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Oxfam report reveals scale of inequality in UK as charity appeals to chancellor over tax

By Larry Elliott

 

Who are the five richest families?

The scale of Britain’s growing inequality is revealed by a report from a leading charity showing that the country’s five richest families now own more wealth than the poorest 20% of the population.

Oxfam urged the chancellor George Osborne to use Wednesday’s budget to make a fresh assault on tax avoidance and introduce a living wage in a report highlighting how a handful of the super-rich, headed by the Duke of Westminster, have more money and financial assets than 12.6 million Britons put together.

The development charity, which has opened UK programmes to tackle poverty, said the government should explore the possibility of a wealth tax after revealing how income gains and the benefits of rising asset prices had disproportionately helped those at the top.

Although Labour is seeking to make living standards central to the political debate in the run-up to next year’s general election, Osborne is determined not to abandon the deficit-reduction strategy that has been in place since 2010. But he is likely to announce a fresh crackdown on tax avoidance and measures aimed at overseas owners of high-value London property in order to pay for modest tax cuts for working families.

The early stages of the UK’s most severe post-war recession saw a fall in inequality as the least well-off were shielded by tax credits and benefits. But the trend has been reversed in recent years as a result of falling real wages, the rising cost of food and fuel, and by the exclusion of most poor families from home and share ownership.

In a report, a Tale of Two Britains, Oxfam said the poorest 20% in the UK had wealth totalling £28.1bn – an average of £2,230 each. The latest rich list from Forbes magazine showed that the five top UK entries – the family of the Duke of Westminster, David and Simon Reuben, the Hinduja brothers, the Cadogan family, and Sports Direct retail boss Mike Ashley – between them had property, savings and other assets worth £28.2bn.

The most affluent family in Britain, headed by Major General Gerald Grosvenor, owns 77 hectares (190 acres) of prime real estate in Belgravia, London, and has been a beneficiary of the foreign money flooding in to the capital’s soaring property market in recent years. Oxfam said Grosvenor and his family had more wealth (£7.9bn) than the poorest 10% of the UK population (£7.8bn).

Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy, Ben Phillips, said: “Britain is becoming a deeply divided nation, with a wealthy elite who are seeing their incomes spiral up, while millions of families are struggling to make ends meet.

“It’s deeply worrying that these extreme levels of wealth inequality exist in Britain today, where just a handful of people have more money than millions struggling to survive on the breadline.”

The UK study follows an Oxfam report earlier this year which found that the wealth of 85 global billionaires is equivalent to that of half the world’s population – or 3.5 billion people. The pope and Barack Obama have made tackling inequality a top priority for 2014, while the International Monetary Fund has warned that the growing divide between the haves and have-nots is leading to slower global growth.

Oxfam said the wealth gap in the UK was becoming more entrenched as a result of the ability of the better off to capture the lion’s share of the proceeds of growth. Since the mid-1990s, the incomes of the top 0.1% have grown by £461 a week or £24,000 a year. By contrast, the bottom 90% have seen a real terms increase of only £2.82 a week or £147 a year.

The charity said the trends in income had been made even more adverse by increases in the cost of living over the past decade. “Since 2003 the majority of the British public (95%) have seen a 12% real terms drop in their disposable income after housing costs, while the richest 5% of the population have seen their disposable income increase.”

Osborne will this week announce details of the government’s new cap on the welfare budget and has indicated that he wants up to £12bn a year cut from the benefits bill in order to limit the impact of future rounds of austerity on Whitehall departments.

Oxfam said that for the first time more working households were in poverty than non-working ones, and predicted that the number of children living below the poverty line could increase by 800,000 by 2020. It said cuts to social security and public services were meshing with falling real incomes and a rising cost of living to create a “deeply damaging situation” in which millions were struggling to get by.

The charity said that starting with this week’s budget, the government should balance its books by raising revenues from those that could afford it – “by clamping down on companies and individuals who avoid paying their fair share of tax and starting to explore greater taxation of extreme wealth”.

The IMF recently released research showing that the ever-greater concentration of wealth and income hindered growth and said redistribution would not just reduce inequality but would be economically beneficial.

“On average, across countries and over time, the things that governments have typically done to redistribute do not seem to have led to bad growth outcomes, unless they were extreme”, the IMF said in a research paper. “And the resulting narrowing of inequality helped support faster and more durable growth, apart from ethical, political or broader social considerations.”

Phillips said: “Increasing inequality is a sign of economic failure rather than success. It’s far from inevitable – a result of political choices that can be reversed. It’s time for our leaders to stand up and be counted on this issue.”

 

Duke of Westminster (Wealth: £7.9bn)

Gerald Grosvenor and his family owe the bulk of their wealth to owning 77 hectares (190 acres) of Mayfair and Belgravia, adjacent to Buckingham Palace and prime London real estate.

As the value of land rockets in the capital so too does the personal wealth of Grosvenor, formally the sixth Duke of Westminster and one of seven god parents to the new royal baby, Prince George.

The family also own 39,000 hectares in Scotland and 13,000 hectares in Spain, while their privately owned Grosvenor Estate property group has $20bn (£12bn) worth of assets under management including the Liverpool One shopping mall, according to leading US business magazine Forbes.

 

Reuben brothers (£6.9bn)

Simon and David Reuben made their early money out of metals. Born in India but brought up in London, they started in local scrap metal but branched out into trading tin and aluminium.

Their biggest break was to move into Russia just after the break-up of the Soviet Union, buying up half the country’s aluminium production facilities and befriending Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch associate of Nat Rothschild and Peter Mandelson.

The Reuben brothers are still involved in mining and metals but control a widely diversified business empire that includes property, 850 British pubs, and luxury yacht-maker Kristal Waters. They are also donors to the Conservative party.

 

Hinduja brothers (£6bn)

Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja co-chair the Hinduja Group, a multinational conglomerate with a presence in 37 countries and businesses ranging from trucks and lubricants to banking and healthcare.

They began their careers working in their father’s textile and trading businesses in Mumbai and Tehran, Iran but soon branched out by buying truck maker, Ashok Leyland from British Leyland and Gulf Oil from Chevron in the 1980s, while establishing banks in Switzerland and India in the 1990s.

The family’s London home is a mansion on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St James Park and just along from Buckingham Palace, which is potentially worth £300m. They have links with the Labour party.

 

Cadogan family (£4bn)

The wealth of the Cadogans family is built on 90 acres36 hectares of property and land in Chelsea and Knightsbridge, west London.

Eton-educated Charles is the eighth Earl of Cadogan and ran the family business, Cadogan Estates, until 2012 when he handed it over to his son Edward, Viscount Chelsea.

Charles, who is a first cousin to the Aga Khan, started in the Coldstream Guards before going into the City.

He was briefly chairman of Chelsea Football Club in the early 1980s and his family motto is: “He who envies is the lesser man.”

 

Mike Ashley (£3.3bn)

Ashley owns Newcastle United football club and became a billionaire through his Sports Direct discount clothing chain which he started after leaving school.

He was the sole owner of the fast growing business, which snapped up brands such as Dunlop, Slazenger, Karrimor and Lonsdale, until it floated on the stock market in 2007. He now owns 62%.

Ashley is a regular visitor to London’s swankiest casinos but is famously publicity-averse.

 

17 March 2014

The Guardian

By Hozan Alan Senauke

Buddhadharma  recently asked Hozan Alan Senauke, Soto Zen priest and longtime peace activist, to offer some insight on the current conflict between Buddhist and Muslim ethnic groups in Burma. Below is his response — an excellent explanation not only of the conflict itself but of how we, as Western Buddhists, might try to make a difference.

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; by non-hatred only is hatred appeased.  This is an unending truth.  — Dhammapada, 5

On February 27, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was ordered to close all its long-established clinics in Myanmar/Burma. They were accused of giving preferential treatment to Muslim Rohingya people. This was in response to statements by MSF about what they saw as ongoing and systematic attacks on Rohingyas in vulnerable communities of Burma’s western Rakhine state. According to UN documents, the latest of these attacks — in Du Chee Yar Tan village this January — left forty-eight Rohingya dead, mostly women and children, at the hands of Buddhist-based rioters and state security forces. MSF, with numerous clinics in the area, publicly reported that they had treated at least twenty-two victims.  The government of Myanmar has denied claims of these abuses, asserting that the UN’s and MSF’s facts and figures were “totally wrong.”

After negotiations, the government stepped back a little, allowing MSF to continue its HIV/AIDS work and other activities in Kachin and Shan states, as well as in the Yangon region. Rakhine state remains off-limits to MSF, despite the pressing needs of thousands from all religions and ethnicities who depend on their clinics.

