admitted publicly that the banks ignored this “advice” as well.

With the collapse of the oil price by 50% in the second half of 2014, the banks have found that a widespread type of commodity derivative known as a “threeway collar” has become very dangerous to them. As the price has declined, from $110/barrel for West Texas Intermediate Crude all the way down to below $55/barrel now, these derivatives have compelled the banks not only to buy more leveraged debt paper, but to buy more oil and gas futures as well.

According to financial experts, the immediate prospect of losses from defaulting debt in the leverage loan and junk bond markets, together with the only slightly longer-term prospect of huge losses in the derivatives markets, have put the Wall Street banks in trouble. The latter’s losses could be in the hundreds of billions in total, given that this derivatives exposure of Wall Street is in the trillions.

The biggest U.S. banks, which now reportedly have some $240 trillion in derivatives exposure, have been allowed to pile up almost all of it on their FDIC-insured commercial banking units since Glass-Steagall was eliminated in the 1990s. But due to their extreme risk, these commodity derivatives were among the few types that could not be in those depository units—until the banks ran roughshod over Congress in mid-December. Now, with potentially huge losses looming, those trillions in derivatives are subject to a crisis Federal bailout.

30 December 2014

By Paul Krugman

In 2014, soaring inequality in advanced nations finally received the attention it deserved, as Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” became a surprise (and deserving) best seller. The usual suspects are still in well-paid denial, but, to everyone else, it is now obvious that income and wealth are more concentrated at the very top than they have been since the Gilded Age — and the trend shows no sign of letting up.

But that’s a story about developments within nations, and, therefore, incomplete. You really want to supplement Piketty-style analysis with a global view, and when you do, I’d argue, you get a better sense of the good, the bad and the potentially very ugly of the world we live in.

So let me suggest that you look at a remarkable chart of income gains around the world produced by Branko Milanovic of the City University of New York Graduate Center (which I will be joining this summer). What Mr. Milanovic shows is that income growth since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been a “twin peaks” story. Incomes have, of course, soared at the top, as the world’s elite becomes ever richer. But there have also been huge gains for what we might call the global middle — largely consisting of the rising middle classes of China and India.

And let’s be clear: Income growth in emerging nations has produced huge gains in human welfare, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty and giving them a chance for a better life.

Now for the bad news: Between these twin peaks — the ever-richer global elite and the rising Chinese middle class — lies what we might call the valley of despond: Incomes have grown slowly, if at all, for people around the 20th percentile of the world income distribution. Who are these people? Basically, the advanced-country working classes. And although Mr. Milanovic’s data only go up through 2008, we can be sure that this group has done even worse since then, wracked by the effects of high unemployment, stagnating wages, and austerity policies.

Furthermore, the travails of workers in rich countries are, in important ways, the flip side of the gains above and below them. Competition from emerging-economy exports has surely been a factor depressing wages in wealthier nations, although probably not the dominant force. More important, soaring incomes at the top were achieved, in large part, by squeezing those below: by cutting wages, slashing benefits, crushing unions, and diverting a rising share of national resources to financial wheeling and dealing.

Perhaps more important still, the wealthy exert a vastly disproportionate effect on policy. And elite priorities — obsessive concern with budget deficits, with the supposed need to slash social programs — have done a lot to deepen the valley of despond.

So who speaks for those left behind in this twin-peaked world? You might have expected conventional parties of the left to take a populist stance on behalf of their domestic working classes. But mostly what you get instead — from leaders ranging from François Hollande of France to Ed Milliband of Britain to, yes, President Obama — is awkward mumbling. (Mr. Obama has, in fact, done a lot to help working Americans, but he’s remarkably bad at making his own case.)

The problem with these conventional leaders, I’d argue, is that they’re afraid to challenge elite priorities, in particular the obsession with budget deficits, for fear of being considered irresponsible. And that leaves the field open for unconventional leaders — some of them seriously scary — who are willing to address the anger and despair of ordinary citizens.

The Greek leftists who may well come to power there later this month are arguably the least scary of the bunch, although their demands for debt relief and an end to austerity may provoke a tense standoff with Brussels. Elsewhere, however, we see the rise of nationalist, anti-immigrant parties like France’s National Front and the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, in Britain — and there are even worse people waiting in the wings.

All of this suggests some uncomfortable historical analogies. Remember, this is the second time we’ve had a global financial crisis followed by a prolonged worldwide slump. Then, as now, any effective response to the crisis was blocked by elite demands for balanced budgets and stable currencies. And the eventual result was to deliver power into the hands of people who were, shall we say, not very nice.

I’m not suggesting that we’re on the verge of fully replaying the 1930s. But I would argue that political and opinion leaders need to face up to the reality that our current global setup isn’t working for everyone. It’s great for the elite and has done a lot of good for emerging nations, but that valley of despond is very real. And bad things will happen if we don’t do something about it.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. Mr. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1977. He has taught at Yale, M.I.T. and Stanford. At M.I.T. he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.

