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By Franklin Lamb

Damascus: It is widely recognized that the damage done to our cultural heritage in Syria and to the heritage of those who will follow us, cannot be calculated. Untold quantities of archaeologically vital artifacts have been looted, sold, displaced and discarded through industry-like efforts.

Citizens of Syria who are increasingly resisting the “IS Caliphate” and risking their own and their families lives to flee ISIS controlled areas in Syria are often willing to discuss their experiences and to offer instructive insights.

Among these patriots are regular citizens as well as the stellar nationalist employees of Syria’s Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) who this observer has interviewed extensively over the past nearly three years as they elucidate why ISIS destroys and loots our irreplaceable antiquities. This observer’s research has been augmented by other eyewitnesses, some who are themselves former jihadists or their victims, to ISIS looting and its distribution of franchises to sell off our shared cultural heritage give witness.

Heretofore, three varying but cogent explanations for ISIS’ rabid destruction of our shared cultural heritage have been commonplace.

The first identified the well documented Islamic State iconoclastic antipathy towards their and our pre-Islamic past. The second is that the jihadists are generally considered to be profiting hugely from selling our looted antiquities.

Thirdly there has been some evidence-but not compelling in this observers judgment, that jihadists are destroying our cultural heritage in Syria as ‘publicity stunts’ to get attention on social media, with some motivated by profit and offering to sell Syrian artifacts via Facebook, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. Meanwhile, according to a US Congressional staffer this week, leftover artifacts are currently being sold by IS to locals at public auctions including but not limited to Raqqa, Mari, Dura-Europos and Deir al Zor.

With respect to the first and second explanations, it is well documented that ISIS has ransacked thousands of artifacts from dozens of World Heritage and archaeological sites in Syria and that the profits from flogging cheap our cultural heritage helps IS meet its monthly budgets, more than 50% of which goes to pay salaries and multiple relatively generous benefits to its fighters and their families.

Yet research by this observer on this subject concludes that ISIS looting income, contrary to many claims including a recent one by CBS News that reported that ISIS generated “hundreds of millions of dollars” from antiquities transactions, although that figure—which rivals the annual haul of antiquities sold legally throughout the entire world, has not been backed up by probative, material data.

One expert, Randall A. Hixenbaugh, Director of New York based Hixenbaugh Ancient Art, told a Manhattan conference recently, “We’re looking at objects that are worth hundreds of dollars here. When we say that these antiquities are worth millions of dollars, where is the evidence of this? I think that prompts people to pick up shovels in eastern Syria. Are we not adding to the problem right now, by hyperbolic assessments of value?”

On May 15, 2015 a raid by American Special Forces on an ISIS safe house in a small village outside Deir ez-Zor killed ISIS leader Fathi Ben Awn Ben Jildi Murad al-Tunisi, better known by his nickname Abu Sayyaf who was in charge of overseeing the excavation of our cultural heritage. The raid also freed an 18-year old Yazidi slave woman, and captured a trove of documents that revealed far lower amounts from marketing cultural heritage artifacts than earlier estimated. The raid also uncovered many USB’s containing documents verifying that our cultural heritage artifacts are for ISIS just a natural resource to be extracted from the ground rather than as “ghanim” a.k.a looted items or spoils of war.

Selling plundered antiquities is frankly not strategic funding for IS compared to oil, banks, taxes and stolen goods. Far from the initial claims that ISIS was making tens of millions or more from stolen antiquities, the true figures are likely far lower. Some antiquities can indeed be sold to the final buyer in Europe, the United States or Asia for large amounts. But most of the material coming out of the ground in ISIS areas on a daily basis, such as pottery, glassware, coins, and architectural fragments are worth, at most, several hundred dollars at the final point of sale.

The total annual income of ISIS from antiquities is currently calculated by this observer and others who are more expert, at only a few million dollars; compared to, say, oil revenue, which for 2014 was estimated to be between $100 million and $263 million.

Admittedly hard data is tough to come by and while Archaeologists can no longer visit most of Syria, they do monitor cultural depredation in Syria from the secure vantage point of outer space. Employing pretty amazing high-resolution satellite imagery as Oxford University’s Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA) is doing as it instructs us and gives us hope for restorations of our cultural heritage in Syria with its One Million Images project.

This observer submits that there is a forth and even more sinister reason that has not been much considered with respect to the Islamic State brand, which admittedly is an ambitious and seductive vision that has proven to be a fairly major social media success. He posits for dear readers consideration that the destruction and looting of our heritage underpins an intricate scaffolding of intense micro-managed social control over its captive populations, a system that is designed to intensely regulate individual behavior.

This even applies with respect to where and when to excavate and to loot our antiquities with maps and time and date-stamped permits in hand, at assigned archaeological sites thought worthwhile to excavate and to strip of anything guessed to be of some value.

Recently ISIS has introduced a highly organized control over looting of our cultural heritage which is evidenced by satellite photos revealing neat rows of looting holes on archaeological sites. As noted above, ISIS considers antiquities a natural resource such as oil or gas along with its large-scale operation of theft of personal and real property. Its Department of Precious Resources (Diwan al Rikaz) which controls mines and minerals also now oversees antiquities and issues excavation permits. Diwan al Rikaz demands on average 20% of objects excavated, it also applies a sales tax and uses social media to augment its marketing while relying mainly on obedient citizens to do the excavation work while its fighters perform their jihadist duties elsewhere. Unlike oil extraction, antiquities looting are not a major guaranteed stream of income in fact locally the activity is a bit of a gamble. As in a Los Vegas casino, many can wager but with only a long shot prospect of a high payoff. The vast majority of artifacts currently being unearthed at sites in Syria are of great archaeological importance but little value on the art market.

Increasing its social control by regulating the theft and destruction of our past is now part of a wider and expanding organizing frenzy of the IS.

The ISIS glossy propaganda magazine, now issued in 14 languages, ‘Dabiq,’ named after a key site in Muslim apocalypse mythology, and which bills itself as a periodical magazine focusing on the issues of tawhid (unity), manhaj (truth-seeking), hijrah (migration), jihad (holy war) and jama’ah (community) frequently features ISIS attacks on Syria’s pre-Islamic heritage sites.

Typical of its taunting of those who value culture heritage is Dabiq’s recent comment:

“Enemies of the Islamic State were furious at losing a ‘treasured heritage.’ The mujahidīn, however, were not the least bit concerned about the feelings and sentiments of the kuffar. (ed: ‘non-believers’). The kuffar had unearthed these statues and ruins in recent generations and attempted to portray them as part of a cultural heritage and identity that the Muslims of Syria should embrace and be proud of. Yet this opposes the guidance of Allah and His Messenger and only serves a nationalist agenda.”

This sort of ISIS iconoclasm mirrors its other social control punishments. Dabiq recently featured a post-card size list of good citizen ‘reminders’ recommending that it be always carried by IS citizens:

“Death for blasphemy against God, death for blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad, death for apostasy against Islam, death to both the penetrator and receiver of gay sex, hand and leg amputations for theft, more than two dozen violations such as drinking wine earn 80 or more lashes, while “highway criminality” brings death by crucifixion.”

Another sign of intensifying social control by ISIS is found in recently issued laws on Hijab wearing in Syria. According to conversations of this observer with recent women escapees from IS areas in Syria, all women past the age of puberty must comply with the following social control rules on Hijabs or face draconian punishments. Specifically, all women in Syria must wear Hijabs that are thick and not revealing. “It must be loose (not tight). It must cover all the body. It must not be attractive. It must not resemble the clothes of unbelievers or men. It must not be decorative and eye-catching. It must not be perfumed.”

In the south Beirut Hezbollah neighborhood of Dahiyeh, where this observer currently resides, Shia women are known and appreciated for their attractive often richly colored head coverings and scarves/hijabs and for their special way of tying them to one side under their chin that is quite distinctive, attractive and often are conscious fashion statements. This is forbidden for all Muslims in IS areas of Syria, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere ISIS has control of populations on penalty of 80 lashes.

Further tightening social control is evidenced by ISIS which is currently introducing a higher organized and centralized control over looting of our cultural heritage which is evidenced by satellite photos revealing neat rows of looting holes on archaeological sites.

ISIS considers antiquities a natural resource such as oil or gas along with its large-scale operation of theft of personal and real property. Its Department of Precious Resources (Diwan al Rikaz) that controls mines and minerals also oversees antiquities and issues excavation permits, takes on average 20% of objects excavated, applies a sales tax and uses social media to augment its marketing which relies mainly on obedient citizens to do the work while its fighters perform their jihadist duties elsewhere. Artifacts are now also being sold, according to Syrian citizens who have fled, to locals at public auctions in Raqqa and Deir al Zor.

By controlling antiquities like other resources, ISIS inserts itself into countless holes in the ground. The real goal is not simply cash profit but rather it is psychological control over new ranges of behavior and thought of its subjects which is part of its totalitarian vision of absolute control. ISIS has transformed the pre-Islamic past of Syria into a forbidden zone, a mere natural resource to be exploited. But while the financial profits may be relatively small, more importantly it also offers ISIS yet another way to control the behavior and thoughts of its population, transforming them from captives into dependents of the “Caliphate.”

Increasingly the Obama administration and its allies are frustrated regarding the subject of the need to protect and preserve Syria’s Endangered Heritage. They remain less than confident that ISIS plundering of our heritage in Syria as part of its intensifying social control in its “Caliphate” can be stopped anytime soon.

Yet at the urging of the White House, last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee worked on H.R. 1493, the Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act and favorably reported the measure for full consideration by the Senate.

The original bill which passed in the House of Representative in June 2015 called for the appointment of an Assistant Secretary of State as the new United States Coordinator for International Cultural Property Protection, commonly referred to in Washington as a “Cultural Czar”. The new language which was designed to obtain early passage, recommends “that the President should establish an inter-agency coordinating committee to coordinate and advance the efforts of the executive branch to protect and preserve international cultural property at risk.”

The mandate of the new inter-agency committee, to be chaired by an Assistant Secretary of State, includes working to protect and preserve international cultural property in Syria while working to prevent and disrupt cultural heritage looting and trafficking in Syria.

The legislation’s mandate also includes protecting sites of cultural and archaeological significance while seeking to provide for the lawful exchange of international cultural property from Syria.

