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By Stephen Kinzer

DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY in our presidential election set off many convulsions, but few were as shattering as the one that dynamited the Washington foreign policy elite. Almost every member of this incestuous band of Beltway bombers supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign. They had reason to do so, since she has spent her career promoting their aggressive, we-know-best approach to the world. Now they face four years in the wilderness. Voters have driven a stake not only into the heart of the Clinton machine, but also into the heart of the American foreign policy establishment. Now we will see something new — or will we?

Several months ago, an evidently frustrated President Obama lamented that American foreign policy comes from a playbook that says Americans have a duty to shape the rest of the world. Today it is tempting to believe the playbook has been thrown into the Potomac. That is too optimistic. The ability of presidents and Congress to shape foreign policy is overstated. Deeply vested interests control the sprawling national security bureaucracy and make real change all but impossible. No one knows this better than Obama. He began his presidency by winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but his foreign policy legacy is dominated by war in Afghanistan, chaos in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, targeted killings, Guantanamo, and a trillion-dollar program to build a new nuclear arsenal.

To say that Trump’s foreign policy ideas are unformed would be an understatement, but he has a few. Three sound highly promising. First, he wants to de-escalate our spiraling conflict with Russia. For whatever reason, he has rejected the playbook view that President Vladimir Putin is a mad thug whose policies threaten our national security. If he remains firm and pulls us out of the spiral of US-Russia confrontation, he will be stepping back from the conflict that has seemed more likely than any other to explode into nuclear war.

Trump’s unorthodox view of Russia leads to his second wise foreign policy instinct, about the horrific war in Syria. Here his ignorance is an asset. Instead of reading the piles of reports that have gushed from the think-tank world in recent months, all of which demand military escalation, he is using common sense. It tells him that Syria poses no threat to the United States, and that our priority there should be crushing ISIS, not overthrowing the government.

The third way Trump’s foreign policy may break with the playbook has to do with his view of NATO and the other alliances through which we project military power. During his campaign, he said he would ask our European and Asian partners to pay for their own defense. He doesn’t seem to like the idea that the United States could be dragged into great-power war over a local dispute in the Baltic or the South China Sea. His election could allow NATO to escape from American control and pursue the less aggressive policies that France, Germany, and Italy would prefer.

That’s the good news. Alongside it are depressing indications that in important ways, Trump will be just as eager to double down on failed policies as Hillary Clinton would have been. The common sense with which he sees Russia and Syria fails him when he views Iran. He also looks suspiciously on Cuba, even though it is poor, weak, and no threat to us. His anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim tirades have alienated huge numbers of people. He has dismissed climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese to weaken our economy. His approach to deal-making — squeezing everything you can out of an adversary — may work in business, but it is the opposite of diplomatic negotiation, which succeeds only when all parties walk away with some success.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump’s approach to foreign policy was shaped by an odd contradiction. He declared his willingness to break from orthodoxy in shocking ways, but the few major political figures who supported him are charter members of the bomb-’em-all club. Newt Gingrich, said to be a likely candidate for secretary of state, is unreservedly pro-Israel and anti-Iran. Nonetheless, he is not a classic militarist. He has called himself a “cheap hawk,” and might look dubiously at the corporate welfare program known as the defense budget. Foreign aid also leaves him cold: “You ought to start off with zero and say, ‘Explain to me why I should give you a penny.’ ” His views on climate change are as dismissive as Trump’s, but he is less anti-trade and anti-China. Some of his musings even suggest that he might be willing to pull our troops out of the Afghanistan quagmire.

The end of the Cold War obliged the United States to adopt a new foreign policy to deal with new realities. We never did. Instead we lashed out in ways that have weakened our security while wreaking havoc on unfortunate countries. Large numbers of Americans reject this aggressive approach to the world. They want us to concentrate on rebuilding our own declining country. It would be a delicious irony if Trump gives us the post-Cold War foreign policy that we should have adopted a generation ago.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and author of the forthcoming book “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.” Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzer.

10 November 2016

By Jon Kofas

Right wing political groups throughout the world are celebrating Trump’s victory but rather prematurely. The traditional conservatives and liberals are sufficiently delusional to believe that they are somehow far removed from Trump-style authoritarian politics when in fact they laid the groundwork for Trump to succeed. Meanwhile, some traditional conservative political leaders around the world are wondering if right wing populism flirting with Fascism is the way to political victory, never questioning if their policies drove people to the far right. Others are questioning if BREXIT and the Trump victory really mean popular discontent with globalization under the neoliberal development model. Many analysts are already decrying the rightwing course of the American electorate, as though Clinton was a New Deal Democrat rather than a Rockefeller Republican with a more pro-Wall Street and more hawkish foreign policy than Trump.

Political correctness aside, the US was already a quasi-police state before Trump under both Bush and Obama. Therefore, the socio-cultural-political landscape was fertile for the new populist Republican leader, especially considering the corruption scandals that plagued Clinton. It is not at all the case as many have argued that US democracy suddenly became bankrupt because of Trump’s victory, because this was the case throughout history, with some exceptions when reformism became necessary to strengthen capitalism under the pluralistic society as during the Progressive Era and New Deal.

Behind the new authoritarian figure that will become America’s president, and behind the Republican victory of both houses of congress, the real power is corporate America as it always has been. Wall Street, not Washington, will determine policy under Trump who promised economic nationalism vs. globalization, isolationism vs. interventionism, job-growth oriented economy vs. jobs export oriented economy. Mainstream politicians, the media, and the entire institutional establishment have always projected the image that elections are equated with democracy.

The establishment wants people to believe that the electoral process affords legitimacy to the social contract. No matter how manipulated by the political class, financial elites and the media, elections put a stamp of legitimacy on what people believe constitutes popular sovereignty. As shocking as it was for many across the US and around the world, a Trump victory represents the illusion of democracy at work in a country where voter apathy is very high in comparison with most developed countries – the US ranks 27th in the world below Mexico and Slovakia in voter participation.

Besides the illusion of popular sovereignty, elections inject a sense of hope for a new start in society – the eternal spring of politics intended to maintain the status quo. An even clearer picture emerges regarding the distasteful “steak or fish” choices, as President Obama alluded during the correspondents’ dinner a few weeks before the election to indicate with pride that there is no third political choice. The larger problem is the lack of differences between ‘steak and fish’ (Democrats and Republicans) in every policy domain, except social, cultural/lifestyle issues.

Of course, the very high percentage of ‘negatives’ for both presidential candidates and the absence of alternatives other than those that the political and financial establishment chose for people to give their final approval reveals that people were voting for what each side deemed the ‘lesser of two evils’ – the ‘steak or fish’ choice that the establishment places on the menu and then the media ‘guides’ voters to choose one over the other as though it really makes much difference. This is hardly a manifestation of democracy and a testament of a system far removed from popular sovereignty.

Unlike elections in many developed countries, American elections have an aura of finality about them. It is as though everything has been decided at the ballot box until the next election cycle and people must conform. Elections invalidate expression of dissident voices, but not for corporate lobbyists influencing legislation. Despite the aura of finality and the historic election of populist Republican supporting economic nationalism, after the presidential election the US remains more bitterly divided than it was during the last years of the Vietnam War under President Nixon; certainly more undemocratic because of the ubiquitous surveillance state and Homeland Security regime that is here to stay. Although these divisions are not expressed as part of a class struggle, given the absence of working class solidarity, they find expression in varieties of smaller social, religious and cultural groups at odds with each other.

This is not to suggest that the US is as authoritarian as other countries claiming to be democratic. Nevertheless, there is considerable underlying sociopolitical polarization in a country hardly democratic as its apologists insist. Because of factionalism (socio-cultural-religious conservatives, isolationists/anti-globalist libertarians, traditional fiscal conservatives), Republican infighting will invariably manifest itself when the executive branch tries to push measures that congress will reject because corporate lobbyists oppose them. Animosity within the Republican Party and between the two major parties in congress will result in more gridlock despite a sweeping Republican victory of all branches of government. This is what Wall Street wants. Gridlock projects the image that both sides are fighting for the interests of the people when they are really fighting on behalf of corporate interests. Nevertheless, they present the process as the essence of democracy and the media reinforces that view.

Trump’s quasi-Fascist America will be unacceptable to many Democrats who believed that pluralism and multiculturalism in a country with changing demographics must become a reality with a first female president symbolizing these changes. On the other hand, Trump voters will be very disappointed once reality sinks in that the flamboyant charlatan billionaires cannot deliver in the promise to make America great again in terms of raising living standards. Trump had raised expectations so high that the first to be disappointed will be his own voters. However, he will deliver on the implied promise to take America back a few decades when white male supremacy was rarely questioned at home or abroad.

Just days before the election, a FOX NEWS poll of its own audience indicated far greater pessimism about the country’s future than the general population. These people also fear deepening division in the country because the liberal establishment is an anathema to their cultural identity. With a Trump victory, the Republican popular base watching FOX NEWS will be hoping that their right wing messiah will lead them to the promised land of the early Cold War of the 1950s and to the elusive American Dream of yesteryear. Disillusionment has already set it on the part of many on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who see their dream of greater social justice far removed.

