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By David Swanson

21 July 2013

@ warisacrime.org

Thanks to Michael Feikema and Doug Hendren for inviting me.  Like most of you I do not spend my life studying trade agreements, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is disturbing enough to make me devote a little time to it, and I hope you will do the same and get your neighbors to do the same and get them to get their friends to do the same — as soon as possible.

I spend most of my time reading and writing about war and peace.  I’m in the middle of writing a book about the possibility and need to abolish war and militarism.  I hate to take a break from that.  But if we think trade and militarism are separate topics we’re fooling ourselves.

New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman, a big fan of the supposed wonders of the hidden hand of the market economy says, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15.  And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Of course, there’s nothing hidden about that fist.  The TPP is planned to include the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam, with Japan expected to be added this month, and with the ability to expand to any other Pacific nation even after the treaty is created — if it is created.  The U.S. military works closely with the militaries of all of those nations, encourages their militarization, and keeps its own troops in most of them.  The U.S. military is currently building up its presence in the Pacific — including even in Vietnam, where McDonald’s also opened its first store this week.  In a presidential debate last year President Obama described the TPP as part of a strategy to counter China and exert U.S. influence in Asia, the same rationale behind the naval base on Jeju Island and all the rest of the military build up around China’s borders.  In this year’s State of the Union, Obama said the TPP and an agreement with the European Union were priorities for him this year.

There is also, of course, nothing hidden about the hand of corporate trade agreements.  These are not agreements aimed at maximizing competition by preventing monopolies.  These are very lengthy and detailed agreements that include protection and expansion of monopolies.  Rather than relying on the magic of the marketplace, a corporate trade agreement relies on the influence of lobbyists.  Just as the corruption of the military industrial complex helps explain a global military buildup in the absence of a national enemy — I mean an enemy that is a nation, not a handful of criminals who ought to be indicted and prosecuted rather than blown up along with whoever’s nearby — so, too, the corporate ownership of our government explains our government’s trade policies.

What is hidden, in another sense, is the detailed negotiated text of the proposed TPP treaty.  Some 600 corporate advisors are helping the U.S. government write the text.  Some of these advisors come from those benevolent, public-interest firms known as Monsanto, the Bank of America, Chevron, and ExxonMobil.  The rest of us are shut out.  The government gathers up our every communication, but we aren’t allowed to see what it’s doing in our name.  We don’t influence the text and we don’t get to see it.  Some courageous person or persons willing to risk charges of aiding the enemy (even if there is no enemy) has made parts of what is in the TPP known.

I dealt with corporate trade agreements a little when I worked as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich for President in 2004.  Basically my job was to tell any media outlet that would listen that we were going to end wars, create single-payer healthcare, and abolish NAFTA.  But mostly we were going to end wars.  I remember in the 2008 campaign, a whole bunch of Democratic primary candidates lined up on a stage for a huge labor-organized debate in a football stadium.  Kucinich said he would abolish NAFTA, get out of the WTO, and create bilateral trade agreements with nations, agreements that left in place protections for workers, consumers, and the environment.  The applause suggested most people there agreed.  But every other one of the candidates refused to say they would end NAFTA.  Instead, every one of them, including Barack Obama, said they would re-negotiate NAFTA to fix it by adding in the protections it was missing.  Most of them, of course, didn’t get elected.  The one who did seems to have had a change of plans.  The TPP has been under negotiation for 5 years.

A year and a half ago, some of us were living in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., and there was another camp just over in McPhearson Square, and the Occupy Movement had gone national through corporate television and newspapers.  A Senate committee was holding a hearing on new corporate trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and Korea.  After the lobbyists got their seats, there were a few left for the public, and I took one.  The senators were discussing how they would mitigate the damage of what they were about to support.  They planned to try to help find jobs for some of the people they would throw out of work.  I thought I should point out to them that they could just leave everybody in their current jobs.  I was hoping they would realize that on their own.  I didn’t want to be rude and interrupt.  But it seemed an important enough point.  So I spoke up.  And they arrested me.

Then the senators discussed Korean and U.S. tariffs on beef.  A woman in the audience spoke up and asked why we couldn’t just leave the Korean beef in Korea and the U.S. beef in the United States instead of shipping beef both ways across the ocean.  They arrested her.  They arrested everybody who said anything.  In the first year of the previous agreement made with Korea, U.S. exports to Korea fell 10% and the U.S. trade deficit with Korea rose 37%.  The same sort of results are likely with a new one.

On the plus side, Congress was kept safe from interruptions.  The charges carried some months in jail, as I recall.  Four of us made deals in court that kept us out of jail but banned us from Capitol Hill for 6 months.  In the next courtroom over, some friends were convicted of speaking out against torture when some committee chairman hadn’t asked them to.  And straight across the hall, that same day, another friend was told she’d completed her probation for having interrupted Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Capitol, a punishment imposed even though Netanyahu had thanked her for speaking and bragged about how she’d have been treated worse in Iran — although the assault she suffered in the U.S. Capitol put her in a neck brace.

The First Amendment is not doing much better than the Fourth Amendment these days.  I know that some of you will say nobody should interrupt anyone.  How would I like to be interrupted myself? Et cetera.  But how much has the corporate media that dominates our communications system, and does so with our subsidies, told us about the Trans-Pacific Partnership?  Unless we can organize enough of these meetings, someone is going to have to interrupt someone to get the word out.

Maybe the first thing I would interrupt a super bowl or a state of the union to tell people about the TPP is that it creates corporate nationhood.  This is something I started to focus on after interviewing Lacey Kohlmoos of Public Citizen on my radio show.  Public Citizen has a website set up at ExposeTheTPP.org.  Another coalition has created FlushTheTPP.org.  Another is at CitizensTrade.org.  And then there’s a cross-border effort to organize against the TPP at TPPxborder.org.  You can find pretty much everything I have to say, and much more, at those websites.  You can sign up and get involved with ongoing campaigns as things develop at those websites.

Many of us have heard of corporate personhood.  Corporations have been given the Constitutional rights of persons by U.S. courts over the past 40 years, including the right to spend money on elections.  By corporate nationhood I mean the bestowing of the rights of nations on corporations.  The TPP, drafts of which have been leaked to Public Citizen, has 29 chapters, only five of which — according to Public Citizen’s thinking — deal with trade.  The others deal with things like food safety, internet freedom, medicine costs, job off-shoring, and financial regulation.  Treaties, according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, are — together with the Constitution itself — the supreme law of the land.  So U.S. laws would have to be made to comply with the TPP’s rules.

The United States is party to treaties banning war and torture.  Some treaties are treated more like helpful suggestions than the supreme law of the land.  That would not be the case with the TPP.  Our federal and state and local governments would have to obey the TPP.  And if they didn’t, corporations could force them to.  A corporation could take the U.S. government or other nations’ governments to court (or rather, a special tribunal) and overturn their laws.  That’s corporate nationhood.  A bunch of corporate lawyers would make their case to a tribunal made up of three corporate lawyers taking a break from themselves arguing such cases in order to rule on some of them.  These three lawyers would answer to no electorate and be bound by no precedents.  There would be no appeals process.  They would be empowered to order any amount of compensation whatsoever, to be paid to corporations by tax payers.

So, if the United States has a healthcare policy or an environmental or workplace policy or a banking or internet or other public policy that a few corporate lawyers can convince three other corporate lawyers fails to comply with the TPP, the policy will be overturned, the law rewritten, and compensation ordered to be paid by the public treasury to the corporations that suffered from having to provide healthcare or from having to refrain from poisoning a river, or whatever.  We don’t know all of the details — I’ll get to some of them shortly.  But this framework is an outrage no matter what they turn out to be.  And it’s an expansion of something already being tried under existing corporate trade agreements.

ExposeTheTPP.org says: “Tribunals have already ordered governments to pay over $3.5 billion in investor-state cases under existing U.S. agreements.  This includes payments over toxic bans, land-use policies, forestry rules and more.  More than $14.7 billion remain in pending claims under U.S. agreements alone.  Even when governments win, they often must pay for the tribunals’ costs and legal fees, which average $8 million per case.  The TPP would expand the scope of policies that could be attacked.

“The proposed TPP foreign investor privileges would provide foreign firms greater ‘rights’ than those afforded to domestic firms. This includes a ‘right’ to not have expectations frustrated by a change in government policy. Claiming such radical privileges, foreign corporations have launched investor-state cases against a broad array of environmental, energy, consumer health, toxics, water, mining and other non-trade domestic policies that they allege undermine their ‘expected future profits.’