Franklin Lamb’s recent book, Syria’s Endangered Heritage, An International Responsibility to Preserve and Protect, is available on Amazon/Kindle, Smashwords, and other ebook sites as well as in hard-copy in Arabic and English. Lamb is currently based in Beirut and Damascus and reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

05 February, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents.org

A UN legal panel has ruled that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should be allowed go free and be compensated for his “deprivation of liberty”. The UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that Assange’s detention “should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected”. “Assange should be afforded the right to compensation,” it added.

The Wikileaks founder had been subjected to “different forms of deprivation of liberty” it said, initially while he was held in isolation at London’s Wandsworth Prison for 10 days in 2010. The deprivation had been “continuous” since he was initially arrested in the UK on 7 December 2010.

It also found a “lack of diligence” by the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office in its investigations, which resulted in his lengthy loss of liberty. Three members of the five-person panel found in Mr Assange’s favour, while one rejected his claim and another did not take part in the investigation.

Assange, 44, – who faces extradition to Sweden over a rape claim, which he denies – claimed asylum in London’s Ecuadorean embassy in 2012.
He has been arbitrarily detained since his arrest in 2010, the panel said.

Speaking at a news conference via a video link from the embassy, he said the opinion of the panel was “vindication”, adding: “The lawfulness of my detention is now a matter of settled law.”

Mr Assange said it was a “really significant victory that has brought a smile to my face”.

However, the UK Foreign Office said the report “changes nothing” and it will “formally contest the working group’s opinion”.

UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Assange was a “fugitive from justice”, adding that he can come out “any time he chooses” but will still have to face justice in Sweden.

The Police said it will make “every effort” to arrest Assange should he leave the embassy.

The government says the panel’s ruling is not legally binding in the UK and a European Arrest Warrant remains in place – meaning the UK continues to have a legal obligation to extradite Mr Assange.

05 February, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Ali Abunimah

Israeli doctors say that Palestinian hunger-striker Muhammad al-Qiq could die at any minute.

The 33-year-old journalist remained on hunger strike in the HaEmek hospital in Afula, in the north of present-day Israel, for the 75th consecutive day on Saturday.

Hiba Masalha, an attorney for the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, visited al-Qiq on Friday evening in the hospital where he is being kept under an Israeli court order.

Masalha said that al-Qiq is in a “struggle against death”

A photo tweeted by the Quds news outlet on Saturday shows al-Qiq with a Quran by his hospital bedside:

“There has been a severe deterioration in the health condition of the detained journalist Muhammad al-Qiq,” Masalha told Quds.

“He has completely lost the ability to speak. He continues to suffer from fatigue, dizziness and breathing difficulties due to the continuation of his hunger strike and his refusal of treatment for the 74th consecutive day,” she said.

Masalha added that al-Qiq’s condition has become severe following his rejection of the Israeli high court’s decision to “freeze” his administrative detention order.

On Thursday, the Israeli judges “froze” al-Qiq’s detention – but ordered him to remain in HaEmek hospital.

Al-Qiq began his hunger strike in November, shortly after Israeli authorities arrested him. Following his interrogation, Israel put him in administrative detention – indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial.

“The court’s decision is deception,” Masalha said, adding that al-Qiq’s demand “is an end to his detention, not a freezing which means that he can be re-arrested at any time.”

Masalha said that the deputy director of HaEmek hospital, Dr. Tuvia Tiyosuno, had informed her that al-Qiq is in extreme danger and in constant decline.

Al-Qiq’s internal organs could fail at any time and he is at high risk of bleeding in his brain.

His heart could stop beating at any time, which is why the hospital’s ethics committee decided that al-Qiq could be treated against his will if it meant saving his life, Masalha said the Israeli doctor told her.

“Every minute that passes poses a threat to his life,” Masalha cited Tiyosuno saying.

Masalha said she was called to the hospital by the Israeli doctors Friday evening in light of al-Qiq’s condition and his insistence that any treatment he received would take place only in a Palestinian hospital.

Masalha added that efforts were ongoing with Israel’s military occupation authorities to reach an agreement over al-Qiq’s case.

On Friday, Palestinian media disseminated this video of al-Qiq in his hospital bed holding a sign in English, Hebrew and Arabic declaring that he was continuing his hunger strike:

Earlier on Saturday, Quds TV reported that al-Qiq’s family had denied that any deal had been reached.

Human rights organizations and UN officials have called on Israel to charge or release al-Qiq, who is one of more than 660 Palestinians held in administrative detention.

As his strike has continued, Palestinians throughout the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and present-day Israel have held rallies and vigils in solidarity with al-Qiq.

On Friday, among his visitors in hospital was Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, a political party Israel outlawed in November.

Update

On Sunday, al-Qiq refused an Israeli offer to be released in May. While still gravely ill and at risk of death, the hunger striker is insisting on an immediate end to his administrative detention, the Ma’an News Agency reported.

Ali Abunimah 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.

08 February, 2016
Electronicintifada.net

By Caitlin Gibson

Concepcion Picciotto, the protester who maintained a peace vigil outside the White House for more than three decades, a demonstration widely considered to be the longest-running act of political protest in U.S. history, died Jan. 25 at a housing facility operated by N Street Village, a nonprofit that supports homeless women in Washington. She was believed to be 80.

She had recently suffered a fall, but the immediate cause of death was not known, said Schroeder Stribling, the shelter’s executive director.

Ms. Picciotto — a Spanish immigrant known to many as “Connie” or “Conchita” — was the primary guardian of the anti-nuclear-proliferation vigil stationed along Pennsylvania Avenue.

In a 2013 profile in The Washington Post, Ms. Picciotto said she spent more than 30 years of her life outside the White House “to stop the world from being destroyed.”

Through her presence, she said she hoped to remind others to take whatever action they could, however small, to help end wars and stop violence, particularly against children.

Ms. Picciotto, a diminutive woman perpetually clad in a helmet and headscarf, was a curious and at times controversial figure in Washington. Fellow activists lauded her as a heroine. Critics and even casual passersby, reading her hand-lettered signs, dismissed her as foolish, perhaps unwell. Ms. Picciotto was quick to share elaborate accounts of persecution by the government, which she considered responsible for many of her physical ailments.

Ellen Thomas, a demonstrator who protested alongside Ms. Picciotto for decades, told The Post in 2013 that the truth was somewhere in between. She acknowledged that there were “issues that haven’t been addressed” where Ms. Picciotto’s mental health was concerned but lauded her dedication and stamina.

Ms. Picciotto spoke little of her life before 1960, when she emigrated to New York City and worked as a receptionist for the economic and commercial office of the Spanish Embassy. She met an Italian man who became her husband in 1969, with whom she adopted an infant daughter, she said.

Ms. Picciotto first came to the White House in 1979, she said, after she came to believe that her husband had orchestrated an illegal adoption and arranged to have Ms. Picciotto separated from their child and committed. She believed she was the target of a web of conspiracies — involving doctors, lawyers and the government — and hoped that elected officials could help get her daughter back.

But that never happened. Ms. Picciotto said she last saw the child when the girl was a toddler.

She had just given up on reconnecting with her daughter when she met William Thomas, a self-described wanderer, philosopher and peace activist who founded the peace vigil along Pennsylvania Avenue. Ms. Picciotto joined Thomas there in 1981 — since she could not help her own child, she said, she wanted to do what she could to help other children — and the two became a fixture in the park.

They were joined in 1984 by Ellen Benjamin, who soon married Thomas. The budding romance sparked hostility from Ms. Picciotto, who questioned Ellen Thomas’s motives for joining the protest and believed the new woman was after William Thomas’s money.

But despite that perpetual tension, Ellen Thomas told The Post, the trio protested together in the park for 25 years. The group’s grass-roots nuclear disarmament campaign was known as Proposition One, and its crowning achievement came in 1993, when a nuclear disarmament petition circulated by the activists resulted in a ballot initiative passed by District voters.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s congressional delegate, helped the activists prepare a nuclear disarmament and conversion act, which she has since introduced in nearly a dozen sessions of Congress. The legislation has never reached the floor for a vote.

Norton told The Post in 2013 that although the value of the vigil’s presence could not be readily quantified, it has served as an important and ongoing reminder to all who passed by.

“They want to keep the issue of nuclear proliferation and its potential terrible consequences before the public,” Norton said of the protesters. “And they have chosen a prime spot to do it. . . . We won’t ever know what the success is, because it doesn’t have a specific end of the kind we are used to.”

From their rudimentary encampment on the red-brick walkway in Lafayette Square, the protesters demonstrated against wars and military conflicts, survived historic blizzards and scorching heat waves, and endured tense confrontations with passersby and police.

The vigil evolved into a well-recognized feature of the city’s landscape. The makeshift shelter became a regular stop for D.C. tour guides and a topic of discussion in local college classrooms. The vigil and its keepers made a cameo appearance in Michael Moore’s 2004 political documentary film “Fahrenheit 9/11” and starred in another feature-length documentary, “The Oracles of Pennsylvania Avenue” (2011).

When Thomas died in 2009, Ms. Picciotto vowed to continue her protest in his honor. But the vigil’s future was called into question in recent years, as its aging caretaker faced health problems and the possibility of eviction from the home she shared with other activists in Northwest Washington.

After Ms. Picciotto was hit by a cab in 2012 while riding her bicycle, she came to rely heavily on the help of younger activists to maintain the vigil, which could not be left unattended, according to National Park Service rules.

For months, the activists — many of whom lived with Ms. Picciotto at Peace House, a rowhouse owned by Ellen Thomas — took turns guarding the vigil, allowing Ms. Picciotto to scale back her watch to just a few hours each day.

But on two occasions in recent years, activists abandoned their station during overnight shifts, and the shelter and its signs were quickly removed by police. In both instances, the station and its signs were later returned by authorities.

Peace House was sold last year,, and Ms. Picciotto eventually found shelter at N Street Village, within walking distance of her vigil. “I have to be here,” she said of her work. “This is my life.”

Caitlin Gibson is a feature writer at The Washington Post.

