2017/2018 INSEAD Greendale Foundation Scholarship in France and Singapore for African Students

Application Deadline: For January 2017 Class:

Applications Open: 23 May 2016
Deadline: 6 June 2016
Round 2:
Applications Open: 18 July 2016
Deadline: 3 August 2016 

Offered annually? Yes

Scholarship Name: INSEAD Greendale Foundation Scholarship

Brief description

Financial Aid Opportunity for MBA postgraduate students from Southern and Eastern Africa in 2016 to study Abroad in France or Singapore for the 2017/2018 admission session.

Accepted Subject Areas?

MBA programme

About Scholarship

INSEAD is considered one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools, with campuses in Europe (France), Asia (Singapore) and a research centre in Israel. The Trustees of the Greendale Foundation provide access to the INSEAD MBA programme to disadvantaged Southern and East Africans who are committed to developing international management expertise in Africa and who plan their careers in the Southern and East African regions. Scholarship recipients must return to work in these African regions within 3 years of graduation. In the event this condition is not met, the recipients will be asked by INSEAD to refund their scholarship within the fourth year after completion of the MBA Programme.

Scholarship Offered Since: Not Specified

By what Criteria is Selection Made?

These scholarships are granted under various criteria and essentially there are two basic categories of scholarships:

• Need-based: demonstrate financial need
• Non-need based: based on merit, nationality, gender, professional background, leadership abilities, field of previous studies etc.

Who is qualified to apply?

Candidates must be nationals from Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa (disadvantaged backgrounds), Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia or Zimbabwe (from disadvantaged backgrounds)who have undergone the major part of their education in Southern or East Africa. Preference will be given to those who have worked there prior to INSEAD. The candidate’s financial situation will also be taken into consideration.

How Many Scholarships are available? Not Specified

What are the benefits?

€35,000 for each scholarship recipient

How long will sponsorship last? The scholarship is a onetime financial award to cover for tuition fee

To be taken at (country): France or Singapore

How can I Apply?

Essay topic:

1) In 350-400 words, describe (a) why you wish to undertake the INSEAD MBA (b) How you envisage contributing to the future development of Southern or East Africa after graduation, and (c) why you should be selected for this scholarship.

2) In 150-200words, provide a concise but accurate description of your financial circumstances as well as a cash flow forecast for the year at INSEAD (details of income set against all expenditures)

Sponsors: The Greendale Foundation

How can I get more information? If you need more Information about this scholarship, kindly visit the Scholarship Webpage

Important Notes:

All scholarship applications are online except where mentioned in the scholarship description. To submit an application, first follow the Scholarship Guide and get yourself registered.

Scholarship awards are deducted from the last installment of your tuition fees.

INSEAD Alumni Fund (IAF) Women’s Scholarship(s) 2017/2018

Application Deadlines: 

January 2017 Class:

Application Deadline:6th of June, 2016

Round 2
Applications Open: 18th of July, 2016
Deadline: 3rd of August, 2016

August 2017 Class: 

Applications Open: 24th of October, 2016
Deadline: 5th of November, 2016

Offered annually? Yes

Scholarship Name: INSEAD Alumni Fund (IAF) Women’s Scholarship(s)

Brief description: The INSEAD Alumni Fund (IAF) offers scholarship for Women from any country to study for MBA at INSEAD campus

Eligible Field of Study: Masters in Business Administration

About Scholarship: The INSEAD Alumni Fund (IAF), created in 1977, raises funds from alumni for INSEAD’s development. A significant portion is allocated to scholarships that will underwrite the breadth of diversity of INSEAD participants: country of origin, background, gender, etc. The IAF Women’s Scholarships support INSEAD’s commitment to bring outstanding women professionals to the MBA Programme and to increase representation of women in leadership positions in the business community. Some 10 to 15 awards are made per class and most are allocated at the time of admission based on merit.

Scholarship Offered Since: 1977

Scholarship Type: MBA Scholarships for women

Selection Criteria and Eligibility

INSEAD seeks bright, dynamic and motivated women who are making significant achievements in their professional and/or personal lives. Merit scholarships will be awarded to recognize these outstanding women. Their financial situation may also be taken into consideration.

Essay topic :

1).In approximately 350 words please answer the following questions: Women are still not equally represented in the business world. What can be done about this? What have you contributed to date to address this issue, and what do you expect to contribute in the future?
2).In approximately 150-200 words explain why a women’s scholarship at INSEAD would be important to you and outline any factors that you feel would distinguish you from other candidates.
3).What amount of award do you consider appropriate? Discuss. (approximately 150 words)

Number of Scholarships: 10 to 15 awards are made per class

Value of Scholarship: € 20,000

Duration of Scholarship: for the period of study

Eligible Countries: Any country

To be taken at (country): INSEAD

How to Apply

No essay required

To be considered for these scholarships please submit your application on line before the specified deadlines. Candidates will also be considered for the INSEAD Judith Connelly Delouvrier Scholarships.

Visit Scholarship webpage and description page for details

Sponsors: The INSEAD Alumni Fund (IAF)

Trade Pacts and Deregulation: Latest Leaks Reveal Core Problem with TISA

Deborah James

The 18th round of negotiations on a secret deal to limit public oversight over the services economy starts this week at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, and negotiators will have a new item on their agenda: how to deal with the onslaught of leaks of proposals that were supposed to remain locked away in secret until five years after the deal was concluded or abandoned.