Regardless of Trump’s promises to improve the lives of the poor and the middle class by bringing jobs back home, the only certainty is the hegemony of markets over the state resulting in continued political polarization in society that has turned sharply to the right even more than it was under Reagan AND Bush-Cheney. Globalization and neoliberal policies (the model based on state empowering the private sector in every domain and incentivizing it through fiscal policy and subsidies) will continue no matter what Trump promised/threatened, and that will result in further capital concentration and downward pressure on middle class living standards and sociopolitical polarization will become more evident.

Parading the confederate flag and a hunting rifle, the Trump voter will continue to feel one with the apartheid culture of the past. Trump’s supporters will feel marginalized and will become more fanatical. By contrast, the Clinton voter supporting trans-gender rights and the woman’s right to choose will be optimistic that the time has come for pluralism to expand the all-inclusive socio-cultural net. By the end of Trump’s first hundred days, neither the Trump nor Clinton voter will see much evidence to celebrate a future rise in living standards.

Many academic economists, private investment firms, the IMF, the World Bank, and OECD estimate that low growth will be accompanied by market concentration and jobs exported to cheap labor markets, keeping American wages low in the coming years. The average median net worth of Americans ranks lower than 18 other nations and dropping as personal debt is rising. Misplaced optimism on the part of Republicans will soon be replaced with pessimism almost as intense as that of the Democrat voter.

Campaign promises to raise living standards have been made by every presidential candidate in the last four decades. Living standards have been declining and they will continue on that trajectory according to all studies on future economic prospects. Considering the low-growth global economic environment, the high US debt under a system that encourages more capital concentration and export of high paying jobs, no one expects inflation adjusted improvement in living standards during the next four years. Moreover, the low interest rates, which stimulated some very modest growth since the recession of 2008, are ending. The absence of monetary stimulus will further impact middle class credit and the consumer-driven economy.

Contrary to appearances, Trump will be limited in what measures he can pass through congress that relies heavily on wealthy donors and lobbyists for campaign finance. The executive branch will be weaker than it was when Obama succeeded an unpopular president in 2008 amid a deep recession and US military intervention. The legislative branch will be more aggressive toward the executive branch than it was under Obama. The result will be greater political division that only helps corporate America. The share of the economic pie for the middle class and workers will continue to shrink This in no small measure because the sharp rise in the public debt will require higher indirect taxes, cuts in entitlement programs, and higher interest rates to attract buyers for US treasury bonds – presumably a risk free asset threatened by rising rapidly rising debt levels undermining the dollar’s value.

Besides the structurally weak economy under neoliberal policies and corporate welfare, several factors will lead to sharper political division in the next four years. First, Republicans will be predictably hostile to any Democrat policy proposal from background checks on guns to relief for college debt aimed to further the Democratic Party’s popular base. Second, many conservatives will use the Trump victory to rally popular support for an extreme right wing agenda to keep the populist wing of the Republican Party strong. Third, Trump already set the divisive tone by alienating every social group in the country, but was well rewarded for it, thus reflecting the ideological, political and cultural milieu of the American mainstream now entrenched on the far right of the spectrum.

People who voted Trump will feel vindicated about their attitudes toward women, minorities and foreigner from Latin America and the Middle East. As their living standards decline, they will become more fanatic. Their church leaders and local civic leaders along with right wing talk radio and FOX NEWS will encourage right wing fanaticism because they all have an ally in the White House. To appease the Republican voters, along with local law enforcement, many in the military generally accepting of a police state, President Trump will likely focus on an infrastructural development program to create some new jobs. At the same time, he will strengthen defense while fighting out with mainstream Republicans about rapprochement with Russia and withdrawal from regime change foreign policies.

Co-optation of the Popular Base

For both political parties, the biggest challenge will be to co-opt the masses while serving Wall Street and the defense/intelligence industry establishment. The Democratic Party is indeed an umbrella that includes elements ranging from Rockefeller Republicans especially suburban women opposed right wing populism, to progressive social democrats and even some espousing a form of socialism. As middle class living standards continue to decline, in accordance with IMF predictions among others, the ability of the Democrat party to remain a large umbrella will be diminished, especially after Clinton’s crushing defeat.

Unless the Democrats revert back to FDR’s New Deal politics of the 1930s, something that neoliberals and their wealthy donors adamantly oppose as do Republicans, the party will have to choose between remaining in the camp of Rockefeller Republicanism like Clinton, or abandon its neoliberal commitments and move closer to the Bernie Sanders camp.

The election of 2016 proved that Republicans have moved farther to the right than anyone could have predicted. Nevertheless, divisions remain between traditional economic/fiscal conservatives, some Libertarians, and populist socio-cultural-religious conservatives, including the Ku Klux Klan that endorsed Trump. For now, Republicans have the luxury to ignore the changing demographics – Hispanics and African-American voters along with younger voters.

No matter how charismatic the Republican or Democrat political leader, it will not be easy to compensate for the growing chasm between rich and poor. As much as ideology matters, in the end the Democrat voter cannot pay her bills with LBGTQ bumper stickers any more than the Republican voter can do so with the confederate flag. No matter the obfuscating political and media rhetoric about disparate social groups transcending social class, socioeconomic factors determine class as they always have. Both parties will try to indoctrinate their voters to live by ideology alone, as churches convinced the faithful masses that salvation of their soul was the only thing that matters.

Suppressing class struggle evident in all aspects of society, the media will continue to propagate for class collaboration using nationalism as the catalyst. Subservience to capital identified with the national interests is a historically rooted belief that has remained in the social consciousness as secular dogma and taught in schools as gospel truth. The media perpetually delivers the message that if there is a problem in the political economy the culprit is the political class, the elected official and not the financial elites; certainly not capitalism as a system engendering structural inequality.

Trump will be no different than politicians of both parties that try to distract public opinion by directing attention away from domestic issues to foreign enemies new and old alike; pursuing the dream of Pax Americana despite its costs and limitations in a multi-polar world order where East Asia plays a dominant global role. The only leverage of the US is to keep Asia divided by demonizing China, as Trump has done repeatedly. Demonizing a foreign enemy to distract from focusing on domestic problems worked during the Cold War to engender sociopolitical conformity amid the triumph of Pax Americana. In the absence of a Communist bloc, the counter-terrorism ideology that replaced anti-Communism will be intensified under a Trump administration because it is in the interest of the defense industries.

As we have seen since 9/11, there are limits and monetary and political costs to the counter-terrorism, considering that US policy and practices actually contribute to the growth of terrorism not its elimination. Even the most gullible right wing Trump fanatics realize that polluted water in Flint Michigan has nothing to do with ISIS, and everything to do with the massive tax breaks of the state’s Republican governor to corporations and the rich of that state. Similarly, people are aware that after several trillion dollars spent in Middle East wars and counter-terrorism, the US public debt has risen sharply and the economy weakened.

Sociopolitical Polarization under Corporatocracy

Even for the apathetic masses that do not bother with elections, the magic of the ballot box affords the illusion that people have a voice in the political arena. Politicians, pundits and the media remind the public that they have only themselves to blame for their elected officials. They rarely mention rich donors behind the political class that decides who runs for elected office. The realization that people’s prospects are not improving, that their children are not experiencing upward socioeconomic mobility, and policy works to benefit a small segment of society drives some to the extreme right and others to the left.

The weakened center that Democrats claimed to represent in fact causes more people to rebel from the right because it is socially and ideologically acceptable as it has deep historical roots going back to the Civil War. Trump’s victory offers ample proof of this reality. By contrast, the US, unlike many countries around the world, has no historical tradition of sustained strong left wing politics, and see right through the hollow liberal rhetoric behind which is Wall Street financial interests.

Just beneath the thin veil of conformity that the media, politicians and mainstream institutions promote, there is lingering sociopolitical polarization that will become more pronounced now that Trump is elected and legitimized neo-Fascism in America. The mainstream media actually reinforces sociopolitical polarization mainly caused by structural conditions in the economy and a political system representing corporatocracy (rule by the corporations). FOX News, right wing talk radio, among others advocates a more authoritarian/militarist/police state course for society. The rest of the media presents itself as ‘objective’ propagates for the façade of a pluralistic society that permits cultural diversity, but it is as committed to corporatocracy as the right wing. In short, corporatocracy led to the election of a populist Republican who is as close to an authoritarian leader and open to Fascism as any in the past.

Regardless of whether it supported Republican or Democrat candidates, the mainstream media in search of the culprit for the public debt is critical of social security, subsidized housing and health care for the lower strata of society, school lunches, and social programs. At the same time, the media echoes Wall Street in blaming government for the conditions of poverty that the political economy creates. Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ slogan referring to Washington never mentioned the source of the swamp which is Wall Street and its lobbyists. Therefore, the media never blames corporatocracy but the elected officials serving it in order to preserve the system. By embracing the authoritarian Republican leader, the majority voters are revealing that they see greater hope for their future under such a regime that promises to fight corporatocracy than they do under a Democrat leader linked to Wall Street.