25 January 2016

www.washingtonpost.com

By Jon Kofas

Introduction

In so far as capital markets predict economic trends, the downturn in global markets during December 2015-January 2016 indicate the kind of contraction that IMF economists are also predicting after revising earlier estimate downward for GDP of major economies. “World stock market losses are approaching $8 trillion so far this year and investors last week poured the most money into government bond funds in a year, suggesting they fear the global economy could tip into recession, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said on Friday (22 January 2016.” http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nearly-8-trillion-wiped-off-140643148.html

What does this say about the nature of the economic recovery after the 2008 Great Recession, about the soundness of the economies not just of developing nations suffering the most but of the core countries? Was it a hollow recovery and an uneven recovery mostly limited to the core countries and within those to the top 1% of income earners? Does this mean that the fault rests with governments that are not providing even greater incentives, even greater tax breaks, even greater corporate welfare measures for capital? Is this just another “market correction” or is capitalism manifesting structural problems pointing to chronic decay?

If one takes seriously the mainstream media coverage, listens to market analysts, politicians, journalists and pundits, the inevitable conclusion is that fault for the economic problems rests in anything but gross socioeconomic inequality, and the income and wealth inequality on a world scale. It is simply astounding to read and hear that the fault of the global markets tumbling rests with everything except the structural flaws within the system that includes the following:

1. Wealth concentration: Although there are literally thousands of books, articles, and other empirical studies showing the incontrovertible evidence of wealth concentration and its detrimental effects on society, nothing has changed even when the capitalist economy is threatened with imbalances both at the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels. Sixty-two people own more wealth than 3.6 billion of the world’s bottom-tiered income population; Four Americans own as much wealth as 40% of the US bottom-tiered population. “A global network of tax havens further enables the richest individuals to hide $7.6 trillion. The fight against poverty will not be won until the inequality crisis is tackled.” https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-1?utm_source=oxf.am&utm_medium=Znhx&utm_content=redirect

2. Artificial dollar value as a hard currency losing its preeminent global status, a reality that has been brewing since the IMF secretly warned President Eisenhower in the late 1950s that the chronic US balance of payments deficits accounted for an artificially high dollar value. US currency manipulation through the Federal Reserve and imposing monetary austerity on most of the underdeveloped countries through the IMF, thus keeping capital concentrated in the core nations, has kept the dollar artificially high to the detriment of other economies using the dollar as a hard currency to trade. Because of China’s rise to a preeminent global economic status and the increasing skepticism on the part of many countries about the value of the dollar as a hard currency that only helps the US, we have more diversification in the basket of hard currencies under the IMF Special Drawing Rights than ever before (euro, yen, British pound and Chinese yuan).

This could (and very likely will) lead to the fact all foreign central banks will dump part of their dollars to buy the Chinese currency in the future, thus flooding the currency market with dollars and reducing the purchasing power in the US. This would also mean that the era of cheap borrowing costs would eventually come to an end and lower living standards for Americans saddled with massive public and private sector debt, thus precipitating more and deeper cyclical economic crises. https://reason.com/archives/2012/09/13/occupy-the-fed; http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-06/usa-manipulating-its-own-currency-important-imf-meeting

3. High structural unemployment in the US and EU is twice the official rate and when combined with underemployment the fulltime working population drops between two-thirds and three fourths. Meanwhile, there has been an assault on labor unions and organized labor in general as much in the US as in Europe. Ever since the Reagan-Thatcher decade of the 1980s, neoliberal policies became prevalent and governments determined that labor rights, especially collective bargaining, impede capital concentration. The so-called US “right-to-work” laws and their versions in other countries that the IMF has been pushing are nothing but another way of driving wages down as low as possible; all of it made possible because government yields to corporate demands. http://useconomy.about.com/od/suppl1/f/real_unemployment_rate.htm; http://www.salon.com/2015/03/25/noam_chomsky_blasts_the_assault_
on_labor_right_to_work_means_right_to_scrounge/

4. Geographic wealth concentration. When the G20 own more than 80% of the world’s wealth and rich countries account for 90% of overall global financial assets – stocks, bank assets and insurance – the rest of the world suffers and helps to contribute to low consumption that accounts for the crisis of overproduction. (Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance; https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/wealth-distribution-income-inequality.
After WWII, the US recognized that its own economy would lapse into recession quickly unless the US helped to strengthen the economies of Europe and Japan, as major trading partners, albeit for geopolitical considerations as well. Although the international political economy of the early 21st century does not resemble that of 1945, disequilibrium on a world scale owing to centralization of capital in the core countries poses a threat to the entire capitalist system. (Mario Baldasari et al. eds.. Global Disequilibrium in the World Economy)

5. IMF austerity policies and the integration patron-client integration models that the US, EU, and Japanhave imposed on the underdeveloped nations have resulted in massive transfer of wealth from the periphery to the core. What the IMF, backed by the World Bank, OECD, the FED and all central banks, calls “structural adjustment” results n essence of wealth transfer from the debtor nations in the periphery – essentially non-Western nations, but also Southern and Eastern Europe – to the core countries. http://richmondvale.org/blog/structural-adjustment-a-major-cause-of-poverty/; http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-austerity-work-or-does-it-make-things-worse/;

6. Tax havens for corporations and the rich. Corporate and individual money amounting to several trillion dollars (as much as $10 trillion by some estimates) that is sitting in tax havens instead of absorbed back into the economy, and the failure of governments to absorb surplus capital from the private sector to use it to stimulate economic growth and expansion based on a horizontal model of development – benefiting the broader middle and working class. When the top 500 US corporations have sheltered away at least $2 trillion and demand massive tax breaks to repatriate some of that money it is indicative how highly concentrated capital rules over the state. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/10/6/top-us-companies-keep-21-trillion-in-tax-havens-abroad.html; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/offshore-tax-havens/

7. Steadily declining mass consumption across all core countries relying on middle class and working class consumer spending to stimulate growth remains a very serious cause of the cyclical contractions. In the US, consumer spending accounts for 70% of GDP as comparable percentages account for the top 20 richest countries. When the mass consumer suffers downward income pressure, to the degree that some US corporations have decided to raise minimum wages voluntarily, the signs are very clear of a real structural problem in capitalism. The world’s largest retailer WALMART which has just decided to close more than 160 stores, mostly across the south where incomes are low, is the last company to raise wages voluntarily. Although US consumers saved $88 billion in energy in 2015, there was a decline instead of rise in consumer spending when compared with 2014.
Despite a real GDP rise of 2%, sales decline in the US during the fourth quarter of 2015 was -5.3%, indicative that consumers are simply unable to carry any more debt given their income levels. World trade decline in 2015 was the worst since 2009 amid the Great Recession, reflecting a world consumption slump. Ironically, the IMF whose monetarist (austerity policies) are responsible for steadily declining consumption among the middle and working classes lists “low consumption demand” as a root cause for the declining global GDP in its latest revised estimate that I am positive will be revised downward at least once in 2016 possibly twice. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2016/update/01/; http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fe1df514-4b43-11e5-b558-8a9722977189.html#axzz3xtlGwZsK.

8. Wealth inequality is one-hundred times higher than income inequality, thus signaling a very dire future not just for the US, but the entire western world. Just one month ago, December 2015, the US congress passed legislation providing tax breaks amounting to just over half a trillion going mostly to the rich. This was with the considerable backing of Democrats whose rhetoric is that only Republicans favor tax breaks for the rich. In the EU amid economic contraction and austerity in the last five years the wealthiest 10% have become wealthier, even in the hardest hit countries of Southern and Eastern Europe, thus curbing the consumption power of the middle and working class. According to the PEW Research Center, the US wealth inequality is the highest on record! This does not mean that situation is much better in the EU where inequality is also growing. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-upper-middle-income/; http://reports.weforum.org/outlook-global-agenda-2015/top-10-trends-of-2015/1-deepening-income-inequality/

9. Neoliberal and corporate welfare policies that are parasitic and simply recycle money from the bottom 80% of the population to corporations and the top one percent that own most of the wealth have been at the heart of the contracting cycles that started during the banking crisis of the 1980s and is continuing today. US taxpayers are paying out money to fund everything from sports stadium that millionaires own to subsidizing General Electric that is a very profitable company to providing lucrative contracts by government at all levels to subcontractors for work that is done at a higher cost and less efficiently than it would have at the public sector level. Corporate welfare is not just in the US but all across Europe and it is a policy that the IMF and the World Bank are imposing on governments around the world because it is what the richest are is pushing to maintain their privileged positions. http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/; http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/07/corporate-welfare-a-93bn-handshake

10. EU monetarism. Under Germany’s economic and political hegemony, Europe has been pursuing monetarism and imposing austerity on the periphery countries – Southern and Eastern Europe – in the last five years in order to solidify its dominant role in Europe under the patron-client model. This has caused disequilibrium not just in the periphery economies of the EU but across all of Europe against the sanctions imposed on Russia and counter-sanctions by Russia, thus slowing growth down and impacting EU-US and EU-China and Japan economic relations. In short, the Greek crisis mushroomed into a greater crisis because Germany was determined to use austerity as a mechanism for EU hegemony. In an article entitled: ‘The Fourth Reich’: What Some Europeans See When They Look at Germany” argued that: “Following World War II, a German return to dominance in Europe seemed an impossibility. But the euro crisis has transformed the country into a reluctant hegemon and comparisons with the Nazis have become rampant.” http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-power-in-the-age-of-the-euro-crisis-a-1024714.html. European Central Bank president and former Goldman Sachs executive, Mario Draghi has faithfully served Germany largely because the EU multinational corporations benefit from the German model. http://www.socialeurope.eu/2014/09/mario-draghis-policy-ideas-wont-work/

The Pretexts for Global Contraction

There all kinds of excuses and shallow propaganda often by well paid consultants promoting various financial services on why the economy is in its current state of contraction, including the weather is too hot or too cold, thus preventing consumers from spending on winter products and services or conversely staying hope because it is too cold out! The utterly absurd arguments aside, of which there is no shortage especially considering that most people are paid to propagate, the IMF has just released a new report that has revised global DGP growth downward. This includes US growth that Obama, the media and analysts claimed would be robust.