Before going much further, I should say that nothing I write can convey the complexity of issues or the passion and fear that fire both sides. From my distant vantage point in the United States, I know that I can’t see the whole picture, which includes colonial history and geopolitics, along with regional and ethnic tensions within modern Myanmar.

Seven years ago, the junta’s harsh economic measures brought a daring movement into the streets of Burma’s towns and cities. That movement came to be called the “Saffron Revolution.” Many thousands of Burmese joined the tide of protest, led by monks and nuns who stood up to the armed troops of an entrenched military dictatorship. The vision of a river of robed monastics and stark images of courageous confrontations of activists and soldiers are still clear in my mind. It was inspiring to see Buddhist monks and nuns take the lead and bear great risk for the sake of their nation.

Inspiring as it was, the Saffron Revolution was crushed by the junta’s armed forces in the late days of September 2007.  Monasteries were emptied, with police cordons set up at their gates.  Thousands of monks, nuns, and supporters were thrown into prisons or disappeared.  An unknown number were killed. According to some reports, crematoriums on the outskirts of Yangon were operating night and day. When I visited Yangon with a small witness delegation in December of that year, we saw for ourselves the silent streets, empty monasteries, and the look of fear on people’s faces.

The Buddhist-led Saffron Revolution opened the world’s eyes to the plight of Burma. Images of brutality, violence, and murder — smuggled out at great risk — raised the stakes between the junta and citizenry.  The whole nation — citizens and junta alike — was shamed by these images.  That shame deepened the following year when Cyclone Nargis tore across southern Burma, leaving more than 150,000 dead and large areas of population and agricultural devastated.  The junta’s sluggish response and resistance to outside humanitarian relief drove the death toll higher. Once again, Burma was shamed before itself and the world.

In the spring of 2011, after fifty years of direct oppression, a flawed but nonetheless significant election seemed to set the course for a period of liberalization. Many of us were heartened by this change and by the return of Nobel-laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to active political life.  In time, almost all of the thousands of known political prisoners, many of them monks and nuns, were released, rededicating themselves to the building of a free society.

These changes, tentative as they seemed, were hopeful signs, acknowledged by the wide community of nations and by international nongovernmental organizations ready to help with resources and training. On my visits to Burma I could feel a burden of fear lifting and the sense that a future was possible.  Although there was still active fighting between government troops and rebel forces in Shan and Kachin states, it was possible to imagine an end to internal violence after so many years.

But in May 2012, the rape and murder of a woman in Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh, touched off violence between groups of ethnically Buddhist Rakhine people and local communities of Muslim Rohingyas. Hundreds were killed, dozens of villages were looted and burned, and many Rohingyas fled to hastily constructed camps. The population of these camps is now approaching 200,000, out of an estimated population of 750,000 Muslims in Rakhine state.

Over the last two years, voices and acts of intolerance in Burma have been regularly in the news,  as have the government’s denials of discrimination or responsibility.  Burma’s minister of religious affairs, Sann Sint, a lieutenant general in the former junta, justified a boycott of Muslim businesses led by monks: “We are now practicing market economics,” he said. “Nobody can stop that. It is up to the consumers.”

In May 2013, authorities in Rakhine state announced a policy imposing a two-child limit on Muslim Rohingya families in two western townships, reinforcing the perception of ethnic cleansing in Burma. This alarming policy is the only known legal restriction of its kind today against a specific religious group.

According to the June 14, 2013 edition of The Irrawaddy, “About 200 senior Buddhist monks convening in Rangoon on Thursday have begun drafting a religious law that would put restrictions on marriages between Buddhist women and Muslim men.”

In July the international edition of Time magazine added fuel to the fire with a cover photo of the fundamentalist Burmese monk Wirathu, calling him “The Face of Buddhist Terror.”  President Thein Sein’s office released a statement about Wirathu and his fundamentalist 969 movement, saying 969 “is just a symbol of peace” and Wirathu is “a son of Lord Buddha.”

Anti-Islamic violence has spread to other areas of the country. March 2013 riots in Meikitla, in central Burma south of Mandalay, left forty-four people dead and thousands of homes consumed by flames.  Later, two days of violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Lashio — the largest town in Burma’s Shan state, near the Chinese border — left a mosque, an orphanage, and many shops destroyed by Buddhist-identified mobs roaming the streets on motorcycles.

Undoubtedly, there has been violence on both sides. But in each of these instances, the preponderance of organized reaction seems to be Buddhist-identified, often with leadership from monks, and with minimal response from the government and the Burmese army only after damage has been done. Local people describe the military as standing by and watching as the destruction unfolds.

This conflict has tangled roots, going back decades to the British colonial occupation and years before. But the current tensions also speak to contention over scarce agricultural land and economic resources that manifests as communal hostility. Rakhine state, an independent kingdom for several thousand years, was only absorbed into greater Burma at the end of the 18^th century, then ceded to the British only forty years later. Under the military dictatorship, Rakhine state was exploited by the generals for its rich natural resources and labor. In the north, it was pressed by an ever-expanding “Bengali” population of Muslim-majority Bangladesh. It is no surprise that Rakhine fear “Bengalis” and are suspicious of outsiders.

One wonders, too, whether we are seeing garden-variety religio- or ethno-centrism, a disease of group identity and privilege that is sadly endemic among humans?  Is there also a perverse political motivation in which the former military junta is “allowing” the violence so they can intervene and reassert their position as the preservers of social order in Burma?

Rohingyas have lived in Burma in Rakhine state for generations, and very likely for several hundred years, although the facts are hotly contested. The former military regime’s 1982 law excluded them from among the nation’s 135 recognized ethnicities, denying the Rohingyas citizenship and basic rights on the basis that they were in fact “Bengali,” having infiltrated Burma from the eastern region of the Indian Empire. Yet present-day neighbor Bangladesh denies citizenship to Rohingyas living within its own borders.  In the background, of course, is a fear rooted in the historical sweep of Islam across Buddhist and Hindu India and on, across large portions of Southeast Asia.

The Rakhine state region, with natural gas reserves and a long shoreline on the Indian Ocean, is also at play in geopolitical tensions between China and India, each with its eye on Burma’s wealth and strategic location.  It is not surprising that the United Nations views the Rohingyas as “one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.”

Myanmar/Burma is still in a delicate transition to democracy after fifty years of military dictatorship. The 2008 constitution reserves one quarter of the seats in both legislative bodies to delegates from the tatmadaw/military.  It is hard to imagine Burma going back to its dark ages, yet within recent memory we can recall the dissolution of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia into oppositional ethnic and religious enclaves when Soviet-style dictatorship ended.  One hopes against hope for better in Burma.  We look to the government of Burma, including President Thien Sein and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, to play an active and nonviolent role in resolving conflicts between Buddhists, Muslims, and all ethnic groups. Central to this resolution is a guarantee of citizenship as well as human and religious rights to all Burma’s diverse inhabitants. So far their response has been evasive.

At a press conference with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in early March of this year, Jim Brooke, editor of the Cambodia Daily, asked her to address the plight of Burma’s Rohingya People.  Suu Kyi’s response was indirect, to say the least.  She said:

In any society, when there are tensions between different communities, you have to first of all ensure security. People who are insecure will not be ready to sit down to talk to one another to sort out their problems. So if you ask me what the solution is to the problem in the Rakhine, I would say simply ‘I don’t know what the solution is completely, but one essential part of it is the establishment of the rule of law.’

It seems to me that when the house is burning down, it’s not the time to discuss the fire department’s management policy. At the same time, one can understand Daw Suu’s vulnerable political position as parliamentary elections approach in 2015.  Fundamentalist Buddhists have already begun to form alliances with the former junta generals to block Aung San Suu Kyi’s eligibility to stand for the Myanmar’s presidency.

The views of many “progressive” Buddhists are defensive and locked down with regard to Muslims. This can also be seen as an artifact of a military dictatorship that dismantled an excellent education system in a successful effort to replace knowledge with fear, mistrust, and superstition.  A friend recently returned from Myanmar, where she was evaluating a residential program in peacebuilding for Buddhist activists, reports that even voices of moderation, reflection, and dialogue are now being effectively silenced.

A monk in Sittwe, capital of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, told my friend:

Rakhine [people] do not like the talk of foreigners on human rights, and their suggestions to accept Muslims. The Rakhine have too much fear and lack trust…. They fear Muslims will take over their land, and feel betrayed by foreigners who come to help Muslims and not them.

I don’t assume that the concerns of Rakhine Buddhists have no factual basis. Violence by individual Muslims is also part of the picture. But it might be that the fears and acts of Buddhists — effectively, the demonization of Rohingyas and of Muslims throughout Burma — are creating the very conditions they fear most, with an increasing internationalization of an organized and potentially violent Islamic pushback.

