Archives: Articles

By Adam Parsons

22 January, 2014

Sharing.org

Can the sharing economy movement address the root causes of the world’s converging crises? Unless the sharing of resources is promoted in relation to human rights and concerns for equity, democracy, social justice and sustainability, then such claims are without substantiation – although there are many hopeful signs that the conversation is slowly moving in the right direction.

In recent years, the concept and practice of sharing resources is fast becoming a mainstream phenomenon across North America, Western Europe and other world regions. The internet is awash with articles and websites that celebrate the vast potential of sharing human and physical assets, in everything from cars and bicycles to housing, workplaces, food, household items, and even time or expertise. According to most general definitions that are widely available online, the sharing economy leverages information technology to empower individuals or organisations to distribute, share and re-use excess capacity in goods and services. The business icons of the new sharing economy include the likes of Airbnb, Zipcar, Lyft, Taskrabbit and Poshmark, although hundreds of other for-profit as well as non-profit organisations are associated with this burgeoning movement that is predicated, in one way or another, on the age-old principle of sharing.

As the sharing economy receives increasing attention from the media, a debate is beginning to emerge around its overall importance and future direction. There is no doubt that the emergent paradigm of sharing resources is set to expand and further flourish in coming years, especially in the face of continuing economic recession, government austerity and environmental concerns. As a result of the concerted advocacy work and mobilisation of sharing groups in the US, fifteen city mayors have now signed the Shareable Cities Resolution in which they officially recognise the importance of economic sharing for both the public and private sectors. Seoul in South Korea has also adopted a city-funded project called Sharing City in which it plans to expand its ‘sharing infrastructure’, promote existing sharing enterprises and incubate sharing economy start-ups as a partial solution to problems in housing, transportation, job creation and community cohesion. Furthermore, Medellin in Colombia is embracing transport-sharing schemes and reimagining the use of its shared public spaces, while Ecuador is the first country in the world to commit itself to becoming a ‘shared knowledge’-based society, under an official strategy named ‘buen saber’.

Many proponents of the sharing economy therefore have great hopes for a future based on sharing as the new modus operandi. Almost everyone recognises that drastic change is needed in the wake of a collapsed economy and an overstretched planet, and the old idea of the American dream – in which a culture that promotes excessive consumerism and commercialisation leads us to see the ‘good life’ as the ‘goods life’, as described by the psychologist Tim Kasser – is no longer tenable in a world of rising affluence among possibly 9.6 billion people by 2050. Hence more and more people are rejecting the materialistic attitudes that defined recent decades, and are gradually shifting towards a different way of living that is based on connectedness and sharing rather than ownership and conspicuous consumption. ‘Sharing more and owning less’ is the ethic that underlies a discernible change in attitudes among affluent society that is being led by today’s young, tech-savvy generation known as Generation Y or the Millennials.

However, many entrepreneurial sharing pioneers also profess a big picture vision of what sharing can achieve in relation to the world’s most pressing issues, such as population growth, environmental degradation and food security. As Ryan Gourley of A2Share posits, for example, a network of cities that embrace the sharing economy could mount up into a Sharing Regions Network, then Sharing Nations, and finally a Sharing World: “A globally networked sharing economy would be a whole new paradigm, a game-changer for humanity and the planet”. Neal Gorenflo, the co-founder and publisher of Shareable, also argues that peer-to-peer collaboration can form the basis of a new social contract, with an extensive sharing movement acting as the catalyst for systemic changes that can address the root causes of both poverty and climate change. Or to quote the words of Benita Matofska, founder of The People Who Share, we are going to have to “share to survive” if we want to face up to a sustainable future. In such a light, it behoves us all to investigate the potential of sharing to effect a social and economic transformation that is sufficient to meet the grave challenges of the 21st century.

Two sides of a debate on sharing

There is no doubt that sharing resources can contribute to the greater good in a number of ways, from economic as well as environmental and social perspectives. A number of studies show the environmental benefits that are common to many sharing schemes, such as the resource efficiency and potential energy savings that could result from car sharing and bike sharing in cities. Almost all forms of localised sharing are economical, and can lead to significant cost savings or earnings for individuals and enterprises. In terms of subjective well-being and social impacts, common experience demonstrates how sharing can also help us to feel connected to neighbours or co-workers, and even build community and make us feel happier.

Few could disagree on these beneficial aspects of sharing resources within communities or across municipalities, but some controversy surrounds the broader vision of how the sharing economy movement can contribute to a fair and sustainable world. For many advocates of the burgeoning trend towards economic sharing in modern cities, it is about much more than couch-surfing, car sharing or tool libraries, and holds the potential to disrupt the individualist and materialistic assumptions of neoliberal capitalism. For example, Juliet Schor in her book Plenitude perceives that a new economics based on sharing could be an antidote to the hyper-individualised, hyper-consumer culture of today, and could help rebuild the social ties that have been lost through market culture. Annie Leonard of the Story of Stuff project, in her latest short video on how to move society in an environmentally sustainable and just direction, also considers sharing as a key ‘game changing’ solution that could help to transform the basic goals of the economy.

Many other proponents see the sharing economy as a path towards achieving widespread prosperity within the earth’s natural limits, and an essential first step on the road to more localised economies and egalitarian societies. But far from everyone perceives that participating in the sharing economy, at least in its existing form and praxis, is a ‘political act’ that can realistically challenge consumption-driven economics and the culture of individualism – a question that is raised (although not yet comprehensively answered) in a valuable think piece from Friends of the Earth, as discussed further below. Various commentators argue that the proliferation of new business ventures under the umbrella of sharing are nothing more than “supply and demand continuing its perpetual adjustment to new technologies and fresh opportunities”, and that the concept of the sharing economy is being co-opted by purely commercial interests – a debate that was given impetus when the car sharing pioneers, Zipcar, were bought up by the established rental firm Avis.

Recently, Slate magazine’s business and economics correspondent controversially reiterated the observation that making money from new modes of consumption is not really ‘sharing’ per se, asserting that the sharing economy is therefore a “dumb term” that “deserves to die”. Other journalists have criticised the superficial treatment that the sharing economy typically receives from financial pundits and tech reporters, especially the claims that small business start-ups based on monetised forms of sharing are a solution to the jobs crisis – regardless of drastic cutbacks in welfare and public services, unprecedented rates of income inequality, and the dangerous rise of the precariat. The author Evgeny Morozov, writing an op-ed in the Financial Times, has gone as far as saying that the sharing economy is having a pernicious effect on equality and basic working conditions, in that it is fully compliant with market logic, is far from valuing human relationships over profit, and is even amplifying the worst excesses of the dominant economic model. In the context of the erosion of full-time employment, the assault on trade unions and the disappearance of healthcare and insurance benefits, he argues that the sharing economy is accelerating the transformation of workers into “always-on self-employed entrepreneurs who must think like brands”, leading him to dub it “neoliberalism on steroids”.

Problems of definition

Although it is impossible to reconcile these polarised views, part of the problem in assessing the true potential of economic sharing is one of vagueness in definition and wide differences in understanding. The conventional interpretation of the sharing economy is at present focused on its financial and commercial aspects, with continuous news reports proclaiming its rapidly growing market size and potential as a “co-commerce revolution”. Rachel Botsman, a leading entrepreneurial thinker on the potential of collaboration and sharing through digital technologies to change our lives, has attempted to clarify what the sharing economy actually is in order to prevent further confusion over the different terms in general use. In her latest typology, she notes how the term ‘sharing economy’ is often muddled with other new ideas and is in fact a subset of ‘collaborative consumption’ within the entire ‘collaborative economy’ movement, and has a rather restricted meaning in terms of “sharing underutilized assets from spaces to skills to stuff for monetary or non-monetary benefits” [see slide 9 of the presentation]. This interpretation of changing consumer behaviours and lifestyles revolves around the “maximum utilization of assets through efficient models of redistribution and shared access”, which isn’t necessarily predicated on an ethic of ‘sharing’ by any strict definition.

Other interpretations of the sharing economy are far broader and less constrained by capitalistic assumptions, as demonstrated in the Friends of the Earth briefing paper on Sharing Cities written by Professor Julian Agyeman et al. In their estimation, what’s missing from most of these current definitions and categorisations of economic sharing is a consideration of “the communal, collective production that characterises the collective commons”. A broadened ‘sharing spectrum’ that they propose therefore not only focuses on goods and services within the mainstream economy (which is almost always considered in relation to affluent, middle-class lifestyles), but also includes the non-material or intangible aspects of sharing such as well-being and capability [see page 6 of the brief]. From this wider perspective, they assert that the cutting edge of the sharing economy is often not commercial and includes informal behaviours like the unpaid care, support and nurturing that we provide for one another, as well as the shared use of infrastructure and shared public services.

This sheds a new light on governments as the “ultimate level of sharing”, and suggests that the history of the welfare state in Europe and other forms of social protection is, in fact, also integral to the evolution of shared resources in cities and within different countries. Yet an understanding of sharing from this more holistic viewpoint doesn’t have to be limited to the state provision of healthcare, education, and other public services. As Agyeman et al elucidate, cooperatives of all kinds (from worker to housing to retailer and consumer co-ops) also offer alternative models for shared service provision and a different perspective on economic sharing, one in which equity and collective ownership is prioritised. Access to natural common resources such as air and water can also be understood in terms of sharing, which may then prioritise the common good of all people over commercial or private interests and market mechanisms. This would include controversial issues of land ownership and land use, raising questions over how best to share land and urban space more equitably – such as through community land trusts, or through new policies and incentives such as land value taxation.

The politics of sharing

Furthermore, Agyeman et al argue that an understanding of sharing in relation to the collective commons gives rise to explicitly political questions concerning the shared public realm and participatory democracy. This is central to the many countercultural movements of recent years (such as the Occupy movement and Middle East protests since 2011, and the Taksim Gezi Park protests in 2013) that have reclaimed public space to symbolically challenge unjust power dynamics and the increasing trend toward privatisation that is central to neoliberal hegemony. Sharing is also directly related to the functioning of a healthy democracy, the authors reason, in that a vibrant sharing economy (when interpreted in this light) can counter the political apathy that characterises modern consumer society. By reinforcing values of community and collaboration over the individualism and consumerism that defines our present-day cultures and identities, they argue that participation in sharing could ultimately be reflected in the political domain. They also argue that a shared public realm is essential for the expression of participatory democracy and the development of a good society, not least as this provides a necessary venue for popular debate and public reasoning that can influence political decisions. Indeed the “emerging shareability paradigm”, as they describe it, is said to reflect the basic tenets of the Right to the City (RTTC) – an international urban movement that fights for democracy, justice and sustainability in cities and mobilises against the privatisation of common goods and public spaces.

The intention in briefly outlining some of these differing interpretations of sharing is to demonstrate how considerations of politics, justice, ethics and sustainability are slowly being allied with the sharing economy concept. A paramount example is the Friends of the Earth briefing paper outlined above, which was written as part of FOEI’s Big Ideas to Change the World series on cities that promoted sharing as “a political force to be reckoned with” and a “call to action for environmentalists”. Yet many further examples could also be mentioned, such as the New Economics Foundation’s ‘Manifesto for the New Materialism’ which promotes the old-fashioned ethic of sharing as part of a new way of living to replace the collapsed model of debt-fuelled overconsumption. There are also signs that many influential proponents of the sharing economy – as generally understood today in terms of new economic models driven by peer-to-peer technology that enable access to rather than ownership of resources – are beginning to query the commercial direction that the movement is taking, and are instead promoting more politicised forms of social change that are not merely based on micro-enterprise or the monetisation/branding of high-tech innovations.

Janelle Orsi, a California-based ‘sharing lawyer’ and author of The Sharing Solution, is particularly inspirational in this regard; for her, the sharing economy encompasses such a broad range of activities that it is hard to define, although she suggests that all its activities are tied together in how they harness the existing resources of a community and grow its wealth. This is in contradistinction to the mainstream economy that mostly generates wealth for people outside of people’s communities, and inherently generates extreme inequalities and ecological destruction – which Orsi contends that the sharing economy can help reverse. The problem she recognises is that the so-called sharing economy we usually hear about in the media is built upon a business-as-usual foundation, which is privately owned and often funded by venture capital (as is the case with Airbnb, Lyft, Zipcar, Taskrabbit et cetera). As a result, the same business structures that created the economic problems of today are buying up new sharing economy companies and turning them into ever larger, more centralised enterprises that are not concerned about people’s well-being, community cohesion, local economic diversity, sustainable job creation and so on (not to mention the risk of re-creating stock valuation bubbles that overshadowed the earlier generation of dot.com enterprises). The only way to ensure that new sharing economy companies fulfil their potential to create economic empowerment for users and their communities, Orsi argues, is through cooperative conversion – and she makes a compelling case for the democratic, non-exploitative, redistributive and truly ‘sharing’ potential of worker and consumer cooperatives in all their guises.

Sharing as a path to systemic change

There are important reasons to query which direction this emerging movement for sharing will take in the years ahead. As prominent supporters of the sharing economy recognise, like Janelle Orsi and Juliet Schor, it offers both opportunities and reasons for optimism as well as pitfalls and some serious concerns. On the one hand, it reflects a growing shift in our values and social identities as ‘citizens vs consumers’, and is helping us to rethink notions of ownership and prosperity in a world of finite resources, scandalous waste and massive wealth disparities. Perhaps its many proponents are right, and the sharing economy represents the first step towards transitioning away from the over-consumptive, materially-intense and hoarding lifestyles of North American, Western European and other rich societies. Perhaps sharing really is fast becoming a counter-cultural movement that can help us to value relationships more than things, and offer us the possibility of re-imagining politics and constructing a more participative democracy, which could ultimately pose a challenge to the global capitalist/consumerist model of development that is built on private interests and debt at the cost of shared interests and true wealth.

On the other hand, critics are right to point out that the sharing economy in its present form is hardly a threat to existing power structures or a movement that represents the kind of radical changes we need to make the world a better place. Far from reorienting the economy towards greater equity and a better quality of life, as proposed by writers such as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Tim Jackson, Herman Daly and John Cobb, it is arguable that most forms of sharing via peer-to-peer networks are at risk of being subverted by conventional business practices. There is a perverse irony in trying to imagine the logical conclusion of these trends: new models of collaborative consumption and co-production that are co-opted by private interests and venture capitalists, and increasingly geared towards affluent middle-class types or so-called bourgeois bohemians (the ‘bobos’), to the exclusion of those on low incomes and therefore to the detriment of a more equal society. Or new sharing technology platforms that enable governments and corporations to collaborate in pursuing more intrusive controls over and greater surveillance of citizens. Or new social relationships based on sharing in the context of increasingly privatised and enclosed public spaces, such as gated communities within which private facilities and resources are shared.

This is by no means an inevitable outcome, but what is clear from this brief analysis is that the commercialisation and depoliticisation of economic sharing poses risks and contradictions that call into question its potential to transform society for the benefit of everyone. Unless the sharing of resources is promoted in relation to human rights and concerns for equity, democracy, social justice and sound environmental stewardship, then the various claims that sharing is a new paradigm that can address the world’s interrelated crises is indeed empty rhetoric or utopian thinking without any substantiation. Sharing our skills through Hackerspaces, our unused stuff through GoodShuffle or a community potluck through mealshare is, in and of itself, a generally positive phenomenon that deserves to be enjoyed and fully participated in, but let’s not pretend that car shares, clothes swaps, co-housing, shared vacation homes and so on are going to seriously address economic and climate chaos, unjust power dynamics or inequitable wealth distribution.

Sharing from the local to the global

If we look at sharing through the lens of just sustainability, however, as civil society organisations and others are now beginning to do, then the true possibilities of sharing resources within and among the world’s nations are vast and all-encompassing: to enhance equity, rebuild community, improve well-being, democratise national and global governance, defend and promote the global commons, even to point the way towards a more cooperative international framework to replace the present stage of competitive neoliberal globalisation. We are not there yet, of course, and the popular understanding of economic sharing today is clearly focused on the more personal forms of giving and exchange among individuals or through online business ventures, which is mainly for the benefit of high-income groups in the world’s most economically advanced nations. But the fact that this conversation is now being broadened to include the role of governments in sharing public infrastructure, political power and economic resources within countries is a hopeful indication that the emerging sharing movement is slowly moving in the right direction.

Already, questions are being raised as to what sharing resources means for the poorest people in the developing world, and how a revival of economic sharing in the richest countries can be spread globally as a solution to converging crises. It may not be long until the idea of economic sharing on a planetary scale – driven by an awareness of impending ecological catastrophe, life-threatening extremes of inequality, and escalating conflict over natural resources – is the subject of every dinner party and kitchen table conversation.

Adam Parsons is STWR’s editor and can be contacted at adam [at] sharing.org

References:

Agyeman, Julian, Duncan McLaren and Adrianne Schaefer-Borrego, Sharing Cities, Friends of the Earth briefing paper, September 2013.

Agyeman, Julian, Just sustainabilities, julianagyeman.com, 21st September 2012.

Bollier, David, Bauwens Joins Ecuador in Planning a Commons-based, Peer Production Economy, 20th September 2013, bollier.org

Botsman, Rachel, The Sharing Economy Lacks A Shared Definition, fastcoexist.com, 21st November 2013.

Botsman, Rachel, The Sharing Economy Lacks a Shared Definition: Giving Meaning to the Terms, Collaborative Lab on Slideshare.net, 19th November 2013.

Childs, Mike, The Power of Sharing: A Call to Action for Environmentalists, Shareable.net, 5th November 2013.

Collaborativeconsumption.com, Shareable Cities Resolution: Passed, 26th June 2013.

Daly, Herman and John Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Beacon Press, 1991.

Eberlein, Sven, Sharing for Profit – I’m Not Buying it Anymore, Shareable.net, 20th February 2013.

Enright, Michael in interview with Benita Matofska and Aidan Enns, Sharing, Not Buying at Christmas (Hr. 1), CBC Radio, 16th December 2012.

 

Friends of the Earth, Big Idea 2: Sharing – a political force to be reckoned with?, 26th September 2013.

Gaskins, Kim, The New Sharing Economy, Latitude, 1st June 2010.

Gorenflo, Neal, What’s Next for the Sharing Movement?, Shareable.net, 31st July 2013.

Grahl, Jodi (trans.), World Charter for the Right to the City, International Alliance of Inhabitants et al, May 2005.

Griffiths, Rachel, The Great Sharing Economy, Co-operatives UK, London UK, 2011.

Grigg, Kat, Sharing As Part of the New Economy: An Interview with Lauren Anderson, The Solutions Journal, 20th September 2013.

Heinberg, Richard, Who knew that Seoul was a leader in the sharing economy?, Post Carbon Institute, 12th November 2013.

Herbst, Moira, Let’s get real: the ‘sharing economy’ won’t solve our jobs crisis, The Guardian, 7th January 2014.

Jackson, Tim, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, Routeledge, 2011.

Johnson, Cat, From Consumers to Citizens: Welcome to the Sharing Cities Network, Shareable.net, 9th January 2014

Kasser, Tim, The High Price of Materialism, MIT Press, 2003.

Kisner, Corinne, Integrating Bike Share Programs into a Sustainable Transportation System, National League of Cities, City Practice Brief, Washington D.C., 2011.

Leonard, Annie, The Story of Solutions, The Story of Stuff Project, October 2013, storyofstuff.org

Martin, Elliot and Susan Shaheen, The Impact of Carsharing on Household Vehicle Ownership, Access (UCTC magazine), No. 38 Spring 2011.

Matofska, Benita, Facing the future: share to survive, Friends of the Earth blog, 4th January 2013.

Morozov, Evgeny, The ‘sharing economy’ undermines workers’ rights, Financial Times, 14th October 2013.

Olson. Michael J. and Andrew D. Connor, The Disruption of Sharing: An Overview of the New Peer-to-Peer ‘Sharing Economy’ and The Impact on Established Internet Companies, Piper Jaffray, November 2013.

Opinium Research and Marke2ing, The Sharing Economy An overview with special focus on Peer-to-Peer Lending, 14th November 2012.

Orsi, Janelle and Doskow, Emily, The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life and Build Community, Nolo, May 2009.

Orsi, Janelle et al, Policies for Shareable Cities: A Sharing Economy Policy Primer for Urban Leaders, Shareable / The sustainable Economics Law Centre, September 2013.

Orsi, Janelle, The Sharing Economy Just Got Real, Shareable.net, 16th September 2013.

Quilligan, James B., People Sharing Resources: Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons, Kosmos Journal, Fall/Winter 2009.

Schifferes, Jonathan, Sharing our way to prosperity (Part 1), rsablogs.org.uk, 6th August 2013.

Schifferes, Jonathan, Profiting from sharing (Part 2), rsablogs.org.uk, 6th August 2013.

Schor, Juliet, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, Tantor Media, 2010.

Simms, Andrew and Ruth Potts, The New Materialism: How our relationship with the material world can change for the better, New Economics Foundation, November 2012.

Standing, Guy, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

Tennant, Ian, What’s in it for me? Do you dare to share?, Friends of the Earth blog, 8th January 2014.

Wiesmann, Thorsten, Living by the Principle of Sharing – an interview with Raphael Fellmer, Oiushare.net, February 2013.

Wilkinson, Richard and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin, 2010.

Yglesias, Matthew, There Is No “Sharing Economy”, Slate.com, 26th December 2013.

By Mike Billington

17 January, 2013

@ EIR

Jan. 5—Since 2006, three Thai governments, each elected by overwhelming majorities, have been removed from office by extra-legal means, or by courts acting under dictatorial powers granted by a military junta—and now a fourth such coup is underway, this time by an overtly fascist mob, demanding the end of democratic elections and of representative government, in favor of a return to a form of absolute monarchy, overseeing an appointed “people’s council” with absolute power.

Two issues—neither of which are mentioned in the voluminous media coverage of these illegal coups—are essential to understanding why Thailand has been subjected to this recurring chaos and dictatorial rule. First, each of the elected governments under former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra have played a leading role in bringing Thailand and most of Southeast Asia into a close collaborative role with China, and with the rest of East Asia generally—which is seen as a crime by those in the West gunning for a military confrontation with China. Just as Ukraine is today being targeted for destruction, for the “crime” of cooperating with Russia, so Thailand’s destabilization is intended to disrupt the growing cooperation for development with China by Thailand and its neighbors.

Not surprisingly, two George Soros-funded groups, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, are on the scene of the demonstrations in Bangkok, as they are in Kiev.

The second issue which needs to be addressed is that Thailand is still a monarchy, which is essentially dominated by the British and related royal families of Europe. These monarchies have openly supported each coup, and are now determined to finish off Thai democracy altogether with the imposition of a fascist junta.

To even mention the role of the monarchy within Thailand risks incarceration under the draconian lèsemajesté laws. The feudal character of this monarchical system is finally, only now, becoming transparent to a growing number of Thais and some international analysts. Whether the Thais will mobilize to end this tyranny before Thailand descends into total destruction is a question of importance for all citizens of the world.

Great Projects and the General Welfare

The current Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, is the sister of Thaksin, the widely popular twiceelected prime minister, who served from 2001 until the royalist/military coup which deposed him in 2006. Every election since that time has returned Thaksin’s supporters to power, even though Thaksin himself is in self-imposed exile due to a contrived conviction against him over a petty corruption charge.

When Yingluck was elected in 2011, she began to reinstate the ambitious development programs initiated by her brother, along with his policies to uplift the peasantry from poverty and backwardness. These include:

• a massive water control project to end the deadly annual flooding, with primarily South Korean support;

• high-speed rail projects to connect the major cities, and eventually complete the “Orient Express” from Kunming to Singapore, with primarily Chinese support;

• universal health care, providing decent care at low cost to the rural poor for the first time;

• special credits to each village for development projects;

• university scholarships for the rural poor;

• government-supported increases in the price paid to peasants for rice.

Although it has not been officially adopted by the government, leading Cabinet ministers, and Thaksin himself, have also called for reviving the Kra Canal project (Figure 1), which has long been championed by EIR (see http://larouchepac.com/node/28237), this time with potential support from China and Japan.

After Thaksin was overthrown in 2006, all these programs were scrapped under the appointed government of Abhisit Vejjajiva, who was born, raised, and educated in Britain. Now, Abhisit’s Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban (most famous for his role in ordering the military to open fire on demonstrators supporting Thaksin in 2009, leaving dozens dead), has turned himself into the demogogic leader of “the people,” directing his middle-class mobs to occupy government buildings, and ordering a total shutdown of 38 International EIR January 17, 2014 Bangkok beginning Jan. 13, until Yingluck resigns. Not even Yingluck’s call for new elections Feb. 2 failed to head off Suthep’s action.

One Million Bottles of Beer

Suthep has made clear that, if he gains power, all major development programs will once again be scrapped—he calls them “boondoogles”—while the many programs to uplift the standard of living and health and education of the poor will be “frozen”—he calls them “bribes” by Thaksin’s supporters of the “ignorant masses” in the countryside.

One spokesperson for the fascist mobs on the street, Chitpas Bhirombhakdi, the heiress of the Boon Rawd company (brewer of Thai Singha beer), denounced the supporters of the government as ignorant country people who can’t understand democracy, and said that therefore democracy had to be suspended. The backlash was immediate.

A call for a boycott of Singha beer, issued by Pakdee Tanapura (a long-standing collaborator of EIR in Thailand, and a leading organizer for the Kra Canal), led to a collapse of Singha beer sales by 1 million bottles in one week, according to a source in Bangkok. The parents of the heiress were so astonished and dismayed, that they demanded that their daughter renounce the family name!

More Boycotts?

Tanapura also warned that if the mobs proceed with their threat to shut down Bangkok and overthrow the government, other companies which are known to fund the fascist movement should be included in the boycott. This could include the Charoen Pokphand Group, Thailand’s largest conglomerate, with interests in agriculture, telecom, and the Internet. In addition, Tanapura said that, if the military goes through with its veiled threat to carry out a coup, the public should withdraw its funds from the banks and refuse to make loan repayments, thereby hitting the London-centered international financial oligarchy which is ultimately responsible for the chaos.

Tanapura has informed the population in his regular TV appearances about the fascist nature of the royalist mobs, describing how Hitler and Mussolini came to power as “people’s power” advocates against elected governments. But most telling, Tanapura is reminding Thais of what happened in neighboring Cambodia in the 1970s, when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge seized power, denouncing industrial development, modern agriculture, and “Western” education, calling instead for “selfhelp”— leading to genocide.

Interestingly, the British intelligence leak-sheet Asia Sentinel published a warning Dec. 17, “Thaksin: The Thai Monarchy’s Savior?”, that the extreme actions of Suthep’s mobs, claiming to be defenders of the monarchy, may actually undermine the monarchy itself. The article notes that although Thaksin and his supporters have never attacked the King, their program of lifting the peasantry into the modern world is in direct contradiction to the King’s “self-sufficiency” policy—essentially keeping the peasantry well fed, but backward. The article also says that while it may be true that the Thai people revere the King (as is reported internationally, ad nauseam), that does not mean that they love the monarchy. The current King—the richest and longest-serving monarch in the world—is very ill and could die at any moment. The article concludes that the “current nationwide commitment to royalism is owed to [King] Bhumipol, not the palace or the elite cohorts.”

To these British analysts, it were better to let Thaksin Shinawatra back in the country than risk losing the monarchy!

By Ismail Salami

19 January,2014
Countercurrents.org

Somalia has become a breeding ground for Washington’s black operations since 2001, with the African country suffering human losses due to US hegemonic policies.

Only recently, it has been revealed that the US secretly deployed two dozens of troops under the guise of military advisors. It is naïve to think that the US has no ulterior motives other than giving advisory clues to the military men in Somalia or protecting the security of the African people.

In 1993, the US embarked on a military expedition dubbed Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia under the pretext of eliminating a Somali warlord, an operation which sadly caused massive human losses. Quite naturally, the US swiftly exonerated itself and attributed it to a misstep.

According to Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy, CIA officials privately concede that the US military may have “killed from 7,000 to 10,000 Somalis during its engagement. America lost only 34 soldiers. Notwithstanding that extraordinary disparity, the decision was to withdraw.” So, the estimates delivered by the US media have been drastically overlooked or underestimated.

The fact is that there is no justification for this human catastrophe. However, as is their wont, Washington officials barefacedly insist that their mission was to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid who was openly opposed to the presence of the US in Somalia.

Later, much to the disappointment of many, this military farce was unfortunately glorified on the screen by Ridley Scott in a movie called Black Hawk Down.

Among other black operations in Somali is a series of killer drone sorties which the US had been carrying out for years without openly acknowledging the fact. It was in 2012 when the White House eventually lifted the lid of secrecy on its black ops in the Horn of Africa and admitted to the crime for the first time.

The US excuse for launching such attacks is the same old story: eradicating the al-Qaeda elements.

A count by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that the US-conducted drone attacks have so far at least 112 Somali militants. This treacherously dubious number excludes the 60 civilians who were killed in the killer drone attacks. Washington’s method of distinguishing between the civilians and non-civilians is understandably strange. Those who are adults are non-civilians and those who are not, are civilians.

Interestingly, the US used to prefer a policy of denial regarding the drone attacks until a few months ago when the CIA acknowledged that the drone attacks in Somalia and other parts of Africa were carried out under the supervision of the espionage agency.

Further to this, there is an active CIA station in Mogadishu. In August, Jeremy Scahill reported on the CIA’s compound at Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport, sating, “the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab.”

According to Scahill, the CIA is not in the least interested in dealing directly with Somali political leaders, who they say are corrupt and untrustworthy. Instead, the United States has Somali intelligence agents on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans. “They support us in a big way financially,” says the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”

What is the US really doing in Somalia?

A look at the natural resources of this country is enough to provide an answer to this question.

An LA Times article reveals that nearly two-thirds of Somalia’s resources were allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia’s pro-US President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration’s decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there. Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as “absurd” and “nonsense” allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.

According to a report issued by Range Resources, there are some huge oil seeps in north Somalia (Somaliland) and in the southwest where Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet.

New estimates of the country’s oil reserves, onshore and offshore, run as high as 110 billion barrels. According to the reports, there are likely vast natural gas reserves in Somali waters in the Indian Ocean. Add to that a series of fields which have been found off Mozambique and Tanzania and which contain an estimated 100 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Under the banner of combating terrorism, the ghoul of imperialism intervenes and vindicates its spree killer drone attacks and other inhuman black operations and spares no efforts in reaping the ill gotten benefits of its military lust in the Muslim lands.

Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.

 

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

19January,2014
Countercurrents.org

President Obama’s Friday speech on NSA surveillance was a calculated endeavor to calm a furor at home and abroad over the US dragnet surveillance. However, the proposed changes do not provide any fundamental changes in the intelligence gathering activities.

The president called for an end to the government’s current storage of “metadata,” information about many millions of calls made by ordinary Americans. He emphasized that the capacity to search metadata is one that must be preserved, but without government itself holding it. The president directed the U.S. attorney general and the intelligence community to report on the best way to transfer the metadata out of government hands, before the program comes up for reauthorization on March 28. He said during this transition period, the government shouldn’t have access to metadata without judicial approval.

The president endorsed the proposal to appoint a public advocate to represent privacy and civil liberties interests before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The president called for more transparency with respect to National Security letters, which allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation, without court approval, to obtain access to people’s records (such as their bank and credit card information).

In his 43 minutes speech President Obama aggressively defended the NSA surveillance programs as important tools to combat terrorism.

The New York Times pointed out that President Obama made no mention of two of the recommendations of his panel of most pressing concern to Silicon Valley: that the N.S.A. not undermine commercial

Software and that it move away from exploiting flaws in software to conduct cyber attacks or surveillance.

Brian Fung writing in the Washington Post argued that President Obama’s reforms are narrowly targeted at the NSA’s phone metadata program under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. “They don’t cover other programs the government carries out under Section 215, such as the reported scraping of financial information by the CIA. They don’t address the NSA’s counter-encryption activities or any geolocation information that the NSA may have or may be collecting. They also don’t address other programs like those conducted under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which is the authority under which PRISM operates. Some of the reforms, both on the telephony metadata surveillance and others that the President is announcing today, require an act of Congress, and given the Senate’s general support for the NSA throughout the controversy, it’s unclear how much traction these proposals will get. Much of the spying that happens internationally will also remain untouched.”

Washington Post reported that President Obama avoided almost entirely any discussion of overseas intelligence collection that he authorized on his own, under Executive Order 12333, without legislative or judicial supervision. The Washington Post has disclosed in recent months, based in part on the Snowden documents, that the NSA is gathering hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, breaking into private networks that link the overseas data centers of Google and Yahoo, and building a database of trillions of location records transmitted by cell phones around the world. Unless Obama says otherwise in the classified annex to his directive, those programs will carry on unabated.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation scorecard

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put together a scorecard showing how President Obama’s announcements stack up against 12 common sense fixes that should be a minimum for reforming NSA surveillance. On that scale, President Obama racked up 3.5 points out of a possible 12. Here are the scoreboard points:

1. Stop mass surveillance of digital communications and communication records. Score: 0.2

2. Protect the privacy rights of foreigners. Score: 0.3

3. No data retention mandate. Score: 0

4. Ban no-review National Security Letters. Score: 0.5

5. Stop undermining Internet security. Score: 0

6. Oppose the FISA Improvements Act. Score: 1

7. Reject the third party doctrine. Score: 0

8. Provide a full public accounting of our surveillance apparatus. Score: 0.5

9. Embrace meaningful transparency reform. Score: 0

10. Reform the FISA court. Score: 1

11. Protect national security whistleblowers. Score: 0

12. Give criminal defendants all surveillance evidence. Score: 0

NSA collects millions of text messages daily in ‘untargeted’ global sweep

President Obama’s NSA “reforms” came a day after the Guardian reported that the National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.

The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.

On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:

• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

• Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

• More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

In the statement to the Guardian, a NSA spokeswoman said: “Dishfire is a system that processes and stores lawfully collected SMS data. Because some SMS data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.”

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net)

 

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

18 January, 2014

Countercurrents.org

Neoconservative extremists, Zionist lobbyists from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and their willing executioners on Capitol Hill driven by the right-wing Israeli government are trying everything to sabotage the agreement between Iran and the five UN Security Council members plus their German annex. This unholy alliance tries to drag the Obama administration into another Middle Eastern war. These lobbyists have raised the stakes so high that Iran’s only alternative to war would be unconditional surrender. After the Iranian government has agreed to normalize its relations with the West, these US extremists demand not only a continuation but a tightening of the sanctions screw.

The newly introduced Menendez-Kirk Iranian Sanctions Bill (S. 1881) can be seen as a roadmap to war with Iran. The Democrat Menendez and the Republican Kirk seem both on the “payroll” of AIPAC; they receive campaign money that makes them susceptible to a particular policy. Fifty eight cosponsors support this de-facto script to war. The rhetoric of this bill requires from the sovereign Iranian nation to drop politically and publically its pants and gives up its legitimate nuclear energy program.

The sponsors of the bill propose that the Congress put the lives of U.S. servicemen in the hands of a foreigner, Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Thus, under item (b) (5) of the Bill, the Congress is asked to pledge unconditional military, diplomatic and economic support to Israel, should its government feel “compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program.” How politically deranged Netanyahu is, shows his outrageous historic analogy; he suggests we are now in 1938, and Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany. As a German, I wish Germany would have been in 1938 in a situation that Iran is in today: World War II would have never happened.

Netanyahu is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing, who screams constantly ‘stop the thief’, though his government is the one that threatens its neighbors and is armed up to its ears with nuclear and biological weapons. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has not signed and does not intend to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This omission allows Israel to legally refuse international inspections of its nuclear arsenal. The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly recommended the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle-East. Israel is opposed to that recommendation, invoking unique security needs.

On January 15, 2014, the British daily “The Guardian” ran a story on the hypocrisy of the U. S. and Great Britain regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its efforts to acquire the technology and the nuclear material. Despite knowing about Israeli massive nuclear arsenal, the West turns a blind eye on it.

 

President Obama might be well advised not only confront the Zionist lobby head on but also the “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill who fight for the interests of Israel against their own government and constituencies. Why in the world want even Democratic senators bring Obama’s Iran policy to failure? In a speech, Obama should show to their constituency and to the American people whose interests their elected senators represent. He should not only call out AIPAC but also the Democratic senators who want to destroy Obama’s only foreign policy success as U. S. President. He should follow Chris Hayes example, the young and brilliant reporter from MSNBC, who has challenged AIPAC and the U. S. Democratic senators. Speaking of “Israeli senators”; in 2008, the former U. S. senator Huck Hagel, who holds right now the office of Secretary of Defense, put it this way: “I’m not an Israeli senator; I’m a United States senator.” The majority of the incumbent senators try with tooth and nails to bring the nuclear deal with Iran to failure. If Israel really wants to instigate a war with Iran, the U. S. should let Israel go it alone and not lift a finger when the country gets into trouble. It will show to the whole world that the right-wing Israeli government is the aggressor and a menace to world peace.

Besides attempting to torpedo an agreement with Iran, the Netanyahu government is also not interested in peace with the Palestinians. Defense minister Moshe Ya’alon regards the U. S. security plan “not worth the paper it’s written on”. Kerry “cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians”, he said. For the last few months, there have been no negotiations between the Israeli and the Palestinians but between the U. S. and us, said Ya’alon. “The only thing that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace.”

This political behavior by Israeli officials should be an eye-opener for the Obama administration. Every year, the American taxpayer gives the Israeli government 3 billion Dollars, not to mention all the other advantages Israel gets on the top of it. The U. S. administration regards Israel as one of its closest allies, but this “ally” often bites the feeding hand.

As long as the U. S. and the U.N. Security Council treat the Iranian nuclear program differently from the Israeli one, the negotiations will fail. Iran will and can’t surrender to the whims of the Zionist lobby and its “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill. If these forces prevail, even Obama can’t prevent another war that lies not in the interest of the American people.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany. He runs the bilingual blog between the lines. http://between-the-lines-ludwig-watzal.blogspot.de/

 

 

 

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

18 January, 2014

Countercurrents.org

Neoconservative extremists, Zionist lobbyists from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and their willing executioners on Capitol Hill driven by the right-wing Israeli government are trying everything to sabotage the agreement between Iran and the five UN Security Council members plus their German annex. This unholy alliance tries to drag the Obama administration into another Middle Eastern war. These lobbyists have raised the stakes so high that Iran’s only alternative to war would be unconditional surrender. After the Iranian government has agreed to normalize its relations with the West, these US extremists demand not only a continuation but a tightening of the sanctions screw.

The newly introduced Menendez-Kirk Iranian Sanctions Bill (S. 1881) can be seen as a roadmap to war with Iran. The Democrat Menendez and the Republican Kirk seem both on the “payroll” of AIPAC; they receive campaign money that makes them susceptible to a particular policy. Fifty eight cosponsors support this de-facto script to war. The rhetoric of this bill requires from the sovereign Iranian nation to drop politically and publically its pants and gives up its legitimate nuclear energy program.

The sponsors of the bill propose that the Congress put the lives of U.S. servicemen in the hands of a foreigner, Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Thus, under item (b) (5) of the Bill, the Congress is asked to pledge unconditional military, diplomatic and economic support to Israel, should its government feel “compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program.” How politically deranged Netanyahu is, shows his outrageous historic analogy; he suggests we are now in 1938, and Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany. As a German, I wish Germany would have been in 1938 in a situation that Iran is in today: World War II would have never happened.

Netanyahu is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing, who screams constantly ‘stop the thief’, though his government is the one that threatens its neighbors and is armed up to its ears with nuclear and biological weapons. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has not signed and does not intend to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This omission allows Israel to legally refuse international inspections of its nuclear arsenal. The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly recommended the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle-East. Israel is opposed to that recommendation, invoking unique security needs.

On January 15, 2014, the British daily “The Guardian” ran a story on the hypocrisy of the U. S. and Great Britain regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its efforts to acquire the technology and the nuclear material. Despite knowing about Israeli massive nuclear arsenal, the West turns a blind eye on it.

 

President Obama might be well advised not only confront the Zionist lobby head on but also the “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill who fight for the interests of Israel against their own government and constituencies. Why in the world want even Democratic senators bring Obama’s Iran policy to failure? In a speech, Obama should show to their constituency and to the American people whose interests their elected senators represent. He should not only call out AIPAC but also the Democratic senators who want to destroy Obama’s only foreign policy success as U. S. President. He should follow Chris Hayes example, the young and brilliant reporter from MSNBC, who has challenged AIPAC and the U. S. Democratic senators. Speaking of “Israeli senators”; in 2008, the former U. S. senator Huck Hagel, who holds right now the office of Secretary of Defense, put it this way: “I’m not an Israeli senator; I’m a United States senator.” The majority of the incumbent senators try with tooth and nails to bring the nuclear deal with Iran to failure. If Israel really wants to instigate a war with Iran, the U. S. should let Israel go it alone and not lift a finger when the country gets into trouble. It will show to the whole world that the right-wing Israeli government is the aggressor and a menace to world peace.

Besides attempting to torpedo an agreement with Iran, the Netanyahu government is also not interested in peace with the Palestinians. Defense minister Moshe Ya’alon regards the U. S. security plan “not worth the paper it’s written on”. Kerry “cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians”, he said. For the last few months, there have been no negotiations between the Israeli and the Palestinians but between the U. S. and us, said Ya’alon. “The only thing that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace.”

This political behavior by Israeli officials should be an eye-opener for the Obama administration. Every year, the American taxpayer gives the Israeli government 3 billion Dollars, not to mention all the other advantages Israel gets on the top of it. The U. S. administration regards Israel as one of its closest allies, but this “ally” often bites the feeding hand.

As long as the U. S. and the U.N. Security Council treat the Iranian nuclear program differently from the Israeli one, the negotiations will fail. Iran will and can’t surrender to the whims of the Zionist lobby and its “Israeli senators” on Capitol Hill. If these forces prevail, even Obama can’t prevent another war that lies not in the interest of the American people.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany. He runs the bilingual blog between the lines. http://between-the-lines-ludwig-watzal.blogspot.de/

 

 

 

 

By Nick Turse

18 January, 2014

TomDispatch.com

They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America. They snatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and shoot it out with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They feel the salty spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific. They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the deep freeze of Scandinavia. All over the planet, the Obama administration is waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed — until now.
Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget. Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally. This presence — now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations — provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace.
In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120. Today, that figure has risen higher still.
In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134 countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs. This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of overseas power projection. Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.

Growth Industry
Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command has grown steadily in the post-9/11 era. SOCOM is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001. Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as its baseline budget, $2.3 billion in 2001, hit $6.9 billion in 2013 ($10.4 billion, if you add in supplemental funding). Personnel deployments abroad have skyrocketed, too, from 4,900 “man-years” in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.
A recent investigation by TomDispatch, using open source government documents and news releases as well as press reports, found evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in or involved with the militaries of 106 nations around the world in 2012-2013. For more than a month during the preparation of that article, however, SOCOM failed to provide accurate statistics on the total number of countries to which special operators — Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, and civil affairs personnel — were deployed. “We don’t just keep it on hand,” SOCOM’s Bockholt explained in a telephone interview once the article had been filed. “We have to go searching through stuff. It takes a long time to do that.” Hours later, just prior to publication, he provided an answer to a question I first asked in November of last year. “SOF [Special Operations forces] were deployed to 134 countries” during fiscal year 2013, Bockholt explained in an email.

Globalized Special Ops
Last year, Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven explained his vision for special ops globalization. In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, he said:
“USSOCOM is enhancing its global network of SOF to support our interagency and international partners in order to gain expanded situational awareness of emerging threats and opportunities. The network enables small, persistent presence in critical locations, and facilitates engagement where necessary or appropriate…”
While that “presence” may be small, the reach and influence of those Special Operations forces are another matter. The 12% jump in national deployments — from 120 to 134 — during McRaven’s tenure reflects his desire to put boots on the ground just about everywhere on Earth. SOCOM will not name the nations involved, citing host nation sensitivities and the safety of American personnel, but the deployments we do know about shed at least some light on the full range of missions being carried out by America’s secret military.
Last April and May, for instance, Special Ops personnel took part in training exercises in Djibouti, Malawi, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. In June, U.S. Navy SEALs joined Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, and other allied Mideast forces for irregular warfare simulations in Aqaba, Jordan. The next month, Green Berets traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to carry out small unit tactical exercises with local forces. In August, Green Berets conducted explosives training with Honduran sailors. In September, according to media reports, U.S. Special Operations forces joined elite troops from the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia — as well as their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded coun­terterrorism exercise held at a training center in Sentul, West Java.
In October, elite U.S. troops carried out commando raids in Libya and Somalia, kidnapping a terror suspect in the former nation while SEALs killed at least one militant in the latter before being driven off under fire. In November, Special Ops troops conducted humanitarian operations in the Philippines to aid survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. The next month, members of the 352nd Special Operations Group conducted a training exercise involving approximately 130 airmen and six aircraft at an airbase in England and Navy SEALs were wounded while undertaking an evacuation mission in South Sudan. Green Berets then rang in the new year with a January 1st combat mission alongside elite Afghan troops in Bahlozi village in Kandahar province
Deployments in 134 countries, however, turn out not to be expansive enough for SOCOM. In November 2013, the command announced that it was seeking to identify industry partners who could, under SOCOM’s Trans Regional Web Initiative, potentially “develop new websites tailored to foreign audiences.” These would join an existing global network of 10 propaganda websites, run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets, including CentralAsiaOnline.com, Sabahi which targets the Horn of Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com.
SOCOM’s push into cyberspace is mirrored by a concerted effort of the command to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway. “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C. — from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,” SOCOM chief Admiral McRaven said during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center last year. Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of departments and agencies where SOCOM is now entrenched at 38.

134 Chances for Blowback
Although elected in 2008 by many who saw him as an antiwar candidate, President Obama has proved to be a decidedly hawkish commander-in-chief whose policies have already produced notable instances of what in CIA trade-speak has long been called blowback. While the Obama administration oversaw a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (negotiated by his predecessor), as well as a drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (after a major military surge in that country), the president has presided over a ramping up of the U.S. military presence in Africa, a reinvigoration of efforts in Latin America, and tough talk about a rebalancing or “pivot to Asia” (even if it has amounted to little as of yet).
The White House has also overseen an exponential expansion of America’s drone war. While President Bush launched 51 such strikes, President Obama has presided over 330, according to research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Last year, alone, the U.S. also engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Recent revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have demonstrated the tremendous breadth and global reach of U.S. electronic surveillance during the Obama years. And deep in the shadows, Special Operations forces are now annually deployed to more than double the number of nations as at the end of Bush’s tenure.
In recent years, however, the unintended consequences of U.S. military operations have helped to sow outrage and discontent, setting whole regions aflame. More than 10 years after America’s “mission accomplished” moment, seven years after its much vaunted surge, the Iraq that America helped make is in flames. A country with no al-Qaeda presence before the U.S. invasion and a government opposed to America’s enemies in Tehran now has a central government aligned with Iran and two cities flying al-Qaeda flags.
A more recent U.S. military intervention to aid the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, saw a coup there carried out by a U.S.-trained officer, ultimately led to a bloody terror attack on an Algerian gas plant, and helped to unleash nothing short of a terror diaspora in the region.
And today South Sudan — a nation the U.S. shepherded into being, has supported economically and militarily (despite its reliance on child soldiers), and has used as a hush-hush base for Special Operations forces — is being torn apart by violence and sliding toward civil war.
The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military’s elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road. As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has noted, the utilization of Special Operations forces during the Obama years has decreased military accountability, strengthened the “imperial presidency,” and set the stage for a war without end. “In short,” he wrote at TomDispatch, “handing war to the special operators severs an already too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.”
Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11. Strangely enough, those at the other primary attack site that day, the Pentagon, seem not to have learned the obvious lessons from this lethal blowback. Even today in Afghanistan and Pakistan, more than 12 years after the U.S. invaded the former and almost 10 years after it began conducting covert attacks in the latter, the U.S. is still dealing with that Cold War-era fallout: with, for instance, CIA drones conducting missile strikes against an organization (the Haqqani network) that, in the 1980s, the Agency supplied with missiles.

Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world. But if history is any guide, they will be felt — from Southwest Asia to the Mahgreb, the Middle East to Central Africa, and, perhaps eventually, in the United States as well.
In his blueprint for the future, SOCOM 2020, Admiral McRaven has touted the globalization of U.S. special ops as a means to “project power, promote stability, and prevent conflict.” Last year, SOCOM may have done just the opposite in 134 places.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. He is the author/editor of several other books, including The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyber Warfare, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt), The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives and The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His website is Nick Turse.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, or Facebook.

By Suresh Shah

18 January, 2014

 

It must have happened to you, as it continues to happen to me. You tell yourself when you get out of bed in the morning, ‘I’m going to be good today. I’m not going to react to any provocation. I’ll keep my cool. I’ll maintain my patience. I won’t back-bite anyone. I won’t gossip today. I’m going to behave as God wants me to.’

Sometimes, it strikes you that there simply is no other way to maintain your sanity but to be good. You know that this is what God wants. You know that this is the way to win God’s pleasure. Being good is the way, you know, if you want to succeed in the Hereafter. You know full well that if you are good, you’ll feel good, too. You know that being good to others is a means for being good to yourself as well.

On such occasions, it also strikes you how disgusted you feel with yourself after you’ve burst out at someone who you think has belittled you; how terrible you feel after you’ve snubbed someone whose done something you don’t like; how you hate yourself for gossiping about someone’s foibles! You know all this isn’t at all good for you. God doesn’t like such things. You know, too, that every such action will work against you in the Hereafter. And you also know that the feelings that such reactions generate within you—hate, anger, tension, irritation, fear and so on—only make you even more miserable than you already are. And so, you tell yourself, ‘I’m not going to lose my temper or get irritated with anyone today. I’m not going to gossip or criticize people or revel in their faults. I’ve done with all this—it’s done me no good, and has only made me miserable. I’m going to turn a new leaf!’

But it isn’t enough just to say that you want to be good.  After all, and contrary to what we think, being good isn’t as easy as we think it is! We have to demonstrate the sincerity of our resolve to be good at every single moment, when, confronted with the choice of being good or bad, we consciously choose the former, even if this means having to defy the urgings of the ego.

Being good isn’t really as easy as it sounds!

*

That day, I had resolved to be good all day. I was tired of succumbing to nasty thoughts about others, of indulging in petty gossip, of wasting time making polite conversation, of wallowing in self-pity and agonizing over the past. And so, I decided I was going to be as good as I could that day, and even for the rest of my life!

I have to admit I was reasonably good for much of the day, or so I’d like to think. I didn’t speak very much unnecessarily. I kept myself busy in office. I tried not to indulge in idle chatter. I overlooked minor irritants. If someone wanted to gossip, I made an effort to change the topic. If someone said something silly, inane or provocative, I overlooked it. I smiled and wished people I met that day. And I felt all so very good with myself!

It had been, on all counts, a wonderful day! But that evening, as I curled into bed after a day of being reasonably good, I couldn’t get to sleep! From the room just above mine, I heard the sound of water dripping. Now, I’m a very light sleeper, and the slightest sound, even of a leaking tap, can keep me awake almost all night.

And then do you know what happened? Well, I can’t tell you everything. I certainly won’t tell you all the awful things I thought about the lady whose room the noise was coming from—such terrible things, and that, too, on a day when I had resolved to be so very good! Ugh! If you knew all that I thought about the poor thing, you’d really, really hate me!

I tossed about in my bed as my irritation rapidly mounted. The sound of the water was driving me mad! I tried to reason with myself, ‘You must not react to this provocation. If you do, you’ll be going back to your old crabby, selfish self. This is a test of the sincerity of your resolve to not to get provoked, to not let things or people irritate you. It is a test of your patience and your compassion and tolerance. Don’t worry, you’ll soon be fast asleep and the sound won’t trouble you anymore.’

But you know how cunning the ego is. You know how skillful it is in being able to invent the most alluring excuse to justify the most appalling behavior. And that’s just what my ego did that night, as it launched a full-scale attack on my conscience and insisted:

‘What nonsense is this? How dare this woman behave like this? She’s got no manners at all! No civic sense! And she is so very irritating! She’s absolutely good-for-nothing! I have to tell her off for own good. She’ll learn how to behave, and that’s good for her!’

Thinking such (and worse) thoughts, I leapt out of my bed and rushed upstairs, forgetting completely all the principles that I had resolved to observe that day—equanimity, patience, love, respect, tolerance, non-provocation and so on. I rudely knocked on the lady’s door, and when she opened it, I gave her a piece of my mind. I didn’t shout my head off, but I was caustic and curt. The poor thing was shocked, hurt and deeply apologetic, and you won’t know what sadistic joy I derived at that pathetic sight.

I went back to my room, very pleased with myself for telling the woman off. It was as if I had scored a major moral victory. The tap stopped leaking, and I drifted off to sleep.

But the next morning, I can’t tell you how horrible I felt about myself. How I regretted having lost my cool the night before! How I hated myself for being so weak, for giving up trying to be good over just a minor inconvenience! How I agonized for having insulted my neighbour and for taking malicious pleasure in putting her down! How I berated  myself for being such a miserable, selfish, mean hypocrite—with all my talk about God, the Hereafter, kindness and goodness and ethics, and yet caring nothing at all for thinking terrible thoughts about my neighbour and lambasting her over such a trivial matter as a leaking tap!

Later that day, when I met my neighbour, I profusely apologized for my awful behavior. It was really wrong of me to scold her like that, I said. I pleaded with her to forgive me. She laughed it off—she had the large-heartedness to do so. That didn’t make me feel much better, though. My falling in my own estimation was the punishment I had to suffer for my despicable behavior.

*

Whoever said that being good was easy?

 

By Chandra Muzaffar

When a nation with a multi-ethnic population is confronted with a serious economic challenge, it has to be concerned about how it will impact upon ethnic relations. This is especially true when the ethnic situation, prior to the economic challenge, is already problematic.

The rising cost of living in our country could have repercussions for ethnic relations in at least two ways. One, the tendency to put the blame for any escalation in the price of goods and services on one party or the other — rather than looking at the total picture — could result in a segment of the people criticising the mainly Malay government for their plight while another segment may choose to condemn a largely Chinese business community for their difficulties. These are perceptions which exacerbate the ethnic situation. Two, sometimes, elites, unable to arrest the decline of the economy, may deliberately manipulate ethnic fears in order to divert the people’s anger and perpetuate their own power.

We should not fall into this ethnic trap. Responsible men and women in all spheres of Malaysian society should turn around this economic challenge into an opportunity to improve ethnic relations. There are perhaps 10 steps that can be taken in that direction.

One, all communities in Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah and Sarawak should be mobilised to combat the rising cost of living. It should be a truly multi-ethnic mobilisation which would identify the causes of the rising cost of living and act firmly and expeditiously to overcome the problem.   If say profiteering and cartels have aggravated issues of demand and supply, effective punitive measures should be implemented immediately.  This would also be the right occasion to initiate a nation-wide ‘people’s price-alert movement’ which would be a powerful pressure group against unscrupulous traders.

Two, this would also be the time to reiterate our commitment to a policy that extends support and assistance to everyone regardless of ethnicity, based upon needs. This should apply not only to poverty eradication, health-care and welfare— where it already exists — but also to education, housing, bank-loans and the like.

Three, there should also be a concerted effort to reduce the gap between the ‘have-a-lot’ and the ‘have-a-little’ which is essentially a socio-economic challenge. Its resolution will impact positively upon inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic disparities.  Implementing a minimum wage policy; providing facilities for the poor such as child-care centres and kindergartens, IMalaysia clinics and IMalaysia shops; and creating a comprehensive public transport system are commendable moves but much more has to be done. Building more affordable houses for the middle and lower income groups would be one such endeavour. At the same time, incomes will have to rise further for 60 to 70 percent of the working population while emoluments for the top brass which are sometimes astronomical will have to be reviewed.

Four, as part of this attempt to close the gap between the very affluent and those who are struggling to make ends meet, the level of education and skills of 75 percent of the Malaysian workforce who possess only a School Certificate (SPM) and other lower qualifications will have to be improved considerably. Here again, the effort should be multi-ethnic. Polytechnic education would be a critical component of this elevation of skills.

Five, raising skills and educational standards should go hand in hand with massive investments in scientific research. In spite of current economic difficulties, the budgetary allocation for research and development (R & D) should continue to increase. This is what will spur invention and innovation in the future. The private sector which has been lagging behind in this field should play a bigger role in this national mission that should transcend ethnic barriers.

Six, it follows from this that recognising and rewarding ability and excellence, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, should be an integral aspect of the national psyche. This is a principle that should be observed in both the public and private sectors. The national economy as a whole will benefit from this. Needless to say, it will undoubtedly result in greater inter-ethnic harmony.

Seven, recognising ability is linked to some extent to the question of recruitment and promotion in the public sector. In the last four or five years there has been a more earnest drive to recruit more non-Malays and non-Muslim Bumiputras from Sarawak and Sabah into the public services. The mobility they enjoy, as provided for in the Federal Constitution, should enable them to hold high positions of responsibility. At the same time, Chinese captains of industry and leading entrepreneurs should demonstrate a commitment to strengthening entrepreneurship among Malays and other non-Chinese Malaysians through mentorship programmes and by facilitating accessibility to their business networks. This has not been done in an organised, systematic manner by any Chinese entity since Merdeka.  And yet this is the sort of cooperation that will reduce the distance between communities.  It underscores the principle of reciprocity which is a fundamental prerequisite for harmony in any multi-ethnic society.

Eight, indeed, the nurturing of reciprocity and other such positive values will be a tremendous boost to inter-ethnic relations. We have not done enough to harness the potential of values such as cooperation, respect and integrity — or reciprocity for that matter— in our economic policies and programmes. Leaving aside the tokenism in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, economic activities, by and large, have been dominated by the credo of profit maximisation and crass competition. The present economic situation is a good time as any to explore alternatives. Perhaps cooperatives which can also be a conduit for promoting multi-ethnic sharing may be a way of evolving new economic structures in the future that are more orientated towards justice and compassion.

Nine, it is because values that would ennoble the economy and society have not been accorded the importance they deserve that a lack of professionalism and a lack of competence appear to be more glaring today than in the past.  This is obvious in the Auditor-General’s annual reports on the performance of government departments and public agencies. Malaysians of all shades and stripes are incensed by disclosures of wastage, leakages and extravagance in these reports. They are also united in wanting the Government to punish the culprits as harshly as the law would permit — and yet the response of the authorities has always been below public expectations.

Ten, Malaysians are also united, irrespective of ethnicity, in their desire to see the government eradicate corruption — a scourge that is again a reflection of the weakening of society’s moral fibre. While institutional arrangements and processes directed at fighting this scourge are stronger than ever before, elite corruption remains a challenge. Unless there is more transparency and accountability — honest adherence to the culture of open tenders for instance — corruption will continue to make a mockery of the nation’s professed commitment to the virtues of integrity. Worse, it will continue to erode the trust that the ruled must have in their rulers if governance is to lead to justice and peace.

Indeed, it is trust between rulers and the ruled that will enable us to overcome the challenge posed by the rising cost of living just as it is trust that will ensure harmonious inter-ethnic relations.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Yayasan 1Malaysia.

Petaling Jaya.

17 January 2014.