In the 2016 State of the Union address, Obama claimed that it is a myth the US economy has problems as Republicans claim. Nevertheless, the IMF report lists “subdued demand” as a cause for lowering GDP estimates. However, the IMF proposed at Davos in January 2016 that EU simply lower minimum wage laws and labor laws to absorb Muslim migrants. It goes without saying that refugees would work for food and shelter given their desperate condition to flee war-torn Iraq and Syria where the US and its allies created chaos in the first place. The irony here is that he same IMF that lists “low consumption demand” as a cause for the lower than expected global GDP in 2016 and also 2017, is recommending a wage policy that would only worsen the situation. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2016/update/01/

One can understand why corporations and governments spend billions trying to convince the public that economic contractions that account for lower living standards and downward socioeconomic mobility has nothing to do with the structural contradictions of capitalism and the policies governments are pursuing favoring the very wealthy. If they were to admit such a thing, then they would have to accept blame and change the political economy to the benefit of the people rather than corporations and the top one percent that own half of the world’s wealth. The only thing left to do is to manufacture excuses and to have well-paid Nobel Prize winners in economics, politicians and journalists manufacture a pretext, to insist on a better neoliberal model and never examine the structural flaws in a decadent system.

1. China is to blame

a. China not growing its GDP at the same double-digit GDP pace as in the previous decade. If this is the case, then does it not reveal the structural weaknesses of the Western economies and their inexorable dependence on China? Besides, is it realistic to expect China to grow at double digit rates without suffering the same cyclical crises given that it is operating within the capitalist world economy?

b. China’s stock market has dragged down the entire world markets. But who drove the values of markets China higher if not speculative foreign investors that expected growth to take place and drive global demand even higher at home and globally? Even under a quasi-statist system, the evolution of the Chinese market followed a pattern of expansion and contraction as all capitalist countries have done historically.

c. Chinese currency (yuan) manipulation by the government intended to increase exports is the problem along with “shadow banking” that conceals the real debt problem of China, thus intensifying capital flight. China actually helped the US and the world economy soften the blow of the Great Recession of 2008 by keeping its currency at such levels and stimulating continued growth amid global contraction. This at a sacrifice to its own population for the sake of securing market share in the future.

d. Chinese government owns slightly more than half of securities, and manipulates the stock market. Therefore, the absence of market freedom is to blame because the quasi-statist policies preclude free markets from reflecting real values in companies. If China did not have a quasi-statist regime, would it have achieved the economic miracle that it has in a country that had no capitalist class? After all, is this not how Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea also developed after 1945? Are analysts so blind to the realities of China’s history, traditions, institutions, and social structure that the stock market is the only focus as though it operates totally separately from the rest of society? Are they so oblivious to China’s internal dynamics everything from huge income gaps and the need to continue transitioning the economy to better serve its own population instead of serving foreign investors? (http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-global-recession-may-be-brewing-in-china-1439764500; http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/18/experts-china-global-recession-currency-rmb-yuan-stock-market/; http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/20/is-china-really-to-blame-for-the-global-sell-off.html; http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/capitalism-not-china-is-to-blame-for-the-current-global-economic-decline.html)

2. Energy Glut

Oil and natural gas prices collapsed to levels that forced giant multinational energy corporations to suffer major losses and energy producing countries to see their GDP slashed. While this is true, why did energy prices collapse? In part, this is because of the contracting world economy, especially manufacturing in China, India, and Japan, all suffering contraction. However, the energy market was also deliberately manipulated for political reasons by the Saudi Arabian regime, with the tacit approval of the US and northwest Europe needing cheap energy to punish both Russia and Iran as major energy producers. Now we know that market manipulation coinciding with sluggish energy demand globally has backfired and impacted those doing the manipulation to a greater degree than Iran and Russia that have struggled to diversify their economies.

From June 2014 to January 2016, the price of oil tumbled by 60%, contributing to the uncertainty about energy stability and of course overall downward pressure on all commodities from cacao to natural gas effecting primarily developing nations that depend on commodity exports. As revenues of energy and commodity-producing countries fell sharply, some including Russia and Iran but smaller states like Azerbaijan among them, used revenues to diversify production and become less dependent on imports. Although the overall impact of the energy and commodities slump has entailed lower asset values, this has hardly translated into any kind of a growth stimulus, as many were speculating but now know better. http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/azerbaijan
The low energy argument hardly explains the current world contraction and market slump because it is high energy prices that invariably contribute to such contraction as they divert spending from other sectors to energy – as has happened historically. Nevertheless, this is the pretext many are using instead of looking at real causes for capitalism’s structural flaws, just as is the inane argument about Iran releasing a few hundred thousand more barrels of oil in the market. The reality is that Greek oil tankers were already transporting Iranian oil illegally for years to areas that supposedly had sanctions on Iran. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24746689.html; A. H. Cordesman et al.The Gulf and the Military Balance)

3. FED Rates

FED raised rates too quickly and should have waited because this precipitated a negative investor psychology considering companies were used to rates close to zero that allowed them to borrow at practically no cost. FED was slow in raising rates so that market psychology was confused and took this as a signal things were not going as well regarding real unemployment and GDP growth. The FED has been manipulating the currency to the advantage of Wall Street since the 1930s and it follows what Wall Street dictates. If the FED was interested in helping the average American, it would have an inflationary monetary policy, something that would of course entail low dollar value given that the US public debt is about equal to GDP. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/03/federal-reserve-policy-helping-rich-get-richer-blackrock-pro-rick-rieder.html; Anthony Sutton, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, 2014; Stephen Lendman, How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War, 2011)

4. Presidential Election Jitters: Will Wall Street Have its Favorite?

The presidential race is not going as well as the billionaires funding the Republican campaigns and Hillary Clinton wanted. The chaos in the Republican camp with Bush marginalized and Sanders doing as well as he is brings into question of how well the wealthy control the candidates that they hand to the voters for their final approval. No matter who wins, the capitalist system will remain exactly as it is today, but that is not enough for the billionaires that demand even greater concessions. The reason for the market slump is that investors fear Donald Trump winning and proposing measures that curtail some of the manipulation of Wall Street as he has stated publicly.

The billionaire Koch brothers who own as much wealth as about 20% of the US population, have stated they are adamantly against Trump because of possible tighter market regulations. http://theweek.com/speedreads/587257/donald-trump-reportedly-tried-woo-koch-brothers-sheldon-adelson-turned-down; At the Davos meeting where the world’s most powerful businesspeople and political figures are meeting, the international elites are just as alarmed about Trump as the Koch brothers. “Unbelievable”, “embarrassing” even “dangerous” are some of the words the financial elite gathered at the World Economic Forum conference in the Swiss resort of Davos have been using to describe U.S. Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.” http://finance.yahoo.com/news/davos-elite-alarmed-prospect-nominee-trump-185041216.html. In the last analysis, Trump is a billionaire who will faithfully follow Wall Street as every president has done in US history.

Bernie Sanders is the other pretext along with Trump for Wall Street contraction. Bernie Sanders as a self-proclaimed Socialist-Democrat that many on Wall Street adamantly oppose. While it is true that he is outspoken against the neoliberal political economy and dilution of the social safety net, when one looks at his votes in the senate and his policy positions on fiscal, monetary, trade, investment and labor policy it is clear he is interested in restoring some modicum of Keynesianism that neoliberals have eliminated. Ending some of the pork barrel corporate welfare measures, fiscal advantages to the rich, strengthening banking regulation, criminalizing corporate crimes are some of the proposals he has put on the table.

Contrary to CEOs fears, Sanders who admittedly opposes “cannibal capitalism” (a term coined by Eugene Debs) has proved that he works within the system he wishes to reform on some new version of neo-Keynesian model but realizes it is almost impossible. Even if he wins the presidency, which is highly unlikely, Sanders will fall into the Obama mold and cater to Wall Street with only modest policy changes to strengthen the social safety net. The last time the US reformed its political economy to save it from catastrophe was under FDR in the 1930s who acted out of necessity. The US is not yet in the kind of crisis it experienced in the 1930s and Bernie Sanders is not FDR. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34314-ten-powerful-reasons-why-bernie-scares-wall-street

5. The BRICS and Non-Western Economies Contracting

The fault rests with the countries in the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and other developing nations. In short, China and the emerging markets are unable to absorb the surplus that the US, EU, Japan, Canada and Australia are producing therefore it is the fault of the BRICS and emerging market economies for causing problems in the G-7. Never mind that the global recession of 2008 started in the US and spread to core countries and then to the rest of the world, taking it down with them. Nor does it matter that US and its EU partners made matter worse by advocating austerity within the European periphery and in many countries outside of Europe at the same time they imposed sanctions on Russia that have only backfired to contribute to Western contraction.

Is it any wonder that instead of slashing defense spending after 2008 and keeping it at low levels, the US demanded that NATO spending increase to maintain an effective containment policy on Russia, policies that have diverted capital from the civilian economy in the US and all across Europe, as well as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. When bankrupt Greece asked permission from the EU and Germany to cut defense because it had cut just about everything else under austerity since 2010, the answer was that would defense cuts impact contracts with German and French manufacturers. In short, cut mass consumption and reduce living standards that the IMF and monetarists advocate but not defense.

Because of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the public debt rose substantially and the average homeowner paid $600 more in mortgage interest by 2008 when the recession hit. Deficit spending is one thing when resources are devoted to productive projects for the civilian economy and to the benefit of people, and entirely another when devoted to the parasitic defense industry. While the media, politicians and pundits in the US and the West defend raising defense spending, they bitterly criticize Russia for doing the same in response to NATO encirclement policy. Oddly enough, the neoliberals in the West defending defense spending argue that in Russia’s case it weakens the civilian economy!
http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/economy/macroeconomic; https://news.vice.com/article/russias-economy-is-a-mess-and-its-problems-arent-going-away

It is just as important to mention that the US and UK have been manipulating their currencies to the detriment of the emerging economies. For example, India has recently decided to trade with Iran solely on their currencies and to leave out reserve currencies euro and dollar. Having to pay debt and balance of payments in dollars or in UK British pound that are highly inflated is hardly in the interest of countries trying to enjoy monetary and economic sovereignty. It only stands to reason that both trading partners derive benefits from trade transactions in their own currencies just as it stands to reason that they along with many emerging economies see the dollar and other reserve currencies as obstacles to their growth because it imposes underlying monetarism on their countries. In October 2015, the IMF predicted a global US dollar recession, as more countries abandon it and begin to consider alternatives, including the yuan that the IMF accepted as a hard currency. The decline of the dollar is the result of US policies, not the fault of Brazil and India or other emerging economies. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/3/d86944c0-6d14-11e5-aca9-d87542bf8673.html#axzz3xtlGwZsK; Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System, 2012)

Conclusion: Solutions to the Crisis of Capitalism

What solutions do mainstream economists, politicians, businesspeople, pundits and media, offer for the cyclical crises of capitalism? These are same solutions they have offered since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. Increase market share domestically and globally, innovate to lower production costs, lower taxes on business and the wealthy, less regulation of business, more flexible labor laws more government support for business – everything from exporting products abroad to pursuing a monetary policy that allows for low interest rates and liquidity and providing incentives for research and development, and lower spending on any social programs.