Political Co-optation Strategy

In their struggle to broaden their popular base, aspects of Bonapartism, the political strategy of projecting the impression of rising above classes, have been embraced by both political parties, especially the Republicans. Unless the political parties representing capital co-opt the disillusioned middle class and working class elements; unless they give them an outlet to express their disapproval with a political economy favoring the rich; unless they give them hope that the system works for them, then bourgeois democracy collapses and a form of authoritarianism ensues. This is already a reality in Trump’s America.

A precursor to Fascism in Europe, Bonapartism would not be possible unless all mainstream institutions and not just the political parties and media contributed to the promotion of institutional conformity. Although a segment of the population sees past such efforts at conformity and supports the reformist candidates – Bernie Sanders in 2016 – invariably those candidates are co-opted by the mainstream and bring along the masses. This was the case with Senator Sanders who managed to lead a grass roots movement only to deliver it in the hands of the Wall Street candidate, as Sanders described Clinton.

Partly because of the Sanders candidacy, Clinton succeeded to some degree in co-opting the progressive elements of the left into the Democrat Party. A continuation of the defunct Tea Party behind which was energy corporations and right wing billionaires, Trump’s populist ‘revenge anti-establishment politics’ was even more successful in co-opting the masses that the Democrats. While the Democrats efforts focused on de-radicalizing the progressive elements by securing loyalty of their leaders into the mainstream, Republican efforts focused on driving them even farther toward fanaticism as an expression of dissatisfaction with the Democrat status quo that implicitly castigated the corporate elites.

Co-optation of the masses by Republicans necessarily entailed a populist appeal to social/cultural conservatives, mostly angry whites who feel besieged by demographic and structural economic changes in society. Instead of analyzing the root causes of structural inequality built into the system, Trump backers blame other social groups, but refused to criticize the political economy because it is unpatriotic to question capitalism. They believe that if all minorities somehow disappeared and no immigrants ever entered the land, then their social and economic problems would disappear as well and their status would magically flourish.

Because of demographic changes and downward income pressures, the traditional Republican appeal confined only to fiscal/economic, and defense-security conservatives is no longer sufficient to elect a president. Revenge politics of extreme right wing populism was more the message of the Trump team promising to clean up Washington, to distance itself from the UN, dilute NATO, exit from international trade agreements or re-negotiate them, and discipline corporations while first incentivizing them so they do not take jobs into cheap labor markets overseas.

Disgruntled social/cultural conservatives liked Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric against the political and economic establishment, against minorities, Muslims, and women. His emotional appeal similar to that of the Nazi Party (‘give people someone to hate’) worked because Republican right wing populism has deep roots and offers hope for reverting to a racist/sexist/xenophobic America of the past instead of the one that exists now under current demographic and economic conditions.

The irony is that Obama’s America operated under a regime many would justifiably label quasi-police state and institutionalized racism was evident despite an African-American president. Police officers were shooting unarmed black males and a criminal justice system reflecting institutional racism not so far off what Trump and many of followers openly or covertly advocate as a reaction to political correctness and equal opportunity institutional access (affirmative action).

Weak Executive Branch, Strong Wall Street

Wall Street pharmaceuticals and defense-related stocks celebrated with a sharp rise to welcome a Trump victory. However, a weak executive branch is inevitable under the new president, but it should not be confused with a weak governmental structure typically characteristic of developing nations. In much of Africa, and parts of Latin America and Asia, states are unable to raise taxes and deliver basic services to their citizens. Although the state structure in the US is hardly like that of developing nations, there are signs that it is weakening at the expense of the masses under the neoliberal regime Trump will follow no matter his hyperbolic rhetoric against globalization. The only certainty about the US election outcome is policy continuity, which is what the markets want, regardless of a president-elected who mobilized popular support by appealing to racism, xenophobia, sexism and authoritarian style politics.

To maintain corporate hegemony over the state, Wall Street and the media it owns can only prevail if the legislative branch is compliant and checks the powers of the executive that may dilute corporate welfare policies in order to maintain the social order by providing certain basic social programs from affordable health care and social security to affordable education. One glaring contradiction of the political economy is that people must be convinced that their interest is inevitably linked to the fortunes of big capital and not contrary to it; that big capital is not responsible for declining living standards for America’s middle class and workers in the last forty years; and that the enemy is the politician.

The media helps to keep the focus on the politician (establishment political class of both parties) as the evil force behind the calamities that befall society; never on the capitalists on whose behalf the politician conducts policy. The media will always examine tantalizing stories of all sorts about the personal lives of politicians, stories that deserve attention because they reflect integrity of character. However, the media never examines the politician as a servant of big capital and the massive influence of corporate lobbies in determining legislation. The media will never cover social justice issues, because they lead back to the structural inequality built into the political economy. In other words, the business of perpetual mass indoctrination and distraction is essential to keep the majority under the illusion that they live in a democracy – rule by the people – when in fact it is Corporatocracy. In winning the presidential election, Trump gave the illusion to his followers that they have hope for structural change.

Culture wars and personality conflicts as distraction from social justice issues will remain front and center to distract people from focusing on the root causes of downward social mobility. While market hegemony is a reality of the nexus between state and capital, the media and politicians have convinced people into believing in the illusion of choice – ‘the future is in your hands’ and ‘the people have spoken’, as media headline read. The question for capitalists who were divided between Clinton and Trump is how to manage the economy and what role the state must play against the background of intense global competition and shifting balance of power from the West to the Far East. This is not to minimize the intense political rivalry, the partisanship of law enforcement and other institutions at all levels of government, or the ongoing struggle for policy influence.

CONCLUSIONS: Revolt of the Extreme Right

Trump’s victory temporarily sets into hibernation the majority popular base of the Republican Party while emboldening its more extreme right wing elements. There is nothing like the illusion of identifying with a political victory to appease those feeling marginalized among the lower layers of the social pyramid. Once it becomes evident that domestic conditions will continue as they have in the recent past, contrary to Trump’s lofty promises to the middle class and working families, disillusioned voters will have to be content with the Republican cultural agenda, strong law and order position, and strong defense policy. Republicans are more likely to support leaders advocating greater reliance on militarism and police state methods and less tolerance for dissent. The elements for an authoritarian society are already deeply rooted in the culture and will eventually come into the forefront more pronounced than ever.

Ironically, both Republican and Democrats are responsible for the underlying causes of a revolt by the masses rallying around a right wing demagogue appearing to be in a struggle against the establishment. Judging by the performance of the US stick market, the establishment knows he represents Wall Street and not the unemployed worker in Cleveland. The media has convinced the average American that it is anathema, un-American to rebel from the left against the unjust system but patriotic to do so from the right. With the exception of the Klan label, there is no stigma attached to rebelling from the right against the establishment which includes not just Washington but corporate America. The job of the right wing politician will be to co-opt the popular base and keep it loyal to corporatocracy.

While the corporate media sings the praises of globalization and subtly criticizes Trump’s economic nationalism, it can only carry that message up to a point without appearing unpatriotic. The dilemma for the corporate elites is not to be caught in contradictory messages when trying to rally support of the masses, something that has become exceedingly difficult because of the downward socioeconomic mobilization. This is where it becomes convenient to blame politicians, and to keep the executive branch weak and government divided so that people blame everything on politicians who are actually in gridlock in the first place because they differ about which segment of the economy and which corporations benefit more than others as a result of policy.

Political campaign promises are like happy endings in children’s novels. People enjoy reading and dreaming about such things but they do not really expect that everyone lives happily ever after. The lives of the vast majority of Americans will not improve no matter who had won the White House in 2016. Symbolically and not just because she is a woman, but also in terms of engendering greater social harmony among the disparate demographic groups, Clinton was better suited for the sake of continuity from the Obama administration. However, Trump will serve Wall Street and neoliberal policies and globalization just as faithfully because corporate America will give him no choice.

Because of objective domestic and international conditions in the early 21st century, the middle class is on a continuing downward slope that radicalizes people either on the right or the left will realize cannot be fixed by populist right wingers or mainstream Democrats. Hence polarization in society will continue and it will become much worse after the next deep recession in the US because the political economy is increasingly serving a much narrower social base than it has since the 1920s. Trump has broken all political and ideological taboos about crossing the line from traditional conservatism to flirting with Fascism. This is America’s political future and it has been here for some time only to manifest itself more candidly in Trump.

Jon V. Kofas, Ph.D. is a retired professor of History/international political economy, author of 11 books and two dozen articles on international development

10 November 2016

By Ali Abunimah

On a day that most people expected not to see, we can say few things with certainty.

One of them is that Hillary Clinton would have been a disastrous president for those supporting the Palestinian struggle for their rights.

Her failed campaign pitched her as the natural successor to President Barack Obama, the Democrat who just unconditionally handed Israel the biggest military aid package in history.