That’s because WikiLeaks released draft texts on three previously unpublished cross-cutting annexes of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) yesterday: disciplines on the way governments can regulate State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs); Professional Services, and New Provisions Applicable to All Services.

With this leak, 17 proposed annexes as well as the core text have been released to the public, although none through official government channels. Updated texts on financial services, e-commerce, movement of natural persons (Mode 4), telecommunications, and transparency were also leaked. Member groups of the Our World Is Not for Sale (OWINFS) global network have analyzed earlier chapters.

The publication follows a high-profile leak by Greenpeace earlier this month of a trove of chapters of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and Europe. Given that congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is on the rocks, as the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is in those countries, and given that public opposition to the TTIP is on the rise, negotiators had hoped that the TISA could slide by under the public radar. This leak makes that possibility even more remote.

The New Provisions annex would restrict the job-stimulating localization requirements that governments can place on foreign services providers. These proposals, which are more extreme than existing free trade/investment agreements, would make it harder for all TISA countries to effectively regulate these companies — including potentially in the finance sector. And they would restrict developing countries’ ability to regulate foreign investment to promote development the way the industrialized TISA countries did when they were developing, according to an extensive analysis by Sanya Reid Smith, legal adviser to the Third World Network in Geneva.

The U.S. Treasury Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative yesterday revealed a plan to go beyond the TPP in terms of localization requirements on financial services in the proposed TISA, to appease major banking industry corporations and the members of Congress who represent them.

The irony of this is that the limits on localization requirements that the United States, and a few other countries, intend to impose through the TISA are the very same mechanisms by which the U.S. and other countries allege that developing countries would primarily benefit from opening their services sectors to foreign participation.

“They’ll hire local workers, and your population will gain know-how” — nope, requiring local hiring would be prohibited under the TISA. “Having foreign companies will result in the transfer of technology to locals” — except that requiring technology transfer is also prohibited in the proposed text.

Historically, the U.S., Japan, and many European countries required that domestic nationals sit on the boards of foreign companies providing services in their countries; this “local management” tool is explicitly prohibited in the leaked text. This is kicking the proverbial development ladder away, indeed.

This is a core of the problem of the proposed TISA. Because it’s not the participation of foreign companies in a country’s market that the TISA would herald; it does not force foreign banks to provide capital to slum dwellers, or giant telecoms to ensure communications access for the rural poor, or energy corporations to ensure universal access to electricity.

Instead, the TISA is designed to limit the ways in which governments can ensure that the presence of those foreign corporations in an economy can benefit the local population. In the United States, we have enough problems with the customer service of Comcast, Verizon, and the like — imagine how it would be possible to hold a giant telecom accountable if they did not have a local presence, as the proposed TISA would prevent countries from requiring?

The Professional Services annex would restrict how governments and professional associations regulate market access, cross border supply, local presence requirements, foreign capital limitations, and licensing requirements for foreign services providers in specified professional fields including accounting, taxation, architectural services, engineering, urban planning and landscape architecture, technical testing and analysis, and also potentially legal services, engineering-related scientific and consulting services, veterinary services, private education services, and construction-related engineering services.

According to a brand-new analysis of the proposed annex on SOEs by University of Auckland Law Professor Jane Kelsey:

the US proposal for state-owned enterprises in TISA adapts key parts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement chapter on SOEs as part of its strategy to create new global rules through the triumvirate of new mega-deals: TPPA, TISA and TTIP. The proposal would force majority-owned SOEs to operate like private sector businesses.

It doesn’t directly require countries to privatise, but removes the rationale for them to remain public entities, creating conditions for privaTISAtion by stealth. The most extreme, complicated and potentially unworkable provisions in the TPPA relating to state support are not included — yet. But mandatory negotiations would be triggered if a country with a high proportion of SOEs wanted to join TISA. China is the real target. There is an unmistakable message: adopt the US model or stay out of the club.

“Changes to the e-commerce chapter continue to be made in complete isolation from the stakeholders it affects, notably the global Internet community of users and innovators. This legacy, closed model of trade negotiation is no way to be making public policy for the digital environment,” noted Jeremy Malcolm, Senior Global Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The documents, along with the analysis, highlight the way that the TISA responds to major corporate lobbies’ desire to deregulate services, even beyond the existing WTO rules.

This leak exposes the corporate aim to use TISA to further limit the public interest regulatory capacity of democratically elected governments by imposing disciplines on domestic issues from government purchasing and immigration to licensing and certification standards for professionals and business operations, not to mention the regulatory process itself.

Today’s leak follows others, including a June 2014 WikiLeaks revelation of a previous version of the Financial Services secret text; the December 2014 leak of a U.S. proposal on cross-border data flows, technology transfer, and net neutrality, which raised serious concerns about the protection of data privacy in the wake of the Snowden revelations; and the February 2015 release of a background paper promoting health tourism in the TISA, although this issue is unlikely to be included as an annex in the final agreement.

WikiLeaks blew the cover on the entire agreement in June 2015 when it issued the massive publication of 17 documents on the TISA, along with accompanying analysis, including annexes on specific services sectors including: air transport, maritime transport, competitive delivery; electronic commerce; telecommunications; financial services; professional services; and on government functions with regards to the Domestic Regulation and Transparency annexes. This was followed by the July 2015 publication of an updated batch of texts, along with the core text of the TISA and accompanying analysis.