Even if every single one of these were to work out as ideally in the real economy as its advocates wish, the question remains how it is possible for the mass consumer to stimulate the economy when income and personal debt determine consumption power. No matter how great and how less expensive the smart phone may be, where is the consumer base once the market is saturated on a global scale? How much more debt should the mass consumer carry so that more products and services are consumed before we have a major consumer debt crisis analogous to the student debt crisis in the US about to explode even with US government guaranteeing such debt currently at $1.3 trillion in an $18 trillion economy? US average total debt is at $130,000 or $12 trillion total representing two-thirds of GDP, while US average income is just $52,000. When we consider that public debt resulting in higher taxes for the mass consumer, and consumer debt, the combination of the two necessarily contributes to cyclical crises as scholarly studies on this issue have demonstrated.
(http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-credit-card-debt-household/; Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Roggof, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, 2011; R. Z Aliber and Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 2011)

The economy has not escaped cyclical contractions and periodically very deep ones, even under a policy mix that includes Keynesian measures. Yet, there is not a single mainstream economist or bourgeois politician who would dare to address the core issue of the problem that is the wealth and income inequality issue. Of course, some of the reformists in the Keynesian school argue in favor of strengthening the social fabric in conjunction with the saving of capitalism by providing a better safety net for the middle and lower classes to secure a democratic society. Under the neoliberal political economy that has prevailed since the 1980s, even those politicians who claim to support some degree of Keynesian policies have not dared to put them into policy and use the rhetoric to win elections and nothing more; France, Spain, Portugal and Greece serve as good examples of politicians running on a Keynesian agenda but governing as neo-liberals. Even the nationalist regimes in Latin America that invoked Keynesianism – Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador – catered as much to the nationalist capitalist class as to the comprador bourgeoisie and foreign capital. Embracing the neoliberal path is a manifestation of market hegemony over the state, thus forcing politicians, businesspeople, economists, journalists, and commentators to manufacture myths about disequilibrium in the economy and chronic downward socioeconomic mobility.

There is no reason to look for scapegoats in the economy, no reason to create fictitious forces or policies that brought us to the reality of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the Koch brothers owning more wealth than 127 million Americans. There is no reason to constantly evade and avoid the bitter truth about the inescapable crash of the markets that most likely will come in a decade perhaps in the 2030s on the 100th anniversary of the Great Depression. When the culture of the Western world, now a global culture that reaches from Mongolia to Mozambique, celebrates the millionaire and billionaire as society’s hero instead of villain who destroys society, while marginalizing those who work and create, why is anyone surprised that the sharp market decline of January 2016 amounting to more than $8 trillion in losses is but a small signal of a crash that is inevitable probably toward the end of the next decade or early 2030s.

Jon Kofas is a retired university Professor from Indiana University.

25 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Robert Barsocchini

The US illustrates to ISIS, and the world, that the path to the seat of regional and then global power is genocide, land-theft, mass enslavement, never paying reparations, then wielding this illegally and brutally obtained money and military hardware over others and proclaiming one’s national group to be superior (ethnocentrism) and a “respected leader”, while in reality the country is feared, loathed, and isolated, maintaining and expanding its hegemony through continued methods of extreme propaganda, subversion, and physical force.

Through terror, bribery, threats, and other tactics, the US foists huge loans on small, relatively weak nations (which are often weak because of having been ravaged by Europe or the US), then forces them to repay the loans with interest as it drains and impoverishes the target countries, making them cheap resource and service stations for the top tiers of an actual global super-elite.

This tightly controlled and forcibly expanded US/Western-peddled economic system, capitalistic oligarchy, euphemistically referred to in the West as ‘globalization’ or ‘neo-liberalism’, which we are intended to believe is a ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ process (it is not), was highlighted this week by Oxfam. While US and Western agencies spend billions trying to convince people that capitalistic oligarchy (‘globalization’) is being globalized for the good of the public, not the enrichment of a tiny elite – a no-brainer propaganda tactic – Oxfam notes:

“Oxfam’s analysis of wealth trends between 2010 and 2015 finds the poor are getting much poorer.

The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent in the five years since 2010—that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542 billion), to $1.76 trillion” while “the wealth of the bottom half fell 41 percent or just over $1 trillion.”

These “62 individuals ha[ve] the same wealth as 3.5 billion people, the bottom half of the global population, compared with 388 individuals five years earlier”.

The global oligarchic dictatorship being spearheaded by the United States “did not come about by accident; it is the result of deliberate policy choices”, says Oxfam. These include US/Western military-enforced, corporate-written economic laws and the US’s dubious “loans” to weaker nations, with an emerging end picture similar to a heavily policed planetary slum cheaply laboring to serve a tiny, ultra-rich gated community.

In Lima, the capitol of US-backed Peru, the vast majority of people spend most of their waking hours laboring, then return here.

…while a tiny percentage of the city lives here, in the widely guarded and gated, ultra-rich district.

But in contrast to the self-serving ideology it preaches and forces on its victims, the US itself became powerful by taking out perhaps the biggest loans in world history and then never repaying them (2-3; 6). Further, the loans came from unwilling lenders: the people of Indigenous and African nations. Well-known Israeli author Miko Peled notes in an open letter to Obama this week:

“As a black man, you had an unprecedented opportunity to address the issues of Blacks, but you didn’t. You showed no care for Black lives or for the lives of Blacks in America. You said little and did even less to stop the killing of Black men and the mass incarceration of Blacks. You said nothing and did nothing regarding the over due payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves, men and women upon whose backs the US economy was built. And, if any proof was needed, the outcry of the [Black Lives Matter] movement shows that your priorities were elsewhere.”

The prospects for Native peoples are even more grim. Members of Native nations remain the people killed most often per capita by US government forces. As one Native person commented:

“There are no white or black faces rallying around us, marching with us, protesting with us over this injustice. Why? Because we are a forgotten people.”

If the US were to repay its own loans (or even simply cease its ongoing campaigns of genocide and forced submission), the nation would cease to exist in its current form. All of its physical and more than half its economic foundation rests on the backs of dead Natives and tortured, tormented, raped, enslaved and slain African men, women, and children (the US had a culture, going all the way up to the ‘founding fathers’, devoted specifically to the enjoyment of raping enslaved African children and adults) (6). Yet it is this nation that owes its own existence to loans unprecedented in their scale and ugliness that uses its ill-gotten money and equipment of death to force loans on others and then demand their repayment through funds, labor, ‘favors’, and ‘concessions’.

The US thus illustrates to ISIS, and everyone else, that the path to regional and then global power is to pursue unrelenting genocide, land theft, and hegemonic expansion while taking out huge loans through enslaving people, never repaying the loans, and then using the acquired pool of dirty money to start a global-scale, mafia-style loan-sharking business, and make examples of the disadvantaged people who can’t repay the ‘loans’ by terrorizing and killing them, often en masse.

ISIS seems an apt pupil, but only on a comparatively microscopic scale. However, with further tutelage from continued US refusal to repay its land-theft and slavery loans, and continued US military savagery and expansionism, the US should be able to lead by example and, within a few years, coach ISIS into becoming a stable regional power.

Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Updates on Twitter. Author’s review of the historical background to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.

20 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Gail Tverberg

A person often reads that low oil prices–for example, $30 per barrel oil prices–will stimulate the economy, and the economy will soon bounce back. What is wrong with this story? A lot of things, as I see it:

Oil producers can’t really produce oil for $30 per barrel

A few countries can get oil out of the ground for $30 per barrel. Figure 1 gives an approximation to technical extraction costs for various countries. Even on this basis, there aren’t many countries extracting oil for under $30 per barrel–only Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. We wouldn’t have much crude oil if only these countries produced oil.

2. Oil producers really need prices that are higher than the technical extraction costs shown in Figure 1, making the situation even worse.

Oil can only be extracted within a broader system. Companies need to pay taxes. These can be very high. Including these costs has historically brought total costs for many OPEC countries to over $100 per barrel.

Independent oil companies in non-OPEC countries also have costs other than technical extraction costs, including taxes and dividends to stockholders. Also, if companies are to avoid borrowing a huge amount of money, they need to have higher prices than simply the technical extraction costs. If they need to borrow, interest costs need to be considered as well.

3. When oil prices drop very low, producers generally don’t stop producing.

There are built-in delays in the oil production system. It takes several years to put a new oil extraction project in place. If companies have been working on a project, they generally won’t stop just because prices happen to be low. One reason for continuing on a project is the existence of debt that must be repaid with interest, whether or not the project continues.

Also, once an oil well is drilled, it can continue to produce for several years. Ongoing costs after the initial drilling are generally very low. These previously drilled wells will generally be kept operating, regardless of the current selling price for oil. In theory, these wells can be stopped and restarted, but the costs involved tend to deter this action.

Oil exporters will continue to drill new wells because their governments badly need tax revenue from oil sales to fund government programs. These countries tend to have low extraction costs; nearly the entire difference between the market price of oil and the price required to operate the oil company ends up being paid in taxes. Thus, there is an incentive to raise production to help generate additional tax revenue, if prices drop. This is the issue for Saudi Arabia and many other OPEC nations.

Very often, oil companies will purchase derivative contracts that protect themselves from the impact of a drop in market prices for a specified time period (typically a year or two). These companies will tend to ignore price drops for as long as these contracts are in place.