During the Democratic primary campaign, Clinton marketed herself as a belligerent and violently hawkish allyof Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the Palestinian people.

She vowed to make blocking the nonviolent Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement a priority of her would-be administration.

She went out of her way to campaign against the mildest efforts to hold Israel accountable, including appealing directly to members of her United Methodist Church last spring to vote against divestment from companies that assist and profit from Israel’s occupation.

Clinton positioned herself as an anti-Palestinian extremist at a time when the Democratic Party base showed itself more open than ever to embracing Palestinian rights.

Her extreme support for Israel is just one of the many ways she and her party operatives pandered to donorsand revealed themselves to be out of touch with large segments of the country they had taken for granted.

But Hillary Clinton will not be president.
President Trump

The only thing that can be said about President-elect Donald Trump with any confidence is that no one knows exactly what he will do.

Earlier in the campaign he insisted that he would be even-handed in dealings with Israelis and Palestinians, driving many of Israel’s most fanatical and neoconservative supporters into Clinton’s arms.

But facing a backlash, he quickly pivoted, promising Netanyahu he would recognize Jerusalem as the “undivided capital of the State of Israel,” and actively encouraging Israel to continue building colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Trump still showed flashes of unwillingness to appease. After winning his party’s nomination in July, he brushed off a reporter’s question about whether he would follow the “tradition” of other Republican candidates and visit Israel.

“It’s a tradition, but I’m not traditional,” Trump shot back.

Even if these changes reveal an erratic man with no fixed views, Trump’s most pro-Israel positions don’t differ much in substance from the policies of Obama, on whose watch settlement construction more than matched the pace during the term of President George W. Bush.
Visceral fears

In his victory speech last night, Trump returned to a regular theme: “We will get along with all other nations willing to get along with us … We’ll have great relationships. We expect to have great, great relationships.”

That will be little comfort to people in the US and around the world whose visceral fears are stoked by the forces that helped propel Trump’s rise: his racist baiting and incitement against Muslims and Mexicans, his boasts about sexually assaulting women, his denial of global warming and his indulgence of anti-Semitic white supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan, which gave him its endorsement.

The Israeli counterparts of these vile American racists are celebrating Trump’s victory today.

Netanyahu congratulated Trump, calling him a “true friend of Israel.”

“I am confident President-elect Trump and I will continue to strengthen the alliance between our two countries and bring it to greater heights,” the Israeli prime minister added.

Naftali Bennett, the Israeli education minister who has boasted about his killings of Arabs, hailed the coming Trump era.

“Trump’s victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause,” Bennett said.

But the so-called two-state solution was already dead and Clinton would not have changed that.
Fighting back

The Palestinian cause has already shifted to a struggle for equality against an entrenched system of Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid anchored and rooted in support from the US bipartisan establishment.

Palestinians were not waiting for the result of the US election to decide which way their struggle would go.

Trump has won, but some things have not changed. Over the last decade, support for Palestinian rights has been rising in the United States, particularly among the young – and in the increasingly diverse Democratic Party base that has been utterly failed by its establishment leadership.

More than ever, people understand that US support for Israel comes not only from the same places where support for white supremacy, mass incarceration, unchecked police violence and US militarism and imperialism are strongest.

It also stems from the liberal, pro-human rights circles that championed Clinton, who more often than not equate colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, occupation and resistance.

This base has no choice now but to rally from its despair, which at any rate the election of either candidate would have precipitated, to keep organizing and fighting for its rights and the rights of people around the world.

The truth is, we had no choice but to wage that fight anyway.

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books. Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.

First published in Electronic Intifada

10 November 2016

By Poppy McPherson

One year after a historic election put a civilian government in
charge, the country’s army is using brutal methods to regain its
popularity.

On a cool night last November, a euphoric crowd surged around the
headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD)
in Yangon. Supporters danced and waved flags as result after result
was announced from a digital billboard. It was a landslide. Amid the
cheers, a man named Than Htay told me he how he had waited decades to
vote freely.

For the first time in more than half a century of a brutal junta,
civilians would be in charge of the country. But a year after the
vote, it’s not clear just who is in charge in Myanmar — and Myanmar’s
military, once despised, is riding a new wave of support.

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The reason? An enemy propped up for decades by the army has made a
resurgence in the public imagination, if not in reality. The military
is restoring its political power by returning to its war footing
against Rohingya Muslims, a persecuted minority who for years have
been loathed as “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, despite their
presence in Myanmar dating back centuries.

The Rohingya have been discriminated against for generations, but the
persecution has grown particularly intense in recent years.

It was dictatorial Gen. Ne Win who, after seizing power in a coup in
1962, pushed through the 1974 Emergency Immigration Act and 1982
Citizenship Law that stripped Rohingya of their citizenship. In Burma:
A Nation at the Crossroads, Benedict Rogers quotes a former government
minister as saying the junta chief “had an ‘unwritten policy’ to get
rid of Muslims, Christians, Karens and other ethnic peoples, in that
order.’”

Government prejudice has been mixed with demagogic hatred, with the
Rohingya portrayed as foreigners and, more recently, vehicles for the
spread of jihad. In the era of the Islamic State, existing suspicions
have become bound up with a global narrative of Islamist extremism.
Nationalist Buddhist monks like Ashin Wirathu have framed Islam as an
existential threat to Myanmar, stoking fears that Muslims are both
outbreeding the Buddhist majority and connecting to international
terrorist groups.

The Myanmar military now claims to be facing an organized rebel
insurgency among the Rohingya, chiefly in the western province of
Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. It’s true that the far-flung state
has been home to various insurgencies, both Buddhist and Muslim. In
the past year, the Arakan Army rebels, comprised of Rakhine Buddhists,
has fought several skirmishes with the military.

In the early hours of Oct. 9, scores of assailants armed with swords
and pistols attacked three border posts in Maungdaw Township, northern
Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. Nine police officers were killed
and five soldiers then died pursuing the attackers. Both the
authorities and the public blamed the Rohingya, with the government
accusing the attackers of being Rohingya Muslim terrorists trained by
the Taliban, citing evidence obtained — possibly by force — after
soldiers captured some of the alleged culprits. In a later interview,
Suu Kyi backpedaled, saying the claims came from only one person and
may not be reliable.

The subsequent crackdown was swift and, according to multiple
accounts, brutal. There have been accusations of arbitrary arrests,
burned villages, extrajudicial killings, and rape.

All have been met with blanket denials, not only by the government but
by a public already defensive about international criticism of
Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya. Jingoistic articles have
dominated state media and Myanmar-language Facebook. “Insurgents
arrested!” (Bedraggled-looking men in a police lineup.) “Guns seized!”
(Decades-old hunting rifles).

For the military, the attack came at a convenient moment, as other
long-standing conflicts — with the Kachin rebels along the Chinese
border, and with the Ta’ang Liberation Army in Shan State — are
flaring up again. When 30 soldiers were killed this May in fighting
with the Arakan Army, another minority — but not Muslim — militia in
Rakhine, the military didn’t comment. But following the Maungdaw
attack, the authorities have been warning of a “Muslim invasion” and
promising to arm Buddhist civilian militias. The plan has fueled fears
of a repeat of 2012 violence when Rakhine Buddhist mobs — allegedly
facilitated by local authorities — set upon Rohingya Muslim
communities, burning down homes and killing scores. “For the first
time since the Kokang crisis of early 2015, the military is getting
strong public support for its actions,” commented Richard Horsey, a
Yangon-based political analyst, referring to a spasm of fighting in
the north last year which killed more than 100 soldiers and rallied
support for the armed forces.

In the wake of the Maungdaw attacks, Rakhine Buddhists marched around
villages chanting their support for the army, while leading Myanmar
journalists questioned why Rohingya were “uncooperative” with the
military. A reporter who gave an interview to the New York Times
saying he had witnessed soldiers shooting unarmed Rohingya later
retracted his comments in a Facebook post that was shared thousands of
times. What pressures he was under to do so remain unknown.

Sittwe, the Rakhine State capital, is an hour’s flight from Yangon and
five hours away from the operation zone in Maungdaw, which is off
limits to foreign journalists. In the dusty coastal town, it’s easy to
forget how much Myanmar has changed since 2011, when the military
launched reforms. The junta apparatus is everywhere, from the hotel
whiteboards that listing the names of every guest and their room
numbers, to the secret police and informers. Checkpoints stand outside
derelict mosques, guards watching for long-gone congregants. They’re
no longer needed, as most of the Muslim population were driven out of
their homes following clashes with the Rakhine Buddhist majority in
2012, pelted with fruit by local Rakhines they trudged to the
internment camps on the outskirts of the city where they have been
confined ever since.

Inside the camps, the mood is bleak. In Maw Thi Nyar camp, Noor Islam,
a middle-aged Rohingya community leader, told me he hadn’t heard from
his sister from Maungdaw in more than a week. “She told me that her
neighbor had already been killed,” he said. During their last
conversation, she said, “Just pray for us and just pray for Maungdaw.”

