Archives: Articles

By Garikai Chengu

01 August, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

A bloodless revolution is silently taking place in Zimbabwe. President Mugabe’s Indigenisation of the land and the economy will set a precedent for the creation of a forerunning, economic model for Africa. Consequently, a victory for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe’s election is a resounding victory for the future of the African continent.

Only ninety years ago, the British South Africa Company owned every square inch of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwean land and natural resources were taken violently and divided amongst European settlers. All the while, indigenous Zimbabweans were considered subjects and assets, solely belonging to the British Crown.

After decades of liberation struggle, Africans finally placed the crown on their own heads. But, in 2013, where are the jewels of this crown?

The mining and extraction of precious resources, like oil, natural gas, gold, and platinum, enrich Western corporations. Here, we see the West’s current control over Africa’s “jewels”.

Western economic control of Africa casts a shadow of poverty throughout the continent. Whether in the Niger Delta or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the majority of people experience lives of misery and receive very little benefit from the richness of their land.

In fact, Africa’s natural resources, land, and forced labour have fueled the world’s economy for centuries. To this day, Africa is still the world’s engine-room for economic growth.

In short, Africa fuels the global economy, while reaping little profits at home; this is the “black man’s burden.” Indigenisation is designed to allow Zimbabweans to free themselves of this centuries’ old burden. Lifting this crushing millstone is our generation’s greatest struggle.

At President Mugabe’s last campaign rally, he proclaimed that, “we must re-write the economic books for our children. Those books were written to suite the West’s agenda of exploiting our resources. Our children must know that our resources are more significant, more precious than their capital.”

Years from now, economic books will use Zimbabwe’s Indigenisation Program as a model for African decolonisation. African politicians will look to Zimbabwe as a point of reference.

As with tobacco, diamonds, cocoa and oil, Africa exports its precious resources to the West, only to buy them back at a premium. This is Africa’s greatest problem and biggest opportunity. The solution to this problem is simple: Africa must not only control its raw materials but also build the capacity to make them into finished products.

Indigenisation is the much needed bridge between poverty and industrialization, and therefore, transforming Africa into a first world power.

No longer will Europeans take our natural resources; no longer will they control our industrial processes. We will not be burdened; we will not be stripped of our land, our pride, our Africa.

If Africans indigenise our economies and resolutely build the capacity to refine our crude oil, gold and platinum, as well as the capability to cut and polish our diamonds, we will certainly turn this into an African century.

Clearly, Africa is not under-developed; she is over-exploited. Western foreign investors are merely foreign exploiters.

According to a recent UN Africa Progress Report, Africa loses 63 billion dollars, each year, through foreign multinational corporations’ illegal tax evasion and exploitative practices. This figure surpasses all the money coming into the continent through Western aid and investment.

It is for this reason that Zimbabwe’s new Indigenisation model emphasizes local ownership and foreign partnership with emerging nations, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Zimbabwe’s Indigenisation Program is as much about looking inward as it is about looking east.

Today, I say, with confidence, that Zimbabwe is the only economically liberated, black nation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Zimbabwe has proved to her African brothers and sisters that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to take back our land.

Let us now look to our recent past for guidance into our new economic future.

A few years ago, the international media houses and Western academics repeated the same, twisted narrative about the Indigenisation of Zimbabwe’s land, claiming it was an economic failure, which only benefited ‘Mugabe’s cronies.’

The West’s economic sanctions on Zimbabwe were designed to cripple our economy, in an attempt to dissuade other African nations from emulating our cause.

Western sanctions sent a clear message to Africa’s landless and economically disempowered masses: “You can have your democracy, but keep the economic power in the hands of the white minority; otherwise, you’ll end up like Zimbabwe.”

The World Bank still estimates that a staggering 65% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s best arable land is still controlled by white settlers or multinational corporations. The World Bank also estimates that as much as 70% of the net wealth in Sub-Saharan Africa is owned by non-indigenous Africans or foreigners.

Clearly, the West is fine with other African nations adopting democratic governments, but any attempt to democratize the economy and the land is dealt with by NATO, the CIA, or economically destabilizing sanctions.

Nowadays, those same Western media houses and academics are admitting that Zimbabwe’s land democratization program has not only benefited over a million people, but also pioneered a more economically productive way of farming.

President Mugabe’s Indigenisation of land has created employment and support for the livelihood of over 1.7 million Zimbabweans.

This year alone, Zimbabwe raked in over a half billion dollars from tobacco sales. Before land Indigenisation, a handful of rich, white farmers would have greedily divided these profits, moving the money away from African pockets and into Western bank accounts.

In fact, the World Bank estimated that, “nearly 40 percent of Africa’s aggregate wealth has fled to foreign bank accounts.”

Indigenisation will combat this outflow of wealth by creating more African corporate owners. These local shareholders are more likely to save their rent in local banks, spend their dividends on domestic goods, and invest their profits in local businesses.

Today, 75,000 indigenous Zimbabweans benefit from the tobacco sales’ profits of a half billion dollars. Land reform is now possible in all African countries after Zimbabwe’s successful example.

With a rapidly growing and indigenously owned economy, many African nations will increasingly seek to emulate Zimbabwe. Years from now, African states will strive to achieve Zimbabwe’s economic success.

Say what you want to say about Mr. Mugabe, but today, Zimbabweans own Zimbabwe.

By re-electing President Mugabe, the people of Zimbabwe are making history. ZANU-PF will now have five more years to finish implementing a revolutionary economic model that will inevitably spread across the continent.

Garikai Chengu is Fellow of the Du Bois Institute for African Research Harvard University. Garikai Chengu can be contacted at chengu@fas.harvard.edu

By Mary Shaw

01 August, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

On July 30, in a military trial at Fort Mead, Maryland, war crimes whistleblower Bradley Manning was acquitted of aiding the enemy (the most serious charge against him) but was found guilty of 19 other charges. While serving as a Private First Class in the U.S. Army, Manning had released hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks which exposed U.S. war crimes and other government misconduct. Doing so led to his court-martial.