The most recent previous TISA leak was the December 2015 leak of annexes on energy and environmental services which showed that states’ ability to implement their Paris climate commitments would be highly constrained if the TISA were adopted according to the existing proposals.

Global civil society has long warned:

[t]he TISA negotiations largely follow the corporate agenda of using “trade” agreements to bind countries to an agenda of extreme liberalization and deregulation in order to ensure greater corporate profits at the expense of workers, farmers, consumers and the environment. The proposed agreement is the direct result of systematic advocacy by transnational corporations in banking, energy, insurance, telecommunications, transportation, water, and other services sectors, working through lobby groups like the US Coalition of Service Industries (USCSI) and the European Services Forum (ESF).

The TISA is currently being negotiated among 50 countries (or 23 parties counting the EU as one) with the aim of extending the coverage of scope of the existing General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in the WTO. However, even worse than the opaque talks at the WTO, the TISA negotiations are being conducted in complete secrecy.

Last year, Uruguay left the negotiations after a public uproar ensued in the wake of the publications of the documents, which resulted in a cabinet-level review of the potential implications that came back with near-universal thumbs down from the various departments. Paraguay followed shortly thereafter.

Public Services International (PSI), a global union federation, published the first TISA report, TISA vs Public Services in March 2014, and PSI and OWINFS jointly published “The Really Good Friends of Transnational Corporations Agreement” report in September 2014. A factsheet on the TISA can be found here and more information on the TISA can be found at OWINFS’s website.

Memorial Day and the Glorification of Past Wars

Paul Craig Roberts

The Saker reports that Russia is preparing for World War III, not because Russia intends to initiate aggression but because Russia is alarmed by the hubris and arrogance of the West, by the demonization of Russia, by provocative military actions by the West, by American interference in the Russian province of Chechnya and in former Russian provinces of Ukraine and Georgia, and by the absence of any restraint from Western Europe on Washington’s ability to foment war.

Like Steven Starr, Stephen Cohen, myself, and a small number of others, the Saker understands the reckless irresponsibility of convincing Russia that the United States intends to attack her.

It is extraordinary to see the confidence that many Americans place in their military’s ability. After 15 years the US has been unable to defeat a few lightly armed Taliban, and after 13 years the situation in Iraq remains out of control. This is not very reassuring for the prospect of taking on Russia, much less the strategic alliance between Russia and China. The US could not even defeat China, a Third World country at the time, in Korea 60 years ago.

Americans need to pay attention to the fact that “their” government is a collection of crazed stupid fools likely to bring vaporization to the United States and all of Europe.

Russian weapons systems are far superior to American ones. American weapons are produced by private companies for the purpose of making vast profits. The capability of the weapons is not the main concern. There are endless cost overruns that raise the price of US weapons into outer space.

The F-35 fighter, which is less capable than the F-15 it is supposed to replace, costs between $148 million and $337 million per fighter, depending on whether it is an Air Force, Marine Corps, or Navy model.  A helmet for a F-35 pilot costs $400,000, more than a high end Ferrari. (Washington forces or bribes hapless Denmark into purchasing useless and costly F-35.

It is entirely possible that the world is being led to destruction by nothing more than the greed of the US military-security complex. Delighted that the reckless and stupid Obama regime has resurrected the Cold War, thus providing a more convincing “enemy” than the hoax terrorist one, the “Russian threat” has been restored to its 20th century role of providing a justification for bleeding the American taxpayer, social services, and the US economy dry in behalf of profits for armament manufacturers.

However, this time Washington’s rhetoric accompanying the revived Cold War is far more reckless and dangerous, as are Washington’s actions, than during the real Cold War. Previous US presidents worked to defuse tensions. The Obama regime has inflated tensions with lies and reckless provocations, which makes it far more likely that the new Cold War will turn hot. If Killary gains the White House, the world is unlikely to survive her first term.

All of America’s wars except the first—the war for independence—were wars for Empire. Keep that fact in mind as you hear the Memorial Day bloviations about the brave men and women who served our country in its times of peril. The United States has never been in peril, but Washington has delivered peril to numerous other countries in its pursuit of hegemony over others.

Today for the first time in its history the US faces peril as a result of Washington’s attempts to assert hegemony over Russia and China.

Russia and China are not impressed by Washington’s arrogance, hubris, and stupidity. Moreover, these two countries are not the native American Plains Indians, who were starved into submission by the Union Army’s slaughter of the buffalo.

They are not the tired Spain of 1898 from whom Washington stole Cuba and the Philippines and called the theft a “liberation.”

They are not small Japan whose limited resources were spread over the vastness of the Pacific and Asia.

They are not Germany already defeated by the Red Army before Washington came to the war.

They are not Granada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, or the various Latin American countries that General Smedley Butler said the US Marines made safe for “the United Fruit Company” and “some lousy bank investment.”

An insouciant American population preoccupied with selfies and delusions of military prowess, while its crazed government picks a fight with Russia and China, has no future.