He and others were convinced the rebel movement had been fabricated by
the military. “Currently, the Myanmar military is implementing their
policy,” he said as a small crowd gathered to listen in. “I’m just a
simple man, so I don’t understand, but I’m hearing from my grandmother
and grandfather and my father — because this is my ancestral land —
that the Myanmar government is trying to ethnically cleanse these
people, torturing people, eliminating people, doing such bad things to
these people.”

The next morning, two Muslim men said that they had been fishing in a
local river a few days earlier when they were detained and beaten by
the navy. One of them, Abdul Amin, lifted his longyi, the long cloth
worn by Myanmar men, to reveal purplish red marks on the backs of his
legs. “We were just taking a rest after we pulled in the net and ate
our dinner at 8 p.m.,” he said. “At that time the navy came to us and
just bound our hands and beat us with a stick, made us lie down and
beat us with a wooden stick.”

As we spoke, other Muslims gathered around, nodding in agreement as
Abdul Amin said, “It’s like it’s government policy to kill people.”

There is no evidence that the Myanmar military faked the murder of
their own border police. But few doubt that their actions over recent
years may have nourished an appetite for retaliation.

Matthew Smith, CEO and founder of Fortify Rights, a nongovernmental
organization, described the military’s “divide and conquer” strategy
in the region to rally the support of the region’s majority Buddhist
population. “It has an uncanny ability to instigate conflict between
ethnic groups, and it’s done that to great and deadly effect in
Rakhine,” he said. “We haven’t seen evidence that the attacks on
police were a false flag event but it’s clear the military is using
the situation to shore up favorable sentiment.”

“The allegations [about military atrocities] emerging from northern
Rakhine State are still difficult to verify given very limited
international and media access to date. But they are broadly
consistent with allegations that are heard from other military
operations zones, including in northern Shan and Kachin,” Horsey, the
political analyst, commented, referring to two other long-standing
conflicts between the military and minority groups.

But many local Buddhists don’t want to see a return to violence of any
kind. Rakhine Buddhists who had fled the fighting against the
suspected Rohingya insurgents in the north and were staying in a
makeshift refugee camp inside a stadium in late October said that they
had been friends with Muslims back in their home villages and met up
for religious ceremonies.

Ronan Lee, a doctoral candidate at Singapore’s Deakin University who
has done research in northern Rakhine, said that “despite the events
of 2012, many Muslim and Buddhist communities in northern Rakhine
State were keen to work together and they understood that both their
communities were better off when there was peace and trade between
them. Despite the state’s natural resources, keeping Muslim and
Buddhist communities separate and restricting Muslims’ ability to
travel has damaged the state’s economy.”

As the military’s popularity has surged following the attacks, the
civilian government’s muted response has left it looking ineffectual.
Shortly after the attacks, State Counsellor and de facto government
leader Suu Kyi flew to India. Last week, she was in Japan. She has not
visited Rakhine and neither has her president, Htin Kyaw. According to
Reuters, the Ministry of Information submitted a list of questions
about the army’s response that went unanswered. “There are really two
governments in Myanmar: the civil government and the military
government,” said Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for
Human Rights, which recently released a report on northern Rakhine.

The military retains control of vital institutions including the
ministries of defense, home affairs, the police, and immigration.
“Thus, there is a very strong military presence along the land
borders, including with Bangladesh,” Brown said. “This control coupled
with concerns about insurgencies means that the military government,
not the civilian government, is really in control in northern Rakhine
State.”

The months leading up to the Maungdaw attacks had brought rare,
civilian-led progress in the search for peace in the state. In the
face of staunch opposition from the military, the government paved the
way for an independent Rakhine commission, headed by former United
Nations chief Kofi Annan, to conduct investigations and file an
advisory report. The recommendations are due in late 2017.

Now that enterprise looks distinctly shaky. “The naming of Annan to
head up a state advisory commission is an attempt to shed light on
abuses and set the stage for some reconciliation,” said Brown.
“However, the ability of the commission to have an impact was already
limited, as it is merely advisory and the recent violence in northern
Rakhine State may have cost the commission any opportunity to have an
impact.”

More disturbing than the suggestion that the civilian government is
powerless against the military is the idea that they tacitly approve.
Nobody really knows what Suu Kyi thinks of the Rohingya, although she
has often been criticized for her failure to act. There is also
evidence that other senior NLD officials are deeply hostile.

After the October attacks, state media, which is run by the
civilian-led Ministry of Information, has carried opinion pieces
condemning “fabricated” allegations of human rights abuses by the
military and accused journalists of being “hand in glove” with
terrorists. They have referred to Rohingya as “thorns.”

On Facebook, Zaw Htay, a spokesman for the government, singled out a
journalist at the national English-language newspaper, the Myanmar
Times, for her reporting on alleged military rapes. “We support and
advise government to take legal action against [the Times] and those
who are responsible for fabricating false news,” read one of the many
comments. The reporter was fired, reportedly following calls to the
paper by Zaw Htay, a former soldier who served in the former
military-backed administration but was kept on by Suu Kyi.

A few days ago, Zaw Htay confidently said the government and army were
“collaborating” on the crisis. “And [they have] also the same policy
on it.”

Additional reporting by Aung Naing Soe.

10 November 2016

By Jonathan Cook

The earth has been shifting under our feet for a while, but all liberals want to do is desperately cling to the status quo like a life-raft. Middle-class Britons are still hyperventiliating about Brexit, and now middle-class America is trembling at the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House.

And, of course, middle-class Americans are blaming everyone but themselves. Typifying this blinkered self-righteousness was a column yesterday, written before news of Trump’s success, from Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, Britain’s unofficial stenographer to power and Washington fanboy. He blamed everyone but Hillary Clinton for her difficult path to what he then assumed was the White House.

Well, here is some news for Freedland and American liberals. The reason Trump is heading to the Oval Office is because the Democratic party rigged the primaries to ensure that a candidate who could have beaten Trump, Bernie Sanders, did not get on the ticket. You want to blame someone, blame Clinton and the rotten-to-the-core Democratic party leadership.

But no, liberals won’t be listening because they are too busy blaming Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing the truth about the Democratic leadership set out in the Clinton campaign emails – and Russia for supposedly stealing them.

Blame lies squarely too with Barack Obama, the great black hope who spent eight years proving how wedded he was to neoliberal orthodoxy at home and a neoconservative agenda abroad.

While liberals praised him to the heavens, he poured the last US treasure into propping up a failed banking system, bankrupting the country to fill the pockets of a tiny, already fabulously wealthy elite. The plutocrats then recycled vast sums to lobbyists and representatives in Congress to buy control there and make sure the voice of ordinary Americans counted for even less than it did before.

Obama also continued the futile “war on terror”, turning the world into one giant battlefield that made every day a payday for the arms industry. The US has been dropping bombs on jihadists and civilians alike, while supplying the very same jihadists with arms to kill yet more civilians.

And all the while, have liberals been campaigning against the military-industrial complex that stole their political system? No, of course not. They have been worrying about the mass migrations of refugees – those fleeing the very resource wars their leaders stoked.

Then there is the liberal media that served as a loyal chorus to Clinton, trying to persuade us that she would make a model president, and to ignore what was in plain sight: that Clinton is even more in the pocket of the bankers and arms dealers than Obama (if that were possible) and would wage more, not less war.

Do I sound a little like Trump as I rant against liberals? Yes, I do. And while you are busy dismissing me as a closet Trump supporter, you can continue your furious refusal to examine the reasons why a truly progressive position appears so similar to a far-right one like Trump’s.

Because real progressives are as frustrated and angry about the status quo as are the poor, vulnerable and disillusioned who turned to Trump. And they had no choice but to vote for Trump because there was no one aside from him in the presidential race articulating anything that approximated the truth.

Sanders was ousted by Clinton and her corrupt coterie. Jill Stein of the Greens was made invisible by a corrupt electoral system. It was either vote for Clinton and the putrid status quo, or vote for Trump and a possibility for change.

Yes, Trump is very bad. He is as much a product of the plutocracy that is now America as Clinton. He, like Clinton, will do nothing to fix the most important issue facing humankind: runaway climate change. He is a climate denier, she is a climate evader.

But unlike Clinton, Trump understood the rising popular anger at the “system”, and he was articulate enough to express it – all it took was a howl of pain.

Trump isn’t the antithesis of liberal America. You liberals created him. You unleashed this monster. It is you in the mirror. You stayed silent, you took no stand while your country was stolen from you. In fact, you did worse: you enthusiastically voted time after time for those who did the stealing.

Now the path is clear and the route fast. The precipice is ahead, and American liberals are firmly in the driving seat.

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

9 November 2016

by Binu Mathew

At the stroke of midnight November 9, 2016, Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi imposed an undeclared economic emergency on India. With a stroke of pen he wiped out Rs 15 lakh crores in cash from the system. What prompted this drastic step? What will be the fall out of the action for Indian economy is a  billion dollar question.