1 January 2015

By Andre Damon

The wealthiest 400 people in the world saw their combined net worth grow by $92 billion last year, hitting $4.1 trillion. The bonanza for the super-rich was underwritten by governments and central banks around the world, which fueled surging stock markets and record corporate profits by pumping hundreds of billions into the financial markets.

The figures were provided by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which was initiated in 2012 and tracks the wealth of the 400 richest people in the world.

The combined net worth of these 400 individuals is greater than the gross domestic product of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. The average net worth of each of the billionaires grew by $240 million, to $10.25 billion.

Since the 2008 financial crash, which triggered multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts and the infusion into the financial system of trillions more in virtually free cash, the wealth of the super-rich has nearly doubled. The net worth of the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans increased from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to $2.29 trillion in 2014.

Over the past year, global stock markets have continued to soar. The American Nasdaq index has shot up by 14.1 percent. The Japanese Nikkei is up by 7.1 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 18,000 for the first time on December 26, after hitting a record 17,000 in July 2014 and 16,000 in November 2013.

The Dow is up by 155 percent over its level in March 2009, when it was below 6,000. US corporate profits have likewise hit record highs, reaching $1.8 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2014, up from $671 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Investor Warren Buffett, the world’s second richest man, according to the Bloomberg list, saw his wealth grow to $74.5 billion, up by $13.7 billion, or more than 22 percent, in the past year. Buffett’s wealth has more than doubled since 2009.

Bloomberg noted that “dozens of operating businesses the 84-year-old chairman bought over the past five decades churned out record profit” over the past year. Buffett’s business model has been to buy traditional industries such as railroads and food producers, then ruthlessly cut costs, making billions in the process. Buffett’s businesses have profited handsomely from the ongoing fall in labor costs, which have been dropping year after year since 2008 as a result of falling wages and cuts in benefits for workers.

Commentators did not hesitate to ascribe the growth in the wealth of the super-rich to the continuing infusion of cash by global central banks. This week, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi indicated that the bank would pursue additional stimulus measures, which markets predicted could mean the initiation of US-style “quantitative easing,” where the central bank essentially prints money to buy state bonds in addition to private securities.

Two of the three billionaires who made the most in 2014 reside in China, which is experiencing a stock market bubble, with the country’s FTSE Xinhua 200 index up by 49.49 percent over the past year. Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba Group, saw his wealth shoot up by $25.1 billion this year, to $28.7 billion, following the September initial public offering of shares in the Chinese Internet trading company he heads.

The wealth of Wang Jianlin, chairman and founder of the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda, nearly doubled over the past year, hitting $25.3 billion, after his company held an initial public offering for its commercial properties division last year. Of the six billionaires whose wealth more than doubled, five live in China.

Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, saw his wealth grow by $9.1 billion, to $87.6 billion. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s net worth grew by $5.7 billion, to $49.4 billion. The wealth of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg increased $10.6 billion to $35.3 billion. Zuckerberg’s wealth has grown nearly 18-fold since 2009, when it stood at $2 billion.

The financial sector made up a significant share of the Bloomberg list. In addition to Buffett, billionaire investors George Soros and Carl Icahn featured prominently, with $26.1 and $23.6 billion, respectively.

The soaring wealth of the super-rich comes amid growing warnings over the implications of rising social inequality. Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a report noting: “Today, the richest 10 percent of the population in the OECD area earn 9.5 times the income of the poorest 10 percent; in the 1980s this ratio stood at 7:1 and has been rising continuously ever since.”

The OECD reported that the gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom ten percent had reached “around 10 to 1 in Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal and the United Kingdom, between 13 and 16 to 1 in Greece, Israel, Turkey and the United States, and between 27 and 30 to 1 in Mexico and Chile.”

The obscene enrichment of the world’s billionaires and multi-millionaires is accompanied by—and dependent on—the growth of unemployment and poverty around the world. According to a report issued by the International Labor Organization last year, the number of people worldwide without work has hit 200 million for the first time ever. The figure marked a 5 million increase in one year, surpassing 2009’s record high of 198 million.

According to a separate report by the OECD, some 12 percent of the world’s population, or 860 million people, lives in poverty. Some 805 million people were chronically undernourished between 2012 and 2014, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

The ever-greater enrichment of the world’s financial elite is not the byproduct of a general growth in the real economy and development of the productive forces, let alone a broader rise in living standards. On the contrary. The real economy is stagnating or declining, the productive infrastructure of the US and other industrialized countries is being starved of investment and allowed to rot, and the living standards of the broad mass of people are falling.

Today’s financial oligarchs generally make their fortunes on the basis of social plunder and economic parasitism, much of it borderline illegal or outright criminal. Increasingly, the meager benefits and savings of workers—in the form of pensions and other benefits—are being stolen by the corporate-financial elite by means of corporate and municipal bankruptcies and other pseudo-legal forms of swindling.

The Bloomberg report on the super-rich is one more demonstration of the failure of capitalism and the necessity for the working class to overthrow it and replace it with socialism.

03 January, 2015
WSWS.org