Burma seems headed into a maelstrom of intercommunal conflict.  And this may very well fit the purposes of still-powerful generals and politicians whose vision is to create a strong nationalist entity with a Burmese Buddhist identity. Ethnic confrontation in Burma challenges many of our cherished ideas of a “peaceful” Buddhism and religious fellowship. We know that the Buddha’s teaching and example are profoundly nonviolent, but for those of us inside and outside Burma who may have idealized a Buddhist-based nonviolent movement for democracy and human rights there, violence in Rakhine State and elsewhere is a discouraging reality.

And this is not confined to Burma. A decade of conflict between Buddhists and Muslims in southern Thailand has left more than 6,000 dead and 10,000 injured.  In Sri Lanka, after the murderous suppression of a Hindu Tamil minority in the north by Singhalese Buddhist nationalist military, tensions between Buddhists and Muslims have taken center stage.  In the modern era, we see again and again that where a national state and religious identity merge, nothing wholesome will emerge.

I know there are countless open-minded citizens, monks, and nuns in Burma who desire peace and harmony among all religions and ethnicities. May they have the courage to speak out. And may they remember that what happens in the name of Buddhism affects how people around the world view this precious path that we strive to follow. Shakyamuni Buddha lived in a place and age of great diversity and change. He never taught fear. He never advocated violence. He did not hesitate to speak out for what was right and just.  I would hope that Buddhists of today, whether they are in Burma or the West, would hold themselves to the same high standard. May all beings live in safety and happiness.

Hozan Alan Senauke
Clear View Project
March 2014

 

Postscript: What Can I Do?

Many Buddhists and concerned people in the West want to know what we can do to be of help in this painful situation.  Over the last two years I have organized and taken part in letter-writing campaigns to Myanmar’s government, the United Nations, and the U. State Department by citizens and Buddhist teachers from Asia and the West. So far, to no avail. By long habit, the government of Myanmar is relatively heedless of outside criticism, and they know that money from developed nations will continue to flow in their direction so long as Burma has resources to sell.

Nonetheless, we have to try.  Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield just returned from Burma, and he suggests the following:

Write or contact your congresspeople and the State Department, pressing the US not to support major aid, business deals, and especially military collaboration with Burma unless the Burmese government stands up for human rights for all groups. Western Buddhist can write to Myanmar’s Ministry of Religious Affairs www.mora.gov.mm/ expressing your concerns.

I would also urge you to stay informed and be watchful. Online publications like www.irrawaddy.org/, as well as conventional sources like the New York Times and the BBC, do a good job following this issue.

I am encouraged by discussions that took place at last November’s conference of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (www.inebnetwork.org/) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Throughout the conference, Burmese Buddhists and Muslims held a daily dialogue behind closed doors, where they could begin to map out both differences and possible solutions. Growing from these discussions, a commission of inquiry has been organized by a recently formed International Forum on Buddhist-Muslim Relations. This fact-finding commission plans to meet and collaborate with local civil-society bodies inside Myanmar. It will have three primary objectives:

1. to bring forth the facts of Buddhist-Muslim conflict in Myanmar;
2. to ascertain the causes of this conflict;
3. to develop resources and proposals for the establishment of inter-religious peace and harmony in Myanmar.

People of Burma and of the whole Southeast Asian region will need to solve these problems by their own agency.  I believe they can do this, and they will need us to bear witness and lend support.  In time we will be able to offer help.

As the situation evolves, I will do my best to keep you informed in these pages and on the Clear View Project website and blog (www.clearviewproject.org).

—  A.S.

Hozan Alan Senauke is vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center in California, where he lives with his family. As a socially engaged Buddhist activist, Alan has worked closely with Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists since 1991. In 2007 he founded Clear View Project, developing Buddhist-based resources for relief and social change in Asia and the United States.

March 18, 2014 – 12:43 pm

By PIEF

 

Joining his voice to those of the churches in Palestine and Israel, the World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit has expressed “grave concern” about a law recently passed by the Israeli Knesset or parliament.

The law passed by the Knesset on 24 February would define the status of Palestinian Arab Christians in the state of Israel.

Top officials of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land have said that this new law “introduces a distinction between Christian and Muslim Palestinians and states that Christian Palestinians are Christians and not Palestinians”.

In a statement issued on 18 March, Tveit called on “Israeli authorities to reverse this law to stop an injustice against the Christian citizens of Israel”.

He encouraged the WCC member churches to “raise this issue with representatives of Israel and with their own governments”, urging reversal of this law.

Tveit said that this law establishes a “legislative distinction between the indigenous Palestinian Arab Christians and Palestinian Arab Muslims, both of whom are citizens of the State of Israel”. This distinction, he stressed, is an “unacceptable severing of entire communities from their cultural identity”.

Tveit added that the “Knesset has transgressed all proper distinctions between state and religious authority by attempting to define the nature and character of Christian communities within Israel against their own will and self-understanding”.

Warning of the adverse implications of this law, Tveit said that “rather than creating divisions among communities, the Knesset should pave the way for breaking down barriers that divide people according to ethnicity and religion.”

Tveit echoed heads of the Catholic Church in Israel, who stressed that “it is not the right or the duty of the Israeli civil authorities to tell us who we are”.

The Catholic Church leaders have called this law part of a campaign which was aimed at drafting Christian Palestinians into the Israeli military. “This campaign clearly has as its aim to divide Christians from their Muslim compatriots. However, it is equally dangerous because it will divide Christians among themselves even further,” they said.

The WCC has long affirmed the right of religious communities to define themselves, condemning the manipulation of religious identity for political gains.

 

19 March 2014

http://dv25.oikoumene.org/

 By Ramzy Baroud

Long before the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign inched slowly from the fringes of global solidarity with Palestinians to take center stage, Tony Benn had been advocating a boycott of Israel with unrestricted conviction, for years.

“Britain should offer its support for this strategy by stopping all arms sales to Israel, introducing trade sanctions and a ban on all investment there together with a boycott of Israeli goods here and make it a condition for the lifting of these measures that Israel complies with these demands at once,” Benn wrote in his blog on April 19, 2002, under the title “A STATE OF PALESTINE NOW”. The ‘strategy’ of which Ben spoke was for Arafat to declare a state, and for ‘friendly nations’ to recognize it.

Yes, the title was all in caps. It was as if Benn, a principled British left wing politician, had wanted to loudly accentuate his insistence that the Palestinian people deserved their rights, freedom and sovereignty. He was as bold and courageous as any man or woman of true values and principles should always be. He remained uncompromising in matters of human rights and justice. This international warrior left a challenging space to fill when he passed away at the age of 88, on Thursday, March 13.

Following the news of his death, British media was awash of reports about Benn and his long legacy of being a stubborn politician and uncompromising advocate for human rights. Frankly, there was less emphasis on the latter and much more on the former, despite the fact that Benn understood politics was a platform to quarrel with moral dilemmas. The parliament was a platform to serve the people, not to conspire with other politicians for the sake of one’s party. For some politicians, it is all about winning elections, not using office to carry out a morally-grounded mandate to serve the people. Benn was different, thus there was the love-hate relationship Britain had with him.

True to form, British media immediately conjured up a few buzzwords by which it attempted to define Benn’s legacy. He had ‘immatured with age,” was one of them. It was a remark made by Benn’s fiercest rival in the Labor Party, Harold Wilson (still alive at 96) in reference to Benn’s becoming more of a radical left-winger as he grew older. Some in the media simply love axioms and catch phrases, for it spares journalists the pain of exhaustive research. Wilson and his camp invested heavily in assigning Benn the responsibility of the successive defeats experienced by the Labor Party at the hands of the Conservatives. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher and then John Major had won four elections in a row, and between them changed the face of British economy and quashed major labor unions. But blaming Benn for splitting the party is unfair to say the least.

Compare Tony Benn’s legacy with that of Tony Blair. The first was principled to the core, boldly challenged US hegemony in the world, and fought hard for Britain’s poor, working class and against unhindered globalization that made states vulnerable to the inherent disparity of the global economic system.

Blair stood for the exact opposite: a self-serving politician, devoid of any morality, and was rightly dubbed Bush’s poodle for heeding to the US military adventurism, mainly in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Benn, even from the point of view of those who disagreed with him, was always seen, and shall always be remembered as a man of high values. Blair had been districted by his own peers even before he was forced to concede office. One can imagine that Israeli media is the one likely to remember Blair with much fondness.

 

Although Benn seemed guided by the same high moral values that accompanied him throughout the over 50 years in which he served as an MP in the British parliament, when he retired in 2001, he seemed ready to take on even bigger challenges. His task morphed from that of a fierce politician at home, fighting for the very definition of the Labor Party, to an internationalist, taking on the most difficult of subjects, and never bowing down.

Following the US-British so-called ‘war on terror’ – designed around economic and strategic interests – Benn rose to greater prominence, not as another TV celebrity ‘expert’, but as a fierce opponent to the US and his own government’s wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Since then, the man never stayed away from the streets. He spoke with passion and mesmerized audiences in his beautiful, immaculate English. Most important about the timing of Benn’s courageous stances was the fact that back then, all public discourses related to the wars were saturated with fear. But, whenever Benn spoke, he pushed the narrative up to higher degrees of audacity.

I listened to him once speak at Trafalgar Square in London. He wore a Kuffiya, the traditional Palestinian headscarf. He spoke of Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, as if their peoples were his own. Thousands of us applauded with so much enthusiasm. It was as if his words alone were the salvation that would free Arab nations from the bondage of military occupation and war. But at times, words live in a sphere of their own where they multiply, and when repeated often enough, can change the world.

“The main responsibility for the appalling crimes being perpetrated against the Palestinians must be equally shared between Jerusalem and Washington for successive American governments have funded Israel, armed Israel and used their veto at the Security Council to protect Israel from being forced to comply with what world opinion wanted,” he said in 2003, in an interview with Egypt-based Al Ahram.

True, Benn was not the only British politician who spoke with such candor about the shared responsibility of crimes committed against Palestinians, but few went as far as he did.

The next time there is a rally for Palestine, there ought to be an empty chair with a Palestinian Kuffiya, and the name of Tony Benn. It is a Palestinian tradition to honor its heroes, even those with a splendidly beautiful British accent.

Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

 

19 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

By Rohini Hensman

The cornerstone of Modi’s and the BJP’s campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections is that the UPA has ruined the Indian economy and the BJP led by Modi will make it boom. These claims have been reinforced by corporate adulation for Modi in his ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summits [1] and surveys showing that almost 75% of top corporate CEOs want him to be the PM [2]. How valid are these claims?

The UPA’s performance

The economic reforms initiated by the Congress government in the 1990s raised the GDP growth rate from an average of around 3.5% per annum since Independence to more than 9% between 2005-06 and 2007-08 [3], before dropping to 6.7% in 2008-2009 as a result of the global crisis [4]. Global competition forced manufacturers of products like electrical and electronic goods to improve the quality and reduce the prices of their products. Computers, internet access and mobile phones became much more widely available.

However, neoliberal policies that were part of the changes had serious negative consequences. Privatisation was in many cases accompanied by massive corruption (e.g. the CWG and 2G scams), as politicians and bureaucrats received kickbacks from the corporates they favoured. In other cases, even if there were no kickbacks, lack of adequate regulation allowed corporates to make windfall profits, while public sector banks offered them generous loans without exercising due diligence. The campaign by industrialists for the abolition of protective labour laws reached a crescendo during the NDA regime. It stopped when the UPA came to power, but the anti-labour atmosphere had already influenced state labour departments and even the judiciary to such a degree that workers struggling for their rights were seldom successful.

The result of these trends was a huge increase in inequality. At the top, a few capitalists became dollar billionaires, joining the global rich. Just below them, 10-15% of the population became a prosperous middle class. But for the vast majority there was no improvement. Between the top and the bottom there was an unbridgeable gulf.

These developments were not peculiar to India . A wave of neoliberalism was sweeping through the world. What does this mean? The only interest of most capitalists is to maximise their profits regardless of the damage they do to the economy. If reducing wages below subsistence and destroying the environment boosts profits, so be it; if gambling with worthless derivatives promises trillions, then go for it. If privatisation of public utilities like electricity and water offers huge profits to a few, then that is the way to go, even if it reduces the profits of many others and imposes an intolerable burden on non-coporate users. But normally the state, even if it supports capitalism, takes a broader view. It may regulate the banking sector so that it is not threatened with collapse if risky investments go wrong. It may nationalise railways and public utilities so as to reduce costs for all capitalists. It may even invest in health and education in the interests of a better labour force.

The peculiarity of a neoliberal regime is that the state takes the standpoint of individual capitalists and allows them to do what they want rather than protecting the system as a whole. The corruption unleashed by this regime in countries like the US has been phenomenal. Mortgage providers ramped up the housing market to astronomical levels by offering large mortgages to buyers who would never be able to pay them back. Investment banks then ‘bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got credit rating agencies to rate them as AAA securities, and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the financial system, and all too often betting against the instruments they sold…’ [5]. The outcome was the global crisis of 2008, resulting in millions of homes, jobs and pensions lost on one side, while on the other side gigantic fortunes were made. Years later, some of these banks were penalised, but their CEOs were not [6]. Credit rating agencies too came under fire for giving triple-A ratings to junk; Standard & Poors even faced a civil suit [7]. Yet they too remained in operation.

This background is important in understanding what has been happening in the Indian economy. The global crisis hit all countries across the world. India , because its economy was not fully neoliberalised, did better than most. Its relatively well-regulated banking sector survived, though not unscathed: generous loans given to corporates like Kingfisher Airlines without proper scrutiny of their ability to repay piled up on the balance-sheets of the banks as non-performing assets [8]. This has justifiably been seen as collusion between bank managements and corporates to rob the public of over 3 lakh crores over the past two years [9]. The Finance Ministry and Reserve Bank acknowledged the scale of the problem in November 2013, and pledged to take steps to deal with it [10]. Recession and austerity in developed countries hit exports from India , which in turn hit employment, reducing wage expenditure and demand. Paradoxically NREGA, which had been intiated before the crisis, acted as a stimulus package, creating employment, helping to raise agricultural wages and preventing the collapse of rural spending power. But the middle classes, who had been doing so well before the crisis, saw their future and the future of their children threatened.

The net result in India has been a slow-down in economic growth and high rates of inflation, which are causes for concern but not nearly as catastrophic as the slow-down in developed countries. According to Shankar Sharma, a director at one of India ‘s leading investment brokers, First Global, ‘ India ‘s current economic management is inarguably the best that we have… In the last nine years, India has grown at about seven and a half percent compounded. But more importantly, in this ten years, debt to GDP has come down from 91 percent to 67 percent’ [11]. APCO Worldwide agrees with this assessment of the UPA’s economic performance: ‘ India today is a trillion-dollar market with an enviable rate of GDP growth. India ‘s economy is fueled by the combination of a large services sector, a strong and diversified manufacturing base and a significant agricultural sector that continues to provide a framework for the growth of the domestic economy. The country’s resilience in weathering the recent global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that India can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy in the months and years ahead’ [12].

This is a very different picture from the constant BJP blitzkrieg blaring the allegation that the UPA has made a mess of India ‘s economy. Given that APCO is the PR firm hired by the state government of Gujarat from 2009 to 2013 at a reported cost of $ 25,000 a month to promote Modi’s Vibrant Gujarat [13], it can hardly be accused of pro-Congress bias. Moreover, while rampant corruption during the UPA regime is undeniable, it also enacted the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which played a considerable role in exposing corruption. If the BJP’s anti-UPA propaganda is economical with the truth, what about its pro-Gujarat propaganda?

Corruption, poverty and pollution in Vibrant Gujarat

The average GDP growth rate in Gujarat over the past ten years has been above the national average, but in line with the growth rates of comparable large states like Maharashtra , Tamil Nadu and Delhi [14]. Gujarat’s growth has been achieved at the cost of handing over complete control over the economy to corporates, and wholesale privatisation: ‘Key sectors – traditionally held to be the preserve of the state – such as ports, roads, rail and power have been handed over to corporate capital. This has meant, inevitably, that the government has abdicated all decision making powers, as well as functional and financial control over such projects. Nowhere else in the country has this abdication of responsibility been so total, nowhere else has the state given over the economy so entirely to the corporates and private investors ‘. Infrastructure and access to water and electricity favour industry over agriculture and individual consumers. Employment growth in manufacturing and services turned negative in the last five years, and even prior to that was concentrated in the informal sector [15].

The Modi administration’s largesse to corporates can be judged by two examples. One is the staggering subsidies offered to Tata for its Nano plant and other projects. Against an investment of 2900 crores, Tata received a loan of 9570 crores at 0.1% interest, to be paid back on a monthly basis after 20 years, in addition to land at much below market rates, with stamp duty, registration charges and electricity paid for by the state. Tax breaks mean that the people of Gujarat will not be getting any of this money back in the near future [16]. All the rules were bent to provide Adani with a power supply contract costing the state of Gujarat an excess Rs 23,625 crores over 25 years [17], and other companies, including Reliance Industries and Essar Steel, were extended similar favours [18]. So when these companies praise Modi to the skies [1], support his candidature for PM [2], use the media they own to promote Modi and silence criticism of him [19], and put their aircraft at his disposal [20], this is merely quid pro quo.

Any objective definition of ‘corruption’ would include such activities. The scale of corruption in Gujarat is stupendous, and those who campaign against it have not fared well. With only 5% of India ‘s population, 22% of the murders and 20% of the assaults of RTI activists in recent years have occurred in Gujarat , which has only two RTI Commissioners compared to eight in Maharashtra and nine in Tamil Nadu [21]. The post of Lokayukta (corruption watchdog) was not filled for ten years since 2003. When the Governor and Chief Justice of the High Court selected Justice R. A. Mehta for the post in 2011, as they were empowered to do according to the Gujarat Lokayukta Act, Modi fought tooth and nail against the appointment, reportedly spending Rs 45 crores to challenge it all the way up to the Supreme Court. Even after the Supreme Court had upheld the appointment, the state government refused to cooperate with Mehta, leading him to decline the position [22]. Subsequently the state government amended the Lokayukta Act to make it a toothless body under the control of the very government whose corruption it was supposed to monitor [23]! Apparently Modi learned a lesson from the fate of his friend Yedyurappa, former BJP Chief Minister of Karnataka, who was forced to resign due to corruption charges against him initiated by the Karnataka Lokayukta [24], and resolved never to give any Lokayukta the opportunity to do the same to him.

The ordinary people of Gujarat have paid a heavy price for its economic growth. Gujarat has one of the highest poverty levels of all the Indian states. Huge swathes of land allocated to corporates have displaced lakhs of farmers, fishermen, pastoralists, agricultural workers, Dalits and Adivasis. During Modi’s tenure, 16,000 workers, farmers and farm labourers had committed suicide due to economic distress by 2011 [25]. Gujarat has the highest prevalence of hunger and lowest human development indices among states with comparable per capita income, its implementation of NREGA is the worst among large states, and Muslims, ‘in particular, fare poorly on parameters of poverty, hunger, education and vulnerability on security issues’ [26]. Refuting Modi’s claim that the high level of malnutrition in Gujarat is a consequence of vegetarianism and figure-consciousness, an eminent scholar has pointed out that the real reasons are extremely low wage rates, malfunctioning of nutrition schemes, lack of potable water supplies, and lack of sanitation: the state ranks 10 th in the use of toilets, with more than 65% of households defecating in the open, with resulting high levels of jaundice, diarrhoea, malaria and other diseases [27]. Uncontrolled pollution has destroyed the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen, and subjected the local populations to skin diseases, asthma, TB, cancer and death [28].

Contrary to the myth that Gujarat is a powerhouse attracting large FDI inflows, in 2012-13 its share in FDI was a meagre 2.38%, ranked 6 th , compared to Maharashtra ‘s 39.4% [29]. Most damning of all, for a state that purports to provide a template for the whole country’s economy, is the Modi government’s ‘lack of financial discipline. The Gujarat growth pattern relies on indebtedness. The state’s debt increased from Rs 45,301 crore in 2002 to Rs. 1,38,978 crore in 2013… In terms of per capita indebtedness, the situation is even more worrying, given the size of the state: each Gujarati carries a debt of Rs 23,163 if the population is taken to be 60 million’ [30].

The Gujarat economic model is a more extreme version of neoliberalism than the version practised by the UPA, which retains elements of regulation and social welfare. This is clearly the reason why the majority of CEOs want him to be the PM. It bothers them that the policy of endless credit from public sector banks has come under scrutiny by the UPA, and billionaires like Sahara boss Subrata Roy can be arrested for robbing small investors of Rs 20,000 crores [31]. They look forward to a Modi regime where they can continue to loot the public unhindered by regulations, where small concessions to working people like NREGA and the Food Security Act can be shelved, and the NDA’s old programme of scrapping protective labour legislation can finally be realised. Importers of gold and other luxury consumption goods can’t wait to have a PM who is clueless about technicalities like current account deficits and fiscal deficits and would allow the whole country to become as indebted as Gujarat is today [32]. It is also instructive that the very same ratings agencies and investment banks indicted for making trillions by bringing down the US economy and causing a global crisis (see [5] and [7]) have been busy downgrading the UPA economy [33] and batting for Modi [34]. All these firms, Indian and international, would be least bothered if the Indian economy were to crash; they would have parked their profits elsewhere by then.

Modi’s policies are exactly the same as those which destroyed the economy of the US , the richest country in the world, resulting in the global crisis: wholesale privatisation and deregulation, extreme disparities in wealth, and unsustainable indebtedness. And they would have the same results in India , such as massive job losses, and worse. The US dollar has maintained much of its value because it is a global reserve currency, and other countries buy it in order to maintain their currency reserves. The Indian rupee is not a global reserve currency, and there is nothing to stop it from plummeting due to the rising deficits, leading to runaway inflation many times worse than India has ever experienced. Ironically, it is the same sections of the middle class who look to Modi as their saviour who would be hardest hit, because they have so much more to lose than the poor, who would also be hit.

Perhaps Modi would leave the economy to be handled by others in the BJP, but who is competent to do it? Yashwant Sinha, the finance minister during the NDA regime, does not exactly inspire confidence. ‘In 1990, Sinha was finance minister in the government of Chandrashekhar, when the bottom fell out of the Indian economy. The government’s policy response then was to ship all the gold in the Reserve Bank of India ‘s vaults off to the Bank of England as collateral for a loan… In 1998, by a peculiar coincidence, Sinha was again finance minister, this time in the BJP-led NDA coalition government… In March 2001, soon after Sinha presented his Budget, India experienced one of its worst market crashes: about $32 billion worth of market capitalisation was wiped out that month… In the NDA era, a little less than $4 billion entered India each year on average. Under the UPA, this number stands at a little less than $25 billion, more than six times the NDA average’ [35]. According to investment broker Shankar Sharma, ‘The BJP is the only mainstream political party that has no economist. And the BJP rule between 1999 and 2004 had the worst nominal GDP growth in the last 30 years in India , the worst by far. They ran the country into a huge debt trap. India ‘s debt to GDP ratio went from about 78 percent in 1999 to 91 percent by 2004. So again, whatever GDP growth the BJP delivered in those five years, the growth was with very high debt’ [11].

At a time of downturn and global crisis, putting India ‘s economy in the hands of a party that has no competent economist is tantamount to economic suicide. In accordance with their-frog-in-the-well perspective, Modi and the BJP never mention the global crisis or inquire into its causes. Anyone who takes the trouble to do so would realise that the ‘medicine’ they prescribe for the economy, which is suffering from slow poisoning by neoliberalism, is a lethal dose of the same poison.

Do the Left parties and the Aam Aadmi Party offer viable alternatives?

The Left parties failed to deliver a better model of development during more than thirty years in power in West Bengal , culminating in the Nandigram and Singur violence [36]. The Paschim Banga Khet Mazoor Samity had been demanding a rural employment guarantee scheme for decades, but the Left Front government refused even to consider it until NREGA was enacted by the UPA. The lack of an alternative was demonstrated most starkly over the issue of FDI in multibrand retail, where they formed a united front with the NDA to oppose it [37] rather than thinking of anything more principled and imaginative like forming consumer cooperatives which draw in street vendors. The failure of the Left parties to offer any economic alternative is particularly disappointing because they do have a critique of neoliberalism, and can at least be counted on to oppose the wholesale privatisation and deregulation of the economy or attempts to scrap protective labour legislation and welfare schemes.

AAP has a one-point economic programme: eliminating corruption. Their Jan Lokpal Bill, through which they hope to achieve this, sees all corruption as emanating from the state, and affecting only corporates that have a relationship with the state: a view entirely compatible with neoliberal World Bank anti-corruption programmes [38]. Its economic model is neoliberalism purged of corruption and ‘crony capitalism’. This comes through in their recent speeches. Privatisation is good, because ‘Government has no business doing business, it only has to govern. Business should all be held by the private sector,’ according to Arvind Kejriwal, who made a point of saying that the party disagreed with the economic views of Prashant Bhushan, the left-wing face of AAP [39]. AAP objects to industrialists like the Ambanis getting favoured treatment, but former banker Meera Sanyal clarified that they want to create the conditions in which all ‘hard working entrepreneurial, highly innovative people can feed themselves and their families’, suggesting that the state would help all capitalists equally [40]. Yogendra Yadav said that ‘Food subsidies should not be provided,’ and that the party stands for ‘clean politics, pro-business deregulation, non-interference of the state and not to serve the interests of crony capitalists’ [41].

This economic model is as neoliberal as Modi’s and more neoliberal than the UPA model, which still has elements of regulation and social justice. It offers nothing to workers and the poor, and would do nothing to reduce inequality. With their exclusive focus on an extremely narrow definition of corruption, AAP ignores the underlying disease of which it is a symptom – extreme inequality resulting from neoliberalism – and their policies would in fact exacerbate the basic problem. In theory, their model would be free of ‘crony capitalism’, but whether AAP can actually eliminate corruption is questionable, given that much of the corruption during the UPA regime has been the consequence of pro-business deregulation. Finally, their government’s grant of electricity subsidies to supporters who had not paid their bills but not to non-supporters who had paid their bills (subsequently stayed by the High Court) [42] sounds suspiciously like quid pro quo: you vote for us, we give you subsidies.

Conclusion

For years the BJP, Modi, the corporates which support him and the media they control have bombarded us relentlessly with propaganda and lies about the mess that the UPA has made of the economy and the shining success of ‘vibrant Gujarat’. In reality, we find that the UPA regime suffers from the same problems as other neoliberal regimes and has done better than most, while Modi’s policies would have catastrophic consequences for the Indian economy. AAP’s policies would not be much better: they would benefit a wider layer of entrepreneurs – say 3-5% of the population compared with Modi’s 0.1% – but scrapping food subsidies would make the poor poorer, so inequality would be greater than under the UPA. The UPA and Left parties seem to be the best of a bad lot so far as economic policy is concerned.

Does this mean that there is no better alternative to current policies? Far from it. Perhaps before the next Lok Sabha elections we will have a party opposing sops and subsidies to the rich, loss of lives and livelihoods due to expensive, dangerous and polluting nuclear power plants and weapons, the privatisation of public utilities, education and health care, and much more. A party which would stand for reducing inequality through (1) raising wages by protecting the right of all employees, regardless of their place of work or employment status, to unionise and bargain collectively without fear of victimisation; (2) putting in place a comprehensive system of progressive taxation to help fund the provision of education, health care and social security for all; and (3) creating employment through various measures such as (a) shortening statutory working hours to 40 per week and enforcing this measure; (b) expanding NREGA and including new projects such as water harvesting and rural electrification through small renewable energy projects; and (c) supporting the formation of workers’ cooperatives in agriculture, industry and services. Until then, mass movements have to continue fighting for such goals.

Those who think these goals belong to an obsolete left-wing economic model would do well to listen to Christine Lagarde: ‘Let me be frank: in the past, economists have underestimated the importance of inequality. They have focused on economic growth, on the size of the pie rather than its distribution. Today, we are more keenly aware of the damage done by inequality. Put simply, a severely skewed income distribution harms the pace and sustainability of growth over the longer term. It leads to an economy of exclusion, and a wasteland of discarded potential’ [43]. These are not the words of a left-winger but of the head of the International Monetary Fund, the financial institution which, along with the World Bank, has done the most to impose neoliberal policies on the world. If she can see the writing on the wall for neoliberalism, it is high time that policy-makers and the public in India followed suit.

 

Rohini Hensman is a writer and researcher active in workers’ rights, women’s rights, anti-communal and anti-war movements.

 

19 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

By Chris Marsden

The Obama administration is utilising Moscow’s incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation to escalate its campaign of threats and sanctions. To this end, the United States is lining up its puppet regime in Ukraine and its regional allies to prepare a series of military provocations.

Following a speech Tuesday to the Russian Federal Assembly, President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty annexing Crimea.

US Vice-President Joseph Biden responded by accusing Russia of a “blatant violation of international law” and making a “brazen military incursion.” The US was considering deploying ground troops to the Baltic States on new military exercises, he threatened.

Hours later, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told his defence ministry that the conflict in Crimea had entered a military phase. Yatsenyuk accused Russian forces of killing a Ukrainian serviceman at a base near the Crimean regional capital, Simferopol, calling the incident “a war crime.” Ukraine then authorised its troops to fire in “self-defence.”

Provocations to legitimise war need not take place only within Crimea. They could be staged throughout eastern Ukraine.

Yesterday, Ukraine’s armed forces were busy moving tanks and digging trenches in the Donbas basin. The Ukrainian State Border Service stated that Russian troops were a threat to the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Donetsk, where Russian-speaking residents are demanding a Crimea-style referendum, has been placed under the leadership of the oligarch Sergei Taruta. He has threatened to carry out arrests and break up protests, declaring, “The soft touch is over, we are now going to defend ourselves.”

The Ukrainian government has allotted more than $600 million to bolster military defences and partially mobilize the armed forces. It refused Monday to remove its troops from Crimea, despite a March 16 peace treaty signed with Russia that extends to March 21. Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko said “the most important issue is to restore the military might of Ukraine… Our army should be ready for combat.”

Putin’s speech tempered an endorsement of Crimean annexation and denunciations of the US and its allies for creating the crisis in Ukraine with the offer of a compromise.

The Maidan protests in Kiev, he said, were utilised by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites” who “executed this coup,” and who had “foreign sponsors.” He accused the West of using double standards because it intervened in Kosovo in 1999 and endorsed that province’s unilateral separation from Serbia.

In Ukraine, he said, the West had behaved “irresponsibly,” pushing the protests that toppled President Yanukovych until Russia “could not step back any more.” He declared that “Russia has national interests that need to be respected.” It had faced the possibility of Sevastopol, where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based, being used by NATO, which would have threatened southern Russia.

He concluded, however, with a pledge not to “split Ukraine” or trample on Ukraine’s national feelings, implying that there would be no further Russian military interventions. He then signed a treaty accepting the “Republic of Crimea” and the city of Sevastopol as parts of the Russian Federation.

Putin’s offer of a compromise—essentially a pledge to go this far and no further—was summarily rejected by Washington, Germany, the UK and France. German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned moves to incorporate Crimea as “against international law,” while French President Francois Hollande said, “The next European Council meeting on March 20-21 must provide the opportunity for a strong and coordinated European response to the hurdle that has just been jumped.” UK Prime Minister David Cameron said “further measures” should be taken against what Foreign Secretary William Hague described as “a land grab.”

A combined G-7 and European Union crisis meeting has been called for next week in The Hague, following a request by US President Barack Obama.

The US, together with the European Union, is threatening an escalation of sanctions—so far limited to targeting political figures close to Putin—to cover businesses and trade. But yesterday, the US again focused its energies on building a regional military alliance against Russia.

The US and the EU are providing all of the funding and equipment to Ukraine’s military, now reorganised around a newly-created 60,000-strong “National Guard” under the leadership of fascistic politicians Andriy Parubiy and Dmytro Yarosh and encompassing Right Sector and Svoboda militias.

On Monday, after a meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsia, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen pledged a partnership that “includes development of ties with the Ukrainian military as well as the expansion in the number of joint drills.” He added, “In addition, NATO will more actively involve Ukraine in its multinational projects regarding the development of military potentials.”

A key role in US military scheming is being assigned to Poland, with Biden holding talks in Warsaw with Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Bronislaw Komorowski.

Writing in Forbes, Loren Thompson noted the key geo-strategic significance of Poland, a NATO member since 2004 with a population of 38 million that “shares borders with three former Soviet republics and the Russian enclave at Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.”

He wrote that Poland was now intent on renewing its earlier abortive effort to acquire a missile defence system, Polish Shield, which was rejected in 2009 by Obama due to Russian opposition. Costing at least $43 billion, it will operate in conjunction with “land-and sea-based defences the US is deploying to the region.”

The plan is to purchase the Medium Extended Air Defense System, or MEADS, from the US. Thompson noted that the Obama administration “late last week gave prime contractor Lockheed Martin permission to offer” MEADS to Warsaw.

Poland has announced plans to form a multinational military brigade with the Caucasian states, Ukraine and Lithuania. The proposal was first made in 2009, but defence ministers will meet this week to form a brigade that the Daily Telegraph said “would straddle NATO’s eastern border and bring Ukraine’s armed forces closer to the Western fold.” Last week, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister visited NATO headquarters to discuss the move.

Biden also met with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, Latvian President Andris Berzins and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Latvia and Estonia share borders with Russia. All three have significant Russian populations. Russians in Latvia, making up a third of the population, are considered “non-citizens” and cannot vote. This week, 1,500 Latvians who fought for Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS held their annual parade through Riga.

The Islamist Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made its most bellicose statements against Russia to date, warning that it will close the Bosphorus to Russian ships if there is any violence against Tatars in Crimea. Turkey will not recognize the referendum in Crimea, Erdogan said.

 

 

19 March, 2014

WSWS.org

 

By Chris Hedges

The banning of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Northeastern University in Boston on March 7, along with a university threat of disciplinary measures against some of its members, replicates sanctions being imposed against numerous student Palestinian rights groups across the country. The attacks, and the disturbingly similar forms of punishment, appear to be part of a coordinated effort by the Israeli government and the Israel lobby to blacklist all student groups that challenge the official Israeli narrative.

Northeastern banned the SJP chapter after it posted on campus replicas of eviction notices that are routinely put up on Palestinian homes set for Israeli demolition. The university notice of suspension says that if the SJP petitions for reinstatement next year, “No current member of the Students for Justice in Palestine executive board may serve on the inaugural board of the new organization” and that representatives from the organization must attend university-sanctioned “trainings.”

In 2011 in California, 10 students who had disrupted a speech at UC Irvine by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren were found guilty, put on informal probation and sentenced to perform community service. Oren, an Israeli citizen who has since been hired by CNN as a contributor, has called on Congress to blacklist supporters of the campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and to prosecute those who protest at appearances by Israeli officials. Some activists at Florida Atlantic University were stripped of student leadership positions after they walked out of a talk by an Israeli army officer and were ordered by school administrators to attend re-education seminars designed by the Anti-Defamation League. Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (CSJP) was abruptly placed on suspension in the spring of 2011 and barred from reserving rooms and hosting events on campus. The university administration, before the ban, had a practice of notifying the campus Hillel in advance of any CSJP event. The suspension was eventually lifted after a protest led by attorneys for the CSJP.

Max Geller, a law student and a SJP member at Northeastern whom I reached by phone in Boston, accused the university of responding “to outside pressures,” including that of alumnus Robert Shillman, who is the CEO of Cognex Corp., and hedge fund billionaire Seth Klarman, both supporters of right-wing Israeli causes.

“To prohibit students from holding leadership roles and student groups simply because they engaged in a peaceful political protest is antithetical to the university’s mission to educate students,” he said. “It erases any pedagogical value disciplinary process might seek.”

“In the last year,” Geller went on, “I have received death threats, been publicly and unfairly maligned, and have been threatened with disciplinary measures. This has made engaging in speech about an issue about which I care deeply, both as a Jew and an American, a fear- and anxiety-causing prospect.”

Israel’s heavy-handed reaction to these campus organizations is symptomatic of its increasing isolation and concern about waning American support. The decades-long occupation and seizure of Palestinian land and the massive military assaults against a defenseless population in Gaza that has left hundreds dead, along with growing malnutrition among Palestinian children and enforced poverty, have alienated traditional supporters of Israel, including many young American Jews. Israel, at the same time, has turned into a pariah in the global community. If it were to become devoid of American support, which it largely buys with political campaign contributions funneled through groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel would be adrift. There are a growing number of banks and other companies, especially in the European Union, joining the boycott movement, which refuses to do business with Israeli concerns in the occupied territories. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking before AIPAC on March 4, surprisingly devoted much of his talk to attacking the nascent BDS movement, which he said stood for “Bigotry, Dishonesty and Shame.” He called for BDS supporters to “be treated exactly as we treat any anti-Semite or bigot.” He warned that “naive and ignorant” people are being recruited as “gullible fellow travelers” in an anti-Semitic campaign.

Israeli officials are also apparently attempting to infiltrate the BDS movement and are using subterfuge to link it to Islamic extremism, according to The Times of London. The Israeli government in addition is pushing censorious, anti-democratic bills in the state legislatures of New York, Maryland and Illinois that would impose financial sanctions on academic organizations that boycott Israeli institutions. Meanwhile, the United States and others enthusiastically impose sanctions on Russia for an occupation that is much less draconian than Israel’s long defiance of international law.

The ADL-designed indoctrination classes for university activists are, according to those who have been required to take them, shabby attempts to equate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

“Myself and two other members of SJP were forced to attend the ADL-sponsored ‘diversity training’ course or we would have violated the terms of our probation and in turn we would be suspended and/or expelled,” said Nadine Aly, a Florida Atlantic student activist who with other activists walked out of a lecture given at the university by an Israeli army officer, Col. Bentzi Gruber, who had helped devise the rules of engagement for Operation Cast Lead, the horrific attack on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. I reached her by phone at the Florida campus. “The very idea that the administration is implying that it is racist to criticize Israeli policy is ludicrous. We were put on ‘indefinite probation,’ banning us from holding leadership positions in any recognized student organizations, including student government, at the university until our graduation. I was stripped of my position as president of SJP as well as a student senator, and the former vice president of the SJP lost her position as a Student House representative. It is a shame that this university, like most universities, bows to the pressure of the Zionist lobby and wealthy Zionist donors, when they should be protecting the rights of their students.”

The persecution of scholars such as Joseph Massad and Norman Finkelstein who challenge the official Israeli narrative has long been a feature of Israeli intervention in American academic life. And the eagerness of university presidents to denounce the American Studies Association call for an academic boycott of Israel is a window into the insatiable hunger for money that seems to govern university policy. The current effort to shut down student groups, however, raises traditional Israeli censorship and interference to a new level. Israel seeks now to openly silence free speech on American college campuses—all of these student groups have steadfastly engaged in nonviolent protests—and has enlisted our bankrupt liberal elites and college administrators as thought police.

The failure among academics to stand up for the right of these student groups to express dissenting views and engage in political activism is a sad commentary on how irrelevant most academics have become. Where, in this fight, are the constitutional law professors defending the right to free speech? Where are the professors of ethics, religion and philosophy reminding students about the right of all to a dignified life free of oppression? Where are the Middle Eastern studies professors explaining the historical consequences of Israel’s violent seizure of Palestinian land? Where are the journalism professors defending the right of dissidents and victims to a fair hearing in the press? Where are the professors of queer and gender studies, African-American studies, Native American studies or Chicano studies acting to protect the voices and dignity of the marginalized and oppressed?

This assault will not end with groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. The refusal to hear the cries of the Palestinian people, especially those 1.5 million—60 percent of them children—who are trapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, is part of the wider campaign by right-wing operatives like Lynne Cheney and billionaires such as the Koch brothers to stamp out all programs and academic disciplines that give voice to the marginalized, especially those who are not privileged and white. Latinos, African-Americans, feminists, those in queer and gender studies also feel this pressure. Under a bill signed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, books by leading Chicano authors have been banned from public schools in Tucson and elsewhere in Arizona on the ground that such ethnic studies promote “resentment toward a race or people.” It is language similar to what Ambassador Oren has used to justify his call for criminal prosecutions of BDS activists—that they are advancing “bigotry.” The neoconservatism that grips Israel has its toxic counterpart within American culture. And if other marginalized groups within the university remain silent while Palestine solidarity activists are persecuted on campuses, there will be fewer allies when these right-wing forces come for them. And come they will.

Those of us who denounce the suffering caused by Israel and its war crimes against the Palestinians and who support the BDS movement are accustomed to sleazy Israeli smear campaigns. I have been repeatedly branded as an anti-Semite by the Israeli lobby, including for my book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” That some of these dissident voices, such as Max Blumenthal, who wrote “Goliath: Fear and Loathing in Greater Israel,” one of the best accounts of contemporary Israel, are Jewish does not seem to perturb right-wing Israeli propagandists who see any deviation from the Israeli government line as a form of religious heresy.

“I have been on tour discussing my book, ‘Goliath,’ since October 2013,” said Blumenthal, with whom I spoke by phone. “And on numerous occasions, Israel lobby groups and pro-Israel activists have attempted to pressure organizations into canceling my events before they took place. I have been slandered by teenage pro-Israel students, prominent magazine columnists and even Alan Dershowitz as an anti-Semite, and my family has been attacked in right-wing media simply for hosting a book party for me. The absurd lengths pro-Israel activists have gone to stop my journalism and analysis from reaching a wide audience perfectly illustrate their intellectual exhaustion and moral poverty. All they have left is loads of money to buy off politicians and the unlimited will to defend the only nuclearized apartheid state in the Middle East. As young Arabs and Muslims assert their presence on campuses across the country and Jewish Americans reel in disgust at Netanyahu’s Israel, we are witnessing pro-Israel forces wage a fighting retreat. The question is not whether they will win or lose, but how much damage they can do to free-speech rights on their way towards a reckoning with justice.”

“It would be heartening if prominent liberal intellectuals would agree with all of my conclusions, or would accept the legitimacy of BDS,” Blumenthal went on. “But the only reasonable expectation we can hold for them is that they speak up in defense of those whose free-speech rights and rights to organize are being crushed by powerful forces. Unfortunately, when those forces are arrayed in defense of Israel, too many liberal intellectuals are silent or, as in the case of Michael Kazin, Eric Alterman, Cary Nelson and a who’s who of major university presidents, they actively collaborate with fellow elites determined to crush Palestine solidarity activism through anti-democratic means.”

Hillel chapters, sadly, often function as little more than Israeli government and AIPAC campus outposts. This is true at Northeastern as well as at schools such as Barnard College and Columbia. And university presidents such as Barnard’s Debora Spar see nothing wrong with accepting Israel-lobby tours of Israel while Palestinian students must risk imprisonment and even death to study in the United States. The launching of campuswide defamation campaigns from supposedly religious houses is a sacrilege to the Jewish religion. In seminary I read enough of the great Hebrew prophets, whose singular concern was for the oppressed and the poor, to know that they would not be found today in Hillel centers but would instead be protesting with SJP activists.