First let us hear what are the reasonings of the government.  This what PM Modi said in an unprecedented address to the nation at 8 PM last night.

“In the past decades, the spectre of corruption and black money has grown. It has weakened the effort to remove poverty.

There comes a time in the history of a country’s development when a need is felt for a strong and decisive step. For years, this country has felt that corruption, black money and terrorism are festering sores, holding us back in the race towards development.

Terrorism is a frightening threat. So many have lost their lives because of it. But have you ever thought about how these terrorists get their money? Enemies from across the border run their operations using fake currency notes. This has been going on for years. Many times, those using fake five hundred and thousand rupee notes have been caught and many such notes have been seized.

On the one hand is the problem of terrorism; on the other is the challenge posed by corruption and black money.

To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the five hundred rupee and thousand rupee currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight, that is 8th November 2016.

So, in this fight against corruption, black money, fake notes and terrorism, in this movement for purifying our country, will our people not put up with difficulties for some days? I have full confidence that every citizen will stand up and participate in this ‘mahayagna’.

New notes of five hundred rupees and two thousand rupees, with completely new design will be introduced.”

So, according to the government’s logic the demonitisation is to fight corruption, black money and terrorism. Well and good. They why the re-introduction of new 500 and even a new Rs 2000 note? Will this not be easier for black money hoarders, corrupt officials and terrorists to handle 2000 note? Then why is this surgical strike on economy?

First thing first.

The all important Uttar Pradesh (UP) elections are coming up. Modi came to power promising to bring back black money stashed in overseas banks and deposit into everyone’s bank account 15 lakh rupees each. Two and half years have passed since this promise made. Not a single rupee appeared in anyone’s bank account. He had to show his electorates that he is doing something to tackle black money. No one should ask how can Modi bring back black money hoarded in Swiss banks or elsewhere by demonitisation. One can blissfully forget that big money hoarders don’t stash their cash under their beds but in the safety of overseas banks in Switzerland, Mauritius or Maccau. Who is Modi fooling? The majority of poor Indians who are leading a life with just Rs 32 to spend a day.

And to the argument on corruption, here is a fact:

The Indian Express reported that “twenty-nine state-owned banks wrote off a total of Rs 1.14 lakh crore of bad debts between financial years 2013 and 2015, much more than they had done in the preceding nine years.” RBI refused to give the names of the beneficiaries. We can’t imagine that that the largesse went small loan holders. If it isn’t corruption, what else is?

What about the black money converted into gold and real estate?

Well, the corruption, black money, terrorism argument falls flat on its face. Then what must have been the government’s other motive?

Scrutinising Modi’s speech closely will give some more clues.

He said, from midnight onwards “…..The five hundred and thousand rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become just worthless pieces of paper.”

Here he gives it away. “Anti-national and anti-social elements”! All those who hold a 500 Rupee note or 1000 Rupee note is an anti-national! If you follow the argument to its logical conclusion most of Indian citizens have joined the long list of anti-nationals that this government has been making ever since it assumed office in 2014. Modi further says, “ ….in this movement for purifying our country, will our people not put up with difficulties for some days? I have full confidence that every citizen will stand up and participate in this ‘mahayagna’.”

Purify the country? De ja vu! Haven’t you heard this same rhetoric from Europe half a century before? What was the ‘final solution’?

Modi also draws from Aryan mythology and calls his mission a ‘mahayagna’. Nothing surprising to hear from the Prime Minister of a secular nation who calls himself “I’m a Hindu nationalist because I’m a born Hindu”.  These subtle insinuations will have a big impact on the coming UP elections, where Modi’s BJP is trying to consolidate Hindu votes against the ‘Muslim threat’. Remember that BJP orchestrated a riot in Muzaffarnagar in Western UP and boasted about it to gain to rich dividends. BJP won 72 of 80 seats in UP in 2014 parliament election.

Behind Modi’s move there is also the ambition of the PM to make India a cashless country. Even Sweden, one of the most advanced countries in the world, could not fulfill this ambition. How can India with a 80% or more of rural population achieve this? Recently hackers breached and the stole the details of 3.2 million debit cards in India. This breach is a warning that the move to cashless world is fraught with security dangers. Moreover, one can suspect, if this demonitisation is an act to help now emerging payment wallet companies like PayTM. PayTM has come out with a 2 page jacket advertisement praising Modi on demonitisation.

Is that all to the story? I think there is more to it than meets the eye.

Here are some facts.

>> Market capitalization of Public sector banks fell from 4.5 lakhs in Jan 2015 to 2.7 lakhs  in January 2016

>> Public sector banks sitting on over Rs 7 lakh crore stressed assets, including Non Performing Assets and restructured loans.

>> The Hindu Businessline reported that the sharp deterioration of public sector banks’ finances in the last couple of years has shaken investors’ confidence.

>> The Business Standard reported that  the Reserve Bank of India had to buy a lot of bonds from the secondary market – Rs 2.1 lakh crore in the past 12 months, to help banks come in a neutral liquidity zone now.

>> The Business Standard again wrote -unless a bank lends money, it can’t create more money. Since banks have slowed their lending exercise, enough money is not getting created and therefore, the multiplier has slumped to a multi-year low. This gap in money creation has led to liquidity shortage, prompting RBI to step in with bond purchase support.

>> The Business Standard again wrote -Liquidity in the banking system has again become tight because of a number of reasons. Apart from the weak money multiplier, currency in circulation has risen among the public because of festive demand. Holding cash means taking money away from banks and this contributes to the liquidity shortage. According to Credit Suisse estimates, the currency in circulation increased by Rs 2.6 lakh crore over the past 12 months.

From above all these reports it is amply clear that the Indian banks were facing a liquidity crisis. Ever since Modi came to power he was trying with all his might to kick start the economy. Like Donald Trump in USA his mantra was to make “India a manufacturing hub”. In spite of all his efforts, according to available data manufacturing output did not pick up but actually fell over the past few years.

Modi might have thought or his advisers coaxed him to believe that to kick start the economy and ‘make India great again’ a surgical strike on economy was necessary. RBI was helpless since it could not increase liquidity for fear of igniting inflation. So the last card on the table was to call back all the money in circulation and deposit it in banks thereby foisting the wobbling banking industry, and the chance of increasing liquidity after the pain of the surgery was over.

Look at the timing of the announcement. It was just after Diwali, the biggest festival in India, when largest amount of cash is in circulation.  India has physical cash circulation of Rs 17 lakh crore , of which 88 per cent is Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. According to the RBI press conference after the announcement of the PM, there are 16.5 billion ‘500-rupee’ notes and 6.7 billion ‘1000-rupee’ notes in circulation right now.  Roughly Rs 15 lakh crores was sucked back from the   system. 15 lakh crore rupees will go back into banks. And there is restriction on how much you can withdraw from your account. Now it is Rs 20,000 for a week. There lies the catch.

By fractional banking, the banks can lend several times of that amount. Who will benefit? Not the poor farmers who are committing by their thousands every month. Not the children who are dying of malnutrition in several parts of the country. Not the small manufacturers who are struggling to keep up their businesses? Who will benefit? The crony capitalists that props up the Modi regime. This demonetization is the biggest crony capitalist neo-liberalist coup that has ever taken place in India. Never doubt it, India will have to pay a heavy price for it.

Last night, after the news broke, I looked at my wallet and found some ‘anti-national’ notes in it. I wanted some ‘nationalist’ notes to survive for the ‘hard days’ ahead. I went to several ATMs. Most of them had only 500, 1000 notes. One which I saw had a long  line of people standing in front of it. I went to a less crowded ATM machine. There was a small queue. One man who was in the cabin was furiously withdrawing money, keeping us all waiting. One gentleman got angry and barged into the ATM and asked him to stop and leave.

People are getting infuriated. Panic is spreading. Two days of complete banking ban, limits on withdrawal when the banks open. What will someone do in case of a medical emergency? A life support machine costs Rs 75000 in rent for a day! That’s for the people who are linked to banks.

What about nearly 80% of Indians who don’t have access to banks, or don’t depend on banks for their daily lives? How much hardship they’ll have to pay to change whatever little ‘anti-national notes’ they hold. If they have a bank account, and if they choose to go to bank, their money will be sucked into the loan they owe to the bank, which most in rural India do.

Some financial experts are worried about breaking the money chain. They are worried that breaking it will bleed the economy and getting it back on track will be a hard task. Who will suffer? The poor people of India. Real wages could plunge.   Will the poor and the middle classes remain mute spectators, while their wealth being sucked up by the banks and eventually the crony capitalists? Like that man in the ATM, will they revolt? If they revolt the financial emergency will turn to political emergency.

Meanwhile, the rich crony capitalists will laugh all the way to the bank.

Binu Mathew is the editor of www.countercurrents.org

9 November 2016

by  Dr Ramzy Baroud

Last July, the Palestinian Authority took the unexpected, although belated step of seeking Arab backing in suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration. That ‘declaration’ was the first ever explicit commitment made by Britain, and the West in general, to establish a Jewish homeland atop an existing Palestinian homeland.