There is also the issue of employee retention. In a sense, a company’s greatest assets are its employees. Once these employees are lost, it will be hard to hire and retrain new employees. So employees are kept on as long as possible.

The US keeps raising its biofuel mandate, regardless of the price of oil. No one stops to realize that in the current over-supplied situation, the mandate adds to low price pressures.

One brake on the system should be the financial pain induced by low oil prices, but this braking effect doesn’t necessarily happen quickly. Oil exporters often have sovereign wealth funds that they can tap to offset low tax revenue. Because of the availability of these funds, some exporters can continue to finance governmental services for two or more years, even with very low oil prices.

Defaults on loans to oil companies should also act as a brake on the system. We know that during the Great Recession, regulators allowed commercial real estate loans to be extended, even when property valuations fell, thus keeping the problem hidden. There is a temptation for regulators to allow similar leniency regarding oil company loans. If this happens, the “braking effect” on the system is reduced, allowing the default problem to grow until it becomes very large and can no longer be hidden.

4. Oil demand doesn’t increase very rapidly after prices drop from a high level.

People often think that going from a low price to a high price is the opposite of going from a high price to a low price, in terms of the effect on the economy. This is not really the case.

4a. When oil prices rise from a low price to a high price, this generally means that production has been inadequate with only the production that could be obtained at the prior lower price. The price must rise to a higher level in order to encourage additional production.

The reason that the cost of oil production tends to rise is because the cheapest-to-extract oil is removed first. Oil producers must thus keep adding production that is ever-more expensive for one reason or another: harder to reach location, more advanced technology, or needing additional steps that require additional human labor and more physical resources. Growing efficiencies can somewhat offset this trend, but the overall trend in the cost of oil production has been sharply upward since about 1999.

The rising price of oil has an adverse impact on affordability. The usual pattern is that after a rise in the price of oil, economies of oil importing nations go into recession. This happens because workers’ wages do not rise at the same time as oil prices. As a result, workers find that they cannot buy as many discretionary items and must cut back. These cutbacks in purchases create problems for businesses, because businesses generally have high fixed costs including mortgages and other debt payments. If these businesses are to continue to operate, they are forced to cut costs in one way or another. Cost reduction occurs in many ways, including reducing wages for workers, layoffs, automation, and outsourcing of manufacturing to cheaper locations.

For both employers and employees, the impact of these rapid changes often feels like a rug has been pulled out from under foot. It is very unpleasant and disconcerting.

4b. When prices fall, the situation that occurs is not the opposite of 4a. Employers find that thanks to lower oil prices, their costs are a little lower. Very often, they will try to keep some of these savings as higher profits. Governments may choose to raise tax rates on oil products when oil prices fall, because consumers will be less sensitive to such a change than otherwise would be the case. Businesses have no motivation to give up cost-saving techniques they have adopted, such as automation or outsourcing to a cheaper location.

Few businesses will construct new factories with the expectation that low oil prices will be available for a long time, because they realize that low prices are only temporary. They know that if oil prices don’t go back up in a fairly short period of time (months or a few years), the quantity oil available is likely to drop precipitously. If sufficient oil is to be available in the future, oil prices will need to be high enough to cover the true cost of production. Thus, current low prices are at most a temporary benefit–something like the eye of a hurricane.

Since the impact of low prices is only temporary, businesses will want to adopt only changes that can take place quickly and can be easily reversed. A restaurant or bar might add more waiters and waitresses. A car sales business might add a few more salesmen because car sales might be better. A factory making cars might schedule more shifts of workers, so as to keep the number of cars produced very high. Airlines might add more flights, if they can do so without purchasing additional planes.

Because of these issues, the jobs that are added to the economy are likely to be mostly in the service sector. The shift toward outsourcing to lower-cost countries and automation can be expected to continue. Citizens will get some benefit from the lower oil prices, but not as much as if governments and businesses weren’t first in line to get their share of the savings. The benefit to citizens will be much less than if all of the people who were laid off in the last recession got their jobs back.

5. The sharp drop in oil prices in the last 18 months has little to do with the cost of production.

Instead, recent oil prices represent an attempt by the market to find a balance between supply and demand. Since supply doesn’t come down quickly in response to lower prices, and demand doesn’t rise quickly in response to lower prices, prices can drop very low–far below the cost of production.

As noted in Section 4, high oil prices tend to be recessionary. The primary way of offsetting recessionary forces is by directly or indirectly adding debt at low interest rates. With this increased debt, more homes and factories can be built, and more cars can be purchased. The economy can be forced to act in a more “normal” manner because the low interest rates and the additional debt in some sense counteract the adverse impact of high oil prices.

Oil prices dropped very low in 2008, as a result of the recessionary influences that take place when oil prices are high. It was only with the benefit of considerable debt-based stimulation that oil prices were gradually pumped back up to the $100+ per barrel level. This stimulation included US deficit spending, Quantitative Easing (QE) starting in December 2008, and a considerable increase in debt by the Chinese.

Commodity prices tend to be very volatile because we use such large quantities of them and because storage is quite limited. Supply and demand have to balance almost exactly, or prices spike higher or lower. We are now back to an “out of balance” situation, similar to where we were in late 2008. Our options for fixing the situation are more limited this time. Interest rates are already very low, and governments generally feel that they have as much debt as they can safely handle.

6. One contributing factor to today’s low oil prices is a drop-off in the stimulus efforts of 2008.

As noted in Section 4, high oil prices tend to be recessionary. As noted in Section 5, this recessionary impact can, at least to some extent, be offset stimulus in the form of increased debt and lower interest rates. Unfortunately, this stimulus has tended to have adverse consequences. It encouraged overbuilding of both homes and factories in China. It encouraged a speculative rise in asset prices. It encouraged investments in enterprises of questionable profitability, including many investments in oil from US shale formations.

In response to these problems, the amount of stimulus is being reduced. The US discontinued its QE program and cut back its deficit spending. It even began raising interest rates in December 2015. China is also cutting back on the quantity of new debt it is adding.

Unfortunately, without the high level of past stimulus, it is difficult for the world economy to grow rapidly enough to keep the prices of all commodities, including oil, high. This is a major contributing factor to current low prices.

7. The danger with very low oil prices is that we will lose the energy products upon which our economy depends.

There are a number of different ways that oil production can be lost if low oil prices continue for an extended period.

In oil exporting countries, there can be revolutions and political unrest leading to a loss of oil production.

In almost any country, there can be a sharp reduction in production because oil companies cannot obtain debt financing to pay for more services. In some cases, companies may go bankrupt, and the new owners may choose not to extract oil at low prices.

There can also be systemwide financial problems that indirectly lead to much lower oil production. For example, if banks cannot be depended upon for payroll services, or to guarantee payment for international shipments, such problems would affect all oil companies, not just ones in financial difficulty.

Oil is not unique in its problems. Coal and natural gas are also experiencing low prices. They could experience disruptions indirectly because of continued low prices.

8. The economy cannot get along without an adequate supply of oil and other fossil fuel products.

We often read articles in the press that seem to suggest that the economy could get along without fossil fuels. For example, the impression is given that renewables are “just around the corner,” and their existence will eliminate the need for fossil fuels. Unfortunately, at this point in time, we are nowhere being able to get along without fossil fuels.

Food is grown and transported using oil products. Roads are made and maintained using oil and other energy products. Oil is our single largest energy product.

Experience over a very long period shows a close tie between energy use and GDP growth (Figure 3). Nearly all technology is made using fossil fuel products, so even energy growth ascribed to technology improvements could be considered to be available to a significant extent because of fossil fuels.
Figure 3. World GDP growth compared to world energy consumption growth for selected time periods since 1820. World real GDP trends from 1975 to present are based on USDA real GDP data in 2010$ for 1975 and subsequent. (Estimated by the author for 2015.) GDP estimates for prior to 1975 are based on Maddison project updates as of 2013. Growth in the use of energy products is based on a combination of data from Appendix A data from Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects together with BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015 for 1965 and subsequent.

While renewables are being added, they still represent only a tiny share of the world’s energy consumption.

Figure 4. World energy consumption by part of the world, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015.

Thus, we are nowhere near a point where the world economy could continue to function without an adequate supply of oil, coal and natural gas.

9. Many people believe that oil prices will bounce back up again, and everything will be fine. This seems unlikely.

The growing cost of oil extraction that we have been encountering in the last 15 years represents one form of diminishing returns. Once the cost of making energy products becomes high, an economy is permanently handicapped. Prices higher than those maintained in the 2011-2014 period are really needed if extraction is to continue and grow. Unfortunately, such high prices tend to be recessionary. As a result, high prices tend to push demand down. When demand falls too low, prices tend to fall very low.

There are several ways to improve demand for commodities, and thus raise prices again. These include (a) increasing wages of non-elite workers (b) increasing the proportion of the population with jobs, and (c) increasing the amount of debt. None of these are moving in the “right” direction.

Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies points out that once diminishing returns set in, the response is more “complexity” to solve these problems. Government programs become more important, and taxes are often higher. Education of elite workers becomes more important. Businesses become larger. This increased complexity leads to more of the output of the economy being funneled to sectors of the economy other than the wages of non-elite workers. Because there are so many of these non-elite workers, their lack of buying power adversely affects demand for goods that use commodities, such as homes, cars, and motorcycles.1

Another force tending to hold down demand is a smaller proportion of the population in the labor force. There are many factors contributing to this: Young people are in school longer. The bulge of workers born after World War II is now reaching retirement age. Lagging wages make it increasingly difficult for young parents to afford childcare so that both can work.

As noted in Section 5, debt growth is no longer rising as rapidly as in the past. In fact, we are seeing the beginning of interest rate increases.

When we add to these problems the slowdown in growth in the Chinese economy and the new oil that Iran will be adding to the world oil supply, it is hard to see how the oil imbalance will be fixed in any reasonable time period. Instead, the imbalance seems likely to remain at a high level, or even get worse. With limited storage available, prices will tend to continue to fall.

10. The rapid run up in US oil production after 2008 has been a significant contributor to the mismatch between oil supply and demand that has taken place since mid-2014.

Without US production, world oil production (broadly defined, including biofuels and natural gas liquids) is close to flat.