The Funny Business of Farm Credit

Ralph Nader

In May of 1998 we held a conference dedicated to two Government-sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In my statement to that assembly, I noted that both corporations had been enjoying good times, but cautioned that one of the unintended consequences of fat profits over a long period is the tendency of both government and private corporations to start believing in the fantasy of ever-rising profits. GSEs often escape the accountability that Congress or regulatory agencies should impose.

Recent hearings in the U.S. House and Senate have provided some much needed oversight on another GSE―the Farm Credit System (FCS).

The Farm Credit System was the first GSE to be established by the United States in 1916. Unlike Fannie and Freddie, the Farm Credit System can make direct loans to farmers, ranchers and others involved in agriculture. However, as The Wall Street Journal reported back in 1985: “the Farm Credit System would lend money to anyone. Herbert Ashton, an Indiana fruit farmer, recalls being wined and dined at a local country club by bankers from his local [farm credit] system bank who extolled the virtues of inflation and offered to lend him $1 million on the spot. ‘I turned it down,’ he recalls. ‘But they sounded like a soap testimonial. They were giving money to whoever passed their way, and they didn’t ask too many questions.’”

Not surprisingly, The Farm Credit System was also the first GSE to be bailed out by taxpayers at a cost of $4 billion when the farm economy collapsed in 1987.

The Farm Credit System reported a net income of $4.7 billion and assets of $283 billion in 2014.  It gets its huge funding capital from the Federal Farm Credit Banks Funding Corporation which sells bonds on securities markets. It receives exemptions from Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform and pays only a small percentage of state and local taxes. With these facts in mind, the FCS has veered off course from the mission Congress originally intended for it to do―“…to make loans for the production and marketing of agricultural products.”  The FCS’s lending practices are less focused on serving the credit needs of new farmers and ranchers, but instead lending today focuses on large farmers, agribusinesses, utilities and even businesses having nothing to do with farming!

For example, in 2004 twenty-five percent of new FCS loans went to owners of small farms and ranches while seventy-five percent went to owners of large farms.  In 2014, less than 14 percent of new FCS loans went to owners of small farms and ranches, while over 86 percent went to owners of large farms. On their website, FCS addresses the open question of whether or not they exist to just serve farmers and ranchers by elaborating: “The System’s mission is to serve all types of agricultural producers who have a basis for rural credit, as well as others who help ensure that agriculture and rural America are economically successful. This includes farm-related businesses, rural homeowners, rural infrastructure providers, including electric, telecommunications, water and waste, as well as other rural service providers.” This open-ended description leaves a lot of wiggle room about who FCS chooses to lend to―which is problematic.

Providing loans to large corporations, to non-farm enterprises and to wealthy individuals and families for a variety of non-farm investments goes well beyond what the Farm Credit System was set up to do. Some eye-opening examples follow:

* In October 2013 – CoBank, a $93 billion Farm Credit System bank, loaned $725 million to Verizon to help finance its acquisition of Vodafone -a London-based telecom giant. At a June 25, 2014 hearing, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) told Jill Long Thompson, Chairman and CEO of the Farm Credit Administration, “I have been a supporter of the Farm Credit System. But, it is pretty hard for me to explain—I can’t explain why you are financing a merger deal with Verizon, or the Farm Credit System is.”

* In April 2015 – CoBank participated in a $300 million unsecured term loan to Black Hills Corp., a vertically integrated energy company with natural gas and electric utility operations in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming.

* In January 2015, Greenstone Farm Credit Services ACA/FLCA joined with several large commercial banks in providing “a five-year $750 million revolving line of credit” to Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc., a national restaurant chain.

* In 2007, Farm Credit of the Virginias loaned the Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard $34 million to increase the winery’s output and construct luxury homes on the estate.

Former Farm Credit Administration Chairman and CEO Leland A. Strom pointed out that Farm Credit System associations “have developed very efficient marketing programs for farmers and ranchers involved in commodity-type agriculture (from corn and soybean production to livestock, for example) in addition to an “ongoing and impressive” effort at “education and outreach to these farmers and their children.”   But he warned, the Farm Credit System was not providing the same level of service to those who “farm and market their products directly to consumers, local restaurants, schools, hospitals, etc., in what many call the Local Foods System.”

The Farm Credit System needs congressional oversight of its operations and lending. In addition to regular congressional oversight―the recent hearings were the first in over a decade―Congress should also consider new legislation that would make the FCS subject to Dodd-Frank, require FCS to increase lending to young, beginning and small farmers and ranchers and limit lending to non-farm corporations and non-farm activities.

Small farmers, let your member of Congress know what you think.

The Intricacies of Language

James Abourezk

I spoke very little English when I was a small boy, mainly because of my mother, who emigrated to America eleven years before I was born in 1931. She spoke very little English after arriving in South Dakota. She did, however, teach me Arabic, most of which I lost as I grew up and attended school in the Rosebud Reservation village of Wood, South Dakota. My father had settled there after traveling throughout small towns in South Dakota peddling goods out of a pack on his back. He had opened the store in Wood in 1912, and another in the Reservation town of Mission in 1920, the year my mother was able to come to America, along with her brother, John Mickel, who my dad appointed to run the store in Mission.

It was my burden to learn about the Arabic word, “Inshalla,” as I grew up.