It is too early to tell whether the Arab League would heed the Palestinian call, or if the PA would even follow through, especially considering that the latter has the habit of making too many proclamations backed by little or no action.

However, it seems that the next year will witness a significant tug of war regarding the Balfour Declaration, the 100th anniversary of which will be commemorated on November 02, 2017.

But who is Balfour, what is the Balfour Declaration and why does all of this matters today?

Britain’s Foreign Secretary from late 1916, Arthur James Balfour, had pledged Palestine to another people. That promise was made on November 02, 1917 on behalf of the British government in the form of a letter sent to the leader of the Jewish community in Britain, Walter Rothschild.

At the time, Britain was not even in control of Palestine, which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Either way, Palestine was never Balfour’s to so casually transfer to anyone else. His letter read:

“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

He concluded, “I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”

Balfour was hardly acting on his own. True, the Declaration bears his name, yet, in reality, he was a loyal agent of an Empire with massive geopolitical designs, not only concerning Palestine alone, but with Palestine as part of a larger Arab landscape.

Only a year earlier, another sinister document was introduced, albeit secretly. It was endorsed by another top British diplomat, Mark Sykes and, on behalf of France, by François Georges-Picot. The Russians were informed of the agreement, as they too had received a piece of the Ottoman cake.

The document indicated that, once the Ottomans were soundly defeated, their territories, including Palestine, would be split among the prospective victorious parties.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, also known as the ‘Asia Minor Agreement’, was signed in secret one hundred years ago, two years into World War I. It signified the brutal nature of colonial powers that rarely associated land and resources with people who lived upon or owned them.

The centerpiece of the agreement was a map that was marked with straight lines by a China graph pencil. The map largely determined the fate of the Arabs, dividing them in accordance with various haphazard assumptions of tribal and sectarian lines.

The improvised map consisted not only of lines but also colors, along with language that attested to the fact that the two countries viewed the Arab region purely on materialistic terms, without paying the slightest attention to the possible repercussions of slicing up entire civilizations with a multifarious history of co-operation and conflict.

The Sykes-Picot negotiations were completed in March 1916 and, although official, was secretly signed on May 19, 1916.

WWI concluded on November 11, 1918, after which the division of the Ottoman Empire began in earnest.

British and French mandates were extended over divided Arab entities, while Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement a year later, when Belfour conveyed the British government’s promise, sealing the fate of Palestinians to a life of perpetual war and turmoil.

Rarely was British-Western hypocrisy and complete disregard for the national aspiration of any other nation on full display as in the case of Palestine. Beginning with the first wave of Zionist Jewish migration to Palestine in 1882, European countries helped facilitate the movement of illegal settlers and resources, where the establishment of many colonies, large and small, was afoot.

So when Balfour sent his letter to Rothschild, the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was very much plausible.

Still, many supercilious promises were being made to the Arabs during the Great War years, as the Arab leadership sided with the British in their war against the Ottoman Empire. Arabs were promised instant independence, including that of the Palestinians.

When the intentions of the British and their rapport with the Zionists became too apparent, Palestinians rebelled, marking a rebellion that has never ceased 99 years later, and highlighting the horrific consequences of British colonialism and the eventual complete Zionist takeover of Palestine which is still felt after all of these years.

Paltry attempts to pacify Palestinian anger were to no avail, especially after the League of Nations Council in July 1922 approved the terms of the British Mandate over Palestine – which was originally granted to Britain in April 1920 – without consulting the Palestinians at all. In fact, Palestinians would disappear from the British and international radar, only to reappear as negligible rioters, troublemakers, and obstacles to the joint British-Zionist colonial concoctions.

Despite occasional assurances to the contrary, the British intention of ensuring the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine was becoming clearer with time. The Balfour Declaration was not merely an aberration, but had, indeed, set the stage for the full-scale ethnic cleansing that followed, three decades later.

In fact, that history remains in constant replay: the Zionists claimed Palestine and renamed it ‘Israel’; the British continue to support them, although never ceasing to pay lip-service to the Arabs; and the Palestinian people remain a nation that is geographically fragmented between refugee camps, in the diaspora, militarily occupied, or treated as second class citizens in a country upon which their ancestors dwelt since time immemorial.

While Balfour cannot be blamed for all the misfortunates that have befallen Palestinians since he communicated his brief, but infamous letter, the notion that his ‘promise’ embodied – that of complete disregard of the aspirations and rights of the Palestinian Arab people –that very letter is handed from one generation of British diplomats to the next, in the same way that Palestinian resistance to colonialism has and continues to spread across generations.

That injustice continues, thus the perpetuation of the conflict. What the British, the early Zionists, the Americans and subsequent Israeli governments failed to understand, and continue to ignore at their own peril, is that there can be no peace without justice and equality in Palestine; and that Palestinians will continue to resist, as long as the reasons that inspired their rebellion nearly a century ago, remain in place.

– Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada” and his latest “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story”. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

3 November 2016

by Esther Htusan, Martha Mendoza

Just five months after her party took power, Burma’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is facing international pressure over recent reports that soldiers have been killing, raping and burning homes of the country’s long-persecuted Rohingya Muslims.

The US State Department joined activist and aid groups in raising concerns about new reports of rape and murder, while satellite imagery released Monday by Human Rights Watch shows that at least three villages in the western state of Rakhine have been burned.

Burmese government officials deny the reports of attacks, and presidential spokesman Zaw Htay said Monday that United Nations representatives should visit “and see the actual situation in that region.” The government has long made access to the region a challenge, generally banning foreign aid workers and journalists.

But the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, Yanghee Lee, said serious violations, including torture, summary executions, arbitrary arrests and destruction of mosques and homes, threaten the country’s fledgling democracy.

“The big picture is that the government does not seem to have any influence over the military,” said Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, an advocacy group that focuses on the Rohingya. Burma’s widely criticized constitution was designed to give the armed forces power and independence.

A three-week surge in violence by the military was prompted by the killings of nine police officers at border posts on 9 October in Rakhine, home to Burma’s 800,000 Rohingya. There have been no arrests, and a formerly unknown Islamist militant group has taken responsibility.

Although they’ve lived in Burma for generations, Rohingya are barred from citizenship in the nation of 50 million, and instead live as some of the most oppressed people in the world. Since communal violence broke out in 2012, more than 100,000 people have been driven from their homes to live in squalid camps guarded by police. Some have tried to flee by boat, but many ended up becoming victims of human trafficking or were held for ransom.

When Ms Suu Kyi’s party was elected earlier this year after more than five decades of military rule, the political shift offered a short, tense window of peace. But that quickly ended as the former political prisoner and champion of human rights failed to clamp down on military atrocities.

The current crackdown has prompted an estimated 15,000 people in the Rakhine area to flee their homes in the past few weeks. The satellite images from Human Rights Watch show villages burning, and residents report food supplies are growing scarce as they are living under siege.

US Ambassador Scot Marciel has urged Burma’s Foreign Ministry to investigate the allegations of attacks and restore access for humanitarian groups trying to help.

“We take reports of abuses very seriously,” said U.S. Embassy spokesman Jamie Ravetz in Yangon, Burma. “We have raised concerns with senior government officials and continue to urge the government to be transparent, follow the rule of law, and respect the human rights of all people in responding to the original attacks and subsequent reports of abuses.”

Families in Rakhine depend largely on humanitarian aid for food and health care, but that support has been cut off for weeks by officials who will not allow outsiders into the region. A government-sponsored delegation of aid agencies and foreign diplomats was supposed to visit the region on Monday, but local officials said they hadn’t seen anyone yet, and have not been informed they were coming.

“The government should end its blanket denial of wrongdoing and blocking of aid agencies, and stop making excuses for keeping international monitors from the area,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

Associated Press

31 October 2016

By John Pilger

October 27, 2016 “Information Clearing House” – The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.

In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War.

The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it”.

He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.

Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.

Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.

In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics. The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America. Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.

Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.

What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria. Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications. The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.

It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous. In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005.  There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.

When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoi Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.

The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable. As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.

From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”

The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished. Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals. The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.

Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia — and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post. These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.

And they love war.

While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life. In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people.  That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.

In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable. So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France.  Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!”

The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.” Intervention — what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.

According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them] under the age of ten”. As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS.

Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up withduring the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.

Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21st century.

This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.

To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China. In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.

Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House. The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq.  When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China. She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria — a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime –a distinction for which the competition is fierce.

Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public. That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.

Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target. Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th,  If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia.  None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom”.

George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”.

Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

This text is adapted from an address to the Sheffield Festival of Words, Sheffield, England, On 27 October 2016.http://johnpilger.com

by Shamus Cooke

With Hillary Clinton’s victory in the bag, there’s a growing fear that her presidency will begin with a bang: regime change in Syria. Clinton has said as much. Last year Reuters reported that “removing President Assad” would be Clinton’s “top priority.”