In response to the verdict, Amnesty International suggested that the U.S. government needs to reassess its priorities: “The government’s priorities are upside down. The U.S. government has refused to investigate credible allegations of torture and other crimes under international law despite overwhelming evidence,” said Widney Brown, Amnesty’s senior director of international law and policy. “Yet they decided to prosecute Manning who it seems was trying to do the right thing – reveal credible evidence of unlawful behavior by the government. You investigate and prosecute those who destroy the credibility of the government by engaging in acts such as torture which are prohibited under the U.S. Constitution and in international law… It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Manning’s trial was about sending a message: the U.S. government will come after you, no holds barred, if you’re thinking of revealing evidence of its unlawful behavior.”

In other words, U.S. policy is to shoot the proverbial messenger.

The lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) agree. The CCR had filed a case challenging the lack of transparency around the Manning trial. Now, in the wake of the verdict, the CCR has released a statement condemning the charges against Manning related to the Espionage Act: “[T]he Espionage Act itself is a discredited relic of the WWI era, created as a tool to suppress political dissent and antiwar activism, and it is outrageous that the government chose to invoke it in the first place against Manning. Government employees who blow the whistle on war crimes, other abuses and government incompetence should be protected under the First Amendment.”

The CCR statement goes on to question the future of journalism and the First Amendment itself: “We now live in a country where someone who exposes war crimes can be sentenced to life even if not found guilty of aiding the enemy, while those responsible for the war crimes remain free. If the government equates being a whistleblower with espionage or aiding the enemy, what is the future of journalism in this country? What is the future of the First Amendment?”

Indeed. And it’s not just journalists and whistleblowers who should be worried.

Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated. E-mail: mary@maryshawonline.com

ShareThisShareThis

Comments are moderated

By Countercurrents.org

01 August, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Diplomacy moving around Mohammad Morsi, the Egyptian president overthrown by the country’s army, shows the US-UK-EU have not abandoned Muslim Brotherhood and the army is not the sole ally of the axis. Germany , Washington and the European Union have earlier urged an end to the secrecy imposed on Morsi’s whereabouts, heaping pressure on the interim government to free the toppled president. The US State Department condemned the detentions of Morsi and members of the Muslim Brotherhood as “politically motivated” and urged the military to free them.

Media reports from Egypt said:

The UK has called on the Egyptian authorities to release Morsi. It also held the Egyptian security forces responsible for killing of the civilian protesters.

In a phone talks with Mohamed El Baradei, Egyptian vice president for foreign affairs, the UK foreign secretary William Hague called for “the release of all political detainees, including president Morsi, unless there are criminal charges to be made against them.”

This is the first time since his removal by the army, the UK called Morsi a president.

Hague’s remarks came hours after the Egyptian cabinet extended mandate to interior ministry to confront what it called ‘acts of terrorism and road-blocking.’

In a statement after his talks with El Baradei, Hague said he also emphasized that it is vital that any charges against detainees are not politically motivated.

A UK foreign Office spokesman refused to say whether his government is convinced that the charges Morsi is facing are criminal not politically motivated.

Alistair Burt, the UK Middle East minister, visited Egypt last week and met the interim government official and Muslim Brotherhood.

At the end of the visit he said Egypt needs a political process that includes all groups on an equal footing leading to early and fair elections which all parties are able to contest, and a swift return to civilian-led government.

US

Two leading US senators have been asked by US president Barack Obama to travel to Egypt to urge the country’s military to hold new elections.

Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, seen as leading legislative voices on US foreign policy and security matters, told reporters that they plan to travel next week to Cairo.

“The president asked Senator McCain and me to go to Egypt next week, so we’re trying to find a way to get there,” said Graham.

Graham said the goal of the trip is to “reinforce in a bipartisan fashion the message that we have to move to civilian control — that the military is going to have to allow the country to have new elections and move toward an inclusive, democratic approach.”

He and McCain, who was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2008, intend to “talk to the military and the political leaders — hopefully including the Muslim Brotherhood — to have a unified message that we want Egypt to be successful,” said Graham.

The South Carolina lawmaker continued: “You cannot stop the progress and the march for democracy that the military has to turn over as fast as possible control to a civilian government.”

Graham added: “The days of supporting friendly dictators or military regimes are behind us, the Arab Spring is real.

US defense secretary Chuck Hagel called once again on Egypt ‘s military to show restraint in the wake of deadly protests.

Hagel spoke to General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi by telephone after EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton paid a first-of-a-kind visit to ousted president Mohamed Morsi.

Hagel spoke to El-Sisi “to discuss the security situation in Egypt and urge restraint by Egyptian security forces in dealing with ongoing protests,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

The two spoke about Ashton’s visit and “the need for an inclusive reconciliation process,” Little said.

Germany

The Egyptian presidency said it had received a request from German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle to meet detained former president Morsi, but hinted it might not have the authority to allow such visit.

In a statement on July 31, 2013 , the presidency said it had informed the German foreign minister that “the former president is under investigation and is facing numerous charges,” suggesting it may not have the authority to accept Westerwelle’s meeting request.

The German foreign minister is expected to visit Cairo to discuss the political situation in Egypt with interim government officials and a number of Muslim Brotherhood members.

Earlier, in mid-July, the German chancellor Angela Merkel renewed calls for the release of Morsi.

Merkel called for “an inclusive political process involving all groups of the Egyptian population.” She gave her remarks in a press conference in Berlin .

In mid-July, Germany called for the release of Morsi.

“We call for an end to the restrictions on Mr Morsi’s whereabouts,” a foreign ministry spokesman told reporters.

The German ministry spokesman said a “trusted institution” such as the International Committee of the Red Cross should be granted access to Morsi.

EU

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton met Morsi for two hours on July 29, 2013 at an undisclosed location.

Morsi was “well,” Ashton said at a press conference in Cairo the day after the meeting.

“Mohamed Morsi is fine, I met him and we had a friendly discussion for two hours,” said Ashton.

“I do not know where he is, it is an undisclosed location,” she said. “He is in good health and he sends good wishes to the outside world.”

Morsi has access to TV and newspapers, she confirmed.