After moving to Washington, D.C. in the 1970s, I also learned from the Arabic speakers I met there, as well as in the Middle East, great variety of ways to use Inshalla. The most recent experience was watching television news after the disappearance of the Egyptian Air Bus passenger plane in the Mediterranean. I watched one day with amazement as an Egyptian official was asked by a reporter if the search for the “black box” would produce imminent results, divulging the secret of why so many people had tragically died in the crash.

“Inshalla,” the Egyptian official said, increasing the mystery by breaking out in a huge smile. The literal translation of the word “inshalla” is “God willing.” It is a two word phrase that has real meaning only to Arabic speakers. If one breaks down the word into its usage, it can have a plethora of meanings, most of them known only to veteran Arabic speakers who have had years of experience in usinginshalla. It can mean, I’ve learned, something will happen very soon, as in discovery of the airplane’s black boxes. Or it can mean it will happen if God intervenes and desires that the black boxes will be found, as well as a dozen interpretations in between. It would also include the thought that if the searchers are lucky, we will have the answer to the mystery.

But until the boxes are found, inshalla, we are content to speculate on what the Egyptian meant when he gave the answer to the world via American television news, mostly because when answering, he had a mysterious smile on his face.

Which brings to mind another mystery created by people who do not like to be pinned down on the meaning of words.

In Mexican Spanish, the word “manana”means, I understand, “tomorrow.” But it is used in many indefinite ways, meaning mostly the speaker is hopeful that something will happen, as in “when will you be able to finish the work you’re doing for me?”

“Manana.” The English speaker can be excused for confusing manana with Inshalla, but these words have two entirely different meanings. I will now bring in the Arabic word, “bukra,” which means tomorrow, and I will illustrate it by relating an anecdote about a Mexican and an Arab debating the meaning of words in their respective languages.

“I understand,” the Arab said to the Mexican, “that the word, manana,means that there is a possibility that something will happen in the near future. We have a similar interpretation of the word, bukras.“But you should know,” the Arab said that bukra does not have the same sense of urgency as “manana.”

Libya: How to Bring Down a Nation

Patrick Howlett-Martin

More than 30,000 Libyans died during seven months of bombing by an essentially tripartite force – France, Great Britain, United States – which clearly favored the rebels. “The most successful mission in NATO’s history”, in the imprudent words of NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a Dane, in Tripoli in October 2011.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s eagerness to support a military intervention with the purported aim of protecting the civilian population contrasts with the reception offered to the Libyan president, Muammar Gaddafi, when he visited Paris in December 2007 and signed major military agreements worth some 4.5 billion euros along with cooperation agreements for the development of nuclear energy for peacetime uses. The contracts that Libya seemed no longer willing to pursue focused on 14 Dassault Rafale multirole fighter jets and their armament (the same model that France sold or is trying to sold to Egypt´s General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the self-proclaimed marshal), 35 Eurocopter helicopters, six patrol boats, a hundred armored vehicles, and the overhaul of 17 Mirage F1 fighters sold by Dassault Aviation in the 1970s.

The major oil companies (Occidental Petroleum, State Oil, Petro-Canada…) working in Libya helped Libya pay the 1.5 billion dollars in compensation that the Libyan regime had agreed to pay to the families of the victims of Pan Am flight 103. At the time, the compensation was intended to be one of the conditions for Libya to be reaccepted into the community of international relations.

The principal Libyan investment funds (LAFICO-Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company; LIA-Libyan Investment Authority) were shareholders in many Italian and British corporations (Fiat, UniCredit, Juventus, the Pearson Group, owner of the Financial Times, and the London School of Economics, where Gaddafi was addressed as “Brother Leader” during a video conference in December 2010 and his son Saif was awarded a PhD in 2008). The New York investment bank Goldman Sachs was sued in 2014 by a Libyan fund (Libyan Investment Authority) which had lost more than 1.2 billion dollars between January and April 2008 after the American firm took a commission of 350 million dollars for investing their money in highly speculative derivatives.

Muammar Gaddafi had been received with full honors by the major powers some months earlier: in addition to the reception in grand style in Paris, where he was a guest for five days in 2007, he was received in Spain in December 2007, in Moscow in October 2008, and in Rome in August 2010, two years after accepting the Italian gift of 5 billion dollars as compensation for the Italian occupation of Libya from 1913 to 1943. And also of note are the five trips to Tripoli in three years by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a paid senior advisor to the investment bank JPMorgan Chase. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was received in Tripoli in July 2007, where he announced the beginning of a partnership for the installation of a nuclear power plant in Libya. The European Union was ready to facilitate access to the European market for Libyan agricultural exports. Libya was invited by the NATO Chiefs of Defense to the Maritime Commanders’ Meeting (MARCOMET) in Toulon on May 25-28, 2008.

A policy that recalls the one towards the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was invited to Paris in June 1972 and September 1975; an agreement was signed in June 1977 for the sale to Baghdad of 32 Mirage F1 combat aircraft. A coincidence that didn’t do either of them any good in the long run.

Arab military leaders (veterans of Afghanistan and members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, with ties to Al-Qaeda) helped overthrow Gaddafi. One of the principal military leaders of the rebellion, Abdel Hakim Belhadj (a.k.a. Abu Abdullah al-Sadik), then Tripoli Security Chief and today the main leader of the conservative Islamist al-Watan Party had been arrested in Bangkok in 2004, tortured by CIA agents, and delivered to Gaddafi’s Abu Salim prison. He is now the main ISIL leader in Lybia. Jaballah Matar was kidnapped from his home in Cairo by the CIA in 1990 and then handed over to Libyan officials Documents seized after the death of Gaddafi reveal close cooperation between Libyan, American (CIA), and British (MI6) intelligence services.