This regime change sentiment was echoed more recently by her foreign policy adviser, Jeremy Bash, who said that Clinton would “…work to get Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, “out of there.”

More spectacularly has been Clinton’s repeated insistence during debates that a “no fly zone” should be implemented in Syria, which, as the Libyan experiment proved, is a euphemism for regime change and war.

The fact that such blatant warmongering can go unchallenged is itself a major PR victory for the establishment. The anti-war movement seems speechless, immobile in the face of yet another war.

This paralysis is due, in part, to the Left’s splintering over Syria, where vicious infighting over a consistent anti-war perspective has spoiled debate.

Instead of focusing on stopping the next war, the Left continues to bicker about who deserves the most blame for the Syrian catastrophe. As a result, working people are left in the dark about the U.S. role in the Syrian war. They don’t know the U.S. has been leading a proxy war against the Syrian government, and they are unprepared for the full-scale military intervention that remains a real possibility.

The vast educational void around Syria is being filled, in part, by mainstream politicians, such as moderate Congressional Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who sounds “radical” when she recently wrote in an online petition:

”The war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad is creating more devastation, human suffering, and refugees…Have we learned nothing from Iraq and Libya? We must end our [U.S.] war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad now.”

If only most Left groups spoke as clearly as Gabbard about Syria, whose petition is only radical because the Left has so thoroughly minimized the U.S. role in funding, arming, training, and coordinating the proxy war against the Syrian government.

A key mistake some Left groups make is focusing their anti-war actions on “all sides,” wrongly believing that this alone is an internationalist approach against imperialism and war. But a critical component gets ignored when this principle is clung to.

Stopping the U.S. war on Syria requires that U.S. activists actively educate and focus on the U.S. role, so that people can be agitated into action and mobilized by the tens of thousands. The principled “pox on both houses” approach leads, in practice, to inaction, making it an empty phrase when what is needed is a concrete strategy for effective on the ground organizing.

The essence of a revolutionary, internationalist approach to anti-war strategy was summarized by Leon Trotsky, when he said “In the struggle against imperialism and war the basic principle is: ‘the chief enemy is in your own country.’”

The quote is a guide to action for those living in imperialist countries, and the U.S. remains the world’s foremost imperialist country. Syria is not an imperialist country.

The focus, therefore, for U.S. anti-war activists should be on the U.S.’ actions abroad in order to mobilize to stop it. An internationalist approach is working to minimize the harm that your imperialist country can do to the working class abroad.

All anti-war organizers should base their actions on this premise, since this truism allows for the most effective anti-war strategy when put into practice. Straying from this principle can get you into serious trouble.

It’s in your own country where you actually organize people on the ground, where they can be educated and mobilized directly against the government to apply direct pressure.

Writing the occasional anti-war article that analyzes the various bad actors is fine, but when it comes to the realm of action and organizing, focus is required. You cannot organize effectively against all sides. Your efforts must be prioritized where you can have the most impact, and where your efforts cannot be co-opted by your government as war propaganda.

Your own government is the enemy because its foreign policy is dictated by the same U.S. corporations that exercise power domestically, who exploit workers in the U.S., who don’t pay taxes in the U.S., and who fund anti-worker legislation domestically.

Some of these same corporations want raw materials, contracts, and new markets abroad, and will bomb the world to smithereens to get it.  The fight against war always starts at home.

As Fred Halstead wrote in the groundbreaking work “Out Now,” the anti-Vietnam war movement was strong when it focused on educating and mobilizing U.S. society, from students, veterans, union members, etc., while also directly agitating U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam, who were emboldened by the mass rallies they saw at home. When U.S. soldiers began organizing against their officers by refusing to fight, the war could no longer continue. The excellent documentary “Sir No Sir” shows the power of organizing active duty military personnel.

The anti-Vietnam war movement didn’t focus on the violence of the North Vietnamese, or the role played by China and the U.S.S.R., they focused on the role played by the U.S., and because of this they were able to effectively educate and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people, stop the war, and effect a cultural change in the U.S. where for decades it was politically impossible to enact direct military intervention.

A similar approach was used by the Russian revolutionaries in World War I, where a massive anti-war movement was created, not by agitating against the Germans — who were arguably the aggressors — but by focusing first on the Czar of Russia, and then on the Russian capitalists who wanted to continue the war after the Czar’s downfall. The mobilization for “peace” grew to be one of the pillar demands of the successful revolution.

U.S. Left groups needn’t focus on the “evils” of Russia or the Syrian government; huge resources are already spent on this by multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates. Demonizing the enemy of U.S. imperialism doesn’t help U.S. workers in terms of mobilizing to stop the war. In fact, demonizing “the enemy” helps keep workers passive, since it makes the war appear “moral.”

A good example of this grave mistake comes from the International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose recent article criticizes the new antiwar coalition ‘Hands Off Syria.” The article reads:

“U.S. Hands Off Syria is exclusively focused on opposing U.S. military intervention and what it claims is Washington’s determination to achieve regime change in Syria. But this means the coalition and those who endorse it ignore the main source of the barbaric violence and repression in Syria today:  the Assad government, its allies within the region and the Russian empire that backs Assad to the hilt….”

Hands Off Syria keeps true to the antiwar maxim “the chief enemy is in your own country,” and the ISO ridicules them for it.

The same article goes on to slander Hands Off Syria by accusing them of “…supporting a dictator like Assad and an imperialist power like Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”

This “pro-Assad” slander has been aimed at anyone — this writer included — who focuses their fire on the U.S. involvement in the Syrian conflict. The smear campaign has ruined the discussion around Syria, helping to mis-educate people who might otherwise be organized into action.

The ISO fails to mention in its article that Hands Off Syria specifically mentions that “It is not our business to support or oppose President Assad or the Syrian government. Only the Syrian people have the right to decide the legitimacy of their government.”

The ISO calls Hands Off Syria “pro-Assad” because the group says, correctly, that Syria has the right to self-determination. In a nutshell “self-determination” means that non-imperialist countries, like Syria, have a right not to be interfered with by imperialist countries, such as the United States.

All revolutionaries have a duty to uphold this core tenant of anti-imperialism. Watering this principle down — because “Assad is a brutal dictator” — is another example of undercutting both theory and action around anti-war work.

The main demands of the Hands Off Syria coalition are completely supportable from an internationalist, socialist perspective, and deserve mention, since they went unmentioned in the ISO article that attacked them:

1   An immediate end to the U.S. policy of forced regime change in Syria and full recognition and compliance by the U.S., NATO and their allies with principles of international law and the U.N. Charter, including respect for the independence and territorial integrity of Syria.

2   An immediate end to all foreign aggression against Syria, and serious efforts toward a political resolution to the war.

3   An immediate end to all military, financial, logistical and intelligence support by the U.S., NATO and their regional allies to all foreign mercenaries and extremists in the Middle East region.

4   An immediate end to economic sanctions against Syria. Massive international aid for displaced people within Syria and Syrian refugees abroad.

Hands of Syria is a united front coalition that should have existed for several years; its late arrival is due to the gutter-level Syria debate among Left groups. So attacking this big step forward in anti-war work only detracts from the anti-war movement, and thus empowers the U.S. government to act with a freer hand in Syria.

A consistent antiwar approach means combining theory with action, going beyond intellectual exercises and into organizing. If an antiwar theory equals inaction in the face of war, that perspective is exposed as moribund, lifeless. An antiwar approach must have practical applications to movement politics, a way to connect with and mobilize the masses.

Blaming “all sides” has the unintended consequences of pacifying working people in the face of war, since the kind education that might agitate them into action — their own government’s actions — is being either minimized or crowded out by nonstop comparisons with the “worse” actions of other governments (those in the cross-hairs of U.S. imperialism).

To put anti-war work into practice, every effort must be made to explain the history of the U.S. intervention in Syria, and how this intervention continues today, and how the logic of this intervention inevitably leads to a full scale military confrontation, as very nearly happened in 2013 when Obama backed down from attacking the Syrian government.

A revolutionary approach to war lies in exposing the lies of the capitalist media and politicians, so that workers understand the propaganda that is leading them into war, so they can be prepared to mobilize against it when war breaks out. Anything less is an academic exercise, divorced from the realities of the class struggle in the U.S.

Most conflicts have several precipitating factors, so ascribing blame to who fired the first shot or who was the “most savage” cannot be a guiding force in anti-war work. It serves mainly to distract, to disorient.  By focusing on Russia and Syria, the U.S. war propaganda goes unchallenged, and thus can maintain a powerful stultifying force on working people in the face of war.

Any mass movement for peace wields revolutionary implications. Especially in the U.S., whose global empire of military bases acts as a stifling conservative political force across the globe, while the domestic politics have been stifled by this same “military industrial complex.” This behemoth of concentrated power will require an equal power to demobilize it, and that power can only be the working class mobilized.

Any effective anti-war work must stay true to the basic principles elaborated by Trotsky decades ago: the enemy remains at home.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached out shamuscooke@gmail.com

27 October, 2016