Figure 5. Total liquids oil production for the world as a whole and for the world excluding the US, based on EIA International Petroleum Monthly data.
Figure 5. Total liquids oil production for the world as a whole and for the world excluding the US, based on EIA International Petroleum Monthly data.

Viewed separately, US oil production has risen very rapidly. Total production rose by about six million barrels per day between 2008 and 2015.

Figure 6. US Liquids production, based on EIA data (International Petroleum Monthly, through June 2015; supplemented by December Monthly Energy Review for most recent data).

US oil supply was able to rise very rapidly partly because QE led to the availability of debt at very low interest rates. In addition, investors found yields on debt so low that they purchased almost any equity investment that appeared to have a chance of long-term value. The combination of these factors, plus the belief that oil prices would always increase because extraction costs tend to rise over time, funneled large amounts of investment funds into the liquid fuels sector.

As a result, US oil production (broadly defined), increased rapidly, increasing nearly 1.0 million barrels per day in 2012, 1.2 million barrels per day in 2013, 1.7 million barrels per day in 2014. The final numbers are not in, but it looks like US oil production will still increase by another 700,000 barrels a day in 2015. The 700,000 extra barrels of oil added by the US in 2015 is likely greater than the amount added by either Saudi Arabia or Iraq.

World oil consumption does not increase rapidly when oil prices are high. World oil consumption increased by 871,000 barrels a day in 2012, 1,397,000 barrels a day in 2013, and 843,000 barrels a day in 2014, according to BP. Thus, in 2014, the US by itself added approximately twice as much oil production as the increase in world oil demand. This mismatch likely contributed to collapsing oil prices in 2014.

Given the apparent role of the US in creating the mismatch between oil supply and demand, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Saudi Arabia is unwilling to try to fix the problem.

Conclusion

Things aren’t working out the way we had hoped. We can’t seem to get oil supply and demand in balance. If prices are high, oil companies can extract a lot of oil, but consumers can’t afford the products that use it, such as homes and cars; if oil prices are low, oil companies try to continue to extract oil, but soon develop financial problems.

Complicating the problem is the economy’s continued need for stimulus in order to keep the prices of oil and other commodities high enough to encourage production. Stimulus seems to takes the form of ever-rising debt at ever-lower interest rates. Such a program isn’t sustainable, partly because it leads to mal-investment and partly because it leads to a debt bubble that is subject to collapse.

Stimulus seems to be needed because of today’s high extraction cost for oil. If the cost of extraction were still very low, this stimulus wouldn’t be needed because products made using oil would be more affordable.

Decision makers thought that peak oil could be fixed simply by producing more oil and more oil substitutes. It is becoming increasingly clear that the problem is more complicated than this. We need to find a way to make the whole system operate correctly. We need to produce exactly the correct amount of oil that buyers can afford. Prices need to be high enough for oil producers, but not too high for purchasers of goods using oil. The amount of debt should not spiral out of control. There doesn’t seem to be a way to produce the desired outcome, now that oil extraction costs are high.

Rigidities built into the oil price-supply system (as described in Sections 3 and 4) tend to hide problems, letting them grow bigger and bigger. This is why we could suddenly find ourselves with a major financial problem that few have anticipated.

Unfortunately, what we are facing now is a predicament, rather than a problem. There is quite likely no good solution. This is a worry.

Note:

[1] For example, more dividend and interest payments are paid, tending to benefit the financial industry and the elite classes. More of the output of the economy goes to workers in supervisory positions or having advanced education. Other workers–those with more “ordinary” responsibilities–find their wages falling behind the general rise in the cost of living. As a result, they find it increasingly difficult to buy cars, homes, motorcycles, and other goods that use commodities.

Gail E. Tverberg graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1968 with a B.S. in Mathematics. She received a M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1970. Ms. Tverberg is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. Ms. Tverberg began writing articles on finite world issues in early 2006. Since March 1, 2007, Ms. Tverberg has been working for Tverberg Actuarial Services on finite world issues. Her blog is http://ourfiniteworld.com
20 January, 2016
Ourfiniteworld.com

 

By Samar

“I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan. At last, this is the only letter I am getting to write.”

Rohith Vemula, a young Dalit research scholar and student activist of the University of Hyderabad, would certainly not have wanted to die. No one with dreams does, after all. Yet, he died yesterday, on 17th January 2016. He killed himself after leaving the protest venue he was living at for 15 days, after getting expelled from his hostel. He sneaked out on some pretext and hanged himself. Did he really kill himself though?

Go through the ‘suicide note’ and it becomes apparent that he did not. He was in fact killed by the phantom limb of caste on which the pretentious democratic credentials of the republic are superimposed. He was forced into killing himself for standing against and injustices against his people, the ex-untouchables.

Rohith was forced to kill himself because he did not stop at that cardinal sin of fighting for his own people. He dared to speak for all the marginalized ones, be it the minorities, the workers or women as a leading activist of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA).

There is nothing new in suicides, actually cold blooded murders, of bright Dalit students in premier educational institutions of the country. Many such incidents have been documented in the recent past showing how continuous harassment from the so called upper caste faculties and students pushed Dalit students into taking the extreme step. A documentary named ‘Death of Merit’ had counted 18 such cases in 4 years up to 2011 and led to a fierce discussion on the issue.

The suicides include that of Jaspreet Singh of Government Medical College, Chandigarh who was an extraordinary student and never failed even once. That was till he reached the final year of his graduation in medicine. The head of the department failed him then and threatened to do so over and over again. Unable to cope up with this torture, Jaspreet committed suicide blaming the head of department for his death. Yet, the police refused to lodge the First Information Report against the perpetrator. The trauma of losing him followed by this grave injustice was so severe for his sister, a student of Bachelor of Computer Application, that she also committed suicide,

The outrage over the suicides led to the intervention of the National Commission of Scheduled Castes (NCSC) which made a three-member team of senior professors re-evaluate his answer sheet. The team found that he had in fact passed the examination. It was only after NCSC’s intervention that the police filed the FIR under SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Not all the Dalit students killed by the system were fortunate enough to get even this much; a semblance of justice of something being done against their murderers.

Despite the clear pattern of caste based discriminations leading to such ‘suicides’, there is something markedly different in Rohith’s case. He, unlike most of the other young Dalits murdered for their caste, was not killed behind the walls of educational institutions away from the public gaze. His case was not about bad grades, or getting deliberately failed by the rogue faculties. Neither was his case about years and years of such endless torture finally culminating in a suicide and the world getting to know of that only after the final act.

Rohith’s suicide-murder was not one of them. It unfolded under full public gaze, on television, in social media, a gaze that apparently failed to save him.

Further, most of the other victims of suicide-murders had no support system inside the institutions they were harassed in, Rohith had. He had his friends, colleagues and common students supporting him in droves. He was expelled from the hostel and hundreds of those not expelled came to sleep out in open with him in solidarity. He, with his activist friends, led a procession in his campus and thousands marched in their own across the country. Yet, he was forced to kill himself and that is what makes this suicide-murder different, and a dangerous marker of the times to come by.

Recapping the incidents that led to Rohith’s suicide-murder may shed some light on the times to come by for the marginalised of the republic. His troubles started when ASA organised a protest march in August 2015 at the campus against the attack on the Montage Film Society in Delhi University by Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). They were attacked for screening a documentary movie ‘Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai” that exposed the roles of Hindutva outfits in Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013. Local ABVP unit did not, of course, like the protests and its leader Susheel Kumar posted a comment on Facebook calling ASA members ‘goons’. He later submitted a written apology. Next morning, Susheel Kumar alleged that about 30 students belonging to the ASA had beaten him up and he had to be hospitalized.

The University’s Proctorial Board conducted an enquiry into the allegations with a medical examination which found no proof of injuries claimed by Susheel Kumar. The Board observed the following-

“The board could not get any hard evidence of beating of Mr. Susheel kumar either from Mr Krishna Chaitanya or from the reports submitted by Dr. Anupama. Dr. Anupama’s reports also could not link or suggest that the surgery of the Susheel Kumar is the direct result of the beating.”

Based on these findings, the Board, reportedly, decided to end the matter with a warning to both the groups. The final report of the Board, however, inexplicably blamed ASA activists for causing injuries to Susheel Kumar and ordered the suspension of five students, including Rohith. ASA organized a protest following the suspension and held an open discussion with the then vice chancellor Prof. RP Sharma over the discrepancies in the findings and the punishment. Realising the injustice done to ASA students, Prof. Sharma revoked the suspension, subject to constitution of a new committee to enquire into the incident afresh.

Things started changing course soon afterwards. The new vice-chancellor Prof. P Apparao who took over from Prof. Sharma constituted no committee for a fresh enquiry and kept the suspended students in the dark until the Executive Council decided to suspend the students and expel them from their hostels. Self-evidently, Union Minister Bandaru Datttreya’s ‘intervention’ with the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) seems to have played an important role in the change in the university administration’s instance.

Mr. Datttreya, as it later came to be known, had intervened with the MHRD and urged it to discipline “casteist, extremist and anti-national’ elements like ASA. His primary reason for accusing ASA to be all this was simple- it had “held protests against the execution” (of Yakub Memon). Yes, he chose a reason which would turn many of the celebrated lawyers of the country including Anand Grover, Prashant Bhushan, Indira Jaisingh, Yug Choudhary, Nitya Ramakrishnan, Vrinda Grover and others into anti-nationals for opposing the same and seeking (and getting) an unprecedented 5 AM hearing by a Supreme Court bench to stop the execution.

What could have made a Union Minister intervene with the MHRD in such a ‘small’ case, likes of which keep taking in campuses across the country? Was it Rohith’s, and ASA’s, attempt to link the struggles of all the marginalized communities into one that had irked him? Perhaps it was, as Dalits standing up for Muslims, a vulnerable minority, would puncture the politico-ideological narrative that has propelled the present regime to power.

This makes the suicide-murder of Rohith markedly different from those preceding it and must send a shiver down the spine of any conscientious citizen of the country. The operational blame of past suicide-murders of the Dalit students lied, primarily, with identifiable rogue casteist elements; rogue because practicing casteism was never that easy despite it being deeply entrenched in the system. Harassment of Dalit students in prior cases could often be traced back to the individual perpetrators. It never was brazen enough to allow an incumbent union minister proactively trying to silence the voices for social justice by terming them anti-national and what not for raising issues as a united whole and not from the scattered locations of being a Dalit, a minority, tribal and so on.