“Some of the investor-state attacks now underway are:

Chevron trying to evade liability for its Ecuadorian Amazon toxic contamination;

Phillip Morris attacking Australia’s cigarette labeling policy;

Eli Lilly attacking Canada’s drug patent policy; and

European firms attacking Egypt’s post-revolution minimum wage increase and South Africa’s post-Apartheid affirmative action law.”

Corporate trade agreements like the TPP don’t impose something as dangerous as corporate nationhood as part of the cost of some other benefit.  These agreements have no clear upside, unless it’s inexpensive, poorly made products that poorly paid people can afford to buy.  Most destructive public policies are justified by jobs.  We’ll chop down that forest for jobs.  We’ll build a bigger military for jobs.  We’ll mine coal for jobs.  We’ll concentrate wealth beyond medieval levels for jobs.  But corporate trade agreements eliminate, or at least export, jobs.

The United States had about 20 million manufacturing jobs before NAFTA, and lost about 5 million of them, including the closure of more than 60,000 facilities.  Imports have soared while the growth of exports has slowed.  Millions of service jobs have been offshored too, of course.  The TPP is referred to by those who have seen drafts of it (and you can read some draft chapters online) as NAFTA on steroids.  It expands on NAFTA’s policies.  The TPP would provide special benefits to, and eliminate risks for, companies that offshore jobs.  Vietnam’s wages are even lower than China’s.  An average day’s wage in China is $4.11.  In Vietnam it’s $2.75.

The TPP will push U.S. wages downward.  And if NAFTA’s impact on Mexico is any guide, the TPP won’t end up being seen as beneficial to Vietnam either, especially when some other country decides that it can pay workers even less than Vietnam does.

The TPP will also move U.S. government contracting jobs to foreign companies by banning buy-American procurement policies.  The ability of U.S. firms to bid on government contracts in the other participating countries will not begin to balance this out.  And in every country involved, the foreign companies will be less accountable to the people whose money is being spent.  Also banned will be preferential treatment for sweat-free businesses, minority-owned businesses, women-owned, or environmentally-friendly businesses.  Not only does the TPP make corporations into governments, but it also makes governments into corporations, requiring that they work purely to maximize profits — although the profits are for the corporations.

The TPP doesn’t end there.  When it comes to food safety and workplace safety and other consumer or environmental protections, an agreement like this could require that all nations enforce a high standard, even the highest standard of any of the nations, or a higher standard than any nation now meets — after all, the agreement would create an even playing field for all and ought to be seen as an opportunity to collectively raise the standards.  The TPP, as drafted, does just the opposite.  It would require the United States to import meat and poultry that doesn’t meet U.S. safety standards.  Any U.S. food safety rule on pesticides, labeling, or additives that is higher than international standards could be challenged as an “illegal trade barrier.”  Malaysia and Vietnam are big seafood exporters.  High levels of contaminants have been found in Vietnam’s seafood.  (I can’t imagine why!)  The FDA only inspects 1% of imported seafood now.  Local seafood producers struggle as it is.  The pollution involved in shipping seafood around the globe probably won’t work wonders for future seafood either.  And don’t imagine we’ll all just buy local and “vote with our wallets.”  The TPP will impose limits on labeling where food comes from, labeling GMO foods, labeling foods dolphin-safe, etc.  You won’t know where your food comes from or how it was produced unless you grow it or buy it from a neighbor who grew it.  But the odds will be stacked even more heavily against the small farmer if the TPP is enacted.

Once everyone’s gotten good and sick by eating TPP food, just wait to see what the TPP does to healthcare.  Corporations with national rights will be able to overturn domestic patent and drug-pricing laws.  The big drug companies will be able to raise prices with extended monopolies over drugs and over surgical procedures.  People in need of inexpensive generic drugs will be denied them, and many of those people will die.  The TPP, in the end, may turn out to be more deadly than any war.  The TPP would threaten provisions included in Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ health programs to make medicines more affordable.  Foreign corporations will also be able to challenge laws on toxics, zoning, cigarettes, alcohol, public health, and the environment — anything that they could claim might cost them profits.  NAFTA doesn’t go as far as the TPP, but these things are already happening under it.  ExposeTheTPP.org says: “Canada lifted a ban on a gasoline additive already banned in the U.S. as a suspected carcinogen after an investor attack by Ethyl Corporation under NAFTA. It also paid the firm $13 million and published a formal statement that the chemical was not hazardous.”

Under the TPP, the United States could increase its exports of so-called natural gas, and that will mean more fracking.  And laws to protect the environment, including the human beings, where the fracking is done could be challenged by corporations as limiting their future profits.  The same problems arise with tar sands.  Even under existing corporate trade agreements, governments have already paid over $3 billion to foreign corporations, and over 85% of that has been the result of challenges to oil, mining, gas, and other environmental and natural resource policies.  This includes payments by the governments of Mexico and Canada to U.S. fossil fuel corporations.

The United States has been growing accustomed to secret laws.  The PATRIOT Act, for example, according to numerous members of Congress, has been secretly “reinterpreted” to mean things radically at odds with and worse than what the words of the bill — horrible as they were — meant.  The TPP could become public, and bits of it keep leaking out, but it outdoes the PATRIOT Act in size and breadth.  It would rewrite laws.  It would even put in place laws very intentionally rejected by Congress following a very public process.

Last year there was a big struggle over SOPA, a bill that was marketed as copyright protection but ultimately rejected as internet censorship — following a great deal of public, and even some corporate, pressure.  According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU, the TPP would largely recreate SOPA while no one’s watching.  Unless, of course, we start watching.  Under the TPP, internet service providers will be able to monitor user activity, remove internet content, and prevent certain people from accessing certain content.  Downloading a song could be treated the same as a large-scale for-profit copyright violation.  The TPP would impose copyright protections for 120 years for corporate-created content.  Breaking digital locks (and no, I don’t really know what those are) for legitimate purposes, such as using Linux or accessing closed captioning for the deaf or audio-supported content for the blind could result in fines.

Then there are the laws that we dream our government might enact that the TPP would prevent, such as reasonable regulation of Wall Street.  Under the TPP a government could not ban the toxic derivatives and other risky financial “products” that helped crash the economy.  A firewall could not be put back in place between different types of financial institutions.  Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, arguing that it prevented economic crashes for a half century from the 30s through the 80s. The TPP would forbid it.  A huge movement that I’ve been working with wants to impose a Robin Hood tax, a tax on financial transactions.  Some nations’ governments have begun to agree.  The TPP would forbid it.  If our government creates and then abides by the TPP it will be asked for more bankster bailouts.  If it creates and does not abide by the TPP, corporate tribunals will make it pay the bailouts as punishment for imposing regulations.  Our government is doing this to itself because it is broken.  Elections are broken.  Communications are broken.  Secrecy is out of control.  Whistleblowers are persecuted.  Bribery is institutionalized.  Parties have replaced branches.  And a culture of shortsighted greed and subservience has supplanted anything resembling statesmanship.

The TPP will, as the flyer for this event stated:

§  Prevent effective regulation of Wall Street

§  Trade good-paying careers for sweatshop labor

§  Destroy family farms

§  Accelerate global warming in the name of profits

§  Keep the public in the dark

§  Place corporate rights above our national sovereignty

§  Crush our ability to support local economies

§  Weaken and undermine democracy at home and abroad

President Obama wants to fast-track the TPP.  Industry groups this week have been demanding that Congress approve fast-tracking.  Corporate trade agreements are not treated as treaties requiring a two-thirds vote in the Senate.  Rather, they are treated as requiring a simple majority in both houses.  If Congress allows fast-tracking, that means the thing can’t be amended.  And it can’t be filibustered.  It must be simply voted on as is, with the most horrible bits included along with the only moderately horrible parts.  Most Congress Members had no time to read the PATRIOT Act before they voted on it, and of course the public had not seen it.  Congress has not seen the TPP yet either.  There are three chapters in the draft text that no one has leaked even the titles of.

Fast-track authority expired in 2007 and Congress refused to renew it.  Urging Congress to continue rejecting fast-track could be part of a comprehensive campaign aimed at getting Congress to take itself seriously, a campaign that might include repeal of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force which essentially handed war powers over to the president.  Regardless, stopping fast track would help stop the TPP.  And it wouldn’t stop decent trade agreements that can withstand the light of day.  There have been over 500 trade agreements created since 1974, and fast track has been used for only 16 of the worst ones.

As a candidate, Obama said he would replace fast track and make sure that Congress played a strong and informed role in trade agreements. Now he’s seeking fast track.  If he gets it, the TPP will become likely in every gory detail.

The TPP can be stopped.  Others have been since NAFTA passed, including the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which failed following huge public protests.  In the case of the FTAA, the negotiation documents were made public.  Not this time.  But FlushTheTPP.org offers these words of encouragement:

“Since the ‘Battle in Seattle,’ the World Trade Organization has had an impossible time moving forward, as was seen in the failure of the Millennial and Doha Rounds of the WTO. We also stopped the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. And at least 14 other corporate trade agreements have not been completedbecause of widespread public opposition. This is hopeful news, and together we can stop the TPP also, which will be a tremendous victory for the people against transnational corporate power!”

FlushTheTPP.org has a map where you can find or create actions around the country.  Groups are encouraged to hold TPP Tuesdays, dedicating Tuesdays to educational or nonviolent resistance events.  In August, when Congress Members are expected to be in their districts and senators in their states.  We should bird-dog them, lobby them, meet with them, interview them, pressure them, protest them, until they agree to make the TPP public and to stop fast track.  Former US Trade Representative Ron Kirk has said that if the contents of this agreement were known it could not be signed because it would be so unpopular.

The Backbone Campaign, online at BackboneCampaign.org, has great ideas for props and banners and puppets.  They’ve even been holding training camps, teaching things like action planning, light projection, song and dance flash mobs, guerilla theatre, fundraising, giant banner construction and deployment — including with helium balloons, blockades, rappelling, etc.  I recommend contacting them or organizing a similar effort.

Maybe TPP opposition can be a catalyst for a resurgence of Occupy Harrisonburg and Occupy Everywhere.  We are going to have to get organized and we are going to have to occupy.  We need to keep moving the money out of the big banks.  We need to advance worker ownership and community power.  We need to become independent of the outrageously corrupt political party that we’re supposed to hate and the outrageously corrupt political party that we’re supposed to like.  We need to stop cheering when President Obama gives speeches opposing his own policies.  I can’t recall once demanding that President Bush give a speech.  We always wanted something more substantive than that.

There are places to get involved:

http://ExposeTheTPP.org

http://FlushTheTPP.org

http://CitizensTrade.org

http://TPPxborder.org

Also, at RootsAction.org, where I work, there is a page at which 20,000 people have already emailed Congress and the president against the TPP, and you should too.  Make your voice heard here.

This free trade agreement is not free and not about trade, and we’re definitely not in agreement!

By Countercurrents.org

21 July, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

At least 20 people, including women and children were injured when police attacked peaceful protesters agitating against Nitta Gelatin India Limited (NGIL) at Kathikudam, in Thrissur district of Kerala in South India. Police went on a rampage and ransacked houses of villagers and damaged vehicles parked in the area. According to eyewitnesses the police attacked the protesters without any provocation.

The Nitta Gelatin India Limited Action Council was on a hunger strike for over a month. The grama sabha had decided to remove the pipes that were pumping untreated effluence to the nearby river today. A large police was stationed in the area. Although the removal of the pipes did not happen as planned, the police started arresting the protesters. When the agitators resisted the arrest, police started beating up people indiscriminately. Protesters alleged that the police prevented ambulances to reach the place to take the injured people to hospital. Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan, home minister of Kerala, has ordered an enquiry into the incident.

The NGIL produces ossein and limed ossein, intermediaries in gelatin manufacture. Ossein gelatin is derived from de-greased, hard animal bones that are washed and then leached with dilute hydrochloric acid.

The village people are facing huge health impacts on their lives. During the past 10 years more than 60 people have died of cancer. Asthma, Bronchitis and skin diseases are spreading in the area. The company is using 6290200* litres of water per day from Chalakudi river and pumping the waste in to the river and surrounding areas.

The struggle has been on for 30 years, but could not sustain because of the pressure of the company and the authorities. After a period of inactivity, on March 2008 an action council was formed. The initial demand from the people was to stop the pollution. But after so many promises, the company keept on polluting the area and now the people are demanding that the company should be shut down.

* The company claims that the consumption of water has been brought down to below 30,00,000 by October, 2012 and currently consumes less than 28,00,000 litres of water.

By Eve Ensler

21 July 13

@ Reader Supported News

It is unusual for me to write about boys or men unless I am calling them to end the violence against women and girls or asking them to join us in standing up for women’s rights. I realize this is probably a failure on my part, a failure of attention or empathy or time. A failure to expand my frame and point of reference, a failure to find the way to weave my struggle, my pain with the larger story of pain, to weave our struggles into the larger story of justice. But you changed all that, Trayvon. I can’t stop staring at your photograph. You, at 17, the same age as my son when I adopted him because his birth mother had been murdered when he was five. The same age, that same half man, half boy, half needy, half daring face. That same playfulness, cleverness, sadness, anger, unreachable boy/man loneliness. I stare at your photograph and imagine my son lying in the mean streets dead, a spilled can of soda at his head. But there was something else that triggered my outrage, my heartbreak, my solidarity when the verdict to free George Zimmerman was announced last week.

I am not you. I am not Trayvon Martin. I will never know what it feels like to live in the skin, in the daily rhythms and predeterminations of a black boy or man in America. I will never know what it is like to always be held suspect, to feel categorized from birth as dangerous. But as a woman, there are things I do know and things that I have experienced that bring us into the same story, the same struggle. I know for example what it is like to walk the streets, any streets, (particularly at dusk or dark) and be totally vulnerable, in trepidation and terror. I know what it’s like to be worried about being followed, to speed up my step or slow down and pretend to be casual. It’s a pity the prosecutors were unable to communicate your terror to the all-female jury, as we would hope they would have connected. I know what it feels like to be attacked or raped and be blamed for it because of what I was wearing (hoodie =short skirt). I know what it is like to be someone whose opinions and experience are essentially perceived as inferior and untrustworthy. I know what it feels like to be told I am to blame for violence inflicted on me by the way I walk or look or carry myself or time of day I go out. I know how it feels to be blamed for talking back, defending myself (see recent story of Marissa Alexander, who fired warning shots in the air against her abusive husband and got 20 years in prison), or making an angry or upsetting grimace (the police in Miami have not articulated any legitimate basis for jumping on 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian, throwing him to the ground, placing him in choke hold, and terrorizing him until he urinated on himself. The assertion was that he gave the officers “dehumanizing stares” or looked at them in a “menacing” way). I know what it’s like to have the law stacked against me or the culture surrounding the law used to diminish my moral character, if not erase it, before I step into the box. I know what it’s like to be alone, disbelieved, and in pain.

I have met many George Zimmermans. I know them intimately. The broken men who are full of a simmering explosive rage, determined by poverty or shame or violence or humiliation or low self esteem. The men with unexamined history and closed hearts. The men who are just waiting for a target, an excuse, and we are both easy targets as we are so easily discounted, disappeared and disbelieved. I know these men, and many of them have patterns of committing violence against women before they commit murders or other violence. George Zimmerman has already allegedly stalked and slapped a woman and allegedly molested a little girl before he got to killing you. I know if we lived in a world where these crimes against women were taken seriously and men were held accountable, maybe crimes, like the one against you, would have been prevented.

I know that guns do not serve either one of us and that guns in the hands of broken men looking for an excuse to express their rage is a sure path to our destruction. I know that this violence, these guns, this domination, keeps us forever divided in our own wounds, stories, victimhoods, unable to find a frame or empathy to connect with the bigger story and struggle.

This February 14, 2014, women and men will rise all over the planet for justice, One Billion Rising for Justice, for an end to violence against women, for an end to the humiliation and degradation of men which leads to violence. We will rise for an end to guns and Stand Your Ground laws where unarmed 17-year-olds are shot down dead. We will rise to say Justice involves the whole story — the story of race, of class, of gender. Our struggles are one.

I am rising for you, Trayvon, and for all the Black boys who have been determined guilty before they took their first breath. I am rising so your death is not in vain. I am rising for Rachel Jeantel, your friend who spoke the truth at your trial and was minimized and dismissed because of her size and color and gender and class. I am rising for Marissa Alexander, that she may be set free. And I am rising for George Zimmerman and all the George Zimmermans, that they may see themselves and take responsibility for their actions with or without the pressure of the courts. That they may put down their guns and get the much-needed help to stop directing their self-hatred out in racist, sexist, homophobic ways that take lives, destroy hearts, families and communities.

I am rising for a justice that is contingent on you rising, Trayvon and all the boys with tender hearts and big dreams in their hoodies.

By MAUNG ZARNI

19 July 2013

@ www.dvd.no

Today Burma observes the 66th anniversary of the death of Aung San and his nationalist colleagues. It was also on this day all those years ago that Aung San’s ‘Big Tent’ vision for the country, where ethnic equality and self-determination were to be the bedrock of the Union of Burma, was buried.

Aung San was a rare bird from a deeply traditional country under colonial control. He was a secularist, anti-feudal radical thinker and leader, who despised sycophants of all stripes and colours. The general did not bog himself down with questions concerning which races belonged in Burma and which didn’t.

He defined tai-yin-thar (ethnic nationalities) as anyone who was born on Burmese soil and loved his or her birthplace. He would certainly be turning in his grave at this juncture in Burma’s history.

In the weeks leading up to his assassination, Aung San was stridently opposed to British economic exploitation and accused the colonial authorities of attempting to destabilise Burma as the country edged closer to independence.  He called the British post-WWII policies towards the country “fascist” and derided their colonial mindset and worldview.

According to the Nation editor and publisher the late Edward Law-Yone, who met the last colonial governor Hubert Rance, London was thinking of putting U Saw – their local proxy and mastermind behind Aung San’s murder — in charge of forming a government immediately after the general’s death on 19 July 1947.

The late Brigadier General Kyaw Zaw, who was one of the members of the famed 30 comrades that made up the nucleus of the Burma Independence Army, was unequivocal when he wrote in his autobiography that the colonial crime investigation department (CID) in Rangoon knew days in advance about U Saw’s plot to take out Aung San.

And Aung San was also supposedly aware that the conspiracy was being hatched and told his aide-de-camp Captain Tun Hla that it would be U Saw pulling the strings.

According to filmmaker Rob Lemkin, who made the documentary “Who killed Aung San?”, the British government removed or otherwise destroyed official and potentially incriminatory dispatches sent from Rangoon back to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London following the assassination.

Lemkin’s film also claimed that a key staff member from the British Council was the main liaison with U Saw. A few months prior to the assassination, news broke that about 200 British-made automatic sub-machine guns disappeared or were stolen from a colonial arms depot. The officer in charge of the depot slipped out of the country in no time, and with no troubles, assisted by the last colonial government to rule the country.

U Nu was eventually handpicked by the British to lead Burma’s new cabinet, and Nu did everything in his power to quell popular public opinion by burying the truth behind Aung San’s assassination.

On his part, Nu, now head of the almost independent government provided the British government with major economic concessions and welcomed the country’s military advisers to train the Burmese army. The communists bitterly opposed Nu’s terms of independence, which saw the Burmese pay full compensation to all the British commercial firms including the Burmah Oil Corporation (BOC), mining companies, etc.

“The former colonial rulers are heading back to their old stomping ground to exploit the country again!”

When the communists rejected the deal as a sham and went underground within 90-days of independence, the British came to Nu’s aid. They trained Burmese military leaders in ruthless counterinsurgency methods – including the infamous “Four Cuts” strategy. The British also sold the military hardware to General Ne Win and his army that they needed to fight the communists.

Now history is repeating itself.

Back in 1880′s the Kingdom of Burmah was known “one of the world’s unexplored markets”.  A century and half on, the country is again considered to be one of the very few remaining ‘frontier markets’.

The British banks sucked Burma dry leading up to the Japanese-Burma Independence Army “invasion” in Dec 1942, while externalising the financial side of the operations to South Indians, known as Chettyers, who became the scapegoats for all the ills of colonial Burma.

Now, the former colonial rulers are heading back to their old stomping ground to exploit the country again!

This time our ruling and opposition elites are facilitating the process. Oxbridge-trained financiers, Royal Military Academies-trained advisers and representatives from Britain’s arms industry, which sold  £12 billion worth of weapons to repressive regimes around the world last year, are all about to rush in to penetrate the world’s latest frontier market.

While the country is about to be re-exploited by British interests, Burma’s people have yet to overcome the country’s colonial legacy. Burma was carved up under British rule. Ethnic groups were played off of each other as the British sought to divide and rule their colonial estate.

Aung San realised that for Burma to succeed, the country would to have embrace a secularist-multiculturalist society after independence.  This day 66 years ago Aung San and some of his closest multi-ethnic advisors – a Shan, a Karen, a Myanmar Muslim, a devout Bama Buddhist and a liberal socialists were murdered while meeting in the Secretariat in Rangoon.  “Made in England” weapons killed not only Burma’s nationalist visionaries but also their dream of a multiculturalist, secular Burma.

Pro-Aung San Burmese campaigners trying to revive the annual call to pay homage to the fallen martyrs through the state broadcast of sirens at 10:37 am should go beyond these simple demands.

For the country to be peaceful, prosperous and democratic, Burma’s leaders and citizens must urgently embrace, and actively put into practice, the martyrs’ ‘Big Tent” vision of a multicultural state for all – irrespective of ethnicity, faith, and ideologies.

Only then will the fallen martyrs be able to say: Sadu/Thadu! Sadu/Thadu! Sadu/Thadu (A good deed has been done!)

Maung Zarni is an associate fellow at the University of Malaya where he is also the editor of the Journal of Democracy and Elections and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.

By Maung Zarni

19 July, 2013

@ www.atimes.com

LONDON – Britain, the largest donor country and former colonizer of Myanmar, is effectively aiding and abetting the unfolding “ethnic cleansing” of Muslim Rohingya by helping to finance the country’s controversial 2014 national census.

Ex-general and head of Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government Thein Sein made an official visit to Britain this week, during which his hosts announced a new 30 million-pound (US$45.6 million) development assistance package and resumption of arms sales. One third of that amount is earmarked to bankroll the former colony’s census, “which is essential to make sure support is getting to those who need it more”, according to an official British government statement.

Because Thein Sein’s government is forcing the Rohingya people to register as “Bengali”, a continuation of a decades-old policy of stripping the Rohingya of both their citizenship and ethnic identity, Britain’s financial support for this process is troubling. The coming census will no doubt be used to reinforce this racist policy and practice of forcibly registering the self-referenced Rohingya and erasing the fact that the Rohingya as an ethnic nationality group ever existed in Myanmar.

During a question and answer session following his beautifully written, liberal sounding speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, Thein Sein was emphatic about his government’s policy towards the estimated 800,000 to one million Rohingya whose cultural, economic and historical roots can be found on both sides of the once East Bengal and former Arakan State.

He stated that “to use the term Rohingya, in our ethnic history we do not have the term Rohingya”. This official denial and the racist policies that perpetuate the marginalization of the Rohingya is tantamount to ethnocide, a blatant erasure of a verifiable fact that a distinct ethnic community, with all its typical sociological fluidity, exists in Myanmar.

Gregory Stanton of George Mason University, who is president of Genocide Watch and a world renowned scholar in genocide studies, sees in Myanmar’s mistreatment of the Rohingya a Nazi-like “us versus them” classification in which the dominant group and its political state dish out discrimination, mistreatment and eventually “final solutions”.

In his influential essay entitled “The Eight Stages of Genocide”, Stanton writes: “We treat different categories of people differently. Racial and ethnic classifications may be defined by absurdly detailed laws – the Nazi Nuremberg laws, the “one (African blood) drop” laws of segregation in America, or apartheid racial classification laws in South Africa.”

Classification is universal across all cultures and political systems. However, when it is carried out in a militaristic state with a deeply Islamophobic “Buddhist” society such as the present-day Myanmar, there is only a short jump between the deliberate act of mis-classifying the Rohingya as “illegal Bengali” or “Bengalis” and being dehumanized as “viruses”, “ogres” or the local language equivalent of “niggers”. The next stage is mass violence with state impunity against a given dehumanized community.

That is precisely what has happened to the Rohingyas of western Myanmar since 1978. In February that year, the Burma Socialist Programme Party-led government, a one-party, one-man dictatorship under General Ne Win, launched the country’s first large-scale ethnic cleansing operation. Known as the Na-Ga-Min, or King of the Snakes, operation, inter-ministerial and inter-agency units from police, customs, immigration, army, navy, intelligence, civil administration and the home ministry’s religious affairs department were mobilized against the Rohingya.

Even the government’s conservative estimate put the number of Rohingya who fled to neighboring, newly independent Bangladesh at 150,000; other independent sources put the figure much higher. Since then the Rohingya have been living in security grids where virtually every aspect of their lives is severely restricted and monitored as a matter of policy.

A cursory glance at doctor-patient ratios, adult illiteracy and mortality rates among children under five speaks volume about the policy-induced dire conditions under which the Rohingya are forced to live. The doctor-patient ratio for the Rohingya in northern Rakhine State is 1:83,000, adult illiteracy is over 90%, and the mortality rate for under-five children is twice as high as Myanmar’s already very high national average.

No longer able to endure decades of a myriad forms of sexual violence, summary execution, forced labor, extortions, and other means of abuse, many Rohingya families – including women, children and the elderly – have attempted to flee the country, willingly risking their lives in rickety boats on the Andaman Sea and facing an uncertain future as stateless people in countries as varied as Canada, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia and neighboring Bangladesh.

Unconscionable policy

Ethnocide may sound like esoteric academic jargon but its consequences are grave and of growing international concern. A policy of ethnocide sets the ideological and social-psychological stage for an otherwise peaceful people to carry out unspeakable and unconscionable atrocities against those whom they have been trained to consider an existential threat.

The military-controlled state in Myanmar – now headed by ex-general Thein Sein and his quasi-civilian government in Naypyidaw – has both paved the way for and carried out ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Ethnocide of the Rohingya has empowered the racist, ultra-nationalists among the local Buddhist Rakhine, national leaders and Buddhist society at large to dehumanize the Rohingya.

The fact that Thein Sein felt comfortable enough to repeat his government’s ethnocidal stance on the Rohingya at the prestigious Chatham House should ring alarm bells among the British public. His speech spoke volumes about the extent to which Myanmar’s former colonial master has become officially complicit in the atrocities against the Rohingya, London’s expressed “human rights concerns” notwithstanding.

Apparently designed to hit Britain’s subliminal colonial guilt, Thein Sein framed the Rohingya as a problem which the former British colony inherited from the Raj upon achieving independence in 1948. In Thein Sein’s words: “During the colonial administration there was a migration of economic migrants from other countries into the Rakhine State (formerly known as Arakan) to work on the lands… So they grew their crops and then they did the harvest and then they went back home. But later on they decided to settle in the region. During the colonial administration there were 50,000 Muslims in that region… Now we have 800,000 Muslim population in the region. That of course caused a lot of tension.”

Colonial-era statistics have proven more often than not unreliable and the racial conceptualizations and classifications on which these demographic data rest were often full of racist and pseudo-scientific methodologies that were part and parcel of colonial rule. In 1824, the year of the British annexation of the Arakan, itself a pre-British feudal colony that was depopulated by both Buddhists and Muslims by repressive military conquest, around one-third of the population of Arakan was Muslim, according to colonial records.

Today, out of the estimated three million who live in Rakhine State, around a third are Muslim. This is hardly a demographic threat to the local Rakhines and certainly not a national threat to the predominantly Buddhist country of 50-plus million people. Beyond the numbers’ games, there are other people-centered – as opposed to nation state-centric – perspectives that are far more convincing and far closer to Arakan’s historical realities than is Thein Sein’s dubious explanation.

In a public seminar on the Rohingya held at Columbia University in September last year, Amartya Sen, the world renowned Bengali philosopher and economist and Harvard University professor, perceptively observed: “The Rohingya did not come to Burma. But Burma came to the Rohingya.”

Like other borderland ethno-cultural communities, the Rohingya as a people can be found on both sides of the borders of modern nation states, namely the former Burma, which since 1989 has been known as Myanmar, and former East Pakistan, which since 1971 has been known as Bangladesh. The boundaries of once boundary-less feudal kingdoms, many characterized by fluctuating territorial control and administrative powers, were abruptly locked and divided into post-colonial nation states.

In fact, there is nothing strange or persecution-worthy about numerous ethno-cultural and linguistic communities being split and scattered across these manufactured borders as nation states emerged out of wars, conflicts and other processes of exploitation. Even in the case of Myanmar, there are other groups such as the Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Mon, Shan, Tai, and, yes, even the Buddhist Rakhine, who also belong to different neighboring nation states. Notably, none of these communities are facing ethnocide or genocide by Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, India or China.

Twisted history

The truth is that the Rohingya were not always denied their existence by the Myanmar state. In contrast to Thein Sein’s ethnocidal perspective, and in spite of the contemporary debates as to whether the Rohingya are historical or ancestral “children of the land”, four successive Myanmar governments – the parliamentary democracy government of prime minister U Nu (1948-58), the caretaker government of General Ne Win (1958-60), the Union Government of premier U Nu (1960-62) and General Ne Win’s early military government, namely the Revolutionary Council (1962-74) – had all officially recognized the Rohingya as a distinct ethno-cultural community.

The Rohingya had their own national ethnic language program based at the state’s sole national broadcasting service (Burma Broadcasting Service, or BBS) alongside other national ethnic language programs such as Shan, Lahu, Bama and others. The official social studies textbooks described them as Myanmar’s Rohingya ethnic nationality and placed them on the ethnic map of the country.

The household lists and national identification cards bore the word “Rohingya” for those who self-identified as such. All cabinet offices of these aforementioned governments used the word “Rohingya” in their official dispatches and records, while senior military generals in the ministry of defense addressed the Rohingya community and its religious leaders as ‘esteemed Rohingya leaders’ in the former’s public remarks and speeches. The government’s official Burmese Encyclopedia (published in 1964, two years after the military government came to power) had a specific section on the Rohingyas of northern districts of the country.

Since the first genocidal operation against the Rohingya in February 1978, successive military leaderships have been relentless in their drive to cleanse western Myanmar of the ethnic group – whom they now derisively and officially insist on calling “Bengali” – both from state discourse and from the land. Ethnocide began under Ne Win’s whimsical dictatorship, which was steeped in nationalist and anti-colonial ideologies that justified draconian policies towards the Rohingya. As a result, Myanmar now has an apartheid system for the Rohingya, who have survived various waves of ethnic cleansing since 1978.

Instead of confronting Thein Sein over his past and present role in the ethnocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, the British government instead gave 10 million pounds for his government’s 2014 census, a project that will almost surely drive the final nail into the coffin of the Rohingyas’ existence in Myanmar.

This also puts Britain’s plan to involve the British Ministry of Defense in training Myanmar’s armed forces in the areas of human rights and civil-military relations in a new light. For while British officials talk of human rights and accountability in military classrooms, they will simultaneously be financing a census that will be used to facilitate ethnic cleansing with British tax-payers’ money.

For those familiar with Britain’s international trajectory, its decision to help fund Myanmar’s ethnocidal census, which in turn will be technically assisted by the United Nations Population Fund, should not come as a surprise. Nor should the British government’s decision to reward Thein Sein with the export of made-in-UK arms worth $5 million. Foreign Office spin-masters will, one can be sure, soon be justifying this questionable arms deal as one to help end the country’s ethnic conflicts.

On July 19, 1947, made-in-England bullets killed independence hero Aung San and a group of the country’s co-founders in a British-assisted but locally carried out assassination. Aung San, a staunch anti-imperialist nationalist, was then seen as an obstacle to the unfettered pursuit of Britain’s post-colonial, post-World War II commercial and strategic interests in Myanmar.

Sixty years on, the resumption of export of made-in-UK arms to Thein Sein’s military-backed, genocidal regime sends an ominous signal to those ethnic and religious minorities who may not be as open to British official and corporate interests as the ethnic Burman military generals and their cronies.

In pursuit of its own hidden and not-so-hidden strategic and corporate interests, Britain is simply repeating the old colonial policy of ethnic divide and exploit. In the days of the British Raj of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British pursued their imperialist aims and interests through the use of the country’s non-Buddhist ethnic minorities along the country’s borderlands, then referred to as the “frontier peoples”.

In 2013, Britain’s new design in Myanmar is about pursuing British interests through the dominant “Buddhist” generals and their repressive state while looking the other way when their colonial era ethnic instruments, namely the frontier or borderland ethnic peoples of the Rohingya, Karen, Kachin, and others are being further marginalized, militarily overwhelmed or ethnically cleansed.

Maung Zarni (www.maungzarni.com) is a Burmese dissident blogger and a Visiting Fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the London School of Economics.

By Maung Zarni

17 July, 2013

@ maungzarni.com

Aung San was murdered on 19 July 1947, 66 years of ago tomorrow. He was killed by 27 bullet wounds from the British Army-issued machine guns in the British-assisted assassination.

When Aung San and his multi-cultural and multifaith comrades were killed by Made-in-England bullets it was not just the men’s lives they were taken away.   Aung San’s secularist, egalitarian and multiculturalist vision too was killed and buried along with their remains.

Aung San was a rare bird from a deeply tradition-bound colonial Burma who attempted to redefine who was a son (or daughter) of the soil – or Tai-yin-tha.  He was secularist, anti-feudal radical thinker and leader, who defined everyone whose umbilical chord was cut on the Burmese soil as Tai-yin-thar.  If Aung San knew that his country is now having a Nazi-turn under the “Buddhist” disguise, he would certainly be turning in his grave.

Besides, the Burmese elites of today are attempting to bring back the British commercial and military complex against which Aung San fought throughout his grown-up life.

Ironically, it is the leaders of the Army he founded under Fascist Japan’s patronage, and his own daughter who are facilitating this re-penetration of Burma by British interests as a frontier market and resource brothel – at the expense of the minorities – and the non-elite Burmese public.

According to the Nation editor and publisher the late Ed Law Yone, who met the last colonial governor Hubert Rance, in the latter home in Surrey, London was thinking of putting Galon Mr/U Saw, their local proxy and the local Mastermind behind Aung San’s murder, to form the government immediately after Aung San’s death on 19 July 1947.

The late Brigadier General Kyaw Zaw, one of the 30 members of the nucleus of the Burma Independence Army was unequivocal when he wrote in his Burmese language biography – that none other than the colonial Crime Investigation Department (CID) knew days ahead of U Saw’s plot to take out Aung San. And Aung San himself knew the plot was being hatched to take him out and told his ADC Captain Tun Hla that it would be U Saw who would take him out.

The truth of the matter is Aung San was a smart (as opposed to doctrinaire) Marxist-influenced radical nationalist whom the British Establishment saw as a serious threat to Britain’s post-independence designs over Burma.

Weeks leading up to his assassination, Aung San was so stridently anti-British economic exploitation – and accused the British authorities of attempting to de-stablizie the country on-the-verge of independence. He called the British all kinds of name, and derided Britain’s colonial mindset and worldview.

My neighbor in Oxford was the film director Rob Lamkin, formerly with the BBC, who made the documentary “Who killed Aung San?” He said the British Government removed or otherwise destroyed official dispatches from Rangoon back to FCO in London, which would have incriminated Brits in the assassination of Aung San and half of his multicultural and multiethnic cabinet.

There have 60-plus years’ attempts to sanitize the narrative of the assassination of Aung San and his closest colleagues. Even Suu Kyi’s late husband Michael Aris was involved. According to Lamkin, the day “Who killed Aung San?” was aired on the BBC Panorama (?) Mr Aris called the director and angrily registered his deep displeasure that Rob went ahead and more than insinuated the shadowy British official involvement in the killing of Aung San. He was worried that the film would put “Suu in a very difficult position with the British government (which she came to rely on as a foreign source of support).”

The official entity that was involved, according to the documentary, was the British Council, more specifically, a key staff of the Council was the main liaison with the local Mastermind U Saw. U Saw kept asking prison officials when he would be able to see his main contact.

A few months prior to the assassination, the news broke that about 200 Made-in-England automatic sub-machine guns disappeared or stolen from the British Army arms depot. Surely, the assassins killed Aung San and his deputies, including 2 Muslim colleagues, with the very machine guns. The officer in charge of the depot slipped out of the country in no time, and with no troubles, assisted by the last colonial government.

U Nu was eventually handpicked by the British to lead the new cabinet, and Nu did everything in his power to quell the popular public opinion by burying the truth behind Aung San’s assassination: the British aiding and abetting the local Mastermind whom they later hang when the events turned out against their original idea of making Saw Aung San’s successor. On his part, Nu, now the head of the almost nearly independent government, went ahead, giving Britain major economic concessions and accepting British military advisers to train the Burmese Army.

The communists bitterly opposed Nu’s terms of independence – the Burmese paying full compensation to all the British commercial firms including natural resource extractive industry such as Burmah Oil Corporation (BOC), mining companies, etc.

When the communists rejected the independence of Burma as a sham and went underground within 90-days of independence – in March 1947 – India was the first to help Nu fight the Communist revolt. In due course, the British came to Nu’s aid, training Burmese strategists in ruthless counter-insurgency methods – most specifically the infamous “Four Cuts” strategy and selling all military hardware that Ne Win and his army needed to fight the Communists.

Now history is repeating itself.

Funeral Process of Aung San and his comrades, Fall 1947

The British banks sucked Burma dry leading up to the Japanese-Burma Independence Army ‘invasion’ in Dec 1942 while externalizing their blood-sucking responsibility to the South Indians known as Chettyers who came to be scapegoated for all the ills of the colonial Burma.

Now the vampires are heading back to their old lucrative hole to suck more!

This time our ruling and opposition elites are facilitating this blood-sucking process, themselves morphing into third class mini-vampires!

Orwell calls the ‘white man’s civilizing mission’ in colonial Burma ‘humbug’ and the Raj nothing more than ‘a system of theft’.

Now Orwell’s thieves and looters are heading back to Burma in a second Gold Rush. Indeed the second coming of the Raj, this time Raj Lite.

Oxbridge-trained financiers from the City, Sandhurst and Royal Academies-trained advisers and ex-British service men in Britain’s arms industry, that sold GBP 12 billion worth of arms to repressive regimes around the world last year are all about to rush in to penetrate the frontier market. Back in 1880’s the Kingdom of Burmah was ‘one of the world’s unexplored markets’. A century and half on, today’s Myanmar is one of the very few remaining ‘frontier markets’. So, Britain won’t miss the rush.

Aside the country being about to be re-exploited by the British interests, what the society and a people have long already lost, thanks to the British colonial designs, is this:

When Aung San and his multi-cultural and multifaith comrades were killed by Made-in-England bullets it was not just the men’s lives they were taken away.

It was their original secularist-multiculturalist vision for a post-independence Burma that was murdered and buried along side these martyrs who included a Shan, a Karen, a Myanmar Muslim, a devout Bama Buddhist, a liberal socialist, and a radical secularist Aung San.

For those pro-Aung San Burmese campaigners trying to revive the annual call to pay homage to the fallen co-founders of a post-independence Burma through the state broadcast sirens at 10:37 am tomorrow they should go beyond the siren calls for a few minutes and observing a moment of silence.

They – and the whole nation on the brink of Nazification – urgently ought to embrace, and actively put in practice, the Martyrs’ ‘Big Tent” vision of a secularist multiculturalist Burma – for all, irrespective of race, faith, and ideologies.

Only then will the fallen Martyrs will be able to say,

Sadu/Thadu! Sadu/Thadu! Sadu/Thadu! (A good deed has been done!)

Well-done! Well-done! Well-done!

By Nile Bowie

16 July, 2013

As figures in Egypt’s powerful military collude with the political opposition to form a civilian interim government, what kind of political and economic solutions will the new regime offer, and is Washington’s hidden hand at play?

Political polarization has reached new heights in Egypt following the dramatic overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected leader. After sweeping away two presidents since 2011, the original goals of the revolution, embodied in the popular slogan “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice and Human Dignity,” haven’t come close to materializing. For all intents and purposes, life for the average Egyptian is more difficult now than under Hosni Mubarak, and although Morsi’s shortcomings may not have justified a military coup, his tenure was a spectacular failure. Although many perceive Morsi and Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) as being hijackers of the 2011 revolution, the bottom line is that the revolutionary fervor emanating from Tahrir Square is not directed against one party or political figure, but against economic conditions and neoliberal tendencies that have largely remained unchanged throughout the ebb and flow of Egyptian politics in recent times.

Morsi’s year in office saw the doubling of food prices and the weakening of the Egyptian pound while his administration negotiated a $4.8 billion loan with the IMF that would have imposed crippling conditionalities on the people, including the slashing of subsides that the poorest rely on. While some 40 percent of Egyptians live in poverty, Morsi’s narrow pursuit of more liberalization, deregulation and privatization appeared to many as a continuation of Mubarak-style economics. To be sure, the Islamist flavor of Morsi’s tenure upset many secular Egyptians, as well as those in the Coptic Christian community, but the crux of the issue remains Morsi’s mishandling of the economy, in addition to his failure to reach out beyond the Muslim Brotherhood’s political base. Morsi’s approach to foreign policy was the greatest indication the he was in fact bound by a Western leash, and the coup in Cairo has left a mark on the grand chessboard.

Saudi Arabia & Qatar play geopolitical ping-pong

It’s generally accepted that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were bought and paid for by Doha, which channeled some $17 billion into Brotherhood-led regimes throughout the post-Arab Spring landscape – as such, Morsi’s foreign policy moved in step with Qatar. Shortly before being deposed, Morsi closed down the Syrian embassy in Cairo and pledged allegiance to the jihadist insurgency working to topple Bashar al-Assad. Furthermore, security coordination with Israel became more intimate under Morsi than under Mubarak, while he allowed the destruction of the majority of underground tunnels between Gaza and Sinai that Palestinians had used to smuggle in food and goods. Those pudgy sheiks in Doha were so upset over losing their man in Cairo (and their investments) that the Emir likely gave orders from the top to the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera news network requesting that the pro-Brotherhood line be toed, resulting in the resignation of 22 staff members over what they allege was “biased coverage” of the events that unfolded.

When the Qataris dropped the ball, the House of Saud was there to pick it up. King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarch, was one of the first regional leaders to recognize Egypt’s interim government right after the coup – primarily because SCAF Chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is his man. Al-Sisi held his post for less than a year before bringing down Morsi and previously served as Egypt’s military attache in Saudi Arabia – he also studied in Washington and previously cooperated with Washington over war games and intelligence operations. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have since stepped up to provide emergency financing for the bankrupt Egyptian state, to the tune of $8 billion. Relations between Doha and Riyadh sway back and fourth between being cordial at times, to outright bitterness. Another subplot recently saw the Saudi-US-backed Ahmad Jarba take over the Syrian National Council, marking the notable ascendancy of Saudi influence within the Syrian opposition, a major setback for Qatar.

Are Washington’s fingerprints on the Egyptian coup?

Some may ponder, why would Washington involve itself in the removal of Morsi when he was such a perfect stooge? The fact is that the Americans knew that critical mass was building against the Muslim Brotherhood (some 22 million people signed a petition calling for Morsi’s resignation), which prompted them to give SCAF a reluctant green light to stage a coup, seeing it as the surest bet that Washington would continue to exert control over Egypt and the geopolitically crucial Suez Canal. The US knew which way the wind was blowing, and stepped up financing of anti-Morsi organizations and figures through the National Endowment for Democracy and other quasi-governmental organizations financed through the State Department and USAID. The fact that Washington fell short of referring to the military coup as what it rightfully was lends credence to US complicity; moreover, Washington has not changed its plans to deliver four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt in the coming weeks, which speaks volumes of the Obama administration’s position on the matter. SCAF receives some $1.3 billion in annual US assistance, and no matter how one reads the political tea leafs, Washington’s interests in Egypt are too great, and it has no choice but to diplomatically, financially and militarily back the product of the July 3 coup.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Obama isn’t exactly losing sleep over the changes in Egypt, probably because the new interim government is lined with Western-educated “liberals”that will continue the same political and economic policies as Morsi, and Mubarak before him. Interim President Adly Mansour, former chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, had a hand in dismantling the “political isolation” law that prohibited members of the old [Mubarak] regime from contesting elections, and is widely seen as the civilian face acting on SCAF’s behalf. Mansour appointed Hazem el-Beblawi as Prime Minister, a former finance minister and Paris-trained economist who has worked with international financial institutions and taught at the American University in Cairo; a recent editorial in the New York Times has called on him to slash Egypt’s energy subsides, a move he whole-heartedly supports. Ahmed Galal, a Boston University-trained economist and Word Bank veteran has been named Finance Minister; Nabil Fahmy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States, is the Foreign Minister who also served as the head of opposition National Salvation Front, whose members have received funding from the State Department-linked National Endowment for Democracy.

The icing on the cake is the appointment of opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei as interim Vice President, who is a trustee of the US International Crisis Group and a former senior UN diplomat, who has been a staunch advocate of IMF medicine for Egypt. Some of the loudest voices calling for Egypt’s democratization during Mubarak are now key figures in the interim government. Members of the opposition with no public mandate to speak of are now in power after jailing the democratically elected president, a move that reflects their commitment to democracy as a principle, or lack thereof. If mass protests against Morsi amounted to a majority at the ballot box, the opposition could have constitutionally and legally removed him from power through a scheduled parliamentary vote – what the Egyptian people got was an opportunistic collusion between SCAF and members of the opposition to usurp power. Morsi supporters will not soon concede to a sullen acceptance of the coup, but any armed insurrection on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood won’t go down well, seeing as SCAF has them severely out-gunned.

Recent polls taken before the June 30 protests showed that SCAF’s approval rating had reached 94 percent while the Muslim Brotherhood’s rating was at 28 percent and the opposition’s at 38 percent. It’s strange that Egypt’s anti-Morsi activists would place their trust in SCAF given its extensive crackdown on civilian protestors since the revolution began, and certainly no one can deny that the Muslim Brotherhood was isolated during its final days. It is highly unlikely that Morsi would ever be reinstated at this point, and the interim government can be expected to pursue austerity measures, economic restructuring, and a foreign policy in step with Western-Gulf states. The military’s strong grip over the economy (estimates suggest that military-connected enterprises account for 10 percent to 40 percent of the Egyptian economy) and its monopoly on force make it a political construct that won’t be blown down by revolutionary winds so easily, and as long as it enjoys backing from the United States, expect SCAF to remain firmly entrenched. It should be of no surprise if the many who made their voices heard in Tahrir Square take to the streets yet again in the coming months with one thing on their mind – third time’s the charm.

By Edward Snowden

13 July, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

NSA Whistleblower asks for support from international community and human rights campaigners

Edward Snowden along with Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks (left) at a meeting with human rights campaigners in Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow today where he released the following statement. (Photograph: Tanya Lokshina/Human Rights Watch)

Hello. My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates.

It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.

That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.

Since that time, the government and intelligence services of the United States of America have attempted to make an example of me, a warning to all others who might speak out as I have. I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression. The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists. It demanded Hong Kong return me outside of the framework of its laws, in direct violation of the principle of non-refoulement – the Law of Nations. It has threatened with sanctions countries who would stand up for my human rights and the UN asylum system. It has even taken the unprecedented step of ordering military allies to ground a Latin American president’s plane in search for a political refugee. These dangerous escalations represent a threat not just to the dignity of Latin America, but to the basic rights shared by every person, every nation, to live free from persecution, and to seek and enjoy asylum.

Yet even in the face of this historically disproportionate aggression, countries around the world have offered support and asylum. These nations, including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world. It is my intention to travel to each of these countries to extend my personal thanks to their people and leaders.

I announce today my formal acceptance of all offers of support or asylum I have been extended and all others that may be offered in the future. With, for example, the grant of asylum provided by Venezuela’s President Maduro, my asylee status is now formal, and no state has a basis by which to limit or interfere with my right to enjoy that asylum. As we have seen, however, some governments in Western European and North American states have demonstrated a willingness to act outside the law, and this behavior persists today. This unlawful threat makes it impossible for me to travel to Latin America and enjoy the asylum granted there in accordance with our shared rights.

This willingness by powerful states to act extra-legally represents a threat to all of us, and must not be allowed to succeed. Accordingly, I ask for your assistance in requesting guarantees of safe passage from the relevant nations in securing my travel to Latin America, as well as requesting asylum in Russia until such time as these states accede to law and my legal travel is permitted. I will be submitting my request to Russia today, and hope it will be accepted favorably.

If you have any questions, I will answer what I can.

Thank you.

Whistleblower Edward Joseph Snowden is a US former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who leaked details of top-secret US and British government mass surveillance programs to the press.

By Bryan Dyne

13 July, 2013

@ WSWS.org

Newly released documents reveal the depth of collaboration between Microsoft and the National Security Agency in collecting data from the company’s users, including communications and documents sent or accessed over Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. They also show that Microsoft worked with the NSA to break the company’s own encryption, ensuring the fullest possible access for the agency.

The latest files, provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in the Guardian, come from the the Special Source Operations (SSO) division. The SSO overseas all programs that target US telecommunications via corporate partnerships, of which Prism, exposed by Snowden last month, is just one.