Under Gaddafi, Islamic terrorism was virtually non-existent. Prior to the U.S. led bombing campaign in 2011, Libya had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all Africa. Today Lybia is a wrecked state.

In January 2012, three months after the end of hostilities, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, reported the widespread use of torture, summary executions, and rape in Libyan prisons. At the same time, the organization Doctors Without Borders decided to withdraw from the prisons in Misrata because of the ongoing torture of detainees.

The NATO intervention in Libya, involving most member countries under a humanitarian pretext, set an unfortunate precedent for efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis: the attack by French and British warplanes on the Warfallah tribe, who remained faithful to Muammar Gaddafi, and on the convoy carrying the Libyan leader and one of his sons, leading directly to Gaddafi’s death under deplorable circumstances. The images by videographer Ali Algadi and journalist Tracey Sheldon provide a graphic account of the Libyan leader being dragged from a drain pipe on October 20, 2011 and killed shortly thereafter. These circumstances belie the pseudo-humanitarian nature of the military intervention and tarnish the image of the “Libyan Spring”.

The death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens and one of his aides in a fire set in the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in September 2012, revealing the breadth of CIA activities, in which the Consulate served as a façade. The recruitment by the CIA on its Benghazi base of combatants from the city of Derna for the conflict in Syria, fief of the Islamists (Al-Bittar brigade), against President Bashar al-Assad, has inescapable parallels with the recruitment in 1979, again by the CIA, of the mujahedeen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, with all the consequences that we are well familiar with, and particularly the birth of Sunni jihadism.

The car bomb attack on the French Embassy in Tripoli in April 2013; the escape of 1,200 detainees from the Benghazi prison; the murder of the human rights lawyer Abdel Salam al-Mismari in July; and the attack on the Swedish Consulate in Benghazi in October 2013 all highlighted the inability of the authorities to gain control over the security situation in Libya as it was overrun by heavily armed militias. In July 2013, Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan threatened to bomb Libyan ports in the Benghazi region that were in the hands of militias who were profiting by exporting the oil now under their control. In October, the Prime Minister was kidnapped by 150 armed men in the center of Tripoli and held for six hours to protest the abduction on Libyan soil of Abu Anas al-Libi in a secret American airport operation. Al-Libi was accused of being one of the leaders of Al-Qaeda and later died while in custody in the United States.

The year 2015 began with Libya bereft of all institutions. It is ruled by a motley group of coalitions vying for power, based in Tripoli (Farj Libya, which controls the central bank), Benghazi (Shura Council, consisting of Ansar al-Sharia, facing off against the Libyan National Army of the renegade general Khalifa Hiftar), and in Tobruk-Bayda (offshoot of the National Transition Council, enjoying international diplomatic recognition after the June 2013 elections).

The security and health situation for the civil population is near disastrous. When I visited the country in 1994 it was a model for public health and education, and boasted the highest per capita income in Africa. It was clearly the most advanced of all Arab countries in terms of the legal status of women and families in Libyan society (half of the students at the university of Tripoli were women). The aggression against the presenter Sarah Al-Massalati in 2012, the poet Aicha Almagrabi in February 2013, and the women’s rights activist Magdalene Ubaida, now in exile in London, bear grim testimony to their legal status in post-Gaddafi Libya. The city of Benghazi is now semi-destroyed; schools and universities are mostly closed.

It is the theatre of fratricidal clashes between rival factions financed and armed by a series of sorcerer’s apprentices A general who has been stationed in the United States for 27 years commands a motley coalition with military backing from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia while Islamist groups claiming allegiance to ISIL and well entrenched in Sirte and Derna are able to spread their influence thanks to the institutional crisis. and, Qatar, Turkey, and Sudan supporting Farj Libya on the other.

Gaddafi, leader of the Libyan revolution, the Jamahiriya, in power from 1969 to 2011, gave a warning to Europe in an interview with French journalist Laurent Valdiguié of the Journal du Dimanche on the eve of the NATO intervention, in words that now seem prophetic:

“If one seeks to destabilize [Libya], there will be chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions. That is what will happen. You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And there will no longer be anyone to stop them. Bin Laden will base himself in North Africa […]. You will have Bin Laden at your doorstep. This catastrophe will extend out of Pakistan and Afghanistan and reach all the way to North Africa”.

Libya has become a hub for illegal trafficking, particularly of African emigrants under conditions reminiscent of the slave trade. According to Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, the refugee smuggling market in Libya was worth 323 million dollars in 2014. In the first five months of 2015, more than 50,000 undocumented immigrants have reached Italy from sub-Saharan Africa via Libya; 1,791 of them lost their lives at sea. Prior to the initiation of hostilities, 1.5 million sub-Saharan Africans worked in Libya in generally menial jobs (oil industry, agriculture, services, public sector). Darker days at sea are still to come.

Imperial Blues: On Whitewashing Dictatorship in the 21st Century

Miguel A. Cruz-Díaz

 “For goodness sake, this is the 21st century. We’ve got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let’s make money for everybody.”