The campus Hillel centers, with lavish budgets and gleaming buildings on campuses often situated in centers of urban blight, offer running events, lectures and programs to promote official Israeli policy. They arrange free trips to Israel for Jewish students as part of the “Taglit Birthright” program, functioning as an Israeli government travel agency. While Jewish students, often with no familial connection to Israel, are escorted in these well-choreographed propaganda tours of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remain trapped in squalid refugee camps cannot go home although their families may have lived for centuries on what is now Israeli land.

Israel has for decades been able to frame the discussion about the Palestinians. But its control of the narrative is coming to an end. As Israel loses ground it will viciously and irrationally attack all truth tellers, even if they are American students, and especially if they are Jews. There will come a day, and that day will come sooner than Israel and its paid lackeys expect, when the whole edifice will crumble, when even students at Hillel will no longer have the stomach to defend the continuous dispossession and random murder of Palestinians. Israel, by ruthlessly silencing others, now risks silencing itself.

Chris Hedges will deliver a lecture sponsored by the Northeastern University Political Economy Forum at 6 p.m. March 25 at West Village F, 20, 460 Parker St. in Boston.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

 

17 March, 2014

TruthDig.com

 

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

In an unprecedented turnout unmatched by any Western election, Crimeans voted 95.7% to join Russia. As I pointed out earlier today, under the twisted logic of Washington Crimea has never been a part of Ukraine as Russians were not allowed to vote when the Soviet dictator Khrushchev stuck the Russian province of Crimea into Ukraine in 1954.

While Crimeans celebrate in the streets and international observers declare the referendum to be totally fair and free of all interference and threat, the neo-Nazi White House declared that “we don’t recognize no stinking vote.” The moronic White House spokesperson said that the White House and “the international community”–Washington in its arrogance thinks that it is the voice of “the international community”–do not recognize the results of democracy in action.

Democracy is not acceptable to Washington, or to the two-bit punk American puppets who rule for Washington in Germany, UK, and France, when democracy does not serve Washington’s agenda of hegemony over the entire world. The neo-Nazi White House spokesperson lied through his teeth when he claimed that the referendum, which has been declared by international observers to have been completely free, was “administered under threats of violence and intimidation.”

This statement, which the entire world now knows to be false, marks the government in Washington, and its subservient media, as the worst and most dangerous liar the world has ever experienced. All Washington is capable of is lies: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections, Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons against his own citizens, Iran has a nuclear weapons program, Gaddafi gave his soldiers viagra so they could better rape Libyan women, Russia invaded Crimea, Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11. I could continue with hundreds of incidences of Washington’s lies. Indeed, among aware people the word Washington has become synonymous with liar.

When will the world sanction the criminal enterprise that pretends to be a government of the United States?

When will the War Crimes Tribunal and the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for Obama and his entire criminal regime as well as the criminal regimes of Bush and Clinton?

When will the assets of the US government and its criminal members be seized?

How long will the world tolerate Washington’s incessant destruction of countries and peoples from Somalia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Pakistan to Yemen to Syria to Ukraine, with Russia, Iran, and China waiting in the wings?

The United States government is the worst criminal enterprise in the history of the world. Not a single member of the government has told the truth about anything in the entire 21st century. The executive branch lies consistently to Congress, and the cowardly, weak, despicable fools sit there and take it. Congress is so useless it might as well be abolished. I expect Obama to issue an executive order abolishing the useless institution at any moment.

But “we have freedom and democracy.”

The truth is that the entire evil of the universe is concentrated in Washington. It is this evil that is destroying millions of lives, and it is this evil that will destroy the world.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

 

17 March, 2014

Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Mickey Z.

 

When Barack Obama was first inaugurated in January 2009, he clearly and firmly announced to the planet: “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense.”

I’d say this is one promise the Pope of Hope has kept.

Wake-up Call: Our way of life is a way of death.

“Our way of life” is based on violence, expansion, consumption, domination, and predatory capitalism.

Our way of life means 1 in 31 American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation, yet we live in Land of the Free™.

It means the U.S. military — the planet’s worst polluter and recipient of more than 50 percent of U.S. tax dollars — can launch predator drones at civilians, but somehow we dwell in the Home of the Brave™.

Our way of life means homelessness. It means sweatshops. It means “illegal” is a noun and “union” is an insult.

It means 150-200 animal and plant species go extinct… every single day.

Wake-up Call: Our way of life is a way of death.

Our way of life means there aren’t any cod in Cape Cod, and soon no ice at the North Pole.

It means strip malls; it means strip mining.

Our way of life means New Hampshire license plates read: “Live free or die.” It also means New Hampshire license plates are manufactured by prisoners.

Our way of life means Mumia abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier and Chelsea Manning remain in prison, while war criminals like Madeleine Albright and Dick Cheney walk free. Speaking of war criminals, our way of life also means President Obama can take time out from waging two wars to accept a Nobel Peace Prize.

Our way of life teaches us what to accept as “normal” and, as a result, normal means every 46 seconds, a woman is raped in America. It means depleted uranium and landmines. Normal means gay bashing and racial profiling; veal crates and vivisection; clear cutting and ocean trawling.

Wake-up Call: Our way of life is a way of death.

Normal will have you taking off your shoes at the airport, getting shot at by trigger-happy cops, but never having to walk more than two blocks to find the nearest Starbuck’s. (Did I say walk? I meant drive, of course. Walking… how Third World of me.)

Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic? Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid? The global animal by-products industry murders 1 trillion animal per year for “food,” consumes and destroys one-third of the planet’s and surface, and is the top source of human-created greenhouse gases?

All normal. All part of our vaunted way of life — the same way of life that has removed 80 percent of the world’s forests and 90 percent of the large fish in the ocean and will not stop until they’re all gone.

Wake-up Call: Our way of life is a way of death.

Make no mistake about it, our beloved way of life was built on a nearly exterminated indigenous population, an African slave trade, and all those killed in places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Southeast Asia, Central America, Middle East, etc. etc.

It was created on stolen land, using stolen oil.

Our way of life is built on terror and it is maintained by terror — the terror of cops, prisons, military, and the psychological terror of propaganda.

The first step to end terrorism remains this simple: Stop practicing it yourself.

The precarious state of things on Planet Earth is not some preordained theology or an unstoppable force of nature. We’re in this mess thanks to human decisions. If different decisions had been made in the past, different outcomes would’ve likely occurred.

If different decisions are made and different actions are taken — starting right now — perhaps different outcomes can still transpire. I say we find out…

#shifthappens

Note: To continue conversations like this, come see Mickey Z. in person on March 15 at Bluestockings Bookstore in NYC.

Order Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism here.

***

Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green.

15 March, 2014

World News Trust

 

By Gary Corseri

(Note: American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death on March 16, 2003, while trying to stop an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) armored bulldozer from demolishing Palestinian homes in the occupied Gaza Strip.)

Barely a woman, twenty three years old–

Soft, vulnerable…. Surely, the Monster

Will stop in its tracks!

 

She steels her will,

Thinks of the tank in Tiananmen Square–

One little man stopping a tank!

 

Surely,

They will perceive her love-resolve:

To die in a great cause is to mortar–

Not martyr–the Cause!

 

She must not die!

Cannot break her parents’ hearts–

Back home! (She sees them now!)

If only they knew

How she had grown!

 

They would understand…

This other love that held her now

In place, this love of home and place,

And the Other,

Of the faces, the voices, the laughter…

Olive groves and sun-scented skin;

The love she’d found for dispossessed:

Children, fathers, mothers–also of her,

Belonging to her, because

Everyone suffering was One.

 

It was hard to explain… but the Monster

Truck was coming now–remorseless Caterpillar,

Sci-fi bulldozer to scoop her up!

 

It would stop in its tracks!

Because a man drove it!

A man who would see her,

In her orange jacket

Like a bumble bee!

 

He would see she had to

Do it—stand there in its way

(Though its iron mouth gaped,

Though its hard lips snarled.)

 

To save their houses, olive groves… to save

Herself! And these other selves–part of her

And part of the one who drove the Monster

Closer now, with droning, cacophonous,

Tank-like clanking,

And the sun burning its panes like eyes.

 

Surely

It must stop, if she steels her will, is resolute,

Peers in his eyes… surely… then… understand…

He will–the suffering… the children… why she stood

In its way–

 

Barely a woman, bones against

The iron tread, encircling,

Winding, crushing, crackling,

Bursting in sunburst light,

In the dying light,

For the sake of all.

 

Gary Corseri has published his work at hundreds of websites and periodicals worldwide, including Countercurrents, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Village Voice and The New York Times.

15 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org