Ashton was not blindfolded

Catherine Ashton was not blindfolded while traveling to meet Morsi, said European officials.

EU aides told the New York Times that Ashton was transported to the meeting at night via helicopter so as to maintain secrecy around the former president’s location.

A delegation of human rights activists who visited Morsi before Ashton’s trip were similarly misled as to Morsi’s location, circling in a helicopter for 15 minutes before landing at the undisclosed site.

According to the Egyptian military, the intense security shrouding Morsi’s detention is intended for the ousted president’s own safety.  There are also speculations that his location remains undisclosed in order to discourage supporters from camping-out in protest, as which occurred outside the Republican Guard headquarters in early July.

African Union

Morsi was also visited on July 30, 2013 by a delegation from the African Union Wise Men Committee delegation, led by former Malian president Alpha Omar Konare.

The AU had suspended Egypt ‘s membership in the group shortly after Morsi’s deposition.

Both Ashton and the AU meetings aimed at reaching a resolution to the current impasse in Egypt .

Mohamed Morsi told the African Union Wise Men Committee that he was the victim of an injustice and had been wrongly ousted from power.

The AU delegation discussed the outcome of the meeting during a press conference in Cairo .

According to former president of Botswana Festus Gontebanye Mogae, the delegation told Morsi that as a leader, he must contribute to achieving peace and ending violence.

Mogae added that the delegation pressed on Morsi to encourage his supporters to achieve peace.

The AU Wise Men Committee also met representatives from the April 6 Youth Movement and the Tamarod. “We did not come here to make judgment on matters, but to hear from all parties” said Mogae, adding that a summary of the visit will be presented to the African Union secretariat.

Alpha Oumar Konar, the former president of Mali who heads the ‘Wise Men’ delegation, stated that if inclusive reconciliation is not reached, Egypt may be on the path to a civil war.

Tamarod

Leaders of the anti-Morsi ‘Rebel’ (Tamarod) campaign met Catherine Ashton in Cairo and stressed they reject “deals” and a safe exit for Morsi and other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Everyone involved in bloodshed must be subject to a fair trial,” Mahmoud Badr, one of the leaders of Rebel said, according to a statement on the group’s official website.

“We asked her if she would personally accept an armed sit-in to be set up under her house, one that would force her to go to her home before being searched thoroughly and would turn the gardens surrounding her house to places for people to sleep, and would construct toilets in them,” read the statement.

Badr said the delegation told the EU’s top diplomat that the Egyptian people respect those who respect their will and “all countries must respect our will.”

He also posed her a question about whether European nations would allow sit-ins by Al Qaeda in their cities, pointing out that “black flags of Al Qaeda are present at all of the pro-Morsi rallies.”

The archaic black flag carrying “there is no God but Allah” in white is used by Al-Qaeda. It has appeared in numerous Islamist and Brotherhood rallies in Egypt over the past two years.

By Countercurrents.org

31 July, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Tunisia’s largest trade union called on July 30, 2013 for the dissolution of the Islamist-led government and the interior minister offered to resign as a political crisis deepened. Calls for the ouster of the government are continuing. Now , it’s from members of the government and the National Constituent Assembly’s (NCA) ruling coalition. Civil society and political parties joined calls for a new government in separate press conferences.

Media reports from Tunisia said:

The powerful Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), which has about 600,000 members in the public and private sectors, said a technocratic government should replace the one led by Ennahda. The union called for the dissolution of the government and for the appointment of a committee of experts to examine the constitution.

“We consider this government incapable of continuing its work,” Hussein Abbassi, general secretary of the UGTT, said in a statement.

Although endorsing demands for the government to fall, the UGTT has opposed dissolving the assembly – a measure which would throw the country’s fragile transition process into limbo.

“We propose maintaining the Constituent Assembly but … with a time-frame to speed up completion of its work”, said Abbassi. The UGTT brought much of the country to a halt with a one-day strike on Friday.

The UGTT leader said that if this” terrorism is not uprooted, Tunisia will fall into a blood bath.”

Softening its rejection of demands for the government’s departure, the Islamist party Ennahda said it was ready for a new government, but opposed any move to disband an elected body that has almost completed work on a new draft constitution.

“We are open to all proposals to reach an agreement, including a salvation or unity government,” said Ennahda official Ameur Larayedh. “But we will not accept dissolving the Constituent Assembly. This is a red line.”

Along with political unrest the army is struggling to contain Islamist militants, who killed eight soldiers on July 29, 2013 in a mountainous region near the Algerian border in one of the bloodiest attacks on Tunisian troops in decades.

The secular opposition in Tunisia has stepped up pressure on the Ennahda-led government to quit.

Some opposition leaders were dissatisfied with Ennahda’s offer to form a new government but keep the Assembly in place.

“The street wants to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, which is already dying politically and ethically. Its legitimacy is over,” said Mongi Rahoui, a leader in the Popular Front. Rahoui also said Ennahda must relinquish the post of prime minister in any deal.

Opposition leaders criticize the Assembly for far exceeding the one-year deadline it set in December 2011 to complete its tasks, which include drafting a constitution.

Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou, a judge and political independent from the Al Qasreen area near where the troops were ambushed by militants, said in a radio interview Tuesday: “I am ready to resign. A salvation government or national unity government must be formed to get Tunisia out of this bottleneck. I am trying to see the implications of my resignation. Once a salvation government is formed, I will give up my position to the new government.”

“Parties should gather, put their differences aside, and form a national salvation   government,” said Jeddou.

Earlier, the secular party Ettakatol threatened to withdraw from the ruling coalition unless a unity government was formed to defuse widespread and often violent protests.

In their statement, Ettakatol has call ed for the dissolution of the government . However, the party has urge d the NCA to finish the constitution and electoral law and to approve the Law of Transitional Justice and the Independent Board for Elections (ISIE) before October 23.

The opposition, angered by the assassination of two leftist leaders – Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi – has rejected several concessions and power-sharing proposals from the Ennahda-led coalition in the last few days.

The ruling coalition headed by primeminister Ali Larayedh has begun to fray in the last few days as political turmoil and street unrest grip the North African nation of 11 million.