This is also why Rohith’s suicide cannot be seen as an act of desperation. Neither was his struggle an individual one, for grades for instance, nor there was a reason for him to go desperate suddenly. His suicide note makes it clear too. His letter is not a suicide note in fact, it is an indictment of the republic that had been failing its vulnerable citizens for long and has started to shed even the pretence of justice of late.

To quote from his ‘suicide note’ again-

“The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In very field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.”

It is this reduction of human beings into mere categories that he fought against all his life. It is this reductionism, perhaps, he tried to challenge with one last act of supreme sacrifice. His body, as a body of a Dalit, had always been a site of struggle between forces wanting to dehumanize and own it and those wanting to put an end to this dehumanization. He turned it into a site of marking the necessity of all liberation struggles joining hands against increasingly vitiating attacks of the old order with new power.

This is our turn to not let his sacrifice go in vain. This is our turn to ensure that a functioning and accessible mechanism is put in place to support those fighting against systemic discrimination based on caste, gender, religion or any such regressive identity. It is high time to ensure that perpetrators do not get away with their crimes- be it witch hunt of activists or torture of individual students.

We need to begin with ensuring that all those responsible for this suicide murder, including VC Appa Rao and Union Minister Bandaru Datttreya, are booked under both -the provisions of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Preventions of Atrocities) Act and for abetment of suicide-murder of Rohith Vemula.

Samar is Programme Coordinator – Right to Food Programme Asian Legal Resource Centre / Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong

18 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Patrick Cockburn

It has been a week of bombings across the world, most of them carried out by Islamic State (Isis). Some were highly publicised because they took place in the centre of large cities and involved foreigners, such as the suicide bombing on 12 January close to the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul which killed 10 people, nine of them German tourists. Two days later gunmen and bombers claiming allegiance to Isis killed two people in Jakarta in an attack that topped the international news agenda because it appeared to show that Isis has a frightening global reach. Furthermore, it took place in a city of 10 million people which is a media hub, ensuring that there were plenty of television cameras to record events.

The reverse is true of a double bombing in Muqdadiyah, a town in the Iraqi province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, which took place the day before the Istanbul attack. Though the casualty figures of 46 killed and 55 wounded were far worse than in Turkey and Indonesia combined, the slaughter was scarcely noticed by the Iraqi or international media. Isis had first exploded a bomb outside a coffee shop, allegedly frequented by Shia militiamen belonging to the Hashd al-Shaabi movement, and followed this up soon after with a second explosion that killed people who had gathered to see what was happening or to help the injured.

The attack provoked, as Isis probably intended, retaliatory attacks on Sunni by Shia militia who killed 15 people, burned seven Sunni mosques and at least 36 shops. Diyala is a mixed Sunni-Shia province, famous for fruit growing when I first visited in the 1990s but notorious over the last 12 years for sectarian warfare. Even within Iraq there was little publicity for the killings last week, because people in Baghdad are used to this happening in Diyala, the Shia-dominated government and Shia militias were not keen to publicise it, and the risks of doing so were demonstrated when two journalists from Sharqiya television channel were killed.

The publicity generated by a “terrorist” attack may exaggerate or understate its political significance. In Indonesia, it was in the interests of Isis, the Indonesian government and the perpetrators of the attack to emphasise that it was similar in method and intent to the massacre in Paris on 13 November.

Isis wants to show it can operate anywhere in the world, and the Indonesian government that it can largely thwart such evil intentions. In fact, Isis does not seem to have had much to do with it, but the extreme Islamist faction that carried it out knows that it can instantly generate vast global interest and news coverage by labelling itself as the Isis branch in Indonesia. The Isis attack in Istanbul is important because it shows that the movement now considers itself to be at war with the Turkish state that between 2011 and early 2015 showed a tolerance for IS movements in and out of Turkey that were central to the growth of the movement. Ankara was sympathetic to all jihadi movements trying to bring down President Bashar al-Assad and saw Isis as a counter-balance to the growing strength of the Syrian Kurds.

Turkish policy towards Syria has been one miscalculation after another since the Syrian uprising began five years ago. Assad did not fall, and Isis became much stronger than the Turks expected. Worst of all, not only did Isis fighters fail to beat the Syrian Kurds in the four-and-a-half month siege for the city of Kobani on the Turkish border, but the Kurds allied themselves with the United States and have been advancing with the help of thousands of US airstrikes. The 25,000 Kurdish soldiers of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) are not on their own the most powerful military force in Syria, but backed by the largest air force in the world they are of crucial significance.

Turkey is deeply alarmed by the rise of a militarily strong Kurdish quasi-state running along its southern flank in de facto alliance with the US and Russia. It has discovered to its cost that Isis is not the answer to the Kurds, but it is not clear what is. Five years ago there were not wholly unrealistic dreams in Ankara of Turkey being a model for the new Middle East, and spreading its influence through Iraq and Syria. Instead, it is now in danger of being excluded from the region after allying itself to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and supporting or turning a blind eye to the activities of extreme jihadi groups such as Isis, the al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Nusra Front and the ideologically similar Ahrar al-Sham.

The problem for Turkey and the Sunni powers is that they now have to raise their stakes in Syria if they want to stay in the game. They did this earlier in the year by backing an anti-Assad offensive that made gains on the ground, but sparked a Russian and Iranian counter-intervention in September that enabled Assad and the Syrian army to go over to the attack. Turkey is getting close to the point where it has to become militarily engaged in the war for northern Syria or become a marginal player. The sealing of the Turkish border by Syrian Kurds and a Russian-backed Syrian army would be a body blow to all the other anti-Assad forces in Syria from which it would be difficult for them to recover.

The Syrian army has not won any decisive victories since the Russians intervened, but its soldiers are advancing rather than pulling back. The armed opposition as a whole is on the retreat. This is one of several reasons why the Syrian peace talks that begin in Vienna on 25 January are unlikely to succeed. Assad and the combination of powers behind him – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah – feel that they are getting stronger rather than weaker so there is less reason for them to compromise.

The Russians evidently enjoy interacting with the US in a way that recalls the super-power bargaining of the Cold War. But a former Arab diplomat points out that “Syria has two separate alliances with Russia and Iran and, of these, the Iranian one is the most important.” A defeat in Syria has always been a far more devastating prospect for Iran than Russia. The Iranians are the leaders of the region-wide Shia axis that is one of the guarantees of Assad’s survival and they have also, hitherto, provided badly needed money to Damascus which the Russians have not. This limits Russia’s capacity to put pressure on Assad on Vienna even if it wanted to.

The other problem facing negotiations in Vienna is that the armed opposition groups which are doing most of the shooting will not be present. The most important of these are Isis and al-Nusra, while Ahrar al-Sham is ambivalent towards Saudi Arabia’s attempt to unite the opposition. There is little point in having local ceasefires, unless al-Nusra and the other extreme fundamentalists agree to them and get something in return.

Guerrilla forces tend to disintegrate if they are not fighting an enemy. It is difficult to see why the war should not go on.

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent. He was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards.

17 January 2016

Peace for Life, a global faith-based peace and justice movement resisting militarism, war and globalisation, lauds the United Methodist Church (UMC) for blocking five of the biggest Israeli banks from its $20-billion Pension and Health Benefits Fund investment portfolio. UMC’s divestment deals a major blow to the Israeli apartheid regime and inspires other communities of faith to take the morally courageous stand for peace, justice, and human rights in Palestine.

The five banks are Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, First International Bank of Israel, Israel Discount Bank, and Mizrahi Tefahot Bank. Additionally, UMC sold its holdings in the Israeli real-estate company Shikun & Binui, and barred the company from the pension group’s investment portfolio.

According to the 2010 report released by the Israeli rights group Who Profits, Israeli banks partake in Israel’s brazen violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in Palestine, specifically through: 1) the provision of mortgage loans for homebuyers in settlements; 2) special loans for building projects in settlements; 3) financial services to Israeli local authorities in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights; 4) setting up of branches in Israeli settlements; 5) providing financial services to businesses in settlements; and 6) holding captive the Palestinian monetary market.

The UMC is justified in divesting its investments from companies that gain from the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. These settlements constitute a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbidding an occupying power to forcibly displace the population of an occupied territory. Israel’s plunder of land, water, and other natural resources for the benefit of settlements and residents violate the Hague Regulations of 1907 prohibiting an occupying power from expropriating the resources of the occupied territory for its own use. Israeli businesses, according to the rights watchdog Human Rights Watch, comprise the lion’s share of the illegal settlement activities in the occupied territories and enjoy low rents, tax incentives, government subsidies, and access to cheap Palestinian labour.

Peace for Life congratulates the United Methodist – Kairos Response (UMKR) for its years of persistent hard work and conscientious efforts to increase awareness within the church about the Palestinian peoples’ struggle and to highlight the need to put its ethical commitment into action by aligning its business practices and investment policies with the United Methodist Social Principles and Social Creed.

We support the continued initiatives of the UMKR divestment committee to urge the UMC to further ensure consistency and completely ban from its investment portfolio all companies that financially sustain Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine. UMKR has already submitted four proposals to the Church’s upcoming General Conference in May. Three of the proposals require divestment from companies involved with the occupation, and one puts in place a screening procedure to rule out investments in companies doing business in illegal settlements anywhere in the world.

Similarly, we recognize the actions taken in previous years by various Christian confessions in the US in support of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israel. In June 2015, the overwhelming majority of participants in the 30th general synod of the United Church of Christ (UCC), upheld the resolution supporting boycotts and divestments from companies profiting in Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. In June 2014, the 221st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church voted to sell its stock in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions whose products Israel uses to pacify and oppress Palestinians.

Peace for Life urges other churches to follow the UMC, the UCC and the Presbyterian churches’ lead and support the Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaign against Israel. We look forward to further working with the United Methodist Kairos Response and similar groups in bringing to public attention the plight of the Palestinians and their struggle for justice and freedom. We call for an ecumenical united front against Israel’s occupation and violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws.