Dialogica

Hip-Hop & Tzol de la Maria S.A. "Regele" democratiei de cumetrie

2012-01-30T22:42:00.010+01:00

Cât citiţi aceste rânduri, ‘jde oameni „de bine“, confuzi da' sătui de licheaua securistă, aleasă la căpitănia României de milioanele de "diasporizaţi" (... în ţări relativ mai calde decât este Balcaniada neoliberalismului mioritic din mahalaua Europei!) dau "like-a-like" (maneaua Faecesbook-ului, gestul reflex, condiţionat de frenezia tabloidă a numitorului comun!) pe „ştirile“ „Prinţişorului“ Radu, bâlbâindu-se ca un disc zgâriat în „imaginile“ limbii de lemn, dar cu sângele albastru... de Prusia! Dar, şi mai bine, să ascultăm "bardul" (aproape) în original:

“Majestatea S.A. […cu capital anonim, Ponzificat la Bursa non-valorilor Dâmboviţene] Regele va avea întâlniri cu personalități din mediul de afaceri, diplomatic şi […] imaginea Majestatii S.A.le îmbunătăţeşte [iar]imaginea românilor în Italia, […unde] era nevoie de o [surprize-surprize] imagine pozitivă în mediul diplomatic, de un mesaj de încredere în mediul investitorilor şi de un cuvânt cald, deschis şi prietenos (sic!)... În aceste momente, şi nu numai, Majestatea S.A. Regele era cel mai în măsură să le transmită!”

NATO ţie, dă-mi-o şUE: Poezie curată, frate! Adevărat Hip-Hop & Tzol de la beizadeaua scăpătată!

The Great Austerity War: What Caused the US Deficit Crisis and Who Should Pay to Fix It?

2012-01-30T22:08:00.002+01:00

by James Crotty, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Abstract

Rapidly rising deficits at both the federal and state and local government levels, along with prospective long-term financing problems in the Social Security and Medicare programs, have triggered a one-sided austerity-focused class war in the US and around the globe. A coalition of the richest and most economically powerful segments of society, conservative politicians who represent their interests, and right-wing populist groups like the Tea Party has demanded that deficits be eliminated by severe cuts at all levels of government in spending that either supports the poor and the middle class or funds crucial public investment. It also demands tax cuts for the rich and for business. These demands constitute a deliberate attempt to destroy the New Deal project, begun in the 1930s, whose goal was to subject capitalism to democratic control. In this paper I argue that our deficit crisis is the result of a shift from the New-Deal-based economic model of the early post-war period to today's neoliberal, free-market model. The new model has generated slow growth, rising inequality and rising deficits. Rising deficits in turn created demands for austerity. After tracing the long-term evolution of our current deficit crisis, I show that this crisis should be resolved primarily by raising taxes on upper-income households and large corporations, cutting war spending, and adopting a Canadian or European style health care system. Calls for massive government spending cuts should be seen as what they are - an attack by the rich and powerful against the basic interests of the American people.

Key Words: deficit crisis; fiscal crisis; austerity; Social Security crisis; health care crisis.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

2012-01-23T20:58:00.002+01:00

As anti-capitalist protesters take to the streets, mathematics has teased apart the global economic network to show who's really pulling the strings...

Updated 13:15 24 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
Magazine issue 2835. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Finance and Economics Topic Guide

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world [...], science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies (see below), mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere...

The Occupy Wall Street movement spreads to London (Image: Dave Stock)

But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies:

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy
(Data: PLoS One)

The War on Democracy

2012-01-19T23:08:00.002+01:00

by John Pilger

Published 19 January 2012

From the Chagos Islands to Pakistan, innocent civilians are pawns to America, backed by Britain. In our compliant political culture, this deadly game seldom speaks its name.

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling, girls!"

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said: "I didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lisette. "When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."

Air Base of Diego Garcia located in the Indian Ocean

Reference : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Diego_Garcia_%28satellite%29.jpg

Lisette, her family and hundreds of the other islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a journey of a thousand miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser - bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two of the women on board miscarried.

Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette's youngest children, Jollice and Regis, died within a week of each other. "They died of sadness," she said. "They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home for ever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading "Maintaining the Fiction", the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "reclassifying" the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along". Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime - in exchange for a $14m discount off a US Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on the agenda of a group of British "defence" correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. "There is nothing in our files," said the MoD, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets on two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it Camp Justice.

Wipe-out

What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole political culture behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination in its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis". Longer and bloodier than any other war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "It never happened . . . Even while it was happening it wasn't happening." Last July, the American historian William Blum published his updated "summary of the charming record of US foreign policy". Since the Second World War, the United States has:

1) Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected.

2) Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.

3) Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

4) Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

5) Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism - but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power, or a society occupying strategically useful territory and deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to the 11 September 2001 attacks, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (in "Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists, but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Margaret Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered in what the CIA described as "the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century". This estimate does not include the third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine-guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of uncoercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of advertising to soundbites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that "disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in "American Football":

Hallelujah.

Praise the Lord for all good things . . .

We blew their balls into shards of dust,

Into shards of fucking dust . . .

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers sitting in front of their computer-game screens type in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines as Brand Obama was elected: "Momentous, spine-tingling" (the Guardian). "The American future," Simon Schama wrote, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed with anticipation." The San Francisco Chronicle saw a spiritual "Lightworker . . . who can . . . usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America's largest creditor and the new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia, Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long-planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Surveillance state

Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defence Authorisation Act, a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens secretly and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to the US. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and, in effect, repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and "support [the] civil authorities". In other words, US troops are to be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons - the consequence of a "market" extremism that, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14trn in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young, jobless, homeless, incarcerated African Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will feature "a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe, where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of £84bn in jobs and services exceeds even the amount of tax "legally" avoided by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but with a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen and which, as Hywel Williams wrote following the 9/11 attacks, "can itself be a form of self-righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claimed to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain in order to "protect the intelligence agencies" - the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos Islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," Lisette said. "And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others." Such is the eloquent answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"

I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain next to her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

Corporate "justice" rears its ugly head...

2012-01-17T15:03:00.001+01:00

Is the genocidal criminal, Augusto Pinochet, escaping what ought to have been just retribution after Margaret Thatcher's extra-judicial shenanigans going to have the last laugh?...

Pinochet judge Baltasar Garzon goes on trial in Spain

via the BBC News

Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who famously indicted late Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet, has found himself in the dock for the first time.

He went on trial at the supreme court in Madrid charged with illegally authorising police to bug the conversations of lawyers with clients.

It is the first of three private prosecutions Judge Garzon is facing.

Suspended from Spain's National Court in 2010, he could see an end to his career if convicted.

Dressed in his own judge's robes, Mr Garzon, 56, sat next to his lawyer in court and listened as the presiding judge read out the charges.

Judge Garzon's supporters say he is being unfairly targeted by people who resent his work on human rights over the past two decades.

In a second case opening on 24 January, he is charged with exceeding his powers by ordering an investigation into the disappearance of tens of thousands of people during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and under Franco's dictatorship.

No date has yet been set for his third trial, where he is accused of taking bribes over payments he allegedly received for bank-sponsored seminars in New York.

'Absolute corruption'

If convicted in his first trial, Judge Garzon would not go to prison but could be suspended from the legal profession for 17 years.

Arriving at the court, he smiled as he was applauded by a small crowd of supporters who were held back behind a police line.

The judge is accused of overstepping his authority by ordering the recording of prison conversations between three defendants and their lawyers.

He sat quietly with his lawyer, reading papers and taking notes, as a seven-judge panel heard a clerk read out the charges and background to the case.

Asked by the Associated Press news agency how he was feeling, Mr Garzon said: "Fine, just fine."

Spanish law allows the bugging of prison conversations involving terrorism suspects but is vaguer on non-terrorism cases.

It does allow for bugging if the investigating judge believes the conversations will yield evidence relevant to an investigation.

One of the signs held by the protesters outside the court read: "They are covering up their crimes by going after Garzon."

Gaspar Llamazares, an MP for the United Left party, told AFP news agency that Mr Garzon was being persecuted for this work to expose the crimes of the Franco era.

"We are faced with an act that shames Spanish democracy, justice and the supreme court itself judging an innocent person for trying to judge Francoism and also for trying to fight corruption," he said.

"I think the damage is done and the sentence is pre-determined."

Another protester, 68-year-old Angel Fernandez, said: "I don't know the law, but I can see there is an injustice.

"I can see there is absolute corruption and that they are not judging those who should be judged."

The Streets of 2012

2012-01-09T00:17:00.000+01:00

by Naomi Wolf

NEW YORK – What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent?

The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are likely to see much greater centralization of top-down suppression – and a rash of laws around the developed and developing world that restrict human rights. But we are also likely to see significant grassroots reaction.

What we are witnessing in the drama of increasingly globalized protest and repression is the subplot that many cheerleaders for neoliberal globalization never addressed: the power of globalized capital to wreak havoc with the authority of democratically elected governments. From the perspective of global corporate interests, closed societies like China are more business-friendly than troublesome democracies, where trade unions, high standards of human-rights protection, and a vigorous press increase costs.

All over the world, the pushback against protest looks similar, suggesting that state and corporate actors are learning “best practices” for repressing dissent while maintaining democratic facades. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron routinely impugns human-rights laws; the Metropolitan Police have sought authority to use baton rounds – foot-long projectiles that have caused roughly a dozen deaths, including that of children, in Northern Ireland – on peaceful protesters; and a police report on the threat of terrorism, distributed to “trusted partners” among London businesses, included updates about Occupy protests and referred to “suspected activists.”

The UK has stringent internal-security legislation, but it never had a law like the United States Patriot Act. After anti-austerity protests in early 2011, followed by riots in major cities in August, the Metropolitan Police claimed powers to monitor private social-media accounts and smartphones. And, under the guise of protecting this summer’s Olympics against terrorism, the British military is establishing a massive base in London from which SAS (special forces) teams will operate – a radical departure from Britain’s traditional civil policing.

In Israel, Ha’aretz reports that Occupy-type protests have been met with police violence, including a beating of a 15-year-old girl, and threats of random arrest. Israel, like Britain, has seen a push, seemingly out of nowhere, to enact new laws crippling newsgathering and criminalizing dissent: a new law makes it potentially a crime to donate to left-wing organizations, human-rights laws have been weakened, and even investigative reporting has become more dangerous, owing to stricter libel penalties. Ha’aretz calls the push “the new feudalism.”

Finally, in America, the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress in December, allows the president to suspend due process for US citizens, detain them indefinitely, and render them for torture. One should not be surprised to see similar legislation adopted in democracies worldwide.

Not only are laws criminalizing previously legal dissent, organizing, and reporting being replicated in advanced democracies; so are violent tactics against protesters, backed by the increasing push in countries with long traditions of civil policing to militarize law enforcement.

Indeed, increasingly sophisticated weapons systems and protective equipment are being disseminated to civilian police officers. In the US, the federal government has spent an estimated $34 billion since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to arm state and local police forces with battlefield-grade hardware. Investigative reporting has also revealed cross-pollination of anti-protest training: local police from cities like Austin, Texas, have been sent to Israel for training in crowd control and other tactics.

The globalization of mercenaries to crack down on dissent is also proceeding apace. Mercenaries are important in a time of global grassroots protest, because it is easier to turn a foreigner’s guns or batons against strangers than it is to turn the military or police against fellow citizens. Erik Prince, the head of the most infamous outfit, Academi (formerly Xe Services, formerly Blackwater), has relocated to the UAE, while Pakistani mercenaries have been recruited in large numbers to Bahrain, where protesters have been met with increasingly violent repression.

But this apparently coordinated pushback against global protest movements is not yet triumphant – not even in China, as the people of Wukan have shown. While the outcome of the villagers’ protest against the local government’s confiscation of their land remains uncertain, the standoff reveals new power at the grassroots level: social media allows sharper, coordinated gatherings and the rapid dissemination of news unfiltered by official media. The Internet is also disseminating templates of what real democracy looks like – instantly and worldwide.

Not surprisingly, people use this technology in ways that indicate that they have little interest in being cordoned off into conflicting and competing ethnicities, nationalities, or religious identities. Overwhelmingly, they want simple democracy and economic self-determination.

That agenda is in direct conflict with the interests of global capital and governments that have grown accustomed to operating without citizen oversight. It is a conflict that can be expected to heighten dramatically in 2012, as protesters’ agendas – from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Moscow – gain further coherence.

Much is at stake. Depending on the outcome, the world will come to look either more like China – open for business, but closed for dissent – or more like Denmark.

Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/

Eric Hobsbawm on 2011: ‘It reminds me of 1848...’

2011-12-24T10:06:00.001+01:00

By Andrew Whitehead
BBC World Service News

The renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm has watched the revolutions of 2011 with excitement - and notes that it's now the middle class, not the working class, that is making waves.

"It was an enormous joy to discover once again that it's possible for people to get down in the streets, to demonstrate, to overthrow governments," says EJ Hobsbawm at the close of a year of revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world.

He has lived his life in the shadow, or the glow, of revolutions.

Born just months before the Russian revolution of 1917, he was a Communist for most of his adult life - as well as an innovative and influential writer and thinker.

He has been a historian of revolution, and at times an advocate of revolutionary change.

Now in his mid-nineties, his continuing passion for politics is reflected in the title of his most recent book How to Change the World - and in his keen interest in the Arab Spring.

"I certainly felt a sense of excitement and relief," he says, talking to me in his north London home, which is strolling distance from Hampstead Heath.

Books about jazz - he was once a jazz critic - jostle for space on the shelves with works of history in several languages.

"If there is to be a revolution, it should be a bit like this. At least in the first few days. People turning up in the streets, demonstrating for the right things."

But, he adds: "We know it won't last."

The historian in him draws a parallel between the Arab Spring of 2011 and Europe's "year of revolutions" almost two centuries earlier, when an uprising in France was followed by others in the Italian and German states, in the Hapsburg Empire, and beyond.

Arab democracies?

"It reminds me of 1848 - another self-propelled revolution which started in one country then spread all over the continent in a short time."

For those who once crowded Tahrir Square and are now worried about the fate of their revolution, he has a word of comfort.

"Two years after 1848, it looked as if it had all failed. In the long run, it hadn't failed. A good deal of liberal advances had been made. So it was an immediate failure but a longer term partial success - though no longer in the form of a revolution."

However, with the possible exception of Tunisia, he sees little prospect of liberal democracy or European-style representative government in the Arab world.

Not enough notice has been taken, he says, of the differences between Arab countries in the throes of mass protests.

"We are in the middle of a revolution - but it isn't the same revolution."

"What unites them is a common discontent and common mobilisable forces - a modernising middle class, particularly a young, student middle class, and of course technology which makes it today very much easier to mobilise protests."

The importance of social media extends to the other global movement of the past year, the Occupy protests North America and Europe. That too has caught Eric Hobsbawm's attention, and to a large extent his admiration.

The movement dates back, he argues, to Barack Obama's election campaign, which successfully mobilised otherwise politically inactive young people, largely through the internet.

"The actual occupations in most cases have not been mass protests, not the 99%, but the famous 'stage army' of students and counter culture. Sometimes that has found an echo in public opinion - and in the anti-Wall Street, anti-capitalist occupations, that is clearly the case."

Yet across the world, the old left of which Hobsbawm was a part - as participant, chronicler and would-be moderniser - has been on the margins of the mass protests and occupations.

"The traditional left was geared to a kind of society that is no longer in existence or is going out of business. It believed very largely in the mass labour movement as the carrier of the future. Well, we've been de-industrialised, so that's no longer possible.

"The most effective mass mobilisations today are those which start from a new modernised middle class, and particularly the enormously swollen body of students.

"They are more effective in countries in which, demographically, young men and women are a far greater part of the population than they are in Europe."

Wider push

Eric Hobsbawm doesn't expect the Arab revolutions to ricochet still further round the world, at least not as the harbinger of wider revolution

More likely, he believes, is a wider push for gradual reform of the sort which, in the 1980s, saw a movement of the young and middle class in South Korea wrest power from the military.

Of the political dramas still playing out in Arabic speaking nations, he makes a point of harking back to Iran in 1979, the first revolution to be couched in the political language of Islam.

One aspect of that revolution has found an echo in the Arab world in recent months.

"The people who had made concessions to Islam, but were not Islamists themselves, were marginalised. And that included reformers, liberals, communists.

"What emerges as the mass ideology is not the ideology of those that started off the demonstrations."

While the Arab Spring has brought him joy, this aspect of it he regards as an "unexpected and not necessarily welcome" development.

Andrew Whitehead's interview with Eric Hobsbawm will be broadcast on the BBC World Service's World Today Programme.

The imperial delusions of the United States

2011-12-23T21:35:00.000+01:00

Almost ten years after the 9/11 attacks, US foreign policy remains aggressive and unrealistic.

by Robert Jensen

Ten years ago, critics of the United States' mad rush to war were right, but it didn't matter.

Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes.

It didn't matter because neither the public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments. People wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized the opportunity to use US military power. Critical thinking became a mark not of conscientious citizenship but of dangerous disloyalty.

We were right, but the wars came.

The destructive capacity of the US military meant quick "victories" that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, it became clearer that the position staked out by early opponents was correct - the wars not only were illegal (conforming to neither international nor constitutional law) and immoral (fought in ways that guaranteed large-scale civilian casualties and displacement), but a failure on any pragmatic criteria. The US military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organisation, but a decade later we are weaker and our sense of safety is more fragile. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as predicted.

Ten years later, we are still right and it still doesn't matter.

There's a simple reason for this: Empires rarely learn in time, because power tends to dull people's capacity for critical self-reflection. While ascending to power, empires believe themselves to be invincible. While declining in power, they cling desperately to old myths of remembered glory.

Today, the United States is morally bankrupt and spiritually broken. The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles - delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world's resources by whatever means necessary. As the United States grew in wealth and power, bounty for the chosen came at the cost of misery for the many.

After World War II, as the United States became the central character not just in the Americas but on the world stage, the principles didn't change. US foreign policy sought to deepen and extend US power around the world, especially in the energy-rich and strategically crucial Middle East; always with an eye on derailing any Third World societies' attempts to pursue a course of independent development outside the US sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to US dominance from other powerful states.

Does that summary sound like radical hysteria? Recall this statement from President Jimmy Carter's 1980 State of the Union address: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." Democrats and Republicans, before and after, followed the same policy.

The George W Bush administration offered a particularly intense ideological fanaticism, but the course charted by the Obama administration is much the same. Consider this 2006 statement by Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both administrations:

"I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that - both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries."

If the new boss sounds a lot like the old boss, it's because the problem isn't just bad leaders but a bad system. That's why a critique of today's wars sounds a lot like critiques of wars past. Here's Martin Luther King, Jr's assessment of the imperial war of his time: "[N]o one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over."

Will our autopsy report read "global war on terror"?

That sounds harsh, and it's tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honour those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the US empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11. But given the events of the past decade, there is no way to take the politics out of the anniversary.

We should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day. But as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality: While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.

That's why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti-war/anti-empire movement. Being right means nothing if we failed to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation.

Ten years later, I feel the same thing that I felt on 9/11 - an indescribable grief over the senseless death of that day and of days to come.

Robert Jensen is a professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin. His latest book is titled, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

It's Groundhog Day!

2011-12-17T23:26:00.007+01:00

Panetta to "pay tribute to the Libyan people"

As the Military-Industrial Complex's Chief (Pent-up...) Goon, Leon (Panetta) is scouring the Earth (from Iraq via Turkey and now into the NATO-"liberated" Libya), reenacting the Monroe Doctrine ...

... to ensure the American Empire's strategic assets aren't being threatened by the Arab spring revolutionary movements, we take a look at the unfinished business in Tahrir Square via al-Jazeera's dramatic footages of demonstrators beaten in a (second) day of clashes resulting in 10 (ten) people being killed and more than 430 wounded...

Sources: Activist Post and al-Jazeera

Mary (whether "virgin" or merely "young"!) Higgs...mas, Bosons!

2011-12-15T08:03:00.012+01:00

"Our Christian tradition of 2,000 years is that Mary remains a virgin and that Jesus is the son of God, not Joseph", says Lyndsay Freer, spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese of Auckland where this billboard was defaced within hours of its unveiling...

Yet, all this "traditional" indoctrinating gibberish (which is hardly about the translation of the word "almah") is about to perish at the scientists' hands rather than of the scholars... Though it may not be the best Christmas pressie, it is humanity's best chance ever to evade the mysticist narratives prevalent in the Age of Ghost-Modernism...

LHC: Higgs boson 'may have been glimpsed'

By Paul Rincon,
Science editor, BBC News website, Geneva

The most coveted prize in particle physics - the Higgs boson - may have been glimpsed, say researchers reporting at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.

Two teams at the LHC have seen hints of what may well prove to be the Higgs

The particle is purported to be the means by which everything in the Universe obtains its mass.

Scientists say that two experiments at the LHC see hints of the Higgs at the same mass, fuelling huge excitement.

But the LHC does not yet have enough data to claim a discovery.

Finding the Higgs would be one of the biggest scientific advances of the last 60 years. It is crucial for allowing us to make sense of the Universe, but has never been observed by experiments.

The Higgs boson

The Higgs is a sub-atomic particle that is predicted to exist, but has not yet been seen
It was proposed as a mechanism to explain mass by six physicists, including Peter Higgs, in 1964
It imparts mass to other fundamental particles via the associated Higgs field
It is the last missing member of the Standard Model, which explains how particles interact

Q&A: The Higgs boson

Six theoreticians, including the English physicist Peter Higgs, first proposed the Higgs mechanism in 1964

What is the Higgs boson?

The Higgs so far definitively exists only in the minds of theoretical physicists. There is a nearly complete theory for how the Universe works - all of the particles that make up atoms and molecules and all the matter we see, along with more exotic particles. This is called the Standard Model. However, there is a glaring hole in the theory: it does not explain how it is that all those particles have mass. The Higgs mechanism was proposed in 1964 by six physicists, including the Edinburgh-based theoretician Peter Higgs, as an explanation to fill this hole.

What is so important about mass?

Mass is, quite simply, a measure of how much stuff an object - a particle, a molecule, or a Yorkshire terrier - contains. If not for mass, all of the fundamental particles that make up atoms and terriers would whiz around at light speed, and the Universe as we know it could not have clumped up into matter. The Higgs mechanism proposes that there is a field permeating the Universe - the Higgs field - that allows particles to obtain their mass. Interactions with the field - with the Higgs bosons that come from it - are purported to give particles mass. This is not unlike a field of snow, in which trudging through impedes progress; your shoes interacting with snow particles slows you down.

How do scientists search for the Higgs boson?

Ironically, the Standard Model does not predict an exact mass for the Higgs itself. Particle accelerators such as the LHC are used to systematically search for the particle over a range of masses where it could plausibly be. The LHC works by smashing together two beams of the sub-atomic particles called protons at close to light speed. This generates a vast shower of particles that are only created at high energies. The Higgs will probably never be observed directly, but scientists at the LHC hope that a Higgs will momentarily exist in this soup of particles. If it behaves as researchers think it will, it should decay further into yet more particles, leaving a trail that could prove its existence.

It is not the first machine to hunt for the particle. The LEP machine, which ran at Cern from 1989-2000, ruled out the Higgs up to a certain mass, and the US Tevatron accelerator searched for the particle above this range before it was switched off this year. These data are still being analysed, and could yet be important in helping confirm or rule out the particle. The LHC, as the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, is just the most high-profile of the experiments that could shed light on the Higgs hunt.

When will we know if we have found it?

As with all particle physics, this is a tricky point. The Higgs should show up in a particular range of masses, and signals that indicate it is there in the mess of particles will show up as a kind of "bump" in the data. Making sure that bump is really due to a Higgs is a different matter. If you flip a coin ten times and get eight heads, you might think the coin is somehow "loaded". But only after hundreds of flips can you say so with the kind of certainty that physics requires for a formal "discovery". What is clear about the LHC results so far is that the two teams working to find it do not have enough data - enough "flips" - to say that the Higgs has been found or excluded beyond doubt. More experiments will be needed for that.

How do we know the Higgs exists?

Strictly speaking, we do not, and that is what is so exciting about the status of the hunt at the LHC - the giant experiment that was built in part to hunt for the Higgs. In its simplest form, the theory predicts a "Standard Model Higgs", which is the focus of the current hunt. But history has shown that predictions from theory can be wrong, and the absence of the simplest Higgs particle may suggest that it exists at different energies, decays into different particles, or perhaps doesn't exist at all.

What if we don't find it?

Most professional physicists would say that finding the Higgs in precisely the form that theory predicts would actually be a disappointment. Large-scale projects such as the LHC are built with the aim of expanding knowledge, and confirming the existence of the Higgs right where we expect it - while it would be a triumph for our understanding of physics - would be far less exciting than not finding it. If future studies definitively confirm that the Higgs does not exist, much if not all of the Standard Model would have to be rewritten. That in turn would launch new lines of enquiry that would almost certainly revolutionise our understanding of the Universe, in much the same way as something missing in physics a century ago led to the development of the revolutionary ideas of quantum mechanics.

This basic building block of the Universe is a significant missing component of the Standard Model - the "instruction booklet" that describes how particles and forces interact.

Two separate experiments at the LHC - Atlas and CMS - have been conducting independent searches for the Higgs. Because the Standard Model does not predict an exact mass for the Higgs, physicists have to use particle accelerators like the LHC to systematically look for it across a broad search area.

At a seminar at Cern (the organisation that operates the LHC) on Tuesday, the heads of Atlas and CMS said they see "spikes" in their data at roughly the same mass: 124-125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV; this is about 130 times as heavy as the protons found in atomic nuclei).

"The excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting. We cannot exclude anything at this stage," said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the Atlas experiment.

Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the CMS experiment, said: "The excess is most compatible with a Standard Model Higgs in the vicinity of 124 GeV and below, but the statistical significance is not large enough to say anything conclusive.

"As of today, what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson."

'Exciting'

Prof Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of Cern, told BBC News: "Such signals can come and go… Although there is correspondence between the two experiments, we need more solid numbers."

None of the spikes seen by the experiments is at much more than the "two sigma" level of certainty.

A level of "five sigma" is required to claim a discovery, meaning there is less than a one in a million chance the data spike is down to a statistical fluke.

A level of "five sigma" is required to claim a discovery, meaning there is less than a one in a million chance the data spike is down to a statistical fluke.

Statistics of a 'discovery'

Particle physics has an accepted definition for a "discovery": a five-sigma level of certainty
The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect
Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a "loaded" coin
The "three sigma" level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row
Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
Unlikely results can occur if several experiments are being carried out at once - equivalent to several people flipping coins at the same time
With independent confirmation by other experiments, five-sigma findings become accepted discoveries

Another complicating factor is that these tantalising hints consist only of a handful of events among the billions of particle collisions analysed at the LHC.

Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of Cern told BBC News: "We can be misled by small numbers, so we need more statistics," but added: "It is exciting."

If it exists, the Higgs is very short-lived, quickly decaying - or transforming - into more stable particles. There are several different ways this can happen, which provides scientists with different routes to search for the boson.

They looked at particular decay routes for the Higgs that produce only a handful of events, but have the advantage of having less background noise in the data. This background noise consists of random combinations of events, some of which can look like Higgs decays.

Other decay modes produce more events - which are better for statistical certainty - but also more background noise. Prof Heuer said physicists were "squeezed" between these two options.

Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, called the quality of the LHC's results "exceptional", adding: "Within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists, but it is likely not going to be a Christmas present."

The simple fact that both Atlas and CMS seem to be seeing a data spike at the same mass has been enough to cause enormous excitement in the particle physics community.

The Age of Ghost-Modernism 2.0: Critical Thinking - The Awareness Revolution

2011-12-12T12:22:00.007+01:00

... the Key to Freeing Yourselves from the Corporate Shackles of the Military-Industrial Complex

Critical Thinking is the Key to Freedom

The Greatest Truth Never Told

Part 1. Denial - the Awareness Revolution: the key to changing the bankrupt neocon paradigm i.e. fast capitalism's operating system... click on the link for your own awakening!

Part 2. Anger

Part 3. Bargaining

Part 4. Depression

Part 5. Acceptance

The Age of Ghost-Modernism 2.0: Why Goldman... Sucks!

2011-12-04T01:43:00.012+01:00

Arriving more than a century late, following Marx's prediction about capitalism's eventual implosion, the two-stroke, boom-bust-ic system of human exploitation has finally started circling the drain...

We take another long look at the post-democratic, Genetically and Ideologically-Modified American Dream, where corporate agents, such as Goldman Sucks' endeavour to engineer virtually every major market manipulation marking capitalism's Great Depressions - from the thirties until the irreversible one of our noughties...

This system, which has been built on a centuries' old paradigmatic Lie, has long-passed its sell-by-date and is now in dire need of a qualitative (i.e. Revolutionary!) change to democratize its inequitable and eco-cidal economy. This is why...

The Great American Bubble Machine

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

By Matt Taibbi
April 5, 2010

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention […]

This article appeared in the July 9, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in its online archive.

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

The Feds vs. Goldman

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

BUBBLE #1 The Great Depression

Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

Wall Street's Big Win

Goldman... Sucks! Illustration by Victor Juhasz

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

Taibblog: Commentary on politics and the economy by Matt Taibbi

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leveragebased investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."

BUBBLE #2 Tech Stocks

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Fast-forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor's assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street.

It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair — but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace."

But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's cochairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national clichè that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline The Committee To Save The World. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by uptoolate bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."

The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. "Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s."

Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future."

Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent.

How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called "laddering," which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here's how it works: Say you're Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You'll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a "road show" to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price — let's say Bullshit.com's starting share price is $15 — in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO's future, knowledge that wasn't disclosed to the day trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company's price, which of course was to the bank's benefit — a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money.

Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman.

"Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator," Maier said. "They totally fueled the bubble. And it's specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation — manipulated up — and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in." In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations — a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.)

Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was "spinning," better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price — ensuring that those "hot" opening-price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business — effectively robbing all of Bullshit's new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company's bottom line into the private bank account of the company's CEO.

In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman's board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age — Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as "an egregious distortion of the facts" — shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. "The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk," then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. "Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business."

Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.

Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits — an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.")

For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent —they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.

BUBBLE #3 The Housing Craze

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those shitty mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con's mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can't write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn't know what they are.

Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance — known as credit default swaps — on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won't.

There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated — and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.

More regulation wasn’t exactly what Goldman had in mind. “The banks go crazy — they want it stopped,” says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. “Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped.”

Clinton's reigning economic foursome — “especially Rubin,” according to Greenberger — called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 11,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities — a third of which were sub-prime — much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.

Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation — no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody's projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.

Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners — old people, for God's sake — pretending the whole time that it wasn't grade D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. "The mortgage sector continues to be challenged," David Viniar, the bank's chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. "As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions … However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable." In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.

"That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb — they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing."

I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against — particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer — doesn't amount to securities fraud.

"It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."

Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million — about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.

The effects of the housing bubble are well known — it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.

And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion — an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."

But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down — and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.

BUBBLE #4 $4 a Gallon

by Trap: The Real Art of Protest

By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, sub-prime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years — the notion that housing prices never go down — was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling.

Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market — stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps — to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops — Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap — the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market — driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash — finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers — and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC," says Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions.

"I had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy," the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, 'Yeah, we've been issuing these letters for years now.' I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'"

The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over.

Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index — which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil — became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions — meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up."

Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by The New York Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives."

But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices — it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of 2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices.

In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn't just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World.

Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now," says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up."

Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it."

BUBBLE #5 Rigging the Bailout

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson green-lighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict of interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 — with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses — off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 — which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. "They cooked those first quarter results six ways from Sunday," says one hedge fund manager. "They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit."
Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout.

Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new "stress test" for banks seeking to repay TARP money — suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn't pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. "They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after," says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. "The government came out and said, 'To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC — which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before."

And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?

Fourteen million dollars.

That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion — yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.

How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

This should be a pitchfork-level outrage — but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore."

BUBBLE #6 Global Warming

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.

The new carbon credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy futures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.

This article originally appeared in RS 1082-1083 from July 9-23, 2009.

Let’s Talk About Inequality, Baby

2011-12-01T17:20:00.002+01:00

Posted on Nov 29, 2011

Occupy has opened up the conversation about economic inequality in the U.S.; UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi has had her hand in more than just the UC system; and a woman says she had an affair with Herman Cain for more than a decade. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

The links below open in a new window. The latest ones are at the top.

Debating inequality

Finally, and in large part because of the Occupy movement, the issue of economic inequality in the United States is being discussed and debated.

The return of the sitcom laugh track

After a few years of silence, sitcoms are giggling again...

The Democratic Promise of Occupy Wall Street

Regular politics in Washington now resembles an ecological dead zone where truth perishes in a polluted environment.

AT&T hits wall in bid to boost might

AT&T was once the poster child for antitrust enforcement / AP Photo

The Obama administration’s two-pronged attack on AT&T’s T-Mobile deal represents a sea change in antitrust enforcement that stands to have political and business ramifications far beyond dropped calls and deals for the hottest smartphone.

Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy

The world of animal rights is busy, perplexing and uneven.

Linda Katehi and the neoliberal reform of Greek Higher Education

linda_katehi_uc_chancellor

Linda Katehi has come under the spotlight because of her role as chancellor of UC Davis, her support of an openly corporate higher education and her stance regarding brutal police tactics against peaceful demonstrators at UC Davis.

Why the Media Misses and Distorts the Occupy Story

News dissector Danny Schechter on why mass media covers and miscovers Occupy Wall Street.

Woman Claims She Had 13-Year Affair With Herman Cain

An Atlanta woman is claiming that she had a 13-year-long extramarital affair with Herman Cain that ended eight months ago, shortly before the Georgia businessman launched his presidential campaign.

Give Thanks to Citizens With Cameras

A menacing crowd of protesters had encircled police and they had no choice but to defend themselves with pepper spray. Or at least, that is the story campus cops at UC Davis initially told. Video of the Nov. 18 incident tells a different story.

Reimagining a Global Ethic

2011-12-01T00:18:00.002+01:00

CREDIT: Thompson Chan (CC).

Michael Ignatieff, Joel Rosenthal

A global ethic, says Michael Ignatieff, stands for one world in which all human beings are entitled to equal moral concern, in which all of us have a common responsibility to a single habitat.

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, November 30, 2011

Click here to download

Introduction

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Good evening and welcome to the Carnegie Council. I have the privilege of introducing our guest and good friend, Michael Ignatieff.

Michael will be speaking on a topic chosen specifically for this occasion. It's a theme that has been discussed among our fellows earlier today. The theme is "Re-Imagining a Global Ethic."

To paraphrase George Orwell, every program at the Carnegie Council is special, but some are more special than others. This gathering is in the "more special than others" category, for three reasons.

First, this program is the highlighted event for the inaugural gathering of the Carnegie Council's Global Ethics Fellows. We have fellows in attendance from all around the world; fellows with research agendas, teaching interests, and community outreach programs that reach a genuinely global audience of scholars, teachers, students, civic leaders, and concerned citizens. Our fellows are creating a Global Ethics Network linking likeminded thought leaders through face-to-face meetings like this and through the Carnegie Council's digital platform, enabling us to share events like this around the world on an ongoing basis. We have ambitious plans for this new network, and so we're kicking it off with great excitement.

The second more special quality of this program this evening is that it marks the beginning of the Carnegie Council's centennial activities. The Carnegie Council will turn 100 years old in February 2014. Andrew Carnegie founded our Council in 1914 with a specific purpose in mind. He thought it was possible to avoid the great war that was on the horizon. In fact, he approached the project with a great degree of optimism. Carnegie thought that the barbarity of industrial war would become a thing of the past. Humanity was evolving, becoming more civilized with each passing decade. Common interests and common sense led him to believe that large-scale war would go into the dustbin of history, similar to other uncivilized practices, like slavery and dueling.

This was no idle dream. Carnegie rolled up his sleeves, in a very pragmatic fashion. He helped to build the Peace Palace at The Hague and lobbied heavily for the League of Nations. He saw both efforts as practical measures necessary to enable the peaceful resolution of conflict.

As part of our Council centennial, I'm preparing a letter to Mr. Carnegie, a report, 100 years on, which I hope to read at our Council's centennial gathering in 2014. I'm just beginning to draft this letter, so your ideas are most welcome. But I will confess that the outline of this letter is already established. The bad news will have to come first. The failures of the peace movement that began with such optimism in the early 20th century cannot be ignored. The 20th century brought three world wars, if we count the Cold War; it brought the Holocaust, genocide, famine, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. In short, we are left with many painful questions about man's inhumanity to man.

But I will also report some good news. The very building of international law and organization as a serious normative enterprise shapes international relations today. We have seen remarkable, if not unimaginable, shifts in expected and required behavior, especially in civil rights, human rights, and human security. Many of our aspirations for ethical standards are not yet achieved, and yet the agreement on their importance and relevance is clear. Where we go from here, in large part, will be up to us.

And here is where we reach the third and most important more special quality of this program, our guest speaker himself. When we began to plan our centennial activities, we knew immediately that we would reach out to Michael Ignatieff to provide us with some guidance and inspiration. Michael's professional career is well known. He has taught at Harvard, where he was director of the Carr Center for Human Rights, had various posts in the United Kingdom, and now at the University of Toronto. He has been a commentator, critic, broadcaster for the CBC in Canada and the BBC in the UK.

He is the author of many nonfiction and fiction books. Among my favorites, however—and perennial favorites among my students, some of whom are in the audience today—are his biography of Isaiah Berlin and his books on war, human rights, and nationalism. Michael has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, has won several literary awards, and was selected as the 2003 Gifford Lecturer, where he delivered the lectures that produced his book, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in the Age of Terror. Until earlier this year, Michael was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

We study ethics not only to better understand the world, but also to try to make the world a better place. Michael's life and career is exemplary in this way. A man of thought and action, I can think of no more inspirational role model. Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to our guest this evening, Michael Ignatieff.

Remarks

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: Thank you. Such a pleasure to be back, Joel. Thank you for coming.

I've been at this podium before. I remember going down these steps and having Kishore Mahbubani, then the very distinguished ambassador of Singapore, beat me up for half-an-hour. Whenever I go down those steps, I see Kishore's face.

It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a real honor. I must confess a good deal of apprehension, because I'm an odd bird. I've been a professional politician for six years, having been an academic, intellectual, and writer. I don't advise you to try that. But I did. It means I'm coming back to first loves and first passions—that is, the place of ethics in international affairs. I am by no means a specialist on global ethics. When Joel gave me this arduous assignment, I immediately, like a nervous graduate student, began to read a lot very fast.

What I intend to do today is take off, attain quite a high altitude, and map what I see below. But it's at high altitude. I'm going to only indicate certain contours on the ground. The purpose is purely heuristic—that is, to give you my sense of what the field below of global ethics looks like to me, not as an expert, but as a politician—all the things I've been—and try to give you a sense of what that map looks like.

My map is definitely not going to be your map, but my map may help you to reorient your map a little bit. That's what I'm trying to do.

My title, "Re-Imagining a Global Ethic," is kind of grandiose, but actually my ambitions are quite modest.

I really want to start by asking the simplest question of all, which is, should we be speaking of a global ethic, in the singular, or global ethics, in the plural? Why not start with the most obvious question of all?

I start by saying that a global ethic, in the singular—a perspective that takes all human beings and their habitat as its subject—does exist. It's doing very well and it's flourishing in academic philosophy departments around the world.

Its function is to lay bare the ethical presuppositions that underlie injustice and inequality in a globalized world. It's a critical tool. Its purpose is political: to expose what is unfair and unjust in our world, and expose that from an ideal vantage point, and then to devise the ideal distributions of resources and responsibilities that would make our world fairer. That seems like a very good idea to me.

A global ethic, in the singular, is a response to the injustices of globalization, but I think it would be a mistake to think of a global ethic as something that has been created by globalization. In fact, it seems to me we have always had a global ethic. The truest and deepest roots of our philosophical tradition have always tried to reason for all mankind, and sometimes even all womankind as well, and have tried to reason on behalf of our species and of our habitat.

Globalization has made many of our problems more salient, but the philosophical traditions we draw on are very ancient, very old, and it's one of the reasons that they have become very powerful.

As long as philosophers have been using, for example, the idea of natural law to criticize positive law, as long as they have been using the universal rights of mankind to criticize the privileges of the few—an immemorial function of philosophy—they have used universals to criticize the local ethical partialities of human beings. And that's what a global ethic is basically for.

So while some of our problems are new, the tools we bring to the task are very old. They are as old as philosophy itself.

So that's a global ethic, in the singular.

Now let's shift to global ethics, in the plural. We do have a global ethics, in the plural, and it's enshrined in the structure of international law. We tend to forget how important international law is as the incarnation of ethical systems—settled consensuses by nations about what the basic standards of international conduct at least ought to be.

We have them. We have the UN Charter, we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR], we have the Geneva Conventions, and we have the Refugee Convention. All of that is familiar to you. We built it between 1945 and 1952.

The only thing I want to say about this is that these are systems that are purpose-built to solve certain problems. Because they are purpose-built to solve certain problems, they are enclosed in complete ethical systems unto themselves. They are in contradiction. That's why we talk about global ethics in the plural. These systems have a job to do, but these systems contradict, and I will want to talk about that a little.

So we have a global ethic, in the singular, and we have global ethics, in the plural.

One thing, before I go in a little more detail about this, is that I don't think we need to invent the wheel all over again. I don't think we need to start again. Some people think we should. Twenty years ago, a very distinguished theologian, Hans Küng, put together a Universal Declaration of Responsibilities. He has been shopping it around.

It's important work. He puts the emphasis on duties, obviously, because he doesn't like rights talk as the way to cash out or incarnate what we care about with human beings. That's a good thing to do. He's not the only one out there thinking about a global ethic in attempting to find a new language.

Hardly a day goes by without religious groups gathering together to think about what the syncretic common points of view from religious traditions are. Some of that has been very important, because Christianity probably had too much of a look-in in these discussions, so it's extremely important to bring other traditions to the table of a discussion.

Then there is a kind of third side of global ethics discussion, which is to try to grind out a global ethics from an idea of human nature. You base the idea of human nature that you have in the latest findings of neurobiology, psychology, genetics, whatever.

These are all elaborate, important projects. All of these projects—the religious project, the duty project, and the science and human nature project—are ambitious and admirable, but I'm not going to touch them with a ten-foot pole. Too complicated for me, too difficult. I don't want to exclude that. I think they should be part of these conversations. But I want to focus on what we've got.

What we've got is a global ethic, a highly disciplined philosophical subject based on an ancient tradition, on the one hand, and then we have the structure of international law. We ought to figure out how these systems operate. That's what I will try to talk about a little bit.

I take a global ethic, in the singular, to mean an ethics whose object of moral concern is one world, one world in which all human beings are entitled to equal moral concern, in which all of us have a common responsibility to a single habitat, the only home we've got. That sense of equal moral concern for all individuals and that we've only got one home seem to me the core of what we understand by a global ethic.

If you start all ethical reflection from those twin starting points, what I would say you are doing—you have to have a particular view, a particular vantage point. I would call that "the view from nowhere." My wife would correct me when I try this out on her. She says "the view from nowhere in particular"—also the view from no time in particular. But that's too complicated. Let's just keep it simple—the view from nowhere, and nowhere in particular.

A global ethic seeks to defend all human beings and our common habitat against the partialities and interests that are grounded in family, community, ethnicity, economic position, and, above all, the nation we belong to.

The view from nowhere is not an easy place to reason from, because we're partial human beings—male, female; rich, poor; black, white; whatever different religion. The view from nowhere is an attempt to shed your partialities and stand up and look up from a high altitude at what we owe mankind and our habitat.

But it's the view we're trying to reach if we, for example, reason behind "a veil of ignorance," to use Rawls's famous phrase, or even if we use a much older view from nowhere, which is natural rights. The oldest and best views from nowhere: What are the natural rights that all human beings possess? You have to get way up to nowhere before you can even see what that might imply.

Once embraced, the view from nowhere allows us to expose the partiality of views from somewhere, especially those that shape our national communities.

Let me just mention a few examples of how philosophers are doing this. Many of you are professionals in the field and will know this stuff much better than I do.

But when I look around as an amateur, when I gin up my own teaching, these are the people I turn to. Joseph Carens, Michael Walzer, Michael Blake, Thomas Hurka, just to name a few of these global ethicists, have raised questions like why states should have the right to impose visa and immigration quotas on some human beings, but not all; why states have the right to expel non-citizens; and why they grossly favor their own citizens over people living in other countries in the distribution of global resources.

If you look at other work by Thomas Pogge, Henry Shue, and Peter Singer, they have all argued that allocating global resources to individuals on the basis of the country they happen to have been born in carries "moral luck"—Bernard Williams's wonderful phrase—a little far. Why should our lives be so determined by the moral luck of having had the enormous, great good fortune of being born in Canada, as I was?

It's one of the greatest draws in the global lottery, to be born in my country, as you must feel about being born in the United States. But the question of whether the distributions of resources that then result are just and whether moral luck can adjudicate these distributions is a question raised by the view from nowhere by these very powerful ethicists.

Peter Singer and others have used a global ethic to figure out a morally rational way to apportion responsibility for action on climate change. The global ethic view from nowhere is both a criticism of the views from somewhere, a criticism of ethical partiality, and also a powerful rational tool to figure out a morally rational way to distribute resources more fairly, allocate responsibility for climate change, and figure out what citizens and strangers owe each other.

This one-world perspective has been immensely powerful, and it has been one of the most exciting things to develop in the last 40 years, based, as it is, on these historical roots. It has become a common moral vocabulary, and it drives the activism of NGOs [non-governmental organizations] around the world. I think it maybe drives the consciences of some people in this room and those of you watching on television.

It's a philosophy in service of a sustained critique. I think this is important. The view from nowhere has a powerful politics. It's a cry against injustice, a cry against the unjust ways in which power is exercised and distributed in the world, and it is a sustained critique of the partiality of national communities. So it's a very powerful moral language.

But as a politics, it has to be said, it ain't making much headway. States are no closer to a morally rational way of allocating responsibility for action on climate change. Countries still impose immigration quotas, and few countries have met their global justice obligations to the poorest on earth, including and especially my own. A global ethical discourse flourishes in universities and in civil society, and probably flourishes in this room, but it has made very, very limited progress against the ethical partiality of states.

What I would argue is that I don't think we understand this problem if we simply use a global ethic to castigate the selfishness of nation-states and the selfishness of our own national interests.

I would argue, in fact, that there's another problem here just behind that which is more fundamental: There's a conflict, at least in those states with popular suffrage, between two principles—between democracy and justice. This is one of the most fundamental problems in the whole armature or central claims of a global ethic, a conflict between the value we attach to the self-determination of peoples and the value we attach to abstract justice for all individuals.

Joel kindly referred to the fact that I'm the biographer of Isaiah Berlin. You can't be the biographer of Isaiah Berlin without it affecting you deeply. And it affected me all the way down, as he would have said. He argued, as you know, that some absolute values conflict absolutely and all good things cannot be had at once.

One of the chimeras or illusions that I think Isaiah wants us to focus on when we think about a global ethic is the risk of our seeing the global ethic as a non-contradictory set of goods. I just don't think a global ethic can possibly be a non-contradictory set of goods, because, as I have just said to you, I think there's a substantial conflict between democracy and justice, between the self-determination of communities and what we owe abstractly in terms of justice to individuals.

So if a global ethic cannot be non-self-contradictory, what is it good for? What can we use it for? Here, I would say that it's an ethical perspective that allows us to get up above the view from somewhere—it gives us an ideal perspective—and it becomes, not a doctrine, but a site of argument.

The purpose of a global ethic is to create a site of argument in which claims have to justify themselves; a site of argument in which the particular ethical views, partialities, are called to the bar of justification—if I can kind of mix religious and judicial metaphors for a second. The particular is called to the bar of the universal, but the universal is also called to the bar of justification by the particular. A global ethic creates the possibility of a process of recurrent adversarial justification, but a global ethic is itself not freed of the obligation to justify itself.

What I don't like is any idea of a global ethic as having a kind of status above argument. It's in the argument. It has to justify. It has to explain and justify itself against counterclaims. It's crucial for us to create a field in which that adversarial justification occurs and is clear, because we need to know what we disagree about.

We need to know why we disagree. We're not going to get closer together, which is presumably our political goal, unless we understand deeply the grounds of our disagreement, and even agree to disagree.

One of the most wonderful achievements of human beings is to agree to disagree and to understand what that means. A global ethic makes, I think, it possible for us to agree to disagree about ultimate questions, provided we have the philosophical clarity that comes from that process of adversarial justification.

We can see what this means in relation to justice and democracy. Democratic communities, I would argue, have the right to balance what they owe to their own members against what they owe to strangers. Because politics everywhere is local—incorrigibly local, let me tell you, having done it—a global ethic that privileges the universal over proximate duties will never trump in practical politics. It just won't.

Democratic choice will be ordered by the preference of citizens in free debate. That democratic deliberation will determine the distribution of scarce resources between domestic and international claims.

What this means in practice—and this is an unfamiliar thought, but it's one that we really need to think about—and I owe it to Brad R. Roth, a very good jurisprudential scholar who is at Wayne State.

He says this very important sentence. He says, in practice, democratic peoples have the right to be wrong about justice. Think about that. Democratic peoples have the right to be wrong about justice.

If that's the case, that's a deep thought. It suggests a conflict between principles of abstract justice and principles of democracy. This is why, in my view, a global ethic, if it's fair to democracy and fair to conceptions of abstract justice, has a contradiction at its heart, which it is the duty of philosophy and the duty of practical ethicists to think about and take us forward on.

While the present distribution of global resources grossly privileges citizens at the expense of strangers, it does not follow that it would be just to privilege strangers at the expense of citizens. This is a matter of balance between duties and between democratic self-determination and universal justice.

Finding that balance is the business of politics. Having done some politics, we could certainly use some philosophic clarification of what's at stake. I hope that the global ethic initiative of the Carnegie Council will help the politicians who have to make these choices and the citizens who have to make these choices know what the heck they are disagreeing about. That, it seems to me, is one of the functions of a global ethic.

It's a fact of politics that the interests of democratic citizens will be shaped primarily, though not exclusively, by the view from where they sit—that is, the view from somewhere—and only secondarily, if at all, by the view from nowhere. Challenging this will take time.

Global ethicists have sought to respond to the claims of national self-interest by casting their arguments in terms of what John Stuart Mill called self-interest properly understood. What has to be properly understood, the global ethicists would claim, is that there will be no view from anywhere unless we begin to think more seriously about the view from nowhere—unless governments, that is, factor in, to an important degree, the universal interests of our habitat, for one thing.

That's true at the level of theory. Self-interest properly understood, for all countries, has to mean collective action to protect the habitat. But the political obstacle, the climate change with which you are all familiar, is no longer an impasse over whether it's happening—look at the weather outside—or even whether states have a duty to do something about it, but rather to solve a lower-order problem, which is to solve the problem of the penalties in economic competitiveness that first-mover states believe they will pay if they take leadership.

So an appropriate further task for a global ethic, in the singular, is to reason out the incentives necessary to solve these first-mover problems. If you are into this business, you have to help the first mover. You can't keep appealing for leadership. You have to solve the leaders' first-mover problems, because there are penalties for first moving here. That's another task for a global ethic, which I think is important.

And there are no trump cards of justice to play in politics. But the entry of a global ethic into political debate will subject all particularistic claims—nationalist claims, local claims—to a demand of justification. Hopefully, this will set in train a process by which national policy becomes more globally justifiable over time.

That's, I think, my recurring theme, this theme of justification. The view from nowhere puts everyone's self-justifications to the test. If the powerful sleep less well because of it, so much the better, because that's how change does occur.

That's why Carnegie believes in ethics. It makes people sleep badly at night, and they change because of it. I'm Presbyterian enough to believe that. The sense of sin, the sense of that you failed to justify a claim, is an important lever of change. That's one of the important roles, it seems to me, of a global ethic.

To summarize at this point, the first function of the view from nowhere is to force the view from somewhere to justify, and when it fails, this, I think, initiates the process by which policy becomes more cognizant of the negative consequences that follow from selfish behavior beyond our borders and makes us more globally minded in the framing of national responsibility. So the first function of a global ethic is to criticize the ethical partiality of states.

The second function, it seems to me, is to evaluate the ethical partiality of faiths and groups, sub-state groups. Religious, ethnic, and linguistic differences help constitute our moral loyalties. We are not disembodied people.

One of the problems with the view from nowhere is that it sometimes appears to forget that we come in genders, we come in races, we come in faiths. Our moral views are deeply embedded in those loyalties and commitments. Then the question becomes, how does a global ethic, the view from nowhere, negotiate with the moral partiality which makes us human beings? This is a deep and difficult question.

In a plural moral universe, the particular faces off against the universal. But, I would argue, neither plays as trumps. Neither is privilege. Both are obliged to justify. One thing to say about this encounter between the particular and the universal is that we don't live in separate bell jars. This is what it does mean to live in one moral world.

The reality is not that we live in bell jars, but we are in membranes that are constantly in contact—rural, urban; north, south; poor, rich; Islam, the West; Christianity, the secular. These are not separate bell jars. They are constantly in interaction and in a process of mutual self-justification. Moral universes are no longer closed, if they ever were.

One of the tasks that I was talking to Joel about before we came down here is that a global ethic, I think, needs a sociology of this encounter between the universal and the particular. It's especially fascinating—and I have taught this stuff a bit. I'll give you one example of what I mean, that's relating to health and voice rights for women.

Western NGOs who promote health and voice rights for women have learned over time in developing societies that they have to get local buy-in. What I want us to focus on is what buy-in means.

How does that work? I contrast it very grossly with conversion.

When missionaries came to Africa, they weren't looking for buy-in; they were looking for the soul, the whole of the soul. They wanted the soul. Conversion is an absolute experience.

Buy-in is much more political. That's why I like the word "buy-in." Buy-in is emphatically not about the soul. It's an exchange in which one side offers to change a practice in return for respecting all the stuff they don't want to change. Buy-in is a long negotiation between the particular and the universal, village community by community, as anybody knows who has talked to a Western health worker who goes to work in small village communities. That's what you're doing. What you're doing is not medicine; you're doing politics.

That sociology of buy-in, I think, is especially fascinating because we may assume that the universal, the global ethic, comes to the table with the power and the influence and the prestige, but the power on the ground is with the particular—it's with the tribe, it's with the community, it's with the village women, it's with the people on the ground. If you don't understand that, you don't get buy-in, and nothing changes.

Female genital cutting, to take the particular example I had in mind, will not stop simply because Western health nurses point out the septicemia statistics or point out the equal worth of women. Cutting stops, as we have discovered, when village women decide that they can substitute an initiation ritual that safeguards their girls' health without lowering their value to the family as brides.

When there is successful buy-in, the particular practice changes—fewer girls die of septicemia because they don't do cutting—but the universal changes, too. The female Western health nurse discovers the importance for women of supporting local marriage customs, even when they fall a little short of Western gender equality. Buy-in implies tradeoffs on both sides. Female mortality declines, which surely is a victory for the global ethic, but polygamy and patriarchy may well remain.

Yet that's not the end of the story in this buy-in thing, because it's an iterative process. First, you reduce female mortality and genital cutting, and then it starts to roll. That iteration between the particular and the universal begins to generate change, if you get the incentives right.

I would urge the Council to think about the sociology of buy-in, how the universal gets bought in here and how that works, because it seems to me very important for the future of a global ethic on the ground, which is where we want it to be. We don't want it in the classroom; we want it on the ground.

To summarize so far, a global ethic defends the universal interests of mankind and the planet. Its purpose is to engage all forms of ethical particulars in an adversarial justification. The rules of these encounters, flowing as they do from the starting premise of human equality, preclude coercion and mandate tolerance, which is what happens down in the village.

You've got to persuade. You can't coerce. You've got to persuade, because there's nothing else you can do down there.

So the first two functions of a global ethic are to interrogate the particularism of a nation-state and custom at the community level.

The third function is to interrogate universalism itself. Here I'm trying to set up a contrast between the global ethic we have been talking about and now the global ethics, and the ways in which global ethic, in the singular, is a critique of global ethics, in the plural.

What is the global ethics I'm talking about? I'm talking about four basic pillars of law put into place between 1945 and 1952: the UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the Refugee Convention. If you ask me, "What is the moral structure of the postwar world?" it's those four pillars. That's why I say we don't have to reinvent the wheel in ethical terms.

We have an incredible historical achievement here, imperfect as it is. But it's a legally codified fabric of ethical conventions that have been ratified by peoples around the world and that, to some degree—and I teach this stuff Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—constrain the behavior of states—not so much, but some, a little bit.

The one point I want to make about these four pillars—and that's why the pillar metaphor doesn't work so well—is that they conflict with each other. They support a framework, but there's something about these pillars that needs to be noticed.

The Charter priority on sovereign equality of states contradicts the UDHR priority on human rights. The Geneva Conventions—this is a contradiction not often discussed—prioritize civilian protection in war, while the UDHR prioritizes the right to life and has basically a pacific set of moral assumptions, where the Geneva Conventions basically say the boys are going to fight, and our moral problem is to keep this from being too destructive. They are two very different approaches to the issues of human conflict.

The third one is the Refugee Convention, which insists on rights for refugees, but the quid pro quo is accepting the privileged status of citizens, which doesn't sit very easily with a global ethic which says, why should we privilege citizens over strangers?

These are familiar ethical contradictions, and I'm not going to explore them in detail but I just want to put them out there lest we think we live in a non-contradictory ethical world. The basic framework we live is in conflict, constant conflict. It's important to understand that and respect that.

Pluralism is not just the phenomenon of different faiths, different classes, different religions. The pluralism is built into universalism itself. The conflict in the basic founding structure, ethical structure, of our world is important. That's one of the functions of the global ethic, to elucidate these contradictions in the ethical systems.

The most obvious of these conflicts—and I'll just say a few more words about this, because it used to be my daily bread—the most obvious ethical contradiction in our systems is between sovereign equality and human rights. The exercise of sovereignty is a venal affair, and a global ethic is universally scornful about sovereignty.

But we forget that sovereignty incarnates a moral value—which is extremely precious to us—which is the sovereign equality of peoples, the sovereign equality of states, and the protection that the sovereign system provides weak states against the might of the strong. Those are moral values. They are not simply contingent surrenders to the unfortunate necessity that we live in states.

The Charter incarnates very important values, which presumably we want to defend. We don't want a world in which the weak are at the mercy of the strong.

If we want a world in which strong states do not have the right to dictate to the weak, we have to guarantee the inviolability of states in law, and if we do this, we have to accept the likelihood—indeed, the certainty—that some will exploit sovereignty to oppress their own people.

So we have an international legal system with two competing ethical goals, and a morally adequate international system, I would argue, has to do both. But the values are in fundamental conflict.

What you then do about it is what we tried to do in the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, on which I had the honor to be both a member and a drafter. We sought to address that fundamental conflict, and to do so by proposing that sovereignty be made conditional on two basic responsibilities: respect for the sovereignty of other states and the responsibility to provide basic security for a population; that is, to refrain from subjecting them to massacre, genocide, or ethnic cleansing.

We set the bar pretty low. The responsibility-to-protect doctrine is an attempt to bridge this fundamental ethical divide between sovereign equality on the one hand and the Charter and the UDHR guarantees of human rights.

But the contradiction will endure, and it will force choices on all of us in the international systems. Ethicists have an important role. I think Ethics & International Affairs probably spends one issue in five exclusively devoted to this question. And god bless them. It's not as if this thing is going to go away, this fundamental conflict at the heart of the ethical systems that govern our world.

It's time to come to a conclusion. I've just started. I'm now descending from the high mapping phase down to the ground. I hope we'll have time for questions.

This high-altitude view of the field tells us there's a global ethic as a philosophical discourse and there's a global ethics, in the plural, as an institutional practice. The former exists primarily to criticize the latter. We don't need to invent a new global ethics so much as to understand the deeper contradictions within the ethical systems that already guide the actions of states, individuals, and leaders.

Professional ethics has a job to do to understand these contradictions—I have alluded to some of them—between democracy and justice, between the self-determination of peoples and the survival of the planet, the value of sovereignty versus human rights.

My key point, I think, is that the most important function of a global ethic is to force such contradictions out into the open light of public debate and to force political excuses for injustice and ethical partiality to justify themselves.

I just make a general concluding point about moral life as I have known it. Moral life is a process of justification, giving reasons for opinions and conduct to those who do not agree with you and then altering both your opinions and your conduct as you discover that your justifications fail—fail either to convince the person opposite or, most importantly, convince the person looking at you in the mirror.

The essence of moral life is this process of recurrent, repeated behavior-changing justification. It's inherently adversarial. This process needs standards. A global ethic provides the view from nowhere and global ethics provides a view of somewhere. If sides in the disputes that we have accept that standard, they argue with each other, not past each other. If they accept the standard, they are more likely to accept the obligation to change when justification fails.

It's very important to create a common site of argument and a common discursive space, because it creates the basis for changing behavior when justification according to that system fails. It's vital for philosophers and Global Ethics Fellows to elaborate further the view from nowhere. Without it, the view from somewhere will not be faced with the burden of justification, and without that burden, without the test of argument, we will not change. And it's change that matters.

Thank you for listening.

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: David Rodin. I'm one of the members of the Global Ethics Network.

Thank you so much for an incredibly exhilarating talk.

I just want to push you a little bit on the claim that you made that this global ethic—and I think your characterization of it was wonderful—is entirely impartial in the way that it approaches things.

Here's a trivial example. I'm at the beach and there are two children drowning, and I can only save one of them. One of them is my daughter. If I flipped a coin, that would be monstrous.

What I think examples like that show is that there is a role for partiality even within the global ethic itself. You pose the tension as very much one between the global ethic and a local politics, where partiality was embedded in the politics. That's clearly right; it is embedded in there. But what I think examples like that show is that there's a role for partiality even within our best understanding of the global ethic.

There's much more space for that partiality in an action to assist than there is in harming.

Do you think that that's right, that there is a role there within the ethic itself?

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: That's a very good point. Save your kid. You would be a monster if you didn't. But don't leave the other kid in the water if you possibly can. You know, we can kind of work this out.

I'm not a philosopher. I read this stuff, frankly, as an amateur. But I do read a lot of these discussions of forcing partiality to justify itself according to universal standards.

I see the universal beginning to bend under the force of examples like that, but lots of other ones. I'm trying to give partiality the benefit of democracy here and saying one of the reasons that we are partial—we have really good reason to be partial, which is that we choose as we choose. That's the force, and the bitter force, of "democratic societies have the right to be wrong about justice." Then the question is, how wrong? For how long? In what degree?

I'm trying to set up a scheme in which partiality defends itself, universality defends itself, and they are called to the bar, as I say, of adversarial justification. This stuff moves around here.

What I don't like is the idea of—I think we have very deeply religious views about a global ethic. We have a Ten Commandments view of these systems, basically. That's what I'm trying to argue against. The frame of moral life that I see is, you just give me a good example and I begin to move, and I push you back, and we're moving this thing around constantly. The key thing is, we both have ownership of it. It's this sense of ownership and that we're talking to each other, and not past each other.

Your example is absolutely pertinent. It didn't hit the wall up here. It hit me right here. That's what philosophical discussion is trying to achieve. Then, when it moves into politics, when the arrow hits home to a political actor, it then begins to create the possibility of change.

QUESTION: Michael Smith. I'm also in the same group.

I would like to ask almost a similar question from the opposite point of view, about your notion of dialogue. When you quote this Wayne State person who says democratic polities have the right to be wrong about justice, that suggests that's a trumping value. Why should that be true? What is the justification of that right to be wrong? So really it is a permanent dialogue, in a sense.

My question is, in your varied life, are you persuaded that argument is going to be enough to call that conviction—that because I'm democratic and I'm wrong, I have the right to be wrong?

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: Brad Roth is a jurisprudential scholar. The right to be wrong about justice is essentially the Charter rights of sovereign states in the international system. It's a trump only because international law says it is, and then responsibility to protect, another doctrine, says not to the point at which you begin to massacre your own people—engage in genocide, engage in ethnic cleansing. So the right to be wrong about justice is bounded—even Roth would think it's bounded, not only by international law, but just by natural justice itself.

I think that's what I would say in direct reply. I'm just struck, as a political matter, by the ways in which over time this process of adversarial justification is moving the boundaries of sovereignty. Sovereign inviolability meant one thing in 1970. In 2010, because of this process of back-and-forward, it's in a very, very different place normatively. It just is.

The black-letter law of international law hasn't moved an iota, but I think many fewer states, as a matter of state practice, think they can get away with anything. It's partly because of this process of —it's not merely dialogue. There was also coercive action. The dialogue is often accompanied by force.

One of the things I hate in philosophical discussion is that everything is a conversation. Not everything is a conversation. Sometimes the hammer has to come down, and sometimes there has to be closure. That I did learn in politics. It's not all talk. And it can't be.

QUESTION: Christian Barry, Global Ethics Fellow.

It was very interesting when you were mentioning the four pillars of the normative order, in addition to the global ethic. It occurred to me that there's a lot to work with there. There are at least ways to build and re-imagine a global ethic away from those pillars about some issues. But one thing that seems very much missing is anything of comparable sophistication and complexity that has anything to do with the organization of international economic life, where certainly strong Westphalian principle seems to reign.

I was just going to get your view on whether you thought it was a plausible or an interesting project to try to articulate some sort of normative order—obviously you can't get anything comparable to what was constructed in the immediate aftermath of the postwar order, but something that had some sort of bite, that wouldn't simply be what Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge say, but that actually is something that could be woven together with these other normative orders.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: That's a great point. In those pillars, the economic and social rights convention—even the UDHR itself has stipulations, which are purely aspirational, about a just international order, with a clear implication that they are talking about a globally just economic order. That language has been very productive. It has led to the right to development and all kinds of stuff.

There are a lot of rights there. It's a little fuzzy at the edges. Who is the rights holder? Who is the duty holder? What obligations are entailed by a right to development? All that kind of stuff.

What I would say in direct answer to your question is that that normative order created between 1945 and 1952 was deeply conscious of your question and sought to put in, particularly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and then the conventions that followed, some quite strong ethical language about a more just economic order.

But we are now living through the reality that the sanctioned actor in the international system on international economic matters is actually the sovereign state—sovereign debt, sovereign risk, sovereign default. You watch the language. It's absolutely amazing.

We have had 35 years of this market theology, and economists steadily whittling down the appropriate ambit of the state and economists being steadily more scathing about rights to development and social and economic justice on a global scale and steadily more scathing about the dysfunctional impact of government on markets. And when the stuff hits the fan, whom do you call? Whom do you call? You call the sovereign. That's a real piece of learning for us all.

That's one of the other reasons why, when I think about the ethics we're trying to balance here, I want strong states. I want strong, capable states, because they are the only ultimate guarantor of the equality of peoples, on the one hand, and the capacity of peoples to have some mastery over their economic destiny, as opposed to being playthings of global economic forces.

That may not be the answer you expect, but that, boy, is what I take home here—every tub on its own bottom, sovereigns exercising their appropriate regulatory control over economies. That's why, in a curious way, I think sovereignty is making a moral comeback.

QUESTION: Ron Berenbeim.

When you talk about the right to be wrong, could we say perhaps that that's subject to limitations of process, that process can establish a certain credibility for being wrong—it was a product of a fair election, say, in the case of Hamas on the West Bank or it was the product of a well-established judicial system?

But if you do say that, does that privilege developed states at the expense of less developed states that don't have these processes in place, but still may be entitled to enjoy the right to be wrong?

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: It's a troubling question. You put it very well. As you were talking, I thought of two contrasting examples, the Texas death penalty, on the one hand, or the death penalty practice in many American states, which, for a Canadian and many Europeans, is the classic example of the right to be wrong about justice—these are democratic convictions of citizens.

All the process requirements have been met. The courts have looked at this stuff 14 ways to Sunday. There's no process problem. It's just that the taking of life by the state strikes many people, on rational grounds, as being wrong. But these national preferences, settled democratic preferences, by Americans are absolutely unbudgeable. Nothing international is going to make a darned bit of difference.

If you contrast that with a weaker state, a less prestigious state in the international system—Uganda, attempting to pass laws which are discriminatory against gays, came under massive external pressure. These were the settled preferences of many Ugandans. It's not clear that they have the right to be wrong about justice.

You want to have more consistency here. If Americans can keep their death penalty—and I don't like where this is going, since I'm a passionate defender of equality of rights for all people, especially for gay fellow citizens—then this is a world in which stronger states have a greater capacity to be wrong about justice than weaker ones. That should trouble us.

As I say, I don't like where having the right to be wrong about justice takes you. I was part of a commission that sought to directly limit that right to be wrong where it comes with gross physical harms. The American death penalty is the classic case where the process is unassailable, it seems to me, and it's a settled democratic preference.

QUESTION: Craig Charney.

I would like to push you a little bit more on the question of the sociology of the global ethic, because that fascinates me. My colleague John Zogby has written about what he calls the "First Globals" in this country. We also see the emergence in the Arab world of young people who are demanding more democracy.

Even in places like China and India, young people are questioning the role that their countries are playing in terms of endangering the global climate. In other countries as well, various sorts of convergences seem to be happening.

What's going on here?

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: I think what you're pointing out, in the nicest possible way by putting it as a question rather than a comment, is that I'm missing a crucial dimension, which is the globalization of citizenship and consciousness among particularly educated people through some of these societies.

My sociology—I think you put your finger on a problem—kind of implies that we have some global thinking in universities in the West and then everybody else is local, tribal, primitive, defending reaction. Clearly that isn't a sociology; that's a joke.

If you are saying there is the emergence of what could be called a global middle class—you can't understand Tunisia, Libya, Egypt without understanding all the kids who went away to work in Europe and came back. You can't understand the importance of those revolutions without the diasporic experience and coming back. You can't understand that without the social media stuff that's happening.

When I said in the paper that we don't live in bell jars, I think that's where I was going. We live in worlds where the global and local are inter-penetrated to an incredible degree. And the inter-penetration is very, very complex.

Let me tell you just one story about this. I remember doing a class at Harvard, at the Kennedy School, about women's rights. A lot of castigation about arranged marriages, and human freedom has to mean free marriage choice. It's such an important aspect of what we think freedom is.

I talked about the Universal Declaration commitments on free marriage choice and talked about the Nuremburg Laws and the ways in which the UDHR came out of this terrible experience in the 1930s of forbidding Jews and Aryans to marry and all this stuff. My student TA [teaching assistant], a very, very nice woman from Pakistan, extremely sophisticated, lived in the States for many years—we had a discussion that came out saying we thought arranged marriages were extremely problematic in human rights terms.

She came up to me in a state of genuine alarm and said, "My marriage was arranged."

She lives in a highly globalized world, and she lives in a world in which she gives respect to a marital custom that she finds difficult to justify as a TA in a global human rights class. That's our world.

When we get to the sociology, that woman is fascinating to me. She has put together a moral world which is extremely complex. She's a passionate supporter of women's equality, women's rights, human rights, but her marriage is arranged. Go figure. But she's figuring.

The moral sociology of this is, I think we haven't begun to understand what it means that we live in these membranes that are constantly touching and inter-penetrating. We need to understand it better, because there are these moments when you walk into the wall of difference.

With this woman, I felt somehow that I should have known. I had this weird feeling that I should have known. I didn't want to make her choices problematic. That's her life. It's her culture. It's her religion.

QUESTIONER: We have had the rise of educated middle class before, for example, throughout Europe. The interesting thing was that these were the vehicles of nationalism and conflict. I guess one of the things that I find quite striking is that, in addition to the social phenomenon that more people are getting more education in more places than ever before, there seems to be some kind of common content, and some kind of common content which, despite all the particularistic forces you talked about, actually points them, in many issues, in similar sorts of directions.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: Yes, that's true, although I think it's important, again, to get this right. Your challenges are excellent ones.

I think it's wrong to get global ethic equals cosmopolitanism, equals global citizen, equals "I haven't got time for national, tribal, or religious allegiance."

That may be the point of my story about this woman. She's all these things. It's all complicated. She's as cosmopolitan as you could wish. She speaks more languages than I'll ever begin to. But she's fiercely Pakistani, and she's also Muslim in any important way to her. She is a member of a particular family logic and culture. It's all of those things.

Then it's a matter of highly complex overlapping moral identities, to which we need to give some sociological—and then not be surprised when these cosmopolitan sophisticates go home and become passionate nationalists and passionate defenders of certain kinds of particularism—"get those Americans out of here," and all that stuff. You shouldn't be puzzled that it's a Kennedy School graduate who is giving the Americans the hardest time.

Do you see what I'm saying? That's the kind of puzzle.

QUESTION: Jon Gage.

I'm not one of the philosophers; I'm just on the board, so I won't be able to ask this question lucidly. First, thank you for that last answer. As a married man, I never thought of marriage as having much to do with freedom. So that was actually eye-opening.

This is the view from nowhere in particular. My question really is aimed at asking if there is another way to frame, if you will, the definitions about a global ethic and global ethics to discuss the contradictions in a more productive way, perhaps, to resolve some of those contradictions.

The global ethic is the view from nowhere and the global ethics is the view from someplace. But suppose global ethic was thought of as being the view from everywhere. Then it should somehow take into account some resolution of a debate in a better sense between some of those contradictions.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: The view from everywhere would make it sound easier to get the kind of ethical syncretism that I think we're looking for. I pushed it to the view from nowhere, and nowhere in particular, because I wanted to emphasize the weirdness, the human weirdness, of this philosophical exercise that has been going on for millennia, because we really are partial beings. We just really are.

I'm what I am. I've got the helmet on. It's too late to take it off. You know what I'm saying? That's what makes the philosophical enterprise kind of Martian to me. I'm a historian by training. The view from nowhere expresses what a struggle it is to get up and out of ethical partiality and the embeddedness of being who you are and who I am and all that stuff. I'm sure the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs would be much happier if I retitled it "the view from everywhere." There is no question. And I will have to think about that.

But I'm sticking with "view from nowhere" to emphasize that the move from embedded ethical partiality of a sociological kind to universality is enormously difficult, in fact, and it then gets involved in dialogue. There are some forms of universality which are just inhuman, like saying, "I'm going to run the trolley experiment before I fish a particular kid out of the water."

I will think about that. But I'm still sticking with "the view from nowhere."

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I'm going to have to intervene now. I just want to thank you, Michael, for this talk.

The Carnegie Council, as I said, is going to be 100 years old. I guarantee you that this talk this evening is one of the more important historical events in the Carnegie Council's history, because what you said is going to set the agenda for what we're going to be doing in the next several years. So thank you very much.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: Thank you.

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From Corporate Ghost-Modernism to Anthropo-localism via... the Economics of Happiness

2011-11-29T23:16:00.003+01:00

From:

The International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote systemic solutions to today’s social and environmental crises. Its educational work seeks to reveal the root causes of those crises—from unemployment to climate change, from ethnic conflict to the loss of biodiversity— while promoting grassroots and policy-level strategies for ecological and community renewal.

a film by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick & John Page

Far from the old institutions of power, people are starting to forge a very different future...

Featuring:
Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Andrew Simms, Zac Goldsmith, Samdhong Rinpoche, Clive Hamilton, Mohau Pheko, Keibo Oiwa and more...

Further measurement tools may be found via the Genuine Progress Index (GPI)...

... rather than the dated, environmentally eco-cidal Gross Domestic Product (GDP)!

Mr. Fish's Cartoons: Democracy Keeps Me Up at Night

2011-11-29T08:04:00.000+01:00

Kuala Lumpur tribunal: Bush and Blair guilty

2011-11-28T21:10:00.002+01:00

A war crimes tribunal in Malaysia offers a devastating critique of international criminal law institutions today.

by Richard Falk

In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict that found George W Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide as a result of their roles in the Iraq War.

A tribunal in Malaysia's capital found George W. Bush and Tony Blair guilty of War Crimes in Iraq [GALLO/GETTY]

The proceedings took place over a four-day period from November 19-22, and included an opportunity for court-appointed defense counsel to offer the tribunal arguments and evidence on behalf of the absent defendants. They had been invited to offer their own defense or send a representative, but declined to do so. The prosecution team was headed by two prominent legal personalities with strong professional legal credentials: Gurdeal Singh Nijar and Francis Boyle. The verdict issued on November 22, 2011 happens to coincide with the 48th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy.

The tribunal acknowledged that its verdict was not enforceable in a normal manner associated with a criminal court operating within a sovereign state or as constituted by international agreement, as is the case with the International Criminal Court. But the KLWCT followed a juridical procedure purported to operate in a legally responsible manner. This would endow its findings and recommendations with a legal weight expected to extend beyond a moral condemnation of the defendants, but in a manner that is not entirely evident.

The KLWCT added two "Orders" to its verdict that had been adopted in accordance with the charter of the KLWCC that controlled the operating framework of the tribunal: 1) Report the findings of guilt of the two accused former heads of state to the International Criminal Court in The Hague; and 2) Enter the names of Bush and Blair in the Register of War Criminals maintained by the KLWCC.

The tribunal also added several recommendations to its verdict: 1) Report findings in accord with Part VI (calling for future accountability) of the Nuremberg Judgment of 1945 addressing crimes of surviving political and military leaders of Nazi Germany; 2) File reports of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague; 3) Approach the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution demanding that the United States end its occupation of Iraq; 4) Communicate the findings of the tribunal to all members of the Rome Statute (which governs the International Criminal Court) and to all states asserting Universal Jurisdiction that allows for the prosecution of international crimes in national courts; and 5) Urge the UN Security Council to take responsibility to ensure that full sovereign rights are vested in the people of Iraq and that the independence of its government be protected by a UN peacekeeping force.

Mahathir Mohamed's anti-war campaign

These civil society legal initiatives are an outgrowth of a longer-term project undertaken by the controversial former Malaysian head of state, Mahathir Mohamed, to challenge American-led militarism and to mobilise the global South to mount an all-out struggle against the war system.

This vision of a revitalised struggle against war and post-colonial imperialism was comprehensively set forth in Mahathir's remarkable anti-war speech of February 24, 2003, while still prime minister, welcoming the Non-Aligned Movement to Kuala Lumpur for its thirteenth summit.

Included in his remarks on this occasion were the following assertions that prefigure the establishment of the KLWCC and KLWCT:

"War must be outlawed. That will have to be our struggle for now. We must struggle for justice and freedom from oppression, from economic hegemony. But we must remove the threat of war first. With this sword of Damocles hanging over our heads we can never succeed in advancing the interests of our countries.?War must therefore be made illegal. The enforcement of this must be by multilateral forces under the control of the United Nations. No single nation should be allowed to police the world, least of all to decide what action to take, [and] when."

Mahathir stated clearly on that occasion that his intention in criminalising the behavior of aggressive warmaking and crimes against humanity was to bring relief to victimised peoples - with special reference to the Iraqis, who were about to be attacked a few weeks later; and the Palestinians, who had long endured mass dispossession and an oppressive occupation. This dedication of Mahathir to a world without war was reaffirmed through the establishment of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War, and his inaugural speech opening a Criminalising War Conference on October 28, 2009.

On February 13, 2007 Mahathir called on the KLWCC to prepare a case against Bush and Blair, whom he held responsible for waging aggressive warfare against Iraq. Mahathir, an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and its aftermath, argued at the time that there existed a need for an alternative judicial forum to the ICC, which was unwilling to indict Western leaders. Mahathir was in effect insisting that no leader should any longer be able to escape accountability for such crimes against nations and peoples. He acknowledged with savage irony the limits of his proposed initiative: "We cannot arrest them, we cannot detain them, and we cannot hang them the way they hanged Saddam Hussein." Mahathir also contended that, "The one punishment that most leaders are afraid of is to go down in history with a certain label attached to them ... In history books they should be written down as war criminals and this is the kind of punishment we can make to them".

With this remark, Mahathir prefigured the KLWCC register of war criminals that has inscribed the names of those convicted by the KLWCT. Will it matter? Does such a listing have traction in our world?

In his 2007 statement, Mahathir promised that a future KLWCT would not, in his words, be "like the 'kangaroo court' that tried Saddam". Truly, the courtroom proceedings against Saddam Hussein was a sham trial excluding much relevant evidence, disallowing any meaningful defense, and culminating in a grotesque and discrediting execution. Saddam Hussein was subject to prosecution for multiple crimes against humanity, as well as crimes against peace, but the formally "correct" trappings of a trial could not obscure the fact that this was a disgraceful instance of victors' justice. Of course, the media, to the extent that it notices civil society initiatives at all, condemns them in precisely the same rhetoric that Mahathir used to attack the Saddam trial, insisting that the KLWCT is a "kangaroo court" or a "circus". The Western media, without exception, has ignored this proceeding against Bush and Blair, presumably considering it as irrelevant and a travesty of the law, while giving considerable attention to the almost concurrent UN-backed Cambodia War Crimes Tribunal prosecuting surviving Khmer Rouge operatives accused of genocidal behavior in the 1970s. For the global media, the auspices make all the difference.

Universal jurisdiction

The KLWCT did not occur entirely in a jurisprudential vacuum. It has long been acknowledged that domestic criminal courts can exercise universal jurisdiction for crimes of state wherever these may occur, although usually only if the accused individuals are physically present in the court. In American law, the Alien Tort Claims Act allows civil actions provided personal jurisdiction of the defendant is obtained for crimes such as torture committed outside of the United States.

The most influential example was the 1980 Filartiga decision awarding damages to a victim of torture in autocratic Paraguay (Filartiga v. Peña 620 F2d 876). That is, there is a sense that national tribunals have the legal authority to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes wherever in the world the alleged criminality took place. The underlying legal theory is based on the recognition of the limited capacity of international criminal trials to impose accountability in a manner that is not entirely dictated by geopolitical priorities and reflective of a logic of impunity. In this regard, universal jurisdiction has the potential to treat equals equally, and is very threatening to the Kissingers and Rumsfelds of this world, who have curtailed their travel schedules. The United States and Israel have used their diplomatic leverage to roll back universal jurisdiction authority in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and Belgium.

To a certain extent, the KLWCT is taking a parallel path to criminal accountability. It does not purport to have the capacity to exert bodily punishment, and stakes its claims to effectiveness on publicity, education, and symbolic justice. Such initiatives have been undertaken from time to time since the Russell Tribunal of 1967 to address criminal allegations arising out of the Vietnam War, whenever there exists public outrage and an absence of an appropriate response by governments or the institutions of international society.

In 1976, the Lelio Basso Foundation in Rome established a Permanent Peoples Tribunal that generalised on the Russell experience. It believed that there was an urgent need to fill the institutional gap in the administration of justice worldwide that resulted from geopolitical manipulation and resulting formal legal regimes of double standards. Over the next several decades, the PPT addressed a series of issues ranging from allegations of American intervention in Central America and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to human rights in the Philippines' Marcos dictatorship, the dispossession of Indian communities in Brazil's Amazonia state, and the denial of the right of self-determination to the Puerto Rican people.

The most direct precedent for KLWCT was the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), held in Istanbul in 2005, which culminated a worldwide series of hearings carried on between 2003-2005 on various aspects of the Iraq War. As with KLWCT, it also focussed on the alleged criminality of those who embarked on the Iraq War. WTI proceedings featured many expert witnesses, and produced a judgment that condemned Bush and Blair, among others, and called for a variety of symbolic and societal implementation measures.

The jury Declaration of Conscience included this general language:

"The invasion and occupation of Iraq was and is illegal. The reasons given by the US and UK governments for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 have proven to be false. Much evidence supports the conclusion that a major motive for the war was to control and dominate the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil as a part of the US drive for global hegemony… In pursuit of their agenda of empire, the Bush and Blair governments blatantly ignored the massive opposition to the war expressed by millions of people around the world. They embarked upon one of the most unjust, immoral, and cowardly wars in history."

Unlike KLWCT, the tone and substance of the formal outcome of the WTI was moral and political rather than strictly legal, despite the legal framing of the inquiry. For a full account see Muge Gursoy Sokmen's World Tribunal on Iraq: Making the Case Against War (2008).

Justifying tribunals

Two weeks before the KLWCT, a comparable initiative in South Africa was considering allegations of apartheid directed at Israel in relation to dispossession of Palestinians and the occupation of a portion of historic Palestine (this was the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, South African Session, November 5-7 2011).

All these "juridical" events had one thing in common: The world system of states and institutions was unwilling to look a particular set of facts in the eye, and respond effectively to what many qualified and concerned persons believed to be a gross injustice. In this regard, there was an intense ethical and political motivation behind these civil society initiatives that invoked the authority of law. But do these initiatives really qualify as "law"? A response to such a question depends on whether the formal procedures of sovereign states, and their indirect progeny - international institutions - are given a monopoly over the legal administration of justice. I would side with those that believe that people are the ultimate source of legal authority, and have the right to act on their own when governmental procedures, as in these situations, are so inhibited by geopolitics that they fail to address severe violations of international law.

Beyond this, we should not neglect the documentary record compiled by these civil society initiatives operating with meager resources. Their allegations almost always exhibit an objective understanding of available evidence and applicable law, although unlike governmental procedures, this assessment is effectively made prior to the initiation of the proceeding.

It is this advance assurance of criminality that provides the motivation for making the formidable organisational and fundraising effort needed to bring such an initiative into play. But is this advance knowledge of the outcome so different from war crimes proceedings under governmental auspices? Indictments are made in high-profile war crimes cases only when the evidence of guilt is overwhelming and decisive, and the outcome of adjudication is known as a matter of virtual certainty before the proceedings commence.

In both instances, the tribunal is not really trying to determine guilt or innocence, but rather is intent on providing the evidence and reasoning that validates and illuminates a verdict of guilt and resulting recommendations in one instance and criminal punishment in the other. It is, of course, impossible for civil society tribunals to enforce their outcomes in any conventional sense. Their challenge is rather to disseminate the judgment as widely and effectively as possible. A Permanent Peoples Tribunal publication can sometimes prove to be surprisingly influential in book form, given the extensive factual basis it presents in reaching its verdict. This was reportedly the case in generating oppositional activism in the Philippines in the early 1980s during the latter years of the Marcos regime.

The legalism of the KLWCT

The KLWCT has its own distinctive identity. It has the imprint of an influential former head of state in the country where the tribunal was convened, giving the whole undertaking a quasi-governmental character. It also took account of Mahathir's wider campaign against war in general. The assessing body of the tribunal was composed of five distinguished jurists, including judges, from Malaysia, imparting an additional sense of professionalism. The chief judge was Abdel Kadir Salaiman, a former judge on Malaysia's federal court. Two other persons who were announced as judges were recused at the outset of the proceedings, one because of supposed bias associated with prior involvement in a similar proceeding, and another due to illness. There was also a competent defense team that presented arguments intended to exonerate the defendants Bush and Blair, although the quality of the legal arguments offered was not as cogent as the evidence allowed.

The tribunal operated in strict accordance with a charter that had been earlier adopted by the KLWCC, and imparted a legalistic tone to the proceedings. It is this claim of legalism that is the most distinctive feature of the KLWCT - unlike comparable undertakings that rely more on an unprofessional and loose application of law by widely known moral authority personalities and culturally prominent figures, who make no pretense of familiarities with legal procedure and the fine points of substantive law. In this respect, the Iraq War Tribunal (IWT) held in Istanbul in 2005 was more characteristic. It pronounced on the law and offered recommendations on the basis of a politically and morally oriented assessment of evidence by a jury of conscience. The tribunal was presided over by the acclaimed Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, and composed of a range of persons with notable public achievements, but without claims to expert knowledge of the relevant law, although extensive testimony by experts in international law did give a persuasive backing to the allegations of criminality. Also, unlike KLWCT, the IWT made no pretense of offering a defense to the charges.

Tribunals of 'conscience' or 'law'?

It raises the question for populist jurisprudence as to whether "conscience" or "law" is the preferred and more influential grounding for this kind of non-governmental initiative. In neither case does the statist-oriented mainstream media pause to give attention, even critical attention. In this regard, only populist democratic forces with a cosmopolitan vision will find such outcomes as Kuala Lumpur notable moves toward the establishment of what Derrida called the "democracy to come". Whether such forces will become numerous and vocal enough remains uncertain. One possible road to greater influence would be to make more imaginative uses of social networking potentials to inform, explain, educate, and persuade.

This recent session of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal offers a devastating critique of the persisting failures of international criminal law mechanisms of accountability to administer justice justly, that is, without the filters of impunity provided by existing hierarchies of hard power.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume, International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008).

He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

The rich: Exactly what does the terminology mean?

2011-11-24T22:02:00.003+01:00

By Caroline McClatchey

BBC News Magazine

"Bankers", "the rich" and "the 1%" have become part of the lexicon of a maelstrom of protest. But what do the terms really mean?

A wave of protests across the world and of more measured anger expressed in newspaper letters pages and on social networking sites have thrown up a new lexicon of resentment of the wealthy and the powerful.

But how did all these newly popular terms come to be used as they are?

"The rich"

Everyone knows someone they consider to be rich. But many would struggle with a precise definition, and plenty considered rich by others would shy away from using the term.

In his book Richistan, Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank concluded that "people's definition of rich is subjective and is usually twice their current net worth". Some people would define rich as having more money than you "need" to live, but definition of "needs" vary dramatically.

A survey of professional households by insurance firm Hiscox suggested an annual income of £93,000 in the UK was hard to manage on. Those polled complained of feeling broke and said they would need to earn more than £150,000 before they felt wealthy.

For some, merely owning a business means you are wealthy, regardless of whether it's a corner shop or a multinational company. During the summer riots in England, two teenage looters explained that they were showing the police and "the rich" they could do what they wanted. But their definition of rich seemed to encompass anyone who owned a shop. "It's the rich people, the people who have businesses," said one.

At the other end of the spectrum, Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich was pressed during a court appearance recently on whether one of his partners was, in his opinion, rich.

"It's hard for me to say whether someone is a wealthy person or not a wealthy person," he said.

Lurking under the surface is the knowledge that "the rich" is a hostile term in this era. During the 2008 US presidential election, Republican John McCain declared he was not a rich man, despite owning several homes.

But is there any neutral set of parameters for richness?

One way of dividing the rich from the middle class is through the top tax rate, which kicks in at £150,000 a year in the UK and $379,151 in the US.

Millionaires used to be the most obvious qualifiers for the "rich" label, but they aren't very rare these days, and the number of billionaires is rising.

The Forbes list of the world's richest people lists more than 1,200 billionaires across the globe, with Russia and China boasting more than 100 billionaires each. The US has more than 400 billionaires and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is top of the pile with a net worth of $59bn.

There are 73 billionaires in the UK - up from 53 the previous year, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List.

Prof John Van Reenen, director of the Centre for Economic Performance, says you need to be making more than £140,000 a year to be among the top 1% of UK earners. (See the entry below on the 1%.)

"If you look at the top 1% of the population over the last 100 years, a century ago a big chunk of the money would have not have come from earnings - it would have come from investment returns and bequests. Today the vast majority comes from earnings."

The definition of rich has certainly changed over time.

"Powerful, mighty; noble, great." That's the first reference to rich in the Oxford English Dictionary but this definition, from Anglo Saxon times, is now obsolete.

But it also meant "having much money or abundant assets; wealthy, moneyed, affluent" and this meaning has stayed the course.

The further back you go, the rich were richer in comparative terms, says Prof Bill Rubinstein, an expert on the history of the wealthy. But there are more wealthy people now because of the rise in house prices in the UK.

In 1880 a rich person would have had £100,000 in assets or an income of £10,000 a year, he says. About a hundred people a year died leaving £100,000 and by 1910 this was 250 - "a microscopic fraction of the number of deaths at the time".

Prof Rubinstein thinks annual earnings of £250,000 is the cut-off point today and says the rich-poor divide has always been tolerable only as long as the poor have opportunities.

"The 1%"

"We are the 99%".

That's the rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement which pitched its tents in Manhattan's financial district on 17 September in a move that spread to other US cities and around the world.

While it is difficult to pin down the protesters' exact goals, their terminology has been widely used in the media.

In 2009, it took "just" $343,927 a year to join the elite group at the top of the ladder of US taxpayers. Just under 1.4 million households qualified for entry, they earned nearly 17% of the nation's income and paid roughly 37% of its income tax.

Richard Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, used figures from a new Congressional Budget Office report to back up the basic claim of Occupy Wall Street.

"Simply put, the CBO report shows that over the last quarter century (1979 to 2007, to be exact), the top 1% of income earners enjoyed far, far bigger real income gains than the other 99%," he wrote.

The picture is even more dramatic if you consider wealth - the total value of a household or individual's assets such as their home and investments.

According to data compiled by economist Edward Wolff in 2007, 99% hold about two-thirds of American wealth, meaning the top 1% has nearly a third.

However, the Guardian has crunched the numbers and says the divide in the US is more like the 0.01% v the 99.99%.

"Occupy" is the top word of 2011, according to the Global Language Monitor's annual global survey of the English language.

And in 10th place is "(The Other) 99", referring to the majority of those living in Western democracies who are left out of the dramatic rise in earnings associated with the top 1%.

But the Occupy protesters were not the first to use "the 1%". It has been cropping up in surveys, forecasts and reports for years.

In the UK, the richest 1% take about 14% of all income - the highest since World War II but lower than the interwar period, according to the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance.

Its study looks at who they are and how their pay has changed over the past decade. A Manchester United footballer was paid an average of £941,000 last year compared to £357,000 in 2001, a top barrister's pay jumped from £286,700 to £535,417, and a partner in an accountancy firm went from £472,000 to £759,000.

The chief executive of a FTSE350 company - the index of the 350 biggest companies in the UK - was paid an average of £1.5m last year, compared with £969,000 in 2001.

Ruth Lea, economic adviser to the Arbuthnot Banking Group, says the phrase "the top 1%" should always take wealth into account.

"When it gets into the press, it's about earnings rather than wealth. It is not what I believe to be the concept of rich."

Many people would assume the top 1% are all bankers but it also includes landowners and long-standing family businesses, she says.

"In a society like ours, which is still class-ridden, there's an amazing acceptance of extremely wealthy people who have inherited the wealth. They don't come in for the criticism that the likes of Bob Diamond (chief executive of Barclays Bank) comes in for.

"It's hard for people to grab hold of the idea that his contribution to the business is that many times bigger than someone else's."

"Banker"

"Bankers" has become a catch-all "boo-word" that can be seen on thousands of placards and letters pages.

Many people imagine bankers to be pinstriped, Porsche-driving men who have big houses and high-maintenance trophy wives.

Just this week, there was a story about a banker in London who spent £37,000 on dancers, Cristal champagne and food at Spearmint Rhino, a lap dancing club in London. The financier was described as a "youngish, slim Englishman" who was "celebrating a massive windfall", on his own.

According to analysis run by Collins Dictionaries, the verbs most commonly used in English with "banker" from 2009-11 are "disgrace" and "shame", says editor Ian Brookes.

Ex-Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin will always be "disgraced", as far as some headline writers are concerned.

The most common adjective used with banker is "greedy", which is almost twice as common as the next adjective "responsible", though this is usually used in phrases like "bankers who are responsible for the mess", notes Brookes.

"Bash", as in "banker bashing", also stands out as a new connection.

Earlier this year Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan, hit out against "banker bashing", saying it was a "huge misconception" that all banks ran into trouble during the financial crisis.

Bankers have all been tarred with the same brush, says London-based head-hunter John Purcell.

Protesters are singling out the top 1% of the banking community who tend to earn the telephone number salaries and lumping them together with everyone who works in the financial sector, suggests Purcell.

"The protesters, whether they appreciate it or not, are really only talking about a tiny fraction of that group. They are not looking at the vast majority of people who earn reasonable reward."

Other categories of high finance worker, like hedge fund managers, have been criticised, but "hedgies" has not proliferated across placards. Of course, it was banks that were the main targets of the bailouts, but insurance company AIG was bailed out too.

"Squeezed middle"

This was a term that was ridiculed when Labour Party leader Ed Miliband first used it. Now it has earned a certain degree of status as global word, or rather two words, of the year.

Chosen by Oxford University Press lexicographers in the UK and the US, it refers to hard-working families on an average income, who are seeing their living standards eroded by rising prices, pay freezes, cuts to their pensions and increases in VAT. Like Prime Minister David Cameron's Big Society the term is widely used if not always understood.

Miliband came in for a bit of stick when he struggled to define the term during an interview on Radio 4's Today programme earlier this year but it now appears to have taken root.

Susie Dent, spokeswoman for Oxford Dictionaries and language expert on Channel 4's Countdown, says the power of the label lies in its vagueness.

It's something that a large proportion of the electorate feel they belong to, she says.

"It has actually been around for some time. Bill Clinton quite liked the idea of the squeezed middle. He talked about hard-pressed working families squeezed in the middle which sounds very familiar."

Dent believes squeezed middle is here to stay but it needs to show more longevity before making it into an Oxford dictionary.

The words squeeze and middle are now seven times more likely to occur together than any two random words, says Brookes.

He found the phrase "this squeezed middle white class" in the 1928 book Dark Princess: A Romance by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. There is a reference to the "squeezed middle class" in the Toronto Globe and Mail in 2003 and the "squeezed middle" first appeared in 2010.

"Fat cat"

Fat cats are great fodder for newspaper cartoonists. They are are usually smoking big fat cigars and their greedy grin screams "we got the cream". A giant Fat Cat flap is also occasionally drawn.

The word was first used in the 1920s in the US to describe rich political donors, but now it tends to be shorthand for those who are seen to have it easy at the expense of others.

In 2009, US President Barack Obama criticised "fat cat" bankers who pay themselves large bonuses.

There has been a gradual increase in the use of this term since the 1960s, says Brookes. From 2009-11, "fat" is the most commonly used adjective in front of "cat" - "pet" is second, followed by "stray", "pussy" and "scaredy".

The term was once aimed near-exclusively at people in the private sector, but now it's frequently used to describe those in the public sector.

Headlines such as "Town hall fat cats should be ashamed" and "The council 'fat cat' earning £570,000" are now typical.

CIA's Operation to Assasinate bin Laden Damages Children's Vaccination Programme

2011-11-23T12:20:00.002+01:00

A health worker, right, administers a polio vaccine to a child during a vaccination campaign in Afghanistan in October 2011. A CIA decision to disguise a spy operation as a health mission might strengthen some fundamentalist religious leaders' mistrust of vaccines. (Photo credit should read Aref Karimi/AFP/Getty Images)

via In These Times:

CIA Boosts Vaccination Conspiracies

The agency’s public health ruse to confirm Bin Laden’s whereabouts caused collateral damage.

by Terry J. Allen

One grotesque aspect of the covert operation against Osama bin Laden has the potential to blow back—with the easy loft of a germ in a windstorm—and kill millions, especially children.

The Obama administration now openly embraces assassination as a useful and legal tactic in the increasingly amorphous project called “war.” But a new twist will spread collateral damage far beyond luckless civilians who are in the wrong place at the wrong time when Navy Seals swoop in, or when hit squads in bland U.S. offices unleash deadly remote-controlled drone strikes halfway around the globe.

Before deploying its team, the U.S. government sought to confirm that Bin Laden was actually in the walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Not a bad idea. But then the CIA cooked up a ruse to obtain confirmatory DNA by entering the house under the guise of a Hepatitis B vaccination program.

Although the “medical” team got inside, it is not known if it obtained the proof it sought. But the CIA decision to disguise a spy operation as a health mission did supply clear evidence to people around the world who fear that vaccination is a Western plot. Already suspicious, they will cite this abuse to resist immunization against polio, measles, cervical cancer and other debilitating diseases.

“In the mountains, the religious people can use [the Hep-B plot] to say, ‘See? We have been saying there is an agenda,’” Atiq ur-Rehman, director of a hospital in Peshawar, told the Washington Post in July.

The Taliban and other fundamentalist religious leaders (and some Americans) need no encouragement in concocting fabulous conspiracies. Even before the CIA operation, skeptics were charging that Western-sponsored vaccines are designed to sterilize or exterminate Muslims. Others assert that Islam forbids vaccination, charging that the drugs contain “extracts from bones and fat of an animal prohibited by God: the pig,” as Pakistani Taliban commander Maulvi Faqir Mohammed announced on a radio station that reaches from eastern Afghanistan to northwest Pakistan, according to the AP.

The CIA defends its Abbottabad “vaccination” program with a combination of outright lies and blame-the-victim stupidity. “It was conducted by genuine medical professionals who planned to provide everyone with the full course of treatments,” the Guardian reported, quoting “a senior U.S. official.” (In fact, the CIA-sponsored team gave only a small number of children the first of three required shots, and never followed up on the other doses.) “The damage here was caused by locals reacting to the mistaken idea that this was a fake public health effort.”

Tell that to Save the Children, which had to suspend medical programs and evacuate personnel because the Hep-B team-head had covered for the CIA mission by concocting a specious affiliation with the nonprofit.

The broader impact of the misguided covert op is on global public health itself. Saving millions of lives a year, vaccination has been the most effective medical intervention in history, next to clean drinking water. Before vaccination made it the first major disease to be eradicated, smallpox took 5 million lives annually. The measles vaccine has more than halved the number of deaths to the still-unconscionable figure of 1 million-plus a year. And polio, which used to claim hundreds of thousands annually, has been largely contained by vaccination efforts.

But just as the prospect of eradicating polio nears, programs are starting to falter, and vaccination fear is a key factor. In 2009 and 2010, 23 previously polio-free countries were re-infected by imports of the virus, according to the World Health Organization. The worst-affected area happens to be where the CIA ran its scam. Pakistan and Afghanistan (along with India and Nigeria) are the world’s only remaining polio-endemic countries, and rates are rising in Pakistan and Nigeria.

So the CIA got its man, but the deception—disguising spies as caring medical personnel—was lethally shortsighted. Such blatant violations of medical ethics stoke conspiracy theories with real fuel.

The fire is spreading. “As long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of contracting polio,” the WHO reports. And the same is true for adults, and for the many diseases that are preventable through safe immunization—an effort that is contaminated when governments and spy agencies hijack public health.

Occupy Spring

2011-11-22T22:19:00.008+01:00

Here is one of the boldest predictions: the Age of Ghost-Modern, post-industrial, corporate capitalism is finally going to end its centuries' old boom-bust-ic life-cycle this coming spring, in 2012!

The demise of the middle classes and their civil(ised?) society has brought a critical reduction in the size, scope and status of these social actors to the exploitable/subaltern status of (vaguely human) resources, mere spare parts destined to be exploited (via the Great Speedup) for the selfish benefit of a microscopic kleptocracy.

Wallerstein's analysis, as presented by the Al-Jazeera network, is but one attempt at drawing parallels between counter-narratives united by an irrepressible quest for social justice...

via Al-Jazeera

The contradictions of the Arab Spring

The spirit of 1968 flows through Arab Spring and Occupy movement - as its counter-current attempts to suppress uprising.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

In 1968, socially and economically marginalised groups of people protested in a global movement [Gallo/Getty]

The turmoil in Arab countries that is called the Arab Spring is conventionally said to have been sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in a small village of Tunisia on December 17, 2010. The massive sympathy this act aroused led, in a relatively short time, to the destitution of Tunisia's president and then to that of Egypt's president. In very quick order thereafter, the turmoil spread to virtually every Arab state and is still continuing.

Most of the analyses we read in the media or on the internet neglect the fundamental contradiction of this phenomenon - that the so-called Arab Spring is composed of two quite different currents, going in radically different directions. One current is the heir of the world-revolution of 1968. The "1968 current" might better be called the "second Arab revolt".

Its objective is to achieve the global autonomy of the Arab world that the "first Arab revolt" had sought to achieve. The first revolt failed primarily because of successful Franco-British measures to contain it, co-opt it, and repress it.

The second current is the attempt by all important geopolitical actors to control the first current, each acting to divert collective activity in the Arab world in ways that would redound to the relative advantage of each of these actors separately. The actors here regard the "1968 current" as highly dangerous to their interests. They have done everything possible to turn attention and energy away from the objectives of the "1968 current", in what I think of as the great distraction.

The past didn't go anywhere

What do I mean by a "1968 current"? There were two essential features to the world-revolution of 1968 that remain relevant to the world situation today. First, the revolutionaries of 1968 were protesting against the inherently undemocratic behaviour of those in authority. This was a revolt against such use (or misuse) of authority at all levels: the level of the world-system as a whole; the level of the national and local governments; the level of the multiple non-governmental institutions in which people take part or to which they are subordinated (from workplaces to educational structures to political parties and trade-unions).

The '1968 current' refers to a revolution of the 'forgotten peoples' [Gallo/Getty]

In language that was developed later on, the 1968-revolutionaries were against vertical decision-making and in favour of horizontal decision-making - participatory and therefore popular. By and large, although there were exceptions, the "1968 current" was deeply influenced by the concept of non-violent resistance, whether in the version of satyagraha developed by Mahatma Gandhi or that pursued by Martin Luther King and his collaborators, or indeed older versions such as that of Henry David Thoreau.

In the "Arab Spring" we could see this current strongly at work in Tunisia and Egypt. It was the rapid public embrace of this current that terrified those in power - the rulers of every Arab state without exception, the governments of the "outside" states who were an active presence in the geopolitics of the Arab world, even the governments of very distant states.

The spread of an anti-authoritarian logic, and especially its success anywhere, menaced all of them. The governments of the world joined forces to destroy the "1968 current".

A growing world movement

So far, they have not been able to do it. Indeed, on the contrary, the current is gaining force around the world - from Hong Kong to Athens to Madrid to Santiago to Johannesburg to New York. This is not solely the result of the Arab Spring, since the seeds and even the revolts elsewhere predated December 2010. But the fact that it has occurred so dramatically in the Arab world, once thought relatively unresponsive to such a current, has added considerable momentum to the growing world movement.

How have the governments responded to the threat? There are really only three ways to respond to such a threat - repression, concessions and diversion. All three responses have been used, and up to a certain point, their use has achieved some success.

Of course, the internal political realities of each state are different, and that is why the dosage of repression, concessions and diversion has varied from state to state.

However, the decisive characteristic is, in my view, the second feature of the world-revolution of 1968. The world-revolution of 1968 included in a very major way a revolution of the "forgotten peoples" - those who had been left out of the concerns of the major organised forces of all political stripes. The forgotten peoples had been told that their concerns, their complaints, their demands were secondary and had to be postponed until some other primary concerns were resolved.

Who were these forgotten peoples? They were first of all women, half the world's population. They were secondly those who were defined in a given state as "minorities" - a concept that is not really numerical but rather social (and has usually been defined in terms of race or religion or language or some combination thereof).

In addition to women and the social "minorities", there exists a long list of other groups who also proclaimed their insistence on not being forgotten: Those with "other" sexual preferences, those who were disabled, those who were the "indigenous" populations in a zone that had been subject to in-migration by powerful outsiders in the last 500 years, those who were deeply concerned with threats to the environment, those who were pacifists. The list has continued to grow, as more and more "groups" became conscious of their status as "forgotten peoples".

As one analyses Arab state after Arab state, one realises quite quickly that the list of forgotten peoples and their relation to the regime in power varies considerably. Hence, the degree to which "concessions" can limit revolt varies. The degree to which "repression" is easy or difficult for the regime varies. But make no mistake about it, all regimes want, above all, to stay in power.

One way to stay in power is for some of those who are in power to join the uprising, casting overboard a personage who happens to be the president or ruler in favour of the pseudo-neutral armed forces. This is exactly what happened in Egypt. It is that about which those who are today reoccupying Tahrir Square in Egypt are complaining as they seek to reinvigorate the "1968 current".

The problem for the major geopolitical actors is that they are not sure how best to "distract" attention and advance their own interests amidst the turmoil. Let us look at what the various actors have been trying to do and the degree to which they have been successful. We will then be able better to assess the prospects of the "1968 current" today and in the relatively near future.

Ex-colonial redemption

We should start the story with France and Great Britain - the fading ex-colonial powers. They were both badly caught with their pants down in Tunisia and Egypt. Their leaders had, as individuals, been personally profiting from the two dictatorships. They not merely supported them against the uprising, but actively counselled them on how to repress.

Finally, and very late, they realised how big a political error this had been. They had to find a way to redeem themselves. They found it in Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi had also, just like the French and the British, fully supported Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. Indeed he went the furthest, deploring their resignations. He was obviously deeply frightened by what was happening in the two neighbouring countries. To be sure, there was not much of a true "1968 current" in Libya. But there were plenty of discontented groups. And when these groups began their revolt, he blustered about how hard he would repress them.

France and Great Britain saw their opportunity here.

The 1968 spirit is expanding, despite recession, despite concessions, despite co-option [Gallo/Getty]

Despite the degree to which these two countries (and others) had engaged in profitable business in Libya for at least a decade, they suddenly discovered that Gaddafi was a terrible dictator, which no doubt he was. They set out to redeem themselves by open military support for the Libyan rebels.

Today, Bernard-Henri Lévy is boasting of the way in which he created a direct link between President Sarkozy of France and the structure of the Libyan rebels on the basis of active intervention to promote human rights.

But France and Great Britain, however determined, were unable to unseat Gaddafi without help. They needed the United States. Obama was obviously reluctant at first. But, under internal US pressure ("to promote human rights"), he threw in US military and political assistance to what was now called a NATO effort. He did this on the basis that, in the end, he could argue that not a single US life was lost - only Libyan lives.

Just as Gaddafi was unnerved by the ousting of Mubarak, so were the Saudis. They saw Western acquiescence (and subsequently approval) of his departure as a highly dangerous precedent. They decided to pursue their own independent line - the defence of the status quo.

They defended it first of all at home, secondly in the Gulf Coordination Council (and in particular in Bahrain), then in the other monarchies (Jordan and Morocco), then in all Arab states. And in the two neighbouring countries in which there was most turmoil - Yemen and Syria - they began to pursue a mediation in which everything would change so that nothing would change.

A current not easily contained

The new Egyptian regime, under attack at home from the "1968 current" and always sensitive to the fact that Egypt's primacy in the Arab world had diminished seriously, began to revise its geopolitical stance, first of all vis-à-vis Israel.

The regime wanted to take its distance from Israel, without, however, jeopardising its ability to obtain financial assistance from the United States. They became an active advocate of reunification of the split Palestinian political world, hoping that this reunification would not only force significant concessions from the Israelis but hamper the development of the "1968 current" among the Palestinians.

The global spirit of protest won't be easily contained [Gallo/Getty]

Two neighbouring countries - Turkey and Iran - sought to profit from the Arab unrest by strengthening their own legitimacy as actors in the Middle East arena. This was not easy for either of them, especially since each had to worry about the degree to which the "1968 current" would menace them internally - the Kurds in Turkey, the multiple factions in the complicated Iranian internal politics.

And Israel? Israel has been assaulted all around by the prospect of "delegitimisation" - in the Western world (even in Germany, even in the United States), in Egypt and Jordan, in Turkey, in Russia and China. And all the while it has had to face a "1968 current" that has emerged among the Jewish population within Israel.

And, as all this geopolitical juggling has been going on, the Arab Spring has become simply one part of what is now very clearly a worldwide unrest occurring everywhere: Oxi in Greece, indignados in Spain, students in Chile, the Occupy movements that have now spread to 800 cities in North America and elsewhere, strikes in China and demonstrations in Hong Kong, multiple happenings across Africa.

The "1968 current" is expanding - despite repression, despite concessions, despite co-option.

And geopolitically, across the Arab world, the success of the various players has been limited, and in some cases counterproductive. Tahrir Square has become a symbol across the world. Yes, many Islamist movements have been able to express themselves openly in Arab states where they could not do so earlier. But so have the secular left forces. The trade unions are rediscovering their historic role.

Those who believe that Arab unrest, that world unrest, is a passing moment will discover in the next major bubble burst (which we can anticipate quite soon) that the "1968 current" will no longer be so easily contained.

Immanuel Wallerstein is a professor in the department of sociology at Yale University and author of some 30 books, including The Modern World System - published in four volumes, with a further two anticipated. Prof Wallerstein's decades of work, critical of global capitalism and supporting 'anti-systemic movements' have led to him being recognised as a world-renowned expert in social analysis.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Palestine Vote Showcases the Decline of American Power

2011-11-17T20:17:00.004+01:00

by Juan Cole

The United States, castigated by its critics as recently as a decade ago as a “hyper-power,” is now so weak and isolated on the world stage that it may cast an embarrassing and self-defeating veto of Palestinian membership in the United Nations. Beset by debt, mired in economic doldrums provoked by the cupidity and corruption of its business classes, and on the verge of withdrawing from Iraq and ultimately Afghanistan in defeat, the U.S. needs all the friends it can get. If he were the visionary we thought we elected in 2008, President Obama would surprise everyone by rethinking the issue and coming out in favor of a U.N. membership for Palestine. In so doing, he would help the U.S. recover some of its tarnished prestige and avoid a further descent into global isolation and opprobrium.

AP / Seth Wenig

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas listens as President Barack Obama speaks at the U.N. on Sept. 21.

It is often the little things that trip up empires and send them spiraling into geopolitical feebleness. France’s decision to react brutally to the Algerian independence movement from 1954 arguably helped send its West African subjects running for the exits, much to the surprise and dismay of a puzzled Gen. Charles de Gaulle. Empires are always constructed out of a combination of coercion and loyalty, and post-colonial historians often would prefer not to remember the loyalty of compradors and collaborators. But arguably it is the desertion of the latter that contributes most decisively to imperial collapse.

Thus, it is highly significant that an influential Saudi prince warned the United States that a veto of Palestine at the U.N. could well cost the latter its alliance with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is the world’s swing petroleum producer and has done Washington many favors in the oil markets, and although such favors were seldom altogether altruistic, Riyadh’s good will has been a key element in U.S. predominance.

The House of Saud has other options, after all. It has been thinking hard about whether its ideological differences with the Chinese Communist Party are not outweighed by common interests. Among these mutual goals is the preservation of a model of authoritarian, top-down governance combined with rapid economic advance to forestall popular demands for participation, as an alternative to Western liberalism. For its part, China has invested $15 billion in the Arab world in recent years and is an increasingly appealing destination for Arab capital. Beijing is supporting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ initiative for recognition in the U.N.

NATO ally Turkey has also broken with the U.S. over Palestine policy, vowing to do what it can to end the shameful and illegal Israeli blockade on civilian Palestinians in Gaza. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to change Obama’s mind, reminding him of his 2010 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, in which the U.S. president looked forward to the establishment in short order of a Palestinian state. Erdogan says of the veto threat, “We have difficulties in understanding their position. ... The U.S. has always advocated a two-state solution.”

Even NATO ally France, which has troops fighting in Afghanistan alongside U.S. forces, broke with Obama on Palestine, advocating a compromise abhorred in Washington and Tel Aviv whereby the Palestinian Authority would join the Vatican in being a formal U.N. observer state. Indeed, NATO is divided on this issue, with Spain and Norway joining Turkey and France in bolting from U.S. leadership. In the wider European Union, the split is even more stark. With countries traditionally willing to follow the U.S. lead on important geopolitical issues now breaking with Washington on Palestine, it is no surprise that the tier of rising world powers known as the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—is unanimously in favor of the Palestine bid at the U.N.

Also gone by the wayside are Arab dictators such as Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who were usually willing to do Washington’s bidding in dealing with the Palestinians. The vital youth movements in the Arab world have not foregrounded the Palestine issue, afraid of giving their dictators an opportunity to change the subject from domestic issues of repression and corruption. But the invasion by some Egyptian protesters of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and the forced withdrawal of Israeli ambassadors from Egypt and Turkey signal a likely turn in the region toward governments more attentive to public opinion in favor of the Palestinians in the Middle East. The revolutionary youth of 2011, having overthrown three governments and shaken a half-dozen more to their foundations, had idolized democracy and seemed willing to give Washington a hearing. But Obama could squander the remnants of his good will by appearing to support the repression of a whole people’s yearning for basic human rights.

Iran, which has suffered a loss of prestige in the Arab world because of its support for the repressive government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria (from which Tehran has recently only mildly backpedaled), could recover some of its past cachet if the U.S. vetoes the Palestinian bid for U.N. membership. Iran’s public relations difficulties in the Arab world had been a godsend for Obama in the past six months, but he could easily squander this opportunity.

The American inability to fashion a consensus on this issue among its closest allies, much less on the world stage, stands in stark contrast to the role Washington had been able to play only two decades ago. One recalls the unarguably impressive performance of George H. W. Bush in 1990 in constructing a U.N.-backed international alliance, including the Arab League, for the purpose of the Gulf War. In part, the failure derives from declining economic and political clout. The U.S. economy is only 20 percent of the world gross domestic product now, down from 25 percent in 1990 (and down from 50 percent in 1945), and America has powerful new economic challengers such as China, which could overtake it in a decade.

But in large part, Washington’s current difficulties derive from adopting a position contrary to international law and to basic human decency. Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank looks suspiciously like Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait—both being land-grabs that violate the United Nations Charter, Article 2.4. The stateless Palestinians ultimately have no individual rights. No national courts uphold their property deeds or rights to resources such as water. At least if they are recognized by the vast majority of U.N. member states, the Palestinians may gain the standing to sue in national and international courts to stop the ongoing torts being committed against them by the Israeli settler-industrial complex. In standing against this attempt to right an epochal historical wrong to an entire people, Obama puts the United States on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of world opinion. Neither is likely to forgive him.

Nuclear Israel revisited

2011-11-13T18:34:00.001+01:00

To have or not to have nuclear weapons is a question of human security and not European privilege.

by Joseph Massad

How many times must this story be retold? It is common knowledge in the United States, in Europe, in the Arab World, indeed in the entire world. The international press has been reporting on it since the late 1960s. The historical details of the story are also well known. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower gave Israel its first small nuclear reactor at Nahal Sorek; in 1964, the French built for Israel its much larger and major Dimona nuclear reactor in the Naqab (Negev) Desert; in 1965, Israel stole 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from the United States through its spies at the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation company in Pennsylvania; in 1968, Israel hijacked a Liberian ship in international waters and stole its 200-ton shipment of yellowcake. Israel has possessed nuclear bombs since the early 1970s. Despite official US denials, Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel, reportedly prepared to launch 13 nuclear bombs on Syria and Egypt in 1973 and was stopped short of committing this genocidal act when Henry Kissinger gave Israel the most massive weapons airlift in history at the time to reverse the course of the 1973 war (as Time Magazine reported the story). Israel has had an ongoing nuclear weapons collaboration with the South African Apartheid regime for decades, which only ended with the collapse of the regime in 1994.

Since then, experts have estimated that Israel has upwards of 400 nuclear devices, including thermonuclear weapons with megaton range, as well as neutron bombs, tactical nuclear weapons, and suitcase nukes. It also has the missile delivery systems to launch them with a reach of 11,500km (which can reach beyond Iran). Israel also has submarines that are capable of launching nuclear attacks as well as jet fighters that can deliver Israel’s nuclear cargo.

Israel has diligently prevented its neighbours from even acquiring nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. It violated international law by bombing the Iraqi French-built Osirak nuclear reactor still under construction in 1981 in an unprovoked raid even though the reactor was going to be used, according to the French and Iraqi governments, for peaceful scientific purposes. Israel also bombed what intelligence reports allege was a North Korean nuclear reactor under construction in Syria in 2007. Israel’s Mossad has also been linked to the assassination of numerous Egyptian, Iraqi, and Iranian nuclear scientists over the decades. Israel continues to refuse to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to allow members of the International Atomic Energy Commission to inspect its Dimona reactor.

Israel, a predatory and aggressive country that has consistently launched wars on all its neighbours since its establishment, expelled hundreds of thousands of people, created millions of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Egyptian refugees, murdered tens of thousands of civilians and used internationally-banned weapons (from napalm to phosphorous bombs, to name the most notorious cases), continues to occupy the Palestinian territories and the Palestinian people in violation of international law, is governed by a foundational anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist state ideology to which all its leaders, governing structures, and institutions adhere, as does its popular and political culture and a variety of its laws. Indeed, Israel not only consistently launches wars against its neighbours but also urges world powers to invade these neighbours as well, and in the meanwhile sponsors anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist campaigns of hatred in the United States and across Europe in addition to integrating such racism in its school and university curricula and much of its cultural production.

Racist policies

Israel’s protector, the United States, is the only country on Earth that has ever deliberately used nuclear bombs against civilian populations and continues to defend this decision 66 years after this genocidal act, and inculcates its population, in its school curricula and in the media, to defend it. The United States has also made certain that Israel’s nuclear arsenal would not ever be discussed at the UN Security Council despite persistent proposals over the decades to discuss it. Indeed, the United States insistence on keeping Israel’s nuclear capability an open "secret" is engineered, among other things, to keep United States aid to Israel flowing, especially as a key legal condition of receiving such aid is for recipient countries to be signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Israel refuses to sign.

Yet the United States and Israel, which have been the major threats to world peace and indeed the major global warmongers since World War II, insist on telling the world that Iran, a country whose current regime never invaded any country (but was rather invaded by Saddam’s Iraq in 1981 at the behest of the dictatorial ruling Gulf oil-rich families and their US and French sponsors), is a threat to world peace were it to possess a nuclear device.

The racist policies of the United States as to who should get to possess nuclear weapons and who should not (according to racial criteria of whether they are European or of European stock or not) aside, it must be made clear that the extent to which there is a nuclear race in the Middle East, it is one fostered by Israel’s warmongering and its possession of such weapons of mass destruction. If the Middle East is to be a nuclear-free zone, then the international effort to rid it of such weapons must begin with Israel, which is the only country in the region that possesses these weapons, and not with Iran who may or may not be developing them.

The racism of the Obama administration against Arabs and Muslims clearly knows no limits, but for the people of the Middle East (Arabs, Turks, and Iranians), Obama’s racist criteria are not terribly persuasive. To have or not to have nuclear weapons is a question of human security, as far as the people of the region are concerned, and not one of European racial privilege. While the US may not fear Israeli nukes, Israel’s neighbouring countries and their civilian populations have for decades been (and continue to be) terrorised by them; and for good reason. Once Obama learns this lesson, the people of the region will reconsider US credibility about its alleged concern about nuclear proliferation.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

The Instability of Inequality

2011-10-30T01:00:00.000+02:00

by Nouriel Roubini

NEW YORK – This year has witnessed a global wave of social and political turmoil and instability, with masses of people pouring into the real and virtual streets: the Arab Spring; riots in London; Israel’s middle-class protests against high housing prices and an inflationary squeeze on living standards; protesting Chilean students; the destruction in Germany of the expensive cars of “fat cats”; India’s movement against corruption; mounting unhappiness with corruption and inequality in China; and now the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in New York and across the United States.

While these protests have no unified theme, they express in different ways the serious concerns of the world’s working and middle classes about their prospects in the face of the growing concentration of power among economic, financial, and political elites. The causes of their concern are clear enough: high unemployment and underemployment in advanced and emerging economies; inadequate skills and education for young people and workers to compete in a globalized world; resentment against corruption, including legalized forms like lobbying; and a sharp rise in income and wealth inequality in advanced and fast-growing emerging-market economies.

Of course, the malaise that so many people feel cannot be reduced to one factor. For example, the rise in inequality has many causes: the addition of 2.3 billion Chinese and Indians to the global labor force, which is reducing the jobs and wages of unskilled blue-collar and off-shorable white-collar workers in advanced economies; skill-biased technological change; winner-take-all effects; early emergence of income and wealth disparities in rapidly growing, previously low-income economies; and less progressive taxation.

The increase in private- and public-sector leverage and the related asset and credit bubbles are partly the result of inequality. Mediocre income growth for everyone but the rich in the last few decades opened a gap between incomes and spending aspirations. In Anglo-Saxon countries, the response was to democratize credit – via financial liberalization – thereby fueling a rise in private debt as households borrowed to make up the difference. In Europe, the gap was filled by public services – free education, health care, etc. – that were not fully financed by taxes, fueling public deficits and debt. In both cases, debt levels eventually became unsustainable.

Firms in advanced economies are now cutting jobs, owing to inadequate final demand, which has led to excess capacity, and to uncertainty about future demand. But cutting jobs weakens final demand further, because it reduces labor income and increases inequality. Because a firm’s labor costs are someone else’s labor income and demand, what is individually rational for one firm is destructive in the aggregate.

The result is that free markets don’t generate enough final demand. In the US, for example, slashing labor costs has sharply reduced the share of labor income in GDP. With credit exhausted, the effects on aggregate demand of decades of redistribution of income and wealth – from labor to capital, from wages to profits, from poor to rich, and from households to corporate firms – have become severe, owing to the lower marginal propensity of firms/capital owners/rich households to spend.

The problem is not new. Karl Marx oversold socialism, but he was right in claiming that globalization, unfettered financial capitalism, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct. As he argued, unregulated capitalism can lead to regular bouts of over-capacity, under-consumption, and the recurrence of destructive financial crises, fueled by credit bubbles and asset-price booms and busts.

Even before the Great Depression, Europe’s enlightened “bourgeois” classes recognized that, to avoid revolution, workers’ rights needed to be protected, wage and labor conditions improved, and a welfare state created to redistribute wealth and finance public goods – education, health care, and a social safety net. The push towards a modern welfare state accelerated after the Great Depression, when the state took on the responsibility for macroeconomic stabilization – a role that required the maintenance of a large middle class by widening the provision of public goods through progressive taxation of incomes and wealth and fostering economic opportunity for all.

Thus, the rise of the social-welfare state was a response (often of market-oriented liberal democracies) to the threat of popular revolutions, socialism, and communism as the frequency and severity of economic and financial crises increased. Three decades of relative social and economic stability then ensued, from the late 1940’s until the mid-1970’s, a period when inequality fell sharply and median incomes grew rapidly.

Some of the lessons about the need for prudential regulation of the financial system were lost in the Reagan-Thatcher era, when the appetite for massive deregulation was created in part by the flaws in Europe’s social-welfare model. Those flaws were reflected in yawning fiscal deficits, regulatory overkill, and a lack of economic dynamism that led to sclerotic growth then and the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis now.

But the laissez-faire Anglo-Saxon model has also now failed miserably. To stabilize market-oriented economies requires a return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of unregulated markets and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Even an alternative “Asian” growth model – if there really is one – has not prevented a rise in inequality in China, India, and elsewhere.

Any economic model that does not properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy. Unless the relative economic roles of the market and the state are rebalanced, the protests of 2011 will become more severe, with social and political instability eventually harming long-term economic growth and welfare.

Nouriel Roubini is Chairman of Roubini Global Economics, Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and co-author of the book Crisis Economics.

The US security complex: Too big to fail

2011-10-30T00:03:00.006+02:00

Many Americans are not aware that their tax money is being spent supporting a huge military industry.

by Tom Engelhardt

US taxpayers are shelling out $1.2 tn. for the military, intelligence and homeland security sectors [EPA]

Think of Iraq as the AIG of wars - the only difference being that the bailout there didn't involve just three payouts. More than eight years after the Bush administration invaded that country, the bailout is, unbelievably enough, still going. Even as the US military withdraws, the State Department is planning to spend billions more in taxpayer dollars to field an army of hired-gun contractors to replace it. Afghanistan? It could have been the Lehman Brothers of conflicts, but when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office he chose the Citigroup model instead, and surged troops in twice in 2009. In other words, he double-TARPed that war, and ever since, the bailout money has been flooding in.

Until now - as the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations make clear - "too big to fail" has meant only one set of institutions: the plundering financial outfits that played such a role in driving the US economy off a cliff in 2008, looked like they might themselves collapse in a heap of bad deals and indebtedness, and were bailed out by Washington. Isn't it finally time to expand the too-big-to-fail category to include the Pentagon, the US Intelligence Community, and more generally the National Security Complex?

There is, of course, one major difference between those bailed-out financial institutions and the Complex: however powerful the banks may be, however much money financial outfits and Wall Street sink into K-Street lobbyists and the election campaigns of politicians, however much influence the US Chamber of Commerce may wield, when too-big-to-fail financial institutions totter, they have to come to the federal government hat (and future bonuses) in hand.

For the Pentagon and the National Security Complex, it's quite another matter. These days it's only a slight exaggeration to claim that they are Washington and that their very size, influence, and power protects them from the consequences of failure.

In the last decade, as "the troops" became sacrosanct, the secular equivalent of religious icons, they also helped ensure that no Congress could afford not to pour money into the Pentagon. Pay no attention to the much-touted $450 bn that institution is expected to trim over the next ten years. That sum will largely come from "cuts" in future projected growth and anything more will be strongly resisted. In that same decade - thanks largely to two hijacked planes that damaged New York beyond al-Qaeda's wildest dreams - "American safety" (narrowly defined as "from terrorists") became the mantra of the moment. Soon enough, it was the explanation of choice for any expenditure: the latest drones, surveillance equipment, high-tech motion sensors, or peeping-Tom technology at airports.

"The troops" translated into a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Pentagon, and it worked like a charm. In the three years since the economy melted down, when so much that mattered to most Americans was being cut back or deep-sixed, that budget was still merrily expanding. In the meantime, there were those constant infusions of fear for "American safety", helped along by terror plots generally too inept to do the slightest damage. All this ensured that an already massive crew of intelligence outfits would morph into a labyrinthine bureaucracy of stupefying proportions.

That same phrase fertilised the Department of Homeland Security, the homeland security state that went with it, and an immensely lucrative homeland-security-industrial complex that went with that - all growing at a remarkable clip.

An insurance policy for the National Security Complex

Imagine for a second that, at the height of the Cold War, someone had told you of a future in which the US faced no great armed power (not one) and at most a few thousand terrorists scattered across the planet, as well as modestly armed minority insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine that person making this prediction as well: in budget and size, the National Security Complex of that moment would put its Cold War predecessor in the shade.

Without a doubt, you would have dismissed him as a madman. If someone had proposed such a future to those running the Cold War back then, they would have called it victory. And yet that's exactly our reality today, while victory itself has become the rarest of vintages, no longer stocked anywhere in our American world.

The dimensions of the National Security Complex now beggar the imagination. In fact, everything about it should make it the global yardstick for "too big to fail". The Pentagon budget is, for instance, about 50 per cent higher today than the Cold War average and accounts for nearly half of all military expenditures globally. And yet it has kept right on growing; and if bailed-out bankers continue to take home their bonuses as thanks for practically sinking the country, top Pentagon types continue to take home their golden pensions with future revolving-door opportunities in the military-industrial complex always available.

If you really want to grasp the enormity of the National Security Complex, just consider this stat: today, 4.2 million federal workers and employees of private contractors have security clearances - about, that is, the population of New Zealand or Lebanon.

Whatever Washington turned over to the banks, the Complex has it so much easier. After all, its managers essentially pay themselves more or less what they desire in the name of supporting the troops and promoting American safety. Yes, our congressional representatives officially dole out the money, but they have little choice when it comes to offering less than what's asked of them. And presidential election campaigns always lock candidates into yet more of the same.

So here's a basic American reality in the second decade of the twenty-first century: the Complex has an insurance policy unavailable to other Americans, while a vast blanket of secrecy in the name of national security ensures that most Americans have no idea what's being done with their money. The Complex's funding is safe and its employees are above the law, no matter what acts they may commit. Notoriously, the Pentagon has never even passed an audit. By default, we guarantee the Complex that, whatever happens to other Americans, its institutions and employees will remain safe. That's the real definition of American security - and doesn't it sound something like the banks and bankers who just can't fail?

Don't ask, don't tell

In such circumstances, cost is no object. To pick a random example, one of the - count them - 17 outfits that make up the US Intelligence Community is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Of course, like 99.9 per cent of Americans, you've never heard of it, and yet it has 16,000 employees, a "black budget thought to be at least $5bn per year," and a new, nearly Pentagon-sized headquarters complex in Virginia that's cost you, the taxpayer, a nifty $1.8bn.

And what does it do? Protect you, of course. Ensures your safety, naturally. Beyond that, don't ask how it uses your money. As writer Gregg Easterbrook explains, that's highly classified information. The agency does claim to provide "timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security". Be satisfied.

And that's no anomaly. Your taxes regularly bail out the Complex. You ensure its wellbeing, and no one even bothers to give you an explanation. In 2008, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes did the numbers and offered a "conservative" estimate of the ultimate costs of the Iraq War: $3tn. Now that Washington increasingly looks like it is giving up hope of keeping any significant number of troops stationed in Iraq, you might ask just what that phenomenal sum bought Americans. But no answer will be forthcoming. On Iraq, mum's the word, nor will anyone in Washington be held accountable.

Oh, and don't bother to ask, because no one who matters thinks you need to know. Meanwhile, talking about golden parachutes, the president who took us into Iraq and kept us there is overseeing the creation of a library named after him and by last accounting had already raked in $15m on the lecture circuit at $100,000 to $150,000 a pop; the vice president, who was a key player in the decision to invade and the war that followed, took home more than $2m for his bestselling memoir; the national security adviser, who offered her keenest advice to the president on the subject of Iraq, garnered a guaranteed $2.5m on a three-book contract and now charges up to $150,000 an appearance for speaking engagements, while settling into posts at Stanford University and the Hoover Institute; and the secretary of state who went to the UN to infamously defend the coming invasion with a pack of lies has pulled in a similar $150,000 ($5,000 a minute) for his lectures - and those are just the first few names on a far longer list.

By the way, in case you think it's over in Iraq, think again. Washington's stimulus bill for that country is still in effect. Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren writes at the Huffington Post that the State Department is now asking Congress for $5bn over five years to create jobs for police officers - Iraqi police officers, that is.

A recent report from Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies estimated that the ultimate cost of both the Afghan and Iraq wars could range up to $4.4tn (with another vast stimulus package going to the Afghan police and military for years to come). And keep in mind that those trillions don't include the global war on terror or spending on the rest of the national security complex.

Chris Hellman of the National Priorities Project did the maths for TomDispatch and found - again, a conservative estimate - that US taxpayers are shelling out at least $1.2tn a year for the vast military, intelligence, and homeland security combine that operates in their name.

All of this to keep you safe from the next underwear bomber. Of course, if you live in Topeka or El Paso or Sacramento or Juneau, you have about the same chance of being endangered by a terrorist as meeting an angel. Which means that whoever's safety net that money is going to, it's not yours. Those trillions don't secure your home from going "underwater", or your income from falling off a cliff, or your pension from evaporating, or your job from going down the drain or overseas, or the teachers in your community (not to speak of the police) from being given pink slips, or the library in your neighborhood from closing, or that "extra" firehouse in your vicinity from being shut down.

Too safe to fail?

When a country spends "more on defence than the next 17 top-spending countries combined" and can't win a war, you should know that something's wrong, and that "too big" and "fail" do stand in some relation to each other. Washington, however, doesn't.

"The United States is preparing 'dramatic' cuts to its defence budget so European allies will have to take on greater role within NATO", US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said [EPA]

Right now, the United States is still involved in conflicts, declared or undeclared, overt or covert, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Only last week, President Obama upped the ante, by announcing that he would send the (first) 100 Green Berets on an armed "advise and assist mission" to Uganda and three other African countries that most Americans couldn't locate on a map.

They are to help ferret out the Lord's Resistance Army, a grim, if small, guerrilla force that has been doing terrible things for years (but has in no way endangered the United States). This is, in part, payback for the way Ugandan troops have helped advance the US war on terror in Somalia. Whatever else it may be, it also threatens to be yet another small-scale conflict without end - and of course another potential payday for the National Security Complex.

The only problem: unless you're inside that Complex or involved in making weapons or other equipment for it, it's not your payday, just your payout. You, the taxpayer, bailed out AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and a host of other tottering financial firms. You saved their skins and their bonuses (and got nothing in return). The only bright spot: those were one-time, two-time, or three-time deals.

The Complex is forever (at least as its managers see it). Despite modest rumblings in Washington about the Pentagon and intelligence budgets and the deficit, it's not just considered too big to fail, but generally too big to question, and too deeply embedded to think much about.

No wonder TARPing war has become a Washington pastime.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.

The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source:

Al Jazeera

Epoca Modernităţii Himerice: Falimentul Noului Liberalism Utopic si democratizarea post-corporatistă a economiei inechităţii

2011-10-02T22:43:00.002+02:00

The Age of Ghost-Modernism: The New Liberal Utopianism and the Post-Corporatist Democratization of its Inequitable Economy

Abstract

It is this thesis’ contention that the hollow closure of post-modernity’s formative context and codifying social practices is aptly described as the Age of ‘Ghost-modernism’ [originator]. Beyond political-correctness and/or alleged attempts at axiological neutrality, the brutal truth revealed by the current economic crisis is that its profit-seeking perpetrators (which I describe as “utopian liberal agents”) have unleashed a barrage jamming of morally and ethically bankrupt signifiers (reducing critical thinking to its lowest common denominator) in order to promote their eco-cidal cult of the “free” market (which disfigures the environment while fragmenting society) as the ultimate meta-narrative to be had.

In this inquiry, Weber’s Zweckrationalität (instrumentally rational) framework for social action is employed to critique Ghost-modernity’s Hegelian specificity and socio-historical relativism as revealed by the corporate agents running the Military-Industrial Complex’s Permanent War (on “Terror”) Economy. In doing so, it affirms a Wertrationalität (value-rational) framework whose values prioritise people’s welfare over the technocrats’ inequitable financial profits – benefits accrued by reducing former social actors to the exploitable/subaltern status of (merely) human resources while a microscopic kleptocracy “privatises” the profits made after mortgaging this underclass’ future on a bankrupt episteme offered as collateral.

Moreover, the bounded rationality of the consumer system’s ideologically-modified, “turbo-capitalist” dystopia is critically deconstructed to delegitimize its seemingly perennial symbolic order and proceed to replace this post-liberal, corporate utopian order with a Pareto-efficient society.

Why boycott Israel?

2011-08-13T21:54:00.003+02:00

A founding member of the campaign for the academic and cultural boycott outlines the motivation behind the movement.

Author and history professor Mark LeVine speaks with sociologist Lisa Taraki, a co-founder of the Palestinian campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Mark LeVine: What is the "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" movement and how is it related to the academic and cultural boycott movement? How have both evolved in the past few years in terms of their goals and methods?

Lisa Taraki: The BDS movement can be summed up as the struggle against Israeli colonisation, occupation and apartheid. BDS is a rights-based strategy to be pursued until Israel meets its obligation to recognise the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and complies with the requirements of international law.

Within this framework, the academic and cultural boycott of Israel has gained considerable ground in the seven years since the launching of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in 2004. The goals of the academic and cultural boycott call, as the aims of the Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions issued in 2005, have remained consistent: to end the colonisation of Palestinian lands occupied in 1967; to ensure full equality of Palestinian citizens of Israel and end the system of racial discrimination; and to realise the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

The logic of the BDS movement has also remained consistent. The basic logic of BDS is the logic of pressure, not diplomacy, persuasion, or dialogue. Diplomacy as a strategy for achieving Palestinian rights has proven to be futile, due to the protection and immunity Israel enjoys from hegemonic world powers and those in their orbit.

Second, the logic of persuasion has also shown its bankruptcy, since no amount of "education" of Israelis about the horrors of occupation and other forms of oppression seems to have turned the tide. Dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, which remains very popular among Israeli liberals and Western foundations and governments that fund the activities, has also failed miserably. Dialogue is often framed in terms of "two sides to the story", in the sense that each side must understand the pain, anguish, and suffering of the other, and to accept the narrative of the other.

This presents the "two sides" as if they were equally culpable, and deliberately avoids acknowledgment of the basic coloniser-colonised relationship. Dialogue does not promote change, but rather reinforces the status quo, and in fact is mainly in the interest of the Israeli side of the dialogue, since it makes Israelis feel that they are doing something while in fact they are not. The logic of BDS is the logic of pressure. And that pressure has been amplifying.

Institutional pressure

The Palestinian-led academic and cultural boycott is an institutional boycott; that is, it does not target individual scholars or artists. This point has also remained the same since the inception of the BDS movement. Yet it's important to state here that all Israeli universities and virtually the entire spectrum of Israeli cultural institutions are complicit in the state's policies, and as such are legitimate targets of the boycott. Guidelines and criteria for boycott, however, have been elaborated since the founding of the movement, as more experience is gained on the ground, and in response to requests for guidance from conscientious academics and cultural workers wishing to respect the Palestinian boycott call. PACBI in particular spends a great deal of effort guiding and advising international solidarity activists. Consistency is achieved through adhering to the guidelines developed by PACBI, in cooperation with other elements in the Palestinian BDS movement.

World renowned public intellectuals, academics, writers, artists, musicians and other cultural workers have now endorsed the academic and cultural boycott call; their names are too many to note here, but the interested reader can consult the PACBI website. In addition, several campaigns for academic and cultural boycott have been established around the world: in the UK, the USA, France, Pakistan, Lebanon, Germany, Norway, India, Spain, South Africa, and Australia, and many other countries. The newly established European Platform for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (EPACBI) is an important coordinating body in Europe.

The lethal Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009 and the murder of Turkish solidarity activists aboard the Mavi Marmara in May 2010 served as further catalysts in the tremendous spread of BDS actions around the world, which include cancellations of artistic performances in Israel, protests against complicit Israeli institutions' performances abroad (such as the past and current protests around performances by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra), and many more creative forms of protest and boycott of Israeli and brand-Israel projects and institutions.

Israel's crackdown on dissent

ML: The Israelis have recently passed a so-called "anti-Boycott law", which opens Israelis who support any form of boycott, even if it's limited to settlement products, to significant civil penalties and lawsuits to force them to stop their actions. Can you comment on this whole discourse, especially the commentary in the Israeli press critical of it, claiming it represents a move against democracy, towards fascism, and similar responses which seem to suggest these are unprecedented measures?

LT: The Palestinian BDS movement is encouraged by the adoption of the logic of BDS, and boycott in particular, by sections of the Israeli left, and feels it has been vindicated in its argument that pressure - and not persuasion - is the best way to make Israelis realise that the system of occupation, apartheid and colonialism must end. Having said this, I must note that there are at least two disturbing aspects to the new surge of activity surrounding the new anti-boycott law passed by the Israeli Knesset recently.

First, the boycott being defended by leftist and liberal Israelis targets institutions (such as the University Center of Samaria and the cultural center in Ariel) and products of the Israeli colonies in the West Bank only. This boycott, then, is silent on the complicity of all mainstream Israeli institutions - and indeed many industries, such as the weapons industry - in maintaining and legitimising the structures of oppression.

Second, this boycott is often cast in terms of "saving Israeli democracy". As such, it is an Israel-centred discourse and project, and the point of reference is neither Palestinian rights as stipulated by international law nor an acknowledgment that they are heeding the call of the Palestinians. One outstanding exception is the Israeli group "Boycott from Within", which explicitly endorses the Palestinian BDS call and considers it the basic point of reference for its agenda of activism - such as urging artists and musicians not to perform in Israel, supporting a military embargo of Israel, advocating for different divestment campaigns, and many other activities that target all complicit Israeli institutions. Other Israeli groups, such as the Coalition of Women for Peace, ICAHD, and others have also endorsed the Palestinian BDS call publicly.

ML: What is your impression of what happened with the latest Gaza flotilla? Some commentators have argued that the "successful" use of supposedly "non-violent" strategies by the government of Israel to put pressure on other governments to stop the flotilla before it got anywhere near Gaza represents a defeat for the rising tide of non-violent resistance, showing that the Israelis have learnt the lessons and are now able to beat the activists at their own game.

LT: I don't agree with that assessment at all. I think the main aim of the flotillas, which has been to highlight, resist, and protest Israel's illegal siege of the Gaza Strip, has been realised, despite Israeli efforts to bear extreme pressure against governments to prevent the vessels from sailing. The ridiculous Israeli response to the recent "Welcome to Palestine" campaign did more to publicise the campaign than would otherwise have happened.

You are right to frame the flotilla movement as a part of the international movement to isolate, expose, and bear pressure upon Israel to respect international law and end its system of colonisation, occupation, and apartheid. That this movement - still in its early stages - has achieved world recognition is attested to by the state of disarray in official Israeli and Zionist circles. Already, several conferences and strategy papers have been launched in Israel and abroad to counter what is being marketed as the "delegitimisation threat". If BDS, the annual and growing Israel Apartheid Week events, and other resistance actions such as the waves of flotillas are mere nuisances, I doubt that so much effort would be invested merely out of an "academic" interest in them. Strong-arm tactics with some governments may have prevented the flotillas from reaching Gaza, but the strength of the BDS movement - and other solidarity actions - is that they are built on people's initiatives, [these] cannot be easily suppressed, despite intimidation, legal threats and lawsuits, and other silencing tactics.

A wider perspective

ML: In the BDS literature, there is a critique of those, like myself, who argue that anyone who wants to join BDS for Palestine should also adopt similar actions vis-a-vis other countries involved in massive systematic oppression and/or occupation (China, India, the US, to cite the most obvious examples), and that the need to think systemically is not merely an ethical imperative but a strategic one as well. Your response, when we last met in Ramallah, was that this strategy is utopian, that Palestinians have enough trouble getting people to engage in BDS merely against Israel, and that enlarging it would be untenable.

Can you explain how BDS can become more effective without thinking of joining with other movements against oppression and occupation that might call for a similar campaign?

LT: The BDS movement does operate with a conceptual framework, of course. This includes an analysis of global and regional power relations. BDS is predicated on the fact that the collusion of the hegemonic, or major world powers of the so-called "international community" with Israeli impunity is the single most important factor that enables Israel to continue flouting international law. The hegemonic powers not only shield Israel from censure; they have also often turned a blind eye to grievous offences committed by their allies - but only when it serves their own interests. The inconsistency of US and European foreign policy is not something I need to stress, I believe. Plenty of rogue regimes continue to oppress and suppress their citizenry without international censure, as we all know.

What is important to note, however, is that when an oppressed people decide to appeal to the world to help them achieve self-determination and freedom through boycotts and other pressure mechanisms, as the vast majority of Palestinian civil society has done, then the response of all conscientious people would usually be to respect that appeal directly and immediately. It certainly was the case in South Africa. I don't think anyone had the temerity to suggest, during the anti-apartheid struggle in that country, that the existence of a full-throttle anti-imperialist movement would be the precondition for supporting the boycotts called for by the oppressed in South Africa, or that a boycott of the US, the UK (and indeed Israel) was the only principled course of action to take. That would have been a recipe for paralysis.

Israel, unlike many other oppressive states, enjoys the full support of the hegemonic powers, as I have noted. Precisely because of this, since there is no other impetus for change, it is incumbent upon forces that support justice to heed the Palestinian call. If there were a robust BDS movement in China or in Morocco today urging a boycott of the existing regimes, then certainly it would be an obligation to respect the call of the oppressed.

The growth of the movement

ML: It seems increasing numbers of diaspora and Israeli Jews are supporting BDS, at least in principle - although as you alluded to - what they imagine BDS is and what it actually means can differ significantly. How is the growing support impacting the success of BDS? Do you think it is penetrating more into Israeli society? And have you seen any changes in the way the Israeli government deals with non-violent protest in the last year or so, given the increasing success of the movement?

LT: My comments concerning the Israeli boycott of the colonies in the West Bank are relevant in this context as well. I think most Israelis are very far from becoming convinced that BDS is an effective strategy for radical change of the status quo, and that is because Israeli society has no incentive to change the status quo. Only pressure, in the form of various BDS measures, can move the Israeli body politic. That is the logic of BDS, after all. As for the treatment of protests by the Israeli government and military, it's obvious that they are continuing to reassess their on-the-ground tactics in the face of the continuing escalation of protests, both by Palestinians and international and Israeli supporters. The use of force has been a constant for several decades now and is nothing new. During the first intifada, which was a form of civil resistance and disobedience, the response of the Israeli military was deadly and violent, just as it is today. The language of force will not be abandoned. That is the logic of a colonial power, after all.

ML: Can you elaborate a bit more on what the initiators of the BDS movement mean when they describe institutions or artists/academics who "serve Brand Israel". What is "Brand Israel" and whose interests does it serve?

LT: "Brand Israel" is a worldwide campaign launched in 2005 by some agencies of the Israeli government and major pro-Israel groups internationally, primarily in the United States. It's a diffuse and diverse effort, but the main idea behind it is to portray and promote Israel as a normal country for tourism, youth culture, enjoyment of the fine arts, sports, and all other "normal" and "civilised" pursuits. Public relations firms have played an important role in crafting the Israeli brand. In addition, Israeli consulates and embassies as well as Jewish and Zionist organizations (such as Hillel in the US) are actively involved in promoting Israeli art, scientific accomplishments, and other "achievements" abroad. The modernity, diversity, and vitality of Israel are stressed in Brand Israel promotional activities.

I may add that the Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor has uncovered evidence of official Israeli sponsorship of Brand Israel-type activities, and with a price tag attached; in an article published in 2008, he revealed that any Israeli artist or cultural worker accepting financial support from the Israeli Foreign Ministry for exhibiting or showcasing his or her work abroad was obligated to sign a contract stipulating that he or she "undertakes to act faithfully, responsibly and tirelessly to provide the Ministry with the highest professional services. The service provider is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel".

What this reveals, then, is that, in light of the bad press Israel has been receiving in past years, it has been deemed necessary to make sure that artists and other cultural workers - perhaps because of their reputation as idiosyncratic or even eccentric - know what is expected of them when they accept state funding of their tours abroad. They are supposed to act as "cultural ambassadors" for Israel, which - in large part - is to become apologists for Israeli policies and practices that oppress the Palestinians.

ML: In terms of the academic boycott, if I have a student who needs to come to Israel to develop her or his Hebrew in order better understand the dynamics of the occupation and can only afford to do this through various programs such as Erasmus or Education Abroad Programs that involved affiliation with Israeli universities, or wants to do research at Israeli archives on the country's history that require students to be affiliated to Israeli universities to obtain research clearance, what is the official position of PACBI towards this?

LT: The PACBI guidelines for the implementation of the academic boycott, which apply to international academics and students, are clear: any interaction with Israeli universities, regardless of the content or form (studying there, accessing archives, giving a course, attending a conference, conducting research) violates the academic boycott if such an interaction entails official contact with the institution.

This can include accepting an invitation to attend a conference, registering for a course, accepting employment or agreeing to conduct seminars, or conducting research in affiliation with such institutions. While using a university facility such as a library does not strictly violate the boycott, doing so in the framework of affiliation with the university would.

Institutional study abroad schemes, research activity conducted in the framework of institutional cooperation agreements - such as the various EU-funded programs, including Erasmus Mundus - violate the boycott. Regarding the study of Hebrew, I think that the international options for pursuing that are very wide indeed; most universities in the West offer Hebrew instruction.

In general, conscientious scholars and students are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the logic and aims of boycott and to abide by its spirit if situations other than the ones noted above are encountered. Since Palestinians - including academics and their representative body, the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Employees - have called for an academic boycott, it becomes a responsibility of conscientious academics and students considering visiting the area for research or study purposes to become familiar with the context, which includes thinking seriously about the meaning of their affiliation with Israeli universities in light of the boycott call.

ML: Critics might say that this response is explicitly putting politics - however worthy - ahead of the advance of scholarship. For historians, for example, it is impossible to produce new knowledge without accessing archives. For student historians, their degree depends on their access to archives. If the archives are controlled by the state, then is the mere fact of using them mean complicity with the state?

LT: This is not putting politics above scholarship; it is about applying ethical principles to the practice of scholarship. No scholarly activity takes place in a vacuum, and every scholar must consider the consequences of his or her research strategies when pursuing scholarly activity. State control of some archives does not necessarily preclude using them, as I noted earlier; usually, it is enough to prove one's academic credentials to gain access to them. It is the same as using Israeli medical facilities or any other public service. The main issue is institutional affiliation.

Drawing inspiration

ML: Are there any lessons from the so-called Arab Spring, or from other mass mobilisations globally against oppression in the past year or two that can inform and even help the BDS movement and Palestinian resistance more broadly? Do the events of the last eight months give you hope, or is the situation in Palestine different enough - being at once a colonial situation and an internal struggle for democracy both within Israeli and Palestinian societies - that these other mass mobilisations can't really help beyond inspiring Palestinians to stay the course?

LT: The revolutionary spirit that has ignited the Arab will no doubt make the question of Palestine more urgent than before, both in those countries that have begun the process of revolutionary transformation and those in which struggles for freedom and democracy are still unfolding. Once there are free and unrigged elections for new parliaments in Egypt and Tunisia as well as other Arab countries, the new parliaments will have to be sensitive to the views of the people - unlike the situation that has hitherto prevailed.

It is well known that Palestine is an Arab question, and that includes widespread rejection of Israel's destructive role in the region. The forces of counterrevolution may try to combat popular sentiment, and there will be continuous contestation and ongoing struggles, but the policies of Arab countries will not be the same now that the revolutionary spirit has taken hold of the imagination of the Arab people.

ML: How do you think the sudden rise of the protest movement in Israel for "social justice" will impact the BDS movement and Palestinian resistance more broadly to the occupation? Especially with the likely coincidence of renewed protests in Israel next month and a major Palestinian push for statehood at the UN, is there a space for Palestinians to make a significant intervention in the protest discourse inside Israel that helps reshape it towards broader ends? And if so, what role would BDS play in this?

LT: From all indications, the protest movement in Israel has nothing to say about justice for Palestinians, either as citizens or as occupied people. The Palestinian BDS movement does not address the Israeli public directly in order to persuade it or to appeal to its sense of justice. That is not the logic of BDS. It is up to Israeli political forces to make that connection and to influence their public. We expect that pro-BDS Israelis, however small their numbers might be, will be taking this up within their society.

Lisa Taraki is a sociologist at Birzeit University in the occupied Palestinian territories and a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.

The views expressed in this article are those to whom they are attributed and do not necessarily represent al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source:

Al Jazeera

The Berlin Wall, Fifty Years Ago

2011-08-13T17:12:00.001+02:00

While Condemning Wall in Public, U.S. Officials Saw "Long Term Advantage" if Potential Refugees Stayed in East Germany

"East German infantrymen line-up in close ranks to seal off Berlin's key border crossing point, the Brandenberg Gate" [from the USIA caption], undated, circa 13 August 1961. (All photos from National Archives, College Park MD, Still Pictures Division, Records of U.S. Information Agency, RG 306, collection PS-D, box 56)

Three Days Before Wall Went Up, CIA Expected East Germany Would Take "Harsher Measures" to Solve Refugee Crisis

Disturbed By Lack of Warning, JFK Asked Intelligence Advisers to Review CIA Performance.

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 354
Posted - August 12, 2011

For more information contact:
William Burr - 202/994-7000

Uncovering the US military's secret military

2011-08-08T17:11:00.002+02:00

Special US commandos are deployed in about 75 countries around the world - and that number is expected to grow.

by Nick Turse

US special forces, like the Navy Seals, are now more actively engaged in more overseas operations[GALLO/GETTY]

Somewhere on this planet a US commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you're done ... for the day. Without the knowledge of much of the general American public, a secret force within the US military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world's countries. This Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has generally been ignored by the mainstream media, and deserves further attention.

After a US Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden's chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the US military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight. It was atypical. While it's well known that US Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has often remained out of the public scrutiny.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that US Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, US Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. "We do a lot of travelling - a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq," he said recently. This global presence - in about 60 per cent of the world's nations and far larger than previously acknowledged - is evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

The rise of the military's secret military

Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight US service members died, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987. Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate.

Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions. Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army's "Green Berets" and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialised helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States' most specialised and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes US citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal "kill/capture" campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine".

This assassination programme has been carried out by commando units like the Navy SEALs and the Army's Delta Force as well as via drone strikes as part of covert wars in which the CIA is also involved in countries like Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. In addition, the command operates a network of secret prisons, perhaps as many as 20 black sites in Afghanistan alone, used for interrogating high-value targets.

Growth industry

From a force of about 37,000 in the early 1990s, Special Operations Command personnel have grown to almost 60,000, about a third of whom are career members of SOCOM; the rest have other military occupational specialties, but periodically cycle through the command. Growth has been exponential since September 11, 2001, as SOCOM's baseline budget almost tripled from $2.3bn to $6.3bn. If you add in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8bn in these years. Not surprisingly, the number of its personnel deployed abroad has also jumped four-fold. Further increases, and expanded operations, are on the horizon.

Lieutenant General Dennis Hejlik, the former head of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command - the last of the service branches to be incorporated into SOCOM in 2006 - indicated, for instance, that he foresees a doubling of his former unit of 2,600. "I see them as a force someday of about 5,000, like equivalent to the number of SEALs that we have on the battlefield. Between [5,000] and 6,000," he said at a June breakfast with defence reporters in Washington. Long-term plans already call for the force to increase by 1,000.

During his recent Senate confirmation hearings, Navy Vice Admiral William McRaven, the incoming SOCOM chief and outgoing head of JSOC (which he commanded during the bin Laden raid) endorsed a steady manpower growth rate of 3 per cent to 5 per cent a year, while also making a pitch for even more resources, including additional drones and the construction of new special operations facilities.

A former SEAL who still sometimes accompanies troops into the field, McRaven expressed a belief that, as conventional forces are drawn down in Afghanistan, special ops troops will take on an ever greater role. Iraq, he added, would benefit if elite US forces continued to conduct missions there past the December 2011 deadline for a total American troop withdrawal. He also assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that "as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at Somalia".

During a speech at the National Defense Industrial Association's annual Special Operations and Low-intensity Conflict Symposium earlier this year, Navy Admiral Eric Olson, the outgoing chief of Special Operations Command, pointed to a composite satellite image of the world at night. Before September 11, 2001, the lit portions of the planet - mostly the industrialised nations of the global north - were considered the key areas. "But the world changed over the last decade," he said. "Our strategic focus has shifted largely to the south ... certainly within the special operations community, as we deal with the emerging threats from the places where the lights aren't."

To that end, Olson launched "Project Lawrence", an effort to increase cultural proficiencies - like advanced language training and better knowledge of local history and customs - for overseas operations. The programme is, of course, named after the British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), who teamed up with Arab fighters to wage a guerrilla war in the Middle East during World War I. Mentioning Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, and Indonesia, Olson added that SOCOM now needed "Lawrences of Wherever".

While Olson made reference to only 51 countries of top concern to SOCOM, Col. Nye told me that on any given day, Special Operations forces are deployed in approximately 70 nations around the world. All of them, he hastened to add, at the request of the host government. According to testimony by Olson before the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, approximately 85 per cent of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. The others are scattered across the globe from South America to Southeast Asia, some in small numbers, others as larger contingents.

Special Operations Command won't disclose exactly which countries its forces operate in. "We're obviously going to have some places where it's not advantageous for us to list where we're at," says Nye. "Not all host nations want it known, for whatever reasons they have - it may be internal, it may be regional."

But it's no secret (or at least a poorly kept one) that so-called black special operations troops, like the SEALs and Delta Force, are conducting kill/capture missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, while "white" forces like the Green Berets and Rangers are training indigenous partners as part of a worldwide secret war against al-Qaeda and other militant groups. In the Philippines, for instance, the US spends $50m a year on a 600-person contingent of Army Special Operations forces, Navy Seals, Air Force special operators, and others that carries out counterterrorist operations with Filipino allies against insurgent groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf.

Last year, as an analysis of SOCOM documents, open-source Pentagon information, and a database of Special Operations missions compiled by investigative journalist Tara McKelvey (for the Medill School of Journalism's National Security Journalism Initiative) reveals, the US' most elite troops carried out joint-training exercises in Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Germany, Indonesia, Mali, Norway, Panama, and Poland.

So far in 2011, similar training missions have been conducted in the Dominican Republic, Jordan, Romania, Senegal, South Korea, and Thailand, among other nations. In reality, Nye told me, training actually went on in almost every nation where Special Operations forces are deployed. "Of the 120 countries we visit by the end of the year, I would say the vast majority are training exercises in one fashion or another. They would be classified as training exercises."

The Pentagon's power elite

Once the neglected stepchildren of the military establishment, Special Operations forces have been growing exponentially not just in size and budget, but also in power and influence. Since 2002, SOCOM has been authorised to create its own Joint Task Forces - like Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines - a prerogative normally limited to larger combatant commands like CENTCOM. This year, without much fanfare, SOCOM also established its own Joint Acquisition Task Force, a cadre of equipment designers and acquisition specialists.

With control over budgeting, training, and equipping its force, powers usually reserved for departments (like the Department of the Army or the Department of the Navy), dedicated dollars in every Defense Department budget, and influential advocates in Congress, SOCOM is by now an exceptionally powerful player at the Pentagon. With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people's heads or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops. Since 2001, SOCOM's prime contracts awarded to small businesses - those that generally produce specialty equipment and weapons - have jumped six-fold.

Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, but operating out of theatre commands spread out around the globe, including Hawaii, Germany, and South Korea, and active in the majority of countries on the planet, Special Operations Command is now a force unto itself. As outgoing SOCOM chief Olson put it earlier this year, SOCOM "is a microcosm of the Department of Defense, with ground, air, and maritime components, a global presence, and authorities and responsibilities that mirror the Military Departments, Military Services, and Defense Agencies".

Tasked to coordinate all Pentagon planning against global terrorism networks and, as a result, closely connected to other government agencies, foreign militaries, and intelligence services, and armed with a vast inventory of stealthy helicopters, manned fixed-wing aircraft, heavily-armed drones, high-tech guns-a-go-go speedboats, specialised Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as well as other state-of-the-art gear (with more on the way), SOCOM represents something new in the military.

Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army", today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive's private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once "special" for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.

That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows. Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral Olson: "I am convinced that the forces … are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer."

Recently at the Aspen Institute's Security Forum, Olson offered up similarly gilded comments and some misleading information, too, claiming that US Special Operations forces were operating in just 65 countries and engaged in combat in only two of them. When asked about drone strikes in Pakistan, he reportedly replied, "Are you talking about unattributed explosions?"

What he did let slip, however, was telling. He noted, for instance, that black operations like the bin Laden mission, with commandos conducting heliborne night raids, were now exceptionally common. A dozen or so are conducted every night, he said. Perhaps most illuminating, however, was an offhand remark about the size of SOCOM. Right now, he emphasised, US Special Operations forces were approximately as large as Canada's entire active duty military. In fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the nations where the US' elite troops now operate each year, and it's only set to grow larger.

Americans have yet to grapple with what it means to have a "special" force this large, this active, and this secret - and they are unlikely to begin to do so until more information is available. It just won't be coming from Olson or his troops. "Our access [to foreign countries] depends on our ability to not talk about it," he said in response to questions about SOCOM's secrecy. When missions are subject to scrutiny like the bin Laden raid, he said, the elite troops object. The military's secret military, said Olson, wants "to get back into the shadows and do what they came in to do".

Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, and investigative journalist. The associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a new senior editor at Alternet.org, his latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books).

A version of this article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Enemies of Democracy

2011-07-23T18:13:00.002+02:00

The Fall of Media Mogul Murdoch

by Jack Random/ July 22nd, 2011

"Rupert Murdoch is no saint; he is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power he’s carnivorous: all appetite and no taste. Politicians become little clay pigeons to be picked off with flattering headlines, generous air time, a book contract or the old-fashioned black jack that never misses: campaign cash."

— Bill Moyers Journal, June 29, 2007

Which of the following does not belong: Benedict Arnold, Boss Tweed, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Karl Rove, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Rupert Murdoch?

Answer: None of the above.

All are notorious for their groundbreaking betrayal of American democracy from its inception to the present day.

Benedict Arnold was a commander in the Continental Army who secretly plotted to hand West Point over to the British. Boss Tweed was the strongman of New York’s Tammany Hall in the mid 1800’s who was ultimately convicted for bribery and extortion, dying in the Ludlow Street Jail.

Richard Nixon was a crook whose scorn for American democracy went so deep that he never questioned the necessity of committing crimes of espionage against a presidential opponent so weak he failed to carry his own state. Nixon got his due.

J. Edgar Hoover famously wiretapped and eavesdropped on anything that moved, from politicians and journalists to movie stars and musicians. During his five-decade reign of terror, if you didn’t have a dossier on file at the FBI you were nobody. Hoover survived Democrats and Republicans alike because he had the goods to destroy anyone who stood in his way. Blackmail and extortion were his calling card yet he has his name on the building that houses the nation’s highest law enforcement agency. American justice will never be vindicated until that inscription is taken down.

Karl Rove was the architect of the largest disenfranchisement scheme since the days of Jim Crow. He is the man who made George W. Bush President of the United States by effectively stealing two consecutive elections.

Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy are the only three members of the high court to vote for both Bush v. Gore 2000 and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 2010. Bush v. Gore anointed George W. Bush president without benefit of a majority vote and Citizens United opened the doors to unlimited corporate financing of political campaigns.

Now, with the revelations of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s unscrupulous operations in the phone-hacking scandal, Murdoch can take his rightful place alongside the most infamous betrayers of our democracy.

The founders in their wisdom acknowledged the critical nature of a free press, enshrining the principle in the first amendment to the constitution. Not all lived up to that wisdom (as the Alien and Sedition Acts under President John Adams attest) but, as a whole, the founders recognized that a vibrant and independent press was an essential fourth pillar of a functioning republic.

The founders did not envision a time when the press is supplanted by the media, when information and misinformation is disseminated by radio, television and the worldwide web, and when a handful of international corporations would own and control the flow of information throughout the world.

The founders never envisioned a media mogul as powerful as Rupert Murdoch. He is the CEO of News Corporation, which in turn owns Fox Broadcasting, the Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones), the Times of London, the Daily Mirror, Sky Television, the Sun, the Star and the New York Post. His tentacles extend from Australia and New Zealand to North and South America, from the British Isles across Europe to the Middle East. He is the closest thing to a media czar the world has ever known.

While his political philosophy is notoriously rightwing, he has courted alliances on both sides of the aisle, befriending conservative Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron as well as the Labour Party’s Tony Blair. While his Fox News has consistently bent to the far right, providing a litmus test for Republican presidential candidates, Murdoch has offered counsel and support to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Barack Obama as well as George W. Bush and John McCain.

Considering his relationship with both the Clintons and Tony Blair, it is plausible that Murdoch played some direct or indirect role in turning the left toward center and the center to the right. In what Bill Clinton and Blair referred to as the third way, the Democrats and Labour abandoned progressive economics while still clinging to progressive social issues. Since Murdoch considers himself libertarian, the new left (which is not left at all) is very much consistent with his own views. Most importantly, it gave him free reign to extend his media empire.

In 1995, with Bill Clinton in the White House, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that Murdoch’s ownership of Fox Broadcasting was in the best interests of the public.

It pays to cultivate friends in high places.

Pimping a war for oil, consuming and transforming legitimate journalistic enterprises into broadsheets, and shamelessly operating a propaganda empire to advance his own interests were not sufficient to discredit Murdoch but hacking the phones of innocent victims and their relatives for sensationalist stories finally tipped the scale.

The tar from Murdoch’s hands has stained everyone he touched, from the current resident at Number 10 Downing Street to the once-venerated Scotland Yards. Former employees and allies are falling like ducks at a carnival shooting gallery.

Anyone who believes Murdoch’s “I’m too old to know anything” act before the Media Committee of the House of Commons is as gullible as a grassroots member of the corporate Tea Party. In the bumbling fashion of an old man in the early stages of dementia, Murdoch stated he knew nothing of the operations and techniques of the offending news corps. He claimed this despite his company paying the equivalent of $3.2 million in settlements to hacking victims on condition of non-disclosure.

What’s a few million here and there?

It remains to be seen whether this scandal has the legs to bring the mogul down. He still has friends in high places and on both sides of the Atlantic. Republicans in congress are afraid to whisper his name in anything but a positive light. Democrats are Democrats and Obama is Obama. The investigation in America will not be in earnest unless public outcry demands it and even then, Murdoch has the media to fight back.

The excuse will be that we have far more important matters with which to concern ourselves like a debt crisis that Murdoch and his ilk trumped up for media consumption. (The only real crisis lies in our refusal to remove the debt ceiling in a timely manner.)

Regardless of Murdoch’s ultimate fate, the odds of real media reform are something less than the odds of real financial reform after the near collapse of the global economy. That would require breaking up the media conglomerates and requiring news organizations to divest themselves of other corporate interests.

The chances of that are nil. So in a sense Rupert Murdoch has already won the war. He has shaped the media of the future. That it is ruthless, amoral and devoid of public interest should not surprise any of us.

It is a corporate media for a corporate world.

Jack Random is the author of Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press) the Jazzman Chronicles, Volumes I and II (City Lights Books). The Chronicles have been published by CounterPunch, the Albion Monitor, Buzzle, Dissident Voice and others. Read other articles by Jack, or visit Jack's website.

In Defense of Fair Hiring

2011-07-23T17:51:00.001+02:00

Verité launches a toolkit for the ethical recruitment of migrant workers.

By Erin Klett
Verité, July 22, 2011

Migrant workers on temporary contracts work in greater and greater numbers in the world's factories and fields. Often they have traveled thousands of miles and across national borders for jobs that are, truly, a blessing - providing better work at better rates of pay than they could have found at home.

CREDIT: noborder network (CC)

Căpşunari din toate ţările, Uniţi-vă!

But in too many cases these workers endure human trafficking and forced labor. These abuses can be traced back to how they were recruited and hired into their jobs.

Most migrants on temporary work contracts, and particularly those in lower-skilled jobs, were not recruited or hired directly by their employer. They were connected with their jobs abroad through one or more labor intermediaries - commonly referred to as labor brokers.

While labor brokers can be a boon to aspiring migrant workers and business efficiency, there are more than a few bad apples. Brokers often charge excessively high fees for their services, ranging in Verité's experience from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands. They also frequently misrepresent the job terms and salary to the jobseeker.

In this "bait and switch" scheme, a jobseeker wagers that paying a high fee is worth it, given how much he'll make once he gets abroad. So he borrows the money, pays the fee, and takes the leap.

By the time he discovers that the job pays much less than promised, it is too late. He is already heavily in debt, stuck on a temporary work visa that ties him to a job he didn't want, vulnerable to further exploitation, and with little or no recourse either to the employer or to the broker who deceived him.

Take for example Benny, whom Verité met while doing research in the Philippines: Benny graduated from a four-year computer school and was unable to find work. He borrowed money to pay a recruiter for a job in an IT factory in Taiwan. When Benny got to Taiwan, he discovered that his recruitment debt had been increased by 150 percent, and his salary was only half what he had been expecting.

Benny worked six to seven days a week, 12 hours a day, with mandatory overtime for two years. When his contract was up, he returned home having barely dug himself out of the recruitment debt. With no savings and his family reeling from a storm that flooded their home, Benny is desperate enough to return to Taiwan to try again. This time, he says he hopes to go with an "honest" recruiter.

Examples like this make it clear that any policy or program to protect migrant workers is not complete unless it includes a focus on the path that workers take to get a job in the global economy. Social responsibility efforts and government policy both need to be broadened to take issues of ethical recruitment and hiring, and the role of labor brokers, into account. Ethical sourcing - a watchword among brands - is not complete unless fair hiring is in place.

A Fair Hiring Toolkit

This June, Verité launched the Fair Hiring Toolkit - a clearinghouse of information, tools, and techniques for taking action to manage labor brokers and protect migrant workers from exploitation in recruitment and hiring. Verité developed this material based on our more than ten years of experience in the factories and farms where migrants work.

The Fair Hiring Toolkit provides resources not only for companies—including both the buyers and suppliers of goods—but also for governments, investor groups, social auditors, labor rights advocates, and multi-stakeholder initiatives. The Toolkit aims to galvanize these stakeholder groups to action, and to coalesce their efforts around a common set of issues that must be addressed.

The Toolkit begins with a set of policies and benchmarks that companies can adopt as a starting point to ensure ethical recruitment and hiring practices. It then goes deeper, demonstrating how a company can integrate these ethical recruitment policies into its management systems and those of its labor brokers. The Toolkit also encourages and provides recommendations on how companies can collaborate with public policy actors, labor advocates, multi-brand and multi-stakeholder groups, and others.

Because of unethical and opaque hiring practices, virtually all companies that employ migrants face the risk of labor exploitation—and even forced labor—in the production of their goods. Yet despite the severity and magnitude of the problem, only a few companies have tried to understand and resolve these issues within their supply chains. Those that work on the issue generally do not talk publicly about it for fear of harming their reputations.

The Apple Example

Over the years, though, Verité has forged partnerships with a handful of forward-thinking brands to move toward fair hiring, by monitoring working conditions at farms and factories, and also evaluating the performance of labor brokers involved in recruiting, hiring, or managing migrant workers.

The first step for all companies on the path to fair hiring is understanding the problems that workers face. Apple started with the discovery, through a 2008 workplace assessment, that migrant workers were paying excessive fees to get jobs at Apple suppliers. The company then conducted a thorough investigation, the results of which pointed to a complex recruitment process and excessive fees charged to migrant workers who were making the company's products.

Unethical hiring practices had led to risks of involuntary labor and debt bondage at the workplace. Apple used the findings from the investigation to identify and prioritize the steps necessary to right wrongs and ensure the problem did not repeat itself.

Apple now has extensive code language on issues that relate to the trafficking and forced labor of migrant workers. The company has also set a limit—one month's pay—on recruitment fees that brokers in its supply chain are permitted to charge to jobseekers. It also put in place new social auditing procedures, a supplier training program on direct hiring, onsite management of foreign workers, and best practices in monitoring recruitment agencies.

Finally, Apple has pioneered the practice of returning fee overcharges to workers: Since 2008, Apple has returned more than $3.4 million in overcharges, amounting to thousands of dollars per worker in some cases.

No Company in the Dark

Leveraging the tools in Verité's Fair Hiring Toolkit, this path is open to all other brands and their suppliers. The Toolkit is the first set of resources to offer the depth and breadth of action necessary for a comprehensive approach, for a variety of stakeholder groups. It is also the first web-based, totally open-source clearinghouse of its kind.

In the words of Verité's CEO Dan Viederman, the Toolkit "basically means that no company can say they are in the dark about how to rid their supply chains of forced labor or slavery, or work around abuses by labor brokers."

Verité's Toolkit recognizes first, that companies need concrete advice on how to expand social responsibility beyond the workplace to where jobs begin, in recruitment and hiring; and second, that nothing less than a 360-degree approach to the problem—where stakeholders with various leverage points and spheres of influence work individually or in concert to reward good brokers, penalize bad ones, and protect migrant workers from abuse—will bring the results that migrant workers deserve.

A Global Minimum Wage System

2011-07-22T14:45:00.001+02:00

By Thomas Palley

July 21, 2011

The global economy is suffering from severe shortage of demand. In developed economies that shortfall is explicit in high unemployment rates and large output gaps. In emerging market economies it is implicit in their reliance on export-led growth. In part this shortfall reflects the lingering disruptive effects of the financial crisis and Great Recession, but it also reflects globalization's undermining of the income generation process.

One mechanism that can help rebuild this process is a global minimum wage system. That does not mean imposing U.S. or European minimum wages in developing countries. It does mean establishing a global set of rules for setting country minimum wages.

The minimum wage is a vital policy tool that provides a floor to wages. This floor reduces downward pressure on wages, and it also creates a rebound ripple effect that raises all wages in the bottom two deciles of the wage spectrum. Furthermore, it compresses wages at the bottom of the wage spectrum, thereby helping reduce inequality. Most importantly, an appropriately designed minimum wage can help connect wages and productivity growth, which is critical for building a sustainable demand generation process.

Traditionally, minimum wage systems have operated by setting a fixed wage that is periodically adjusted to take account of inflation and other changing circumstances. Such an approach is fundamentally flawed and inappropriate for the global economy. It is flawed because the minimum wage is always playing catch-up, and it is inappropriate because the system is difficult to generalize across countries.

Instead, countries should set a minimum wage that is a fixed percent (say 50 percent) of their median wage—which is the wage at which half of workers are paid more and half are paid less. This design has several advantages. First, the minimum wage will automatically rise with the median wage, creating a true floor that moves with the economy. If the median wage rises with productivity growth, the minimum wage will also rise with productivity growth.

Second, since the minimum wage is set by reference to the local median wage, it is set by reference to local economic conditions and reflects what a country can bear. Moreover, since all countries are bound by the same rule, all are treated equally.

Third, if countries want a higher minimum wage they are free to set one. The global minimum wage system would only set a floor; it would not set a ceiling.

Fourth, countries would also be free to set regional minimum wages within each country. Thus, a country like Germany that has higher unemployment in the former East Germany and lower unemployment in the former West Germany could set two minimum wages: one for former East Germany, and one for former West Germany. The only requirement would be that the regional minimum wage be greater than or equal to 50 percent of the regional median wage.

Such a system of regional minimum wages would introduce additional flexibility that recognizes wages and living costs vary within countries as well as across countries. This enables the minimum wage system to avoid the danger of over-pricing labor, while still retaining the demand side benefits a minimum wage confers by improving income distribution and helping tie wages to productivity growth.

Finally, a global minimum wage system would also confer significant political benefits by cementing understanding of the need for global labor market rules and showing they are feasible. Just as globalization demands global trade rules for goods and services and global financial rules for financial markets, so too labor markets need global rules.

In sum, globalization has increased international labor competition, which has contributed to rupturing the link between wages and productivity growth. That rupture has undermined the old wage-based system of demand growth, forcing a turn to reliance on debt and asset price inflation to drive growth. It has also increased income inequality.

Restoring the wage–productivity growth link is therefore vital for both economic and political stability. A global minimum wage system can help accomplish this.

© 2011 Thomas Palley. Republished with the author's kind permission.

This article is drawn from Chapter 12, "The Challenge of Globalization," of Thomas Palley's forthcoming book: From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economic Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Freedom of expression subverted in Israel, US

2011-07-22T13:48:00.002+02:00

Both the US Congress and Israel's Knesset have passed profoundly anti-democratic measures in recent months.

by William A. Cook

The French ship "Dignite al Karama" - trailed by Israeli ships above - was taken over by Israeli sailors in international waters, but many other boats in the so-called "Freedom Flotilla II" were prevented from leaving ports in Greece [EPA]

"The right to freedom of expression is a fundamental one, necessary to protect the exercise of all other human rights in democratic societies because it is essential for holding governments accountable to the public." (Human Rights Watch, "When Speech Offends", February-March 2006)

Contrary to Fox News and Benjamin Netanyahu, democracy is neither alive nor well in the United States and Israel. Indeed, it is dying a slow, agonising death as each nation writhes in pain in adjoining beds, unaware that the intravenous feeding tubes controlled by their respective Knessets drip poison into their life-sustaining veins. Israel's Haaretz newspaper, in the voice of Carlo Strenger, carries the warning:

"The flood of anti-democratic laws that were proposed, and partially implemented, by the current Knesset, elected in February 2009, constitute one of the darkest chapters in Israeli history. The opening salvo was provided by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party with its Nakba law, that forbids the public commemoration of the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war.

Since then, a growing number of attempts were made to curtail freedom of expression and to make life for human rights groups more difficult. The latest instance is the boycott law that (is) was passed (this) last Monday by the Knesset, even though its legal advisor believes it to be a problematic infringement on freedom of speech."

Curiously, the US does not have a newspaper as brave and open to civil discourse as Haaretz. Instead, we rely on the New York Times, infamous for promoting the Iraq war on its front page, thus benefiting the war industry and its corporations that control Congress. Yet Congress, like its twin in Israel, has adopted similar anti-democratic resolutions that curtail freedom of speech and action not only of American citizens, but also of the representatives of the United Nations.

Role of the United Nations

House Resolution 268, entitled "Reaffirming the United States commitment to a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations", was introduced on May 13, 2011 and passed by an overwhelming margin of 407-6.

The resolution specifically threatens the member states of the UN by condemning any "unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state" as well as the "unbalanced United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process." To accomplish this end, the resolution announces that "the Administration will veto any resolution for Palestinian statehood that comes before the United Nations Security Council", opposes recognition of a Palestinian state by other nations, and in other international forums and, in a Mafia-like manner, threatens the Palestinians with "serious implications" for assistance programmes should they not obey.

Resolution 268 condemns in advance any deliberation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by any nation, in any forum, that does not await an "agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians". Curiously enough, this same resolution states that the United States "will not deal with nor in any way fund a Palestinian government that includes Hamas", a statement that prevents at the outset negotiations with the Palestinians, since Hamas represents over 1.5m Palestinians, thus belying the very purpose of the resolution, to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians. How deceptively clever.

The resolution also demands that Hamas and the people they represent accept unconditionally the position of the US and Israel that it renounce violence, recognise Israel and agree to follow the previous obligations of the PLO. There is no recognition of Israel's violence against Hamas or Gaza, nor recognition under international law that the Palestinians have rights to resist the occupation of a foreign nation.

Nor does the resolution impose on Israel a comparable stipulation to recognise the right of the Palestinians to have a state of their own. That would require that Israel recognise Palestine's existence, its borders, and the land that Israel must return to its rightful owners. The resolution makes no mention of the conditions imposed by Israel that made implementation of the Oslo Accords possible, nor does it mention Israel's rejection of the stipulations made by the Quartet - the European Union, Russia, the UN and the US - thus placing full blame for the failed "peace negotiations" on the Palestinians.

Resolution 268 dictates to the people of the world that their voices will not be heard, their desires not considered, and their empathy for a besieged people made irrelevant; only the will of the Israeli administration and the Obama administration will stand. In a calculated fashion, the resolution was passed while the Quartet met in Washington. The acid that destroys democracy drips on.

But Resolution 268 is only the most recent example of the erosion of our rights in the United States. It follows one of the most glaringly illegal and potentially destructive interventions in international affairs taken by a purportedly democratic state and fully supported by our own Knesset.

Israel's law

Israel's prevention of freedom of speech and action by the international group of peace activists desiring to express their solidarity with the imprisoned Palestinians in the second flotilla to Gaza, by coercing the economically crippled Greek government to refuse representatives from many countries to leave the Greek ports, graphically demonstrates that a government like Israel can and will enforce its will on any nation, thereby denying the rights of free people everywhere. This, despite the fact that the peace activists had complied with every legal demand.

As Human Rights Watch wrote in 2006:

"The right to freedom of expression is a fundamental one, necessary to protect the exercise of all other human rights in democratic societies because it is essential for holding governments accountable to the public. Freedom of expression is particularly necessary with respect to provocative or offensive speech, because once governmental censorship is permitted in such cases, the temptation is enormous for government officials to find speech that is critical of them to be unduly provocative or offensive as well.

The freedom to express even controversial points of view is also important for societies to address key political, social, and cultural issues, since taboos often mask matters of considerable public concern that are best addressed through honest and unfettered debate among those holding diverse points of view."

The full implications of Israel's takeover of the Greek government (with its conscious awareness that any action it took would be supported by our Congress) and hence its disregard for the will of the Greek citizen has been little regarded by our free press.

Yet perhaps nothing is so ominous as this blatant, hostile action by one foreign nation against another. What mindset permits Israel to impose its will on citizens of other nations? What provocation could possibly justify intervention of such magnitude? If Israel had evidence that the flotilla and its organisers were physical threats against the state of Israel, could they not bring that evidence before the UN and international courts to prevent the boats from sailing to Gaza? Why then the need to deny freedom of speech to citizens of many nations and commandeer another nation's government? Doesn't a democracy pride itself on rule of law?

Why, then, abandon law in favour of might? Again, in the words of Human Rights Watch: "The right to freedom of expression is…necessary to protect the exercise of all other human rights in democratic societies because it is essential for holding governments accountable to the public".

The death of democracy

No nation on this planet, no member state of the United Nations, no individual citizen nor groups of citizens can change what Israel and the United States did to Greece and to freedom of speech. They move with impunity as they impose their wills on nations that disagree with their policies. Neither is ruled by their people; they are owned by an elite few who have surreptitiously over time taken control of our freedoms. Neither government is held accountable to the public.

Indeed, it is that very accountability that they do not want and cannot allow to happen, which is why both governments fear the "Arab spring". Given the absolute control of our Congress by Israel, as the vote on Resolution 268 exemplifies, the US has to raise the fear of terrorism in its citizenry to ensure compliance with the anti-democratic behaviour and policies it pursues. Israel does the same. Carlo Strenger puts it this way:

"What stands behind this frenzy of attempts to shut down criticism? The answer, I believe, is fear, stupidity, confusion - and now also a power-trip.

The result of Netanyahu's and Lieberman's systematic fanning of Israelis' existential fears is tangible: polls show that Israelis are deeply pessimistic about peace; they largely do not trust Palestinians, and in the younger generation belief in democratic values is being eroded.

But this pessimism and siege-mentality is not only to be found in ordinary Israeli voters, but also in the political class … They have profound misconceptions about the Free World's attitude towards Israel, and very little real understanding of the paradigm shift towards human rights as the core language of international discourse. They buy into Netanyahu's adage that Israel's existence is being delegitimised, rather than realising that Israel's settlement policy is unacceptable politically and morally to the whole world."

The US umbilical cord that sustains Israel's policies of occupation, settlements and oppression damns it before the world as people begin to find other ways to break the controls that US power provides for Israel. The flotilla activists effectively used moral sensibility to identify the illegality and inhumanity of Israel's siege of Gaza.

And while Israel successfully torpedoed the flotilla in Greek ports through a massive political propaganda campaign of manufactured lies, coercion and threats of lawsuits against shipping companies and insurance carriers, it also successfully torpedoed truth, turning even more of the world against a state that thrives on distortion, deception and devastation.

What both Israelis and Americans must realise, as these anti-democratic actions by both nations attest, is that democracy in both nations has been subverted in favour of those who command our representatives to actions that betray the essence of democracy and the will of the people. Democracy has been turned over to those who undermine the moral foundations on which it was built: equality for all, justice for all, dignity and respect for all; with government serving the people, not a corporate board. When the representatives of the state determine what people must accept, what they can and cannot do or say; when the power of two nations subverts the will and actions of all other nations, then democracy is dead.

William A. Cook, Ph.D., is a professor of English at the University of La Verne and the author of Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy; The Rape of Palestine; and The Plight of the Palestinians.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Exclusive: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks & Philosopher Slavoj Žižek In Conversation With Amy Goodman

2011-07-05T22:34:00.000+02:00

In one of his first public events since being held under house arrest, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared in London Saturday for a conversation with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, moderated by Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. They discuss the impact of WikiLeaks on world politics, the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and Cablegate — the largest trove of classified U.S. government records in history. “From being inside the center of the storm, I have learned not just about the structure of government, not just about how power flows in many governments around the world that we’ve dealt with, but rather how history is shaped and distorted by the media,” Assange said. Assange also talks about his new defense team, as well as U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, the accused Army whistleblower who has been jailed for the past year. Assange is currently under house arrest in Norfolk, outside London, pending a July 12 appeals hearing on his pending extradition to Sweden for questioning in a sexual misconduct case. He has now spent six months under house arrest, despite not being charged with a crime in any country. Assange was wearing an ankle monitor under his boot and Saturday’s event concluded shortly after 6 p.m. so he could return to his bail address by his curfew. The event was sponsored by the Frontline Club, founded in part to remember journalists killed on the front lines of war. Today we play highlights from part one of their discussion. [Includes partial transcript]

Is the Crisis of Capitalism Terminal?

2011-07-04T00:22:00.001+02:00

by Leonardo Boff*

I believe the present crisis of capitalism is more than cyclical and structural. It is terminal. Are we seeing the end of the genius of capitalism, of always being able to adapt to any circumstance? I am aware that only few other people maintain this thesis. Two things, however, bring me to this conclusion.

The first is the following: the crisis is terminal because we all, but in particular capitalism, have exceeded the limits of the Earth. We have occupied and depredated the whole planet, destroying her subtle equilibrium and exhausting her goods and services, to the point that she alone can no longer replenish all that has been removed.

Already by mid XIX century, Karl Marx prophetically wrote that this tendency of capital would destroy the twin sources of its wealth and reproduction: nature and labor. That is what is happening now.

Especially in the last century, Nature was stressed as never before, including the 15 great disasters she experienced throughout her four billion year history. The verifiable, extreme, phenomena in every region, and the changes in the climate that tend towards ever increasing global warming, support Marx’s thesis. How can capitalism continue without Nature? It has reached an insurmountable limit.

Capitalism reduces, or eliminates, labor. There are great laborless inventions. A programmed and robotic production apparatus produces more and better, almost without labor. The direct consequence of this is structural unemployment.

Millions of people will never join the labor market, not even as a reserve army. Instead of depending on labor, capital is learning to do without it. Unemployment in Spain approaches 20% of the general population, and 40% of youth. In Portugal, it is 12% of the population, and 30% among the young. This results in a grave social crisis, like that which Greece is undergoing at this very moment. All of society is sacrificed in the name of an economy that is not designed to take care of human needs, but to pay the debts to the banks and the financial system. Marx is right: exploited labor is no longer the source of its wealth. The machine is.

The second reason is linked to the humanitarian crisis that capitalism is creating.

Before, it was limited to the peripheral countries. Now it is global, and it has reached the central countries. The economic question cannot be resolved by dismantling society. The victims, connected by new venues of communication, resist, revolt and threaten the present order. Ever more people, especially the young, reject the perverse capitalist political economic logic: the dictatorship of finance that, through the market, subjugates the States to its interests, and the profitability of speculative capital, that circulates from one stock market to another, reaping profits without producing anything at all, except more money for the stockholders.

Capital itself created the poison that could kill it: by demanding that its workers have ever greater technical training, to create accelerated growth and greater competitiveness, it unintentionally nurtured people who think. They are slowly learning the perversity of the system, that all but skins people alive in the name of pure material accumulation, and shows its heartlessness by demanding greater and greater efficiency, to the point of profoundly stressing the workers, pushing them to desperation, and in some cases, even to suicide, as has occurred in several countries, including Brazil.

The streets of several European and Arab countries, the “indignants” who fill the squares of Spain and Greece, are an expression of a rebellion against the current political system, controlled by the markets and the logic of capital. The young Spaniards shout: «it is not a crisis, it is theft.» The thieves are comfortably housed on Wall Street, in the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and in the Central European Bank. In other words, they are the high priests of the exploitative global capital.

As the crisis worsens, the multitudes who can no longer tolerate the consequences of the super exploitation of their lives and of the life of the Earth, will grow; and will revolt against the economic system that is in agony, not because it is old, but because of the strength of the poison and the contradictions it has created, punishing Mother Earth and afflicting the lives of her sons and daughters. (ALAI)

Editor’s Note: Leonardo Boff is a noted South American liberation theologian; the Earthcharter Commission. http://leonardoboff.com/ (Free translation from the Spanish sent by Melina Alfaro, Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas, EE.UU