The demand for a national salvation government was echoed by current members of the government.

The Democratic Alliance, an opposition political party, called for a national salvation government. The Alliance suggested a committee of leading political figures be formed to support and advise the independent members of the proposed salvation government.

The initiative is also calling all parties to sign an agreement that sets October 23 as a deadline for the NCA, and to dissolve Leagues for Protection of Revolution, a group that many say promotes violence to support the Islamist Ennahdha.

“There is no legitimacy that is higher than the interest of the country and the security and blood of Tunisians,” said Mohamed Hamdi, member of the Democratic Alliance.

“As for the NCA, we don’t really cling to it but we don’t also believe its dissolution is imperative. We are being pragmatic. This is the democratic path we started and chose and people were enthusiastic about. These deadlines that are not respected are making things worse. We need the NCA to be restricted to a date and limit his work to getting Tunisia to the elections,” Hamdi said in a press conference .

“We are with the call for consensus and for the idea of an expert committee to examine the constitution so that it is not discussed in the plenary sessions until it is scrutinized by these experts,” he added.

Gilbert Naccache, a leftist Tunisian politician and activist, denounced the demand to dissolve the NCA in an interview with Express FM.

“We have no interest in dissolving the NCA since the [aftermath of the assassination] shows the weakening of Ennhadha, which now needs to make concessions when it comes to the constitution. It is not the time to dissolve the NCA. I might not trust certain political movements but I do not trust [a committee of independent] experts on this.”

“Politically, it is madness to put the constitution under the scrutiny of a committee of experts. We either dissolve the NCA and find a way to write the constitution or keep the NCA and continue pressuring them to make the constitution as democratically as possible. Here, it is the constituent assembly members who decided and not experts. Experts can only intervene when it comes to formality aspect of writing the constitution, not the contents,” he added.

“Islamists and Troika will not leave power unless they are forced. Is it necessary to get them to leave? What is the alternative to the NCA? ” ,   he asked, referring to the ruling coalition.

A Tunis datelined Reuters report said:

More than any threat of military force, the power of Tunisia ‘s main trade union may be what pushes the Islamist-led government to accept opposition demands for it to quit.

The secular opposition in Tunisia has taken to the streets to demand a new government. Thousands of its supporters have been joined by ordinary Tunisians fed up with rising instability and economic stagnation.

All this had seemed to leave the ruling party Ennahda unmoved – until Tuesday. Then the Tunisian General Labour Union, courted for days by the opposition, came out in support of creating a new echnocrat government. Ennahda later said it was willing to consider that plan.

Whereas in Egypt military power decided the Islamist government’s fate, in Tunisia the economic muscle of the union may prove decisive . J ust one day of strikes can cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It is the force capable of influencing the street and its leaders can topple the government,” said opposition activist Sofian Chourabi. “The UGTT can reshuffle the political cards because of its manpower and its political and economic weight. It can play the role that the Tunisian army can’t.”

The UGTT has been a major political player since it staged regional strikes in 2011. These helped protesters to force out autocratic ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, setting off a wave of uprisings across the region.

On the cost of strike the report cited economists:

More recently economists estimate a one-day strike, called by the UGTT to protest against the assassination of leftist politician Mohamed Brahmi, cost up to $422 million last week.

Economist Moez Joudi told local newspaper Assabah that the stoppage caused a stock market dive and pushed the Tunisian dinar to its lowest value ever against the dollar and euro.

Such influence gives the union a forceful hand to play in a country suffering economic stagnation and rising unemployment – problems which are already increasing frustration with the government.

A leftist workers’ body, the UGTT is ideologically already close to the secular opposition that has been on the offensive.

Brahmi’s killing drew further support to the opposition’s cause.

The Tunisian army may have played a role in Ben Ali’s overthrow by refusing to shoot demonstrators. But unlike the Egyptian military, which helped protesters to topple fellow autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, it remains politically weak.

It has few strings to pull and, unlike the Egyptian military, little economic privilege to protect.

“The Tunisian army is neutral and won’t force its will… It has no established custom of playing a political role,” said a source close to the military.

Though most opposition leaders publicly deny wanting military intervention, average supporters make no secret of their desire for an ” Egypt scenario”.

Young activists have even copied the Egyptian campaign group Tamar o d (Rebel!) by organizing their own petition calling for the government to quit. Their movement (also called Tamar o d) says it has collected more than 200,000 signatures.

In a face-off on the streets, it is unclear whether the opposition could force Ennahda to accept its demand to dissolve not only the government, but also the transitional Constituent Assembly – which is weeks away from finishing a draft constitution.

On the role of the internal security forces the Reuters report said:

Some observers suggest internal security forces could play a more influential role. Under Ben Ali, Tunisia was a police state where Interior Ministry forces had influence and power, but they are now as divided as the general population.

At recent protests in Tunis , Reuters reporters heard some security force members arguing about whether to fire tear gas at demonstrators.

“The Interior Ministry is a mess of divisions. Some departments are now in the hands of Ennahda, others are holdovers from the former regime,” said Tunisian analyst Youssef Welati. “I don’t think they have any kind of decisive role. And neither does the army. The most they can do is decide not to suppress protests.”

Citing sources close to the opposition the report said:

Opposition leaders trying to form a rival “salvation government” are proposing security force members, such as Rachid Ammar, the former army chief, and former defense minister Abd Elkarim al-Zbidi.

On the role of trade union the report said:

But the institution the opposition is best poised to benefit from is the UGTT. Historically, the unions have been a powerful force and the UGTT organized against French colonial authorities before independence in the 1950s.

“We are a national organization whose role it is to rescue the country,” Sami Tahri, the assistant secretary general, told reporters on Monday.

The union has hinted it may consider more strikes if the political situation doesn’t improve but is also trying to create for itself a more unifying role. It has rejected opposition calls to dissolve the constitutional assembly, apparently aware of complaints that this would be destructive and could lengthen Tunisia ‘s transition to democracy.

That stand seems to have eased Ennahda’s fears and allow it to open up to the possibility of a new government.

“The UGTT can find a deal that guarantees the continuity of the state but at the same time meets some of the demands of angry protesters,” activist Chourabi said. “It may be the one who can create a consensual exit plan from the crisis.”

By Jonathan Cook

@ The Electronic Intifada

Nazareth

31 July 2013

Leaders of Israel’s Palestinian minority have accused the Israeli authorities of intensifying efforts to push Christian and Muslim communities into conflict, as part of a long-running divide-and-rule strategy towards the country’s Palestinian citizens.

The allegations have been prompted by a series of initiatives to pressure Christian school-leavers into the army, breaking the community’s blanket rejection of the Israel army draft for the past 65 years.

Leaders from the Palestinian community, Christian and Muslim, who have spoken against this new enlistment effort have been called in for investigation by Israel’s secret police. In an Orwellian inversion, they have been accused of “incitement to violence.”

The issue first came to prominence last October when the defense ministry quietly staged a conference close to Nazareth, the effective capital of Palestinians in Israel, to promote military service among Christians.

The participation of three local clergymen in the conference sent shock waves through the Muslim and Christian communities.

The move was seen as a prelude to launching a more general recruitment drive among Palestinian Christians. Currently both Christians and Muslims, comprising nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, are exempt from conscription.

Instilling “Zionist values”

In an apparently related step in July, a Christian in Nazareth whose brother is an official in the defense ministry announced the establishment of a Christian-Jewish party. Municipal elections are due in late October.

The movement, which also runs an enlistment forum to encourage Christians to serve in the army, has paired with a far-right Jewish group, Im Tirtzu.

Im Tirtzu has been behind various McCarthyite campaigns, including pressuring Israeli universities to dismiss staff seen as left-wing; lobbying to strengthen “Zionist values” in the school curriculum; and seeking penalties for Israeli nongovernmental organizations supporting the rights of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Officials in Nazareth have warned that their city is at risk of becoming a flash-point for inter-communal fighting if Israel continues to stir up sectarian tensions.

Dominated by its Christian institutions but with a two-thirds Muslim majority, Nazareth has been struggling to temper sectarian divisions since the late 1990s. That was when the Israeli government promoted a provocative project to build a mosque next to the city’s main Christian pilgrimage site, the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Israel’s Palestinian Christians, numbering 125,000, or about nine percent of the Palestinian minority, are mostly located in Nazareth and its surrounding villages.

Divide and conquer

The issue of military service is an especially contentious one for the Palestinian minority, said Azmi Hakim, leader of the Greek Orthodox community council in Nazareth.

Most Palestinian citizens refuse to join the army because they reject the role of the Israeli military in oppressing other Palestinians and in enforcing an occupation that violates international law. However, there are strong objections on other grounds.

“Israel has tried to use military service as a way to break us up as a national group since the state’s earliest days,” Hakim said. “It wants us to be weak, separate religious communities incapable of organizing and demanding our rights.”

The Druze community, of a similar size to the Christian one, has been conscripted into the army since the 1950s. As a consequence, Israel designated the Druze a national group distinct from the rest of the Palestinian minority, and created a separate education system to inculcate “Zionist values.”

Israel has also persuaded some Bedouins to volunteer as army trackers. Otherwise, only a tiny number of Christians and Muslims request to have their exemption waived — in most cases, according to scholar Rhoda Kanaaneh, in the hope of accruing extra financial benefits related to army service.

Abir Kopty, a former Nazareth councilor, said that Israel had long tried to instill in Christians an insecurity towards their Muslim neighbors.

“Israel’s goal is to make Christians feel like a vulnerable minority and that they will be safer only if they have been trained by the army and have a gun. We hear Christian youngsters who consider enlistment saying things like, ‘I want to protect myself and my family,’” she said.

In similar fashion, Druze youths have been known to turn their weapons on Christian and Muslim neighbors when disputes have arisen. In one notorious incident, in 2003, Druze soldiers fired an anti-tank missile at a church in the village of Rama in the Galilee (“Communal pitfalls,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 6-12 March 2003).

Sectarian campaign

The pro-enlistment conference held in October was arranged by Ehab Shlayan, a career officer in the Israeli military from Nazareth who was recently appointed as “adviser on Christian issues” in the defense ministry.

It was staged in Upper Nazareth, a city established on Nazareth’s lands in the 1950s as part of Israel’s project to “Judaize the Galilee,” the area where the Palestinian community in Israel is concentrated. The mayor, Shimon Gapso, an ally of Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, helped sponsor the event.

Palestinian leaders said Gapso’s role was entirely cynical.

Last year Gapso described Nazareth as a “nest of terror” and called on the government to cut all funding to the city. He argued that Nazareth’s residents should be expelled to Gaza.

In recent years he has angrily denounced the growing trend for families from Nazareth, many of them Christian, to move to his city, with much of the migration spurred by land shortages that have made it increasingly difficult to build in Nazareth.

Palestinians now comprise as much as a quarter of Upper Nazareth’s population, but Gapso has publicly declared they are unwelcome. He recently erected large Israeli flags at all entrances to the city “so that people will know Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city.”

Gapso’s antipathy towards the Palestinian minority has demonstrably included Christians. In winter 2010 he banned Christmas trees from all public buildings, and has refused to allow the establishment of a church in his city.

Recent reports revealed that he secretly appointed a “settlement adviser” – Rabbi Hillel Horowitz, a settler from Hebron – on ways to bring extremist religious Jews to the city in the hope of driving out Palestinian residents “Mysterious ‘adviser on settlement affairs’ no. 13 on Habayit Hayehudi slate,” Haaretz, 11 January).

“Good Arabs”

News of the conference on recruiting Christian community members was revealed on social media a short time after it was held in October. More than 120 Christian teenagers were reported to have attended, mostly drawn from the local Greek Catholic and Maronite scout groups.

However, the fact that three senior clergy from Nazareth took part and spoke in favor of Christian enlistment has caused particular consternation.

They include 39-year-old Bishop Jibril Nadaf, from the Greek Orthodox community, the largest Christian denomination in Israel, and Father Masoud Abu Hatoum, of the Greek Catholic community.

Nazareth’s Greek Orthodox council, an elected body that represents the community’s interests in the city, immediately issued a statement denouncing Nadaf’s participation. A short time later the patriarch in Jerusalem, Theophilus III, barred Nadaf from entering the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation.

According to church officials, Theophilus will announce Nadaf’s relocation to Jerusalem in the next few weeks.

Azmi Hakim said Israel had been trying to find a way to recruit Christians to the army – to sever them from the 80 percent of the minority who are Muslim – since the state’s creation. The chief obstacle, he said, had been finding a religious leader who would give the initiative the stamp of the church’s approval.

“Now they think they have a way to split the Christian community by using Nadaf’s authority to justify an enlistment drive,” he said. “But only the council can speak for the community.”

Nadaf has also been criticized by Palestinian members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, including MK Haneen Zoabi from the Balad party and MK Muhammad Barakeh from Hadash. Both have called for his dismissal.

So far Nadaf has remained defiant. He stated in June: “We want young Christians to be completely integrated into Israeli society, and this means also carrying an equal share of the burden. Our future as a Christian minority is wrapped up in the future of the State of Israel” (“Arab pastor: Our future is with Israel,” Israel Today, 9 July).

Nadaf’s mention of “sharing the burden” was a reference to a government campaign to justify continuing to deny Palestinian citizens their rights unless they either serve in the military or perform an equivalent civilian service.

Nadaf has since received public calls of support from government ministers, most notably from the justice minister Tzipi Livni and the interior minister Gideon Saar.

Activists harassed

Likud MK Miri Regev, who heads the Knesset’s interior committee, this month criticized the Palestinian MKs’ intervention, calling them “Trojan horses in the Knesset.” She accused them of “incitement against a Christian priest who encourages young Christians to enlist in the IDF [Israel’s military].”

The Israeli publication Ynet reported that the police had received “a green light” to question the MKs for possible incitement (“Arab MKs to be questioned on suspicion of incitement,” Ynetnews.com, 3 July).

Those who have led opposition to the conference have found themselves called in for interrogation by the police and Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet. They have been warned that they are under investigation for “incitement to violence.”

Hakim said he had been called for interrogation on three occasions since he and the council denounced Nadaf.

He was also phoned by the Shin Bet two hours before the council met to issue its statement: “They warned me, ‘This is bigger than you or the council.’ They told me not to get involved.”

He has faced a hate campaign and death threats ever since the council issued its statement. “Shortly afterwards, I received an anonymous phone call identifying my children, my place of work and my home address. I was told people would come for me, to behead me,” he said.

He has repeatedly complained about a Hebrew hate site on Facebook created in his name. Despite repeated complaints to the police, nothing appears to have been done to remove the page.

Azmi Hakim, the Greek Orthodox community leader in Nazareth, was required to sign a statement that he would not approach or contact Nadaf but has refused to sign another stating that he would not mention his name.

Abir Kopty was also called for interrogation after writing a blog post in Arabic and English criticizing those who participated in the conference.

The Shin Bet have demanded of all those brought in for interrogation an unexpected condition: that they agree to provide a DNA sample.

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the Adalah legal center for the Arab minority in Israel, said the requirement to submit to a DNA test was illegal in both Hakim and Kopty’s cases.

This month Adalah sent a letter to the attorney general saying there was no basis for an investigation of either of them. Bishara said: “This is clearly a free speech matter and the investigations are a transparent attempt to intimidate and silence them.”

New Jewish-Christian party

In an apparent sign that Israeli officials are now keen to push ahead with enlistment, a new Jewish-Christian party was established in Nazareth this month called “Sons of the New Testament.”

The founder, Bishara Shilyan, a 58-year-old former merchant navy captain, has several sons who volunteered for the army. His brother, Ehab Shilyan, works for the defense ministry as an adviser on Christian issues.

Bishara Shilyan, who refers to himself as an “Arabic-speaking Israeli Christian,” told the New York-based Jewish weekly the Algemeiner Journal: “We live in Israel, and I feel a part of the state and the Jewish People. Israel belongs to the Jews, and we are part of it.”

The campaign is reported to have already increased enlistment among school leavers. According to the Maariv newspaper, 90 Christians joined the Israeli military in recent months, a threefold increase from 2010.

Shilyan’s party has sought to play on Christian fears of what it describes as a growing “Muslim threat” in the region, as Islamic movements struggle for power in neighboring countries such as Egypt and Syria. “People see what’s happening now in Lebanon, Egypt and Syria,” Shilyan told the Times of Israel. “They understand where we’re living” (“New Christian Arab party calls for IDF enlistment,” 10 July 2013).

That message was echoed in an editorial in The Jerusalem Post, which rallied to Bishop Nadaf’s side: “Trying to survive under the Muslim thumb inside Israel’s Arab sector, Christians have kept a low profile, striven to give no offense and toed even the most extremist line to evince loyalty and avoid risk. … Those young Christians now eager to break the cycle should be encouraged, not discouraged” (“Father Nadaf,” 26 June).

Shilyan’s forum has been coordinating with the defense ministry in arranging regular meetings with Israeli Jewish Knesset members. The Israeli military recently announced that it had made Christian conscription easier at the nearest office in the Galilee, in Tiberias.

Shilyan is among those arguing that the Israeli military could increase enlistment numbers if it stopped assigning Christians to the Bedouin Reconnaissance Battalion, where they serve alongside Bedouin soldiers.

Sectarianism

The Israeli military also has a poor track record in its treatment of Palestinian soldiers. It was recently widely reported that, under pressure, the military had finally agreed to allow non-Jewish soldiers killed in action to be buried in the same cemeteries as Jewish soldiers, although they will be kept in separate rows.

The matter came to a head on Memorial Day this year because the chief of staff, Benny Gantz, following traditional practice, laid a wreath on the grave of the last Jewish soldier to have been killed over the past year. As a result, he overlooked a soldier whose Jewishness was in doubt.

According to some observers, Shilyan has received support from a small group of Palestinian Christians based in the nearby town of Kafr Yasif who have adopted Christian Zionist positions. This has led to suggestions that the party may be receiving funds from Christian Zionist groups in the United States.

Hakim said the government’s latest efforts to recruit Christians to the army were a continuation of its meddling in Nazareth in the late 1990s, in what has come to be known as the “Shihab al-Din affair.”

In the run-up to the arrival of Pope John Paul II for the millennium celebrations in Nazareth, the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to a group of Muslims to build a large mosque in a square in front of the Basilica of the Annunciation, the destination for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. The square is the resting place of Shihab al-Din, a nephew of the Crusaders’ nemesis, Saladin.

The decision surprised observers, both because the mosque threatened to overshadow the Basilica and because it required unprecedented Israeli state recognition of Muslim claims to restitution of property confiscated in the 1948 war.

As the Muslim group took over the site, tensions escalated and by Easter 1999 violent clashes between Muslims and Christians were reported on front pages around the world.

Israel later reneged on its promises to the Muslim group and in 2003 demolished the foundations of the mosque that were under construction (“Divide and destroy,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 3-9 July 2003).

Widely-held suspicions in Nazareth are that the government sought to inflame sectarian violence in Nazareth at that time, shortly before peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership at Camp David in 2000, to help strengthen Israel’s case that only it could be entrusted to look after the holy sites in Jerusalem in a final-status agreement.

Accounts from Camp David suggest that Israel’s prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, remained adamant that Israel should have exclusive sovereignty over the al-Aqsa compound of mosques in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Longstanding policy

The latest moves to recruit Christians to the army echo earlier efforts by Israeli officials, as part of a policy that sought to undermine the Palestinian population’s cohesion and its national identity.

A key figure among the Christians in the state’s early years was George Hakim, the Greek Catholic bishop for the Galilee.

According to Hillel Cohen, author of Good Arabs, a book about early collaboration by Palestinian leaders, Hakim sold church lands close to Nazareth in the early 1940s to Jewish pre-state organizations. He also established a Christian militia during the 1948 war.

It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that he and many of his followers, unlike most other refugees, were allowed to return from exile in Lebanon at the end of the war in 1949.

Hakim went on to transform the Catholic Scouts into a Zionist youth movement opposed to the Communist party, a joint Jewish-Arab party popular among Israel’s Palestinian citizens. It was then the only non-Zionist political movement allowed.

In 1958 Hakim considered signing an agreement with the army similar to that of the Druze leadership, but found little support among the wider Christian community. A photograph in Good Arabs shows Hakim seated next to Druze leader Sheikh Amin Tarif at an Israeli military parade for Independence Day in 1959.

The logic of Israel’s moves to recruit the Christians and Druze was explained in 1965 by Shmuel Toledano, the prime minister’s Arab affairs adviser: “The communal frameworks of religious and linguistic groups should be fostered, except for the Muslim, and the individuality of each and every separate community should be consolidated.”

Recent events highlight that this policy formulated in the state’s early years – to use sectarian differences to isolate the largest Palestinian community, of Muslims, from their Christian and Druze compatriots – holds to this day.

With Palestinian communal solidarity seen as a serious threat to the state’s Jewishness, Israel would prefer to push Muslims, Christians and Druze into open conflict.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.

By Barry Grey

31 July, 2013

@ WSWS.org

The guilty verdict handed down Tuesday in the court-martial of whistle-blower Bradley Manning is a travesty of justice. The judge, Col. Denise Lind, found the 25-year-old Army private guilty of 19 of the 21 counts lodged against him, including five counts under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Manning faces a prison term of up to 136 years in the sentencing phase of the trial that begins today at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Manning‘s acquittal on the charge of “aiding the enemy,” which carries a potential death sentence, reflects the awareness of the military and the Obama administration of the broad popular opposition to the proceedings against the young soldier. At the same time, it underscores the fraudulent character of the entire trial.

The prosecution denounced Manning as a “traitor” and charged him with aiding Al Qaeda and carrying out espionage even though there were no allegations that he handed over information to any foreign government or terrorist organization. Instead, in a sinister and unprecedented attempt to make the revealing of government secrets potentially a capital crime and undermine First Amendment guarantees of speech and press freedom, the government argued that any leaking of classified information constituted espionage because the information could be accessed by those deemed to be enemies.

As the government well knows, the “enemy” for whose benefit Manning courageously exposed proof of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the American people.

Manning’s conviction, particularly on espionage charges, establishes a reactionary precedent that will be used against whistle-blowers and journalists in the future.

Of all the revelations made by WikiLeaks on the basis of material supplied by Manning, the one that most infuriated Obama and the military was the video posted on YouTube in April 2010 showing the wanton and cold-blooded killing of unarmed civilians and reporters in Baghdad by an American helicopter gunship. That incident graphically summed up the criminal nature of the war.

The US ruling elite was all the more frightened that the broad opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was finding expression among a section of rank-and-file soldiers.

The response of the Obama administration was to imprison Manning for more than three years before any charges were laid, keeping him for much of that period in solitary confinement and subjecting him to cruel and abusive conditions that were condemned by human rights organizations around the world as tantamount to torture.

The trial itself was a legal farce. It was a show trial aimed at intimidating popular opposition to the wars and further subordinating an already cowed press. It is largely because of the cowardice of the official media and its complicity in covering up government lies and crimes that individuals such as Manning and National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden have been compelled to sacrifice their freedom and jeopardize their lives to get the truth out to the public.

Manning’s court-martial, in the final analysis, arises from Washington’s launching of an illegal war of aggression against Iraq and the attempt of the government to conceal all of the crimes—torture at Abu Ghraib and other US prisons, the destruction of Fallujah and other Iraqi cities, the incitement of a sectarian civil war—that arose from that war.

Because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were criminal enterprises, based on lies, none of the allegations against Manning, who sought to expose the criminal character of those wars, has any legal or moral substance.

Under the principles established by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which tried and convicted Nazi leaders after World War II, it should be Obama and other top US civilian and military leaders who are standing in the dock, rather than Manning. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, insisted that the central crime committed by the defendants, and the source of all other crimes, was the preparation and waging of wars of aggression.

The Obama administration is guilty of this crime not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Libya and Syria, and it is preparing further and even bloodier wars against regimes deemed to be obstacles to the geostrategic and financial interests of the American ruling class, including Iran and China.

In April of 2011, while Manning was languishing in prison, Obama said of the Army private: “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make decisions about how the law operates. He broke the law.”

Not only did this statement from the chief executive make a mockery of any claim to due process in the Manning case, it came from a president who has been caught shredding the US Constitution and the democratic rights guaranteed in its Bill of Rights. It is well known that Obama is presiding over a massive and illegal spying operation against the American people and millions more around the world, that he oversees a program of drone assassinations, including of American citizens, and sanctions the use of force-feeding and other forms of torture against detainees at Guantanamo and other US gulags.

The American president is engaged in the erection of the framework of a police state within the United States. The vindictive prosecution of Bradley Manning and the international with-hunt against Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are bound up with the preparations for repression on a mass scale against social and political opposition.

By Ben Quinn

31 July 2013

@ The Guardian

Official account of what many believe was British central bank’s most shameful episode revealed more than 70 years after event

Bank of England records detailing its involvement in the transfer and sale of gold stolen by Nazis after the invasion of Czechoslovakia were revealed online on Tuesday.

The gold had been deposited during the 1930s with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the so-called Central Banker’s bank, as the Czechoslovak government faced a growing threat from Germany.

The document goes on to detail how a request was made in March 1939 to transfer gold, then worth £5.6m, from a Czech National Bank account at the BIS to an account operated by Germany’s Reichsbank. Some £4m of the gold went to banks in the Netherlands and Belgium, while the rest was sold in London.

The document tells how the chancellor, Sir John Simon, had asked the governor of the bank, Montagu Norman, if it was holding any of the Czech gold in May 1939, two months after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.

It says: “The Governor in his reply (30th May) did not answer the question, but pointed out that the Bank held gold from time to time for the BIS and had no knowledge whether it was their own property or that of their customers. Hence, they could not say whether the gold was held for the National Bank of Czechoslovakia.” A further transaction was made that June – despite concerns from Simon being raised. On that occasion, there were sales of gold to the value of £440,000 and a £420,000 shipment to New York.

According to the documents: “This represented gold which had been shipped to London by the Reichsbank. This time, before acting, the Bank of England referred the matter to the Chancellor, who said that he would like the opinion of the Law Officers of the Crown.”

The BoE’s account, of what some regard as one of the Threadneedle Street’s darkest episodes, was written in 1950 and published online on Tuesday following the first stage of the digitalisation of the bank’s archive. It admits that the incident involving the Czech gold “still rankled” at the outbreak of the second world war “and for some time afterwards”.

“Outside the Bank and the government the Bank’s position has probably never been thoroughly appreciated and their action at the time was widely misunderstood,” it adds.

“On the BIS enquiring, however, what was causing delay and saying that inconvenience would be caused because of payments the next day, the Bank of England acted on the instructions without referring to the Law Officers, who, however subsequently upheld their action.”

Professor Neville Wylie, a historian at the University of Nottingham who has examined the period as part of research into Nazi Germany’s looted gold and the role of Britain and Switzerland, said on Tuesday that the Bank of England’s official history of the period was news to him and shed new light on a number of issues.

Wylie said that the attitude shown by the BoE in the history was consistent with what emerged from his own research into the British position towards Germany’s wartime financial activities, which he described as “wanting”.

He added: “The bank was wedded to a view of international finance and central bank co-operation. It was too concerned about maintaining London’s status as an international financial centre – and clung to the need to maintain sterling’s convertibility long after it was wise to continue with this policy.”

Sources at the Bank of England on Tuesday drew attention to a section in the official history, containing comments by the chancellor to the House of Commons in June 1939, when he stated that Law Officers had advised him that the British government was precluded by protocols from preventing the BoE from obeying instructions given to it by the BIS to transfer the gold.

By PETER BUFFETT

July 26, 2013

@ The New York Times

I HAD spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his accumulated wealth back to society. In addition to making several large donations, he added generously to the three foundations that my parents had created years earlier, one for each of their children to run.

Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.

Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex.

But now I think something even more damaging is going on.

Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising. At the same time, according to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed.

Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.

Often I hear people say, “if only they had what we have” (clean water, access to health products and free markets, better education, safer living conditions). Yes, these are all important. But no “charitable” (I hate that word) intervention can solve any of these issues. It can only kick the can down the road.

My wife and I know we don’t have the answers, but we do know how to listen. As we learn, we will continue to support conditions for systemic change.

It’s time for a new operating system. Not a 2.0 or a 3.0, but something built from the ground up. New code.

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there.

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff).

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

It’s an old story; we really need a new one.

Peter Buffett is a composer and a chairman of the NoVo Foundation.

By David Krieger

July 24, 2013

@ www.wagingpeace.org

This article was originally published by Truthout. Vaya aquí para la versión española.

The wars of the last century have offered important lessons for peace.  Among these are:

Wars begin in the minds of men (and women) and are often based on the lies of leaders.

Wars can occur when they are not at all expected.

Politicians and generals send the young to fight and die.

Wars can consume entire generations of youth.

Wars are not heroic; they are bloody and terrifying.

Wars now kill more civilians than combatants.

Long-distance killing and drones make wars far less personal.

Any war today carries the risk of a nuclear conflagration and omnicide (the death of all).

The terms of peace after a war can plant seeds of peace or the seeds of the next war.

The best ways to prevent illegal war are nonviolent struggle and holding leaders accountable for the Nuremberg crimes: crimes against peace (aggressive war); war crimes; and crimes against humanity.

Lessons offered unfortunately do not necessarily translate into lessons learned.  Philosophers have warned that we must learn the lessons of the past if we are going to apply them to the present and change the future. In a nuclear-armed world, the challenge is made all the more urgent.  As Einstein warned, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”  Today, learning these lessons for peace and changing our modes of thinking to put them into practice are necessary to assure that there is a future.

David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.