— Hillary Clinton

It seems as though empires also get the blues from time to time. Sometimes empire, like the rest of us, suffers from a crisis of confidence and needs to find itself, and it looks like our American empire has finally found a more relaxing way of flexing its muscles other than bombing brown people in the Middle East. On Friday the 19^th of May MSNBC joyously celebrated the push towards a bipartisan deal to approve a bill that would provide Puerto Rico with much needed debt relief for its economic woes. The title of the article says it all: “Despite some issues, Democrats get behind Puerto Rico bill”. Even Hillary Clinton, the Democrat’s presumptive nominee, came out in favor of the bill: “without any means of addressing this crisis”, Clinton said, “too many Puerto Ricans will continue to suffer”. Clinton expressed that she had some “concerns” regarding the nature of the oversight committee that would rule over the island, but nevertheless she supports the bill. All hail bipartisanship! What a stroke of luck that the Puerto Rican debt crisis has joined both parties in their attempt at providing debt relief! Isn’t there a disarming nature to that? No relief effort could be bad. Itch relief, pain relief… all of these things are great. Yet this bill seems awfully familiar, and that familiarity quickly becomes full recognition after a passing glance at it. Regurgitation, it seems, is an old political ploy, and it is present here in full force. The more things change, right? First it was H.R. 4900, and now it’s H.R. 5278. Indeed, this is a second attempt at passing the beloved “Promesa”.

Hillary Clinton’s support for the “Promesa” bill should not be at all surprising. Clinton has time and again trampled on Puerto Rico. The Democratic Party’s Clintonista wing’s preferred scare-tactic revolves around a Donald Trump presidency, but Trump is a symptom of current political indolence, the product of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, and Fox News. Clinton is a vector of transmission of this disease. She is against the release of our political prisoner, Oscar López Rivera. She represents the most reactionary conservative elements of her party and is inexcusably tied to the neoliberal agenda of Wall Street. Is it at all surprising that she would support a bill that seeks to impose a neocolonial Congressional dictatorship on Puerto Rico?

Recognizing the second-hand wolf in shiny new wolf’s clothing explains an overpowering and nauseating sense of déjà vu that I cannot seem to shake off as I write this column. I blame those imperial blues that force this constant revisiting of why these “debt relief” bills are such insults to the very idea of democracy. It is a draining experience that always leaves me feeling as if I were standing in the middle of a field of manure. We have inherited and maintained a neoliberal political class that seems hell-bent on shoveling an ever-expanding pile of feces as a main course all the while the corporate media presents it all tied up in a neat little bow. It is exhausting and demoralizing to the extreme. And yet here we are once more, pushed face-first into the open-air sewer of empire under the cover of “relief”. The rancid stench of waste is what passes for the political system of this here United States in its entire late neoliberal splendor. It is the excrement of a system bought and paid for by vulture capitalists that is being shoveled down the throats of over three million of its citizens, some of whom welcome such a contemptuous feast with rapturous fervor. Any scraps from our masters are, certainly, always welcome are they not?

Before I continue I do believe that some clarification is in order. While my political character is heavily indebted to anti-nationalism and anarchism, my cultural identity as an individual is first and foremost as a Puerto Rican. Our American citizenship was only granted to my forefathers and mothers in 1917, nearly twenty years after the United States invaded the island. I’ve always seen this move as conveniently expedited on the eve of the United State’s entry into the First World War, so that Puerto Ricans could swell the number of troops being massacred in the European killing fields. That citizenship has been paid in blood time and time again. And make no mistake that it’s a second-class citizenship built on a colonial lie that claims that my people have self-determination. Bills like “Promesa”, resurrected in any shape or form from the dead and pushed back into abhorrent life, thoroughly destroys any notion of self-rule.

The annihilation of Puerto Rico’s status quo does, however, bring with it a silver lining. Besides for the festive air of watching local politicos running around like freshly decapitated poultry it also severely damages the standing fiction of a bilateral agreement between colony and colonizer. If anything this situation has served to underscore the complete disconnect between reality and most political factions on the island, a disconnect that can at times provide for darkly humorous undertones. At this point I feel the need to engage in a quick-and-dirty primer on the political culture on the island of Puerto Rico in order to draw a clearer picture for the non-Puerto Rican reader. Bear with me, please; it’s a somewhat Byzantine picture.

The biggest alienated group seems to be the Popular Democratic Party, historically tied to the birth and eventual decomposition of the Commonwealth status quo. Having the current governor, one of the most underwhelming governors in Puerto Rican history, as the party head has terribly weakened the populares, and the ever-present specter of the economic junta only seems to reaffirm the argument that the present political arrangement is done for. The party has also gradually but steadily shifted to the right, becoming more and more conservative as time passes by. This conservative drift is also apparent in the Democratic Party, and many parallels can be drawn between both political groups.

The pro-statehood New Progressive Party, meanwhile, seems to have jettisoned both progressiveness and common sense simultaneously. In the midst of running a contentious primary between the current resident commissioner in Washington Pedro Pieruisi, a voiceless “representative” of the colony with the political relevance of your common variety garden gnome statue, and Ricardo Rosselló, the son of former governor Pedro Rosselló and heir apparent to the governorship. Rosselló Sr.’s eight years in power were marked by controversy and corruption scandals, a reputation that plagues his son who is also followed by allegations of academic plagiarism.

Last and certainly least is the pro-independence Puerto Rican Independence Party. If there ever was a party in need of self-discovery this one is most certainly it. While the PDP is unashamedly pro-colonial, or rather “pro-Commonwealth” and the NPP is also similarly subservient to the whims of the United States while wildly gesturing for attention, the pipiolos (as they are commonly known on the island) claim to represent the independence-centric vote. The truth of the matter is that a large percentage of Puerto Rican independentistas do not vote at all in the general elections as they follow a strategy of electoral non-participation. As a result the PIP is lucky to draw 3% of the electorate in general elections. The PIP is also notoriously male-dominated, with only one female senator currently seated in the island’s legislature.

These three parties represent the mainstream apparatus of colonial administration on the island. They are set up by their respective allegiances to a specific formulation for the island’s political status, but in reality they are set up to administer the island itself. Both the NPP and the PDP share the booty of a two-party monopoly on power while the PIP is there as a symbolic outlier of resistance that has never really had any political weight on the island’s political landscape other than, perhaps, the effective resistance to the U.S. Navy’s occupation of Vieques Island.

In recent years there has been an attempt by non-traditional groups to break this stranglehold on electoral politics. The most important of these is the Puerto Rican Worker’s Party, an attempt at establishing a more inclusive third way approach to Puerto Rican politics that is not implicitly tied to the status question, although there has been a noticeable level of tension between the pro-statehood and nationalist factions within the party as of late. While this movement is generally viewed positively by many it is still a victim of traditional Puerto Rican political sectarianism.

Finally there is the question of the traditional left on the island. I have previously mentioned my misgivings on the state of the left on Puerto Rico, and I will not dwell too long on this subject, but it must be mentioned for completion’s sake. The traditional Puerto Rican left suffers from severe obsolescence brought by a blind obedience to orthodox statism and a problematic lack of self-criticism. In a way the Puerto Rican left is frozen in time: a fossilized cult of personality based on Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba (and later Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution”) that demands absolute obedience to discipline. It is almost a Leninist understanding of socialism devoid of critiques from the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and the Continental and British Left. Finally there is also a virulent strand of nationalism that often combines itself with this interpretation of the left and would feel more at home in the late 19^th century than the early 21^st.

This is of course, a picture painted with wide brush strokes and the Devil is always in the details, but this overview is as possible as a brief primer can be. The real issue, however, is where does this political maelstrom leave Puerto Rican reactions to this new assault on its sovereignty? Not surprisingly in a divided, dysfunctional mess. The two major parties have been caught in the raging (un)civil war taking place within the Democratic Party and severely weakened by the more aggressive strain of U.S. colonialism severely eroding their reasons for existing in the first place. Independentistas and the left have also been divided between those that demand ideological purity and abstention and those that see a chance at serious decolonization efforts with Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile a large number of Puerto Ricans themselves claim to support the imposition of the junta, to the anger of many local public intellectuals. However I believe that this apparent support for the junta is in itself deceptive. After decades of political erosion caused by the local political class’s slow suicide the island’s citizens are feeling a great deal of disenfranchisement. This is probably manifested in open contempt for existing politicians and the belief that the oversight committee will eventually punish those that are perceived as responsible for the crisis in the first place. I do believe that there will be a sharp reversal of this support once the repercussions of this bill become more evident.

Imperial blues are problematic because they affect many across nationalities. Establishing this economic junta, I have stated before, is simply a whitewashed implementation of empire. The media has made a commendable effort at selling this move as economic relief to an American audience that by and large do not even know that Puerto Ricans are American citizens themselves. With its severe divisions and complete lack of communication between fractious factions Puerto Rico is at a severe disadvantage to resisting the imposition of this project and forfeiting its limited democracy under the American empire. The situation looks grim, and a Trump or Clinton presidency will all but guarantee that this project will come to pass.

Obama Violates Nuclear Treaties While Iran Upholds Them

Robert Barsocchini

The IAEA issued a new report reconfirming that Iran is "complying with the P5+1 nuclear deal, and that Iran’s stockpiles have all remained below the limits set forth in the deal."

The 'deal' has been selectively imposed, mainly by the US, as a propaganda and war-weapon against Iran, which the US has sought to reconquer since its proxy dictator was overthrown in 1979. While forcing Iran to comply with the strict regime, Washington ignores nuclear violations and ambitions by its allies or proxies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The US itself remains the world's leading violator of nuclear weapons law and the only country that has used nuclear weapons on people, including in human experimentation.

New Pentagon figures show that, while accepting peace prizes and preaching disarmament, Obama has worked specifically to'dramatically', as Jason Ditz puts it, slow down the rate at which the US reduces its nuclear arsenal. Instead, he has illegally allocated at least a trillion dollars towards 'modernizing' nuclear weapons, a move experts have said is "counterproductive" and "sure to cause an arms race."

At the same time, Obama has told residents of the impoverished US village of Flint to drink polluted water, and has violated international law by refusing to provide water at all to residents of Detroit, many of whom have been affected by off-shoring of manufacturing in search of workers that are easier to repress.

In better news, the US seems to be caving to international pressure to stop selling illegal cluster bombs to Saudi dictator Salman bin Abdulaziz, who, with US support, has been killing civilians in a war of aggression against Yemen.