What has been released so far reveals how Microsoft in particular worked with the US intelligence apparatus to provide full access to all documents and messages of the company’s users. The NSA referred to the program as a “team sport.”

Microsoft—which boasts the slogan is “your privacy is our priority”—was reportedly involved in the Prism program to provide NSA data since 2007, the year the program began. While Microsoft claims that it only submits to “legal processes” initiated by the government, it does not specify what those are. Such a vague statement could mean anything, especially since it is now known that the NSA operates under a set of laws secretly overseen and interpreted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

According to the documents, a major project between Microsoft and the NSA involved handing over the data passing through Outlook.com, Microsoft’s primary email client, which includes Hotmail. Last July, the NSA became concerned that it would be unable to intercept the encrypted messages being passed through Outlook’s chat service. In response, Microsoft worked with the agency to break its own encryption.

A document from 26 December 2012 states: “MS [Microsoft], working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal” with the need to bypass Outlook’s encryption. “These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.” This was a full two months before Outlook.com went live to the public.

At the time, the NSA already had full, unencrypted access to all emails sent via Outlook.com. “For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption,” the documents state. The only difficulty was collecting email aliases, which can make tracking specific people slightly more difficult. However, as one entry states, “The FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) team is working with Microsoft to understand” this feature and overcome it.

Microsoft’s collusion with the NSA also extends to the SkyDrive cloud storage service introduced last year, which now houses documents of 250 million users and is fully integrated into Windows 8 and the latest Office suite. The company worked “for many months” with the FBI to allow Prism full access to the service without any separate or special authorization.

This means, according to a document dated April 8, 2013, “that analysts will no longer have to make a special request to SSO for this—a process step that many analysts may not have known about”.

In other words, every analyst at the NSA has full and easy access to everything that is on SkyDrive. This includes essentially every file that is generated in Microsoft Word, Excel, and other office programs on a Windows 8 machine, which automatically “backs up” everything to the SkyDrive.

In the words of the NSA, “this new capability will result in a much more complete and timely collection response” of the data of Microsoft users. The agency then applauded Microsoft: “This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established.”

The NSA has also worked intensively with Skype, both before and after it was bought by Microsoft, to gain access to the text, audio and video communications of Skype’s estimated 800 million users. Despite its denials, Skype does appear to have the ability to collect all the information and data from all calls and hand them over to the US government. This throws into question denials of other companies, such as Facebook, Google and others, on the same question.

According to the files, the NSA began working on integrating Skype into Prism in November 2010 but didn’t succeed until February 4, 2011. Two days later, it began full audio communications interception. “Feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete,” reads the initial reports on collected Skype calls.

Now, even video communications are collected. “The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete ‘picture’”, bragged one NSA file from July 14, 2012, when the NSA tripled its ability to collect Skype video communications.

These revelations underscore the extent to which the government has relied on, and received the active assistance of, giant companies that control much of the Internet and telecommunications systems. Through relations with these corporations—including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, and others—the government has been able to tap into the Internet backbone, collect online communications, and gather the phone records of hundreds of millions of people.

These companies are all part of a state, intelligence and corporate nexus that has been engaged in the systematic and illegal violation of the democratic rights of the population of the United States and the world.

By Bill Van Auken

12 July, 2013

@ WSWS.org

The Obama administration has announced it will go ahead with the shipment of four F-16 fighter planes to the Egyptian military, signaling its intention to ignore US laws requiring a cutoff of aid to countries that have suffered military coups.

This gesture of support to the so-called interim government, which is dominated by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and its top commander, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, comes as the ruling junta is intensifying its police-state crackdown against supporters of ousted Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi.

The ruling junta has cynically justified its orders to arrest leading figures in the Muslim Brotherhood by claiming that they bear responsibility for the army’s July 8 massacre of at least 55 demonstrators who had marched on Cairo’s Republican Guard compound, where Mursi was believed to be held prisoner. The military and the Egyptian media have cast the incident, in which several hundred other unarmed demonstrators were wounded, as a “terrorist” attack on the army.

The bloodletting has raised the specter of a civil war erupting in Egypt, with mounting concerns that demonstrations called by Muslim Brotherhood supporters for Friday after the mosques let out, and a rival rally called by their opponents among the bourgeois liberal and pseudo-left forces of the Tamarod (“rebel”) coalition in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, could produce clashes in the Egyptian capital.

Egypt’s public prosecutor has ordered the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and at least nine other senior members of the Islamist party, while hundreds of others are being hunted down for participating in Monday’s bloody protest.

The Muslim Brotherhood charged that the arrest orders could serve as a pretext for the violent breakup of a protest vigil that the group and thousands of its supporters have been staging at the Rabaa Adawiya mosque in Cairo.

Even while the security forces are hunting down Muslim Brotherhood leaders, Hazem el-Beblawi, the free-market economist who has been named prime minister as one of the civilian front men for the army’s rule, told Reuters that he was offering posts to Muslim Brotherhood leaders in a cabinet that he expects to be filled by next week. The news agency said that the MB has rejected the offer, vowing not to participate in a regime brought to power by a “fascist coup.”

The Obama administration has shown no such reticence in dealing with the coup regime. While the Pentagon issued a brief statement Wednesday saying that the US president had ordered it to “review our assistance to the government of Egypt” in light of “the events of last week,” as in similar statements issued by the White House and the State Department, it carefully avoided using the word “coup.”

A legal finding that a coup had taken place would require that the US administration cut off some $1.5 billion in annual aid to Egypt, $1.3 billion of which goes directly to the country’s military. Since 1948, Washington has poured some $40 billion in military aid into the country, ensuring the Egyptian military’s dominance of the country’s political life.

More significantly, the White House has ordered a scheduled delivery of four F-16 fighter jets to proceed as planned. It is part of an arms package consisting of 20 of the warplanes, eight of which have already been delivered.

White House spokesman Jay Carney declared Wednesday that it would not be “in the best interests of the United States to make immediate changes to our assistance programs.”

Multiple press reports have pointed to a direct US role in the coup that toppled Mursi. In a July 6 report, the New York Times detailed discussions involving US national security adviser Susan Rice and other US officials in the period proceeding Mursi’s overthrow.

According to the report, an Arab foreign minister “acting as an emissary of Washington” delivered a final ultimatum to Mursi ordering either that he accept being turned into a figurehead president with a government appointed by the military, or that the military would overthrow him.

Mursi’s foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, then held discussions with the US ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, and with national security adviser Rice and was told, after Mursi rejected the offer, that the coup would begin.

“Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” a Mursi aide texted an associate, the Times reported. Because of its unceasing meddling in the country’s affairs, Washington is referred to by Egyptians as “Mother America.”

In a separate report Thursday, Al Jazeera cited documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Investigative Reporting Program at University of California Berkeley establishing that the Obama administration had “quietly funded senior Egyptian opposition figures who called for toppling of the country’s now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi.”

The funding, provided under the guise of “democracy assistance,” came through various US agencies, such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) and the US Agency for International Development (AID).

Al Jazeera reported that these entities, which carry out functions previously filled covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency, “sent funds to certain organisations in Egypt, mostly run by senior members of anti-Morsi political parties who double as NGO activists.”

This description applies to a number of pseudo-left organizations, including the Revolutionary Socialists, which backed the coup, after having previously claimed that the electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood represented a victory for the Egyptian revolution. The role of these groups has been to assist the Egyptian bourgeoisie by working to divert the mass struggles that erupted against Mursi’s right-wing policies into political support for the military coup.

In addition to the US funding, the Tamarod was backed by major political and financial interests linked to the old US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled by the mass revoluionary struggles of 2011.

“Working behind the scenes, members of the old establishment, some of them close to Mr. Mubarak and the country’s top generals, also helped finance, advise and organize those determined to topple the Islamist leadership, including Naguib Sawiris, a billionaire and an outspoken foe of the Brotherhood,” the New York Times reported.

Sawiris told the Times that he “donated use of the nationwide offices and infrastructure of the political party he built, the Free Egyptians. He provided publicity through his popular television network and his major interest in Egypt’s largest private newspaper. He even commissioned the production of a popular music video that played heavily on his network.

“Tamarod did not even know it was me!” he said. “I am not ashamed of it.”

In a further indication of the character of the anti-Mursi coup, the right-wing oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf have rushed to provide economic assistance to the military junta. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have between them pledged $12 billion in aid, clearly viewing military rule as more compatible with their own dictatorial regimes than the Muslim Brotherhood government.